"What does Immigration want from me?" writes the author of this early collected selected, Stan Persky, in his short essay "Reasonable Beings" (122).
Persky (b. 1941, Chicago) has always struck me as someone who needs to be wanted in order to make what he has to say that much harder to take.
A Marxist, Persky is first and foremost an American exceptionalist, an attitude which, more than any other amongst United Staters, is the first thing you feel when an American walks into a Canadian room. I have even met U.S.-born Indigenous artists who, despite their stated connection to their land, language and people, carry that attitude. It is something that can't be shaken. Like the party voice, it's just there.
I saw a copy of Wrestling the Angel in the People's Co-op Bookstore Poetry Section a couple days ago and bought it for eight dollars. I'd flipped through it first and found all sorts of mentions of Vancouver and San Francisco from the 1960s and early 70s, so a necessary addition to my exceptional library of "Vancouver" books, writings, drawings and photographs.
At his least self-conscious, Persky is a pleasure to read. "A Portrait of Angela Bowering" tells at the outset how "the land under the highway suddenly collapsed and fell into a pit 75 feet deep ... we're eating lunch there -- Brian and I -- before that Robin and I -- smoking hell, with our sun-burnt or hell-burnt faces and at night in the open pit the moonlight gleaming ... "(150). Genet!
No comments:
Post a Comment