Stanley Park Poetry Walkabout

*Small Group Walk - Registration required, limit of 25 participants*

This is a walking tour taking place as part of the Jane's Walk Vancouver festival.

Description: Given the quality attention Jane Jacob’s paid to the everyday workings of the city and its people, it’s no wonder that the Poetry Walkabout portion of Jane’s Walks has been such a hit (this will be the third poetry-themed walk in the past couple of years.) Poetry, after all, is about paying attention and noting the particularities of a place.

This year, we’ll be walking and hearing poetry from the West End into Stanley Park. In this, we acknowledge the difficult histories of forced eviction and displacement of Indigenous, Hawaiian, Portuguese, Chinese and mixed race folks’ homes and communities in the area now known as Stanley Park. More on these overlooked stories can be found here: https://bcanuntoldhistory.knowledge.ca/1880/stanley-park-established We encourage everyone to learn more about these histories of displacement, so we can all move forward with a better understanding of the present and our shared future.

According to the 2016 census, there were almost 50,000 people residing in the West End. While there’s no census information about the number of poets living in the West End, this area, in its proximity to the water, trees, small creatures and trails, has inspired many residents and non-residents alike to put pen to page. This year’s Poetry Walkabout will start at the West End Community Centre and go down Haro towards Lost Lagoon and then into the park with Kevin Spenst (walk leader), Betsy Warland, Fiona Tinwei Lam, Jaeyun Yoo and Onjana Yawnghwe. Please join us in listening to poetry that will celebrate communities, reflect upon place and sing out the small noticings of the particular.

Walk Leader: Kevin Spenst

Starting place: Just outside the West End community centre on Denman Street.

How to recognize your walk leader(s): I'll be the loud person in a floral cap just outside the West End community centre.

Accessibility Info: Fast-paced, covering lots of ground, Bicycles welcome

Travel Tips: There's parking beneath the West End Community Centre. There's a bus stop at the corner of Robson and Denman.

Walk will end at X̱wáýx̱way First Nations village site / Lumberman’s Arch.

This event is taking place as part of the Jane’s Walk Vancouver Festival (May 2-5 2024). Jane’s Walk is an annual festival of free, citizen-led walking conversations inspired by Jane Jacobs. Check out other Jane’s Walks happening this year in Vancouver here.

We respectfully acknowledge that Jane's Walk takes place on the unceded traditional territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.

READER’S BIOS:

Kevin Spenst is the author of four full-length books of poetry along with sixteen chapbooks. He is one of the organizers of the Dead Poets Reading Series, has a chapbook review column for subTerrain magazine, occasionally co-hosts Wax Poetic on Vancouver Co-op Radio, and teaches poetry at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver on unceded xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) territory where he cohabitates with the one and only Cheryl Rossi.

Betsy Warland is the author of fourteen books of creative nonfiction, memoir, and poetry. Two of those books are now published as second editions with new material. A leading mixed-genre writer, teacher, and manuscript mentor/editor in Canada, her collection of essays on writing, Breathing the Page—Reading the Act of Writing, became a bestseller in 2010. A second edition, with ten new essays, was published in November, 2023. Also in its second edition, Warland’s most enduring book, Bloodroot—Tracing the Untelling of Motherloss (2000), was released in a second edition in 2021 with a foreword by Susan Olding, and a long essay reflecting on the book twenty years later by Warland.

Fiona Tinwei Lam has authored three poetry books and a children's book. She edited The Bright Well: Contemporary Canadian Poems on Facing Cancer and co-edited Love Me True: Writers Reflect on the Ins, Outs, Ups & Downs of Marriage with Jane Silcott. She has won The New Quarterlys Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest and was a finalist for the City of Vancouver Book Award. Her work appears in over thirty anthologies, including The Best of the Best Canadian Poetry in English: The Tenth Anniversary Edition and Forcefield: 77 Women Poets of BC. Her poetry videos have screened at festivals locally and internationally. She teaches at Simon Fraser University's Continuing Studies.

Jaeyun Yoo is a Korean-Canadian poet and psychiatrist who is a graduate of The Writer's Studio at Simon Fraser University. Her poems have appeared in Room, Contemporary Verse 2, Canthius, and elsewhere. She is a finalist for The Fiddlehead’s 2023 Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize. Her work is forthcoming in Best Canadian Poetry 2025 and she was nominated for the Best of the Net anthology. She is a member of Harbour Centre 5, a local collective of emerging poets. Together, they published a collaborative chapbook called Brine.

Onjana Yawnghwe is the author of Fragments, Desire (2017), and The Small Way (2018), both nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Her third book of poetry, We Follow the River, is being published in Spring 2024 by Caitlin Press. She lives in the traditional, ancestral, and unceded lands of the Kwikwetlem First Nation (Coquitlam), and works as a registered nurse.

Host or Publisher Jane's Walk Vancouver (May 2-5, 2024)