Versions of North

Unsettled Settlers and Post-Colonial Colonists: Greg Lainsbury’s Versions of North. Caitlin Press, Halfmoon Bay,  BC, 2011. 88 pages. $16.95.

 

 

Lainsbury’s long poem consists of “versions” of the North, or “scenarios” as the individual poems are called. Together, they illustrate what he calls the “psychopathology” of North – North as a dysfunctional state of mind. South, in his view, is a similarly but less evidently dysfunctional state of mind.

 

An “important point of reference”, Lainsbury says, is William Carlos Williams’ Paterson, which, according to Williams, is “a long poem [written] upon the resemblance between the mind of modern man and a city.” Williams personifies the city: “Paterson lies in the valley under the Passiac Falls . . . He lies on his right side, head near the thunder of the water filling his dreams!” And Williams objectifies his personified city as “modern,” seeing himself as representative of modernity.

 

Lainsbury doesn’t attempt personification as a structural device, nor much even as a figure. His long poem more resembles Wordsworth’s Prelude, which claims to illustrate “the growth of a poet’s mind” under the influence of natural settings. A major character in Wordsworth’s poem is a personified Nature (a “she” of course – to emphasize nurturing but also to leave room for an overriding “He”), but personification is not used structurally. The structural element in Wordsworth’s Prelude is an early form of behaviorism developed by David Hartley – the human mind as a kind of computer capable of progressive development in which Nature does the programming. Wordsworth spoke of the spirit that rolls through all things, including “the mind of man.” Lainsbury talks of “the forces” that “brought him to a particular place [North], and that have shaped the place where he finds himself.”

 

Wordsworth’s Nature is, like Williams’ Paterson, ultimately benign, not dysfunctional. The trouble with Wordsworth’s perspective is, as Coleridge pointed out, that he idealizes Nature and portrays the human mind as a passive recipient of Nature’s influence. As Coleridge well knew, the mind could convert the “natural” state of mind into negative states like, in Coleridge’s case, dejection. He wished that Wordsworth had delved into the pre-programming of Hartley’s computer (by the “He”) and/or into the other forces (a non-benign, non-human Nature) that must be involved in the programming.

 

Lainsbury actually attempts this. He sees North as his own dysfunctional state of mind: “The poem is both more or less than the ‘Idea’ of North . . .; it is, in the limited sense that is always ‘my’ sense, the embodiment of an uncertain North, weak and highly constrained by context.”

 

Ignoring the abstract and grammatically ambiguous nature of this statement, it sketches a legitimate ambition. Red Lane once described poetry as “introspection” of a special kind – “not from the outside looking in, nor from the inside looking out – more like from the inside looking inside out.” Lane used some analogies: “Surgery for the sake of surgery.” Or: “The hunter hunts in a circle and moves so swiftly that he comes up behind himself and shoots himself in the back – he falls, and cries ‘I’ve been murdered!’ Then he picks up his body, buries it and mourns his death. Then he goes out to hunt down his killer. He hunts in a circle.”

 

Sounds inefficient, but also very familiar. It’s a paradigm of induction/deduction, common sense, of which a good poem is, in my opinion, along with good prose and good science, an epitome. You arrive at a generalization that seems to explain a series of clear facts and then have that generalization killed by subsequent facts and resurrected in a new form only to be killed again. Gradually the generalization survives longer, and thus becomes more useful. The process fails when the thinker falls Narcissus-like into the infinity mirror of the Egotistical Sublime, into the production of images of himself, into “the still, sad music of senility,” as they said of Wordsworth. Generalizations are contrived to fit the facts, facts perverted to fit generalizations, and the thinking (the poem) gets moralistic and sloppy.

 

The opposite danger was courted by Coleridge: deliberate experimentation, with drugs, Platonic love, and/or theory, the latter featuring massive generalizations and omnium-gatherum, cherry-picking, “abstruse” research. Lainsbury is, like Coleridge, a self-confessed fucked-up polymath, and he can, like Coleridge, sometimes, especially when a good line or a promising idea pops up, be proud of it. He is also, like Coleridge, an attractive fuckup, candid at times, insightful, and comical in both what he says and does.

 

Lainsbury’s “Note on Text” for example, which postulates Paterson as a point of reference and describes the “Idea” of North also (Coleridge-like) anticipates and so seems to try to forestall objections. This is comical and also convenient for the reviewer, who doesn’t have to find flaws but has them listed for him. The poet, protesting too much concerning the unusual and therefore suspect features of his poem, accuses himself.

 

The first note in of this sort in Versions of North states that, “The poem began as a formal exercise in technique, the utilization of postwar cut-up technology to circumscribe the linearity of conventional poetic logic. Over the years I introduced a drafting process which included image-collage as the background to the emerging poem – the process of composition has been captured on video, which can be viewed on YouTube under glainsbu.”

 

No thanks. I found the poem too wildly associative, large parts of it incomprehensible, though regularly I crossed paths with excellent conceits and memorable phrases. Even though I’m inclined to think well of Lainsbury and to chance ingesting some shit because truffles keep appearing, I’m not inclined ascribe too much disconnectedness on the chance that a gestalt will emerge. I don’t do it in life, beyond occasional doses of wine and Viagra, and I don’t do it in reading and writing.

 

In fact I like to think that, through this review, I will be for Lainsbury a kind of visitor at Porlock, doing the same thing as the guy who awakened Coleridge from his laudanum-induced hallucinations to enquire as to where he was and thus ended “Kubla Khan” exactly where it should have ended. Or the “friend” who advised Coleridge that he should save the definition of “Imagination, the esemplastic power,” billed as the pivotal chapter of Biographia Literaria, for another book (as if that was ever going to happen), and to shut up about metaphysics and get on with his interesting autopsy of the long dead but still twitching corpses of Southey and Wordsworth.

 

Second, Lainsbury’s Note explains that “each mounting of the work is constrained by the technology of presentation. The work is first done on eleven-by-seventeen-inch sheets, and ‘reduced’ for chapbook publication to a seven-by-eight-and-a-half-inch page. Trade book publication has necessitated further work to fit the constraints of the page size made available to me by Caitlin Press. Thus my most observant readers will note that line breaks and spacing vary considerably in the various publications of the work over time, reflecting my interest in an improvisatory gestalt.”

 

In other words, line breaks and spacing play for/against grammar and logic as well as figures of speech, so there isn’t always an exactly correct place where they have to be. This is a legitimate point; it shows at least that Lainsbury, despite the bullshit about “improvisatory gestalt,” understands how lyrical measure works. In fact, I have taken him at his word when I quote him in this review, indicating line breaks and spacings only where they serve as a substitute for punctuation marks. I (as a logic-freak and failed poet) prefer my prosaic version. The fact is that if you happen to hear a lot of noise, as I did, you harbor a suspicion that you are not experiencing poems that are more than a summary of their parts. You suspect that you are experiencing parts, some of which may be noticeably better than the compositional whole. Given the choice—and Lainsbury gives it to us—why shouldn’t I make these attractive parts more attractive by punctuating them conventionally?

 

Third and finally, the Note lists some of the texts wherein Lainsbury indulged in those “abstruse researches” that tossed up the lines that make up the collage/gestalt. Coleridge’s “sad ghost” (as Eliot had it) appears again. In Biographia, the pivotal chapter on the “esemplastic power” starts with 20 lines from Paradise Lost, moves on to a paragraph (in Latin) from Leibnitz, to four lines of Greek poetry (in Greek), and to a summary of “Des Cartes, speaking as a naturalist and in imitation of Archimedes.” All of this wisdom, Coleridge then tells us, was condensed and epitomized by “the venerable Sage of Koenigsberg [Kant] in his essay on the introduction of negative qualities into philosophy.”

 

After a couple more pages of names and quotations in the lead-up to the definition of Imagination, with the reader confounded and confronted with having to read thousands of words in many languages in order to find the point, Coleridge’s “friend” mercifully intervenes. Coleridge takes his advice, and “Imagination” is defined in few words, the clearest of which are plagiarized from Schelling. If the reader needs more, Coleridge says, he can get that in an essay on the Supernatural soon to be prefixed to “The Ancient Mariner” – an essay that (you guessed it) was never written.

 

Coleridge lectured in the same way, and I imagine—having shared with Lainsbury the profession of college teaching—that he has done the same, avalanching students with quotes authored by people with foreign names and with lines from favoured poets. Coleridge’s lectures were popular, though again some of the best insights were plagiarized. The audience gave up on logic, picked up random insights, arrived at their own Gestalt, and went away inspired. This method is justified by us instructors by the fact that most students are smarter than (if not as well informed as) we are.

 

One of Lainsbury’s more abstruse speculations is that one of the “forces” that creates North, a “large” one, is Aristotelianism, a focus and dependence on reductive logic. It is identified in various ways in the poem: “Greek Abstraction” or “Aristotelian historicism,” or left-hemisphere brain activity (“thank goodness people’s right brains have been eaten by roboticized steel rats”), or “the chronic atomization of consciousness.” This force, as mentioned, exists in/comes from the South but is hyperactive/super-obvious/inescapable in the North.

 

In the course of this atomization, politics and economics are reduced to “the post-Nation-State logic of Capital” and into the “essential Satanism of Commerce” whereby “the old North becomes the New West.” Learning is reduced to “planning and producing customized learning-objects for the One Big College.” Community is experienced mainly in bars, under the influence of booze and drugs. Love is fractured into “dosing” and “contemplation” and talked out in the terms of “the Happiness Project.” “The aesthetic disposition” is shrunk into “the disinterested consumption of all manner of cultural objects for their own sakes,” “deconstructive method” into “the execution of unconscious inclinations,” and poetry into “the solipsistic dead-end of the Romantic lyric.” Of course all of these events happen in the South too, but again are more obvious and affective in the North.

 

On the physical landscape this state of mind, in the past, manifested itself as the network of ports, forts and interconnecting routes and trails that covered  what Lainsbury calls “beaverland.” Lainsbury lives in one of the forts, telling us that, “Fort St. John is the oldest European-established settlement in present-day British Columbia.” Pelts are no longer so important, but have been replaced by wheat, oil, gas, electricity and lumber. A web of rail lines, highways, transmission lines and pipelines now covers the land.

 

Presently the “Energetic City” is the BC nexus of the oil/gas boom and is a light-industrial wasteland with plenty of bars and motels and acres of trailers and mobile homes. The country surrounding it is scarred by clear-cuts, “the paraphernalia of oil and gas exploration,” and hydro dams with their festering (flooded without being logged) lakes.

