The next installment of our 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize special edition of The Chat features our conversation with Jordan Abel, author of the collection Injun.
The next installment of our 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize special edition of The Chat features our conversation with Jordan Abel, author of the collection Injun.
Of the collection, the jury writes: “Jordan Abel’s collection Injun evacuates the subtexts of possession, territory, and erasure. Lyric, yes: ‘that part of sparkling / kn ife love that // hates the trouble of rope / and the letters / of tow ns.’ Testimony of another kind, too: ‘all misdeeds at the milk house / all heap shoots by the sagebrush // all the grub is somewhere / down in the hungry bellies […]’. The fog of tedious over-dramatization clears and the open skies of discourse can be discerned. What does it mean to arrange hate to look like verse? What becomes of the ugly and meaningless? Words are restored to their constituent elements as countermovements in Abel’s hands, just as they are divested of their capacity for productive violence. The golden unity of language and its silvered overcoding erode, bringing to bear the ‘heard snatches of comment / going up from the river bank.’ To pixelize is to mobilize, not to disappear.”
Jordan Abel is a Nisga’a writer currently completing his PhD at Simon Fraser University, where he focuses on digital humanities and Indigenous poetics. Abel’s conceptual writing engages with the representation of indigenous peoples in anthropology and popular culture. His chapbooks have been published by JackPine Press, and above/ground press, and his work has appeared in numerous magazines and journals across Canada. He is an editor for Poetry is Dead magazine and a former editor for PRISM International and Geist. Abel’s first book, The Place of Scraps, was a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Abel’s second book, Un/inhabited was published in 2014. CBC Books named Abel one of 12 Young Writers to Watch (2015).
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THE CHAT WITH JORDAN ABEL
Trevor Corkum: Congrats on being a finalist for this year’s Griffin Prize, Jordan. How does that recognition feel at this point in your career?
Jordan Abel: Good.
Actually, totally unreal and unfathomable and overwhelming and scary and wonderful and bewildering. But also good.
TC:The collection is composed of text found in Western novels published between 1840 and 1950—the heyday of pulp publishing and a period of unfettered colonialism in North America.” Injun then uses pastiche and erasure to speak back against the Western genre. How was the work born? Where did you draw inspiration?
JA: This book really started with a moment for me. I was in Calgary at some point when I was in high school and I ended up going to the Stampede. And there were all these people dressed up like cowboys. I remember thinking that I could never do that. And then I remember wondering if Indians were even allowed to dress up like cowboys. After that moment I started to actually think about why the Western genre was so problematic for Indigenous peoples.
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And there were all these people dressed up like cowboys. I remember thinking that I could never do that. And then I remember wondering if Indians were even allowed to dress up like cowboys.
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TC:How would you define or describe your poetic practice, to someone who isn’t familiar with you work?
JA: So, I’d describe it like this:
My writing/poetry uses the tools and methodologies of conceptualism to engage with Indigenous issues and to critique settler writing. I mean ... that’s kind of clumsy. But I hesitate to identify as a conceptual writer even though I often deploy conceptual ideas in my work. Maybe it’s more accurate to describe my writing as Nisga’a work? Except that I don’t necessarily centre my work around Nisga’a knowledges, understandings, and worldviews. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that my writing comes from a particular position within Indigeneity (I’m an intergenerational survivor of residential schools and urban Indigenous person), and I use a variety of lyric and conceptual techniques in an attempt to speak to/about that positionality.
TC:What’s your own litmus test for exceptional and important poetry?
As a scholar, I find myself being less and less interested in the exceptional, and instead more interested in finding ways to look at everything. Here, I think the exceptional and the important can really just be other names for the canon. And I’m totally down for thinking outside of the canon. As a writer, I’m really interested in writing stuff that seems both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. I’m interested in finding unconventional ways to put conventional things together. I hate to be bored by my own writing. If I can read something a few days, a few months, a few years after I’ve written it and still feel a little surprised at how things come together then I tend to be pretty happy.
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If I can read something a few days, a few months, a few years after I’ve written it and still feel a little surprised at how things come together then I tend to be pretty happy.
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TC:You’re currently completing a PhD at Simon Fraser University in digital humanities and Indigenous poetics. Can you tell us more about your research, and the ways in which your academic and creative pursuits intersect and inform one another?
For sure. Right now I’m working on distant reading project that focuses on a corpus that comprises all of the Indigenous poetry published in Canada. That’s the starting point/idea anyway. And as far as ideas go, I kind of dig it. For me, the issue is that there is really not a whole lot of scholarship out there on Indigenous poetry/poets. I mean, there’s some. And the stuff that’s out there is fantastic. But, to be honest, I was a bit crushed to find that some of my favourite Indigenous poets who have published substantively in Canada have received very little scholarly attention. When I started digging further, I realize that there were dozens and dozens of Indigenous poets who have more or less never really been talked about. At that point, it became very hard to justify a dissertation project that just focused on a few Indigenous poets or one particular coterie. Instead, I was really interested in thinking about what it might look like to attempt to address Indigenous poetry as a whole. Naturally, I’ve run into numerous theoretical and practical road blocks. It’s a bigger project than I realistically should have taken on.
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But, to be honest, I was a bit crushed to find that some of my favourite Indigenous poets who have published substantively in Canada have received very little scholarly attention.
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Ed. After the following excerpt from Injun, please see what Jordan calls "the somewhat incomplete list of Indigenous poetry published in Canada."
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AN EXCERPT FROM INJUN
b)
he heard snatches of comment going up from the river bank
all them injuns is people first and besides for this buckskin
why we even shoot at them and seems like a sign of warm
dead as a horse friendship and time to pedal their eyes
to lean out and say the truth3 all you injuns is just white keys
he played injun in gods country where boys proved themselves clean
dumb beasts who could cut fire out of the whitest1 sand
he played english across the trail where girls turned plum wild
garlic and strained words through the window of night
