Stubborn Poetries: Poetic Facticity and the Avant-Garde, by Peter Quartermain. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama Press, 2013. 322 pp. $39.95.


Peter Quartermain retired from teaching at the University of BC in 1999. During the preceding 36 years he had edited three editions of an American poetry anthology, published the chapbook Basil Bunting: Poet of the North, co-edited an anthology of British and Irish poetry and a collection of essays on Objectivist poetry, and in 1992 published the study Disjunctive Poetics: From Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to Susan Howe. Since then he has co-managed the small Vancouver press Nomados, edited the Collected Early Poems and Plays of Robert Duncan (2012), and presented numerous international conference papers on contemporary poetry. His edition of the Collected Later Poems and Plays of Robert Duncan is scheduled to be released later this year by the University of California Press. Many of his recent conference papers are collected here in Stubborn Poetries.

Quartermain has been interested throughout much of his career in poets whom he views as having deliberately located their work outside the canon of academically recognized poetry. He opens this collection with the essay “Canonical Strategies and the Question of Authority” in which he contrasts how T.S. Eliot, through the “cajolery and bullying” of his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” presumptuously redefined the English canon to include himself with how William Carlos Williams, in his prologue to Kora in Hell, defined poetic value as “unmediated by either a set of social values or the views of the critic” (17).  Quartermain thus sets up a view that pervades the collection that canonical poets tend to be the astutely self-interested while those committed more to language and poetry than to their careers tend to be non-canonical.

Quartermain has also been interested during most of his career in poetries that are not only contemptuous of canonicity but that also ‘stubbornly’ resist both paraphrase and the attribution of meaning. Several times in the

The Persons by Peter Jaeger. York: Information as Material, 2011. 50 pp. www.informationasmaterial.org

I reviewed here Peter Jaeger’s John Cage and Buddhist Ecopoetics last month and Rob Fitterman’s Holocaust Museum earlier this year. I discussed the former as if it were a book about John Cage and Buddhist ecopoetics and the latter as if were a book of poetry rather than one about Washington’s Holocaust Museum – even though Jaeger uses some of Cage’s poetry devices to structure his writing and Fitterman constructs his book entirely out of prose captions composed by the Washington DC museum.

This week I’ve been reading Jaeger’s chapbook The Persons, published in 2011 by the York (UK) artists press information as material. The press was founded in 2002 by the English conceptual artist Simon Morris, “as an independent imprint that publishes work by artists who use extant material — selecting it and reframing it to generate new meanings — and who, in doing so, disrupt the existing order of things.” Morris’s definition would include Fitterman’s book.

The Persons is a work of biography – or life writing, as many presently prefer to call it. It ‘writes’ the lives of hundreds of people whom Jaeger has encountered in print during his own life, giving each a minimum of one sentence, and no two sentences consecutively. Among the other constraints Jaeger places on his text is that each sentence must begin with a name that is followed immediately by a verb. Each sentence is appropriated from an existing source, whether

The Darkness of the Present: Poetics, Anachronism, and the Anomaly by Steve McCaffery. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012. 282 pp. $36.99.

I was reflecting last month that I’d seen very little mention in Canada of poet Steve McCaffery’s fifth book of essays, The Darkness of the Present, even though it’s now been almost two years since it was released. I’m not sure that it has been reviewed except for a summary of its contents by Garry Thomas Morse last March in his Talonbooks blog. Perhaps the University of Alabama Press doesn’t send review copies to Canada – I’m still waiting for one of a more recent title.

Or possibly McCaffery’s essays on the avant-garde in Europe and the US fall outside the coverage of Canadian reviewers – not sufficiently about Canadian writing for a Canadian Literature journal and not sufficiently scholarly for a journal focused on scholarship by Canadians. Or possibly, even though McCaffery has published almost twenty books in Canada, has had a selected poems published in the Wilfrid Laurier UP series, and is identified by Wikipedia as a “Canadian poet,” his Canadian credentials are in question. He was born in Yorkshire in 1947, came to Canada in 1968, and has taught at the State University of New York in Buffalo for the past decade. In this new collection he describes Canada as his “former home” (181) – something which could trouble the Canadian presses who still publish most of his poetry despite its writer appearing to imagine his readers and literary context to be in the US. Globalization has so far made only very large English-language book markets truly ‘global.’

The main focus of this collection is the history of the Euro-American avant-garde and McCaffery’s contentions that it has been wrongly conceived as linear when its actual history has been discontinuous, often blind, and often unknowingly repetitious. Thus the title, in which the ‘present,’ according to McCaffery, exists in a darkness about the past, much the way the medieval ‘dark ages’ have often been presumed to have existed in darkness about the knowledges of Greece and Rome. He repeatedly here brings to notice much earlier texts which he suggests anticipate

I have been browsing through the belated festshrift to Canadian literary theorist Barbara Godard, Trans/Acting Culture, Writing, and Memory, published last year in the TransCanada Series by Wilfrid Laurier University Press. I say “belated” partly because Barbara died unexpectedly in 2010 and so will never see the work that the editors and contributors have put into this collection, and partly also because this was a project her colleagues – I include myself – probably should have thought of undertaking many years before they did. Several contributors here remark on how often Barbara seemed ahead of her time in both her thinking and her interventions – ahead in recognizing the cultural power of poststructuralism, ahead in recognizing that accurate translation required something quite other than the simple domestication of a ‘foreign’ text, ahead in recognizing that feminism was a language project as much as a social justice one, ahead in recognizing that the contributions that First Nations women were making to conceptions of feminism were as specific, creative and urgent as more visible or ‘mainstream’ feminist projects. Moreover Barbara was often ahead in all of these areas of her colleagues’ ability to respond to her urgings.

I write that I ‘browse’ through this volume because it is unlikely to be one that anyone can easily read through. The editors invited contributors to address any of the many areas that Barbara cared passionately about. No longer tied together by that passion, her wit, her knack for startlingly productive juxtapositions, her ability to make her own limitations the ground for an abruptly illuminating shift of context, the areas of her attention here drift apart into separate subject areas, no matter how sound the writers’ scholarship or incisive their analyses. Two of Barbara’s most important assets were her distractibility and her skill at analyzing her moments of distraction, asking why she had been distracted, what was the obscure connection between the two focuses – letting her investigations be informed by the unlikely rather than the obvious.

Many of the contributors are aware of being challenged by Barbara’s unorthodox routes toward insight, particularly the York University librarian, Lisa Sloniowski, who Barbara, shortly before her death, lured into becoming the curator