The Properties
Poetry begins when the properties of things—and the correspondences among them—reveal themselves through language. Language is the veil that can pierce itself.
The poems in The Properties record encounters between desire and the repressed or suppressed interstices of social, economic, political and unconscious forces. They’re alert to correspondences, attentive to the lines of force to which the poet’s family quietly assented in the contested place that is the Northwest Coast of North America.
All times and places exist simultaneously. The texts in The Properties range from a twenty-first-century visitation by Herman Melville at a diner in New York City to an unknown history of the Lions Gate Bridge that begins in the Coast Salish village of Xwemelch’stn and ends with an assassination in Egypt. Igor Stravinsky, Sigmund Freud, Stefan Zweig, Duke Ellington, Jeanne d’Arc, Walter Guinness, George Bowering, André Breton (who sought out “the interior voice within each human being”), and more appear.
Several texts continue the exploration of the documentary form begun in The Shovel. These plaited histories begin as improvisations and gleanings. The title piece, “The Properties,” is a companion to the music drama The Kingfisher. A poem in honor of Browne’s mother breaks a silence. A piece about his great-aunt becomes a poem about Richard Strauss. Included are the words sung for a screening of Carl Dreyer’s 1928 film La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, for which contemporary Vancouver-based composer Stefan Smulovitz wrote a luminous score. A manifesto celebrates the stick. There are works that return to sound poetry and repetition. Throughout, short lyrical fragments juxtapose longer texts in anticipation of a kind of capillary action.
Colin Browne has published five volumes of poetry. His most recent publications are Entering Time: The Fungus Man Platters of Charles Edenshaw (Talonbooks, 2016) and The Hatch: Poems and Conversations (Talonbooks, 2015). His books have been nominated for a Governor General’s Award and the Dorothy Livesay Award / B.C. Poetry Prize. He is a celebrated filmmaker; his experimental documentary White Lake was nominated for a Genie Award for Best Feature Documentary. His recent exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery, I Had an Interesting French Artist to See Me This Summer: Emily Carr and Wolfgang Paalen in British Columbia (2016), explored the brief encounter between these two Modernist artists in Victoria, B.C., in August 1939, and presented the first extensive exhibition of Paalen’s work in Canada. His collaboration with composer Alfredo Santa Ana, Music for a Night in May, was presented at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre in May 2018. Recent essays exploring the links between Surrealism and the art of the Northwest Coast have appeared in exhibition catalogues in the U.S. and Europe. He is currently working on new curatorial projects and preparing a collection of essays for publication. Until recently, he taught in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, where he is Professor Emeritus.
