Phinder Dulai
[Author Name]
Biography
Phinder Dulai is the Surrey-based author of dream/arteries (Talon Books) and two previous books of poetry: Ragas from the Periphery (Arsenal Pulp Press, 1995) and Basmati Brown (Nightwood Editions, 2000). Phinder toured dream / arteries extensively across and Canada and USA. He read from dream / arteries at the Asian American Writers Workshop in New York City in 2015. His work has appeared in Canadian Literature, Cue Books Anthology. Ankur, Matrix, Memewar Magazine, Rungh, the Capilano Review, Canadian Ethnic Studies, Toronto South Asian Review, subTerrain, and West Coast LINE. In 2017, he was the co-creater of Canada's first writing residency for BIPOC writers called Centering Ourselves at the Banff Centre for the Arts. Currently serves as the Poetry Editor for Canadian Literature Journal. He lives in Surrey, BC.
Poetics Statement
“The act of writing poetry is an emancipatory act that allows me to write my truths and observations about the world we live in. I also am a researcher at heart, which allows me to explore the art of poetry from a place of documentation, and engaging both the archives and engaging popular media references. I glean from both popular media, social media and news media some to create critical observations on life and my place in the world I inhabit. The archive for me is a place of uncovering the silences and absences of voices that have come before but were never provided the light of day. My work is to engage and incorporate creative-based archive writings that fills in the gaps of what I consider to be colonial records of the past and how these collections have influenced the course of human life. I also reflect on the body and particularly to racialized and colonized body. My work makes reference to the body a lot as this is a place of projected views of the colonial gaze. My Punjabi cultural background has a rich documented past and I mine that past to make meaning of the present. In all my writing I consider myself as a documenting poet that seeks to bring voice to absence.”
Sample of Poet's Work
my name is sicilia, you called me saviour once
(rusted tin box found snagged at the end of the Wakkanai North Seawall, Hokkaido, Japan, in 1995)
Archival Note: # KM file 10038 – hks95 – Contents Revealed:
Item inside the box – sealed letter – opened and entered as record
“for tomorrow then, and the days after February 9, 1926”
to my friend ellis
ellis, my friend, you have a rotund capacity for irony
you are kind enough to remember me from before
sometimes you listen to my weariness
if you were to ask the question who they were
then i would tell you clearly who they were
russian and ukrainian families swathed in scarves
patriarchs with stiff straw hats and hard eyes
families escaping the unspoken pogroms, losing their old names
solitary greek and italian boy-men
ready-made labourers walking into tomorrow’s progress
in the corner end of a new york moment
anchorless unknown citations misidentified – women, men, and other
always an invitation to invention and lineage
young women, eyes glisten against
the spectacle of arrival, departure, and arrival
the emptied-out lives of the recently widowed and orphaned
one remaining family member
leaving behind graves and grave names with no bodies
while deep in the hills, the mouldering ash marks a dead disease
whole reconstructed families
find the dark hull the last sanctuary rusted and ready
homes on stone pavements
the smoking walls of marsovan
evacuated homes
dust prints toward the desert
the trek that conjured up dreams of bayonets, axes, execution
names removed from lives, silence brought to lips
an erasure of neighbourhoods during the summer heat
each loved survivor arrived in le havre, samsun, smyrna
stepped into my body
papers full with fiction and fact
names true and less true
anonymous and deceased ones now with new life
and those who survived
agopian, fenerdjian, malhassian, mardikian, tcoulian ...
a manifest ship laden with fact, fiction, and forgetting
one, or more
lost, driven
seeking solace
of an emptied mind
tear ducts swollen
salt water
for the journey
on arrival at the centre many replied
“... no thnich ... no thni city”
... blank
gained amnesia
disembarked
into a future
thirty-four thousand, one hundred and twenty-four
34,124
[Poem from dream / arteries, published by Talon Books, 2104]
The Grove
gravel
scream stream mosaic
backside confluence
webbed light
tattooed bark
cedar and douglas presiding over chaos
all things depend
upon
a shopping cart
a cackle of crows
graphed open
open to graph
the ripped promo
a lifestyle choice?
this style of life
choiced
what will be transformed
once a bar
a wet bar becomes
there is no turning back
hal sat in the corner on fridays drinking a jug of plonk
the slurred conversations
beer cans make
prince ranj surveys from the bench
an emptied bud
tossed by the casual hand
Community Park
The trail is well worn
More so recently
As those who would normally work
Are in pause
The great pause
Much like the cedar trees
That stand and shiver in the winter
Are in waiting for the sun to arrive
On a bench long in its welcome
Sit the ghosts of elders
Playing seep while they while away their years
Their beards greying in the winter thaw
Their turbans worn in an old agrarian way
In between the hands
They speak of old world news
The news of a farmers’ revolt
Where long trains of tractors
Line the roads to Delhi
Each one stating which relative is part
Of the great cause
Against the modified government
Which village is interconnected to another village?
By blood and marital bond
They talk like ancestors who have lost their way
Eyes crinkle into smile,
Tell of their stories of arrival
And their departures to Punjab
Where they dream about Canada for four months
This is the soul journey of the present
Where absences are marked by cards
Slapping down on to a long table
As the chill breeze warms into sunshine.