8x8x7, Colin Smith

The middle-class Evangelical could not feel it wrong to make money, however little one should enjoy it when it was made; and he would spend Sunday in proclaiming the vanity of earthly riches, and weekdays in amassing as much of them as he could. Hey buddy, can you spare $20 for some therapy? Savings bonds go to heaven, but transnationals go everyone. Operation Fuck You. One world, no hope.

Underground shelters are reserved for VIPs whose actions caused the necessity to use them. No GST no MSG. SAVE A DONUT KILL A COP. Politically we don’t want our circuitry rerouted—just our buttons pushed. File Under: Recovery Cancer Family Baseball Sports Suffering.

The ceasefire isn’t. The poor always know when they’re being picked on. Volunteer opportunities for you. A welfare cut combined with a rent hike. Forced training for nonexistent jobs. (“Just”)

In preparation for his upcoming Ottawa reading, I’ve been going through Winnipeg poet Colin Smith’s second poetry trade book, 8x8x7 (San Francisco CA: Krupskaya, 2008), a follow-up to his Multiple Poses (Vancouver BC: Tsunami Editions, 1997). Constructed out of twelve poem-sections, 8x8x7 is a series of poem-collages that weave their language poetry way through social concerns. One thread of the aesthetic of Vancouver’s Kootenay School of Writing, a group Smith has been associated with since the 1980s, could be loosely described as language writing paired with social commentary, from writers such as Jeff Derksen, Peter Culley, Stephen Collis, nikki reimer, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk and Maxine Gadd, to the “Woodsquat” issue of West Coast Line edited by Aaron Vidaver. In his book-length study, The Only Poetry that Matters: Reading the Kootenay School of Writing (Vancouver BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2011) [see my review of such here], Clint Burnham includes Smith in his chapter “Social Collage and the Four Discourses,” writing on how his “polysemy intersects with an anti-narrative stance.” (p 93). Examining Smith’s poem “Straw Man” from the anthology Writing Class: The Kootenay School of Writing Anthology (eds. Klobucar and Barnholden; Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 1999, Burnham writes:

Smith’s text works as a hysteric discourse: the irony disavows its very address to the master. Think, for example, of the upper half of the hysteric’s discourse ($ [tab] S) in which the barred subject ($) is the subject of lack, the speaking subject, and could also be seen as the capitalist subject or the political protestor. […] In part, what goes on in this style of writing, in this social-collage tendency of the KSW, is a disjunction both in the sentence and between sentences, and in this disjunction, we see the hysteric subject at work. The disjunction we’ve seen in Smith operates partly in terms of the line-break, but also between the three sentences that make up the verse-paragraph I’ve quoted from his “Straw Man.” The first two sentences, for example (“I am not chosen / but have applied for the job” and “I’ve always wanted to be a Government / of Canada Initiative”), have some thematic continuity: the economics of looking for work, of government spending.

[Colin Smith reads in Ottawa with Sandra Ridley at the AB Series on Friday, November 2, 2012]

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.

‘a gentleman collector of sentences’: notes on rereading Lisa Robertson

In an interview conducted by Kai Fierle-Hedrick in The Chicago Review (51:4/52:1, spring 2006), Lisa Robertson said:

The prose poem has always seduced me—I find that the grammar of the sentence truly is glamorous to me. With the sentence it’s more of a losing myself in the balance of phrasing, in the geometry of making that balance fresh each time. I do find each sentence is exciting, even erotic. I always loved parsing sentences in grade school. I don’t do that now—though it would be fun to begin again. I relate to prose thoroughly at the level of the sentence, not at all at the level of narrative. I’m really a gentleman collector of sentences. I display them in cabinets.

Why not take Lisa Robertson at her word? A Victorian collector of sentences, the way Bolster and Swensen collect gardens and zoos, writing into display cases. Accumulation of lines that fall out of notebooks, collected there too, from archives and reworked, reordered, from one sense into another.

I NEED A GENRE for the times that I go phantom.

Lisa Robertson, “How Pastoral, A Prologue,” XEclogue

Lisa Robertson, before anything else, a poet of sentences. Again, why not take her at her word? Sidestepping genre by refusing to fall into obvious patterns. Creating new genres out of the even-older. The Weather, a book that came out of the language of weather reports, sitting in an archive in Cambridge. All the weather a library could hold.

