The idea that poetry is communal practice, in which poets work with and re-work forms and concepts that have accumulated through the writing of their colleagues and predecessors, concepts which are available to the use – or non-use – of all, has been circulating in Canada at least since Robert Duncan lectured in Vancouver in 1961, and paraphrased from an essay he was writing,“As Testimony,” that he welcomed “the end of masterpieces, the beginning of testimony.” It is with Duncan’s assertion in his H.D. Book that “the goods of the intellect are communal” and his claim that to be creatively “derivative” should be each poet’s goal, that Stephen Voyce concludes his study of what he argues have been four “poetic communities”: the Black Mountain College community in North Carolina in the 1950s, the Caribbean Artists Movement in London, UK, in the 1960s, the Women’s liberation movement (largely understood by Voyce to have occurred in the U.S., and to be different from the theory field known as ‘feminism’) in the 1970s, and the Toronto Research Group in the 1970s and 80s. He titles his book – newly published by the University of Toronto Press, Poetic Community: Avant Garde Activism and Cold War Culture.

Invocations of the Cold War as a partly determinative context for literature have been increasingly frequent in U.S. literary studies, as in Edward Brunner’s Cold War Poetry: The Social Text in the Fifties Poem (2001) and Michael Davidson’s Guys Like Us: Citing Masculinity in Cold War Poetics (2004). Voyce finds the Cold War directly relevant to all but the Toronto Research Group section, where it seems to be present only implicitly in his discussions of Steve McCaffery’s Marxism and his translation of the Communist Manifesto into Yorkshirese, and in his views of intellectual property. “The TRG’s experiments in multi-authorship, I argue, constitute a poetic activism challenging proprietary definitions of authorship” (206); “TRG’s ‘Kommunism’ sought to advance the principles of an egalitarian economic model with open, model with open, local, and playful experiments in artistic collective life” (207). The Yorkshireise “Kommunism” (Wot we wukkers want), though, was not published as a TRG work but on audiocassette as a solo performance by McCaffery. Overall, however, this is a very good book for those who would like to consider further the issues of collaboration and literary ‘property.’ Voyce handles the various poets’ declarations about community,

I’ve been reading Jussi Parikka’s What Is Media Archaeology (Polity, 2012), on the basis of several Twitter recommendations and on the publisher’s promise that it illuminates methodologies “used to excavate current media through its [sic] past” and that it is “essential reading for anyone interested in the interdisciplinary ties between art, technology and media.” It also seemed like an appropriate book for the London Open Mic site of this blog, where the oral dissemination of poetry from often handwritten manuscripts – a centuries old practice – is billed as ‘Open Microphone’ – a mere century-old device – and promoted on a Microsoft-based website.

Parikka is a Finnish scholar who currently teaches at the University of Southampton. My impression from this perhaps understandably Eurocentric book is that “media archaeology” is a much larger field than he currently envisions. I didn’t find any specific references to writers’ uses of technology in any of the chapters, although clearly inventions such as paper, the alphabet, moveable type, the fountain pen, the typewriter, the tape recorder, the Selectric typewriter, the word processor, the phototypesetter, the modem, the internet, e-books and search engines have altered how and what writers can write as well their conceptions of collaboration, intellectual property, originality and what it means culturally to be a literary practitioner. In 1984 when Fred Wah and I put the world’s first electronic literary magazine, SwiftCurrent, on-line and invited writers to participate we encountered established writers who were unable to type, poets worried that their ideas might be stolen, fiction writers horrified that we intended to do no editing, a surprisingly large proportion of