seeds, streams, see/pages a poetics begins with my body—a walking, breathing, dreaming bag of water—holding an instrument, out of which another fluid, ink, releases. i relearn this body with each word i write. this body whose tributaries learn and benefit from the poems of shirley bear, jeannette armstrong, lee maracle, marie annharte baker, kateri akiwenzie-damm, marilyn dumont, connie fife, joanne arnott, janet marie rogers, sharron proulx-turner, and more. how do i pay my respects to this land but by starting with the poems that survive and defy colonization, the poems that move through the air into my eyes, ears, throat, & pulse? acknowledging the work of indigenous women poets is central to a feminist poetics, an ethical practice, an imagining of a possible future that spirals backward and forward from filaments of collective memory. we don’t have to write the same way (thank the earth that we don’t), but we do need to respect the voices that share this turtle island so courageously, and dare i say, generously. a generosity that inspires, breathes-life-into, reciprocity. spiral in a caracol (solnit), kanata a village with room for both-and. navigating the etymology of rival: those who share a river (irland). riven: broken apart by conquer-and-divide, how do we build a raft named respect, spaciously? immersed in the muddy, polluted stream that we call the english language, i still need the stream to live, even as i filter the pollutants, rearrange them in funny shapes in order to try to understand what they are doing to my body, and yes, i eat dirt. geophagy, it is called. made all the more dangerous by what has been mined from earth’s bowels: uranium, copper, coltan, selenium, gold, silver, nickel, zinc, and more. this dirty water is what i have to drink, what i have to give back, you can call it ink. as lydia kwa once taught me, dirt is good. when all elements balance. spiral back: in 1993 lee maracle generously facilitates a workshop for the women of colour collective in calgary. to this day, i remember her teaching a sense of self based not on the binary of body and mind, but one based on heart, mind, body and spirit. trying to integrate emotional, intellectual, physical and spiritual ways of being and doing is a good entrance into mapping a life’s poetics. how would such a poetics relate to over ten thousand years of human activity on this continent, but through respectful listening. to each other, the birds, the trees, the wind, the water. jeannette armstrong’s poem “water is siwlkw,” which opened the 2003 world water forum, asserts that people are water. armstrong articulates an interconnectedness that western science is still coming to terms with: “knowing that you are the great River as is the abundant land it brings to carve its banks then spread its fertile plains and deltas and open its basins its great estuaries even to where it finally joins once again the grandmother ocean’s vast and liquid peace.” kateri akiwenzie-damm writes, “we find meaning and purpose as human beings, as anishnaabek, as people of good intentions, in connectedness, in community. we are supported and sustained within a web of relationships. and it begins with the land” as an uninvited guest on this land, i ask how my actions can bridge the gap between intention and effect. land feeds me--i am a world eater, and what do i give back to the world? poems are slow seeds, but will they grow? land is not as solid as i used to assume, she is groundwater, she is mycorrhizal mat, she is dirt and rock, and with human intervention, more chemical surprises than i had first imagined.

“it always takes long to come to what you have to say, you have to sweep this stretch of land up around your feet and point to the signs, pleat whole histories with pins in your mouth and guess at the fall of words” - dionne brand in 1993 jamila ismail facilitates a workshop at the writing thru race conference. her work reminds me to laugh at how ebullient, how unpredictable language is! at that workshop, i also realize how unraveling the imperialism (what sky lee later calls imperial delirium) that i am unintentionally implicated in will be a life’s work. ismail’s poem, “scared texts,” reminds me to laugh simultaneously in cantonese and english while scrutinizing the slipperiness of the identity codes that have been projected onto our bodies as they encounter min[e]d fields (miki), borders:

young ban yen had been thought italian in kathmandu, filipina in hong kong, eurasian in kyoto, japanese in anchorage, dismal in london england, hindu in edmonton, generic oriental in calgary, western canadian in ottawa, anglophone in montreal, metis in jasper, eskimo at hudson's bay department store, vietnamese in chinatown, tibetan in vancouver, commie at the u.s. border.

