I am delighted to be taking part in Michèle Provost’s upcoming show, Roman Feuilleton, a “promotional campaign for a series of literary works” based on “a surrealist text which Provost herself has composed out of lines from four of Québec’s literary landmarks; Anne Hébert’s Kamouraska, Michel Tremblay’s La grosse femme d’à côté est enceinte, Réjean Ducharme’s L’avalée des avalés, and Une saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel, by Marie-Claire Blais.”
The show opens on Friday June 13, 2014, at Centre d’exposition L’Imagier in Gatineau, with a vernissage at 6pm followed by a poetry reading at 8pm. I will be a part of the poetry reading, reading new work based on Michèle’s text. It was a fun challenge to work solely with Michèle’s words, which were themselves taken and translated from the initial four novels. My set of poems, titled “Elsewhere”, take their cue from Barbara Godard’s argument that “the partial inclusion of Quebec literary works within the field of English-Canadian cultural production decontextualizes and refracts them: a few works are admitted to inoculate the field against difference, against alterity, but not enough to effect real change” (“A Literature in the Making: Rewriting and the Dynamism of the Cultural Field”).
Other poets reading include Christian Bouchard, Monique Desnoyers, Amanda Earl, Guy Jean, Glenn Nuotio, Pearl Pirie, Carmel Purkis, Sandra Ridley & Grant Wilkins.
Hope to see you there!
ROMAN FEUILLETON Press Release
Cameron Anstee 