The 'people's poetry' online: a special welcome to Chris Faiers

I'm delighted to hear that one of Canada's foremost 'people's poetry' activists, co-founder of the Canadian Poetry Association (CPA) and perhaps the nation's greatest Al Purdy champion, Chris Faiers, has started a "Riffs & Ripples from ZenRiver Gardens" blog. Activist with the heart of Eastern poet, unstinting supporter and practitioner of a poetry close to where the heart lives, Chris is someone I seem to have known for a very long time (primarily through email, his Al Purdy A-frame campaign and numerous other notices of special interest to local poetry communities) though never meeting him in person yet.

If I'm asked what I'd like to replace the abysmal 'mainstream' Canadian poetry with, it's this: a people's poetry in the tradition of Katherine L. Gordon, Andreas Gripp, Al Purdy, Wayne Ray, Jeff Seffinga, Milt Acorn, James Deahl and Ted Plantos. A community rather than a bureaucracy; a network of friends, supporters & artists with loyalties to a national literature (though many hail from different parts of the world). In the time Chris has been active in Canada several significant literary events (like Purdyfest) have appeared, poetry publications & associations like the CPA continue to flourish, & anthologies (such as the recent Crossing Lines -Poets Who Came to Canada in the Vietnam War Era, Seraphim Editions, 2008) occasionally appear on the literary landscape.

And with a growing number of people's poets going online perhaps it's also time to think of creating our own true Canadian poetics & form a real alternative to the elitist CanLit establishment that's had a free ride for too long, & usually at taxpayers' expense. Let the poetry & discussions begin!

Mohamed Bouazizi, and the rise of a new avant-garde



Mohamed Bouazizi

Sometimes the poetry you think you know can have an even darker more unimaginably abyssal side, and if it results in acts of self-immolation (as I believe it did in the case of Mohamed Bouazizi), verses and flames cannot be separated any longer. I believe a young vendor who "devoured literature and especially poetry" & set the course of the pro-democracy revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa initiated a new world avant-garde at the same time.

The cry of the end of the avant-garde in the postmodern world ends here, devoid as it now is of both its textuality & the cosy self-serving ideology of critics and theorists who've fed it for decades: of its hostility against real-time history. For all their iconoclasms, postmodernists continue to stay comfortably ensconced in ivory towers while the world crashes round them. From this point on all cultural works can't be apolitical any more. In fact, the very same political bureaucracy, nepotism and corruption that led to Bouazizi's martyrdom must now been seen in a very real way as mirroring the stodgy culture-badgering of state-sponsored writers & critics. Dictatorial theory and politics now look the same because of the potential for destructiveness they've always wielded.

Tactical media (primarily linked through Facebook and graffiti) combined with a sense of violated self-worth to form a new lyricism of struggle worthy of Pindar, Sappho, Tagore. The results have been nothing less than revolutionary. Words of the poet (& poetry lover), now absolutely inseparable, change from the safe metropolitanism of "official verse culture" into the very dirt under the street vendor's feet: and the vaunted disconnectedness between sentiment & language popular today, with all its critical appurtenances, must now be seen as built on the same institutionalized state surveillance and ideology that led to a poet-lover's death.

Is this exaggeration for rhetorical effect only? No. It's a necessary beginning & it's not as if we haven't seen national epics before or the beginnings of one. When the poetic heart of a street vendor caught fire it was the collectivism of a national epic, and the outrage of local pieties against ruling overlords, that fuelled it & set it on its eternal course. With outrage powerful enough to overturn dictatorial regimes, it's perhaps time also to cheer the end of a type of world-literariness that likes to destroy local sentiments, customs &, above all else, a collective imagination: the overthrow of the postmodern and perhaps the well-heeled and well-fed minions of globalization in all its forms. Poetry (except when it was joined to the human heart) was never able to topple the citadels.

