Concepts of Vancouver Author Spotlight – Joseph Dandurand
January 10, 2019
Joseph A. Dandurand is a member of Kwantlen First Nation located on the Fraser River about twenty minutes east of Vancouver. He resides there with his three children Danessa, Marlysse, and Jace. Joseph is the Director of the Kwantlen Cultural Center. Joseph received a Diploma in Performing Arts from Algonquin College and studied Theatre and Direction at the University of Ottawa. He recently published 2 books of poetry: I WANT by Leaf Press (2015) and HEAR AND FORETELL by BookLand Press (2015). His newest book of poems: The Rumour, will be published by BookLand Press in (2018). SH:LAM (the doctor) will be published by Mawenzi Press (2019).
Poetry Abstract
at a gathering of fools they wept
and wept until daylight and then the
fire went out and everyone went home
to the insane streets of the pathetic
city where gloom and odor roam
Canadian Literature issue 235, Concepts of Vancouver: Poetics, Art, Media, is available to order through our online store.
Concepts of Vancouver Author Spotlight – Ajmer Rode
January 3, 2019
Ajmer Rode has published books of poetry, prose, drama and translation in English and Punjabi. His publication Leela, more than a thousand pages long (co-authored with N. Bharati) is considered a landmark in twentieth-century Punjabi poetry. His poem “Stroll in a Particle” is one of the eight international poems inscribed on a public wall outside the new office complex of Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle.
Poetry Abstract
Says the city whispers
in her ear: I will keep my air clean.
Waters too. Will keep my soul green,
skies blue. Will let my earth spread
more root-runs not pipe runs.
Canadian Literature issue 235, Concepts of Vancouver: Poetics, Art, Media, is available to order through our online store.
Concepts of Vancouver Author Spotlight – bill bissett
December 20, 2018
originalee from lunaria a far dstant planet
i was on th first childrns shuttul from that
trubuld planet as it had run out uv oxygen altho iuv bin on erth a whil i still have troubul undrstanding erthling wayze
dont yu
my first love is sound vizual poetree most recent book th book from talonbooks my latest cd we ar almost ther with
malcolm jack i show my paintings n vizual art work at th secret handshake toronto
Poetry Abstract
uv th strange nite skies ride
in our sky skrapr dreems
letting them fly
Canadian Literature issue 235, Concepts of Vancouver: Poetics, Art, Media, is available to order through our online store.
Concepts of Vancouver Author Spotlight – Chelene Knight
December 13, 2018
Chelene Knight is currently the managing editor at Room magazine, and the 2018 Programming Director for the Growing Room Festival. Braided Skin, her first book (Mother Tongue Publishing, March 2015), has given birth to numerous writing projects including her second book, memoir, Dear Current Occupant (BookThug, 2018).
Poem Abstract:
notice the paint peel in slow
motion there’s a division of race, of gender, of class, of—
a city’s silence
they call it art
they call it science
they call it some unsolvable math equation
Canadian Literature issue 235, Concepts of Vancouver: Poetics, Art, Media, is available to order through our online store.
Concepts of Vancouver Author Spotlight – Christopher Gutierrez
December 6, 2018
Christopher Gutierrez is based in Montreal, Quebec, where he is a lecturer in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. His research focuses on the points of contact between affect theory, media studies, urbanism, and everyday life. Amongst other places, his work has appeared in (re)constructions, Sorbet Mag, and CM: Communication and Media.
