a delible mind

Matrix 84 is out now, with a dossier on new Vancouver writing (which I co-edited with Sachiko Murakami).  Our intro:

The work collected here reflects some of the ways that the Vancouver writing scene has constituted itself through ties to the visual, to social critique, and to genre-busting. Aaron Peck’s protagonist performs a post-Benjamin tour of the Richmond night market (a time-honoured pilgrimage among bargain-seekers and certain of the Vancouver intelligentsia), his thoughts turning to a visual and material analysis of what appears in his path by happenstance and by design. Charles Demers’ protagonist, no less the contemporary flaneur, performs an astute social analysis of place and class set off by the purchase of a one dollar slice of pizza. Meredith Quartermain’s assay into historical fiction sees her character’s biography focussed through the narrowest of prisms (a language of “footings and slip joints”), reshaping the genre.

Daniela Elza’s poem evokes Mountain View Cemetery, a large inner-city graveyard that straddles a dozen city blocks (the crematorium’s contrails are said to distract local highschool students); it is a historic Vancouver site, literally graven with memory, but also the recent site of cultural activities including a Vancouver Biennale vernissage and Capilano University Editions book launch. Social issues and writing have long been entwined in Vancouver, and Rita Wong, Larissa Lai, and Reg Johanson offer up important social critiques in poems that are political, tactical, and deftly languaged. In these, meaning accrues through feints and imputations, images are glancing and meaning is unsettled: Wong’s piece, a non-fiction meditation, poem, and call to action at once, traces the devastation wrought by our contamination of water as life source; Lai deftly connects commodified substances with natural sources — so long uncoupled that the reconnection of leaf and paper is felt as small shock; and Johanson offers up, in his “Escratches,” a glimpse of the social outrages mounted in the name of Vancouver’s upcoming Olympics. In the poems of Scott Inniss, history emerges alongside place names to collide with the present, and tensions mount between “affluence” and “effluent.” Nikki Reimer offers accounts of the RCMP’s tasering of Robert Dziekanski at YVR. The poems stutter through distorted grammar and syntax, echoing both the failure of communication that contributed to Dziekanski’s death and the debacle of public inquiry that followed. Jacqueline Turner turns her attention upwards to the ubiquitous building cranes at sites of development that more familiarly define to a Vancouverite the cityscape than the buildings they create; Ray Hsu questions whether it is the Empire or its inhabitants who define a city. Inhabitants abound, from the “barrage of khaki pants” in Dina Del Bucchia’s tribute to Nyac, longtime Vancouver Aquarium resident and YouTube celebrity otter, to those “busy loving everything” in Jen Currin’s “You are on Yew Street.”

In the world of images, Vancouver veers between utopia – a fabled city of glass rimmed by mountains – and city of bedlam, in which images of the Downtown Eastside’s inhabitants are portrayed as irrationally drug-ridden and intractably poor. Bastin and Van Camp avoid such narrow representations of the city: Richard Van Camp’s lens captures a whimsical and nuanced Vancouver in the scrawled and hand-made signage this city’s occupants sometimes use to hail one another and Sarah Bastan’s diptychs offer views of the city and its citizens, separated. While at first glance Bastin’s pictures — like the poems and writing gathered here — might appear to be of any city, in the details one sees that these could only be, powerfully and unmistakably, portraits of Vancouver.

Sachiko Murakami & Anne Stone, eds.

September 2009