Artist: Ken Belford (Vancouver)

Date: April 7, 2009

Open Word: Readings and Ideas series, a collaboration with the University of Victoria Department of Writing, continued with a reading by poet Ken Belford. Belford read on Tuesday evening, April 7 at 7:30pm at Open Space, followed by an interview with Donna Kane.

Ken Belford is the author of six books of poetry including lan(d)guage (Caitlin Press 2008), and when snakes awaken (Nomados 2007). A proponent of what he has termed lan(d)guage, Belford assembles his intellectually independent sequences out of the shifting language of the BC interior, writing out a type of poetic pidgin by mixing language markers of the modern west coast with an older contact lingo of the lands beyond the edge of the farmers and rancher’s field. Self educated, Belford has lived in the roadless mountains of the headwaters of the Nass River for half his life. Neither his body nor his text have been colonized. Instead, he adapts language and ideas, making a writing with a governance and order of his own. Lan(d)guage is his sixth book. He will be reading from lan(d)guage and a new manuscript, decompositions, to be published by Talon.