Anna Lee-Popham: Empires of the Everyday

One doesn’t often encounter a debut book like Anna Lee-Popham’s Empires of the Everyday, published by the McClelland & Stewart imprint of Penguin/Random House. Having a first poetry collection, especially an experimental one, published by a major press is quite a coup. Usually, some luck is involved when any first book is accepted, as is the case with this one. Lee-Popham, who completed an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Guelph, acknowledges the help of her professor Canisia Lubrin in guiding her work, and Lubrin is also the poetry editor of (you guessed it) McClelland & Stewart.

Before examining the structure and themes of this book, an issue emerges: the M&S web page’s blurb mentions “In an attempt to access a more revelatory language, the poems spar with an AI translator, disturbing the disease of twenty-first-century life that the city makes solid and covers up.” One of Lee-Popham’s distinctive gifts is creating imagery and grammatical shifts with a touch of the random or surreal, such as “within each sieved ambiguity of evenings.” However, she doesn’t specify whether any of these came from an AI source like ChatGPT in her Notes section. Of course, writers can use AI as a source or brainstormer. Creative writing has a long tradition of building on other texts, whether in a found poem or in tribute forms like the glosa. In the 1950s, William Burroughs and Brion Gysin developed the cut-up method, snipping prose segments from periodicals and books, and then mixing and re-matching them. There’s no impropriety if Lee-Popham did use some AI-generated text, but it makes me wonder if books should now list their ingredients, as do cereal boxes, declaring the contents “99% AI-free.”

Lee-Popham acknowledges a major influence: “This series of poems would not be possible without Dionne Brand’s thinking and words, which open language and landscapes.” As in Brand’s work, social justice is a major concern but Lee-Popham’s verbal landscape is unique. She explains, “The structure of the collection follows Bertolt Brecht’s understanding of episodes and epic theatre, the latter of which ‘proceeds by fits and starts, in a manner comparable to the images on a film strip’”.

Each of the Episodes starts with a short, enigmatic poem, whose lines open a hall of mirrors. Then follows a mix of unrhymed Shakespearean sonnets (three quatrains and a final couplet), and blocky prose poems, justified right and left except for the final line. Filling out a rather slender collection of about 60 pages of poetry are eight Notes pages that acknowledge influences and phrases borrowed from or inspired by sources, and another eight of “suggested readings” emphasizing postmodern and anti-colonial works of poetry and theory. These inclusions remind one that the book is the result of an MFA academic journey, albeit by a very intelligent and well-read writer.

So, what about the poetry itself? It’s striking, sometimes jarring, and certainly worth reading (although you may find it difficult, if Rupi Kaur is your poetic icon). Lee-Popham deserves credit for taking on major issues like the dual nature of a modern city, which promotes its services and offers some a home, while it ignores the homeless and poor, feeding on the data trails of its citizens; and the contemporary wired capitalist cyber-state, where we are all objects of surveillance and tracking, in nearly everything we do, eternally inundated by texts, images, and messages ranging from war footage on the news, commercials and ads, to the banal conversations of others yakking on their phones in public spaces. To express living in such conditions, Lee-Popham’s writing style is itself episodic, a series of images, sensations, and actions joined by an onrush of commas, conveying that there is little rest or resolution in a 21st-century metropolis:

“to I: Amid cranes, copper stripped, coiled

vibrations of your voice, amid highways,

you inject your dry knowing of zeros,

of ones, of heaving catastrophes, …”

This approach communicates a kind of breathless existential anxiety about survival and boundaries. Key concepts recur throughout the poems: maps, geography, data, translation, the body (especially as reconstructed or appropriated by external systems). “To the City in Translation” ends with:

“… your own struggles written

in an impossible language, a necessary one, you parse

the city’s wires, at the threshold of doctrine you form

to be on another tongue, you concrete a common thing.”

Empires is both a homage to Lee-Popham’s literary and academic influences, and the introduction of a distinctive and important voice in Canadian poetry. I look forward to reading her next collection, which with a little more distance from her studies, may be even stronger.

Anna Lee-Popham is a writer and editor whose poetry and non-fiction has been published in Arc Poetry Magazine, Brick, Canthius, Riddle Fence, Autostraddle, Lingue e Linguaggi, and others. Anna holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph and lives in Toronto.

Publisher ‏: ‎ McClelland & Stewart/ Penguin/ Random House
Language ‏: ‎ English
Paperback ‏: ‎ 84 pages
ISBN-13 ‏: ‎ 978-0-7710-1236-5
Publication : 2024

John Oughton

John Oughton first lived in Guelph, Ont. After sojourns in Iraq, Egypt, and Japan, he now resides in Toronto's Beaches area. He studied literature at York University and completed two non-credit summer sessions at Naropa U.'s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, Col., where he was a research assistant to Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman. He has published close to 500 articles, reviews, blogs, interviews, and six poetry collections, the most recent being The Universe and All That (Ekstasis Editions). He has also written a mystery novel, Death by Triangulation; and Higher Teaching: A Handbook for New Postsecondary Faculty. John retired as a Professor of Learning and Teaching from Centennial College. His current pursuits include guitar, photography, and kayaking.