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". A
utre 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.