 

The settlers are described as being exiled or incarcerated. The population of Lainsbury’s favorite bar is representative of “the Gulag:” “our inhabitants include: rig hands in doghouses/whole villages from Cape Breton/one who doesn’t know what a suntan is/the alcoholic driver & the catskinner/recent parolees from federal institutions/economic migrants from dying prairie towns/bars full of sad promiscuous & angry souls/they’re often really fat & their clothes too tight.” They project “the cowboy image: proud, aggressive, competitive, vain, maudlin, controlled and violent,” “living life without benevolence, destroying without malice.” They are “Proudly born & raised/flesh & blood local heroes” and they “gut it out in the corners/Thanatos reasserts himself with a vengeance: love of debauchery.”

 

Left-brain domination results in right-brain revolt.

 

While he can only tell us about the psychopathology of his fellow settlers, Lainsbury can show us his own psychopathology in the way he writes and what he says about himself. The perspective is first person mainly but regularly slips into the royal “we” and sometimes from the third and second persons as Lainsbury comically speculates on himself as an object or brings himself into over-cozy proximity to the reader: “are you radioactive, pal? Has you the night sweats & the day sweats, pal? Do you float on a silver stream of impunity?” Even though he sees the Romantic lyric as a dead end, he provides, as an “Intertext,” six such lyrics, and they are largely, indeed, as if to prove his point, dead.

 

He tells us that he suffers from depression, a condition that came with him to the North. “Taking medication for depression for 20 years allowed him to be productive.” He cannot maintain friendships or a family life: “myself can hardly stand to touch my person to someone else’s.” He chances wild experiments of consciousness — high idealism, maudlin romanticizing and mean-spirited cynicism augmented by booze and (prescription) drugs.

 

Not even Coleridge indulged in self-justification to the extent of Lainsbury does when he argues: “If one’s ambition is vulgar in its magnitude perhaps one should give oneself over to lying dissolute and melancholy on the ground? To be able, at least, to romanticize one’s situation, even if hopelessly infected with cynicism [is] a sign of mental health, however tenuous.” Thus the reference to the Gulag. It is insulting to suggest a comparison between those who really suffered and those who mainly just imagine they do, but Lainsbury is a troubled and desperate man who, in his weaker moments, likes to see himself as a victim of forces beyond his control. But he is also self-aware enough to treat his histrionic tendencies and outbursts with contempt.

 

And not even Hamlet indulged in such flights of procrastination: “In the wings struts the hero of sensitivity feeling like he wants to kill people all the time/this excessive, non functional cruelty demands an outlet/distinguishing idleness & work-preparation/job descriptions of an absurd future distracting children for a living/a poetics for depression . . . . Oh, to take leave of the past/gaily to trace/the thin gold of imagination/through a rocky mass of metrical gab/its ascendance measuring the recession of the dreams. . . . To be in all this/a moral lever/to prise open our own/condition: ruthless, savage & rigorous/conquering God & the old life/in a last struggle to attain/the grand style in Art. . . . Then comes the turn; the speaker’s identification becomes literal/ha! Drunk on virility/obsessed with rank/winged indecision/moving in terror from bar to bar/the lector with no method but ethos. . . . How can a man like me be expected to live & work under such conditions? Why cast all thou hast into the fire, of course!”

 

The attraction of this outburst is its quick-mindedness.

 

The “we” and “you” in Lainsbury includes not only Lainsbury himself, of course, and the residents of Ft. St. John and North, and the reader, but also “Tanya,” to whom, along with “Ezra” and “the girls,” the book is dedicated. She is described as “the district psychologist” and also as Lainsbury’s “ex-common-law” wife. He avails himself of her services, comically: “It is her job after all to make him feel better/but most of the things he thinks about are of no importance to her: genre as social action/corporate semiosis/an episode of the Lone Ranger [Is this Lainsbury himself?] involving a black widow [a neighbor of African extraction who has lost her husband in a gas explosion?]/hygienic governance & social morbidity/the apogee of the asset bubble/the fluttering of an anxious middle/(also she thinks he is stupid).”

 

Tanya is an alternative to North, obviously a difficult one. The dedication also features a line from Pound’s Cantos, “if love be not in the house there is nothing.” This could indicate that things are not going well between Tanya and her patient. She refuses the role of earth mother, engaging in “tough love,” yet she shares his take on things and understands his frustration. “So where is this world they are advertising?” she asks as they drive North “through a critique of emerging meaninglessness/an ethnology of death/transcendent bleakness of taiga/Swan Hills Waste Disposal Facility/a station of my Gulag Archipelago.”

 

Another refuge for Lainsbury is the land itself, physical Nature – trees, animals and land-and sky-scapes—noted in the old Wordsworthian vein as representing and sustaining an older, right-brain state of mind. And then there are the aboriginal peoples – but this, Lainsbury knows, is tricky. Are we saying they are more “natural,” that they haven’t degenerated into right/left-brain dysfunction to the extent that Second, Third, Fourth etc Nations have? Are we accordingly participating in the European idealizing and therefore trivializing of “the Red Man” as a paragon of simple goodness, as Rousseau’s “natural man?” Are we again creating caricatures like Pochahontas, Hiawatha, Chingisgook, Grey Owl, and Tonto in order to salve our consciences for having committed acts of physical and cultural extermination?

 

Aboriginal people force Whites to deal with what is actually to be done about an unacceptable situation. If you don’t like Aristotelian Capitalism, what do you like? The White traditional way of life (five acres and a cow) is unacceptable and anyway will likely lead us back to where we are; the Aboriginal traditional way of life is even less practical. The northern social worker, teacher, and medical worker goes out to “marginalized” native communities to “help” – to bring modern medical and counseling services and training – taking care (before teaching welding rather than cedar-bark weaving or summoning Medivac rather than the shaman) to pretend to have come out to “learn” – to spout pious remarks about the evils of assimilation and the superiority of Aboriginal medicine, astrology, justice, and community services.

 

As one of the “sensitive” settlers, Lainsbury sees himself as “inheritor of the truly original inhabitants/of the Americas.” But he knows that this is an attitude that Aboriginal peoples would likely regard as presumptuous and condescending. A tribal council might as an act of good faith adorn the Minister of Indian Affairs with a ceremonial head-dress, but doesn’t want him wearing it around Parliament Hill all the time, especially when stepping up to the microphone to announce yet another stupid policy.

 

Lainsbury describes “the imaging of Indians as self-perpetuating industry,” and admits that he finds it convincing only when stoned: “a chronic consciousness of crisis/that odd state of soul when the void becomes eloquent/concealing our labours/bringing us all back home to the time before the new Safeway/before satellite dishes disrupted suburban rooflines/to when Dunn Za [Beaver Indian] real people/whose events take place only after being experienced in dreams/their adaptive success dependent on skill & knowledge of individuals [he was stoned out of his brain but knew a good idea when he heard it].

 

Versions of North illustrates the pace of “Northern development,” its improvisatory, desperate nature, and the onset of the pathology it represents and creates. The poet, like the engineer, bureaucrat and oil-worker, has no time for anything but speed and no energy for anything but improvisation: “what is left/ when armed with only shrunken experiences & subservient languages of banality and despair/but to attempt to stitch together a work consisting entirely of quotations . . . ? So when thinking you are losing your head consider the long pome as feasible & culturally necessary! Or at least as sort of barricade ‘gainst their massive data structures’.”

 

This is the long poem as filibuster, obstructing Roberts Rules of Order and what Lainsbury regards as the “linearity of conventional poetic logic” in their task of creating banal legislation of both the acknowledged and unacknowledged kinds. I don’t buy the filibuster idea generally, but is a legitimate tactic under certain difficult circumstances and a way to begin resistance. And Lainsbury is inspired by good models of the long poem deriving from Williams and Pound through Olson and Ginsberg.

 

The first and (in terms of number of references) most important of these models is George Stanley, cited three times: “’this was once a city’ proclaimeth George Stanley to those assembled in the parking lot/‘this plastic rose’ now inscribed in our species-being a moment in the history of capital/a dumping ground for scum/a vanguard machine dragging humanity after it/hungry ghosts everywhere.”

 

Stanley is the source/confirmation of Lainsbury’s view of capitalism as an oversimplified and therefore polarizing and destructive way of thinking. Stan Persky, in a review of Stanley’s book At Andy’s (set in Terrace/Kitimat), says: “Stanley is one of the few poets I know of who consistently takes capitalism – its social effects and the difficulty of comprehending its dual character of blatant obviousness and invisible workings – as a necessary feature of his subject matter . . . . Stanley’s world is realistic, ordinary, and informed by an understanding of macro-economic causality.” Stanley’s poetry,” Persky goes on, “is capable of overcoming the ‘difficulty’ of talking about the ‘ordinary’ effects of capitalism: “One of the notable features of Stanley’s poetry is that his mind’s processing . . . of the phenomena he encounters . . . is always a possible partial subject matter . . . . The events in his mind frequently interrupt, short-circuit, or, as they say these days, destabilize whatever he’s writing about.”

 

And yet Stanley is a master of the ballad, the quip, the expressive anecdote and other forms of lyrical logic. His long poems (Lainsbury cites Vancouver, A Poem in particular) contain connected short poems and forego scattered spacing (most lines starting at left margin, some tabbed in the usual consistent indents). They exhibit a “narrative arc” and build a consistent characterization of Stanley as a person with a Zen-like acceptance/understanding arising naturally from his “destabilizing” intellect. You destabilize to achieve stability.

 

Lainsbury’s “Ghost-Town Elegies,” part 3 of Scenario 3, begins with this advice from Vancouver, Part 8: “And I’ll tell you – it’s no big thing anyway, to be a person, with a Kind of life, yet that’s what people are interested in . . . .” Stanley goes on in that poem to say that, for poetry: “That it be interesting/to others [is] a simple test . . . . Everyone wants to know/what you don’t know, or are afraid to know./There’s no need to make anything up.”

 

Lainsbury’s other acknowledged influence is Barry McKinnon: “Another key event in the development of a shift in my poetic practice from the short lyric to the long poem was my meeting Barry McKinnon in the fall of 1994; I had recently moved from Vancouver to Terrace, and Barry’s reading at a UNBC literary conference made a significant impression on me; his influence on my practice as a poet and on this particular project are profound.”

