filling Station #57 : showcase of experimental writing by women

Vancouver For Beginners #4: Public Transit

Walk into the people rivering stripped to the waist, never look back, door lasered neat in aluminum surf, flesh striving to dinner tables, sloughing intent. We plunge to airborne chambers, I wonder if there will be people farms after all the fish farms run out, a child demands of the commuters, we claw at rubber loops, we sway like reeds whipped rush hour raw. The traffic does not seal behind you, swing, swing to diurnal clock. We are called a city of transients, you’ll never meet a person who was actually born here, but seaweed knots in our elbow hinges, sand coagulates when dampened with our sweat, we ride each other’s blasted auras at high slack. More of an intertidal zone than a holding-ground. A woman panhandling at the commuter train station snarls at me, one day you’re gonna get it. Coins bless our foreheads as we board the lightrailed basket across the river filleted by another morning, puzzle-horizon of logging from our islands, matchsticks mapping out the water, squint hard into the Western light before the plunge into the tunnel through the undercarriage that workers walk at night with tightrope raccoons. A friend comes and goes from his city of birth-canal streets, I lean through the gateway and say, from here on in it’s all death and babies. He goes to a dry place. This train is for Waterfront terminus station. On morning radio the hosts marvel. A whale has swum under the Burrard Street bridge, fooling us again. (Alex Leslie)

An interesting response to the VIDA Count and CWILA over the past number of months comes “Calgary’s experimental literary magazine” filling Station’s #57, as a “showcase of experimental writing by women” (before these lists existed, other responses to the same frustrations included Nate Dorward’s ANTIPHONES: Essays on Women’s Experimental Poetries in Canada, published by The Gig in 2008 [see my review of such here], and Heather Milne and Kate Eichhorn’s Prismatic Poetics: Innovative Canadian Women’s Poetry and Poetics, published by Coach House Books in 2009 [see my review of such here], as well as the more recent I'll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women, published by Les Figues in 2012 [see my review of such here]). I know some would rather see work by any group—whether through gender, racial or geographic lines—selected by a criteria of quality before anything else, but with the terrifying disparities exposed throughout American literary publications by the VIDA Count, and subsequently throughout Canadian publications via CWILA, to produce an issue (or three or six or eight) of work by women serves to further show the ridiculousness of just how few works by women (in comparison to those by men) are critically reviewed. So much of the literary work done by women is magnificent, plentiful and wide-ranging in style, tone and subject matter; why is there such a gap in criticism? Fortunately, CWILA has been pushing hard to remain positive in attempts to open up conversation on and by Canadian women, and have even founded an annual critic-in-residence position (the inaugural critic-in-residence, for 2013, was Sue Sinclair, followed in 2014 by Shannon Webb-Campbell). As filling Station managing editor Caitlynn Cummings writes in her introduction to the issue, “Stage Fright and Muscle Cars”:

Through not directly addressing CWILA’s object of tracking statistics on gender representation in reviewing, issue 57 does speak to their second mandate: bringing relevant issues of gender into our national literary conversation. By publishing a showcase of experimental writing by women, filling Station aims to provoke discussions in our readership about gender disparity, to exhibit some of the most phenomenal experimental writing Canadian and international women are creating, and to directly reach out to women, encouraging them to bring us this writing on a more regular basis.

There are some great pieces in this issue (such as the Alex Leslie piece, above, that manages to bring up an issue of geography that so many citizens of Ottawa hear as well, the needlessly dismissive “you’ll never meet a person who was actually born here”), including poetry by Sonnet L’Abbé, Daniela Elza, Kimberly Campanello, Anne Germanacos, Kelly Malone, Allie Marini Batts, Sasha Krioutchkova, Catherine Greenwood, Kristin Hannaford and Fazeela Jiwa, fiction by Meredith Quartermain, Susan Sanford Blades, Kyeren Regehr, Vanessa Farnsworth and Alex Leslie, non-fiction by Kathleen Brown, Tricia McDaid and Sue Sinclair, and artwork by Natascha Stellmach. The text-spaces of the works included by poets Daniela Elza, Kelly Malone, Catherine Greenwood and Kimberly Campanello are quite stunning, most of which would be nearly impossible to replicate here. New Zealand poet Kelly Malone’s “SOS Olson,” for example, utilizes Morse Code in truly inventive ways (which can be heard, also, on the filling Station website here), as she writes in the introduction to her section of five poems:

This work, visually, or as both page and sound poetics, considers breath and code in relation to the semiotic gap.

