Language / Truths: Power, Disenfranchisement, and Politics
In Northern British Columbian Poetics

Michal Latala

B.A., University of Victoria, 1999.

Thesis Submitted In Partial Fulfillment Of
The Requirements For The Degree Of
Master Of Arts
in
Interdisciplinary Studies

The University of Northern British Columbia
February 2008

© Michal Latala, 2008

1*1

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Abstract
Northern British Columbian poetry from communities like Prince George is often
marginalized by literary centres of power. The economic realities of resource-based
towns are the foreground in Ken Belford's, George Stanley's, and Barry McKinnon's
writing. Their poetry enacts resistance in the face of global capitalism and homogenizing
economic forces.
Ferdinand De Saussure's language theory and Jean Baudrillard's concepts of
simulacra and "radical thought" show the arbitrary and illusory qualities of writing.
Edward Soja's theory of spatiality and Felix Guattari's "ecosophy" posit that landscapes
are divided into three interdependent and interpenetrating spatial spheres: physical,
mental, and social. These theories are used to present landscape cohesively as a venue of
contestation and change. As a further means of addressing the disenfranchisement of
Northern B.C. writers, I have written a collection of poetry exploring local politics,
resistance to globalizing capitalism, and attitudes about Northern B.C. poetics.

Latala 1
Introduction
The concept of being cannot occur without space. Everything happens
somewhere. Space is not a static and inactive void. It is not a background. It is not
merely a location. It is not something to be exclusively and permanently controlled.
Space is complex and is comprised of social, physical, and mental spheres. Like
languages, these spatial spheres are in flux. They have the capacity to create change and
to be changed. And they affect individuals just as individuals affect them.
In order to understand poetic landscapes as spatial components and as valid and
integral parts of social being, one must account for their plurality and their resistance to
homogenization by examining language. Using the theories and ideas of Pierre
Bourdieu, Jean Baudrillard, Ferdinand De Saussure, and Jacques Derrida, Chapter 1
argues that any language is an arbitrary system capable of presenting versions and truths
that have their own values. Poetic and social landscapes are infused with contradictory
ideologies, politics, and belief systems which readily contest one another, yet they
coexist and give significance and meaning to people's lives, beliefs, identities, and
notions of belonging. Chapter 2 further examines the pluralism of poetic landscapes by
exploring ideas of space through the works of Edward Soja who argues that physical,
mental, and social spaces are not divorceable from one another. Instead they
interpenetrate each other and are constantly in a state of change. This suggests that
spaces hold valid yet varying significances for different individuals or groups of
individuals and should not be presented or treated in a singularized fashion, yet this is
what tends to occur in Northern British Columbia. In single-industry towns such as
Prince George, space is continuously defined on a strictly economic basis where land is

Latala 2
viewed as a commodity to facilitate lumber production. The homogenizing effects of
global capitalism singularize individuals and reinforce stereotypical attitudes towards
this region.
Northern British Columbian writing exists in a variety of forms and voices;
however, Chapter 3 of this thesis can only hope to address a small part of that chorus.
The works of three authors, Ken Belford, Barry McKinnon, and George Stanley, share
an understanding of space in a manner where it becomes the foreground, a venue of
social activity infused with politics, economy, and identity. These writers' work
identifies a rooted sensibility to place and enacts resistance. It challenges the often
stereotypical and basic definitions that Northern B.C. is saddled with by metropolitan
centres of literary influence and forces of economic power. In this respect, it is unlike
the majority of mainstream literary poetics because it speaks out of and about fringe
communities. However, the three poets have very distinct relationships to northern
landscapes.
Ken Belford has been described as a working-class poet, an eco-poet, and an
outdoorsman, but these definitions fail to encapsulate his unique literary stature.1 What
makes Belford particularly relevant as a poet is his relationship to the land and his
connection to literary centres of power. For three and a half decades, Belford operated
an eco-tourism venture at Damdochax Lake in the Nass River headwaters. During this
time he came to understand his relationship to land in a way different from most people.
In the poem "Carrier Indians" he writes, "Ugly people with large eyes. / Having
nowhere to go. /1 am one of them" (Belford, Four Realities 3). Belford does not

1

For a detailed account of Ken Belford's literary activity see "Search: Ken Belford / Invisible Ink" by
Barry McKinnon.

Latala 3
identify himself as a white male nor as a colonizer. While he is not aboriginal, his
sensibility, environmentalism, and identity connect him to land in a symbiotic manner.
Another striking aspect of Belford has been his apparently sporadic way of writing. The
Post Electric Cave Man, published in 1970 by Talonbooks, is considered to be his first
publication, yet his first book of poetry, The Hungry Tide, self-published in 1965, has
virtually fallen into obscurity, a trend that continued for thirty more years (McKinnon
"Search" 1). Belford did not publish a subsequent work, Pathway Into the Mountains,
until 2000. During this time where he seemed to have fallen off the literary grid,
Belford continued to write and self-publish. He has come to be known for his prolific
chapbook making, and, in a sense, his literary existence has not depended on publishers
or on literary centres of power. This has enabled him to approach poetics from a unique
viewpoint, and it makes his work particularly relevant to Northern B.C.
Barry McKinnon has been central to building and maintaining the writing
community in Prince George for over three decades. While teaching English at the
College of New Caledonia, he continuously brought poets and writers to the city. In
February of 2008, he retired from his position as an English instructor. He is a widely
published and respected author. The The, published in 1980, was short-listed for the
Governor General's Award for poetry, and in 1991 Pulp Log won the Dorothy Livesay
Prize (B.C. Book Awards). What makes McKinnon significant is his resistance to a
lyric sensibility that is identified with much of modern mainstream Canadian poetry.
Furthermore, questions about identity as a poet and as an individual in relation to being
in a northern single-industry town figure prominently in much of his work. In that
aspect his work is often political. It challenges and explores how economic forces

Latala 4
impact an individual's sense of belonging, and this type of writing is largely absent from
Canadian poetics.
George Stanley's poetry offers another unique perspective on how Northern
British Columbia is presented in limited ways. Stanley was born and raised in San
Francisco where he received bachelor's and master's degrees. Subsequently he moved
to Vancouver where he lived for five years before taking a college instructor position in
Terrace, British Columbia. He worked there until his retirement, and he currently
resides in Vancouver. Stanley is not a city writer who is unaware of the proximity of
economic realities and their effects on small towns. Instead his experience of
geographic and social contrasts between San Francisco, Vancouver, and Terrace, makes
him attuned to how centers of social power marginalize small communities. Thus, much
of his poetry juxtaposes fringe communities with major cities.
A focus on these three well-established white male poets implies an exclusion of
other poetic voices. The work of women poets, First Nation poets, and emerging poets
is not sufficiently examined, in part due a difficulty of finding writers who have a
significant history with the Northern B.C. and in part due to limitations of the length of
this work. However, the line of thought presented here argues for poetic landscapes that
are multi-vocal and inclusive, and the focus of this thesis is not meant to be
representative of all Northern B.C. poetics. Writers such as Gillian Wigmore, Judith
Lapadat, Jaqueline Baldwin, Donna Kane, Jeremy Stewart, and Richard Kruger are an
integral part of Northern B.C. poetics whether their work is examined here or not.
I have been unsettled by the type of poetics that pervades much literary
publication in Canada particularly since it often addresses personal matters and emotions

Latala 5
that say very little about significant outer social and economic issues. There is value in
this type of poetry; however, many writers who attempt to address politics through
poetry remain unpublished. Writers from fringe communities are often disenfranchised,
disempowered, and devalued by literary centres. My poetry is an attempt to add to the
voices of fringe writers and further the discourse surrounding Northern B.C. poetics. It
is not the representation of the north, but a representation. It is masculine and
incomplete. It attempts a representation of the local literary scene and forms intertextual
dialogues with local and non-local writers. Most importantly it strives to be political
and enact resistance against prevailing conceptions of and attitudes towards poetics in
Northern B.C.
Fringe communities are often written about by individuals who look out from the
polis and from centres of literary power. In this respect my motivation comes out of the
stereotypes and limitations faced by Northern B.C. writers in the context of the types of
lives that are associated with life in resource towns, the effects of globalization on smalltown economies, and the proliferation of singularizing economically driven ideas and
attitudes that seek to define individuals and the landscapes they are rooted to:
to tell a person of a singular world,
insist on one pleasure, one text
My poetry means to utilize praxis to explore the manner in which fringe communities
are marginalized. In that aspect it takes a performative approach that supports a
pluralism of ideologies and sees the poetic landscape as a stage for contestation, debate,
and power. It is an attempt to understand my own aspect of belonging to this northern
locality.

Latala 6
Chapter 1
Poetic Illusion: The Value of Textual Simulacra
Say: I am real, this is real, the world is real, and nobody laughs. But say: this is a simulacrum, you are
only a simulacrum, this war is a simulacrum, and everybody bursts out laughing. With a condescending
and yellow laughter, or perhaps a convulsive one, as if it was a childish joke or an obscene invitation.
Jean Baudrillard "Radical Thought"

French social theorist Pierre Bourdieu's concept of "doxa" refers to the
naturalization of a social system by the workings of its own inner mechanisms. In
effect, Bourdieu contends "every established order tends to produce (to very different
degrees and with very different means) the naturalization of its own arbitrariness" (159).
In this light, the reaction to Jean Baudrillard's challenge against language's widely
accepted "reality," in particular the questioning of the correspondence between image
and reality as well as word and reality, is evidence of the very power and homogenizing
effects of language. No one wants to admit the ambiguity inherent in language; no one
wants to accept the multiplicity of realities language propagates and conceals. Neither
does anyone wish to conclude that the breakdown between language and reality is a
freeing and passionate consequence of what Baudrillard terms "radical thought"
("Radical Thought").
Poetry, not entirely unlike other written and non-written artistic mediums, is
made essential and valuable by its mandate to create a type of illusion. Baudrillard
defines the breakdown between a sign and the reality it attempts to represent a
"simulacrum," and by playing on the artificial qualities of words, poetry attempts to
create a meaningful discourse. The examination of poetry is also a study of linguistic
functions, and using the ideas of Ferdinand De Saussure, Chapter 1 of this thesis

Latala 7
addresses the nature, function, and structure of poetic intricacy. Furthermore, poetic
devices such as sound, layout, and considerations of form contribute to the specific
internal signification of language; any poem can determine the values of its linguistic
parts through its own context.
Because language functions as a mediator of experience, questions of
representation and authenticity become central in the interplay between word and reality.
Experience does not occur inside of language, yet the discourse about any experience is
shaped by the means of communication. The distinction between functions of
simulation and representation determines simulacral qualities of words. Consequently,
the role and value of poetry as a discourse of simulation is a necessary and defining
feature of poetry because it shifts attention away from an inaccessible outer reality to the
linguistic constructs which constitute and shape social discourse. It calls attention to
itself.
De Saussure argues that the building block of language is the linguistic sign.
The sign is like a piece of paper; while it has two sides, each one is inseparable from the
other. The signifier constitutes one side of the sign; it is a mental image, an equivalent
of a concept. The sound-image, a sensory aspect, makes up the other side. Thus, "the
combination of a concept and a sound-image [is] a sign" (De Saussure 67). If the word
"tree" is examined, the image and sound of the word, the signifier, is linked with the
concept of a tree, the signified. Furthermore, the sign does not reflect any natural
quality of the thing it represents. The use of a word to designate a thing is purely
arbitrary and "has no natural connection with the signified" (69). The multitude of
words used across languages to represent the same thing, such as a tree, is evidence to

Latala 8
this effect. Furthermore, even onomatopoeic words like "buzz" or "snap" that seem to
mimic the natural sound of the signified do not arise as a result of a natural
corresponding quality. The etymology of such words shows that they have not always
existed in their current forms but rather have been derived from earlier forms of words2.
De Saussure claims this "is a fortuitous result of phonetic evolution" (69).
In addition to the arbitrary nature of the sign, the meanings of signs arise from
their relational qualities to one another: "Language is a system of interdependent terms
in which the value of each term results solely from the simultaneous presence of the
others" (114). For instance, the word "tree" is but one word in a chain of terms:
"shrub," "bush," "seedling," "sapling," "plant," etc. Consequently, the meaning of the
word "tree" is constituted by its relation to the other words. If the words "seedling" and
"sapling" were not to exist, "tree" would have a much different meaning; it would
necessarily have to denote plants with a wooden main stem in any degree of growth and
development. This is a part of Jacques Derrida's notion of differance. The term is a pun
on the words and concepts of difference and deference because rather than attaining
meaning from a real presence, a connection to a reality, words gain their value from
other signifiers. Signifiers attain meaning not just through the difference of terms in an
endless chain of signification but also through an infinite deferral of terms. In essence,
there is no primary cause or starting point in the chain of signification.
In effect, any context, poetic or otherwise, will contribute to the signification of
words. The term "pine tree" will have different consequences depending on the context,
literal, symbolic or geographical, where the term is used. In Northern British Columbia,

2

De Saussure's section on onomatopoeia provides examples oifouet "whip" and glass "knell." See
Course in General Linguistics 69-70.

