Jeff Derksen's Citational Poetics

Abstract

This paper investigates Jeff Derksen’s citational poetics in The Vestiges, and how this text’s creative practice critically examines the processes of neoliberalization in the present. With citational poetics, I see Derksen’s writing copy and comment on multiple textual forms in order to depict the poem’s role in social observation alongside its ability mobilize and array these textual forms against structures that far exceed the structure of the poem itself. The Vestiges in turn displays how the disparate materials of the long neoliberal moment and the traces of its manifold processes—from critical theory and chart topping hits to overthrown governments—can be brought to bear on the present, and specifically how mobilizing these different kinds of textual and historical matter locate citational poetics within a wider project of anti-capitalist research.