Through using the breath as code (the ‘human’ aspect of language whereby humans require breath for the spoken word) Charles Olson’s manifesto for open verse is explored in a new way. (The recordings of SOS Olson and the heart by way of breath are ‘projective verse Morse breath and ‘the heart by way of breath’ respectively.)

This aspect of breath as code and its function within spoken human language is then contrasted with computer code through the works titled, ideophone, phonosemantic / remorse scale and remorse moves.

Pure Data (PD) programming is seen in the (poetic) image phonosemantic / remorse scale. I have used PD to form an ideophonic language or a type of phonosemantic poetics through programming the computer keyboard to play a note simultaneously while the letter is being typed.

The poem ideophone is typed and the subsequent sound that occurs is the result of the scale (in this instance the remorse scale) I’ve programmed through PD (the recording being ‘ideophone note’). The possible semiotic gap between computer code and a user’s desktop screen is thus heard in the playing of ideophone. Additionally, I show the semiotic gap between the code and screen: programming language/algorithm/code is seen in the poem remorse moves which uses the ‘remorse scale’ programming language of PD; the image of the PD desktop application is seen in phonosemantic / remorse scale.

At the start of ideophone, the ideophone OM (aum) is played by the ‘remorse scale’, typing the letters ‘o’ and ‘m’ in Morse (-- ---). This draws together the Morse code, while playing the semiotic gap, and alludes to the breath through the practice of chanting ‘aum’ itself.

I include one of the poems she discusses, here:

the heart by way of breath to the line

- …. .

…. . .- .-. -

-… -.--

.-- .- -.--

--- ..-.

-… .-. . .- - ….

- ---

- …. .

.-.. .. -. .

Going through the author biographies at the back of the collection, one realizes just how wide in geographic scope the issue has managed, with contributors from New Zealand, Victoria, Vancouver, Dublin, San Francisco, Fredericton, Calgary, Australia and Quebec’s Eastern Townships, and I wonder how deliberate that might have been; part of me is thrilled for the wide geographic range of incredible work, and another part of me wonders why there weren’t more Canadian contributors to such an important project, showcasing “experimental writing by women” (there are more than enough to produce dozens of issues on the subject). Should I be thrilled with opening the floodgates of international experimental work, or sensitive to the percentages of the issue that could have been filled by the work of worthy Canadian experimental writers? Or both?

FRAGMENT 147

]

            ] sobs [

]

Soft [

]

]

]

            ] useless [

]

pelts of small animals. (Catherine Greenwood)

Really, there isn’t a low note in this entire issue (although there are always names I would have liked to have seen also included in such a collection, which can’t help but be the nature of the beast: Mercedes Eng, Brecken Hancock, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Christine McNair, Fenn Stewart, Judith Copithorne, Shannon Maguire, Sandra Ridley, Marie AnnHarte Baker, Liz Howard, Margaret Christakos, Maxine Gadd, Amy Dennis and so many, many others). Exactly what is the problem, literature? Why aren’t more literary works by women being discussed?

Let’s say that poetry is a method of transmitting information in tones, light, clicks or echoes.

Let’s say that narrative is human speech.

Because it can be heard by humans without a decoding device, narrative is sometimes a useful alternative to generative metaphors for sending analog data to listeners.

