To mark National Poetry Month, In other Words is being guest-edited by rob mclennan. Throughout April, rob will present the work of dozens of poets he thinks deserve readers' attention, as seen through the eyes of their fellow poets.
Today: Rob Budde on Ken Belford
Rob Budde: Born on a farm near DeBolt, Alberta, Ken Belford grew up in East Vancouver, where he was immersed in the poetry of that era. In the late 1960s, he moved to northwest B.C., north of Hazelton, where he homesteaded with his wife and daughter. Together they ran a "soft paths ecotourism" business in the unroaded Nass River headwaters at Damdochax Lake. He now lives in Prince George, B.C., where he is writing full-time and mentoring the writing community. Belford has published five previous books of poetry: Fireweed; The Post Electric Caveman; Pathways Into the Mountains; ecologue; and, most recently, lan(d)guage. He also regularly produces hand-made chapbooks. He has a book forthcoming from Talon Books called Decompositions.
The "new world" that Belford gestures toward in this poem is both an abandonment of previous modes of thought on the "wilderness" and "nature" and a recognition of that profoundly "other" space out there that he knows so well. Belford is something else. He is not a "nature writer" and is nervous about the label "ecopoet." He is suspicious of that gaze looking into the natural world as it makes meaning and colonizes the nonhuman. Belford has spent enough time on the land to be the gaze looking back at the roads and farms and cities. His assemblage poems and poetics sequences engage the language of dominant culture and radically trouble it, altering it with switches and turns that undo the meaning that we want to make, those comforting myths and visions that hold power over the land. The "story" of nature is not in Belford's poems - there are glimpses, nuances, discourses, collisions, but no romance and no pastoral gasp at the beauty of it all.
I slept beside a Grizzly, each of us unaware of the other, and when I awakened, heard his breath next to mine. Time began for me in that instant when I arose and saw him sleeping there with a Salmonberry leaf on his head. No longer alone, all things since are altered by that switch. What else is there to know, each of us asleep and happy? But he awakened just then and barreled off into the brush, toward everything necessary. At that moment everything I knew left me and now a new world has taken place. It comes to the same thing - astonishment that this should happen at all. But I heard him breathe, and saw him make tracks before I could think. To see this thing was not horrendous, and to see it go was not delightful. Nothing meaningful occurred, but time started with a big bear. This is not about anything, but I'm waiting for some thing to come up behind me in the night. I'm like something else now, and very breath I take anticipates that moment I want again and again.
From lan(d)guage: a sequence of poetics. Halfmoon Bay: Caitlin, 2008
Photo of Ken Belford by Si Transken