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No, Wait. Yep. Definitely Still Like this Book.

9/22/2014

No, Wait. Yep. Definitely Still Hate Myself by Robert Fitterman. Brooklyn, NY: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2014. 78 pp. $16.00.

Rob Fitterman’s latest book comes without any jacket burbs or prefatory material except for an epigraph from the late New York School poet James Schuyler (1926-91) – from the title poem of his 1980 Pulitzer-prize-winning collection, The Morning of the Poem. An alert reader will likely notice that the line structure of the six-line excerpt is similar to the line structure of each two-line unit of the Fitterman.

However, in the publisher’s on-line catalogue, and reprinted from there by Amazon and other on-line booksellers, is this note:

          Robert Fitterman's new book-length poem borrows its poetic form, loosely, from James
          Schuyler's The Morning of the Poem, to orchestrate hundreds of found articulations of sadness
          and loneliness from blogs and online posts. A collective subjectivity composed through the
      avatar of a singular speaker emerges. But the real protagonist of No Wait, Yep. Definitely Still
          Hate Myself is subjectivity as a mediated construct-the steady steam [sic] of personal articula-
      tions that we have access to are personal articulations themselves already mediated via song
          lyrics, advertising, or even broadcasters. No, Wait ... blurs the boundary between collective
          articulation and personal speech, while underscoring the ways in which poetic form participates
        in the mediation of intimate expression.

Fitterman is of course a well-known writer of conceptual and flarf poems, so perhaps his publisher was assuming that anyone who picked up the book in a bookstore or library would recognize that this was a book of “found articulations” – or perhaps they were assuming that all copies would be marketed on-line and that the purchaser would encounter the catalogue blurb.

No, Wait helps map the wide range of conceptual/flarf ‘transparency’ practices, with Kenneth Goldmith’s 2005 The Weather at one end, unabashedly acknowledging its source as a transcription of the the hourly weather bulletins on 1010 WINS, New York City’s all-news radio station, and Lisa Robertson’s 2001 The Weather at the other, with only a remark she made to surprised interviewer Kai Fierle-Hedrick that it was “all lifted” (Chicago Review 51/52:4/1 [Spring 2006]: 40) to reveal that it has been constructed of “found articulations.” In one sense it shouldn’t matter whether

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The Earle Birney-Al Purdy Letters

9/15/2014

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We Go Far Back in Time: The Letters of Earle Birney and Al Purdy, 1947-1987. Ed. Nicholas Bradley. Vancouver: Harbour Publishing, 2014. 480 pp. $39.95.

Like Al Purdy, I also go far back in time with Earle Birney. In 1955 he signed his newly published novel Down the Long Table for my godmother to give me for Christmas; in 1957 I began seeing him, tall and slightly stooped, on the UBC campus; in my third year in 1959 I enrolled in his Chaucer class and sat in the back row where I wondered whether he ever saw me. Always theatrically self-creating, he played each day to an appreciative audience of graduate students who had preempted the front row. He savoured speculatively the Wife of Bath's portrayal, “Housbondes at chirche dore she hadde fyve, / Withouten oother compaignye in youthe,” and spent much of another class pondering new research into a rape charge that Chaucer had faced, and whether “raptus” could mean that he had only kidnapped the young woman, and perhaps not for himself, possibly for John of Gaunt. Stimulating stuff for a country boy like me or Al Purdy – wouldn’t have missed a word of it. In a 1969 letter to Purdy, however, Birney remembers: “I think he got firstclass marks from me; but he scarcely ever attended my lectures” (213).

Purdy writes three letters to Birney in 1947, while trying to get poems accepted by him for the Canadian Poetry Magazine, which Birney was editing, and begins a more personal correspondence in 1955, with letters that editor Nicholas Bradley here terms both “pugnacious” and “sycophantic” (15). Much to his credit, Birney replies, with patience and good humour. The two poets’ correspondence continues until Birney’s devastating heart attack of 1987.

Bradley describes his aims in this collection as “primarily curatorial” (30). He has seemingly reproduced all currently available letters exchanged by the two, deleting only brief passages “that seem to me gratuitously offensive, tactless, or cruel about people who are not public figures” and a “few” that disclose “sensitive medical information about” Purdy’s wife, Eurithe (32). He notes that there are frequent gaps in the correspondence where letters appear to be missing – possibly lost, or not yet catalogued, or contained within the numerous cartons of Birney papers still under embargo. Birney was notoriously protective of his public reputation, and within his lifetime prevented researchers from accessing any materials associated with his first wife, the teenage Trotskyist Sylvia Johnstone, or lovers such as

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Lynette Hunter's New Contemporary 'Canadian Literature' Book

9/8/2014

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Disunified Aesthetics: Situated Textuality, Performativity, Collaboration by Lynette Hunter. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2014. 314 pp. $39.95.

