Geof Huth: a gift of "Simply words, alone" sent to me on 20 November 2009

I've received a gift lately: a poem and words: wordpoems: "pwoermds" from Geof Huth: dbqp qbdp pdqb bqpd. And as I gingerly remove each piece from the bubble mailer in which it came I literally unpack a means and materials of literary production: first a light, delicate "birchth" poem (one of 29 copies), then an &² an/thology of pwoermds, the heaviest and most canonical item, to be followed by a Karri H Kokko dbqp leaflet, and the various other postcard & small chapbook "dbqp" publications by J. Ryan, Jonathan Brannen and Huth and his family.

A remarkable conflation of "genre" and artifact in one package if I ever saw one: maybe even of poet and materials between which it's at places impossible to distinguish. I've said in an earlier post about Huth's blog that his signature dbqp is a matrix for every conceivable poem-type, one of many "transcendental" properties of his "visualizing poetics". Huth remarks in his "Why One Word is Enough" introduction to his an/thology of pwoermds, "The reader must think through the possible meaning and image of the poem; the reader must take an active role in creating the poem in the mind." And perhaps among the single-word offerings contained in that package from Schenectady, NY, an active inversion of poet and his work itself can be wrought, even authorial possession to be seen as radically manipulable as type, font and page lay-out. No author but in one-word things.

And the effect (on me) has been primarily to tease, or disorient a little or just help me appreciate a complete immersion of text in all its configurable ("DNA") parts. Or perhaps, finally, to drop the foolish bias I've had against the "otherstream" poetics of Saroyan, Finlay, and Huth, as if I hadn't already intuited their affiliations to haiku, & earlier (more established) minimal poetry of Corman, Grumman, and Baker. Among the pwoermds authors in Huth's an/thology I even recognize some of my own favourite Eastern/minimalist authors: Marlene Mountain, Jim Kacian, Richard Kostelanetz. And, of course, Canada's own irrepressible bpNichol.

But Huth sent more than an anthology of verse: there's a multipage book marker by G. Huth entitled

bo,ok

   of

unLloʎdb

in which each page competes playfully with the others for the privilege of book-insertion. My personal favourite being Lloy d'Ll , after its eponymous author. And the Derrida in me can't help noticing the clever binary of wordbqprocessing/meanign, set one above the other on the same divided vertical strip. So I won't fall for "[p]arody of the translator, naïveté of the metaphysician or of the pitiful peripatetic who does not recognize his own figure and does not know where it has marched him to"(Derrida, "White Mythology"): no, instead I identify in each Huth offering the artifact itself of "simply words, alone", configured as one of many possible variations of the dbqp matrix, & handled delicately by the appreciative reader.

And a glossy "drawn photopoem" postcard by J. Ryan (dbqprescard Nr. 5 / ed. 120 / 10 IV 91) entitled "no moon" in neon-like lettering I can't exactly interpret much less reproduce here except as a combination of two words of almost visually contrasting luminosity, easily reproducible through text color alone. A bit of a tease this: a virtually unreadable side of the "moon" recognized only by a kind of penumbral haze enveloping the double "o" of the more garish "moon" poem itself. If I "take a more active role in creating" (as Huth enjoins us to do), I'd say it's a case of the poem's dark-matter (barely seen in outline only as an artistic courtesy) holding the visible text together.

And, again, a slip of "birchth", a little frayed at the edges, fragile but authentic (as far as I can tell), with the single poem caught in the birch's grainy stream. A one-word poem in a forest (after Ian Hamilton Finlay). I wonder what's become of metaphor here. And what counts as the putative Index may actually be a serial poem on its flip side—

g. huth
29 copies
& #b
objecta 9
11 oct 2002
db
qp   209,

a record in delible ink of the poem's origin and materiality.


And journals of "raw coinage" printed on a 3"X5" card, a more normal-sized card unevenly folded at the front and a mini-chapbook, each differently scripted & with variously differing text: in fact, if spread out in front of you the parts can form a sort of tangram mystery (again, my creative role as reader). The smallest acts as a kind of depository (I'm tempted to say syllabary) of possible one-word combinations,

any- gain
sandboat
daynights
gomogwa
bemember

then to be inscribed into a quad of ordering pwoermds that can be read vertically, horizontally and diagonally, such as is found in the larger "journal" card,

droubt           flaud



Chruch         cant'

with the largest mini-chapbook piece saved for the more traditional 'vertical' reading of text, the same type of one-word poems but now arranged to suggest a sequencing of thought (that's open, of course, to many interpretive readings):

li've/laugnage/whomb/groww/eyeye/jellymoonfish

I've received a gift of word-poems from American poet Geof Huth: a delightful illustration of what bpNichols once called a "gift economy" in which poets and artists are privileged to live. Works as "potlatch" are not meant to accumulate into grand oeuvres, at least not without distortion and compromise, and nor do they aspire to the elusive status of mainstream productions.

I've received a gift of  an "otherstream" way to see the world & its language: of "Simply words, alone". And for that I am very grateful.

