Black History in 1880s Vancouver
London Open Mic Poetry Archive
  • Home
  • Frank Davey Blog
  • Stan Burfield Blog
    • Fred Burfield's Homestead Memoirs
  • Our Events
  • News
  • PHOTOS & SUMMARIES
    • Season 5: 2016-2017 >
      • June 7th, 2017: Summary & Photos featuring Stan Burfield
      • May 3rd, 2017, Summary & Photos featuring Jason Dickson
      • April 5th, 2017 Summary & Photos, feeaturing James Deahl & Norma West Linder
      • Mar. 1st, 2017: Photos & Summary featuring Andy Verboom
      • Feb. 1st, 2017: Photos & Summary featuring Ron Stewart
      • Dec. 7th, 2016: Photos & Summary featuring David Stones
      • Nov. 2th, 2016: Photos and Summary featuring Don Gutteridge
      • Oct. 5th, 2016: Photos and Summary featuring David Huebert
    • Season 4: 2015-2016 >
      • June 1st, 2016: Photos and summaries: featuring Lynn Tait
      • May 4th, 2016 Photos and Summary: featuring indigenous poetry
      • April 6, 2016 Photos & Summary, featuring Steven McCabe
      • Mar. 2nd, 2016 photos, summary: featuring Andreas Gripp
      • Feb. 3rd, 2016 photos: 3 Western students.
      • Dec. 2, 2015 photos: featured reader Peggy Roffey
      • Nov. 7, 2015 photos: Our Words Fest open mic
      • Nov. 4, 2015 photos: featured reader Charles Mountford
      • Oct. 7th, 2015 photos: Madeline Bassnett featured
    • Season 3, 2014-15 >
      • Aug. 16, 2015 photos: The Ontario Poetry Society's "Sultry Summer Gathering"
      • June 3rd, 2015 photos: John B. Lee featured
      • May 6th, 2015 photos: Laurie D Graham featured
      • Apr. 1st, 2015 photos: John Nyman & Penn Kemp featured
      • Mar. 4th, 2015 photos: Patricia Black featured.
      • Feb. 4th, 2015 photos: feature Gary Barwin
      • Dec. 3rd, 2014 photos: Feature Debbie Okun Hill
      • Nov. 5th, 2014 photos: feature Julie Berry
      • Oct. 1st, 2014 photos: feature Roy MacDonald
    • Season 2, Sept. 2013 to June 2014. >
      • June 4th, 20114, featuring Monika Lee
      • May 7th 2014, featuring Susan McCaslin and Lee Johnson
      • Sept. 4th, 2013 featuring Frank Beltrano
      • April 16th, 2014, featuring Penn Kemp and Laurence Hutchman
      • March 5th, 2014, featuring Jacob Scheier
      • Feb. 5th, 2014: featuring four UWO students of poetry; music by Tim Woodcock
      • Jan. 2nd, 2014: featuring Carrie Lee Connel
      • Dec. 4th, 2013, featuring M. NourbeSe Philip
      • Nov. 6, 2013 , featuring Susan Downe
      • Oct. 2nd, 2013, featuring Jan Figurski
    • Season 1: Oct. 2012 to June 2013 >
      • June 4th, 2013 featuring David J. paul and the best-ever open mic
      • May 1st, 2013, featuring Sonia Halpern
      • Apr. 24, 2013 featuring Frank Davey & Tom Cull
      • Mar. 6th, 2013, featuring Christine Thorpe
      • Feb. 6th, 2013, featuring D'vorah Elias
      • Jan. 3rd. 2013: John Tyndall featured.
      • Dec. 5, 2012: RL Raymond featured
    • Dig These Hip Cats ... The Beats
  • Poet VIDEOS (open mic & featured readers)
    • 5th Season Videos (2016-2017)
    • 4th Season Videos (2015-16)
    • 3rd Season Videos (2014-2015)
    • 2nd Season (2013-2014) videos
  • BIOGRAPHIES - Featured poets & musicians
  • INTERVIEWS & POEMS (featured poets)
    • SEASON 6 - Interviews & Poems >
      • Kevin Shaw: Poem & Interview
      • David Janzen - Interview
    • SEASON 5 INTERVIEWS & POEMS
    • SEASON 4 INTERVIEWS AND POEMS
    • SEASON 3 INTERVIEWS AND POEMS
    • SEASON 2 INTERVIEWS & POEMS (only from Dec. 4th, 2013)
    • Season 1 INTERVIEWS & POEMS (& 1st half of Season 2) >
      • INTERVIEWS of Featured Poets
      • POEMS by Featured Poets (1st Season & to Nov. 2013)
  • Couplets: Poets in Dialogue
  • Future Events
  • Past Events
    • 5th Season: 2016-2017
    • Season 4: 2015-2016
    • Season 3: 2014-2015
    • Season Two: 2013-2014
    • Season One: 2012-2013
  • Who we Are
  • Testimonial
  • Our Mission
  • Links
  • Contact us
  • Frank Davey Blog
  • Frank Davey Blog
  • New Page

