Working groups list: The Olive

The Olive Reading Series

Olive's Regular Poetry Readings

An evening of intense poetry, politics and discussion
Second Tuesday of every month (Sept to April)
Location: Hulbert's 7601 115 St (Belgravia)
Free admission and an open mic to follow for new poets.

The readings will start at 7:00 pm

 

About the Olive
The Olive is a non-profit editorial collective that was established by students and former students at the University of Alberta in 2000 in order to provide a regular and consistent forum for poetry in Edmonton. The Olive is a reading and zine series that holds monthly poetry readings from September to April. Each reading focuses on the work of one poet, who reads for roughly 30-40 minutes; an open stage, where anyone in attendance is welcome to read their own or someone else's poetry, concludes every reading.

Furthermore, for each reading we also publish a small zine that contains 6-8 pages of the featured reader's poetry. We distribute this zine, free of charge, at the reading and to other people who have expressed interest in receiving it.

Our goal is to highlight the work of both local poets and poets from the rest of the country. In addition to readers from Edmonton, Calgary, and Red Deer, we've also had readers from Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa, Hamilton, and Toronto. Moreover, since we want to help younger/newer poets get experience reading and sharing their writing, we have made one reading per year (this year it will be our February reading) a reading when members of an upper-year undergraduate creative writing class from the University of Alberta will be our featured poets.

Why Poetry?
 
In terms of 'in the public interest,’ The Olive, now in its ninth year, thanks to the generous support of APIRG, is a place where students (and we have a regular student audience) are able to see how 'research and public action' can take many forms, and how contemporary poetry communities are engaged in public debate and commentary on a number of levels. We explicitly welcome new poets, and offer encouragement and a mentorship of sorts through the open mic aspect of our series. Furthermore, several readers from the open mic have gone on to either become members of the editorial collective, or to become recognized poets beyond Edmonton, publishing collections of their work. The Olive empowers new artists both by giving them a space to try out their work, and a space in which their work can be recognized by other poets; it is an encouraging, community event that nurtures the many functions of poetry in our society.

 The Olive actively trains undergraduate members of our collective in how to run a series, organize events, etc., a necessary skill for any kind of community organizing. Not only does The Olive provide poets with a publication, but it provides the community with free chapbooks from local and other Canadian poets. This enables students and community members to see how other writers are dealing with events in their worlds, and how they are taking action through the written and spoken word to promote awareness and change. As such, The Olive regularly features poets whose work is explicitly politically engaged, and is a safe forum where the discussion about the relationship between art and activism can be explored. It provides a secure venue for the poetry of minority writers and a place where experiences are shared and new voices are heard.

As Felix Guattari states, the “only goal acceptable for human activity is the production of a subjectivity that enriches itself in continuous fashion in its relation to the world,” and that poetry is one of the most effective means of activating this production. He writes, “Poetry today has perhaps more to teach us than the economic and the human sciences combined.”

Poetry can work with ruptures of meaning to constitute previously unexpressed textual subjects.  A poem works like a perpetual motion machine. Meaning ignites in contingent relations that are fueled by the persistent drive of word bodies. The constructive play of language blasts across meaning and chronological time, manifesting the materiality of words and demonstrating the interactive and potentially democratic constitution of meaning.

Poetry is, as Vico says, “the necessary mode of expression.” It bears with it the basis of our real and the traces of our linguistic beginnings and possible futures. Poetry reveals language as an ambivalent site of the real within which the human makes and is made. In poetry, humans are the linguistic bodies, images and edges through, within, and against which the material world is perceived, adored and composed.

The practical necessity of poetry is not mysterious. A widening of the medium (the human) and its linguistic matter (language) can expand and shift the possibilities of the real. More than any other writing, poetry can send language singing, spiraling, colliding into itself.  And thus poetry can expand linguistic sense into the space of meaning’s possibility and into particulate, temporary local coherences. Is this utopian?  Yes. Because in poetry, we may write ourselves elsewhere and otherwise than where and what we have been.

With the help of APIRG, we've been able to realize three goals for The Olive:

  • we have substantial funding to continue preparing the monthly zine (before, the members of the editorial staff had to fund the zine out of their own pockets).
  • we are now able to pay our featured readers an honorarium.
  • we have been able to expand our publications by becoming a poetry chapbook press. Our plan is to release two chapbooks per year; ideally with one established poet and one emerging poet for each set.