Category: Peter Jaeger

Peter Jaeger's Family Time Poetics

11/9/2015

Family Time, by Peter Jaeger. Bristol: Shearsman Books, 2015. $8.11. 30 pp.

Peter Jaeger is one of my favorite Canadian poets, partly because in every book he seeks new ways in which a poem can be written. Family Time is ‘about’ his three children but is also a poetics lesson in various possibilities for constraint poetry.

You’re unlikely to find this little book in a Canadian bookshop – over time, it’s likely to be a scarce item. But one of Britain’s bigger book dealers, The Book Depository, has it available on-line, including through Amazon.ca.

Last week I looked at George Bowering’s thematizing of constraints in his new collection of short fiction, 10 Women. There are hints of that in at least one of Jaeger’s poems. In “The Rurals / Ruckles Park,” written on Salt Spring Island while his partner was pregnant with their first child, each prose stanza begins in a perception about gestation biology, marine biology, or woodland botany:

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Iconic Words: When Text is Visual Art

11/21/2014

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This is the text and accompanying images of a presentation I gave last night at the RSC meetings in Quebec City. -- FD

bpNichol, “Letter to a Loved One,” 1967.

1. In my recent biography of Canadian poet and lay psychotherapist bpNichol I outlined the arguments he developed around 1964 for writing visual poems. Unaware of the international concrete poem movement, he was calling his proposed new poems “ideopomes.”

bpNichol, “Blues,” 1967.

2. These “ideopomes” would help him, he believed, avoid didacticism and self-pitying emotional expression, which he saw as the main weaknesses of his conventional poetry. He also believed that self-pity and narcissism were serious limits on the Freudian psychotherapy he was undergoing, and limits to the success of any psychoanalysis.

3. He would later call his visual poetry a means of resisting “arrogance.” In these arguments one can perceive the shadow of high modernist arguments against Victorian moralism and sentimentality, and in favor of imagism and impersonality; collage and “objective correlative” in early Eliot, and of Pound’s “ideogrammic method.”
(sections 4-20 via "Read More" below)

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Lisa Robertson's CINEMA OF THE PRESENT

10/1/2014

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Cinema of the Present by Lisa Robertson. Toronto: Coach House Press, 2014. 112 pp. $17.95.

“Cinema of the Present” would be an appropriate title for many recent conceptual poetry books, including Fitterman’s No, Wait. Yep. Definitely Still Hate Myself, with its assemblage of approximate 1000 on-line expressions of self-doubt, which I looked at here last week. Would Fitterman’s be an adequate title for the Robertson? – not quite, but close. But change his “hate” to “doubt” and we’d be there. Robertson’s title, however, makes a much larger claim to profundity and cultural relevance than does Fitterman’s, or than, say, Peter Jaeger’s also similar subjectivity-mapping long conceptual poem The Persons.

In a generally helpful discussion of Cinema of the Present, reviewer Alex Crowley in Publishers Weekly writes, rather paradoxically, that it “defies review,” – that it “instead demand[s] engagement, conversation, and multiple rereads,” and that [i]t may not be a great place to start for newcomers to Robertson’s work.” That her poetry is pleasurably incomprehensible seems to be becoming a standard view of Robertson – most of the online bookstores offering the book quote a New York Times review of her 2009 Magenta Soul Whip that “Robertson proves hard to explain but easy to enjoy” – a quotation that also appears on her publisher’s website. Though to some it may recall Swinburne, it’s probably a powerful marketing tag, since most readers of traditional poetry by far prefer enjoyment to explanation. Moreover Cinema of the Present isn’t all that far from traditional poetry (while still far from Swinburne) – much of it can be read as disguised lyricism or confessionalism, or even as forming a disguised romantic ode. In such a reading it may be not at all difficult for newcomers.

Crowley also describes Robertson not as Canadian but as “Canadian-born” and “living in France.” Perhaps being Canadian is not an especially attractive attribute to Publishers Weekly readers, who tend to be connected to US publishing and bookselling – better to have that citizenship in doubt. Perhaps he hopes that “Canadian-born”

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No, Wait. Yep. Definitely Still Like this Book.

9/22/2014

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No, Wait. Yep. Definitely Still Hate Myself by Robert Fitterman. Brooklyn, NY: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2014. 78 pp. $16.00.

