Fight for Your Right to Poetry
Mile End Poets’ Festival to Occupy the Main
In a world where Occupy protests are popping up in public spaces around the globe like revolutionary seedlings, a group of Montreal poets is out to occupy St. Laurent Blvd. this week—but their demands aren’t necessarily about international finance.
Starting Oct. 19, the Mile End Poets’ Festival, which is in its second year of existence, will feature a litany of literary types both local and imported; Montreal poets will coexist with out-of-town guests like performance poet Tanya Evanson, Alberta poet Ali Riley and famed graphic novelist Eric Drooker.
Ian Ferrier, one of the festival’s co-organizers, said of Drooker, who recently completed a graphic version of Allen Ginsberg’s famous poem “Howl,” “[He’s] creating the image of these times.”
“His images have always been able to do that,” Ferrier continued. “The face of banks and huge corporations is often shiny towers removed from humanity. Drooker paints them as the steaming engine of Moloch, as if Babylon were now and the furnaces were being fed with human sweat.”
Drooker will be presenting highlights from some of his many works Oct. 21 at La Sala Rossa at an event presented by Artists Against Apartheid.
Ferrier credited “a longstanding relationship with Stefan Christoff, the musician/activist behind the Howl series and Artists Against Apartheid” with helping to get Drooker on board.
“Stefan and I both like to present art with a connection to social justice, but so beautiful and compelling in its own right that you would see it for any reason.”
Collaborative partnerships were important for the five-day festival, as it teamed up with a number of other organizations like the Enpuku-ji Zen Centre and Intimate Sky—a music/poetry series featuring local jazz collective Kalmunity.
Along with those two, both of whom collaborated with the Mile End Poets on last year’s inaugural festival, this year featured Artists Against Apartheid and Janejane Productions for the first time.
It might seem like a convoluted mix at first glance, but Ferrier says that there’s a lot of commonality between them—the four groups “either inhabit or regularly present their work in the Mile End, [and they] represent the artistic, spiritual, activist and exploratory nature of the neighbourhood.”
The local organizations weren’t the only Mile End addition; musician Xarah Dion of Les Momies de Palerme was in just the right place to get in on the festival’s action, after striking up a conversation with Ferrier at Casa del Popolo, where she works.
“We were just talking about what we’re up to,” said Ferrier, “and I mentioned the festival and she said they’d be interested. I got a copy of their record and was blown away. So I came back the same night to see if they’d play and she said yes.”
Concerning the egalitarian nature of the festival when it comes to artistic genre—the Mile End Poets mashes up music, visual art, spoken word, improv, dance and whirling (yes, as in dervishes)—Ferrier didn’t mince words: “We call it a poets’ festival because it is hosted by the poets of the Mile End. Our friends are poets, musicians, dancers and performers and this is what we like.
“The idea behind the festival is to bring together performances that demonstrate the beautiful, searching nature of the work being done here—work that you might not otherwise see because it happened in a little café for 18 people and was barely publicized.”
For a full list of performance times, locations and prices, head to litlive.ca/event/361 or search “Mile End Poets’ Festival” on Facebook.
