Digital technologies have introduced new ways of writing and connecting to others. These three authors have different approaches to engagement with technology and poetic inquiry. They provide an opportunity to read, view, create, and write poetry in a multiplicity of ways: by doing it collaboratively and opening it to the world to contribute (Kedrick James); by offering a fresh and new experience of reading and writing poetry (Jim Andrews); and by playing with the notion of digital and analog, permanency and temporariness of the written word (Natasha Boskic).
Location: Room C440, UBC Robson Square
Type: Panel
Panelists: Kedrick James, PhoneMe (app) | Natasha Boskic, Still/ed /Here (transmedia installation) | Jim Andrews, Sea of Po (app)
About The Panelists
Kedrick James is a language naturalist, exploring the wilds of discourse and befriending all the strange creatures he finds there. He explores improvisation and extends his poetics to music and other media. He is the founder of PhoneMe, a free mobile app for place-based spoken poetry and believes in poetry as something of, for, and by the people. He has published his work in books, magazines, journals and on vinyl records, cassettes, CDs and online. He is best known as a spoken word performer, and in this capacity has toured internationally, been featured on TV, radio, podcasts and theatrical productions. He currently works as a professor in the the Department of Language and Literacy Education at the University of British Columbia, and is writing on a new book about poetry in the age of language-generating Artificial Intelligence. He spends his spare time on his ranch in the Boundary Country of southern British Columbia
Natasha Boškić works at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. She moved to Canada with her two children from war-torn Serbia in 1999, during a NATO aerial bombing campaign. A long history of storytelling, folk tales and legends, and her personal life experience have shaped Natasha’s writing. She writes poetry and short personal narratives. Interested in technology as a new landscape for literary expression, she experiments with new media. She is fascinated by the opportunities to combine analog and digital technologies, and uses a variety of media to write narratives. She likes bringing poetry into every day in fun and engaging way. Her collaborative transmedial installation, “Still/ed here,” has been exhibited in Canada, Portugal, Serbia, Denmark, England and Ireland, and was awarded the 1st prize in the category of Digital and performative multimedia art in Surrey Art Gallery in 2019. The video poem, “On the Margin of History”, part of the installation, was also screened at various film festivals. Her project “Taste of Love” was a collection of edible flowers made of wafer paper with poetry lines printed on the petals. Each unique flower was available during Hot Chocolate Festival in Vancouver in 2020 for Valentine’s Day. Natasha’s Smart Cookie project was presented at TEC Expo event at UBC, where lemon tarts were overlayed with audio poetry, accessible via mobile app. Natasha’s work have been published in a number of literary journals and magazines in Canada, Europe and US. (ditch, Quills, Allegro Poetry, Visual Verse, The Post Feminist Post: Modern Romance), anthologies (Timeless Voices, Alive at the Centre: An Anthology of Poems from the Pacific NorthWest) and special publications. Natasha’s latest short poetry film, “Legacy”, was exhibited at the Polygon Gallery in North Vancouver in 2022 and screened at film festivals in 2023. She obtained a Ph.D. at UBC, with a focus on ethics and narratives in gameworlds. More about her work at onlywords.ca
Jim Andrews has been publishing vispo.com since 1996. It is the centre of his work as poet-programmer, media poet, and essayist on language, art and technology.