Latala 9
the associations to resource-based labor, the pine beetle epidemic, and the general yet
central connection to single-economy cities like Prince George somehow overshadow
other no less valuable meanings. The function of the term seems to take the issue back
to representation; there is a correspondence to a reality that validates the use of a specific
concept for those associated meanings. Similarly the historical trends of the lumber
industry in Northern B.C. serve to intensify the signification of the term "pine tree" in a
context such as a poem, for instance. In Northern B.C., though not exclusively, notions
of reality tend to have a legitimizing effect because they became grounded in a type of
factuality. The concept of a "pine tree" is primarily presented in an economic manner,
and one would be hard pressed to discover other powerful and significant significations
in northern single-industry towns and communities.
Returning to issues of representation, De Saussure's first proposition, namely the
arbitrary nature of signs, refutes the idea of a correspondence between language and
reality: "If words stood for pre-existing concepts, they would all have exact equivalents
in meaning from one language to the next; but this is not true" (116). Languages are one
component of our existence and they constitute our world, among other processes,
because through their constructions they exclude certain conceptualizations and
encourage others. This is often apparent in translations where it is simply not possible to
transpose a concept across languages and maintain its power and effect. Nuances, for
instance, play a central role in writing or advertising designed to manipulate audiences
and consumers in order to evoke a particular type of response, need, or want. In military
propaganda, the same holds true. Considering casualty reports, the phrase "fifty
inoperative military personnel" employs words of Latinate origin. The words

Latala 10
"inoperative," "military," and "personnel" have a duller, less fierce, and less emotional
impact than the Anglo-Saxon words "dead" and "soldiers." If one were to look at
Latinate words in general, they have the connotation of mummifying and objectifying
the world. Binomial nomenclature, the naming system used for plant and animal
species, uses Latin to categorize; the aim is not to produce an emotional response.
Manipulating diction is one way to vary, and to some extent manipulate, the reader's
emotional responses in order to pragmatically convey a required message.
It seems unlikely that De Saussure would deny the existence of a tangible world.
He would, however, insist that languages do not just label reality but shape it:
In language there are only differences. Even more important:
a difference generally implies positive terms between which
the difference is set up; but in language there are only differences
without positive terms. Whether we take the signified or the signifier,
language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the
linguistic system, but only conceptual or phonic differences that have
issued from the system. (De Saussure 120)
If "real" objects are constituted and determined by a structure such as language, then
reality, in so far as language represents it, is only a construct. The construct may be an
attempt at mediating reality; however, it can never successfully encapsulate any
otherness because reality, strictly in the binary sense of an ontological divide between an
object and a perception of it, is beyond language. Furthermore, any linguistic construct
can be dismantled and a new one can be put in its place. Such an attempt is evident
through feminist challenges of the linguistic implications of word construction. The

Latala 11
identity of "woman" is somewhat determined by language partly because the word
"woman" is always defined by juxtaposing it to its binary opposite "man." The linguistic
connections reflect underlying ideological assumption as to the "nature" of woman; they
also serve to concretize or naturalize those assumptions.
Ludwig Wittgenstein in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus validates the realm of
the factual and attempts to kill poetry by reducing language to a singularity of meaning.
Wittgenstein constructs a linguistic system that allows only one way to say one thing. In
his approach he uses truth-tables to designate meanings and bases his work on the
assumptions that the world "is everything that is the case" and "is the totality of facts,
not of things" (Wittgenstein 31). While Wittgenstein realized the connection and
interdependence between thought and language, he was unable to reconcile the
ontological divide between an external reality and the mental and linguistic
representations of it. If language and thought are spheres, they tend to overlap; one
thinks with language and in language. However, there is no such overlapping between
those spheres and the corporeal world. This irreconcilability between reality and
mediations of it prompted Wittgenstein to abandon his entire argument. In the last
proposition of his work Wittgenstein concludes, "whereof one cannot speak, thereof one
must be silent" (189). The idea of the world as a singular set of facts implies a static
reality: there is no room for symbiotic existence, coexisting yet contradictory ideologies,
a capacity to change or to be changed, or a capacity for redefinition. There is only room
for an absolute adherence to a singular set of discoverable and immutable Truths.
In Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein's further explores language by
introducing the concept of a "language game." This marks a movement away from his

Latala 12
earlier attempts to instruct people on how to use language, and instead he focuses on
how to see beyond language traps and confusions. By "language games" Wittgenstein
means several things: primitive models of language, supportive aspects of language that
enable learning, and even "the whole [of any language], consisting of language and the
actions into which it is woven, the "language game" (Philosophical Investigations 5). A
language game is not a word game; rather it is a means of communication that has its
own set of rules relevant to a desired outcome and that is capable of change:
But how many kinds of sentence are there? Say assertion, question, and
command? - There are countless kinds: countless different kinds of use
of what we call "symbols", "words", "sentences". And this multiplicity
is not something fixed, given once and for all; but new types of language,
new language-games, as we may say, come into existence, and others
become obsolete and get forgotten. (Wittgenstein, Philosophical
Investigations 11)
A language game is not representative of a natural correspondence between language
and reality. In a sense, it is a pragmatic type of communication that brings "into
prominence the fact that the 'speaking' of language is part of an activity, or form of life"
and Wittgenstein's aim is "to teach [one] to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to
something that is patent nonsense (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations 11; 133).
Jean Baudrillard bases his study of the nature of the sign in postmodern society
on a notion of disconnectedness between sign and reality. Like the structuralists,
Baudrillard does not deny the existence of reality. However, he believes that throughout
history signs and reality have ceased to correspond. Baudrillard outlines four phases of

Latala 13
the sign: the first being before the Renaissance, the second "roughly corresponding] to
the period of time from the Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution," the third phase
coming with the Industrial Revolution, and the fourth being the current postmodern age
(Turner 240). While signs have never equated reality, in the first stage the
correspondence to reality was that of accurate representation; signs approximated the
real. In the second phase, signs augmented reality, and this can be conceptualized as a
movement from realist to surrealist painting. In the third phase signs masked the
absence of a reality, and abstract art such as that of Roman Pollock provides a good
example. Finally, in the current postmodern stage, signs have come to have no
connection with reality whatsoever. In Baudrillard's words, the successive phases of the
sign are as follows:
1. it is the reflection of a basic reality
2. it masks and perverts a basic reality
3. it masks the absence of a basic reality
4. it bears no relation to any realty whatever: it is its own
pure simulacrum. (Baudrillard 173)
The qualifying feature of the simulacrum lies in the performative roles signs can play.
The key difference between the sign and the simulacrum is distinguished by
notions of "simulation" and "dissimulation." Assuming language mediates reality in an
attempt to describe it as best as it can, dissimulation tends to uphold the reality principle
and simulation fractures it: "To dissimulate is to feign not to have what one has. To
simulate is to feign to have what one hasn't. One implies a presence, the other an
absence" (170-171). Baudrillard uses illness as an example where feigning a disorder

Latala 14
requires a sort of make believe. One can pretend to be ill; however, without symptoms
there is nothing to suggest the presence of an illness. To simulate an illness on the other
hand requires a production of the symptoms; this can be done in respect to mental
disorders. The simulation produces an effect and implies a corresponding cause, yet the
cause does not exist. In simulation, the reality behind the symptom, sign, or image in
question does not exist: "Simulation threatens the difference between 'true' and 'false,'
between 'real' and 'imaginary' (171).
The notion that writing has a capacity for misrepresenting or nullifying reality is
an old one. Plato mistrusted the written word and preferred the dialectical method of
questioning. As Geoffrey Hartman points out, Derrida in his essay on Plato's Phaedrus
"shows that writing may be viewed as a poisoned gift" (119):
[Derrida] argues that Plato looked on writing as a drug whose effects
could not be controlled: words are potentially good medicine ...
but when written down they become poison for the mind. Poison
because writing weakens memory and correlatively, the filial
nature of words, their reference back to a responsible, locatable
source. The written text cannot be questioned like a speaker; it
orphans the voice that is alive and present. (Hartman 119)
Plato assumes that words gain their authority from their logical nature and from their
connection to the speaker; the spoken discourse (logos) has a father while written
discourse is orphaned. One cannot question a text as to what it means by saying this or
that in the same manner that one can question a speaker; spoken words have a filial
nature. Thus, for Plato logic resides outside of written language but is present in spoken

Latala 15
discussion. Derrida takes issue with Plato's conceptualization of writing based on its
privileging of logic outside of language:
There is no sense in doing without the concepts of metaphysics in order
to shake metaphysics. We have no language - no syntax and no lexicon
- which is foreign to this history; we can pronounce not a single
destructive proposition which has not already had to slip the form, the
logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest.
(Writing and Difference 280-281)
In "Plato's Pharmacy" Derrida understands the father-son relationship Plato uses to
define logic as being created through language rather than "naturally" residing outside of
it: "[T]he father is not the generator or procreator in any 'real' sense prior to or outside
all relation to language" (A Derrida Reader 119).
Derrida's attack on Plato's logo centric conceptualization of language returns the
point back to Baudrillard's examination of the connection between sign and reality. In
"Radical Thought" Baudrillard argues that the belief in "Truth" and the assumption that
reality is accurately rendered and represented in language is an intellectual crutch: "The
belief in truth is part of the elementary forms of religious life. It is a weakness of
understanding, of common-sense" ("Radical Thought"). Baudrillard means that "Truth"
as a constitutive part of a singular "Reality" asserts a one dimensional discourse. It is
exactly what Wittgenstein meant by assuming facts comprised the totality of the world,
for he wanted to eliminate all creative, multi-vocal, and pluralistic modes of
communication. Truth and reality imply having a type of faith; it is a dogmatic
construct, and it "is instituted as a sort of life-saving insurance, or as a perpetual

Latala 16
concession" ("Radical Thought"). With that concession in place, by necessity, one is
forced to devalue most subjective statements because they remain only relative and can
never be correct in an absolute sense. Thus everything that is opinion remains opinion
and can never gain the absolute legitimacy, brought by absolute proof that is ostensibly
evident in disciplines such as mathematics or science. It can never hold true for
everyone. But that subservience to the Truth ignores the specific uncompromising
differences and idiosyncrasies that are essential to any individual's identity, belief
system, and conception of the world. However, in post-modernity a rendition of any
event or of any life has value precisely because it does not strive to measure itself
against an absolute external version. It is its own truth and has its own value; thus,
"never again will a single story be told as though it were the only one" (Berger 133).
The problem with a universal correspondence between thought and reality, or
language and reality, is its objectivity. Ideologies, by their very pluralistic nature,
cannot all be correct since the thought-reality construct permits only one set of facts, the
correct set:
The irony of the facts, in their miserable reality, is precisely that
they are only what they are. At least, that is what they are supposed
to mean: "the real is the real." But, by this very fact (so to speak),
they are necessarily beyond [truth] because factual existence is
impossible: nothing is totally evidentiary without becoming an
enigma. Reality, in general, is too evident to be true. (Baudrillard,
"Radical Thought"; [truth] is Baudrillard's notation).

Latala 17
From a Eurocentric perspective, everything not Western is immediately defined as being
the other, the un-true, or the mistaken. This is often given the label of "subjectivity"
implying that a given conceptualization of the world is not the actual way things are; it is
only what people happen to believe. Religion is a perfect example of where ideologies
are readily contested and formulate various conceptualizations as to how a world
operates. Baudrillard asks, "Why would there be only one real world?" ("Radical
Thought"). While this question might seem innocent and naive, it is an essential
component of radical thought. It undermines the single-reality perspective and validates
pluralism of ideology, thought, and society without privileging or devaluing social
discourses at the expense of one another.
Baudrillard defines "radical thought" as "an ex-centering of the real world and,
consequently, [as being] alien to a dialectic which always plays on adversarial poles"
("Radical Thought"). The definition resists a binary construction. "Radical thought"
does not necessarily deny the concept of reality because "the radical prediction is always
that of a non-reality of the facts, of an illusion of the factual" ("Radical Thought"). The
issue returns to the problem of representation in language:
Any fusion of the thought (of writing, of language) with the real - a
so-called "faithfulness of the real" with a thought that has made
the real emerge in all of its configuration - is hallucinatory. It is
moreover the result of a total misinterpretation of language, of the
fact that language is an illusion in its very movement, that it caries
this continuation of emptiness or nothingness at the very core of

Latala 18
what it says, and that is in all its materiality a deconstruction of
what it signifies. ("Radical Thought")
Radical thought embraces language's inability to mediate reality without altering it.
This is exactly what Derrida means by claiming "there is nothing outside of the text
[there is no outside-text; il n 'y a pas de horstexte] " (158). It is not that reality does not
exist; however, every attempt of language to get outside of itself is unsuccessful. The
"doxa" of language is a perpetuation of its own limited functioning. The entire
argument of language and representation seems circular and doomed to return to the
taken-for-granted connection between the signified and signifier; namely, is this
construct referring to reality or not?
Poetic writing is an affirmation of the ambiguous nature of language precisely
because its primary concern is neither with fact nor with representation. Poetry seeks to
create rather than mediate experience; it is not concerned with reality but with its own
illusionary power: "The objective of writing is to alter its object, to seduce it, to make it
disappear from its own vision. Writing aims at a total resolution, a poetic resolution as
Saussure would have it" (Baudrillard "Radical Thought"). The nature of radical thought
and poetry is not to seek answers: "Radical thought does not decipher. It anathematizes
and 'anagrammatizes' concepts and ideas, exactly what poetic language does with
words" (Baudrillard).4 Baudrillard suggests that if radical thought is an essential part of
poetry, then by definition it must make possible a discourse that resists homogenization.

3

The translation may mislead to a conceptualization with an inside / outside boundary. However, this is
inaccurate as Derrida is questioning the inside / outside construct to begin with.
4
Baudrillard is referring to radical thought's (and by correlation, writing's) illusionary power; it has the
power to curse and denounce (anathematize) as well as to code or to make into its own anagram
(anagrammatize).

Latala 19
Radical thought refuses the "true" and "false" binaries. Since any binary eliminates all
differences on both sides, a binary cannot be free, passionate, or poetic.
Baudrillard argues for "a passion of the artificial [and] a passion for illusion"
("Radical Thought"). He is referring to the recognition and embracement of writing
because the very nature of poetic writing is its ability to create a multiplicity of
discourses. Similarity, Derrida points out that losing oneself within the confines of a
language is the key to creativity:
To grasp the operation of creative imagination at the greatest possible
proximity to it, one must turn oneself toward the invisible interior of
poetic freedom. One must be separated from oneself in order to be
reunited with the blind origin of the work in its darkness. This
experience of conversion, which founds the literary act (writing or
reading), is such that the very words "separation" and "exile," which
always designate the interiority of a breaking-off with the world and
making of one's way within it, cannot directly manifest the experience;
they can only indicate it through a metaphor. (Derrida, Writing and
Difference 8)
In this manner, poetic word play challenges the dogmatic assertions of straight
correspondence to a "natural" and objective world because a large aspect of poetics
involves presenting the same things in new and different ways and in new voices. To
assume that language reflects what is already present out there without adding its
difference to it is to validate the cliche. But it is the metaphor that remains the central

Latala 20
component of writing as it transfers the name of one thing to another thing with a
different name; any application of a name to a thing is always metaphorical.5
The quest for meaning has preoccupied empiricism, Western science, and
religion to the extent that the real has become a holy grail. This pursuit and this mode of
thought have become deeply ingrained in Western society to the extent where they are
seldom questioned, and the assumptions behind them are taken for granted. The
consideration of alternative truths legitimizes other conceptualizations which are the
founding blocks for individual and collective cultural identity. Thus, to challenge a
binary construct which gives power to those who propagate it becomes meaningful
because it validates one's own sense of culture and identity. The key premise here is to
refuse to legitimate the "other" external reality and validate the "inner" linguistic one.
This act is a form of passion which '"wins' in the free and spiritual usage of language, in
the spiritual game of writing. And it only disappears when language is used to a limited
finality, its most common usage perhaps, that of communication" (Baudrillard "Radical
Thought"). In this manner, language provides a platform to legitimize an exploration
and questioning of its own inner workings. As it concerns poetry, it is precisely this
play at a fundamental level that roots one in the linguistic realm and bases itself on the
relationship between its own intrinsic system and its renderings.
On one level, poetry requires both the reader and the writer to attempt to
transcend the divide between language and reality. The fact that the gap cannot be
entirely transcended through language is inconsequential. Rather, the act of challenging
that division is essential to how individuals formulate their identities:

5

The translator of Jacques Derrida's Writing and Difference, Alan Bass, makes this observation in
relation to the apparent non-metaphorical qualities of the verb "to be." See note 18, page 303.