 

Lainsbury’s “line” looks much more like McKinnon’s than Stanley’s, though McKinnon’s has lately tended more to blocks of prose. McKinnon also exhibits North as a dysfunctional state of mind, but that dysfunction is revealed more psychosomatically than psychologically: “city, mind – body.” And there is no progression to insight and understanding, only decay and the desperate hanging-on to original values of family, friendship, love. As a character in his own poems, McKinnon is opposite to Stanley in that he doesn’t theorize and find thereby any sort of “vision:” “I can’t find the grammar machine – make no proposal.” He favors irony and his conclusions are totally un-Zen: “the city hates itself.”

 

Lainsbury’s third long-poem northern poet – in the sense that he comes north (to Canada) regularly in pursuit of shirt-tail ancestors and the whole history of the alien in “civilization” – is Cecil Giscombe.  Giscombe is merely listed in the “Note on Text,” so I place him last. He is the Wallace Stevens in the group, exploring dictionaries and encyclopedias as well as vast stretches of prairie and northern turf, seeking a language that doesn’t distort the reality of the alien – a language between “linear logic” and romanticizing rhetoric, between what Giscombe calls “reference” and what he calls “metaphor.”

 

McKinnon can’t or refuses to find the grammar machine. Stanley plays with it, usually in subversive ways, Giscombe studies it and puts it to use, moving fox-like between its two extremes. Lainsbury’s place in the pantheon of long-poem poets of North seems closest to Giscombe’s. But it is unique due to Lainsbury’s tendency to Coleridgean/Poundian “abstruse research,” something not evident in Stanley and McKinnon and pursued in Giscombe only in the more traditional fields of history and cognitive psychology. Lainsbury has a more conventionally academic approach to the psychopathology of Capitalism.

 

Since psychology is the way by which poetics connects with the other disciplines, Lainsbury, in developing his poetry, may have to go back—as a student if not as a patient or husband—to Tanya. I advise this though I suspect that he doesn’t need my advice. He did dedicate the book to her.

 

 4271 words November 5, 2011                                                                                                                                                                         

 

The New Ken Belford: Reaching Out without Selling Out

Ken Belford, Decompositions, Talonbooks, Vancouver, 2010, 96 pp. pb  $16.95

The 92 untitled and interconnected poems of Ken Belford’s Decomposition (2010) start with a version of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave:

It just happens the idea

of meaning exists only

in fiction, where it takes on

a life of its own.  The evolution

of the living image pleases

our dispositions but the pliable

appearance does not walk around

on the ground and lives only in

the fictional world of flashback

and dream. The reality is, scenes

take place, and these impossible

events, these replications of

objects that are not very much

like the world are secondhand

experiences, an idea, a likeness

of scenery, or an event staged

in front of a microphone.

Belford’s version differs from Plato’s in interesting ways. “Evolution,” connoting as it now does adaptation, puts a new twist on the way “the living image” changes as it registers on the sensorium, and “disposition,” connoting “mood” or “temperament,” conceptualizes the sensorium as more erratic, more dependent on chance, than Plato had it.

Belford may be presenting, as fact or the foundation of his own philosophy (since this is the book’s first poem) the Enlightenment’s or Kant’s interpretation of the allegory. This view holds is that none of us inmates ever gets to turn around to look directly at the parade of reality and the fire beyond that throws shadows on the sensorium, shadows that are “not very much like the world.” There is no Socrates, Buddha, or Christ to tell us what is or what method of dialectics, conscience or meditation will lead us to what is. There are only us sophists and scientists, catching familiar patterns in the moving shadows, drawing connections, testing, comparing, hypothesizing, and affirming (as bravely as possible) propositions and theories that we know will take us only part way.

Note Belford’s rhetoric of certainty: “It just happens [to be that]” . . . . “The reality is . . . .” The point of view is first-person plural — Belford is speaking for us, telling us what it is with “our dispositions.” Also, the proposition is put in commonplace terms and in present tense — is positioned right in front of our faces — and is made up of abstractions presented in prepositional phrases attached to other abstractions: “the idea of meaning,” “the evolution of the living image,” “the fictional world of flashback and dream,” “the replications of objects,” and “a likeness of scenery.” In other words, the abstractions seem carefully sifted and sorted, as if it can be assumed that the connections have all been worked out. The poem is made up of three fairly long and conventionally punctuated sentences. The sentences convey assertions seemingly made in the certainty that the proposition is common knowledge or so self-evident that it can safely be dumped into our laps in a hurry.

This confidence—what Barry McKinnon has described as “ontological certitude” — has always characterized Belford’s delivery. Here it’s illustrated by a poem from Sign Language, a chapbook published by McKinnon in 1979:

Shadows

when the lights go on

circle us, an over flow

of fluid, without

receiving light.

I am on time

since I handle the lamps right.

I swing them casual

and step out

at my own pace.

I will not forget

who I am

or why I am going

Donna Kane, in a recent Malahat review of Belford’s immediately previous book, Lan(d)guage: a sequence of poetics (2008), speaks of his “declarative tone” and his “prophetic stance.” Such a stance may seem at odds with a person to whom revelation has been denied, to whom meaning is fiction. But that view itself reveals a method in which a person of the Enlightenment can have a faith as strong (more in the sense of stubborn than assured) as any religious, ideological, nationalistic or ethical one — a faith in “reason.”

The second poem begins to illustrate that faith. This poem is utterly the opposite of its predecessor, a poem in the first person but singular this time, not plural, with the poet identifying himself as “Ken” and speaking to us, not for us. It is a poem devoid of abstractions that provides Ken’s readers, provides us, with an anecdotal summary of his search for what is:

I was a man, the story goes, who needed

a name, but before I get to it, let me tell you

the stories about my other name.

My pen name was Ken.

Some of you follow my name around.

My poems are my only property.

I was unsuccessful at love and work,

but was generous with my money

and gave it away as it came in.

Stories were written about me,

but narratives were imposed on my work

and all of them ignored my complexity.

I pissed out the windows of my friends,

puked on the doorstep of my neighbour,

and drank in the local dive.

My name was an empty space

but according to one version,

Si followed me home to Hazelton

and went up to me as I reached my tent.

When my poems are read out

it is in the context of my name story.

I have had to cope with competing narratives

but my name was chosen by me

and the variations of the tale

are my attempts to explain him.

Here, the punctuation swiftly shifts to line-end, while the first words of main clauses, the upper-cased first letters of the first words of sentences, and the conjunctions and prepositions that start clauses and phrases shift to line-beginning. This correspondence of sentence and line, of meaning and breath, indicates conclusiveness. However, if the delivery is more controlled than in the first poem, where the sentences are broken by the line endings, the message is that Belford is basically unsettled. He says he is “looking for himself,” as the cliché has it. His search for himself is a “story.” The story has “competing narratives,” that are not entirely mutually exclusive but are “attempts” at explanation.

As “the story goes,” Belford has two names. The first is a “pen name” or pseudonym. It’s the name on the book’s cover, “Ken.” Pseudo Ken is the teller of the story, the “I.” A pseudonym implies a real name, one that Pseudo Ken is about to “get to.” This real name, Pseudo Ken’s “other name,” “was an empty space.” Note the past tense, implying that Pseudo Ken is filling or has filled that space. The first implication, that the space has not been filled but is less empty now, seems to be affirmed in the poem’s last line, which is in present tense, indicating that Pseudo Ken’s attempts to “explain” the Other or Real Ken are ongoing. Pseudo Ken refers to himself, in the last line, in the third person, but uses the pronoun “him,” not a proper noun, not an actual name. This actual name remains the object of his search, the theme of his ongoing “name story.”

In the context of his story, Ken attempts to identify that of which he is certain and that of which he isn’t — Kant’s methodology, the beginnings of the psychology of rational consciousness. He indicates that his poetry is a success: “my poems are my only property.” This is convincing since we are holding his book. Furthermore, he asserts that some of us are not just readers but also fans — we “follow” him. Since I have read most of Ken’s books, I pretty much have to agree that Ken has reason to be confident of his poetic success.

But about other aspects of his life Ken says he is less certain. There are “versions,” some of them “conflicting,” of the story. This is a warning to us followers. We ourselves will have to make some judgments, to be skeptical about Ken’s directions as we follow him around.

About “love” and “work,” for example, Ken says that he was “unsuccessful.” Can this be true? Is Ken misreading/mistelling his own story? There are poems to Alice (Ken’s first wife) and Hannah (their daughter) throughout Ken’s books, from Fireweed (1967) to the selection Pathways into the Mountains (2000), that indicate that he loved them both and felt loved.  Certainly the poems register the difficulty of love; “Origins” in The Post Electric Cave Man (1970) expresses the sense of smothering alienation from “a woman/who is my wife, partly.” But other poems express sympathy and affection, and a number of poems in Pathways indicate nostalgia for his lost life with wife and daughter in the wilderness:

The water flowed and filled our pail

Those years our family lived

Together under one roof,

A roof we made together, us three.

As for “work” (not the poetry, which has been defined as “property”), all the books, especially The Post Electric Cave Man, mention assorted jobs on highway crews and in mining, logging and ranching. These “work poems,” different from those of Tom Wayman and to a certain extent of Patrick Lane in that if Ken complains it’s mostly about himself, do indicate a kind of failure or futility. In “The Highways Crew,” Ken mentions “filling the same/damn hole . . ./wanting/it left there.” “Branches Back Into” describes Ken’s inadequacies as a chain man surveying for a road—inadequacies that are hauntingly akin to those we feel in following Ken:

His job was

to walk in

front of me. . . .

I followed him, holding

my end of the chain

in the one hand, in

the other, a

small axe for

notching the trees. No

one has since

followed us, or

built the road

it was to be, be. I . . .

remember few words

passed between us, he

ahead of me

with his instruments

recording it all,

can remember, too, how

I answered him,

never once faltering,

shouting, even

though long

ago I had lost

my axe and was

too afraid

to tell him.

On the other hand, the poems about the guiding operation that Alice, Hannah and Ken developed on the upper Nass River indicate that Ken moved from his various laboring jobs to work that satisfied him. In Lan(d)guage, Ken describes the joys and frustrations of his business and announces, repeatedly, that it is a “good” business. “Cheap travel,” he says, makes “fly fishing is an affordable pleasure.” It is a “romantic” pleasure, “and men are suckered in by fantasies,” but “the release [of fish] is in good taste” and “The Blackwater is good to look at/And has been a good investment for my Daughter./I see good in what she is doing.” Also, “My Ex is well behaved and obedient on the river.” Ken says he was not so well behaved: “Back then I took the good with the bad./Some of the assholes were always good for a laugh . . . ./In the winter months I helped the bourgeois/Organize their thoughts and make decisions./On the river I gave good advice.” His last sentence, with its ambiguous sequence of tense, “The fact is, I never had it so good” (not “I’d never” or “I’ve never”) seems to apply both to his life now and his life on the Blackwater.

