V125PC

Vancouver (Canada) is holding a poetry conference (amongst other events) to celebrate its 125th anniversary. Here’s a bit more about the event from an Oct. 19, 2011 article by Cheryl Rossi for the Vancouver Courier,

If the idea of a four-day poetry conference conjures images of men who sport berets pontificating alongside grim women, you might be surprised to learn the Vancouver 125 Poetry Conference, Oct. 19 to 22, [2011] includes one writer who has posted poetic structures that others can “renovate” online and another who aims to embed prose in bacteria.

“Quite frankly, I often don’t even admit I’m a poet because it just sounds so pretentious,” said Brad Cran, the city’s outgoing poet laureate who dreamt up the convention. “But in reality, poetry’s this really dynamic thing. More than anything, that’s what I wanted to show with the curation of this event is that poetry, it can’t really be defined easily and it’s as open and as infinite as any art.”

The ’embedded prose in bacteria’ piece sounds like it might have been inspired by J. Craig Venter who coded a quote from James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man into synthetic DNA (mentioned in my Synthetic biology bumps up against James Joyce and copyright posting in March 2011). Here’s a little more about the ‘renovation’ and ’embedded prose’ projects,

Author Sachiko Murakami is inviting writers to remodel others’ poems with her online Project Rebuild. She’ll read and speak at an event that focuses on future directions in contemporary poetry alongside Calgary’s Christian Bök, whose Xenotext Experiment aims to create a poem in the form of a genetic sequence that would serve as a set of instructions to build a protein that would include another embedded message or a second original poem.

There’s still a couple days left for the conference so here’s a link to the schedule of events.

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  1. Pingback: Vancouver’s (Canada) 2nd annual International Poetry Festival « FrogHeart

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