Robin Blaser: or the problematics of dual-citizenship in Canada

Robin Blaser was (til his recent death this past May) a very well-known Canadian poet, widely read and disseminated (mostly by academic readers), creator of a body of work that represents an interesting synthesis of poetry theory and practice in our day, but alas, he was American. Or was he? Is that even a problem? Not even receiving the "Lifetime Achievement Award" in 2008 from the very lucrative "Griffin Trust", that gives its $ 50 000 prize money to a Canadian and foreigner, seems to have settled the matter of national affiliation: after all, did he receive it for work as Canadian or American, or does the distinction even matter? Is there even one to be made?

Northrop Frye, on the other hand, the canonical voice of  academicism and archetypal studies, was certainly not the agent for literary change Blaser and the Simon Fraser poets were in 60s Vancouver but, along with McLuhan and Innis, perhaps this country's most institutionalizing force. More Canadian than Blaser then? If all I have to rely on for an answer is The Fire: Collected Essays of Robin Blaser (Ed. Miriam Nichols, 2006), the response seems to strike another blow at Canadian literary autonomy, or even self-respect: no, Blaser, erudite, interesting & well-intentioned as we was, inspiration to Canadian poets and critics who read him (including myself) cannot be touted as a distinctly Canadian accomplishment any more than could the Maple Leafs former captain Mats Sundin. There was just nothing Canadian about him.

Resurrecting old 'nationalist' concerns along lines of Keith Richardson (Poetry and the Colonized Mind: Tish), George Grant (Lament for a Nation)  and (the earlier and more interesting) Margaret Atwood (Surfacing) may seem in bad taste today, contrary to the modern bias for cosmological citizenship.  A Canadian but with dual U.S. citizenship, understandably,  can perhaps see nationalist limitations—ripe for critique or re-reading—better than those (myself included) who've lived in Central Canada. Or could he? Again, I doubt it and I have Blaser's own words to show he brings forward only the most staunchly American perspectives to the discussion of poetry & poetics, unable to drop them even when reading Bowering, Dudek and Dikeakos. Canadian themes, authors and related artistic disciplines never stray from an Olson-Duncan ("Black Mountain")  project and an even wider socio-cultural assimilation to foreign traditions always part of Blaser's own interpretation of things.

Nichols has divided the Collected Essays into poetics and commentaries, reserving the end for her own summary overview of Blaser's main ideas. But there's also the equally vital anecdotal record, the reminiscences, reading habits and his own quirky predilection for extensive citation: all of which reveal the man & his own biases as forcefully as the essays themselves do. Whether reflecting on poetry or on the practice of poets and artists Blaser is constrained to a single style, terminology and distinctively American modo di parlare. A labyrinth from which he isn't able to extricate himself (even in his best passages).

Blaser's American in the uniquely American postmodernist thinking he everywhere espouses.  The form and content of the man, molded in this poststructuralist didactics, combine to reveal a distinctive intellect and personality, particularly the eclecticism of his method: form is for Art and its primarily postmodern methodologies (Blaser discussing not just poets but novelists and collage-artists), content for the characteristically Blaserian style, "the personalness of language and form" (7), forged in Berkeley Renaissance and cast over a wide body of learning and personal experience. And Canada, of course, is caught in that net of critical commentary.

It's in "The Fire", for example, that the form of Blaser's critical practice announces itself as "a writing about my poetry in relation to poetry" (3), the need to tie the style of the man to an American poetry tradition. Indissoluble everafter.The serial poem (5) emerges as the exemplar: by which is meant not slavish devotion to Form but rather, as the title means to suggest, the "heat of the process" (10), Blaser's primary metaphor from this point on for poetry as a pure engagement with "the specific, the particular, the place" ("Particles" 21), a typically postmodernist move away from the tyranny of "totality" (Lyotard cited in "Mind Canaries" 251) towards a normativity of textual loci, discontinuities and slippages.

It's in the elixir of "particularity" that poetry works as a kind of world, complete with inhabitants, rivers and maps (25), a deleuzian "thousand plateaus" vision of reality made sayable through a radically heterogeneous language. "The reading of a poem," Blaser says, "is the re-enactment of the images of contact with the world" (24), landscape and language set as limits to the possibility of any artistic expression. The key to that last statement is in "images". "The Stadium of the Mirror" is where three traditions meet at a crucial crossroads for an understanding of the poetic "image": the personal (Blaser), American (Olson) and European (Arendt, Merleau-Ponty, Lacan). Through a reading of his own "Image-Nations" series (from the Holy Forest collection), Blaser appropriates for his uses a basic Lacanian "image" motif, abetted by Arendt's socio-cultural insights into the modern condition & Olson's own grand designs on Language (envisaged as no less than a return to a Pleistocene poetics), with Merleau-Ponty providing a useful "phenomenological process" vocabulary. The man's repertoire is amazing.

A ménage of influences and personal idiosyncrasies that results in a highly delicate kneading of experience into the stuff of the "serial" poem. The necessity for native & foreign influences is seen to lie in the very living substance (embodiment) they confer on a poem's genesis and growth. Again, the dominant metaphor of alchemical "fire" in which a poem crystallizes. In Blaser's own words:

The serial poem constantly circumscribes an absence that brings its presences to life. An indefiniteness that is one of the providing aspects of the world. The reader is disclosed in an act of such worldliness, or rather, he(sic) is open to it, and has not constituted the real himself. He may enter a disclosed obedience, different from the polis imposed upon our time. He—there—then—comes to a gate. And as he steps through, he becomes invisible—suddenly to begin his visibility again ("The Stadium of the Mirror" 34).

