Aaron Vidaver, Counter-Interpellation: Volume One

MEMORANDUM

DEPARTMENT OF SOCIAL WELFARE

FIELD SERVICE

257 Station Street,

Duncan, B.C.

TO      Adoption Placement Section,

            Child Welfare Division,

            Department of Social Welfare,

            100 West Pender St.,

            Vancouver 3, B.C.                                           August 7^th, 1969

RE:FRANKLYN, Virginia Athea

Please find enclosed Background Study of a child being Relinquished for Adoption. The child is expected the first week in September.

                                                            [signature: “E. McKierahan”]

[signature illegible, “for”]

PETER H. CLUGSTON, District Supervisor

PHC:ey

Encl.

[stamp: “RECEIVED SEP 9 1969 CHILD WELFARE DIV’N”]

I’m fascinated by Vancouver poet, critic, editor and publisher Aaron Vidaver’s Counter-Interpellation: Volume One (North Vancouver BC: CUE Books, 2019). I’ve seen literary works constructed out of the archive numerous times—poems and works of prose that directly utilize and incorporate archival materials—but Vidaver’s latest is made up entirely of archival documents, without editorializing or context, one that provides a fascinating portrait of how one imagines self from the outside. The bulk of Counter-Interpellation: Volume One focuses on Vidaver’s birth, his relinquishing and subsequent adoption, providing multiple and layered view into how an archive, especially one as thoroughly researched as this one, creates a portrait of an individual through what might otherwise be seen as cold and disconnected letters, forms and files.

The book is composed in eight sections—“Letter to Josephine Vidaver / from Ridgeview Elementary School,” “Adoption,” “Birth Certificate,” “International Certificates of Vaccination / Certificats Internationalaux de Vaccination,” “July 1972,” “Alien Registration,” “Collected Evaluations (1975-1995)” and “Hospitalization.” The bulk of the book explores the details of his origins and subsequent adoption, and finally move into his twenties, examining records around his depression and subsequent hospitalization, which shifts the attention away from immediate origins in a curious way (and suggest the book is a collection of all of his official records, which simply happen to be from these two poles of life experience—origins and adult depression). As someone who is also adopted, as well as an author who has been sending boxes upon boxes of literary papers into an archive at the University of Calgary, I have long been curious about the kinds of portraits various archives and archive material might present of ourselves, which in itself causes one to distrust the archive as any kind of complete overview of anyone, instead providing exactly that: a portrait, one that exists from a particular time and place, and one that might even have been curated (or “edited”). What does the archive allow, and what does it leave out? What might the archive, through no fault of its own, overlook, and how might that affect the resulting portrait? The difference between a life lived, I might wonder, and a photograph taken of you with your parents in church clothes. At the end of the collection, in his “Note,” he writes that “Additional notes on the work appear in the final volume of Counter-Interpellation, with a glossary and list of abbreviations, a lexicon, a bibliography and acknowledgments.” Given this is “Volume One,” I can’t presume how many more volumes exist, beyond the singular (although a quick search discovers Daniel LaFrance’s review via The Capilano Review, that suggest three volumes to come), but I am curious to go through this work and realize the purity of the archive being presented, without a single word or phrase of editorial commentary by the author/archivist. While I might be curious to know something from the author itself, I admire the purity being presented here. It might be all the information I need.

Stephen Collis, To the Barricades

The first principle of The Barricades Project, to which To the Barricades belongs, is taken from Robert Duncan: “We begin to see that the intention of the boundless is manifest in the agony and restoration of pages or boundaries or walls” (“The Delirium of Meaning”).

A second principle can be found in Walter Benjamin: “This work has to develop to the highest degree the art of citing without quotation marks. Its theory is intimately related to that of montage” (The Arcades Project).

If there is a third principle, it may be contained in the following passage from Rancière:

Suitable political art would ensure, at one and the same time, the production of a double effect: the readability of a political signification and a sensible or perceptual shock caused, conversely, by the uncanny, by that which resists signification between opposites, between the readability of the message that threatens to destroy the sensible form of art and the radical uncanniness that threatens to destroy all political meaning.

(The Politics of Aesthetics)

To push through boundaries towards the boundless (which is tangled there) – to mix appropriation of found material with lyric expression to the point that the one becomes indistinguishable from the other – to practice a dialectic of “readable” political signification and uncanny shock – these are the pathways of this poetry. A lyric voice takes up procedures and citations because they are the world in which it finds itself embodied, a co-embodiment of the address “Dear Common” that someone calls out to anyone else there. “Lyric,” writes Thom Donovan, “relates the body of the poet to a poetics of collective affects” (“Lyric’s Potential,” Jacket2). So we try here, in a lyric space in which we must continue building resistance.

This volume is part of an ongoing long poem project that always seeks “plausible deniability” that it is in fact a long poem project. Everything I write is thus part of some inaccessible and inconceivable totality outside the work itself. Part of its fight is thus with itself, and with “culture” as such. The barricade made of language is both boundary and call for “beyondery” – an outside still to be practiced. But there’s that other boundary looming everywhere here too: how and when do we cross over from word to world, from text to action? Does the poem barricade us from a world of “doing things,” postponing action? Does it wall us up in the “merely cultural”? These poems, increasingly, have been written between actions in the streets. They hover there – a boundless boundary around the bound. The gaps and spaces between poems and pages and books are inhabited by “activism,” by a body amongst bodies in streets. Dear Common. Let’s speak our way into action, into each other’s arms, into new shared futures, into new speeches at new barricades thrown.

If this is “documentary poetry” – and it is certainly as much researched as it is lived – it is a documentary of social affects, past and present, of collective expressions of desire, of hope, of outrage, of solidarity, of defiance, of the endless call from the commons for “liberty or death.” It is a documentary of the spirit of resistance and revolution. The address of the insurgent impulse, to all potential insurgents, to all tomorrow’s insurgent parties. (Stephen Collis, “Notes and Acknowledgements”)

It’s difficult to begin to discuss Vancouver poet and critic Stephen Collis’ poetry collection To the Barricades (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2013) without first quoting at length from his “Notes and Acknowledgements,” placing this collection in a context larger than itself. Collis is the author of a number of books, including two previous poetry collections which form the first two sections to his ongoing “Barricades Project” – Anarchive (New Star, 2005) and The Commons (Talonbooks, 2008). Over the space of five trade poetry collections, Collis’ work explores a series of short-phrased stretches of sentence-stanzas in an ongoing project writing Vancouver specifically, Canada generally and social issues throughout.  In his “12 or 20 questions” interview (posted September 7, 2007), he talked about his work-in-progresss, “The Barricades Project,” and the subsequent volume of such, to be titled “The Red Album,” which appears to have since shifted into fiction, given that The Red Album is the title of his forthcoming novel with BookThug. As he writes in the interview:

I always work on books or series of books. The book is the main unit I think in terms of—my unit of composition. At the same time I do write short, occasional lyrics, and I publish a few of these in journals, but whenever I’ve tried to group them as a possible book it’s been entirely unsatisfactory. I just don’t work that way. I have to have the concept for the book to work towards, to think through. Writing in general usually begins with the making of collages—word assemblages that come out of the research I’m doing for the book in question. These often don’t make it into the book, but at some point the playing around with my research stops, and something else takes over, as I find my way into the language I want to use—or be used by.

There has long been a history of politically-engaged poetry out of Vancouver, something that, in comparison, seems lacking in much of the rest of the country, and something that has been given far less critical attention than it deserves. What is it about Vancouver that makes so many of their writers, especially language writers surrounding the past couple of decades of the Kootenay School of Writing, so engaged? One can point to such socially and politically-engaged poets such as Aaron Vidaver, Roger Farr, Maxine Gadd, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Jeff Derksen, Marie Annharte Baker, Reg Johanson, Peter Culley, Nancy Shaw and nikki reimer, among others. To the Barricades is a book that works to document protest and other civil action, including the “Paris Commune” or “Fourth French Revolution,” a working class revolution that ran from March to May, 1871. The collection contains critical poems of self-protection, poems working to protect human interest and interaction, constructed out of ready-made material, quotes that speak of action, such as the Fredric Jameson quote that opens the poem “RELUMINATIONS 1”: “Barricades involve a kind of bricolage, a provisional cobbling together of whatever bits and pieces come usefully to hand … this may also serve as a perceptive account of the poetic techniques of a Rimbaud, indeed of the revolutionary avant-garde in general.” In the second part of the poem “La Commune [1871],” he writes:

