I recently received the latest issue of Canadian Poetry: Studies/ Documents/Reviews, edited at Western University by D.M.R. Bentley. It’s a research journal that publishes a bit more for posterity, it seems, than for urgent impact – this newly printed issue is dated Fall/Winter 2012 – which in the bibliographic history of the journal it undoubtedly is. The issue contains three items that I personally am pleased to see – the articles “Freeing Myth from Reality: India as Subject in Canadian Poetry” by Wanda Campbell and “Resurrection in Adonis’s Garden: the Life-Long Poems of Louis Dudek and bpNichol” by Medrie Purdham, and a very lengthy review of my biography of Nichol, aka bpNichol, by poet Lola Lemire Tostevin. Together they take up almost half the issue.

Wanda Campbell’s article surveys Canadian poems concerning India by eight poets from Louise Bowman in 1927, through F.R. Scott in the 1950s and 60s, Earle Birney in 1960, Irving Layton in 1962, Eli Mandel in 1981, myself in 1986 in my long poem The Abbotsford Guide to India, Himani Bannerji in 1991, Danielle Ladagh in 2007. It’s a complex company for my book to be among – back in 1982 I had re-read the poems Campbell discusses by Birney, Layton and Mandel before travelling to India, along with Sara Jeannette Duncan’s The Pool in the Desert, E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, and Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet. Campbell doesn’t come to any remarkable conclusion in her article but she is a very careful reader, in the case of my poem uncovering a surprising number of covert allusions. It was also good to see a book-length poem included a multi-poem article; most critics don’t attempt that. For all eight poets she seems alert for related writings, although I’m not sure she became aware of other poems concerning India in my later books or my 1988 article “Some Postcards from the Raj.” I also wonder about her exclusion of Sri Lanka (and thus Michael Ondaatje) from her “India” – it was a province of British India; also a part of India were the various British invasions of Afghanistan, usually launched from Peshawar and the Khyber Pass, which were part of my 2010 Afghanistan War: True, False – or Not.

Medrie Purdham’s article on the life-long poems Dudek and Nichol addresses the work of two of my favorite writers, both of whom I knew personally and whom I’ve written books about. She begins with a long discussion of the close, productive and uneasy relationship between them – one of mutual admiration but disagreement on some fundamental issues including orality and the possible range of signification. I don’t care for her treatment of Dudek’s various theoretical statements, made over five decades, as if they were synchronic – some of his views did evolve and should have had specific dates assigned to them. As Nichol once wrote, “we are words and our meanings change.” But her close readings of Nichol’s life-long The Martyrology and its recurrent grappling with endings, ending it all, suicide, death, and the openness to continuance which ‘martyrdom’ and life both require are among the best I have read, and should be required reading for anyone writing on Nichol. The use she was able to make of my aka bpNichol is also gratifying to see.

My pleasure in seeing Tostevin’s review of that book is somewhat different – it is good to see the sad politics which has greeted aka bpNichol on the literary gossip scene finally out in the open. As I noted in its preface, Nichol’s widow

Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Harvard University Press, 2009, 2011.

In the late 1970s when I was teaching at York University in Toronto the dean of Arts asked me to attempt to create an undergraduate creative writing ‘program’ from the nine writing courses offered by four departments, two in Arts and two in Fine Arts. Logically enough, he proposed that the program would be administered by a “Coordinator”  who would oversee the necessary cooperation among the departments and faculties. By fall 1978 I had cobbled together an introductory course and two poetry workshops offered by the English department, two fiction courses offered by the Humanities Division, two playwriting courses offered by the Theatre Department, and two filmscript courses offered by the Film Department, together with a list of twentieth-century literature courses from which a student majoring in Creative Writing would have to take at least one, and had persuaded both faculties to accept the other faculty’s courses as in-faculty credits, and both to offer the new CW degree. Later the Humanities Division volunteered to contribute a new course in literary non-fiction.  

My thoughts at this time about the university teaching of Creative Writing were that students who were going to be independently writing poems, plays and stories while at university ought to be able to get course credit for their work, be shown ways of writing they might not have become aware of, and also receive some feed-back, much like publishing writers get feed-back from editors and book-reviewers. The new Program I also saw as one for students who were going be active writers regardless of whether their university was offering CW courses or a Program. So for me, unlike for the US programs examined here by McGurl, the issue of whether or not creative writing could be “taught” never seemed relevant. The students were already writers and needed only to be shown how large the possibilities for writing were. In the years that I was Coordinator, the assortment of celebrated instructors – Irving Layton, Eli Mandel, bpNichol, Miriam Waddington, Clark Blaise, Dave Godfrey, Don Coles, Mavor Moore – rarely consulted one another and probably wouldn’t have agreed on many aesthetic or ideological questions if they had. We had one meeting a year in which we mainly addressed administrative matters.

In The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, Mark McGurl’s understanding of “program” is a lot narrower. Here a writing program is assumed to be pedagogically coherent, to have aesthetic principles and goals. It is most often the creation of a single powerful administrator, such as Iowa’s Wilbur Schramm and Paul Engle or Stanford’s Wallace Stegner. It exists separate from the university’s literary and language departments, often as part of a Fine Arts department, and often in an antagonistic relationship to them. Although most of the programs are postgraduate, the student is not already a writer but instead someone who goes day after day to the writing workshop anxiously wondering “Am I a writer yet?” (398). 

This past Thursday and Friday I was in Kelowna during the Textual Editing and Modernism in Canada (TEMiC) week-long summer institute. For the graduate students enrolled it was an intense course in “editing modernism on and off the page” – the printed page, the electronic page, and audio recordings – for which they could receive graduate course credit. Because the host faculty at the University of British Columbia (Okanagan) is one of “creative and critical studies,” the course also focused on editing as both a creative and critical activity and on the relationship between the creative and the critical. (Myself, I’m not so sure that they are sufficiently separate activities that there can be a “relationship” between them – but that’s another matter.)

To emphasize the links between the creative and the critical, the course was interwoven with a two-day “Poetry Off the Page” event of readings and discussion. The invited writers – myself and George Bowering, Daphne Marlatt, Sharon Thesen, and Fred Wah (that's us in the cheerful photo, above, by Paul Marck) -- were all ones who had also been editors, worked with early tape-recorded materials, and had produced creative, critical and creative-critical publications. The organizers – Dean Irvine, the director of the Editing Modernism in Canada project, and Karis Shearer of UBC (Okanagan) – tell me that Phyllis Webb, a poet who has created and edited much taped-recorded work for the CBC, was also invited but unable to attend. Poetry off the Page was marked as a kind of  “50th anniversary  of the