Home
Forage
Having won this year's Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize for Forage (Nightwood $16.95), Rita Wong has proven that a challenging and somewhat flawed book can win an important prize. Unnoticed poets take note: originality still counts.
One hesitates to open a book of poems if the back cover blurb announces "an important book for an important time,"; but Forage comes close to justifying the hype.
Alongside a list of Monsanto patents on transgenic plants, Wong has placed instructions on growing basmati rice on your own vegan poop in a Vancouver sewer.
Several pages of references indicate her main concerns: industrial toxins and human health, genetic engineering, colonization and the destruction of indigenous cultures, sustainability, linguistics, globalization, biopiracy and civil disobedience. (Not to mention Chinese poetry both ancient and modern.)
For a mere 66 pages of poems, that's a staggering weight. The commentary of outraged protest usually overtakes poetry, so how does Wong keep the full-out accusation and rage from sliding into a tirade?
She eschews conventional poetics, slips into humour, variety and even love poetry, often employing unique forms and language. Though occasionally just skirting rant and inaccessibility, this poet's energetic ethical indignation shakes the reader up. Her aphorisms are striking, at times bordering on sloganeering,
"Profound mistrust of fashion is healthy.";
"Assume poison unless otherwise informed.";
When the public ear has been deafened you have to be outrageous to be heard. So who can blame her for trying? There are many pages of clever but also daunting wordplay:
"intermittent insistence sinister complicity stillborn mister minister toxic tinctures stinking pistols stricken cysts";
The density of her unpunctuated prose pieces does not always surrender to comprehension, even upon re-reading, and the hand-written marginalia can be a bit coy. Transliterations are not always offered for the Chinese ideograms that exclude many readers. So this is a difficult book for a difficult time.
Toxicity and its toll on our health is one of the main connecting themes. Dioxins and exponential mistakes "magnify their way up the food chain/ into my mother's thyroid/ my neighbour's prostate/ my cousin's immune system/ my aunties' breasts/ my grandmother's cervix";... "industrial food defeats nutrition/immune systems attrition...brain murmurs tumour.";
This jeremiad verges on apocalyptic prophecy. After the devastation that is "more disfigurement than development/ we summon precautionary principles/ in agriculture, manufacture/ voluntary simplicity/ coyotes bare their sharp teeth/ have the last howl.";
So out we'll go, not with a whimper or a bang, but a coyote's howl.
Given the language needed to describe the toxicity of circuit board recycling villages, benzene in aquifers or the disposability of Shenzens's factory girls is different from the language generally used to describe mountain mists and ocean's drama, Rita Wong has emerged as a valuable counterweight to the nature poets so plentiful in B.C.
978-0-88971-213-3
by Hannah Main-van der Kamp, BC BookWorld
One hesitates to open a book of poems if the back cover blurb announces "an important book for an important time,"; but Forage comes close to justifying the hype.
Alongside a list of Monsanto patents on transgenic plants, Wong has placed instructions on growing basmati rice on your own vegan poop in a Vancouver sewer.
Several pages of references indicate her main concerns: industrial toxins and human health, genetic engineering, colonization and the destruction of indigenous cultures, sustainability, linguistics, globalization, biopiracy and civil disobedience. (Not to mention Chinese poetry both ancient and modern.)
For a mere 66 pages of poems, that's a staggering weight. The commentary of outraged protest usually overtakes poetry, so how does Wong keep the full-out accusation and rage from sliding into a tirade?
She eschews conventional poetics, slips into humour, variety and even love poetry, often employing unique forms and language. Though occasionally just skirting rant and inaccessibility, this poet's energetic ethical indignation shakes the reader up. Her aphorisms are striking, at times bordering on sloganeering,
"Profound mistrust of fashion is healthy.";
"Assume poison unless otherwise informed.";
When the public ear has been deafened you have to be outrageous to be heard. So who can blame her for trying? There are many pages of clever but also daunting wordplay:
"intermittent insistence sinister complicity stillborn mister minister toxic tinctures stinking pistols stricken cysts";
The density of her unpunctuated prose pieces does not always surrender to comprehension, even upon re-reading, and the hand-written marginalia can be a bit coy. Transliterations are not always offered for the Chinese ideograms that exclude many readers. So this is a difficult book for a difficult time.
Toxicity and its toll on our health is one of the main connecting themes. Dioxins and exponential mistakes "magnify their way up the food chain/ into my mother's thyroid/ my neighbour's prostate/ my cousin's immune system/ my aunties' breasts/ my grandmother's cervix";... "industrial food defeats nutrition/immune systems attrition...brain murmurs tumour.";
This jeremiad verges on apocalyptic prophecy. After the devastation that is "more disfigurement than development/ we summon precautionary principles/ in agriculture, manufacture/ voluntary simplicity/ coyotes bare their sharp teeth/ have the last howl.";
So out we'll go, not with a whimper or a bang, but a coyote's howl.
Given the language needed to describe the toxicity of circuit board recycling villages, benzene in aquifers or the disposability of Shenzens's factory girls is different from the language generally used to describe mountain mists and ocean's drama, Rita Wong has emerged as a valuable counterweight to the nature poets so plentiful in B.C.
978-0-88971-213-3
by Hannah Main-van der Kamp, BC BookWorld
Submitted on July 27, 2008 in By David.