Poetry, in this Blaserian synthesis, is an artifact of the world, a living testimony to sense & sensuality, a real contact with the image because of the way it meets us at many levels of our Dasein. Blaser's own term for that Heideggerian engagement is the "world-image", again typical of his penchant for synthesis and critical appropriation. But, of course,  membership in this new poetic Cosmos comes with the death of anything that smacks of "lyric voice" ("Poetry and Positivisms" 39): par for the poststructuralist course. Only the materials of language, art and music count, so that Art turns into so many types of "positivisms", collage in a radical Rauschenbergian sense and atonality, respectively. Even a "materiality of soul" where a sense of the sacred is concerned (41): no hostages taken. The arts and the sacred form parts of the same discourse ("The Recovery of the Public World" 78)

Blaser is certainly countenancing an anti-modernist stance, as his repeated references to Arendt attest or, at least, those great modernist figures with outside-the-"Western box" instincts like Rilke, Mallarmé and Broch who seemed to prefigure and eschew the terror of Absolutist tendencies in their own age. The way they are, as Blaser says in regard to Mallarmé, a "kind of distillate of so many intellectual challenges to art." (57)

Well and good: Berkeley Renaissance poet with strong anti-modernist roots in the historicism of  Olson and Arendt and the irreparably "shattered" transcendentalism ("The Irreparable" 107) of Mallarmé, Lacan, et. al. Whose reading of Spicer, the best and most impassioned of them all, is a definitive catalogue of Blaser's own poststructuralist beliefs: that (a) the 'serial' poem, after Spicer, is a sort of Jamesean house of fiction in which lights flicker on and off ("The Practice of Outside" 119); (b) content is a "doubling" of the unsayable and the act of "dictation" by which the invisible becomes visible, again after Spicer (121); (c) the ghostly voice is not that of narrator but of a "composition" made visible through its cryptic, gnostic and intensely lonely language (123); and (d) the journey from the unsayable to poetry constitutes a "field" or "topology" of writing, the ground from which a writing begins, resulting perhaps even in a new literary form (127). Was all of it bound to lead him in the end to make the definitive case for an Americanized poststructuralist poetics in which

the push of contemporary poetics towards locus, ground and particularity is a remaking of where we are. In this sense, the poem becomes an extraordinary field of forces which measure and contain the I of men(sic) and poets. From Pound's hierophanies to Williams's ground to Olson's cosmology to Spicer's narrative of the unknown, a remaking of the real is at stake. One needs only to notice how much of it is a common experience and also something regained, rather than an invention.(133)

And which Blaser carried with him even into Canada's dark waters (his portmanteau criticism), talking about Bowering and Dudek, in particular, as if they were special cases of a pretty even paradigmatic model. With really little or no attention paid to the quintessentially native sensibility of the writings (without exception) of all Canadian poets since at least the modernist 30s and 40s. Including even the bad boys of Tish whose voiceless, fractured and asyntactical writings always kept room for opposition from their intimidated critics.

At least, it's the way Blaser always appears to speak (at least to me). The Canadians (and I am excluding Blaser's reading of collage-painter Christos Dikeakos) come in for a heady dose of the indeterminacy-become-determinate elixir of Spicer poetics, bolstered always by the Berkeley Renaissance pulsions whose weak version took place in 60s Vancouver, at Simon Fraser University where Blaser taught for two decades. It's as though ours has also been a literary destiny forged in the same American "fire". But it isn't and the great poet-critic should have known better.

In his reading of Bowering Blaser almost seems to be applauding a 60s experimentalist student on correctly ingesting the Olson-Duncan aesthetics: he everywhere praises Bowering (and bpNichol and Fred Wah, almost in the same breath) for simplicity of expression ("George Bowering's Plain Song" 179), the right use of "indeterminacy" (179) and the consequent "doubling" effect of a wounded writing that's always reminiscent of Spicer. As though all he ever talks about is Spicer. Death of lyricism reinforced by fragmented expression, and an always accompanying sense of alienation in a cultural landscape result in the desired "multiplied voices" technique of postmodernist writing (182): the usual haunting cri du coeur for the loss of artistic unity & identity. Typical of Blaser's "palimpsest" criticism is his reading of Bowering's novel A Short Sad Book, of which he says (among other things):

The text begins with an apparent naïveté of surface and brief, simple sentences that stop and start as if the "novel" itself were talking back, and it is. This is the beginning of a lost innocence in writing, which is our own, the reader's loss, and of a regained language and imaginative form. A marvellous, raucous laughter works on us throughout (183).

