I always have too many projects going on at once. I’ve been writing for years and not putting out much - my two books were written as one, fifteen years ago, and I added a few things here and there before the second one came out. Poems have been piling up ever since. I’m completely rewriting most of that work, and adding on based on what this self-transformation is letting me see about my past and present experiences.
As I mentioned before I’m putting together a fourth book right now, all in French, of poems about places in Western Canada. It’s become a practice of tentative decolonization, partly by working on old poems that kept that colonial gaze on a land that’s empty of people and relations, empty of history, just something to be perceived. There can be beauty in that, Camus’ writing has a lot of it, but this beauty comes at a cost and is an appropriation, is part of the larger continuing appropriation of the land through settler colonialism. It’s beauty that’s predicated on erasing a lot of what makes beauty possible.
And at the back, somewhere, is another book on travel, and that one will end up being bilingual in different ways, and might have to be unconventional in its presentation because I want to account for distance through history and geography. I have no idea where I might even submit it, but I suppose that’ll be a problem I’ll need to wait to deal with later on. I have a lot of poems I’ve written while travelling. There’s colonialism here too: in reading these poems I feel I was often appropriating all these places in that same way I’ve been doing it in the Prairies. But now… There’s confinement and the absence of deconfinement for my family even though it’s August now, and the nostalgia for travel itself and not just for specific trips. There’s carbon emissions, and then there’s the destruction that tourism brings, even as it’s supposed to bring some money - and that might just be another form of exploitation. Travel writing can’t have the same meaning it used to have, when eurocentrism was the norm. It certainly doesn’t for me.
For more immediate things, on Instagram (@lethejerome) I’ve been messing around with an old idea of bringing together poetry, politics, and philosophy. And it’s mostly poetic prose, so automatic translations should give you something. Lately there’s a lot about landscaping and sidewalks because with confinement I’m going for walks in a residential neighbourhood. Sidewalks lend themselves to a lot of metaphors, and there’s a lot they exclude. There’s a larger project in there somewhere, writing poetry about and from political philosophers, but I haven’t figured out what that might be just yet. I want to read more political poetry first. I’d love to be able to write something that’s at once poetry, politics, and philosophy, where neither of the three terms are an adjective or qualifier for the other, but where I might find each in the other through various techniques. I’m willing to give it time.
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