A street-level avant-gardism such as Mohamed Bouazizi has inspired might run on the following principles: firstly, language must turn into tactics, and poetry hereafter into Internet poetry:

"INTERNET POETRY will be a beacon of hope: a symbol for a new and blossoming way to spread poetry and culture: INTERNET POETRY will carry us through the end of gatekeepers in poetry, the end of poetry as an obscured printed product, and the end of poetry as something people intentionally and successfully avoid:


print is dead: publishers are dead: academia is dead: borders is dead: literary journals are dead: ezra pound is literally dead";

secondly, Bouazizi's self-immolation is to be seen as a radical culmination (similar to a papal visit that brought down Communism in the 80s or Mandela's imprisonment), one caused by a sense of undeserved shame and Facebook activism;

thirdly, organized belief systems like the corporation or academy that haughtily cite any dictatorial regime (such as is found in Libya, Iran, Saudi Arabia) as another "end of ideology" & not take some responsibility for it will bear the same mark of guilt as the Tunisian tyranny that stilled the vendor's grief. Writers, activists, researchers impassioned by Bouazizi's martyrdom must lay down the pen & tag the walls and streets in the settlements, favelas and shantytowns;

fourthly, once wrested from the class of professional writers & critics discourse must stop looking like government policy and guidelines, and look more like what caused the Tunisian revolution in the first place: a tactical media created by an enraged poetry. And towards that end computers, handhelds, iPhones and other types of networks (even the radio) will always be the primary means of cultural transmission in a digital public domain. Since Bouazizi's poetry was a people's poetry, the overthrow was a collective effort: something that (in the words of the Internet poetry manifesto) people will no longer purposely avoid; and

lastly, a literary vanguard must form to bring about real revolution. Please note how the couplet-slogan has toppled the Egyptian tyrant! Here was a global political event materialized through poetry.

Canada's only real avant-garde (as far as I can tell), and why

Duffy's dose of anti-Art in "radio deleuze"

The avant-garde in Canada is at the moment a class with only one member, at least by the definition that appears here: and he is Clifford Duffy. It's a claim I'm prepared to make even in our post-historical era. I've said recently, in regards to the topic of mainstream writing, that the intellectual is the toxin in the system but I meant that as a verbal warning. In the case of the avant-garde, properly conceived, it ought to be taken more literally and more seriously, viz. as the invisible slow-acting dose of anti-Art poison the mainstream ingests at its own risk because that's what Duffy's giving: text, images & sound of uniquely vital Dada work always hovering round risky liminal edges & entrance ways, always distinguishable by the familiar rattle. Poet Genesis p-Orridge says of Burroughs in the documentary William Burroughs: A Man Within what can also be said of Duffy: "People who are prepared to risk sacrificing their freedom and their physical safety because of an idea are always dangerous to a society."

I thought once I could write in his own rigorously deleuzian way, splicing language and stupidly hoping for the most fortuitously creative pattern of images to appear: as if I could, in a word, dice things up like a Rauschenbergian collagist & hope for a poem. But that came shortly after my introduction to the man & his mercurial temperament at the now defunct deleuze-guattari spoon collective: when both artist and work had made quite an impression. I had no more success with Dada at the time than with the Eastern writing I was also dabbling in, and I didn't because I had no real talent for either. Yes, the avant-garde is for the few. And if we look at just his radio deleuze site alone, it looks as if he can also foreground writing in pretty decent html code, making his blogwork a decidedly new type of media art. He may, in a word, actually be among the last of the historical avant-garde in the strictly Deleuzian sense of purposely evoking resistant & inhuman sensations. He does have a knack, in any event, for courting the obscurity that the blog as neo-Dadaist collage will most certainly assure him.

Duffy's "machinic" poetry

But it's not just neo-Dadaist collage work made possible by Internet technology he's after. There's no faking the aesthetics here because I don't believe there is one; Duffy genuinely hates the public and the public's taste for Art (perhaps Art itself as "info-economy") and the fame & publicity it is prepared to give the lucky scoundrel who profits from it all; and, in return, the public ought properly to hate him. He's threatening to rob it of culture itself! It's a little like trying to smash the urinal display as if it were the Pietà. Duffy's blog is that last little bit of gross anti-Duchamp violence converted into VR format: guerrilla tactics of the radical deleuzian wing aimed not so much at image-bashing —what's an image for anyways?— as garish interfaces, blog networks (even if only his own) &, as I've said, html code itself. These have been turned into "resistant sensations" aimed at subverting the still prevalent bourgeois art world. He plays in pure "machinic assemblages" meant to copy & represent not any one artistic style in particular since, after all, its all for him just a play of design and systems ready to hand, a purely processual aesthetics in which "We become Universes. Becoming animal, plant, molecular, becoming zero." (What is Philosophy, 169)

Being tied to really one text & one thinker does have its advantages, & sets Duffy apart from the fake avant-gardists in Canada who lack a true conceptualist grounding. His is a thoroughgoing deleuzianism based on a view of 'virtuality' according to which "The elements, varieties of relations and singular points coexist in...the virtual part of the work or object" (Difference & Repetition, 209). The blog handles the virtual component rather nicely.The resultant artifact, one bolstered by its VR format, is the celebrated "Body without Organs", the object or work emptied of respectable empirical coordinates to tie it down to a particular genre, style, following: a place where intensities or the most liberatory artistic impulses imaginable can take physical work & convert it into any of several "monstrous" forms (from the hypochondriac to the schizo to masochist). The possibilities almost seem terrifying but always tempting.