The case of Dudek is more interesting still since of all the Canadians Blaser praises, he's the poet of "large imaginative structures" (190) and so the most opposed to the Olson-Duncan literary agenda, and so to Blaser himself. Perhaps a case here of the purveyors of "fragment-structure" always guiltily giving leeway for their critics to speak. A very strategically placed acknowledgement. Dudek with Layton, Avison and Page formed the only counterpoetics to Tish, the modernists whom Simon Fraser had successfully strangled. Almost equating them, in the minds of a generation of future poets and readers, with the outmoded Confederation poetry the original Canadian Imagists (& Objectivists) had directed their polemics at the turn of the century. I'd like to think of them as the recurrent nightmare in  literary experimentation not likely to dissipate and that, in my view, makes the poststructuralist project ripe for overthrow.

Dudek is touted as if were the Canadian Ezra Pound ("Infinite Worlds: The Poetry of Louis Dudek" 262-3), the modernist problematic that an era of "fragment-structure" won't dispense with easily (if at all). Even Blaser must see Dudek and his work as "an inheritance, directly engaged, from that whirlwind of meaning which identifies the modern project in art, philosophy and science. Dudek's work belongs to that project; that is its argument and that is one measure of its size." (263) Devoted to long narrative poetry, and to cherishing the cultural continuities it's designed to carry forward & hold as part of a tradition worth saving in the face of the age's love of "vanity", "the commonplace" (278) & junk aesthetics, Dudek may very well be Blaser's own inverted mirror-image. Image of the problematical Other that doesn't seem to sit well with him (notwithstanding the profuse praises) because it's perhaps himself he's sensed as foreign, the ex-pat faced with the difficulties of transporting a viewpoint that's not that adaptive to the Canadian tradition. Problematics of dual-citizenship!

In the face of a real Canadian , Blaser has no option save to smother the man & his work in the usual layerings of American poetics: the same descriptors for Dudek's works, like "indeterminate", "doubling", "fragment-structure", etc., as have been pretty consistently used throughout the entire essays. Except, of course, that here modernism won't dissolve and the Canadian literary experience won't give up too handily its strong Dudek lyrical and narrative voice.

Transcendental poetics: a primer for Internet reading & writing

We are no longer a part of the drama of alienation; we live in the ecstasy of communication. And this ecstasy is obscene. (Jean Baudrillard, "The Ecstasy of Communication")

There is always an Other; and this Other willy-nilly turns interpretation into a social activity, albeit with unforeseen consequences, audiences, constituencies and so on. And, I would add, interpretation is the work of intellectuals, a class badly in need of moral rehabilitation and social redefinition. (Edward W. Said, "Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies and Community")

It is my belief that it is somewhere in this messy denial of the thought of poetry that an explanation can be found for the importance of community. That poets do band together...The reason is that only in such communities is the necessary talk of this high, serious realm possible. Such communities tend to build a structure for men (sic) who wish to keep, hold, and record the passionate relation with the outside that the world, the nation, need. This the only place where such talk goes on. (Robin Blaser, "The Fire")

The call to virtual ethics! It's a requirement for responsible e-communication made necessary these days by the Internet's gross heterogeneity & bewildering array of blog-types—a potentially (if not actually) morally messy place where writing behaviours, according to "Social Media Behaviour in a Venn Diagram" (in blogtactic) can range from ADHD to narcissism to stalking—Perhaps envisaging a vital e-"community" (as in Robin Blaser's sense of the term in epigraph) is a necessary first step. Alas, the hope. What Baudrillard has remarkably called an "obscenity" is perhaps the inverse of that ethical call, or a kind of e-writing hostile to community of any sort. That is, the asocial (at times even apolitical) beast we find it today to be. "It is the obscenity, " as he says in his essay 'The Ecstasy of Communication', "of what no longer has any secret, of what dissolves completely in information and communication."

I'd like an ethics of e-writing to try revealing (at least to me) the secret of a wholeness that can't be too easily tampered with.What's at stake is the notion of text itself, about to be reconfigured into E-page technology with the potential to rewrite 'writing' itself. I'd like a return to opaqueness and mystery before the page turns into "display modules" (& real space runs out): a text viable enough to spur bloggers on to a sense of the importance of saying the unified instead of the always more fashionable ruptured text sans syntax, sans author, sans memory. Can e-writers, in short, give themselves the job of eliminating as many of the barriers as possible to this 'new' form? And what would be the mode of attack anyways?More on that later.

I've suggested, after Levinas, that a sense of writerly proprietorship would be necessary. He's provided the term 'transcendental' but it's the impetus and not the substance of the term I need: the obligatoriness, not the uncomfortable strictures to act in a way writers would probably find uncomfortable. Levinas and the pope aren't good friends for nothing. I'm thinking more of the "silent, radical, one-sided and impossible" ideal of ethical behaviour that the Danish philosopher Knud Ejler Løgstrup proposes in The Ethical Demand . Internet ethics must comprise of a spontaneous, uncompromised sense of restoring the integrity of site and the writer/writing that inhabit it: restoring (especially where one doesn't exist) a community of interested, genuinely good stewards of their Internet garden (in the way Jonathan Zittrain suggests here).

We've stacked gnawing imperatives somewhere back in the human genome (not conscience or heart), adaptive (or even assimilable) to writing emergencies such as the Internet creates from time to time (again, see the Zittrain video).They'd send through the system just the right shock-waves &  admonitions to step responsibly onto new ground.The move into somebody's domain has to be principled but not overbearing. To an increasingly contracted (and radically varied) space of Internet communication we must direct all our resources.All the unwieldy theorizing we'd normally associate with rigid (deontological) ethical discourse would just get in the way. Without checks the ethical could be a hindrance to the technical.


