Stephen Collis, To the Barricades

The first principle of The Barricades Project, to which To the Barricades belongs, is taken from Robert Duncan: “We begin to see that the intention of the boundless is manifest in the agony and restoration of pages or boundaries or walls” (“The Delirium of Meaning”).

A second principle can be found in Walter Benjamin: “This work has to develop to the highest degree the art of citing without quotation marks. Its theory is intimately related to that of montage” (The Arcades Project).

If there is a third principle, it may be contained in the following passage from Rancière:

Suitable political art would ensure, at one and the same time, the production of a double effect: the readability of a political signification and a sensible or perceptual shock caused, conversely, by the uncanny, by that which resists signification between opposites, between the readability of the message that threatens to destroy the sensible form of art and the radical uncanniness that threatens to destroy all political meaning.

(The Politics of Aesthetics)

To push through boundaries towards the boundless (which is tangled there) – to mix appropriation of found material with lyric expression to the point that the one becomes indistinguishable from the other – to practice a dialectic of “readable” political signification and uncanny shock – these are the pathways of this poetry. A lyric voice takes up procedures and citations because they are the world in which it finds itself embodied, a co-embodiment of the address “Dear Common” that someone calls out to anyone else there. “Lyric,” writes Thom Donovan, “relates the body of the poet to a poetics of collective affects” (“Lyric’s Potential,” Jacket2). So we try here, in a lyric space in which we must continue building resistance.

This volume is part of an ongoing long poem project that always seeks “plausible deniability” that it is in fact a long poem project. Everything I write is thus part of some inaccessible and inconceivable totality outside the work itself. Part of its fight is thus with itself, and with “culture” as such. The barricade made of language is both boundary and call for “beyondery” – an outside still to be practiced. But there’s that other boundary looming everywhere here too: how and when do we cross over from word to world, from text to action? Does the poem barricade us from a world of “doing things,” postponing action? Does it wall us up in the “merely cultural”? These poems, increasingly, have been written between actions in the streets. They hover there – a boundless boundary around the bound. The gaps and spaces between poems and pages and books are inhabited by “activism,” by a body amongst bodies in streets. Dear Common. Let’s speak our way into action, into each other’s arms, into new shared futures, into new speeches at new barricades thrown.

If this is “documentary poetry” – and it is certainly as much researched as it is lived – it is a documentary of social affects, past and present, of collective expressions of desire, of hope, of outrage, of solidarity, of defiance, of the endless call from the commons for “liberty or death.” It is a documentary of the spirit of resistance and revolution. The address of the insurgent impulse, to all potential insurgents, to all tomorrow’s insurgent parties. (Stephen Collis, “Notes and Acknowledgements”)

It’s difficult to begin to discuss Vancouver poet and critic Stephen Collis’ poetry collection To the Barricades (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2013) without first quoting at length from his “Notes and Acknowledgements,” placing this collection in a context larger than itself. Collis is the author of a number of books, including two previous poetry collections which form the first two sections to his ongoing “Barricades Project” – Anarchive (New Star, 2005) and The Commons (Talonbooks, 2008). Over the space of five trade poetry collections, Collis’ work explores a series of short-phrased stretches of sentence-stanzas in an ongoing project writing Vancouver specifically, Canada generally and social issues throughout.  In his “12 or 20 questions” interview (posted September 7, 2007), he talked about his work-in-progresss, “The Barricades Project,” and the subsequent volume of such, to be titled “The Red Album,” which appears to have since shifted into fiction, given that The Red Album is the title of his forthcoming novel with BookThug. As he writes in the interview:

I always work on books or series of books. The book is the main unit I think in terms of—my unit of composition. At the same time I do write short, occasional lyrics, and I publish a few of these in journals, but whenever I’ve tried to group them as a possible book it’s been entirely unsatisfactory. I just don’t work that way. I have to have the concept for the book to work towards, to think through. Writing in general usually begins with the making of collages—word assemblages that come out of the research I’m doing for the book in question. These often don’t make it into the book, but at some point the playing around with my research stops, and something else takes over, as I find my way into the language I want to use—or be used by.

