Donato  Mancini

Bio

DONATO MANCINI is author of two books of poetry Ligatures (2005; shortlisted for a ReLit award) and Æthel (2007), both from New Star Books. Long after his first published poem "Empty Page" appeared in the second-last issue of The Canadian Forum (1920 - 2000), Donato started his real writing life as a full-time contributor to classical music division of allmusic.com (then called allclassical.com). Over the course of 2.6 years, he sold allclassical.com at least 685 entries about pre-Baroque and 20th century music, at 5 to 10 cents per word. In the time since, Mancini has published numerous chapbooks, including Tribute to a Remarkable Cat/Two Hearts Beat as One (Access 2002), 9-11/7-Eleven (Open Space 2004), Floating World (Burning Cradle 2004), Causal Talk: Interviews with 4 Canadian Poets (above/ground press 2004), and no.22 in the "Hell Passport" series published by Perro Verlag (2007). His visual and textual works appear in the anthologies Decalogue 3: Ten Visual Poets (Chaudiere, 2008), Boredom Fighters! (Tightrope Books, 2008), and Open Text (Capilano Review Press Society, 2008). A key contributor to the Western Front's magazine FRONT since 2001, Donato has also published in many journals, including Open Letter, West Coast Line, BafterC, Rampike, dANDelion, W, Filling Station, Queen Street Quarterly, Parser, Offerta Speciale and sub-Terrain. Collaborations with the visual art group 536 (2000-2003), have been exhibited in Canada, USA, England, Cuba, Germany, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, China, Russia and Japan. Works by 536 included The Wallet Gallery (a viral interverntionist / performative network of portable art galleries), and AVATARA, an important document of one of the first independent internet communities and still the world's only documentary feature shot entirely in interactive VR cyberspace. Mancini's own artworks have appeared variously in almost all of the artist-run centres around Vancouver, most notably Surveillance Sketch at Artspeak in August 2003, first of the gallery's now-annual windowfront exhibitions. A member of the Kootenay School of Writing collective since June 2003, he has created and edited an archival website to house audio recordings and documents from the KSW stretching back to 1985. He is now also editor of the Canadian section of the Electronic Poetry Center, with Meredith Quartermain. In a previous life, Donato studied art history and music composition with Christopher Butterfield and Michael Longton at the University of Victoria, where Butterfield often enough gave live performances of Kurt Schwitters' Ursonate as his lessons. An English Literature MA student as Simon Fraser University, Donato is (March 2008) at work on a study of the ideolect of poetry reviews in Canada since 1961.