Back Shelve is a serial, accretive poem. It is the mirror companion to another poem called “Book Selvage.” The above/ground press chapbook form is what (almost, momentarily) contains and completes it. Extant parts of both poems appear in other publications, mostly Some magazine. I intend to add to it sporadically over the years—to compose further sections or series of identical method and logic.
The brisk line, enjambing, five-couplet structure is definitional of all the poems in this series. All sections are open to, invite narrative and lyric inflection, but its key determinations are shifting socio-subjective indices and historico-economic (dis)locations. Like books on a shelf. The materials are from a project that I initiated nearly fifteen years ago, following the completion of an undergraduate degree in English and creative writing from Concordia University. They index both a pursuit and escape from what I was learning there. I collocated then recomposed the language of the poem when living first on Malkin Avenue and then on East Georgia Street. Contextually, Back Shelve is about institutional, educational, and pedagogic (in)conclusions. Its process is about the ready-to-head, reaching out to and gathering from what is most near.
Scott Inniss is a recent
graduate of the doctoral program in English literature at the University of
British Columbia. Current work includes interviews with poets Kevin Davies,
Dennis Denisoff, and Louis Cabri (the last of which is forthcoming in Tripwire).
He is also in the final stages of completing a critical monograph on Humorous
Tendentious Poetics: Radical Punchlines and Contemporary Poetry. He lives in
Strathcona, Vancouver. A poetry chapbook entitled Book Shelve has just
appeared from above/ground press.
