Astonishing Structures of Long Time


R. Kolewe and Dianne Chisholm; hosted by Margaret Christakos, inaugural Meredith and Peter Quartermain Poet in Residence and the 18th Writer in Residence at Green College


Wednesday, February 16, 5-6:30pm
in the series
Distance as a Keeping: Meredith and Peter Quartermain Poet in Residence


This second evening of the Distance as a Keeping Series will set two very different writers alongside each other. R. Kolewe is a Toronto-based poet whose mammoth long poem The Absence of Zero derives its structure from quantum processes such as the Riemann curvature tensor in four dimensions, radioactive decay algorithms, TS Eliot, Dürer, exploring spacetime and memory. Dianne Chisholm, whose feminist scholarship includes Queer Constellations: Subcultural Space in the Wake of the City and H.D. Freudian Poetics, has evolved an immersive photography practice in extreme environments in the Arctic Circle, investigating place-making powers and processes, combining writing and photography to place the reader at the intersection of exposure and perception. We'll put together these two practices in a discussion about art as intricate, complex spaciousness that requires and repays the fierce momentum of ongoingness.

R. Kolewe was born in Montreal and lives in Toronto. Educated in physics and engineering at the University of Toronto, he pursued a successful career in the software industry for many years. He now lives in Toronto and writes full time. His work has appeared in various online and print magazines and he has published three collections of poetry, Afterletters (Book*hug, 2014), Inspecting Nostalgia (Talonbooks, 2017) and The Absence of Zero (Book*hug Press, 2021) as well as several chapbooks.

Dianne Chisholm practices a nomadic, land-based form of photography with an eye to cultivating what Inuit revere as Silantuniq: climate wisdom. She frames images with lyrical prose to draw out and reflect upon immanent poetics of place-making/-unmaking, and to score the myriad undercurrents of inhabitable change. A Professor Emeritus of English literature, she lives in Edmonton and Canmore, Alberta, a summer off-road, down-river and afoot in the sub/Arctic Canada, and revisists East Greenland whenever possible. To learn more about Dianne's photographic practice, visit: diannechisholm.space.

Distance as a Keeping is a series curated and hosted by Margaret Christakos, the inaugural Meredith and Peter Quartermain Poet in Residence and the 18th Writer in Residence at Green College. This series features three creative public events featuring talks/performances by special guest artists on themes of mutual attention, solo/polyvocality, embodied apartness and tactical spaciousness.