After all these years of trying to teach myself to complicate and nuance, I’m in a position of really learning to clarify and simplify for the purposes of first year teaching. One of the things I want my students to learn is that language is not transparent. But how do you teach that without exercising the assumption of transparent language?

I’m mulling form these days, after having witnessed Mark Nowak’s extraordinary poetry work with American and South African Autoworkers, and Walter Lew’s movie-telling exercises with his students. Both are about a kind of subversion and both have a kind of beauty, or strength, though not in the sense that I expect any of my own students to get. (Why don’t I? May they would get it.) Or my own performance/paper at Tracing the Lines, with Rita, in which had seven others help us perform a piece that engaged various kinds of texts functioning at various levels of consciousness about their textuality, and at the same time attempting to do work that is social and political. I’m not sure that it “worked” or that it was “strong” but it drew people together in a way that seemed to me to be step in the right direction—away from authority, towards community and recognitions of kinship in difference (between natives and settlers, between humans and the elements).

If I had my way, everyone who came out of my classes, or for that matter, any one with the good fortune of a Western education would write, read and share poetry. Its quality wouldn’t matter nearly as much as the engagement with text and with other readers and writers. What could an education be that wasn’t about producing elites? What would its poetry sound like?

Thanks, Myron, for the quality banner!

If you’re here, then you’ve discovered my new website, courtesy of Bontano.net. It’s been an intensely busy few weeks, between David Khang’s How to Feed a Piano at Centre A, and Tracing the Lines: A Symposium on Contemporary Poetics and Cultural Politics in Honour of Roy Miki.

A few cool ideas/instances to emerge out of these discussions: Edouard Glissant’s idea of a poetics of relation (eloquently taken up by Rinaldo Walcott on the panel for How to Feed a Piano), the notion that to become animal is to be elevated from the location of the human (Candice Hopkin’s idea), that to practice many languages produces a different kind of freedom in bodily, social and intellectual life (from Marwan Hassan’s talk at Tracing the Lines).

Had a particularly good time working with Rita Wong and Dorothy Christian on our evolving water project. With an eye towards deepening our collaborative and coalition building practice we involved seven other people in our performance/paper: Roy Miki, Denise Nadeau, Phinder Dulai, Candice Hopkins, Monika Kin Gagnon, David Chariandy, Cecily Nichols. The piece was a scripted performance of original text and quotation, all of which resonated around the ideas of water, community, indigenous/settler coalition, sound and time.

Now—thinking about other kinds of collaboration that might be possible through my upcoming stint as Peter Wall Early Career Scholar. And trying to sort out content for my section of English 110, which I’m thinking of framing around the notion of alternate realities. And preparing to move house again…