Spotlight series #75 : Jamie Sharpe
Curated by Canadian writer, editor and publisher rob mclennan, the “spotlight” series appears the first Monday of every month.
STATEMENT
In the spring of 2020 Jamie Sharpe was in New Brunswick, purportedly studying the famed Magnetic Hill outside Moncton. A dog-walker discovered Sharpe in a ditch, naked except for a backpack containing a manuscript, Get Well Soon (to be published by ECW Press in fall, 2023).
In an email from Michael Holmes, executive editor at ECW, upon first receiving Get Well Soon:
“The damnedest document was left for me today . . . all formulas and diagrams with no relation. And the text! It pertains to an altogether different nothing. The whole is rather like a drunken handmaid’s guide, complete with sewer schematics. I wonder about this Sharpe: his intellect is dizzying.”
Beyond his four previous collections of poetry, little is known of Jamie Sharpe. He seems to have lived, at various times, throughout remote areas of the Yukon and British Columbia. A few, somewhat intelligible, interviews exist. Sharpe’s oeuvre is perhaps best encapsulated by the poet-professor Jonathan Ball, in the Winnipeg Free Press, with “Sharpe has been slowly building a largely overlooked body of work.” (October 24th, 2020)
Two “poems” (?) from the forthcoming Get Well Soon:
“Doing My Pärt” (2016):
“Film Clips” (2021):
Like Avro/ I entered a decade’s silence — / Which is to say I spent The Tens/ Watching Netflix — and came/ Out with this:
Author’s Notes:
1) From 2012–2017 I lived in Whitehorse, Canada. There I was introduced to a commune, called Whiskey Flats, a secretive community relocated out of town when their original riverfront squatter shack community was bulldozed in 1963. During one summer I lived on their land and acted as resident poet and barber. The hair in “Doing My Pärt” (2016), was collected from every Whiskey Flats resident, such that it could be used in my work.
2) Now living in Comox, I’m part of an artists’ collective that gets together for a bi-monthly film club. At one screening I surreptitiously snipped enough of my guests’ hair for the piece, “Film Clips” (2021). Speaking of this piece at the Rijksmuseum, in response to a question about its impetus, I responded: “Ik handel in overleg met degenen die ik knip. Waar zijn we van gescheiden? Hier hebben we een momento mori voor het verlies van ons vermogen om met Penelope Cruz te daten.” (I act in concert with those I cut. What are we severed from? Here, we have a momento mori, collectively morning the loss of our ability to date Penelope Cruz.”)
Jamie Sharpe is the author of Animal Husbandry Today, Cut-up Apologetic, Dazzle Ships, Everything You Hold Dear and the forthcoming Get Well Soon, all from ECW Press. He has a degree in English literature from the University of Calgary and an M.F.A. from the University of British Columbia, and has taught E.S.L. and worked in record stores and as a grape-picker. Over the last decade, he has lived, for limited durations, in Nanaimo, White Rock, Whitehorse, Salmon Arm, Prince George, Galiano Island, Texada Island, Dawson and most recently Comox, BC.
