National Poetry Month : Julia Polyck-O'Neill,

A Supine Poem for Adrian Piper

I reflect art’s heroes and elders

What does my reflection look like

Laden with the debts of collectivity

You shoulder the mattress of histories

Subtle daggers with dull edges, mostly shine

Class is cancelled in our shouted fantasies

An inscription gets reinterpreted with each read

We have the tendency to be lazy philologists

This conversation should be exquisite and unsettling

Stories nested together uneasily they’re not meant to be

Bracketed like this, chapters in logical sequence

I wear my irrationality an earned badge

Julia Polyck-O’Neill is an artist, curator, critic, and writer. Her writing has been published in B.C. Studies, Feminist Spaces, Tripwire, Touch the Donkey, Fermenting Feminisms (a project of the Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology, curated by Lauren Fournier), The Avant Canada Anthology (WLU Press, 2019), and other places. She recently co-edited a special issue of Canadian Literature with Gregory Betts, “Concepts of Vancouver: Poetics, Arts, Media.” She has published three chapbooks, femme (2016), Everything will be taken away (2018) and poem| image | self, all with above/ground press. She currently lives in Toronto, completing her SSHRC-funded PhD in Interdisciplinary Humanities (Brock University).

National Poetry Month 2017: Julia Polyck-O’Neill,

for a video against the mythology of everyday life

(after Martha Rosler)

refuse realism

by foiled expectations

by palpably flouted conventions

            pile one on top

            of the other

            and another

            and we have staged a monument

            flattened affect

            histrionics

wretched pacing

            bent space

special virtue,

yours is one medium among several

mimic skills, process and structure

cash me, read me

inside out, capitalize on my aesthetic

hold us in thrall.

Julia Polyck-O’Neill is an artist, curator, critic, and writer. She is a doctoral candidate in Brock University’s Interdisciplinary Humanities program (Culture and Aesthetics), where she is completing a SSHRC-funded interdisciplinary and comparative critical study of contemporary conceptualist literature and art in Vancouver. She teaches in contemporary visual culture in the department of Visual Arts at the Marilyn I. Walker School. She also curates the award-winning Border Blur Reading Series in St Catharines. Her writing has been published in Feminist Spaces, Tripwire, The Lamp, Ottawater, Fermenting Feminisms (a project of the Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology), and The Avant Canada Anthology, and her debut chapbook, femme, was published in 2016 by above/ground press.

Julia Polyck-O'Neill reviews N.W. Lea's Understander (2015)

St. Catharines, Ontario poet Julia Polyck-O'Neill reviews N.W. Lea's Understander (2015) over at her enormously clever blog. Thanks much! This is the second full review of Understander, after Rob Thomas did his write-up over at Apt613. You can see Polyck-O'Neill's full review, here. And of course, copies of Understander can be ordered directly here.