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Episode 6: Madeline Bassnett & Kevin Shaw

10/26/2016

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Friday, October 28th, 7:30pm – 8:30pm @ 211 King Street (2nd floor), London

Madeline Bassnett is the author of two chapbooks: Elegies (Frog Hollow, 2011) and Pilgrimage (Baseline, 2016). Her poems have appeared in journals such as Grain, The New Quarterly, Riddle Fence, The Fiddlehead, and The Malahat Review. She teaches English and Creative Writing at Western University.

“Bassnett’s most significant accomplishment in this collection is her technical mastery of the interplay between syntax, line, and stanza. …[H]er sentences both weave across line breaks and stretch over stanza breaks to create complex patterns of tension and resolution. …[I]t’s like watching a close tennis match, though one with perhaps more at stake. …Elegies is characterized by a technical virtuosity that allows the poems to carry the reverberations of loss that echo through a person’s quotidian existence. They alert us to the unexpected resonances that crop up in the wake of a loved one’s passing.” —Sue Sinclair, The Fiddlehead
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Bassnett was the featured reader at the London Open Mic Poetry Night on October 7th, 2015. Visit the London Open Mic Poetry website to read an interview with Bassnett and three of her poems from Elegies. (Credit for Bassnett’s author photo, below, goes to Debra Franke.)


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Kevin Shaw is from London, ON. His poems and nonfiction have recently appeared, or are forthcoming, in Contemporary Verse 2, Grain, The Fiddlehead, and The New Quarterly. His essays have been nominated for the CBC Creative Nonfiction Prize (twice) and the Event Nonfiction Contest. He won Arc Poetry Magazine‘s 2015 Poem of the Year award and the 2016 PRISM InternationalPoetry Contest. He’s currently a PhD candidate in English at Western University, where he researches censorship law and queer poetics in English-Canadian writing.

Shaw’s PRISM Poetry Contest-winning “The Flood of ’37” (pictured above) appears in PRISM 54:4.
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Get a load of the new Couplets venue!

10/9/2016

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Couplets organizer Andy Verboom made a necessary last-minute move of his series from Chapters South to the wonderful loft of the old Novacks store at 211 King St. downtown. (Of late, it has also been the home of Brown and Dickson Booksellers)

He was forced to take the only date still available, which happened to be the day before London Open Mic's season opener at Mykonos. But in future he will be able to spread events out further, making it easier for poetry lovers who want to go to both events.

Christine Thorpe was the senior poet to Brittany Renaud's upstart in this 5th Couplets. They read poems they wrote in response to each other's poems, asked each other questions, read their own poems, and, between bouts, read little throw-away poems they literally ripped from their pads and tossed out into the audience. One of Brittany's sailed my way. It poked fun at the wild difference between the two poets. I was going to secretly uncrumple it and offer it to you here but apparently had thrown it out myself. So it goes.
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It was an invigorating evening in a rough old loft some of us could live in.
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Oct. 4, 2016: Episode 5: Christine Thorpe & Brittany Renaud

9/22/2016

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​Make September a day in October by attending Couplets, ep. 5: a collaborative reading by anchor poet Christine Thorpe and wildcard poet Brittany Renaud. ***Many thanks to Brown & Dickson for organizing our new location, 211 King St.*** More details at coupletsreadingseries.wordpress.com. Please invite widely!

Christine Thorpe, a native of Penticton, BC, is a graduate of the University of Toronto and Carleton University. Before settling on English Literature as a field of study, she studied biology, followed by mathematics and computer science. Since moving to London, she has joined the organizing committee of Poetry London and retired from the workaday life. Thorpe’s books include A Rind of Sun and Tendered Arms (both collaborations with her partner, James Wood), as well as, most recently, the chapbook Survival Strategies.

Brittany Renaud recently graduated from Western University with her Honours Bachelor of Art and hopes to pursue an MFA in Creative Writing in the next year. Renaud has published poetry in Occasus and the anthology Another London, and she aspires to write poetry and prose that is both accessible and thought-provoking. She’s currently working on a collection of poetry about Algonquin Park and family.
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Episode 2: Andreas Gripp & Koral Scott

6/16/2016

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Friday, June 24th, 6:30pm – 7:30pm @ Chapters (South), 1037 Wellington Road, London.

