Many people in the literary community outside of Vancouver will know Michael Morris primarily as a mail artist, founder in 1969 of Image Bank, or as a performance artist, co-founder with Vincent Trasov in 1973 of The Western Front, one of Canada’s most important artist-run galleries. This collection’s numerous colour reproductions of his geometric and soft-edge paintings of 1966-69 and essays on their place in European and North American art history will enlarge that view, as will the reproductions of his concrete poetry of that period. Curiously, the latter was not widely circulated in Canada – not represented in bpNichol’s 1970 anthology The Cosmic Chef, nor often published in literary magazines. Morris seems to have produced them mostly as single copy drawings or as limited series prints, and presented them on gallery walls much like he did his paintings. 

The three essays that accompany the reproductions of Morris’s paintings and sculpture – essays by David McWilliam, William Wood, and Scott Watson – map its development and place and locate it informatively within the context of the art then emerging in Europe and North America. They also relate it usefully to his creative and curatorial projects in mail art and concrete poetry.  The two essays that accompany the concrete poetry – Jamie Hilder’s “Concrete Poetry: from The Procedural to the Performative,” and Michael Turner’s “Visual Poems: Imaginary Museums,” are

Reading the Difficulties: Dialogues with Contemporary American Innovative Poetry, ed. Thomas Fink and Judith Halden-Sullivan. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama Press, 2014. 230 pp. $34.95.


Reading the Difficulties is another spring 2014 release in the Modern/Contemporary Poetics series co-edited by Charles Bernstein and Hank Lazer. It is less a book about how to read ‘difficult’ contemporary poetry than one that presents examples of readers doing that. The subtitle, “dialogues with contemporary American innovative poetry,” suggests that “reading” can involve having “dialogues” with poems, and is a fair description of most of the contents. Two of the twelve essays are on Canadian poets, bpNichol and Lisa Robertson, who appear to have become honorary Americans for this occasion. Or perhaps “American” has been unconsciously redefined here as referencing North America – the rapid globalization of literary distribution and creation has complications for everyone. Also frequently cited here is a third Canadian, Steve McCaffery.

Difficult not to notice is the sometimes awkwardly close connection between the book and series co-editor Bernstein, who rather famously linked the word ‘difficulty’ to his own writing in his 2011 collection The Attack of the Difficult Poems. Much of the first third of this book reads like a tribute that important book. The lead-off contribution is his 2006 poem “Thank You for Saying Thank You,” which begins “This is a totally / accessible poem.” The fourth essay is a comparison by Stephen Paul Miller of Bernstein and Walter Benjamin as radical secular Jewish poets. Thirty-three mentions of Bernstein are listed in the index (mostly in the first 50 pages), more than double those of any other writer except for fellow Language poet Ron Silliman who receives 23.   

The arguments of most of the contributors indeed have their roots in Bernstein’s assertions over the years in work such as The Artifice of Absorption (1987) and Content’s Dream: Essays 1975-84 (2001) against the reduction by readers and teachers of literary works to their “content” – a scandalizing argument that has paralleled in the US poetry scene the one which I introduced to the Canadian Literature criticism scene in 1974 with my (“vastly influential” according to the Oxford Companion [one hopes!]) essay “Surviving the Paraphrase.” Paralleled with rather more panache, disruptive force and literary consequence, I would say. Here is some of Bernstein’s “artifice of absorption” argument against paraphrase, i.e. against throwing away a text’s materiality while “absorbing” its imagined/abstracted “meaning”:

Robert Duncan. Collected Essays and Other Prose. Ed. James Maynard. Berkeley: U of California P, 2014. 542 pp. $60.00.

This is the third gathering of Robert Duncan’s essays, following Duncan’s own selection of thirteen in Fictive Certainties, 1984, and Robert Bertolf’s selection of twenty in A Selected Prose in 1994. Maynard’s new selection of 41 essays certainly eclipses the other two, although it doesn't live up to its title of “Collected Essays” – something which Maynard hints in his introduction may have troubled him. He describes Collected Essays there, somewhat paradoxically, as including only “most of Duncan’s longer and more well-known essays along with a representative selection of other prose “ (xxxiv-xxxv) and calls for the publishing of  “a necessary companion volume for all of Duncan’s remaining uncollected prose” (xxxvi); he also provides a five-page “Appendix of Uncollected Essays and Other Prose.” His book’s title was possibly his publisher’s decision, perhaps dictated by its being part of the press’s series “The Collected Works of Robert Duncan.” Although Maynard also describes his new selected as a “reader’s edition” and only “lightly” edited, it is by far the most scholarly of the three, with a 51-page section of notes and a lengthy bibliography of the works and editions which Duncan appears to have cited.

