Oh bp! bp! look what youve done

The romantic vaniteux does not want to be anyone's disciple. He [sic] convinces himself that he is thoroughly original...Romantic revulsion, hatred of society, nostalgia for the desert, just as gregariousness, usually conceal a morbid concern for the Other." (René Girard)

Anyone who is even moderately good at what they do - in literature, the theatre, skiing or whatever - tends to become a national figure. And anyone who stands out at all from the crowd tends to be praised to the skies and given the Order of Canada at once." (Lord Moran, high commissioner in Ottawa between 1981 and 1984)

I won't hesitate to suggest that art considered only "moderately good" (as in Lord Moran's use of that term) stems mainly from imitation, but imitation of the wrong kind. Bad poetry is ubiquitous in Canada but poetry of the kind Canada's premiere 60s experimentalists (bpNichol, bill bissett, Fred Wah, etc) thought they'd learned from the Americans who'd visited their shores, and then shunted round the better 'modernist' specimens available. And, of course, who better to teach the postmodernist revolution than Olson, Duncan, Creeley, etc. So theory came with a dizzying velocity, unsettling established literary mores and spurring impressionable young middle-class lit. grads on to untapped creative energies.

By bad I really mean a misguided or perhaps misappropriated poetry that's really a copy of an even weaker copy of what was (and still is) remarkable avant-garde theory and practice. Atwood's dictum that Canadians are syncretistic in nature didn't seem to apply to a new "anti-Aesthetic" project (to use Hal Foster's term) that came with too much theoretical baggage and too few opportunities for a distinctly Canadian expression. Caroline Bayard, in one of the better expositions of the new Canadian poetics, The New Poetics in Canada and Quebec,gives a very favorable picture of Canadian assimilation but I think she's too generous. I believe the Vancouver period made Canada sadly anti-Aesthetic in the sense that it failed to accede to the earlier modernist initiative of W.W.E. Ross, Raymond Knister & F.R. Scott whose experimentalism always respectfully mixed old with the new. Poetry since bpNichol and Tish seemed to have lost its voice or rather it was garishly sanded down to grit.

Gulls churr: ululu, ululu. Ducks cluck. Bulls plus
bucks run thru buckbrush; thus dun burrs clutch
fur tufts. Ursus cubs plus Lupus pups hunt skunks.
                                                      (Christian Bök)

The opportunity to learn from the American innovators was there, the promise of a real cultural & language exchange but the Canadians just weren't up to it. Bad to middling poetry has been the result, a literary output dismally lacking in heightened language and, more importantly, in that creative interplay of sound & sensibility that separates it at least from prose ("LangPo" theory notwithstanding). It was as if their contemporaries Layton, Dudek, & P.K. Page, heirs themselves to an earlier  experimentation, weren't on the literary radar anymore.

But bad imitative poetry does not a bad poet make. As poet Andreas Gripp reminds me at times, most if not all of mainstream CanLit authors, without the pressure to write for a trite & banal magazine market, could actually produce superior work. I suspect that the 60s bad boys of Simon Fraser had not just failed to learn American models properly: they purposely misprized the efforts of those who could have offered better exemplars. So that even the few radicals who'd tried their hands at 'trad' verse later floundered, epic memory seeming to have been permanently erased from the cultural landscape.

You should know that, you adult;
why dont you flings your arms wide
into the juicy air, chuck your ardent loneliness,
bump birds out of their dark paths
homeward to their grieving chicks. (George Bowering)

And certainly not all publishable poetry in Canada today is second-rate but just that failed experimentalist type with which I equate the name bpNichol and that, in my view, has literally dictated how the business of poetry is to be conceived and disseminated today. What was once irreverently anti-establishment— considered so offensive that even bpNichol's winning the Governor-General's Award caused a stir in Parliament— has now become the standard for mediocre, pre-set verse. Coach House and Open Letter, staffed by bpNichol's own friends and colleagues, stand today, notwithstanding their masthead claims to the contrary, for the sort of uncompromising mainstream Art they'd once vilified. Open Letter even dares to claim it will "not accept unsolicited poetry". Autre temps, autre moeurs.

Where is the forest
not cut down
for profit or literature

whose blossoms instead
will close the heart (Michael Ondaatje)

But that's not to say bpNichol was a bad poet either. His significant contributions to the sound-text go uncontested (though Richard Kostelanetz in "Text-Sound Art in North America" gave "The Four Horsemen" barely passing grades): it's just that he didn't have a knack for the skilled 'serial', countersyntactical or 'poetry by field' styles of his American role models. I don't think any of them really did. The poems I've excerpted (the copies of a copy), scattered throughout the blog post, illustrate not lack of talent but the misguided way bp & bp's imitators tried to write, never realizing the potential for better formal & linguistic experimentation that lies in better teachers or their own writerly instincts.

We wanted to thank you


for painting our fingernails electric pink

while we lay dying in the hospital.

It was a lovely gesture.

We remember our last breath,

how we rattled like a toy as they told us we would,

and of course, what came after.

We’ve learned we can’t live

in the seed and in the grain.(Damian Rogers)

Whether they complement my own appraisal of Nichol, or seem the exception, will be decided individually. But cite them I will, poor lost ghosts of what I believe was a tragic failure of Canada's own 60s radical experiment: a failure to both assimilate newness to a Canadian sensibility and leave good substantive work in its wake. It's scarcely possible to tell one from the other: if I delete the names, I doubt anyone could. Ragged edges rather than complete, more aesthetically pleasing works designed on true principles of avant-gardism but rooted also in real Canadian traditions bpNichol and his crew cavalierly snubbed.

In the end, the edges of memory

            are licked smooth
                   by the rough tongue of time,
                              wiped clean.

All you did was beautiful, and good. (Karen Connelly)  

As to specific causes. To begin with, innovators who thought they were doing heady revolutionary stuff did so without an eye on where their works were taking them. It was a sort of empty constructivist impulse that made its young devotees too self-congratulatory and critically incautious to see beyond themselves. Brian Fawcett, participant in the 60s Simon Fraser scene, admits in Local Matters that "In 1970 I believed that the road to poetic accuracy ran right through the most rubble-littered intersections of the self." (25) A lot of contemporary work does seem to retain a "navel-gazing" quality (as Fawcett often says) that almost borders on obsessive subjectivity and may oftentimes lead to social irresponsibility.

You who.
You who never, who
neverest, who
ever unart.
You who summon the watch, who
hamstring the seeker, you who piss in the wine
                                                   (Dennis Lee)

Prescience has always been a necessary part of the avant-garde, theory staged always with a view to gauging the effect of Art on the human condition. Peter Bürger in Theory of the Avant-Garde mentions, for example, the conflict between "autonomous 'high' literature and a literature given over to the ideological reproduction of society" (ix) But our 60s avant-gardists didn't really contrast their radical styles against anything perceived to be monolithic, bypassing that crucial Bloomian "anxiety of influence" test : they got both Art and the salubrious sense of literary continuity all wrong, preferring to shatter the icons and then try to make new poetries out of the fragments. Gazing for decades into that fragmented pond. The problem with literary radicalism is that it's oftentimes entrusted to the young: how nicer things would have been if bpNichol, bill bisset, Fred Wah, etc had first been as old (& judicious) as Kant before writing their revolutions?

narcissus as it was so long a go
                                           e go
                                           and maybe even i go
                                           o go s poe goed
                                           edgarrishly
                                           all'a narcissistically
                                           so u go
                                           but u wonder y go (bp Nichol)

The "hyperreal" look of the real thing did appeal to certain interested groups.The publishing industry in combination with the universities looked favorably on all this, of course, both profiting by that spectacular 60s Art make-over (even if there really was one), hoping to get a lot of good years from the propagation of a Leonard Cohen-type of "romantic vaniteux myth, institutionalizing, in short, a sort of literary aping that has encouraged every self-styled artiste (preferably with good looks) to apply for Canada Council and write.Cohen struck the most dashing literary figure but, as I've said, the poet who scribed the model from which decades of weak (because wrongly appropriated) verses arose is bp Nichol. Mainstream Canadian publishing, buttressed by Canada Council and their ideological lackeys in the universities, has given their stamp of approval to a bpNichol-inspired poetics & turned everything into common fare.

For dinner they fry chicken, make tea and scones,


tarts filled with peanut butter.
He runs her a lavender bubble bath,

washes her hair, greases his own.

She lays her head against his chest
during late night TV, murmurs of the man
who gave her fame, and he of the woman for whom
he won his. She wants to sway
to the beat of his heart in her ear, slow
as "Are You Lonesome Tonight." In sleep
their tear-blotched faces could be anyone's.(Stephanie Bolster)

The work that inspired this critique of Nichol's poetics is Stephen Scobie's bpNichol: What History Teaches, a book that is decades old but probably a more useful guide to his writings than anything written since precisely because of its nearness both to the man and the radical poststructuralist 70s and 80s in which Nichol gets serious attention. And that's precisely the point. It's to him I think that the impetus and spirit of contemporary writing can be traced (though I could have easily included more than bp in the mix) because writing came weighed down with literary doxa. Like all his imitators Nichol really couldn't separate theory from practice, the two always clumsily interpolated in his (aural and visual) writings. Again, Nichol was not a bad poet but rather a poor student who placed himself purposely (and maybe too self-consciously) in a cultural abyss, thinking that to infuse his life's work with the fashionable word-salads of his day would establish continuity with the emerging 'New American Poetry' scene.

drum  anda  wheel
anda  drum  andaw
heel   anda  druma
ndaw heel   andad (bp Nichol)

So closely wedded is poststructuralist theory to literary practice (in not just Nichol's but Davey's, Wah's, writings) that many lines in the Martyrology, for example, can virtually pass for Derridean critique itself, not even bothering to make prosy theorizing sound poetic: "third millenium bc.../pre-diluvian pre-babel king/gilgamesh suffers disunities of language of time" (What History Teaches 122), and "given back into the drift of print/of speech/  born anew among the letters/a different tension/   different reach" (119). The one regrettable consequence of this propensity to write always according to critical theory is that Nichol dashed lyricism aside as too logocentric and perhaps too fatuously colonial for his purposes. And the results for poetry to this day have been disastrous.

elderly male smoker

lives alone
on
his x-ray

needs company

no
heroics

forget radiation

he’s
done (Andrew Steinmetz)

Language reconfigured that radically still, uncentered & carelessly errant, looks pretty empty of just about everything except itself: compelled, in other words, to draw attention to bare words, typographical alterations on a page & loosely arranged vertical and horizontal series. Any meaning it does try to make for the reader is, of course, given with the predictable word-play, author assassination and impish many- entrances-and-exits strategies of deconstructive practice. (As an aside, I suggest Nichol's adaptation of comic strips to poetry may have given some Ministry officials the idea to design comic book Shakespeare texts for secondary school English curricula today!)

if here is the centre

of my own geography
and I am the remembrance
of yours--how is it
we are so far from ourselves?
we are so close
we are almost attached (Gillian Wigmore)

And dear old isolable (semantic) meanings also go by the wayside, dangling loosely on the tongue as slippery 'signifiers', the poem caught in the closure of language that cannot mean anything but itself. There's something self-aggrandizing in the theory that brash experimentalists were naturally drawn to. Words are ultimately signs of more possible signs in a ménage of many possible discourses where syntax, "linearity of discourse" (34) and most of the traditional figurative devices virtually dissolve. It's the look and sound of words that matter, sonorously and garishly crafted to draw attention to themselves; and if words taken as 'signs' refer to anything, it's only to the way they reveal the unspoken social and moral (always politically correct) discourses of the day. After decades of this poetry's become the whetstone of critical theory only, and that means it's aimed like a primitive rocket launcher at any styles & meanings that threaten to stand out from the mainstream thinking of Vancouver 60s style writing. The results are dolmens in the Canadian landscape. "No unsolicited poetry here".

They are always talking about commitment: hers to him, his to his

family. The greatest good for the greatest number

and he has four children, the youngest is five. A boy should have
 man's example means a son should live with his father

so she sees her teenage son on weekends. Supposed to be
practicing, he slouches on the piano stool while her lover

sits with her at the kitchen table, sipping wine, glancing at
his watch. (Betsy Struthers)

Again, one last time, bp Nichol was not a bad poet (his remarkable innovations in sound poetry undisputed) and the poems I've dropped between paragraphs represent only the misguided efforts of Nichol & his imitators to write (and be) like something they're not:  radical New York or Bay Area philosopher-poets. Even Americans like Cid Corman and Richard Kostelanetz, who had nothing personally to gain from their association with Canada and only refer to our avant-gardists with passing interest, never really had anything flattering to say about them. So what was all that Tish and grOnk about. Oh bp! why did you trail off into voiceless, motherless deserts, lost in many nights instead of the one to which you were entitled. I doubt Derrida, Barthes ever read you, really. I doubt they had even a jot of the same genius for the autochthonous in Art the Canadians have if left to their own native resources.

Brian Fawcett's Local Matters: poetry, politics and cityscape, or why he stopped writing poetry 

My introduction to Brian Fawcett is entirely serendipitous, meaning I'd encountered his name by accident in Ken Norris's book The Little Magazine in Canada 1925 - 80 as the editor of an early Vancouver newsletter NMFG that was short for (among other things) "No Money from the Government". I know brazenness of that kind is common enough; it's what every editor and publisher exploits for commercial success but after all these years, Fawcett the seasoned writer, street philosopher and local activist, seems genuine, less apt to disappoint and not just because he was a poet and pioneer in the early "small lit. mag movement" days (his affiliations with the magazine Iron also coming to mind), and his site dooneyscafe.com has grown into something like cultural icon status. But because he's Brian Fawcett. There's just something personable, likeable and good-naturedly Canadian about Fawcett you sense when you begin to read him, and something you tend to miss—not just a nostalgic return to common sense or something—when you don't. Just the sort of person we'd all like to chat over a coffee with, eh?

The Canadian cultural landscape is strewn with the corpses of my disappointed hopes. How's that for an opening premise: but it's true in a sense. And it's why I thought if there's anyone who could sympathize with my dream of Canadian poetry renewal (among other things), it's Brian Fawcett. After all, he was once a practicing poet actively involved in those heady early Vancouver 60s radical days, prone himself to what he's called a "manifesto moment" or two along the way. Who better to co-author a nationalist rebirth along the lines, say, of a new National Energy Program for the culture industry. Fawcett as a Trudeau figure taking on all the literary Lougheeds across the country. The "Exile" article, for example, doesn't it combine the acuity of social criticism with the activists' sense of moral outrage? Yes, from name to a national literary awakening seemed a reasonable step. The point is anyone who reads Fawcett can get this easily enthused, he's that congenial and that good: if s/he could just harness this man's radical and critical energies, what wouldn't be possible? And to think if I'd skipped to the next paragraph of Norris's book, I'd never have known he was alive and never have written this.

I'm probably embarrassing the man with all this so let me take it down a notch. I'll say that of all the contemporary writers I've encountered Fawcett's seemed the most congenial and honest, qualities that get sadly compromised in a market driven not by intellectual content but celebrity-appeal. As for that heady activist stuff with which I admit I first approached him, Fawcett, writer and former poet, has also been something of a splash of cold water over the head .Yes, his is a refreshingly unbiased voice of social and literary critique but the effect of quiet, sympathetic perusal of his work can be to put you in your place. Though it'd be great, I doubt if he'll march with me in a neo-Aesthetics literary parade anytime soon (he does say he's agoraphobic, too): his poetry and radical poetry magazine days may be over and he's earned the right to say his peace, writing quietly in his corner of Dooney's Café . We should all wear our grey hairs as gracefully as he does! He is Canada's premier public intellectual, not John Ralston Saul. And Local Matters: A Defence of Dooney's Café and Other Non-Globalized Places, People, and Ideas is a delightful work that covers many topics, from the Toronto streetscape, to Starbucks Corporation, to globalization and poor city planning, things Fawcett is all too uniquely qualified to write about.

Fawcett is someone, as he says, who "accept[s] no tribal affiliations, not with my fellow citizens or with other writers." (68) If he won't march with you under any literary or national banners, it's because he wants you to go it alone, condemned (as writers are) to sift patiently through the data, all eyes and ears for what's good & bad about the world, and arrive at your own viewpoints. So go it alone I will, armed with the inspiration and same zeal for honest critiquing. And the issue I'd really like to explore is just why Brian Fawcett, literary entrepreneur, social activist and plain nice guy, won't write poetry anymore. Though he's listed a set of reasons in a chapter entitled "The Tides Are Caused By The Moon's Gravity, Not By Ours: A Personal Essay on the Future of Poetry", I believe it's this time the sub-text of his entire work: for didn't he try already an openly visible subtext for his most well-known book Cambodia: A Book For People Who Find Television Too Slow? And if I search for the causes among  areas of personal experience, literary influences and a bad case of global angst, I won't be too far off the mark. I'm convinced, in fact, that the decision not to write really amounts to a silent (but devastating) indictment of the current marketplace of ideas and of the intellectual torpor into which most of us have fallen. With so many more relevant issues to address, poetry may have come to seem a piddling pastime. Or perhaps he's making the even stronger claim that the world just isn't poetical anymore: one thinks, for instance, of Adorno's devastating comment about the death of poetry after Auschwitz.


I'm not all that unfamiliar myself with the temptation to quit writing; I did say I'm in a mood for a literary renaissance of sorts. Why do the Americans have them and we don't? And don't talk to me about Tish. The urge to overturn the tables at Canada Council has been building for some time now. Fawcett would probably say since I'm one of those guys whose writings have "no influence on the political centre or the marketplace" (120) I'm better off casting aspersion from the margins, a nomadic and destabilizing influence, the proverbial shit-disturber. The poetry scene today, in particular, both entices and repels me and it does so because I, literary nomad, don't have what Fawcett seems to have: perhaps the strongest (& ultimately the most therapeutic) metaphor for literary community at his disposal (And I know how fond of metaphors he is). I've always tended to equate state-funded Art (of the kind we have) with the production, and consumption, of second-rate work, a claim I'll defend to the end. If George Grant were alive today (a man whose wisdom I've learned much too late), he'd write a second book entitled Lament for a Literary Nation. But I continue to write anyways, angry a good deal of the time at both the practice and mainstream authors of bad writing in Canada. Fawcett, however, as qualified as he is to wear it, has cast off the poet's mantle and done so because today he speaks from a place that's always eluded me, a utopian hope, at best: the wise enclave of lifelong study combined with the activist's ardor and appreciation of the world as it is.

Yes, I'm a poet and so was Fawcett once. He was there, writing, editing and learning his craft under the likes of Robin Blaser: a pioneering sort of community-builder of the literary scene in Vancouver that's earned him the right to talk about Canadian literary history. Always self-aware and very much his own person from the start (tracing the origin of his first poem to a refusal to kill a cat (111) and his first encounter with the Muses to a terrifying coal shed incident(117)), he describes himself as "solitary, usually independent, but determined to be the investigating messenger of everything that was not me" (112). That he's carved out his own writing niche in areas of social activism is a function not of literary intention (as with too many) but of direct personal experience. The writer's best qualities and impulses just seem blatantly misused when all s/he's interested in is something as pretentious & self-serving as poetry and literary theory. Just too light, frivolous and insubstantial for serious writing.

It's Fawcett's belief that for writers "life is about writing, not about us" (116), as how could it not be when there are very pressing issues for writers to address (like the impact of globalization & multinational corporations on local economies). As city planner, teacher of prison inmates, parent and Toronto activist, he's chosen the path of the real rather than illusorily surreal, or irreal, a type of writing that compels him to be necessarily conscious of coherence and audience and writer interaction: a type of "cosmopolitanism" that he credits his early Vancouver experiences and particularly his Simon Fraser University days with having formed early in him. (147) Fawcett's dropped the ego-stroking, self-indulgent Muses of literary creation (without entirely dismissing them) for more demanding and "pedestrian" attention to precision, research and a sense of responsibility towards the world of readers as they are (118).

Literary influences, and particularly an era of Olson-worship in 60s campus scene, though at times the butt of sophomoric parodying, did impress on Fawcett the necessity to leave nothing unquestioned (in the true spirit of a humanist education); perhaps even more importantly, the need always to keep an ear close to the ground, preferring particulars to the abstract, the absence of which leads to what Fawcett calls a damaging "ground and figure" rhetoric that results in flighty and patently absurd writing. It was this combined humanist questioning and more pragmatic approach to university studies that made poetry seem to embody too much of the excessive bombast and self-aggrandizement of literary theory. And it was that sort of honest self-critiquing that led to the creation of "Serious Iron"magazine (140) in the first place, a healthy and educative outlet for pretty typical student confusion and self-loathing. Olson, the man and literary grandee may have been the primary object of much of this reverential lampooning— the poet-intellectual whose epic Maximus verses were writ large over campus skies— but it was all of them collectively, Olson, Duncan and Blaser, that led Fawcett, and his generation, to a new cosmopolitan vision, impelling them to see "it was better to think cosmologically than globally (as the latter has devolved), and better to think locally than to measure value in terms of nations and the myriad other exclusions that now make up our politics." (145) (It was the sort of effect George Grant and, to a lesser degree, Hans Georg Gadamer had on me in the 70s, kind, generous and clear-sighted men whose graduate seminars I had the privilege of attending). 

Fawcett seemed to have got the good Zeitgeist of his day, in a word: unlike that 70s type, say, (to which I'd been prone) that led to "spiritual self-cleansing" (25) and the notorious navel-gazing of most literary productions. The era of self-critical and bigger-than-life (Olson-and Duncan-style) cosmopolitanism has had the result of making Fawcett a critic of globalization, a term not to be confused with the personal and intellectual openness to wider "cosmological" issues that are just not always about us and that lie at the heart of a true world citizenry. It's a recurrent motif in Local Matters, deriving from both his hostility to the advance of postmodernist thought in the 70's and 80's and that early Blaser influence at Simon Fraser. The attention to significant local detail that informs a true literary consciousness is a far cry from the "atomization of political, social and cultural values and enclaves we've experienced since the mid 1970s" (155), pretty good descriptors of a type of writing Fawcett abhors and, more disturbingly, of the almost fanatically spiteful way educated liberals vilify people and causes they don't support. 

So why did Brian Fawcett give up poetry? Personally, because of his fear of open markets and a native propensity to sit alone, in Dooney's Café, meditating quietly, believing writers do their best work undistracted by much of the literary & social spectacle outside. And perhaps his early days with the small literary magazine showed him the silliness and impracticality of all literary nouveauté, always impatient to morph into something more noisy and controversial, always a little irrelevant to the lives of real people.

Intellectually, by the important lesson learned at Simon Fraser that a too busy concern with self-expressions of the navel-gazing kind (a favourite expression of Fawcett's), divorced from the wider human cosmos, are a sure segue to the new style of "self-aggrandizing but mainly academic techno-nincompoops" (155) who did actually monopolize writing in the decades leading to the present. The writer's job is, simply stated, "to make the world better and more understandable" (173) rather than join fatuous Writers' Unions and act like the literary lackeys they are. And here I'll throw in my bit, again, about Canada Council and the statism it promotes.

Globally, by the need to see always the bigger picture through a local prism, never substituting fake corporate charity for real "civic responsibility". In a word, to defend always the dignity of "non-globalized places, people and ideas".

Fawcett who won't write poetry because of all of these has also, in my opinion, delivered the most potentially devastating indictment of contemporary life since perhaps George Grant's Lament for a Nation or Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle. If he was a little embarrassed with my initial enthusiasm for his early pioneering work, he may now be downright angry at the impudence of an admirer to lay that title of iconoclast on him. But he has smashed a few 'idols' along the way, and I shall name them in closing. The unreflective habits of most academic writing in Canada (what does he call most of the professors he knew: "mediocre clerks"?), arrogant and always Liberal in scope, with the potential sometimes for real virulence; the chic cadre of postmodernist writers, artists & critics (like poor Grant McCracken) who work always by "polemical overkill" (157) and a love for meaningless complexity for its own sake; environmentalism, a movement that Fawcett says ought to give us all pause for the vehemence with which environmentalists talk about sanitizing the world; globalization, a term synonymous in Fawcett's mind with the ascendancy of money and corporatist power and decline of individual freedoms at the state and local levels ("The Purpose of Paranoia"); and computer technology, especially blogs and websites notorious for mostly subjective, poorly-researched and poorly-written work.

Sound poetry: Penn Kemp and the metamorphosed ear

"We have loaded the work with strengths and energies that helped us to rediscover the evangelical concept of the "word" (logos) as a magical complex image. (Hugo Ball cited in Ken Norris, The Little Magazine in Canada 1925-80)

The most resonant possibilities for poetry as a medium can be realized only when the performance of language moves from human speech to animate, but transhuman, sound: that is, when we stop listening and begin to hear; which is to say, stop decoding and begin to get a nose for the sheer noise of language (Charles Bernstein, My Way: Speeches and Poems 300)

you are this that you see
assume my name        my mantle
              become me       now (Penn Kemp, from  Trance Form)

I listen to Darkness Visible: A Sound Opera by Chris Meloche and Penn Kemp as I write. Then I listen primarily to write. Beginning with verses gets you as far as the page only, always typographically & spatially incomplete, even if it's the verses of Penn Kemp's Trance Form, from which comes the song opera's divisions into 'mattermater', 'moonphase', 'familiars' and 'bonepoems'. Even if the segments of Darkness Visible (available at 94.9 CHRW- Gathering Voices) most text-dependent are the apantomancy of "familiars" and the erotic "bonepoems" chant. Concrete poetry with the potential to turn into sound text does more than convert words into living performance: it knocks the text-as-king view off its throne, breaking the illusion that the textual is supreme, more ready to hand than invisible sound. And Penn's work opens up a rich store of literary interpretation accessible only to the ear. And this, again, even though most of the work is scored off the text.

It's my view that a Penn Kemp sound opera metamorphoses the ear, by which I mean she's not just making meaning but making song: and not just the song of chant, incantatory and almost mystical,but that of natural processes themselves. The text, even as wildly liberatory and open-ended as contemporary linguistics theory admits, can never be that fluid, 'multiform'. In fact, to make darkness visible, by which she means to restore the materiality of lived experience to poetry, is the audio text's primary impetus: particularly in the way it metamorphoses voice into any living thing imaginable. As she's said in a "ditch" interview (used with permission here), "Sound Opera is what I call my narrative genre-bender of poetry, music and sound. It is a new form I developed in performance and recording with collaborators in a desire to lift poetry off the page to the stage." Bending more than genre, in fact, but becoming the very space of poetry.

Apantomancy in "familiars", for example, means a divination by animals, a vision of ecstasy induced by communion with the turtle, lion, and tiger. But it's transformative vision, with poet-shaman herself turning into turtle into lion into tiger, speaker induced, at each stage, to "follow slowly sluggish with change/to unclean green brackish water/rolling off our great horn shells". "familiars" (from the latin familiares ) suggests also rituals of intimacy with the "green brackish" processes of every imaginable life form. Sound opera gives a kind of materiality to that ritual of intimacy, using modulated and rhythmic properties of voice to recreate a virtual divination for the ear. David Abram in The Spell of the Sensuous, a work that is the prose counterpart of Kemp's audio text, speaks of a "human speaking [that's] necessarily tuned...to the various nonhuman calls and cries that animate the local terrain." (140)

It's Kemp's sound opera that gives voice to the non- (or perhaps trans-)human world: for in poetry become augury "the snaky way/becomes my trail/becomes my antler".What's heard (or even imaginable) in both segments of Darkness Visible is the res ipsa of voice & the natural world to which it sings. And it can do that because it seems the ear (rather than the "thinking eye", as Silliman puts it) has been pre-set (perhaps through evolutionary design) for registering formal properties of sound, engaged primarily in what Charles Bernstein calls the "iconicity" of language, both written and verbal (295) It's hard to describe how this living reenactment of living process is heard in sound opera except as just this "ability of language to present rather than represent or designate" (295, Bernstein's emphasis). Meaning recreated as a type of performance (299).


In "bonepoems" the dark side of natural processes become starkly visible and audible, voices pitched into many roles, expertly ranged from keen to languorous chant to sexual play and release: from "overunderoverunderoverunder" to "quickbonequickbonequick" to "when soft flesh/withers". Here's a sound poem attuned not just to the physical but the mythological and linguistic. Instead of conjoined female choric singing (as in "familiars") there is a more haunting and sensuous male-female interplay: the male's monodic pursuit to female's dithyrambic teasing that results not in apantomancy but Tantric sex, a ritual of intimacy with nature's unrelenting & insatiable other. Kemp's voice, in particular, is a type of babbling (of plosives & aspirates) that in Lacanic terms alludes to the preverbal rhythmic speech of the female. Scripted meanings appear always intersected by the darker background male, a pattern of pursuit typified in Persephone and Dian mythologies.


If ever there was a Derridean binary worth unpacking, it's the text/performance one but suffice it to say criticism has leant too heavily towards the visual poem, regarding sounds alone as derivative and of secondary importance. Again Charles Bernstein, among the most elegant sound poetry theorists, makes the case for the semantic integrity of sound poetry

Indeed, the drift of much literary criticism of the past two decades has been away from the auditory and performative aspects of the poem, partly because of the prevalent notion that the sound structure of language is relatively arbitrary. Such elements as the visual appearance of the text or the sound of the work in performance may be extralexical but they are not extrasemantic. When textual elements that are conventionally framed out as nonsemantic are acknowledged as significant, the result is a proliferation of possible frames of interpretation (Charles Bernstein, My Way: Speeches and Poems)

The enchanting rhythms of a sound opera make the need for textual competence not just irrelevant but even otiose, as though the critic's drone were a violation of the text's true sacredness in performance. To hear the poem, and access it through use of pitch, timbre and breath pause only, is to re-encounter in it the language of the "poet-shaman", the oral text's essential fluidity and, as Hugo Ball says, "magical complex image" : its potential for aural metamorphosis in a way that is not visual or figurative but genre-bending.

So that as I listen and write I also intuit poet Penn Kemp as "sonosopher" and medium for transformation; and through chant, oftentimes the sound opera's primary channel, I sense the constellations of language, myth, dream and sexual play. As she says herself (in the same "ditch" interview), "Experienced viscerally in the present moment, [the sound opera's] dominant verb for me is 'to play'." An organic work (in the Coleridgian sense) springing out of natural processes: vegetative and meteorological, mineralogical & somatic. In fact, arising out of and back into nature's animate and nonanimate processes.The ear registers meanings of languishing streams, of turtle speech, and sanded objects strewn along a careless trail to "centre island" (the antlered syntax of the Canadian 'experience'). And not just figuratively for the eye but "magically" for the ear.