Revolution

is the search for happiness

we know history

repeats itself

thanks

to all the dead anarchists!

I make you a chain of flowers

a grave of roses

now let’s not lack audacity

in dealing with the banks

even in a democracy

we aren’t free to demonstrate    freely

things kept germinating

long after the event

it’s time we stop being

represented and start     being

the commune echoes

we’re still at the same point

[Stephen Collis reads in Ottawa to launch To the Barricades alongside Margaret Christakos on April 20, 2013, as part of the A B Series]

jwcurry’s newsnotes + other recent 1cents

plastic houses don’t crumble pretty (predictable aesthetics

plastic houses don’t crumble pretty. when I’m old
walking past melted neighborhoods (townhouse removal)
won’t the skin bubble where I once considered surgery?
won’t the cinematic windswept swirl just then,
movie longforgotten – think it my idea?
all gardens go Lego at the thought. all trees shiver
into shiny / polyurethane dogs polyurinate.
yeahsure. you take off your hair revealing
bald yellow knob, pull off your head
& then remember it’s not supposed to do that. (Laurie Fuhr)

For quite a while, Ottawa writer/publisher/bookseller jwcurry has been referring to Vancouver poet Judith Copithorne as our first lady of concrete, being the first woman in Canada to engage with (and continuing to engage with) visual and concrete poetry, appearing in such important Canadian concrete/visual poetry anthologies such as the four author Four Parts Sand (Ottawa ON: Oberon Press, 1972), John Robert Colombo’s New Directions in Canadian Poetry (Toronto ON: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971) and bpNichol's The Cosmic Chef (Ottawa ON: Oberon Press, 1970). Despite this, the other night in his apartment, curry ran through a list off the top of his head of important studies, anthologies, book-length essays, journals and other publications that have worked to discuss the importance of Canadian concrete and/or the contributions of Canadian women in writing and publishing, that have managed to overlook the contributions of Copithorne (including as footnote if at all), despite a productivity that is working its way up to five decades long.

In his four hundredth issue of 1cent, produced as the thirteenth issue of his ongoing news notes (for Judith with love, a bibliography of the whole series so far at the back of the publication), Copithorne admirer curry has compiled a small festschrift of sorts, even including the beginnings of a list of her publications, whether as author or editor, something which seems long overdue. I would quote what Columbo wrote in his anthology about Copithorne, but I can’t seem to find my copy of the small anthology. Not that the whole issue is taken up with Copithorne, but awash with short reviews, essays, poems, and other reproductions, with contributions from Lance LaRocque, Maxine Gadd, Pearl Pirie, Richard Truhlar, Ben Watson, Bob Snider, Laurie Fuhr, bpNichol, Daniel f. Bradley, Warren Dean Fulton, John Barlow and a whole slew of others, as well as curry himself.

Ran Delimited Poaching or Donut

This far isn’t
which act
out chin

eats ejecting rate
additive plant
crack trapped crab

snare for shore
untoward claims

exact to trans
and as else
to dots miss
rang

could digit that

pulls loose pack
all such tape
unbred

legislate m’keep
even no inasmuch
them litter the foot

patch
easy at blight
copies. Awful shears (Aaron Vidaver)

How does one describe the 1cent series? First off, they sell for a penny each [see my piece on such in Open Letter, reprinted in my recent collection of essays], with most rubber-stamped on the back. Some are hand-printed, some made on his 1920s-era Gestetner. Other recent publications in the same series include pieces by Alana Madison, the poem “SLIVERICK” by Margaret Avison (reprinted from the 1969 5¢ Mini Mimeo; curry has wondered out loud, has this poem appeared anywhere else since?), and Tom Kryss’ prose-piece “Roses that Bloom,” among others (even another reprint of some works from Vancouver’s old 3¢ Pulp (precursor to the current Arsenal Pulp Press), including one by the late Ottawa bookseller Richard Simmins).

