Jeff Derkson

For the third installment of Small Press Traffic's "Life/Forms" series, we will have a weekend with Jeff Derksen, the brilliant Canadian poet and controversialist, the man who knows, better than any other, why so much of today's best writing, including his own, mixes up the social, the personal, and the political. Jeff Derksen's Down Time (1990) and Dwell (1994) from Vancouver's Talonbooks are classic, and there's a new one I haven't seen called But Can I Make a Living from It (Hole Books, 1998). Former editor of Writing Magazine. Board Member of The Kootenay School of Writing (Vancouver) and Truck Gallery (Calgary). Edited the groundbreaking "Disgust & Overdetermination: a poetics issue" of Open Letter. Articles on art and poetics have appeared in Poetics Journal, Fuse, West Coast Line, and others. Currently working on a new poetry MS: I Need to Know If this Is Normal and a book of essays: From Form: Essays in Cultural Poetics.
February 26-27, 1999

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