Date
Thu April 12, 2012
The Dirty Dozen, with Alex Boyd
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Poetry, Pasta and Prosecco: An Interview with Erin Moure and Priscila Uppal
Submitted by Nadika on July 9, 2010 - 8:43pm
Poetry, Prosecco & Pasta is a three-part intimate dinner series featuring moderated conversations with poets Molly Peacock, Erín Moure and Daniel David Moses. In a corresponding three-part interview series, Open Book is pleased to have the opportunity to talk with each poet and moderator. Next up is poet Erin Moure, author of O Resplandor (House of Anansi), whose dinner and discussion takes place at Grano Ristorante on Thursday, July 15. The night will be moderated by Piscila Uppal. Open Book: Toronto:If you could have a dinner party with five people, living or dead, famous or not, who would they be? Why? Erin Moure:Ah, I have dinner parties all the time with my friends and love them the best. But at my fantasy dinner party, I'd invite friends who've died whom I remember as being great fun at dinners: Anastasia Hamulyak (my grandmother, d. 1963), Paul Letain (my old boss and mentor at VIA, d. 1989), Kathleen Martindale (feminist critic of great energy, d. 1995), my Mom (a force of nature, d. 2007), Robin Blaser (great poet, d. 2009). We would talk in French and English and Ukrainian, all at once. Priscila Uppal:Don Quixote: for his chivalric manners, fabulous conversation skills, and ability to instigate rowdy brawls Dorothy Parker: for her cheeky poetry and her lugubriousness Alexander Ovechkin: for his bodychecks and party hat tricks Christopher Doda: because he's been my fella for 14 years and would be duly insulted if I didn't invite him and Bono: because he's Bono OBT:What is your favourite Toronto restaurant? EM:Nazareth on Bloor near Dovercourt... (I love Ethiopian cuisine coz there are no peanuts anywhere!).... PU:The Rushton on St. Clair West Great staff, great food, great atmosphere. OBT:What elements would your ideal dinner entail (ie. Perfect company, favourite food, ideal setting)? EM:A barbeque with real charcoal on a terrasse near the beach in Galicia... with wooden plates of polbo á feira, and sardiñas á brasa... PU:My ideal dinner is an exquisite meal prepared and served by fine chefs to my finest friends with a line-up of our favourite bands playing a private concert for us. Lots of champagne flowing. Perhaps on a beach in Barbados? OBT:Name one food that describes Toronto to you and why. EM:Peameal bacon sarnies at St. Lawrence market. Coz we dont eat peameal bacon in Montreal and I like it better than smoked meat! PU:I can't possibly pick one. What I love about Toronto is the food variety available. The CNE every year has this food pavilion where you can get fast food Dim Sum or Gyros or Curry or Buffalo Burgers or Perogies or Waffles or anything else you can imagine all within a few feet of each other. To me it's a microcosm of what is available in Toronto as a whole. I love that I can walk down my street every night and choose between Thai and Southern U.S. and Italian and Indian and French and Mexican and Brazilian and Caribbean and Greek and Chinese and Ethiopian food and more. OBT:What is your ideal writing environment? EM:Any will do... ideal is sitting on the roof deck away from the internet... PU:I have a piece of patio furniture called an orbitor, which is a round two-person lounger with an umbrella in the middle and two side-tables attached to the side, with four portions that can be raised as back rests. I love writing on the orbitor during sunny summer days, my tabby cat Vergil on his leash sleeping at my side. OBT:How well can you cook? EM:Ask my friends! They seem to keep coming back... PU:Because my mother left our household when I was eight years old, I cooked so much as a child and teenager that I resented cooking once I lived on my own and tried to do as little of it as possible. Now I tend to only cook when we're entertaining, and even then, I'm not sure heating things and chopping things up really counts as cooking. I don't make a lot from scratch and I don't make anything too complicated. I can't remember the last time I baked. My partner and I go to so many arts and literary events during the week that we rarely have the opportunity to cook for ourselves, so Toronto is an ideal city for us with so many great restaurants of all ethnic cuisines available at all different price points. OBT:Tell us about the poems you'll be reading at Poetry, Prosecco & Pasta. EM:I'll be reading work from my new book O Resplandor (House of Anansi) in which "Elisa Sampedrín" translates a dead Romanian poet, Nichita Stanescu, into English, without knowing any Romanian and without being a native English speaker, and "Erín Moure" translates Paul Celan, not from German but from an English translation of an original in Romanian, translating English to English, as it were. And there is a winding mystery narrative as well in which everyone is looking for everyone else. It's about love and grief, in one sense, and how they accompany us... in another sense, it's about the glories of reading, really....
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