Edmonton: NeWest Press. 276 pp.  $17.95.

The blurbs for this book – from older writers in the two westernmost Canadian provinces – stress how well-written and “intelligent” the stories are. I wonder whether very many read a book because it is well written or wise. I think most want more – which Love at Last Sight definitely offers. The cover copy also dwells on how allusively literary the stories are, as if that might sell copies. But it’s not the stories that are allusively literary; it’s the young-woman narrators of the stories, usually would-be writers or artists, who are characterized by Thea Bowering as obsessively literary – as drifting in a global world they perceive as having been oppressively and decisively written, written again, and overwritten.

THAT I find interesting: i.e. how can one function as a writer when it seems that all possible writing has already been done? How can one even navigate in a world that seems so overwritten that there is nothing unwritten, nothing outside of literary discourse, to experience? How can one be an edgy writer when the edges seem to have been long ago honed and all the incisive lines inscribed by the famous and recently famous names – Homer, Sappho, Shakespeare, Shelley, Keats, Baudelaire, Tolstoy, Flaubert, James, Bakhtin, Yeats, Williams, Woolf, HD, Benjamin, Synge, Orwell, Duncan, Cage, Barthes, Calvino, Derrida, Kroetsch, Berger, Sontag, Blaser – including also one George Bowering, to whom this book is dedicated? So many texts are quoted or incorporated in Love at Last Sight, from all of the above plus numerous texts written, sung or spoken by popular performers, that the collection concludes with nine pages of detailed credits. Nine pages of cheerily disguised anxiety of influence.
 
The title certainly conveys some cynicism – that one loves most at the moment of loss or departure. Most of the characters in these stories are reluctant to invest emotionally in their relationships, as if the already-written and multiply digitized world in which they live has no more promises not only of creativity but also of happy endings or

Marjorie Perloff’s Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century was first published in a hardbound edition by the University of Chicago Press in 2010, but was made available last fall in an inexpensive full-size paperback. The book is printed on heavy photographic paper to accommodate its numerous images, some of them in colour. Perloff, for those who don’t follow “poetry by other means,” has been for the past two decades the most influential global scholar of alternative poetries – aka the avant-garde.

Thirty years ago I presented a paper at McGill in which I lamented that term for its apparent linearity, like an army on the march, and quoted Baudelaire’s mistrust of its overt militarism. Perloff here offers a strong case for retaining both it and its category, positing a historical avant-garde that began in Europe in the latter part of the nineteenth century and which developed until approximately 1916 when it began to be overwhelmed by the Great War, the Depression, the Second World War, the Cold War and the conservative expressive poetics all four events encouraged. The recovery of that avant-garde, and the creation of new poetries built on its methods of appropriation, quotation, collage and montage, are what she finds to be simultaneously both avant-garde and arrière-garde today. A military avant-garde usually has an accompanying arrière-garde, she points out, writing “[w]hen an avant-garde movement is no longer a novelty, it is the role of the arrière-garde to complete its mission, to ensure its success. The term arrière-garde, then, is synonymous neither with reaction nor with nostalgia for a lost and more desirable artistic era; it is, on the contrary, the 'hidden face of modernity' (Marx 6)" (53). 

She declines the association of “progress” with both “avant-garde” or any intellectual movement, including the ethical progress often claimed for literature by post-colonial theorists (in Canada see Diana Brydon in “Canada and Postcolonialism” 64  and Pauline Butling in Writing in Our Time 122), implying that the most that literature can aim to accomplish socially is to be formally relevant to its cultural moment (53).