Latala 21
It is the peculiarity of human life that here and here alone
a being has arisen from the whole endowed and entitled to
detach the whole from himself as a world and to make it
opposite himself. (Buber 99)
The writer has the playful challenge to mediate reality as accurately as she is able with
the full knowledge that she is offering something to be experienced and challenged
rather than something that is to be assimilated or accepted. In doing so, she must bring
herself as close as possible to that which she wants to convey, and she needs to do this in
a cohesive manner. She will have the full disposal of the language at her command to
fulfill her task; however, she should not fall into the trap of language writing and write
only for language's sake. In other words, the writer needs to understand that writing is a
social discourse that invariably exists in the social sphere and cannot be bound and
isolated to only one realm of that sphere.6 For Instance, George Stanley's concept of
"aboutism" jokingly suggests that poetry should be about something.7 Stanley is voicing
his displeasure towards poetry that removes itself from social contexts by being strictly
about its own linguistic components. Such poetry can be about anywhere. It has no, and
needs no, geographical markers to situate it because it is not about any specific sense of
place and the associated lives, discourses, and issues that are relevant to that place.
Stanley's poetry, on the other hand, is largely and specifically situated to the extent that
if one were to replace all markers of place, the entire meaning and significance of his
poems would collapse. Key examples of his poems to this effect include "Terrace 79,"

6

This notion of writing builds on Soja's ideas of spaciality which are discussed in Chapter 2.
"Aboutism" suggests that a poem should be about something in the world in a way which is significant
on some social or personal level. The concept is a response to contemporary poetry that is confined to its
own self to the extent where there is nothing beyond its own abstraction and its own anecdotal functions.
7

Latala 22
"Terrace '87," "San Francisco's Gone," "San Jose Poem," "Gentle Northern Summer,"
"At Andy's," and "Terrace Landscapes."
A poetry reader comes to terms with the meanings and experiences that are
rendered in language at a level that is a response to some aspect of his identity. It is not
enough for a poem to be well constructed and well crafted. For it to be art, at some level
poetry must be capable of challenging dogmatic thought by presenting issues which
challenge beliefs and ideologies of individuals and which are capable of being debated.8
In other words, poetry should not repeat conventional thought. The same holds true in
respect to poetic mechanics where the use of tired and cliche expressions and techniques
is considered poor writing. Why then should poetry not be held accountable, at least to
some extent, in terms of its subject manner? If it cannot spark a significant discourse, it
fails to challenge any aspect of prevailing dogmatic thought or otherwise. Roland
Barthes makes a distinction between two types of text in The Pleasure of the Text: "Text
of pleasure: the text that contents, fills, grants euphoria; the text that comes from culture
and does not break with it, is linked to a comfortable practice of reading" (14). Such a
text, or work, can be identified with any number of kitsch movies, television programs,
poems, short stories, and novels that have no socially significant core other than their
superficial qualities like, for instance, romance novels. The second type of text Barthes
identifies encompasses socially significant discourse:
Text of bliss: the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that
discomforts (perhaps to the point of certain boredom), unsettles the
reader's historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency

8

This is not to suggest that poetics cannot re-affirm; however, any re-affirmation is necessarily a part of a
larger literary and social context that is not dogmatic but a site of contestation and contradiction.

Latala 23
of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with
language. (14)
These types of text typically face resistance as they challenge mainstream conventions.
Their aim is not to please the reader or to unsettle the reader but to address topics often
related to disenfranchised and disempowered people.
Considering these two types of text in relation to simulacra, language will
perpetuate the "meanings" it shapes. Some meanings will result from an approximation
of the external reality individuals interact with on a phenomenological level while others
will increase in distance from the real into the realm of pure simulation. In this fashion
language has the ability not just to approximate and misrepresent but to put forth
creations of its own making that are disguised in legitimacy. Language can put forth any
ideology, even one that is its own pure simulacrum where the connection between reality
and language is nonexistent; primarily this occurs in power relations. For instance, the
naturalization of the sexes into essentialist categories can constitute a type of
simulacrum. In order for these simulacra to be identified and considered as self-creating
constructs that have significance, one must engage with the material and overcome the
concept of reality as a realm of pure otherness. Questions of an external reality and the
means of representation are secondary to issues concerning the built up constructs that
are created, legitimized, and contested in societies. By embracing the arbitrary quality
of language, poetry does not preach a natural and validating reality; it creates its own
meanings that are no less and no more significant.

Latala 24
Chapter 2
Redefining Space
The key problem of the definition of language presented here can be understood
in a different light if paralleled to the space-time debate central to postmodern
geography, namely examining the affirmation of time at the expense of space. In the
last hundred years, the Western world has exemplified an obsession with time,
prioritizing history over geography: "Space was treated as the dead, the fixed, the
undialectical, the immobile. Time, on the contrary, was richness, fecundity, life,
dialectic" (Foucault 70). In addition, the challenges of defining space plaguing
contemporary social theory are made difficult by "the historical debate [that] has been
monopolized by the physical-mental dualism almost to the exclusion of social space"
(Soja, Postmodern Geographies 120). This is a dualism, or more directly a
correspondence theory, which affects not only space but also the language of place and
space, and it fosters a singularity of meaning.
Edward W. Soja's work on space and geography pushes for a "reassertion
towards a spatialized ontology" where he aims for "a geography of simultaneous
relations and meanings that are tied together by a spatial rather than a temporal logic"
(Postmodern Geographies 1). The idea of space as spatiality, as a symbiotic and
reflexive relationship between physical, mental, and social spaces, faces resistance
rooted in the habit and history of Western thought. Traditionally space has been viewed
in an oversimplified fashion as a mere venue for activity, as an abstract distance rooted
in mathematical figures, or as an abstract of its own somehow separate from human
activity in general. Space is defined as nothing short of an overriding constant: the

Latala 25
unlimited or incalculably great three-dimensional realm or expanse in which all material
objects are located and in which all events occur. Some more specific definitions of
space define it as a continuous extension in all directions that is devoid of matter, an
extent sufficient for some purpose, the dimensional place occupied by a body, and an
empty part or void. These definitions usefully fit into a capitalist mindset where
enterprises are comprised on the basis of manipulating and using passive objects, or
commodities, be they spaces, raw materials, products, or even ideas.
Capitalist ideas of progress, expansion, and innovation have made it difficult to
conceptualize space cohesively. Space has typically been considered as a site of
economy where it gains value from its designation or function towards a means of
production, resource extraction, development, or infrastructure. When space is left
unused, there is a sense that it is without value unless its use has been designated for a
future event or unless someone will find an economically creative means of using it.
However, "the social relations of production have a social existence only insofar as they
exist spacially; they project themselves into a space, they inscribe themselves in a space
while producing it" (Lefebvre qtd. in Soja, Postmodern Geographies 127). The relations
of economy, production, and property have been the major forces in Western discourse
over the last hundred years:
There is a distinct bias or distortion of the way Americans and Europeans
tend to perceive the political organization of space. Conventional
Western perspectives on spatial organization are powerfully shaped by
the concept of property, in which pieces of territory are viewed as
"commodities" capable of being bought, sold, or exchanged at the market

Latala 26
place. Space is viewed as being subdivided into compartments whose
boundaries are "objectively" determined through the mathematical and
astronomically biased techniques of surveying and cartography. (Soja,
The Political Organization of Space 9)
Seeing and treating spaces as commodities is congruent to capitalism especially in the
context of globalization; however, the propensity to do so creates the illusion that this is
the only way of viewing space. Not only has this notion of space "extended its image
beyond the local context of landholding and property ownership to pervade the full
spectrum of spatial political organization," it has given a singular impression that "with
only a few exceptions (generally involving unpopulated areas), [space] is entirely
'filled'" (9). Yet this overarching notion is quite new. The Western notion of space "is
irrevocably based on exploitation. [...] Land (terrestrial space) is a 'thing' which
modern Westerners cut into pieces that they call parcels which they can then buy and
sell on the market. Such an activity is very rare among societies of the world - it is
recent in our own" (Bohannan 174-175).
In Northern British Columbia, space is invariably tied to natural-resource-based
modes of production, in particular logging operations. Between 1980 and 1987 the
British Columbia Forest Service logged the Bowron River valley at an unprecedented
scale. What resulted was a clearcut measuring roughly fifty three square kilometres, or
53 000 hectares:
In the Bowron River valley of northern British Columbia there is a
clearcut so large that in the early 1980s, orbiting astronauts were able to
see it during daylight hours. Foresters in Northern B.C. claimed that,

Latala 27
along with the Great Wall of China, it was the only human alteration of
the planet that could be distinguished. What they saw was the 20th
century's largest contiguous forestry clearcut, larger than any in the
Amazon or the former Soviet Union. (Fawcett, xv)
The logging extracted approximately 15 million square metres of lumber valued at over
$800 million, $27 million of which the government collected in stumpage fees (45). The
clearcut was also reforested through tree planting, and over nearly two decades the
forest, in a sense, has returned:
There's been no serious attempt to provide biodiversity, which the
industry tends to equate with underbrush and competitive noncommercial species whether they admit it or not. To them, these are
farms for trees, and they're not about to deliberately introduce weeds or
even mix together commercial species to confuse the next harvest. (283)
The above account suggests that the B.C. Forest service operates with a singular
mandate, but supporters of the forest service and its goals would attack Brian Fawcett on
his lack of scientific expertise and in-depth research, particularly since his work, Virtual
Clearcut, is largely opinion, a first-person account quite removed from the hard facts.
The value in Brian Fawcett's work is that it presents a foil against largely
unchallenged and unquestioned economic power relations in Prince George. Fawcett's
unregulated voice is a rarity in that it represents a small-town sensibility but does so
from a metropolitan literary centre, Toronto. There have been few frank national
publications about the economic reality of cities like Prince George and about northern
fringe communities. One recent example is Sarah de Leeuw's Unmarked in which she

Latala 28
explores and examine places she has called home along Highway 16 that are too small to
appear on maps.9 To most people those places do not exist. De Leeuw and Fawcett add
to the intertextual dialogue by putting social, political, economic, personal, and interpersonal elements of northern communities on the map. The accounts are not absolute,
neither are they intended to be so, and their value is precisely in their subjectivity and
propensity to raise questions and to resist stereotypical representations.
The management and use of forested space within Northern British Columbia is
problematic in that it asserts a monopoly over forest management; it asserts a purely
singular ideology which, by its very nature, cannot help but to be self serving. When
facing the spruce beetle infestation of the Bowron River Valley, not unlike the current
pine beetle infestation of British Columbia, the central issue has been and continues to
be economic. The stability of the forest sector is studied and managed much more in
respect to a probable economic provincial fallout and less so in respect to issues of
environmentalism and impact on economies of single-industry towns like Prince
George, McKenzie, Fort. St. James, and Vanderhoof. Because Northern B.C. relies
heavily on its timber industry, the economic aspect of the problem is paramount.
However, the interpretation of the function of space in a purely industrial sense asserts a
fallacy because the logic behind it ignores all spheres but the economical ones:
"Spaciality cannot be completely separated from physical and psychological spaces"
(Soja, Postmodern Geographies 121). To do so is to assert a type of propaganda:

9

Sarah De Leeuw's Unmarked is a collection of autobiographical creative essays about her life in small
northern fishing and logging communities that are often unacknowledged by urban centres. De Leeuw's
essays originally comprised her creative thesis for the degree of MA in Interdisciplinary Studies in 2003 at
the University of Northern British Columbia.

Latala 29
There can thus be no autonomous naturalism or social physics, with its
own separate causal logic, in the materialist interpretation of human
geography and history. In the context of society, nature, like spaciality, is
socially produced and reproduced despite its appearance of objectivity
and separation. The space of nature is thus filled with politics and
ideology, with relations of production, with possibility of being
significantly transformed. (121)
The concept of transformation does not necessarily need to be connected to resource
management. Neither is there an implication that human agents need to be directly
involved in and responsible for the change.
A rebuttal to this one-dimensional logic may assert that the B.C. Forest Service
does take into account opposing and sometimes contradicting ideologies of
sustainability, environmentalism, preservation, and ecology. Theoretically this line of
argument has merits, yet in practice Northern British Columbians are shown a different
view. The ideology that the forest service presents of itself is simulacral in that the
discourse surrounding its own practices is fragmented and hidden. As Fawcett states,
"since there is no agreed-to, acknowledged-in-public history to the B.C. Forest Service,
then [one] version is as valid as any" (49). The B.C. Forest Service Research Branch
website states that the mission of the Forest Sciences Program is
to provide innovative solutions to high-priority forest resources
management problems in British Columbia and to seek opportunities to
advance resource stewardship based on sound scientific principles, so that
Ministry responsibilities under the Ministry of Forests Act, Forest

Latala 30
Practices Code of British Columbia Act, Forest Act, Range Act, and other
related statutes can be fulfilled. (British Columbia, Ministry of Forests
and Range)
Furthermore, the purposes and function of the ministry as outlined in the Ministry of
Forests Act include the following:
(a) encourage maximum productivity of the forest and range resources in
British Columbia;
(b) manage, protect and conserve the forest and range resources of the
government, having regard to the immediate and long term economic and
social benefits they may confer on British Columbia;
(c) plan the use of the forest and range resources of the government, so
that the production of timber and forage, the harvesting of timber, the
grazing of livestock and the realization of fisheries, wildlife, water,
outdoor recreation and other natural resource values are coordinated and
integrated, in consultation and cooperation with other ministries and
agencies of the government and with the private sector;
(d) encourage a vigorous, efficient and world competitive timber
processing industry in British Columbia;
(e) assert the financial interest of the government in its forest and range
resources in a systematic and equitable manner. (British Columbia,
Ministry of Forests Act).
These mandates are solely economic, and financial government interests remain the sole
operating mandate. Environmentalism is only considered insofar as it does not

