I went to the Volcano group's "The Four Horsemen Project" on Friday night at Toronto's fabulous Theatre Centre. The theatre event combined live performance with animation and video footage in a collage representation of the 1970s and 1980s Canadian sound poetry supergroup. It was, to say the least, a strange event. While it was nice to some of the poems performed, the event was conceptually bizarre and ultimately unsatisfying.

To be honest, I couldn't really figure out who the intended audience was. The interpretation of the Horsemen didn't offer much to people familiar with the work: there was nothing 'new' or challenging in the re-staging -- just the pleasure of the act of re-staging. Furthermore, the radicalism of the Horsemen was erased and even the theoretical sophistication minimized. This wasn't a comment on the group, or an exploration of the boundaries they unsettled -- it was literally, "4 Horsemen: The Musical." A surreal "Phantom of the Opera" for Canadian poets. There was nothing 'punk' left of this very radical group.

On the other hand, the disconnected nature of the event wouldn't have been particularly gratifying to someone completely new to the world of the Horsemen or sound poetry -- so it wouldn't work very well as a general-public introduction. The "Lion King" crowd would have been alienated by the lack of characters and relationships on the stage. There wasn't a narrative or a storyline to connect the poems. Just a strange combination of interpretive dances, vaudeville antics, and minute narratives (an orgasm scene, a simple love narrative) acted out.

Another strange dimension was the reduction of the Four Horsemen into a bpNichol and his band scenario. Most of the poems performed and animated were, in fact, not even Horsemen texts but bp's own work. They featured familiar works like "Australopithicus", "st*r", "cycle #22", "Blues", "Flower Eyes" and "parallel lines". The video montage mostly featured beep, and were mostly taken directly from Michael Ondaatje's "Sons of Captain Poetry." This was nice, and all, but the question remains -- why the focus on his non-Horsemen work? It would have been more interesting/challenging if they had attempted some of the more extreme works by each of the other poets (can you imagine an interpretive dance version of McCaffery's "The Black Debt"?).

It would have been more accessible to a general audience (assuming that is what they are going for) if they had built up a narrative around the history of the formation of the group, maybe even depicting some of the tensions that caused the group to implode. It is generally held that beep held the group together, but the performance didn't give any insight into the raison d'etre of the group let alone the people involved. If they are not going to give us an experience of the group's radicality, or engage with them theoretically, then some insight into the human drama might give the work as a whole some necessary focus.

The show is presently being "workshopped" and may see some substantial revisions before being officially launched next year. I hope that they make a more committed decision about their intended audience and re-orient the show more appropriately in either direction (or even drop the charade and make it a bpNichol bioshow). I don't mean to be totally negative: it is fascinating to see a new generation work on the Horsemen, and some of the 'skits' in the show were promising. All of the good work, though, served to highlight the potential of the project to me, rather than fulfill its great promise.

Was thinking about Lisa Robertson's "Rousseau's Boat" (Nomodos 2004) tonight in relation to an emerging trend in contemporary writing to witticisms and humour. Writers like David McGimspey and Lynn Crosbie, and many others (especially at the poetry readings I've been going to lately) seem to rely on humour as the heart and soul of their writing. I suppose this is not so unusual -- certainly a large chunk of Margaret Atwood's writing relies on a biting humour, and Al Purdy often used self-deprecating humour in his works.

To be clear, Robertson is not funny. I was thinking about her in relation to that style because there is something about her form that seems perfectly suited to humour -- even if it never really happens. But she is witty and much of the work entails fragmented sentences that just subtley twist familiar expectations:

Someone's history seemed sexy.
Place here a fifty-page description of errors made by the body.
People are flourishing inside all kinds of needs.
Just above a system, the slipping face is flawed and brave for no-one.
It will always be sex for someone who will want it protected as sex.

I know humour is the wrong language to refer to this by, but its one-liner nature, and its observational jouissance have a playfulness that at the least keeps humour in proximity.

Steve Evans has a useful review of the chapbook in Jacket that offers some insight into the Rousseau quote on the back, which informs the title of Robertson's work. Basically, Rousseau used his boat to escape the political world. It was the quiet, the passivity of the boat that gave him pleasure, not the ripping conclusiveness of political theory. Evans makes the nice point that Robertson's text capitalizes on "the drifting, non-purposive and non-accumulative experience" of Rousseau's boat.

It is a useful key to reading the poems as well -- they have the same pacing as the errant thoughts in mind as one is canoeing down an idle river. The first poem "Passivity" could even be read with the pacing of a paddle in hand, remembering painting, performance, and abstracted memories:

Here/ freedom has no referent. It is like/ an emotion.

This is not humour, of course, but it is akin to the amusement of discovering abstracted self-contained thoughts that pull us into their reality and away from the peaceful meanderings of the world.

Later:

At about midnight in autumn
The nightreading girls were thinking by their lamps.
The fleeing was into life.

My trip to Philly

I would like to test (or apply) some of the thinking of purposive writing onto a specific text for no better reason than to see if it works or fits. Way back in the day, people (including poets and critics) felt confident expressing clear, coherent statements about the purpose of poetry. Thus we arrive at "to teach, to move, [and/or] to delight." I mused a moment ago about how this kind of statement, which was meant to establish the ideal for all of poetry, might relate to contemporary writing. Well, as chance would have it, I've been reading some of the very kind this very day: Monty Reid's new chapbook Sweetheart of Mine (BookThug). Here's one from the set:

Dark Hollow

another man's darling
and the stories

are all about
where you have been seen

the where
of it

the hollow of it
overflowing

[If you are Monty Reid and would like me to remove this poem, please just say the word. It is, as it is, posted here without permission.]

With thanks to Mark, I won't comment on the artsy line-breaks nor the (oh oh obvious) theme of "man versus nature" in the poem. What I did want to mention is the use of allusion in it; specifically, to the traditional song of the same name. Now, most of the poems in the little collection are also direct responses to songs. I caught some of them, but didn't recognize an equal number. In case you did not pick up the specific references, though, Reid thematizes it for you and includes 10 poems that explicitly allude to songs (the word "song" itself is repeated 7 times in 26 poems). This heavy repetition of a theme (a conceit!) effectively divides the poems in two directions: to the music they reference, and to the poems they are. Allusion, here, thus opens the whole project up into an ironic space. If it were paintings, it would be ekphrasis, but it's (American) music so I don't know what the term is.

I would argue that the allusions are meant to be a delight -- they give pleasure in recognition, they give even more in their twist and corruption of the original source. Parody, pastiche, irony, satire, and other kinds of humour could all be read into these little poems. In fact, they keep themselves open enough that it could be argued they do little more than invoke the allusion, without attempting to interrogate or destablize it.

The poem above, for instance, seems to use the same voice as the narrator of the traditional song (which is your standard lament of a cuckold). Reid adapts the old work for a new medium, and adds to the original with the additional gloss that, to a great extent, 'outspeaks' the original, daft narrator of the song. The haunted quality of the last four lines (and, perhaps, that allude to Eliot) heightens the outright expression of emotion of the original song, but that emotion is already in the original ("I'd rather be in some dark hollow, where the sun don't ever shine, than to see you another man's darling, would cause me to lose my mind").

Okay, fine, I confess that the segue at the start was really my attempt to connect the two discussions, and I wanted to talk about Reid's new book (which is, as usual, a beautiful BookThug object). Here I am though, having done a reading of the poem, reaching toward a conclusion that could very easily meet the well-discussed aphorism, and I find that I don't want to talk about the "purpose" of the poem. I don't want to understand how this little poem attempts to either teach, move, or delight -- though I am interested in the kind of teaching, movement, and delights it has to offer. It is a fine line between the two, and I don't have a good solution for or explanation of the difference. I suppose you could say that I am not interested in the closed utility of the poem, but definitely interested in its shifting, possible, and provocative usefulness. I want to read Reid's poem, hear the rhythm and intonation of the traditional song in the background, and carry on to the next poem, "Every Time You Say Goodbye."

