the slurry

as ideas move across, a wet

interaction will form, made

of material from the sharpening

mind and the listener--it is important that this

remain in the poem to facilitate

slippage and friction

as the moisture in the language

drops, it is crucial that it be kept wet,

slurry re-applied to the reading act because

it contains all the particles—the pieces and fragments

of thought up until that point in the

text—and so will contribute to the

meaning: fine, keen, ready to work

High rings & harm

by Si Transken


It’s not funny. It’s tragically absurd.

Ugly as an incurable ill that intermittently

recedes below the skin. The sores stop seeping.

It camouflages itself  as non-contagious.

You know you’re old when you’ve sat on

more than a 100 hiring committees – from feminist

grassroots non-profits to hiring committees

for org.coms with planes of snow men in suits.

Usually the hired person has an inside track

to the ear of someone already who knows

someone who is sleeping with someone or

the son or daughter of a someone.

Sometimes the most wrong candidate is chosen.

Appointed because they’re the least disliked, 

minimally offensive  – rather than

that they’re the most skill endowed.

My molars are worn from all the grinding.

Or the person with the obviously

politically correct & stacked disadvantages

gets the position. Stats improve.

No structural or organization change.

Someones make each other shine

& multiply. They fortify each other’s

fortresses. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink.

Everyone’s invited to a barbeque.

Church & club members are keenest

to reproduce their own while being

butter slimy & honey honey sweet

about honesty & transparent process.

I know I’m old because I care only

passingly these days. I see the slides & slithers

of power under the enunciations, behind

the doors, through dozens of disguises.

My eyes hurt from watching all this.

Aware. Aching with ridiculous impotency

I see the lean of the hiring panel into following the

leader who is  the whitest, most Big Daddy,

heterosexual, healthy unflawed body …

Recycle the old boy’s networks.

Now with a Sarah Palin/ Margaret Thatcher, Queen Bee,

Cheerleader girl, handmaiden casting with the boys.

Or a token beige boy’s allowed to pretend to lead.

Old tricks. Old codes. An old dog

I pull my unremarkable tail between my slow legs

with shame for being in the same room –

unable to bark. Or even shit on their shoes. 

Decommissioning the Road In

that part living human made

dammed or cut, a lack

of flow in the elements of knowledge

relegated to charts and boardroom

sludge, tailings and run-off clogged

with the residue of ire

to remove the road’s meaning

from here to there the trans-

port a running over, a spill-

way tread deep into the layered

stories of who and what before

rail, pipe, asphalt, ATV

tracks all to get what’s to be got

out of other concerns duly

noted in the consultation process

that living flow is nonhuman

made and divisible by measures,

an unknown technology and

narrative turn just where the road

thought it was stable, before the new

mythology told it why.

from "The Barricades Project, the Life-Long Poem, and the Politics of Form Notes towards a Prospectus" by Stephen Collis

"I am consistently struck by the singular unambitiousness of much contemporary poetry. It would seem that, as poetry slipped from cultural significance (or at least was perceived to have slipped from perceived significance), poets have simultaneously retired to the safety of lyric introspection, becoming specialists of the quotidian, the small, the insular, the private—shrinking from the historical, social, and public. So poets bemoan the loss of “the centrality of the single poem,” and seek a return to the safe sealed domain of the singular page." 

Speaking in English

                                  I have these

voices in my blood that sang me sitting here

                                                            John Lent

You could walk along an avenue here

many places actually and there would appear

unmagically asphalt and road signs and

houses, large and small, and a store

and another (a pedestrian—“hello”) and

another (this one selling something you need

to go with the stuff the first one is selling)

and a restaurant and another,

a government office, a police station . . .

well, you get the picture

You could walk along an avenue here

unmagically and begin to peel away

its imposition, to trace the paths

of its assertion, to unearth (much like

an unearthed mass grave that had gone

unrecorded) the measures of violence

that made this avenue you walk

You could walk differently along this

incline of forgotten waterways

and smell the uprooted vegetation

notice a furtive movement here

a motion that is unmagically you.