Latala 31
negatively affect production. There is nothing in these mandates which contradicts
Fawcett's claim that the government sees forests as farms for trees. With these issues in
mind, several questions need to be addressed. How do singular and, for the most part,
stereotypical Northern British Columbian practices of defining and understanding
Northern B.C.'s landscapes affect its residents? More specifically, how do limited
definitions of landscape influence ideas of belonging, identity, and home?
Northern British Columbia and central cities like Prince George continually
presents themselves in limited ways. The warped pavement of Highway 97 cutting
through the centre of Prince George is a constant reminder of all the lumber that has
been trucked through over the decades. The visual parade of logging trucks, forestry
and private company pick-up trucks equipped with tidy tanks and winches, and eighteen
wheelers loaded with processed lumber in its various forms give a singular message with
no foil. It is also a reminder of the prevalent meanings that one sees in northern
landscapes. A local rock radio station, FM 94, often broadcasts urgent job opportunities
for experienced logging truck drivers and skidder operators. One advertisement in
particular illustrates a dominant message:
I'm walking here in the forest thinking to myself, "What's in my future?"
Heck, that's like asking, "What's the future for this tree?" It could
become a two-by-four, a door, furniture, plywood, a guitar, or a book.
The possibilities for one tree are endless. Huh, I guess with a career in
forestry, they are for me too. (McGregor Model Forest Association)
In fact, one tends to see more stumps than trees in Prince George. Most patches of pine
trees within city limits and around residential spaces have been cut down because of the

Latala 32
pine beetle infestation, in part to create housing lots due to the booming real state
market. Similarly the city continues to sell off plots of land to developers, and no effort
is made to protect patches of birch and other trees that remain in what is becoming a
treeless suburban sprawl. Eco-sustainability, bio-diversity, air quality, civic planning,
transportation infrastructure, and inter-personal issues of belonging are being ignored;
those voices are absent from the landscape, and the concept of social space and its praxis
remains limited at best.
Social space, or spatiality, is socially produced in that it has its own powers and
functions in relation to the political and social activities that take place in it. This
inhabited space is formed and shaped by individuals as much as it, in turn, shapes and
forms those individuals. Soja's spatial logic calls for a symbiosis of social space, the
site of human activity and interaction; physical space, the actual distance between
entities and objects; and cognitive space, the mental representations, ideas, and
memories of lived-in spaces. The effect of disseminating and thereby reinforcing a
singular message of landscapes propagates an anti-spatial idea of what is a complex
relationship between physical, social, and cognitive spaces. These spaces inform
individuals through context, memory, and experience and constitute a sense of
individuality, being, and belonging.
While social space is distinguishable from cognitive space as well as physical
space, this does not lead to three separate and independent categories, and it would be a
mistake to think so:
As socially produced space, spatiality can be distinguished from the
physical space of material nature and the mental space of cognition and

Latala 33
representation, each of which is used and incorporated into the social
construct but cannot be conceptualized as its equivalent. [...] The
classical debates in the history of science over the absolute versus relative
qualities of physical space exemplify the former, while attempts to
explore the personal illustrate the latter. (Soja, Postmodern Geographies
120)
The North holds a plurality of socially significant and valid meanings; however,
individual identity suffers by being presented only one type of answer:
Human subjectivity, in all its uniqueness - what Guattari calls its
'singularity' - is as endangered as those rare species that are disappearing
from the planet every day. It is up to us to resist this mass-media
homogenization, which is both desingularizing and infantilizing, and
instead invent new ways to achieve singularization of existence. (Pindar
and Sutton 6)
Like Soja, what Guattari is calling attention to is the paralyzing and homogenizing
effects that ensue from presenting the wondrous, intricate, and indelible nuances of life
in a standardized manner. Guattari defines "ecosophy" as "an ethico-political
articulation between the three ecological registers (the environment, social relations and
human subjectivity)" (28). The concept of ecosophy is also linked to Baudrillard's work
in that centres of economic power tend to disseminate simulacral and homogenizing
messages.
Around 1958 the Prince George City Council under advice from the Chamber of
Commerce titled Prince George as the Western White Spruce Capital of the World

Latala 34
(Fawcett 12). The title neither made sense nor gave accurate distinction to the region:
"Shouldn't it be the Spruce Capital of the World [...]? Claiming that you're the
Western White Spruce Capital of the World [is] a little like saying that the Fraser River
[is] the Largest Fraser River in the World' (12). The choice of title was done
predominantly to portray Prince George as a purely industrial town and help lumber
sales. It is no coincidence that a majority of businesses use the same strategies by
associating profitability with the lumber industry. The two largest malls are named
"Pine Centre Mall" and "Parkwood Mall," and "appropriately" perhaps their aesthetic
represents a larger picture: "there are no trees left / at the pine centre mall. I could care /
less" (McKinnon "Sex at Thirty-One"). Literally, McKinnon's lines suggest a veiled
concern for the visual representation of the mall, and by extension the city. Yet the
phrase, "I could care less" is frequently used to express sarcasm, and through its use one
gets a sense of the general Prince George attitude towards itself. There is no open
activism or wide public concern for the lack of trees and the resulting anti-aesthetic
presentation due to commercial and residential development. Interestingly, the city
partook in city tree planting drives in order to counteract the effects of the recent pine
beetle infestation.
Spatiality and ecosophy focus on the inter-relationships and interconnections
between inseparable areas of human existence. Similarly the value and significance of
writing, a realm of ideas inextricably linked to every aspect of human life, falls into the
same symbiotic and inseparable ties. To categorize poetic landscapes, for example, as
being somehow separate and different from physical landscapes, is to valorize one

Latala 35
pervading mode of thought, the economical one, at the expense of individual identity
and basic freedom:
It is quite wrong to make a distinction between action on the psyche, the
socius and the environment. Refusal to face up to the erosion of these
three areas, as the media would have us do, verges on a strategic
infantalization of opinion and a destructive neutralization of democracy.
(Guattari41)
Guattari defines "dominant methods of valorizing human activity [as] those of the
imperium [Latin: 'authority'] of a global market that destroys specific value systems and
puts on the same plane of equivalence: material assets, cultural assets, wildlife, etc." (29;
[Latin: 'authority'] is Guattari's notation).
To think in terms of ecosophy is to understand the value and quality of
individualized perspectives, both from various distinct groups and from individuals, in
so far as they actively attempt to value the environment, social relations, and the psyche
in context. This valuation cannot occur without trying to balance these three areas as
equally important factors in human existence and being. It also requires broader
awareness of and resistance against mass-media dogma: "We need to 'kick the habit' of
sedative discourse, particularly the 'fix' of television, in order to be able to apprehend
the world through the interchangeable lenses or points of view of the three ecologies"
(41-42).
Poetry is one means of actively addressing and resisting the homogenizing mass
media. On a broader level, poetry is able to create discussion beyond the immediate
literary levels to the external events that are the catalysts for the poems themselves.

Latala 36
Poetry from fringe areas, small towns and communities in regions like Northern B.C., is
often filled with ideology and politics:
Everything in them [minor literatures] is political. In major literatures, in
contrast, the individual concern (familial, marital, and so on) joins with
other no less individual concerns, the social milieu serving as a mere
environment or background. [...] Minor literature is completely different;
its crumpled space thus becomes all the more necessary, indispensable,
magnified, because a whole other story is vibrating with it. In this way,
the family triangle connects to other triangles commercial, economic,
bureaucratic, juridical that determine its value. (Deleuze and Guattari 17)
In Northern B.C. minor literature is often political, environmental, ecological, and very
much different from writing in major metropolitan centres. John Harris's
autobiographical books Small Rain and Other Art address Harris's experiences of
program cuts, work politics, union trips, and layoffs at the College of New Caledonia.
Barry McKinnon's Pulp Log is essentially a metaphor for a writer's psyche in a northern
industrial town, and it addresses the challenges of dealing with "the hell of it, this
separation from self and other, self/ and self (4). Similarly George Stanley's poetry
deals with living in Northern B.C. His poetic voice rises out of life in the north without
sentimentality or projections of natural beauty that are often associated with B.C. in
general: "People of this north will have to change / their ways (some newspaper)"
(Gentle Northern Summer 5). Stanley also often juxtaposes northern life against his
experiences in urban centres such as San Francisco and Vancouver: "Vancouver - being
there - feeling marginalized - out of it" (Gentle Northern Summer 64).

Latala 37
Chapter 3
The Poetic Landscape
Poetry affords as many means of creating and representing landscape as
language usage allows. Some landscape representations are considered to have accuracy
in the sense that they claim a faithful mediation of an external reality. Others seem
purely elusive or suggestive and are segregated to the realm of cognition: an internal
otherness somehow separate from the "reality" people inhabit. British geographers
Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels contend landscapes are purely mental entities, a
concept challenged by anthropologists Christopher Tilley and Tim Ingold who insist on
a physical aspect of landscape. The debate is a metaphysical one. If conceptualizations
and discourses of landscape are founded in the inseparable and interdependent workings
of language and thought, then landscape indeed seems to be cognitive. However, while
thought and language constitute an experience on their own, they are not the source of
the experience of being in the world. As De Saussure argues, words do not stand for
pre-existing concepts. At best they are mediators of experience but are limited since
language cannot step outside of itself. The problematic tendency has been to cut up
human existence, encapsulate it in a petri dish, and conceptualize and discuss it as if
though it were disconnected from the source. Yet, as has been shown, in Soja's concept
of spaciality and Guattari's concept of ecosophy, social, physical, and mental elements
of life are inextricably linked. Similarly, landscapes whether poetic or physical, cannot
be defined in binary terms of thought and reality and treated as separate and distinct
categories exiting independently from the social sphere.

Latala 38
While poetic landscapes are cognitive, they are neither entirely fictitious nor
entirely representative of reality because their significance as cultural symbols depends
on a mutual interplay between social experience and the analysis of that experience.
First, landscape is more than scenic land or a formative container of human activities.
To change Shakespeare's metaphor, it is a living stage. As such, its nature is neither
natural nor constructed but intertwined into every fabric of human activity. Second,
language constitutes poetic landscapes through poetic and linguistic conventions,
functions, and devices that are as valid as any form of communication. Third, the
meanings of poetic landscapes arise from the static and fluid elements inside and outside
the text: the social sphere. These outer social contexts are concerned with appropriation
and power, and they are usually evident in contested landscapes where varying views
and ideologies clash. Fourth, meanings of landscape arise from a phenomenological
apprehension of the text in relation to the reader's experiences, but they are all bound in
social space and social discourse. Words themselves are not passive labels; they are a
further means of creating a construct and exercising power over a landscape. Fifth, the
meanings of a poetic landscape are neither entirely different from those of real
landscapes nor are they any less significant as far as representations are concerned.
They represent not "the" way to apprehend a place but "a" way: a definition that resists
homogenization. While the manner of apprehension is individualized, it is not to say
that poetic landscapes are incapable of constituting a discourse of collective
significance. Finally, poetic landscapes function to represent, create, recreate, remind,
and augment. They also can employ the concept of the simulacrum by creating
simulation. To reiterate Baudrillard, simulation does not hide truth as in the case of

Latala 39
dissimulation. A patient who dissimulates lies about his illness, but the illness is there.
Simulation requires a production of an effect without a correlating cause. This is where
the patient produces a symptom but the underlying cause is never there; the illness does
not exist but one assumes it does. Thus, landscapes can be labeled, portrayed, or
encoded in order to create meanings that are their own pure simulacrum. In the face of
the outlined functions of landscape, the reader is forced to confront and reconcile
cognitive representations of landscape as she would with other representations such as
maps or histories, each being capable of simulation and lending a stage for debate and
contestation. However, coming to terms with the poetic landscape is similar to living in
the world and confronting spatial relations; the latter happens through the act of
performance, the former invariably occurs through active thinking, but both require
engagement. In addition the poetic discourse, its principles and history, is intertwined
into the fabric of social relations and does not only have its own overriding logic.
The interdisciplinary study of landscape has produced a number of definitions of
the term. Not only are some of the definitions misleading and contradictory, but the
tendency to use landscape as a buzz word is prevalent. Some of the more common
conceptions of landscape define it as nature, aesthetic, artifact, problem, habitat, system,
wealth, ideology, history, and place (Meinig 34-47). These definitions mostly
conceptualize landscape in terms of the other: an entity to be used, controlled, settled,
admired, or understood. Conceptualizing landscape as an artifact asserts that nature is
only a backdrop: "So comprehensive and powerful has been man's role in changing the
face of the earth that the whole landscape has become an artifact. Ideologically this is a
view of man as creator, not only emancipated from, but the conqueror of, nature"

Latala 40
(Meinig 37). These definitions fail to articulate the essential feature of landscape:
landscapes shape individuals as much as individuals shape landscapes. Consequently
the relationship between people and landscapes is neither purely physical nor purely
mental since it is rooted in experience that occurs in a place and in a social sphere.
Furthermore, the way that a landscape will affect individuals will vary: "Different ethnic
or cultural groups might share the same physical landscape, but their mental landscapes
may still be totally different" (Keller 90). Keller proposes the following definition of
landscape:
a mental landscape + a physical landscape = a cultural landscape (90)
Based on the above model, a poetic landscape can be conceptualized as follows:
any cultural landscape + poetic meditation = poetic landscape
The central aspect of this definition is the written cultural landscape which is necessarily
rooted and captured in language but is a reflection of a broader discourse outside the
page.
Intertextuality accounts for one aspect of meaning outside of the text. The
definition of intertextuality is "a relation between two or more TEXTS which has an
effect upon the way in which the intertext (that is, the text within which other texts
reside or echo their PRESENCE) is READ" (Hawthorne 182). In other words, as poetry
can be written in response to other poetry in terms of theory, form, content, or issues of
contestation, it will add further layers of signification. The process in not just linear
where the past influences the present, but it also causes different meanings to reverberate
back to prior works and makes possible their reinterpretation. The continuation of
poetics reshapes the poetry of the past. Granted, these connections may be less

Latala41
accessible to the general public since they depend on a deeper knowledge of a larger
body of work. Nonetheless, most poets are scholars of their fields and responses to
trends in poetic movements and ideological underpinnings constitute a part of their
repertoire. Ultimately however the meanings poetry can evoke are dependant on the
interplay between reader and text.
There is an overt yet seemingly passive war of ideas occurring in Western
society, and it is rooted not just in place but in writing about place. In most cases this is
due to a dominant power trying to assert its own singularity onto the world, as in the
case of capitalism:
Post-industrial capitalism, which I prefer to describe as Integrated World
Capitalism (IWC), tends increasingly to decentre its sites of power,
moving away from structures producing goods and services towards
structures producing signs, syntax and - in particular, through the control
which it exercises over the media, advertising, opinion polls, etc. subjectivity. (Guattari 47)
The economic value of the sign has become so powerful that ideas, concepts, and values
associated with products have come to outweigh the value of the actual products
themselves. Individuals have become more interested in commercials about
commodities than in the commodities themselves. This proliferation of ideas has moved
outside the realm of consumer economics to encompass a wider range of beliefs and
attitudes. Arguments have been made by Bateson, for instance, that an ecological battle
for survival is occurring in the realm of ideas (500-501). Bateson argues that specific
precepts have become invariably intertwined into mainstream mentality to the extent

Latala 42
that they have become the dominant and unquestioned dogma of our times. There is a
preference for the individual over the collective, an over-reliance on technology, a right
for absolute control over the environment, an overriding faith in economic determinism,
and a perception of people and the environment as other and as an enemy to be
conquered (Bateson 500).
The idea of landscape as nature, an entity to be tamed and controlled, is often
associated with Northern British Columbian fringe communities in part because of their
harsh winter climates, histories as resource frontiers, and current economic dependence
on lumber. Here individuals understand how ideas are presented to commodify forests
because the lumber industry remains the major economic pulse of their communities and
the source of their livelihood. Understanding resource extraction as a one-way
relationship is prevalent in Northern British Columbian poetics and there is an
awareness of and a contestation against the manipulation and proliferation of
singularizing ideas to that effect:
The idea of the wilderness
was introduced in the 50's
when the cabins were burned
as preparations for industry.

