University of Northern British Columbia: Open Journal Systems
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The Governor General, the Prime Minister and the Request to Prorogue
Get PDFThe unusual request to prorogue parliament, made by the prime minister of Canada Steven Harper just prior to a scheduled vote of non-confidence, provoked considerable debate in Canada. This article examines the events leading up to Harper's request as well as the constitutionality of the Governor General's decision to accept it. It argues that the Governor General followed the only reasonable course of action available to her
“Poetry's Evolving Ecology: Toward a Post-Symbol Landscape”
Get PDFThis meditative essay sees the shifting of Western poetics from Modernism to Postmodernism as evolutionary, and considers formative imagination’s function in that shifting to serve as a resource for contingency. According to this kind of thinking, poetics and ecology are influenced by globalization. The present meditation explores the shedding of cultural symbols in poetry baring the more contingent language of signifiers. It suggests that the resulting ecology of signifiers brings readers closer to nature because it removes assumed values of a given culture. The result is postmodern approaches to poetry. The essay outlines the relationship between the formative imagination and contingency. It remarks on how the nature of mediation and the formative imagination pivot on contingency, allowing poetics to adjust to perpetual change. It also recognizes that the signifier and aporia have become basic tools of the poetic imagination marking time until multiculturalism has established itself and perhaps a new world literature becomes one language. The meditation uses a poem by Jorie Graham as an example of poetry bridging religious symbolism to Darwinian thought. Charles Bernstein’s poem, stripped of cultural symbolism, is an example of a poem of contingency. Together, they illustrate the evolution of poetics and its most contemporary ecology. The meditation concludes with my own poetry, highlighting its changing ecology from cultural to multicultural symbolism and then to the threshold of contingency
“Patrick Kavanagh - An Irish Pastoral Poet in the City”
Get PDFPatrick Kavanagh was born in 1904, came of age just after the First World War, and began his poetic apprenticeship in the 1920s when he wrote verses which were the essence of pastoral. Just before the break-out of the Second World War, he came to Dublin, where he was to spend most of his life, with some time spent in London in the 1950s. In his work, we can trace a journey from the first self-conscious verses of a country poet imbued with the spirit of creation, to an artist of major importance in the 20th century, when he developed and evolved a new aesthetic about the situation of a country man in Dublin. This personal aesthetic, which has been defined in the 1990s by the eco-critic and poet Terry Gifford as “post-pastoral,” was not only bound to have resonance with all city dwellers, but also indirectly touched upon issues of religious, national and social identities in its combined preservation and transformation of Kavanagh’s rural Irish roots as an alternative to the discourses prevailing at the time―revivalist nationalism and political polarisations. His work can now be read as an illustration of the place of human consciousness in the ecological web, for his poetic autobiographies intertwine with his first experience of an unbounded Nature in the countryside, a love that, when recollected, transformed his poetry in the city in his later years. As this biographical survey of his poetic development shows, Kavanagh’s particular brand of “urban pastoral,” what the Romans would have called rus in urbe, is not merely elegiac for the past left behind in the countryside; we can see it too as a “post-pastoral” move that relies on the categories of “immanence” and “beauty” to make Culture inseparable from Nature. Kavanagh’s poetry, therefore, also constitutes an idyllic quest for personal integrity in our times
“‘Narratives from Another Creek’: Judith Wright and the Poetics of Water in Australia”
Get PDFThe recent dramatic evidence that Australia’s largest river system is severely stressed to the point of imminent collapse compels Australians to face the critical challenge of fostering and developing a new way of understanding their relationship to water in Australia, and by extension, the intricately dynamic natural world upon which, or, rather, in and by which, they subsist. The change of preposition reflects the prevailing mentality: that humans hold dominion over the land and its bounty, a persistent presumption of command and control which, in itself, points to the scale of the contest we face—the need to radically change, at the most fundamental level, long-held attitudes towards the earth and its “bounty.” Affronted and alarmed by the degradation of the natural environment in Australia, Judith Wright, renowned poet and environmental activist, challenged prevailing attitudes and practices, finding in and through poetry an effective means of envisioning new forms of awareness. A pioneering environmentalist, Wright’s concerns over the environment align directly with the now-established ecological, eco-feminist and postcolonial critiques. In reading Wright’s poem, “Unknown Water,” this paper offers a reappraisal of her ideas and work as both poet and political activist so that Wright’s “ecopoetics” can be seen as both a guide to, and affirmation of the need for, a celebratory poetics of water in Australia and beyond
“Goin’ to Nature to Reach Double Consciousness: A Du Boisian Methodological Journey to Graves of the Formerly Enslaved”
Get PDFToo few W. E. B. Du Boisian scholars happen upon the fact that “double consciousness” is self-awareness or an assessment of self-identity that flows from two very different sources of memory—diachronic or accretive, and syndetic or invoked. I have borrowed Du Bois’s notion of “double consciousness” as an angle of perception to begin to theorize about what I believe occurs―knowingly or unknowingly—when some members of the African and white descendant communities visit burials of formerly enslaved people of African descent. This paper explores the significance of gravesites of formerly enslaved people of African descent as powerful sacred spaces in nature that embody and percolate ancestral memories. In so doing, it also considers one’s feelings of attachment to local landscapes of memory, one’s preoccupation with cultural identity at natural sites of entombment, and one’s relation to the visitable past. These thoughts, while they may strike some as out of place in traditional academic circles, are an acknowledgment of what we can learn from the language of rituals as structures and practices performed in nature. As such, these rituals identify cultural ethnicities and individual identities, as well as provoke reflection and understanding of social memories and embodied histories
