a.rawlings has collaborated with Ciara Adams, Elizabeth Bachinsky, Jaap Blonk, Geoff Bouckley, Kyle Buckley, Stephen Cain, Eugenia Catroppa, Matt Ceolin, Margaret Christakos, Jason Christie, Christine Duncan's Element Choir, Conor Green, Jill Hartman, Maggie Helwig, Susanna Hood, Sarah Janssens, Maja Jantar, Lori Nancy Kalamanski, Bill Kennedy, Kristof Lauwers, François Luong, Jelle Meander, Alexis Milligan, Michael Morse, Katherine Parrish, Tim Posgate, Reykjavík!, Joe Sorbara, Mister Tahti, Theatre Gargantua, Helen White, Jonathon Wilcke, Richard Windeyer, and Rachel Zolf, among others...
Björk, Meredith Monk, Tagaq, Jorane, Diamanda Galás, Steve Reich, John Cage, R. Murray Schafer, Tori Amos, CocoRosie, Kate Bush, Cia Rinne, Nina Hagen, Nico Muhly, Ben Frost, Valgeir Sigurðsson, Matt Ceolin, Diane Borsato, Erna Ómarsdóttir, Ólafur Eliasson, Gertrude Stein, bpNichol, Steve McCaffery, The Four Horsemen, Caroline Bergvall, Steve Venright, Jaap Blonk, Bedroom Community, Margaret Christakos, Christian Bök, Chris Dewdney, Jordan Scott, Bill Kennedy, Darren Wershler, John Oswald, Theatre Gargantua, bluemouth inc., Merce Cunningham, Steve Paxton and Nancy Stark Smith, Jacques Lacan, Frederich Nietzsche
風格近似
Codex Seraphinianus, Dictionary of Divinatory Practices
a.rawlings is a Canadian poet, editor, and multidisciplinary artist who has presented and/or published work in Belgium, Canada, Iceland, Norway, and the United States. Her poetry has been translated into Dutch, French, Icelandic, Korean, and Spanish.
In 2001, rawlings received the bpNichol Award for Distinction in Writing when she graduated from York University. Since then, she has worked with a variety of literary organizations, including the Mercury Press, the Scream Literary Festival, Sumach Press, Word: Canada’s Magazine for Readers + Writers, and The Lexiconjury Reading Series. rawlings was recently nominated for the 2008 K.M. Hunter Artists Awards.
As an arts educator, rawlings has led youth-oriented creative writing workshops for terminus1525.ca, the Toronto District School Board, Learning through the Arts, and the Toronto Public Library system. In 2007, she taught a creative writing course at Ryerson University. In 2008, she joined the roster of authors working with Writers in Electronic Residence. rawlings currently co-facilitates (with Ciara Adams) VOCABLE: a sound, text, and movement workshop.
In 2005, rawlings hosted the poetry documentary series Heart of a Poet. She is also co-editor of Shift & Switch: New Canadian Poetry (2005), an anthology featuring over forty emerging poets from across the country. rawlings' creative work has been published by literary journals across North America.
Her first book-length collection of poetry, Wide slumber for lepidopterists was published in spring 2006 by Coach House Books. In November 2006, Theatre Commutiny staged a full-length performance of the book as part of Harbourfront Centre's Hatch: Emerging Performance Projects series; rawlings performed in and co-produced the show. In April 2006, Wide slumber for lepidopterists received a nomination for the Gerald Lampert Award for Best First Book of Poetry. The book was also awarded Alcuin Award for Book Design, and was listed in The Globe and Mail's top 100 books of 2006.
In addition to literary pursuits, rawlings actively works in theatre and dance. She taught ballroom, Latin, and swing dances from 2001-3. She has worked with Toronto's Theatre Gargantua, and currently sits on the board of directors for bluemouth inc. and hum dancesoundart.
rawlings received a Chalmers Arts Fellowship, and spent half of 2009 developing new work in Belgium and Iceland.
