Against Conceptual Poetry by Ron Silliman. Denver: Counterpath, 2014. 190 pp. $18.00.

Against Conceptual Poetry is the third volume of Silliman’s Universe long-poem project, its 45th degree according to the title page, and its 45.4th  degree according to its LC cataloguing data. So possibly another .6 degrees of this section are yet to come. The title appears to be a play on the title of conceptual poets Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith’s 2011 anthology Against Expression. The text carries many of the marks of a conceptual poem, and could be read as a kind of parody.

It’s a transcript, chopped into mostly Silliman-like six-word lines, of a 3-hour 12-minute interview that Eric Schmidt, ex-CEO of Novell and Google, Jared Cohen, once an advisor to U.S. Secretaries of State Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton, Scott Malcomson, once foreign editor of The New York Times, and Lisa Shields, vice president of the US think tank The Council on Foreign Relations, conducted in Britain with Julian Assange in 2011 as part of research for Schmidt and Cohen’s 2013 book The Digital Age. Created in Britain by Americans who are speaking with an Australian who is in flight from sex charges in Sweden and who operates the globally fugitive website Wikileaks in an attempt to be a political benefactor to global humanity, the text offers the first solid basis for the Bookthug claim that Silliman's Universe is a work of “globalization” literature. In the background as one reads is always the struggle of the US to drag Assange from his global perch and into the range of American national power.

Is Against Conceptual Poetry a conceptual poem? Certainly it is primarily a concept. From a literary/aesthetic perspective, once one has identified the concept – much like in Goldsmith’s The Weather – one may have no need to read further. Some conceptual poems – Peter Jaeger’s The Persons and Rapid Eye Movement come to mind – raise a

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

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

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).

[There were amusingly lyric moments in Barack Obama’s marginally encouraging speech this Tuesday on climate change. They led me to wonder what he might have said had he been concerned about poetry climate change. ]

Fellow citizens – remember that man in the moon
looking over at Earth, beautiful; breathtaking;
a glowing marble of blue oceans. But even he can now see
that poetry has been changing
in ways that will have profound impacts on all human poets.

12 of the longest poems in the history of our language
have been written in the past century. Last year
the automated re-use of words in some areas of poetry
reached record highs and the pool
of words considered unpoetic shrank to the smallest size on record
faster than most sociologists had predicted. These are facts.

Now we know that no single poem event is caused solely by climate change.
Haiku, epigrams, and sapphics, they go back to ancient times.
But we also know that in a world where there’s more words being used
than there used to be, all language events are affected by a planet ever
more robotic and garrulous. The fact that most of our poetry books
are a half-inch thinner than a century ago
didn’t cause books with titles like The Alphabet, Draft , Footnotes, Day
or Metropolis, but it certainly contributed to
to the shrinking that left large parts of our mightiest canon
feeling small and overshadowed.

The potential impacts go far beyond falling word levels. Here at home
2012 was the most silent year in our history. The plains were parched
by the longest sentence drought in its memory. Visual poems scorched
an area larger than Leaves of Grass. Only last week a conceptual poet
in nearby Alberta published a whole book made of 90s.

As a resident, as a father, and as a Poet I’m here to say we need to act.

My plan begins by cutting language pollution