Canadian Sex Work Policy for the 21st Century: Enhancing Rights and Safety, Lessons from Australia
Get PDFThis paper reviews the current problematic state of public policy addressed to the sex trade in Canada. It explores the recent parliamentary inquiry into the sex trade and suggests that the Canadian polity needs to set in train a clear program for reform in this area. A particular priority of these reforms should be to enhance the safety and rights of sex workers. At present the Canadian polity is mired in philosophic, moral and political divisions over the acceptability of sex work and this is limiting the search for practical ways of addressing urgent social problems. We argue that this search needs to be wide and continuing and that some practical ‘lessons’ can be learned from Australia where reforms have been in place for some time
“Poe(trees) of Place: Forest Poetics from Lithuania to Tasmania”
No full textAnalysing the poetic ecology of the forest as a cultural landscape offers insight into ecocritical consciousness. This article compares Lithuanian national and Tasmanian colonial poetics, and examines post-colonial poetry linked to the Tasmanian conservation movement. Starting in nineteenth century Lithuania under Russian rule, this article examines The Forest of Anykščiai by Antanas Baranauskas in English translation. The poem, a national anthem to a cleared forest, reconstructs an entire ecosystem and imbues it with Lithuanian mythology. In this way, the poem re-inscribes Lithuanian forests as nationally significant, and inextricably linked to culture, sense of place and the struggle against Russian colonisation and imperialism. Nature becomes a nationally unifying symbol and forests in particular are represented as cultural landscapes. In far away Tasmania, the island state of Australia, a violent colonial past has also been unfolded in the setting of extensive forests. In nineteenth century Tasmania, however, the forest poetics were written by members of the colonising power, people who saw forests as hostile, dangerous places, and whose political agenda included the social legitimisation of the invasion of inhabited lands. Therefore, in many examples of Tasmanian colonial poetry, the representation of Nature as silent and empty of life deletes the ecological presence of forest. The silencing of the forest neatly accompanied the denial of any indigenous history of the land. This has had the effect of enacting the colonial doctrine of terra nullius and participating in a literature of indigenous “extinction.” More recently, a post-colonial re-awakening of the sound and breath of organic forest ecologies has occurred in poetry associated with the Tasmanian conservation movement. There has also been a deliberate re-inscription of indigenous history in post-colonial poetics that includes human interaction with Nature as part of an environmentally sustainable vision for the future
“Recycles: the Eco-Ethical Poetics of Found Text in Contemporary Poetry”
Get PDFThis essay proposes that the use of found text is particularly prevalent in the work of experimental British and American poets with an interest in environment and ecology. It considers whether this recycling of texts might be considered a form of ecopoetics. Drawing on and drawing together the work of British and American contemporary poets, it examines found text poetry in the light of this thesis by considering three central areas: the methodology employed by poets in their use of found text; the spirit of citation (ranging from homage to satire); and the eco-ethical significance of this practice. The range of poetry referenced illustrates the diversity of found poetry methodologies and introduces the reader to some little known texts by new writers such as Dorothy Alexander, as well as to poems by well-established writers such as Rachel Blau DuPlessis. The essay argues that, in all this work, we see writing in which an eco-ethical stance is embedded in a form that endeavours to stimulate the reader into understanding and action. Further, these found text methodologies work against the capitalist commodification of poetry within a culture that prizes originality and ownership above collaboration and globality. The essay attempts to practise what it preaches by using the poets’ own words on these issues via writers’ notes, interviews and e-mail conversation
The 2008 Provincial Election in Quebec
Get PDFIn November of 2008, Quebec Premier Jean Charest decided to call a snap election. His obvious goal was to regain a majority of seats in the National Assembly by taking advantage of the Action Démocratique du Québec’s steady decline in the polls and of the breaking financial crisis. The campaign’s central theme was the management of the upcoming “economic storm.” Based on the overall outcome, it is clear that Charest won his gamble, but this came at the price of an extremely low turnout. Also, it is unclear if the Liberal government will be able to win a fourth consecutive election down the road. The current controversy surrounding the Caisse de Dépôt et Placement’s debacle may well hurt the PLQ in the long term. The Parti Québécois, having regained its place as the official opposition, now appears well positioned to become the alternative to the government next time
Quebec’s Family Medicine Groups: Innovation and Compromise in the Reform of Front-Line Care
Get PDFAt their origin, public healthcare systems were designed mainly for the treatment of acute illnesses. For many years, therefore, public health care focused on services offered in healthcare establishments and primary care was allowed to evolve on the periphery of hospitals, with doctors free to follow their own conception of how best to provide and follow up on care. As hospital costs grew, however, and new challenges regarding the provision of care began to emerge, governments felt increasingly responsible for organizing the front line (Nolte and McKee 2008). How doctors would be called upon to participate in the new configuration of services—particularly in Canada, where physicians function as independent entrepreneurs—is the subject of this article, which investigates the decision to introduce family medicine groups (FMGs) to the province of Quebec