I will spare you. I had to update my CV and biography, thought I might as well post it to provide some background.

H E A T H E R H A L E Y

• POET • SINGER • Born in Matapedia, Quebec, Heather Haley was composing songs and stories by the age of six. She attended church in order to participate in the choir—usually catching a well-deserved nap during mass—and read voraciously, often under the covers. Thusly, the night has always been her friend and she has grown weary of people characterizing her work as dark. "If you don't laugh, you'll cry."

• POET • PERFORMER • Haley is an accomplished spoken word artist and musician, performing for audiences at the Vancouver International Writers Festival, Kootenay School of Writing, Vancouver Public Library, Word on the Street Festival, Western Front, Thundering Word Heard, Bukowski's, West Coast Poetry Festival and Vancouver City Hall. She's been featured on CFRO, CBC radio and Book Television. She sang and wrote songs for an all-girl punk band, the .45s (with Randy Rampage of DOA) and HHZ—Heather Haley & the Zellots—praised by music critic Craig Lee as one of "Ten Great LA Bands". She's played the Smiling Buddha Cabaret, Mabuhay Gardens and Geary Street Theatre in San Francisco, the Hong Kong Cafe, Blackies, Club 88. Club Lingerie and the John Anson Ford Theatre in Los Angeles.

Upon her return to Vancouver in 1993 Haley worked the streets as an official BC Transit busker. In 2004, she teamed up with guitarist/sound designer and dj Roderick Shoolbraid to produce a series of live shows • RECORDING ARTIST • and an audio CD of song and spoken word called Surfing Season. Recently, she has appeared at Crush Champagne Lounge, the Lamplighter pub, Rime on Commercial Drive, Telling Tales on Bowen Island, the Red Schoolhouse Poetry Festival in Kingston, Art Bar in Toronto, Words & Music in Montreal, Bowery Poetry Club in New York City, the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf in Las Vegas, Red Sky Poetry Theatre in Seattle and Shakespeare & Sons in Prague.

• POET • WRITER • During a long stint as an expatriate, Haley was employed as a staff writer, editor and arts reviewer for the LA Weekly. The spoken word was her beat and she published many of the city's finest in her own section of the popular, alternative journal. Haley's poetry has appeared in numerous North American periodicals and anthologies and Anvil Press published a collection of verse called Sideways in 2003. "Tough, irreverent, and in-your-face, Heather Haley asks all the questions that a nice girl's not supposed to ask. Down back roads and highways, her characters long to possess the past and harness the future. Cowboys, car accidents, broken hearts, dead lovers-and potential violence-hover like heat on the horizon. Whether they're gangsta girls or riot grrrls, roaming the range or pacing the mall, Haley's women are always in the forefront, in the driver's seat, crankin' the wheel in their direction. This is brawny and uncompromising language from a voice that demands to be reckoned with."-Brian Kaufman. The BC Publishers Association selected the book's Europa for their Poetry in Transit program. Digital publications include e-poets.net, the University of Manitoba's e-zine, Treeline, Tales of Slacker Bonding and Assemblage-The Women's New Media Gallery. In 2006 she completed a residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts' Wired Writing Studio working with Karen Solie under the directorship of Fred Stenson. Haley's new book, Window Seat will come out in the fall of 2007. • POET • MEDIA ARTIST • She will also launch AURAL HEATHER, a podcast, and a new cd, Princess Nut.

In 2003, Haley's videopoem, Dying for the Pleasure, premiered at Pacific Cinèmathéque. Employing a poem-as-script strategy, it's a blackly humorous, kaleidoscopic trip down Memory Lane, the car a metaphor for power, an extension of desire. Set at the intersection of flesh and metal, beyond road rage and autoeroticism, the videopoem explores a woman's dread of, and terrible infatuation with, the car and car culture. Lyle Neff, in a review for The WestEnder, characterized it as "suitably hair raising." Dying for the Pleasure toured the festival circuit and was screened at Milan's International ArtExpo, Kalingrad's National Centre for Contemporary Arts and at the National Poety Therapy Association conference in the U.S. 2006's Purple Lipstick has garnered kudos and been selected by VideoBardo in Buenos Aires, the Zebra International Poetry Film Award in Berlin, the NFB sponsored Female Eye Festival in Toronto, (a memorial of the Montreal/École Polytechnique Massacre) and the European Media Arts Festival in Osnabrück, in the Netherlands, (from 2000 entries).

