Chuffed about Chapbooks: A Poetry Tour of Everywhere

This land is overlaid with poetry networks that crosshatch the country in a beautiful patterning that often goes unseen. These overlapping communities sustain and help support writers and readers.  Kevin Spenst initiated his 50-venue poetry tour of 13 cities to follow a few of the strands that hold the poetry worlds together. More information on the tour, its stops and Kevin Spenst's work can be found on his website kevinspenst.com

Under the auspices of RCLAS president Janet Kvammen, Spenst was excited to start his tour in New Westminster on April 15th with Métis/Icelandic poet Jónína Kirton and former poet laureate Alan Hill, Spenst read from three new chapbooks  —A Video Tape Swaddled in Purple Wool Sand In the Bed  and Recto-Verso Chez the Devil’s Printers—and from his full-length Hearts Amok: a Memoir in Verse. For venue #2, on the unceded traditional territory of the Semiahmoo First Nation, Katzie and Kwantlen First Nation, Spenst co-facilitated a chapbook workshop and read with Tolu Oloruntoba at the Surrey Art Gallery.

For Chuffed about Chapbooks: a Poetry Tour of Everywhere, Spenst will do readings at art galleries and bookstores nationwide, such as Edmonton’s Paper Birch, Peryton Books in Saskatoon, and London's TAP Centre for Creativity. But that’s not all. He will also do a reading on a ferry in Kingston with poet laureate Sadiqa de Meijer and at various pop-up events and poetry crawls in Edmonton, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, and London (where the poetry crawl starts at 2pm on June 15th at Museum London). He’ll also be participating in reading series in Toronto (the Art Bar), Guelph (artBar), Montreal (the bilingual Accent reading series) and at Catherine Owen’s home reading series in Edmonton. These are the people and places that anchor the webwork of poetry across the country.

Spenst, who teaches creative writing at Vancouver Community College and was the 2022 Poetry Mentor at SFU’s Writers Studio, is a Pushcart Poetry nominee and the author of Ignite and Jabbering with Bing Bong. He has also written a dozen other chapbooks, including Surrey Sonnets and Upend. In 2019, he was writer-in-residence at the Joy Kogawa House where he wrote about his Mennonite heritage.

Chuffed about Chapbooks is the latest incarnation of Spenst’s touring, which started with 50 readings in a day in Vancouver for his first self-published book in 2008 and led to a 100-venue tour of the country in 2014.

Spenst will be joined by local poets and authors Aaron Schneider and Kit Roffey, and will be at TAP from 4:00PM until 4:30PM.