Gary Barwin and Gregory Betts, The Fabulous Op

 

O this is a
poem become
minded whole
a great white
washed shall
adios
various radios
radiate variants
pliant plaints
record prophets
this wobbly planet
where poems
splint winds

I’ve been eager to explore titles from Beir Bua Press, an Irish publisher that appeared to emerge out of nowhere a short while back, and seemingly publishing stellar works of experimental writing from the get-go; the first of their titles I’ve managed to get my hands on is Hamilton writer Gary Barwin and St. Catharine’s, Ontario writer Gregory Betts’ collaborative The Fabulous Op (April 2022), a book of collaborative play, response and experiment through a bleed of text and image. “re new / re new grief / re language rising / re broken laugh / re always,” they write, mid-way through the collection, “recomposing / as what you / riot / you art [.]” Barwin’s collaborative explorations have become more prevalent over the past few years, although he’s been working in the form for some time, and this particular collection seems an extension of their previous collaborative effort, The Obvious Flap (Toronto ON: Book*hug, 2011). As they offer as part of a preface:

The title of our book, The Fabulous Op has nothing whatsoever to do with its anagrams, “about hopefuls,” or “hub of foetal soup,” “Uh, upbeat fools,” “push taboo fuel,” or even, “Afoul pub ethos.” Rather, it is a collaborative poem which we—uh, upbeat fools—began by asking our social media contacts to post lines of poetry that they keep memorized, wanting the project to be grounded in the soil of the brain, the canon of the individual as sieved through their experience. We considered how the transmission of DNA is affected by the experiences of those who it both creates and describes through epigenetic processes. We imagined the canon (and our culture) to be a kind of genetic code who’s transmission is similarly affected by “the experiences of those who it both creates and describes” (unacknowledged source).

For the curious, other collaborative efforts by Gary Barwin include a forthcoming collaboration with Toronto poet Lillian Nećakov—Duck Eats Yeast, Quacks, Explodes; Man Loses Eye (Toronto ON: Guernica Editions, 2023)—two recent full-length collections with London, Ontario poet Tom Prime—A CEMETERY FOR HOLES, poems by Tom Prime and Gary Barwin (Guelph ON: Gordon Hill Press, 2019) [see my review of such here] and Bird Arsonist (Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 2022) [see my review of such here]—Frogments from the Frag Pool (with derek beaulieu; Toronto ON: The Mercury Press, 2005), Franzlations: the Imaginary Kafka Parables (with Craig Conley and Hugh Thomas; New Star Books, 2011) [see my review of such here] and the collaborative novel The Mud Game (with Stuart Ross; The Mercury Press, 1995), as well as chapbook-length collaborations with Alice Burdick, Amanda Earl, Tom Prime and even myself. Ever since the publication of Barwin’s For It Is a PLEASURE and a SURPRISE to Breathe: new & selected POEMS, edited with an Introduction by Alessandro Porco (Hamilton ON: Wolsak and Wynn, 2019) [see my review of such here], I’ve been curious at the possibility of editor Porco perhaps furthering his examination of Barwin’s ouvre with a volume of selected collaborations; it would be interesting to see the length and breadth of that particular and seemingly ongoing thread of his work. And one might argue, in certain ways, that everything Betts’ produces is in some way a “response,” from his collaborative efforts to his own solo projects, including The Others Raisd in Me (Pedlar Press, 2009), a collection of poems carved out of William Shakespeare’s sonnet 150 [see my review of such here], collaborative works with Arnold McBay, as well as the ongoing “Mutter Sound” collaborative project with Barwin and Toronto dub poet Lillian Allen.

