Fast-Vanishing Speech: The 2023 Douglas Lochhead Memorial Book Arts Panel: Jim Johnstone, Klara du Plessis and Christopher Patton, with an introduction by Lisa Fishman

 

When a book or a poem or essay or performance has already been made, are there ways for it to keep changing, so to speak, in part by means of being thought about, spoken about, written about, overhead by others? We know that the answer is yes, and that criticism is one word for that process, even if cultural space for meaningful criticism seems to be shrinking. A practice discussed at length by the panel is curation; each writer approaches curation in ways likely to expand and refresh one’s sense of what critical engagement is. When Andrew Steeves sets type as a printer and publisher, when Jim Johnstone reviews a book, when Chris Patton exhibits fragments of a text written by a person who was once alive, when Klara du Plessis creates the conditions for a new text or experience to be made by way of bringing writers together to share their work in unforeseen ways (her name for this is Deep Curation) – when any such endeavours are undertaken, work by someone is brought forward to be encountered by someone else. Curation lays the ground for conversation, critical inquiry, collaboration, and – as the panelists light upon with palpable hope – community. (Lisa Fishman, “INTRODUCTION”)

I recently caught a copy of Fast-Vanishing Speech: The 2023 Douglas Lochhead Memorial Book Arts Panel: Jim Johnstone, Klara du Plessis and Christopher Patton (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2024), originally curated as one of the Wayzgoose Talks via Gaspereau Press, the full list of which is included at the back of this collection. “At the annual Gaspereau Press Wayzgoose,” the collection cites, “authors Jim Johnstone, Christopher Patton, and Klara du Plessis were invited to discuss the topic of Literary Criticism and Curation by their publisher, Andrew Steeves.” Have publications been produced of every talk-do-date? It would seem a very Gaspereau thing to do, certainly. Either way, I would hope that transcripts of such might be available, somewhere, as a kind of checking-in on how various writers, curators, thinkers etcetera are considering their craft. As Steeves began these particular proceedings: “I think the best place to start would be for all of us to just locate ourselves. Briefly, in what way do each of you write about writing?”

For those unaware, Klara du Plessis has been engaged for some time with what she terms Deep Curation, an absolutely fascinating curatorial structure she discusses as part of this conversation. As part of the panel, she offers that her sense of the term “literary curator” “[…] includes my more recent and ongoing project, Deep Curation, that experiments with collaborative poetry performance and centers the poetry reading as more than a vehicle for disseminating published texts, as an artform in its own right. In my academic work, I’ve been thinking a lot about the kind of labour that goes into organizing poetry readings (like the ones we saw here today). It’s very under-valued and under-theorized work. Both in the practical and theoretical sense, for me, this literary curatorial work is a form of thinking about and enlivening writing. This work becomes an analysis, whether I engage with more traditional scholarly forms or not.”

The ensuing conversation floats easily through and across literary curation as each participant sees such, specifically around each of their individual practices, much of which begins to overlap, in quite interesting ways, one I dearly wish I could have attended in person. So much of this work, this community effort, is being attended by multiple across the country, so any kind of deep dive into the conversation around such is essential, especially given the rarity of such conversation. It is one thing to say there aren’t enough reviews, for example, but then even fewer are discussing the arguments and ethos of reviewing, let alone any consideration of literary curation, from editing books and chapbooks to writing reviews or essays and organizing and curating literary readings. “When we’re talking about curation,” Johnstone says, near the end, “we’re talking about filtering noise. There are a lot of people who write, and there’s a lot of writing waiting to be published – a good curator can get a community excited about what’s happening. They can bring voices into perspective in a way that makes you want to hear them.”