Other sources confirm what Ken says here. McKinnon’s account of his visiting Blackwater Lake in Going Someplace (Cocteau Books 2000) confirms the business’s success and, in assorted interviews for media, Ken has indicated his satisfaction with what he did. On 15 May 2005, he told Hardy Friedrich, in an interview for the Prince George Free Press, “I was in eco-tourism before they even coined the phrase.” Friedrich adds that Ken “was referring to his successful guiding outfit, from which he has since moved on.”

The fact that Ken was generous with money is too generalized to explain Ken. If you think of donations to Sally-Ann Santas at Christmas, it seems admirable, but less so if you think of buying rounds in “the local dive,” which you just might do a few lines down the poem when Ken adds drinking in that dive to his summary of narratives.

The drinking is classified among “narratives imposed on my work.” The difference between the “stories” (that were written about Ken) and the “narratives” (that were imposed on his work) seems to reside in the idea that “stories” are evolving things and “narratives” are fixed or preconceived. In Lan(d)guage, Ken defines narrative as “an evocative story/suitable for replay.” The “imposed” narratives are itemized: “I pissed out the windows of my friends,/I puked on the doorstep of my neighbour,/and drank in the local dive.”

For those of us who follow Ken around, this is as surprising as Ken saying that he was unsuccessful in love and work; there is next to nothing in Ken’s early poetry about these three activities, which presumably are connected. I can think of only a couple of poems, like “Omega” (Fireweed) where Ken could be talking about uncontrolled drinking: “The dog in the snowbank is dead/Because he trusted me as meat/And I fed him wine for a laugh.” However in Lan(d)guage Ken, in a confessional mood maybe, starts alluding to this part of his past: “I used to drink myself stupid/and wander through the towns looking lost.”

So it is in this sense that Ken says “my name was an empty space.” The narrative about his drinking was true, but meaningless. It was “imposed” on him in the sense that others made much of it. Ken never implies, though, that he was put upon. He acceded to the drinking narrative, and takes full responsibility for this as well as for the drinking: “My name was chosen by me/and the variations of the tale/are my attempts to explain him.” Ken accepts the burden of the idealistic view of the sensorium; what is perceived is imposed by the sensorium and so the responsibility of the self. You face up to and learn from your actions and from conclusions that others have drawn about you.

These others in Ken’s case would be his editors and publishers, since there was no serious criticism of Ken’s poems until Greg Lainsbury’s paper, delivered at the MLA convention in Philadelphia on 30 December 2006. And there has been no biographical writing about him except Barry McKinnon’s 2007 “Search: Ken Belford/Invisible Ink,” in It’s Still Winter: A Web Journal of Contemporary Canadian Poetry and Poetics.

McKinnon, who has become an important chronicler of BC small press poetry and the BC poetry scene, makes nothing of what drinking he and Ken did, except that it lubricated talk of poetry, and he mentions no impromptu pissing and puking. The Post Electric Cave Man, however, shows Ken and another writer, Pat Lane, on the cover. The photo indicates a friendship, and Lane’s Very Stone House had earlier co-published Fireweed with Talon. The two poets are holding hunting rifles and staring menacingly out over mountainous terrain. Drinking, pissing and puking would seem to be more adequate a summary of some narratives imposed/self-imposed on the poems of Patrick Lane rather than those of Belford, and here the two are associated.

Al Purdy too wrote about drinking and its symptoms, and it was his Storm Warning anthology of 1971 that gave Ken some prominence as part of “the new generation of poets who would ‘supplant’ (though not necessarily eclipse) the present-day literary establishment in Canada.” Ken is pictured against a backdrop of bush and a rough shack, sitting on a wicker chair dressed like Jeremiah Johnson and smiling vaguely as if quietly exulting over the North American Indian male person he has just fought to the death. For Purdy, Ken was “a rumor and legend” rather than a fellow good old boy, but again there is an association. Purdy published the poem about Ken poisoning his dog (as well as a poem about killing an Arctic grouse and a “statement” about shooting horses). He saw Ken as he saw Lane, as a kind of psychotic yokel with the gift of poetry.

“But,” Ken continues, seemingly leaving behind narratives about his earlier self and moving on to a contrasting one about his more recent self, “according to one version/Si followed me home to Hazelton/and went up to me as I reached my tent.”

Si is familiar to us followers of Ken. Lan(d)guage was dedicated to her and Decompositions is too. So far as I know she appears for the first time in the literary record in connection with Ken in The Capilano Review 2:43 (42 on the title page), Winter 2004, in George Stanley’s “special section” entitled “Northern Poets.” Her last name is Transken, and her work is presented next to Ken’s. The “Contributor’s Notes” says that she “has been teaching in social work programs for eight years; she has a background in anti-poverty anti-racist feminist activism. Her doctorate is in Equity Studies/Sociology of Education but she is doing another MA in First Nations Studies/Creative Writing at the University of Northern British Columbia. She is old white bush trash being recycled. She has edited collections of creative writing such as This Ain’t Your Patriarch’s Poetry Book and Outlaw Social Work.”

Judging by the Capilano Review selection, Si writes protest poetry, in the tradition of, say, Sharon Stevenson, another important figure, from 1969 – 71, in the Prince George literary community. For Stevenson poetry is indoctrination and for Si it is therapy. Stevenson’s poems feature titles like “You’re Doomed if You Leave the Working Class” and “Poetry too Has a Class Nature,” while Si’s poems feature titles like “How Senior Academics May Gang Rape Your Mind” and “Contemporary Women/Students/Clients/and Millennium Love.” In both poets, otherwise dead polemical poetry can once in awhile leave political polarizing and show a sensitivity to human experience, a knowledge of life and a care for line and image.

In 2005, Si and her student Jorge Kelly presented a paper at the Writing Way Up North symposium on northern BC writing, in which she described Ken as a model member of a supportive local writing community and confessed to a certain bias “because of my relationship to him.” She also says that she met Ken at a “writer’s event.”

So Ken in his second poem seems to be stage-setting, for maximum dramatic effect, his meeting with Si. He does this not just by fessing up to what he previously played down or thought unimportant (drinking), not just by writing off his first marriage as a failure of love, not just by claiming failure at work, and not just by leaving out other narrations we know of (the softer, gentler, more ardently environmentalist Ken of Pathways, the Ken who spent years contributing to the negotiations that led to the Nisga’a Treaty), but also by staging his meeting with Si on his old turf, putting her face-to-face with the old Ken. By doing that, he implies a “Saul-on-the-road-to-Damascus” conversion.

The nature of the significant new version of Ken’s name story that hinges on the advent of Si may be indicated by Si’s paper at the symposium on northern writing. “Prince George Writing: Creating Comfort and Community Differently” is an account of Prince George poetry that evokes an image of the typical male poet as urban or rural working-class hellraiser (Lane and Purdy) and contrasts that image to that of the typical local Prince George poet, including Ken, that Si encountered on arrival in Prince George in Autumn 2000. Si says she has since been a willing participant in the local writing scene because of what she encountered and of course mainly because of Ken.

Both kinds of poets are “real writers” — that is they write good poems. But the Prince George poets direct their poems to doing social good. Ken’s poems gain him “minimal material reward,” but “contribute significantly to a sense of community being cultivated. Ken donates copies of his works to fundraising events, takes his poetry into logging camps, wilderness retreats,” and “shares his creative voice equally with academics and street people.” Other Prince George poets like Barry McKinnon and Rob Budde, both creative writing instructors, the first at the college and the second at the university, “nourish community” in ways like Ken and also are “organizers” of literary events and teachers of creative writing. As teachers, they work “without damage to a writer’s original voice or artistic self-esteem.” Overall, Ken, McKinnon and Budde “are community oriented”, “describe a world around them in which they wish for more social justice,” “welcome others into the circle of conversation,” “refuse the American arrogance,” and “have a sense of humor . . . that propels us forward into resistance writing.”

Si’s image of the Prince George writer’s opposite, the other “real writer,” is meant facetiously, in the sense that it is exaggerated. I can think of only one poet who fits the following description near-totally, and that is John Berryman, though he had actual “duties” at the podium. Si doesn’t give any actual examples, though obviously she means this type of real writer to represent a familiar reality:

The image of a “real writer” is someone who is white Anglo middle-aged to mature male, slightly tortured by the vastness and burden of his incredible and rare talent. He is drug/abusing/alcohol abusing/woman abusing emotionally volatile person — who must be forgiven these excesses and ugly traits because of the glory of his contribution to society. The “real writer” is someone who wears tweed, loves being at an academic podium, has no other hobbies or duties (except for those maniacal or manic ones mentioned above). Real writers publish in American hardcover and they do the talk show circuit. Many real writers become profoundly successful soon after they die. This is especially so if their death was accomplished through suicide or a homicide caused by a jealous husband or lover. Real writers are intense, obsessed, lonely, and self-absorbed. Very very self-absorbed. This type of “real writer” wouldn’t survive long in Prince George.

As well as Lane and Purdy, this calls to mind a number of Ken’s literary associates — indeed a whole milieu of poets centered in Vancouver through the sixties and seventies when Ken established his reputation. Red Lane’s Letters to Geeksville, published by McKinnon in 1976, is a look at the scene in the early sixties when Tish was being published and Pat Lane was running Very Stone House. Red Lane describes certain alcohol-driven, highly volatile events featuring people like Maxine Gadd, Jamie Reid, bill bissett and Daphne Buckle (Marlatt) where poems and criticism and on occasion insults and blows are exchanged: “Bissett has published a magazine Tish-like that is fuck offul & terrible poems — Dappy buckle read out of her novel not too bad but affectitious mostly” (October 1963).

Si’s description also calls to mind the writings of Brian Fawcett, a prominent Vancouver poet/publisher, connected to Prince George because he was born and grew up there and made much of the town in a series of poems and stories. The stories especially (starting with Friends in1971) became popular and put the town on the literary map of Canada (with “American hardcover” publication, Prince George became Akron, Ohio). Like Red Lane, Fawcett describes, from the first-person point of view, a lot of pissing, puking and drinking, not to mention sexual predation and abuse. These are presented (as they are in Lane) as the products of a resource-extraction milieu as much as the products of machismo, but still the machismo is evident. The first writer that grabbed Fawcett’s attention in his youth was Hemingway. Fawcett saw him as a model of courage, honor and honesty.

