Jason Christie
Biography
Jason Christie is the author of Canada Post (Snare, 2006) and a co-editor of Shift & Switch: New Canadian Poetry (Mercury, 2005). His most recent book of poetry, i-ROBOT (EDGE/Tesseract, 2006), is currently available. He is currently working on another manuscript tentatively titled most of our birds eat garbage, in which he examines the ideas of boundaries and rituals.
Poet's Note
In the robot poems, fully sentient robots begin to desire the rights and privileges that can act as a tonic for a person’s dedicated role to the social system: the right to vote, the right to speak freely, the right to private property (instead of the right to be private property). Their pursuit of freedom has many obvious parallels in our own history, but I’d like to highlight the fact that often the way we treat the objects in our life can demonstrate how we feel about others, or even about the part of ourselves that our current social situation obligates into service as an other. Too often the necessity of having to earn money to survive flattens a person’s uniqueness or forces it into service as a utility. With the robot poems I tried to hyperbolize the situation and make it a bit ridiculous to counterpoint my growing unease with my role in the dominant social system. I sometimes feel trapped in the role of inscribing the social system’s tenets even as I try to point to that role. I’ve expressed the inevitability I feel through humour, but humour wouldn’t work without an element of hope to buffer against total crisis, and perhaps that’s the most important part of the robot poems.
Sample Work
"Ideo Radio Poem" (pdf)
External Link
Test Recording
23 September 2006
Diana Fitzgerald Bryden (29:18, 28.1 MB, info.)
Jason Christie (20:58, 20.1 MB, info.)
Question and answer session (17:21, 16.7 MB, info.)