Coming up tomorrow (June 20, 2012) is another entry in the Lunch poems @sfu (Simon Fraser University) series in downtown Vancouver (Canada):
This month lunch poems @sfu presents:
Sonnet L’Abbé and her guest poet Renée Sarojini Saklikar
When: Wednesday, June 20th, 2012, 12 noon to 1 pm
Where: Teck Gallery (on main floor), SFU Harbour Centre,
515 West Hastings Street,
Vancouver, BC
Sonnet L’Abbé is the author of two collections of poetry, A Strange Relief and Killarnoe, and a reviewer of Canadian fiction and poetry for The Globe and Mail. She is currently at the University of British Columbia writing a dissertation on botanical metaphors in representations of human cognition in the work of American poet Ronald Johnson.
Renée Sarojini Saklikar writes thecanadaproject, a life-long poem chronicle. Work from thecanadaproject appears online and in newspapers and literary journals. Poems from thecanadaproject will be the focus of a seminar at the Association of Cultural Studies Crossroads conference, Paris, July 2012. Renée is working on her first book, a sequence of elegies about Canada / Air India.
Neither poet appears to have a website but I did find this about L’Abbé in a Wikipedia essay (Note: I have removed links and footnotes.),
Sonnet L’Abbé is a Canadian poet and critic. As a poet, L’Abbé writes about national identity, race, gender and language. She has been shortlisted for the 2010 CBC Literary Award for poetry and has won the Bronwen Wallace Memorial Award for most promising writer under 35.As a critic, she is a regular reviewer of fiction and poetry for The Globe and Mail and has written scholarly articles on Canadian contemporary poetry.
And, I found this poem of Renée Sarojini Saklikar’s (from the Leaf Press website),
Carnarvon Street Lament
Oh I like the fog bound morning
hours when light casts a shadow
on my raggedy sweater and shoes cause
I’m now what I always knew I’d be
a raggedy woman just off the streets Oh
I sing in my veins a trapped noise
not let to the air cause I’m a raggedy girl
gone home from high towers to the ground
Oh watch me that’s where I’ll be
learning to spin wool to plant carrots in the dark soil Oh
I pound my feet ‘neath the big box towers
driven from road to road I’m the Raggedy One
claiming the moon oh the stars the sun.
As it turns out, Saklikar is married to Adrian Dix, leader of the New Democratic Party and of the opposition in the BC (British Columbia) Legislative Assembly according to an April 17, 2011 article by Charlie Smith for the Georgia Straight newspaper when Dix was chosen to be party leader.