 Voice reconfigures textual silence into music, almost ex nihilo (and so Ball's "evangelized concept of the 'word'"). I'd even dare to valorize ancestral dream over waking rationality when I encounter poet and sound poetry through the very dynamics of primitive oral composition. As Ken Norris says, "Primitive sense and sacred time are being reawakened", both in a single listening experience. (The Little Magazine 137). Kemp talks of "restor[ing] poetry to the power of its aural origins around a Neolithic fire." To the ear encountering the mystical ménage of sound and poetry for the first time, the sound poem seems free of the constraints of traditional verse, not having to rely on the more formal conventions of metrical verse because of its inherent affinities to the pre-literate, the aural, Neolithic.

The sonic text is liberatory, freeing listener from syntactic constraints on a page; even if it begins or works with text, the concrete poem from which the sound opera derives, as though its libretto, the experience's also an essentially transmogrifying one in the way in which the text converts visual into sound structure. Sound poetry is a form that doesn't impose unnatural order on content: it rather allows that content to sing (and unwind into) its own stories. I will say the inner screen that replaces the neutral page becomes the highly charged one of transfigured shapes, objects and the new contextual alignments they create. Silliman thought, in The New Sentence, that by allowing the prosodic to escape from prose the new sentence can emerge, the "poet's prose"; but he didn't go far enough. Unleashing 'prosody' takes you not to prose but back to the "speech" of what Kemp calls "MotherWorld's enChantments" and her " seasonal song cycle of ecco poetry"): the shaman's chant, the sonosopher's dialogue with the place where all of nature's water, earth, air divinities interweave.

In Kemp's sound poem Flux, Flash, Flood, some of which is reproduced below, poets reciting in unison change the text not into lexemes (intelligible bits for the eye) but words charged with sound,words becoming not just signifiers but harbingers of the inevitability of natural (gynecological) change. There are none here of the usual letter or word permutations exploited for their rhythmic potential (at least not to the same obvious extent as in Trance Form): the "Flux, Flash, Flood" is strictly libretto to the audiotext's sound opera. The way for poet to register directly the concreteness of menopause is to present straightforward text augmented by sound, not reflecting about but with the inevitability of life-processes: the only artifice is perhaps that of the strong choragic female voice of Antigone, Elektra or Sappho, embattled but self-reliant still in the face of age. And the easy enjambments, nearly uniform stanzaic arrangements and assonance and alliteration (as in the title itself) make it nicely amenable to sound technique.

The subject of hot flushes never arises
in our conversation. Are we ashamed
to admit the extraordinary, the poet

as heating system gone berserk in
the everyday climacteric, proclamation
of sweat the race is conditioned to?

A fever of estrogen deprivation confuses
my cooling system. Where else would the therm-
ometer measure a Hermes of despair, a message
of ruin, a riot of theorems that do not compute?

In Kemp's Night Orchestra (Track 11) the voice, electroacoustically overlaid & expertly enhanced, foregrounds the poem even more strongly than in "Flux, Flash, Flood": pitch, intonation and vocal intensity create in the listener's inner space a poetry of the primal (and sacred) and never just its representation. What the poem can ordinarily do on page only through manipulation of sound and sense, here a solo voice does alone through sound, never the messenger of linear messages but always sinuous and deep.

Deep in summer
stillness, an electric
hum of air conditioner
in B flat flat monotone
entrains my body
              monotonous

Heat produced to cool
my neighbours thrums
the outside air, heats
up our collective night.

Mechanical multitudes
self-replicate in chorus,
relentless fridge and clock.

Again, metamorphosis is the key to Kemp's sound poetics, genre-bending, aural, Neolithic . It's perhaps the musical upper limit of speech as envisioned by American Objectivist poet Louis Zukofsky in "A" - 12, up to this point in Canadian experimentalism perhaps only ideally realized; or the apotheosis of bill bissett's own return to a primitive Ur-speech through a distinctively new pictographic reconfiguration of language(as in the case of Blew Ointment), and then, of course, through his own pioneering sound experiments.

True to the impetus of Ganglia, the Toronto-based magazine bpNichol first published for concrete and sound poetry (see Writing in our Time: Canada's Radical Poetries in English 1957-2003, 65), Kemp's sound operas fan out like nerve endings into air, earth, wind and night, registering fluid ecstasy, parturition or vegetal loneliness: animal, human and inorganic in a kind of sound collage that's genuinely avant-garde. Associated though she was with the first group in Canada to experiment with sound poetry,"The Four Horsemen" comprising bpNichol, Steve McCaffery, Paul Dutton and Rafael Barreto-Rivera, Kemp's sound performances are not meant (as theirs was) for radical 60s-type critique. For her it was "an expression of pleasure in word play: mishearings, trope and the fun of standing cliché on its head." ("ditch" interview)