Si’s satirical description of Real Writers echoes too what some feminist critics, prominent among them Angela Bowering, Daphne Marlatt and Pauline Butling, have said about George Bowering, Fred Wah (Butling’s husband) and Frank Davey of the Tish school, the originators of the Vancouver scene in which Ken came to prominence, as well as about Fawcett and some others like McKinnon. Abuse of alcohol and women and emotional violence are mentioned in Angela Bowering’s fictionalized memoir Piccolo Mondo. This account focuses on the Tish group. Butling has reported that Marlatt was traumatized by the “male ethos” of Tish, notably its physical and emotional violence — Creeley punched Bowering, Wah threatened to punch Purdy, Robert Sward punched Robin Skelton. Fawcett was attacked for relegating his wife Sharon Thesen to work as typist on Iron etc (she does appear too as a contributor and editor, but it seems this work was abbreviated by her primary duty as typist) and McKinnon for erasing, in his 1988 history BC Poets in Print (Open Letter), a whole history of women’s “non-aggressive,” “supportive” and “cooperative” editing and publishing in favor of a male tradition that pushed and illustrated “patriarchal values of dominance, aggressiveness and competitiveness.”

Much of what Butling, Si et al say about community and poetry is of course off the point, is politics, as is Si’s statement that the macho type of real writer would not survive long in today’s Prince George. Presumably the macho poet should stay out of Dodge or be loved to death. It’s true that the narrative of the wild poet (mostly male) propagates the false idea that self-destruction and the use of mind-altering substances contribute to writing and are even (as Si says) signs of genius. But the narrative of the nurturing poet (usually female) propagates the equally false idea that sensitivity and responsible social action contribute to writing and indicate genius. The wild poet destroys himself with drugs and excludes and hurts people usually by over-aggressively pushing a favored poetics. The responsible poet, concerned as Si says to protect individual voice and self-respect, fails to push any poetics. Good poetry is “good” poetry, measured by the cause it espouses.

Note the quote from Red Lane. He states his opinion clearly, and had that opinion been expressed in that setting at the time (rather than just in the letter to Bowering) it could have hurt bissett and Marlatt. It could also have helped. Poets like Red Lane and Purdy have become important benchmarks of aesthetic opinion for subsequent poets. The matter of how they put their opinions has turned out to be irrelevant. Lane told Bowering very directly that he thought “Creeleyesque” writing was not right for him, “crossing a line” in their friendship. Purdy was sensitive about discouraging young poets and tried to say nothing about the writing of his friends, but was candid about his equals. He got beer sprayed in his face for telling Atwood she was an “academic.” It may be better for writers to have opinions put strongly and poetics argued vehemently than to encounter silence or generalized approval out of a concern for “voice” or ego.

The longer anonymous blurb on the back cover of Decompositions, suggests that Ken is now solidly in line with assorted prevailing causes and their related virtues: environmental awareness, open-mindedness, and social engagement. It says that he understands the land “as a complex living organism,” that his poetry “explores linguistic and political particulars from a gaze that is opposite to the shelters of convention, the academy, the city or the south,” and that he offers “a social engagement that is at once larger and other than the consumer discourse of trade and ownership” as well as a “self-taught language of subsistence [that is not] aligned with the well-worn ancestral narratives of our forefathers.” Also he features “a consciousness informed by the latest recognitions of science and technology.”

Obviously this is the new, more politically correct Ken as described in Si’s paper. It also, in referring to “the latest recognitions of science and technology,” confirms something that Kane points out in connection with Ken’s declarative and prophetic stance: “His lines are often rife with scientific references ranging from the emission of light rays to string theory to computer and cognitive science. This referential element has the effect of authority (and sometimes humour), and the poems often take the structure of a rational hypothesis, particularly in Belford’s treatises on poetry.”

But obviously too this cover blurb tells another competing narrative, which is that Ken is near godlike in his poetic abilities. Ken accedes to this narrative as the second poem indicates, and likely in the sense too that he would’ve have approved of the blurb appearing on his “property.” Unfortunately the blurb praises him in bafflegab, ignores his complexity in failing to account for competing narratives, and so is unconvincing. The invitations to compare/contrast “engagement” to “discourse” and “language” to “narratives” are mind-boggling. The blurb is also scary. If we take it as mere advertising in that it is characteristic of book covers in the postmodernist age, we are then implicating Ken and his publisher in “the consumer discourse of trade and ownership” that Ken and postmodernist publishers are said to be beyond. That we hope Ken in particular is beyond.

The fact is, Ken’s gaze cannot be “opposite” to “the academy, the city or the south.” The fact is, a southern press (Talon) published the book, and that press, which also published Ken’s first two books, is located (according to the publishing-data page) in the city of Vancouver which is south of Prince George and New Hazelton. The magazine from which that press derived, it too based in that southern city, published most of Ken’s earlier poems. Ken’s most significant community of writers, therefore, could be, in the present as in the past, Vancouver rather than Prince George. Second there is a blatant contradiction in mentioning that Ken’s gaze is opposite to the “academy” and saying that his consciousness is informed by “the latest recognitions of science and technology.” Surely most of these recognitions are produced by the academy. Ken in fact, by providing in a couple of poems footnotes (in the name-date style required by the American Psychological Association), indicates that his involvement in the academy includes concern even for its protocol.

The possibility of Ken’s acceding to the idea that he features a “self-taught language of subsistence” worries me — though I’m not clear on what such a language would be. Can that language of subsistence, with “its sub-text rooted in questions of both origin and evolution,” truly be unaligned with the “well-worn ancestral narratives of our ancestors,” those narratives “representing uncolonized spaces as a return to a golden age?” Is the author saying that our ancestors spoke of the wilderness as the remains of lost Eden whereas Ken speaks of it more meaningfully because he is informed about “the latest recognitions of science and technology” which enable him to better understand how we can “subsist” in the wilderness?” This might detach Ken from old myths but it attaches him to newer ones, those of progress, postmodernism, and the haywire survivalist techno-anarchistic illusions about going back to the land that carried over from the hippy New Left into postmodernism.

Postmodernism defames canonical literature for favoring an aesthetic of “pleasure” or “entertainment” that involves confirming a culture’s/audience’s existing prejudices, ideologies and faiths and consequently ignoring important issues like the inequality of sexes, classes and races and the progressive upsetting of the “balance of nature” by technology and technique. The works of Sappho, Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare and Austen are considered stupid and equated to contemporary advertising and political discourse.

The old Ken was not at all pretentious on these issues:

virgil’s story

of the bee, most

beautiful, in

language, shrewdly

observant of

the truth in parts,

strangely full of

error in others,

enshrining all

the old foolish

notions which he

had gathered from

the legends and

memorable

in this, that as

he says, they are

driven by and

possess a share

of the universe,

and draw

the breath of heaven,

for they think

the deity moves

through all lands

and spaces of the sea,

and deep of heaven;

that hence all flocks,

herds, men,

every kind of wild beasts,

each one at birth

derive the delicate spirit

of life;

and so in the course of things,

are restored to this fountain

and thither return again by dissolution,

and there is no room for death.

You can’t get any closer than this to the anthropomorphic heart of nature poetry, to the essence of “golden age” myths (no mutability or death), and to a balanced, appreciative look at an older writer’s work. Ken understands that, while there is progress in scientific and technical knowledge that progress is slow and has little effect in evolving morality and art. If the classic writers said little about the various inequalities and injustices that concern our age, they had lots to say about more basic things, things even closer to individuals — how men react to fighting a protracted war, how sexual love tears open individuals, families and societies, how pride and ambition change people, how technology erodes traditional attitudes including those about nature. They include the good and the bad results of basic, inescapable human traits.

Classical writers often give voice to specific causes and some localized idea of progress — Spenser and Milton, for instance, were overtly anti-Catholic, Wordsworth was against railways, big cities and the thinking that led to them, Eliot was for Anglicanism and the monarchy and Pound was a fascist. But they had to go deeper than polemics to make their arguments convincing. Jane Austen, for example “accepted” the patriarchal, oligarchic structures of her culture in that she seldom (except in Mansfield Park — which includes the issue of slavery) expressed or illustrated a definite politics, but she did display the constraints that attitudes about class put on both sexes and showed how individuals can find fulfillment despite them. About Allen Ginsberg’s superficial litany of societal failings in Howl Red Lane said, “are we to raise cry and take up arms over things that can be dismissed at will!” About pronouncements in poetry he said, “impression must always supercede expression in every sense — formula for a classic.”

Decompositions takes us straight into the “latest recognitions of science and technology,” but with no immediate sense that these have endowed Ken with a knowledge of, as the cover blurb breezily puts it, “bright openings to our undisclosed future.” Ken’s nose is close to the test-tube, his eurekas muted. The third poem examines the mistakes we make in life in terms of cognitive science (“outcome bias”) and computer-data formats, and promotes an experimental rather than a faith-based approach to experience:

when I broke free of assumptions,

I realized an error is a starting point,

and love, resembling wonder, is

the trajectory of buggy accidents.

Oh, incidents evolve, and

signs come in over many noisy feeds.

To Kane’s list of the scientific and technical disciplines evident in Lan(d)guage, Decompositions adds economic theory, biology, multivariable calculus, geology, land management, genetic engineering and postmodernism. Charting Ken’s new epistemological wavelength through Decompositions, a graph with time (sequence of poems) along the bottom and space (content) up the side climbing (for the appropriate symbolism, since Ken is known best for his life in the mountains and since modern poetry is known for speaking of “the thing itself”) from abstraction at the bottom and anecdote at the top, Pseudo Ken is ranging more often and more sharply from the mountains of anecdote into the valleys of abstraction (from the old Ken to the new Ken) and back. He starts off slowly, maybe at pains to condition us followers properly, with the totally abstract Poem #1, the totally anecdotal Poem #2, and the totally abstract Poem #3. Poem #4 moves faster, starting in abstraction (economic theory), moving up to anecdote, then turning down to abstract again. This frequency continues to the end of the book, with the peaks and troughs remaining extreme.

