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Jeff Derksen

Jeff Derksen is a founding member of Vancouver’s writer-run centre, the Kootenay School of Writing, and worked as an editor of Writing magazine. His work has been anthologized in East of Main and Verse: Postmodern Poetry and Language Writing. As an editor, Derksen also organized “Disgust and Overdetermination: a poetics issue,” for Open Letter and “Poetry and the Long Neoliberal Moment” for West Coast Line. Derksen’s poetry and critical writing on art, urbanism and text have been published in Europe and North America. Formerly a research fellow at the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at the City University of New York, he currently works in the English Department at Simon Fraser University. He collaborates on visual art and research projects (focusing on urban issues) with the research collective Urban Subjects. Derksen’s Down Time won the 1991 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Award at the BC Book Prizes. A selection from Dwell — “Host Nation, Host Society”—was nominated for inclusion in The Gertrude Stein Anthology of Innovative North American Poetry: 1993.

February 2012 : Jeff Derksen reading from Dwell at Capilano College

December 2011 : Talonbooks Presents Karl and Christy Siegler's Farewell Bash

January 2011 : North of Invention: A Canadian Poetry Festival

BOOK AWARDS

Winner of the 1991 BC Book Prize: Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize

BOOK AWARDS

Alberta Writer’s Guild Award Nominee, 1994

QUOTES OF NOTE

Praise for Jeff Derksen:

“Derksen’s poetry works at the level of the sentence: each one perfectly clear, with a subtle ironic twang, but together forming a text of unsettling perspicacity, one in the reading of which we become aware of a new social relation, where the productive reader, no longer just the passive consumer of romantic lyrics, participates in the contestation of meanings and utopian possibilities.”
– Globe and Mail

Praise for Jeff Derksen’s Transnational Muscle Cars:

“Globalism and nationalism, as well as sexuality, culture, and class identity, are depicted as links in a chain of products and correspondences … It’s an idiom that has already been influential on other writers, such as Kevin Davies, Rodrigo Toscano, and Tim Davis, who are creating bridges between radical constructivism and a vaudevillian social platform. But even for first-timers, this book is accessible in themes, comfortably paced, and motored by an anti-heroic punk sensibility.”
– Publishers Weekly

QUOTES OF NOTE

“In Annihilated Time, Jeff Derksen offers a clear point of view from which to critique and unsettle contemporary neoliberalism and its slippery redeployments of democratic ­vocabularies for undemocratic ends. By recognizing the range of scales—local, national, and global—through which ­neoliberalism operates, and the contradictory interactions of the same or related gestures depending on the scale at which one reads, Derksen suggests that it is through a ­multivalenced poetics of space, movement, and reflexivity that readers and ­writers resist and thrive. These are smart, thoughtful essays that offer a wide range of ­opportunities to help the justice-minded to productively refuse or rearticulate rapidly ­shifting forms of power for more open and liberatory movements.”

— Larissa Lai, author of Saltfish Girl

“In this long-awaited collection of essays, Jeff Derksen explores the new pressures placed on poetry, art, and theory by the intensified intimacy between culture and economics in the ‘long neoliberal moment,’ with great intelligence and ironic humour. Drawing on live debates and controversies—as opposed to isolated theories or static models—in ­disciplines ranging from Marxist geography to postmodern architecture, Derksen raises the question of what it means to make art in the present moment in a new and exciting way.”

— Sianne Ngai, author of Ugly Feelings

“Just as Charles Olson turned to geographer Carl Sauer to pry open the field of ­contemporary poetry and poetics in the previous century, Jeff Derksen here brilliantly ­relates poetry (‘that underachieving commodity’) to ­architecture, and explores the ­uneven development of contested urban territories in the work of Marxist geographers. Derksen’s incisive critiques of the lengthy spectre of neoliberalism that is haunting our globe seek to create not only new readers of poetry but new forms of and spaces for a re-scaled, re-envisioned, and re-invigorated cultural citizenship. ­_Annihilated Time_ ­deserves to be read as it was written: boldly and widely.”

— Mark Nowak, editor of XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics, author of Coal Mountain Elementary

QUOTES OF NOTE

"[A] canny text, astute and sharp. This a brilliant mind at work, dwelling in, dwelling on."
– Books in Canada

“As Jeff Derksen approaches family and personal life, at home and abroad, his work comes down to earth, becomes more serious, more analytical, optimistic, precise, and fragile. The word tour economic; a life’s work, critique, focus, attending to, listening a living, an expression of insolitude among domestic monuments and affairs of state.” – Melanie Neilson

"Dwell provides just the right kind of fin de siècle topo map required to reconnoiter our present bearings. Derksen’s accurate delineation of narrative edge coloured by layers of diction’s own superfluousness is a rare and honest measure of a world that’s signed out. In language that’s resolute in its probe for meaningful coordinates, these poems ‘fulfill’ their own codes, absorb ‘all (our) private space.’ We’ll never get home without them.” – Fred Wah

“Dwell is a compassionate and humane book, the product (nice package) of a personality engaged in analysis of meaning-making. And I feel I’ve been reading the presence of a life in its pages … a breathing friction. It’s like listening to music in its privileging of experience over knowledge.” – Prairie Fire

“Dwell … offer[s] an unsimplified and penetrating look at our time and place, where meaning and significance alter and blend. Derksen invites his readers to take part in this process.” – Vox