Each spring, we host our annual MC Visual Poetry Contest & Film Festival to celebrate the incredible young poets and videographers in the Cowichan area. Though we can only name 3-4 cash winners per year, we still chose to honour all of the top entries on our film festival night. In the setting of Vancouver Island University’s beautiful theatre at their Cowichan Campus, we invite the top 10-15 students, their families, and our community to enjoy a selection of our favourite video submissions, listen to some local live poetry, and cheer on our winners as they are awarded live.
Explore this page to see highlights from our previous events and check out all the videos that were shown on those nights. We look forward to seeing what the next contest will bring!
EMCEE: Cam Drew
SPEAKERS & READINGS:
Immediately it struck me that nothing… could be simpler.
I mean seriously “nothing” would be simpler if we could add a
little thing to it, you know,
in order to get your metaphorical hands around it.
Because it’s really hard to know nothing
without first thinking of it in terms of something not being.
…
I realized that that nothingness is in fact
the secret something
to unending poems about everything.
…
So I’ll sing songs until my lungs burn and
I’ll make music until the strings that I play burst into flames and
I’ll dance with a fiery passion that leaves scorched footprints behind me and
I’ll make paintings that capture the sunlight in each stroke and
I’ll write.
Oh, I’ll write. I’ll write in my cage of twenty-six letters
carving sonnets in the walls of my cell.
Clawing haikus into my chains and
bleeding free-verse onto the floor.
I will write. I will create.
I will do everything I can for everyone to see the fire
EMCEE: Cam Drew
SPEAKERS & READINGS:
EMCEE: Daniel Varga
SPEAKERS & READINGS:
