Open Letter (Fourteenth Series, Number 6, Summer 2011): Remembering Barbara Godard

Next to Barbara Godard's own sharp, scholarly, critique of the gutting of the institutions of Canadian culture, stands my memory of her own power to shape cultural networks. The strongest image I carry from knowing Barbara is that of her Bloor street introductions. Running into Barbara on the street, being swept into her monologue. Within a minute being introduced to someone else who crossed our path. This crafting of networks, as others have noted, was a generous gift that Barbara gave to the world. It also forms a hopeful antithesis to Godard's diagnosis of the encroachment of the market model of culture in Canada. Is it enough? I don't have an answer. I instead have an imagining of another world. Where Godard's Toronto is Woolf's London, where Godard merges with another maker of introductions, Clarissa Dalloway. (Shauna Lancit, “Barbara Godard on Bloor Street”)

Guest-edited by Jennifer Henderson, Eva C. Karpinski, Ian Sowton and Ray Ellenwood, the summer 2011 issue of the critical journal Open Letter is a festshrift to the late writer, translator, teacher and critic Barbara Godard. When she died, in May 2010, I was startled that there wasn't an obituary published in the Globe and Mail (they didn't post one for the poet John Newlove, either), so a volume as such in tribute becomes an overdue relief. As their introduction explains, work on the current volume began before her sudden death, charging and changing the work of editing and compiling:

When we first started collecting contributions to this special issue dedicated to Barbara Godard, she was still among us. Her sudden loss, in May 2010, gave a completely new meaning to the process of honouring her, casting a shadow on what was to be a happy occasion of celebration, and transforming it into a more solemn event. Yet it is still a feast of memory, a symposium albiet upstaged by death. This volume is a collective act of bearing witness to many relationships – of friendship, collaboration, or mentoring – that she invited into her life. It is thus both an act of friendship and a performance of mourning, celebrating her memory through our memories of her. Coming from different academic generations, all four of us have traversed similar trajectories in our relationships with her, either as colleagues becoming collaborators becoming friends, or students becoming collaborators becoming colleagues becoming friends.

As the introduction goes on to describe, the first piece in the collection is by Nicole Brossard, presented as one of two inaugural addresses (the other, by Daphne Marlatt, is “Breaks and Becomings”) “at the Barbara Godard Symposium 'Inspiring Collaborations' that took place in Toronto in December 2008.”

I know what I owe to Barbara who was the first to introduce my poetry and my writing to Coach House Press and to an English audience through her translation of three major feminist books of mine, books written at a crucial moment of my life and reflection : Lovhers, These our Mothers and Picture Theory has been un tour de force. It is because of Barbara's translation of poems from Lovhers that I was able to participate in May 1981 in the event Writers in Dialogue with Adrienne Rich. Part of my English life starts with Barbara's translation of Lovhers. To be given the possibility to exist in another language because of translation is an enormous gift. Barbara has offered me that gift and privilege et je lui en suis profondément reconnaissante. (Nicole Brossard, “Le petite musiqe de Barbara Thompson”)

This issue is divided into four sections, with pieces by Nicole Brossard, Beatriz Hausner, Dunja Baus and Majero Bouman, Shauna Lancit, Sherry Simon and Cheryl Sourkes in “Remembering & Documenting Barbara in the World,” an uncollected essay by Barbara Godard, along with pieces by Michéle Lacome, Susan M. Murphy, Janice Andreae and Darren Wershler in “Cultural Criticism,” pieces by Eva C. Karpinski, Robert Majzels and Kathy Mezei in “Translation,” and pieces by Nadine Boljkovac and Zoë Druick in the final section, “Film.” Each section working to explore the many facets of Godard's ongoing works, and perhaps this issue might exist as a small companion to Godard's expansive collection of essays, Canadian Literature at the Crossroads of Language and Culture, edited by Smaro Kamboureli (Edmonton AB: Writer-as-Critic / NeWest Press, 2008). One can only hope that perhaps a further, more comprehensive volume covering more of Godard's works, and continuing such, will follow.