Juliana Spahr: Geese, Banks, Oil, and Poetry

10/13/2015

0 Comments

 
Picture
That Winter the Wolf Came, by Juliana Spahr. Oakland, CA: Commune Editions, 2015. 86 pp. $14.00.

This is a poetry book that takes a fresh and at times troubled look at how to do politics, and a fresh look at how to do poetry that engages politics. Its site is the Occupy Wall Street meme Occupy Oakland which began October 10, 2011, almost a month after Occupy Wall Street, as a project to continuously occupy Oakland California’s city hall square in protest against United States wealth distribution and banking practices. The project has continued in the form of smaller sporadic actions to the present.

To some extent Spahr’s text is a journal of her attempts “week after week” to be present at least some of the time as a supporter of the occupation and participant in its marches and demonstrations – despite her contrasting and possibly conflicting needs to protect and educate her young son, who is often with her, and to carry on the everyday middle-class life that she can so easily return to by merely walking a block from the sometimes violent demonstrations. “I should tell you that I never spent the night at the occupation”( 19). The ‘authenticity’ of the text is often due to the seeming candour of the poet about her limited and ‘nervous’ participation in a project she largely supports.

                I have a tendency to anxiously slow down. I also stay to the side. I am nervous,
             nervous. I want to keep saying this. I am an anxious body. Shortly after we step
             out into the street, the white vans, which have been idly waiting nearby, pull
             out and the motorcycles drive up from behind. Engines then and bright directed
            lights. (21)


The protesters have a mixture of political aims, from anti-poverty activists and chanting police-violence opponents to “black bloc” anarchists (familiar to Canadians at the Toronto G20

demonstrations of June 2010) who smash windows and carry knives and “multi-tools.” Spahr finds this awkward yet somehow cooperating melange of politics and methods appealing at very least in its contrast to the rigidly hierarchical state and business systems all of the protesters find oppressive. She has no wish to substitute a new system for an old, but also no wish to have the old continue.

                It was Non-Revolution. Or it was me. Or it was Non-Revolution and me. I was unsure what
             it really was. Maybe it was my thoughts. My thoughts at one minute about Non-Revolution.
             About the smell of Non-Revolution. Sweat, urine, sage, pot, rotting food, hay all mixed
             together. Perhaps about Non-Revolution’s body. I am sure I am not the only one who has
             thought it exceptional, but I am also just as sure that by the standards of bodies,
             Non-Revolution’s is fine but not exceptional. That is the point. That is why Non-Revolution
             is called Non-Revolution, why they have revolution as a possibility in their name but it is
             a modified and thus negated possibility so as to suggest they are possibly neither good
             nor fucked. (65)


Readers will note that a somewhat discontinuous succession of sentences common to Language poetry is being used here to suggest the writer’s mixture of contrasting thoughts – a use however which risks placing the emphasis of Spahr’s text not on language itself, and on its political effects, but on the writer and her attempts to represent both her confusions and her heterogenous and multiply situated politics. One senses that Spahr may not be entirely happy with a metaphysically dubious return to representation and so disrupts it here as well with awkward pronouns – “they” for ‘Non-Revolution” – and further non-sequiturs – “That is the point.”

Spahr also veers away from representing the Occupy protests themselves, which were/are protests against the unfairness of Western banking systems, where governments indemnify banks and bankers for losses which those bankers' own greed and foolishness has incurred while not obliging them to indemnify the losses of small investors and taxpayers also caused by that bank foolishness. She focuses instead on concurrent events in the oil industry, implying that, as well as being environmentally dangerous, these – which in the opening poem she calls “the oil wars” – may be at the root of the bank practices the protesters are decrying. The most powerful passages in this book for me are not the ones narrating the writer’s small part in the Oakland occupations but the various ones – “Transitory, Momentary” and “Brent Crude” – that recount fluctuations in the price of Brent Crude oil and the economic dislocations these can cause. “Brent Crude” is also one of her most detailed accounts of the Oakland protests, but begins with the Brent Crude Oil Spot price and ends with both a new Spot price and lines describing deepwater drilling. Even more remarkable is “Dynamic Positioning,” a poem that narrates the ecologically disastrous self-destruction of the BP oil drillship Deepwater Horizon off the Louisiana coast in 2010.

