Fall 2020 Virtual Sessions

Avleen K Mokha, also known as Mirabel, holds a B.A. in English Literature and Linguistics from McGill University. Mirabel's work has appeared in carte blanche, Dream Pop, Yolk Literary, and Déraciné Magazine, among others. She edits poetry and prose for Persephone’s Daughters, a literary magazine devoted to survivors of abuse. Her debut collection is DREAM FRAGMENTS (Cactus Press, 2020). Leading from new work, this session will consider reading practices through concepts drawn from psycholinguistics and creative process.

In “Homage to Sextus Propertius,” Ezra Pound maintains that “pure form has its value.” Querying the distinction between poetry and prose, this seminar-style session of Poetry Matters, facilitated by Hadas Blum, considers how the form of poetry can shape meaning. Leading from Blum’s graduate research in progress, focusing on poetry by Yeats and Pound, the session attends specifically to effects of rhythm in poetry—rhythm considered both as poet’s instrument and as readerly experience. We explore how different methods of rhythmic analysis, relevant to both metrical and free verse, reveal how a poem operates and guides attention; and we examine how rhythm contributes to emotional effects, construction of personae, and commentary in verse.

Hadas Blum is an M.A. candidate in the Department of English at McGill University. She is co-founder and editor of the first two volumes of Caesura, the English literary magazine at Tel Aviv University (2018-2019). Her current graduate work addresses formal allusion in the poetry of Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, and W.B. Yeats, with emphasis on rhyme and rhythm.

Reading from her recent poetry collection, Sea Burial Laws According to Country, Kasia van Schaik examines how we understand animals and ecologies — and vice versa — in a time of rapid environmental change. Her poems question the artificiality of national borders, gender binaries, and animal-human dichotomies. Defamiliarizing oceanic law and animal-human relations, her work makes room for the uncategorizable, the confessional, and the posthuman; it imagines what emergent ecological aesthetics might look like in the time of emergency. Balancing fears of vanishing ecologies with hope for the future, this reading grapples with what it means to define and defend life in a time of radical uncertainty.

Kasia van Schaik is a South African-born, Canadian writer living in Montreal/Tiohtià:ke. Her chapbook, Sea Burial Laws According to Country (2018), was adapted into an experimental concerto by the Montreal Contemporary Music Lab in 2019. Kasia’s writing has appeared in Electric Literature, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Prism International, and The Best Canadian Poetry Anthology. Recipient of the Adilman Prize for poetry related to ecological concerns, the Irving Layton award for fiction, and the Quebec Federation’s short story Prize, Kasia focuses her current work on modes of eco-feminist listening, elemental portraiture, and hybrid literary forms. Kasia serves as the fiction editor for carte blanche (QWF) and is completing her doctorate in English at McGill. Find Kasia at kasiajuno.weebly.com or on twitter at @kasiajuno.