Poetry Pick for Sunday 2 April: Meredith Quartermain

Sunday April 2 Art Square cafe/gallery 4
pm, 334 Dundas St. West. Directly across from the AGO.


To add to my picks of the week, here's an event surely worth catching. Meredith Quartermain, co-editor of Nomodos Books, will be in town to read from her Vancouver Walking. The book, which I have not had a chance yet to read, has been recently shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry prize in BC.

I have previously enjoyed Quartermain's The Eye-Shift of Surface by greenboathouse books. The gorgeous little book was printed in a run of 52 (mine is #49), all signed by the author and filled with full-colour photos and textured paper. Its the kind of lush project that is delightful to touch and appreciate -- an exceptional product. The poems themselves are a delightful and playful and strange combination of Elizabethan language ("I forgot quite at shrift the heathen name of her ... Keep out, I warn ye.") and the playful observational disjunctiveness of LANGUAGE poetry: uncovering prescient puns and other uncommon ruptures in language, all with an imagistic intensity. Here's #32:

EACH I A CONGREGATION OF EYE-SPOTS FACING EARTH -
putting a glass to the blind, with an eye on the time, and rich young
bachelors. Corporation's no small gain. Gold and silver plate for the
county -- counting bread and honey.

Laws have eyes for war and for you, the I-spots, the business of
measurement.

Pay attention.

***

Lovely stuff with a hint of threat.

It was recently drawn to my attention that some people found Nathalie Stephens' new book highly derivative of Nicole Brossard. The more I think about this comment, the less credibility I believe it has. You can make connections, certainly, and there are obvious parallels, but that is a large step away from derivation, which in the context of criticism has an inherent ugliness to it. I've said here that I believe her work connects to Anne Hébert's writing, and I wouldn't protest too strongly a comparison to the Quebecois variant of Helene Cixous' écriture feminine. But I can find little to support a sense of derivation to a text like Mauve Desert -- it just doesn't seem fair. I was re-reading Anne Carson's The Autobiography of Red (fun fun book) and found more in common between Je Nathanaël with both her narrative tease (where the plot always seems to be inching forwards in a fundamentally ambiguous story arch) than to Brossard.

But it is a funny hat for me to doff -- defending the originality of one author's voice -- in light of my ongoing interogation of influence and thieving. I maintain that there is a fundamental dishonesty with anybody writing inside a conventional medium claiming originality. If it was truly original, it would not be recognizable as poetry. Recognizing this primal fact, however, and recognizing how interconnected and interallusive texts constantly are (whether consciously or not) does not mean derivation isn't a limitation. The art of negotiating influence is a combinatorial feat, awakening surprising links between divergent antecedents. Derivation, on the other hand, and the root of the accusation, is that one is merely re-doing another's work, without any insight or input into their own writing.

On a less focussed front, and building from this, does derivation as a literary offense lie somewhere between banality and outright plagiarism? It would be useful, oh humble reader, to know the rules.