Difficult, in other words. Or, a better word maybe, challenging. Certainly chancy. But rational. The Si version of Ken’s story does not tell of Ken climbing onto the platform of political protest, or winging off into the lululand of Eleanor-Roosveltian do-goodism and purse-mouthed moral condemnation, or indulging in the what Alan Bloom calls the “conspicuous compassion” of the New Left and Postmodernism. Ken can on his new wavelength come close to making these mistakes. Lines like “systems of class are more dangerous than natural disasters” or “I transgressed the imagined and/resisted the ordered metaphors/of threat,” or “it’s a good idea to burn the G E crops” make him sound like (respectively) Karl Marx, Pauline Butling and Ludwig Wiebo. But he never settles into this sort of expression, always rises again into impression, reconfiguration and (sometimes) insight.

For us followers, the peaks of anecdote are familiar. We have been there before — the headwaters of the Nass River, the forests and ranches around New Hazelton, the mill town of Prince George. But the valleys of abstraction are unfamiliar. I spent more time googling than reading. When it seemed that Ken knew where he was going I was happy, but when I failed to see the application of abstraction to anecdote and had to rush to catch up, I cursed him (beneath my breath — Ken’s certainty is intimidating). I figured he was taking me through a kind of Reader’s Digest “hit parade” of great ideas from Scientific American, Paul de Man, National Geographic and Discovery Channel.

Obviously there’s no way that Ken really understands much of his new material. The practical applications of land management, forestry, geology, and biology fit into his past, and of postmodernist theory into his thinking about poetry, but those of string theory, variable calculus and economics don’t and the range is too wide to permit even a generalized familiarity. For a poet, however, this is enough. The more knowledge the better, of course, but Ken is searching for analogies, interesting language and rationality. He uses these, as he says at the end of the second poem, in “attempts” to “explain” himself. In these attempts he speaks in a revitalized voice, not a better poet than the old Ken, but a greater one. It would be impossible for him to improve on the great poems of his past, but he can produce more great poems in a new range.

Here’s the last in a series of three poems (one of three such series), where Ken explains himself in forestry jargon:

I am a big tree with small seeds and

my birds sing the age of an old field.

There is a balance between dispersal,

and relevance, and poetry. I write about

gap dynamics, and I live on the border

of abundance of any abandoned pasture

up to a hundred years old. I speak the

continuous explanatory of the variable

and have no liking for cattle.

This is a kind of metaphysical nature poem, strung from the old bromide of the poet/poem as tree and striding along comfortably (until the end) in trochaic pentameter. The second line features a metaphor that seems like pure “poetry” and the second-last line is onomatopoetic in the anapests and dactylls of its multisyllabic words. But the poem’s meaning is totally revealed when you google “gap dynamics,” which I had to do. You find much of what Ken is saying here, including the idea behind the image of birds singing the age of an old field. Gap dynamics is a technical term in forestry and seed dispersal and the proximity of pasture and abandoned pasture are considerations in the colonization of merchantable tree species. Many subsequent poems discuss gaps, which are also geological features, so the reader builds up a sort of expertise in the “code,” one of new pleasures in reading Ken. “Cattle” is part of the code — they signify (in other poems) both a threat to forest (studied by the foresters) and the ruminating nature poets of whom Ken disapproves. They kill the tree-like Ken poets.

Here’s a more difficult but better poem that describes an abstraction, realism, using terms and concepts from digital half-toning:

Primarily about the distribution of light,

realism is a synthetic noise called grey

that makes use of an orthodox theology,

images forced to lie on slabs of light.

Realistic images are filtered through grey

levels before light leaves the apparent

object on the way to bias.  It’s one of the

synthetic examples of fashion hardware,

but belief (reaching out without selling out)

is the reason for poetry. When the viewpoint

is fixed, even the depth estimates are

conservative. And if the resolution of the

output image is the same as the input image,

then the illumination of the generated image

is grey, grey (Wong, Browne et al., 2008)

Here Ken’s disapproval of realism (entirely understandable in terms of the book’s first poem) is expressed in common words. Realism is “a synthetic noise.” “Synthetic” comes to be understood as “artificial” as in association with “fashion hardware” (buttons etc) and “noise” means “any sound that is undesired, unwanted or disturbing.” Calling the color “grey” a “noise” associates realism with age, imprecision (“grey area”), gloom, boredom and lack of cheer (Webster’s). Figuratively, Ken depicts realistic images as no longer “living” (as in Poem #1) but “forced to lie on slabs of light.” Torture and death are suggested here, in connection with realism’s “orthodox theology,” and so is photography which in a subsequent poem is alluded to as “fiction that/is on the film in the box that has a lens.” Halftones are “burned,” shot through powerful and hot arc-lights. Realism contrasts with “belief,” defined as “reaching out without selling out” (commitment with skepticism, the Enlightenment ideal) and as “the reason for poetry.” The “fixed” images of realism result in “conservative” (with connotations of “fixed” as well as “moderate” and “cautious”) “depth estimates,” “depth” indicating “profundity.”

The poem ends with one of the “laws” of half-toning, either quoted or paraphrased. The repetition of “grey” at the end suggests paraphrasing, since repetition would be unlikely in a quote from a science report, though Ken could have decided to cut off a clause starting with “grey” to get this effect. The statement of this law lends “scientific” credibility to Ken’s up-to-that-point purely rhetorical assertions about realism. Of course it doesn’t — analogies don’t do that, no matter how good they are and this one is very good. But even in science a good analogy is a potential step towards truth, a possible clue. The “law” says that with digital half toning what you put in is what you get out, and for Ken this means that if you put in realism you get grey or bleak. The footnote is a rhetorical effect intended to produce conviction, but in this poem it is more likely to induce a smile.

As you follow Ken you learn where to trust him. Economics, absolutely no. When he starts on it you can assume he is lost. Poem #4 explains economics as a “design” of the rich to create “systems of class” or a “widening gap” between rich and poor. Ken says that he was caught up in this, the “voluntary risks” that he took doomed to failure by the involuntary risk of birth — “our [evidently his and Alice’s] families were failures.” “So we took refuge in the mountains,” a voluntary risk that worked out. They found a relatively safe place, any disasters (“wildfires of the Nass,” “the Skeena floodline,” a “handmade home on a steep slope that looked like the upper Volta”) being “understood” and so less dangerous than “systems of class.” But “I lived in a flimsy economy.” This seems to have resulted in disaster, though that disaster is not specified, and the poems about Ken’s life with Alice and Hannah in the mountains suggest that it was a personal disaster more or more fundamentally than it was an economic one.

Ken’s idea that economics is explained as a conspiracy of the rich (“it takes money to buy design”) is vague. You can buy design (intention?) with charisma too. And beauty. Admittedly the implication is that the dangers of “systems of class” “can’t be understood,” but the idea of a conspiracy seems to be modified by the idea that the rich are themselves subjected to risk (“the canyons of the rich slough away in flood”) and the connected idea that “income continues” when this happens — ie, when the rich fail, the gap is narrowed, the poor are better off. This is not the case as Conrad Black continues to point out; usually a disaster for the rich is a disaster for the poor (which means to Conrad that the rich have an obligation to the poor to get richer). Ken’s theory needs to be developed and explained more clearly. Since he is theorizing about rich and poor, reading Marx might be a good start.

The poems that apply economic theory to Ken’s success, his poetry, are as hard to grasp as those that apply the theory to his work and love:

Market forces dictate what it costs to

flip a switch. It’s called the exchange rate

in the news, but market forces dictate

the level of penetration. Trends go up

faster than they come down unless

the sustainable level of the price of gas falls

below the national baselines of poverty

and ecosystem degradation. Management

poetry works the social hours, taking up

space and attention in classrooms and

academic journals, but the shanty dwellers

are unregulated and not influential.

Market forces dictate what you do, but first

you have to know enough to get started.

The first sentence indicates that market forces dictate everything, the flipping of a switch being a euphemism for starting things. The pronoun “It” in line 2 seems to refer back to “what it costs” which is asserted to be “the exchange rate.” Market forces can be said to determine the exchange rate when a country has not fixed the value of its currency in some way (by attaching it to the value of gold, for example). The “but” in line three is therefore confusing — should it be, rather, “Market forces dictate . . . the exchange rate . . . and . . . “the level of penetration?” “Level of penetration is the amount of the use of a product or service as a percentage of the total theoretical market. For example, 22% of Canadians over ten years of age own cell phones. “Trends go up/faster than they come down” could indicate penetration trends or exchange rate trends, probably the first. I could find no information on how fast these go up or down but obviously exchange rates would come down fast if the economy collapses, and penetration rates would stay the same. Collapse may be what Ken is saying would happen when “the price of gas falls below national baselines of poverty and ecosystem degradation.” This connection I do not understand.

Somehow this, all “dictated” by market forces, results in two kinds of poetry, “management poetry” and (in the next poem) “nonmarket poetry.”  Nonmarket poetry is not mentioned in the list of things determined by market forces, so presumably management poetry is so determined. Management poetry, taught and studied in “classrooms and academic journals,” is used to regulate people — only the “shanty dwellers” escape it (and, maybe, produce it). But hold on. In this country even shanty dwellers go to school, and do “market forces” really or entirely dictate what is taught in school? The last two lines seem to indicate that, if you learn enough to get started (writing poetry, for example) what you do (write) will be dictated by market forces. “Learn” may refer back to “classrooms,” so Ken might actually mean that any formal study of anything (including poetry) puts you in the control of market forces. This seems excessively harsh. Many great poets who derived from shanties (Seamus Heaney) have said that they first encountered poetry in school and that that poetry was often presented with enthusiasm and sensitivity.

To me, Ken’s description of how poetry is effected by economic forces sounds like whining. Presumably poets — especially self-confident ones like Ken — would be best at poetics, so what Ken says about poetry would generally be more trustworthy than what he says about work and life, serving as a benchmark for appraising Ken’s attempts, through his post-Si narrative, to explain Real Ken.  Of course there is the danger of the poet’s vested interest skewing the experiment — a danger that is fatal to this poem. A poem about poetry must itself be proof of the validity of its assertions (as in Wallace Stevens). A failed poem can’t express a credible poetics nor be proof of the effects of adverse economic forces.

But overall, Ken is good at writing poetry about poetry. The two poems discussed above are Ken pontificating, floating his message in on a tide of economic bafflegab and political sloganeering. But they do provide rough definitions of two kinds of poetry — definitions that become useful in reading further poems. Again, this is a feature of the new Ken — the poems are read individually but also accumulate. Definitions and symbolic anecdotes and scenes accrue. What seems to be the first principle of Ken’s poetics is explained when he says, “Only the few who have adjusted the models/even know what nonmarket poetry is.” So something like an experimental approach is needed.