Revolutions do indeed begin with simple things, with a change in a word or a sensation. They continue, as Himani writes, when “Someone will teach someone who will teach others” (1986 49). As I've attempted to show here, this teaching of readers takes place in language. (Barbara Godard, “Poetics of Resistance: the Work of Himani Bannerji”)

Barbara Godard, 1942-2010

a sad note from Kate Eichhorn: On Sunday evening, literary critic, cultural theorist and translator Dr. Barbara Godard [pictured, left] passed away in Toronto. The author of over 200 articles (some reprinted in her 2008 book, Canadian Literature at the Crossroads of Language and Culture) and editor of several edited collections, Barbara played a major role in creating new critical approaches to Canadian and Quebecois writing, especially innovative women's writing. Barbara was deeply committed to working in collaboration with colleagues and students as well as writers, artists and activists. In 1984, she founded the journal Tessera with Daphne Marlatt, Gail Scott and Kathy Mezei. For many years, she served on the editorial board of Open Letter. In addition to her research and writing, Barbara supervised several generations of Canadian literary critics and cultural studies scholars. She will continue to have a tremendous impact on Canadian literature and culture, both terrains she helped to write.

Open Letter: Beyond Stasis: Poetics and Feminism Today

This is less a statement of feminist poetics than a statement of anxiety about feminism and poetics.

First, I wonder: what is a feminist poetics?

Writing difference, asserting versions, multiplicity, complication?

What’s a useful question to answer here? How do I, as a writer, experience writing, as a woman? The question is so qualified.

The question is about writing but after writing.

The question is how is the writing received? (Natalie Simpson, “Never quite arriving, or: a poetics of anxiety”)One of the most impressive issues of the critical journal Open Letter that I’ve seen in some time has to be “Beyond Stasis: Poetics and Feminism Today” (Thirteenth Series, Number 9, Summer 2009), guest-edited by Kate Eichhorn and Barbara Godard. This issue covers more than two hundred pages on and by some of the most provocative of Canadian women innovative writers over the past twenty years, including Rachel Zolf, Natalie Simpson, Oana Avasilichioaei, Rita Wong, Trish Salah, A. Rawlings, Angela Carr, Suzanne Zelazo, Sylvia Legris, Sina Queyras, Margaret Christakos, Nathalie Stephens, Joanne Arnott and Lola Lemire Tostevin. Produced out of the result of a conference that never got off the ground, I almost wish there were fewer conferences in the world, just so more issues like this could come to fruition; most conferences that actually happen don’t have half the energy and verve of what’s happening here. As Eichhorn writes in her introduction:

This issue’s title, “Beyond Stasis,” is both a statement of fact and a call to action. It also references the intentionally sardonic title of a conference on feminist poetics that four of the issue’s contributors attempted but ironically failed to realize five years ago. As Elena Basile explains, our failure to move “beyond stasis” at the time, however, may hold valuable insights into why a younger generation (or two) of Canadian women writers and critics have struggled to establish and sustain dialogues on poetics, politics, feminism and (post)nationalism since the mid 1990s: “A few insistent questions kept haunting our meetings, which today I am tempted to read as symptomatic both of a deep-seated anxiety for cultural/political recognition, and of an ambivalent desire to engage with the legacy of second wave innovative poetics in ways capable of addressing present issues and concerns without falling prey to
generational nostalgia or generational resentment.”

One of the questions that comes up throughout is the sheer amount of critical lack for a whole generation or two of Canadian women writers; I would suggest that the problem is even broader than that, that this isn’t simply a gender issue, or even one of generation. As Christakos writes in her piece, “Assignment of the Cleft”:

Over the past two decades, apart from the crucial support of the small literary presses who have published my work and the grants I have received through peer-juried recommendation processes, there has been very little in the way of my work being offered any critical attention, or sustained exegesis. I don’t think my experience of paltry reception is unusual though. Every innovative writer colleague of my own generation has been woefully overlooked. The question I suppose remains: who would or should do that looking, that receiving? In the 1980s one hoped for response from one’s mentor generation. In this era of antic overwork and exhaustion, most senior writers, unless they are located within academia, do not participate in the production of poetry criticism. It is almost expected now that emerging writers should ‘pay their dues’ by expending a great deal of artistic energy on writing barely remunerated or unpaid ‘reviews’ generally for any of the small-circulation Canadian journals or for online magazines, and for doing the slog work as assistant editors, interns, program coordinators and event organizers for their seniors.

It is rare to find a critical essay on any of the writers of my generation or the two next generations composed by any of the writers whose influence most powerfully
shaped my/our work.

I’ve wondered the same for many years about the same critical lack, but would cast the net far wider, from anyone beginning to write in the 1970s to the present, overshadowed, perhaps, by the long shadows of the first wave of 1960s innovators. Overshadowed, and too, caught up in the overwhelming amount of work that hasn’t been done, against those few left who seem willing to do any of it, and even fewer publishing options for critical writing. Does anyone remember the days when journals such as Contemporary Verse 2, Paragraph, Brick: A Journal of Reviews, Essays on Canadian Writing and others existed for the sake of continuing conversation through reviews, interviews and essays? And why is it that writers such as Lisa Robertson, Natalie Stephens and Anne Carson seem to get more attention and critical response in the United States than by those in their own home country? In her piece, “Nothing Simply This Way Comes,” Sina Queyras gets more specific, continuing (nearly) the same thought, writing:

In fact, Canada is in the very odd position of having some of its most innovative poets both in the mainstream spotlight and reviled by it. The more successful women such as Anne Carson, Margaret Atwood and Moure become, the more they are attacked, portrayed as terrifying creatures, and here at home, often much maligned – described as national embarrassments and worse. There is something perplexing about poetry – more specifically, feminist poetry – and its unwillingness to con/form that seems to evoke very personal, direct, and often anatomical or body-related attacks. “I have developed an allergy to Erin Moure, and so should you,” Shane Nielson suggests. What exactly is he allergic to? Is this aversion to the terms of the conversation offered by Moure, in his inability to engage in it? Should we develop an allergy to all things in a poem that tear and demand attention? Should we develop an allergy to thinking texts? Complexity? Discomfort? Innovation? Anything we don’t understand or like? Poems themselves? Language?

Another point that Rachel Zolf brings up is in the resistance that most seem to have to so called “difficult work,” including resistance by those who profess to want to engage with such, whether reviews, critics or other writers, as Zolf asks exactly what poetry can, is and should be doing. What exactly is the problem?

Leaving aside any latent (or not-so-latent) interpersonal issues underlying these responses, the exchanges bring up some important questions. Do we have to like, enjoy, feel uplifted by everything we read? What is it about a text that makes it likeable – or not? What do readers hope to ‘get’ out of texts? Should poetry enact a transparent transmission of meaning? Is its task to provide comfort and certainty in complex and different times? What can and does poetry do?

Part of what makes this issue like a conference itself is how the issue is organized into sections, beginning with “Positions” and “Dialogues” into “Histories” and “Analyses,” ending finally with Tostevin’s “Afterword,” where she begins by acknowledging the sixteen years between this current issue and the “Redrawing The Lines: The Next Generation” issue of Open Letter she edited. Where has the time gone, and what has it done? It’s compilations such as these that keep me optimistic for the future of critical inquiry and discourse through and about Canadian writing generally, and poetry specifically. As Tostevin writes in her endpiece:

So what does feminist poetics mean today? Is it, as Natalie Simpson asks, writing with a difference? is it an assertion of versions, multiplicity, complication? It is certainly all those, but does this apply exclusively to feminist writing? As Holly Dupej points out “third-wave feminists are rightfully weary of such ‘essentialist’ notions of gender and cultural categories, and the falsely universal definitions that they imply.” Doesn’t this also apply to the creative imagination, I would like to add? Or as Heather Milne asks, has the time come “to push beyond the stasis that has come to characterize our generation’s orientation to feminist poetics?”