Cecily Nicholson, Crowd Source

 

those eyes
lined in laughter 

fawned
from the floor up 

understory
as the
            flies
I hike
carrying my body 

to elevation
to rest 

a col between
two sisters’
snowy peaks 

the alpine air
quality up close 

trace elements

ancient
volcanic vents

The fifth full-length poetry title by Vancouver poet Cecily Nicholson, following Triage (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2011), From the Poplars (Talonbooks, 2014) [see my review of such here], Wayside Sang (Talonbooks, 2017) [seemy review of such here], which won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, and HARROWINGS (Talonbooks, 2022) [see my review of such here], is Crowd Source (Talonbooks, 2025). According to the back cover, Crowd Source “parallels the daily migration of crows who, aside from fledgling season, journey across Metro Vancouver every day at dawn and dusk. Continuing Nicholson’s attention to contemporary climate crisis, social movements, and Black diasporic relations, this is a text for all concerned with practicing ecological futurities benefitting corvid sensibilities.” While fellow British Columbia poets such as Kim Trainor, through A blueprint for survival: poems (Toronto ON: Guernica Editions, 2024) [see my review of such here] and Matt Rader, through his FINE: Poems (Nightwood Editions, 2024) [see my review of such here], focus their conversation through the lyric around climate and wildfires, or Manitoulin Island poet sophie anne edwards, through Conversations with the Kagawong River (Talonbooks, 2024) [see my review of such here], focuses her climate conversation as a lyric study around a particular river, Nicholson focuses her own lyric conversation, her own particular study, through climate, colonialism and urban crows. “on the grounds / two of us stop to watch / a campus corvid of the oaks / right a small container still full / of dipping sauce,” she writes, as part of the book’s fifth section, “garbage, all of us / providing so much garbage // invisible until I am seen / in proximation [.]”

Held as a book-length suite in thirteen numbered lyric sections, Nicholson’s extended, expanded sequences are stitched through fragment and ongoingness, stretching a single line along a book-length thread. “to realize what’s common / pause for the count / and continuity / keep time,” begins the seventh section, “blackbirds are common / in the thousands / mythical / about this femme’s feet [.]” She speaks of crows and through crows, setting all else to a foundation of corvids across spaces occupied and altered by human activity. Nicholson’s lyrics, her small points and moments, accumulate across great distances, holding each moment in relation.

Late Pleistocene blackbird
families separated by glaciers
over fossil-rich chalk beds
prior to human settlement
Northwesterners 

in the Pacific Northwest
mainly kept to coastlines
beaches and seafood
in particular whelks 

back then blackbirds
fashioning beads
onyx of perceptive eyes
abalone primer in feathers
early years alert to arrivals

Detailed and delicate, there is something of the lyric study approach in Nicholson’s Crowd Source comparable to American poet Lorine Niedecker’s own approach through Lake Superior (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2013) [see my review of such here]. As such, Crowd Source exists as a book-length poem fueled by research, observation and study, but propelled by language. “I am traffic, always looking to the sky,” Nicholson writes, as part of the sixth section, “braced for / aggression [.]” Or, two pages further, as she offers:

the nature of sources is to attribute citation
sources may form or signify communities
wooded area intermittent creek industrial
high-tech office park poles used for perching
trees: cottonwood, alter, yew, cedar, fir
in a riparian channel harbouring a deep V
inward, to the earth, through to old aquifers

first the waiting-for-kids-to-be-born season
fledglings fight to make flight in the blue
whole as families unlike our voided families
return each night to gather in conference
learning the lay of the land likely close to
four or five before establishing or inheriting
relations in firm but opaque commitments

