I Am a City Still but Soon I Shan't Be

""Hailed by the Call as I stepped across Venables at Clark following a transverse line like all the other commodities circulating aimlessly I drifted along corrugated steel walls sun burning every body every building every form cash exploding from crowns of distant towers occupied by the rentiers in this haemopolis of arteries and conduits branching out centrifugally." ​ At some point in the last decade, the "unreal cities" of Modernity became post-Real. Roger Farr's I Am a City Still But Soon I Shan't Be metabolizes the modernist long poem in order to provide a psychogeographical I-witness account of this transformation. In nine Cantos, or spheres of hell, Farr moves impossibly between major and minor cities, crossing and re-crossing zones, edging boundaries, charting dreamscapes, always drifting, without ever becoming a flaneur. Vancouver stars in "pre-conceptual" found footage from 1973, which is actually a dream of the future. New York is an "elegant incubator" for the new avant-gardes, who are preparing for another civil war. Berlin is a nightclub, or a mall, that "kettles" its negations. Nanaimo is a necropolis seen through a lens held by the hand of a dead poet. Meanwhile a