Duncan’s 1984 selection, on which he worked intermittently for at least fifteen years, contained most of the essays that were influential in the reception of his poetry during the 1960s, its most productive decade – “Ideas on the Meaning of Form,” “Towards an Open Universe,” “The Sweetness and Greatness of Dante’s Divine Comedy,” “The Truth and Life of Myth,” and “Man’s Fulfillment in Order and Strife.” Bertolf in 1994 omits all but the first two of these, I suspect because the other three are among the most theosophical, performative and rhetorically extravagant of Duncan’s prose. One gets a sense that Duncan presented the essays he wanted to disseminate and be known by, and Bertolf those that he thought it politic for him to be known by. Maynard merely wants Duncan’s essays known and includes both these essays of wondrous excess and the somewhat more circumspect – “Ideas on the Meaning of Form” and “A Critical Difference of View.” Even in the latter, however, while writing less ecstatically, Duncan found it

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).

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

The idea that poetry is communal practice, in which poets work with and re-work forms and concepts that have accumulated through the writing of their colleagues and predecessors, concepts which are available to the use – or non-use – of all, has been circulating in Canada at least since Robert Duncan lectured in Vancouver in 1961, and paraphrased from an essay he was writing,“As Testimony,” that he welcomed “the end of masterpieces, the beginning of testimony.” It is with Duncan’s assertion in his H.D. Book that “the goods of the intellect are communal” and his claim that to be creatively “derivative” should be each poet’s goal, that Stephen Voyce concludes his study of what he argues have been four “poetic communities”: the Black Mountain College community in North Carolina in the 1950s, the Caribbean Artists Movement in London, UK, in the 1960s, the Women’s liberation movement (largely understood by Voyce to have occurred in the U.S., and to be different from the theory field known as ‘feminism’) in the 1970s, and the Toronto Research Group in the 1970s and 80s. He titles his book – newly published by the University of Toronto Press, Poetic Community: Avant Garde Activism and Cold War Culture.

Invocations of the Cold War as a partly determinative context for literature have been increasingly frequent in U.S. literary studies, as in Edward Brunner’s Cold War Poetry: The Social Text in the Fifties Poem (2001) and Michael Davidson’s Guys Like Us: Citing Masculinity in Cold War Poetics (2004). Voyce finds the Cold War directly relevant to all but the Toronto Research Group section, where it seems to be present only implicitly in his discussions of Steve McCaffery’s Marxism and his translation of the Communist Manifesto into Yorkshirese, and in his views of intellectual property. “The TRG’s experiments in multi-authorship, I argue, constitute a poetic activism challenging proprietary definitions of authorship” (206); “TRG’s ‘Kommunism’ sought to advance the principles of an egalitarian economic model with open, model with open, local, and playful experiments in artistic collective life” (207). The Yorkshireise “Kommunism” (Wot we wukkers want), though, was not published as a TRG work but on audiocassette as a solo performance by McCaffery. Overall, however, this is a very good book for those who would like to consider further the issues of collaboration and literary ‘property.’ Voyce handles the various poets’ declarations about community,

Please, No More Poetry: The Poetry of derek beaulieu, edited and introduced by Kit Dobson, is a new release in Wilfrid Laurier University Press’s poetry series and, despite the title, there will probably be others in the series. The book is a novel venture for WLUP. Most of the series has presented small collections by long-serving and relatively well known Canadian writers. beaulieu, who has edited the very small presses No Press and housepress, is well known mostly among other small press poets.

There is probably no prize for identifying the title and subtitle as a curiosity-raising paradox. What is this? – a book of poetry that wants to be last book of poetry? – that wants no competitors to follow it? (Good luck!) Or is the “poetry” of the subtitle different from the “poetry” of the title? If so, surely the press could have given the reader a little typographical hint, perhaps putting the second “poetry” in all lower case, or in quotation marks?  Dobson’s introduction, however, indeed indicates that the two “poetry” words are different, quoting beaulieu on his being a poet who is “concerned with exploring forms that move away from the ‘the poem as finely wrought epiphanic moment of personal reflection,’” and who “‘abandons narrative intention in favour of compositional intention.’” He quotes beaulieu again as having asserted that “poetry is no longer the beautiful expression of emotive truths; it is the archaeological arrangement of the remains of an ancient civilization.”