At any rate, you have one (or several). It's not so much that it preexists or comes ready-made, although in certain respects it is preexistent. At any rate, you make one, you can't desire without making one. And it awaits you; it is an inevitable exercise or experimentation, already accomplished the moment you undertake it, unaccomplished as long as you don't. This is not reassuring, because you can botch it. Or it can be terrifying, and lead you to your death. It is nondesire as well as desire. It is not at all a notion or a concept but a practice, a set of practices. You never reach the Body without Organs [BwO's], you can't reach it, you are forever attaining it, it is a limit." ( A Thousand Plateaus, 150)

It looks as though he's trying to make himself (via the many personas he often appears in, such as Jill and Mona, Jean Genet's Bastard Son, MutualMachineBook, etc) and his Art invisible by making the blog page into a pure IT display of schizo & masochist bodies. And it's always done with the quickness & ingenuity ("intensity") of e-mail, text messaging, laptops, etc. And as a result the poet-blogger leaves only dissident and unformed language clusters, only partial representations with rough jagged edges (collagist-style), fragments of music, image and contemporary headlines always about to give a complete narrative but never doing so. An almost total collapse of representation. Perhaps as a way to keep all of his work from breaking apart, Duffy's own site indexes and collects aspects of an overriding deleuzian methodology: in fact, each of his sites is a node in a fluid Dada mosaic. Otherwise it's all going to be just radical impulse, destructiveness and form for their own sake, which it isn't. In fact, artistic Form is the chronically unformed or unfinished; any story and meaning the writer sets out to deliver in the theatre of Web 2.0 is bound to lead to this techno-deleuzianism.

Schizo & masochist bodies

So how to tell the true from the fake Canadian avant-garde? Firstly, concept and digital image must coexist but not in any new faddish or intellectualist way designed to get people's attention (and certainly not at taxpayers' expense): the tone is always (& always ought to be) iconoclastic, rude, disembodying, the poet a spectral menace to established poetic practices. And Duffy certainly is. Secondly, media technology should never be considered the means for poetic expression: it must be every bit as subversive as were the materials of Tzara, Duchamp & Schwitters. Just so much stuff to be scissored and pasted. Poetry's not a pastime for academics. And Duffy's certainly isn't. Thirdly, the avant-garde must have a Web presence, visible & active primarily through blogs, listserves, wikis, etc. Even an iPhone will do. How else to see the face of the enemy of Art: the Duffy schizos and masochists who don't consider the media they appear in interactive at all, & who could care less, in fact, about you and any input of yours into their networks.

The poet here, Dadaist with political leanings, a thoroughgoing deleuzian, is no amateur with software at his disposal. Duffy's iconoclasm is not purposeless. The space he's made has been there for quite some time: a field of technical & artistic possibilities laid bare already by Tzara, Breton & Genet, fluid and metamorphosing, with no room for insititutionalized ideas & groupings (not even Dadaism itself). Ripe for a sort of return to the basics of avant-garde appreticeship & work. Only the materials have changed; the impetus is the same. radio deleuze is a multimedia site, a blog without an active comments stream, both portal & academic forum but, above all else, the domain of anti-Art. The site (or non-site) of a virtual poetics and the restless shiftings of its creator who'd like nothing better than to wrest Art from you and give it back to real writer-practitioners. And, at the moment, that means Clifford Duffy only.

