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
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