Known for her sentences, in a landscape of poets who, more and more, exist in the pure language of sentences. Ron Silliman. Cole Swensen. Christine Stewart. Margaret Christakos. Juliana Spahr. Rachel Zolf. Lisa Jarnot. Sarah Manguso. Paige Ackerson-Kiely. The straight line. The direct statement. What is it she’s writing? Where is it she’s leading us? As Christine Stewart wrote of Robertson (and Susan Clark, Nancy Shaw, Catriona Strang and Lissa Wolsak) in “This Then Would Be The Conversation”: “In reading, we are writing; in writing we are reading, conversing, waiting, listening and no longer waiting. This is a discussion. We are around a table. we pass warmth to our left, cool glass to the right. there is a clatter of plates and implements. Our human becomes un-human as the possibilities for being extend into the furthering edges of words.”

I dreamt that Virgil mapped my lavish sleep

I read the curbs of epic lust’s derive

And there, saw myself

Lisa Robertson, Debbie: An Epic

The (deceptive) straight line. Never as simple as what she is pointing at. Phil Hall a poet of the compiled folk-fragment, Jay MillAr a poet of accumulation. Erin Mouré a poet of translation, Stephen Cain a poet of tens. Christian Bök our conceptual poet. John Newlove a poet of bare bone, Fred Wah our poet of breath’s only rhythm. Andrew Suknaski, the poet of Wood Mountain, Saskatchewan. Lisa Robertson’s sentences.

I don’t understand what I adore.

Lisa Robertson, Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip

In WITH+STAND’s “Lisa Robertson issue,” Stephanie Young writing her “Reading Report” on Robertson, on being caught by a coupe of Robertson’s sentences; run through, and run.

It’s still January, I’m getting there, I’m reading Laura Moriarty’s Conceptualisms Diary in the new issue of ON: Contemporary Practice. It is giving me a great sense of permission. I think, huh, “highly prosodized syntactic units” (how Laura has come to refer to A Tonalist writing). Maybe Lisa Robertson’s writing is A Tonalist.

Tone, without tone. Writing the sound out of words, into. Hammered, out. Further. A poem of sentences, a poetry of sentences. R’s Boat, and earlier Rousseau’s Boat. The pastoral line of XEclogue. Her greenspace, perhaps. Bordering her city of everything else.

We die and become architecture.

Lisa Robertson, “Utopia/,” Rousseau’s Boat

Soft architecture, walking in lines, whether ruler-straight, curled. Seven walks, about talking. A short exercise, walking out around Vancouver, around the thoughts in her head. Thoughts, which are never linear, straight.

Yet our city is persistently soft.

Lisa Robertson, The Weather

Sentences that distill and twist order, moving linearily back and forth, confusing the issue. What is the issue? Straight lines. What is your issue with straight lines? Not necessarily pointed all in the same direction; not necessarily all in the “correct” (so called) order. What does this order afford us? what does it give that simplicity doesn’t? A collision, collusion of sentences. We sentence these lines to a new, further life. As Lise Downe once wrote, all of these words have appeared elsewhere, but their order has been changed, to maintain their innocence. No one is innocent.

This is a history of sincerity.

The tree uses silence.

Lisa Robertson, “Utopia/,” Rousseau’s Boat

As Jorge Luis Borges wrote of Pierre Menard, who word for word rewrote Don Quixote, and thus made it new. Will this make all the difference? I am writing out sentences, across and around Lisa Robertson; what might be impossible to write through. Writing them out, again. Rewriting. Is this important?

Works Cited:

Robertson, Lisa. The Apothecary. Vancouver: Tsunami Editions, 1991; 2001.

________. The Men. Toronto: BookThug, 2006.

_______. R’s Boat. Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 2010.

_______. Rousseau’s Boat. Vancouver BC: Nomados, 2004.

_______. Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip. Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2009.