Back then, before lies were produced
in factories, people lived across the land.
(Belford, Pathways into the Mountains 54)

Latala 43
An extreme sense of connection to the land pervades writing and identity in Northern
B.C. particularly since "the people of the north who have felt, and still feel themselves to
be citizens, have now become exploitable in another way: as semi-finished consumers"
(Stanley, "Northern Poets" 57). The landscape does not function just as a backdrop or a
scene of activity. Instead the places where writers live "have been the subject of the
poems as lived experience. In a sense there is no background in the north. All is figure,
all is ground" (57).
The battle of ideas within the socio-economic and inter-personal spheres
particular but not exclusive to poets from Northern British Columbia is evident in a
struggle for identity. Being from up here, one gains an acute understanding of the
marginal and cliched manner in which the North is presented by people and institutions
from major metropolitan areas:
The urban centres of end power - Toronto, and to a lesser extent,
Vancouver - are satisfied by poetic representations of our north, and of
the hinterlands in general, that reinforce their prejudices about the kinds
of lives that are lived up here. As Belford puts it in an unpublished essay,
"there are language zones in Vancouver and Toronto. In those cities ...
it's as though the north I know doesn't exist, as though we northerners
write in invisible ink." (Lainsbury 4)
Northern writers Barry McKinnon and Ken Belford have referred to this as 'placism'
which Robert Budde elaborates on as "the complete erasure of the colonized culture or
its replacement with a comforting and oversimplified misrepresentation [where] the aim

Latala 44
of this cultural control is to secure a willing and demoralized resource to prop up the
centre of power" (Budde Writing Way North).
The struggle for identity and representation presents itself in the literary sphere
where poets from fringe communities tend to be de-legitimized by literary centres of
power on the basis of not having adequate intellectual capital such as university
affiliations or academic credentials. In essence, a bias of privileging university-educated
writers largely on the basis of "acceptable" techniques tends to support the idea of only
certain types of poetics. In "The Journeyman" Ken Belford offers a counterpoint to this
approach to writing and poetics:
I'm a working class poet, a child of farmers.
I worked in the mills and sorted lumber.
I never taught school and I'm not celebrated.
Can't change that and can't change this.
There wasn't money to send me to school.
I know how to put up hay by hand, how to
make

handles,

how

to sharpen

and

shape, how to join timbres. I lived where
scholars don't. Little is known of me. Only a
few are like

me. I'm Canadian and the

author of these poems. I'm not invited to
read in the universities. They don't know
who I am. I learned to write in the middle
of

the

night

when

work

was

done. (Ecologue 40)

Latala 45
Thus, for a poet like Belford university affiliation is not a necessary element of poetry.
Poetry can serve as a means of reflection, introspection, commentary, analysis, or
criticism of one's self and of the sociopolitical climate of a given region. The ideology
pervading a poem is free to take precedence over a poem's other components and
aspects. In this manner, the poet is not subject to career risks that political writing may
entail.
Much of contemporary Canadian poetry is not know for being overtly political.
Breathing Fire: Canada's New Poets (1996) and Breathing Fire 2: Canada's New Poets
(2004), anthologies compiled by Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane, hold interesting
assortments of poetry. In the first anthology many poets address personal themes,
particularly love, relationships, and sexuality. Ideas and experiences of relationships are
explored in Lesley-Anne Bourne's "Think of Him," "Risks," and "Cars and Fast-Food";
Suzanne Buffam's "Drive Thru" and "Astronomical Love"; and Karen Connelly's "The
Word is Absurd." Some poems that delve into sexuality include Mark Cochrane's
"Latent" and Thea Browning's "Lost in the Transaction." Many other pieces use family
relationships to foreground unresolved tensions, loss, and illness. Other pieces such as
Alison Calder's "Imagine a Picture" deal with gender politics and detrimental
associations around questioning what it means to be a woman. For the most part, the
poetry is intra-personal and emotionally accessible. The second anthology showcases
poems with a different variety of forms. Several longer poems presented in sections
include Zoe Whittall's "Six Thoughts on a Parkdale Porch" and Chandra Mayor's
"Crisis House" as well as portions of larger works such as excerpts from Ray Hsu's
"Benjamin: Nine Epilogues" and sections from Steven Price's Anatomy of Keys in

Latala 46
which he explores the nature of the metaphor. In some regards the poetry touches on
world politics such as Brad Cran's "S-21 Cambodia"; however, there are few references
to specifically localized political, ideological, ecological, and environmental concerns:
That other poetry is what I call the "poetry of the absent reference," and it
has absolutely nothing in it about gender or race, or class, or the so-called
economy, or ecology, or consumption. It's interesting to take notice of
what's missing in those poems, what's intentionally being left out.
(Belford, "Viewed from the Mountains" 10)
In a way, many of the poems could be about anywhere; the poetic landscapes seldom
foreground the poems. Current events and local and regional politics seldom exist in
those poetic landscapes.
This is not to suggest that there is something wrong with writing from universities
or with Breathing Fire and Breathing Fire 2 anthologies, but Belford regrets that more
poets do not "come at language from a different perspective" ("Viewed from the
Mountains" 4). For Belford there is a distinct difference between a writer who has lived
in a place and has understood its significance as a "complex living organism" and an
urban writer who writes about regions that are relatively unknown to him and in which
the writer has not lived in ("Lan(d)guage"). In that aspect, Belford's affinity for
incorporating the written word into his existence of the land and in the land has to do
with his conceptualization of landscape in general. For most people, the city or town is
the place from where one looks out of. The periphery, on the other hand, is the place that
is looked in on. For Belford, the opposite is true: "I don't drive out of town in a car or
truck, and look at it. I'm looking back at colonization from the foliage, from the

Latala 47
unroaded mountains" ("Viewed from the Mountains" 1). The land informs Belford's
writing rather than merely functioning in a literary sense as a background:
The literal nature
of this
country. The
geography of
it.

Leading me somewhere.
And I willing. ("The Literal Nature")
Belford is willing to conceptualize the landscape and write the landscape as if that venue
for activity were linked to and perhaps indispensable from his manner of approaching a
poem. But the poem itself has its own type of geography infused with meaning and ideas
that pose significant questions to Belford especially in respect to the way poetics is
constructed and used:
The sort of writing I'm partial to is not so much about getting published;
but about a personal examination of one's experiences, a questioning or
asking of questions, a curiosity of what is really going on behind the
scripted scenes and reflections of poetry as a product or commodity.
("Viewed from the Mountains" 4)
Thus, the theory behind language, the politics of language, the means of using language,
and the motivations behind that use, in the poetry he reads and writes, are vital questions
to Belford in terms of his own identity and individuality as a Northern British Columbian
poet. This approach offers a validation of the uniqueness of an individualized mode of

Latala 48
thought and method of poetry that does not assert itself as superior but resists
homogenization or conformity.
As discussed earlier, the previously unchallenged nature of words has come under
much debate as a result of Ferdinand De Saussure's work in linguistics. De Saussure
argues that words do not stand for pre-existing concepts. This is relevant in the discourse
of place naming because naming is a method of appropriation and control.
[M]aps have the character of being textual in that they have words
associated with them [and] employ a system of symbols with their
own syntax. They function as a form of writing (inscription),
and [...] they are discursively embedded within broader contexts
of social action and power. (Pickles 193)
While Pickles argues that no map is an objective and accurate representation of the land
since all maps are constructions, the same can be said of rendering a landscape in a poetic
context. One means of representing a landscape is no more or less valid than another if
both are constructs. In poetry this does not seem to be problematic because all poems are
considered artistic interpretations lacking power and authority. They do not purport to be
authorities in the way that maps do. However, the linguistic components used in poetry
tend to have an authoritative voice. The poem sets boundaries in the same manner a map
does. The author much like a cartographer decides what content to include and the
manner and order in which to include it. As a result, the meanings and attitudes of
regions like the North can be presented in a singularized dominating manner.
Reiterating some key concepts from the previous chapters allows for a clearer
distinction between maps and poetic landscapes. According to Bourdieu, all systems are

Latala 49
self-legitimizing and self-naturalizing. They employ "doxa" and turn their own arbitrary
qualities into foundations that deny their arbitrary natures. Commonly this could be
referred to as convention. Throughout the history of any system, map making or poetry
writing, certain conventions, attitudes, and practices have become grounded and
acceptable to the extent where they form significant and not easily abandoned precepts.
The difficulty lies in realizing that those precepts are neither natural nor absolute.
Western Map making is an assortment of conventions that has come about through its
own processes and by its own means. It can never be the way of mapping even though it
asserts itself as such. Likewise the development of various poetic conventions or poetic
systems is ultimately arbitrary. Poetic schools guise themselves in legitimacy by infusing
their own conventions with more power than they really have. Yet in poetics this is
perhaps more readily contested due to the creative aspect of poetry and its faithfulness to
a pervading and shifting arbitrary system, to language. However, the manner in which
Northern B.C. landscapes are understood and poeticized by some local and fringe writers
still faces resistance from established literary centres. The poetic landscape is a site of
contestation.
Poetic landscapes have manifold functions and capacities which usually are all
present to some extent or another. On the basic level, poetic landscapes can be an
attempt at the representation of real landscapes. These representations are part of the
poem's larger discourse in the same way that real landscapes shape and are shaped by
individuals. Representations employ names of a specific existing locality and poets have
a responsibility concerning issues of representation. The setting they use must attempt to
interact with the social landscape without being simulacral. This not only includes issues

Latala 50
of factual geographical information but the broader social discourse that constitutes the
social landscape:
To understand a built landscape, say an eighteenth-century English
park, it is usually necessary to understand written and verbal
representations of it, not as 'illustrations', images standing
outside it, but as constituent images of its meaning or meanings.
(Cosgrove and Daniels 1)
Poetic discourse is an essential component of a social landscape and it is influenced by
the physical landscape as much as it influences it. Thus, to understand specific Northern
British Columbian landscapes, one needs to understand the literary and social discourses
surrounding them as well as their performative aspects. A space has significance in
relation to what occurs in it: "It is in a sense actuated by the ensemble of movements
deployed within it. [...] In short, space is a practiced place" (De Certeau 117).
The apprehension of any context, and necessarily any place, resides with the
reader; thus, meanings of poetic landscapes arise from an apprehension and experience of
the text. At this point, it is crucial to assert that the manner of experiencing poetry is not
a passive or one-directional relationship between individual and other or subject and
object. Such a division creates an artificial separation between individuals and the livedin world. The relationship between reader and text is reflexive. Martin Heidegger, for
instance, argued against the Cartesian definition of humanity as a combination of mind
and body precisely for this reason:
Descartes entitles the second of his meditations on metaphysics "De natura

Latala 51
mentis humanae: quod ipsa sit notior quam corpus," "On the nature of the
human mind, that it is better known than the body." Despite or precisely
because of this allegedly superior familiarity of the subject, its mode of
being is misunderstood and leaped over everywhere in the period
following him, so that no dialectic of mind can once more reverse the
effect of this negation. (155)
Phenomenology is a means of bridging the divide between mind and the world and of
grounding it. According to Edmund Husserl, " the idea of an all-embracing philosophy
becomes actualized [...] as a system of phenomenological disciplines, which treat
correlative themes and are ultimately grounded, not on an axiom, ego cogito, but on an
all-embracing self-investigation" (156). By discovering the active role of one's
consciousness, one can better understand the parts of one's experiences. This occurs in
intending and in creating activity because not all intention is actualized but rather is
treated as a viable reality, as possibility. In this manner, individuals constitute and create
the experiences of being in the world through actively living; the perception of
experience must include the awareness of the agent participating in that perception.
The interplay between a reader's experiences and expectations of a given text
contributes to create the meaning and significance of that text that can inform both
individuals and masses. This type of reader response theory indicates that reading
involves the continuous adjustment of perceptions, ideas, feelings,
and evaluations. [T]he meaning of a work is the moment-by-moment
experience of it, not something separate or left over. Meaning is

Latala 52
therefore a process, not a product; it is an event, not a retrospective
reconstruction or intellectual reformulation. (Leitch et al. 18-19)
The same can be said about the writing process. A writer can experience composing a
poem as an "event" without aiming at a singular truth. To Belford, writing a poem is an
experience on its own:
There is a moment where I suddenly I see, or hear, language or phrases or
words around me. I assemble them onto a page in no specific order and
start composing something. I try not to approach the making of a new
poem with a hypersensitive lyric perspective. It surprises me when I write
something because I have no idea where it is going [...] ("Viewed from
the Mountains" 8)
Having a plan or an agenda or following and adhering to rules of specific forms such as
lyric poems, sestinas, ghazals, or even sonnets can lead to a confined and less reflexive
type of thinking because it requires a type of faithfulness to the conventions inherent in
those systems.
Much poetry constitutes an unchallenging type of discourse that does not prompt
questioning of social processes, power relations, ideological precepts, government
policies, or moral beliefs. Despite its ambiguity in those areas, it is still considered to be
art. While there is place and value for this type of poetry, there seems to be a lack of
balance where not enough poetry forms a discourse and prompts some form of
questioning of society, politics, morality, and the individual in context. I feel poetry
needs to address significant aspects of being in the world and can prompt one to question
and understand contradictory yet coexisting ideologies and social contexts that permeate