It's not concrete moral dilemma we have to do with here anyways:  a creative indeterminacy has run rampant and it's time for a 'close writing' guided by new transcendental imperatives. Away from critical distractions, writing & the writer begin to reinvigorate all those intention-and-practice correspondences that have been discarded. Not with the idea of restoring them; a point of non-return has been reached. It seems almost as utopian as some of the modernist literary projects (like Joyce's Finnegans Wake, Pound's Cantos, etc), and still, just because of the need for accountability the new e-literacy requires, the Internet writer (blogger) discerns in the attempt something of a radical stil nuovo pulsion.

The blog, with its monomaniacal eye always turned out, is bound to be resistant to radical 'accounting'. I suppose it's the problem with Absolutes of any kind, now a technological one, that Blaser says "is careless of relations in the world and tends to become a dreadful, fun-house, mirrored image of Humanity." ("The Recovery of the Public World" in The Fire: Collected Essays ).How can it be otherwise with an Other that is of the author's own mirrored intention and design? Not mimetic but mirrored Humanity. Hardly a new experimentalism and yet nothing could be more extreme. E-text works with astonishing complexity and processes, layered into creative instincts, have to be content with the deadening white planar surfaces they get. 

The blog, if we subject it to analysis, is certainly not an unbiased copy of the world (not the silly reportage made famous, say, by The Huffington Post blog, etc. ) but a rigorous technics adapted to word, visual and sound processing projects: it is the daily register of its own form and contents, and just as interestingly critical (& suspicious ) of  the world of things as avant-garde Art itself. As witness the "obscene" amount of differing data evident online. Even Finnegans Wake wouldn't look too out of place on the Internet.

How to read the blog, if coaxing it out of its headspace is potentially perilous, and then write it? The underlying principle of a transcendental ethics in writing is that care be taken never to overstep/ override the text to which inquiries are directed in a reading (and direct they must be if a writing is to begin). 'Taking care' is, of course, a Levinasian gesture. Which can be demonstrated primarily in a basic application of what I'll call an attributive protocol. To the text, always single & knowable in itself, can be attributed an 'ethics' never independent from a set of potentially verifiable imperatives, ways of calling the author out, and which the reader must at least intuit before he writes.The reader's never a "conquering and voluntary ego" (Levinas, Otherwise Than Being), the sly Derridean nor the lackadaisical flâneur who casually strolls into another's writing ; s/he rather works with a view of reflecting the authorial acknowledgements already made to the text. Its congenial accessibility to an author and a work the reader first must face (again, Levinas): imperatives to be both responsible readers & writers.

Among the most important imperatives to be called out are the following. Firstly, forms and their combinations into genre or even more loosely structured types (like scripture, Gilgamesh, fin de siècle, curriculum theory etc), conjectural or established; secondly,analogy, contrasts, implicative theses-making, processual analyses or any other expository tags for the traditional ends of writing; thirdly, and more controversially, the expressionist or ideational pulls to originary sources, such as Celtic, Marxist or nouveau roman, always present in a work whether acknowledged or not; fourthly, cultural strategies with indices for the recovery (not discovery) of essentially transmissible parts (and their relations, antinomies and concordances); and lastly, and perhaps the ground of all of them, a set of parallel or incongruent reading histories of an author, seen as either a deliberate superimposition or lurking quietly round the edges.

All these serve as a way to scope out, canvas and then prepare a text for that transition from headspace to something that's writable, at last. To something like a 'close writing'. A title, sometimes more properly attuned to the site than even the textual body, may be the first to suggest rules and set a sort of 'lexical positioning' network in motion. Or, at least, intuit a way for an unerring eye to see what's lying just ahead. Take the example of Geof Huth's site dbqp: visualizing poetics, or the mirrored letters of a title that look as if they're about to actualize into text. To see (and visualize, perhaps in the sense of imagining) the possible reconfigurations of material language: already an intention and design, as close to us as the site's own transcendental ("dbqp") Logo. And we haven't even begun to read the blog text yet.

And when we do, randomly but never intentionally beginning with the latest post (Tuesday, November 10, 2009: "The're is No The're The're (or maybe the're is)") we find a loosely re-structured type of a found (or commemorative) poem (imperative 1) with textual commentary, a birthday poem Huth actually began a year ago so that two poems 'virtually' appear in the November 10th post, the first entitled "Bearth: Day”, and second "Water of Life", both appearing together and giving interesting contrastive sides (imperative 2) to a single co-celebratory/co-textualized event.

