On the last Saturday of every month, from 3-5pm, I will be hosting a Poetry Salon at Urban Gallery! We will have 2 or 3 features and of course Open Mic. Please put the recurring date on your calendar.

The next Poetry Salon is on Saturday April 26th. And what a line-up!



Michael Mirolla

Novelist, short story writer, poet and playwright, Michael Mirolla’s publications include a punk-inspired novella, The Ballad of Martin B.; three novels: Berlin (a Bressani Prize winner and recently translated into Latvian); The Facility, which features among other things a string of cloned Mussolinis; and The Giulio Metaphysics III, a novel/linked short story collection wherein a character named “Giulio” battles for freedom from his own creator; two short story collections: The Formal Logic of Emotion (translated into Italian as La logica formale delle emozioni) and Hothouse Loves & Other Tales; and three collections of poetry: Light and Time, the English-Italian bilingual Interstellar Distances – Distanze Interstellari, and the just published The House on 14th Avenue. A short story collection, Lessons In Relationship Dyads, is scheduled with Red Hen Press in the U.S. His short story, “A Theory of Discontinuous Existence,” was selected for The Journey Prize Anthology, while another short story, “The Sand Flea,” was nominated for the US Pushcart Prize.


Claudio Gaudio

Claudio Gaudio is a Toronto based writer born in Calabria. Studied literature and philosophy at York University. “Texas” a novel published by Quattro Books, is currently being translated into Spanish and, excerpted, by Francesco Loriggio to be included in an anthology of Italian Canadian writers to be released in Calabria, by Rubbettino Editore. His work has also appeared in ELQ (Exile Literary Quarterly), Rampike literary magazine and Geist.

Third Feature TBA

And Open Mic! Five minute spots, sign-up at 3pm.

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Yeah, one of those nuts that takes 3 pages of hand-written notes on her tablet when she goes to a show at the ROM (you are not allowed to photograph or even draw the exhibits in shows like these - all locked up for the gift shop - you want, you buy - but taking notes is permissible). What you gonna do with me? KJ Mullins kindly accepted an offer to write an article from them for newz4u.net, and it's been published now. I wrote the review far too quickly. But hopefully it works for you. If people who read it go to see the show who might not have otherwise I will be exceptionally happy. It's a fascinating offering from The Forbidden City and well worth seeing.


"How can a museum in another city on another continent show the scope of the riches of the Forbidden City? The ROMs show has 250 treasures from the Forbidden City, of which about 80, including armour, textiles, paintings and calligraphy, have never travelled before. The ROMs choices are sparse against a total of 1.8 million artifacts in Beijing, and attempt to cast a wide net over the art and artifacts of the Palace.

How successful is this appetizer of an offering of the treasures of one of the world’s greatest museums?"

Go read the review, let me know what you think: A Peek Inside the Palace of Palaces: THE FORBIDDEN CITY at the ROM

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KJ Mullins published an article I wrote on the Forbidden City show at the Royal Ontario Museum. My article has a different slant to that taken by most of the other reviewers for newspapers and on-line magazines, who didn't seem, overall, to be hugely impressed with the show. I do hope a few folks make their way to the ROM to see it based on my response. The offerings from the Forbidden City are well worth seeing.

A Peek Inside the Palace of Palaces: THE FORBIDDEN CITY at the ROM

Since this is a test-run, a video-in-process, a test of the writing for what I hope to do in the 'real' one, you probably don't need to watch it unless you would like to offer a comment that might help me compose the final video.



direct link: Clay Lady (test)

During the Autumn of 2013, I attended a figurative sculpture session at the Toronto School of Art with Florian Jacot. Throughout the 13 weeks of sculpting from a live model, I took photographs. In December of 2013, I searched for a turntable to video the finished little sculpture spinning but did not include that footage in the video just completed (I have included a 25sec clip at the end of this post). Yesterday I finally set a painting on the floor of my living room as a back-drop, set up a Canon 60D, sat down and read from my notebook. It's off-the-cuff, no preparation, a test run. I also had composed a Picasa album last Fall documenting the progress of the sculpture and made that into a mini video and added it to the test video. Honestly, I am a procrastinator and hope that posting these video clips will inspire me to do the one I had planned, which will be a little more complex in its structure and have many more photographs and video of the sculpture itself.




Uploaded 14 Dec 2013: Only a test run... not using the right camera and not with the poetry I am composing for a videopoem on/of this figure sculpture.

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Clay Lady (a video) - still from a test of the poem & talk. I'll probably upload the test vid too.
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It's official: I will be hosting monthly Poetry Salons at Urban Gallery on the last Saturday of each month from 3-5pm. Urban Gallery is a wonderful gallery and I am most honoured to be asked to host salons and very happy to be part of the art scene developing at the Gallery. Thanks to Calvin Hambrook, Allen Shugar and Kaspara Albertsen!