It can be said that poets will identify with narrative as a possible point of fusion between the thresholds of physical, cultural and experimental material that generates the body of poetry. (Kathleen Brown, “RECURSIVE PROOFS: Analysis of This Narrative’s Imagination”)

I’ve been very taken with the work Vancouver poet and critic Sonnet L’Abbé has been doing the past few years, ranging from language to visual works (as well as a recent above/ground press broadside), and this issue includes “Three Properties from Sonnet’s Shakespeare: 154 Ecolonizations.” As she writes in her brief introduction:

The following poems are part of a book-length materialist rewriting of Shakespeare’s sonnets that take both a postcolonial and ecopoetic stance toward the textual “common ground” of Shakespeare’s poems.

Experimenting with a voice that is at once subaltern and colonial, I play with the ideas of colony, ecology, and the agricultural practices of imperialism by treating Shakespeare’s material as resources available for my extraction, repurposing, or “development.”

The full text of each corresponding Shakespearian sonnet appears in each of the ecolonizations VIII, IX, and LXXXI.

There really does seem something that struck in L’Abbé between the publication of her first trade collection, A Strange Relief (Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 2001), and her second, Killarnoe (McClelland & Stewart, 2007), that opened her work to ideas of the experiment, visuals and non-linear narratives that makes her work increasingly engaging and interesting (and which makes me more and more eager to see any subsequent trade collections). The first of her three pieces in the issue reads:

VIII

Muse! Sick to heart, what yahoos earn, sweetest house, oh, Muse! I curse badly. Sweat bets to win, though sweat gets warned: don’t join yards with elites. Ghettos sing, enjoy wheat-yellow cast throats, but gut hate. How high, chant house-hires. Cell lives. Attain other angles, mad lonely. More loss, eros. Crushed secessions rein vast widths, maple a measure; they morphine annual ploys. Wife other truants, economize accords, offer wells of tungsten; do so under stars. Baby uniforms win some margins. Right education does soften defense; delivers this net-earning. Oath-eyes adore butter. The swing set quiets lonely children, then sews chocolate-uniform sounds. Sin sing single idleness, other parties threaten thought. Shoulder someone’s tab. Earn market showers. Conical beast, brass ring, sworn meeting. Thus broadband atones in a note to her, stricken. Search into breach of goodbye. Mute the dual-border ingratitude. Assembly-line godsons fire handsomeness at each wild androgyne, happening yum yum yum. Other whores ball in the zone, hormones ripple as they bring bank. Notify the dormouse: this thing’s who’s who. Especially special, hairless sons. Go before God, young beings. Man yesses the seemings, the ones, and the abusings. Thread this tonal truth, free the you sinning in league with adults, approve a no-body bone.

I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women, eds. Caroline Bergvall, Laynie Browne, Teresa Camody and Vanessa Place

Why the term “conceptual” now? Why not come up with a new term, one which is actually new? And yet the term “conceptual,” because of its long association with visual arts, merits a wider gaze than it has been given in relation to writing. In other words, it is not a term which can belong to a select few, or be defined too narrowly, at least not at this point in time. The term “conceptual writing” warrants a period of discovery and describes, as illustrated in this book, a wide proliferation of forms and approaches. This anthology is hopefully the beginning of opening such a passage of debate and conversation. The fact is, that the term “conceptual writing,” for better and for worse, has thus far often been employed to describe a set of writing practices which seem, nonsensically, to preclude particular content. Not coincidentally, this content is often chosen by women. In this collection of work by women a reader may find that process and restraint driven writing is often expressive and intellectual, and that the assumption of a dualistic paradigm which claims that conceptual writing creates only ego-less works is actually another false construction. While looking at the work of women in this collection, it is evident that in conceptual writing methodologies do not dictate or predict the writing that follows, nor is methodology the only indicator of conceptual writing. (Laynie Browne, “A Conceptual Assemblage An Introduction”)

Perhaps one of the most highly anticipated anthologies of recent memory is the new I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women (Los Angeles CA: Les Figues, 2012), edited by Caroline Bergvall, Laynie Browne, Teresa Carmody and Vanessa Place. The editors include the work of “64 women from 10 countries, with contributors’ responses to the question—What is conceptual writing?—appearing alongside their work.” This collection comes on the heels of some fiery debate, including the founding of both the VIDA (Women in Literary Arts) and CWILA (Canadian Women in Literary Arts) organizations, working for the sake of an increased dialogue with and about women writing and writers. In terms of Canadian writing, also, this new collection follows some other important works in a similar field, including Nate Dorward’s ANTIOPHONES: Essays on Women’s Experimental Poetries in Canada (Toronto ON: The Gig, 2008), Kate Eichhorn and Heather Milne’s Prismatic Publics: Innovative Canadian Women’s Poetry and Poetics (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2009) and Eichhorn and Barbara Godard’s guest-edited “Beyond Stasis: Poetics and Feminism Today” issue of Open Letter (Thirteenth Series, Number 9, Summer 2009). It seems baffling that still, after enough examples have been forwarded of women writers over the years, why does so much of it still get overlooked? Why is there still such a disconnect? Only recently, Ottawa poet, publisher and bookseller jwcurry lamented the list of Canadian critical studies on small press publishing, visual/concrete poetry and women’s works that have nearly erased the contributions of Vancouver’s Judith Copithorne, said to be the first woman publisher in British Columbia, producing works alongside Gerry Gilbert and bill bissett. Despite the fact that her work has been ongoing, with her first pieces published back in the 1950s, the critical silence is deafening.

                                                OF BETWEEN

Between the precious and the radical

Between the strategic and the tragic

Radiant and strained

Fountain is a folding fan of water.

The pressure of errant streams

massages precious togetherness open.

From the fissure clear water issues

as though from a purse

between clasps of discourses

and their embroidered surfaces

Between the institutions of pairs

The middle is a guess of worn surfaces

Between the privilege of two

Between the two of conformity

or the two of caution

if vanity is between us

as much as

we have yet to break

Between the surfaces of singing

and the surfaces of speaking

entre tes braz trestoute nue (Angela Carr)

With their contributions of sixty-four writers from ten countries, one might suspect that those contained within might all be aware of each others’ work, but borders are stronger than one might imagine, even with the added bonus of the internet, and journals such as Jacket magazine and Jacket2. The range of writers are enough that those in the anthology might even be introduced to someo f the others within for the first time, or for the first substantial time. The collection is organized in sections—1. Process (Constraint, Mimicry, Mediation, Translative, Versioning); 2. Structure (Appropriation, Erasure, Constraint, Formula, Pattern, Palimpsest); 3. Matter (Baroque, Hybrid, Generative, Corporeal, Dissensual); 4. Event (Documenta, Investigative, Intertextual, Historicism, Speculative); and 5. Concluding Remarks. I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women is an important book in many ways, in no small part for the lively range of statements included by each author. As Sarah Dowling opens her statement, included after a couple of pages of her visual works: “I come to conceptual writing with a scholarly interested in description.”  In her statement, “Some Ambivalence about the term ‘Conceptual Poetry,’” Rosmarie Waldrop writes: “By these criteria, I am certainly not a conceptual writer.” She opens her piece, writing:

When visual artists go to conceptual work they stress the part of their process that depends least on the nature of their medium, which is sensuous. They in fact leave their medium and cross over into language.

            For writers, the situation is very different. The concept is an essential part of the word, hence the very nature, the very medium of writing—its bane, many would say, for it makes the language arts the most abstract, the least sensuous of the arts. I, like most poets, work at subverting the word’s transparency for its concept (loved by philosophers and other discursive writers) by stressing the “body” of the word, its sound, sometimes its shape. The literary movement that actually corresponds to conceptual art is concrete poetry, which tries to cross over into the visual.