 In both poems a singleTed Berrigan line is repeated, "Today, I am 49 years, 5 months and 16 days old", both appearing at its end. And because of its 20-line verse limit Huth calls it "vigesimon (vigesima, the plural form), after the fact of its twenty lines."  Really a kind of postmodern variation-on-a-theme technique (that's also weakly serialist in design) The explanation for the number 20 shows Huth as an author who's consciously tied to both expressionist and Mayan (and, as he later admits, Shakespearean) cultural sympathies of his own (imperatives 3 & 4, respectively). In Huth's own words,

Twenty has been an important number to me, for two reasons: 1. It represents the Mayan “full man,” the full count of digits (fingers and toes) of a man, thus the complete man, and more importantly so since the Mayans appear to have had a base-20 numbering system; 2. My twentieth year was the most reckless and difficult of my life, and turning 20 seemed like a irrevocable transformation into the adult I never wanted to be, making my twentieth birthday almost a harrowing experience, and who else has had that ridiculous reaction to twenty? Birthdays neither bother nor please me now, and I expect no untoward reactions to turning fifty next year.

An envisaged work ("project"), with errantly misplaced indices & subsections within of various lengths, is to arise from interestingly incongruous readings by Huth himself of a single point of 'origin' . A face-to-face meeting of poem and literary project (imperative 5). His own remarks on the fractured (irregularities) of the work's projected  The’re title marks an originary return to the transcendental origin of his "dbqp" site: the true Logo(s) of any "visualizing poetics".

Deconstructing 'Sopranos': crumbling text, asymmetry &  song in  Episode 13 entitled "Army of One"(Season 3, 2001)

If I puff a tv show like 'Sopranos', it's not to show the ubiquity of pop culture, liberal broadcasting standards of HBO or even my own predilection for mafia storylines (though I've always been fascinated by them) but rather to give it its due. 'Sopranos' is nothing short of brilliant production work.

 Cinematic techniques run the gamut from film noir, to surrealist cinema, to pulp detective and, of course, classic gangster (kudos to David Chase); one-dimensional characters are a guise for rather complex Freudian & Skinnerian diagnoses (as the Dr. Melfi-Soprano therapy sessions illustrate). Here sociopathic personalities undergo literary, sexual and ethnic epiphanies—at times even the whole "Mezzogiorno" ethos coming in for some radical self-critique (as in the controversial Columbus Day episode of Season 1).

And the music (oh! the music), whether the arias, Dean Martin westerns, hip hop & Italian folklore, is an integral part of the narrative (again, thanks to David Chase). I think of the beautifully dissociative effect of pairing Fred Neil's song "Dolphins" with Christopher Moltisanti's heroin relapse at the circus.(Season 6, Episode 9)

One episode in particular, "Army of One", deserves attention not just because of any of the above-mentioned features; it illustrates a recurrent asymmetry between reality and art that I consider to be the show's defining quality.It's the discontinuities between intention and reality (Tony Soprano and psyche; Ralph Cifaretto and parenting; Vito Spatafore and sexual identity, etc) that make the 'Sopranos' text.

But a text whose center cannot hold. What begins as a 50s traditional patriarchal household dissolves into ego, hidden resentments & irrational parody of itself. All the traditional codes, socio-cultural, ethnic and linguistic break apart as story progresses, one by one, sometimes inexplicably and sometimes as the result of a logic of brutal retributive justice. Whether the cosmos or mob dynamics is to blame is best decided individually.

The title itself "Army of One" is a false cipher, among many, for patriarchy & patrimony, one falsely promising control over the maddening randomness of Paterson, NJ. There are two scenes worthy of note linked to two characters, A.J. and Meadow. Consider the last resort to national homogeneity and tradition in the case of an undisciplined son enrolled in a military school against his will. But A.J. Soprano Jr, prone to the same anxiety attacks as the father, collapses on the floor in his shako. With paternity and patriotism all gone in an instant, the father is left questioning the idea of progeny itself.
In Episode 13 (Season 3) things looks fairly stable until, of course, the intruding chaos of the unexamined Italo-American life, the familiar pattern of stability and rupture: first the violent death of Jackie Jr at the hands of his step-dad, then Meadow Soprano's almost hysterical reaction at the wake and her disingenuous avowals afterwards of who is ultimately responsible. A distraught daughter who later futilely tries to exact her own type of revenge against the putative crime boss Corrado Soprano by tossing bread balls at him as he sings a Neapolitan song "Core 'ngrato".

I think viewers recognize that the break with tradition, even a sense of family and clannish loyalty the 'Sopranos' celebrates, comes with a terrible price: no less than that of ethno-cultural distortion or even non-identity. Perhaps 'Sopranos' is a continuing metaphor, throughout all six seasons, of Corrado's "Core 'ngrato" song, a lament for the immigrant experience or transmission of European soul horribly misappropriated in America and fated to end in a final abrupt fade-out.

Perhaps I see in 'Sopranos' a little of the parody of myself as another son of Italy far flung from his cultural shores, left to relive a lost patrimony through perhaps an equally foreign Americanized gangster version. Perhaps too bedazzled to see the "obscenity of spectacle" (Baudrillard) in the brilliant staging, music and narrative of my favourite tv show.