Another facet of Reid's collection: there are 26 poems, whose titles follow an abcedarian pattern (Dark Hollow is, thus, #4 in the sequence). Besides, perhaps, a thin reference to the alphabet song, I can't make out why the poem is structured thus. It seems like a random and incidental structuring device, unless I'm missing something.

Atom Egoyan's Krapp's Last Tape was a struggle for me. The first shot moves slowly, taking too much time, allowing for an awkward silence. In short, it started out with a boring hesitancy that does not translate well onto the screen. It is never a good sign when you are watching something while your thoughts drift off and around to other topics. My thoughts reminded me of my other experiences with Samuel Beckett's fabulous play -- one that I had enjoyed very much on stage, and one that absolutely blew me away on the page. Three media with the same word-for-word literal adaptation of the text, and yet my experience was notably different for each one. The stage version I saw was an amateur theatre production -- tedious and poorly acted (a 20 year old simply does not do an aged man well), but with enough grace to resurrect the fascinating dilemma of an old man listening to his former retrospections, re-remembering them as he listens to himself remember them, often displeased with what he hears. The film seemed, at first, to present but yet another faint echo of the text's possibility. Though John Hurt is obviously a stellar actor, this opening sequence is flat and lifeless. I almost turned it off (and if Arsinee had been in the credits, I would have).

But I didn't. As the strength of the play developed towards its various non-narrative climaxes, the camera work actually became a useful member of the cast. Suddenly, it was like Egoyan woke up to the possibility of the text at the midway point of filming (apparently the entire series was produced with serious time constraints). The rest of the film is actually fabulous. The intensity, the isolation, the confusion, and the absurdity are all felt experiences, so long as you can last the opening out. Which leads me to think that in a kind of counter-intuitive way, the dull opening actually works -- creating a counter-force to the rush of the world, slowing down the pace until the viewer has given up all expectations. Once complete dispiritedness has settled in, the tiny, fragmented and deluded pleasures of the text seem like rapturous moments of joy, despair, and insight. What could be more appropriate for a Samuel Beckett text than a translation that can do all of that? Of course, Egoyan worked from an excellent script.

I still haven't made it down to his new cafe/theatre on Queen Street. I just checked out the schedule for the place, and with absolutely nothing listed on their calendar, it makes one wonder about its existential potential.

Anne Hébert’s Am I disturbing you? raises a number of questions of method that I have been thinking about lately. For starters, and the most obvious one, the “novel” deliberately plays with the conventions of prose in order to produce a ‘poetic’ effect (the cover wrap openly declares the text a ‘poetic tale’). What makes it ‘poetic’? Well, it includes long sections of introspective, choppy dialogue that draws attention to the language rather than to the events described. Indeed, the sensuous language becomes the point of a number of sections rather than any semantic implications.

The story is simple: two men hap upon a young girl lost and bedraggled and take her home. She is pregnant and they adopt her, and help her on her quest to reunite with her lover. One of the men falls in love with her, the other becomes her protector. The baby dies, the men fail, and Delphine, the girl, loses her will to live. I think, with this précis, I have missed perhaps one or two from the novel. The rest of the text is made up of Hebért’s stylized prose, hung on the lips of the young, confused girl, describing her hunt for her former lover:

I just had to go wherever Patrick was going with his heavy suitcases. To surprise him. To see and be seen by him. Without really wanting to. Or deciding to. Only a diary in my head that I had to follow to the letter to fulfil my need to be with him. A sort of obligation, stronger than anything else. A tremendous stubbornness. I followed him from station to station, from train to train, from town to town, from hotel to hotel. Always, I was there waiting, and he thought he was going crazy. And I thought I was going crazy. Always, he was surrounded by people he knew. They mustn’t see us together. Pretend not to know each other in stations and hotels.

What interests me about this text is the point of demarcation between poetry and prose. It’s been said before, but considering how valued prose is and how poorly valued poetry is, it seems worth attempting to approach the question in relation to texts that blur the borders. I am not particularly interested in the question ‘why does the author blur the borders’ nor am I particularly interested in dividing the text into either category exclusively. I am interested in the fact that parts of this novel feel like prose and others like poetry – that you can actually experience the split while reading. The plot inches forward (prose) and then, in another long dialogue segment, the bottom drops out, and meaning becomes embroiled in the expression and the means of expression (poetry). The way the text is organized makes it actually feel as if Hébert calculated (probably by intuition, these things being rarely mathematical – unless you are Ernest Buckler or Christian Bök) the ratio of poetry to prose sections.

Paul Valéry loosely defined the terms in relation to his experience as a reader and a writer: prose was the “rapid passage over words” whereas poetry was the experience of being “jolted out of my habitual state of mind.” Considering the explosion of poetic forms – despite whatever conservative streak there may be, poetry is no longer defined or determined by exclusive forms – the experience of being jolted is a fairly convincing definition of the poetic object. It excludes us, repels us, pushes us around itself, only gradually revealing its subtle magic and mystery: it relies on our ability to fill in the blanks with thoughts new to our thinking; which is in fact more of a willingness than an ability. This also usefully explains why prose is popular and poetry not: for prose seduces us into a sweeping motion, and we enter into its rhythm and escape. Poetry, on the other hand, forces us through the conflagration of disjunction, estrangement, defamiliarization, and jouissance to discover and uncover new ways of thinking. In an already overworked and overtaxed society, the stable drift of prose, the giving over of oneself to the storyteller, with all of the comforts of passivity, creates a needed coherence and meaning in the world – precisely what poetry tends to undermine, challenge, or shift.

In this novel, the character Delphine – the oracle – speaks poetry into the comfortable lives of the men, gradually disaccommodating them, breaking up their reality, and gradually shifting them outside of themselves. The prose sections accumulate around them, and their efforts to find her, contain her, deal with her, seduce her, or capture her. She is a hermeneutic gap, however, they struggle, unsuccessfully, to fill. The title refers to her provocation – the grand hope of the poetic jolt.

Anne Hébert Am I disturbing you? (Anansi 1999) Translated by Sheila Fischman

I had the opportunity to attend the premiere of Rhinoceros Eyes, a first film by Aaron Woodley, son of Denise Cronenberg (who did costumes for the show). The movie rolled casually between comedy, mystery, and brooding psychological suspense. Was it succesful? Everybody in the theatre laughed at the jokes, and the air became sombre during the darker moments. I suppose it would be easy to say the film was a clone of Donnie Darko, but that wouldn't be fair to the playful camera work, which was more akin to Tim Burton. In any event, I enjoyed myself.

The opportunity for seeing the film arose through a contest. I don't think I've ever won a contest before, but I was able to name the director faster than anybody else -- so two free passes. I've done a few film reviews of Canadian movies so I was contacted by the First Weekend Club as somebody who might be interested in their group. From what I gather (I haven't been in it for more than a few weeks), they are a volunteer organization dedicated to spreading word about Canadian films in the theatres. I habitually complain about missing the one night when Robert LePage's latest movie shows outside of Quebec, so I thought a few extra emails in the inbox wouldn't be such a bad thing. In the weeks I've been a member (no charge), I think I've gotten 3 emails (including the contest).

