“Ghost nets and rusting machines”: rivers in the contemporary Canadian long poem

Water has long been fundamental to settler efforts to expand resource frontiers in Canada. European fur traders used the region’s waterways to access animal populations in its interior, forming the basis of an ambivalent national reputation as “hewers of wood, drawers of water” (Innis 1930). More recently, the Trans-Mountain Pipeline Expansion Project and BC Hydro’s Site C Dam have threatened water and Indigenous sovereignty in the pursuit of energy. Canada’s national imaginary is dominated by pristine water (Bakker 2007, 1), yet this image exists alongside and has enabled unjust and extractive hydrological relations. In recent years, Canada has emerged as a major locus of production of ecopoetry, with poets also participating in environmental direct action. This article argues that water has become a key preoccupation for contemporary Canadian ecopoets, who use poetry to highlight historical and ongoing colonial injustices, and draw attention to threats to water in Canada today. It analyses three long poems set on different rivers in British Columbia: Rita Wong and Fred Wah’s beholden: a poem as long as the river (2019), Sarah de Leeuw’s Skeena (2015) and Cecily Nicholson’s From the Poplars (2015). It shows that these texts represent water as central to Canadian histories of resource extraction, and argues that these poems offer broader insights of relevance to the emerging field of hydropoetics, particularly the value of the long poem for writing about water. It concludes that hydropoetry can help envision an alternative “stance toward the living planet” (Hume and Osborne 2018: 9) and to its water.