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Lady in Red Corset (or some such title), life-drawing @ Urban Gallery 1 Feb 2014 (but finished tonight), model: Manminder, by Brenda Clews, 11" x 15", charcoal, graphite, India inks, pastels, etc., on primed canvas sheet.

The red ink might still be sticky, wet enough, and it is photographed at night under daylight bulbs with sheets of mylar hung over them - in daylight, there would be more detail and the colours might be slightly different shades.

On another front, NaPoWriMo is going well, and I am managing to keep up - but posting privately.

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Due to anxiety over those who fly by and swipe a line, an image, a concept, an approach, a theme and use it to build their own little poetry nests elsewhere on the NET without referencing their source or giving credit to me or my work, which happened constantly when I used to openly post my writing, I simply cannot post poetry here. As I move through the block caused by this behaviour of seemingly well-educated and ethical writers, and on the advice of my analyst, who I discussed the issue at length with, including names, sites, specific examples when I was still seeing him, I find I'd like to continue writing on-line.

So I will have to do it in a private blog.

I have, of course, been writing throughout but in bursts and then reading the poems in Open Mics around the city where, I know, no-one really listens - because it's too hard to and with say three featured poets and 10 Open Mics one can't place a single poem in a context to analyze its value and what can potentially be taken from it (if poets in Toronto did such a thing - my experience has been that those living in America do this frequently, Canadians tend to be more original) - and so that felt safe.

What I had hoped to do this month, the month of 'poetry,' is to take a photo or do a drawing every day and write a line or a stanza or a whole poem to accompany it.

So I might share the pictures here, and perhaps a little of the intent.

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Besides a (for me, heartbreaking) issue with Picasa albums and Blogger, which has kept me from posting, and may drive me from this blog ultimately, who knows,

I had wanted to write something every day for the month of April for poetry month, which I've never done before.

With other stuff going on in my life, I forgot entirely.

So I found something I scribbled on the 14th of March, which really encapsulates so very much and yet which, of course, maintaining the silence on my personal life that I have mostly adhered to in this blog, I will not speak about.



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Ann Marcaida featured my performance videopoem, Ink Ocean, at Art and Earth yesterday.


Responses to Ink Ocean:

• "Wow, what a trip. You've made something passionate out of this collision of many technologies and layers. Thank you." John Oughton (who jammed the über cool inky ocean music) 
• "GREAT WORK Brenda, really great. I enjoyed every minute of it, choreography, words, music, background video. WOW." Pierre-Marie Cœdès 
• "You did a fine job of editing, regardless of the circumstances. The surrounding imagery works very effectively, together with your combined dance and spoken word performance and the music. You prevailed over the lighting limitation and static camera. The result is indeed moving, as well as imaginative." Allan Briesmaster
• "Outstanding video effects, excellent message and a perfect musical accompaniment. I especially enjoyed the golden orange segment which you had earlier shared a preview of. Another great piece of artistic work." Bill Sprague
• "Gorgeous! ....the poem, performance, and choice of costume are spectacular." Ann Marcaida

It's been called "an awesome video poem" (Stephen Sinclair); "very impressive" (Hana Barak Engel); "glimmer of gold at sunset...love is the twine that binds our bones....beautiful contrasts to the chaos" (Jennifer W); "I love it"(Poonam Chandrika Tyagi); "Ocean ink is fantastic. Bravo!" (Mawar Marzuki);

Ink Ocean is a poem on the Gulf Oil Spill -we hear the lament of the wild through the birds, fish, plants- a poem on us and our ways and on loving in an increasingly polluted world.

Ink Ocean was shot at a live performance at Urban Gallery (where my poempaintings show was - those are mine hanging on the walls) in January 2014. Sick with the flu afterwards, I spent days researching open domain photos and video of the 2010 Gulf Oil Spill and was often in tears at what I saw (like we all were that year). John, who jammed on his guitar to produce a kind of oceanic sonar soundtrack while I performed, said, of an earlier draft version of the video, that he thought I should try to keep the performance/movement the main focus. I decided not to bombard the viewer with graphic images of the oil spill and used various filters to present the photos and video I used so that (hopefully) they became part of the dance itself. We are immersed in the realities we create. Ink Ocean is an activist poem - but not stridently so - rather helping people to hear the cry of the wild and to care and to keep loving ourselves, each other, the world, so that we may all survive. I hope the poem and performance and video open channels of hope, that there are ways through what we are being told by scientists is the world's sixth mass extinction.

John Oughton jams on his electric guitar with his magic box of sounds as a musical accompaniment to the performance: http://library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/oughton/index.htm

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