Nicholson articulates relation and interrelation, offering the myriad ways in which elements of the world connect together, held in place, at least here, in language, from climate, capitalism and human occupation, all seen through the wisdom of crows. “one of the greatest spectacles / the city ever sees,” she writes, to open the ninth section, “twice daily most seasons / dawn to dusk in lotic spectacle // quantum listening / with an innate sense of numbers // contours sensing a line / between the earth’s magnetic field // synthesized de novo surviving / billions of years as memories / stored in cells [.]” She writes blackbirds and grackles, crows and Vancouver’s SkyTrain, weaving quoted language into such meditative lengths as a kind of day book, riffing off moments and sources, crow activity and colonial impact. Or, as she writes to open the self-contained poem “The Still,” set at the end of the tenth section:

descends into the heart
of its colonial name 

night grows dark as it does
and they are 

finally, the same colour
as the sky 

slightly orange

glinting, even asleep
they are 

wind chimes
and weather vanes

 

Cecily Nicholson, Harrowings

 

for a rattling mind and cooped-up body
ecliptic this apparent path

            the best time to plant
from cultivated and ponded poetics

four clefs incline
in mutual will-o’-the-wisps
            and noise tremors 

lift 19” TVs and manual typewriters
soil and irrigation, the infrastructure rows (“a voice that will clamour: correspondences 1-4”)

The latest from Vancouver poet Cecily Nicholson, following Triage (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2011), From the Poplars (Talonbooks, 2014) [see my review of such here] and the Governor General’s Award-winning Wayside Sang (Talonbooks, 2017) [see my review of such here], is Harrowings (Talonbooks, 2022), an expansive lyric structure of fragments around agriculture, sustainability, legacy and responsibility. Centred around the physical act of planting, Harrowings writes on agriculture and ethical sustainability, placement and displacement, offering, as the back cover writes: “[…] pulses of memoir from the poet’s childhood growing up on a farm, as well as from more recent pandemic experiences volunteering for a local agricultural enterprise led by people who were formerly incarcerated. Considering movements organizing for food security and related, resurgent practices, HARROWINGS also contends with ‘the farm’ as a tract of colonial advance.”

The collection is set in three lyric sections—“carver (a hand in relief),” “well black on the neither side, it will rain” and the four-part “a voice that will clamour”—as Nicholson works an accumulation of short bursts, moving from moment to moment as a singular, ongoing examination. “behind the barn, across the treeline and a ditch / distinguishing property // out cornrows along thin strips of habitat,” she writes, as part of the opening section. A page further, she offers: “I can feel my place in extraction / hear how to centre / how hard to decentre [.]” Nicholson manages the lightest touch of lyric across the line, across the canvas of the open sequence, writing such weight through an evocative language, and such lovely music across a poetry of both document and witness. “the lake over stern draws,” she writes, amid her “correspondences,” “agitation welds // worth what power concedes // for four nights with shore as the lake leaves and returns / speaking of sturgeon // to witness ospreys / the dry mouth of the streambed, physical confines for future water [.]” Invoking and quoting writers such as Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, Langston Hughes and even Robert Kroetsch (“But how do you grow a poet?”), Nicholson writes through and around the rippling effects of displacement, class, incarceration, and the legacies around the history of Black people in “western Canada” (as specifically drawn from Douglass' work). As the first of her quartet of “correspondences” includes:

narrative deep ruts the DNA sweeps
into the quickening dusk

an essential community outside

inside multiculturalism the big mouths,
bellies, and bottom lines celebrate with food

seasonal presente 

all strength to traverse the dark rural roads

There is something of the attentive ecological urgency to her lyrics, akin to Lorine Niedecker, perhaps, or to more recent self-described eco-poets, seeking to ground her language in the earth, attending to a consideration of healing both individuals and their surrounding communities, as well as ecological systems themselves, through the ability to plant, sustain and harvest.

