folio : Forty-five Ottawa poets
Garland Realth- MP for
Ottawa North River
Rideau Centre
“I had the opportunity this afternoon to tour the facilities on the ground
floor of the Rideau Centre. It was incredible to see people from every
walk of life gather together and learn how to navigate each other’s challenges
and life experiences. The lack of locks on the stall doors certainly
contributed to a greater feeling of trust in our vibrant downtown Ottawa
community.”
Jeremy Washerdryer
- MP Kingston Gagetown
Stuckhome Prison
This past summer my intrepid staff worked so hard that I was able to spend some time visiting a local correctional facility. This state of the art building provides geared to income housing for over 5000 people. It was a great place to reflect on proper financial management and the urgent need for tax reform. I would like to thank UCCO 5050 for making my visit so memorable. I’ll be sure to say hello the next time I am in the area, hopefully for a shorter visit.
Chorlie Orbies - West
Reserve Northern City
Protest
As a representative from a Northern Riding, I know showing up matters. I was humbled to speak at this past Sunday’s solidarity rally. It was incredible to see so many marchers waiting for my encouragement outside of the Prime Minister’s office after such a long march through the city’s busy bywords market area. The daias only a few blocks from my apartment was a welcoming environment for my words of togetherness. My words were clearly meaningful to many of those in attendance as a people of them went off to reflect on what I was saying during my speech. Speeches aren’t solidarity though so it was important to see the march continue as the crowd went chanting forwards and I snuck off back home.
I am always drawn to the prose poem sequence as a form. Having the opportunity to work on such a large canvas and revisit themes, characters, and jokes over the course of pages is something I began doing in my first poetry chapbook with Cameron Anstee’s Apartment 9 Press 12 years ago. Initially, I had a hard time identifying these sequences as poetry and it wasn’t until the late Michael Dennis took me aside and explained to me what I was doing that I truly embraced the form.
The three pieces included below belong to a 40-50 piece sequence called “The Political Landscape.” In that sequence I attempt to understand through satire the bizarre genre of political social media posts.
Using what some political operatives refer to as “the Mid-Atlantic accent of politics,” I attempt to recreate the scrolling waves of Facebook feeds. I want to show the similarities between a politician describing a hum-drum event they attended and an alien describing the earth. In the longer piece, several politicians (or their staff) post multiple times so that I may lampoon a form of writing I too practiced for 10 years as a political operative.
In a collection that I
hope will be published one of these years – the Political Landscape joins Bird
Facts, Okay Computer, Nothing On, Safety First, and Who Needs Anemones to form
a book of very long sequences or put plainly a book of books called Books.
David Currie [photo
credit: Danika Lange] lives and writes in Ottawa. He is the author of several chapbooks and has been published across Canada. Between 2015 and 2023, he worked as a speechwriter on Parliament Hill, where he attempted to sneak as many lines from the 1996 Roland Emmerich film Independence Day into the Parliamentary record as possible.
Later this year, he and IAN MARTIN will be publishing a chapbook entitled This Guy Gets it with Shrieking Violet Press.