Metropolitan frontiers : Vancouver poetry and the urban form of extraction, 1965 – 2018
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Metropolitan Frontiers: Vancouver Poetry and the Urban Form of Extraction, 1965-2018 reinterprets the relations between poetic form, capitalist urbanization, and resource extraction through an analysis of the metropolitan frontier. In my conceptualization, metropolitan frontiers are urban spaces where high finance and raw material extraction coincide, or where commercial megaprojects (financed from afar) coexist with timber rafts, pulpmills, oil tankers, and bulldozers. Occupying unceded Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh and Squamish land, Vancouver’s metropolitan frontier is also deeply imbricated with the historical and ongoing forms of settler colonization that constitute the Canadian state more broadly. As such, metropolitan frontiers are temporally multiple, spatially discordant, and psychologically bewildering. The metropolitan frontier thus also names a conceptual and representational problem that, I argue, motivates the poetic projects of late twentieth century Vancouver. I track the uneven development of the metropolitan frontier over the course of the postwar period, concentrating on how poetic works adapt and respond to its brutalizing logics of urbanization and extraction as they unfold across Vancouver and its infrastructural fabrics. If the metropolitan frontier helps us recognize the urban form of extraction that underpins semi-peripheral Vancouver, I argue that poetic invocations of this frontier occur through two key formal practices: poetic mapping and poetic address. Poetic maps employ strategies of paratactical assemblage, immersive description, figuration, and visual practice to mediate the ground-level effects and abstract logistics that drive frontier formations. The strategic modes of address taken up by Vancouver poets — epistolary dialogues, dedications to peers and institutional contexts, direct admonitions aimed at abstract economic forces — foreground how frontier movements are registered at the qualitative levels of social experience and intersubjectivity. Taken together, Vancouver poetry’s critical cartographies and ambitious modes of address open up poetic form to the raw matter and imperceptible structural relations that produce the conflictual experiences of the metropolitan frontier. Curved around the logging camp and condominium, the frontier relations of Vancouver designate the fundamental terrain upon which this archive moves in the postwar period, compelling its sense of site, relation, communality, world, and written form.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".