Foraging

Rita Wong’s work is a complex endeavour to understand the ecology of the animals of language, not to settle their moving limbs and establish control, but rather to be animal with their living existence and breathe with their breaths. Living on Coast Salish land (also known as Vancouver), her work gestures, dares to understand the culture and challenges of the land, strives to be citizen, responsive and responsible.

the gap between the crying line & electric speech

is the urbanization of the mouth

round peasant dialect vowels relocate

off the fields into city streets

where sound gets clipped

like our ability to smell the wet earth

sound becomes wound

we look away from toisan ache

(from “language (in)habits” in forage)

forage forages in the scraps and heaps of a world we actively heap each day into scraps. Composed within the margins of other thinkers, populated with images, contextualized and inscribed with Chinese, forage might ask how can we scrape so that we can forge anew? Wild for provisions, can we provide and not leave a scrapped heap in our wake? Can we wake? Global and local, can we respond responsively? Can we respond responsibly? Can we unbyzantine the byzantine? Can we be “ruminant and luminous”? Can we bear the “unbearable waste” and make a language that is not wasteful? Find our bearings, bare our haste. And who are we?

This question of “we”, which is also a question of “i” is also taken up in Wong’s collaborative work, sybil unrest, composed with the vigorous Vancouver writer and thinker Larissa Lai. In their unstable subjectivities, the “i’s” behave their multiplicities of gender, race, class, movement, geography, culture.

Rita Wong has written three books of poetry, sybil unrest (co-written with Larissa Lai, Line Books, 2008), forage (Nightwood, 2007) and monkeypuzzle (Press Gang, 1998). Her work investigates the relationships between contemporary poetics, social justice, ecology, and decolonization. She teaches at the Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver.

October 6, 2011

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About Folding Borders

If we dare to enter the laboratory of Canadian poetry what experiments might we encounter? What transgressions might we be asked to face? The Folding Borders commentaries will focus on poets whose work exists on some kind of boundary/border, poetry that exists in-between, perhaps as intertext, perhaps as hybrid, perhaps as network. The border might be linguistic (i.e. work written in more than one language), technological (i.e. work that exists in some kind of interaction with technology), collaborative, sound-based, performance-based, digital (i.e. work that has both a printed and a digital form simultaneously), geographical, architectural or a combination of any of these.

Some of the strands in Oana Avasilichioaei’s work traverse geography and public space (feria: a poempark, 2008), textual architecture, orality and multilingualism (We, Beasts, upcoming 2012), translation and collaborative performance (Expeditions of a Chimæra, co-written with Erín Moure, 2009). Living in Montreal, recent projects include The Islands, a translation of Quebecoise poet Louise Cotnoir, “The Mapping Issue” (co-edited with Kathleen Brown for Dandelion Magazine) and collaborating with musicians and sound artists as hex laboratorium.

Jacket2 Commentaries feature invited posts by poets and scholars who take a close, serial look at poetry scenes, archives, poetic concerns, or theoretical clusters. Commentaries, although curated, are not edited by Jacket2 staff. We welcome your comments. Send queries and notes to Commentaries Editor Jessica Lowenthal or contact us at this page.