Fred Wah • Mari-Louise Rowley • Jeanette Lynes • Donna Kane • Hilary Clark • Joe Blades

Photo credits: “Canapotatoes” by Cherie Hanson © 2001. “Lou Rowdy”, “Ripper Lynes” and “Spare Blades” by Joe Blades © 2001. “Kicker Kane” by Emily Mattson. “Extreme Poets” group photo courtesy of Donna Kane © 2001.

Bio Bin
• “Canapotatoes” : Fred Wah is a writer who lives in the BC Interior. Read his book is Faking It: Poetics and Hybridity (NeWest Press).
• “Lou Rowdy” : Mari-Louise Rowley, raised in Saskatoon, is a poet and science/technical writer living in Vancouver. Her collections include a Knife a Rope a Book (Underwhich) and CatoptRomancer (Relevations).
• “Ripper Lynes” : Jeanette Lynes, from Southwestern Ontario, is a poet and professor at St Francis Xavier University in Antigonish NS. Her first book is A Woman Alone on the Atikokan Highway (Wolsak & Wynn).
• “Kicker Kane” : Donna Kane is a poet and fundraiser who has lived most of her life in Dawson Creek BC. The editor of From Moberly Lake (Purple Donut), her first poetry collection is in the works.
• “Clark the Shark” : Hilary Clark, originally from Vancouver, is a poet and professor at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon. Her books are More Light (Brick Books) and Two Heavens (Hagios).
• “Spare Blades” : Joe Blades, originally from Dartmouth NS, is a poet, artist and publisher living in Fredericton NB. His books include open road west (Broken Jaw) and River Suite (Insomniac Press).

You ask, “What makes an Extreme Poet?”

So do we (and we experienced it!) Mix five poets looking for something for their writing with poet Fred Wah. Call it a Poetry Colloquium (not a workshop). Make it happen at the Sage Hill Writing Experience 2001 gathering at the Franciscian-run St Michael’s Retreat in Lumsden (formerly known as Happy Hollow), Saskatchewan. Throw in everyone else at Sage Hill, everyone’s surprise 100th birthday party with Saskatoon berry cheesecake, the van, Regina Beach, Last Mountain Lake, Baldy’s Beach Bar, an Extreme Sports Series Armchair Challenge—“What is wakeboarding?”, beer, Barbara Klar’s raspberry-rhubarb wine, extreme thunder and lightning storms, Nickletree, RCMP on patrol, David Carpenter on banjo, the bar in Craven, a “free” phoptocopier, dance music, yard sales, offsales, softball, Boh, shuffleboard, pool tables, white-tail deer, warblers, ticks . . .

The reading list:
• Jennifer Moxley, Imagination Verses, (New York: Tender Buttons Press, 1996)
• Ray Wilton, “Introduction”, “Self Deconstructing Lyric: Colleridge, Dickinson, Williams, and Webb” doctoral thesis (Edmonton: University of Alberta, Spring 1994)
• Lynn Crosbie, “Something new, please, o universe”, Globe and Mail, June 2001
• Henry Gould, “A Real Book Review” (of Imagination Verses)
• Jennifer Moxley, Wrong Life, (Cambridge UK: Equipage, 1999)
• Randolph Healy interview with Jennifer Moxley, Pressed Wafer, #2, March 2001
• Jennifer Moxley, “Behind the Orbits”, Pressed Wafer, #2, March 2001
• Pete Smith, “A Lovely and Familiar Gravity: the poetry of Jennifer Moxley”, Jacket # Nine, Oct 1999, (Aus)
• Douglas Barbour, Lyric/Anti-Lyric (Edmonton: NeWest Press, 2001)
• Fred Wah, Faking It (Edmonton: NeWest Press, 2000)
• Jan Zwicky, Lyric Philosophy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992)
• Bob Perelman, “The Marginalization of Poetry”, Postmodern Culture v.2 n.1 (Sept, 1992)
• Jennifer Moxley, “Invective Verse”, Oblek, 1993
• Michael Palmer, The Promises of Glass (New York: New Directions, 2000)
• Denise Riley, “Lyric Selves”, The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000)
• Charles Bernstein, from “Shadowtime” West Coast Line, Spring 2000
• Lyn Hejinian, “Happily”, The Language of Inquiry (University of California Press, 2000)
• Steven Ross Smith, from Fluttertongue, Book 1, the Book of Games (Saskatoon: Thistledown, 1998)
• Janet Lyon, “Locating the Manifesto”, Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000)
• plus our own poetry and writings . . .