Incidentally, the world's first conference on the work of Robert LePage is being held this May in London and Manchester. My first question was, why London and Manchester? My second question, why is this just the first conference on his work? My third question was, how the hell am I going to get over there? I would love to go, but the financial barriers are daunting. Even with that new airline, it would still be over 6 bordens. I would still like to go, though, and, I would really appreciate somebody organizing a follow-up conference on the same subject. There is simply too much to say about this national treasure, and somebody has to get on it.

I was at the launch of d'bi young's new/first book of poems last night at the Lula Lounge. I had expected the event to be a love-in, but instead was greeted with a snapshot of a community in action -- Toronto's dub poetry, or dubpoetry as Klyde Broox insists, community. Hailing from the Jamaican dance hall and reggae traditions, dub poetry has kept its roots firmly planted in the musical tradition, but with an obvious acceleration of the textual dynamics. One part story-telling, one part exhortation, and one part the pure bliss of rhythm, dub poetry serves first and foremost the community from which it emerged. I was struck through the evening of performers how each insisted on a historical consciousness of a collectivity they were obviously deeply invested in. Africa, 500 years of resilience, Haile Selassie, and Jah -- the protagonists. Racism, American dreams, and the slave ships -- the antagonists. There was no smoke in the air, but rather cocktails and wine and juice. Children were running around, lots of laughter and hugs. It was most decidedly a community event.

The night itself began with a documentary on d'bi young by Judy Singh called "blood: the matriarch and dub poetry." The film was funded by Bravo. It focussed on the matriarchal line of dub poets and story-tellers that d'bi young descended from. She literally grew up in stories of Anansi, half on the stage with her mother, Anita Stewart, in Kingston, Jamaica. The two immigrated to Canada, and Stewart now lives in Brampton. The film ended with a very touching mother-daughter duet, singing to each other on the couch: "Ever since I was stolen from Africa ... Africa ..."

First performer up was Lillian Allen, the petit grand dame of dub poetry in Toronto, two time Juno award winner, and founder of the Dub Poetry Collective. She read two poems, including one from Psychic Unrest (Insomniac) on the trials and non-convictions of a Rastaman biking down Eglinton. Her vocal range and performance timing was impeccable. She definitely provided the comic highlight of the night -- as the rastaman rode off into the concrete night leaving a trail of weeping policemen, befuddled judges, and delighted jurors in his wake. It reminded me of a Sam Shepherd story, only tighter as a narrative poem.

Motion's more hiphop inflected performance, complete with a masterful beatbox, spun a web of history and context into this socially conscious work. I've seen her perform before, but this particular piece was far superior to all that I've seen previously. Humour, wit, musical and literary allusions, all in vibrant performative mode. The crowd roared as she stepped down, and the spotlight switched the centre of the dancefloor where Byron Beckford, from Jamaica, performed a rumbling but somehow silky dance. I have no vocabulary to talk about dancing, but it was moving and exciting and transformative.

I was speaking with Lillian Allen when Anita Stewart took the stage. Apparently, it was a special and uncommon event that she read -- Allen said it had been over a decade at the least. She looked like a young mother, proud, and smiling -- read competently and was joined by d'bi for another touching performance of the song from the documentary. This one was more polished and choreographed, however, and involved short dialogues and maternal exchanges -- mostly Stewart teasing Young for getting too excited about the political content of the song.



When d'bi read alone she began her performance with a joke, quoting her mother telling her years earlier to "Never, don't you ever go on stage with your book." d'bi had her new book and read a few works from it, eventually joined in turn by a drummer, then a beatboxer, then a handdrummer, and eventually a full 8-piece reggae band -- the dubbin.revolushun.gangstars. She performed a few tracks that I recognized from her previous CDs, and at least one from the album due out this summer (available on her website). "Blood" is still my favourite track of hers, for its originality. They all have a distinct intensity, but some of the other songs rely too heavily on the rhetoric without resonance. Regardless of what flaws I could identify in their lyrical composition, imagining them on the page as they flew through the air, they were all exceptional as performative, communitarian acts of solidarity.

I have been trying to figure out what to make of the dub poetry community for a while now, and last night was entirely instructive. I've heard the many criticisms from the 'avant' crowd -- that they are resolutely, irreparably, confessional, lyrical, unsophisticated, etc, etc. Some of these criticisms definitely hold true (a similar, if slightly varied, list could be drawn up for any poetry crowd). What I realized last night, however, courtesy of d'bi young's outspoken comments on the issue, was that I was witnessing a working-class literary tradition. It brought to mind images of Joe Wallace reading to crowds of thousands of workers, or Dorothy Livesay and Milton Acorn and Earl Birney contributing to social justice and communist causes through their poetry. The connection between the dub performers and their issues/ideas/politics and their audience was perfect and indelible.

There was a time in this country when famous aristocratic doctor's like Osler worked with Prime Ministers and socialists and artists, when artists like Fritz Brandtner and F.R. Scott and Norman Duncan and Oscar Ryan moved back and forth between political activism and aesthetic endeavours; when the avant-garde and the workers movement writers were, if not one and the same, at least of the same herd. Somehow the avants have pulled away from the working-class writing tradition. Although, George Elliott Clarke was there last night, and he certainly crosses the line. Lillian Allen also told me a number of amazing stories about bpNichol, with whom she was friends. She was openly moved by her memories of beep, and was obviously deeply touched by his support of her art. Maybe the line between aesthetic communities is indeed as close as it ever was, despite the jaundiced few. The potential for a relevant political art was certainly unquestioned last night.

I went out for lunch today with Nathalie Stephens where, as it happened, the conversation steered to Anne Hébert (I sweat it wasn't me), whom Nathalie felt offered an important or at least interesting parallel project to her own. The connection came through the double entendre of "l'entre gens" -- which can be translated to point to writing that is "between genres" or writing that is "between genders." Nathalie's newest book Je Nathanaël (Bookthug) reaches toward what she describes as a hermaphroditic language -- a language deliberately situated between -- while it simultaneously seeks to deprivilege the binary of poetry and prose.

Her new book was launched last night at the Lexiconjury, where she delivered a truly transformative reading. Transformative in the sense that the room became sealed into a vacuum of silence, lit by the soft, insistent, and intense light of her voice. Time dissolved with the beckoning of a narrative, of vague yet warm bodies filled with rush, of desire in the broadest sense, chasing after the mythical Nathanaël, an absent signifier appropriated from the work of André Gide. As a result of the hermaphroditic ambition of the text, and the fact that it was originally conceived in French, the poems are all written in the first person with the declensions of the Second Person Singular -- quite literally an address to concupiscence. a. rawlings, mc, followed the reading by commenting on the immense "vortex" that had suddenly claimed the room. We were there. We were gone. It was a trip.

[from Book Five -- and apologies for formatting woes: objects in quotation are not necessarily as they appear]

I said yes. I was caught off guard.
I lost track and left the book open at a blank page. So I followed an altogether different line of thought.
The anxious body undoes itself. Becomes other than the word or gesture that follows closely.
Touch would erase everything. Down to the shiver provoked by a gesture just beginning.

One voice carries another.
The echo is insurgent.
Bones knock together denying the text its impermeability.

As such, the echo carries the fruit of the word's hermaphrodism.

The question that I have as I emerge from such lines, as indeed from the work as a whole (including both readings that I was able to see of hers over the past 24 hours), relates to the undertone of insanity, of madness, perhaps irrationality in such lines. I suppose what I am wondering is whether hermaphrodism is a symptom of or escape from the displacement of language (which, I believe, the poems foreground and provoke). As we never speak from a stable 'I', speech (language, locution) itself becomes intertwined with the fact of disaccommodation. If, as Foucault argues, language provokes madness (or, perhaps, that madness is a symptom of language), what freedom does hermaphrodism propose? Does it change the categorical a priori of language by dissolving the binary logic that leads and creates the displacement? I suppose, in this new way, desire becomes a non-hierarchical subject to subject and object to object impulse (or would that be subject and subject and object and object?) -- the self moves through the world without the self-conscious abstraction that invents madness to justify itself.

There is, I believe, a utopian core to this book that, ironically, seems to thematize the failure of literature, the failure of language, to do what it promises: free us to the now. Consider the anti-literary strain of these lines, taken haphazardly from 3 pages of Book Five:

I entreat you to read eyes closed, to love body open, to break with the organisation of emotions.

The book is, must be, a call to the senses. There is little else to do than leave it.

... one cannot help but resent the text for existing in the first place.

Language's first defect is its inability to articulate itself.

But the resistance to language in these lines finds at least one possible reversal in an oddly modernist nostalgia for that moment that Umberto Eco would describe as life within the perfect language, when words and worlds were united:

If long ago the word was equivalent to breath and poets were impatient to breathe, today the word is an obstacle to breathing.
We all breathe poorly. The echo dies, see for yourself.
Nathanaël must know this, he who remains silent.
He brings the word back to the body, takes breath into his hands.

In these lines, I cannot help hearing the elegy for echo in terms of a gesture towards the mystical -- when an echo was the voice of Echo, calling out lonely with the hope of love; when the sounds of nature were all perfectly intermingled with the voice of divinity. Is this what we all long for? Or is this a flicker of Late Contemporary nostalgia at the very end of the age of irony?

It was a busy week, with lots of new things to see and hear and do. I was bummed to miss Gary Barwin and Max Middle tonight -- caught up in another reading that went much longer than I had anticipated. In fact, the Larissa Lai, Sandra Alland, L.E.V.I.A.T.H.O.N. event was an interesting one to see, though (another) yellow ticket soured my enthusiasm.

Here's what I caught this week:

Friday 24 March 2006:

Dub Poetry Centre
Sandra Alland: I have never heard her before, but recognized a few clips from the title sequence to the Heart of a Poet series. She did one piece that seemed to stand out: an audio mis-transcription provided by software trained to her voice. I've played around with this before, and I'm sure lots of others have, but there was the interesting intralinguistic twist here -- Spanish 'heard' as English. I hadn't thought about the impact the training of the software can have on the translation -- the computer gradually learns your vocabulary and hears your voice into the text.

Larissa Lai: read some of her second novel, which I've heard before, and from her chapbook "Rachel." Not to obsess on the topic or anything, but I couldn't really notice any difference between the poetry and the prose. She defined the difference through the presence/absence of a "narrative through-line" which she admitted has had hegemonic tendencies in its history of deployment. The proposition boils down to an openness of language, allowing it to turn in on itself, or out as it will move, needs to move, adopting strange coincidences. I didn't really hear this kind of openness in her poetry. It was, however, an intruiging tale -- based on Blade Runner.

L.E.V.I.A.T.H.O.N.: young dub poet/spoken word artist. He read three pieces that were expressive, political, but never with the rip of passion or the turn of a complex wit that can make performance writing really rip. I don't know how old he is, but, assuming he is quite young, he offers much promise for the time when he leaves behind what he thinks the genre demands and what his own voice can offer. His eloquence and crisp delivery will work with better material. Superman isn't a strong enough power base for his voice.

Wednesday 22 March 2006

University of Toronto at Mississauga
Nathalie Stephens: I've already commented on her writing in the post below, but I would like to add that in this reading and the discussion that followed, Nathalie proved herself a close and sensitive listener as well. She was asked a direct question about why she uses strong language -- fuck and cunt and the such -- and whether she has any limits to what she won't talk about. It's a question some would balk or stumble at, but she took it in good faith and offered a different way to think about language and the various power relations some words have assumed. I suppose this also connects with the sense of distrust in language I commented on before.

Tuesday 21 March 2006

The Cameron House
Stan Rogal: I have never seen Stan read before either, and I was impressed with his delivery. He has a theatre background (with a play coming up very soon) and you could tell from the subtlety of his facial expressions, and well-timed inflections. Stan read with an ironic -- almost British -- tone, with the weight of suicides, snarls, smirks, and salaciousness all tucked just behind the audible voice.

Louis Cabri: My highlights are no different from Mark's and other comments I've seen and heard. The posing was hilarious, and The Foam Poem stood out. It was really a delightful reading from the LANGUAGE strain. Talking to Louis beforehand, we debated whether CanLit fairly started with Louis Dudek or before. Talking afterwards, we drank beer and talked about the air quality of Windsor.

Monday 20 March 2006

University of Toronto at Mississauga
George Elliott Clarke: with his explosively forward energy, Clarke was a sure hit, and was more than up for the occasion. He laughed loudly before he said a word, declaring that the space he was about to pull us into would be full and boisterous and free. He read from Whylah Falls, but toned down the performance somewhat for the context. One thing really impressed me: he thanked each person that asked him a question, moreover singled out reasons why he thought the question (however awkwardly phrased) worth considering. It was very classy. He also read from Illuminated Verses, his new collaborative project. It is a lush work, erotic and sensual. The poems are unapologetic voice of heterosexual man appraising the body of women through the map of his desire (and various musical and mythical tropes). The corresponding photographs are the bodies of women -- all black, all nude, all built into a landscape like wild, free, nubile nymphs. The point of the poems is not to trouble, to question, to destabilize, or to doubt normative paradigms of sexuality. The poems celebrate women's bodies -- sort of like a literary Playboy for Africadians. Are the poems 'sexy' and erotic? That depends on how you feel about heteronormative discourse. Ultimately, how you feel about Playboy. All I will admit is that I believe Clarke is the best Canadian male poet working with sensual verse. He's no Leonard Cohen, but then again, these days, nobody is.

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.

Do days get nicer than this? Yes, they will get warmer, but this was that first grace of seasonal shift and I absolutely revelled in it. Got out my bike for the first time today and slipped down to OCAD. The streets were positively jubilant and zestful, filled with happy ants on their happy way. I'm not projecting at all -- the sidewalks were packed and I literally saw one or two people smiling. It was shocking.

I was there to do a reading -- in what I suppose (he says playfully) was the World Premiere of the Haikube. The class was focussed on ideas of narrative, so I dipsy-doodled through some older works that seemed relevant, a set from the anagrams, and then read the entire Haikube. Matt Donovan and Hallie Siegel were on-hand with the cube itself, so after the reading we broke into a general discussion. The response, by all outward signs, was enthusiastic; the discussion was fairly robust, I sold a bunch of books, and the students lined up after class (literally single-file and patient) to touch and manipulate the cube. It was a lot of fun -- and it was my first time "up the stilts." It is truly amazing how they can get such an externally audacious building to look so mundane, dull, and lifeless from the inside. The Canadian architectural revolution moves but one step at a time.



More fun after the reading -- the three of us with Prof. Siobhan O'Flynn walked down to Queen St for a few pints in the Black Bull sunshine. We spoke of the possibility of building a java applet or something and a website with an interactive model of the Haikube, that people might create their own poems from it. We spent a good couple of hours on the patio. Truly glorious -- and a delicious bike ride home up Spadina, China Town, Kensington, Bloor, and Little Korea. I'm currently re-reading Dionne Brand's What We All Long For, a celebratory exploration of Toronto's multicultural experiment. As I moved through the various neighbourhoods, the city seemed to awake from its restless seasonal slumber, and the mosaic promise the book suggests is possible seemed genuine and alive.