There has long been a history of politically-engaged poetry out of Vancouver, something that, in comparison, seems lacking in much of the rest of the country, and something that has been given far less critical attention than it deserves. What is it about Vancouver that makes so many of their writers, especially language writers surrounding the past couple of decades of the Kootenay School of Writing, so engaged? One can point to such socially and politically-engaged poets such as Aaron Vidaver, Roger Farr, Maxine Gadd, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Jeff Derksen, Marie Annharte Baker, Reg Johanson, Peter Culley, Nancy Shaw and nikki reimer, among others. To the Barricades is a book that works to document protest and other civil action, including the “Paris Commune” or “Fourth French Revolution,” a working class revolution that ran from March to May, 1871. The collection contains critical poems of self-protection, poems working to protect human interest and interaction, constructed out of ready-made material, quotes that speak of action, such as the Fredric Jameson quote that opens the poem “RELUMINATIONS 1”: “Barricades involve a kind of bricolage, a provisional cobbling together of whatever bits and pieces come usefully to hand … this may also serve as a perceptive account of the poetic techniques of a Rimbaud, indeed of the revolutionary avant-garde in general.” In the second part of the poem “La Commune [1871],” he writes:

Revolution

is the search for happiness

we know history

repeats itself

thanks

to all the dead anarchists!

I make you a chain of flowers

a grave of roses

now let’s not lack audacity

in dealing with the banks

even in a democracy

we aren’t free to demonstrate    freely

things kept germinating

long after the event

it’s time we stop being

represented and start     being

the commune echoes

we’re still at the same point

[Stephen Collis reads in Ottawa to launch To the Barricades alongside Margaret Christakos on April 20, 2013, as part of the A B Series]

Daphne Marlatt, Liquidities: Vancouver Poems Then and Now

how time exposures expose the times

wind come up in fall’s green foil to Save-On Meats

opaque an hour ago lit now by sun rustle shadows one

leaf ripped off blows across bus-lit Arbutus floats by

                        three windows per day … under Second

Narrows Bridge (slack water)   can move 25 to 30

tankers per month

Palace Hotel’s lost light a strand of starling shadows

pawn shop  Honest Joe’s grey face gone flat   pigeon

shit stains Cosmopolitan Inn’s smart pseudonym glow

red daily weekly monthly beyond white walk man’s

rapid beat

                        building bigger cruise ships bigger  and

biggest   too tall to go under the Lions Gate Bridge

dark deepens Save-On pig’s high-flying smile and cash

bag meats grow synthetic in their silver trays plucked backs

legs / 98 / 99 cent links pale under fluorescent innards paling

nuder yet

There aren’t that many writers who rework poems after they’ve been published in a book, let alone revisit an entire poetry collection some four decades later, as Vancouver writer Daphne Marlatt has in her Liquidities: Vancouver Poems Then and Now (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2013). Liquidities revisits her poetry collection Vancouver Poems (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1972), rewriting a number of the poems in the original collection, as well as adding a healthy amount of new pieces. Although it isn’t unheard of for a writer to revisit certain poems while putting together a selected, I honestly can’t think of another example of an entire collection being updated and/or rewritten. Reissues have happened, certainly, from Gerry Gilbert’s Moby Jane to Peter Van Toorn’s Mountain Tea, but those were rarities in themselves, without a single word altered. Does the poem require an update, in keeping with the city’s evolution? Does inflation impact upon writing? As Marlatt writes in her introduction to the collection, “Then and Now”:

Vancouver Poems was a young woman’s take on a young city as it surfaced to her gaze. Under this new title, Liquidities: Vancouver Poems Then and Now, the poems remain verbal snapshots, running associations that sound locales and their passers-through within a shifting context of remembered history, terrain, and sensory experience. Rereading the early poems with a current ear and eye of course led me to re-vision them, in some cases substantially so, in others less so. Picking up a pencil to alter some early orthographic habits like “&” and “thru” let to line lengthening, which sometimes affected their visual and verbal rhythm. Rereading the poems in 2012, I see I had already learned something back then from West Coast aboriginal art—the way forms emerge out of and appear within other forms. The syntax of these poems similarly forms and transforms, merging images in an ongoing flow. This rereading also led to a few changes in diction and, in some of those early poems, lengthier additions or deletions. Not all of the poems from the original edition are included here, only those I felt still had something to say about the city as it was when the 1960s were becoming those heady days of the 1970s.

As it was then: a town outgrowing its wooden houses, Edwardian temple banks and fog, a muggy harbor of shipping, a young city penetrated by water and beginning to register its multiracial, multicultural roots and branches, yet oblivious to First Nations presence both before its own beginning and still active within its boundaries. What might be the shape of such a city’s shite or inhabiting presence, its ghostly energy for self-transformation? In the original Vancouver Poems, I had deleted the Japanese noh theatre word shite (or sh’te, closer to how it’s sounded) from the opening poem, but here the word is restored to its active place. This is the underground import (in both senses), the unconscious question that drives the whole series of poems, then and now.

