Down Time

Roger Nash is Academic Vice-President of Athabasca University and author
of Night Flying.

Derksen’s Down Time is a collection of six experimental pieces that
raise the question, “What is poetry?” They challenge and reject
assumptions about how language must be used to create sense and poetry.
It is crucial that we ask this question in each age, and continually
reflect on, push at, and revise our assumptions. Derksen has performed
an important service here. But he has done this without himself creating
sense in poetry.

Derksen employs parataxis as his main technique. Words, clauses, and
parts of clauses are placed beside one another, without linking-words to
indicate co-ordination or subordination. We may seem to enter a literary
correlate of relativity in physics. There is no settled perspective
provided by familiar subject-object grammar: the pieces jolt us from one
fragment of an alleged position in the world to another.

Where Old English poets used parataxis selectively, Derksen uses it
virtually all the time, like a heavy-handed dogma. Where they wove
clauses together in the music of alliterative metre, Derksen’s book
generally reads unmusically. Their shuffled clauses are rich in concrete
imagery that creates emerging positions of thought and feeling in the
world, positions that link together through complex associations in the
imagery. Derksen’s clauses are in general language, heavily sprinkled
with meta-words for talking about society, the economy, literature, and
language: “technology marginalized / to topless narrative”;
“it’s the cost / per unit is / unit cost / with a broad / shouldered
census”; “culture runts indicate / pinnacle of information /
retrieval.” The shuffling of this techno-jargon assumes a significance
where none has been created. It tries to invoke a sense of human life,
one with few absolutes and much uncertainty, but cannot animate a sense
of it. The vacuous jargon is too bloodless for the comic, or even the
tragic, to live.

Derksen’s pieces could have been produced, deliberately or
accidentally, by the computer malfunction of “file allocation
error.” Is this the “down time” of the title? Though this error
would produce “found words,” do such words always constitute
“found art”?

McCaffery commends Derksen’s pieces as “finely structured poems.”
But perhaps the Emperor has no clothes?