Cole Mash
Alt text: Cole Mash is smiling at the camera. He has long, curly hair and a beard smiles and is lying on a couch. He holds a sleeping baby and sits next to a toddler who is also smiling.
Biography
Cole Mash (he/him) is a poet, scholar, writer, teacher and community arts organizer who lives on unceded Syilx-Okanagan territory in Kelowna, BC. His work often blends poetry and nonfiction, drawing on his working-class roots, personal stories, and pop-culture to explore themes of masculinity, memory, ecology, and family. He has performed poetry locally and nationally for over 10 years, and his creative work has been published in CV2, Pinhole Poetry, Forget Magazine, The Eunoia Review, and anthologized in The Quiet Minds Anthology and Pinhole Poetry’s Volume 2 Selected. His lyric-memoir, What You Did is All it Ever Means, was published with Broke Press in 2021. Cole’s critical work has been published in Scholarly and Research Communication and the SpokenWeb Blog, and he is the co-editor of Resistant Practices in Communities of Sound from McGill-Queen’s University Press. He holds a PhD in English from Simon Fraser University. He is the co-founder and Executive Director of Kelowna non-profit arts organization Inspired Word Café, teaches at UBC Okanagan and Okanagan College. Cole has a wonderful partner, four kiddos, and two kitties whom he loves all the way to the bottom.
Poetics Statement
“Years ago, I brought Okanagan-based writer John Lent into the class of a creative writing course I taught at Okanagan College. He said something along the lines of “when I sit down to write, I want to surprise myself.” I am not the headiest writer in the world, but I think for my own writing and what excites me in the writing of others is always surprise, which can, I think, take many forms. Writing can surprise me if it’s a story that has never been told, or a new perspective on an age-old topic, or it can be something smaller like a fresh image, piece of dialogue, or even two words that just sound good when they are beside each other. When I was younger, I used to be moved by work that was strange and avant garde (if that word means anything anymore), but the older I get I also want poetry to make me feel something, though I know that’s not all that fashionable. In my own work, I have moved toward working across genres. I have a new book I am working on that blends memoir, poetry, photography, and the personal archive to think through artifacts, memory, fatherhood, masculinity, the Anthropocene, and death. In some ways, I have been writing and rewriting this book my whole life, though I have only recently come into a form of prose poetic vignette and the right kind of genre bending to express it. Finally, I have been performing locally and nationally for years as a spoken word poet, so I am also always excited by work that includes the voice and the body, work that is present with an audience, and brings them along through clarity in meaning, intention, or affect. In this arena, I am more excited by poetry’s ability to bring people together, connect across different communities, and allow people who may not think of themselves as poets in any professional manner to express themselves and be upheld. In the world we live in today, connection between people seems more important than any notion of craft. ”
Sample of Poet's Work
On Narrativization
On Narrativization
In a book assigned for the theory course I took in my Master’s, Historian Michelle-Rolph Trouillot describes how silences occur in historical production at four crucial moments:
the moment of fact creation (the making of sources); the moment of fact assembly (the making of archives); the moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives); and the moment of retrospective significance (the making of history in the final instance)
That is to say, first, historical silence occurs when an artifact is produced or when the historian decides which events in a historical narrative will be privileged as facts or fixed points. Second, silence occurs in the creation of archives and repositories of historical knowledge: choices are made, human errors occur and not everything is recorded. Third, in the narrativization of history certain occurrences or aspects must inevitably be left out or, as Hayden White suggests, it would merely be a list, not a narrative. Finally, not every narrative is canonized as part of the history to which it belongs.
there exists a received narrative marked by gaps, silences, and limitations—
but I never meant to tell this story. What I meant to say is you’re right. I should have taken a picture of the bunk bed before I took it apart at our old place. I know that now, staring at neatly organized slats of wood on the floor.
Put a Bird on It
I knew that my dad liked to wear his sunglasses on his head. My mom would too and the glasses would pull her hair back. Her hair was big enough she probably did well in the 80s. It was black-brown and the glasses displaced a lot of it. The last time my dad came to visit, maybe his glasses were on his head like that. Maybe he had a belly like in pictures. But I remember he was out there with us on a cement slab in front of the old trailer that burnt down the following year or maybe the year before. That concrete slab was plain and hot in the sun. He had a garbage bag full of little green army men. One of them had a shovel, or something that didn’t look like a gun. That soldier or others like him, lasted into my childhood. And I resented him for not having a gun. I cut the middle fake ground out from between his feet with scissors to make him run. Dad was gone after that. Maybe the last time he came to see me was the next time or maybe that had been the time after all. As an adult, I wear my sunglasses on the top of my head. It is one of the few things I took from him on purpose. I like how it makes me feel closer to something I can’t see. In a letter I never responded to that he wrote me to try to connect before he died, my dad recalled us trying out a pellet gun in Rock Creek one of the last times he came to visit, though I recalled it differently. I think I remember shooting at cans and trees and inevitably, unfortunately, little birds. I was little, so maybe he never expected I would hit one. But I did. When I asked if it was okay, he told me it was fine and that he set him free in the woods. I remember that too, but not much else. I never really took to guns, but after that I started drawing birds all the time.
Too Much Life
Grandma always measured when she poured
juice or split Butterfinger at their house across the driveway
or drives over on Highway 1 when The Coq closed
fog tunnel emerge to see bad accident
we assume involved eighteen-wheeler.
Window seat waiting for police and highway crews.
Green pine by itself
in the middle of a field of sagebrush—
tree must be magic or lonely.
But too much life is itself a bad thing
(see famine, downtowns, keepsakes living piled in boxes in Mom’s crawl space,
immortal movie vampires who watched all their family and friends die over the years etc. etc.)
Out the window there is garbage too: spandex jaguars
cherry pick salt licks, pop cans caught in
jugular lymph nodes
puffy cheese bags
square cardboard hereditary tar all twenty to even
the field (all relationality, again)
Which is all just to say:
we are you from the past
our deaths were inevitable and necessary for you to read about it
like a mother holding a spoon and looking into a black hole
repeating: everyone cannot be immortal so no one can. Fair is fair.
