Jeff Derksen, Future Works

  

Obsolete cold-war navy dolphins write algorithms that design an
app to do the laundry for overemployed people. 

Dung beetles, decommissioned from nature documentaries,
collectively lug overweight luggage into the cargo bays of
discount European airlines. 

The bats who took a short-term contract to patrol a new condo
construction site at night to thwart theft from “the midnight
lumberyard” are injured when the beam they hang on to take
their break collapses. 

Metallica replaces their drummer with an octopus from Vigo,
Spain, who learned heavy metal on the sides of ships they
once riveted on the waterfront. 

Acrobatic barn swallows dust the penthouses of oligarchs,
poetically catching each mote in the air. 

Turf wars break out between European and Chinese praying
mantids; the deadly squabbles end through negotiations by
unemployed European parliamentarians who lost their jobs
when elected political positions were opened to all species.
                   (“MORE THAN HUMAN LABOUR”)

Very good to see a copy of Future Works (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2025), the latest poetry title by Jeff Derksen, a poet, critic and professor who currently divides his time between Vancouver and Vienna, Austria, and who emerged across those heady days of 1970s and 80s language-exploration through and around The Kootenay School of Writing (originating in Nelson, British Columbia’s David Thompson University Centre, relocating to Vancouver when the government shut David Thompson down in 1984), blending language experimentation with and through social and political commentary. Following poetry titles including Until (1987), Down Time (Talonbooks, 1989), Dwell (Talonbooks, 1994), Transnational Muscle Cars (Talonbooks, 2003) and The Vestiges (2014) [see my review of such here], Derksen’s Future Works offers a heft of references and lines and commentaries stitched together as a rush of a shape, a coherent mass of accumulated texts that form the structure of his poems. “Ants close down the North American banking system with / a highly coordinated strike on ATMs: over New Year’s Eve, / individual bills are carried out of the machines,” he writes, as part of the extended opening poem, “MORE THAN HUMAN LABOUR,” “moved along / predetermined routes, and stashed in complex underground / networks. Two ants are captured but refuse to five up their / comrades. In solidarity, they eat each other.” More power in union, one might say.

Published more than a decade after his prior collection, Future Works is assembled with an opening selection of poems that take up two-thirds or so of the book, as well as a second section of poems, titled “URBAN TREES.” There’s playfulness to Derksen’s serious poems, one with a wry glance across what might otherwise seem serious, dark or even absurd. “I was working in a gas station,” the prose piece “MY SHORT NOVEL” begins, “a greenhouse, in delivery, in gardening, in editing, in teaching, in administration. The weather has a new name and it is no longer adorable.” The distance of time since his prior collection was published offers a slightly different perspective on his ongoing work, providing a reminder at just how much the structure and poetics of Canadian (Calgary, Vancouver, Toronto, Edmonton, Calgary) poet ryan fitzpatrick’s work really has evolved and been influenced by poets such as Jeff Derksen [see my review of ryan fitzpatrick’s latest collection here], both poets presenting moments and meaning through the context and collision of moments and references into and across each other; how ideas of capital, labour, language and capitalism relate and interrelate across layerings and collage of direct statements. “My hard edge paintings / are a list / of demands,” begins Derksen’s poem “MY HARD EDGE PAINTINGS, a poem subtitled “after Pierre Coupey,” “or plans where colour / rushes into / our kinetic future / on a hard-to-observe land / to so-called light / upon in the shadows / under the cover / of canvas, an advance / like walking out / into the city [.]” There is a curious way that Derksen’s approach engages ethics and perspective, offering an alternate way of realizing the lyric, one that speaks of late capitalism and global war zones, future climate catastrophes and contemplative wit across what might otherwise appear as a collage of references, laid end to end, built to produce something far larger and ongoing. “or the most beautiful thing / may be the space you make / it as you imagine it / conceived built inhabited altered,” he writes, to close the poem “THE MOST BEAUTIFUL THING,” “by an encounter that swerves / to what is possible / an act an action / an unscripted learning [.]”