• ARTS ADMINISTRATOR • Haley has a knack for stimulating and directing cultural fulmination. She is an innovative programmer with a history of staunch commitment to the arts community and cultural awareness. With a strongly held conviction that artists, especially poets, needed to be represented on the World Wide Web, she founded The Edgewise Café in 1994, one of Canada's first electronic literary magazines, along with the non-profit arts organization, the Edgewise ElectroLit Centre. The EEC facilitated the Vancouver Videopoem Festival and Telepoetics, a videoconferenced reading series founded by Merilene M. Murphy. The Edgewise ElectroLit Centre's populist mandate and innovative programming effectively made poetry accessible to all and assisted Canadian poets and artists in expanding both their audience and potential. Host and • CURATOR • of SEE THE VOICE: Visible Verse, North America's sustaining venue for the presentation of new and artistically significant poetry film and video. "A well-established presenter of poetry video, she is an instigator of poetry video production and appreciation in Canada. Haley and the Edgewise ElectroLit Centre convened the original Vancouver Videopoem Festival in 1999 which became critically regarded owing to its progressive consideration for spoken word in cinema. The 2000 festival, for example, presented many poets both in performance and on the big screen. The audience could see for themselves the merits and distinctions of poetry rendered in time in these two forms, stage versus screen. The festival then built upon that critical base, with widened explorations into poetry cinema across national frontiers. It presented significant new works from Europe and the Americas, and continued to offer Canadian audiences a remarkably broad selection of new videopoems from our own country. And owing to Vancouver's strength in the film and television production industries, Haley has been able to cultivate critical interest between filmmakers and poets, with positive consequences for both."-Kurt Heintz

• TEACHER • Haley mentors young people and poets through several workshops for elementary schools, universities and symposiums that include the Bowen Island Learning Centre, ReFrame: Video at the Crossroads at Malaspina University College, the Canadian Authors Association conference at UBC and FUEL artist-run centre in Kingston, Ontario. • SPEAKER • PANELIST • Haley has served on numerous juries and panels including the Canada Council for the Arts, Women In Film, Digital Arts and Culture in Atlanta, Georgia and Illume: An Alchemy of Text and Image at the Gene Siskal Film Center/Chicago Art Institute. • AFFILIATIONS • Haley is a member of the Vancouver Alliance for Arts and Culture, the BC Federation of Writers, Women in Film & Video, the League of Canadian Poets and the Bowen Island Arts Council.

As I plot and scheme the adaptation of another poem to video I think of Jean Cocteau, probably the first poet to use film. In 1930 he produced "Blood of a Poet", usually categorized as surrealist art. Recently I read about two American "film-poets" who collaborated with John Cage, and a bono fide poet named James Broughton who made several films around the same time Cocteau was directing his last work, "Le Testament". In Canada the NFB has long produced non-documentary films adapted from poetry, often animated, not surprisingly. Tom Konyves of Montreal's Vehicule Poets coined the term "videopoetry" in 1978 to describe his multimedia work. Though most of us in the West are visually literate, it is brave—foolish some say—to adapt the oral tradition to a medium where image is metaphor. I'm drawn to it simply because it's natural for me, having grown up with the moving images of television and cinema. According to my mother, I sat with my mouth open through the entire 78 minutes of "Jungle Book", my first movie theatre experience. It's a powerful medium and I can't resist its lure.