So Jesus and Judas planned the whole thing together? It is funny to note that two Canadian novelists had already anticipated and proposed the notion.

Bertram Brooker in his 1949 novel The Robber constructed Judas as the most devote of the disciples. He was the only one to actually believe that Jesus was the mesiah -- believed in it so strongly that he did not fear for his saviour's death. The interesting thing about the novel, which adopts the perspective of Jesus Barabbas, the Robber freed by Pontius Pilate in Jesus's stead, is that it actually never confirms (nor denies) the paranormal features of the Christian mythology. In very subtle and effective story-telling, the narrative weaves in and through gospel moments without confirming or denying the abilities of Christ. Mystical ambiguity was a hallmark of Brooker's style -- himself a mystic who rejected occultist dabblings with magic.

The other novel was Morley Callaghan's 1983 A Time for Judas. In that book, which is also one of Callaghan's strongest, Judas appears as a tragic co-conspirator -- honest, filled with integrity and love, and forced to self-sacrifice his passion for the Passion. It is a very powerful novel, and well written. In many respects, the work, in confirming Callaghan's commitment to the Christian tradition, attempts to resolve many of the questions his earlier (and, most would agree, better) books raised. Such is My Beloved and More Joy in Heaven, for instance, both probe the hypocrisies of Christians in the world, including the hypocrisies of the Church. They resolve in rather grim postulates of faith in a falling world.

Incidentally, apparently Barry Callaghan has a book out on Judas as well, though I am not familiar with it. Creates an interesting theme, particularly when you factor in that Brooker and Callaghan were close friends. I haven't tracked down the book yet, but it makes you wonder what they were all up to. Sort of like bpNichol and Michael Ondaatje's simultaneous interest in Billy the Kid.

Phase Four -- Sound Poetry

Steve McCaffery, for the catalogue to the 1978 International Festival of Sound Poetry in Toronto, divided sound poetry into three phases -- that roughly divide as follows: the tribal chanting liturgical phase, the modernist teleological attempt to recover said liturgy, and the post-Henry Chopin investment in technology to externalize and transcend the human body (which all sounds very Marshall McLuhan). The Four Horsemen, while chronologically third phase, have a distinctly second phase element in their investigation of the full expressive range of predenotative forms: grunts, howls, shrieks, and etc.



Tonight at Revival, for the Coach House Book launch, I saw further evidence of a fourth phase of sound poetry. ang.rawlings closed the night with a stellar performance of sound poetry based on her new book with two other women (whose names I will track down). What separates this kind of sound poetry from the three phases mapped out above is the choreographic and performative consciousness. Whereas each of the three phases above ultimately resolve into a negotiation between an isolated self and their experience of the world (either controlling the gods with prayer, attempting to uncover the lost/root integrity of the world, or else pioneering into new space), the performative sound poetry begins conscious of itself existing within a discursive context -- is aware of its audience and is not hostile to its audience.

This is not a postmodern trick of complicated contrivance intended to disappoint and outsmart its audience ('Fooled ya -- ya really thought that was a 'real' murder in this postmodern detective story didn't you? well, that's just the hegemony of the masterplot for ya isn't it? Ya've only yaself to blame.'). Inviting, challenging, inspiring, and provoking. Fluid and dynamic, yet controlled and sharply focused. It is a new level of professionalization of sound poetry -- seen in Christian Bök's new sound work and in Björk Gudmundsdóttir's most recent album, which features (amongst others) Canada's own Tanya Tagaq.

Culturally rich, intellectually savvy, and consummately performed: I haven't heard too much of this new kind of work, and I certainly haven't heard enough. I'm definitely on the look-out for more of this kind of work. I expect, at the least, ang will be developing her "three" minute performance tonight into a longer show -- something to look forward to.

E.K. Brown: A Study in Conflict (1993) by Laura Smyth Groening

Groening tells the story of E.K. Brown, his life and writing. An inspired Cornell Professor, Brown led the kind of life that television despairs over. He did little but sit and read and write. But, the significant role he played, and something Groening brings out well, was the originality of what he read and how he wrote about it in response.

Brown was the first literary critic to read Canadian poetry as Canadian poetry -- to take the mental and imaginitive leap away from British standards of universal excellence (which, not surprisingly, always favoured British texts and authors). Brown's critical model was borrowed from Matthew Arnold (one of those Brits who advocated universal standards) but modified by the American Emerson's anti-colonial defiance. Emerson detested the American tendency of his day to imitate British authors, just as Brown recognized a similarly injurious tendency amongst Canadian writers. Brown's writing, however, sought out those moments in Canadian writing when they were not imitating.

Groening's style is sharp and focussed, but many readers will be put off by her clinical air. The book is almost entirely bereft of anecdotal narratives -- most likely a result of her subject. For instance, of the war years, Brown left Cornell to write political speeches for Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King. Unfortunately for interest's sake, the two only met in person once. A topic was given discretely to Brown, who then penned a draft, adjusted to the favoured style and even words of the Prime Minister(Brown apparently compiled pages upon King's favourite words).

In another anecdote ripe with possibilities, but yet falling when green -- Brown lived in Paris in the 1920s, filled with literary culture. His friend came over, filled with enthusiasm for James Joyce (in his prime). But instead of a Callaghan-esque flirtation with the top of the game, or a Glassco-esque cut to the dirty heart of the scene, the only story of them from the period is a failed attempt to meet Edith Wharton. Leon Edel (Brown's friend) jumped and looked over Wharton's fence. Literaly.

Still, she records the cultural moment when Brown had a particular radicality, when his writing was the best thing going in his field. She does this sharply and efficiently, and provides a thorough case for Brown's originality and the innovative gesture of his reading habits.

If anything, Groening absorbs Brown's perspective too completely. Brown was not a perfect critic, even of Canadian literature of the time, and was more closely alligned with the University of Toronto writers than with the thriving experimental and modernist community underfoot. His biases can perhaps be understood as a product of his geographical isolation, not to mention his arduous schedule as a professor. This does not excuse his ignorance of active writers like W.W.E. Ross, Bertram Brooker, Louise Morey Bowman, and others, but it does perhaps explain it. Groening might have been more critical in this regard. Otherwise, the book is well researched and well written.

Brown: "A great literature supposes that writers and readers alike have a deep interest in the kind of life which is to be found where they live."

So I was poking around the Lorne Pierce collection today and came across this list submitted to a UNESCO committee on culture. These are the books of Canadian literature worth reading and perhaps more. Quite a spectacle.


List of Canadian Books of Special Merit Written in English, CAA 1948

Bird, Will. Sunrise for Peter.
Birney, Earle. The Strait of Anian
Blake, W.H. Brown Waters.
Brebner, John. North Atlantic Triangle.
Brown, Audrey Alexander. A Dryad in Naniamo.
Buchanan, Donald. James Wilson Morrice.
Burpee, Lawrence. The Search for the Western Sea.
Callaghan, Morley. Now that April’s Here.
Campbell, Wilfred. The Poetical Works.
Cappon, James. Bliss Carman.
Carman, Bliss. Poems.
Carr, Emily. Klee Wyck.
Clark, A.F.B. Jean Racine.
Connor, Ralph. Postscript to Adventure.
Cragg, Kenneth. Father on the Farm.
Crawford, Isabella. Collected Poems.
Davies, Robertson. The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks.
de la Roche, Mazo. Whiteoak Chronicles.
Denny, Cecil. The Law Marches West.
Drummond, William. Complete Poems.
Dunham, Mabel. Grand River.
Edgar, Pelham. The Art of the Novel.
Fairley, Barker. A Study of Goethe.
Finch, Robert. Poems.
Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry.
Godsell, Philip. Arctic Trader.
Graham, Angus. Napoleon Tremblay.
Graham, Gwethalyn. Earth and High Heaven.
Grey Owl. Pilgrims of the Wild.
Grove, F.G. Fruits of the Earth. Over Prairie Trails. A Search for America.
Haig, Kennethe. Brave Harvest.
Haliburton, Thomas. Sam Slick.
Hardy, W.G. All the Trumpets Sounded.
Heavysege, Charles. Saul.
Heming, Arthur. The Drama of the Forests.
Hughes, Katherine. Father Lacombe.
Jameson, Anna. Winter Studies.
Kane, Paul. Wanderings of an Artists among the Indians.
Kennedy, W.P. Lord Elgin.
Kirby, William. The Golden Dog.
Knox, Alexander. Bride of Quietness.
Lampman, Archibald. Selected Poems.
Landon, Fred. Lake Huron.
Leacock, Stephen. Leacock Roundabout. Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town.
Lower, A.R.M. From Colony to Nation.
MacDonald, Wilson. Out of the Wilderness.
MacInnes, Tom. Collected Poems.
MacKay, Douglas. The Honourable Company.
MacLennan, Hugh. Barometer Rising.
MacMechan, Archibald. Tales of the Sea.
MacNaughton, John. Lord Strathcona.
Macphail, Andrew. The Master’s Wife.
McArthur, Peter. In Pastures Green.
McDowell, Franklin. The Champlain Road.
McInnis, Edgar. The Unguarded Frontier.
Mitchell, W.O. Who Has Seen the Wind?
Moodie, Susanna. Roughing it in the Bush.
Munro, Ross. Gauntlet to Overlord.
New, Chester. Lord Durham.
Niven, Frederick. Mine Inheritance.
Norwood, Gilbert. Pindar.
Osler, William. The Master Word.
Pacey, Desmond. A Book of Canadian Stories.
Parker, Gilbert. When Valmond Came to Pontiac.
Pickthall, Marjorie. The Complete Poems.
Pratt, E.J. Collected Poems.
Radisson, Pierre. Voyages of Peter Esprit Radisson.
Raddall, Thomas. His Majesty’s Yankees.
Roberts, Charles G.D. Wisdom of the Wilderness. Selected Poems.
Roberts, Theodore. The Leather Bottle.
Robins, J.D. The Incomplete Anglers.
Robinson, Percy. Toronto During the French Regime.
Ross, Sinclair. As for me and my House.
Salverson, Laura. Confessions of an Immigran’t Daughter.
Saunders, Richard. Flashing Wings.
Schull, Joseph. The Legend of Lost Lagoon.
Scott, Duncan. Collected Poems. In the Village of Viger.
Seton, Ernest. Wild Animals I Have Known.
Simcoe, Mrs. John Graves. The Diary of Mrs. John Graves Simcoe.
Sinclair, Bertrand. Poor Man’s Rock.
Sissons, C.B. Egerton Ryerson.
Skelton, Oscar. Life and Letters of Laurier.
Slater, Patrick. The Yellow Briar.
Smith, A.J.M. The Book of Canadian Poetry.
Steele, Harwood. Policing the Arctic.
Stefansson, Vilhjammur. The Friendly Arctic.
Stevenson, Lloyd. Sir Frederick Banting.
Sullivan, Alan. Under the Northern Lights.
Tranter, G.J. Plowing the Arctic.
Wallace, Frederick. Salt Seas and Sailormen.
Waugh, W.T. James Wolfe.
Wells, Kenneth. The Owl Pen.
Wilson, R.A. The Birth of Language.
Wrong, George. The Canadians.

Selected by B.K. Sandwell, F.C. Jennings, W.S. Wallace, W.A. Deacon, Lorne Pierce, Philip Child, Watson Kirkconnel, and E.K. Brown.

My first reaction when I saw the list and before I started reading was to think of all the writers who probably wouldn't make it for so many different political reasons -- people like J.G. Syme, Oscar Ryan, and Joe Wallace. Then I started noticing the major ommission -- people like Brooker, Livesay (all 3), Arthur Stringer, and F. Pollock. But a funny feeling struck me as I realized how many of the names I hadn't heard of, how many of these books I hadn't read, hadn't even heard of. The panel who drew up the list obviously had their biases (all white wealthy men), but this was the list they collectively drew up of the most important books. There's a touch of Ozymandias in reading something like this. All that work, all the fights, all the endless hours, all the lines drawn in the sand over abstract aesthetic minutia -- every word fought over, edited, and paid for to put in print; all reviewed, considered, contested. It's a remarkable and sobering list to consider. Everything we think about, feel about, and ignore about this list will almost certainly be re-enacted sixty years from now.

I also read an account of a lovely debate between a number of poets including Marjorie Pickthall, about the merits of free verse in 1920. The group generally came to the consensus that it was a fad that really had no relationship to genuine poetry. You know, the kind of thing you can pick up and say, "that's a poem." It was proposed and accepted that all free verse poets were merely imitators, second-rate authors, whose importance was inevitably short-lived.

And just to show that these forgotten poets had some significance to the world around them, a few random numbers I also came across yesterday: Philip Child sold 4,000 copies of his first book, Wilson MacDonald sold 1,000 copies of “Miracle Song of Jesus” in 2 weeks. This was back before electronic-speed mass marketing, when the population of Canada was, what?, like 12 million or something. There are lots of facts and things about the world back then that makes this list of books astonishing.

I'm still sorting through the mass I picked up from above/ground press and other writings from the Ottawa odyssey.

Here's what I have:

Calendar Girls by Lea Graham. Poems of love, poems of whispers, poems of winter: "language it is the same word as hope." Working within lyricism and meditation traditions, the poems all seem to push towards a question and insinuate the optimistic potential outcome. Age has proved the happy acumulation of wolf whistles and rivers of wine; and the soul is something one can still talk about without irony.

six strains: variations by rob mclennan. A plunderverse project in progress. mclennan works through three and four different variations of particular poems, using the plunderverse technique of inserting deletions. Some are distinctly more successful than others. Not surprisingly, considering mclennan's devotion to that other GB, the most effective plunders are of Bowering's work -- particularly "Do Sink -- variation three" which creepily blurs the line between mother, love, and cynical opportunist: "for fame, love, we must edit / our romance // dear to keep, a line / we walk." Some of these pieces may appear in a forthcoming issue of Maple Spits (details pending).

the blind aesthetic (or, sorry im all ears) by rob mclennan. I'm still learning how to read rob mclennan's work, a problem compounded by its sheer abundance. The lines have rhythm and a sonorous tonality, but in a small collection like this the lines only leap to life at almost random and haphazard occasion. For instance, lines that mean nothing to me but seem like just words piled atop one another:

beside the conference confers, initiated
description of alignment, a number
of collective are

a studied, work & garment

drone into a trance

I will give him the benefit of the doubt that this is no ironic moment of self-reflexion (the poem concludes, in fact, "w/out the least bit personal / broadcast."). To be fair, the light pun of "confers" returns throughout the sequence and becomes a soft motif. But if the language has the feel of a randomness (which, it should be remembered, is an aesthetic embraced by conceptual artists across the divide), linked by the subtle turn of an embedded word, a pun, or loose association, this tactic produces rich moments too:

dead lovers & absconded, friends
on the delicate essentials
deconstruct the hopelessness
with the dirty topped

indulging in aroma, constellations
on a brain

nine small(er) essays by rob mclennan

The first piece, "the poetics of accident," is a personal essay on his own poetic method that moves through creation by the accident of association, happed upon connections, or even less. This essay confirms, to my mind at least, my experience when reading the poems -- for as much as those connections are environmental and specific, they are lost from the final work, which are sent forth as decontextualized relics of the time. Poems by other poets "trigger" or "result in" poems that are "made out of accidents, random acts and the largest amounts of the unknown." This creates a network between works in a perfectly closed system. Where is the opening to permit entry? mclennan quotes Fred Wah and Bowering to defend his accidental writing "as act of exploration and discovery" -- but this is very different from mclennan's own exploring and discovering, which, unlike Wah and Bowering, does presuppose or depend upon the value of the object found. mclennan, it seems by this essay, would prefer to drop the diamond and skip off toward the sun glint on puddles; a connection found.