Vancouver’s incessant deconstruction and reconstruction, its quick transformations both in (re)structured ground and in urban imagining, come further into play in the new series of poems, Liquidities (from liquid assets, cash, and increasingly from the incessant rain of global warming). The slower, more introspective rhythms of the city poems some forty years ago speed up as wordplay, faster image traffic, quicker jumps through milieux and temporal strata that intensify to verbal collisions in the new poems. Forest terrain faintly recalled in high-rise architecture. Wave trains of thought that oscillate between naming and transition. On edge, littoral, surfacing through the litter it leaves, the city’s genius loci wavers in and out of focus through its tidal marks of corporate progress and enduring poverty. Through refacing and defacing. Through the changing faces of a metropolis driven by big name corporate backing, citizens shortchanged in the private rush to make profit at the expense of a faceless public. Yet these poems hear the quiet generosity of trees, the swirl of riptide rush, under all the changing ings and isms, some generative force like that which runs through words to make connection continue.

For a city constantly rebuilding, as Marlatt suggests, to revisit her original work made the only sense. When Marlatt was composing the original incarnation of this collection, it was not only part of a wave of small press in Canada, but a wave of exploration of Vancouver through poetry, including Maxine Gadd’s late 1960s “The Hippies of Kitsilano” section of her 1977 selected poems, Lost Language (edited by Marlatt for Coach House Press), and George Bowering’s George, Vancouver (Kitchener ON: Weed/Flower Press, 1970) and later Kerrisdale Elegies (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1986; Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2008). Before and since, Vancouver has been explored through poetry by dozens of writers [see the piece I wrote on some of it here], including Meredith Quartermain, Stephen Collis, George Stanley, Elizabeth Bachinsky, Michael Turner, Sharon Thesen, Fred Wah, Sachiko Murakami, Oana Avasilichioaei, Roy Kiyooka, Earle Birney, Gerry Gilbert, John Newlove, nikki reimer and Shannon Stewart. What is it about the city that inspires? And yet, Marlatt’s Vancouver Poems was one of the first poetry collections to write so openly, lovingly, critically and unapologetically lyrical about the city, and I would suspect very much influenced a great number of poets in the years that followed, suddenly given permission to write about Vancouver.

Slimey,

                        mackerel sea-sky (eyes down). Limed

public library steps, the gulls. Mean what they

cry. Time, time. How many stoop to a dead fish?

How would you like a tail in the eye, scales, a

little bit rheumy but other/wise …  Off the point

they go fishing. Under latches of the bridge,

rusty, rattling their rods. Tide. Swirls down

deep there. Noon reigns in the street, a White Lunch.

Blue hubbard figures hump, endless round. The Cup’s

too big to geet into. Would it hold anything but rain?

Steams on a hot day, the park lunches.

Hold my hand in this cracked vinyl booth where

bread wilts. I love you but don’t, fling your rain-

coat over my head. It smells, wet. Hair hangs into

my cup. Love rains. You will go far somewhere.

Where? matter inserts relation.

Peels, heels, float like hulls of hands under the

wharf. Rats dockside. Carrying orchards up, and the

port, and the starred-on-board lights.

Milk run Amalia ends up on library steps, a cigarette,

some soup. A wet day steams up the insides of

their eyes. I want to know how gulls keep flying.

If Barry McKinnon’s poems are described as a single sentence-thought that each rise to an apex and fall away, Marlatt’s poems can be described as single self-contained sentence-breaths that connect perfectly to any of her poems placed before or after; the pattern the reader sees from such comes in part from how the pieces are arranged. There is a restless quality to the poems here, one that make her study of Vancouver not tied to a single temporal point, but a book that stretches across decades. Certainly, Liquidities feels less a straight update of an older work than an extension of the original project, and the lines that open one of the early poems, “Lagoon,” could have been written in either era, and anywhere in between: “down a cut on the city side, apartments / stacked uphill, through shadow and hulls and ribs we walk. / You’ve come home.” For a poet who has always explored the lyric heart, Liquidities reads as a writer’s ongoing relationship to her city, composed as a critical love letter home.

The Capilano Review 3.17: 40th Anniversary

Turn Left Wing Albuquerque

You are the key, the prize too

But your eyes are tired from staring away from the sea

You can’t see the trees for the desert

Think about it, death’s not a question

You’re so powerful, you do not want what is inside

That would be meaning

Turn down that road and don’t step on the grass

Too many letters for Scrabble

Trade Empire for another wing

And don’t fly away angry (Fred Wah)

Forty years is a long time to do anything, especially a literary enterprise, so it’s worth celebrating forty years of Vancouver’s The Capilano Review and their most recent issue for “four decades of experimentation.” As editor Brook Houglum writes to open her short “Preface”:

TCR’s 40^th anniversary issue celebrates contemporary innovative writing and art—the playful, critical, thoughtful, irreverent—by showcasing a wide range of genres and practices. The issue features narrative, poems, epistolary poems, scripts for plays and for a sit-com, a chapter of a novella, an interview, photography, painting, graphic art, collage, and sculpture.

