The Resistance Nyla Matuk ‘And so this being the time of manifestos, here is mine: that poetry, at its best, does not speak on behalf of the self. It speaks on behalf of the Other. It speaks on behalf of community. It speaks the self only in so far as the self is part of something larger,’ Kei Miller wrote in The Poetry Review in 2017.¹ His declaration bears a resemblance to a number of ideas I grappled with as I prepared and edited Resisting Canada: An Anthology of Poetry, published in September 2019 by Véhicule Press of Montreal. The twenty-eight contributors address a plethora of ills resulting from the statecraft of a settler-colonial enterprise, i.e., Canada. Miller’s manifesto takes up poetry’s capacity to bear witness – perhaps to injustice, or to a measure of social agency. It underscores a distinction between the enduring legacy of the egotistical sublime of the English Romantics – ‘on behalf of self’ poems and confessional poetry, which narrate an individual, and poetry with a view to collective consciousness, a politics not necessarily exclusively of identity and identity’s fraught subjective realities, but telling ‘history from below,’ of a collective identity ready to present such a history.

Many of the poets I included in the anthology address the myriad ways Indigenous Peoples, who lived on the land called Turtle Island before colonisers arrived from Europe, have been dispossessed. They still live here, and they are still being colonised. The poets examine, inter alia, the fallout of shameful Canadian institutions such as residential schools, and the violence against Indigenous women and girls that is a legacy of the originally racist assumptions that accrued over ... read more

Brigit Pegeen Kelly Music

On this side of the dunes, there is no wind.   On the other
side, the sea side, the wind comes across the water, and
always, soft or hard, it blows.   But on this side, even when a
little wind finds its way here, you can hide from it,
because in back of the dunes, which are like pyramids, great
white pyramids, there are many small dunes, the dunes’
offspring, and in the small dunes there are countless
windless hollows in which you can lie down and listen to
crow cry and the low sound of the sea.   There is a gun
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Eugene Ostashevsky 17.
This is my totter. This is my other totter.
They play at dress and redress.
They are princesses. They wear prints.          They wear prints out.
Out of what. Out of line. Out to what. Out to tatters.
They, hey. Hey do they speak.
They speak a speak. They speak a speak of mines and takes.
They speak a speak of ekes and keeps. They speak a speak of rates and tears.
They speak a speak I speak of not speaking. Hey.
My totter totters across the room. My other totter totters across the room.
My two totters totter across the room. They take a stance.
... read more