Other essays include a useful descriptive review of Victor Coleman's lipograms and eulogistics, and several (essentially) loosely narrated bibliographies on topics like long poems and urban poetry. There are also useful descriptive introductions to Andy Weaver, Writing the Terrain (UofC Press) and Post-Prairie (Talonbooks), Clare Latremouille, and Stephen Brockwell. Reading nine small(er) essays is much like reading a newsletter update of rob mclennan's desk (and bar table), a first account of those books that have just crossed his path; a sampler of things going on and connections loosely made. It is sort of like an extended remix of his blog.

(end of part 1, more to come)

Impromptu Two: CHB

Any guesses?

The Lexiconjury reading series ended last night in a great and flurious reading that lasted over 3 hours (well, I was there for 3 hours of it, but missed the first readers -- sadly including Jay MillAr, Paul Dutton, and Alixandra Bamford, all of whom I was looking forward to seeing). The cornucopia of talent last night highlighted the diversity of interests that have been attracted to and encouraged to participate in the Lex phenomenon. Some people have suggested over the years that Lex was an intimidating environment, but, from my perspective, this could only be true for those who write without being interested in the tools of their art. Lex has indeed been the best and most consistent forum for language-conscious writings in the city, and this dynamic and critically-engaged space will be sorely missed by writers like myself. More conventional lyricists have always enjoyed a plethora of platforms from which to espouse their enervated selves, and will continue to enjoy this privilege. Lexiconjury was instead a rare space where writers, actors, and weirdos were invited and encouraged to push whatever boundaries they discovered -- flipping the whole jig if necessary. To illustrate its difference, I don't think I heard a single 'girlfriend/boyfriend' poem in all the times I attended. Sexuality? yes. Cheeky irony? yes. Total incoherence? often. Random dyspestia and eruptive banter? constantly. Selfless indulgence? happily so. But apart from Bill Kennedy's harlequin adventure, and the perpetual moanings of whatever leafs fans were present, the woebegone self had been curtailed and exiled.

While its demise is inevitably to be lamented, from my personal vantage its closure seems strangely appropriate. I went to my first Lex, the second Lex of all, shortly after arriving from BC. The last comes just weeks before I leave Toronto for the Niagara escarpment. It is to be hoped that some of the spirit of the Lex can live on and spread and multiply in the fertile foothills of the penisula and beyond.

For all the statisticians, here's the list of who read and their frequency (not including open michelles) from the horses mouth. By my count there were 46 Lexiconjuries featuring over 110 different authors. A phenomenal achievement of organization and diversity. Without a doubt, Stephen Cain appeared on stage the most at seven times, followed by Suzanne Zelazo at five, and a. rawlings at 4. This is not including the Word event which I couldn't make and don't know anything about.

a.rawlings x 4
Aaron Giovanonne
Adam Seelig
Alice Burdick
Allan Briesmaster
Andy Boorman
Barbara Cole
Beth and Joy Learn x 2
Brian Joseph Davis
Camille Martin
CCMC (Paul Dutton on sound singing, harmonica; John Oswald on alto sax; Michael Snow on keyboard, guitar)
Chris Fickling
Christian Bök x 2
Christine Duncan
Clifton Joseph
Curated by Maria Erskine :: Launch and party for Word: Canada's Magazine for Readers + Writers
Daccia Bloomfield x 2
Damian Rogers
Daniel f. Bradley x 2
Danielle Maveal
Darren O'Donnell
Darren Wershler-Henry x 2
Darryl Whetter & Bloemfontein
Dave McGimpsey
derek beaulieu
Derek McCormack
Doug Barbour
Douglas Webster
Emily Pohl-Weary
Emily Schultz x 2
Frances Kruk
Gail Scott
Gary Barwin x 2
Gregory Betts
Helen Tsiriotakis
Hugh Thomas
Janet Neigh
Jap Nanak Makkar
Jason Christie x 2
Jay MillAr x 2
Jesse Huisken x 2
Jessica Westhead x 2
John Kameel Farah
John Lavery
Jon Paul Fiorentino x 2
Jordan Scott
Judy MacDonald
Karen Mac Cormack
Karen Sohne
Katherine Parrish x 2
Katie McGown x 2
Ken Babstock
Kenneth Goldsmith
Kevin Connolly
Kyle Buckley x 2
Lesley Trites
Lise Downe
Lori Emerson
Louis Cabri
Louise Bak
Lynn McClory
Lytle Shaw
Maggie Helwig x 2
Margaret Christakos x 3
Mark Truscott
Michael Mahy
Michael Redhill
Michelle Cross x 2
Nancy Bullis
Natalee Caple x 2
Nathalie Stephens
Nicole Brossard
Nobuo Kubota
Patricia Claxton
Paul Dutton x 3
Paula Stevens
Peter McPhee x 2
Prize Budget for Boys (Jason LeHeup, Neil Hennessy, Ian Hooper)
R.M. Vaughan
Rachel Zolf x 2
Rajinderpal S. Pal
Rob Read x 3
Ryan Knighton
Saghi Ghahraman
Sana Mulji
Sandra Alland x 2
Sarah Dowling
Sarah Lucille Selecky x 2
Sharon Harris x 2
Sheila Heti x 2
Sherwin Tjia
Six Heads
Sparrow
Stan Rogal x 3
Stephen Cain x 7
Stephen Collis
Stephen Humphrey
Steve McCaffery
Steve Venright x 3
Stuart Ross
Susan Holbrook
Suzanne Zelazo x 5
Tara Azzopardi
TEAM (Brea Burton, Jill Hartman, Cara Hedley)
Tim Posgate
Trish Salah

Congratulations and thanks to Bill and a. rawlings for organizing and executing a top-notch series that others can only aspire to. You created a space the absence of which will now be felt by all who experienced the lexness of it all. Let us hope that the black hole creates a rush of new to fill in its oppressive negative ontology.

It was a buried in books day. Here's what I read:

Surreal Estate: 13 Canadian poets under the influence. Ed. Stuart Ross.

In his introduction, Ross aptly clarifies that the text is not authentic surrealism, though all of the writers have been 'influenced' -- in a nebulous, speculative way -- by modernist surrealism (which he defines as a kind of antidote to Dadaism). This book, unlike the very serious psychological experimentation of the surrealists and automatistes, breaks from modernist tautology for play. Oftentimes, it is play pure and simple, word games, puns (good and bad), and seriously considered nonsense: giddy emancipations from the confines of reason.

Beatriz Hausner's "Rider" includes the image:

The eye of the storm watches
from the window: I have
his tongue caught in my mouth.

