Poetry Reading and Book Launch

Wild things happen when poetry is published!

Join host Kelly Madden at Artful : The Gallery for the poetry reading and book launch of Ed Varney and Dan Kirk. Guest poet Kristina Campbell will also join the reading for an entertaining trio of Comox Valley Poets.

Ed Varney was inspired to become a poet during his second year of University and has followed that idea over the past 60 years. Along the way he has learned printing technologies, publishing strategies, book binding skills, graphics and fine arts, arranged exhibitions, edited anthologies, founded small poetry magazines and published over 20 books and chapbooks of his own poetry. Varney reports that poetry continues to engage him and new poems emerge on sheets of paper in his studio. Varney’s latest chapbook is ‘Crossroads', published by the Poem Factory. It follows the path that thought takes as it expresses itself in words and how those words morph into poetry.

Dan Kirk has spent extended periods of time over the past 20 years reading American poets William Stafford, Robert Bly and Emily Dickenson, Spanish poets Antonio Machado and Juan Ramon Jimenez, Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer and Norwegian poet Olav H. Hauge. They have informed and inspired Kirk’s writing in an ongoing conversation where he has responded to, argued with and extended their words and ideas and brought them into his world. This volume ’Still Talking' represents a distillation of his ongoing dialogue with these poets and others who evoke a response. Kirk founded and ran the Red Tree Poetry Series and co-produced the first two Cascadia Poetry Festivals in Cumberland, B.C. with Adelia MacWilliam and Ed Varney. Reading in locations around Vancouver Island and Kelowna, Daniel has enjoyed the varied audiences for poetry in these communities.

Kristina Campbell is an artist and therapist who has lived in the Comox Valley since 2017. In 2020, Campbell established Artful : The Gallery to provide a home base for her multi-media art practice which includes painting, poetry and experimental film. Campbell has reached back through her Danish ancestry to bring the Nordic gods to her mythopoetic sensibility as an artist. Campbell’s style is an expression of her belief that using mythological imagery can inspire and lead to the creation of new narratives. Campbell’s fascination with mythology, symbols, memory and dream imagery is a unifying theme throughout her work.

Kelly Madden is a Vancouver Island poet whose writing is raw, unflinching, and deeply rooted in place. She speaks for the overlooked: those lost to the overdose crisis, those unhoused, and the ecosystems we continue to erase. Her work has appeared in numerous publications supported by the League of Canadian Poets, Reckoning, SAPPzine, Island Writer’s Magazine, CV2, The Poet, Drift, Drunk Monkeys and elsewhere. She is currently working on her second collection of poetry.