Check out my new(ish) work in the latest issue of The Capilano Review. It's an excerpt from a longer piece called "camp set up done," and it's part of my series of oil and gas industry found language poems, which also include "making hole", published in West Coast Line #39 and "NEWS(and yet)", published in dANDelion a couple of years ago.

For anybody who will be in Vancouver next Friday...

LINEbooks invites you to join us for the launch of four new poetry titles:

Accrete or Crumble by Natalie Simpson

Surplus by Roger Farr

Transversals for Orpheus & the untitled 1-13 by Garry Morse

Courage, My Love by Reg Johanson

Friday, December 01 at 8pm at Spartacus Books
319 West Hastings Street Vancouver, BC

Special: pre-launch price box set of all four titles $50

Contact Michael Barnholden
Managing Editor, WCL
www.westcoastline.ca
email: wcl@sfu.ca

Why is it that the less you say the less you have to say? My standards for what is worth writing here have rise proportinately with the length of time since my last entry. Now nothing seems important enough to record.

Each entry, by coming into existence, removes itself from the possibility of the poem. -Robert Kroetsch
A writer is someone for whom writing is difficult. -Somebody

Art is all possibility. To be an artist is to strive and to fail. Inevitably. I was trying to figure out how I can be proud of my writing and ashamed of it at the same time. I think it's because it's painful, just incredibly painful, to confront a particular manifestation of foreclosed possibilities. And it's not that I think I've failed at anything, more that there's no standard of success or failure. It just is what it is, so it's not what it could be. But why does that matter?

Thinking about poetry and law and my sense of trying to operate in two vastly different worlds. While the people and to a certain extent the ideologies representative of each world tend to be quite divergent, I think there are overlaps.

I think postmodern poetics and law dovetail quite nicely in the sense that both are concerned primarily with language, not necessarily as subject but as medium, as the only medium within which they can operate.

And the crucial point about both poetry and law is that there is no certainty. Nothing is certain because language fails. Where they differ is in the effect of uncertainty.

Law strives for certainty regardless, or accepts a conditional sense of certainty recognizing the fiction as less than ideal but necessary. And practitioners of law don’t even have to recognize that much. Most law students and, I imagine, lawyers would claim that the law is certain and that any question of uncertainty is merely philosophical or academic. While I think it’s more accurate to say that uncertainty is an undeniable condition of law, as law is an enactment of language, and the sense of certainty with which practitioners arm themselves is a philosophical illusion.

Poetry can run into the same problems as law when poets strive to express in spite of uncertainty. But postmodern poetrics are more likely to thrive on uncertainty, to find its challenges in indeterminacies.