lay your WORD down Presents The Coburg Launch of "The Essential Anne Wilkinson" with Ingrid Ruthig

Thursday, December 4, 2014 - 7:00pm

The Human Bean
80 King Street West
Cobourg, ON

Our monthly poetry open mike - lay your WORD΅down! 7:30 p.m. - doors open 7 p.m.

FREE Admission!

Come out. Join our audience. We will "brave the microphone." We hope you will, too, and listen as other local people brave the mike (or if you wish, you can skip going to the microphone but listen as other local people do that).

This Reading is the Cobourg book launch of The Essential Anne Wilkinson (Porcupine's Quill) as selected by Ingrid Ruthig and Ingrid herself will be the featured Guest, introducing this brand-spanking-new book and presenting Wilkinson's poetry to our audience.

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Anne Wilkinson (September 21, 1910 - May 10, 1961) was one of Canada's few female modernist poets writing during the 1940s and 1950s. Born into a wealthy family in Toronto, she grew up there and in London, Ontario, and travelled extensively over the course of her private education.

She published her first collection of poetry, , in 1951 at the age of 40, followed by her second, The Hangman Ties the HollyThe Tamarack Review.

Dean Irvine, editor of Heresies: The Complete Poems of Anne Wilkinson (Vehicule Press, 2003), wrote in his introduction that "in her time, poetry was measured in relation to the masculinist canon, in our time her poetry is read in light of feminist revisions to that canon and concerns for the literary legacies of women."

Ingrid Ruthig has informed us, "In March 1950 Canadian poet Anne Wilkinson wrote in her journal, 'Women's position in the world, even in the modern world, is remarkably inelastic. If she acquires an interest, cultivates a talent beyond husband, children and house, she automatically is subject to the qualms of divided loyalties.' Torn between her domestic duties and a desire to become part of the larger world of poetry, she believed to 'write a good poem is to achieve a kind of brotherhood with all the poets of all the ages who have written good poems [.] with all men and women who are lit with the love of their craft.' Before her early death at the age of 50, she produced two acclaimed collections of poetry, as well as two other books, but not without experiencing 'the conflicted relationship between being a woman and being a poet.' The words themselves, Woman and Poet, imply mutual exclusion, that a choice has been or must be made. Even now, each of the terms Woman, Poet, Wife, and Mother categorically limit the possibility of being all at once; each suggests the members of that group are the same, thus negating the individual. Declaring that such linguistic inflexibility should be a relic of the past doesn't make it so."

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Ingrid Ruthig is a writer, editor, artist and former architect. She will visit Cobourg from nearby Durham Region, where she lives with her family.

Ingrid captured attention in our area with her 2011 book Richard Outram: Essays on His Works (Guernica) because he lived in Port Hope until his death in 2005 and many poetry-lovers here counted him among their friends.

Ingrid Ruthig's other books include Slipstream (2011) and the chapbook Synesthete II (2005). Her writing has appeared across Canada and internationally in publications like The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2012 (Tightrope Books), The Malahat Review, Descant, The Fiddlehead, The New Quarterly and Cordite, among many others.

Ingrid's award-winning artwork fusing text and image is held in private collections and has been featured in numerous art galleries and festivals.