On the other hand, Laura Moriarty includes as her sole contribution, the piece “The Writing Practice Formerly Known As,” which discusses the difficulty and complication of naming:

Experimentality in writing is universally acknowledged to comprise innovation, pushing the limits of literary genres or combining genres. These days, there seems to be an impulse to name experimental writing practice, perhaps from a desire to distinguish contemporary writing from older innovative practices or what could be called traditional writing. […] I recently participated in a conference that was called “post_moot” by its organizers, cris cheek, Cathy Wagner and Bill Howe. They used the term “post_moot” rather than employ the dreaded “post language” or “post” anything, as well as to emphasize the communality of current practice. “Moot” means “meeting” with the additional senses of “discussion” and “judging.” Many writers prefer not to characterize their writing or label it at all.

As Laynie Browne writes in her introduction (Caroline Bergvall includes one as well, and Vanessa Place contributes an “Afterword”): “The writers in this collection are not bound by a singular aesthetic intent, but rather by practices which, when considered side by side, form a mosaic of possibilities which resonate as a whole, perhaps because of a commitment to common concerns which span many practices, languages and cultures.” What is fascinating about having two distinct introductions (three with the “Afterword”) to the anthology is that it highlights the difficulties with wanting to place the collection in a singular context, as well as the complication of such a loaded term as “conceptual poetry”; instead, this collection holds a fluidity of approaches, styles, contradictions and geographies, existing as an anthology-as-container, and containing multitudes. The approach feels entirely appropriate for the concept and the materials, attempting to articulate a complicated and contradictory idea, instead of arbitrarily fixing a moving target. To define in almost any way would be to reduce, and therefore negate, that with which they are working to engage. I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women is an ambitious work, large, rich and slightly contradictory, and entirely brilliant, and something that anyone interested in contemporary writing should immediately attempt to get their hands upon. In her “Afterword,” co-editor Vanessa Place speaks of the parable of the five blind men and the elephant, and their incomplete descriptions.

I have previously identified many forms of conceptualism, ranging from the pure to the baroque. These are matters of form. I have come to consider conceptualism, qua conceptualism, that is, as writing that does not self-interpret, is not self-reflexive, at least not on the page. In other words, writing in which the content does not dictate the content: what appears on the surface of the page is pure textual materiality, no more (and often much less) than what you see on the surface of the page. Conversely, in the way of positive and negative space, conceptualism is also writing in which the context is the primary locus of meaning-making.

Canadian Women in the Literary Arts: CWILA

In response to the recent VIDA conversation that came into Canada [see my own post on such here], Vancouver poet Gillian Jerome has created CWILA: Canadian Women in the Literary Arts, a new website and organization worth paying attention to, with a ton of interesting interviews. The site itself is here, and here is a fraction of the "About Us" page. You should become a member and donate. There's no reason at all that there aren't as many works discussed by women as there are discussed by men. Not a single reason.

About Us

CWILA (Canadian Women in the Literary Arts) is an inclusive national literary organization for people who share feminist values and see the importance of strong and active female perspectives and presences within the Canadian literary landscape.

CWILA was founded by poet and essayist Gillian Jerome in response to a conversation on gender representation in Canadian literary reviews that was started by poet, novelist, blogger and critic Sina Queryas on her blog  Lemon Hound and continued by poet, blogger and metalhead Natalie Zina Walschots (a.k.a. Nathalie Zed) on her blog www.nataliezed.ca. The conversation expanded to include a wide range of women active in various literary communities across the country calling for a discursive space to address the politics of representation, the critical reception of women’s writing in the literary press and the ways in which we can foster stronger critical communities of women of all ages including genderqueer writers, indigenous writers, as well as other women and/or genderqueer writers of colour.

CWILA continues the path set by the US organization VIDA, founded in 2009 ”to address the need for female writers of literature to engage in conversations regarding the critical reception of women’s creative writing in our current culture.” VIDA conducts an annual project “to count the rates of publication between women and men in many of our writing world’s most respected literary outlets.” None of the literary outlets counted by VIDA are Canadian.

So in May 2012, CWILA members began a count to document the rates at which men and women were being published and reviewed in fourteen Canadian literary publications in 2011. The results can be viewed here.