Listening to the Songs of Displacement
Poets take us elsewhere. In this sense, they transport us. They sing a sort of displacement in verses rooted in the everyday moments that poetry helps us experience in radically different ways.
With Vancouver’s history of people being displaced due to colonialism and racism and with real estate interests being prioritized over ordinary citizens, the word “displacement” rankles the majority of us with its layers of injustice. These songs from the hearts of everyday people are justifiably angry in tone.
Poetry is a place that accommodates conflicted emotions. Poems sometimes celebrate ordinary beauty and denounce injustice in the space of a single stanza. The poets who will be reading this year at our Jane’s (Poetry) Walk are invested in listening and are excited to share with you their work which represents a range of responses to living in our complicated city.
Given the quality attention Jane Jacob’s paid to the everyday workings of city life, it’s no wonder that the poetry portion of Jane’s Walks has been such a hit (this will be the fifth poetry-themed walk). Poetry, after all, is about paying attention and listening to the particularities of a place.
This year’s Jane’s (Poetry) Walk will start across from the Sylvia Hotel and move to Alexandra Park where Daniela Elza will read. Afterwards, we’ll go east along Burnaby to Broughton and then down to the Seawall. At the Inukshuk, Natalie Lim will read. We’ll continue along the Seawall and our final reading will be the grassy area above Secret Beach (English Bay just outside Stanley Park) which is where Rahat Kurd will be reading. We will return via Comox street. Along the way, I’ll be sharing West End poems here and there.
Please join us on the afternoon of May 4th in listening to poetry from many voices. Who knows, you may also find yourself reciting poetry!
Meeting Place: At Beach Avenue and Gilford across from the Sylvia Hotel at 1pm (your walk leader is Kevin “I’ll be the loud person with the blondest head of hair.”)
Kevin Spenst (he/him) is one of the Poetry Ambassadors to Vancouver’s Poet Laureate Elee Kraljii Gardiner! His seventeenth chapbook has just come out with Anstruther Press and his fourth full-length collection A Bouquet Brought Back from Space came out in 2024 with Anvil Press. He is one of the organizers of the Dead Poets Reading Series, has a chapbook review column for subTerrain magazine, occasionally co-hosts Wax Poetic on Vancouver Co-op Radio, and is one of the poetry ambassadors for Vancouver’s newest poet laureate Elee Kraljii Gardiner. He is the 2025 Poetry Mentor at The Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver on unceded xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) territory where he cohabitates with the one and only Cheryl Rossi.
In 2024, Daniela Elza was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize with a sequence of poems from her sixth and forthcoming poetry collection SCAR/CITY (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2025). Her debut prose collection “Is This an Illness or an Accident?” will be published this year with Caitlin Press. Daniela is the recipient of the 2024 Colleen Thibaudeau Award for Outstanding Contribution to Poetry.
Natalie Lim (she/her) is a Chinese-Canadian poet living on the unceded, traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Peoples (Vancouver, BC). She is the winner of the 2018 CBC Poetry Prize and Room Magazine’s 2020 Emerging Writer Award, with work published in Arc Poetry Magazine, Best Canadian Poetry 2020 and elsewhere. She is the author of a chapbook, arrhythmia (Rahila’s Ghost Press, 2022), and Elegy for Opportunity, her debut book of poetry, is forthcoming from Wolsak & Wynn in 2025.
Rahat Kurd is a writer, editor, and poet of Kashmiri origin, based in Vancouver. The Book Of Z_ is her second book of poetry, forthcoming from Talonbooks this fall 2025. Her previous books, also published by Talon, are The City That Is Leaving Forever: Kashmiri Letters, co-authored with Kashmiri poet Sumayya Syed, and Cosmophilia, her first collection of poems.
Kurd draws on multilingual poetics and studies the ghazal tradition in Urdu and Persian literature, and some of her recent ghazals in English can be read online at Periodicities Journal and in the Winter 2025 issue of EVENT Magazine.
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