Article Abstract
This paper will chart out this particular anxiety as it emerges within the fantasy, and reality, of Vancouver as both a city and a model for urban planning. As this investigation was provoked by the 2011 Stanley Cup Riot, a moment that marked a rupture in the image of Vancouver as an exceptional site and that is discussed in the paper’s final pages, my exploration of Vancouver’s particular anxiousness begins in the history, and its attendant affective promise and future fantasy, that preceded this riot. The first part of this paper (Post-political plans (and charts, and diagrams, and lists, and books, and . . .)) will explore the relationship between the “communicative turn” in urban planning discourse, the increasing number of comparative and quantified metrics for understanding the city, and the development of a post-political image of the city. The following section (Mapping Vancouver(ism)s) considers how Vancouverism, as a model for urban planning, has come to be understood as a commodity within this post-political realm. In the next part, (Entrepreneurial Resonances/Material Remainders) I argue that this particular commodified and imagetic form of Vancouver is felt in the city as an anxious structure. Here, I will consider the relationship between Vancouver’s fantastic image in relation to both the city’s “Empty Condo Syndrome” and the ongoing indebtedness of a city where speculative real estate investment continues to dominate an already expensive housing market. Finally, by combining these discursive, ideational, and material realities, this paper concludes with a close reading of Douglas Keefe and John Furlong’s review report of the June 15th riots to consider the affective forces of both the riot and the response to the riot. Read as a moment where the anxiety of the subject is snapped into a present material reality, this paper concludes by considering the events of that night as a particular affective worlding; as a moment when the image of the city disappeared and a moment when the subject encountered the violent reality of present day Vancouver.
Canadian Literature issue 235, Concepts of Vancouver: Poetics, Art, Media, is available to order through our online store.
Concepts of Vancouver Author Spotlight – Dani Spinosa
November 29, 2018
Dani Spinosa is Adjunct Professor of 
English Literature at York University and Sheridan College. She co-edits Gap Riot Press and is Managing Editor of the Electronic Literature Directory.
Article Abstract
In this paper, Dani Spinosa looks to the semantic and metaphorical connotations of Jim Andrews’ “Seattle Drift” (1997) as a litmus test in order to define the uniquely Canadian, specifically Vancouverite, and transnational, transgeneric contributions to the fields of electronic literature and digital poetics. This paper tries to situate a work that “used to be poetry” but “drifted from the scene” to begin to theorize the role of place (Seattle, Vancouver) and national discourse (American, Canadian) in a digital literary world that increasingly works to blur borders and collapses national and generic conventions alike.
Canadian Literature issue 235, Concepts of Vancouver: Poetics, Art, Media, is available to order through our online store.
Concepts of Vancouver Author Spotlight – Jason Wiens
November 22, 2018
Jason Wiens is a 
Senior Instructor and Associate Head, Undergraduate, in the Department of English at the University of Calgary. He has published widely in the field of Canadian literature, including articles on Dionne Brand, George Bowering, Margaret Avison, and Sharon Pollock. His current research involves the pedagogical applications of archival work in undergraduate courses.
Article Abstract
This paper examines the work of several writers affiliated with Vancouver’s Kootenay School of Writing (KSW). It was written through original primary research in multiple archives, and takes a new approach to reading this work. I posit that we read the work of the writers affiliated with KSW, which has typically been read through similar critical approaches to those taken to language poetry, as both an archive and a repertoire of a community at a particular historical period, the long neoliberal moment. I discuss several writers whose work has been critically neglected, including Kevin Davies, Jeff Derksen, Lisa Robertson, Colin Smith, and Deanna Ferguson.
Canadian Literature issue 235, Concepts of Vancouver: Poetics, Art, Media, is available to order through our online store.
Concepts of Vancouver Author Spotlight – Felicity Tayler
November 15, 2018
Felicity Tayler is the e-Research Librarian at the University of Ottawa. She was an Arts and Sciences Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History of Art at the University of Toronto (2017-2018). Her PhD dissertation at Concordia University addressed counter-national narratives in conceptual bookworks and artist’ magazines of the 1970s. Her scholarly writing has been featured in the Journal of Canadian Art History, International Journal on Digital Libraries, Art Documentation, and Art Libraries Journal.
Article Abstract
The Image Bank International Image Exchange Directory claims to have been published by Talonbooks in 1972, but it does not feature in histories of that quintessential west coast press. As a response to this absence, this article explores the intermedial practices and social scenes surrounding the press, Vancouver’s Intermedia Society (1967-1972), and related sites where the city’s countercultures and neo-avant-garde came into contact. A visual analysis of two photographic images printed in the Directory, one urban, one rural, reveals a social imaginary for Vancouver in which the city flips into different registers of semiotic coding at local, national and transnational levels. The city features in the imaginary geographies of a neo-avant-garde interested in the psychological and cultural impact of media technologies, as per Marshall McLuhan’s “global village,” of transnational media space. Conversely, given a context of post-Centennial cultural nationalism, the Directory also indexes the city within a counter-environment where a utopian state of queer futurity could thrive.