            To celebrate our 40^th year of publication, we invited contributions from ten writers and artists—Pierre Coupey, Christos Dikeakos, Maxine Gadd, Liz Magor, Daphne Marlatt, Steve McCaffery, Stan Persky, Sharon Thesen, Fred Wah and Jin-me Yoon—whose work appeared in early issues of The Capilano Review and was integral to the formations of the magazine. These writers and artists then suggested to us practitioners who are in the early stages of their careers—Soma Feldmar, Geoffrey Hlibchuk, Aisha Sasha John, Alex Morrison, Garry Thomas Morse, James Nizam, Lia Pas, Jasmine Reimer, Jennifer Still, and Charlene Vickers. As such, the issue exemplifies our long-running mandate of featuring the established alongside the new. In the visual art section, each invited artist is positioned adjacent to the artist they recommended.

A lot has changed over the past four decades, which make it even more impressive that so many of the early contributors are still producing and involved, including founding editor Coupey, who not only has “a three decade survey” of his work in spring 2013, jointly curated by the West Vancouver Museum and the Art Gallery at the Evergreen Cultural Centre, but is a member still of the journal’s board. A lot has happened, and many of the journal’s back issues are worth rereading (something that can’t necessarily be said for as many literary journals as you might hope), something I was able to explore in short pieces composed a few months back for The Capilano Review blog (on Sylvia Legris, Lea Graham, Robert Hogg and Roy K. Kiyooka). Some highlights to the anniversary issue include a selection of Soma Feldmar’s epistolary tribute, “Origami: An Imaginary Correspondence with Robin Blaser,” new poems by Daphne Marlatt (who is apparently working up to a new edition of her Vancouver Poems, forthcoming from Talon), Sharon Thesen, Fred Wah, Stan Persky and Aisha Sasha John (furthering on her work-in-progress, “The Book of You”). This is an issue that gives tribute, it seems, to its history, and the histories that have rippled around and through them. For Feldmar’s work on and about Blaser, how is it the epistolary form seems somehow the most appropriate form of tribute and exploration of his writing, composing out her questions?

Dear Robin,

            Do you not write on love? that imagination is

the crown of your glory, love must follow in some

suit. yes. for imagination is at the core of desire.

perhaps ‘love’ is not quite the right word.

            the difficulty in making a home. my resistance

to being cosmic, to being a maker; master or no.

the end of the line, here, beside me. to embody

reluctant presence forget the birth of language.

            I often oscillate between things. am hunted,

haunted, by the ghosts of persecuted poets. this

is eros, I am told. though I fear the onslaught of

hunger.

            To be an architect of white washed words.

is this my fate? to blindly construct houses of

infirmary from which I step into the common

darkness.

            No, I know. I must follow the print press.

follow the way of ink and forge my passage to the

rare shadow land.

                                    sincerely,

                                        —S

It’s heartening, also, to see a lengthy interview with Vancouver poet Maxine Gadd in this issue, conducted by Kim Minkus. Despite Gadd’s return to publishing trade books a few of years ago after such a lengthy gap, there really doesn’t seem to have been much critical attention paid to her work, from her poetry to her activism, and her early work in Vancouver with presses such as bill bissett’s blewointment. Beginning in the early 1960s, she was active in and around Vancouver for more than two decades, yet after the publication of her selected poems, Lost Language (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1982) she didn’t publish another trade collection until Backup to Babylon (Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 2006).

KM: As poets and as feminists. I wanted to ask you about one of the poems in Backup to Babylon, “My 135^th Feminist Nightmare”—I love the title of that. You’ve talked about being a feminist. I went to a wonderful conference a couple of years ago, and at the end of the conference we were to talk about what we had accomplished, and it was such a waste, three hours spent trying to define feminism. That horrible academic tendency of having to define everything. I want to think of things as more relational. What is your relationship to the word “feminism”? I sometimes say to friends, “We’re women and we’re poets. How can we be geniuses?”

MG: Everything works against it. Even people that love you and that you love, or whatever, they’re always, if they’re men, they’re always invading. Of course, women do the same thing to women, too. But as a woman I suppose you feel you have to be open and accessible and meditative and mediate things. It’s very hard to have that wonderful selfishness that the male genius has. I hate to feel like I’m undermining men, but it seems sometimes that we all give up, that’s what happens. We all give up, I think.