"Close writing': or some transcendental properties of the poetry blog

"La poésie est science, déconstruction des évidences mortes...celle du coeur, de l'âme de la patrie et de l'homme." ("Les Dix Propositions", La Presse 4 April 1970, cited in Caroline Bayard's The New Poetics in Canada and Quebec: From Concretism to Post-Modernism )

But communication would be impossible if it should have to begin in the ego, a free subject, to whom every other would be only a limitation that invites war, domination, precaution and information. To communicate is indeed to open oneself, but the openness is not complete if it is on the watch for recognition. It is complete not in opening to the spectacle of or the recognition of the other, but in becoming a responsibility for him (sic). (Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being: Or Beyond Essence )

One of the most urgent tasks for contemporary thought is, without doubt, to redefine the concept of the transcendental in terms of its relation with language...[H]ere "transcendental" must instead indicate an experience which is undergone within language. (Giorgio Agamben, cited in The Fire: Collected Essays of Robin Blaser)

Blogs? If it's neo-Formalist discourse you want, marked by very well-informed and astute commentary, there's Curtis Faville's Compass Rose, or if you'd like to see perhaps Canada's most prolific avant-gardist at work, Clifford Duffy, visit his radio deleuze, a singularly dadaist site with spectacular graphics & audio- and visual- montages for the works of a single author.

 Or if a more openly (& brazenly) non- or counter-or anti-syntactic visual poetry is your thing, see dbqp: visualizing poetics, both cutting-edge & multi-composite to the teeth, or if you subscribe rather to the grand ol' narratives of current LANGUAGE poetics, Ron Silliman's Blog and Charles Bernstein's WEB LOG are for you. A style for just about everyone. Serialist, collage or 'old school' representationalist; minimal, concretist or 'New Sentence'. But what have genres and poetic manifesto really amounted to these days? What have they really to do with the blog? And where's the room for development and responsible critique in the Internet's crowded synchrony?

 As if the bewildering array of styles weren't enough, there's the very important question of writing that goes on in (and for) them. I don't mean writing in the technical sense that servers, website and design & editing features act as its primary means of production. Search technology is not the same as academic research. And nor is it writing in the traditional chirographic sense for it's impossible to write for the blog; a deep abiding sense of whatever it is literacy means has been usurped by that grotesquerie of indelible Internet ink and e-readership, always radically mixed-mode, ethereal and impolitic. I'm looking at writing as the most critical project imaginable.

 It's sort of Lacan's point about the text writing the reader except that there's no real writing going on at all. With nothing to experiment on anymore, we're not the tabula rasa of old. Texts without borders cannot be useful analogues anymore for Lacanian or Kristevian subconscious undercurrents since 'digital only' takes up virtually no space or soul at all. Writing for the blog is as counter-intuitive a notion as driving for the road. So what exactly is it? 

The phonetic alphabet gives sounds a shape and textual 'look' on the page that are instantly transmissible: messages codified, stored and easy to be registered made writing about look unconfoundingly natural. Books, headings, table of contents, citations, etc are the traditional paraphernalia of intelligibility and loci for discussion. In phonetic writing the Word has a mind of its own, wound tight and ready to mean anything under the right conditions. But those typographical spaces (even in the best avant-garde work), the domain or extract of the roving "thinking eye" (as Silliman puts it) have been transgressed for good. Read good visual/concrete poetry today, such as you see in Geof Huth's dbqp: visualizing poetics, and try telling the artifact from the separate visual-syntactic& hypergraphical elements from which it arises. The poem is the "writing eye" that stares back at you, authorial intention and design reduced to subsets of its own easily reproducible technics.


The weblog's become the deconstructed site everyone's been hankering after for the past three decades: the Internet's delivered the goods, handily removing all the typographical, semantic, and authorial barriers that ever stood in the way between you and the signifiant. Not pre- or anti- but perhaps simulverbal communication; a simultaneity of act and product desperate enough for attention to pierce through the babble of multiple sites.The life-world, 'old school' aesthetics, and real author-reader symbiosis have been sacrificed to an impersonal but ubiquitous binary beast. As requested. It's not, in Iser's way of speaking, "an aesthetic object that will reveal the thought system of the social world" (The Act of Reading, 101): the Internet's too asocial, too voluptuously self-absorbed for that.

The problem is that to step beyond some threshold of minimal reading competency is to sense not a text (the d'hors text paradigm permanently displaced by a stiff-necked regimen of 'on/off' coding) but an ominous graphomania. The reader doesn't, in radio deleuze, for example, read poststructuralist deleuze at all; s/he wades rather into the intercellular deep of Clifford Duffy's dream, waging the same anti-Language war. It's interesting that in two of the blogs listed above (Duffy's and Bernstein's) reader comments are not allowed, perhaps as a way of averting the visitor to the very real danger of being trapped not in cyberspace but headspace where there's only room for one. Writing is the only enter- and exit- strategy we have and yet here it cannot really be about anything nor intended for any particular audience nor even designed to give a point of view. Cannot be a writing at all that's unconfoundingly tied (as it once hoped to be) to signs, referents or whatnot.

And so what's all the fuss about close 'reading', close 'listening' then? After a while Bernstein's Pennsound becomes a bore, poets droning on about reading; Silliman's "Alphabet", just downright self-mystifying. If Walter J. Ong's thesis about orality irretrievably assimilated to technical literacy (in Orality and Literacy) has any merit, it's because we sense that after writing there's no going back to a privileged preverbal place. Orality isn't an option (for all of the resemblances of e-reading to preliterate ages). Poetries that have been wound this tight can do nothing but put on displays of themselves, glaringly technical and scenographic: they are a sadly atrophied version of an old school artes virorum. 