Some nuggets from Donald Hall: and, again, the problem with mainstream Canadian poetry

I think it was Joseph Hutchison who alerted me to Donald Hall's (by now classical) essay on poetry and poetry writing entitled "Poetry and Ambition" posted at POETS.org. Lately I've had a chance to look at it and am exceedingly glad I did. In fact, it's a piece I'll return to often whenever, as is often the case, the deplorable state of writing today gets me down. There's no aspect of the topic Hall doesn't at least allude to: he's in the main refreshingly honest, clear-headed & just insightful enough to show us a plausible wait out of the mess writing is in today. I will quote a few passages with brief commentary of my own

Like Hall I've always believed writing is dedicated to the call of anonymity, a lifetime of patient reading, language study & persistent self-scrutiny. The passages taken from Hall's AWP address, among the many that offered themselves, develop each of these writerly virtues in ways I find personally satisfying. Though the examples in Hall's essay are predominantly American the similarities to the Canadian writing scene take on their own unique form: if nothing else the discussion will give me another opportunity to make my case against mainstream Canadian writing.

(a) "To desire to write poems that endure—we undertake such a goal certain of two things: that in all likelihood we will fail, and that if we succeed we will never know it."

There is nothing that is more appalling (to me) than the clamor for recognition & almost celebrity-like status among poets today, most of whom are mediocre and have to attribute any recognition they do get to pure happenstance.The Starnino and Bök Cage Match debate is a perfect illustration of the almost slavish devotion of contemporary poetry to the twin ideals of marketability & funky aesthetics. This crass 'performance' component (probably derived from Fluxus) almost always makes its way into the more popular poetry venues. This unacknowledged obeisance to mass media techniques is absurd.

In an age where anything that looks top-down, commercial-based is always denounced, one wonders why poets resort to staged bickering when they ought to be more collaborative, more intelligently networked, more seriously immersed in practice. At least Carmine Starnino blogs, though profiting by association with the well-established véhicule press name. What is particularly ludicrous is that Bök, putative spokesperson for the avant-garde, can't seem to appreciate the enforced 'anonymity' most of his role-models (like Schwitters, Arp, Apollinaire) had had to endure in the past. His cool will turn to 'uncool' or, even worse, the ol' 90s 'geek' from which it comes, & it won't be fun to read or hear him anymore.

When writing school production is coupled with loud poetry performance the result is a literary milieu of garish theatricality. The anticipation of failure & sanguine hopes for a future readership play no role in contemporary poetry at all. Only in Canada, you say?

(b) "We develop the notion of art from our reading. When we call the poem more important than ourselves, it is not that we have confidence in our ability to write it; we believe in poetry. We look daily at the great monuments of old accomplishment and we desire to add to their number, to make poems in homage to poems. Old poems that we continue to read and love become the standard we try to live up to. These poems, internalized, criticize our own work. These old poems become our Muse, our encouragement to song and our discouragement of comparison."

The only type of reading that's encouraged these days (especially in writing classes) is the slavish critiquing of competitors' work that takes up most of a poet's time & energies and that is touted, by paid writing masters, as solid preparation for real world publishing. What tends to get left out (if not purposely denigrated) in a creative writing workshop model is acknowledgement of literary antiquity itself. Why? Language & the notion of literary precedence seem to have been discarded decades ago as elitist 'old school' modernist baggage. Bloom's celebrated anxiety of influence won't possibly take hold in the imagination that's been reared on the editorial fiats of mostly subsidized journals and mags. As I've said before, nothing stirs literary indignation in Canada-in fact, nothing gets people really worked up-like the threat of more subsidy cuts. In a pampered nanny state like ours literary excellence is always a function of tax-payer dollars and a bogus awards infrastructure.

Reading under these pecuniary conditions can never be serious

(c)"To produce the McPoem, institutions must enforce patterns, institutions within institutions, all subject to the same glorious dominance of unconscious economic determinism, template and formula of consumerism.

The McPoem is the product of the workshops of Hamburger University."

Poetry in my country, and its grants-based operating systems, really amount to a literacy by bureaucracy in which academics, government grants & the publishing houses that subserve them quite literally control the cultural means of production (at least, in the mainstream 'wine-and-cheese' sector, as poet Andreas Gripp calls it). If culture costs money and depends on a well-oiled bureaucracy to maintain & propagate it (and the rationale for Canada Council sounds a good deal like neo-Liberal propaganda anyways), it's bound to be a real drag on the true creative impulse (what Hall & also critic George Steiner refer to as the "cafe"), making Canadian culture a kind of politics-prone product of state control and interference.

