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    Internodes
    Internodes
    Internodes
    Ebook92 pages30 minutes

    Internodes

    By Ken Belford

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    About this ebook

    Moving with nomadic grace across the terrain of his previous book, Decompositions, the poetic language of Ken Belford in Internodes shares similar roots, traversing decades at the speed of a search query – pressing onward through Hazelton, the Bulkley Valley, and the unroaded headwaters of the Nass River in the Damdochax Valley – and meanwhile coming to terms with a poetry that “is lived” on the rugged streets of Prince George.

    In this twenty-first-century evolution, and one may say “mutation,” of Marshall McLuhan’s oft-repeated adage that “the medium is the ­message,” Belford’s text takes into account the nature of viral marketing and the impact of similar forms of social “trending” on our lives and our language, challenging linearity and order in favour of a work that may be read forward or backward or experienced with an abrupt sense of intimacy, in media res.

    Whether reflecting upon the internodal segment that is a vital part of a nerve cell; upon the relationship between the nodes and internodes of a plant stem; or upon the internode merely as an interstice of jargon amid connections we forge through high-speed telecommunication and wireless networks, the text invites the reader to make an informed ­decision before inviting others to “Like,” to “Favourite,” or to otherwise invest their social currency in Internodes.
    In addition to perceiving the poem as the “means of transmission” over time, Belford’s poetic lines welcome readership as a form of collaborative action and agency in an age of crowdsourcing and flash mobs – and also as a form of ongoing social process that is sensitive to the life and demise of many of the decision trees that ultimately nourish our wavering notions of the future.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTalonbooks
    Release dateAug 15, 2013
    ISBN9780889227934
    Internodes
    Author

    Ken Belford

    Ken Belford was born to a farming family in Alberta and grew up in Vancouver. For more than thirty years, he, along with his wife and daughter, operated a non-consumptive enterprise in the unroaded mountains at the vicinity of the headwaters of the Nass and Skeena Rivers. The “self-educated lan(d)guage” poet has said that living for decades in the “back country” has afforded him a unique relationship to language that rejects the colonial impulse to write about nature, but speaks from the regions of the other. “The conventional standards of narrative and lyric poetry give me nothing. The intention of the sequences I write is to assemble words that can be messaged to the habituated souls of the city from the land-aware that live outside city limits.” Currently living in Prince George, British Columbia, with his activist wife, Si, Belford continues to write outside the boundaries of the conventional forms of the various schools of poetry. His seven previous books of poetry are Fireweed, The Post Electric Caveman, Pathways Into the Mountains, lan(d)guage, when snakes awaken, ecologue, Decompositions, Internodes, and Slick Reckoning.

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      Book preview

      Internodes - Ken Belford

      Internodes-Cover.jpgInternodes-Endpapers.jpgInternodes-Title-Page.jpg

      for Si

      Some of these poems have appeared elsewhere. My thanks go to Brook Houglum, editor at Capilano Review , for including six sequences in the 2012 ecologies issue. I am grateful to Christine Stewart at the University of Alberta and Clint Burnham at Simon Fraser University for the eleven sections they curated for the Autumn / Winter 2011 special issue of Canadian Literature , 21st Century Poetics : The Avant Garde in Canada . Other thanks go to Josh Massey, who selected a piece for The Tyee , and to the Kelowna poet Jake Kennedy, who chose a sequence for Open Letter. Also, thanks to George Bowering, who edited a special issue of Jon Paul Fiorentino’s Matrix magazine and included five sequences from this collection.

      Thanks also go to the British Columbia Arts Council for a writing grant that saw me through the making of this book.

      Internodes-Title-Intro.jpg

      Give the word, and disperse early

      and displace often. Let gaps fly

      open. Let the ambiguous in and

      begin with a little old-time melodic

      contour, the outcome of movement,

      the on-the-job practice of working

      out the variations and intervals

      of admission. Let in the elements

      of incidental intension. As far as

      the transparent, bald-faced texts

      that fan out into the obvious, release

      early, and release often. Let go,

      and get rid of the entangled fabric

      of arcane meaning, and breathe,

      and be something more than

      the immediate, repetitious sample.

      My ancestral type reappears.

      Memories are temperamental

      and inbred. I’m not burdened

      with the shallow structure of

      a word order that calls nothing

      into question. Content confounds

      influence and migrates through

      at different speeds. I didn’t inherit

      instructions and I’m not confused

      with old-time dogma. Samples

      are taken from the background,

      and memories are inherited.

      Language is coded, but the code

      isn’t visible, even when desire is

      holding down the new look of

      the image. The nature of the poem

      depends on the nature of the reader.

      When it’s good, it’s a close copy.

      I lived a branchy past of sprigs and

      sprouts and internodes and twigs,

      but didn’t occupy the land. In cahoots

      with roots, I made a living in the bush.

      The upshot is the basis of my belief:

      a subversive affinity

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