Music & Words, Words & Music
When
- June 23, 2017 - Doors at: 7:30pm / Showtime: 8:00pm
Links
The longstanding link between music and poetry will be celebrated at a combined musical performance and book launch Friday, June 23 at the Artesian on 13th Avenue. Featured will be guitar/bass duo John Lent and Mark Nishihara and author Tom Wayman.
The event begins at 8PM, Doors will open at 7:30PM. Tickets are $20 in Advance or at the Door.
“Poetry began as song lyrics, or recited to musical accompaniment,” said Wayman, who will be launching his newest collection, Helpless Angels, the poems of which all relate to music. “As literacy spread through society, poetry began to be written for the page, too. But the two art forms have remained linked, most recently illustrated by the awarding of the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature to singer-songwriter Bob Dylan.”
Performing at the Artesian event will be Vernon, B.C.-based musician-author-educator John Lent on guitar and musician-educator Mark Nishihara on bass. Lent is a long-time principal of the Lent/Fraser/Wall blues and roots trio, but says his work with Nishihara returns him to the folk and folk-rock repertoire of his earliest days as a musician, and as well highlights more recent tunes.
Lent’s considerable talent as a singer-songwriter was acknowledged this year when one of his newest compositions was a semifinalist in Nashville’s International Songwriters Competition, out of 16,000 entries.
Wayman, who lives in southeastern B.C.’s Slocan Valley, said his recent book of poems was conceived when he realized that his generation was the first in human history to be able to listen to any music they choose anywhere they go. “Poems in Helpless Angels reflect on how this development has impacted us throughout our lives. Other poems in the collection honor musicians who have been important to me, respond to the music found in nature, or consider the ways music enhances or alters our moods,” he said.
One poem in Helpless Angels was named in February the winner of Musicworks magazine’s “sonic geography” literary contest. Wayman’s 2012 poetry collection Dirty Snow won the Acorn-Plantos Award, and his 2015 collection of short stories about the Slocan Valley, The Shadows We Mistake for Love, won the Diamond Foundation Prize for Fiction (Western Canada Jewish Book Awards). Author of more than 20 poetry collections, as well as various books of fiction and nonfiction, Wayman in 2015 was declared a Vancouver Literary Landmark with a plaque on the city’s Commercial Drive commemorating his contribution to Vancouver’s literary heritage.
The Artesian event is one stop in a tour that will also take the performers to Saskatoon and Edmonton. Helpless Angels is published by Saskatoon’s Thistledown Press, who also published Lent’s 2009 poetry collection Cantilevered Songs and his 2012 novel, The Path to Ardroe.
