Teaching a creative writing class in a small resource-based city like Prince George BC involves an articulation of and engagement with the power dynamics of the place, and constructing a new economy of ethico-aesthetics in order to empower students.
Exercise #11 Google-sculpt a prose poem portrait of the search term “Prince George” 3 pages long. Write a one-page portrait of Prince George that uses none of the words from the first poem.
Economies depend on fringe places like Prince George for raw resources but the relationship to the center is one of extraction not reciprocal recognition or nurturing. Outside is outside because the inside depends on it. The locations of power must construct the ‘outside’ as outside (Northern BC) in order to fully realize the (artificial) potential of the ‘inside’ (the Lower Mainland). The outside is built by the inside to disavow itself. It tends to be self-deprecating and without a strong identity. It tends to lack self-awareness and has low self-esteem. Its history is erased and its culture undermined—doubly so for First Nations communities. But while this imaginary identity is instituted as a pervasive and grim map of Northern BC (an oil-stained simulacra), the place in question has the capability to construct a overlapping, intervening, or supplementary map of its own.
Exercise #9 Choose a poem written by a Vancouver poet. Choose a second poem written by a Prince George poet. Splice the two together as a call-and-response. Flip a coin to see who goes first.
Part of the will to write is a sense of identity, one that can project a form effectively. A creative writing class that is distant from the economic activities of publishing and promotion (readings, presses, conferences, workshops, etc) has to work hard to produce models of success by rural authors. The NBC creative writing class begins with the pulp mill as poetic, the gas plant as poetic, the demoralized downtown and vulnerable job-market as poetic; in short, a history of resource extraction and settlement of First Nations’ land as the subject of analysis.
Exercise #23 With a small audio recorder, walk through a section of Prince George with the aim to record the sounds of the walk and also to record your voice as you voice all the language you see from the smallest candy wrapper label on the sidewalk to the biggest store sign.
Is there a Prince George aesthetic? It is not singular, but of course there is, and it is not a static thing. I don’t want my students to write any specific aesthetic necessarily, but they need to know about the poetic history around them. The politics of literary/cultural place necessarily becomes a part of creative writing instruction because if it is ignored, and we pretend we are in Vancouver, it decreases the students’ chances of developing as a writer. Parallel to (but not equal to) colonial contact zones, the small city tends to believe that culture is elsewhere, that the local is backward and not world-class.
And large cities consume unsustainably and can produce a restricted economy of writing. Prince George does something else. “That’s why poetry” (Ken Belford).
Exercise #4 Survey and sample from one of the many “economic plans” or “megaprojects” that Prince George politicians, corporations, and community leaders have devised over the years. Do a study of the language used in a poem that has no economic answers and no job creation predictions.
One of the biggest challenges in an upper-level creative writing class in Prince George is getting the students to believe that they can be a writer in Prince George. It sounds simple but the models of success are few, far between, and conditioned by a different kind of success. Are hand-made and hand-distributed chapbooks the mark of a successful writer? No. Yes and no. Yes, because that is what we have in Prince George and it works. It is a different economy—removed even from Bernstein’s sense of a poetry economy:
The economy of poetry is antipathetic to profit, it’s a “negative” economy. As James Sherry once remarked, if you take a sheet of plain white paper, perhaps it’s worth a penny, but if you write a poem on it, it’s worth nothing. It can no longer be sold. But, then again, that nothing is worth quite a lot. You’ve created negative value. Put a different way, that just shows that there are different kinds of economies and that poetry is an exchange economy.
Exercise #15 In the span of one day compose a poem, long poem or poem series, and construct a cheap small run chapbook to hand out the next day to 10 – 20 people you meet. Ask them all to send you feedback on what they read. Remember to keep a couple of the chapbooks for yourself.
Barry McKinnon tells the story of the mayor not wanting to spend money on the public library we have now because it would be filled with “loafers.” One member of the WHL Prince George Cougars hockey team makes more than all the funding for the Community Arts Council. Hunting, fishing and motocross magazines outnumber literary magazines 10 to 1 on the shelves.
I have organized or co-organized over 120 literary readings in Prince George since I arrived in 2001. These included readings by emerging writers, local Northern BC published authors, and visiting Canadian authors from across the country. The title of my readings series, Just West of Unruly, calls attention and de-stabilizes a sense of place. The series’ emphasis on visiting authors risks privileging writing not from Prince George, might be construed as an assertion that writers are only from somewhere else, but my insistence on including local poets, often reading next to visiting authors, does more to position and validate local writing. It also creates a context where writers go away impressed by our local scene and surprised at the energy that Prince George writing creates. If you haven’t been up, and want to come, send me a note.
But the fact is, Prince George is off the literary map. Publishers don’t line up tours through to promote books. Someone in Vancouver or Calgary has way more access to readings, workshops, festivals, parties, schmoozing, collaboration, and classes than a young writer in Prince George. Remote in this sense means a one hour flight at $400 for the round trip on a seat sale. Plus hotel. After a while, the community vents calendar tells you clearly: it’s not worth it.
Exercise #12
Your title is a place name “Privilege, BC”—write a poetic portrait of this place and the dynamics of living there.
Of course, a poetic 100 mile diet would be absurd, like a badly planned economic protectionist policy. While local pride is something necessary for creative survival in Prince George, the “local” is also a troubled insignia to wear.
As Henri Lefebve in The Production of Space remarks “the net result is that a particular ‘theoretical practice’ produces a mental space which is apparently, but only apparently, extra-ideological” (6). The apprehension of the space (“Prince George”) is not a given but a delicate creative interplay between the physical, mental, and social constructions that occupy it (both Lefebve and Guattari in Chaosmosis refer to this three-part harmony).
Exercise #22
Compose a poetic portrait of Prince George in a three part series with the parts titled “psyche” “socius” & “ecos” in any order.
But, besides complex, this network or circuitry of place is one that is striated with power traces. Dainotto argues that place, like the local, has a politicized epistemology that is “possible only from the place of [Walter] Benjamin’s ‘victor’—and as an occultation, precisely, of the barbaric history that has led to the victory” (12). So you have, on the one hand, a claim to the local that is the stamp of the settler, one embedded with colonial, sexual, and other dominant ideologies (very much like a dominant national discourse) and, on the other hand, a self-created exile or displacement as a form of analysis of the very ground one stands on. How is the illusion of nationalism any less oppressive than the illusion of regionalism or the reification of the local? How does any articulation of a regional identity not homogenize with the same brutality as any other identity trap? My class is still wondering.
Wrapped up in the problem of a usable sense of place (read: marketable) is the same epistemological sink-hole but instead of privileging the ‘local’ it is privileging ‘local ecology’ especially as it appears in “nature writing.” Ecology then becomes the new unquestioned ground zero (‘extra-ideological’) even though it is coded with just as much history and oppression. Western codes (symbols, narratives, forms, motifs, stereotypes, positions, etc) that mediate and construct the land, share the structures and dynamics of the oppressive ideologies of Western colonialism and patriarchy. A concerted resistance to these oppressions would share some of the strategies incorporated by feminist and counter-colonial discourse and art.
Exercise #31
As per our discussion of Laurie Ricou’s work, write a detailed study of a local plant that included an element of language/naming, historical, and sociological study.
I have been working through a writing project that encounters a pastoral gem of a plant called Devil’s Club. This is the common name and then there’s the Latin name stemming from the all-pervasive Linneaus naming system: ‘Oplopanax horridus’. The ‘horridus’ is just perfect: horrible, of course, but also descriptive of the rough and sharp qualities of the plant. ‘Oplopanax’ is more complicated, consisting of ‘oplo-‘ meaning ‘armour’ and ‘panax’ meaning ‘heal-all’, related to ‘panacea’ (from the Greek goddess Panacea). So, we have a well-guarded, powerful healing plant. One more layer of colonial naming has come recently, as American companies have misleadingly marketed the plant as “Alaskan ginseng.”
But before these names was the Dakelh name for the plant: Hoolhghulh. I studied two years to learn how to pronounce the name correctly. Ideally, in the creative writing classroom, the semiotics of ecology and the elusiveness of the object of study becomes the poem. Ostranenie in backyards. Where next?
Exercise #29
In a three-part poem, study a place that has two distinct names that come from two distinct traditions or languages. In the third and last section of the poem, find a way to express a mingling of those traditions/languages.
Hani. Hoolhghulh ‘unt’oh. Hoolhghulh ‘ink’ez et bulh cha ‘uhutja lhehunt’az. Et nanulyeh tsulhyo ‘olulhsa ‘ink’ez duchun nulh’en. Hoolhghulh ‘oolnih. Hoolhghulh dilhtulh ‘ink’ez nilghaz. Dulkun mai ‘ink’ez whus hanuyeh. Et yudzi undulhda. Hoolhghulh ndi oo’ul ookw’ehunduda. Hoolhghulh boonujut. Keyoh ‘et whust’i.
Snachail’ya.
Works Cited
Belford, Ken. Lan(d)guage. Halfmoon Bay: Caitlin, 2007.
Dainotto, Roberto M. Place in Literature: Regions, Cultures, Communities. Cornell: Cornell UP, 2000.
Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995.
“Charles Bernstein Interview.” http://www.argotistonline.co.uk/Bernstein%20interview.htm September 19, 2010.
No comments:
Post a Comment