Do you write poetry? Save the date!

Blue Met's "Poets at Night: Changing Landscapes, Eclectic Voices" poetry event will be held on Friday, April 29, 2011 at 6pm in salle Camelia of the Holiday Inn - Select in downtown Montreal.

The evening will feature the writing of several talented poets, both emerging and established. The Montreal International Poetry Prize will be there, too, to talk about their new international prize with its substantial purse ($50,000 first prize) and give details about the award, the jury, and how this new prestigous prize will change the Montreal literary landscape.

Gabe Foreman

Featured poets include:
Gabe Foreman (Quebec), Aurian Haller (Quebec), Andrea Moorehead (USA), Oliver Scharpf (Switzerland), and Edvins Raups (Latvia).

Hosted by Carmine Starnino, one of Canada's best known and most widely acknowledged young poets.

One writer we are happy to have as part of this event is Gabe Foreman. His book A Complete Encyclopedia of Different Types of People (Coach House) will be released in April. His collection features pieces which reside in an immediacy of experience: an image, a play on words, a cultural allusion that forces the reader to consider the relationship between competing ideas or lived experiences.

 Chiropractors in the Off-Hours
        Who's 'scruffy-lookin' '?
                           -Han Solo

Please do not despise your hands.
Feel what you need to feel.
Live and be limited.

By morning, a night of cable television
erupts like dust from a pillow on the sofa.
Dangling thirty feet above the street
a floating, jellyfish vanishes.

Only touching is believing.

Today is Thanksgiving, and we stroll
to the movies to buff plush seats
and squeeze greasy kernels of corn
between our fingers.

Please do not despise your hands.
Feel what you need to feel.
Only touching is believing
Live and be limited.

The need to touch becomes ever devalued culturally given all our virtual toys and the avenues of digital escapes into which we can all take refuge. Yet, Foreman seems to suggest, ideas and virtual experiences vanish like dust and it's only the tactile that truly makes us human, that makes us believe and truly experience. When we think back on an experience from our past, it's not a visual image on a screen we have carried with us: it's the physical sensations that we recall. Living in this "limited" way actually contains our liberation.

If you read or write poetry, or even if you want to understand how poets today continue to challenge and reflect culture and experience, save the date and get your tickets now!