Ben Robinson : YOU CAN DO ANYTHING IN HAMILTON: Notes from The Dept. of Continuous Improvement

He has only ever lived in Hamilton, ON. 

For a while now, this has been the last line of my writing bio. Coming up with a biographical statement for yourself, particularly in the third person, is a strange endeavour. I initially added this line without much thought, but I am becoming increasingly aware of how much living in Hamilton has affected me.

In recent years, with the so-called revival of the city, several businesses have opened that specialize in Hamilton-themed paraphernalia including a particularly popular t-shirt with YOU CAN DO ANYTHING IN HAMILTON printed across the front.

To a certain extent, this slogan makes me uncomfortable – it seems connected to our obsequious relationship with Toronto et al., as well as a Ford Nation™ brand of free-market capitalism (see “OPEN4BIZ”). However, there is also an element of the slogan that resonates with me – the city feels full of possibility, a sense of increase and overflow and saturation.

Living in a city like Hamilton forces you to be prepared for things to take a sharp turn toward absurdity at any given moment. Many of the more surreal elements in these poems came directly from the city itself: someone drives by with an AYN RAND vanity plate, a server asks “Are you one person or two?”, a security guard watches over an empty hole at a construction site. This place is more generative than I could ever hope to be; I’m just trying to pay attention and write as fast as I can.

The restless, unrestrained energy of the city with a lowercase “c” finds its opposite in the capital “C” City of City Hall. As a current employee of the City of Hamilton, I am quite familiar with the bureaucracy of public service, its attempts to corral and manage and sanitize. That said, there is also an absurdity to the work that can be inspiring at times.

The title of this chapbook is pulled from an actual City of Hamilton department, the Department of Continuous Improvement, which I first stumbled upon while browsing internal job postings. At first, I thought it sounded endlessly existential like something out of Orwell. However, Wikipedia tells me departments like these are pretty standard fare – focusing on things like “meta-process”.

There is a section in my poem “Adventures in Family Planning” (which does not actually appear in this chapbook, but speaks to poems that do) that I think captures the un-conceivable creativity of the City apparatus:

HR’s Emergency Contact Form

provides an option

for SELF.

I imagine the option for “SELF” was only included on the form because, at some point, a City employee asked that it be added. Certainly, there are people who are socially isolated and would not have a name to put down as a contact and that is a tragedy of its own, but the sheer paradox of asking your employer to contact you in the event that you are injured on the job is mind-boggling. Is this not the pinnacle of radical individualism? Perhaps even more surprising, is that the employer would accept responsibility for carrying out the logistics of such a request. Kafka could never have foreseen it.

In both instances, in both the city and the City, we have language in the extreme, language off its leash. This place is dark and dangerous and wonderful and surreal and disappointing and beautiful and confusing. I hope all these various energies are present in DoCI in one way or another and that the poems contain some of the same tensions and frictions that give life in Hamilton its particular quality.

Ben Robinson is a poet, musician and librarian. His most recent chapbooks are Keeps on Running from The Alfred Gustav Press and Dept. of Continuous Improvement from above/ground press. He has only ever lived in Hamilton, Ontario on the traditional territories of the Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee and Mississaugas. He is @bengymen on Twitter. He has only ever lived in Hamilton, ON.