matrix » In Matrix 84

Matrix 84

adminx — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 03:40:49 +0000

FEATURING:
LitPop winners, Richard Scarsbrook and Romana Prokopiw (due to an unfortunate formatting error, Romana Prokopiw’s award winning selection of poetry did not appear in Matrix as intended. We are happy to present the poems here, in their proper format: to view Romana Prokopiw’s wonderful Litpop Award winning poetry, click here ( … 1 … 2 … 3 ); poetry by Damian Rogers, Arthur Rimbaud and Christian Bök, and an interview with Frank Davey.

DOSSIER: THE NEW VANCOUVER
Introduction (eds. Sachicko Murakami & Anne Stone)
Sarah Bastin
Larissa Lai
Rita Wong
Jen Currin
Scott Inniss
Nikki Reimer
Daniela Elza
Dina Del Bucchia
Jacqueline Turner
Charles Demers
Aaron Peck
Richard Van Camp
Meredith Quartermain
Ray Hsu
Reg Johanson

COLUMNS:
Billy Fong Parade by Ian Orti
Milo & Sam by Joe Ollmann & Andy Brown
The Self-Esteem Workout by David McGimpsey
Alienated by Darren Wershler
Movie Mythos by Taien Ng-Chan
End Game by Ryan Dodgson

REVIEWS:
22 Skiddo / SubTractions by Michael Boughn
Flutter by Alice Burdick
Montreality: B-Sides & Rarities by Stephen Cain
Wordwards by Stephen Cain
Body of Text by David Ellingsen and Michael V. Smith
Kahlo: The World Split Open by Linda Frank
Pathologies by Susan Olding
Night Work: The Sawchuck Poems by Randall Maggs
February by Lisa Moore
I forgot to tell you by Gillian Harding-Russell
Mosaic Orpheus by Peter Dale Scott
The Hayflick Limit by Matthew Tierney
The Checkout Girl by Susan Zettell

Introduction to The New Vancouver Dossier

adminx — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 03:37:21 +0000

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

Achieved Through Care

adminx — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 03:33:47 +0000

Twenty-eight artists from the Southern Alberta Woodworkers Society participated in a juried show in 2007. As editor of the show’s catalogue, I was responsible for the written material. Each line is taken from a different artist’s statement, in the order in which they were presented in the book.

Achieved Through Care

Because of the border encircling

birds, wildflowers, and dinosaurs,

weed pots

that seems to move with the light

sat in my shop, and I waited for inspiration.

Are the two unsuccessful bears

perfect

, unique in style and proportion,

with curves and bends?

The dark red wood,

too beautiful to use,

is popular in

Manitoba.

To join two bowls,

the interior of the bowl was turned away, while a

pedestal, lifting the

stacks of laminations,

improved the things around us.

When I was in Boston,

I chose a pear,

representing the start of time…

a pleasure for me to build

the precision that is required to

prevent tipping.

I get great satisfaction in seeing

clean, symmetrical lines

and a few adjustments in

the shadows that form where petals meet in the centre of a flower.

—Romana Prokopiw

Laboratory

adminx — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 03:33:19 +0000

The found poems “In the Laboratory” and “Games and a Picnic” were created from a combined source. Sentences in parentheses come from the 1948 publication, A Hog on Ice and Other Curious Expressions by Charles Earle Funk. Funk regales his readers with the stories behind American proverbs and idiomatic expressions. The other sentences (not in parentheses) were taken from The Language of Logic, a workbook for first-year students by Morton L. Schagrin (1968).

In the Laboratory

x is a particle. 0 is the number zero. (This is not a simple sentence.)

(It appears to have alluded originally to some specific operation.)

If the temperature exceeds 500C, the sample

will melt.

The temperature exceeds 500C.

Fat burns. Water boils.

(The allusion is, of course, to the concrete fact.)

How do you feel about this procedure? You have only two tools for this one. The switch

is on. The lever is thrown.

(… at the critical or precise moment…)

The sample melts. An explosion results. Everything is blue.

That won’t work. You should be careful. You wish to be burned?

You shouldn’t have made this error.

Some people are hurt if they don’t know something.

(The expression comes from the cockpit. But it might have occurred to him to

use a politer phrase.)

Any substance can be limited only by a different substance. If any two substances are different from one another, then one limits the other and is limited by the other.

(It is possible that the ancient Hebrew writer had some old metaphor in mind.)

Jones is present. Smith is absent. John remains seated.

You will find him if you turn right

at the corner. Everyone likes John.

Beer is served. (Neither rain nor sleet nor hail will stay these couriers.)

The men are happy.

—Romana Prokopiw

Games and a Picnic

adminx — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 03:33:12 +0000

1. We shall leave at eight o’clock, unless it rains.

It is raining. The wind is too strong. It rains. We are staying home. We shall miss the swim.
	(Such a day may be traced back to the fifteenth century.)
It is sunny. We can have the race! We will not go to the movies and we will not go to the party. We go on the picnic!

2. You may have some candy, or you may have some ice cream, but not both.
	(The saying has no relationship at all to the medieval custom. I think it is likely that it is a literal statement.)
How do you feel about this procedure?

3. Either Betty or Carol spilled the milk and did not wipe it up.
	(One would expect a story, but none has been found. We’ll do a little guessing….)
If Bill is guilty…
	(I think it more likely that some irreverent American may have used it.)

4. Noone likes anyone who hits his sister.	(Anything furnishes a cause for disagreement!)
One always hurts someone he knows.
That won’t work.

5. If Tom is drinking champagne, then he has won the race. You will find him if you turn right at the corner.
	(A spectacular success when defeat seems inevitable.)

—Romana Prokopiw