ATTENTION:
On August 17th, the People’s Co-Op Bookstore will be hosting “2 Cities / 5 Poets,” a reading and a meeting between the twin cities, Vancouver and Seattle, whose ongoing flirtation continues to inspire writers and artists alike. This event features Jen Currin, Don Mee Choi, Melanie Noel, Rachel Rose, Renée Saklikar and Raoul Fernandes, from both cities and from all over.
CONCERNING THE AFOREMENTIONED:
Across time and space (i.e. the last two weeks), I spoke with the event organizer, local poet and writing professor, Jen Currin, about the literary community shared between Seattle and Vancouver. A woman of threes, Jen teaches at three institutions—Vancouver Community College, SFU and Kwantlen—and has authored three books of poetry: The Sleep of Four Cities, Hagiography, and The Inquisition Yours.
We confabulated with the lovely Renée Saklikar, another resident poet of Vancouver, whose upcoming publication from Nightwood Editions, children of air india, is a series of elegies taking up the bombing of Air India Flight 182. The book is part of Renée’s larger work, the life-long poem-chronicle thecanadaproject.
I asked Jen and Renée to ponder the links between people, language, cities, and countries by way of the ephemeral “thing” separating and bridging all of them: borders.
Sad Mag: Where are you originally from?
Jen Currin: Portland, Oregon.
Renée Saklikar: Well, that depends. New-West-Min-Is-Ter (pronunciation, circa 1977) is my British Columbia home-town. I arrived here via Saskatchewan and before that, from Quebec, Northern Ontario, Nova Scotia, New foundland and Labrador, and before that Poona / Pune, India where I was born.
SM: What do you experience when crossing the border?
JC: Annoyance. Depression at the “security” era in which we live. It’s gotten worse and worse since 9/11. Iris scans and fingerprinting for “non-citizens” of the U.S. and Canada. Depressing and ridiculous.
SM: When I say “border” what is the first image that comes to your mind?
RS: Day into night. Grief into joy. Inclusion/Exclusion. Every movie ever made about the immigrant/exile experience, including, El Norte, Casablanca, Children of Men. Also, the Sound of Music.
SM: What’s your relationship to Seattle?
JC: It’s a city I know as a not-quite tourist; I visit my good friends there usually once or twice a year, and go down also to do poetry readings sometimes. Once a year I usually go to get a hug from the holy woman Amma when she does her U.S. tour. I love the coffee, the bookstores, and the green green green.
RS: Seattle is get-away and return. It is permission, for some strange reason required, to go micro-local. It is the Queen Ann district and almost every restaurant and shop in those two city blocks surrounding the faded glory of the Seattle Centre. Favourites include: Toulouse Petit for breakfast, and afternoons spent in the small second hand book store on Mercer. Home away from home in Seattle is the Inn at Queen Ann. [..] In this way, place is a comfy-known, all the edges of the city smoothed over.
SM: How does your particular space inflect your work?
RS: Particularity occurs as dimension: what is seen, not seen; what is at the margins, not the centre; what is un/spoken. What is slant, not straight on. What is un/authorized, un/official. Bargain room. Off-off Broadway. On the bus. Standing in a long queue, waiting.
SM: What has been a significant crossroad for you as a poet?
JC: It was important for me to cross borders—to move up here from the States. Soon after moving here in 2002, three poets and I started a women’s poetry collective; it grew to a collective of seven poets called vertigo west. We worked together for many years, workshopping, giving readings, publishing chapbooks. Two of us were from the U.S., one of us was from Turkey, three were from Ontario, one was from Quebec. I can’t imagine a better “poetic landing” than the one I received. Thank you Brook, Kim, Meliz, Colette, Emilie, and Helen.
SM: What kinds of borders do you cross within your own work?
RS: To cross might be to transgress: memorial undercut by counter / memorial. Official confronted with un/authorized. Subtext underscoring surface, context framing transition, from one kind of narrative to another, the journey as if to a different country. From present to the far past, which is entry into another dimension. From community remembrance as collective: staid, settled— to witness as transaction, ever-changing, present.
SM: For you, what do these cross border encounters do for the literary community?
JC: These borders were made up by colonizers and it’s hard to think of them as anything but arbitrary. That said, they are also very real and these nation-states determine so much of our lives. I am more interested in the Poetry Nation than the nation-state. Cross-border encounters strengthen the Poetry Nation. Poets need each other. We understand that what we do is important, even as late capitalism could give a fuck about us. Good. Let’s remain underground and quietly build our global network. Vancouver [poet] Rachel Rose runs an occasional cross-border reading series called “Cross Pollination,” and I love the idea of poets as bees pollinating the flowers of another region. Sharings of aesthetics, politics, forms…
SM: What happens when poets cross borders?
RS: Present time irradiated by border time. Mix n Match. Cross-stitch. Do-over. Hop-skip. Re-discover.
