Joel Katelnikoff, Recombinant Theory

 

The limits of language seem incomprehensible because we are. Unexpected associations resist assimilation, and thinking is unconscious and almost unfathomable. In this way, poetry becomes the limits of language. (“‘take then these nails & boards’ (Charles Bernstein)”)

I’m intrigued at Edmonton writer and critic Joel Katelnikoff’s Recombinant Theory (Calgary AB: University of Calgary Press, 2024), a collection of essays, of responses, to and through works by Lisa Robertson, Fred Wah, Lyn Hejinian, Steve McCaffery, Sawako Nakayaso, Johanna Drucker, Charles Bernstein, Annharte, Erín Moure and Christian Bök, each of which are done by repurposing the authors’ own words. Set as chapter-sections, Katelnikoff repurposes each writer’s words as a response to those same works, offering a way across the work that is, in fact, through. In his own way, he turns their words back as a mirror to themselves. “In short,” he writes, to open the Erín Moure essay/section, “how can we be true to the way the brain works?”

Katelnikoff’s process has echoes of the way Klara du Plessis has been composing essays over the past few years, specifically through her I’mpossible collab (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2023) [see my review of such here]: the critic is not removed from the material but an essential part, offering the critic a way into the material comparable to the creative non-fiction explorations through the 1970s and 80s by writers such as Myrna Kostash and Brian Fawcett. Whereas du Plessis places the critic directly into the material, Katelnikoff, instead, places the criticism directly into the material, and the material discussed directly into the criticism. Poets have been working elements of essay-poems for years—poets such as Phil Hall, Erín Moure, Laynie Browne and the late Barry McKinnon, for example—swirling across theory through the lyric, but Katelnikoff offers critique through repurposing the language being critiqued, taking the process a whole other level, writing essays from the inside. As he writes as part of the acknowledgments: “All of the essays in this collection are written with the permission of the writers whose textual materials have been recombined. In each essays, the title, the section headers, and the sentences in the first section are direct quotations from the writer’s textual corpus. All other sentences are spliced together from diverse materials found throughout the corpus.” It’s a fascinating process, and a fascinating read.

“my words keep meaning pictures of words meaning tree”

As I am slow in my experience of myself (a man who is a tree and rivers and creeks), I can’t stop looking at the site of this poetics. Landscape and memory as the true practice of thought. Pictures of words meaning something of themselves.

Among the spruce I admit there is a moon at night. Somehow these pieces of driftwood are everywhere, foregrounding the materiality of the Kootenay River, the most important cipher in its dry branches of driftwood. There is a moon among the spruce.

The more I write, the more meaning has slipped, whirling through a green blur of moving trees. The mind wanders in green mountain valleys, a mountain dispersed in a scatter. To write in poetry is to move among the spruce, foregrounding the materiality of a mountain rising to the moon. (“‘where you are is who you are’ Fred Wah”)

new from above/ground press: Notley, Gray, mclennan, Barwin/Burdick, Barwin/Prime, McCaffery, The Peter F. Yacht Club, Marshall, Trivedi + Braune,

Undo
Alice Notley
$5
See link here for more information

Go Under The Surface
Stephanie Gray
$5
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snow day
rob mclennan
$5
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PLEASURE BRISTLES
Gary Barwin and Alice Burdick
$5
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gravitynipplemilk
anthroposcenesters
Gary Barwin and Tom Prime
$5
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CERTAIN WORDS
a septipartite structure investing the seven ideas of Hermogenes
Steve McCaffery
$5
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The Peter F Yacht Club #26
VERSeFest 2018 special
edited by rob mclennan
$6
With new writing by a host of Peter F Yacht Club regulars, irregulars and VERSeFest 2018 participants, including Manahil Bandukwala, Gary Barwin, Frances Boyle, Stephen Brockwell, Jason Christie, Sergio Coddou (trans. Lea Graham), Anita Dolman, Klara du Plessis, Amanda Earl, natalie hanna, Gonzalo Hermo (trans. Ivan Barreiro and Erín Moure), Major Jackson, Sneha Madhavan-Reese, Alex Manley, Steve McCaffery, Gil McElroy, rob mclennan, Peter Norman, Carolyn Marie Souaid, D.S. Stymeist and Janice Tokar
See link here for more information

The Landscapes Were in My Arms (figure 1)
by Sara Renee Marshall
$5
See link here for more information

What We Remembered Before the Fire
Amish Trivedi
$5
See link here for more information

The Cosmos
by Sean Braune
$5
See link here for more information

keep an eye on the above/ground press blog for author interviews, new writing, reviews, upcoming readings and tons of other material;

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
March 2018
CELEBRATING TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OF ABOVE/GROUND PRESS
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy of each

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; outside Canada, add $2) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9 or paypal (above). Scroll down here to see various backlist titles (many, many things are still in print) or check the list of authors (in reverse order of publication along the right sidebar for direct links to their most recent titles.

Review copies of any title (while supplies last) also available, upon request.

Forthcoming chapbooks by Ian Dreiblatt, Jenna Jarvis, Jamie Townsend, Cole Swensen, Jason Christie, Allison Cardon, Melissa Eleftherion, Uxío Novoneyra (trans. Erín Moure), Travis Sharp, Dani Spinosa, Stuart Kinmond / Phil Hall, Natalee Caple, Jon Boisvert, Lise Downe, Dennis Cooley, Andrew Wessels, Marthe Reed, Aaron Tucker, Edward Smallfield, Kate Siklosi, Michael Martin Shea, Jennifer Stella and Miguel E. Ortiz Rodríguez, as well as issue #17 of Touch the Donkey! And you've been catching all the 25th anniversary essays as well, yes? By Gil McElroy, Ken Norris, Jessica Smith, Marthe Reed, Derek Beaulieu and others?

And there’s totally still time to subscribe for 2018, by the way (backdating to January 1st, obviously).

Open Letter, Fifteenth Series, Number 2: Olson @ the Century

Despite the occultation of Olson’s reputation, a return to his ideas and writing is more urgent than ever. What are the stakes of polis in an imminent world of neo-Liberalism, the quantitative accumulation of wealth in a small coterie of corrupt malefactors, the rise of fundamentalist ideals proactively eroding the boundaries between State and Church, and the immersion of heterogeneities into the economic and fiscal homogenous condition dubbed globalization? Olson is the poet who introduced scale and ontology into poetics, radically revising natural history into the human universe, seeing the earth as our home. His Copernican revolution within poetics (“man is himself an object”) together with his commitment to a theory of communication and information that goes far beyond the centralized cerebellum of the Cartesian cogito, rendered him the exemplary poet of the Cybernetic Age. And with the earth on the brink of ecological disaster and language enmeshed in the age of informatics, Olson appears as a prophet and perhaps a destroying angel. (We should also pay credit to Olson’s pioneering work in what later emerged as Ethnopoetics. His studies of Mayan glyphs, though hardly resulting in a decoding, do inflect an interest in non-Romanic writing systems and in pre-Columbian culture that offers an eccentricating parallel to his theory of proprioception). (Steve McCaffery, “Introduction”)

With talk of Frank Davey’s Open Letter: A Canadian Journal of Writing and Theory winding down after some forty-plus years comes an issue guest-edited by Steve McCaffery, “Olson @ the Century” (Fifteenth Series, Number 2, Spring 2013). As McCaffery writes in his introduction: “With the exception of Frank Davey’s, Stephen Fredman’s, and Miriam Nichol’s articles, the present collection of essays is based on papers initially presented as part of Olson@ the Century. An Archival and Projective Reconsideration, a symposium held at the University at Buffalo October 14-16, 2010. Conceived less as an homage to or an attempted reinstallation of Olson’s ideas and theories, the symposium was envisioned as a double-vectored reassessment along the two trajectories named in the title: archival and projective. The ‘projective’ reassessments are presented first; three archival contributions end the gathering.” The issue comes at an interesting time, when most of the current attention on that particular period of American poetry is focused on Robert Duncan, with the publication of Duncan’s The H.D. Book (eds. Michael Boughn and Victor Coleman; University of California Press, 2011), The Collected Early Poems and Plays (ed. Peter Quartermain; University of California Press, 2012) and The Collected Later Poetry and Plays (ed. Peter Quartermain; University of California Press, 2013), and the collection of essays, Reading Duncan Reading: Robert Duncan and the Poetics of Derivation (eds. Stephen Collis and Graham Lyons; University of Iowa Press, 2012), as well as Lisa Jarnot’s biography of Duncan, The Ambassador from Venus (University of California Press, 2012). Given that the conference happened three years ago, why is this collection only coming into print now?

Place, as it unrolls in The Maximus Poems, is not simply a geographical point; it is an intense, multi-dimensional nexus of vectors that include a prehistory, a geological narrative, a geography, multiple human histories and criss-crossing myths, technological mediators, and as well the individual’s own genealogy and inner landscape. Olson draws on state of the art contemporary discourses such as Einsteinian physics, Jungian psychology, Sauerian geography and Whiteheadian philosophy to put together a locus that is complexly alive. He then suggests that individuals hold themselves responsible to it. (Miriam Nichols, “The Closing of the Field: Modernism at the Wall”)

There is an interesting selection of letters from Robert Creeley to Charles Olson, four letters stretching from 1953 to 1970, selected from The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley that Kaplan Harris, Rod Smith and Peter Baker have put together for the University of California Press, to appear this fall. The letters highlight aspects of Creeley’s encouragement, shaping and working Olson’s image. One footnote reads, “The letters chronicle the fact that Creeley was instrumental in shaping the Olson canon. We see Creeley take an active hand in the publication and promotion of Olson’s writing. We also see Creeley continue to be involved with Olson legacy for the duration of his own life, from editing Olson’s Selected Poems (University of California Press, 1993) to advising friends and colleagues on approaches for teaching his work to a new generation of students.” What becomes clear about this collection of pieces on Olson and his work is in how each contributor to the collection manages to talk about Olson directly by dealing with him indirectly, nearly through the works and words of others. Miriam Nichol’s essay, “The Closing of the Field: Modernism at the Wall traces a compelling thread from Charles Olson’s views of history and identity through Ezra Pound to Erin Mouré’s work on the idea of the citizen. As Nichols writes:

            Elsewhere, in the poetry collection O Cidadán, and in her essays, My Beloved Wager, Mouré links her on-going meditation on such transformative properties to a study of citizenship. For Mouré, the inequity and suffering caused by globalization do not call for a return to nationalism in the traditional sense because nationalism implies entitlements and exclusions dependent on a concept of origin. She writes that “historical and national entitlement (a notion warped and split by colonialisms) always seems to mean some people have to die or be denied full citizenship in the policy, denied use of their language, because of their origins. Faced with this, what use are ‘origins’?” (159). Instead, Mouré speaks of “assemblages of the person” or “coalects” (MBW 156, original emphasis); borders that are porous and leaky, bodies that are permeable, identities that are fluid, wonderstruck and eager for transport. The self, she says, has its “two avenues (that of autonomy, standing before the self, and that of the other, standing before those who precede one)” and those “play through and against each other […].”

A particularly interesting essay is Davey’s end-piece, “Olson in Canada,” writing about Olson’s influence on Canadian writers and writing, particularly his lack of influence on writers in eastern Canada, such as Raymond Souster and Louis Dudek. The influence Olson had on writers in the west, particularly Vancouver, is well-known and Davey names names, including Ottawa poet William Hawkins, who drove west with Roy MacSkimming to participate in the 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference. Considering that Souster brought Olson up to Toronto as part of his infamous Contact Reading Series, the lack of change in Toronto poetry reads as particularly willful by some. As Davey writes, “Overall, this period of Olson’s contact with Canadian writers appears to do little more than make them aware of his poetics and of the formal possibilities they offered. Only Dudek shows any significant understanding of them, and is unimpressed. Souster is impressed but seemingly unable to understand well enough to make sustained use of them.” The interaction made little difference on Souster’s writing, but impacted his editorial significantly, as Davey notes a number of future Contact authors who picked up elements of Olson’s writing, including George Bowering and Davey himself. Still, one of the most striking parts of Davey’s essay is the clarification of how exactly Olson’s work influenced Canadian writing: “One of the oddities of Canadian attention to Olson is that even though most of it occurs during the 1960s, it is the Olson of the 1950s – of ‘Projective Verse,’ written in the late 1940s and first published in 1950, and of the first three books of ‘The Maximus Poems,’ that are most influential. Only those who followed him to Buffalo – Wah and Hogg – seem to have found much to learn from in the later books.” About Souster, Davey writes:

Souster’s lack of change, however, may not have been as conscious or deliberate as Whiteman hints. There are several places in his letters to Olson where he appears to regret not understanding Olson’s poems and theories as fully as he would like, or where he apologizes for the limitations of his own poems – in one instance sending Olson a new poem and commenting “not much, I’m afraid, but I suppose typical stuff right now, not really making it” (78). Acknowledging one’s own limitations does not necessarily mean that one has choen to have them. Moreover, Olson seems to have received positively what poems Souster did show him. When Donald Allen proposed to include Irving Layton and Gael Turnbull in his The New American Poetry 1945-1960 anthology in order to show that the new poetry had international reach, Olson quickly replied “lawd if you are going to include Canadians, above all pick Souster for yr center, there – especially for such an anthology, for he and not that Englishy slicky Layton or that nice Migrant Gael: lawd Souster is the one who has for years caught on that the American thing exists for use: ex/ his Contact-Combustion, as against anything Montreal etc” (Maud 60).

Open Letter: Breakthrough Nostalgia: Reading Steve McCaffery Then and Now

Even if the work of Steve McCaffery did not so resolutely resist categorization and containment, this special issue of Open Letter could not hope to encompass his prodigious and heteroclite publications. Consider that McCaffery is the author of over 25 books of poetry, two volumes of criticism, a novel, three selected collections, three edited anthologies, and countless broadsides, posters, and uncollected ephemera. To this one must add his sound poetry and performances, including those that have been recorded or filmed, but also the numerous scores and pieces that have only been performed once and exist in the memories of audiences across North America and Europe. Nor can one overlook McCaffery’s collaborative work with bpNichol, the Toronto Research Group, the Four Horsemen, and other individual poets, critics, and composers including Karen Mac Cormack, Dick Higgins, Jed Rasula, Charles Bernstein, R. Murray Schafer, Bruce Andrews, Richard Truhlar, and Alan Halsey.

With so much material, and such a long history of production, questions of where, and how, to begin arise. (Stephen Cain, “Introduction: Clinamen/ Context/ Concrete/ Community/ Continuum”)

And so begins the special issue on Steve McCaffery of OpenLetter: A Canadian Journal of Writing and Theory (Fourteenth Series, Number 7, Fall 2011), “Breakthrough Nostalgia:Reading Steve McCaffery Then and Now,” edited by Toronto writer,editor and professor Stephen Cain. How does one begin? One could only imagine that an editor would attempt to be as broad and complete as possible, but that the actual process would perhaps liken closer to a collage than a strict trajectory of writings on complete works, and this collection certainly manages quite a range of pieces on quite a range of McCaffery’s ouvre. How else to begin?

There has been a considerable shift over the past twenty years in how Steve McCaffery, a British-born Canadian writer currently living and teaching in the United States, has been viewed by Canadian readers. No longer seen as an extension of or overshadowed by the personality and poetics of the late bpNichol, his work is seen for its own merit and in much broader terms, part of which, I would suggest, came with the publication of the impressive two-volume selected, SevenPages Missing, through Coach House Books in 2000, as well as his move to teach at SUNY-Buffalo in 2004. Cain’s introduction adds that McCaffery’s critical consideration vastly improved through writings on his work by important American poet-critics Charles Bernstein and Marjorie Perloff. For this issue, it is the younger generation of critics/poet-critics who are engaging with McCaffery’s work, and the issue includes assessments by Gregory Betts, Lori Emerson, Tim Conley, Andy Weaver, Christian Bök, derek beaulieu, Alan Halsey and Peter Jaeger. A particularly engaging piece is by Christian Bök on McCaffery’s visual piece, “William Tell: A Novel,” entitled “from ‘Two Dots Over a Vowel’” (if you know the piece, you will understand the reference).

While McCaffery has written a work that might, at first, seem too cryptic for any extended, literary analysis, such a “novel” does at least refer to the famed story of Tell, the medieval marksman from the village of Altdorf. Tell (in the apocryphal recounting) flouts the edicts of his Austrian overlord, Gessler – a Vogt who, in 1307, orders that all locals must bow before his hat, which sits atop a pole in the square of the hamlet. When Tell defies this decree, he gets arrested, and as a punishment for his insolence, he must prove his marksmanship by firing a crossbow at an apple, set up as a target, upon the head of his son, Walter – or else both the man and the boy must suffer immediate execution. Tell passes this awful trial, but nevertheless earns his incarceration after acknowledging that he has come to the test with two shots in his quiver, reserving one for the Vogt in case the child dies after the first salvo. Tell (bound and forced to board a ferry) gets taken to the keep of Gessler in Küssnacht – but during a tempest in transit on Lake Lucerne, Tell escapes from the hold of the ship and thus travels by land to the keep, where, with one shot from his crossbow, he obtains his revenge, murdering the Vogt, thereby fomenting a rebellion that leads to the confederation of the Swiss state.

Part of the appeal of the issue is that this is the second Open Letter issue on McCaffery’s work, after one edited by bpNichol (Sixth Series, No. 9: Fall 1987), which means that Cain doesn’t have to focus on the expected works, allowing the issue the luxury of far more freedom, as well as the benefits that such a distance of time often allows. As editor Nichol began his introduction to the earlier issue:

When I approached Frank about the idea of an issue like the one you now hold in your hands, my idea was simple. Bring together a number of articles by writers and critics who’ve read and appreciated the work of Steve McCaffery. I’ve read lots of negative criticism of his work in Canada, but very little that dealt seriously with his attempt, right or wrong, to come to terms with some of the problems in contemporary writing. That’s what I was looking for and I made that clear to Frank. I didn’t want to edit a festschrift but I did want to edit a collection of mostly pro-McCaffery pieces. My attempt is to balance the lack of same with this issue.

“Then and Now,” as Cain writes, and the collected papers move through the years as easily as they do through pages. Another feature of this issue is that it includes new work by McCaffery, as well as the essay “Parapoetics: A Soft Manifesto for the Nomad Cortex,” which begins:

Let me argue for a poetics on the move and formulated from my own thinking in transit, without finality and without the suffocating safeguard of certainty; a sort of broad experiment in negative capability projected along a hypothetical trajectory: from the end of poetics to a beginning from poetics.

After such responses that experimental writing has had over the years in Canada, it becomes hard to really formulate an argument that there hasn’t been a long-standing resistance here to experimental work, in favour of more conservative forms, and Open Letter remains one of the stronger critical forums arguing for more experimental and avant-garde works. It’s interesting, in such a context, to consider the opening lines of Alessandra Capperdoni’s “Theorizing the Letter: Steve McCaffery’s Writing as Analytic Discourse,” that begin:

The line from McCaffery’s Seven Pages Missing, “provide the context and the content will follow” (224), is a helpful opener for a discussion that follows two invitations at rethinking the legacy of McCaffery’s work and the different impacts it has produced since the early critical reception in the 1980s. Both Clint Burnham’s panel organized for ACCUTE 2010 and the current issue of Open Letter are long due calls to attend to a tactical poetics that scarcely fits any definition and, until recently, has been excluded from institutional reception both in Canada and the U.S. As McCaffery himself notes in an interview with Antoine Cazé, his poetry “has never appeared in major anthologies of Canadian poetry” (30) and has been excluded “in the construction of the Canadian Long Poem canon” (30). If, in Canada, cultural nationalism’s suspicion toward ‘theory’ and ‘intellectualism’ is in part to blame, in the U.S. McCaffery’s poetry has undergone a sort of “ostracization” (30) for different but also related reasons – the construction of an ‘American’ lineage of LANGUAGE/oppositional writing.

jwcurry's Room 302 Books has a new catalogue: list #12

Anyone paying attention to small press in Canada should be purchasing from Ottawa's Room 302 Books, owned and operated by jwcurry, out of his Chinatown apartment/bookstore/workspace. jwcurry really is one of the most important collectors and sellers, as well as one of the most important producers, of Canadian small press. Previous notes I've posted on jwcurry and his wares, rarely available outside of his store, exist (for example) here, here, here and here.

Highlights of the 220 items on “list #12” (with some items already sold out; issued July 18, 2011) include issues of 3¢ Pulp, and works by John Barlow, John M. Bennett, Stan Bevington, Katy Chan, Bob Cobbing, Victor Coleman, Judith Copithorne, Arthur Cravan, jwcurry (including 1¢ newsnotes), Anne Dondertman, Nicky Drumbolis, Daniel f. Bradley, Michael Duquette, K.S. Ernst, a selection of publications and ephemera from the EyeRhymes Conference and Festival (University of Alberta, June 1997), Four Horsemen, D.M. Fraser, Gerry Gilbert, Glenn Goluska, Alan Halsey, Wharton Hood, Mark Laba, D.A. Levy, John Ligoure, R.D. MacPherson, Diane Martin, Steve McCaffery, Janet F. Murchison, Lowell Naeve, Hermann Neutics, bpNichol, R. Murray Schafer, Darrell Schiller, Peter Schuyff, Gio Shanger, John Graves Simcoe, Steven Smith, Raymond Souster, David UU, Alberto Vitacchio and Frank Zappa.

Sample listing:

114. MCCAFFERY (Steve) Prior To Meaning. Buffalo, Friends Of The University Libraries, for 25 december 1996. of an edition totalling 2000, 1/195 trade copies issued as Christmas Broadside series 3 #8. 5 ½ x 8 ½ leaflet; 4 pp printed offset. McCaffery's rather lyrical poem faced w/ fullcolour reproduction of Michael Snow's 1962 “weathered paper collage”, Alice. 7.50

Write, call or simply show up at jwcurry's door for a copy of the list. Other lists are most likely still available.

from the inside cover:

list 12, published occasionally, fixates on a sampling of materials issued to correspond with specific events. there are: exhibition announcements/invitations, catalogues & reviews; holiday mailouts; special issues of magazines; anniversary anthologies; travel gifts; party invitations & handouts; events posters & souvenirs; reminders; memorials; address change notices; publication announcements; programmes; propaganda; parodies; & a handful of unclassifiables. the list could easily have been 5 times its size but, in propitiation for the overt hostility suffusing list 11, i've kept opportunities for bile to a minimum & am mostly enthusiastic about the offerings included herein (irked ire obvious as usual).

of particular note here are the christmas “cards” (& related material, entries 125 – 161) issued by bpNichol &, after his death, Eleanor Nichol. from what i've been able to determine, this is the largest selection ever offered for public sale of these elusive private publications & few – if any – of the variant issues have been previously described.

ROOM 302 BOOKS is probably open whenever you want it to be; just give a call to be sure i'm in & up (613 233 0417) & come to either door of 880 Somerset Street West, Ottawa (K1R 6R7 for the postally-inclined). orders by post are subjected to no postal penalties if paid in advance; please make cheques or money orders payable to jwcurry. returns are a bad idea: don't order it if you don't want it.

Ongoing notes: early June, 2011

House-sitting in Old Ottawa South again, this week. See, here I am, writing away at the Starbucks (I know, I know...).

Have you been catching all these interviews on Kevin Spenst's website? Recent ones include Stan Rogal and Ken Norris, and then there's this less-than-recent interview with Phil Hall; apparently he has a new book, Kildeer, out with BookThug I'd love to get my hands on, as well as the new Rae Armantrout (see Amy King's recent interview with her, here). And don't forget that the Niagara Literary Arts Festival, simply because I'm finally home from such, is still actually going on. And have you seen the Trillum shortlist, including Ken Sparling's Book [see my review of such here]? About damned time.

Keep your eye on: the literary component of WESTFEST, as I read fiction alongside Jon Paul Fiorentino, Gabriela Goliger and others on June 11; a reading I'm doing at mother tongue books with Pearl Pirie and Monty Reid on June 16; the Toronto Small Press Fair I'll have a table at on June 19^th; the ottawa small press book fair, June 25, with pre-reading the night before at the Carleton Tavern. Where will you be for all of this? At all those places, I'd hope. I'm even doing a reading in Perth on August 12 with Christine McNair, if you can wait that long.

Vancouver BC: Presented as a talk on a series of readings is Vancouver writer Michael Turner's pamphlet Three Readings: Camera, Tape and Sound (Kathy Acker, Steve McCaffery/bpNichol, and Kevin Davies, as introduced by George Bowering) (Wednesday, January 12, 2011) as part of Western Front's “Past is Prologue” series, “an ongoing research project considering the Western Front Media Archive.”

The literary reading is a relatively recent phenomenon. Implying a written text, it is closer to Gutenberg than the pre-contact conveyance of Salish myths and legends or the Homeric tradition of poetic oration. Words spoken from a page, as opposed to those that come remembered.

As a reader and a writer I have participated in hundreds of literary readings. Sometimes I look forward to them; other times they fill me with dread. In preparing my visit to the Western Front Media archive, I chose to focus on the collection's literary program, curious to see if the documentation of readings at a centre known for interdisciplinarity differs from those at a literary festival or a writers' club.

What follows are three instances where a reading and its documentation combine to form a third event. The first focuses on the camera; the second on the videotape; the third on the relationship between what is seen and what is heard.

The fact itself that such is happening is astounding enough, as so many artist-run centres seem to be unaware of what exactly they're sitting on, given such staff turnover over the years. In Ottawa alone, I've witnessed both Saw Gallery/Video and Gallery 101 participating in such purges of their archives, as the first sold off, among other items, three first edition copies of Michael Ondaatje's Governor-General's Award-winning The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970) for fifty cents each (a book that, at the time, went for roughly $700 on Abe.com). Gallery 101, on the other hand, simply handed items out or left them on the curb to be collected, for their lack of space.

We now have decades worth of artist-run centres and literary readings in Canada; one can only admire Turner and Western Front, infamous for various literary readings over the years, including a large Talonbooks poetry launch in 1980, enormously for attempting to not only keep the records, but critically explore those same archives. In the first section, “Camera,” Turner explores a reading by Kathy Acker on February 2, 1977 from what would become The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec by Henri Toulouse Lautrec (1978). The second, “Tape,” writes of The Four Horsemen reading on November 21, 1977, and the third, “Sound,” explores a benefit reading for MacLeod's Books on October 22, 1983, focusing specifically on the segment by Kevin Davies.