Rob Fitterman’s latest book comes without any jacket burbs or prefatory material except for an epigraph from the late New York School poet James Schuyler (1926-91) – from the title poem of his 1980 Pulitzer-prize-winning collection, The Morning of the Poem. An alert reader will likely notice that the line structure of the six-line excerpt is similar to the line structure of each two-line unit of the Fitterman.

However, in the publisher’s on-line catalogue, and reprinted from there by Amazon and other on-line booksellers, is this note:

          Robert Fitterman's new book-length poem borrows its poetic form, loosely, from James
          Schuyler's The Morning of the Poem, to orchestrate hundreds of found articulations of sadness
          and loneliness from blogs and online posts. A collective subjectivity composed through the
      avatar of a singular speaker emerges. But the real protagonist of No Wait, Yep. Definitely Still
          Hate Myself is subjectivity as a mediated construct-the steady steam [sic] of personal articula-
      tions that we have access to are personal articulations themselves already mediated via song
          lyrics, advertising, or even broadcasters. No, Wait ... blurs the boundary between collective
          articulation and personal speech, while underscoring the ways in which poetic form participates
        in the mediation of intimate expression.

Fitterman is of course a well-known writer of conceptual and flarf poems, so perhaps his publisher was assuming that anyone who picked up the book in a bookstore or library would recognize that this was a book of “found articulations” – or perhaps they were assuming that all copies would be marketed on-line and that the purchaser would encounter the catalogue blurb.

No, Wait helps map the wide range of conceptual/flarf ‘transparency’ practices, with Kenneth Goldmith’s 2005 The Weather at one end, unabashedly acknowledging its source as a transcription of the the hourly weather bulletins on 1010 WINS, New York City’s all-news radio station, and Lisa Robertson’s 2001 The Weather at the other, with only a remark she made to surprised interviewer Kai Fierle-Hedrick that it was “all lifted” (Chicago Review 51/52:4/1 [Spring 2006]: 40) to reveal that it has been constructed of “found articulations.” In one sense it shouldn’t matter whether

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Peter Jaeger, John Cage, Pussy Riot, Buddhist Ecopoetics

1/6/2014

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John Cage and Buddhist Ecopoetics, by Peter Jaeger. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. 186 pp. $34.50 paper.

Peter Jaeger’s account in his new book, John Cage and Buddhist Ecopoetics, of Naropa Institute (now University) students in 1974 “throwing objects at the stage, playing the guitar, making bird whistles and screaming” (78) in protest of Cage’s performance from his book Empty Words, and of mainstream literary critics responding to Cage’s work with “ridicule” (149), recalled for me church, state and some Western conservative’s responses to Pussy Riot’s now celebrated/notorious performance at St. Basil’s. The power of avant-garde art is often as much in its disruption of its audience as in its disruption of artistic and social conventions, and in its unsettling ability to be resistant to interpretation while simultaneously offering unconceptualizable clarity of meaning. In both the Cage & Pussy Riot cases the artists also generated site-specific meanings. Enigmatic chanting by a poet with his back to his audience in a site of authoritative knowing. Uncoordinated dancing in a site and state of politically choreographed hierarchy. Fools in the seats of masters. Women seizing the altar of patriarchs -- including of course patriarch Putin. Moments of social anarchism in places – a cathedral, the Moscow Kremlin, the academy – of ceremonial enclosure.

Peter Jaeger’s John Cage and Buddhist Ecopoetics is itself an especially rich performance because, in not insisting on interpreting or summarizing John Cage, Jaeger also creates resonances of meaning. In a Canadian context, this book by Montreal-born Jaeger, now a leading conceptual poet and head of Creative Writing at the UK’s Roehampton University, can be read as a sustained demolition of thematic criticism. Texts, like other art objects or performances, have meaning mostly if that meaning is respected as irreducible, is left immanent, is not summarized in symbolic language; as Charles Olson quoted the Taoist poet Lao Tzu, “that which exists through itself is what is called meaning” (Muthologos I, 64). It's a principle that Jaeger has invoked and tried to observe throughout.

Despite its very precise title, John Cage and Buddhist Ecopoetics is an ambitious, wide-ranging book – an exercise in radical critical methodology, a denial of the Cartesian cogito, a critique of the lyric poem (especially the lyric as

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Peter Jaeger's Family Time Poetics

Iconic Words: When Text is Visual Art

Lisa Robertson's CINEMA OF THE PRESENT

No, Wait. Yep. Definitely Still Like this Book.

Peter Jaeger, John Cage, Pussy Riot, Buddhist Ecopoetics

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