             It is nine o’clock. The flow
             Out from the well increased. Trip tank then

             Emptied. Then fluids discharged overboard. Pumps
             Restarted. Drill pipe pressure on constant

             Increase. It goes on like this. Pump number

             Two started. Pressure spike. Then pumps number two, three

             and four are shut down. Pump one still online.
             Then pumps three four restarted. Pressure build-

             Ing, pump two. Pumps shut down. First pump three four
             Then one. Then drill pipe pressure fluctuates.


             Increases. Then decreases. Then again
             Increases. Then held briefly, then again

             Decreases. A repair begins. At some
             Moment hydrocarbons enter the bot-


             Tom of the well undetected and rise
             Inside the wellbore, growing quickly as

             They meet the lower pressure of the sur-
             Face, heavy drill mud, other fluids, sea

             Water, all pushed by the rising and
             Expanding gases ... (46-47)


“Dynamic Positioning” is a subtle poem, in which the growing disruptions in the new oil well are also disruptions in line structure, eventually breaking words apart – a feature made more visible by Spahr’s choice to capitalize each line as poets did in other centuries. She also faintly mimics traditional iambic pentameter, ending each line after ten syllables. The metre of Milton and Dryden meets Big Oil. Once again what could have been a mere narrative representation is disrupted by the materiality of the poetics in which it is presented.

Canadians whose personal and economic lives are currently being roiled by the recent dramatic decline of petroleum prices would understand the links Spahr appears to glimpse between oil exploration and financial markets and the threat to life, quality of life, and environmental health both can be.


The wolf of the book’s title is probably of Canadian heritage – descended from the wolves reintroduced in 1995 to the Yellowstone area. It’s not the ominous wolf of folk tales, but an environmental-change refugee, much like many of the Oakland protesters. Just by its solitary arrival in a once traditional habitat it illustrates the future empoverishment the protesters fear will soon afflict them if current financial practices continue. The oil wars are also ecology wars.


             There was a mist or a fog or a smoke that held us.
             And we walked with this mist or fog or smoke and amidst it also and we
                 breathed it deep.
             It cloaked us. From the inside.
             That winter the wolf came.

             Came to us. Came near to us. Walked toward this fog of us.
             He was two and a half years old and he was the first one back.
             He was alone. Wandering over mountains. Across highways. Through
                 forests.
             Back and forth he went. Alone.

             He was looking for others.
             They were not to be found.
             Yet he was mutual, we noticed, he cavorted with coyotes.
             What else could he do?
             He was the only one, not as in the chosen one, but as one of the un-
                 eradicated ones.
             We called him OR7. (59-60)


Earlier she has noted the Brent geese, after whom the Spot Oil price has ironically been named, are “social, adaptable” and historically have been able to adjust their feeding habits to climate changes (12).


Using the wolf’s return as the title of the book not only parallels his plight with those of both the Occupy protesters and the Brent geese but recasts their protests as unknowing responses to ecological change – change which has transformed coyotes, as it has raccoons and various breeds of goose, into urban foragers.

             But that winter, we were close there.
             Under a tarp. Close. Together
             Just dealing with. Together. Went looking and found coyotes. (61)


In a variety of ways this is an instructive book – about planetary crisis and species crisis, and the challenges of writing protest poetry.

FD



0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Author

    FRANK DAVEY: Poet, former Coach House Press editor, co-founder of TISH newsletter in 1961, co-founder of e-mag Swift Current in 1984, editor of poetics journal Open Letter, 'author' of Bardy Google in 2010 (Talonbooks), author of the tell-much biography of bpNichol, aka bpNichol in 2012 (ECW), and author of the recently published poetry collection Poems Suitable to Current Material Conditions (Mansfield). He has two other websites: a personal one at FrankDavey.net and one (co-managed with David Rosenberg) focused on poet bpNichol at  akabpNichol.net -- have a look!

