This past Thursday and Friday I was in Kelowna during the Textual Editing and Modernism in Canada (TEMiC) week-long summer institute. For the graduate students enrolled it was an intense course in “editing modernism on and off the page” – the printed page, the electronic page, and audio recordings – for which they could receive graduate course credit. Because the host faculty at the University of British Columbia (Okanagan) is one of “creative and critical studies,” the course also focused on editing as both a creative and critical activity and on the relationship between the creative and the critical. (Myself, I’m not so sure that they are sufficiently separate activities that there can be a “relationship” between them – but that’s another matter.)

To emphasize the links between the creative and the critical, the course was interwoven with a two-day “Poetry Off the Page” event of readings and discussion. The invited writers – myself and George Bowering, Daphne Marlatt, Sharon Thesen, and Fred Wah (that's us in the cheerful photo, above, by Paul Marck) -- were all ones who had also been editors, worked with early tape-recorded materials, and had produced creative, critical and creative-critical publications. The organizers – Dean Irvine, the director of the Editing Modernism in Canada project, and Karis Shearer of UBC (Okanagan) – tell me that Phyllis Webb, a poet who has created and edited much taped-recorded work for the CBC, was also invited but unable to attend. Poetry off the Page was marked as a kind of  “50th anniversary  of the

Britain has Anne Hathaway’s cottage, the Yukon has the Robert Service cabin, Florida the Robert Frost cottage, Woodstock Ontario the John McCrae House, Amsterdam the Anne Frank House, Prince Edward Island its house of Green Gables, and Ameliasburg Ontario now the Al Purdy A-Frame. This past spring the ‘save Al Purdy’s A-frame project’ announced that its four-year fund-raising campaign – to which Leonard Cohen donated $10K – had succeeded in purchasing the cabin from Purdy’s widow Eurithe, and now plans to raise yet more money to renovate the property to house a writer-in-residence and receive visits. It has rebuilt the outhouse. It is rebuilding the front deck. It is rebuilding a later but no longer existing structure to serve as a gatehouse. There are rumours it will soon find empty vintage wine bottles for the garden and a 1948 Pontiac for the driveway. That it will begin holding annual dinners across the country at which pipers usher in a barbecued Cariboo horse and all assembled recite “The Song of the Impermanent Husband.”

OK, I have mixed feelings about the project. Purdy is a remarkable example of a self-educated poet, as Bowering’s 1970s monograph documents, and an encouragement to any young writer to persist no matter how weak one’s early poems. The A-frame is said to have been hammered together mostly by him and his wife, Eurithe. Purdy is the author of numerous remarkable lyrical responses to Canadian places and people. He could also, alas, find humour in misogyny and romance in racism, as well as in the often unrequited labour of eastern Ontario’s U.E.L. settlers. He’s been called by critic Sam Solecki “the last Canadian poet” – i.e. the last to be able to assume that being male, white,
beer-loving and British-descended was the Canadian mainstream. But Solecki could be wrong.

The question of why save his A-frame is also the question of why preserve any building because of its literary associations. In a way such preservation is anti-literary – an act that draws people’s attention to things other than words. Proponents argue that Wordsworth’s house in the Lake District leads one back to his poems – which in a few cases it likely does. But for most visiting a literary house is a way of being literary without having to read – an architectural version of a Readers Digest condensed book for a similarly bourgeois audience. Or it’s an event with

Senior American poet Rachel Blau DuPlessis has been investigating how the history of English-language modernist poetry came to be mapped, and its poets identified, ranked or excluded, since at least 1985, when she published Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers. Her most recent publication in this historiographic project is Purple Passages: Pound, Eliot, Zukofsky, Olson, Creeley and the Ends of Patriarchal Poetry (U of Iowa P, 2012).

DuPlessis suggests that she could have focused in this book on other or additional male modernist poets without her findings being “significantly changed” (195). Her choices appear to have been not so much assertions of poetic importance as namings of writers who benefited most visibly from the patriarchal assumptions of both our literary and general culture. They’re also namings without blaming. DuPlessis recognizes the enormous advantages that patriarchal position-taking has offered/offers to male poets – the unquestioned right to ‘speak’ for all gender roles and material situations, to pronounce ‘authoritatively’ on all topics, and to be praised for doing so. She notes also how male poets have been not only reluctant to share such advantages with women poets whom they recognized as able – such as Pound with Mina Loy – but have also quarrelled and maneuvered among themselves for the (most) patriarchal mantle. She both regrets the resultant exclusions and envies the male ability – because of the greater social power the general culture still accords to men – to make “imperial” pronouncements. She begins her book’s final paragraph “I wanted (imperially?) to declare the end of the patriarchal era of poetry by the sheer force of these sometimes negative examples and by the temperate if also suspicious empathy that characterizes most of my analysis” (196). That is, as a willing

Next Thursday evening at the Black Swan Pub in Toronto (154 Danforth) there’s a launch party for the latest issue of Rampike and the last two issues of the journal I publish, Open Letter – the Fall 2012 issue on collaborative writing and the Spring 2013 issue marking 103 years since the birth of Charles Olson – “Olson @ the Century.” The event will feature a bunch of writers from  Rampike and from the Open Letter collaboration issue: Robert Anderson,  Gregory Betts, Gary Barwin,  George Elliot Clarke, Beatriz Hausner, Karl Jirgens, Babar Khan, Camille Martin, Nick Power, Concetta Principe and Richard Truhlar. The single Toronto contributor to the Olson issue, poet Michael Boughn, unfortunately isn’t able to attend.

