Geist blogger and Editor-In-Chief of Poetry Is Dead, Daniel Zomparelli, will be organizing an ongoing series of interviews with poets, and people doing interesting things with poets. If you are a poet doing interesting things or have a tip off for Daniel, you can email him at editor@poetryisdead.ca.

Enbridge's Northern Gateway Pipeline proposes a massive infrastructure that will have large social and environmental impacts. In response and in opposition to this, Christine Leclerc is producing a 1,173km poem involving collaboration from poets and writers around the world. Geist.com met up with Christine to talk about the project and about the idea of poet as activist.

Daniel Zomparelli: What was the inspiration
for starting the Enpipe Line project?

The inspiration came out
of a desire to see Enbridge's Northern Gateway Pipelines proposal withdrawn and
a desire to collaborate with massive numbers of people from around the planet
on a project that would daylight resistance to socially and environmentally
destructive projects like Enbridge's proposed pipelines. But the communities
and activists who give destructive projects (and the governments that back
them) the NO WAY day after day inspire the heck out of me. Many poets raise me
up with their work and/or community. This list is not exhaustive, but an
attempt would include: Nnimmo Bassey, Ken Belford, Stephen
Collis, Jen Currin, Krissy Darch, Jeff Derksen, Roget
Farr, Brenda Hillman, Ray Hsu, Reg Johanson, Thea Kuticka, Peter
Macdonald, Kim Minkus, Miquel Murphy, Michael Nardone, Press
Release, Nikki Reimer, Rhizomatics, Bruce Weigl, Jonathon Wilcke and
Rita Wong & Larissa Lai (as collaborators and individually). I could go on
and on, so don't even get me started on journalists and other (supposed)
non-poets!

DZ: How far along are you from your goal
for the project?

The project's goals are several. There
is the goal of achieving a 1,173 kilometer-long line of collaborative poetry.
This is the game structure of the poem. The Enpipe Line was launched
on November 1, 2010. It is just over 30 kilometers long, and growing every
day. Another goal is to make resistance culture visible through community
engagement. As with many projects being developed by cultural workers
around the world, the existence of the Enpipe Line achieves the goal of
daylighting a culture of resistance minute by minute. An important feature of
the Enpipe Line is that collaborators co-facilitate the way the line is
presented on- and offline. They improve the blog, spread news of the project
through social media, organize photo shoots and demand writing
workshops through their suggestions. They also come up with ideas for
games that would allow people to contribute and collaborate in real time.
Poetry twistering the headquarters of human-rights-violating corporations is
one of my personal favourites.

DZ: Has anything unexpected sprung up from
creating and producing this project?

Every contribution brings something
unexpected, but I find it interesting and apt that water and gold extraction
are high on the list of recurring themes. My mother's desire to contribute
poems was also unexpected!

DZ: The poems for Enpipe Line are quite broad
in respect to their authors and the content. I love that I can see Rita Wong
next to a Facebook status update by Trevor Battye. Can you explain a bit about
how you choose what goes into the project?

I don't choose, you do. The idea is to
cast the net wide, so I'm more interested in what others think should be in the
line than what I think I should think should be there. I want to be surprised,
challenged and inspired by the works that arrive. On occasion, I do request
things that grab me. Trevor Battye's Facebook status is an example of that.
I've also requested permission to use Maude Barlow's recent COP
16 Democracy Now interview in a transcript poem, but otherwise, I just put
the call out and see what comes back.

DZ: In Enpipe Line you are creating a
resistance long poem against the Enbridge's Northern Gateway Pipelines
proposal. What I love about it, is that it is building a structure of something
beautiful as act of rebellion. The discussion that I see between poets, is how
poetry can or cannot be an effective tool for change. Where do you stand on
this issue?

This is a great question, and one I've
been getting a lot, in the form of: But can poetry change anything? This
question tends to come on the heels of unbridled enthusiasm for the Enpipe
Line. I want to talk about the role of culture in defeating oppression, but
first I want to say that I don't think the enthusiasm-hesitance sequence is
coincidental. Why do many of us shy away from what most excites us? Okay, I'll
admit, reasons to shy do from time to time exist, but I think that in most
cases, it stems from defeatism. Do we want what we want or don't we? And if we
want what we want, shouldn't we be going after it? For example, if we want a
culture that resists socially and environmentally devastating projects,
shouldn't we be building it? If we suspect that there might be something to
writing poetry, shouldn't we be going for it?

But what are those somethings? That's
usually the question that follows Can poetry do anything? One thing that poetry
often does is daylight resistance and document atrocity, as well as the
sometimes mundane aspects of alienation. Poetry can expose (I think of Reg
Johanson's Escratches), pose (see Ray Hsu's "Questions for a Rubber
Stamp") and propose (as with Brenda Hillman's call for poets to write
their ways through marches). But aside from rhetorical strategies, poems
themselves, or in some cases, poem-making (if the making is made public),
contribute, generate, and invigorate cultures of resistance.

Cultures of resistance can be small. They
can be fleeting. Activists understand this. The most effective activists are
persistent in their engagement of the public. But activist cultures, and the
intense levels of engagement that exist within them, sometimes struggle to move
"the public" beyond a basic level of engagement. It may be that for
many activists, engagement is the the end goal, but to achieve fast and lasting
change of the kind that is needed on issues like climate change, community is
key. Even if we woke up in a world of policy perfection, it would take hella
info-sharing and teamwork to unroll change on the scale required. It would take
mad community.

Culture is part of where communities store
themselves. And one way to build community is to build culture—a space where
people can come together and interact over, around and through artistic
activity. In writing publicly, persistently and in resistance, I think we can
use the cultures we generate to help pull ourselves into the kinds of
communities that will sustain us through sea change.

Not exactly a short answer, but there you
have it.

DZ: What is the next step once the Enpipe
Line is completed?

It will probably be a couple of years
before the Enpipe Line reaches a length of 1,173 kilometers, but I would
like to see the first one 100 kilometers published as an anthology. I also
think it would be cool to see some portion of the line used in the creation of
a libretto. I think there is a lot of potential for the line being translated
across mediums and languages. Language translation is beginning to emerge as a
feature of the line, as are video poems.

DZ: Where will we be able to find the
Enpipe Line project? Will it find itself in different formats once the project
is complete?

. It also
exists as RSS, readings, sound and video recordings and as broadsides used to
promote the line's first writing workshop—to be held in the multi-purpose room
at the Mount Pleasant branch of the VPL on Thursday, December 16, from 7-9.
People also might come across part of the Enpipe Line in their notebooks. If
so, they should definitely send those parts to