The Fury of the Saints:
Poetry and Trouble
Stephen Jenkinson and Guests
A live encounter with the poet's calling, with poetry's moral, alchemical force.
May 24-25, 2025 ⢠Livestreams from Victoria, BC
Register Now - CADWhat is poetry to a time flirting with madness?
In an age where language is often reduced to transaction and utility, where words can become hollowed vessels stripped of their capacity to disturb and awaken, poetry is - must be - a stubborn testimony to the deeper possibilities of human utterance.
We wonât come to poetry as self-expression, nor as therapy, nor entertainment. Weâll reckon with poetry as a moral force, as an alchemical encounter with what troubles us mostâboth personally and politically.Â
Stephen Jenkinson will be joined by working artists. He means to test poetry's fitness for the tempestâthe political one, the personal one. This is not mere observation or commentary. This is an invitation to witness the divisionary power of the poetic in troubled times.
These sessions are live encounters with a spirit amnesia in a poetically adrift time.
Event Details
Saturday Night, 24 May:
Stephen Jenkinson and painter Gary Dillon
Event 7:00-9:00pm
Sunday Morning, 25 May:
Stephen Jenkinson and poet April Tierney
Event 10:30am-12:30pm
How to Participate in this two day livestream encounter:
$50 CAD for Canadian Participants
$50 USD for International Participants
Includes both Sessions
The digital format offers its own particular mode of witnessing. While different from being physically present, it nonetheless provides entry into a moment of cultural consequence. The camera becomes a portal, not a barrierâanother way of attending to the work at hand.
Register For Livestream - CADWhat is Included:
- Both Livestream Encounters with Stephen Jenkinson and guests
- Three-month access to the polished filmed event
- Suggested reading list from some of Stephenâs favourite poems
- Access to a private community group where the conversation continues
- Witness an unrepeatable dialogue between word-crafters
- A formal invitation to consider poetry not as luxurious diversion but as necessary sustenance
The recording access is not merely a convenience. It is an acknowledgment that some words must be heard more than once, that meaning reveals itself in layers, that what troubles us most, deserves our sustained attention.
Who Is This For?
If you're creative, curious, and committed to the spoken or the written word, to the work of art and the art of work, this livestream event is for you.
This is for those who suspect that language matters, that our words are moral forces. It is for those who have felt the inadequacy of everyday talk, who have glimpsed the possibility that poetryâin its broadest senseâredeems the tongue.
Join working wordsmiths in real time. We'll lift up the craft and the calling of poetry, and bring its power to bear upon some troubles of our time.
In Stephen Jenkinson's Own Words:
âYears ago I was sweating it out, sitting at the front of a room full of urban people I didnât know, people who looked like me, readying myself for a two-hour throwdown about grief and death and the like, waiting for the introduction to conclude. Meaning to honour me and my work, the organizer called me a âvisionaryâ.
Big trouble.
Visionaries come from exotic places, have exotic looks. Thatâs not me. How to deal with that, set the record straight?
âWellâ, I said when I got to the microphone, âIâm not sure about that âvisionaryâ thing. âDivisionaryâ, maybe. That sounds right.â
And thatâs what good poetry is in a time of trouble: Not divisive. Rallying. Questioning. Beautiful in its way, yes. And divisionary.â
â Stephen Jenkinson
Founder of the Orphan Wisdom SchoolÂ
This distinctionâdivisionary, not visionaryâis crucial.Â
Poetry at its most potent does not unify through bland platitudes. It unifies through its willingness to name what troubles us, to articulate the questions we have been afraid to ask. This is the fury of the saintsânot rage for its own sake but a righteous refusal to accept the diminishment of language, the trivialization of human experience, the reduction of our deepest concerns to matters of preference or taste.
On the Nature of This Gathering
This event continues in the tradition of Stephen Jenkinson's previous work, which suggests that cultural redemption requires more than good intentions. It requires craft, precision, and a willingness to engage with difficulty. Â In his death-trade work he pleaded for us to look unflinchingly at our cultural denial of mortality, this exploration of poetry demands that we recognize our impoverished relationship with language itself.
The poets and saints have this in common: they refuse to accept the world as it presents itself. They insist on another way of seeing, another way of speaking. Their fury is not destructive but generativeâit makes possible what seemed impossible before. In troubled times, such fury is not a luxury. It is a necessity.
About the Featured ArtistsÂ
April Tierney is the author of four full-length collections of poetry: Matter/Mother (2024), Memory Keeper (2022), Origin Stories (2020), and Signing to the Bones (2018). Her work has been featured in several anthologies, nominated for The Pushcart Prize, as well as published in Orion Magazine, Deep Times: A Journal of the Work that Reconnects, and Clarion Poetry Magazine, among others. April lives in the U.S. along the foothills of the Colorado Rocky Mountains with her family.
In her poetry, Tierney consistently engages with themes of ecological consciousness, ancestral memory, and the sacred dimensions of everyday life. Her presence at this event brings a particular attentiveness to the ways in which poetry can reconnect us to the more-than-human world, especially in times of environmental precarity.
Gary Dillon is a Ceremonialist and a self-taught Muralist and Artist in many media. In younger days he was engaged in performance dance. He is an independent scholar of Arabic and of indigenous languages, including Hawaiian and Nahuatl.
About Stephen Jenkinson
Stephen Jenkinson, MTS, MSW
~ Culture activist/ farmer/ author ~
Stephen teaches internationally and has authored seven books of cultural critique. He is the creator and principal instructor of the Orphan Wisdom School, co-founded with his wife Nathalie Roy in 2010. The Schoolâs new project, The Scriptorium (2025), is creating an archive and library of his lifeâs work.
Apprenticed to a master storyteller as a young man, he worked extensively with dying people and their families. He is a former programme director in a major Canadian hospital and former assistant professor in a prominent Canadian medical school. Stephen has Mastersâ degrees from Harvard University (Theology) and the University of Toronto (Social Work).
In 2023 Stephen received a Distinguished Alumni Honours Award from Harvard University for âhelping people navigate grief, exploring the liminal space between life and death, and connecting humanity through ceremony and storytelling.â
In August 2025, Sounds True will release Stephenâs newest book: Matrimony: Ritual, Culture, and the Heartâs Work.Â
Stephen Jenkinson is the author of several acclaimed books including Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul, Come of Age: The Case for Elderhood in a Time of Trouble, and A Generation's Worth: Spirit Work While the Crisis Reigns. Since co-founding the Nights of Grief and Mystery project with singer/songwriter Gregory Hoskins in 2015, he has toured this musical/ storytelling ceremony across several continents.
His approach to poetry, like his approach to death, grief, and elderhood is to restore their proper gravity in our lives. His use of languageâprecise, challenging, often poetic itselfâdemonstrates his commitment to words as carriers of cultural possibility.
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This gathering is a threshold momentâa chance to consider together what poetry might be in and for our troubled times. It is an opportunity to witness language reclaiming its moral force, its capacity to trouble the waters and, perhaps, to help us find our way.
Register Now - CAD