Lillian Necakov, whose work I am not familiar with, writes as if she were staging a protest against the nefarious constraints of logic:

what we demonstrate against
is the part of us that once made us whole
the tiny speck of complacency once allowed

Her protest reminded me of Sheila Watson's Double Hook lamp in the daylight imagery - of the dead mother protesting against the infertility of the land. It set me thinking about the previous title to Brooker's novel Think of the Earth, plundered from a line by Keats, which was in fact A Candle in Sunshine, plundered from a line by Blake. I went searching off to explore the connections further -- surrealism to Blake, that is -- when, instead, I picked up and read

The Maple Laugh Forever. Edited by Douglas Barbour and Stephen Scobie.

I paused on this book, which I've seen and ignored at hundreds of book sales, and finally picked it up (I'm at the library now) because it struck me as a possible forerunner to the Surreal Estate anthology. After reading it, I would stand by that, but add that in many respects, The Maple Laugh is even more aggressively disruptive with language than the post-surrealists or whatever you want to call them. From Lionel Kearns' visual poem-pun on the prospect of Quebec's separation to Steve McCaffery's repesentational pattern poem of sheep in a field, there are many moments of radical language disintegration the likes of which the post-surrealists never quite managed. Of course, the mantle of humour allows for more freedom, irreverence, and almost necessitates ribaldry.

Artie Gold's piece fulfills the latter:

you have never seen a man fuck a chicken
till you have seen the current pope of rome
fuck a chicken
now there is a guy
who knows what chicken-fucking's all about.
one rainy easter,
I happened to catch his act.

(Has anybody seen Super Troopers? I pictured this poem read by Farva). The libidinal and scatological gaming of such a piece is pretty obvious, and the dirtiness of the language and its potential offence pretty much frames the impact of the poem. Many of the poems in the pieces in the book are similarly obvious (though only a few are so graphic). As I flipped through the authors included, however, I was astonished by the strength and breadth of the contributors: F.R. Scott, Dorothy Livesay, Steve McCaffery, bill bissett, Al Purdy, P.K. Page, Bronwen Wallace, Michael Ondaatje, and Margaret Atwood to name just a few. With a list like this, it is well to be expected that many of the poems are less funny than witty or brain-twisting in an amusing if disturbing fashion. They included a now rather famous Atwood poem that I personally wouldn't have expected in a humour anthology -- however, the context definitely changed my impression of the piece:

you fit into me
like a hook into an eye

a fish hook
an open eye

which I've always read so seriously, I missed Atwood's sly and dark humour. I was stuck in the anthology section so I picked up

Plush. Edited by Lynn Crosbie and Michael Holmes.

The intention of this anthology was less clear and prescriptive than the other two, but, as it turns out, the poems were more similar and of like kind than either of the others. They chose 5 poets and gave them enough space to suit their voice. The selection method explains the common tone of all the poems in the collection: "We first encountered each of these writers at readings." Which means they all travelled in a similar geography (which, judging from the bios, might be as broad as -- urban North American), a similar demographic, and a similar social milieu. The similarity of the poems suggest, at the least, some kind of extra-literary connection to the writers. Furthermore, though the collection is only a decade old, the poems also confirm the difference that has already emerged between writing now and then. It was the age of stand-up comedy, of AIDS, and the emergence of PRIDE. The poems in this collection swarm these obsessions, internalize them and ooze them in turn into near every line of every poem in the book. The poems are funny, witty, and often provocatively offensive in a deliberately politically (and sexually) challenging way -- smart that is, while dirty.

As Sky Gilbert writes:

I like angels
Also.
I like to see them going at it.
You know.
I like to see angels fucking.
They don't look so goddamn cherubic then.

Like Artie Gold's piece above, the humour comes from the perversion of the familiar. Unlike Gold's context, however, this is one of the tamer pieces in the book. After reading through repeated AIDS references, unsafe sex jokes, more than half a dozen poems on anal sex alone, and the constant name-dropping of American places and people, it began to feel like Allen Ginsberg had become the source text for an evening out at Yuk Yuks. I think Mark Breslan would enjoy an evening performance of the poems in this book, even in order. But, like an evening of amateur stand-up comedy, there was far too much reliance on shock and not enough diversity -- although Courtnay McFarlane's work stood out, highlighted by his intriguing use of slashes:

A history of conquerors
helped me slip easily / out of my skin
My skin / lubricated by exclusion

His poems demonstrated the highest degree of consciousness of their existence outside of the performance and on the page -- with, as these lines indicate, a further awareness of how self and identity are constructed and constricted by language. I would like to read more of McFarlane's work.

Finally, as I descended down into the incult bowels of smutty vulgarians, it seemed an opportune time to pick up and bring down

Daniel Jones' The Brave Never Write Poetry.

These are punk poems that demonstrate their disregard for the world by the constant demonstration of self-destruction the author enacts upon himself. There are deliriously funny poems -- his 'what i've put up my ass' piece comes to mind, and fighting an aged Morley Callaghan was also rebellious and cleverly disrespectful. Pointedly inelegant, the poems read more like haphazard journal entries than crafted works -- fast napkin poetry after an all-out booze-up. The vibrancy of the character behind the words, though, was enough that I bought his novel 1978 on the way home. I also bought

a discord of flags: Canadian Poets write about the Persian Gulf War. Edited by Steven Heighten, Peter Ormshaw, and Michael Redhill. Toronto 1992.

Most of the poems in this selection are flat, occasional, and ranty as can be expected -- that was probably their function at the time; I wasn't around, but I can imagine them being handed out or sold at protests, or, at the least, many of the poems being written for and read at similar events. Many of the topical references passed me by: I have vague memories of my Social Studies teacher in high school showing images of American Generals mother-of-all-battling Saddam Hussein. Still, a number of the poems stand up without the immediate context.

George Elliott Clarke's piece, for instance, writes of

children, invented for death, slouch to school ...
Now, the sad heavens smell of orange blossoms,
Petrol, for her long body fuses flowers
And fire, and chars to incense for Shiva

Victor Coleman has a great sonnet from 1968, and Gerry Gilbert's "The Phoney War" is also original and voice-ful:

Politics sticks
kills to make the world safe for cars

the phoney peace
grief grease ...

let women have the only vote on war

Other noteworthy contributions come from David Helwig, Maggie Helwig, Ralph Gustafson, and Erin Moure. I realize now that I left the book at a coffee shop, gone, so I don't know where I got these lines from, but it is from this book, and it seems to summarize the guilt of being a poet during war time:

lionized
in
the bowels of Bacchic apathy

I also bought and read Hans Jewinski's Poet Cop (1975) but it is too weird to say anything about yet. I'm going to have to re-read this thing and perhaps even try and figure out if Hans is a pseudonym (Margaret Laurence's archives claim to have information on Hans' book, but it needs some explaining). Very strange little book of poetry, and a mass-produced paperback as well. Weird! (one explanation here suggests that Hans was a gimmick tested and quickly dropped by Simon and Schuster, which might explain things. Might. Always looking for the back-story.)

Scream if you know what I did on Saturday

Photos of the Kensington Walking Tour by Lisa R. Betts

Nadia Halim

Emily Pohl-Weary

Mark Truscott

Parked in the Market

Amy Lavender Harris


Barry Callaghan took us out of the Market to his old home on Sullivan.


Das bin ich.

Maggie Helwig

The wading pool dear people.

Sadly, no pictures of Susan Helwig. If anybody has one, I would truly appreciate a copy to post. A huge thanks to all the readers and to all those who braved the sun for a stroll about the Market.

some
Scream in the Square photos by Lisa Betts
thanks to all who came, all who read, and all who helped out...

(click for larger)

a.rawlings and Theatre Commutiny

Dub-Mixer Jarret Prescott

Tomasz Krakoviak and Paul Dutton

Gary Barwin

Me, Dutton, Rawlings, ??, and Prescott

Lillian Allen

Special thanks to Patrick Carnegie.