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Divining for Starters

Divining for Starters innovates with poetic form to explore Jacques Derrida’s ideas in his seminal essay, “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” about the fictionality of and need for origins in Western discourse. As he writes, “Structure…has always been neutralized or reduced, and this by a process of giving it a centre or referring it to a point of presence, a fixed origin.” The fictionality of this ‘fixed origin’ provides the premise for each poem ‘divining’ or trying to find a starting point. Thus, in the title sequence of this book of poetry, to divine for starters is to seek out and potentially create new beginnings, new sites of origin for ways of thinking. As the primary interest lies in Western thought processes, the poems build by fragments rather than complete sentences to mimic units of conscious thought; the concomitant pursuit of multiple threads similarly emulates it. Hence form and content operate together in a work of both critical and creative engagement. Additionally, the first third of the book, the section titled “Landed,” investigates the use of avant garde techniques to explore people’s relationship to the natural environment. Such techniques include fragmentation and use of the page as an open field. Fragmentation has the advantage of suggesting a more intimate relationship with the land by presenting phrases of thought rather than correctly constructed complete sentences, while patterning on the page can mimic shapes in nature and imply a closer relationship between our language and our natural environment than a traditional, flush-left poem can. In section 4 of "Alaskan," the poem's lines become increasingly narrow and centred as the woman is stuck in the gripping silt to face her own drowning.