President's Notebook

A Message from the Acting President of the Edmonton Stroll of Poets
tânisi kahkiyaw nimiyotôtêmitik: Greetings, All my Good Friends,

So much good poetry resounds through the City of Edmonton (amiskwacîwâskahikanihk) these days! The Edmonton Stroll of Poets, an inclusive collective, encourages less experienced poets to gather with more experienced wordsmiths to share the ancient spoken craft of communicating ideas, love, passion, and hope through words.

Please join us at the Poets’ Haven Reading Series on Monday nights at the Upper Crust Restaurant on 109 Street and 86th Avenue, just a few blocks south of the High Level Bridge. Four or five scheduled readers are each allotted 10 minutes to read, and an open mic sign-up gives unscheduled readers each 2 minutes to read. Readings at the Upper Crust begin at 7:00 p.m., and there is a small fee of $5.00 to cover coffee, tea, and sweets. Before the Stroll of Poets Annual General Meeting at the end of March 2012, the reading series at the Upper Crust will continue in addition to four more readings scheduled at Greenwood’s Bookstore on 103 Street and Whyte Avenue. Check out the Stroll of Poets website for the Monday-evening and Sunday-afternoon reading schedules: http://www.strollofpoets.com/

Listen closely for free verse and rhyme, meter and metaphor, paradoxes and oxymorons, similes and synaesthesia, litotes and hyperboles, a wee bit of irony, and a whole lot of feeling!

In the first quarter of 2012, Mary Pinkoski, John Leppard, and Alice Major will each present a poetry workshop. Watch for further notices about these exciting learning opportunities.

Thank you to the current Stroll of Poets Board of Directors for their confidence in me to serve as Acting President until the AGM. I was asked to fill in when Sharon Ingraham resigned for health reasons, and I agreed, provided the Board proceeded according to Stroll Bylaws. At a special meeting of the Board on 26 October 2011, a motion was made to appoint me as Acting President; the motion was seconded, a vote was held, and all Board members but one voted in favour of appointing me. I was the one Board member who did not vote.

We use language because we need to say something to each other, we need to hear each other, and we need to touch each other. Poetry distills the human experience in evocative images, sounds, and words. In case you don’t know, I greeted you with a few Cree words, a language that means a lot to me. Though Cree is one of the original languages of this region, there is now an astonishing array of other languages here. Listen carefully for the beauty of each!

Sincerely,
Naomi McIlwraith, Acting President (October 2011-March 2012)

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