The Monument Cycles

by Mariner Janes

tagged: canadian, poverty & homelessness, social work

Description

The Monument Cycles investigates our relation to monuments and works of public art, ranging from memorials to cenotaphs, expressing our desire to capture the fleeting and intangible. Speaking specifically to the city of Vancouver, these poems focus explicitly on the impoverished Downtown Eastside, exploring the narrator’s experiences working in the poorest postal code in Canada.

About the Author

Mariner Janes was born in Victoria, British Columbia, and was raised in East Vancouver. His work has been published in West Coast LINE and in the chapbook blueprint. The Monument Cycles is his first book. While studying English literature at Simon Fraser University, he co-edited iamb magazine, a venue for new and emerging writers. Janes works in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and he aims to incorporate the multitude of voices he encounters there into his work, through found poetry, transcription, and storytelling. He is currently working on a new collection of poetry that examines the lives and deaths of social and environmental figures from around the world.

Excerpt

ginsberg and kissinger argue in a late-night supermarket
bomb bay, or, political power comes through the barrel of a sunflower

“political satire became obselete when kissinger
was awarded the nobel peace prize.” -tom lehrer

what thots i had of you, henry kissinger, for i
walked under an atomic sky in silent alleys
with a headache self-conscious, looking at the angry moon.
in my angry fatigues, and shopping for images,
i went into the neon supermarket, dreaming of your conspiracies!
what obfuscations, what pomegranates! whole nuclear families
shopping at night! aisles full of chilean dictators! mercenaries in the
avocadoes, hand grenades in the tomatoes! and you, allende, what
were you doing down by the bananas?
i saw you, kissinger, hateful, lonely old bastard,
poking among the corpses in the refrigerator, and eyeing
the cambodian grocery boys.
i heard you asking questions of each: who killed capitalists?
what price human life? are you my antichrist?
i wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cruise missiles
following you, and followed in my imagination by the c.i.a.
where are we going, kissinger? the doors close in
an hour. where does your gun point tonight?
(i touch your ears and dream of our fight in the
supermarket and feel forlorn)
will we stroll dreaming of the lost america of love,
past green tanks in driveways, home to our oval office?
ah, dear horn-rims, lonely old assassin,
what america did you have when charon quit poling his ferry
and you got out on the smoking aisles and stood watching
the floor of the supermarket yawn wide, and
the watermelon bombs disappear into the black sky beneath?

bloodlines

tripped the light fantastic, then just tripped
spit sunfire, echoed coins roman and cold
back to alert bay, to honesty's goodbye basin
hello bodega y quadra compass quandary

o lines frenetic, o lines unstraight and bloodwavering
crossing and recrossing and recrossing
cut through with territorial growing pains
o those pesky inhabitants, o silt of watered earth
trust me, there was no-one there when we arrived
it was the cleanest of slates
trust me, it's still clean

what is there to see? what land is opened,
pleads furrowing, pleads own?
spoiled parallels, quadracepted and inverted
in tune with the local culture and economy

the prow cut through the water cleanly and left
a wide swath of history and ash
we drank cups of international tea, bloodlines furrowed
across the soil
and the sand

Contributor Notes

Mariner Janes was born in Victoria, BC, and raised in East Vancouver. His books include The Monument Cycles (forthcoming from Talonbooks) and blueprint, a chapbook. He has also been published in the literary journal West Coast Line. While studying at Simon Fraser University, he co-edited iamb magazine, a venue for new and emerging writers.

Janes works in Vancouver’s troubled and inspiring Downtown Eastside, and aims to bring the multitude of voices he finds there into his work, through found poetry, transcription, and storytelling. He is currently at work on a second collection of poetry that peers into the lives and deaths of social and environmental figures from around the world.

Editorial Reviews

“The Monument Cycles examines the ways ongoing forms of loss are variously memorialized, materialized, and situated as monuments. … These poems collectively straddle the disparate geographical and historical ties underlying monuments and spaces … It is, however, always the monument around which this collection’s daunting breadth continually coheres, not into a cacophonous or sanctimonious frenzy, but rather in the pulsing echoes of a poetry aware of time and place, intent on making memory as well as memorializing …”
– Canadian Literature

“A new urban vernacular poetry is emerging in Vancouver – tied to the rhythms of the city and the contradictions of the urban. Mariner Jane’s The Monument Cycles talks to the entanglements of all of the spaces and moments that make up a city, and it talks to (and through) other poets who set foot into the unpredictability of the street.”
– Jeff Derksen, author of Dwell and Down Time

“Mariner Janes’s Monument Cycles makes its mark in a growing tradition of contemporary urban poetry notable for its polyvocality and elegiac exploration of the very human crises of late capitalism. This is a poetry both simple and smart, direct and oblique, urgent and carefully pausing over the details of everyday life though which we peer into “the burning world.” The poem is a fleeting monument to be sure – but perhaps no better, or more appropriate, monument is possible to the fragile lives Janes so carefully memorializes as he builds his “ark” of words from the “bones” he finds lying around.”
– Stephen Collis, author of the Dorothy Livesay award winning On the Material, and Dispatches from the Occupation

About BC Books Online

The Monument Cycles

by Mariner Janes

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