Readers learn that other words attached to nonmarket poetry, when Ken is thinking of biology, forestry and land management, are “diversity,” “abundance,” “transitional” (as well as any other words with “trans” as a prefix), “abandoned,” “recombinant,” “wild” “migratory” and “nomadic.” When he’s thinking of aesthetic theory, connected words are “potential” and “contradictory.” When he’s into geology it’s “faults” “rifts” “plates” “shelves,” and when he’s into biology it is “mutations”. Opposing terms, for “management poetry,” taken from the disciplines mentioned above, are “realism,” “representation” “possessive” “institutional” “explicit” “surface” “light (or openness),” “pathogenic,” “canon,” “eastern,” “content,” and “control.”

Here’s an easy introduction to the good poems-about-poems. It’s a sort of “Portrait of the Poet as Item in Bestiary:”

The uniformly creamy Eastern Racer

spends the day basking or gliding

over ground in search of poems.

Generally absent from forested hillsides,

these residents of the open grassland

and pastures are able to crawl faster

than you or I can walk. Racers milk cows

and crawl back and forth over horse-hair

ropes, and their tongues tickle.

Wear protective clothing, and never

go to readings alone. Stay on paths

watch where you go, and never

stick your hands inside their pants. (80)

Here’s a kind of opposing species, unnamed but with a song and physique like Ken’s. Its habitat is further south than Ken’s, so perhaps it’s a related species (the Williams-type poet?):

Absent from the Yucatan Peninsula,

but heard as far north as New York

in hills and ravines, in the old forest

fragments, in the roots of blow-down

trees near muddy toxic streams and

fallen leaves, singing a complex jumble

of short rapidly uttered phrases,

large bodied, with long heavy feet,

ground dweller, primarily picks at

the pain of others, dreams in a cup

made of moss, departs after pairing.

In these poems Ken is away from analogies he doesn’t understand (ones from economics) and into those he does (ones from biology). Note that the Eastern Racer (not necessarily resident only in the east but more prevalent there?) can cover a lot of Lake-District-type landscape and actually knows (or says s/he knows) how to milk cows and whatever crawling over horse-hair ropes involves. Note too what cows generally represent to Ken (domesticated poetry). Racers can even crawl (which has derogatory implications) fast. They do something with their tongues that tickles. What this suggests is best left, I think, to the reader’s imagination, as is the significance of the fact that it’s safer for anyone who attends the readings of Eastern Racers not to put their hands in the Racer’s pants.

The large-bodied, tree-like, Ken-type Poet sings “a complex jumble/of short rapidly uttered phrases” that “picks at/the pain of others.” This is a good summary of what we are reading in Decompositions. This poet is less self-involved, it seems, more concerned about others. As opposed to the Eastern Racer, the Ken-type poet is also less active, more earth-bound, sleeping (like a tree) in a mossy hollow. And s/he tends to dormancy. Another poem explains that this is because s/he reads poems by the Racer and so is quickly driven to despondency:

I’m exhausted from

reading books whose pages

trace the progressively fatal

disease of serious writing,

especially the busy poem in

which every moment counts.

How short the surface of the

page when words are only

one-dimensional. In the under-

appreciated books I like,

meaning is measured by

saying no to the demands

of the possessive poem. Who

says good writing conveys

a strong sense of place?

The apparent attempts at

moral instruction from poets

who do not own their own

lives makes me think that about

is control, which is why I’m

not convenient, and more

temporary, why I long to be

idle and purposely dormant,

and accelerate away from

those empty places country

does not allow escape from.

Ken’s poems about poetry and poets are minor but fun. They sketch a strongly felt aesthetic in graphic terms. The above poem is not as good as the bestiary ones, showing Ken descending to “know-it-all” moralism. The essential data is missing. What does “poets/who do not own their own/lives” mean? What is a “possessive poem?” Maybe what’s missing here are anecdotes and/or names — which, since Ken has introduced footnotes into lyric poems, could easily be added. Would Ken want, after “books” in line two of the above, a note like (see Borson, Crozier, et al). Would he want, after “poets/who do not own their own lives, something like (academic poets)? Or (poets who get grants)? Or (see Skinner’s rats)?

If Ken doesn’t want to mention names, I’d recommend parody or satire. In this way his targets would be clearly identified but at the same time flattered that their poetry is considered worthy of satire by an important poet. Ken shows a real talent for satire — his poem about romantic love poetry includes parodic lines: “her sensations his skin, her loss his eyes, her sweat his body, her death his agony.” Ken could join in the efforts of his admirer Mckinnon who, in collaboration with David Phillips in their Jack Daw collection, parodies the great BC poets (including themselves). Here’s the old Ken:

here, north of it, there’s

always more, cold than a man,

knows, or knows

less. The wife grows

weak, the horses

starving. The moose can smell

a man, stumbling

upon himself in the under, growth.

one more round. In this

gun freezing to

the naked skin. Almost a

part of me now. Like the cold

emptiness of it. I grow

to expect less each time out.

soon night will fall

and then we’ll eat the last dog.

Daw gets at the fragmented syntax (the seemingly fractured intelligence) that opens into other meanings and stumbles towards the cryptic, pseudo-paradoxical utterance of the backwoods guru: “I grow/to expect less each time out.” This movement in Ken’s poems becomes a deeper wavelength when Ken is exploring analogies from science and technology. Daw may be thinking of imitating and exaggerating this too, though in Daw’s introduction to his Selected Poetry (available only through McKinnon) there’s an ominous hint that he may not now be up to it, his talents threatened by a vice Ken has abandoned. “Most of all,” says Daw, “I like to drink.”

As Kane puts it, there is the prophetic voice and the voice of rational hypothesis. It’s as if Ken is bringing them together, and so bringing together, in poetry, two hitherto irreconcilable movements in the academy — postmodernism, that rejects scientific positivism and the idea of a “human mind” present through the ages, seeing the mind strictly in historical and societal terms, and “cognitive science” that assumes a single, timeless human mind, describing it as a kind of complex computer. Because of this split, science is deprived of valuable data from the social sciences and literary criticism, and postmodernism descends into nihilism, “proving” that communication in any constructive form cannot exist and that any attempt to get at it through words and actions is hegemonic and therefore fatal to individual freedom and social equality.

Ken processes his narratives with strict attention to his locale (Old Ken) and to what Kane calls “the structure of rational hypothesis” (New Ken). When he succeeds, he blends the authoritative voice of science with the exploratory one of postmodernism.

As evidence of the merits of his poetics I offer the following from Ken’s ongoing exploration of “landscape” in poetry. First, a vague and unconvincingly polarizing complaint about other poets and an affirmation of his own superior intent in pursuing “theory:”

Landscape is an idyllic place

In the imagination, a claim of meaning

Farmed by old fogeys. I’m looking, not

For a theory that allows for duplication,

But a consonance that’s better.

Yadda, yadda. Postmodernist audiences will suck this up: Right on, man! Personally, I  want a list of those fogeys, and wonder if Ken at his age should be using that word. But what Ken looks for he usually, eventually, finds. Here he ends up back again, while scouting for fish in his technician’s way, at the heart of landscape poetry:

In a small body of slowly moving water,

in the shadow of a Balsam sweeper,

laying still in the common supply of

the warmer waters of the lake, five

pairs each a metre long, they’d been

together all their lives, surfing yesterday

up the river in a pod. I knew because

I saw them enter, saw the arrangement,

the awareness, the commodities they

paid for with their lives, and I knew

the price was fixed. But I headed out

because the water was slowing, and

pans were forming in the bay. And then

in May I returned, my shadow on the river

once again. There they were in the rising

water, and I knew they remembered me

because there was something conscious

in that eye-to-eye flicker in the instant

before the waters turned and I carried on.

9568 words, June 10, 2010

Acknowledging a City’s Dark History

Barry McKinnon. in the millennium. (Vancouver, B.C.:  New Star Books Ltd., 2009. 144 pages. $19 Cdn. $16 U.S.)

This 13-part sequence of poems about love, loss, aging and decay of communities leaves me in near despair but also grateful for the unremittingly truthful description of what we face.

Barry McKinnon, the Prince George author of eight poetry books and, for almost forty years, a College of New Caledonia English instructor, writes about his personal experiences. Earlier poetry collections include Pulp Log, which won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize in 1992, and The the, a finalist for the Governor-General’s Award in 1992.

“When writers write, as Robert Creeley says, they want knowledge of their own experience,” McKinnon said at the Postnorth II: For Science poetry reading at The Twisted Cork restaurant in Prince George Feb. 12, an event organized by College of New Caledonia English instructor Graham Pearce. “They put it into a syntactical twist.

“It says something about how complex your life is. Your poetry could be about your home town.”

In notes to “Head Out (A Letter, Essay, Poem — to Cecil Giscombe)” in this new collection, McKinnon writes, “My job as a poet is to see and unravel arbitrary and preconceived notions and definitions of reality, including what I might conjure as my own: the poet can’t help but do this because of the very nature of the energy & process of the language that’s chosen him or her. What has been mapped by manipulative and self-interested forces, from whatever source or reason, is firstly what the poet must at the most rudimental start of the thinking and writing process attempt to take apart. I must find myself asking unanswerable questions; there is no choice.”

In the final poem of this collection, “Prince George Core,” McKinnon finds that ”the city hates itself,” ratifying the observation of a friend and colleague, Anna Djuric. He’s talking about a city where a former mayor gave voice to “simple mercantile presumptions” by saying, “Libraries are for loafers.”  As McKinnon notes in an earlier poem in the book, “Prince George (Part One)”:

root hog or die

when a city becomes its coldest hearts

we live in the illusion of its habitat:

the invisible/visible: the city you see / did good in

becomes an old cliche in the toxic mill cloud that fills the bowl

and drifts with the winds — a swirl of stink in the

citizenry / penetrates the corpus while the corporate, that most

visible as the source, least accounted for in the non-existent

public square

I can’t breathe

In this poem and others, McKinnon also records typical local taunts against writers and other artists like “when are you going to write something good?”

In Prince George, it’s a case of “us going against the global manufactured,” in the first poem in the book, with the same title as the whole collection.

“Bolivia / Peru” deals with a harrowing trip he took with his wife Joy and Prince George writers John Harris and Vivien Lougheed to some of the most impoverished regions of South America, basing it in part on journal notes he made during the journey. In some ways the violence, immediate or latent, the present or historical exploitation by imperial or corporate power and the poverty and hopelessness bind together experiences travellers in Latin America encounter and what visitors to Prince George’s downtown core must confront.

