English Garden Bondage is another iteration of a larger project, wherein I have been composing sonnets using the most common patterns of structual brickwork, but it was this particular bond that seemed to demand its own treatment different from the others. The extention of ‘bond’ into ‘bondage’ had been kicking around since the first poems of this project were written, but it was ‘english garden’ that insisted there could be an anti-colonial/imperialist poke here, with the project of Canada being this imposition of an ‘english garden’ in the ‘new world’. The one of the less obvious formal restrictions of these poems is line length determining word lengths, and so back editing becomes rather difficult, often only changing tenses or +/- ‘s’, regardless of syntax, to de/increase word length. The results are all nearly one-off poems, and secret failures, where subjective expression stuggles in restraints, thus some of the poems seem to lose their line and veer off in unintended directions, while others may jab around a topic, or so, to still never arrive. Part complaint, part critique, and due to my proximity to bourgeois society these poems are also more personal than previous brick bonds, in that they mingle reality and fantasy while grappling with my attempt to locate myself within the capitalist framework of settler Canada. Not a small part of the impetus behind this chap was a reaction to the supposed preferred a-politicality of formal poetry I've stumbled into online. Ignoring the fact that ‘apolitical’ is very much political in posture, as well as anything entered into the public realm is de facto political, plus I’m not so sure the exclusion of politics from poetry enhances poetry, but actually does the opposite; art qua art is so very often blah qua blah. That said, I hope the blah-content in my chap is minimal.