Latala 53
everyday life. My poetry attempts to address some of these issues in the context of living
in and relating to a social landscape. Existing in and understanding a landscape involves
issues of functionality, identity, belonging, and survival. The mental apprehension of a
poetic landscape involves similar ideas but in a more detached and indirect fashion. This
is because one cannot live in the text; the engagement with a text is of a different nature.
However, since the experience of a text is one of phenomenology, the reader will
ultimately also apprehend her own consciousness through the act of reading. Thus a
poem can force an examination of one's own attachments, emotions, ideologies, biases,
and shortcomings as they relate to a given landscape. The landscape in question ought to
be one of significance since it is a reflection of and a component of the social sphere.
Consider the opening lines of George Stanley's longer poem "Terrace
Landscapes":
The mares & colts near the college. The big single-family
houses built of sand & gravel, smooth rocks, once below
water. Did they want the smell, the farm smell? Some of
them might - might be glad - the farm smell connects them
to the earth - the earth has no purpose. (63)
The poem presents an augmented landscape. The college, a learning institution, is
juxtaposed with horse ranching and family housing. The foundation of the housing
consists of rocks that have been smoothed down by water. The rocks are no longer
submersed which indicates evidence of change; it is unclear whether natural, geological,
or human actions are the cause. Furthermore, the farm smell offers a type of connection,
perhaps a positive one, to the land. Yet the meaning of the assertion that the earth has no

Latala 54
purpose requires contemplation. The earth may have lost its purpose because it no longer
serves as farm land. However, the author does not offer an answer. Instead he questions
whether the farm smell is something the occupants wanted. The smell is residual and
haunting; the purpose of the land has been lost. An economist reading may suggest that
all the functions of this land are without purpose since the land is not as financially viable
as it could be. However, the opposite may also hold true as private suburban real state
land has higher value than farm land. The earth's purpose also may be read in a
metaphysical manner. Why does the earth need a purpose? This quality seems essential
in validating, legitimizing, and assigning worth to land and indicates a privileging based
on functionality. Also, if the statement that the earth is without purpose is a general one,
it presents a challenge to an individual's being which must be confronted. If a reader has
issues with any of the above interpretations, and these are by no means exhaustive, she
will inevitably be confronting the issues as much as the reasons for her reactions to them.
Thus, the act of engaging with a text often leads the reader beyond the text.
The poetic landscape is never entirely in the text because language cannot directly
capture an actual experience of landscape in its entirety nor can it offer a choice to the
reader as to the order in which the experience occurs. In the short story, "The Aleph,"
Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges explores the limits and frustrations of language:
I come now to the ineffable center of my tale; it is here that a writer's
hopelessness begins. Every language is an alphabet of symbols the
employment of which assumes a past shared by its interlocutors. How can
one transmit to others the infinite Aleph, which my timorous memory can
scarcely contain? [...] And besides, the central problem - the

Latala 55
enumeration, even partial enumeration, of infinity - is irresolvable. In that
unbound moment, I saw millions of delightful and horrible acts; none
amazed me so much as the fact that all occupied the same point, without
transparency. What my eyes saw was simultaneous; what I shall write is
successive, because language is successive. Something of it, though, I will
capture. (282-283)
At best language provides essential cues, resonances, allusions, and metaphors through
which the reader is able to fill in the gaps. For instance, the title of Stanley's poem
"Terrace Landscapes" serves to situate the poem through reference to an actual place
while encompassing a plurality of that place. Terrace does not have just one landscape,
nor is there just one manner of apprehending and understanding it. Landscapes have a
range of significance. Issues of location, culture, climate, terrain, and history constitute
an implied context. To some extent this context can create boundaries of accessibility. A
reader with only superficial ideas of Terrace will be unable to fill in the gaps and will
experience the poem's subtleties much differently from a Terrace resident. That is not to
say, however, that an intimate knowledge of Terrace is required to apprehend the poetic
landscape. For someone who is unfamiliar with the college in Terrace, it is not difficult
to form an individualized yet "accurate" picture of it as far as it functions in the poem
because correspondence between reality and the word in a strict sense is not what
validates the poem. The poem is to be experienced and "lived in" just like a landscape.
Both are types of phenomenology, and it is problematic that reading a textual landscape
is usually regarded as less significant than living in a physical one since the former is

Latala 56
ultimately an inseparable component of the latter. One cannot apprehend or engage with
any landscape, poetic or otherwise, outside of place or outside the conception of place.
The experience of a cultural landscape is the phenomenological union between a
mental, physical, and social landscape. The distinction of landscape into mental and
physical categories is problematic since it creates separate and irreconcilable spheres. It
is not the case that one landscape is in here and the other out there. Phenomenology
inseparably and totally joins the landscape categories unmasking the division between
them as an arbitrary categorical construct. A physical landscape cannot be
conceptualized without a mental landscape, and a mental landscape cannot be thought of
without some reference to a physical one because both are essential components of being
in the world: "The interpretation of place is a struggle for position within the meaningful
world" (Thomas 91). This may seem like a contradiction when discussing poetic
landscapes as places since experiencing a poetic landscape occurs through engagement
with language components as signifiers of concepts and only secondarily with an actual
tactile reality. However, this propensity of thinking seems to mistakenly consider
language and concepts as ethereal wisps that are disconnected from reality without
acknowledging that concepts and reality constitute one another's existence. How is
engaging with a text through a physical and mental combination of reading and
understanding any different from the physical and mental engagement with a lived-in
place?
Belford defines lan(d)guage writing as a type of post-language writing, as a
postmodern response to modernist ways of thinking. Lan(d)guage writing, similar to
Guattari's concept of ecosophy, aims towards diverse, equally valuable, and distinct

Latala 57
modes of writing that privilege multiple truths and discount the existence of one
homogenizing Truth. In this regard it is also similar to Baudrillard's concept of "Radical
Thought" discussed in Chapter 1. Belford suggests that the lan(d)guage "writer hears the
names of the land in the way someone from New York cannot. [...] When one speaks
about Morice or Babine or Kispiox, I hear powerful drums in the words" ("Viewed from
the Mountains" 7). This type of writing encapsulates a sense of belonging and
connection to a place that a colonizing gaze never can. Any land is infused with politics,
ideology, contestation, and the possibility for significant transformation. For these
reasons, writers whose identities are inexorably tied to land "see land as a complex living
organism, will hear the names of the land, and see the whole of it" (Belford
"Lan(d)guage").
Chapbook and broadside poetry involves self-publication where manuscripts and
poems are typically exchanged among poets. Often in these works choices of font,
layout, and paper constitute a thematic statement that works together with the poem and
its form. For instance, the construction of Barry McKinnon's award winning chapbook
Bolivia\Peru is meant to reflect the travel experience as well as the decay of the countries.
Consequently, the book is intentionally made with rough and cheap paper. A current
McKinnon chapbook titled Head Out: A Letter Essay Poem to Cecil Giscombe examines
Giscome's relation to his relative John Robert Giscome, a 19th-century Jamaican miner
and explorer, and the town named after him. It explores a connection to place and builds
on McKinnon's own ideas that "a man in himself is I a city" (Two From In the
Millennium 5). More vital still is the actual process of chapbook making, distribution,
and its particular relevance to lan(d)guage writing. Lan(d)guage poetics is at a

Latala 58
disadvantage in terms of getting published because most publishing companies are
located in larger urban centres. Chapbook making exhibits a mode of writing and
communication among writers where nurturing a poet, creating meaningful conversation,
and encouraging pluralistic conceptions become more important than conventional
publishing and its economic and ideological underpinnings. Chapbook poetry does not
depend on larger publishers for approval, publication, or circulation and has a primary
responsibility to its own uniqueness, its own messages, and its own locale. It does not
seek to bring in revenue, notoriety, or admiration. Instead it primarily functions as a
means of exchanging new thoughts, new compositions, and new approaches between
local and non-local writers. It also develops and solidifies local art communities giving
them their own unregulated and unmediated voices.
Based on some conceptualizations of language, poetry has been considered
authoritative or singularizing: "[I]n the majority of poetic genres, the unity of the
language system and the unity (and uniqueness) of the poet's individuality as reflected in
his language and speech, which is directly realized in this unity, are indispensable
prerequisites of poetic style" (Bakhtin 264). Bakhtin contends that the poem is a form of
monologic because it asserts a singular view through its affinity to a singular cohesive
voice. This may have been the case with traditional forms of poetry; however, poetry has
the capacity to achieve dialogism, to have a plurality of voices, in the same manner that a
novel can. To further illustrate Bakhtin's concept, a novel
can be defined as a diversity of social speech types [...] and a diversity of
individual voices, artistically organized. The internal stratification of any
single national language into social dialects, characteristic group behavior,

Latala 59
professional jargons, generic languages, languages of generations and age
groups, tendentious languages, languages of the authorities, of various
circles and of passing fashions, languages that serve the specific
sociopolitical purposes of the day [...]. (262-263)
There is no reason why poetry cannot employ techniques similar to those of a novel and
successfully portray stratification of social classes or to at least convey and encourage
pluralistic dialogues. Maintaining the same poetic voice across a poem is only a
convention as is the assumption that poems in a collection are more separate from one
another than chapters in a novel. They can be, but this is not a necessity. The long poem,
for instance, exemplifies a break from shorter more traditional poetic forms and offers a
different type of opportunity for pluralism.
Through juxtaposition, poetic landscapes can also remind individuals of how
social landscapes used to be: "Nature and humans [...] become what they are because
they constantly interpenetrate each other as realms of experience, and participate in a
mutual transfer of understanding about the relationship in which they are engaged"
(Lovell 9). In Finding Ft.George Robert Budde explores his own changing relationship
with Prince George:
i was house hunting (sans 30/30) told the bowl stunk
all the profs live in the hart (misheard as heart - wow, such
passion, i thot) up above the smell, the place a real estate
economy first, even as i tried to look around. (11)
The interpenetration of social and poetic landscapes serves to change those very same
landscapes because individual attitudes and practices towards them become different over

Latala 60
time. As a result, individuals tend to encode social and poetic landscapes with meaning
and significance. Poetic landscapes can also serve to capture social landscapes and later
function as reminders of subsequent changes as writing does in a historical sense. Some
examples of this include Barry McKinnon's Pulp Log in which he explores his
relationship to the city, its economy, and its politics. The relationship becomes more
vivid especially when considering the intertextual links to John Harris's novels Small
Rain and Other Art which largely focus on politics and union work at the College of New
Caledonia, a place where McKinnon and Harris worked together over a number of years.
Poetic landscapes can also prompt individuals to reflect on the progression of their own
identities since individuals take a sense of who they are in terms of where they belong:
"Locality often appears subsumed within the notion of belonging itself, which serves to
provide collective identity and a sense of cohesion and cultural commonality [...] Yet
belonging itself also appears at least partly predicated upon locality or of a memory of
locality" (Lovell 4). Thus, social landscapes are vital forces in determining identity.
I earlier defined a poetic landscape as poetic meditation of a social landscape.
The implication is that that the poetic landscapes represent cultural landscapes in a
plurality of fashions. If language is a matter of illusion it seems that it cannot accurately
represent culture; however, this is misleading. Baudrillard is not proposing that reality
does not exist, but he does challenge the binary opposites of truth and falsehood. Like
any binary construct, the division of the world into "true" and "false" categories has a
homogenizing effect. It automatically presupposes an ontological divide. For
Baudrillard, language has the propensity to posit multiple realities in the similar sense
that phenomenology privileges individualistic experience. The freeing aspect of a poetic

Latala61
landscape is that it posits social landscapes that cannot be validated through
correspondence to a set of external facts. Instead, their value arises from the manner in
which they shape individuals and how, in turn, individuals shape them.
By addressing space theory, spaciality, "ecosophy", and "doxa" this portion of my
thesis has attempted to show an interpenetrating relationship between social landscapes
and their cognitive counterparts, arguing that cognitive and physical landscapes cannot
exist independently of one another but are bound in the social sphere. Cognitive
apprehension and physical interaction are essential features of phenomenology which
breaches the ontological divide and allows for the co-existence of equally valid
interpretations, attitudes, and value-systems. By examining Northern British Columbian
poetic sensibility not as the sensibility but as a sensibility of a region of multiple
landscapes this paper has attempted to validate a different manner of approaching poetics
that resists the homogenizing effects of global capitalism and its associated ideas
regarding landscape solely as an economic venue. Furthermore, Jean Baudrillard's
simulacra and Ferdinand De Saussure's language theory have been used to question
language as a system and to explore it for the purpose of validating the existence and
legitimacy of coexisting yet often contradictory ways of interpreting the world and one's
position within it. Finally, my own poetry is an attempt to add to the conversation
surrounding Northern British Columbian poetics by presenting an incomplete and
fragmented account of my engagement with this landscape. Also it serves to answer my
own questions of belonging and artistic individuality in Prince George.

Latala 62
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Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas Press, 1981.
Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and
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— Selected Writings. 2nd ed. Ed. Mark Poster. Stanford: UP, 2001.
Belford, Ken. Ecologue. Madeira Park: Harbour Publishing, 2005.
— et al. Four Realites. Ed. Don Precosky. Prince George, Caitlin Press, 1992.
— Interview. "Viewed from the Mountains: A Conversation with Ken
Belford." It's Still Winter. 7.1. Oct 2007. Jan 29 2008. <http://www.itsstillwinter.
com/It%27s%20Still%20Winter/contents_files/justinsinterview.pdf>
— "Lan(d)guage." Unpublished essay, 2005.
— "The Literal Nature." The Post Electric Cave Man. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1970.
(unpaginated).
— Pathways Into the Mountains. Prince George: Caitlin Press, 2000.
Berger, John. G.: A Novel. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980.
Bohannan, Paul. Africa and Africans. New York: Natural History Press, 1964.

Latala 63
Borges, Jorge Luis. Collected Fictions. Trans. Andrew Hurley. New York: Penguin
Books, 1998.
Bourdieu, Pierre. "Structure, Habitus, Power: Basis for a Theory of Symbolic Power."
Culture / Power / History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory. Ed.
Nicholas B. Dirks. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994.
British Columbia. Ministry of Forests Act. Queen's Printer: Victoria, 1996. November
2007. <http://www.qp.gov.bc.ca/statreg/ stat/M/96300_01.htm>
— Ministry of Forests and Range: Research Branch. April 2000. November
2007. <http://www.for.gov.be. ca/hre/welcome.htm>
Buber, Martin. "Distance and Relation." Psychiatry 20, (1957): 97-104.
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California Press, 1984. 115-130.
Cosgrove, Denis and Stephen Daniels. "Introduction: Iconography and Landscape." The
Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design, and
Use of Past Environments. Ed. D. Cosgrove and S. Daniels. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1998. 1-10.
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Trans. Dana
Polan. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1986.
Derrida, Jacques. A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds. Ed. Peggy Kamuf. New York:
Columbia UP, 1991.

