The Public is invited to meet Möe Clark, the first Leonard Cohen Poet-In-Residence at Westmount High School

4 - 6 P.M.,

Monday, February 22, 2010

LIBRARY, Westmount High School

4350 Ste. Catherine St. West

Westmount/Montreal, Quebec

 

Wine and cheese will be served.

 

The Leonard Cohen Poet-In-Residence program is a collaborative effort by the Foundation for Public Poetry, Westmount High School, and the Westmount High Alumni Association.

 

“The Foundation For Public Poetry is proud to have Möe Clark as our inaugural Poet-In-Residence, a residency established to honour Leonard Cohen on his 75th birthday,” says Jack Locke, president of the foundation. “She will give the students of Westmount High the kind of positive encouragement that poet Irving Layton gave to Leonard and countless others.”

 

More information about the residency can be seen at 

www.publicpoetry.wordpress.com

 

Möe Clark photo © Möe Clark

 

Métis sound artist Moe Clark fuses her unique understanding of performance narrative with traditions of circle singing and spoken word. With a background in voice, spoken word, and visual arts, she creates a lyrical style, steeped in ritual and poetic exploration. Her poetic songs resonate with the power to heal, to celebrate spirit and to connect with authentic purpose.

 

After her debut album release “Circle of She: Story & Song” (April ’08) Moe toured extensively across Canada and recently made her debut performances in Europe and South America. As a featured artist in the 2009 Maelström ReEvolution Poétique FiEstival in Brussels, Belgium, she performed alongside Wemotachi elder and storyteller Matotoson Iriniu (Charles Coocoo, Quebec).

 

Her work will be published in a bilingual poetry book in Spring 2010 through Maëlstrom publications, with translations by Marseilles poet Pierre Guéry.

 

Moe has collaborated with and performed alongside established artists such as Ian Ferrier (Montreal), D. Kimm (Montreal), Sheri-D Wilson (Calgary), and Tanya Tagaq (Nunavut). Aside from her poetry performance work, Moe has also stepped into larger artistic collaborations in areas of artistic production, composition and performance creation. In 2008 she collaborated with contemporary dancers Jenn Doan and Carmen Ruiz to create Transfiguration, an interdisciplinary performance show featuring dance and voice that ran to sold-out audiences in Calgary, AB.

 

In Spring 2009 Moe collaborated with the National Film Board of Canada and film artist Emmanuel Hessler on a short poetry video entitled Circle Haiku, a production that involved translation work, compositional development and audio engineering.

Most recently she received support from Bravo!Fact and other sources to create and direct a video poem for Intersecting Circles, a poem that won the 2007 CBC Calgary Poetry Face-Off and has since become a full-stage performance and part of a permanent archive collection in Northern Alberta.

 

Continued collaborations include working with youth and adults on storytelling and writing workshops, performing with Ian Ferrier and his experimental group Pharmakon, and continuing to develop visual design work for festivals and other artists. Moe believes in the power of transformation and the continuum of the oral tradition through active involvement in communities, both locally and internationally.