Tuesday poem #23 : Ken Belford : The sense bearer

        Something happens but

conceptual irony turns up

in isolation. Not bound by

the authority of content or

obliged by the feudal, subjects

I like resist irony because

irony’s about the rat race.

Trying to talk about contempt,

the self-gratifying bully is

too much of a bad thing. He’s

overmuch and woundy, and

not an authority. To take irony

seriously isn’t possible. It’s not

the story of a sense bearer, or

even the invocation of a figure.

Irony isn’t a dream or an in-joke.

Adapt if you are obliged, but

this is the real Belford, except

the sarcastic authority isn’t mine.

        The problem with irony is

it isn’t worth taking seriously.

It’s very something. At first

it carries the whip hand of

authority into the future, then

poses for meaning. This is the

antagonistic argument cranky

men use to explain their hate.

It isn’t fairly accountable and

has nothing useful to say.

I’m the immaterial plural,

a variant best reviewed when

not named, for I am changed

and colourful and unrelated to

the Erl’s of the world. Someday

soon we will come to the end

of the age of irony and it will

no longer be easy to go along

with. This is it. To be for irony is

to surrender to the loss of hope.

        There are reasons to be optimistic

rather than the other way around.

Living roots are like eyes in the wild

and are not that different from talking

trees. They are made of signals that

honour light and touch. But a word

of caution: intelligence is biased and

made of memory forms, a series of

successive new tissues taking place,

unfolding in time, and stored on top

of the old. They are unfolding waves

of separate functions, and they flow

through all networks, and all neural

layers while taking different forms,

and do not remain stationary while

cancelling memories of the ongoing,

but keep an eye out to the foregoing

and the wide reading of expressions

that are not in need of explanation.

Ken Belford lives in Western Canada; not in Vancouver, not in Calgary, and not in Edmonton, not even on the coast, but in the BC interior, with his remarkable partner, Si. His most recent books are lan(d)guage (Caitlin Press, 2008), decompositions (Talonbooks, 2010), and internodes (Talonbooks, 2013). The poem “the sense bearer,” reproduced here, is from an as-yet unpublished book-length manuscript. He is 68, and still beautiful, still creative, still dangerous.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan