Little Review: Jeff Derksen, Transnational Muscle Cars

Talonbooks
0-88922-473-0

Derksen likes to position his poetry right in the mainstream of the saltier, sparring realms of “political discourse,” his lines surfacing from the same semantic gumbo that produced Spiro Agniew’s “nattering nabobs of negativism” and Oscar Wilde’s whipsmart butlers getting one over on their narcissistic, hidebound masters. A spirit of paradox lurks behind the arras of Derksen’s lava-paced comedic discharge: “From agitprop to diamat / I believe it was Tatlin / who said — or was it Jacques Villeneuve: / Learn to make leisure / more work, rumours over tumours, / strategies over tactics. I stand / before you asking to be memorable / for my memorabilia and / symptomatic for my mottoes / in these times when we are told / that movement is what we all share / it’s just that some have more legroom.” (98) 1996’s Dwell began the exploration of a style that would become linked with Derksen: poems of spare, astute “socialist one-liners” (his own phrase) that accrued sentence by sentence to elaborate a complex field of issues, mostly concerning geopolitics and nationalism but also sexuality, culture and class identity. The mode departed from earlier varieties of “Language” poetics – such as those espoused by Barrett Watten, Bruce Andrews or the “new sentence” of Ron Silliman — by not fetishizing opaque formalisms over (or in place of) “content”: Dwell was, even for the newbie, accessible in themes, comfortably paced, and motored by an anti-heroic punk sensibility that jived with the author’s working class background in Vancouver, Canada. Transnational Muscle Cars, his third full-length collection, doesn’t add greatly to the poet’s arsenal of poetic methods — the title poem, “Social Facts are Vertical” and “But Could I Make a Living From It” could be extensions of poems from Dwell, and indeed of each other — though “Jobber” and the stanzas of “Forced Thoughts” (which read at times like decidedly un-Juba-to-Jived Harryette Mullen quatrains) reflect a confidence in extending his methods into longer works. There is a noticeable increase in the language of globalism — focus on the “specific,” especially brand names, is valorized, as a welter of capitalist detritus is depicted as links in a chain of transnational correspondences (“I want to see / the real relations / but you’ve got Nikes on and I like you / so I have to try and understand”) [10], while abstract terms are rendered material, humanized so as to be subjected to warm satire: “I’d like to inflate a bubble building as a mobil public sphere, but I’m a little breathless.” (106) Derksen quirps in “Social Facts are Vertical”: “I questioned authority and the question won,” a characteristically self-effacing remark that takes the “self” as both identity trace and Cartesian burden, but exhibiting a note of frustration with the language of theory itself as a wieldable force of opposition. But Derksen has turned this question into incredibly effective, lively but careful, Brechtian poetry that turns the event of reading into a hootenanny in the village square, and has already been quite influential on other writers creating bridges between radical formalism and a vaudevillian social platform, such as Kevin Davies, Rodrigo Toscano and Tim Davis.