The relationship between McCaffery and Nichol's performance and the deficiencies of the tape is uncanny, with the initial buckle acting as both muse and omen, or a transformational device that sets the stage for what is to come. Prefacing their performance is a story Nichol told at the conclusion of his Martyrology reading. When asked why his poem contained so many references to God, Nichol replied: “I decided a long time ago that anything that came into the poem I would leave in the poem. So I suppose that's in the way of explanation, not an apology.” What came into the documentation of McCaffery and Nichol's poem was just that.

One can only hope that this project continues, and possibly makes its way into some further printed documents, whether as an online archive of texts, and/or even a book-length study of the literary activity at The Western Front. If we don't understand just what it is we've done, what's the point of doing any more?

While a literature exists on the documentation of performance art (the performance document as object and the anxieties that result), I have found nothing on literary readings and their relationship to the (video) camera. One explanation could be the predictability of the format: the author, attached to the podium, reading from a text as if it were a script, one the audience might well be familiar with. A format such as this has little need of a camera operator; one merely presses “record.”

England: I recently received a small assortment of chapbooks by smallminded books, produced and curated by Stride editor/publisher Rupert Loydell, barely large enough to notice.

Nightclub

The Abyss: an apology for god's nightclub.

A calumny, a glorious denunciation of its

permutation on a kerygma: incomprehensible octagon.

In retrospect, it was always dark as anthracite,

propelled to decipher its reversion to

permutations.

So a penultimate home –

penultimate glorious calumny –

now The Anthracite nightclub. (Mike Ferguson)

Putting large poems in tiny spaces, I now own the splay and splendour of Peter Finch's The Insufficiency of Christian Teaching On the Subject of Common Emotional Problems (2011), the odd and sharp containments of Mike Ferguson's Found In Dissonance (2011), the wordplay of Richard Kostelanetz's Doublefulcra 2 (2011) and the wonderment of John Levy's Imagine A Whale (2011).

My

thoughts, she replied, are

like looking at a moving

whale with a magnifying

glass. (John Levy)

I can't find any real internet reference to these small items, although a review of one of Levy's previous in the same series exists here. These small, odd chapbooks remind in part of the Poems-For-All series out of California, tiny booklets small enough to leave in the most unlikely places, created as much for the sake of discovering new poetry audiences as astounding longtime readers. Just how long has he been making these, and how are they distributed?

Philadelphia PA: Recently in the mail, I received the most lovely letterpress object, Agnes Fox Press' sold out and numbered edition of fifty (I have number 19), Philadelphia poet Hailey Higdon's I WRESTLE HOME THE PAPERS (May, 2010). Produced as a five-page accordion strip, her meditation begins:

I wrestle home the papers.

I do.

Your divorced tendencies make you.

They make you.

He says: like baking cookies

you already put in the sugar

you can't get it out now

you have to throw away the whole batch

This is such a lovely piece, and I'm tempted to quote the entirety of such, being that it's short enough, but I won't, allowing it some future space to breathe on its own; considering they went out of print so quickly, might Agnes Fox Press produce another run? I'm caught by the thoughtfulll sadness of this small piece, encountering tweaks of loss, absence, blame, through the suggestion of divorce papers, and the possibility that eventually the feelings of loss will be gone, and the possibilities that this might, in fact, be entirely worse. Higdon, a pre-kindergarten teacher and poet living in Philly, is also the author of the poetry blog Palinode Project, as well as the Agnes Fox Press chapbook How To Grow Almost Everything (February, 2011), which I haven't yet seen. I am intrigued by what else she is capable of.

is it because I stopped meditating?

is that why I feel so asleep all the time?

why do

I have the urge to press my face against babies?

be near their heads and smell them?

this is a shape

I draw it with my fingers