Indigenous Poetics in Canada. Ed. Neal McLeod. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2014. 404 PP. $42.99.

Cree poet Neal McLeod has gathered together essays by, and interviews with, various Indigenous poets and trusted non-Indigenous readers on the subject of Indigenous poetics. Many of the contributors express discomfort with the latter word, however. When asked to “define Indigenous poetics,” Chippewa poet and publisher Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm replies “I’m sort of hung up on that whole concept of poetics and what does it mean in an Indigenous context” (266). Métis poet and Canada Research Chair Warren Cariou notes the word’s origin in Aristotle, “a drawer of boundaries,” and adds “Sometimes that makes me wish Indigenous artists had a different word for the thing he defined as poetics” (31). Onondaga scholar David Newhouse begins with the disclaimer “Poetics – and particularly Indigenous poetics – has not been a part of my formal education, which has been primarily in the sciences and social sciences. I am more comfortable with the knowledge paradigms and truth traditions embedded in them than I am with the interpretative and hermeneutic underpinnings of the humanities” (73). The sciences, of course, and European notions of objective truth, have their origin in the categorizings of Aristotle.

Many other contributors avoid using the word altogether. Those who use it most often employ it as a synonym for philosophy or world view – “the voices of our ancestors” (Tasha Beeds 65), “ways of knowing” (Christine Sy 187 – who also writes of a “poetics of personal decolonization” 185), a “praxis” that resides “not only in our cultural and spiritual inheritances and legacies but also our intellectual and narrative traditions (James Sinclair 208). “When we sing, the bones of our ancestors hear our songs and they work their way to the surface of the land, singing themselves up” writes Lee Maracle (305).

In his 1997 study of Maurice Blanchot, Gerald Bruns contemplates the origins of Aristotle’s terms poesis and poetics, and suggests that they were part of an unsuccessful strategy of containment, a way of domesticating an unruly

Stubborn Poetries: Poetic Facticity and the Avant-Garde, by Peter Quartermain. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama Press, 2013. 322 pp. $39.95.


Peter Quartermain retired from teaching at the University of BC in 1999. During the preceding 36 years he had edited three editions of an American poetry anthology, published the chapbook Basil Bunting: Poet of the North, co-edited an anthology of British and Irish poetry and a collection of essays on Objectivist poetry, and in 1992 published the study Disjunctive Poetics: From Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to Susan Howe. Since then he has co-managed the small Vancouver press Nomados, edited the Collected Early Poems and Plays of Robert Duncan (2012), and presented numerous international conference papers on contemporary poetry. His edition of the Collected Later Poems and Plays of Robert Duncan is scheduled to be released later this year by the University of California Press. Many of his recent conference papers are collected here in Stubborn Poetries.

Quartermain has been interested throughout much of his career in poets whom he views as having deliberately located their work outside the canon of academically recognized poetry. He opens this collection with the essay “Canonical Strategies and the Question of Authority” in which he contrasts how T.S. Eliot, through the “cajolery and bullying” of his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” presumptuously redefined the English canon to include himself with how William Carlos Williams, in his prologue to Kora in Hell, defined poetic value as “unmediated by either a set of social values or the views of the critic” (17).  Quartermain thus sets up a view that pervades the collection that canonical poets tend to be the astutely self-interested while those committed more to language and poetry than to their careers tend to be non-canonical.

Quartermain has also been interested during most of his career in poetries that are not only contemptuous of canonicity but that also ‘stubbornly’ resist both paraphrase and the attribution of meaning. Several times in the

The Darkness of the Present: Poetics, Anachronism, and the Anomaly by Steve McCaffery. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012. 282 pp. $36.99.

I was reflecting last month that I’d seen very little mention in Canada of poet Steve McCaffery’s fifth book of essays, The Darkness of the Present, even though it’s now been almost two years since it was released. I’m not sure that it has been reviewed except for a summary of its contents by Garry Thomas Morse last March in his Talonbooks blog. Perhaps the University of Alabama Press doesn’t send review copies to Canada – I’m still waiting for one of a more recent title.

Or possibly McCaffery’s essays on the avant-garde in Europe and the US fall outside the coverage of Canadian reviewers – not sufficiently about Canadian writing for a Canadian Literature journal and not sufficiently scholarly for a journal focused on scholarship by Canadians. Or possibly, even though McCaffery has published almost twenty books in Canada, has had a selected poems published in the Wilfrid Laurier UP series, and is identified by Wikipedia as a “Canadian poet,” his Canadian credentials are in question. He was born in Yorkshire in 1947, came to Canada in 1968, and has taught at the State University of New York in Buffalo for the past decade. In this new collection he describes Canada as his “former home” (181) – something which could trouble the Canadian presses who still publish most of his poetry despite its writer appearing to imagine his readers and literary context to be in the US. Globalization has so far made only very large English-language book markets truly ‘global.’

The main focus of this collection is the history of the Euro-American avant-garde and McCaffery’s contentions that it has been wrongly conceived as linear when its actual history has been discontinuous, often blind, and often unknowingly repetitious. Thus the title, in which the ‘present,’ according to McCaffery, exists in a darkness about the past, much the way the medieval ‘dark ages’ have often been presumed to have existed in darkness about the knowledges of Greece and Rome. He repeatedly here brings to notice much earlier texts which he suggests anticipate

Producing Canadian Literature: Authors Speak Out on the Literary Marketplace. Kit Dobson and Smaro Kamboureli, eds. Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2013.

This is a book of interviews that most serious North American writers would benefit from reading parts of, though not necessarily each part. A couple of the interviewees don’t entirely understand or share the assumptions of the book they are helping to create – a problem that may have stemmed from the requirements the editors were obliged to meet in their project design. Some of these requirements are, rather ironically, among the matters that the editors have set out to investigate: the silent co-authorship of many contemporary books by the practices of chain bookstores, the financial needs of publishers, the temptation of awards, and the hope of pleasing granting agencies. As co-editor Kamboureli tells Erin Moure, “one of the things we are trying to determine is whether there is a certain kind of cultural grammar, as it were, a grammar of economics, that determines the work that gets done” (97). Various of this book’s institutional co-authors are listed on its acknowledgements page and in Kit Dobson’s introduction – among them the Canada Council, the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the Canada Research Chairs Program, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, whose “ethics” policies required preapproval and standardization of the questionnaire the editors used to structure each of the interviews.

There was a time in Canadian Literature when a book of interviews like this would have featured on its cover, or within, fetching photos of the authors interviewed – a quizzical Margaret Atwood, a sultry Michael Ondaatje. There are no photos offered here  of its interviewees, although Christian Bok, Larissa Lai and others do often appear on Twitter or Facebook as similarly photogenic. The visual fetishization of authors is one of the practices of the literary marketplace that the editors have reservations about and have hoped to investigate. Instead on the cover are images of the cutting parts of a late nineteenth-century meatgrinder – presumably offered as a metaphor for the standard