Liz Zetlin

Liz Zetlin
Originally uploaded by random acts of poetry

Liz Zetlin is a poet and visual artist. Her poetry has won a Stephen Leacock prize and the Shaunt Basmajian Chapbook award. Her first video poems, The Limestone Ghazals, were exhibited in art galleries in Canada and Ireland. One of her latest video poems, Pond, featuring Don McKay’s poem of the same name, is premiering at the Fabulous Festival of Fringe Film.

She’s currently serving as Owen Sound’s first Poet Laureate; co-artistic director of the annual Words Aloud Spoken Word & Storytelling Festival in Durham, Ontario; and co-producer/director of this year’s Festival Documentary and Educational DVD. Zetlin's publications include The Thing With Feathers, Taking Root, and Said the River.

During RAP week, she’ll be launching “Addictions of a Poet Laureate,” a chapbook of poems responsing to people, occasions and events that inspired her during Owen Sound’s 150 anniversary year.

Best known as a “nature poet with a twist,” Zetlin plants garlic to form words of prayer; inscribes words on ornamental gourds as catalysts for poems; grows grassy punctuation marks in her hay field and writes odes to these “modulators of meaning.”

After reading her third poetry collection, The Thing with Feathers (BuschekBooks, 2004) poet Jeanette Lynes cautions “you’ll never feel quite the same about things like milk, badminton or apostrophes. This is a book of sharp tastes and unflinching attentions, word-tangos with poets like Emily Dickinson and Don McKay, and fierce wrangles with hope and crows.” Russell Thornton says “With their clear depths of feeling, sharp intelligence, humour and verve, Zetlin’s poems are original and irresistible.”

links:
League of Canadian Poets: www.poets.ca/linktext/direct/zetlin.htm
Owen Sound Poet Laureate: www.owensound.library.on.ca/page.php?PageID=59
Words Aloud Spoken Word Festival: www.wordsaloud.ca