 

Cecily Nicholson, Wayside Sang

intimate feel of brakes

used too much

squeal worn insensitive

unresponsive

indicators or indications

trauma takes more time

bodies through climates

rolling stone

sharp shoulders

ponding forms potholes

leaching

rainbows of oil solvents

in washouts

burnt sunforged visions

coal

a mountaintop removed

caravan

saharan highway to the sea (“Port of Entry”)

Vancouver poet Cecily Nicholson’s third collection with Talonbooks – after Triage (2011) and From the Poplars (2014) [see my review of such here] – is Wayside Sang (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2017), a collection of six extended lyric sequences/suites with an accompanying “Afterword,” where she writes:

For Wayside Sang I set out to place myself in relation to my birth father’s history. A favourite bit of information that I have about him was that he was a travelling musician. It was in thinking on day jobs, however, and the static demands for artists called out on the road, that led me to study the automobile, its industry, roadways, and hospitality, through and beyond the region all my fathers have travelled. In concert I activated childhood memories of rural car exchange, gearhead brothers, mosport park camping, and so many escapes out on the road, on foot, as a passenger, and as a driver. These tracks I thought would give way to further study, to consider entwined migrations of black-other diaspora, to locate more of my african descent at this late stage, unmoored and mitigated as it may be. Where I cannot locate my bloodlines, I would honour others’ accounts. It seems obvious now that the scope of what I set out to do was in some ways far-reaching.

                       

Nicholson’s work has long been engaged in the book length poem/suite, but there is something about this new collection that holds itself together as a complex breath, constructed as a single, ongoing line. As she suggests in her “Afterword,” Wayside Sang is an exploration through geographic, historical and cultural space, attempting to discern something of her birth father, something the book’s press release reaffirms: “This is a poetic account of economy travel on North American roadways, across the Peace and Ambassador bridges and through the Fleetway tunnel, above and beneath rivers, between nation states. Nicholson reimagines the trajectories of her birth father and his labour as it criss-crossed these borders, in a study that engages the automobile object, its industry, roadways and hospitality, through and beyond the Great Lakes region.” Hers is both a real and imagined space of a lost parent, moving between the archive and the spaces he occupied, writing out automobile production, border crossings and the fossil fuel industry, writing: “low crude prices continue to take their toll / and we continue to live […]” (“Fossil Fuel Psyche”). As much as anything, Wayside Sang is a book of origins, as Nicholson attempts to hear those songs from the side of the road, exploring and critiquing the multiple facets of that space from which she emerged.

Through Wayside Sang, Nicholson composes her own songs to the wayside, and the music of her lines is unmistakable, writing “underground resistance / takes the front stoop // got a car, so is grown // summer now falling away / late pedal steel gives an ambient hum” (“Songs Alongside”). Or further, in the section/suite “Daughter, Imagine Her,” that includes:

here because I’m here on a thread

I hear threads backed up to a wall of sound

with wheels

and this little room

to breathe in is driving the exhales

thrust to gallery

discourses

of era law policy papers acts

pains absent in

liberatory TV on the Radio

                            smoke

watch them fall                               them all an intellect

            of collisions well-anticipated

Tripwire #12 : AKA VANCOUVER

paint under sticky licks of amber finishes

here this canna lily medicine ornament

for use on a journey

this air

fresh commodity

mouthful of water a liquid gem

lead in the blood of your children

may we all

feathers incline in planes side by signal

encased I fly some thousands of miles home my life

has not yet covered on foot

streams below stream by pink the plane races

the sun western lines deepen red. sun wins and I win (Cecily Nicholson, “Rebuilt to Oar”)

I’m very taken with the issue #12 of David Buuck’s Tripwire out of Oakland, California, constructed as a hefty feature on Vancouver writing, “AKA VANCOUVER: WRITING FROM THE UNCEDED COAST SALISH TERRITORIES.” The opening section includes an absolute ton of new writing (and some visual art as well) from Mercedes Eng, Anahita Jamali Rad, Amy De’ath, Cecily Nicholson, Danielle LaFrance, ryan fitzpatrick, Roger Farr, Sonnet L’Abbé, Phinder Dulai, Jordan Abel, Rita Wong, Stephen Collis, Andrea Creamer, Fred Wah, Jeff Derksen, Christine Leclerc, Carolyn Richard, Donato Mancini, Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Lawrence Yzhak Braithwaite and Tiziana La Melia & Vanessa Disler. The works included in this list are just incredible, and represent some of the finest contemporary poetry to come out of Vancouver, and a list of writers and writing that you need to be paying attention to right now. And, while I agree that the work should stand for itself, I still would have liked to see an introduction of some sort to the section, just to have a sense of the framing of this section of nearly one hundred and sixty pages of writing and photography from Vancouver. How was this issue compiled? Etc.