________. XEclogue. Vancouver: Tsunami Editions, 1993.

________. Debbie: An Epic. Vancouver: New Star Books, 1997. [Published in the UK by Reality Street Editions, 2001.]

________. XEclogue. 2^nd revised edition. Vancouver: New Star Books, 1999.

________. The Weather. Vancouver: New Star Books, 2001.

________. Occasional Works and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture. Astoria, OR: Clearcut Press, 2003.

Stewart, Christine. “This Then Would Be The Conversation,” Antiphonies: Essays on Women’s Experimental Poetries in Canada. Toronto ON: The Gig, 2008.

Young, Stephanie. “Reading Report,” WITH+STAND #4, “The Lisa Robertson Issue.” withplusstand.blogspot.com, 2010.

ubu web: Deanna Ferguson

sof
die
ta
tion
lim
ph
no
d I
are

-- from "Unwanted"

I recently discovered the /UBU EDITIONS series edited by New York poet Brian Kim Stefans (while looking up more material by Juliana Spahr, an American poet I've been reading lately), with titles published in pdf form in (so far) two seasons: winter 2003 and spring 2004. Publishing (and republishing) more challenging poetic texts that would be difficult to acquire otherwise, the series includes book length works by Caroline Bergvall, Robert Fitterman, Gustave Morin, Ron Silliman, Brian Kim Stefans, Kevin Davies, Juliana Spahr and Darren Wershler-Henry, among others, as well as two collections by Vancouver poet Deanna Ferguson, including Rough Bush and Other Poems, and a reissue of her earlier Tsunami collection, The Relative Minor. As Stefans says in his introduction to the first series:

"My hope, with the /ubu ("slash ubu") series, is to complement and augment relatively "traditional" methods of publication by usurping one of the most common functions of independent presses -- bringing vital new literature to the attention of a wider public -- while moving into an area that most small press publishers are not able to approach: reprinting important works from the past decades that are too commercially unviable to do as print books.

What made this idea seem interesting now, as opposed to eight or so years ago when internet publishing began its colorful but checkered history (prematurely vaunted by poets as the sequel to the "mimeo revolution") is the realization that people are willing to read long, complex works of literature from the internet provided they can print them out.

By formatting these books with professional typesetting tools and publishing them as Adobe Acrobat files, not only is the amount of paper needed to print out a book lessened because web page items like menu bars and graphics are absent, but the letter-size (8.5 x 11) page is transformed into a visually pleasing "book" page, its seductive gutters, leading and tracking making Cinderellas out of the plain-Jane ream of photocopy paper.

Publishers of innovative poetries on the web have always had trouble formatting works in html (which, among other limitations, does not have tag for a tab), but the ubiquitous Adobe Acrobat format is perfect for giving the designer all the features of advanced typesetting and graphic techniques that are stable and consistent across several computer platforms. A colour printer lets you fully enjoy the cover pages of these files, most of them original designs by Goldsmith and including one of the artworks from the ubu archives." (Stefans)

It's interesting that Ferguson's work moves from potentially having such a localized audience to a much wider one, with her part in the /ubu editions project (will there be a third run, I wonder, or a fourth?). Part of the Kootenay School of Writing collective in Vancouver during the time of Lisa Robertson, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Judy Radul, Jeff Derksen, Colin Smith, Nancy Shaw and others (see Writing Class: The Kootenay School of Writing Anthology), Deanna Ferguson's The Relative Minor was originally published by Tsunami Editions in 1993 (publisher also of texts by a number of the Kootenay collective. Kevin Davies' Pause Button, also reprinted here, was originally published by Tsunami in 1992; rumours have the press perhaps restarting in 2006?). An editor of Vancouver's late Tsunami Editions, as well as Vancouver's tabloid of arts writing from the 1990s, BOO Magazine, Ferguson's publications also include Link Fantasy, Democratique and The Goth Poem (Cleave), ddilemma (Hole Books), Rough Bush (Meow Press) and Small Holdings (Tsunami). As editors Andrew Klobucar and Michael Barnholden write of Ferguson in their introduction to Writing Class:

"Linguistic relations reveal further institutional ties in the work of Deanna Ferguson -- specifically the institution of patriarchy. Unlike Derksen's paratactic socio-economic commentary, Ferguson's lines at first suggest a more continuous narrative:

In using the telephone, she says, I really gave so-and-so
a good reaming, reprimand city,
Soon enough, circularities of story, intimacies shared.
Bullshit made apparent, but
What is constructed in this world
Has at least a shelf-life.