THE PRESS ON WIDE SLUMBER
"Wide slumber for lepidopterists is a feast for the senses." — Vincent Ponka, Broken Pencil, August 2006
"... there is quotidian simplicity at Wide slumber's core. That Rawlings can bend that simplicity with killing jar-like distortions is proof of not only mischievousness but a profound new talent as well." — Brian Joseph Davis, eye, April 2006
"Rawlings spins filamental connections between insect modes of being and states of sleep by excavating the scientific and sensual language around each concept, then using the page to orchestrate back-and-forth movements between her two interests.... The unexpected juxtaposition of these two realms of animal experience is interesting enough, but rawlings's ability to reproduce, using the most clinical terms, the to and fro of a frankly copulative energy pulsing through both worlds is often breathtaking. Vulva rhymed with larva, parallels of penis to proboscis — this is one cool collection, a fresh combination of unashamedly brainy and unabashedly horny." — Sonnet L'Abbé, The Globe and Mail, April 2006
"rawlings’ poems & performance are exciting. By exciting, I mean a thrill to see & hear.... “PUPA: PARASOMNIA” is perhaps the best sex poem (i.e., most sexy sex poem) I’ve heard, maybe ever. By extending her expression beyond everyday use of language & into the realm of sound art, rawlings’ work is a full-body experience.... Fucking fabulous." — T.L. Cowan, terminus1525.ca, April 2006
“Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists is a gorgeous poetic conceit. It’s beautifully produced, a kind of pocket-sized textual flicker book, with some lovely illustrations too. Its subject is sleep, its different stages and parasomnias, viscerally evoked using the language of lepidoptery in quite astonishing experimental configurations…. I rather loved the glossary at the end of the book too, mingling, as does the text, its specialist lexicons.” — Sarah Law, Stride Magazine, August 2007
"[T]he pure joy and pleasure of ferocity that rawlings attacks language with... is enough to marvel even the most seasoned readers." — Aaron Tucker, Black Ink, October 2006
"[Wide slumber for lepidopterists] is a gorgeously produced little thing... The writing has a dreamy, underwater quality." — Alison Calder, Winnipeg Free Press, June 2006
"Wide slumber is ambitious in integrating so many genres, and yet it does so with such aplomb. It is a very accomplished first book." — Suzanne Zelazo, The Danforth Review, May 2006
"'a.rawlings writes a different kind of poetry. Her sensual first book Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists arouses not only its subject matter but the text itself, waking it — at times shaking it — from its sleepy slumber. Words rise and fall, sleepwalk and enchant, and the interplay of sound and silence alone will keep you reading." — Wanda O'Connor, Ottawa Xpress, April 2006
"'Affected by her background in dance and theatre, Rawlings’s text has a kinetic aspect, an awareness of the body and the breath, which is unusual in such linguistically innovative writing. She brings a vocabulary of dance and the body to her consideration of how to approach text as an active, moving site, asking, "How can sound translate into text, text into movement, movement into text? How can a page act as a stage for words?" " — derek beaulieu, Calgary FFWD, April 2006
"Dream words, words that are clear in dream, but when scribbled into a notebook are found to be meaningless in the morning. Or—not meaningless, but unfamiliar. Allowing words to break down and writing lines that mimic words but aren’t, forces the reader to appreciate the text. “Moth” does not equal the insect that lives in our world. “Moth” is a word which is an arrangement of symbols that represents an insect. If I then write “thmo,” you’re forced to think about what a word actually is, because “thmo” is not a word. Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists is very sensitive to how fragile language can be." — Adam Golaski, Open Letters Monthly, May 2007
"Inside the poems, inside the cocoon, as it were, individual words make no claim for meaning. They unfurl (23-29), they mimic (30, 40-41), they list (74-78), they take flight (68-71), and they simply lie on the page, like so much shed skin (84-86). These words, phonemes, morphemes, and poems—these poemes?—perform all of that, though not necessarily in that order, despite the sequential pagination, and not necessarily in order that readers are, mothlike, reborn." — Travis V. Mason, The Goose, November 2006
"In stages they grow, the larvae the caterpillars the signs the questions. The specimens the clusters the phonemes the patterns the organs. There's much agitated excitation in this textual universe, abundant with visual and verbal accretions, sexual binds, mental folds. The gestation of writing bodies." — Caroline Bergvall
"Collector and specimen, observer and observed, become one in this marvellously metamorphic text. Ms. rawlings's language — born of field and lab and other mysterious places — attains a lambent sensuality. These poems are luminous with intelligence, vivacity and beauty. Let the reader, entranced, be drawn to their light." — Steve Venright
Great to see you here too ;-) Loved your performance in Ghent. Hope to see more some day... in Belgium, Canada or somewhere else in the poetic wor(l)d of performance(s)