on the whole very asian. (128) to speak nearby, as trinh t. minh-ha puts it, involves being able to imagine relations with the unfamiliar, or as adrienne rich puts it, “the poetries of men and women unlike you are a great polyglot city of resources, in whose streets you need to wander, whose sounds you need to listen to, without feeling you must live there” (216). this can be a funny and hopeful act, this work of making poems spiral forward: today is earth day 2008, and i am on a bc book prizes tour visiting high schools and public libraries in the kootenays, where i say to students: poetry is a way of slowing down, feeling and thinking through our everyday lives. embedded in “our” is a collective hope, a future that includes clean water, clean air, “hoping for wind and wave and sun and tide” to nourish future generations. what does clean mean in an era of corporate greenwashing? it’s a word i hang onto, stubbornly if unsurely. laiwan’s short essay, “dirty laundry and clean technology: can computers ever be innocent?” encapsulates a number of concerns that have sat within my body and my consciousness for many years: how i am implicated in exploitive labour practices and massive pollution through the sheer chance of being a citizen/consumer in a relatively wealthy country. this concern manifests itself on the cover of my recent book, forage, through a greenpeace photograph of a computer dump in guiyu village, guangdong province, the province where both my parents were born. in guiyu the water has become so acidic from computer waste extraction that it is now undrinkable. the cancer rate has skyrocketed because of people’s exposure to toxic chemicals in the computers and electronic appliances that they break apart to reclaim small bits of precious metals. i don’t want to be implicated in this toxic cycle, but i am. a feminist poetics begins with the land, with its/our pollution, with the difficult, necessary path of decolonization as a route to a possible future. my parents emigrated away from guangdong, but the toxins are global and can be tracked in flesh and exports, plastics and immune system disorders, vegetables and wind my concern about the environment is not new, but i am still struggling with my relationship to it through language. reading books like vandana shiva’s biopiracy, and elizabeth grossman’s high tech trash: digital devices, hidden toxics, and human health, and seeing films like france queyras’ body burden gave me words, information, ideas to work through. in the context of a poetics of detournement, these words include allopoiesis (the process whereby a system produces something other than the system itself—such as a car factory), autopoiesis (interactions in the system help to regenerate that system’s processes—such as a cell), landraces (indigenous seeds), PBDEs (the acronym for polybrominated diphenyl ethers), etc. the terms for the chemicals that are in all of our bodies and environments (body burden), were often in such alienating language, that I found myself wanting to break up the words, or run away from them, or unable to retain them in my memory. this materialized in the poems in terms of fragmented or jumbled words, marginalia, an awkward syntax or rhythm, a feeling of contamination, of pollution. the mixing and recombination of words is a form of poeisis, of messy making. the OED points out that in psychology the term poiesis can also refer to the “coining of neologisms, esp by a schizophrenic.” maybe the coining of such words can also come from a woman with one foot in the dirty and one foot in the clean. the title of forage could refer not only to my coping mechanism as someone who lives amidst capitalist contradictions—what am i doing in the library, on the internet, in the farmer’s markets and the community food co-ops for that matter, if not foraging for ways to survive and understand crisis and contradiction—but also a poetics, a way of writing my way through and in the mess. in his articulations chapbook fred wah writes, “i want to be free to use the crumbs and scraps for the crumbness and scrapness in them, for nothing else.” that line resonates for me—the small in and of itself—has value. i’m attracted to the idea of not wasting anything, not necessarily to align it to a model of use value, but in terms of learning to appreciate the small for what it is, in itself. the modest, the overlooked, this takes me back to the land, quietly present, not to be taken for granted, a force worthy of gratitude artist mike macdonald acknowledges an elder saying that the crime was not only having aboriginal languages and cultures stolen from first nations but the (greater) crime was that the people who came here did not learn the culture of the land. a feminist poetics, begun in chinook-blown calgary and open to the world, would also acknowledge the following aunties, mothers, sisters, cousins in addition to the ones that have already been mentioned:

- claire harris’s poem “policeman cleared in jaywalking case,” which opened up canadian poetry as witness, as more powerful a force than taken-for-granted silent racism, showing that a 15-year-old black girl is worthy of a poem, a protest, a standing-together-with - paula gunn allen’s the woman who owned the shadows, & maxine hong kingston’s woman warrior, encountered in jeanne perreault’s class in 1989 - erin moure’s “furious,” encountered in janice williamson’s classes in 1992 - audre lorde’s “a litany for survival” - this bridge called my back - chrystos’s poems and her observation that “while english is one of the stiffer conqueror languages, i enjoy pushing it around” - lillian allen: “poetry is that dialogue between the world inside of us and the world outside” - the work of dorothy christian, larissa lai, hiromi goto, baco ohama, cindy mochizuki, jin-me yoon, nicole brossard, daphne marlatt, betsy warland, harryette mullen, joy harjo, myung mi kim, si transken, cecilia vicuna, and more…

“let the one who is diseuse, one who is mother who waits nine days and nine nights be found. restore memory. let the one who is diseuse, one who is daughter restore spring with her each appearance from beneath the earth.” – theresa hak-kyung cha

to be contiguous

sources

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