Mercedes Eng, Prison Industrial Complex Explodes

he gets out when I’m 2, but goes back because later I remember my mom saying I have a surprise for you and I think it’s a record player, but it’s my dad behind the door, home from jail. so he went somewhere between 2 and 7, somewhere with dinosaurs and a bumpy gravel road.

we are on the highway in Vancouver, starting our drive back home to Medicine Hat. the car stops suddenly and then there are two really angry men yelling, “open the fucking door!” they smash open the window and they’re both grabbing my dad, one by the hair, the other by the throat. it looks like they wanna strangle him. my dad is kicking, he’s fighting. but it doesn’t work, they take him and he’s gone.

there is a good time, we move to a bigger house. but something happens and my dad is gone again. but then he gets out and he is straightened out and he is working the gas fields and there is money and our allowance goes up and my little brother gets G.I. Joe everything for Christmas and my mom is happy.

we spend summer vacation at the women’s shelter.

Vancouver poet Mercedes Eng’s second collection is Prison Industrial Complex Explodes (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2017), an incredibly powerful and intimate exploration of the Canadian prison system and systematic racism through archival material and her own biography, specifically that of an absent and imprisoned father. There is something akin to George Bowering’s George, Vancouver (Weed/Flower Press, 1970) to the way Eng goes back and forth between the personal and the archive, and a line between the two that often ceases to exist, working through a portrait of her father, his incarceration, and the effects it couldn’t help but have upon her childhood.

This is a difficult and complex work, one that exists as much as a non-fiction critique on the inherent racism throughout the prison system as it does an intimate long poem utilizing her father’s words against, one might say, the words of the state. Given how deeply Eng composes her long poem as critical essay, it does feel very much that she has opened the boundaries of what had been done previously with a form that Dorothy Livesay termed the “documentary poem”; Eng isn’t simply reshaping the archive into the space of her poem, but discovering, instead, a space where the form of the long poem and the critical essay, in part through her use of found and archived materials, meet. Furthering the work of what has come before her, this is the long poem realized in an entirely new way, all while articulating some very difficult terrain. And the question becomes: now that we’ve Mercedes Eng’s Prison Industrial Complex Explodes, how are we to respond? Where do we go from here? After the emergence of such a poetry of witness, might it perhaps spark an action?

According to RCMP documents obtained through access-to-information requests, the federal government created a wide-ranging surveillance network in early 2007 to monitor protests by First Nations people, including those that would garner national attention or target “critical infrastructure” like highways, railways, and pipelines.

An RCMP slideshow presentation from 2009 shows the intelligence unit reported weekly to approximately 450 recipients in law enforcement, government, and unarmed “industry partners” in the energy and private sectors. The presentation states that the intelligence unit can “provide information on activist groups who are promoting Aboriginal issues within your area.”

A series of “weekly situational awareness reports” from Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada reveals a rigorous cataloguing of Idle No More’s activities. In addition to the Aboriginal Affairs reports, Canada’s Integrated Terrorism Assessment Centre, which operates within the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), prepared a threat assessment on Idle No More.

Colin Browne, The Hatch: poems and conversations

the lava field

or without

in the lava fiexld

sicxk of himself

on the nigxht boat

this smallpox takes

the piss out of proxfits

wisdom teeth, then cervix

then the armisxtice

when I lisxten it’s

we’re safer, not safe

leaves bore legs

wind adores

across the on the

in the dowxn the

bring your shovel

and a strong knixfe

takes a bite

out of

wires, wirxed corners

who’s counting

it’s Rudolph that

goes down in history

de Montaigne on cannibals

a sweextness

tunnel leggers

not craxftsmen

but specixalists

all the same

For his newest collection, The Hatch: poems and conversations (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2015), Vancouver poet and filmmaker Colin Browne continues his incredibly-dense exploration into the serial/book-length poem, composing a collection that, as the book jacket informs, “discovers its true nature as collage.” It is as though Browne doesn’t approach his poetry collections as straightforward serial poems or collections, but structuring a singular work of poetry from the perspective of a documentary filmmaker (entirely different than the “documentary poem” named and championed by Dorothy Livesay), allowing a different kind of narrative flow to emerge, and refreshing a book-length form that desperately requires a new way of seeing. In his recent review over at The Bull Calf, Phil Hall writes:

In The Hatch, Browne is attempting the impossible, and hooray for that: starting from where he is, and who he is (reaching back to Scotland)—he is trying to pan the connections between Surrealism (André Breton, Francis Picabia, etc.) and the West Coast and its Native arts and traditions. You will perhaps remember a photo of André Breton’s desk and study, where art, totems, and masks from BC are on display. One result is that Browne’s book is populated by not only historical figures but by Wolf and Raven and Fungus Man, etc.

How could we not love and be intrigued by a book of poems that celebrates the old-fashioned political savvy of many of our waning heroes? These include (hold your hat) Norman Bethune, Emily Carr, Hank Snow, Aimé Césaire, Charles Olson, Blaise Cendrars, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Antonin Artaud, D H Lawrence, and Sorley MacLean… all in evidence here.

Hall might be the perfect reader for Browne’s work, as both have been, for some time, constructing a series of ever-expanding poetry books-as-units-of-composition utilizing history, personal information, mythology, narrative fragments and collage, and a respect for and repeated homages towards forebears, whether personal or literary, as well as a deep awareness of their natural environment. As Browne writes: “now when i dial the stars / our grande ourse – / Desnos’s bear – / is at the switchboard / good hands you’re in[.]” The Hatch builds upon and furthers the work of his three prior collections, all of which appeared through Talonbooks—Ground Water (2002), The Shovel (2007) and The Properties (2012)—in their exploration of expansive and densely-packed collage-works that stride across a wide canvas, from lyric narrative to meditative fragment to impassioned argument to conversational script, exploring the philosophies of origins across politics, geographic space and an array of traditions. Still, there is as much heart as documentary here. This book contains multitudes, to be sure, as well as an array of feathers. As he writes towards the end of “granny soot”: “i was an open mouth / without feathers or fins / a nestling at the sign / of the celestial bear / i got a hook in the head / of the weir i wove / in the trickle of a shallow / ditch[.]” And of course, as he explores in the poem “rideau,” there are even some moments that explore the capital city, where he spent part of his youth:

i’ve boned the old syntax

the ox sprouts two horns

and mistakes submission

for forgiveness. my colleagues

have been subjects for so long

they’ve come to believe that

collusion with authority

while railing against authority

will imbue them with the authority

to deny having acquired authority.

i’m listening to the Peggy Lee Band’s

“Floating Island” and hear

a better model for being human.

i promise i won’t lie to you

without knowing that

i am lying to you (“rideau”)

The stretch and continuation of his lines and phrases are seemingly endless, helping make The Hatch quite a hefty collection, and one not just of size (nearly one hundred and fifty pages), but in scope and scale, making so much else seem entirely too thin.