Poem’s Epitaph

 now or then it might be

a letter a

chiseled sound-

shaped trace I

read at the funeral

a eulogy-filled

apology for not being

more attentive to language

                                  Here Lies

Poem (2008-2011)

                                               

                                                What

Is Written Here

                                                Is

What Is Written

and you know Poem didn’t mean

it in jest or to disrupt

the wake

more of a moreover, more

sanguine than that

I still write to Poem sometimes

long complaints and article

analysis resurrecting old

readings and opinions of Poem,

why she left and who followed

it is one of those moments

when you recognize loss           in an early morning daze, and

                        there Poem is again

                        agitated, vibrant,

                        reaching for the plums

Poem Communally Edits

1) Go to a search engine, see if somebody else has done it already.

2) Poem blogs, studies the commentary cross-linked to other blogs.

3) Twitters in a hundred and forty characters. See if I can get that small. See if it gets retweeted

4) Open source the text; supply some instructables, see if the community takes it any further.

5) Start a Ning social network Poem, the name of the network will be the title, see if anybody accumulates around Poem.

6) Make a Poem video. Youtube it, see if it spreads virally, see if any media convergence accumulates.

7) Create a design fiction that pretends that Poem has already been written. Create some gadget or application or product that has some relevance to Poem and see if anybody builds it.

8) Exacerbate or intensify Poem with a work of interventionist tactical media.

9) Find some kind of pretty illustrations from the Flickr 'On Nothing' photo pool.

10) Then, and only then, Poem will go out and actually talk to someone.

11) Recombine data; go to step 1)

Poem’s Commodity Fetish

in the reading

room or ancient tomb Poem

dreams of a well-wrought

yearning for something

more stylish or tricky

to show your friends or

ad lib in front of a modest

audience in that quiet café downtown

although at the time Poem

was disappointed with her purchase:

the seams hasty, the graphics

uninspired, an oily flavour . . .

sometimes the transaction is meant

to frustrate, like a rebellious

daughter or mid-life crisis tattoo

the text of which Poem now

carries on her left thigh high

enough to be her own

I can’t tell what is

there and there is no use

begging

Poem and the Nothing Ever After

when verbs to be are

reclining not even wanting

to work standing well away from the road

where no traffic moves and

an inconsistent hum comes

from somewhere sourceless

to complicate contemplation

a stillness longing into nothing

more and narrative stalled

stuttering to a stop so the

road’s servitude isn’t one any more

postmodernism slips into the reeds

covered in mud called courage and carrying

succulents for the unstable winter

and everything moves

an inhuman vibration or

responsive leafy listening verging

on an apocalypse of knowledge or

when the machines and plots

desist, it is what is left

blandly undefined and bushed

what is left is a rift—ahistorical

and clustered around a faint

filtering disorder called shelter;

you and I live there for years until

the wild men came with weapons—

after that no records were kept . . .

what is left is considered

faulty verse, a hack’s

ruinous reinvention of negative

culpability—‘git outta here

ya damn tree-hugger, damn

hippy—build something or die!’

Poem Considers Masculine Profit

penniless Poem does not look

well in this light, stark and industrial

dawns with loud semis coming

and going from the factory outlet

behind, a swamp squawks and chitters—

it is unclear whether it pre-existed the mall

or was moved there 

Poem is waiting for a ride or something

like epiphany and is attracting stares

the guy across the way selling

burgers and whistling at a vague idea of salvation

why does Poem always end up out of it?

out of sync? out of fashion? out of the way?

pacifism ripples from the untoward

breeze, an ease, a conditional spark of

not knowing why or who to demean, not

wanting to own any of those favorite terms for torture

commercial driving love into mouths, a kind of self-
immolition and Poem exists, stubborn leaflets crumpling under
the boots of the pornographic entrepreneurs
consolidating an unsustainable hate into
something all the stakeholders can approve

jeez, Poem thinks, presses a thumb to his
pulse—if I am not a live man then I’d better
find some new seeds—not a plot but an area—

something simple, some camouflage, some cache

on the road to the downsized pulp mill

past the oxeye daisies, five or ten
in a clump in the gravel dust
piling on the leaves and petals

alder and cottonwood saplings
shining in the too-hot sun clinging
to the cutbanks and riverbanks
and the road’s cracked asphalt
gleams with the residue of tar and metal

the sound of the nechako is lost in the blare
of trucks and the glare of the windshields
pass along the far shore where a few
young pines survive and lean over the railway tracks

a bald eagle might pass over but not today—
if there are salmon they would have snuck by
months ago—so crows play in the hot
updrafts and a boy pedals down to look for
saskatoons and room to think of something new