The proliferation of
anthologies of “contemporary poetics,” in the Anglophone world, began some time
in the late eighties, climaxed in the late nineties and early noughts, and is,
judging by a search of major library holdings, currently in the midst of its dénouement. The cultural history behind
this arc probably warrants its own book. From a distance, it appears to follow
closely the rise and fall of “Theory” in the academy, with “poetics” apparently
having a bit more tenacity than its more visible double. It is also the case,
however, that in many circles, what passes under the sign of “poetics” today is
not the same as what is regarded as “theory.” Although these modes of literary
discourse share certain elements and features (meta-discursivity, a frequently
defamiliarizing style, an abandonment of the liberal prohibition on “bias,” a
secondary status in relation to “primary” literary texts, etc.), this
collection, like many others, adds an important distinction: here, “poetics”
appears to be a kind of para-discourse, or
dopplegänger—one who walks beside.
“Poetics” in this sense refers to a discourse
about poetry made by poets themselves, which gives it a unique relationship
to its “object of study,” if not always unique methodologies. While this distinction
between poetics and theory can not, and probably should not, be universalized
into a general principle, it is worth pausing on the fact that in the writing
collected here, our attention is always drawn back to the poem itself—even if
only to defamiliarize that object again and again. (Roger Farr, “Introduction”)
Roger Farr’s Open Text: Canadian Poetry and Poetics in the 21st Century, Vol. 3 (Vancouver BC: CUE Books,
2013) closes a trilogy of texts of contemporary avant-garde poetry, following
previous volumes Open Text: Canadian
Poetry and Poetics in the 21st Century (CUE Books, 2008) and Open Text: Canadian Poetry and Poetics in
the 21st Century, Vol. 2 (CUE Books, 2009). Deliberately built
as a single unit made up of three works, the idea appears as an extension of literary
readings, as Farr wrote to end the introduction for the first (and second) volume:
“Between September 2008 and October 2009, the time measured by this volume of
the Open Text series, the fifteen
writers assembled here read from their work at Capilano University as part of
our ongoing reading series. This is a record of what transpired.” The books and
the reading series, it would seem, both provide an opportunity for
dissemination, reading and conversation from a similar aesthetic and series of
impulses, one as extension of the other. The first volume includes writing by
Annharte, Oana Avasilichioaei, George Bowering, Rob Budde, Louis Cabri, Peter Culley, Jeff Derksen, Jon Paul Fiorentino, Maxine Gadd, Claire Huot & Robert Majzels, Larissa Lai, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Donato Mancini, Jamie Reid,
Darren Wershler, Lissa Wolsak and Rita Wong, and the second includes writing by
Ken Belford, Clint Burnham, Edward Byrne, Stephen Collis, Phinder Dulai, Emily Fedoruk, Christine Leclerc, Daphne Marlatt, Roy Miki, Fred Wah, Wayde Compton,
Jordan Scott, Reg Johanson, Angela Carr, Kim Duff and Shirley Bear. It makes
for an impressive list, and an enviable reading series, one I wish I lived
much, much closer to. The third volume is used to close the trilogy through a
collection of texts on writing from some of the contributors of the prior two
volumes, as well as others. As Farr writes to end the introduction to the third
volume:
So, included in this
final volume of Open Text is an
attempt to give some of the poets included in the first two volumes agency in
altering the sphere in which their work is received. Put differently, it is an
attempt to realize a limited form of self-valorization
for both individual writers and the communities they identify with. What is at
stake here is articulated differently from piece to piece; in all cases,
however, I think it safe to say that “the point is to change it.”
What
becomes clear is the insistence that work deemed “difficult” actually requires
to be read on its own terms. I mean, it sounds so basic, and yet, this is a
repeated mantra from readers and non-readers alike when approaching more
challenging works, and the trilogy seems to hold this basic premise as its
underlying argument. Farr writes in the introduction to the first volume:
The Open Text project is ambitious, however.
When finished, it will consist of three volumes—two of poetry and one of
poetics statements—and will be set apart from other anthologies of Canadian
poetry in a number of important ways. First, it will bridge several generations
of avant-garde writing. Some of the writers here were born before the Second
World War, while others were born after Vietnam, allowing readers to trace
lines of affinity and of difference across historical moments and cultural /
literary movements. Second, it will include an unusually generous sampling of
writing from the West Coast, a fact that only becomes significant when we
consider that while much of this work is familiar in the US and the UK, it
remains largely unacknowledged in Canada. This in turn may be an effect of the
third point: the collection includes a significant amount of avant-garde work
that treats formal innovation and experimentation not merely as aesthetic
progress, but as extensions of specific political, ethical and social
commitments.
Including
a mixture of critical prose, interviews and poetry, the contributors to the
third volume include George Bowering, Donato Mancini, Wayde Compton, Cecily Nicholson, Larissa Lai and Rita Wong, Ken Belford, Erín Moure, Danielle LaFrance, Phinder Dulai, Mercedes Eng, Roy Miki, Fred Wah (with Roger Farr),
Stephen Collis, Louis Cabri, Jeff Derksen and Roger Farr and Reg Johanson. The works
included in this third volume are offered to extend and even open a
conversation about writing generally, and specific writing and writers
specifically. A particular highlight is the piece “Circles of Intimacy:
Translation, Corporality, Responsibility: Mi Versión” by Moure, writing on her
past decade or more working more deeply in other languages, from her own writing
to translating books from Galician by Chus Pato and from French by Nicole Brossard, among others:
Yes, when I translate, I
am giving you, the readers and writers of English books, a book by someone not
written in English, because I want you to read it and to feel similar things to
what I once felt, reading it. It is affect that drives me to translate works, a
corporeality, a relation.
In so doing I am able
to share that part of my own corporeality that exists, no, thrives, in other
languages, a part most often masked to my Anglo public, who do not see it, even
though (maddeningly to me) it is part of my being. I perform this unmasking by
translating between languages I know. By listening to the language of someone
else as it enters my body.
In
an excerpt from Vancouver writer and critic Wayde Compton’s enlightening essay “The
Canadian Dub Poets, Aesthetic Conscience, and Donato Mancini’s Critique of the
Discourse of Craft,” he suggests approaches to engaging with Dub and Indigenous
works, writing that one should be “setting aside one’s own positional idiolect and
its terms; by engaging with the experience that the poetry produces; by
considering its own methods and procedures; by responding to the modes or
registers of language that it deploys; and by reading or auditing it without
resorting to the demand that it must decamp before you can admit that it is
poetry at all.”
There
has long been cultural chasms that the writers that Open Text champions have been caught up in (whether accidentally or
deliberately), from purely geographical, to formal and even political. It doesn’t
help that a particular formal consideration of poetry over the past few decades
in Canada—the metaphor-driven lyric—casts a wide shadow, as does the series of
publishers based in Central Canada, allowing for an entire series of other
engagements to produce a literature that isn’t heard about much in these parts.
Much of that is frustrating, and really showcases the downside of the arguments
of Regionalism—many of our regions (and communities) don’t interact nearly as
much as they really should, often existing entirely within self-contained
bubbles of activity.
If the avant-garde has
been characterized by such a dialectical oscillation between formal autonomy /
experiment and commitment to causes reflected in engaged contents and
expressive social affects, we may now be at a transition point where the
pendulum is swinging towards commitment and expression once again—though this
may ultimately also propel an experimental push for new forms pertinent to this
social moment.
Another way of stating this: we are in the midst of a
return, in many communities, to a politicized practice that is positioning
itself within the communist horizon—at least, within the field of struggle for
broad and fundamental social change and a rejection of capitalism in its
totality that is still perhaps best figured, in short-hand, as “communism.”
(Stephen Collis, “Notes on the Death of the Avant-Garde (…once again, with
feeling…)”)
I’ve
long been fascinated in the histories that cumulated in the west coast to bring
about such a combination of innovative language writing, and politics (language,
social, political, cultural, etcetera), with the loose collective of the
Kootenay School of Writing, if not at the exact centre of such, pretty damned
close to the centre. There might be pockets throughout the rest of Canada of
political writing, but the west coast manages one of the more ongoing and
engaged centres for such (and I keep hoping that someone somewhere will write
on the hows and the whys of such, in part so I can gain a clarification). We supposedly
read for a variety of reasons, but one hopes that if you are reading this, your
goals in reading (and possibly writing) include attempting to discover, as
opposed to moving through what is already familiar, which alone make these three
works absolutely essential.
I’m experimenting with
different forms of artistic production. I want to create something that is more
embodied and spatial than poetry produced for the page is, to look for more
visually-oriented modes of expression. Still thinking in terms of text, moving
simultaneously between word and image, one form I try is both: the sampler. A sampler
is a piece of embroidery typically produced by girls and women as a
demonstration of skill in needlework. It often includes the alphabet and
figures to illustrate it, biblical quotes, decorative borders, or sometimes the
name of the embroiderer and the date. But I’m interested in the subversive
potential of this form. (Mercedes Eng, “Notes for a Subversive Sampler”)
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