Vancouver poet laureate hosts screening and awards ceremony for student poetry videos

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Vancouver poet laureate Fiona Tinwei Lam hosted a screening and awards ceremony for student-made poetry videos at the Museum of Vancouver on June 11.

The 33 videos about Vancouver’s historical, cultural, and ecological sites made up stage two of the City Poems Contest, Lam’s legacy project as the city’s sixth poet laureate.

“I thought during the pandemic we were stuck,” Lam says.

“We were locked down in our cities and we had to go to the parks and try to find a way to amuse ourselves, and what better way than to dig deep and go into some of the history of the city [for the project].”

Students from the University of British Columbia, Simon Fraser University, and Emily Carr University of Art + Design (ECUAD) media classes created videos based on 15 poems, which Lam saw as a creative opportunity for them and the poets.

“I wanted poets to get a chance to have their poems seen, because sometimes it’s really hard with a book to get it distributed. And with filmmakers, too, they’re wondering what [they] will make a film about,” she says.

“So I thought this is a chance for there to be a synergy, and it helps both the poet and it helps the student filmmakers.”

While designing the contest, she was inspired by her former mentor and first Vancouver poet laureate George McWhirter’s book A Verse Map of Vancouver, which covers the city’s neighbourhoods and landmarks through poetry and photos.

“I thought nowadays with short attention spans and phones, [this is the] perfect chance for people to learn about a poem, hear the poem, see, experience the poem,” Lam says.

“Maybe [if] they like the poem, they’re going to read more poetry by that poet or by other poets. So it just seemed like a logical extrapolation and follow up from that very first poet laureate and his legacy project.”

Lam had Heather Haley, who ran the now defunct Visible Verse Festival for video poetry, judge the videos.

“I wanted to honour her experience, knowledge, and abilities as a poetry film pioneer in the city, and she’s also been in Vancouver and the Lower Mainland for so long,” Lam says.

The screening was of the 12 finalist videos.

An SFU team won the $1,000 first prize for their video on writer Donna Seto’s poem “Contrasts,” which is about Chinatown’s loss of culture.

Students from SFU and ECUAD tied for the $500 second place prize. Another SFU team won $300, coming in third.

Haley awarded Best Animation to an ECUAD group for their video on author Junie Désil’s poem “This was meant to be for Nora,” which is about guitarist Jimi Hendrix’s grandmother in the historic Black community, Hogan’s Alley.

“[It’s] amazing. It’s just really rewarding for all our hard work to be acknowledged, especially in animation,” says Deanne Angelina Emery, the video’s director.

The group, along with two teams from the other universities, also won an audience choice prize. 

A SFU team took home the Best Documentary-Style Poetry Video award for their video on writer Sadhu Binning’s poem “Welcome” about the Komagata Maru incident, while a UBC group won Best Visual Storytelling for their video on Musqueam weaver Debra Sparrow’s poem “Know Who You Are, and Know Where You Come From.”

Lam hopes the community uses the videos as an educational tool.

“I hope people learn about the sites that were addressed in the poems, because not everyone knows about the Komagata Maru. Not everyone knows about Marco Polo [Restaurant], or the gentrification of Chinatown, or even Alma Street being the name of a river in Ukraine,” she says. 

For more information about Lam and the City Poems Contest, head to https://fionalam.net/.