Through the pieces of The Fabulous Op, Barwin and Betts offer twists of anagrammatic text and puns, texts shaped and re-formed as image, and images recombined and reconstituted, blending shifts and structures and expectation. There are ways in which their explorations of visual and sound exist almost prior to any consideration of meaning, less tethered to the possibilities of how words and images form meaning than the sense that their collage-suites of visual and aural explorations might provide. While their medium might heavily include language, one might attempt to seek meaning from their explorations in the same way one might seek similar from the paintings of Roy Kiyooka, an album by Dave Brubeck or a recorded performance by either The Four Horsemen or the Nihilist Spasm Band. The expectations of how one reads becomes important. Flip through the collection, and catch what they are doing. Can you see what they’re doing?

I am
rose ellipse this
wendering nothing
in-sparkling nothing
onsettling in air
moorning

 

Margaret Christakos, charger

say you missed it

about who won all the awards who should’ve won them

        tug at my bra strap and say

pop by in a couple days                       say

  and it went past me    i let it go past me

          like a wind made (“1. passing on information”)

“passing on information // something has to happen // for something to occur in memory // for something to touch my insides,” Toronto poet Margaret Christakos writes to open her self-described “poem cycle” or poem suite, charger (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2020). charger is set in a dozen short sections—“passing on information,” “what you are is fully charged,” “go to binary categories,” “what we had to cover,” “can i cease and desist,” “woke up thinking about laudanum,” “among poplars i am looking,” “if you are about to die,” “beyond the windowed rectangles,” “if it takes alive sperm,” “the thing that slides over” and “it’s like a solar-powered lawnmower”—with a coda, “the blue day is violent.” The lyric cycle charger is built as a cascade, even a pulse, of fragments that ebb and flow across the page to write on connection and disconnect examining virtual means verses prior means of human connection and conversation, privacies during a world lived predominantly through often multiple levels of social media, and personhood via reproductive rights. “you are              is          fully charged,” she writes, in the second of the book’s cycles.

In charger, her lyric staccato is stretched out, pulled apart and allowed the space to breathe, unlike the block of some of the same text at the end of her previous collection, Space Between Her Lips: The Poetry of Margaret Christakos (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2017) [see my review of such here], (which might have been as much of a spacing decision as anything else). The effect the block of text provides, in comparison, is more of a continuous rush, whereas the pulled-apart spacing appears more meditative, disjointed. The shift between the two versions is interesting, as this prior version, the poem “Charger,” begins:

Passing on information does not make us remember it. Something has to happen inside the organism for memory to occur. For something to occur in memory the skin is a membrane. For something to touch my insides I have to involve it in movement. Information moves when it seeps through time and becomes material. Memory occurs in the dwell of the repercussion. Feel free to argue. Feel free to get stuck in/ on/ over this. Feel free to make a big deal of this. Go ahead and make a mountain of this molehill.

Throughout charger, hers is a through-line both sustained and constantly interrupted, a staccato of reaching and reaching out, disconnecting even as she attempts to connect. And yet, she makes connections—multiple connections—between herself and the world. “unsplicing                   the      act                    and // about // as      if /// always                refilling // bulbous                        glass  aglow // milk       or // or // blood [.]” (“if it takes alive sperm”). What has been interesting about the shifts in her lyric, and her narratives, over the past few collections has been the stretching out of her focus, from earlier collections that wrote on the intimacy of mothering and children and the immediacies of those concerns to a wider scope of reaching out, articulating the ways in which we connect or attempt to. The intimacies of her approach continue, but across the spectrum of social media and how that alters the ways in which connections are made, seeking out the point where human considerations might concurrently scatter, fractal and meet. At the end of his introduction to her critical selected, editor and critic Gregory Betts writes:

Christakos’ work continues to open up language in new ways and with new forms. She explores social media as a space of self-constitution in public (as in public language), and uses its presumptions to probe the limits of access. Her #touchingseries, for instance, is a series of photos of her hand reaching out before the camera as if to touch something in the landscape (be that books, monuments, or screenshots of her own texts). The reaching evokes the desire for touch, the illusion of fulfilment, and the impossible dilemma of accessing the other through its representation. Thus, invoking, stirring, upsetting, and engaging the desire of instant knowledge, the literary industry, and the long neoliberal moment, the fear of grief, uncertainty, and death, but with a deeply felt consciousness of all the contradictions, the privileges, and the exlusions, Margaret Christakos writes.

