Calling all artists region-wide – quilters, potters, painters, sculptors – whatever your discipline, we want to see your visual response to three poems by our three feature writers for Words North – Helen Knott, Jeanette Lynes and Clea Roberts. Below you will find the selected poems from which to draw your inspiration. The guidelines are as follows. For all information on submitting work, you can download our Call for Entries Words North Art Exhibit Brochure.

1. There is no Entry Fee
2. Artists can submit up to three pieces
3. Work can be inspired by one poem, a part of a poem, or a combination of lines from all three poems
4. Deadline for Registration is September 7, 2018
5. Work must be dropped off by September 17th, 2018
6. Opening will be Thursday, September 27th, 2018

To access our guidelines, click on the following links:

  1. Words North Art Exhibit Entry Form AB
  2. Words North Art Exhibit Artist Statement Form C

In you require any further information, please contact Donna Kane at dkane@pris.ca .

 

FEATURE POEMS

Helen Knott
So maybe the house collapsed, maybe the tree fell down
Maybe the cycle is stuck on repeat and the dog ran away
But maybe things had to fall apart
So you could build something new
Cause no one rebuilds the foundation if it doesn’t come unglued
Maybe the endings are beginnings
And you are right where you are meant to be
So take some power, some light and love
And grow something
Remember
They tried to bury us and did not know we were seeds

 

Jeanette Lynes
Alone with Walton’s The Compleat Angler
(from Bedlam Cowslip: The John Clare Poems, Wolsak & Wynn, 2015)
Paper! But now too trouble-tethered
to scribble one stanza. Waited for a southern
wind just as Walton advised, still
nothing. The angle wrong.
Words are trout in night-time, deep-pooled,
hearing but biting not.
The finest canker flies, stone flies or moor flies
fail to lure them to the surface.
Trout seek lusty lives
far from my perusing pencil. And I
an honest poet, incomplete, swarmed
by silent blue. I do not ask so very much—
Only to send forth a rallying cry—
A fish! A fish
A poem! A poem!

 

Clea Roberts
How We Wake Somewhere Different
(from Auguries, Brick Books, 2017)
There is nothing lighter than the touch
that awakens. Morning brought a child

to my bedside. Fingertips touching my cheek—
I did not ask for this blessing.

Is it love or bright dust
that we breathe? It will take the shape

of anything, furring it with light.

 

A HUGE THANKS TO OUR 2018 WORDS NORTH SUPPORTERS!