I was aware of Ken Belford’s two books, Fireweed and The Post Electric Caveman in the late 60’s. I think he’d been peripherally
involved with the early Talonbooks scene (Jim Brown and Very Stone House). I
was interested in him as a BC poet and, in the context of eco- and “place”
poetry, his attention to the north, forest, river, mountain etc. First time I
met him was when I invited him to Selkirk College in Castlegar to do a reading
in the 70’s. This was in the Arts 1 programme and, fittingly, he read in the
log cabin the class had built. Those were back-to-the-land days so he fit in
pretty well. He was very down to earth, a little wild, anarchist, not
anti-intellectual but definitely non-institutional. During the 80’s and 90’s he
focused on running a guiding and hunting business up in the Nass.
In the years after 2000 he was back in Prince George
and very much into writing poetry. He published a number of collections,
including a self-published limited edition series of what he called “c” books.
I always enjoyed these chapbooks for their immediacy. He usually included a
note when he sent them to me. Here’s part of one from 2006 that situates his
attentions:
Got some snow
here, 6 inches of skanky, dark, wet stuff, water on the streets. Sending these
two little c books, replete w places I’d probably not choose for a book but
think to include in this as something to do with where I am at, and what I’m
doing. We were planning to come down for a few days but it’s too expensive for
us right now. After all those years working so hard in the bush, when I sold my
half, the Feds jumped on me an muscled a capital gains tax. Oweeeee. Something
wrong with this.
A couple of the “c” books in this series he titled
“lan(d)guage,” collected in a book of that name in 2008. I talked with Ken off
and on about what I call a poetics of place and this collection he called “a
sequence of poetics.” He was focussed on articulating a poetry that felt
truthful to his palpable sense of the earth as he tried to negotiate that in
the face of neo globalism, always conscious of his own biotext.
B.C. poet Fred Wah’s most recent project is a
collaboration with Rita Wong about the Columbia River, beholden: a poem as long
as the river. Scree: The Collected Earlier Poems, 1962-1991 was
published in 2015. High Muck a Muck: Playing Chinese, An Interactive Poem,
is available online (http://highmuckamuck.ca/). Music at the Heart of
Thinking: Improvisations 1-170 will be published by Talon in 2020. He lives
in Vancouver and on Kootenay Lake.
Photo by Charles Earl, Ottawa, 2009.