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