Latala 64
— Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri C. Spivak. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1974.
— Writing and Difference. Trans. Allan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1978.
Fawcett, Brian. Virtual Clearcut: Or the Way Things Are in My Home Town. Toronto:
Thomas Allen Publishers, 2003.
Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings 1972-1977.
Ed. Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980.
Guattari, Felix. The Three Ecologies. Trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton. London: The
Athlone Press, 2000.
Harris, John. Other Art. Vancouver: New Star Books, 1997.
— Small Rain. Vancouver: New Star Books, 1989.
Hartman, Geoffrey H. Saving the Text: Literature / Derrida / Philosophy. Baltimore: John
Hopkins UP, 1981.
Hawthorn, Jeremy. A Glossary of Contemporary Literary Theory. 4l ed. New York:
Oxford UP, 2000.
Heidegger, Martin. The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Trans. Albert Hofstadter.
Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982.
Husserl, Edmund. Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology. Trans.
Dorion Cairns. The Hague: Martinus Njhoff, 1960.
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Landscape. Ed. Timothy Collins. Galway: UCG Centre for Landscape Studies,
1994. 79-98.

Latala 65
Lainsbury, G.P. "A Presentation of Some Poetics of Northern British Columbia esp. Ken
Belford." It's Still Winter. 7.1 (2007): 8pp. 27 Jan 2008. <http://www.itsstill
winter.com/It%27s%20Still%20Winter/contents_files/lainsbury%20on%20belfor
d.%204%20pdf.pdf>
De Leeuw, Sarah. Unmarked: Landscapes Along Highway 16. Edmonton: Newest Press,
2004.
Leitch B.V. et al. "Introduction to Theory and Criticism." Introduction. The Norton
Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. V. B. Leitch et al. New York:
Norton & Co., 2001. 1-29.
Lovell, Nadia. "Introduction: Belonging in need of emplacement?" Locality and
Belonging. Ed. Nadia Lovell. London: Routledge, 1998. 1-24.
McGregor Model Forest Association and The Council of Forest Industries Education
Program. Advertisement. CIRX, Prince George. 16 Nov 2006.
McKinnon, Barry. Bolivia / Peru. Prince George: Gorse Press, 2004.
— Head Out: A Letter, Essay, Poem to Cecil Giscombe. Prince George: Gorse Press,
2006.
— "Search: Ken Belford / Invisible Ink." It's Still Winter. 7.1 (2007): 8pp. 27 Jan 2008.
<http://www.itsstillwinter.com/It%27s%20Still%20Winter/contents_files/ken%20
intro%201 %20resize.pdf >
— Pulp Log. Prince George: Caitlin Press, 1991.
— "Sex at Thirty-One (a poem)." The The.. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1980.
— Two From in the Millennium. Toronto: Book Thug, 2006.

Latala 66
Meinig, Donald W. "The Beholding Eye." The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes.
Ed. Donald W. Meinig. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1979. 33-48.
Pickles, John. "Texts, Hermeneutics and Propaganda Maps." Writing Worlds: Discourse,
Text and Metaphor in the Representation of Landscape. Ed. Trevor J. Barnes and
James Duncan. London: Routledge, 1992. 193-230.
Pindar, Ian and Paul Sutton. Introduction. The Three Ecologies. By Felix Guattari.
Trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton. London: The Athlone Press, 2000. 1-21.
De Saussure, Ferdinand. Course in General Linguistics. Trans. Wade Baskin. Ed. Charles
Bally and Albert Sechehaye. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1959.
Soja, Edward W. The Political Organization of Space. Washington: Association of
American Geographers, 1971.
— Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. New
York: Verso, 1989.
Stanley, George. Gentle Northern Summer. Vancouver: New Star Books, 1995.
— "Northern Poets." The Capilano Review. 2:43 (2004): 57-59.
Thomas, Julian. Time Culture and Identity: An Interpretive Archeology. New York:
Routledge, 1996.
Turner, Jonathan H. The Structure of Sociological Theory. 7th ed. Belmont: Thomson
Wadsworth, 2003.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1968.
— Tractatus Logico-Phiolosophicous. Trans. C. K. Ogden. London:
Routledge, 1992.

WRITING NORTH
(A POETRY COLLECTION)
by Michal Latala

© Michal Latala, 2008
THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTHERN BRITISH COLUMBIA
February 2008

All rights reserved. This work may not be
reproduced in whole or in part, by photocopy
or other means, without permission of the author.

Writing Up Here

I
the idea we started with
I can't even say
it's bullshit
(but want to)
because I'm not close
enough to the 30 years
of work heebie jeebies
that have pushed Barry's pen,
nor do I know me by looking
out from the land among trees
II
we submit poems
to removed institutions
cross out passive verbs
in similar strokes
that inkling of dying
for lack of change
III
I had to learn home
(the home outside of home) to try
to love it, make myself
follow a road I didn't build
nor intend, but pulled at
IV
take any log, it's still standing
in the form of a tree, tagged
this convenience to know that thing
for the only thing it ever is
lifts all the worry
all the effort
from ever questioning anything

V
truckloads of planks and boards go,
end up in China: the world factory
repackaged in Ontario,
in any halogen lit assembly line,
its long distance dissimilation
with no memory of distance
VI
the town and the periphery,
the living, dying room, and kitchen layout,
an endless duplication
somewhere a mirror
the one looking at it, absent
VII
the office and home,
the poem and the publishers
poets ranked into longitude zones
chapbooks exchanging hands here

Writing Up Here (Part 2)

I
the why)
that this place has become,
a place for writers
a place unlike the place it was
II
fine particulate matter,
allergies (perhaps asthma
things, not yet butterflies, worming upwards,
all because you live here, work here, receive
a manila envelope, have to realize
you've been dismissed from yourself
III
there's always someone from your past
hooking into your mind
with a misused word
you've been through this before
and now you're sure why it stings
IV
in Art Space the scene changes
after work is done,
they all have come, the jackets are off,
gloves put aside, and soft talk all around
the mildly crowded wine table
you are sure someone's about to begin
reading from a book you'll never buy
V
in Prince George someone believes
in The Pleasure of the Text,
smells the pages of old books,
distrusts dogma, the binary, the either-or

VI
the challenge to write politics through a poem
and how a lyric fancy obscures
this necessity (this morality
VII
a suppressed culture is one that doesn't write,
or think there is anything wrong with itself
except to pause and scratch an itch
VIII
a diagnosis of suppression, where you walk the land,
look for footprints and extrapolate,
how few of those walking had writing weighing them down

Your Landscape Changes Me

we cut through the town of predetermined paths,
the head on view, traffic passing in opposite ways,
south and north, the main street pavement
molded and warped by logging rigs,
delivery semis, gas trucks
I have one road, from here to there,
from me to another faded me
no one saw to this, with stencil or blueprint,
from a high rise, or through smogged-over sky,
but they made it nonetheless
we drive through a kaleidoscopic landscape,
a pastiche of concretized erected letters and emblems
against surrounding hills, the reddening pine
it could be any town, any town
North: Quesnel, Williams Lake, Prince George...
a highway runs through them too, where
for every uprooted tree, for every torn down over-aged building
a corporate solution waits: McDonald's, Tim Horton's,
a cold beer store, a pub
tomorrow or the tomorrow after the next ten years,
bark will still peel, the paint will dry on some new franchise,
and someone somewhere will be glad
that we too have a Chapters
I would not want to see a 'local poets' section
only McKinnon, Belford, and Stanley
walking out, not so much jaded, but confirming
what they know
already, and doing it,
in half-finished thoughts

While Here

Always I have been afraid
of this moment:
breaking the land
Ken Belford

a need for national parks and wildlife reserves
manufactured through decades of land use
not wild land, nature, a farm, but an entity
not fenced in or had
and the primal idea of how land
does not have a right to exist without us, unlabeled
the Acropolis of Athens ought to be sold
whenever the price outweighs demands of heritage
except we cling to the ideal,
purity of being civilized so early on
and home's tight grip is part of the knowing
while we excavate remnants of the First Nations world
the modern North American building isn't meant
to last centuries, so why should clearcuts or the effects?
and what part of ourselves do we leave behind by farming
trees except to prop up the polis, fund the 2010 Olympics
the capital of Northern B.C. is named for a British Monarch
and London Deny is called Deny by those who live there
there are no mausoleums hiding in the bush, the footprints
are overgrown, the tire marks layer each other into singular paths
it's a usury to practice and hone, a superiority over back then,
before lies were produced in factories, people lived across the land

The Matters at Hand

...I am puzzled
entertained
for the wrong
reasons
any sense of myself is welcomed. I welcome the absurd
(giving me one more thing I know, to explain
- Barry McKinnon

the garden path (the implanted need
to place oneself there
and someone (in sandals, listening to the forest
waiting to lead you (you being unsure of the intent
The The might be part of an intertextual haven
of questioning, the myriad grains of wood
kept inside all the trees of all the worlds,
the multitude of polished walnut doors
between thresholds of the in.
the out. the you.
when you close your eyes, enter the inner music
and all the people you could have been quiet down,
your being records all
and that this does matter
takes a lifetime to worm out,
fall from you and burrow into the garden soil
in the end of thought when the world
forces the world from our minds,
it returns us here to matters at hand
an inevitably linear scene
the start of a blank page,
one word preceding the next,
a thought nagging to be finished
and an inability to shake the feeling
that an argument can be made
for anything you do

Resources

cutting down a tree
dams the river's mind
cuts and props the cutting hand
it's the forest closing in
through absence
pine, spruce, and balsam
(no other suitable words
nor knowledge of a difference)
except the nausea that comes
when trying to write beauty into this
the land out there
(homogenized verbiage)
the politics placed here
(institutionalizing blue collar labour
half-persons with want)
it's not even proper hell they build
but indifference
a man in himself is
a city a polis alive with trees
and thought currents
(washing silt out into the Fraser
flowing south)

Latala 9
On Reading Contemporary North American Poetry

Sick of language,
would rather be an animal
chewing on the side of the road
- Sharon Thesen

I
a mapping (of sorts
the effect not in
or un-intended
nor the only one, but one that hits
deep in the chest, a mark appearing
years later (but unconnected to
that I once was
stowed away, crossed the Atlantic
in the belly of book, my name
a plumb, taken in by potato farmers
fermented, distilled, bottled and drank
the smell, after each resurfacing of thirst
enduring for generations, passing through and leaving
skin unmarked, rough hands at the wheel
of a cab in Prince George, now hanging
by kitchen table legs, the Polish man in a chair
sleeping in a haze of smoke
and how it is
that I came to escape, climb out
up The Glass Mountain with newfound acquaintances
offering support (or was made to believe
this symbol or that, the enchanted version
or the lesser more affordable model
hardcover or paperback, signed and limited
II
the feeling of being (home, or not at all
a/part in the page, no funny grammar / of love
in divorce, the symbol and thing,
the word and meaning, the person and promise,
a breaking, that my eyes are forced
to look into one lens
see a singular "writerly" text

Latala 10

that I'm looking but not finding
someone to measure up to, where the hills
I know (and the writers who walk them
are peopled by editors from the south
III
the politics of poetry: words to sculpt a world,
here a preference for the personal,
and what the West does to other worlds
becomes the unheard Country Between Us
the poetry of mainstream politics: locution, verbiage, wordage
the unlistenable music, the proverbial penniless artist
IV
to tell a person of a singular world,
insist on one pleasure, one text
want a text without shadow,
without the "dominant ideology"; but this is to want
a text without fecundity, without productivity, a sterile text
ignore how without change some part of us suffers,
beyond views from here, multitudes of eyes
boarded up doors in downtown stores,
burned out businesses, some a footnote,
some a memory, others words
telling one of a home (constructed or imagined,
(written or lived in
the experience of it, there, that worthwhile knowledge,
that wisdom of leaving

Aspiring University Poets

how beautifully
they can create
a mundane moment
(someone putting plates and cups away)
in a stranger's kitchen
and that it was real, first
captured in words, not invented,
just, right
uncontested
(or we'd rage)
we all are at the mercy
of the stanzas we spawn,
and don't consider the cost,
infusions of mood and mystery,
pattern and ritual,
echoed through rounded letters,
parochially attached to everyday objects
the shiny utensils and oven-safe plates
made by a local Canadian company,
it's work to be proud of, good benefits,
fair treatment, no protests

To Help Memory

the Prince George cemetery,
words as lasting as plastic
flowers, the hope that they will
fulfill some need, a moment
a billion moments from now
there is no use to protest
how beautifully dilapidated New Orleans
has become, or your own downtown core
(all those postcard places you pictured yourself in)
except when a natural calamity
acts without approval
reddens the ground with pine needles
had current building aesthetic
been born out of a fascist's vision,
the purity of the right angle, the box store,
the red and yellow logos of stimulation
and how reactions to this
would transform the roadside world
desperate architects design and redesign cubicles,
the out-of-work ones settle for cemeteries,
the poets learn masonry, etch gravestones,
forget how flowers smell

No Room for Smallness

how do you measure
up to a town
like this?
McKinnon writes cruel and frail
(kept layoffs and job politics from unstitching his nerves)
and when anybody read him,
they pictured the physical brawn and girth
of Purdy and Belford,
steady, unflinching, and calm
as unscripted Zen
he may have known
but kept writing
it's hard to know the how and why of it
on George Street
past the burned out B&B Music store
(now a dug out lot)
the new courthouse, the alley behind
the lineage of downtown, once called a "splendid axis"
moving like its blueprints
with non-existing kiosks, a hot dog vendor,
unintended figures (you among them)
a "City Beautiful" design echoing
geometry of Parisian boulevards
vistas and decorative parks
except for the angle of the sun
this once was
the Fort George Indian Reserve,
bought for $125,000 by the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway,
renamed to Prince George
by 153 to 13 votes
the rain isn't small

when you're in it,
and holding picket signs
isn't exactly Other Art,
except how it takes you

Latala 14
to a page,
the residents' language
(cut short)
a measure at a time

Northern Elephants

up here we sway
on a different beast,
stutter while reciting end-line
prepositions, fail to find thoughts
deliberately, or end them,
repeat the definite article,
wait for the indefinite to find us
here the writing of elephants,
rewordings of odor,
their grayness or illusion,
how particular their paths,
how prickly the hairs,
is not in the rhythm
things of worth here are
unformed/unfinished, interrupted
a fringe of descriptive duplicity
with one type of tree mirroring itself
into general banality
land never forgets,
it is where it is because
of where it was,
someone writes in the rest

