Derksen, Jeff
DERKSEN, Jeff
Nationality: Canadian. Born: Murrayville, British Columbia, 1958. Education: David Thompson University Centre, Nelson, British Columbia, 1980–84, B.A. 1984; University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, 1993–95, M.A. 1995. Career: Founding board member, Artspeak Gallery, Vancouver, British Columbia, 1986–95; board member, The New Gallery, Calgary, Alberta, 1994–95; editor, Writing magazine, Vancouver, British Columbia, 1989–93. Since 1984 founding board member, Kootenay School of Writing, Vancouver, British Columbia. Awards: Dorothy Livesay Poetry award, 1991; British Columbia Book prize, 1991, for Down Time; Alberta Writers' Guild Poetry prize, 1994, for Dwell.Address: P.O. Box 61102, Kensington Postal Outlet, Calgary, Alberta T2N 456, Canada.
Publications
Poetry
Memory Is the Only Thing Holding Me Back. Nelson, British Columbia, DTUC Press, 1984.
Until (chapbook). Vancouver, Tsunami Editions, 1987.
Down Time. Vancouver, Talonbooks, 1990.
Selfish (chapbook). Vancouver, Pomeflit, 1993.
Dwell. Vancouver, Talonbooks, 1994.
*Jeff Derksen comments:
Often I am asked why, if I intend the reader to be the primary agent of meaning in my texts, do I make the poetry so "hard." My reply is that my poetry is no harder to understand than a boat ride, say, a canal tour of historical Amsterdam.
* * *There is a restless subjectivity in Jeff Derksen's poetry that refuses the central figure of a stable self. Using a variety of social voices, he blends newscasts, financial and economic statistics, over-heard conversations, intertextual references to other poets and their poetry, and information on pop culture. His work investigates excess rather than closure. Disjunctively presented, the voices shift so that it is impossible to identify any single speaker as the ultimate authority, any one voice as representative of a unified whole. Instead, the persistence of the multiple voices motivates the reader to understand and accept a writing that formally challenges notions of the lyric tradition.
In addition to his poetry, Derksen is known as one of the organizers of Vancouver's Kootenay School of Writing, a collective based on and engaged in supporting and perpetuating language-based writing, and for editing the literary magazine Writing. He has also written essays on contemporary poets and thinkers.
In Down Time and Dwell Derksen combines the long poetry form with formally unrelated texts. These diverse pieces come together within each book by playing off and against one another as singular, isolated poems, so that the effect of reading is cumulative, from the micro to the macro. In "Blind Trust," a piece that embodies the internal dialogue between the materiality of the words by dividing two discrete prose sections with a huge gap of white space, Derksen presents the dialogic possibilities of language itself. "They will recognize others as outsiders," he says at the top of the page: "Coddled, malignant." Then, at the bottom of the page he says, "A chemical engineer and a bank president may sound very much alike. Adjutant, addled." Thus his poetry becomes not only social commentary on a capitalist and homogenizing humanity but also metacommentary on its own processual methodology.
Derksen often plays with the formal construct of justified left margins and ragged-right line breaks. The pieces shift from sentences in paragraphs to numbered stanzas to minimal words composed on the abundance of space on the page. For example, in "Neighbourhood" the justified-left/ragged-right pattern of lyric poetry is turned on its ear. Each word of the poem outside the square brackets, which operate as external social commentary, carries equal weight, and there is not much emphasis or pivot on the line break:
general lap pad data
tackles seam manager [a
qualified control] oligarchy chyme
me menial detail
Moreover, each word is generated by the last few letters in the previous word, so that the act of reading relies on a word's relationship to surrounding words rather than on meaning or narrative connections.
In contrast, Derksen's other pieces in Dwell range from short lyrics to travelogues to celebratory sentence performances. In "If History Is the Memory of Time What Would Our Monument Be" Derksen develops an assortment of disjunctive declarations, ranging from observation on the business world to cancer treatment to gender construction:
That pulp and paper are "in my blood" is the
patriarchal view.
What happens to the poetics of place when your
only "place" is your body and it's not moving.
Still, I'd rather be a statistic than a metaphor.
Derksen's poetry is grounded in his use of irony, which builds on an accumulation of events and information, images, and interruptive narratives that provide the context through which it is to be read. In addition, the heteroglossia that can be found in his poems oppose the tradition of the individual perceiving consciousness and emphasize instead the blurred boundary between world and text.
—Nicole Markotic