In “Bolivia / Peru” McKinnon says visitors find themselves walking

“…on the bones of six million worked to death / though no

graves to mark them (blacks from Amazon /  kids from anywhere.”

or

…In Lima  you land to trust it enough to leave your pack, go

to the can (young lispy guys hanging out

later, you get mugged

Further on in the poem he describes “the meaning of one’s big moment between life and death:

“mugged

on a corner   in Lima Peru.

-

(robber grabs purse, flash of red, no face / body — Joy screaming

my name — clutches purse to chest, then flipped / back to the

ground dragged in / along street, guy won’t let go, no thinking.

the pure action of all bodies adrenalized response. seconds?

I yell you cocksucker! raise travel book “Peru” above my

head and bring it down full force to guy’s head. Joy released….”

Yet it is not just in Lima or New York City that people stand aside and do nothing to stop a violent attack. “Prince George (Part One)”, written for San Francisco and B.C. poet George Stanley, recalls an incident from the 1980s in a seedy old Prince George hotel, replaced in the mid-1990s by the new courthouse, where a tourist was in the wrong place at the wrong time and paid for it with his life, with little intervention from bystanders:

stomp the tourist’s head into the walk — that part psycho

path — the city staggers in hoedown dance / wild

in iconic illusion of how it sees itself — dressed

to kill any thing in sight.

Later in this same poem he writes that

bloody head in its second of consciousness under the killer’s boot

– in metaphoric

drama

be allowed to live.

In recent months McKinnon experienced yet another attack at Third and George, once the city’s central intersection and now arguably its toughest corner, where, after attending a performance at a local venue, he was surrounded by aggressive panhandlers. He hoped they would go away after he gave them a twenty-dollar bill. Instead they moved to harm him, and his son had to rescue him from the situation.

In “Prince George Core” the view in the same area is gritty, ugly.

“ . . . in this

heap, stolen bikes through snow — the grinning homeless lad

either in legitimacy says hello sir – the friendly light of human

greeting or as sardonic gesture: fuck you.

garbage, demise — butts, puke, sand / gravel, the snowy streets,

slush to mud by the Ramada / everywhere — the opera as

backdrop, the screeching of high human voice to keep these

humans away — bums on George. what wealth / squeezed,

burned, horded as the world went  / everywhere else but here.”

He continues:

the old  city / core

disintegrates — simultaneously evolves / to malls / outsourced

plenitude — the perpetual motion of returned goods — an

isolation once sensed defines us being here without

in the millennium is a painful, difficult, but an essential part of Prince George history, the one it refuses to acknowledge.

More on Juxtaposition

My editors suggested that I add a paragraph to my review of Cecil Giscombe’s Prairie Style saying who Giscombe is and explaining his connection to me, Prince George and the dooneyscafe.com readership.

At first this stymied me. Giscombe’s connection to me is that he wrote a good book and it’s my job to prove that fact (to the limited extent that aesthetic judgments can be proven) to the sophisticated and international readership of dooneyscafe.com. When I did Jane Urquhart I said nothing about who she is apart from being a massively overestimated novelist. And I’d already, on 3 August 2001, posted a review of another book by Giscombe that described him briefly and in connection with Prince George. Were the editors asking me to give Giscombe some kind of special biographical treatment? And if so, why?

Next, I worried that they were merely responding to my picky foisting of edits upon them, getting me out of their faces by giving me something else to do. As it turned out, having posted my review of Prairie Style, I subsequently complained that my longer quotations lacked indentation, making it difficult for the reader to see when the quote was over. A day later I informed my editors that I had described, in my third paragraph, the “poems” in the book as being set up like prose with justified left margins. Naturally I meant right margins, since prose as well as most poetry uses justified left margins. I apologized for this gaffe, attributing it to the onset of Alzheimer’s, and then informed them that in my first paragraph the phrase “the second-largest quantity of rhetorical units” was also Alzheimeric. I advised a slight change to “the most conspicuous rhetorical units.”

Naturally all this would have been irritating.

The matter of Prince George was especially puzzling. Why would anyone want to know, in connection with Prairie Style, about Giscombe’s connection to my hometown?

Then it dawned on me. My incisive editors, made suspicious by the fact that I have never before separately reviewed two books by the same writer, must have recalled that I, though I did not mention the fact in my review, am a character in Dislocation. I’m the person in Prince George from whom Giscombe rented a house while on his quest for his famous namesake and (maybe) relative, John R Giscome, after whom the Giscome Portage, north of town, is named. Not only that, but as the book shows I became an eager, indeed irrepressible, indeed unavoidable participant in that quest, cycling with Giscombe, walking the Portage with him, facilitating his canoe trip with my wife Viv (I can’t swim) along the Nechako River, and, finally, suggesting, in print, avenues of research that I thought he should consider.

In short, my editors realized that I’ve long been fascinated with Giscombe’s work. Obviously I regard it as more than just entertaining. I regard it as important. They want me to say why.

I have to admit that I haven’t entirely figured that out yet, and maybe that’s because figuring it out is fraught with danger. I see Giscombe exploring racial myths and generalizations as problems of epistemology and linguistics. Naturally a white guy would want to read a black guy in that way. I entitled my review of Dislocation “Uncle John’s Cabin,” indicating an awareness that John R, and Cecil himself, could, if my interpretation of the book proved convincing, be seen by African Americans (not to mention feminists, gay rights activists, and pomo theorists) as sell-outs.

What Giscombe says about me participating in his research is this: “In 1934 Ella Cooness [John R.’s Victoria landlady and the sole beneficiary of his substantial will] died. In an article in B.C. Bookworld, John Harris points out the oddness of her name, that one has to read it and think or hear “she-coon,” the diminutive — like “hostess” or “poetess” or, of course “Negress” — of the old racist appellation; John’s a short-story writer but oh he thinks like a poet. Some things are inescapable.”

Inescapable especially to a purveyor of “ethnic humor” (albeit always of the most tasteful sort), and here nervously perhaps, under the cover of scholarly research. Cecil was being kind. Imagine! Me a poet! But how likely is it that Ella’s name could be a clue to the personality of John R, even though he was, among many other things, a man of words and a trickster? She would have had to have chosen her name on coming to Canada in the mid-nineteenth century as a joke on immigration officials, thus attracting John R, or John R would’ve had to have given her the name just as he gave her all his money. Later I sent Cecil a clipping from Geist 59, an article “Coonass Going Home,” by National Post reporter Mary Vallis, in Louisiana at the time writing dispatches about Hurricane Rita. She heard the term “coonass” used by a local, and she looked it up (the sort of thing Cecil is always doing in Prairie Style). She says, “it is a derogatory term meaning ‘ignorant, backwards Cajun,’ although some people use it with pride.”

Really, I simply felt that Cecil would find all this interesting, even if it was irrelevant. He thinks about things like this. When someone calls you a “coonass” you can go up to Canada, either the Central Interior like John R. or Salt Spring Island like Ella, where such things are somewhat less likely to happen. Cecil says about this, “there are a lot of ways to take the fall, a lot of places to land and find yourself outside history.” He notes how his family for generations acquired professions — how status and money puts you outside history. He notes how his family gravitates to the north, in at least two cases and three if you count him, to Canada. Maybe white Canadians are not so racially prejudiced. Maybe they are, but focus that prejudice mostly on aboriginal people.

Another thing you can do, or can do as well as heading for Canada, is adopt the derogatory name and “use it with pride.” Irony is another place outside history.

This I think is what interests me about Giscombe. He is inclined to see things, like racism, from the perspective of an individual, not a group. He has been faulted — or at least questioned — for this. In my review of Dislocation I quoted another review by Kalaumu ya Salaam, moderator of CyberDrum, a list of over 500 black writers. He says, “Giscombe treats his blackness like a wound one takes morbid delight in ‘worrying’ over. Even as he celebrates being different, being a loner, being an intellectual, being unbound by race, it is not too long before his finger scratches the scab and the discussion returns to race . . . . Why would someone who values being able to ‘forget about being black’ choose to live in a mainly nonblack environment, one that is inevitably always reminding one of one’s blackness — an existence too often negatively defined by nonblacks?”

Probably Pomo (and feminist etc) theorists too would similarly object to or wonder at Giscombe. With Pomos (in Canada Roy Miki, Fred Wah etc) the strategy is to emphasize your marginality, your victimhood, as a member of a certain group, and to play down your individual connection to the mainstream (your university professorship and the salary attached to it, your cross-cultural friendships and associations, your acceptance of basic mainstream values), to pick away at your “hybridity” as a “problematic,” in order to hold the mainstream to account. The result is that you function as a kind licensed conscience, the absolutely worst thing that a writer can try to be.

In a November 2002 Harper’s article, “The Age of White Guilt and the Disappearance of the Black Individual,” Shelby Steele puts it this way: “Now our group identity has absolutely no other purpose than to collect the fruits of white guilt . . . . Today the angry rap singer and Jesse Jackson and the black studies professor are all joined by an unexamined devotion to white guilt . . . . the idea that individuals are the source of group strength is dead in black groups.” In order to collect the fruits of white guilt, the group has to cling to the idea of systemic prejudice. This means that any successful individual in the group has to cling to that idea, cannot question it, has to use success as a platform for protest.

Steele uses James Baldwin as an example of this. He went to Europe, wrote Go Tell It on the Mountain, came back famous, “and soon, in blatant contradiction of his own powerful arguments against protest writing, he became a protest writer.” Ralph Ellison, on the other hand, rejected protest but “showed a far deeper understanding of black culture than Baldwin’s.”

In Prairie Style as in Dislocation, Giscombe’s irony and his insistence on suspending judgment and investigating the history of racial myths, indicates a courageous affirmation of individuality. Others, confronted with racism, seek to affirm their status as victims, which requires identification with the victimized group and the denial of individuality. Such a denial characterizes Puritanism, fanaticism and theory. Irony and humor are definitely out. Considerations of epistemology and psychology are out. As a result, good writing is out.

Giscombe on the other hand indulges and seeks out his individuality. He picks away at “certainties” of all kinds. His hero, John R, is a “singularity, an anomaly, the thing that Giscombes, if I understand my family, tend to become as we age.”

This, I think, is why he’s a good writer, an increasingly better writer, and why he’s important.

1619 words: November 25, 2009