Stephen Collis
Biography
Stephen Collis is the author of a dozen books of poetry and prose, including The Commons (2008), the BC Book Prize winning On the Material (2010), Once in Blockadia (2016), and Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten (2018)—all published by Talonbooks. A History of the Theories of Rain (2021) was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for poetry, and in 2019, Collis was the recipient of the Writers’ Trust of Canada Latner Poetry Prize. He lives near Vancouver, on unceded Coast Salish Territory, and teaches poetry and poetics at Simon Fraser University.
Poetics Statement
Stephen Collis standing by the New Westminster pier looking into the distant sun (camera right), hands in blazer jacket pocket.
“Poetry involves so much waiting. We all know this: waiting for that door somewhere to open and the poem to walk out—not knowing where the door is or how to find it or when it will open but knowing it will appear somewhere swinging out unexpectedly. You have to be attentive at all times but you can (again, we all know this) prime the pump—usually this is called “reading.” I find poetry along two tracks—the one I’ve just described (little doors unpredictably swinging open upon my waiting), and the one you can call “reading” or “research.”
Either way, what I’ve come to see I’m after is perhaps what I would call the Unwritten. I try to write the unwritten—the thing that is writing by way of its not being written (because—impossible, because—not ready yet and maybe never ready, because—what I don’t know is always more interesting than what I do know but maybe I never really do know anything after all). I’ve been led here by the pursuit of a “project,” over decades, I’ve at times called “The Barricades Project,” which is maybe a long poem that refuses to be a long poem, which is maybe a sort of history in verse of the urge—the felt and somatic and affective pulse—of radical social change and revolutionary passion, past and present. The horizon was and is utopian. But utopia remains utopia—remains the lure of an elsewhere and otherwise—by being unwritten. Now: keep trying to write that unwriting. Demand the impossible. Even amidst this endless catastrophe.
The thing is, those two tracks—the one the ephemeral swinging open of the occasionally encountered door to an elsewhere I call poetry, the other the long slow “project”—so often converge. The door swings open, and what you see is some part of the landscape of the “project,” the fields sweeping along the margins of utopia, whispers from the unwritten, in a language you can almost, but not quite, understand. Right now, writing somewhere between books, I’m an attendant at the door, hoping something vast might still reveal itself—before secreting itself once again. I don’t know what it’s this way—it just is, the little I’ve learned to do.”
Sample of Poet's Work
A Single Starling is No Such Thing
Said this out loud
for no one and nothing
for everyone
and everything
starry regions
avian minds hovering
you and I are nothing
swarms of particles
constellations
liquidities
governed by laws
fuzzy states between
here and there
magnetic and
clinging to continua
Said this to no one
said this to a bird
swooping pulse
throb and oscillation
I’ll have a starling
be taught to speak
but what if all it says
is untranslatable
gurgling and sputtering chatter?
A single starling is no such thing
as one grain of sand or one drop of rain
what is vision—what is harmony?
A swarm is what we want to be
flocking telepathic collective thought
flash out so many minds moving
border crossing seas and mountains
though the starling has
much higher temporal resolution
has affinity groups in sevens
just these nearest seven in flight
sevens touching other sevens continuing
you do the math
fractal and telepathic
navigating by quick norms
I am looking for love in numbers
if I form a flock I am leaving
get my breath by being in sync
tunes me and sets my rhythm straight
an attraction zone / a repulsion zone
and angular alignment
votes being counted
despite the turn in the weather
What is at the limit of the infinite?
What is moving out this mobile mesh
of black purple indigo and deep green
background radiation scintilla of feathers
from out which cosmic depths
stars shoot as million pinholes streaming
to make one bird plumed for night
rise into collective form
of flocks governed by their flock members
of the measure of sevens
of the nearness of wing-to-wing communication
of parables stars and spies of the midnight heavens
Said this was an accident
said it seemed a single bird
abandoned on a hedge
was nothing but an accident
couldn’t identify one without many
There is only one quarrel in the world
Hölderlin wrote:
which is more important,
the whole or the individual part?
And there was no one human way
to choose or maneuver
and sometimes accidentally en masse
thousands of starlings just will form
the fleeting and fluid image
of one leviathanic starling-of-starlings
is all we ever needed to know of politics
and the impossible
and what was common or
could be commoned
crowd wheeling through dim streets
shouts smoke and breaking glasss
the air and its breathing
the covert the cell
sevens touching other sevens
the street of streetlights lighting
swells through cosmic voids
brilliant dark out of darkness splintering
earths dead or alive or still just spinning
all that is a bundle of feathers in flight
all that is bundled
into the bundle of bundles
Dear friend Hölderlin continues
I need pure tones …
the philosophic light around my window …
I think mere radiance is what we honed
wing to wing biome to biome
Before Canoes to Memory
Before canoes to memory
the water was every I
lived there to linger
the tops of firs to wag
the water’s own surface
drinks a paddle splash
was summer or a fall
for mowing the grass to
now and water to plunge
my quenchless visions to
people time with trout
to jump or crystal
reflection along the logs
own bobbing shadow so
look bobolink I don’t know
your name but we share
this love of fresh water
and the forest fringe the air
with fire’s brief flight between
*
Before canoes to memory
privilege permits access
property contained border
another bodied water
tribe of brothers sister
I am swimming the
liquid archive chutes
luddite paddles streammouth
and I wonder what has
become of our comrades
whose shape was also water
*
Before canoes to memory
where my language leaks
boats trains beginners
and life vests valise
trundled letters knee-high ferns
sky storms surface
winds to lift oars to stroke
mundane walks quiet magic
the water near witches weathers
I drift a boat to begin being
drift a boat to recall reeds
a little boat is small pleasure
but I’d give it you the same
to drift elements without envy
give it you a little boat
and the wind we’d share the lake
or take turns at solitary leisure
Stuck Again
Stuck again we came up with something else
tried gluing the cardboard shards of boxes
to our heads and backs like
the defensive plates and spikes
of dinosaurs we weren’t but were becoming
Or drove out west like a movie we remember
where girls feet rest on the dash
window prism light listening to electric chatter
and music seems part of the sunny world
that is escaping last air from a thought balloon
The gentle breeze backyard backdrop
of evergreen trees allows a long strand
of web the faintest visibility floating like
this will be the last word ever spoken
or overheard no this will—Kalamazoo
But then the Internet didn’t care anymore
though it went on recording every keystroke
and whoever we were outside of information
we stood together with our chemicals
and held death a little closer to our whispering lips
Now when we text it is barely the memory of bird song
there might be some data or DNA left somewhere
but with no readers who cares what bugs
are expressing remnants of after images and black holes
the whistle’s blown and we are unplugged for good
