The middle-class Evangelical could not feel it wrong
to make money, however little one should enjoy it when it was made; and he
would spend Sunday in proclaiming the vanity of earthly riches, and weekdays in
amassing as much of them as he could. Hey buddy, can you spare $20 for some
therapy? Savings bonds go to heaven, but transnationals go everyone. Operation
Fuck You. One world, no hope.
Underground shelters are reserved for VIPs whose
actions caused the necessity to use them. No GST no MSG. SAVE A DONUT KILL A
COP. Politically we don’t want our circuitry rerouted—just our buttons pushed.
File Under: Recovery Cancer Family Baseball Sports Suffering.
The ceasefire isn’t. The poor always know when
they’re being picked on. Volunteer opportunities for you. A welfare cut
combined with a rent hike. Forced training for nonexistent jobs. (“Just”)
In preparation for his
upcoming Ottawa reading, I’ve been going through Winnipeg poet Colin Smith’s second poetry trade book, 8x8x7 (San Francisco CA: Krupskaya, 2008), a
follow-up to his Multiple Poses (Vancouver BC: Tsunami Editions, 1997).
Constructed out of twelve poem-sections, 8x8x7 is a series of
poem-collages that weave their language poetry way through social concerns. One
thread of the aesthetic of Vancouver’s Kootenay School of Writing, a group
Smith has been associated with since the 1980s, could be loosely described as
language writing paired with social commentary, from writers such as Jeff Derksen, Peter Culley, Stephen Collis, nikki reimer, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk and Maxine Gadd, to the
“Woodsquat” issue of West Coast Line edited by Aaron Vidaver. In his
book-length study, The Only Poetry that Matters: Reading the Kootenay School of Writing (Vancouver BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2011) [see my review of such here], Clint Burnham includes Smith in his chapter “Social Collage and the Four
Discourses,” writing on how his “polysemy intersects with an anti-narrative
stance.” (p 93). Examining Smith’s poem “Straw Man” from the anthology Writing Class: The Kootenay School of Writing Anthology (eds. Klobucar and
Barnholden; Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 1999, Burnham writes:
Smith’s text works as a hysteric discourse: the irony
disavows its very address to the master. Think, for example, of the upper half
of the hysteric’s discourse ($ [tab] S) in which the barred subject ($)
is the subject of lack, the speaking subject, and could also be seen as the
capitalist subject or the political protestor. […] In part, what goes on in
this style of writing, in this social-collage tendency of the KSW, is a
disjunction both in the sentence and between sentences, and in this
disjunction, we see the hysteric subject at work. The disjunction we’ve seen in
Smith operates partly in terms of the line-break, but also between the three
sentences that make up the verse-paragraph I’ve quoted from his “Straw Man.”
The first two sentences, for example (“I am not chosen / but have applied
for the job” and “I’ve always wanted to be a Government / of Canada
Initiative”), have some thematic continuity: the economics of looking for work,
of government spending.
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