It is with great sadness that I write to share the news of Jeff
Steudel’s passing. Jeff was a husband, father, high school teacher, soccer
player, sometime musician, dear friend to so many, and poet. I became fast
friends with Jeff on a trip we took from Vancouver to Portland to do a reading
at a Lit Crawl at a distillery. Anvil Press sent us out as near strangers
(asking that we share a room if not really a bed) and we came back as buddies.
On the trip, we talked (what else?) poetry and Jeff shared his admiration for
Fred Wah as a poet and teacher.
On the back cover of Jeff’s one and only book that was nevertheless
beautifully impactful on the poetry world, Fred Wah wrote:
Foreign Park measures an immediate world through the palpable juxtapositions of the local, what’s close to hand, organic flashes of the day’s objects that can be touched. The “foreignicity” of his poetic park reveals the paradox of where and how we live, that in-between margin in the world where we “don’t need to know everything” and “Every five minutes together [is] a new world.” These poems shimmer in their aliveness. (Anvil Press, 2015)
The next year, Foreign Park went on to become a finalist for the Dorothy Livesay
Poetry Prize. Foreign Park was also
recognized by the blog All Lit Up, where the book was showcased on Poets
Resist, “a series dedicated to poetry as a form of resistance. Every day on the
blog we will feature a poet whose work explores one of these topics:
colonialism and violence, homophobia and transphobia, environmental
destruction, and/or the !@#$% patriarchy.”
Discussing the poetic influence of a road trip to Prince George in an
interview with Rob Taylor on his website Roll of Nickels, Jeff
explained:
I took a road trip with my dog up to Prince George and then over to Mount Robson Provincial Park, a route that roughly follows the Fraser. I stopped a lot to walk along the river. It really is a grand river, so much spectacular scenery, so much volume and force. However, there are a lot of pollutants dumped into it, some of which can be seen and many of which cannot. I wasn’t really looking for anything in particular on the trip. I wanted to take in details and get a better feeling of the geography. I grew up close to the North Saskatchewan River in Edmonton, and I think I get a feeling of home just being near a river. It's not a good feeling to see industrial effluent discharged into the water. It seems to disappear into the silt, the big mud, but it's still there.
Equally at home in the wilderness or the
city, Jeff also followed an equally wide range of poetic geographies. In Foreign Park there are lyric poems “Bonsai,” a love poem with a light touch
that lives within the shadow of its title; “Qualifying Heat,” a villanelle that
revels in sound and local specificities: “Chain-link rings a skating rink.
Marijuana wafts”; and “Dedication,” a eulogy for Derek Miller, a Vancouver
blogger who fought for assisted dying for people in Canada. This last poem ends
with the equivocal line: “The Magician will be here shortly,” of which an echo
can be found in the last poem in the collection. In “Air Conditioner,” a title
that reminds us of ecology’s cooling powers, we read the line: “Again the magic
of water / rose up and up to be counted on.” This poem elides the I, opting for
a poetics that emerges out of the landscape. Indeed, each section of Foreign
Park begins with an italicized, untitled poem which feels freeform and
notational. It also should be said that Jeff’s curiosity and friendliness
shimmers through his book.
Reading the outpouring on social media about what Jeff meant to so many
people is heart-breaking and heart-warming, heart-breaking in the loss of
someone who was so singularly multifold in their many different relationships,
and heart-warming to see how many different facets of his life will be carried
by so many, but don’t take my word for it, you can hear this for yourself in
Jeff’s voice and vulnerability in this interview he did with RC Weslowski and Pamela Bentley on Co-op radio’s Wax Poetic in 2016.
You can also spend time with his poems by getting a copy of Foreign Park at https://www.anvilpress.com/books/foreign-park
I’ll end with where Jeff’s book begins. “... we cannot draw a line that
delineates where air ends and we begin because air is in us, fused to our lungs
and circulates in our bloodstream. We are air.” - David Suzuki. I like to think
that it’s also impossible to draw a line that delineates precisely, in the
blurred corners of the heart, where others end and we begin. Jeff grew up
hearing German from his parents and grandparents. I think of the happiness in
the corners (Glück im Winkl) that we
share.
