Love Poetry Festival in Honour of Milton Acorn and Gwen MacEwen

Let us sing the praises of the wonderful Canadian poets Milton Acorn and Gwendolyn MacEwen ...

Poets Milton Acorn and Gwendolyn MacEwen

The Love Poetry Festival was the brainchild of the poet George Elliott Clarke, Canada's seventh national poet laureate. Co-organizers George and Michelle Alfano, Founder of the (Not So) Nice Italian Girls & Friends Reading Series, worked together to create the first annual Love Poetry Festival in honour of Milton Acorn and Gwen MacEwen to be held on Centre Island, where the couple lived for a few years in the 1960s, on August 6, 2016. 

The event was held at the historic St. Andrew by the Lake Anglican Church before a generous and appreciative crowd which filled the beautiful church.

Our venue, the beautiful
St. Andrew by the Lake

George Elliott Clarke, Canada's seventh national 
poet laureate, explains the origin of the Festival

The poet and essayist
Trevor Abes starts the first set ...

Karen Mulhallen, force majeure
and Canadian literary icon

Whitney French, writer, storyteller
and multi-disciplinary artist

Honey Novick, singer, songwriter & poet

A musical interlude with the
talented pianist Roger Sharp

Poet, singer/songwriter Robert Priest
leads the second set

Anna Yin, Mississauga's 
Inaugural Poet Laureate

George concludes the second set

Roger ends the reading with another beautiful set

An appreciative crowd

Rob Fujimoto, art director & Festival poster designer, and 

Michelle Alfano, Festival co-organizer & emcee,
sail into the sunset ... 

I Shout Love ~ Milton Acorn

I shout love in a blizzard's

scarf of curling cold,

for my heart's a furred sharp-toothed thing

that rushes out whimpering

when pain cries the sign writ on it.

I shout love into your pain

when skies crack and fall

like slivers of mirrors,

and rounded fingers, blued as a great rake,

pluck the balled yarn of your brain.

I shout love at petals peeled open

by stern nurse fusion-bomb sun,

terribly like an adhesive bandage,

for love and pain, love and pain

are companions in this age.

~

Poems In Braille ~ Gwen MacEwen

1

all your hands are verbs,

now you touch worlds and feel their names -

thru the thing to the name

not the other way thru (in winter

I am Midas, I name gold)

the chair and table and book

extend from your fingers;

all your movements

command these things back to their

places; a fight against familiarity

makes me resume my distance

2

they knew what it meant,

those egyptian scribes who drew

eyes right into their hieroglyphs,

you read them dispassionate until

the eye stumbles upon itself

blinking back from the papyrus

outside, the articulate wind

annotates this; I read carefully

lest I go blind in both eyes, reading with

that other eye the final hieroglyph

3

the shortest distance between 2 points

on a revolving circumference

is a curved line; O let me follow you,

Wencelas

4

with legs and arms I make alphabets

like in those children's books

where people bend into letters and signs,

yet I do not read the long cabbala of my bones

truthfully; I need only to move to alter the design

5

I name all things in my room

and they rehearse their names,

gather in groups, form tesseracts,

discussing their names among themselves

I will not say the cast is less than the print

I will not say the curve is longer than the line,

I should read all things like braille in this season

with my fingers I should read them

lest I go blind in both eyes reading with
that other eye the final hieroglyph