Revelator by Ron Silliman. Toronto: Bookthug, 2013.

Poet Ron Silliman is probably best known not for his poetry but for theorizing “the new sentence” in 1977 and founding ‘Silliman’s Blog’ of literary commentary and reviews in 2002. To a lesser extent he is known as one of the US “Language” poets and editor of the poetry anthology In the American Tree. His “new sentence” – cogently described in 1993 by fellow Language poet Bob Perelman as a sentence that  “gains its effect by being placed next to another sentence to which it has [mostly] tangential relevance” – has become part of the toolkit of avant-garde poetics across North America.

He is also the author of large continuing poems, usually published in small book installments and later collected – Tjanting (1981), The Age of Huts (2007), and The Alphabet (2008). Revelator is described by Silliman as the first part of a 360 part (360 “degree,” that is) poem “Universe” – a book that would take him, his publisher says on the back cover, “three centuries to complete.” Especially with The Alphabet and this new project, Silliman is working in that size-fascinated tradition of American poetry – Whitman and his multitudes, Pound hoping to write a poem that would salvage all essential Western culture, Olson writing in the voice of Maximus. (“My book is bigger than book,” Robert Kroetsch teased the feminist editors of A Mazing Space in 1987– correctly alluding to the phallocentrism of such size matters.) With Universe Silliman appears to have trumped (or perhaps parodied?) his predecessors, even if he has no chance of completing. He does have two more parts of Universe in press for 2014 – Northern Soul from Shearsman in Bristol, and Against Conceptual Poetry from Counterpath in Denver. But most of the parts or degrees of Universe will apparently remain just that – concepts – unless he’s able to write them in a yet unknown part of the cosmos. As the cover blurb says, “We are hopeful.”

The title of this part, Revelator, references Saint John the Revelator / John of Patmos, the presumed writer of Revelations, the last book of the New Testament. John’s warnings of an impending apocalypse have usually been given less credence than other parts the New Testament; his was the last book to be added to the canon, a hundred years after the others, no earlier than 397 AD. So in Silliman’s Universe the last has finally – pun intended – come first. Revelator’s front cover – an over-exposed flooded-with-light photo of Silliman reading in 1978 on a San Francisco street

On the weekend I posted a Tweet that the recently published (by the Manchester Guardian) exchange of letters between Slavoj Žižek and the imprisoned  Nadezhda Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot was a “must read,” and almost at once this London Mic website began receiving multiple visits by four Russian search engines. How a Twitter post brings attention to London Open Mic is I suppose only a bit mysterious. One hopes warmly, of course, that the searchers have been curious about poetry, poetics and Canadian Lit and or are friends of Tolokonnikova.

I had written “must read” for a couple of reasons. One was that, although Žižek theorizes various kinds of disruptive activisms with which Canadians are familiar in the current Idle-No-More, anti-whaling, anti-arctic oil drilling, anti-fracking and anti-wind turbine protests, we have never, as far as I know, observed him in dialogue with an imprisoned activist. Neither does he try to board arctic oil rigs from an inflatable boat, nor, like Pussy Riot and Femin, introduce performance art into politically sacred spaces – unless one considers Hegel scholarship such a space. (I note – re the recent visits of Russian search engines here – that some of the Femin webpages tonight seem to have been hacked and replaced with pages of official-looking Cyrillic text.)

But Žižek’s writings are undoubtedly important to some current activists – though probably unknown to Esther Wightman of the London-Ontario-area anti-wind-turbine movement. In these letters Žižek himself gradually becomes uncomfortable with the contrast between his scholarly activism (which in his initial letters often seems condescending)  and the consequences of acting on intellectual belief that Tolokonnikova is enduring. “ But I feel guilty writing this: who am I to explode in such narcissistic theoretical outbursts when you are exposed to very real deprivations?” he writes toward the end of his second letter.

Her polite response to both the condescension and his dubious apology (“You should not worry about the fact that you are exposing theoretical fabrications while I am supposed to suffer the ‘real hardship’.”) , elicits this interesting passage from him:

Today marks 21 years since the extraordinary Canadian artist Greg Curnoe was killed, in a cycling accident near London that was as puzzling as his sculptures, installations and paintings were remarkable. It was a death reminiscent of Tom Thomson’s – both unlikely and yet tightly linked to his ways of living and creating. I still say hello to Greg nearly every time I drive across the Highway 402 / Longwoods Road overpass that overlooks that Delaware hill on which he died. Beyond are 1812 battlefields which he had often visited and referenced in his art; nearby live some of the First Nations men and women who were assisting him with the books and painting series that he would leave unfinished.

