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 [.]”

SOME : fifth issue,

 

place can over there  and I’ll drop the tree upon it
while over there fetch bbq sauce packets in glovebox

offset on white crescent of bucket’s innard part
between plastic lip and hump of mushroom silhouetted
to take spinning half cut up hwy to sell the PG
creep who refused to leave the mountain who after
an agreement in good faith reneged hence
the loaner red semi driven w scant warning
over his tents, baskets, dog, kitchen things,
against bucket innard eyelid shape
extends flickering shadow of a ribbon of piss (Hamish Ballantyne, “from Hansom”)

I like what Vancouver poet Rob Manery has been doing with his print journal SOME [see my review of the second issue here] and the fifth issue, dated Summer 2022, recently landed on my doorstep, featuring work by Hamish Ballantyne, Clint Burnham, Jeff Derksen, Lary Timewell and an excerpt of a collaborative work-in-progress between Elee Kraljii Gardiner and Chris Turnbull. There is something really valuable about any journal or publisher able to publish work by writers who don’t seem to publish that often in journals, if at all (Lary Timewell, for example), as well as being open to work that might be seen as too long or too experimental for even journals interested in that kind of work. Hamish Ballantyne [see my review of his latest here] is working a larger project through a sequence of fragments, each small section simultaneously offering another and a further perspective. “practice breeds a / constellation of attendant / practices each indivisible / from the instants of their expression,” he writes, further in the excerpt included here, “Later we / if we can find each other in town / decide what they all meant […].”

The intricate and precise layering of Gardiner and Turnbull’s collaborative “MESH” is stunning, offering folds of text wrapped across each other. They’ve a further collaboration in the October issue of Touch the Donkey I look forward to exploring as part of our interview. And as far as Timewell is concerned, it is well beyond the time when someone should be publishing a book by this poet; I know there’s an enormous amount of uncollected work he’s been sitting on, and he certainly deserves far better attention than he’s seen so far. His “Eight Poems” in this issue offer echoes and roots of his 1970s and 80s Vancouver KSW language-origins, but with an engagement in the interpersonal that runs across the foundation of his entire work.

reminiscent of natural animal pleasures

it’s not escapades in cascades
it’s not business as usual
it’s not an unlivable wager
it’s not captivated or decorated
it’s not spurts of pleasant to recall
it’s not learning to be a good loser
it’s not you never loved anyone but yourself
it’s neither happiness not lacking in happiness
it’s not at hand it’s not out of reach
it’s not the blue funk of a sports slump
it’s not favour me won’t you with just one more smile
it’s not picking the lock in your daydreams
it’s more like thinking sweet things of others even as you slowly die
it’s more like it’s nothing like that at all
it’s more like as probably many of you will already know
it’s more like i suppose you have all heard the incriminating rumours of
it’s more (isn’t it?) like your so-called life

There is an approach to accumulated language and political writing that both Burnham and Derksen engage with that sits in a similar realm to other current and former Kootenay School of Writing practitioners; their work reminds of a similar flavour to that of Winnipeg-based poet Colin Smith, for example [see my review of his latest here]. For those aware of any of his numerous collections, Derksen’s four poems here offer elements of both the familiar and the unfamiliar, including a prose piece, “On a Generation that Squandered its Future” (I can’t remember the last time I saw a Jeff Derksen poem set in prose” that begins: “I was working in a gas station, a greenhouse, in delivery, in gardening, / in editing, in teaching, in administration. The weather has a new name and it / is no longer Elizabeth.” The shift in patter, patterns, is curious, while still retaining the accumulative effect of the long thread, writing language across issues of labour and capitalism. Burnham’s piece is an extended poem with a curious title, “letter from Mount Pleasant to Manhattan (on Kevin Davies’s The Golden Age of Paraphernalia, Edge Books, 2008),” suggesting an enormous amount going on through this particular poem, accumulating some fifty to sixty stanzas of piled phrases collaged together to form something far larger, and far more complex. “before her if I have to spell,” he writes, early on in the poem, “it out for you thereby taking // the pamphlet from the / Western Front listing two / dozen Chinese restaurants / nearby now, twenty-odd / years later, I wonder / what the German / sisters are doing now are / they still perpetual / students or did they finish // their degrees and training, / work for a while in the Harz / mountain village their / family originated from […].” There are a lot of directions to grasp this poem, less threads than individual points, and it makes me curious to see this particular Kevin Davies title to get a better sense of how Derksen might be responding to that particular work. Further on, writing: “[…] who // remembers Lorem ipsum, / clip art, clip joints, I’ll / give you a clip on / the ear the / sound of small bits of / gravel and grit under / tires turning (but not rolling, if / you catch my drift) […].” Alternately, the first section of Derksen’s “Anonymous Fanon Poems,” reads:

That which is choking
you is also choking me

but its tight mesh
the police
the army
the state

is not from you

nor others
under a blight

and I will lose it last
following first after

you lose it

I don’t know who carries copies (ie: stores, etcetera), but the colophon writes that correspondence can be direct to: somepoetrymagazine@gmail.com and that “Subscriptions are $24 for two issues. Single issues are $12. E-transfers are welcome.” Also: note that the reading/launch listed here is in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Fred Wah, Scree: The Collected Earlier Poems, 1962-1991

I paint this broader picture, or rescaling, of Canadian literature because Fred Wah’s poetry, no matter how localized it is in the particulars of life, landscape, language, and perception, has also always been transnational and globalized; from the confluence of poetics across the Americas to Europe and Asia, to the content of the works themselves, with its configurations of a hybrid identity that fully develops through this volume (which leads to Wah’s groundbreaking book that refigured writing that engaged with the politics of identity – rather than the rather narrowly defined “identity politics” – Diamond Grill [1996]). The great subtlety of the poetry in Scree is in its expansiveness: a movement from a grounded localness that carries a weight in its details of place and in its precision of language, to syntactically compressed narratives that sweet from “my mountains” of British Columbia to “your [Wah’s father] China youth and the images of place for you before you were twenty are imbued with the green around Canton rice fields, humid Hong Kong masses” (“Elite 8,” Waiting for Saskatchewan, 67-68), Scree pulls together the early and unsure Tish poems and thirteen books, Lardeau (1965), Mountain (1967), Among (1972), Tree (1972), Earth (1974), Pictograms from the Interior of B.C. (1975), Loki Is Buried at Smoky Creek (1980), Breathin’ My Name with a Sigh (1981), Owners Manual (1981), Grasp the Sparrow’s Tail (1982), Waiting for Saskatchewan (1985), Rooftops (1988), and So Far (1991) – and it does so in a manner that creates a movement that foregrounds the way in which themes and poetic forms (the relationship of form and content again!) are in dialogue throughout the book. After many readings of the gathered work, Fred and I decided to deviate from a chronology shaped by the book’s publication dates and instead we ordered Scree roughly according to the dates the poems were written with a particular eye to the shifts and development of poetic form. The dialogue between Fred Wah’s earlier works tests the possibilities of a poetics of place, of a syntactic dynamism opened by the North American postwar experiments in form and a push against the Western box of knowledge (a push that is threaded through 1960s counterculture up to the globalization of the early 1990s). The later works in Scree move away from the more open forms of the earlier works and combine Japanese poetic forms with the dense and materialistic use of language in order to approach the narratives of place, diaspora, and belonging that recur throughout the works in Scree. This relationship of the testing of poetic forms and the shifts, developments, and repetitions of themes cohere powerfully in “This Dendrite Map: Father/Mother Haibun” from the Governor General’s Award-winning Waiting for Saskatchewan and sets the ground for Diamond Grill. (Jeff Derksen, “Reader’s Manual: An Introduction to the Poetics and Contexts of Fred Wah’s Early Poetry”)

It is a bit overwhelming, joyously so, to think that the six hundred-plus pages of BC poet Fred Wah’s hefty Scree: The Collected Earlier Poems, 1962-1991 (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2015), edited by poet and critic Jeff Derksen, is only a selection from Wah’s first three decades of publishing. The book opens with poems published in Tish, and moves through thirteen books over a thirty year period, ending with a selection of his utaniki from So Far [see the short piece I wrote on So Far for Brick Books last year, here]. Still, the boundary line between what might be seen as “earlier” (which does presume a “later”) is a bit curious, and appears to be one of half-way; 1991 is roughly the half-way point between then and now. Given that at least one of the collections in this list, Waiting for Saskatchewan, has appeared in reissue, it wouldn’t be as an argument of which titles remain “in print” against those that do not.

Talonbooks has long been unique in Canadian publishing for their attention to publishing selecteds by Canadian poets, from the early series of selected paperbacks (eight in all) in 1980 by George Bowering, bill bissett, bpNichol, Daphne Marlatt, Roy Kiyooka, Frank Davey, Phyllis Webb and Wah, to the mid-career overviews of poets Sharon Thesen and Barry McKinnon, to these more recent omnibus collections, including Roy Kiyooka's Pacific Windows, The Collected Books of Artie Gold, Phyllis Webb’s Peacock Blue, and now, Fred Wah’s Scree. Edited by Derksen, with a hefty critical introduction by him as well, the book is gorgeous, and must have been a design nightmare, attempting to keep as close as possible the integrity of the original publications into a single volume. The resulting volume—shift of image, colour and font—is a breathtaking accomplishment that does far more than simply replicate a selection of thirty years of writing and publishing, but work to present some sense of what those early publications might have felt like in their original forms. The book also includes a selected bibliography, taken from the Fred Wah Digital Archive, but one that only goes up to 1991; whereas I understand that I could simply look up what he has produced since, the omission of such information is a curious decision (and one that hasn’t yet caught up to the small mound of reissued books that have appeared over the past decade or so).

Part of what has helped Wah become one of Canada’s most engaging poets has been in his ability to remain engaged in exploring how and why poems are constructed, from the breath of the line-break to the breath of his prose lines, as well as his inquiries into his “bio-text,” and larger questions of place and racial identity. What also becomes very clear through Wah’s Scree is his ongoing engagement with breath, gesture, pause and improvisation (something he discussed earlier last year in an interview posted at Jacket2), from the poem “WHEN,” from Lardeau, that writes “When it is hot / when in the afternoon / tomorrow / last night / today when / to expect / the way / to take / (of / the mind’s meadows / yes),” to the final page, from So Far:

            Out of the corner of my eye more rocks. And out an ear I hear a few birds sing their particular song, not solitary: the creeks rush and gurgle down to the valley below. In a corner of my mind is tomorrow’s two-and-a-half-hour hike out to the trailhead and then the long drive home. But nowhere else.

                        clear stingin’ peaks

                                                   rock green moss

                                                                                    campion

                                       all surface news

                                                                        inked

                        to the bloated stone heroes

                                       massed alongside Mao’s mausoleum

                        same shards here

                                                      within the square

                                                                a “percolation

                                                      network”

                        five lines,

                                        five soldiers a line

                                                                duende stone

                        thano-stone

Frank Sherlock, Space Between These Lines Not Dedicated

You can feel good in the skin you’re in even if it’s been broken

You can feel good about the fire fighter & the wonder of fireworks at once

Show off your titty tattoos & feel good     I feel it     Feel good about

falling in love w/o government sanction         Flip the bird to the law &

feel good    You can feel good about your wave cap when it’s tied just right

Can you feel how good this feels this blinking sign of redemption

You can feel good about smoking in bed & not waking up in a fire

You can you

I’m very taken with the poetry collection, Space Between These Lines Not Dedicated (Philadelphia PA: Ixnay Press, 2014), the first work I’ve seen by current Philadelphia poet laureate Frank Sherlock. The author of Over Here (Factory School, 2009) and the collaborations Ready-to-Eat Individual (with Brett Evans; Lavender Ink, 2008) and The City Real & Imagined (with CAConrad; Factory School, 2010), the poems in Space Between These Lines Not Dedicated are made up of a series of sharp lyric accumulations constructed out of a blend of intimate, social and political commentaries. The poems in this collection explore a series of boundaries, including the space between the private and the public, as well as the personal and communal. “Nothing is / unconditional / in this / existence or / the other way / around     I move in / this manner / as a public,” he writes, in the poem “Very Different Animals.” Much further in the same piece, he includes a single line in the middle of the page, writing:

            The poem starts here

There is something both structurally and subject-wise in Sherlock’s work reminiscent of Vancouver poets Jeff Derksen and Stephen Collis, both of whom also work in the political vein of accumulated poem-stanzas constructed out of short phrase-lines, such as in Sherlock’s poem “Love Letter November 15,” that includes: “I trade / news links / through / militarized / playspace / to keep / witnessing / fresh / to stay out / of the back / catalogue / while / looking to / not be / abandoned [.]” His poems move from point to point, including enormous amounts of information in compact spaces, jumping naturally from thought to thought, connecting a series of ideas and events that together become quite unsettling, and shake the reader out of any kind of comfort. These are poems meant to be uncomfortable, aimed to provoke a plethora of reactions. Composed as a series of fragments held together as extended sequences, Sherlock includes the occasional short poem between longer sequences that exist almost as a kind of Greek chorus, created as a kind of bonding agent that brings the ten longer poems together as a single collection. Despite articulating conflicts, complaints, rants and ongoing fears, there is something entirely optimistic throughout Sherlock’s work, such as the ending of the title poem, well towards the back of the collection, that reads:

Still for now

there is a way for

me to get from

here to the rest of

the world    Hear

me stand inside

the piano & play

I will walk

toward you