Poetry in Motion: The Prairie Invocations of Rachel Zolf

aney’s Arcadia (Coach House Books, 2014), the fifth collection from acclaimed poet Rachel Zolf, isn’t an ‘easy’ read; it’s not meant to be. The book pushes the reader to take action by assembling glitch-ridden settler narratives that decry the ongoing violence of Canada’s colonial appropriations. The book stars Janey Settler-Invader, a foul-mouthed cyborg progeny of first-wave feminist Emily Murphy’s pioneer heroine, Janey Canuck, and punk pirate Kathy Acker’s guerrilla icon, Janey Smith. As Kevin Killian notes, ‘A great hunger, ravenous as Canada, and filled with rage and hurt, animates Rachel Zolf’s splendid new book. On one hand, Janey’s Arcadia brings us a few hundred years of western colonization; and on the other, these poems speak to everyone who’s living on someone else’s land or those forced to speak in someone else’s tongue.’Rachel’s poetic practice explores interrelated materialist questions concerning memory, history, knowledge, subjectivity, and the conceptual limits of language and meaning. She is particularly interested in how ethics founder on the shoals of the political. In Janey’s Arcadia, set in Manitoba where Zolf’s family settled in the early part of the twentieth century, Zolf uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to digitally enact an allegory of misreading to these Canadian settler texts, in which Indigenous peoples’ knowledges are already so brutally scrubbed away.Janey’s Arcadia unflinchingly begins with the poem “Janey’s Invocation”:  Readers cannot read Janey’s Arcadia without reaction. This is perhaps best said by poet CAConrad, author of ECODEVIANCE: ‘Few poets embody stress like Rachel Zolf. Pain most poets cannot imagine exposing with such exacting affliction. Janey’s Arcadia recommends we reconsider the weak arguments of “post-identity politics” because this poet sees how we will lie to hide the brutality of our collective suffering for civilization’s advancement. If you read this without waking your emotional intelligence, well, I’m glad I’m not you with that stick so far up your ass. This is the real poetry. I know it is because it changes me.’ Janey’s Arcadia was recently nominated for a Lambda Literary Award. Rachel Zolf made a spellbinding video as part of her Janey Project, which can be viewed here on Vimeo. Watch, and be changed. 

***Thanks so much to Coach House Books, especially Sarah Smith-Eivemark, for sharing Janey’s Arcadia with us.