Kanada Koncrete: Material Poetries in the Digital Age

Last weekend, I was fortunate enough to attend much of Kanada Koncrete: Material Poetries in the Digital Age, the Canadian Literature Symposium at the University of Ottawa for 2018, organized by Robert Stacey and Claire Farley. I’ve been to a number of the annual conferences at the University of Ottawa over the years, from the Long Poem Symposium back in 1996, to conferences on Modernism, Al Purdy, Postmodernism and Robert Kroetsch, but this was far and away the most vibrant and exciting conference I’ve attended (and I was able, in case you hadn’t seen, to produce some chapbooks specifically for the conference – Derek Beaulieu, Amanda Earl, Arnold McBay + Gregory Betts and Tim Atkins – as well as some very recent titles by other participants (who hadn’t actually mentioned “I’ll be in your city two weeks after you produce that”) – Dani Spinosa, Kate Siklosi and Sean Braune – so the whole conference, between them and a variety of others, felt awash with above/ground press authors (Porco! Barwin! Baker! Anstee! Schmaltz! Davey!).

There were some remarkable papers presented, from Tim Atkins’ paper exploring some of bill bissett’s early, pre-Vancouver influences, Cameron Anstee’s paper exploring some of his ongoing work on the late artist Barbara Caruso (specifically her presspresspress), Zane Koss on the poetry networks of Louis Dudek and Marshall McLuhan in the 1950s, Natalie Leduc’s paper on Rupi Kaur as poetry activist (she presented a great argument for such), Paul Barrett on Sandra Djwa’s digital work from 1970, and Michael Nardone exploring the differences and constructs of digital archives vs. repositories, specifically UBU Web, PennSound and the Electronic Poetry Center.

What was impressive, as well, was the fact that there were so many performances, all of which (unfortunately) I managed to miss, due to overload (and the requirements of children), including an evening of some twenty-one poets performing (all of whom were also presenting papers at the conference), and sound poetry by Gary Barwin and Stuart Ross, and jwcurry’s sound poetry ensemble Quatuor Gualuor. It would be difficult to highlight every paper that struck me, as that really would be the bulk of what I saw, but some of what I did find quite amazing included: Jessica Bebenek’s work translating T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” into a knitting pattern, exploring the canon of the male genius through textiles; Amanda Earl and Eric Schmaltz’s artists talks, both of which focused on their own works, from Earl’s work-in-progress “The Vizpo Bible” to Schmaltz’s debut poetry collection, Depths of Surfaces (Invisible); and David Jhave Johnson’s “Aesthetic Animism: A Synthesis,” which moved at such a rate and depth of knowledge and information that it left all in the room reeling. While I did miss a handful of papers, including Johanna Drucker’s talk on Saturday afternoon, the Closing Plenaries on Sunday by Gregory Betts and Derek Beaulieu were spectacular, with Betts exploring the origins of Canadian concrete and visual poetry emerging almost entirely and organically from visual art and an interest in the multi-discipinary (and almost completely unaware of international movements concurrently happening worldwide), while Beaulieu went through a series of contemporary female practisioners currently exploring new realms of concrete and visual works, including Helen Hajnoczky and Erica Baum.

And of course, jwcurry brought some prints of concrete/visual poems to display around the space, including works by P. Cob, Daniel f. Bradley, Judith Copithorne and Michael e. Casteels, such as a piece printed directly onto a cinder block.

All in all, stellar. I’m just disappointed that they couldn’t get funding for this conference. How the hell does such a conference not get funding? A book needs to happen from this conference. There was too much going on that requires recording, reading and further discussion.

I’m abuzz after so much activity, myself.