    Postal Address: Books for review or other mail may be sent to FD at OPEN LETTER, 102 Oak Street, Strathroy, ON N7G 3K3, Canada

    -Bio/interview by 'Open Book'
    -Shorter bio/interview
    -Biography, online

    Categories

    All
    Adeena Karasick
    Agnes Threlkeld
    Aka Bpnichol
    Alan Edward McCartney
    Alan Reed
    Alice Munro
    Al Purdy
    Amodern
    Art Deco
    Artist's Homes
    Avant Garde
    Avant-garde
    Barack Obama
    Barbara Godard
    Barnicke Gallery
    Basil Bunting
    Battle
    Beauty
    Bill Bissett
    'Black Mountain'
    Bookthug
    BpNichol
    Buddhist Ecopoetics
    Canada At War
    Canadian Art
    Canadian Literature
    Canadian Pacific Railway
    Canadian War Lit
    CanLit Institution
    CanLit Teaching
    Ceramics
    Charles Bernstein
    Charles Olson
    Charles Olson
    Christian Bok
    Christine Miscione
    Christl Verduyn
    Climate Change
    Coach House Press
    Cold War
    Collaboration
    Conceptual Art In Britain
    Conceptual Poetry
    Concrete Poetry
    Creative Writing
    Daphne Marlatt
    Dennis Cooley
    Derek Beaulieu
    Devil's Artisan
    Donato Mancini
    Earle Birney
    Ecopoetry
    Emily Carr
    Epistolary Poems
    Eternal Network
    Eva Zeisel
    Ezra Pound
    Fetish Objects
    First World War
    Flarf
    Fluxus
    Frank Sanderson
    Franz Karl Stanzel
    Fred Wah
    Garry Thomas Morse
    General Idea
    George Bowering
    Gertrude Stein
    Greg Curnoe
    Gwendolyn MacEwen
    Gwynne Dyer
    Hart House
    Identity
    Indigenous Poetics
    Industrial Poetry
    Installation Art
    Irving Layton
    Jackson Mac Low
    Jacqueline Du Pasquier
    James Schuyler
    John Cage
    J.R. Colombo
    Judy Chicago
    Juliana Spahr
    Julian Assange
    Jussi Parikka
    Kathryn Mockler
    Kenneth Goldsmith
    Kevin Mcpherson Eckhoff
    Kit Dobson
    Language Poetry
    Laura Farina
    Laura Riding
    Lea Hindley-Smith
    Lemon Hound
    Leonard Cohen
    Lionel Kearns
    Lisa Anne Smith
    Lisa Robertson
    Literary Celebrity
    Literary Marketing
    Lola Tostevin
    Louis Dudek
    Louise Bourgeois
    Louis Zukofsky
    Love Letters
    Lyric Poetry
    Lytle Shaw
    Manifestos
    Mansfield Press
    Margaret Atwood
    Marjorie Perloff
    Max Laeuger
    Media Archaeology
    Michael Davidson
    Michael Morris
    Michael Ondaatje
    Mimesis
    Mina Loy
    Minimalism
    Misogyny In Poetry
    Modernism
    Nadezhda Tolokonnikova
    National Anthologies
    Nelson Ball
    Norman Yates
    Open Letter
    Pataphysics
    Paul Martin
    Peter Jaeger
    Peter-quartermain
    Philippe Petain
    Phyllis Webb
    Pierre Coupey
    Poetic Community
    Poetics
    Poetry Readings
    Procedural Art
    Public Poetics
    Pussy Riot
    Pussy Riot
    Rachel Blau Duplessis
    Rae Armantrout
    Robert Creeley
    Robert Duncan
    Robert Fitterman
    Robert Kroetsch
    Robert Lallemant
    Robert Lecker
    Ron Silliman
    Second World War
    Sharon Thesen
    Sherrill Grace
    Slavoj Žižek
    Smaro Kamboureli
    Stan Bevington
    Stan Dragland
    Stephen Voyce
    Steve Mccaffery
    Susan Bee
    Swiftcurrent
    Telidon
    Thea Bowering
    The Martyrology
    Theodor Adorno
    Tim Inkster
    TISH
    Tomson Highway
    Toronto Research Group
    Trg
    T.S. Eliot
    U-331
    U-Boat Surrenders
    Us Fiction
    Vimy Ridge
    Vincent Massey
    Visual Poetry
    Walter Benjamin
    Warren Tallman
    W.C. Williams
    Weardale
    Wikileaks

    Archives

    January 2022
    September 2020
    August 2017
    August 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly