Metacösm

Join Rollie Pemberton this week in Montreal as we talk about Rollie's memoir, Bedroom Rapper, which serves not only as a personal history but also as a history of rap and a documentation of creative communities in Edmonton and Montreal. We also talk about his music as Cadence Weapon, his time as the Poet Laureate of Edmonton, our mutual respect and admiration for Buck 65, what it's like to write memoir at a young age, the difference between the practices of writing songs and writing poems, and what it felt like to be booed by a massive audience of Rihanna fans. 

Rollie Pemberton, aka Cadence Weapon, is a Canadian rapper, producer, writer, and DJ whose latest album Parallel World won the 2021 Polaris Music Prize and whose memoir Bedroom Rapper was published by Penguin Random House in 2022.

Order Bedroom Rapper here: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/671425/bedroom-rapper-by-rollie-pemberton/9780771051883

Join Šari Dale this week in Prince George. In this episode we talk about Šari's debut poetry book, Para-Social Butterfly, in which the narrator, a young woman disillusioned with her life, decides to live in a digital space called The Ultra-Glam, blurring the lines between the reality experienced in physical and digital spaces. Šari also talks about how her work as a copywriter plays into the writing of her poetry, as well as early experiences in internet chat rooms and current experiences in social media. We discuss persona and influence, her obsession with reality TV, and her current work which draws from the influence of nature and of monster trucks. 

Šari Dale writes from Prince George, BC on unceded ancestral lands of the Lheidli T'enneh. She holds a B.A. in English and Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia, where she was the recipient of The Creative Writing Prize. Her poetry has been published in Arc, Grain, and The Malahat Review among others and anthologized in Best Canadian Poetry 2021 and Poetry Daily.

Order Para-Social Butterfly: https://www.metatron.press/work/para-social-butterfly/

Join legendary Canadian poet bill bissett this week on Metacösm. Deemed The Godfather of Canadian Poetry, bill bissett is a prolific artist whose writing and painting span seven decades. In that time bill has published over seventy books as well as created countless paintings and albums of music, has performed hundreds of readings, ran blewointment magazine and blewointment press, was the subject of documentaries, was persecuted for his work by conservative politicians, received support from Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Margaret Atwood, Leonard Cohen, and bpNichol, was sampled by The Chemical Brothers, has been an advocate for gay rights, women's rights, and the environment, and so much more. His writing, which is lyrical at heart and employs a style often described as unconventional, employs purposeful misspelling, visual and auditory elements, and focuses on love, pain, death, politics, sex, longing, beauty, and an attempt to make sense of the senselessness of this world. He is a true artist.

In this episode our host Brad Casey pieces together several recordings done with bill over the last seven years, beginning in 2014 when he contacted bill to do a formal interview on his life, an interview which became lost. Since then Brad has conducted several informal interviews with bill, the latest being in late 2021, and pieced together clips from all of these interviews to create this episode which serves primarily as a portrait of Bill Bissett but also a tribute to the friendship that has grown between bill and Brad over those years.

Join Marlowe Granados this week in Toronto. Find out why Marlowe prefers hanging out with poets over fiction writers, or why she eye-rolled her way through her university creative writing program. We also get a behind-the-scenes peek at what it was like to publish and release Happy Hour, including being profiled in New York Magazine, hiding out in her hotel during her press tour in NYC, and what it's ultimately like to be perceived through your writing.

Marlowe is a writer and filmmaker. She co-hosts The Mean Reds, a podcast dedicated to women-led films. Her advice column, "Designs for Living," appears in The Baffler. After spending time in New York and London, Granados currently resides in Toronto. Happy Hour is her début novel.

Order Happy Hour: https://www.marlowegranados.com/

With music by Blue Hawaii: https://bluehawaii.bandcamp.com/