“I always allowed myself to think of my forms as bottles, but my process as a liquid. If there was something from the bottle before that I hadn’t totally realized, I allowed myself to put that into the next bottle. Maybe I would develop it a little bit more.” –Meredith Monk

What are the unique properties of the sonnet form? How can we work with(in) it now? How is a sonnet like a “little song?” Is the sonnet form bankrupt or are there ways we can reinvent it, working with and against the form for our time? Is procedural work with the sonnet informed specifically by its structure? Does the sonnet have its own properties as source text? We will work with sonnets by Ted Berrigan, Laynie Browne, Gwendolyn Brooks, Edwin Denby, Robert Hayden, Harryette Mullen, William Shakespeare, and others, as well as with Bernadette Mayer’s Sonnets and List of Experiments.

Poets Lee Ann Brown and Sonnet L’Abbe will lead a collaborative exploration of the sonnet form as well as welcome workshop members to add to the list of possible futures and newly imagined histories of the sonnet.

Suggested cash donation: $10-20

Write to contact@thecapilanoreview.ca to reserve a spot

Lunch provided

Lee Ann Brown is the author of five books of poetry and creates multidisciplinary poetry projects. She is the editor and publisher of Tender Buttons Press, which began in 1989 with the publication of Bernadette Mayer’s Sonnets. She is currently at work on her own manuscript, Sonics, which explores sonic and syntactic possibilities of the sonnet form. See https://leeannbrownpoet.com/

Dr. Sonnet L’Abbé is a poet, essayist, and public speaker. The author of two collections of poetry, A Strange Relief and Killarnoe, L’Abbé was the editor of Best Canadian Poetry 2014 and was the 2015 Edna Staebler Writer in Residence at Wilfrid Laurier University. She has taught creative writing at the University of British Columbia – Okanagan and at the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies. Dr. L’Abbé currently teaches creative writing and English at Vancouver Island University. Her first chapbook, Anima Canadensis, came out with Junction Books in late 2016. She is working on a book called Sonnet’s Shakespeare, an erasure-by-crowding in which she overwrites or “colonizes” all 154 of Shakespeare’s sonnets, which will be out in Spring 2018.

This event takes place on the unceded and ancestral Coast Salish Territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations.

Accessibility information:

There is a 42″-wide ramp leading to the entrance of the Arts Factory. All single doors (including the front entrance, bathroom door, and bathroom-stall doors) are 34″. There is one fully-accessible stall in the bathroom. A lift is available for access to the second floor of the building.