Latala 16
Northern Development

try to take in the surroundings,
this town may not seem to be
much but what is these days
and how can you be
sure of any substance
shoppers in The Brick laying down,
testing a bed, staring at the ceiling fixtures
may sense the sky above,
that recently this space was open,
a flood-lit baseball field,
falling softballs in the night, rec teams
urging themselves on
tailgate parties to follow
imagination isn't needed,
it's the same city plan, transplanted
to any Northern community
with assumptions of economic development
perhaps it's all parlor tricks, how any person
can convince himself to feel good about any of it
and that he expends the energy
to paint the same picture for others
fifth rate college instructors living in the Hart
above the pulp mill stench, willing to change the world
only in the privacy of their living rooms
they don't know that there is no vast difference
from here to there, no inherent goodness attached
to this land, but the power to make one think
and map us
a boy could have been cut down here
with a machete as easily as anywhere
else, and was

The Road North

when you revisit a dream
in a dream (in a series of dreams
in a series of years
with distance, the aura of each object
that you've marked with your presence
reminds you of how to be
there are places exactly (not scientifically
in the middle, the membrane between winter
and summer, between sunlight and a beating heart
between (or as in
the tangible book of the book you write
your mind in, alter half misunderstood dreams
each second taking away
a detail, mile by mile
you don't know you've arrived home
away from here until years later
the predictable pattern of your shoes beside a door,
your clothes absentmindedly adorning furniture,
chocolate bar wrappers with known names,
no surprises on takeout menus

Latala 18
Northern Killings / Paradoxes

once owned bullets cannot be returned
(not to a store (or silence (or from the bush
the great dear rifle debate, the bolt-action that defines
hunter identity continues in words and ad campaigns
at night giant hawk moths on the Spatsizi Plateau pollinate flowers,
get less respect than pine beetles
people are breathing harder in "the bowl"
and getting big ideas is forgotten in the long asthmatic wait
but for the only vascular surgeon in town, the unavoidably deserved
holidays, log fallers facing the bone saw
that we have misunderstood home as far from land, knifed
off what could not be cured
the possibilities of any tree, a singular use reckons us against networks
of back roads, their pragmatic direction away from brush piles
a fake ownership of ourselves, a pith larger than a fist,
layered with heartwood, voice without voice
to find the reason for the shot, place the echo's source
in the mountains, misperceive the stirring tree lines
the mind's cambium, sapwood in the blood,
Northern (uprooted patience

Simply Decide

unlearn winter - shave your legs, head and chest
and glide down University Way
on that mountain bike, breaks squeaking,
threadbare tires turning up snow
count, make marks on lottery tickets a number for every waddling woman,
every bellied man,
every wheezing kid
there is a ratio of pick-up trucks to baseball caps someone's already tabulating
collect the pebbles caught in the soles of your shoes
in an empty paint bucket - don't fill it, ever
start digging a six-foot-hole in the mayor's front yard ten minutes in, stop and whistle the anthem
go to Shane Lake when it's frozen,
touch the surface with your cheek
keep old newspapers
in the trunk of your rusted car,
for nosebleeds, oil changes and obituaries when you've written one for yourself,
take to the train,
leave your car running

Uncovering

the summers in Prince George
wash the sky with billowing depths,
vast and vertical
crowding over you
as if they were drawn
to a phantom mountain peak
only wished for
when downtown a visitor may say
something about the smell, the pulp mill,
methyl mercaptan and sulfur gasses
cliches of "rotten eggs" mixing
over the Goldmine and Old West pawn shops
it must have been ingenuity
or sheer convenience to build
a mill in the river valley depths
of a drain-hole,
this bowl carved out by melting ice,
a fingerprint of the ice age
there is use in this
sky: a scenery, picture-postcard, calming
the Cutbanks: a summer sandblast ski event
(the steep course can take anyone)
the geography: a metaphor, and with it a reluctance
not to fill it
and the cost?
in Parkwood Mall shoppers squeeze their trucks
into Vancouver-sized parking spots
Famous Players is showing few films
suited to this demographic
the prolonged winters here darken themselves
into the hills, and in the short light
snow melts in Fort George park uncovering dog shit
there are no tourists, no towering clouds, no great heights
to fall from

Latala21
The Good in Not Having a Purpose

even in manicured pre-grown lawns
a dandelion will find a way,
a shoot of wild grass will outgrow
the engineered greens
as they bend in the wind
under clouds that have seen
the northbound current, we bend too
under the weight of projected skylines
corporate logos, Starbucks emblems
a design, a template, a claim, a power
unbalancing the ground around us
the space between us and the trees
shortens and when we are about to touch
it is only to mark and consent to have
this too cut out
a movement of repetition,
razing 'unused' spaces and developing
the 'useful' home
they would have us believe the drive North
is a regression in time
yet trucks carry roadside dirt, the same dirt,
and it congeals at the bottom
of every melting snow pile
as a root will spread, here and here again

Latala 22
Prince George
for Rob Budde
understanding home/yourself in a poem
because of the last line
you can't cut out
and vow to write
another

Work the Land

in the south nobody really wants
to cut that tree, burn that field, kill that moose,
cull the wolves, truck that cargo
not for its own sake,
that's not pristine,
nor Vancouverite,
environmentalism forbid
the beer is drunk, the flatscreens bought, the remote starters installed,
the barbeques fired up, the lemons flown in,
the trees in Stanley Park mourned (publicly of course)
all the same, there, here, and in everywhere,
if you believe the news
concision turning the world clock
so people go
into the office, as Belford calls it,
or the cubicle, the one without the bugs and trees
and work the land
a desk clerk has it recorded,
a footprint into every glade,
each broken blade of grass,
each trudge through a mushroom patch
the sprinklers running in the night
the televisions on in each window
inklings that something's screwy in Victoria
(in BC, the best place on earth)
and the unfurnished rooms in dreams, where kids
ice skate on hardwood floors
are all the clues you have
468
474
253
(this is only you)
your fingerprint
your face, unremembered by children,
is what will fade under the sun of time
you never cut any trees, nor built a pulp mill
in a valley, nor hit that deer with your pickup,
the night swallowing it behind
as you watched it thrash (an imagined thrashing

Latala 24
a millisecond, blood rushing your forehead,
it is all an imagined conclusion
somewhere else
somewhere north
somewhere in and of
the land

The Play

you see
the actors fully
convinced they are rightly building
a new ruling mechanical head for city council
(a vital part in act two, as explained by the stage director
it's a tall figure, an oversized yet economical head,
serene, with acceptable hair loss (what's left is graying
crammed in between standard drab laminate flooring
and a peppery tiled t-bar ceiling
(what the scene must look like
in many small Northern community venues
I'm trying to note details (cast, crew, production
writing on my lap in what time I've got
when there's a "fucking hell"
(or so somebody says
among or in between a clattering ruckus
of falling ladder and (an imagined perhaps
popping preceding the un-humming
of power from every fan, motor, and bulb
I don't panic but gather what I can
(having learned to write in the dark Northern winters
the head engineer's role is portrayed
by Mr. George, an undistinguished councilman
or courtroom clerk (I forget
who as memory serves, played an instrumental role
in eliminating swap sheds from city dumps
in favor of doubling recycling services
for hazardous wastes (a psychological blanket / guilt free consumption
at the cost of someone going cold
you see
the play is trying to address the concept of work politics
by attempting to mechanize the process and thus eliminate emotion
(or those who feel it
by removing the administrative human component
(in that the engineer is the business man in Dr. Frankenstein
because as we all see the pressure to earn at the expense
of workers (or oneself
is the leading source of misery

the mayor (portrayed by a college president from the 70s
(now retired, sleeps soundly, goes for walks
has dropped several egg-sized ball bearings
(presumably a part of the waist swivel
and now he's groping around on all fours
trying to gather them
predicting their patterns by listening
as that skill is usually strongest in people of his profession
and then I'm nudged
by someone scuttling around the floor (I assume
who says "sorry 'bout dat"
and the misery of it all is that I've lost
my place on the page, and must stop, for fear
of writing over something important
and reducing everything
to a ludicrously unrecognizable farce
there is only darkness and time,
to think of myself
at a time like this would be unprofessional
(but I see the harm as small
see, I've been hoping for a promotion
to management, the pay raise is substantial
and the hours reasonable,
and I think I could get
used to handling the personnel changes,
and I've heard that keeping costs down
carries several benefits,
perhaps we could afford to buy
a larger house years earlier than we planned
and even upgrading to a newer SUV would be nice,
and then there are those new gas fireplaces at Costco,
(one could go in the den
suddenly the lights come on
humming and unreasonably strong,
I forget what I'm thinking
and only after painfully squinting
for too long
I can see
the exit door out into the night
I don't waste any time and rush out
only to walk into a crowd of actors and crew

Latala 27
standing outside under the moonlight
some are smoking, others simply chatting
relaxed laughter in every conversation,
handshake smiles on all their faces

Versions

call these poetic
thoughts (a writing
(a mapping into existence
(a subjectivity of closed-doors politics
(a small northern college knowing itself
I
college president, Ralph Troschke,
on the Prince George campus, giving
a final layoff notice to a woman
and assuring her he cared
when he excused himself, but only briefly
to speak with men
delivering his new office furniture
II
or the college president, giving
(or not giving,
a layoff notice to a man
(or not a man
and trying to care about issues
but also receive incomprehensible
orders from Victoria
but maybe furniture too
III
or someone standing in for the president
who could have been named
Ray, Ron, or Roy
and only wishing he weren't there
but was, undoubtedly
getting paid for something hard
to identify, ignoring
(or not ignoring
the delivery men, ticking off agenda items
IV
or a memo about
no one at all, an empty room,
the nothing that happened,

Latala 29
expectations of apologies to follow
no one getting any big ideas
V
in his resignation speech he mentioned,
(or didn't mention
his new job, the reduced responsibility,
but higher pay, ironic he may have thought
(or not thought at all
and people did
(or did not think
the good or bad of it
VI
that during any version
or all versions
no one wrote anything down
(or no one is known to have printed
what may have been written down
VII
that all people with layoff notices
still grin and bear it
(or not

Latala 30
The Good People

I
I'm waiting for somebody Canadian to write
to me, a dark joke about politics
how a baby boy unknowingly betrays his father
to the secret state police, the Pinochet regime
presumably the same police who sewed
mice inside women and lost girls
II
in the college cafeteria
before the morning coffee you are a log of wood
two tables of trade students
their workman's overalls and ball caps
centuries away from exposure and infection in prison
or a border crossing away
III
at times I'd like to burn
the writing from up here
that our base qualities exist
regardless of region or century
concerns of hunger or survival
only fictionally relevant, bullshit over beers
IV
somehow wanting to know how
old the baby boy is now
the bile rising in his mouth
at the thought of fatherhood
disgust in the misrecognition
of wanting him to have lived

V
how does time fit into land?
home's tight grip, a gravity immune to distance
home, a house, repainted, still the same
the old uncle down the block believes
the us and them mentality,
anger at immigrants wanting sub-human jobs
VI
the mistaken identity of goodness
that anyone here qualified
except for fire fighters and rescue divers
no one's saving anyone
in momentary acts
people are people

Work Log

I
a clearcut, still caterpillars (rusting
blackflies circling multitudes
of empty yellow galoshes
II
out of the city
at last, the horizon
an opening into itself
an unlogged tree,
an unrecorded log,
a hidden age
III
he logged 25 years with them,
and what to do now
that they've closed
down that block of himself
IV
we enter (as termites do
into a log
all the measurable uselessness
of cubic footage, weight, and cost
V
to hope for purpose,
to log for answers,
these sticky rings of wood
VI
LOG: (lamb of god
a cigarette butt in your coffee
snickering in the commons, the government's assurance
of fair treatment, your family waiting
for a visa, your work gloves missing again,
your mind has tuned out

the buzz of the swarming bush
VII
LOG: (logistics
behind how this wood becomes
a Chinese import
shaped, reshaped, a part of this landscape
under hardened paint,
the buying back of places of ourselves
VIII
love for boys (plutonic
everything classical reduced,
everyone's logging into a pop culture
without ideals
always room in the budget
for gas and oil, for chainsaws,
the foreman, decades of work without a desk,
a group of boyish men checking cell phones
for text messages, getting ready to heli out to camp
IX
somewhere a boy playing,
deliberately arranging
emergency response team figurines
dusty trucks, upturned, unhinged
their matchstick logs precisely scattered
X

rings of a tree, the hidden record
five millennia of fearing fire, gone,
a Great Basin Bristlecone Pine, Prometheus,
logged down by students for something
unrelated
XI
Pulp Log - a record
of how the land can take (or give

any piece of one's self
things to write for
XII
The BC Forestry Service,
and the practice to keep
no official logs of anything it does
a reshaping of a land, not accidentally
but with tangential intent
a landscape without memory
overgrowing tread marks, hard hats,
missing fingers, broken chainsaw teeth

Latala 35
Between Words

I
this is an understanding
a passage (time
the world a hum
tin heads a drum
II
that time moved differently
on any land, in any home
the day fading behind Cranbrook Hill
taking away time to write oneself
into being
one shade at a time
III
walls awash in ink smells
at home, the stitching of poems
hands needling words
children (maybe your own
asleep down the hall
IV
that a work becomes enigmatic
its own language ensuring its own
existence or mediocrity
(in a chapbook or not
V
to run away from how and when
to write, into the mind's orchestral rooms
outside, the masses, their watches
ticking in discord, a proximity
sounding in one direction

VI
upon waking, struggling
for an image of a person
(vagueness of gender
like a caricature, walled in
by daily columns, a repetition
of conventional wisdom
driving one to jigsaw
the body into the land's nooks
VII
it's a silent war of standardized
conventions, no sundials on pedestals
or night watchmen on the streets
just the struggle of beholding
a time: a place
VIII
tomorrow, walking to a study
in the careful raw dawn
retracing words about other places
than the one you've become
looking in the mirror
and seeing the page
IX
to go back to one's self
places ago, unwind the life clock
un-ink the hands

Latala 37
Notes

Lines in "While Here" are from Ken Belford's "Holding Land" and "Pathways Into the
Mountains."
Lines in "Resources" are from Barry McKinnon's "Prince George (Part I."
Lines in "On Reading Contemporary North American Poetry" are from John Minczeski's
"My Name," Sharon Thesen's "Long Distance: An Octave," and Roland Barthes' "The
Pleasure of the Text."
Lines in "Prince George" are Rob Budde's and echo the last lines of his poem "Waiting
For Winnipeg."