Canadian Literature issue 235, Concepts of Vancouver: Poetics, Art, Media, is available to order through our online store.
Concepts of Vancouver Author Spotlight – Mathieu J. P. Aubin
November 8, 2018
Mathieu J. P. Aubin is a SSHRC-funded 
PhD candidate in the Faculty of Critical Studies and a graduate research associate at the University of British Columbia’s Okanagan campus. His research focuses on the intersection between Vancouver’s small presses (i.e., blewointment press and Press Gang Publishers) and lesbian and gay liberation movements. He has recently published an interview with bill bissett titled “allowing th effulgences uv living life” in OK Magpie.
Article Abstract
This essay produces a queer examination of Vancouver’s poetry newsletter Tish. Although narratives and scholarship of Tish have predominantly valorized the experiences of the first male editors and continue to commemorate their efforts (e.g. Davey’s When Tish Happens and Wah’s Permissions: TISH Poetics 1963 Thereafter), this article challenges this trend that dismisses later Tish issues and marks them as failures. Specifically, by engaging with Sarah Ahmed’s and Jack Halberstam’s studies between failure and social spaces and art failure, respectively, I argue that Tish’s later issues (20-E [45]) deviated from the first nineteen issues’ masculinist social relations and ideology by including more marginalized people’s voices, such as women’s and gay men’s works. I demonstrate how the second phase addressed the first phase’s erasure of women, the third phase published radical feminist poetry, and the fourth phase published gay poetry. However, these phases were limited by the first phase’s androcentricism. Instead of disqualifying its later issues, this article’s alternate socio-cultural history of Tish challenges a limited and heteronormative perspective of Vancouver’s poetry newsletter to demonstrate the contributions of women and gay men that have previously been disqualified.
Canadian Literature issue 235, Concepts of Vancouver: Poetics, Art, Media, is available to order through our online store.
Concepts of Vancouver Author Spotlight – Jamie Hilder
November 1, 2018
Jamie Hilder is an instructor in the Critical and Cultural Studies Department at Emily Carr University of Art and Design. His critical and creative work engages the intersections of economics and aesthetics. He has exhibited work in North America and Europe, and has published texts in Public Art Dialogue, Contemporary Literature, and Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art. His book Designed Words for a Designed World: The International Concrete Poetry Movement, 1955-1971 was published by McGill-Queen’s UP in 2016.
Article Abstract
The history of artists’ spaces in Vancouver since the 1960s is, in some ways, a history of bureaucratic forms. The artist collective Intermedia struggled with the imposition of a board of directors by the Canada Council as a condition of funding. Iain and Ingrid Baxter’s N. E. Thing Co. embraced the model of the corporation while adhering to the structure of a patriarchal family. The Western Front and other artist-run centres pursued an owner/operator format as a stabilizing strategy in order to hold space. And independent spaces, through necessity, organized themselves around and through precarity. How these artists’ spaces emerge, survive, dissolve, and re-emerge is imbricated with issues of affordability, national and provincial arts policy, and shifting expectations of what art can and should do. In his excellent history of the Vancouver-based Kootenay School of Writing (KSW), Jeff Derksen cautions that “a history of an artist-run space can unfortunately become a history of its governmental funding” (288). Such an emphasis on funding structures, particularly in the case of the KSW, he argues, can diminish the agency of artists and writers in their collective response to the material conditions created by shifts in cultural policy. But I want to argue that there is a valuable history of artists’ spaces in Vancouver that can only be told through an analysis of the role that public funding has played in sustaining, constraining, and forming art practices and subjectivities over the past half-century.
Canadian Literature issue 235, Concepts of Vancouver: Poetics, Art, Media, is available to order through our online store.