Visual poet/artist Jim Leftwich at his textimagepoem blog has offered, in "discontinuous poem #32", a rallying cry—if ever there was one!— for artistic work that lives through the most disinterested & impassioned means: "Let us imagine instead the construction of an exemplary independence - collective, cooperative and, finally, creative, which is to say capable of disseminating evidence of its difference to and through the quotidian cultural environment." Perhaps the last time the Canadian cultural community felt this significant "difference" was the scandal of bpNichol winning the Governor-General's Award in 1970, an event that sent proverbial shock waves through both mainstream culture and the House of Commons. I don't think this extraordinary feat could be repeated today.

d) "Poets who stay outside the circle of peers—like Whitman, who did not go to Harvard; like Dickinson for whom there was no tradition; like Robert Frost, who dropped out of two colleges to make his own way—these poets take Homer for their peer. To quote Frost again: 'The thing is to write better and better poems. Setting our heart when we're too young on getting our poems appreciated lands us in the politics of poetry which is death.' Agreeing with these words from Frost's dour middle-age, we need to add: and 'setting our heart' when we are old 'on getting our poems appreciated' lands us in the same place."

Art (in my view) is by nature anti-intellectual: in fact, the academic is the toxin in the system for which there is no antidote. With few exceptions academics make the worst poets, always slavishly tied to pet theory, inclined to imitate authors of their doctoral period. Writing is an intensely lonely practice that ought to shun meddlesome institutions, whether academic, political or religious, the writer (particularly the avant-gardist) preferring life at the margins, casting aspersions, giving the finger. As Geert Lovink has aptly put it in his Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture, "Art should hit, slap in the face, go straight through all interference, and not question. It should present itself as an object of desire, a tangible commodity, and not see itself as a prototype. It should be instantly ready for consumption" (41). But interestingly enough the numbers of poet-academics in the blogosphere are legion. Since they seem to have always enjoyed ready access to more prestigious journals & university press publishing, I wonder what brings them there in the first place?

Perhaps the techno-networking that's corollary to having an online presence can replace the top-down hierarchical model of the contemporary university: perhaps it's to the democratizing pull of Web 2.0 that they're secretly drawn. Perhaps they see it as an alternative to traditional academe in the same way that blogging is said to compete with (and certainly, in the case of print, has begun to supersede) mainstream media, offering real diversity & alternative methodologies. However, my experience with the "credentialists' (as poet Ed Baker calls them) has been anything but utopian: and if these same instructors happen also to write poetry, well then it's the same ol' elitism & opinion-vetting as ever. I offer Frank Davey's Open Letter as a prime example of an online academic presence, fuelled by Canada Council dollars, that tries to pass itself off as a cool snarky ("irreverent") addition to contemporary writing. Robert Archambeau's Samizdat Blog, on the other hand, is a less pernicious kind of elitist blogging, a bit more enjoyable than the rest because of its knack for irony and humor . But this could be just a pose.

(e) "So the workshop answers the need for a cafe. But I called it the institutionalized cafe, and it differs from the Parisian version by instituting requirements and by hiring and paying mentors. Workshop mentors even make assignments: 'Write a persona poem in the voice of a dead ancestor.' 'Make a poem containing these ten words in this order with as many other words as you wish.' 'Write a poem without adjectives, or without prepositions, or without content. . . .' These formulas, everyone says, are a whole lot of fun. . . . They also reduce poetry to a parlor game; they trivialize and make safe-seeming the real terrors of real art. This reduction-by-formula is not accidental. We play these games in order to reduce poetry to a parlor game. Games serve to democratize, to soften, and to standardize; they are repellent. Although in theory workshops serve a useful purpose in gathering young artists together, workshop practices enforce the McPoem."

And the result's been what I call the death of the Sentence and what Hall calls "a parlor game". A condition that's markedly worse than the McPoem. In any event, I think we're saying the same thing. Not the poem but the very medium through which it comes into being; not literariness but language itself: not the product but its very conditions for existence—all these, really amounting to the same thing, are what's at stake here. Stanley Fish has recently published a work entitled How to Write a Sentence that'll probably become this century's finest defense of the lost art of effective writing.