If there is contradiction in this work, it emerges at the level of syntax first. Ferguson does not clarify whether the adverbial clause "in using the telephone" modifies "she says" or "I really gave." In other words, is the subject using the telephone to give the other un-named conversant "a good reaming" or merely to tell she has done so? The logic of the narrative supports the latter meaning, for how could one make specific use of a telephone to reprimand a person, save as a device of communication; yet the syntax of the line suggests that in the actual use of the instrument, the reprimand was given. Similarly, the jargon "reprimand city" plays with two meanings, making a pun of her terminology. Even after closely considering the different sections of Ferguson's long poem "Wanke Cascade," from which the above is taken, the reader inevitably realizes that s/he is no nearer to a sense of "shared" narrative than when s/he began. The point at which the description or representation of the supposed event actually begins is not clear here. Ferguson displays two fictions simultaneously, or rather two levels of a linked fiction: "circularities of story, intimacies shared. / Bullshit made apparent, but…" Once again, the medium of communication appears to disrupt more than it transmits.

What in the romantic poetry of social anger or in a "work poem" might appear as a literal complaint cannot overcome its discursive origins, and so retreats back below the linguistic surface. Only "fabrication remains intact"; and this, Ferguson implies, remains the real target of her critique. The poet, and a female poet especially, cannot simply escape her social role or create a new one; her language works against it. But the ideological forces affecting her diction do not necessarily mean that she is completely powerless. It is no small feat to recognize and acknowledge the condition of one's exclusion. Exclusion carries with it its own shades of autonomy and possible freedoms. She concludes:

until all events speak for themselves
until representations know what it feels like
until positioning in the order is located
until orders of knowing suss up
until strata is axed as metaphor
until economic isn't always the organizer
fear, baby

Such are the demands Ferguson makes, not only on her social condition, but on language itself. To revolt against the political economy of liberal capitalism is to abandon all of its cultural institutions, including those guiding communication and representation. Once again, as she suggests, exclusion from mainstream culture invokes its own terms of agency and capability ("fear, baby"). Ferguson is in charge of her language to the extent that she doesn't have to communicate, if she doesn't want to communicate. Perhaps the most cogent example of this form of cultural defiance is her refusal to participate in this anthology. It is difficult to assemble works from so many disparate writers, despite their similar origins and collective engagements, without risking reductive categorizations of a poetry that, by its nature, remains highly dependent upon context for much of its import and innovation. Ferguson is right to be wary of being included in such a project, and she wastes little time in demonstrating her obvious sense of exclusion even here." (p 40-42)

In her collection Rough Bush and Other Poems, Ferguson gives us fifteen poems in under ninety pages, moving from expansive to tight lines, and blocks of prose, wide movements across the page, to thin strips of words. There have been discussions lately on a list-serve or two about if poetry is supposed to be uncomfortable, and I think it should be. And "uncomfortable" can end up meaning a whole swath of things, whether through content or form or any mixture of whatever else. Deanna Ferguson's poems could be considered "uncomfortable" only in the fact that they help challenge any notion of what a poem is "supposed to be," something that should almost always be challenged, and re-thought. Ferguson's poems move through areas of thinking and language that help keep an active blur, and a shift to what a poem is, or can be. For any of us who write, or read, I think it's a constant struggle to keep an open mind to new possibilities of form, and not become too comfortable in any one stance or area, and any of the collections published in this series have certainly achieved great strides in important and interesting directions.

We are welcomed by a special discordance.
In shape of an elder bushes morning.
He was forty-two and I seventeen.
Gone hum-speak-griddle to our boiling roles.
Darned compendium. Too close to a
hint of relative and plank-walled with respect
to the mouth. His nose hooked over my
untaxable cache. Pine hotel. Laid directly
on account of country. Straight through it.
Forty borders in a curious
line behind us. Woody with joints.

-- "Rough Bush," Rough Bush and Other Poems