Featuring: Luciano Iacobelli, John Oughton and Brenda Clews.
Luciano is a poet, visual artist and publisher. His work transgresses borders, edges, finds places where definition is bare. While his pared-down poetry is rich with literary and philosophical reflections and echoes for those who wish to delve into layers and meanings, it is always passionate.
Luciano is performing a piece entitled THE STUTTER NOTEBOOK: The piece employs a stylized stutter to reinforce the idea that all communication is stutter, all language is an attempt at arriving at fluid communication, but the attempt is destined to fail. Language itself is a faulty tool, unstable and full of hesitations. The best anyone can do is stumble to their meanings. The stumble has its own peculiarities, it's own beauty and rhythm. and the determination and drive behind the stumble is poetry.
John has worked as writer, musician, photographer, and performer. He was part of Toronto's improvisational dance/performance art scene, as performer, moving prop, musician and scriptwriter. He has staged his writing with slides, music, video, dancers, and even a battery-powered toy robot. His poetry also is hard to pin down, morphing from comic and satirical approaches to meditations on the presence of science, technology and nature in everyday life, and elegies.
Brenda is a multi-media artist who dances poems in hand-made masks that often find their way into paintings. Thirteen paintings from her Poempaintings Series are currently on show at Urban Gallery. She will be performing in full gear at this Poetry Salon - expect masks, creative movement, rich and sensual poetry - and to see the poempaintings hanging on the walls in a new light.
(PWYC, suggested minimum donation $5.)
Bios:
LUCIANO IACOBELLI is a poet, publisher and visual artist. He is the author of numerous chapbooks and 3 full length books of poetry. His book The examined Life is being published by Guernica Editions in 2016. He is the co-owner of Quattro Books, and the publisher of Lyricalmyrical press.
Born in Guelph, JOHN OUGHTON has lived in the Middle East, Japan, and Nova Scotia, but always seems to return to Toronto. He completed a BA and MA at York U., where he studied with Irving Layton, Miriam Waddington and Eli Mandel, and also was a "graduate assistant" to Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. He is the author of five books of poetry -- most recently, Time Slip from Guernica Editions-- and several chapbooks. His first novel, Enough of Hate, will be published by Neopoiesis Press around the end of 2014. John is also a photographer with three solo exhibitions to his credit. He works as Professor of Learning and Teaching at Centennial College.
BRENDA CLEWS is an African-Canadian poet, painter, videopoet and editor living in Toronto, Canada. She has edited textbooks, written articles for newspapers, taught yoga, done temporary office work, and dog sitting, while maintaining a reclusive lifestyle of writing and painting. She has a degree in Fine Arts and abandoned a PhD in English Lit many years ago. Brenda has had solo art shows at York University (2000), Q Space (2013) and currently at Urban Gallery, and has been in a number of group art shows including 5 By 5 at The Gladstone Hotel in 2013. Her artwork has appeared in several books and as journal covers. Her poetry has been published in various books and in print and on-line journals over the years. LyricalMyrical published her chapbook, 'the luminist poems' in 2013. She has a poetry book, 'Tidal Fury,' forthcoming with Guernica Editions. She cites her early years spent barefoot, living in a compound of mud huts, with many wild animals and the wonderful Ndembu people, in the jungle of Kafue National Park in Zambia, for her deep resonance with the beauty, strangeness and brilliance of the tribal mind and the natural world.
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KJ Mullins-Toronto: One of Toronto’s newest galleries Urban Gallery is opening 2014 strong with its current showing of Brenda Clews’ recent painting collection. Clews vibrant work features paintings from 2011-2014. The latest painting, Spilt Mask, a haunting golden charcoal of the artist, masks and humanity was just completed on January 5.
