bywords John Newlove Poetry Awards

Hosted by Amanda Earl

In Person Poetry Music

Admission

Free

Friday

Oct , 2012

6:30pm

Eastern

Knox Presbyterian Church

120 Lisgar st. (at Elgin) • Ottawa

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The poem possesses a rivering playfulness, a playful awareness of the ambiguous and tricky current of words. At the same time, it is keenly alive with their visceral and tangible currents. You want to dive into this river of words; never the same twice.

Gary Barwin on this year’s winning poem

Join us for the launch of Miss Canada (International) by rob mclennan, the 2011 recipient of the John Newlove Poetry Award. Featuring readings by this year’s award recipient (to be announced at the reading) and honourable mentions, plus music by Neil Gerster!

The Authors

Neil Gerster

Neil Gerster once fronted the Ottawa pop-folk quartet Lighthousekeepers from 2001-2003. As far as public profile goes, he thereafter buried himself under a rock, re-emerging in 2011 with his "ukulele album", Hearts and Other Shipwrecks, containing 14 tracks of poetic lyrics, summer sounds, sea imagery, tales of online dating, mellotron accents, but especially the sounds of ukuleles and banjoleles throughout. His first ukulele was an bought grudgindly: a week of imagining a high-pitched, gut-stringed strumming in a song he was writing ended in a trip to a music store and an impulse buy. The next week, he wrote three new songs. The uke was almost instantly the easiest instrument for him to compose with.

rob mclennan

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of more than thirty trade books, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, the Ottawa Arts Council Mid-Career Award in 2014, and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012 and 2017. His most recent titles include the poetry collections the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022) and World’s End, (ARP Books, 2023).