The Olson issue, guest edited by Steve McCaffery, although lacking representation at this event is every bit as rich as the collaboration one. It contains an extremely useful essay by Don Byrd on Olson’s late-in-life concept of the archive as a possible mode of composition – the poem as an archive. The issue also has several previously unpublished letters to Olson from Robert Creeley, a revealing essay by Kenneth Warren on Olson’s relationship with would-be lover Frances Boldereff, and various reconceptualizing essays on Olson’s roles in the late modernist period by Boughn, Miriam Nichols, Stephen Fredman, Chris Sylvester and Richard Owens. Many of these were presented at the October 2010 SUNY Buffalo conference “Olson @ the Century.”

Despite the questioning that the relationship between the oral and the written has received in recent years, Olson’s 1948 essay “Projective Verse” is still probably responsible for much of the visual appearance of poetry in Canada, and has been over the last four decades – for lines that are structured as units of speech, and line endings understood to indicate pauses or stops. Part of that essay’s innovative force in 1948 derived from the fact that poetry readings were then rare events – the now widespread  “open mic” concept of this website and its reading series was virtually unthinkable. The postwar poetry performance tours of Dylan Thomas – the last one in 1953 soon to be a film – were received as oddities, and  usually ascribed to his Welsh ‘bardic’ roots. Recordings of poetry readings didn’t become widely available until the mid-1950s and the invention of the vinyl LP – in the early releases of Encyclopedia Britannica Film’s “Spoken Arts” series of LPs (1956-) Pound read his “Confucian Odes,” Eliot his “Four Quartets” and Yeats was presented in a few rare recordings supplemented with poems read by actors. When poetry readings became increasing common during the 1950s, various senior Canadian poets had to train themselves to read aloud – some had never before given readings.

Many poets have read Olson’s “Projective Verse” as having theorized the written text as a score for the poem’s oral performance – much like a piece of sheet music enables a faithful performance of a song. That appears to have been Vancouver poet Lionel Kearns’ understanding in 1962 when he devised his “stacked verse” poem notation in which the poet aligned the most heavily stressed syllables of a poem’s lines (there was to be only one heavy stress per line) beneath one another and drew a vertical “stress axis” through them. (Kearns was one of the first to notice Olson’s major blind spot – Saussurean linguistics –  although more as an omission than a problem.) A similar understanding (but again inflected by linguistics) informed the 1970-80s “notayshun” issues of Open Letter, mostly edited by bpNichol – how one “notated” a poem could govern what the poem emphasized and how it was understood. But this wasn’t exactly Olson’s theory – in “Projective Verse” he had also proposed that the poem could be “act of the instant” partly determined by the historically conditioned breath of the poet during that instant; the poem could record the poet speaking out of cosmic and human history in that instant. When Olson came to read one of his poems, however, he was inevitably reading it in a much different “instant” than the one in which he’d composed it. So he would often re-compose his lines as he read, or insert commentary that might or might not be part of the changing poem. Some listeners understood these as revisions, which they weren’t – revision implies a desire to improve, to create a new “more correct” version. How can one instant be more “correct” than another? Other listeners – as during his reading at the 1965 Berkeley conference in which his changes and interpolations were extensive – understood them as irresponsible abandonings of the original text. Some understood them when they were preserved on tape as “variants” – the editor of his Collected Poems, George Butterick, records and dates these as an editor would record the variants in different lifetime print editions. As for Olson, during his readings he appears to have viewed himself as being an active composing poet rather than as being a reader of unalterable scripts.
    
The so-called “breath line” of Olson, now modified by having been linked to illusions of personal presence and sincerity, can be found in the work of numerous poets today who may never have read a word of Olson.  However, the breath here is hardly the Olson conception: a breath he perceived not as that of an individual ego but as one conditioned by history, ecology, biology, physics, politics, economics and archaeology into the unique form of an instant of uttered composition. In Canada that misunderstanding ironically has reinforced the practice of the lyric, a form which Olson, the civic poet of polis, disparaged in “Projective Verse” as “the private soul at any public wall.” That description has always made think of a guy at a urinal – a somewhat sexist image if I’m right (not an unusual thing to find in Olson). Which has then led me to think of Al Purdy’s Roblin Lake outhouse and why poetry afficionados can be sentimental about it.

FD