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Description
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.
Contributor Notes
Ken Belford was born to a farming family in Alberta and grew up in Vancouver. An early advocate for the ecology movement, Belford homesteaded with his wife and daughter in northwestern British Columbia in the 1960s. For more than thirty years, they operated a soft-paths eco-tourism business in 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 attempts to write from nature and our relationship to the land.
Currently living in Prince George, British Columbia, Belford continues to write outside the boundaries of the conventional forms espoused by what he calls the “tribal schools” of poetry. His seven previous books of poetry include Fireweed, The Post Electric Caveman, Pathways into the Mountains, lan(d)guage, when snakes awaken, ecologue, and Decompositions, which was shortlisted for the 2011 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize.
Editorial Reviews
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.
It’s good to see Prince George, British Columbia poet Ken Belford’s new collection, Internode (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2013), shaped to conform to the poems he writes, as opposed to the standard poetry-book size of just about every other book out there, shifting from the more standard six by nine inches to five by eight inches. Belford’s poems have long been part of an ongoing, larger work, composing short, predominantly untitled single-stanza poems that accumulate to book-length and even larger structures, linking back to decompositions(Talonbooks, 2010) to Ecologue (Harbour, 2005) to much of his previous work. “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.” he writes, and Belford’s ongoing poetry (or even, ongoing poem) is one that works to connect to all other things, articulating his connection to the world through a deeply considered eco-poetic. How does eco-poetry connect to pastoral? Belford composes a poetry that is part of the world, as opposed to the pastoral, which is more-often seen as separate, somehow, from the author and the writing. There is something worth comparing here to the works of American poet Fanny Howe for their interconnectivities, as well for the fact that neither poet have been self-conscious enough about any over-arcing project to name such a thing (and, perhaps, neither of them ever should). As he includes in his bio note at the end of the collection:
“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.”
“In Internodes are poems that are spry organisms assembled from the language of body, land and politics. … His poems thrum in response to texts, media and the land itself. … Belford’s book resists conventional thinking as it applies to gender, land use and animal abuse, but he writes in a way that also resists conventional forms of writing that have helped create those ills. It is the pretty image and the good story that have produced the unsustainable context we are in and Belford writes his way out of that tradition and into a new, fluid and uncertain poetic path.”
– Northword Magazine
“In Ken Belford’s poems, ‘The sentence is not limited to what happens.’ Internodes is a meditation linking language to the world.”
– Tsering Wangmo
“In poem after poem in Internodes, Ken Belford deactivates the egoistic, imperious lie of the ‘I’ and yet somehow reanimates that pronoun with wise, land- & animal-aware, breath-giving energy. Internodes is a rare and fierce book of poetics: one of dispersals and laments and ambiguities – and also one of gatherings, celebrations and visions.”
– Jake Kennedy
