Poster by the excellent Loki Design

MELT

Poetry on the theme of climate change

In conjunction with Canadian Poetry Month, Words and Music at the Casa presents MELT, an evening of poetry and music on the theme of climate change. Featuring some of Montreal’s finest spoken word artists and poets.

With Hugh Hazelton, Jim Thomas, Erín Moure, Ian Ferrier, Fortner Anderson, and Taqralik Partridge

featuring a presentation by Dexter X on his experiences of climate change in Canada’s Arctic

and music by Annabelle Chvostek

hosted by Vince Tinguely

At the fabulous Casa del Popolo
4873 St-Laurent

April 18, 8 p.m. $5
The organizer of Melt acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the League of Canadian Poets.

Words and Music at the Casa is sponsored by the Quebec Writers Federation, and is a CKUT FM co-presentation.

Artist Biographies

Fortner Anderson’s poems are found on several CD compilations, and have been published in Poetry Nation and the Short Fuse anthology. His own CD Sometimes I Think appeared in 2000 on Wired On Words. A collaboration with six musicians, Six Silk Purses, was released in 2005, and the single ‘He Sings’, recorded with tape/head, appeared in 2006. Recent performance venues have included the Banff Centre (Alberta), Cabaret (Montréal), the Rivoli (Toronto), St-Mark’s Church (New York), and Genoa, Italy where he opened the 8th edition of the Genoa International Poetry Festival.

Ian Ferrier has performed in Canada, the United States and Europe, and is becoming one of the core writer/performers in the North American performance literature scene. His shows are a haunting mix of poetry, stories and music. His first CD/book Exploding Head Man was released to national acclaim. Ian is a founder of the Wired on Words poetry and music label, host of the Words & Music performance literature series, and remains on the board of the Quebec Writers’ Federation as their past president. Ian’s latest CD, What Is This Place, was released by Bongobeat in 2007.

Hugh Hazelton is a writer and translator who lives in Montreal, where he teaches Spanish translation and Latin American civilization at Concordia. His third book of poetry, Antimatter, was published with CD by Broken Jaw Press in 2003; a Spanish version came out with Split Quotation/La Cita Trunca in 2009. He performs his poems in several languages and believes that poetry should bite, caress, stroke, laugh at, confront, lament, name, imagine, envision, remember, invoke, oppose, and reflect.

Montreal poet Erín Moure writes mainly in English, albeit multilingually. She has also translated poetry by Quebec’s Nicole Brossard (with Robert Majzels), Galicia’s Chus Pato, and Chile’s Andrés Ajens into English, as well as Fernando Pessoa from Portuguese. In her own most recent books, O Cadoiro, O Resplandor, and Expeditions of a Chimæra (with Oana Avasilichioaei) poetry becomes hybrid. In O Resplandor, is the author Elisa Sampedrín or Erín Moure? Both are invented by the very process of grief. O Cadoiro merges voice, experience and thinking with the medieval Galician-Portuguese cantigas. In Expeditions, at least two voices claim to be, or not be, the author. In each case, the names of the poets blur, sexes are indeterminate, multiple languages co-exist, the palimpsest is pockmarked, and at times the reader can’t tell who sings: it must be the book.

Taqralik Partridge is a spoken word performer, Inuit throatsinger and writer originally from Kuujjuaq, Nunavik (Northern Quebec). Taqralik’s voice can be heard on everything from the soundtrack to the BBC’s Billy Connolly – Journey to the Edge of the World, to ads in Inuktitut, French and English for the Government of Canada. She has toured with the Orchestre symphonique de Montreal under the direction of Kent Nagano, and produced works under commission for the CBC. In 2008 she co-founded Tusarniq – a crossroads festival featuring indigenous artists from around the world held annually in Montreal’s always-in-style Plateau. Some of Taqralik’s work can be found on her myspace page featuring music by multi-talented musicians Guido del Fabbro and Philippe Brault.

Jim Thomas was the co-founder of Oxford England’s Hammer and Tongue poetry slam. He was a member of Ottawa’s 2006 slam team, which competed at the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word in Toronto.

Special guest Dexter X is a direct action expert and frequent participant in Greenpeace actions (ie.hanging banners at G8 meetings), as well as a guiding light with the Ruckus Society, which helps organize and fund workshops in non-violent direct action. He’s also a film editor, a dj and live scratch video artist.

In 2008 Annabelle Chvostek released Resilience, produced by Roma Baran (Laurie Anderson) and Vivian Stoll (Isis). It received rave reviews and was nominated for “Contemporary Album of the Year” at the Canadian Folk Music Awards. “At the core, I love to sing; sweet and low, loud and punchy, all over my range. I love words, curling them around the intangible, alighting on the unspeakable.”

Vince Tinguely is a Montreal-based performance poet.