“Personally I draw the line at buggery,” old Rico said.

“But then maybe I was a bit perverted too before I got married. Everything there is. I tried it.

“The whole goddam world was sexual. There was that breathing I could hear. And the smells. There’s no way you can hide them. No way. Remember, always roll your handkerchief into your armpit before you iron it.

“It must have started with that 16-year old girl from the detention home who worked for my mother, she used to jerk me when I was five or six standing on the toilet seat waiting to be dried.

“As a kid though, the two horniest things I can remember are Helen’s frothy open crotch opposite mine when we picked wild strawberries in the pasture next to the loam field. That, and the tight, soft, shiny, purple-black udder of the big mare about four weeks after she foaled.” (Richard Simmins, 1cent #397)

One thing that curry has sought out for years, again referenced in this issue of news notes, is to provide and receive a response/dialogue about so many of these works he prints, publishes, promotes and otherwise writes about (one aspect of such that binds, unfortunately, is that he "distrusts people's obsession with things online" which he sees as a format rather restrictive). Another part of this issue includes a piece by Ben Watson, who has written a great deal on Frank Zappa, and his response (very curry-like, if you will) to a recent conference. The first paragraph, for example, of his “Anti-Zappa, Or, Not Getting the Point,” on the “Third International Conference of Esemplastic Zappology, Paris 4-7 July 2008” writes:

I am afraid I must start with a sharp reprimand to the comrades of the Third International. In a revolutionary movement there are always backsliders, blackguards and lily-livered poltroons who think it easier to excise the revolutionary part of the programme in favour of “accessibility” or “market penetration”, even if this destroys the whole point of being here. I note that whoever was in the charge of the posters for this event saw fit to drop the term “Esemplastic” from the conference title, even though the first two internationals – in London in 2004 and in Rome in 2006 – were specifically designated as “esemplastic”, and organized by myself and Marco Maurizi in order to encourage esemplastic thinking. Calling this the “third” international whilst dropping the inconvenient term – and stooping to the banality of reproducing yet another photo of Frank Zappa’s boring face – steals from our efforts whilst contributing nothing. It is another sorry example of the way all attempts at gaining power in this system without contesting it lead to the same old putrid boring nonsense. Moreover, these publicists are doomed to fail. In so far as you advertise using Zappa’s face, you simply offend the Zappa Family Trust, provide a shabby example of bootleg commercialism, and guarantee that you attract people who will not understand a word of what is being talked about.

Other parts of the issue include fragments a work-in-progress that bpNichol was working on before he died, The OTHER Captain Poetry Poems, a review of/response to the second volume of Barbara Caruso’s journals, a brief write-up around comments made by Dorothy Lusk in the Jacket interview Donato Mancini did a few years back, a piece on the mysterious Toronto artist P. Cob (friends of curry will know he has been talking about a new P. Cob project for months) by D.M. Owen, visuals and text by Copithorne herself, and a few other oddbits.

Lewd Basho posing shaved
in black leather jacket

A golden boy
Wearing just flickers of
Candlelight will fuck
Like a star

Make sure to get a good
Look as heaven declares civil
War suicide bombing
White horses enflared

Cheerleader dark
Nights and day hot drippings

They do a nasty
Thing with their chicken legs
Still screaming
Bok! Bok! Bok! (Alana Madison, 1cent #395)

If you’re interested in further information, be sure to write him c/o #302-880 Somerset Street West, Ottawa Ontario Canada K1R 6R7; otherwise, according to the news notes themselves, you can even find a brief documentary around curry’s recent MESSAGIO GALORE take VI at www.omardabag.webng.com/jwcurry/