Poets on Campus series resumes with Sandy Shreve

Vancouver poet Sandy Shreve will read from her work and extol the virtues of formal verse at Vancouver Island University Monday, Jan. 17.

Shreve is featured speaker for the fourth event in this year’s Poets on Campus series. The event, 4 pm at the Nanaimo campus Library Writing Centre, is open to the public. Admission is by donation. Following the readings, there will be cookies, coffee and conversation.

Shreve is the author of four poetry collections, including Suddenly, So Much (Exile Editions 2005) and Belonging (Sono Nis Press 1997). She co-edited, with author and former VIU Creative Writing Instructor Kate Braid, the groundbreaking anthology In Fine Form - The Canadian Book of Form Poetry (Polestar, 2005), and edited Working For A Living, a collection of poems and stories by women about their work (Room of One’s Own, 1988).

Ursula Vaira at Leaf Press in Lantzville launched her new Gesture chapbook series last August with Shreve’s Cedar Cottage Suite.

"For me, form and content must work together. When I decide to write a particular poem in a given form, it's based on my sense that this will enhance meaning," Shreve told form poetry students in a previous guest presentation at VIU.

"Having a framework to write to seems to help more than hinder my poetic process. Managing the same techniques available to us in free verse – metaphor, image, music, line length, line break, etc., - within a set structure, seems to enhance rather than stifle creativity."

"Establishing a structure somehow demands that I balance and shape the free-flow of inspiration, not only in the editing stage but also as I go along in the first draft, much as I imagine a sculptor must do if she is not to ruin the stone she's chiselling. This seems to establish a kind of tension that can take the writing in unexpected directions."

Shreve has won the Earle Birney Prize for Poetry and been short listed for the Milton Acorn People’s Poetry Award and the National Magazine Awards for poetry.

Born in Quebec and raised in Sackville, New Brunswick, Shreve now lives in Vancouver.

The Poets on Campus series is sponsored by VIU’s Department of Creative Writing, Faculty Association and Dean of Arts and Humanities and supported by Canada Council for the Arts, the League of Canadian Poets and the Writers' Union of Canada.

For more information on readings in the series, visit:

For more on Sandy Shreve’s poetry including her Lure of Tradition presentation at VIU:

For details on Shreve’s chapbook Cedar Cottage Suite: