the answer to everything: Selected Poems of Ken Belford

My review of the answer to everything: Selected Poems of Ken Belford (Caitlin Press, 2021), edited by Rob Budde and Si Transken, with consulting editor Jordan Scott, is now up at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics.

Ken Belford (1946 – February 19, 2020)

Sad to hear, via Rob Budde’s facebook page yesterday, that Prince George, British Columbia poet Ken Belford has died, after an extended battle with cancer. Some would suggest that Ken wasn’t a prolific poet, but he was one with a sense, it would seem, of the long game, and he had a considerable break between the publication of his first two collections—Fireweed (Talonbooks, 1967) and The Post Electric Caveman (Very Stone House, 1970)—to his return to publishing in 2000 with Pathways into the Mountains (Caitlin), a book followed by an array of books and chapbooks: Ecologue (Harbour Publishing, 2005), When Snakes Awaken (Nomados, 2006), Lan(d)guage (Caitlin, 2008), Decompositions (Talonbooks, 2010), Internodes (Talonbooks, 2013) and Slick Reckoning (Talonbooks, 2016). Not that he was completely silent during that period, either, publishing occasional small chapbooks such as Sign Language (1976) and Holding Land (1981), both through Barry McKinnon’s Gorse Press.

As part of an author biography on the Caitlin Press website reads: “Born to a farming family near DeBolt, Alberta, Belford grew up in East Vancouver. In the late 1960s, he moved to the Hazelton area of Northwest BC, where he homesteaded with his wife and daughter. Together they operated a soft paths eco tourism business in the remote, unroaded Nass River headwaters at Damdochax Lake. Remarried, he now lives in Prince George, BC, with his partner Si, and continues to blend the borders of poetics.” Part of his author biography via the Talonbooks website, more up-to-date, provides further details, writing: “For more than thirty years, he, along with his wife and daughter, operated a non-consumptive enterprise in the unroaded mountains at the vicinity of the headwaters of the Nass and Skeena Rivers.” It continues, writing:

The “self-educated lan(d)guage” poet has said that living for decades in the “back country” has afforded him a unique relationship to language that rejects the colonial impulse to write about nature, but speaks from the regions of the other.

We might have caught onto each other’s radar through my early interactions with Barry McKinnon, Talonbooks or even Rob Budde, who relocated to Prince George from Winnipeg back in 2000, around the time that Belford was returning to trade publishing. One thing I always enjoyed was the array of chapbooks he would self-publish under the “off-set house” imprint, something that began during the early years of his resurgence. Occasionally a new envelope of his chapbooks would arrive in my mailbox, most of which I tried to review. I got the sense that his work was a life-long accumulation of short, self-contained, often untitled lyrics on his particular north, ecological concerns and about how one lives in the world as a human being, and one who works to respect the land, the people and the space in which he lives. I would be curious to see if, as Budde’s facebook post suggested, a final collection of new poems was in the works, and even if there might be a selected or a collected to appear at some point, to show the concerns and structures that so obviously ran throughout his work. I would also be fascinated to see a full list of what he self-published, and a quick scan through my archive shows chapbooks including: sequences (series 1) (2003), crosscuts (series 2) (2003), fragments (series 3) (2003), transverse (series 4) (2003) and seens (2008). I’m sure there were others.

He was always very generous me during our interactions, whether the years he spent as an above/ground press subscriber (he offered that once he read the chapbooks, he made a point of passing them onto younger writers in his vicinity), and the few times we’d actually met in person, including a couple of readings I did in Prince George (including one with Stephen Brockwell), and a visit he did to Ottawa, during a few days he was in town for the sake of a conference at Carleton University, when I hosted him as part of a group reading via The Factory Reading Series. He seemed very aware of being a writer outside of the university system, and complained heavily that a room full of poets who teach in universities, some of whom expected me to run an event for them when they came through town, should be more appreciative of my efforts on their behalf. “And they can afford it!” he gruffed. “You shouldn’t be doing this work for free.” And he pushed $120 into my hand when the rest of the room wasn’t looking.

Julie Joosten, Light Light

Quanta of light move in waves over the sea, move the sea to the horizon.

Purple is a horizon extending the sky.

It seems not an earth-sky.

To think of attention as moving without trying to be moved to shadow, hepatica, sea, to purple or sky.

Rain falls on the sea and forms a night field of circles glittering idly in moonlight then dissolves into sea surface.

To give attention to what does not exist.

Here, there. (“Wind”)

Toronto poet and American expatriate Julie Joosten’s first trade poetry collection is Light Light (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2013), a collection of dense lyrics blended with the attention of essays. Joosten writes on spaces lost, forgotten and otherwise misplaced, or even deliberately obscured. “[S]ecrecy another form / of resistance,” she writes, in the poem “If light stabilizing / If to receive a bee.” The sixteen extended lyrics that make up Light Light sketch out a series of meditative studies on and around small moments, as she writes to open the poem “Ghost Species”: “Henry David Thoreau would describe the seasons, listing // the flowering times of wildflowers around Concord Massachusetts / (1851-1858). // It continues today: the data, the occasional field, the wildflowers, / declining.” The poems in Light Light are small studies in horticulture, sketches of ecologies and exploration of botany, and how any gaze changes both watcher and precisely what is being seen and studied. To describe her poems as “eco-poetry” would do the book a disservice, through reducing a more complex set of structures, ideas and perspectives to something far less. And yet, quite simply, her poems speak to a perspective that becomes irrevocably lost, once we lose sight of what is just outside our window, and the relationships we have with nature. By describing and discussing the world and natural histories, she becomes one of the natural world’s strongest advocates.

It began a field, grew valley. Light tipped grass scatters from pollen. Tree atoms gather in splints, divide to aster and cress.

Become a room of weather.

The sun coppers the ground. Its angles bring several seasons at once.

The accident of petals quarrying a winter field.

In a valley of wild hive, orange blossom, and honey the sun is silent. Is carried on the backs of horses.

Ferried against the wind.

By sympathy or suggestion I remember what I am. Walking beside a river humming with the dark. (“Once Sun”)

She certainly isn’t the first to work through ecological concerns and/or natural histories in poetry, and some recent examples of works that share Joosten’s ecological attentiveness, striking language and the book-length unit of composition include Robin Clarke’s Lines the Quarry (Richmond CA: Omnidawn, 2013), Brian Teare’s Companion Grasses (Omnidawn, 2013), Ken Belford’s Internodes (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2013) and Larissa Lai and Rita Wong’s collaborative re-issue Sybil Unrest (Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 2013). There have been poetic conversations going back decades about the pastoral, with more recent strains of eco-poetry and other ecological concerns added to the mix, which can’t help but fall deeper into the writing with every passing day. Light Light is a striking, subtle collection of sharp lyric movements that ebb and flow like water, alternately rushing, punching and as soothing as same. Not just light, but lighter, light or lighter than.

The green of the field felt so unforgettable winter could never again exist.

I’d have said in the absence of colour there thought was. The hills bringing the mind not to itself but to the idea of green. To the feeling of sunlight as expectation. The future opened from a circle of snow.

Stone, maple, daffodil, tadpole, skein.

When the valley came to be a valley I was watching winter grasses brown against the sky then green then suddenly in a startling smallness bud to pink. But it wasn’t as peaceful as that. Mud thickened the ground, made it grabby.

It gripped a finch, spit up feathers to write with, took an oak, four kittens, a thunderstorm, and a pair of woolen gloves. Grabbed a man and a woman whole, left imprints like swollen snow angels.

In a place of winter a field emerged, carving beauty’s furrows, entrenching muck-spattered beauty into the valley.

I was to guard the valley, name it, speak to it by name. (“Once Sun”)

Ken Belford, Internodes

Give the word, and disperse early

and displace often. Let gaps fly

open. Let the ambiguous in and

begin with a little old-time melodic

contour, the outcome of movement,

the on-the-job practice of working

out the variations and intervals

of admission. Let in the elements

of incidental intension. As far as

the transparent, bald-faced texts

that fan out into the obvious, release

early, and release often. Let go,

and get rid of the entangled fabric

of arcane meaning, and breathe,

and be something more than

the immediate, repetitious sample.

It’s good to see Prince George, British Columbia poet Ken Belford’s new collection, Internodes (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2013), shaped to conform to the poems he writes, as opposed to the standard poetry-book size of just about every other book out there, shifting from the more standard six by nine inches to five by eight inches. Belford’s poems have long been part of an ongoing, larger work, composing short, predominantly untitled single-stanza poems that accumulate to book-length and even larger structures, linking back to decompositions (Talonbooks, 2010) to Ecologue (Harbour, 2005) to much of his previous work. “I lived a branchy past of sprigs and / sprouts and internodes and twigs, / but didn’t occupy the land. In cahoots / with roots, I made a living in the bush.” he writes, and Belford’s ongoing poetry (or even, ongoing poem) is one that works to connect to all other things, articulating his connection to the world through a deeply considered eco-poetic. How does eco-poetry connect to pastoral? Belford composes a poetry that is part of the world, as opposed to the pastoral, which is more-often seen as separate, somehow, from the author and the writing. There is something worth comparing here to the works of American poet Fanny Howe for their interconnectivities, as well for the fact that neither poet have been self-conscious enough about any over-arcing project to name such a thing (and, perhaps, neither of them ever should). As he includes in his bio note at the end of the collection:

“The conventional standards of narrative and lyric poetry give me nothing. The intention of the sequences I write is to assemble words that can be messaged to the habituated souls of the city from the land-aware that live outside city limits.”

The Capilano Review 3.16: ecologies

In my opening pages, the identity

of the characters is contested as

a forgery of imagery bound up

with the claims and dispositions

of country. It seems in order

to sustain power in all this,

the city upholds an illusion of

authority over the north, so that

the influential with the most is

a problem to which I return.

But cultures are cumbersome,

each with acquired tastes, and

what is this blur about belonging?

By the time I came along in the

literature, the land was exhausted

and the local I knew was fading. (Ken Belford, “Potential”)

I’m intrigued by the length and the breadth of the definition this new issue of The Capilano Review brings to the theme of “ecologies,” running the stretch of what might be called “eco-poetry” and “pastoral” and further, into less-described territories. This new issue features new writing by Liz Howard, Eleni Sikelianos, Christian Bök, Ken Belford, Jacqueline Turner, Larissa Lai, A. Rawlings, Lary Timewell, Adam Dickinson and plenty of others. What might fall under the umbrella of “ecologies”? 

As a whole cloth, this is a spectacular issue that tackles a wide array of political, social, physical, poetic, social and economic ethos and effects of a variety of ecologies, including globalization, the effects of natural disaster and climate change. By itself, the sequence by Calgary poet Christian Bök, for example, is absolutely breathtaking. 

One of the anchors to the issue as a whole is the piece “’Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’: On Poetry and the Environmental Crisis,” featuring Joanne Arnott, Michael Blackstock, Peter Culley, Roger Farr, Christine Leclerc and Rita Wong. As Farr writes, “This discussion took place on September 18, 2011, on a private “Ecologies” blog set up for the occasion.”

RF: I’m curious about how poetics informs the activist work some of you are doing: Christine’s work against the Enbridge project, for example. Do people active as poets bring anything unique to the movement for environmental protection and defense?

CL: I like the way the question is framed, as I usually think about my activist work informing my poetics. Actually, I participated in poetic community before activism. But obviously, the crews aren’t mutually exclusive, and in a way, the more involved I became in activist work, the more I got to know poets involved in serving their non-poetic communities, and who are engaged in struggles for justice. That said, poetics does inform the activism that surrounds The Enpipe Line poetry project, as The Enpipe Line is fairly non-hierarchical. The contributions that make up the long line of this poem are selected by the poets who come forward with work and resistance to Enbridge’s proposed Northern Gateway Pipelines, and not a panel of editors. And the poem’s editors work on a volunteer basis. It may seem strange to describe the power focus on it because I think it is an essential feature of the work and an important part of what the poem ultimately has to convey.

[…]

Can poets intervene in the corporate and political manoeuvring that allows unwanted projects to move forward? I’m very curious about this question, but don’t yet have a clear answer.

Vancouver poets Stephen Collis and Jordan Scott’s “DECOMP: Selected Readings from the Bunchgrass Zone,” for example, worked a collaborative project of photographs and text on the subject of decay that I would very much like to see more of, writing:

In the summer of 2009 we traveled to five distinct BC ecosystems and communities: the coastal rainforest (on Vancouver Island’s west coast), the Gulf Islands (in the rain shadow of Vancouver Island), the Nicola Valley desert, the Columbia Mountains, and the sub-boreal North. In each ecosystem an identical copy of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was placed in a remote outdoor location, and left there for one year. A GPS reading was taken. In the summer of 2010 we returned to each site and located the specimens. As we hoped, each ecosystem had something different to say about Darwin’s text.

Toronto writer Liz Howard has two poems from her work-in-progress “OF HEREAFTER SONG,” with a note that reads:

Longfellow’s epic poem, “The Song of Hiawatha,” was an attempt to assimilate indigenous, specifically Ojibway, oral tradition into Western textual, metric verse. My own government-imposed identity as a non-status aboriginal person and the trauma and silence surrounding this identity (as in the internment of my great-grandfather in a residential school and estrangement from my native family members) became an emergent theme in my writing. As a mixed-race person, not even quite a “half-breed;” as a subject under a continual process of erasure; as the ideal end-product of assimilative programs such as the residential school system; and as a scientist, employing empiricism as the so-called paramount of Western inquiry into the natural or into how we come to utilitarian truth—how could I even write about this? There was something similar, suspicious, neighbourly between Longfellow’s situation and my own. He was a white settler trying to filter indigenous narrative through the framework of the Western epic and I was trying to reconcile a being at odds with itself. I began to read and un-write his work. The result is a long or sequential work in which I intervene upon the text using several procedures—an overarching process of random sampling (which is the norm in scientific research), as well as homolinguistic translation, intertextual recombination, misappropriation, and cyborgian disruption.

A particular highlight has to be new work by Lary Timewell (also known as Lary Bremner, inventor of Tsunami Editions and more recent obvious epiphanies), who, but a few short weeks ago, returned to Vancouver after a hiatus of some twenty-plus years. As his bio writes, “He spent roughly the past 20 years in Fukushima-ken, Japan, where he survived the physical but not economic fallout of the March 11^th Higashi Nihon Daishinsai; he currently lives in North Vancouver.” Given his experiences with the tsunami hitting his home city in Japan (the city with the disaster-affected nuclear reactors), it allows him a unique and terrifying perspective on the subject of “ecologies.” Here is a fragment of his poem “escape,” from a suite titled “offshore”:

At Yahiko Shrine the raindrops are opaque, an invisible display. No one is so anthropomorphic as to think Nature is apologizing for the moment past. That is to say, any one of us born. There is this world & there is the cessation of suffering, even under shifting fault-line that obliterates time. A veil of birds passing is once again an abstraction forming on the forehead.

The ghosts were torn from the buildings; the apparatus of moonlight unlocked. There are no words for counting the days. Behind door #3, the hell-wraith of mental & material streams, but here in Niigata my nearest neighbor is the weather. The mountain appears as a particle deluge, the rain constructed amorously of retinal seraphs.

My wife & son are safe in Tokyo. CNN is on anabolic steroids; the static the frayed experience raise cilia-hairs on the forearms of hope. Habitué flock to convenience stores reciting nuclear eclogues formed in the precise matrices of chrysanthemums painted on the side of a wall.

Language tastes better with the tang of wasabi, the cool of daikon. That kid with a diamond-encrusted tricycle is sunlight itself. The ululating somnambulistic of media dissipates like an involuntary communion along the auditory canal. Wooly moon through fog forms fissures on sheets, on ceiling.