Book Review
A Poetics of Spatiality
- Jeff Derksen (Author)
Annihilated Time: Poetry and Other Politics. Talonbooks (purchase at Amazon.ca)
- Charles E. Israel (Author)
Shadows on a Wall. Macmillan of Canada (purchase at Amazon.ca - Rona Murray (Author)
The Enchanted Adder. Klanak Press (purchase at Amazon.ca
Reviewed by Michael Roberson
Annihilated Time: Poetry and Other Politics collects over ten years of cultural criticism by one of Canada’s premier contemporary poets, Jeff Derksen. Derksen organizes the book around three main, but articulated, hubs (anticipated in part by the subtitle of the book): Other Politics,
Spaces,
and Poetics.
While most of the fifteen essays within these sections represent revisions of previously published and/or presented works, Derksen offers a broad context for them in the introduction: The Spaces, Times, and Culture of Neoliberalism.
In fact, the introduction provides a scope to a much more comprehensive and ongoing project, investigating the changing possibilities of culture
in, what Derksen terms, the long neoliberal moment. The paradox at the core of this term stems from Derksen’s account of neoliberalism as a long social and economic project,
beginning even before the early 1970s, that has a cultural drift finally brought into clear focus by the events and reactions of 9/11.
Neoliberalism, as a force behind globalization, tends to diminish the role of the nation-state and emphasize the role of the individual and of the global.
But, according to Derksen, this rescaling
provides opportunities for cultural critique of the sociopolitical and economic dynamics within and across those spaces. For example, in the first section of Annihilated Time, Derksen foregrounds the spatial in discussing the transnational
orientation of certain poets responding to 9/11, and certain poets critiquing the culture-ideology of neoliberalism,
as well as the nationalistic
orientation of the Language poets. In one of the most compelling examples from this first section, Derksen describes the sculptural work of Brian Jungen, who dismantles Nike shoes and reconfigures them into Northwest Coast Indian ... ceremonial masks.
Here, Derksen notes, Jungen opens the relations of the global and the local,
which challenges the ideology inherent to both spaces.
In addition to political geography, Derksen employs spatial terminology to address discourse and textuality. In the second section of essays, for example, he examines the relationship between subjectivity
and structure
in a comparison of twentieth-century megastructures and Lyn Hejinian’s long poem My Life. This section also includes a poignant essay on the temporal, spatial, and discursive split
after the destruction of the World Trade Centre in 2001. In following from essays that seem more organized around discursivity than Spaces,
this section concludes with works on multiculturalism
and cross-culturality.
In the last section, Poetics,
Derksen offers statements that might satisfy readers of his poetry, who are looking for instructive clues about the allusions, decontextualizations and recontextualizations at the heart of any of the three books of poetry also available through Talonbooks. For example, he posits art as research
and poetry as a form of knowledge
in the final essays.
Derksen closes Annihilated Time with a historical and ideological account of his own engagement with the Kootenay School of Writing. This essay, as he notes, is previously unpublished, and so an invaluable contribution to scholarship on the contemporary Canadian poetry scene. The same might very well be said of this collection.Â
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MLA: Roberson, Michael. A Poetics of Spatiality. canlit.ca. Canadian Literature, 16 May 2012. Web. 24 May 2013.
This review originally appeared in Canadian Literature #212 (Spring 2012), General Issue. (pg. 144 - 145)
***Please note that the articles and reviews from the Canadian Literature website (www.canlit.ca) may not be the final versions as they are printed in the journal, as additional editing sometimes takes place between the two versions. If you are quoting from the website, please indicate the date accessed when citing the web version of reviews and articles.
