Souster versus the Toronto Research Group: or the rise of the "altermodern"

...WHAT HAS BEEN CONSTANT TILL NOW HAVE BEEN THE ARTIFICIAL BOUNDARIES WE HAVE PLACED ON THE POEM. WE HAVE PLACED THE POEM BEYOND OURSELVES BY PUTTING ARTIFICIAL BOUNDARIES BETWEEN OURSELVES & THE POEM. WE MUST PUT THE POEM IN OUR LIVES (bpNichol cited in Peter Jaeger's ABC of Reading: TRG)

Another thin book of verse
about to be hopefully dropped
into that inviting, wide-mouthed well
which we're only now beginning to suspect

is bottomless...(from "With a Wandering Net")

Raymond Souster never warred openly (as far as I know) with poststructuralism, theory and theorists, but he could very well have. I can't think of any debate that would have done more to clarify the state of Canadian writing today. But then again, if Souster, considered a dyed-in-the-wool modernist, had encountered the poststructuralists, at least in terms of the reflections on the poem, the reader & the nature of the book as recorded by bpNichol and Steve McCaffery in the now celebrated Toronto Research Group (TRG), the reader might've expected Souster to come up sadly short. It might have been a disaster for any appreciation of Souster's legacy as Canada's greatest humanist poet.

Souster's humanism is, however, not an ideal to be discarded (as so much cultural baggage) in the face of the postmodernist. The lyricist's wonderfully illustrative eye may seem sometimes stale and even a bit sentimental at places, an unassumingly keen-edged poetry always liable to be blunted by outmoded deference to notions of nation, nature & literary tradition. Through the filter of about thirty years' worth of textual criticism anything's bound to look quaintly dated. Souster's work, of course, isn't actually stale or even irrelevant to the reader grounded in post-TISH:  the modernists, read against the findings of the TRG,will seem more a living work than reliquary. Incidentally, Souster's aware of the ideological divide that separates him from the younger upstarts. The Charles Olson reference in Souster's poem "Super Crow" (from Running out the Clock in Collected Poems of Raymond Souster. Volume Eight 1991 - 1993, Oberon), for instance, is certainly witness to the American influence in Canada's only significant experimentalist period, & though conversing and conversant with Olson *he can barely conceal his own disgust: not just to the Olson "Super Crow" but all the Duncan and Creeley crows invading his backyard Souster's challenge is unequivocal: "shape up or ship out" (48).

I believe a comparison of two very different literary discourses shows, if anything, that examining Souster through the eyes of Nichol & McCaffery may reveal a modernism never seen before. Or at least disclose 'traces' of a more distinctive Canadian writing that was never allowed to develop, stilled by the American invasion at 60s Simon Fraser. In this sense TRG's become almost exemplary in the way Atwood's only real significant work, Survival, has been for feminist & traditionalist readers: not the slayer but preserver of literary uniqueness detectable across many styles. TRG—what is perhaps its greatest strength—is not just a chronicle of an imported poststructuralist revolution; in the hands of capable literary avant-gardists, TRG theory may makeSouster into a more appreciatively read & understood author. And any vital modernist redux must come primarily through an examination of language.

Or rather the language of poetry research. By research the TRG means an active inquiry into the causes and conditions of writing. In the "Manifesto" chapter of Peter Jaeger's ABC of Reading: TRG, McCaffery states "the TRG research assumes an intertextual and (re)productive engagement with outmoded forms" (73), a symbiotic relationship between text & tradition, writing & the life of the writer. Pound's "make it new" banner can now be proudly waved on Canadian shores. But, of course, the modernist poet (reader) may have to make a few conceptual readjustments in line with poststructuralist theory in order to make Souster 'new'. S/he's faced, in fact, with some rather daunting challenges. Among the most radical recommendations offered by TRG (and I'll cite only the most interesting) are to change the book into a "book-machine", such as McCaffery's "panel" and Nichol's "boxed shuffle" texts,  something so manipulable the reader can't tell the real from the used (16); reverse the reader's role from that of consumer to active meaning-maker (40); make language radically "concrete" (24) (i.e. by investing more in letters, visuals & sounds on the page than text); upset the balance between language and reality through recognition of absence or the "blank space" lying at the centre of every poem (51); and effect the most radical break between text and speech (80-82).

Souster's already made some of these accommodations—without any indebtedness to the TRG I'm aware of—and to that extent the researchers have made Souster a more accessible CanLit poet. But a modernism in line with poststructuralist researches is to be read differently, even given a entirely new name. Taking key terminology from Hardt and Negri's Commonwealth, I'm inclined to drop "resistance" as a reading strategy altogether, & mark the difference between Souster and his experimentalist contemporaries as rather a "diagonal line that escapes the confining play of opposites" (102), something McCaffery & Nichol cannot seem to do. In fact, to call it "altermodern" (after Hardt and Negri) is really a way for critics to resist locating Souster in any notions of "identity" and "tradition", & argue for a type of  writing adaptable to a world of ordinary (& accessible) experiences. Where researchers McCaffery & Nichol cannot, ironically enough, break free from theory, Souster's poetry now can sweep gracefully past all the academic-poet's objections since he's, in a very real way, co-opted them. A few examples will suffice.

Intertextuality ("embedding" in TRG lingo) is, to begin with, a defining quality of Souster's poetry, too, & the man and work can encounter "outmoded forms" with the best of them. In his writings 'outmoded', however, can simply mean a variation on a recognizable theme rather than a discarded style. Prose verse, as in "The First Day of Falling" (52), for example, lets a purposely undefined prose/poetry distinction loose on Souster's charmed readers, his early fall description good for startling revelation or just purposeless fun with the usual literary stock in trade, a source of creative 'misreadings':

Even before the first day of falling the leaves on these street-side trees have worked themselves into such a nervous state that you swear you can hear them trembling on their branches far into the night. It's mostly because there's so much loose talk about the hazards of their terrible journey to the ground below. (52)

The aging veteran in "The Last Gunner down the Arras Road" (51) tries desperately to shore up a broken war narrative turning over in his Alzheimer's, himself a figure of history lost in the shades, the unsettling ephemera of memory and diseased tissue "where not one single puff/of dust is ever raised/by ghostly gun-limbers jolting past." (51). Here is the tragic dance of lack and desire much discussed in Lacanian theory. "Caird's Confectionery" (36) is also a prickly memory—an always deceitfully pleasant (sham) childhood rêve— that reveals its own startling "blank space" at the poem's end: "the sign CAIRD'S CONFECTIONERY/Candies, Soda Fountain, Light Lunches/no longer swings with the breeze" (4). And between a postage stamp image re-discovered in 1993 and the sinking of the real SS Cariboo by German submarine U-69 in 1943 as recounted in Souster's "Pictures from a Long-Lost World: SS Cariboo, Lost at Sea, October 13, 1943" (65) lie a store of personal reminiscences, dialogue & intimations with the look itself of a "concrete" text haplessly arranged on the page.

Souster's lives, works & literary creations, in other words, subserve an intertextuality that passes through a series of nonadjacent life-worlds: doing it almost nonchalantly, certainly without the intermediaries of 'theory', always reckoning on the fellowship of spring-worms (82), squirrel (95), & knife-sharpeners (171), & never ever compelled (because he doesn't have) to try for the brash textual distortions of his post-TISH contemporaries. Rhythm, elegant phrasal clustering and accessible senses are always at the ready so that the commonplaces of life in Toronto become quite extraordinary. I'll cite "Morning Voices" (113) as a bravura piece (reminiscent of Leopardi) written for a "single bird-voice" that's also full echo to the discord outside the poet's window:

This single bird-voice
that seems right outside my window,
has me fully awake now,
listening with every sense I can muster
as he appears to be trading notes
with a bird-duet somewhere in the distance
of the morning, still half-awake;

picking up their echo,
then sending right back
a more perfect one of his own,
so that a moment later when the siren
on a Jane Street police-cruiser starts to wail
like a banshee's daughter, I hear this intrusion
as a third voice only, which, being a man's,
is definitely minor-league,

so that after three or four outbursts
my ear discards it, instead picking up again
the echo, answer, echo, answer
of my first two perfect dawn-raisers.

Here's 'symbiosis', a real concrete sound investment in the lyrical text & acknowledgement also of the "blank space" where harmony manages to live in the chaos of life on Jane Street. Here's a living instance of bpNichol's injunction to "put the poem in our lives".

Of course, the 'altermodern' is applicable to poems of Souster's own distinct making, such as the historical pieces in the "Pictures from a Long-Lost World" series: "John Smith, Poet Laureate of Toronto," (21), "SS Cariboo, Lost at Sea, October 13, 1943" (65), "Airmen on Short-Arm Inspection, Moncton, 1945" (73), "Acting Bombardier on Paris Leave, November 1918" (108), and "Sergeant Macdougall of the York Volunteers, Fenian Raids, 1866" (148). Nothing in TRG can account for their mildly odd (almost anti-narrative) style,

This city's one and only Poet Laureate
(who could imagine a second?).

And today no-one even knows for certain
the year of his birth (either 1792 or '93),
or in what part of Ontario he was born,
though he worked on a farm until his early twenties (21)

one that turns regimental honour and duty into their satirico-comical other,

"It was all I could do
to keep from laughing out loud,
especially when the MO
started down our line of airmen
with battledress trousers dropped
right to the floor, so we stood
in our issue boxer shorts
awaiting his medical pleasure." (73)

has fun with the notion of Canadian identity,

"Ill never forget the rest of that leave

in old Paree, even though I was dead broke two days later—
there wasn't much the Parisiennes wouldn't do for us,
six-day bike-races at the Veldôme, Maurice Chevalier himself,
even then a big star in Paris, taking us to a boxing show
at a private sports club, champagne at the Folies Bergère—
you name it, we did, everything on the house,
for the crazy Canadians, even crazier Australians
and beer-happy Tommies". (112)

 & creates a generally self-inflating text that ends up reducing the language of patriotism to adolescent speech.

"What no-one knew then, or if they did,
didn't want to tell us, was that the men we were to face
(all Irish-Americans, hating everything British to a man),
were for the most part old soldiers,
seasoned Yankee veterans of the Civil War...

Looking back on it now, it's a good thing we didn't know
what lay ahead of us; not that we would have been dismayed
or showed alarm; but it would have completely spoiled
our little holiday excursion to the Falls,
made all our loud, ceaseless chatter,
our boyish whoops ring slightly hollow." 149)

 The diagonal falls across three world-events, & the result is that at least three generations of soldier-citizens & three intersecting segments of the war memoir, far from keeping the story straight, like to dissociate themselves from confining tradition & any privileging of event over poetic language. It's a concession to textuality very much after the heart of the TRG theorist, or even to the way 'series' suggests a deferral of a standard war narrative ("referential stability" in TG-speak) that's told once and then closed.

* I'd like to thank my friend poet Ed Baker for the "Black Mountain North Symposium" link.