So the “no more poetry” that the title wants to see no more of is the poetry that attempts “the beautiful expression of emotive truths,” that aspires to “a finely wrought epiphanic moment of personal reflection” or to a vivid narrative of event or reflection.  In such theoretical statements beaulieu has not been wary of binary oppositions – “narrative intention” is undesirable, “compositional intention” desirable; “beautiful expression of emotive truths” is undesirable, “archaeological rearrangement” desirable. Through these binaries beaulieu is joining the attack on the lyric poem that began back at least as far back as the 1950s with Olson’s critique of the “private-soul-at-any-public-wall” and Duncan’s scathing’s denunciations of poets who wrote poems in order to publicize themselves and aggrandize their careers. Paradoxically, of course, outrageous binary oppositions can help build a poet’s career, as in Irving Layton’s amusingly

Or,
Recessional Sonnet Concerning Cost-cutting Poetries

To cut costs Canadian poets
have used fewer letters in words (B. Bissett)
smaller letters (b. bissett), fewer
vowels  (C. Bok), fewer changes
in pitch (M. Atwood), fewer words
taken from dictionaries (A. Karasick), fewer letterspaces
and smaller letters (bpNichol). They have re-cycled found lines
or sentences (L. Robertson, J.R. Colombo),
or once-abandoned poems (D. Marlatt)
or have re-used and re-used earlier concepts
(I. Layton, R. Souster, A. Purdy inter alios).
Some have used their own alphabets (P. Coupey, bpNichol)
or even made their poems go bare (P. Webb).

FD

A Book of Variations: Love – Zygal – Art Facts is the title of the latest posthumous bpNichol collection. It’s a title created not by Nichol, of course, but by the book’s editor, Stephen Voyce, and it not surprisingly lacks the wit of the original titles of the three books that it reprints. The title Love: A Book of Remembrances mischievously winked at the emphemerality of dreams and joy, Zygal: A Book of Mysteries and Translations commented on the mystery of Nichol’s fascination with drawing and ‘translating’ the ‘mysteries’ of the letter ‘H,’ while Art Facts: A Book of Contexts punned on the ‘artifacts’ of art which were the contexts and inspirations of much of the book’s contents.

These were collections of what were for Nichol his ‘occasional poems’ – hand-drawn visual poems, typewriter poems, pataphysical poems of his “Probable Systems” series, experiments with the comic strip panel. They were poems he could complete, file away or publish without involving himself in a long-term project. Toward the end of his life he is reported to have been filing such work under two more titles: “ox, house, camel, door: a book of higher glyphs” and “truth: a book of fictions.” The new titles extended the wordplay of the three earlier ones. A collection titled Truth: a Book of Fictions, edited by Irene Niechoda, was posthumously published in 1993 by Mercury Press and is still in print.

Voyce writes that there is archival evidence that Niechoda cannibalized the manuscript of “ox, house, camel, door” in order to help give the more arrestingly titled “Truth” the length needed by the publisher. That’s quite possible, but in any case Voyce knows that this kind of collection was in Nichol’s mind an irregularly continuing series, with each volume to be published by a different publisher (10). Had Nichol lived longer there likely would have been more than

Part of the work of writing my recent biography of Canadian poet bpNichol (aka bpNichol) took me to the special collections department of Simon Fraser University’s W.A.C. Bennett Library, where several deposits of Nichol’s literary and other papers had accumulated since the early 1970s. Most had come from Nichol himself, at least one posthumously from his wife Eleanor, and one or two from others, such as artist Arnold Shives, who had exchanged letters with Nichol in the mid-1960s. At Simon Fraser I discovered that parts the Nichol collection were not only large but relatively complete; the collection contained all but one of the diary-like notebooks he had kept, most of the letters he’d received, most of the outgoing letters that he had begun keeping copies of in the 1970s, and most of the many drafts of his published and unpublished writing. There were 50-60 or more large file boxes of often surprising materials. There was also his comic book collection, a large file of his visual poems, many done in colour, a part if not all of his toy collection, and a collection of audio recordings.

But there seemed to be also significant gaps, perhaps only noticeable to someone who hoped to write a Nichol biography. There was very little from the early years of his life, other than the recollections he had recorded in his