In 1999 I tried to define videopoem for a journalist with, "a wedding of word and image." Achieving that integration is not impossible but it is rare. In my experience the greatest challenge of this hybrid genre is fusing voice and vision, aligning ear with eye. Some poets like to see words on the screen. The effect can look exquisite but I find that film/video doesn't accommodate text well. We viewers are busy listening to the poem with our eyes, assimilating it through our ears. I prefer spoken word. Voice is the critical element, media and venue secondary considerations. Unlike a music video—the inevitable and ubiquitous comparison—a videopoem *stars* the poem rather than the poet, the voice seen as well as heard.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF POETS AND FILM -from Catherine Rolfson's article on SEE THE VOICE: Visible Verse 2006. Italics are mine.

1894: Thomas Edison publicly introduces the Kinetograph, the first practical moving picture camera

1930: Jean Cocteau, one of the first poets to work with film, directs the surrealist film, "Le Sang d'un poète"

1970's: Manhattan Poetry Video Project, a series of videos made by poets including Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, and Bob Holman

1975: Poetry Film Festival held in San Francisco, the first event of its kind (running for twenty years and was actually called the Cine-Poem festival)

1978: Canadian poet Tom Konyves coins the term "videopoetry" to describe his multimedia work

1983: Sony releases Betamovie, the first domestic camcorder, enabling anyone make their own films

1990's: MuchMusic airs the popular "Word Up" poetry video series (produced and directed by Jill Battson)

1990's: Digital editing software such as Avid and Final Cut Pro give amateurs the ability to make professional quality films

1991: First annual National Poetry Video Festival held in Chicago

1999: First Vancouver Videopoem Festival

2004: SEE THE VOICE: Visible Verse premieres in Vancouver

2005: YouTube is a born, allowing artists (and angst-ridden teenagers) to share their videopoems with the world


As Gerard Wozek said, "during the 90s poetry video seemed to experience a lull as the Internet attracted the talents of many people who once invested themselves solely in video art. Videopoetry has changed, reflecting the rise in popularity of new media." Many works have been produced solely on the computer, usually through Flash animations. Innovative interactions of text, sound and image are much more possible now.

There still exists an air of excitement as poets discover a new mode of expression, another way to extend their imagination into the world.

This poem is also on my new AURAL HEATHER cd, "Princess Nut."


Whore In The Eddy

Gazes up at ballooning clouds as if imagining
frogs. Giraffes.Corvettes and barns,
as if Neptune's head has heard
her pleas. Sent me. She looks like a mannequin.
As if by law of nature, a stripped woman's
body looks like a mannequin after it floats
to the surface in a rainforest denuded
by steam donkeys and timber sales. All matter
from the depths is netted by log jams.

She stares at me. Cannot see
the pebbles embedded in my knees.
Or my face, not so sweet.
No bubbles, just the stillness
of standing water. No trace DNA.
No hard earned cash. Only cool airstreams
of aspen leaves. My grasping hand
takes hers, skin gliding onto my fingers
like a glove. A device. We share features
any porno masticating, regular working stiff
joe wants in his garage
between the red pickup and the Crestliner.

We watch the rim of night. A spiral
arm of stars, their slow light two million
years too late. Naked eyes decipher
Orion the hunter. Cassiopeia. Bright knots
of the Double Cluster. Mars appears.
I look the other way, to the North Star.

Café Merilene

Hungry for human
ecology, faces
in photographs, checkered
triple-souled queen of gritty
methodology, ruler of operations,
Merilene aroused
air. Space. Systems.
Merilene refused
to kill
time.
Merilene tackled
contraptions. Manuals. Corporate
ennui.
Merilene bent
gadets to her will.
Merilene expanded
devices. The telephone, up
from a puddle of party
lines to microphone
of vox populi.
Merilene busted
machine ghosts.
Merilene tamed
tools, contrivance.
Merilene vaulted
verse off pavement.
Merilene experimented,
exchanged, enlarged. Enhanced
experience.
Merilene declared
peace on war, arming
our poems
with muscle, winging
them with teeth
and sway to soar
through the ether.
Merilene fostered
belonging, linking all through solar
smiles beaming past miles
and miles of mechanism.
Merilene live
from Hollywood.
Merilene fierce,
Merilene doting.
Merilene eternal
sharing
a universal salon.