Andreas Gripp is the author of 21 books of poetry, includingSelected Poems 2000 – 2016 (Harmonia Press). His book Anathemawas shortlisted for the Acorn-Plantos Award for Peoples Poetry in 2010. He presently works at the Goodwill Bookstore and lives in London with his wife Carrie Lee and their two cats.
Selected Poems 2000 – 2016 is a single-volume compilation of Gripp’s poetry gleaned from his trilogy of books Anathema, Perennial, and Apocrypha, as well as new work penned in the past year. Writing in accessible and rhythmic verse, Gripp deals with past love and a new marriage as well as themes of urban life, nature and spirituality, often using an assortment of fictional characters and events based on authentic happenings.
Gripp was the featured reader at the very first London Open Mic Poetry Night on October 3rd, 2012. He was featured again on March 2nd, 2016. On the London Open Mic Poetry website, you can read a career-spanning interview with Gripp.
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Koral Scott is originally from Brantford. She holds an Honours degree in English from Western University, organizes and promotes London Open Mic Poetry events, and has edited forThe Rusty Toque. Her poetry has appeared in Conpareo.
As one of a quartet of young poets writing out of Western University, Scott was a featured reader at London Open Mic Poetry Night on February 5th, 2014.
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May 20th, Episode 1, featuring Laurie D. Graham & David Huebert

6/16/2016

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Episode 2 will be Friday, June 24th, 6:30pm – 7:30pm @ Chapters (South), 1037 Wellington Road, London.
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The poets wrote one together.

6/14/2016

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First Episode of Couplets: Poets in Dialogue - with Laurie D. Graham & David Huebert

4/30/2016

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Couplets: Poets in Dialogue is a new London Open Mic Poetry series presented by Chapters. It will be hosted the last Friday of the month, from 6:30pm to 7:30pm at Chapters (South) in London, ON (1037 Wellington Road). Each ‘episode’ of Couplets will feature a pair of London poets: an established poet drawn from the list of former featured readers at London Open Mic Poetry Night, and a younger or earlier-career poet. Laurie D. Graham and David Huebert will kick off the series’ first collaborative poetic pairing.
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Laurie D. Graham’s first book, Rove, was a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Award for best first book of poetry in Canada. Poems from her second collection, Settler Education, published last month by McClelland & Stewart, were shortlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize and won the Thomas Morton Prize. She is an editor of Brick magazine, a teacher at Fanshawe College, and she hails from outside Edmonton.

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​In Settler Education, Graham explores the Plains Cree uprising at Frog Lake—the death of nine settlers, the hanging of six Cree warriors, the imprisonment of Big Bear, and the opening of the Prairies to unfettered settlement. With language at once terse and capacious, Settler Education reckons with how these pasts repeat and reconstitute themselves in the present.

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David Huebert is the author of the poetry collection We Are No Longer The Smart Kids In Class (Guernica 2015). His poems have appeared in journals such as CV2, Vallum, Event, Prairie Fire, and The Dalhousie Review. His fiction has won The Antigonish Review's Sheldon Currie Fiction Prize, The Dalhousie Review's short story contest, and, most recently, the 2016 CBC Short Story Prize.

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We Are No Longer the Smart Kids in Class
 is a smart and spirited debut volume. These are bawdy, wryly confessional, warts-and-all poems that celebrate language and love, family and nature, the cerebral and the sensual. Occasionally drunk but always observant, Huebert’s narrators contemplate life’s mysteries with their head in the clouds and their pants around their ankles. A pornographer of the heart, David Huebert shies away from nothing. His voice is authentic and raw and is sure to give the Canadian poetry scene a much needed slap in the face.



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    Couplets organizer:
    Andy Verboom

    Official Couplets website:  https://coupletsreadingseries.wordpress.com/

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