Literary: Tribute to Livesay Includes Local Poets

World Poetry Presents
a Life Celebration of Dorothy Livesay,
October 27 at 7:00 pm t the Alliance for Arts
and Culture, 938 Howe St. with host Ariadne Sawyer
and guest host Diego Bastianutti.
Featured presenter: Bernice Lever
Readers: Anita Aguirre Nieveras, Bonnie Nish
Sita Carboni, William Stevenson, Victoria Pascha,
Kyle Christensson, Peter Lojewski and others.
15 minute open mike for poems about or by Dorothy Livesay.
Info: 604-526-4729

Dorothy Livesay (October 12, 1909-December 29, 1996) was one of the leading Canadian poets of the twentieth century. Her free verse poetry probes the mysteries of existence—life and death, waking and dreaming, love and hate, male and female, being and doing—rejoicing that "small miracles / shatter the facts— / explode!" As a social worker, a teacher and a radical journalist, Livesay fiercely protested social habits and polices of oppression and destruction. She asks in her poem, "Ice Age,"

Now who among us
will lift a finger
to declare I am of God, good?
Who among us
dares to be righteous?

Dorothy was born and spent her first eleven years in Winnipeg. Her parents, both journalists, Florence Randal and John Frederick Bligh (J.F.B.) Livesay, fostered her literary interests. Florence was also a poet and translator, J.F.B. a war correspondent and author of Canada's Hundred Days, 1919. In 1920 the family moved to Toronto where J.F.B. was manager of the Canadian Press. Dorothy attended a private girls' school in which, she later wrote, she was isolated from "the pounding pulse of the city." Even as a child she wrote poetry. Without her knowledge her mother submitted one of her poems to a newspaper. It was accepted and she received a cheque for two dollars.
Read more here:
http://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/unitarians/livesay.html