Focusing heavily on the intersections between language and political poetry that have been building in Vancouver for quite a long time, it is important to note that editor/publisher David Buuck is also engaged in an ongoing activism, both in and beyond his own poetry, such as his participation in BARGE — The Bay Area Research Group in Enviro-aesthetics. One might say that Oakland, California and Vancouver, British Columbia exist as sibling-communities, given their shared aesthetic of experimental writing and activism.

My life is a ferris wheel. Chairs rotating around a pin. I’ve never known true happiness, true compassion for another person. I can applaud the architectural firm that made this sentence possible, though I find it hard to think at this level for long

The poets are coming. The Avant-Garde is Coming. We all need our vices. I want to break the fourth wall. THEY should pay our tabs.

I suffer like you have no idea. You can help me with this. Every thing I have done is because of an injury. Give me a smile. Not so big.

Now think of “the Social” as a waiting room, in a Care Facility, by the beach, under construction, one minute past Happy Hour. (Roger Farr, “from The Care Facility”)

Further into this Vancouver issue, Tripwire #12 includes sixty pages of a tribute to the late Nanaimo, British Columbia poet Peter Culley (1958-2015) [see my obituary for him here], including uncollected writings, essays on his work, remembrances, an interview, archival material and other pieces, by Culley himself as well as Elisa Ferrari, Louis Cabri, Colin Smith, Rolf Maurer, George Bowering, Lisa Robertson, Chris Nealon, Lee Ann Brown, Stephen Collis and Jonathan Skinner. One of the first pieces to really strike in this section has to be Rolf Maurer’s short essay-reminiscence, “Peter Culley, Pleasure Poet,” that provides both homage and overview of Culley’s work and life in and around Vancouver:

Peter Culley emerged from, instead of into, the West Coast literary mainstream, in the early 1980s. Jack Hodgins had been a high school teacher, and early mentor; the painter Mina Totino and the poet Kevin Davies were classmates. His elders saw Culley’s promise and his first book was named Twenty-One in part beause that’s what he was when Oolichan Books issued it. Culley later more or less disowned that book, not because of any bad publishing experience, but because even as it was going to the printer his poetry was turning away from the first-person I of those poems to the camera I at the centre of all his later work.

For his part, Louis Cabri includes materials from Culley’s reading in Ottawa in 1991, via Cabri and Rob Manery. Cabri writes:

In Ottawa, Ontario, Rob Manery and I ran, with our poetry magazine, hole, a poetry event series called The Transparency Machine, and Peter Culley presented in it on Nov 2, 1991, at Gallery 101. Peter selected texts to contextualize his poetry (this was the simple idea of the series), and we distributed those texts in newsletter form weeks before his event. The event was an informal discussion during which Peter projected his texts with the aid of an overhead projector. What follows are the invitation card to Peter’s event, three of his six selected texts including from his 1987 chapbook Natural History (after Gilbert White) (Fissure Books, ed Susan Lord), and a photo Rob took of Peter reading. The Transparency Machine event series idea has continue over the decades under different names and in other cities, most recently in Vancouver through the Kootenay School of Writing with additional help by co-curators Ted Byrne, Listen Chen, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Donato Mancini, Cecily Nicholson, and UNIT/PITT Projects.

To round out the issue, there is an impressive mound of further pieces, including a conversation between David Buuck and Danielle LaFrance and Anahita Jamali Rad on their former collective/journal, About a Bicycle, and critical pieces on works by Cecily Nicholson, Mercedes Eng, Lisa Robertson, Catriona Strang, Jordan Scott, Jordan Abel (two pieces: including one by me) and Colin Smith. I’m deeply impressed by the heft and thoroughness of this Vancouver feature, perhaps the finest I’ve seen in a journal in some time.

And, as Buuck reminded me recently, the first ten issues are available on the Tripwire website as free downloadable pdfs.