An "Earish" poem of my own: sort of

Marcus Tullius Cicero

I've used for my own "Earish" poem the following source-text from Cicero's De Oratore, III. ii. 5-6 (Loeb Classical edition). Having read a fair bit of Cicero in my time & being familiar with the diction, subject-matter and style, I might generate a "heard" poem that satisfies both 'translation' & 'poetry' conditions à la Robert Kelly. It's the poetry, however, I'm hoping to "hear' most of all in the great orator's prose & to do it I will resist the urge to use the more familiar "seen" root-words and other contextual sign-posts. The sampling is small but hopefully illustrative of an important "Earish" principle of composition: that of "listening to the sound of the... poem until you can hear it as English".

Permulta tum vehementissima contentione animi, ingenii, virium ab eo dicta esse constabat; sententiamque eam quam senatus frequens secutus est ornatissimis et gravissimis verbis: 'Ut populo Romano satisfieret, nunquam senatus neque consilium reipublicae neque fidem defuisse,' ab eo dictam; et eundem (id quod in auctoritatibus perscriptis exstat) scribendo adfuisse.

If I rely exclusively on the aural & veer as close to the familiar English as is possible (singling out the most "heard" items), the lines of the Cicero passage can undergo some interesting transformations until a 4-verse poem appears. From a strictly literal, almost syllable-by-syllable translation, the first line may sound roughly to me like

pare moult a tomb weigh him in tea sea my content own nay enemy in gaining he weary him obey a diktat assay

the second line,

cone stab ought sent tent I am quay he am calm see not twos fray gains say cue to/too his or not tea sea mist

the third,

eat growl we see miss where bees hoot pop you low roam on know salty seas ferret noon calm sand not twos neck weigh cone see lea whom

the fourth,

ray poor bleak eye neck way feed him deaf you east say obey oh! addict tomb damned quad or torrid ought sea

and the fifth,

poor scree tossed taut bend doe add deaf you say.

The final poem's the product of a few more intermediary steps, some syntax, diction, tone and generous word-order arrangements, which I won't record here. Without them we'd certainly have what Joseph Hutchison calls 'gibberish', a poem denuded of sense. It's perhaps at this concession to authorial intervention that Kelly and I part company. I don't think you can leave even a "homeophonic" poetry to pure chance, hoping for the most harmonious constellation of sounds on the page: a certain degree of authorial manipulation is necessary in order for a poem to appear.

I'd like to emphasize the necessity of omitting some "heard" items in order to avoid redundancy & the chaos of an entire inventory of "sounds" that won't be shaped into a poem. I'll have considered this a success if a strong sense, at least, of the tenor of what I've extracted by ear from Cicero is discernible. Perhaps something of the excessive & inherently unpredictabile nature of speech sounds & their ability to disclose new poetical rhythms, new energies.

My 'Earish' poem is tentatively titled "Horace on life's brevity" (for Robert Kelly):

Await a tumult, content-weary
obey a diktat, my enemy gaining in him

Gains ought not to stab or consent to stab
his tea mist: I too am calm

on ferret noon. You roam, know not salty sands
where bees tent, you whom seas miss

Obey, poor bleak eye. You, feed him, oh!
tomb or deaf torrid sea,

poor tossed scree. Poor taut doe

The "Earish" poetry of Robert Kelly

Jerome Rothenberg at "Poems and Poetics" has posted Robert Kelly's introduction to his experimental translations in 2002 of some 30 of Paul Celan's poetry, entitled Earish, experimental in the sense that what's being translated from the German is not the original poem but something that's "heard". The poem in translation is "heard" by recognizing in Celan's German sounds accessible only to the English ear. (The "Earish" term is given primarily as the sound equivalent of Celan's poem "Irisch" for which the translation experiment was initially begun.) It's the sounds the translator records. The 'sounds' skimmed off the surface-text, however unrelated semantically they may be to the German sources, make the translated poem. It's something Kelly's dubbed "homeophonic": of it he says "By homeophonic translation I mean: listening to the sound of the [in this case German] poem until you can hear it as English-the result, the poem heard, no doubt 'says' a 'different' thing from the 'original.'"

It's an appropriative reading in which, again Kelly, "one listens to the original other-language poem until one hears the sounds of it as somehow one’s own." But it's also a way to write poetry, one that I've tried myself but with more emphasis on the "seen" than "heard". Kelly even admits to having tinkered with "homeophony" in his college days, looking for "heard" sounds in Horace: in any event, he seems to be the first to announce Earish as a new poetics, and Louis Zukofsky, via his translation of Catullus, as the first practitioner. Of course, questions are bound to arise, such as, Is Earish translation or poetry, or in what sense can it be both?  Is "heard" a variant of "found" poetry, lifting not lines but sounds instead? Or, concomitantly to the previous question, is the ear to "heard" what the eye is to "found"? And if "homeophonic translation" produces something that may bear little resemblance to its original & can still be considered a stand-alone poem, is "heard" poetry, in fact, a type of literary fraud?

I'll be perhaps the second person, after Kelly or Rothenberg, to defend "heard" poetry as a legitimate art form. I'll defend it primarily as a writing technique that begins in translation, & I believe Kelly himself does, too: "I am setting at naught whatever I may think or even know the original poem ‘means,’ and instead using just the sounds of it (as it sounds in my ears) to batter some sense into my head. Its new meaning." It's precisely as "new meaning" that the product of translation really can be designated a poem in its own right, sounds to be not so much gleaned from an initially foreign text as somehow deterritorialized (in Deleuzian parlance) into an entirely new creation. Celan's German text is a field of pure possibilities where translations seem to arise from tapping into hidden processes (among which 'sounds resembling English words' is one) that are both spontaneous and essentially indifferent to origins. But that's just a theory & at best an interesting aside: how does, in fact, homeophonic translation actually work?

Consider the case of the "heard" poem "All Dying Seagulls Are Broken? Nay." generated from a translation of Celan's "All deine Siegel erbrochen? Nie." (Again, I'm giving Kelly's English version both 'translation' and 'poem' status). The German original gives us the phonic blueprint from which Kelly's version is read, & all that's required is a willingness to read "until you can hear it as English":

ALL DEINE SIEGEL ERBROCHEN? NIE. 

Geh, verzedere auch
sie, die brief-
hautige, elf-
hufige Tucke:

dass die Welle, die honig-
ferne, die milch-
nahe, wenn
der Mut sie zur Klage bewegt,
die Klage zum Mut, wieder,

dass sie nicht auch
den Elektronen-Idioten
spiegle, der Datteln
verarbeitet für
menetekelnde
Affen.

Kelly's translation by "homeophony" gives us the following "sounds like" version:

ALL DYING SEAGULLS ARE BROKEN? NAY.

Gay verse ether oak
see, the brief
haughty elf
hoofing took her:

that the well, the hornet
fern, the milk
knower, when
the mood she tours clock be awayed,
the clock be dumb mood, weed her,

that she nicked oak
then elect throne dear idiot and
speak low, the dottle
for a bitter too for
many take a long dying
often.

A fairly predictable pattern of "sound" translation emerges in the opening strophe, consisting of no more than a tendency to rearrange a line of Celan's poem— by means of some easily detectable separation or addition moves— into "homeophonic" segments suited to an English reader (like me) with only the most elementary command of German pronunciation. And, of course, little or almost no familiarity with the poem's real meaning is actually necessary: it may even get in the way. Celan's "Geh, verzedere auch", for example, has been transcripted into "Gay verse ether oak" as if the original had appeared as "Geh, verz edere auch", a string of imaginary substantives rather than a complete (imperative) sentence arranged in fairly unorthodox word-order. A line like "hautige, elf-", on the other hand, has been fused into "haughty elf", with "hautige" shortened by one syllable, and a kind of caesural break in the middle of the line obliterated entirely, in order to force a smoother-sounding English phrase. How repetition of a Celan verse line can morph into one "sounding like" English can be the topic of an interesting study in poetic "lines of flight" (more Deleuze).

As I've said, I regard the "Earish" more a poem than translation. That something intended to be a translation can look like a bona fide poem speaks to me of the primacy of "speech" or orality. Sounds divorced from meaning (or only faintly related to it) can return to a primary language "chaos" against which semantical forces are ultimately helpless. Perhaps the failed chaoskampf in Celan's poetry & life—to be noted in Celan's real German poem— is as good a place as any to free "sounds" or let them live where they seem the most comfortable anyways: at the liminal edges between text and translation, away from enforced meanings. In the face of this radical irreducibility of sound to sense, I submit there can be no appreciable difference, after all, between John Felstiner's 'true' translation of Celan's second strophe, one attuned to real signifying practices (from Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan):

so that the wave, honey-
far, milk-
near, when
mettle stirs it to lament,
lament again to mettle

and Kelly's own "heard"

that the well, the hornet
fern, the milk
knower, when
the mood she tours clock be awayed,
the clock be dumb mood, weed her

I'll reserve the next post for an "Earish" poem of my own.

"Homer's Poem" by Al Purdy

This is quite possibly the best look into poetic processes I've yet seen: or, at least, the deepest kindest (most affectionate) acknowledgement of the source of true writing in general. It's to Homer every poet must light his fires.
_______

Homer's Poem
(There's only a hyphen between me and death)

Listen
- we are about to be born
we are soon to become alive
and fear is always alive
when death is near
Listen
- sounds outside the womb
outside are living sounds
of things alive
and they have names
and say their names aloud
but I remember
I have no name
I cannot remember my own name
Listen
to the name of fear
animal fear
for cattle are being slaughtered
it is a great feast day
and there is loud rejoicing
the sounds come to me
as from a far away river
a thunder among the mountains
Listen
I say to him
my brother beside me
waiting as I am waiting
Listen
I say to him
let us stay here
let us not be born
I am afraid of being born
and then whisper to myself
did I say those words
did I say that I was afraid?
-it was only a fever of darkness
only a shred of a dream
Listen
they are making ready the feast-day
there is excitement in their voices
they are celebrating
and the sizzle of cooking meat
comes to me
like the hissing syllables
of words I do not yet know
and saliva in my mouth
is flooding my name
- my name?
what is my name?
but I am not yet born
I have no name
tell me I say to myself
what is my name?
Listen
but there is nothing to hear
there is nothing outside
and we shall be born
into a world of nothing
a world in which there is
nothing to believe in
nothing to hold to
and I think if there was a choice
I would not be born
but there is no choice
Listen
I have remembered my name
and say it to those others
the others around me
who are also about to be born
although not into life
they are being born into death
I say my name to them
my name is Odysseus
in the city of life
which is the city of death
- my name that you may remember
my name is Odysseus
                                 (from The Collected Poems)

"Unoriginal genius": a plagiarism for our times

Too many people mistake a photograph for a work of art, a plagiarism for an audacity, a parody for a laugh, or worse yet, a miserable stroke of inspiration for a creation (Gilles Deleuze)

I've accused the avant-garde of unoriginality,and even of outright theft, often enough. See here and here for the details. The avant-garde is supposed to be quintessentially nonmainstream writing (in the sense of a new artistic era that's superseded modernism) but that distinction's collapsed in the age of globalization  When late-capitalist forces have engulfed everything from global finances to revolution to environmental activism, cultural producers must stop thinking they enjoy any special outsider status. There's really nothing for experimental poetries to be 'outside' of in the new age of Empire (Negri & Hardt). As a result, avant-gardists have resorted to a style of work characterized by repetitiveness and appropriation of old techniques, parroting the past almost to the point of becoming practically indistinguishable from advertising & commercialized art.

Either outright contempt or condescension has usually been the reply to the accusation of unoriginality. In the minds of its staunchest defenders (like Ron Silliman) the critics are philistines who are not worth the bother, to be curtly dismissed; it's been, after all, a year since Silliman's shut off the comments stream altogether at his blog. But I see now why the experimentalists have been so reluctant to fight in the first place or why rather there's now nothing really to fight over.The unthinkable has finally happened: what was once just speculative daring has turned into acceptable practice sanctioned by 'writing class' academics like Marjorie Perloff & Kenneth Goldsmith. Plagiarism, perhaps the last vestige of quality control left in the academic world, is now being touted as legitimate writing practice.  In fact, Goldsmith teaches a course entitled "Uncreative Writing" in which students "are rewarded for plagiarism, identity theft, repurposing papers, patchwriting, sampling, plundering, and stealing." A final grade is even awarded for successfully defending a paper they've stolen from an online source.

Wholesale stealing from past or contemporary authors, now termed by Goldsmith "repurposing", has become acceptable practice. A plagiarism for our times. Claims to creativity are no longer to be granted on the basis of original & insightful writing—an ideal dismissed by Goldsmith as "trite, overused and ill-defined". Outright filching through any means available is considered the standard. Cutting/pasting, appropriation, recycling and intentional plagiarism are among the most "vital and exciting" new means of significant artistic production. The author of Traffic (2007), a transcription of twenty-four hours of traffic reports from a New York radio station, positively gushes (as you'd expect) over this new "patchwriting" manifesto:

Far from this "uncreative" literature being a nihilistic, begrudging acceptance—or even an outright rejection—of a presumed "technological enslavement," it is a writing imbued with celebration, ablaze with enthusiasm for the future, embracing this moment as one pregnant with possibility. This joy is evident in the writing itself, in which there are moments of unanticipated beauty—some grammatical, others structural, many philosophical: the wonderful rhythms of repetition, the spectacle of the mundane reframed as literature, a reorientation to the poetics of time, and fresh perspectives on readerliness, to name just a few. And then there's emotion: yes, emotion. But far from being coercive or persuasive, this writing delivers emotion obliquely and unpredictably, with sentiments expressed as a result of the writing process rather than by authorial intention.

Poetry that comes "with dashes of inauthenticity, falseness, and unoriginality thrown in" is to be seen as the product of a type of "writing machine" (or poet, if you're old school) wedded to choices of code, programming and replication style. A purely processual poetics contemporaneous with digital technology and the Web is what's going to bury the modernists or, at the least, make them look amusingly antiquated.

Well, the critic has been silenced at last but not through any powers of persuasion. It seems my worst fears have come true. Poetry, the poet & the means of artistic production have become appropriated by late-capitalist forces of globalization. Goldsmith, who once worked in advertising & can personally attest to the marketability of "creativity", a fact that makes the notion of "creativity" a sham to begin with, couldn't be a better harbinger for the complete assimilation of experimental poetries to the self-enslaving circuits & drives of Internet technology and, stemming from it, of the media literacies ( via the much vaunted "mechanistic processes") that spawn an almost infinite cache of 'texts' to be thieved at will. It's ironic Goldsmith, the self-styled liberator of poetic energies, should actually point the way towards viewing the digital as an exploitive medium sans pareil, & get abjectly caught in his own Web.

I'd argue that the recent plagiarism manifesto is a natural consequence of not just capitalist forces: to a very great extent Language theory itself, with its wilful particling of speech and language and celebration of indeterminacy, is just as responsible. Poetic language has been diced up and served as expendable digital parts. Goldsmith's talk about the need to "hoard" text in this Web free-for-all, envisaging a work "pregnant with possibility",conjures up images of looting. It's a sort of riot mind-set in which the pillaging follows destruction of the stores. Frederic Jameson in an early essay ("Postmodernism and Consumer Society") once prophesied that late capitalism would be known by just such a fragmentation and loss of memory ("historical amnesia"), and the Language disciples (Perloff, Goldsmith) were quick to feed on the carcass. The desired effect of this total globalization & theory closure is to make the reader-consumer as forgetful of the literary past s/he comes from as last year's Spring fashions.

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.

John Coburn and the "Healing Hearts" project: or true Canadian art

John Coburn is an artist from Toronto, Ontario (Canada) who published a book of art in 2002 entitled Healing Hearts: a series of 43 pen and ink drawings made by Coburn in the months and years following the terrorist attacks in New York. In 2003 Coburn printed 3,000 copies to be donated to the families of 9/11. An art exhibition (curated by Toronto-based Beckett Fine Art) is to be given in Manhattan from September 1 to 15 at 14 Wall Street, at a site near Ground Zero. In fact, Coburn's work will form the basis of both art exhibition and an upcoming documentary film directed by Paul Perrier.

What is particularly remarkable to me is that his book would not have been printed, published and distributed were it not for the generosity of private corporate & artistic donors. His Healing Hearts Art Exhibition wouldn't be possible without the support of Fairfax Financial Holdings in Toronto and Sciame Construction in Toronto. Both art exhibition and documentary are being executive produced by film company owners Tom Powers of Open Door Co. in Toronto and Gordon Smeaton in New York.

Here is indie arts production more to my liking. Here is a people's art moulded by artistic vision and supported by donors, friends and sponsors who are willing to invest in significant cultural expression. What a refreshing change from the usual fatuous 'academic' arts funding such as the recent $60,000 "Research/Creation in the Fine Arts" grant awarded to Brock associate-professor Adam Dickinson in order "to write poetry about the impact of environmental chemicals and other invaders on his body". All of the estimated tens of thousands of grants applications made yearly to government funding agencies will never, in my view, surpass a single Healing Hearts success.

Well done, Mr. Coburn! I celebrate you the man, artist and cultural entrepreneur.