KM: Do you think there’s a way of not giving up?

MG: Well, just to have a voice and then the ego, I guess. That’s one of the big things. You see, spiritually you’re supposed to—this was really big in the ‘60s—you’re supposed to become more Buddhistic, and surrender your ego and that was being preached. And then with feminism you realize, “Where is my ego? Where is the ego of other women? Where are all the other women? Where are their egos and their genius?”

Open Text: Canadian Poetry in the 21st Century, ed. Roger Farr

Do You Fall in Love at the Drop of Happy

Do you fall in love at the drop of happy
Are you brink
Did you clean
Do you miss yourself or are you dripping
You are taken for
Did you bug
Am I held
Do you internet café
Did you fall in love with a hick while napping
You were dirty for
Do you last
Are we heading
Do you lull in happy at the thrust of dropping
Did it last you
You miss bugs
Do you lullaby the habit of propping
Are your friends
Did you pulp
Did you mean this drop to be unhappy
Yeah you meant it (Jon Paul Fiorentino)

One of the first publications in the new CUE Books series (Capilano University Editions, out of The Capilano Review) is the anthology Open Text: Canadian Poetry in the 21st Century, edited by Roger Farr. Meant to be the first third in a larger project, the first two feature poetry, and the third, to feature poetic statements by writers featured in the first two volumes, all of whom have appeared as part of the ongoing Open Text Reading Series hosted by the Creative Writing Program at Capilano University (nee Capilano College) in Vancouver. As editor Farr writes in his introduction:

Editing an anthology of contemporary avant-garde poetry is an inherently risky undertaking as the criteria one invokes in collecting the work are often destabilized by the works themselves. This is especially true when such writing is yoked together under the sign of an apparently shared national identity. I have always thought there should be a fallacy named after the practice of identifying a body of writing with the state-formation that governs its authors. Echoing Charles Bernstein’s observations about “poetic voice,” I would argue that when it comes to poetry and poetics, any alleged quality of “Canadian-ness” is merely a possibility, or an affect—not an essence. So while Open Text is indeed a collection of poetry by Canadian citizens, it is not a collection of “Canadian Poetry,” and makes no attempt to stake a claim for a “New Canon” or even a “New Poetics” on that territory.

A list of the contributors to this volume, working an interesting range of geography and style, include Annharte, Oana Avasilichioaei, George Bowering, Rob Budde, Louis Cabri, Peter Culley, Jeff Derksen, Jon Paul Fiorentino, Maxine Gadd, Claire Huot & Robert Majzels, Larissa Lai, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Donato Mancini, Jamie Reid, Darren Wershler, Lissa Wolsak and Rita Wong. There have been a number of interesting publishing enterprises to start up lately, and this certainly isn’t the first to come out of a journal (Goose Lane Editions in Fredericton, for example, the longest running independent publishing house in the country (according to their own claim) came out of Fiddlehead Poetry Books and The Fiddlehead), with recent forays into publishing for West Coast Line bringing LineBooks (and finally, an available backlist for Michael Barnholden’s Tsunami Editions) and Snare Books out of Montreal’s Matrix magazine. And considering all the years that parts of the west coast avant-garde felt a closed group, now there’s no way to complain of a lack of opportunity. With all these enterprises popping up across the country, could they do anything but enrich?

Rangutang Rage Writer

She makes it all up. She who knows me. She splits and makes up the stories in my absence. She saw me hide all night in a library. Saw the jealous husband chase me. She will look at me as I lug books to bed. I hide behind the text I read. Her eyes reflect me sawed in half. Says a magician took the other part. What is left is for a medicine woman to define. Our mothers are inside us anyway and might help us out even if they left us alone quite often. For me. For drinks. For laughs. Some of the mammas are popular aunties we visit for bannock and tea. They will become Old Ones. Keep us company. Respect our wounds. Sure got remedies. Pretty preachy words. They call each other a warrior but I don’t know because I am only a sole survivor when nobody was around to defend me.

She watches me croon to the dance drum. Her focus on how I beat on Rangutan chest. Beat memories uncomfortable down inside the breasts. I keep forgetting so I compact it all. She is not that proud so she bears my wounds. She reaches for the trauma but manages to moan how the stab didn’t quite do her in. She’s so lucky for that gift. She is a buddy to my body. She was the one that wore the black eye. She coughed for me at for work when I almost passed out from broken rib. She will convince me that I am angry for nothing. She accepted the abuse for me.

I got nothing to talk about. She does keep it all straight. She does not always write it down like a police investigation. I must have to be ready for her break the awful news to me. Yet, many people attribute her anger to me and confuse me to hell. (Annharte)