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

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