CanPo: and why the Internet is just the place for it

Yes, that's right: CanPo, just like LangPo, VisPo and VidPo. What is it? Another poetry manifesto with all the usual idol-shattering & exhibitionism? Well, not exactly a declaration & not so much a new poetry as one that's been pushed underground by mainstream CanLit establishment (the people who get the dollars & top poetry gigs!) & that other funky university-bred stuff that calls itself one of many things: post-avant, mash up, conceptual, slam, flarf, fluxus, codework, L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E, text, appropriation, cleave, ecopoetics, restraint-based, cancellation, concrete, moving, jump-cut, etc etc. We're certainly not going to add ourselves to that growing crowd of third-rate writing class experimenters.

And I can't lay claim to having named it either: it's Chris Faiers who, either intentionally or not, spoke of People's Poetry in those post-avant terms. I mean it seems we're already in a bit of a conceptual quandary from the outset: how to, namely, establish an allegiance to a distinctive Canadian tradition that's been sadly subverted & which a communitarian poetry ideal such as CanPo envisages will restore to something like its former glory. But a name like CanPo? Shouldn't we avoid the cutesy terminology of Ron Silliman and his L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E cohorts? Is adopting the title not a forced concession to changed literary tastes which no amount of ranting will alter? We ought to be in the game, after all, if we want to win.Those of us who want a true poetics back have to learn to navigate a middle course between subjection to the CanLit & post-avant tyrannies & reintroduction of the notion of the artist as a free, independent producer & consumer of cultural goods.

Even Marx cautioned wild-eyed revolutionaries everywhere not to storm the company gates at first but rather to be patient, working slowly & methodically to undermine oppressive regimes from within.Canada-Council and the university are regimes (make no mistake about it!) at the top of every radical agenda for critique & eventual overthrow. It's to them we turn our anger and not competing poetries out there. But we're not really communists nor are we prepared to go to the extreme of Black Bloc activism: we don't have to. I think of CA Conrad's "guerilla readings" at the Philadelphia Museum, an event marked by a friendly storming of a public space in order to read from the works of Gertrude Stein. Maybe we ought to storm Queen's Park and hold a similar sort of Al Purdy rally, once a year to commemorate the Purdy statue unveiling. As Faiers certainly will attest, poetry activism comes always as matter of safeguarding a national patrimony and its key symbols (such as Purdy's A-frame), things always bound to come under threat in a predominantly state-run cultural milieu.

Al Purdy statue at Queen's Park

CanPo is more than just a name & network comprised of symbols or sites consecrated to a ground-up literary expression (in decided opposition to the statist command structures in place today, with their regulations & protectionist policies). It's certainly all those things in one way or another. I'm particularly fond myself of poetry 'sites': I think of the Erland Lee barn where my own readings have been held or James Deahl's former downtown Hamilton "Artbar" reading series or Faiers's own annual Purdyfest celebrations in Marmora. Ours shouldn't be, however, just another cozy enclave of poets & poetries; it'd be likely to develop into another "official verse culture". And nor will I envisage for it any role in preserving a kind of pure Canadian poetics, whatever that means: such talk is mythico-political and will result in another closed system. And we oughtn't be too overly critical & resentful, prepared to give just unrelenting commentary on the inadequacy of competing literary expressions, since that would make the whole thing look elitist & exclusionary, which it isn't. Milt Acorn, founder of the people's poetry movement, would have found the idea revolting.

CanPo does operate internally to both the mainstream & fashionable post-avant. I'd like to think it does, in a strong sense, override both culturally through its vision of a literary commons characterized by openness & fairness and a real Canadian literary continuity. A good example of poetry community is to be seen in the The Grand Piano project , a "collective autobiography" of the early days of Language poetry in San Francisco. And speaking of Americans, I'd always thought the Olson-Duncan- led invasion at Simon Fraser in the 60s had prevented a Canadian modernism from fully developing. The radical Tish poetries of its day hadn't been good to people with a more traditionalist bent & all but killed the lyrical voice. A trend that would have continued were it not for the Internet. There's a very strong affinity, in fact, between people's poetry and a system of Internet linking & networking that by design works strongly towards developing a poetry community. Recently Faiers said he thinks Acorn, consummate conversationalist, would have loved the blog. Faiers:

Uncle Milty (Acorn) would have loved blogging. Milt always had several rants on the go - it was impossible to hang out with him without listening to at least two or three ... they did get a bit repetitious - if Milt had been able to blog his heart out, maybe he would have gotten the rants out of his system sooner & moved on to new areas ...

Software interface is not the same as a live interactive Purdyfest; wikis and blogs, Yahoo! groups and listserves, of course, are not an exact substitute. An Acorn rant wouldn't go as far on his blog. But Web 2.0 & social media are good for poetry, celebration and  research. It's just the place to critique the unholy alliance of Canada-Council, academia & their mainstream publishing outlets & the way they feed on the creative multitude: just the place to refuse to collaborate with any state-sponsored managers of the Arts, exposing them for the freeloaders they essentially are. Make no mistake about it: it's a distinctive type of "surplus value" they've extracted from artists, writers & independent researchers, one comprising of productive practices that they've both encouraged via state "multiculturalist"-style propaganda and then taken as their own so that today literary expression ("cultural capital") is practically indistinguishable from government policy. Here's the unusual paradox of the social welfare state acting like capitalists: and the even more unusual one of the radicals themselves today resorting to corporate tactics to cash in! And where do they go to do it: Internet.

Like good venture capitalists some of the erstwhile 60s Tish poets have paid a kind of forced obeisance to the Web: Frank Davey, Fred Wah and bpNichol, for example, are figures associated with the Simon Fraser revolution who've been digitized, a once thriving live campus and lecture hall activism reduced to links and online submissions. (I can't help feeling, however, that bpNichol would have chafed at the idea of his lifework being converted into digital archive: his spirit was too pure, & his work too mindful of the materiality of art). What happened? Whether as public archive, not-for-profit community venture or forum for academic discussion, the end-game is the same: the capitalist mantra of converting institutions into markets is being sounded everywhere. Let's face it: in Canada the Arts have been institutionalized. Readers, contributors and the odd troll are generously contributing to what Hardt and Negri in their celebrated book Empire refer to as "immaterial labor", "that is, labor that produces an immaterial good such as a service, a cultural product, knowledge, or communication" (290). "Immaterial" is also synonymous with "abstract", as in abstract bureaucratic decrees that are always very far removed from the real live conditions of artistic creation Ministry directors seek to control.

bpNichol

But there we go again talking like Marxists, & even borrowing current communist denunciations of internet technologies as the most advanced form of capitalist exploitation &how, in particular, it infiltrates the very productive processes (such as blogging, file sharing, free software use) that keep it going. Bloggers like me are, according to this, the unsuspecting dupes of software designers and the Zuckerbergs of the social media world who've amassed fortunes because we've been helping ourselves to all their free stuff. Managing to entangle users in sticky webs of circuits & drives, only a few profit from the potential of "informatization of production" (again, Hardt & Negri). Jodi Dean's argued very passionately for just such a position in her book Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive.  I happen to think the communist critiques (to which Dean is uncritically tied) are ridiculously misdirected and I've tried pointing that out to her at her blog: capitalists these days are pretty hard to tell from the socialists & radicals of old.

As I've already said, the "commons" is an idea that can be put to good uses where CanPo is concerned. I won't hesitate for a second to suggest it's rather bureaucratic arts-funding regimes in partnership with academics and mainstream publishing that are the "culture capitalists" who've turned the free labor of artists & writers into an "immaterial" type of property. The multiculturalist credo of inclusivity, fairness & equity in the Arts may even be compared to the "free software" and "open access" lure of informational technologies. Time was in Canada when culture and government were suspcious of each other, and a bpNichol could cause a furor in the House of Commons over his poetry. Perhaps that's something we need to think seriously about.