from Report from the fitzpatrick Society, Vol. 1 No. 1
Louis Zukofsky said: poetry and horses and shit. What he really meant to say was that if we ever wanted poetry to mean something then that’s why spring fields smell like manure. And I guess, when I bend my mind toward guessing, the earnestness usually expected is what I’m really trying to address, when I bend my mind to addressing. And then, Louis Zukofsky said: I liked Ezra Pound at first, right up until the rest of the world found out he was an asshole.
The thread through it all hinges upon value, upon words and capital. So, I would like to let poetry’s fans know that no poems were harmed in the making of the canon. Seriously.
To paraphrase Louis Zukofsky: make of me a kind of shrine to which you will always bow, and tell others about my greatness, for that is how we shall build this pyramid and in the future it won't even matter that we are poets. And then he moved on to write the poems in the second half of A that were basically a big middle finger to the over-thinking things that had fallen out of the backside of modernism. Therein we find a chance to stop being assholes in our writing, or at least I do except that I haven’t learned the lesson yet (obviously).
At the end of it all, when the money dries up, when we’re all in an elevator speaking so loudly in an attempt to be heard, when whatever mall we are in stops employing us, when all we are left with is our dignity (maybe?), when there is no other reason to write poetry because even the poets don’t care anymore as they trade virtual business cards and high fives and copy and paste their grant applications to infinity, at the end of it all, to paraphrase Zukofsky: “Don’t/bother me.” Just kidding, he continues, please review my next book.
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Jason Christie lives and writes in Ottawa. He is the author of Canada Post (Invisible), i-ROBOT (Edge/Tesseract), Unknown Actor (Insomniac), and Cursed Objects (Coach House). His most recent chapbooks are: Bridge and Burn (above/ground) and Heavy Metal Litany (Model press). He is looking for a home for a new manuscript of poetry he wrote with the help of several Python scripts, some of which appear in this chapbook. In November 2023 he won the bpNichol chapbook award for Glass Language Untitled Exaltation (excerpt) (above/ground).