Certainly Fish's idea of the Sentence is markedly different from that of Grenier, say, or Ian Hamilton Finlay and will turn its guns on the disastrous LangPo experiment of the past 2 decades or so. And if this happens in the States, it's bound to have its usual ripple effect in Canada where egregious language misuse, cited always as innovative, can range from slam to Bök's univocalic and now more recent DNA-constrained verses. And as for the latter's recent efforts to mix art with science, Geert Lovink, again: "The will to subordinate to science is nothing more than a helpless adolescent gesture of powerlessness and victimhood." (68)

Nature rapta: a dialogue between two not so great postmodernists

Never let it be said I won't let the not so great postmoderns speak for themselves here. I'll agree to any terms of the debate between two opposing views of landscape provided it appear as a poem first. Provided it just look like a poetry of landscape. As far as I've been able to determine, they are talking about the same thing. It is with these two always hard to tell the poetry from the postmodern primers (something that's even lately grown outdated).

Again, the topic is Nature taken after their own temperament & understanding, and converted into some damn fine verses. To be perfectly objective, it seems only Marjorie's actually tried defining it for us.

__________________________________

Frank says,

"I am the patriline who shoves pieces of eight & cobwebs back into my Tree Who'd dare co-author

 PDFs ('stead of stags in the woods) without me!

or lively & irreverent discussion but never daring, of course, to take a single unsolicited poem (none
of yr sacred woods) without me! E.g., at the base of the escarpment clinging to me

like the chip in my teeth is the smell of a rotten Ode which I hereby signify (in an open letter!) as meaning no more than the layers of my beard & all disassembled errata

for I propose to take the Self as (1) the mole's sinuous isochrony with the weed, identifiable by his
white male radical flows and available, for a Council grant, to any enquiring nibbling scholar, or

(2) the lachrymal weight of dried hearts wrung from bill and bp or (3) the lair of the unseen fox
with his keen rust-tipped finger

and especially the Olson nose for crumbling tufa Ah! sacerdotal passivity and friction
of smell itself (of beard, fawn, et al.!) that has ever led to poetry since 1965  Respectfully (?) yours,

To which Marjorie replies,

  "Ach! Nature's here a too mole-constrained, a too leaf-indiced space for me of jay intensity & grass frisson, estrus dissymmetry and  aggressivity: the ol' gridwork of male sod

and staid unthinking manure of poppa bears, replenishing diverted streams with their spit; the ant-

segregation and canopy-thinking style of binary bees, and

an optimal swale-obdurateness such as sink between emerging ribs  I, Marj, mean rather to be a matriline of rooks or mice, tracing out nebulae

in the night sandy terrain. Make your own micro-lairs like me! With a filmy layer of paisley shawl

round my arm, I try with charms or the rains to be sand-fractious

I the so-called creek mistress (1) won't live like Frank where there's the culpably and serially marshy, or

(2) harp much on the newness treated by sexology or sermons re:  lives of the soil, or

(3) even speak in ways that have to aestheticize hives of a field-mice system for nothing's more

antithetical to a wetland with bug than what I'll term  the imperious 'zed' Self (the unexamined zed of Self!)

Nothing worse!"

ENVOI (by Marjorie)

And where the sled's suspended on spring coils

in the red barn (with gloves and heels

still in the seat!) is a place in process only,

& never a landscape

'Visual poetry"

The cold, coming out with the
  sages, snail-
  stiff as me,
easy to scan behind the wheel,

is grey but scared—
  a deathly oblong (in heraldic terms),
  ol' smoky
who looks a bit lost, too

And the ice, liking to run
  on wooden legs
gives the storefronts along the way
  the

  punctual
  stony
  look
of all the mixed exotic fruit (inside)

ever to be spared the green
  of moss
  (of course)
The signs look swollen, too

Ed Baker's STONE GIRL E-PIC: and a note on Forewords to any future stone girl poetics

I'm happy to announce the publication (by Leafe Press) of Ed Baker's STONE GIRL  E-PIC work, a compendium of poetry & art presented in 5 Volumes for which I was very pleased to write the Foreword.

I've commented on the visual poetry (particularly the style & artistic influences) of Ed Baker here and here. It's actually from my blog posts that most of the Foreword material comes. Trying to keep tenor and conceptual unfolding strictly in conformity with both the temperament and spare, minimalist artistry of this remarkable man, I've arranged it as an informal discussion about Vispo to which many bloggers have contributed in the past (my opinion being only one, of course). I've studiously avoided long-winded academic orations on theory & genealogy of art forms.

Ed's work is an impassioned testimony to the significance of tradition, poetry community and, above all, love of muse (Chin Fay Ling) and poet (Cid Corman). I see Fay & Cid in every one of the E-PIC's 515 pages. It was a real privilege for me to appear, albeit very briefly, in that glorious company.