Internodes
Description
Moving with nomadic grace across the terrain of his previous book, Decompositions, the poetic language of Ken Belford in Internodes shares similar roots, traversing decades at the speed of a search query - pressing onward through Hazelton, the Bulkley Valley, and the unroaded headwaters of the Nass River in the Damdochax Valley - and meanwhile coming to terms with a poetry that "is lived" on the rugged streets of Prince George.
In this twenty-first-century evolution, and one may say "mutation," of Marshall McLuhan's oft-repeated adage that "the medium is the message," Belford's text takes into account the nature of viral marketing and the impact of similar forms of social "trending" on our lives and our language, challenging linearity and order in favour of a work that may be read forward or backward or experienced with an abrupt sense of intimacy, in media res.
Whether reflecting upon the internodal segment that is a vital part of a nerve cell; upon the relationship between the nodes and internodes of a plant stem; or upon the internode merely as an interstice of jargon amid connections we forge through high-speed telecommunication and wireless networks, the text invites the reader to make an informed decision before inviting others to "Like," to "Favourite," or to otherwise invest their social currency in Internodes.
In addition to perceiving the poem as the "means of transmission" over time, Belford's poetic lines welcome readership as a form of collaborative action and agency in an age of crowdsourcing and flash mobs - and also as a form of ongoing social process that is sensitive to the life and demise of many of the decision trees that ultimately nourish our wavering notions of the future.
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Ken Belford was born to a farming family in Alberta and grew up in Vancouver. For more than thirty years, he, along with his wife and daughter, operated a non-consumptive enterprise in the unroaded mountains at the vicinity of the headwaters of the Nass and Skeena Rivers.
The "self-educated lan(d)guage" poet has said that living for decades in the "back country" has afforded him a unique relationship to language that rejects the colonial impulse to write about nature, but speaks from the regions of the other.
"The conventional standards of narrative and lyric poetry give me nothing. The intention of the sequences I write is to assemble words that can be messaged to the habituated souls of the city from the land-aware that live outside city limits."
Currently living in Prince George, British Columbia, with his activist wife, Si, Belford continues to write outside the boundaries of the conventional forms of the various schools of poetry.
His seven previous books of poetry are Fireweed, The Post Electric Caveman, Pathways Into the Mountains, lan(d)guage, when snakes awaken, ecologue, Decompositions, Internodes, and Slick Reckoning.