 And by writing I don't mean écriture (or what Canadian theorist Caroline Bayard calls écouture in the case of radical performance): it's old hat by now and we've gone beyond that. I mean with all this promiscuous heterogeneity in the blogosphere, who needs to bother about codes and hidden discourses anymore? They're all around you. Most internet sites are pretty up-front about those sorts of things: ironic and playful, allegorical and irreverent to the teeth. So how useful will it be for writing to do duty for anything that's pretty much unraveled itself to this extent, bare textual presences audited, texted and 'tweeted' ad nauseum?

 I mean if poetry can be envisaged (as in Christian Bök's Xenotext Experiment ) literally "subsist[ing], like a harmless parasite, inside the cell of another life-form", what's the point of it all?  I fear that poetry sites whose signature layouts, content and textual panache are signs of a blogging self really have nothing to say. With authorial comes scriptural death. But we write !And if authors & their sites become morose or stupidly overconfident (and surprisingly most of them do at times, as I've discovered), how can a reader be expected to fill in those empty "ciphers" robbed of aesthetic content, and avoid the fall at the same time into kitschy discourse? The blog is testimony, if ever there was one, to the hegelian "dark night in which all cows are black", the deadpan face of the Internet's empty Absolute. To communicate through the blog seems to me about as absurd as Bök's hope to encode poetry for posterity. Gone is the notion of an "implied reader"who as part of textual structure (Iser) engages in ongoing discussion about literary meaning,

Death of the author: no kidding!Everything's dead except the will to admit it's finally died & like concerned artists perhaps prevent cases of this kind of self-immolation from recurring. Adorno's point about the death of poetry post-Auschwitz is well taken. It's perhaps in that sense that Canada's bp Nichol and bill bissett talked about the logotherapy of poetry. Perhaps writing is essentially therapy but I think they got it the other way around: poetry causes the therapy. Its healing properties have evaporated; and if we allow the Word into our souls it won't hover above vocables like Spirit (as bill bissett & Ron Silliman hope it will) but just stare back at us (like an unblinking Masonic eye), incapable of changing anything, empty pre-emptive bluster at best. The concretists, dadaists, surrealists, etc wanted to smash language & scatter the bits over the white screen: well, they've got it now. "La désintegration du langage est accomplie." (Raoul Duguay)

The result is weblogs have also grown a curiously thick skin to compensate for this spirit deficit. How? When spelling changes into graphics, representation into hypertext, and linear thinking into 'clouds' ("ephemeral electromagnetic traces"), the type of traditional literacy the blog tried to rely on, scoping out the world for meaning, turns into a pod that's hard to penetrate. Far from the playful & ironic creatures we thought the Internet would make us, we've actually turned out to be ornery monads (not nomads)who live under retractable roofs, looking out at the world through a single glazed Eye. We prefer depth but like sea otters sleep tied to seaweed,  bobbing near the shoreline.Spending too much time in any one blog gives the living sensorium a distinctly oneiric rather than fleshy feel for the world, the other, self. Reader-response is what blogs do but only unintentionally, and only if the tides sway them close enough to dry land.

 Consequently I've never really encountered anything as 'unwriterly' as the poet's weblog: in fact, I've never encountered anything as 'unwriterly' as e-writing itself or the blogger. But the urge to write persists despite the poststructuralist gutting of language, with opinions stubbornly locked into place, countless counter-discourses on the ready. I can think of only one way out of this impasse (or  'aporia'), however. And that's through what I call 'close' writing, one modeled on the Levinasian conception of "responsibility for the other" ( in Otherwise Than Being ) but I will have to be content with only a general outline for now. There's a lot at stake.

I define 'close writing' as a type of  'close watching' (not reading) to avoid the fatal deflection off text (dévier de text) in which the glaring You switches place with content and observer and observed invariably collapse into each other's arms. Reflection is neither participatory nor autonomous enough a description for the type of essential role-reversal that must take place for e-communication to thrive. I suggest we use "transcendence" instead of reflection or authorial intention or referentiality. Preferring to drop the baggage of poststructuralist experimentation altogether & begin to view writing as rather an ontological leap into text, since without the linguistic innards to keep it going  it can be nothing but that. Communication with the other (that the weblog primarily showcases)  is transcendent and as such always inherently dangerous, risky (Levinas). We're ultimately responsible for the blog "spectacle" we've created.

Denuded poststructuralist language cannot read the labile, processual world fully without also unwittingly becoming the carrier of every type of intolerable dogmatism. Perhaps bissett and Silliman have been inching in their works, maybe without meaning to be, towards just this sense of the 'transcendental' to keep the reader from being swallowed whole. I think, for example, of Silliman's description of the prose poem in The New Sentence as a"discontinuous-but-eternal presentness" (180-81), a language of teleology in-laying phrases like "upward falling", "integrate up"into a discussion of contemporary literary theory . The blog as the site of the encapsulation of thought and creativity may have to come in for a virtual ethics, e-writers having to become linguistics watchdogs at the same time. In a future blog article I'd like to show how this innate self-regulating impulse of writers to become responsible for each other's writings actually works, using the weblogs cited at the beginning.

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.