Disunified Aesthetics focuses on Canadian counter-hegemonic writing of the 1970s to the present, including that of Robert Kroetsch, Lee Maracle, Nicole Brossard, Alice Munro, bpNichol, Daphne Marlatt and myself – but one isn’t told that by the title. The book is equally an investigation of the ethics of reading, writers’ responses to globalization, the partiality of human subjects, literature’s relationships to social change, the dynamics of performance art, and of how art can imagine and thus open a way from the current hegemony of liberal humanism, with its quietly patronizing assumption of universalist values, to “democratic humanism,” in which people value the differences that they make among themselves and can act “together and apart at the same time” (248). Proposes Hunter,

    The book can be read as a series of insights into the literature and poetics
    of the last two decades, or as a book that tells a story of moving from a traditional view of the
relation between the artist, the art, and its reception to a more radically democratic view
    of aesthetics and ethics. (4)

Why Canadian writing? In part because Hunter, currently Distinguished Professor of the History of Rhetoric and Performance at the University of California, Davis, and for many years Professor of English and Canadian Studies at the University of Leeds, grew up in Canada, but in part also, Hunter suggests, because Canadian writing has been unusually rich in its imaginings of the social and political otherwise, the alternate, the previously unimagined. “The key motivation of my commitment to the verbal arts in Canada is that I found in so many writers a challenging and engaged iteration with language, society and culture,” she writes in her preface. “Canadian writers have always made it possible for me to value ways of living and knowing that are not usually heard or recognized” (vii). Much later, “The interaction of the critical essay with performance made here by Disunified Aesthetics is part of a recognized Canadian literary tradition” (284).

The book is divided into three sections. The first, “Situated Textualities,” presents texts and critique associated with Hunter’s first three attempts at performed textual engagement, initially (1994) with Kroetsch’s novel The Puppeteer, then (1995) with contemporary Canadian women’s writing, and later that year with Indigenous women’s writing in

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Rachel Blau DuPlessis's INTERSTICES - Writing Past Ending

9/1/2014

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Interstices, by Rachel Blau DuPlessis. Cambridge, MA: Subpress, 2014. 105 pp. $16.00.

This first poetry book since DuPlessis appeared to abandon or end her almost four-decade “life poem” Drafts (Surge: Drafts 96-114, 2013) consists of 52 sections – 26 titled “Letter” and 26 titled “Ledger.” 26 letters is a familiar reference, and indeed there is one “letter” addressed to each alphabet letter. Unlike Virginia Woolf's Prof. Ramsay, DuPlessis gets all the way to “zed” – early in the book, too. And indeed it makes sense for a writer to address the members of the alphabet, one’s literal friends – without them how could a writer be a writer? Another writer of a “life poem,” bpNichol, had a career-long dialogue with them, from The Birth of O in 1966, through several ‘ABCs,’ to the “bp:if” of The Martyrology’s last lines.

“Ledger” doesn’t have the same literary resonance as “letter,” or reason to be limited to 26. But it does satisfyingly balance literacy with numeracy, relating with accounting. (In 1979 Nichol considered titling all of the later parts of his life poem “A Counting.”) Poets do count, count as citizens, count the ways, the lines, the hours, the syllables, the stresses, the accuracies, the book reviews. DuPlessis here takes account – takes a count – each time she writes: following, and sometimes preceding, each “letter” with a “ledger.” Balancing the book.

But not just this book. What is balanced or summed is both the poet’s life and life of life-poem writing – the recently closed or ‘finished’ Drafts. The title of her 1970 Columbia University dissertation on Williams and Pound was “The Endless Poem.” That of her 1985 book on twentieth-century women writers was Writing Beyond the Ending. Such

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No, Wait. Yep. Definitely Still Like this Book.

The Earle Birney-Al Purdy Letters

Lynette Hunter's New Contemporary 'Canadian Literature' Book

Rachel Blau DuPlessis's INTERSTICES - Writing Past Ending

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