Louie Leyson
Featured Writer
Louie Leyson writes on the unceded ancestral territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. Their work has been awarded a CBC Literary Prize in Nonfiction and was nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best New Poets, and National Magazine Awards. They are the recipient of a Research and Creation Grant from the Canada Council for the Arts, received an honourable mention in the Best Canadian Poetry anthology series and was selected as a semi-finalist for the Nimrod Literary Awards: Pablo Neruda Prize in Poetry. They hold a B.A. from the University of British Columbia. You can find their works in Catapult, The Malahat Review, The Account, Stonecoast Review, Plenitude, Nat. Brut, and elsewhere. Their twitter is @aswangpoem.
Events
Workship- Ekphrasis: Ways of Looking at the North
‘Ekphrasis’ refers to the practice of writing in response to visual art. The ekphrastic writer documents what springs in that mysterious space between an artist’s work and a poet’s gaze. I wield ‘ekphrasis’ to name a mode of attention. When we pay close enough notice, any detail in an artwork—whether in painting or in poetry—can gift us a glimpse into the world of an artist, the world we inhabit, and then into the realms of ourselves.
We twirl into a room of paintings, or a library of poems, and often find ourselves caught in a corridor of mirrors. Reflections of our waking and interior lives can wink at us from the startle of a colour, the surprise of a word. As an interdisciplinary practice ekphrasis teaches the poet how to look, and then look closer.
In this workshop we’ll examine the ekphrastic works of poets such as Victoria Chang, Rainer Maria Rilke, Kevin Young, and Anne Carson, and the poetic strategies that propel their responses to the works of artists like Edward Hopper and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Informed by our study of poetic modes of looking, we’ll together generate new writing in conversation with Yukon’s rich creative landscape, training our newly sharpened eye onto the works of local artists.
Reading with Louie Leyson
