Reg Johanson
Biography
Born in Leduc, Alberta, Reg Johanson lives in East Vancouver, BC. Courage, My Love (Line Books, 2006) brings together a selection of works that have appeared over the last decade in W magazine, the chapbook Chips (Thuja, 2001), and in the anthologies Shift and Switch: New Canadian Poetry (Mercury, 2005) and Companions and Horizons (WCL, 2005). Critical work on Standard English as a classist and racializing disciplinary practice and on the political economy of “cheating” and plagiarism has appeared in XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics and as “Working Papers in Critical Practice #1” (recomposition.net); other essays on liquor policy, on “the radical” in poetry, on representations of missing women, and on global urbanization appear or are forthcoming in West Coast Line and The Rain Review. A former member of the Kootenay School of Writing collective and current co-director of the Pacific Institute for Language and Literacy Studies, Johanson teaches comp and lit at Capilano College.
Poet's Note
The poems in Courage, My Love were written to “disturb the placid service of our discourse,” as well as to explore links and complicities among those discourses. Some that I wanted to disturb / align were those around neoliberal globalization, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Islam and terrorism, the arts and the State, urban development, authenticity, addictions, and labour, among others. These discourses are sometimes “live,” or found, sometimes fake or made up, and sometimes filtered or voiced through an I which is variously compliant, abject, resisting, victimized, terroristic, naïve, partying. Making such a critique entails some negativity, if not negation. Of course I experimented on myself first. I’ve retained the traces of my own struggles as affect, which I hope offers some open-heartedness in the hostilities. The title of the book, which was a gift from Vancouver poet Dorothy Lusk, picks up on that too.