Catharsis and Candour: Willow Loveday Little and James Dunnigan

Please join Poetry Matters for readings by poets Willow Loveday Little and James Dunnigan. The event will be hosted by the Anti-Café Vieux Port. All are welcome.

Vice Viscera: The Body Gives up What it Cannot Hold

The act of communication is inherently vulnerable for with it comes the risk of misinterpretation. In a worst-case scenario, words are weaponized against the speaker in a process of emotional evisceration. When trust is broken, the body responds. Trauma. Abuse. Heartbreak. Illness. “Trust your gut,” can serve as a compass to navigate healing or be the source of further symptoms of distress but ultimately, the problem of vulnerability is one that lies at the heart of connecting with others – through poetry and elsewhere. The poems that make up this reading investigate the psychosomatic and imagine “body language” as a process of catharsis – the corporeal as a vessel and a portal, bearing the potential to reveal and conceal the self’s secrets. They attempt to dissect, to explore physical intimacy as means for knowing others and anatomy, as a lexicon for turning things inside out. 

Willow Loveday Little is a writer, poet and freelance editor whose work has appeared in places like The Dalhousie Review and On Spec.  She holds a Bachelor of Arts from McGill University, teaches ESL, and runs workshops at Sur Place Media. In 2018, she was a finalist for the QWF poetry mentorship. She curates “Pieces of Process,” an art series that aims to demystify creative process by providing a space for emerging artists to engage in interdisciplinary conversations about art. Willow is currently agonizing over her first chapbook manuscript, Viscera.

Candour, Or: “Sometimes I Think The Branches In The Winter Night Are Shaken By Your Hands”

Candour, from the Latin candere, to shine; in English meaning openness, frankness, honesty. This reading proposes to investigate candour as a powerful, luminous source of poetic creativity and also as a potent force for change in individuals and the renovation of human relationships. It also seeks to explore candour’s errors, the various ways in which that same force can, along with its potential to heal, to brighten, to better, potentially damage, betray and degrade people, or degrade, betray and damage art. The poems to be presented, thus, are all artefacts of candour, or attempts at capturing it. They will take the hearer many places, from antique Carthage to 20th-century Hungary, from suburban Quebec to the gates of Stalingrad. Drawing from memory and myth alike, they will seek to present a vision of candour as a revolutionary gesture in an era of constant deception, at once a salve for the bruises of the commonplace and a fiery destroyer of illusions.

James Dunnigan is a poet, scholar and fishmonger from Montreal. His first book of poetry, The Stained Glass Sequence, won the Frog Hollow Press chapbook competition in 2018. Shortlisted for the Gwendolyn MacEwen poetry prize in the same year, his work has also appeared in such places as Maisonneuve Magazine, CV2 and Montreal Writes. A second chapbook, Wine and Fire, is forthcoming with Cactus Press.