In As For Me and My House, Sinclair Ross’s best-known novel, we meet a schoolteacher and word-lover named Paul. It’s springtime. Paul is trying to push a car out of a mudhole, and he fails. He’s tired, he’s wet, and he has to walk nearly a mile to find a team to pull the car out. But as Paul is tramping along, a thought occurs to him, and he brightens for a moment. “I just remembered,” he says to his companions: “weary, you know, comes from an old Anglo-Saxon word, meaning to walk across wet ground.”
Paul isn’t the first word-lover who has wearied himself in a springtime journey. April—which has been National Poetry Month in Canada since 1999—was for centuries the month for holy pilgrimages. Travellers since Chaucer have claimed that poems help pass long hours on the trail. This April, therefore, Biblioasis poets David Hickey, Joshua Trotter, and Zachariah Wells will join countless others as they hit the roads of Canada, trying to see if poetry can’t make spring showers smell a little sweeter.
In “The Soloist,” Trotter describes men listening to a singer. “It’s not with sweat their clothes are wet, nor rain,” he says: “Her song slides down the sides of their bowed brains.” But whether you’re looking to be soaked with song or just want to beat the weather, the Biblioasis reading is where you should be. Therefore! Break out your umbrellas, slip on your duckboots, and splash your way to The Phog (Windsor), the Central Public Library (London), or Dora Keogh (Toronto). On April 4th, 5th, and 6th, you can celebrate “the drips, the drops, the trickles” of spring with three of Canada’s liveliest poets. All doors open at 7PM. I know we've mentioned these readings before, but hey! it's April, and poesy's on the brain. --TKM.
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