Despite the 2001 Art Gallery of Ontario Curnoe retrospective Greg Curnoe: Life & Stuff and Dennis Reid and Matthew Teitelbaum’s generous catalogue (right), the Canadian art world does not seem to have yet taken stock of the prodigious figure that he was. There has yet been no Curnoe biography, no catalogue raisonné. In today’s art market Curnoe seems viewed more as an outlier than as the “singularly significant Canadian artist” that the 2001 catalogue proclaimed. Amusingly the Heffel Gallery’s “Top 100 Canadian Artists” and “Top 100 Canadian Painters” lists currently include the likes of Herbert Palmer, Ann Savage, Franz Johnson, Henry Masson and Doris McCarthy – but no Curnoe. One reason for this may be that Curnoe’s work is still too recent for there to be much on the art market; another that his work has little resemblance to the realism and abstractionism that dominate the lists; but a third is surely that his work has received little of the public attention that those of contemporaries such as Milne, Lemieux, Colville or Kurelek have received.

Canadian artists have usually found it difficult to be simultaneously regional, national and international. Not Curnoe, with his reworkings of Dadaism, his bicycle motifs that drew on the racing traditions of Europe, his technically daring and intensely local rubber-stamp works and his highly original contributions to the self-portrait genre – as both above and left, on the cover of his book Deeds Nations. (In that genre I suspect he belongs with Rembrandt and Schiele.) In the same year he could paint a Lake Erie beach, an homage to Van Dongen, a Canadian-made racing bicycle, and create a three-dimensional work of super-realism.

You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone, Joni’s “Big Yellow Taxi” lamented. In Curnoe’s case, even that proverb hasn’t held.

FD

Stan Dragland, probably best known for his Duncan Campbell Scott scholarship, also published with the old Coach House Press various books as much quirky as avant-garde – Wilson McDonald’s Western Tour (1975), Peckertracks: A Chronicle (1978), Journey Through Bookland and other Passages (1984). These were deadpan books, to use a word Dragland leans on in the new one (“I only ever do deadpan” [45]) – books that seriously delayed a reader’s recognition that its comedies were, well, serious too.

Deep Too. Toronto: Book Thug, 2013. 79 pp. “Non-Fiction.” $12.00. A quirky problem in genre classification – a prose poem? a true story?  A book.

Like Peckertracks, Deep Too is a penis book. In a series of collaged 1-3 page, often hilarious anecdotes it addresses, however, not the erect ejaculator but the working-class Lacanian power symbol – the one can that piss further, create a larger trouser-bulge, hang further off a bridge, and skewer more yaks than any other. Yes, those yaks are here in Dragland's book. It’s the phallus of the urinal, limerick and washroom graffiti, of those men and boys who hang pairs of brass testicles on the trailer-hitches of their pickup trucks, and who are all too eager, Dragland implies several times, to invest in that legendary pharmaceutical “Me-ga-di k.”  Theirs is a developmentally retarded sexuality which he can amusingly mock and lament, while also mocking himself for being complicit in it. But, he decides, about two-thirds through this short collage, these anecdotes have not been “The Worst” of its aspects.

Curiously –  or perhaps not – he seems to find more energy and wit for writing this opening section (37 of the 73 pages) than he does for “The Worst,” the book’s three remaining parts. Much of the latter, moreover is made up of

Some things to note about this latest publication (from Denver’s Counterpath press) by conceptual poet Robert Fitterman. One, the Library of Congress cataloguing data on the verso of its title page doesn’t specifically name it as poetry. “1. Mass media-philosophy. 2. Photography. 3. Conceptual art.” Only Tim Atkins’ cover blurb (one of three) does, as “contemporary poetry (however it gets labeled.” This indicates not so much hesitation as how much conceptualism  has expanded poetry generically. It also reflects how Fitterman’s reputation as a conceptual poet and theorist can mark, by default, almost anything he publishes as poetry.

Two: the book nowhere indicates which Holocaust museum is referenced in the title, though details within the text point to the photography collection of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, which in its logo highlights the Fitterman's title words “Holocaust” and “Museum”.  And if one googles any of this book’s passages, one discovers indeed that the passage is the caption of a photograph in the USHMM collection. That is, as in flarf, all of this book was most likely on-line before it was written or published -- ready to be composed by Ctrl-C / Ctrl-V.

Three: the book is a narrative; one notices this immediately on reaching the table of contents, which begins with