Category: TISH

Michael Morris and Concrete Poetry

2/11/2016

Letters: Michael Morris and Concrete Poetry, ed. Scott Watson and Jana Tyner. Vancouver: Belkin Art Gallery; London: Black Dog Publishing, 2015. 192 pp. $39.95.

This impressively produced survey of the early work of Vancouver painter, conceptual artist, performance artist, and concrete poet Michael Morris, together with a presentation of Canadian concrete poetry of the 1960s and 70s and its international context was “published to accompany the exhibition” Letters: Michael Morris and Concrete Poetry in 2012 at the University of British Columbia’s Belkin Art Gallery, but not published by the UK’s Black Dog Publishing until late in 2015. The Belkin appears to be the book’s co-publisher and Canadian distributor, although the book is copyrighted only to Black Dog.

Untitled concrete poem by Morris, 1967. Letters, 105.

Many people in the literary community outside of Vancouver will know Michael Morris primarily as a mail artist, founder in 1969 of Image Bank, or as a performance artist, co-founder with Vincent Trasov in 1973 of The Western Front, one of Canada’s most important artist-run galleries. This collection’s numerous colour reproductions of his geometric and soft-edge paintings of 1966-69 and essays on their place in European and North American art history will enlarge that view, as will the reproductions of his concrete poetry of that period. Curiously, the latter was not widely circulated in Canada – not represented in bpNichol’s 1970 anthology The Cosmic Chef, nor often published in literary magazines. Morris seems to have produced them mostly as single copy drawings or as limited series prints, and presented them on gallery walls much like he did his paintings.

The three essays that accompany the reproductions of Morris’s paintings and sculpture – essays by David McWilliam, William Wood, and Scott Watson – map its development and place and locate it informatively within the context of the art then emerging in Europe and North America. They also relate it usefully to his creative and curatorial projects in mail art and concrete poetry. The two essays that accompany the concrete poetry – Jamie Hilder’s “Concrete Poetry: from The Procedural to the Performative,” and Michael Turner’s “Visual Poems: Imaginary Museums,” are

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The Earle Birney-Al Purdy Letters

9/15/2014

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We Go Far Back in Time: The Letters of Earle Birney and Al Purdy, 1947-1987. Ed. Nicholas Bradley. Vancouver: Harbour Publishing, 2014. 480 pp. $39.95.

Like Al Purdy, I also go far back in time with Earle Birney. In 1955 he signed his newly published novel Down the Long Table for my godmother to give me for Christmas; in 1957 I began seeing him, tall and slightly stooped, on the UBC campus; in my third year in 1959 I enrolled in his Chaucer class and sat in the back row where I wondered whether he ever saw me. Always theatrically self-creating, he played each day to an appreciative audience of graduate students who had preempted the front row. He savoured speculatively the Wife of Bath's portrayal, “Housbondes at chirche dore she hadde fyve, / Withouten oother compaignye in youthe,” and spent much of another class pondering new research into a rape charge that Chaucer had faced, and whether “raptus” could mean that he had only kidnapped the young woman, and perhaps not for himself, possibly for John of Gaunt. Stimulating stuff for a country boy like me or Al Purdy – wouldn’t have missed a word of it. In a 1969 letter to Purdy, however, Birney remembers: “I think he got firstclass marks from me; but he scarcely ever attended my lectures” (213).

Purdy writes three letters to Birney in 1947, while trying to get poems accepted by him for the Canadian Poetry Magazine, which Birney was editing, and begins a more personal correspondence in 1955, with letters that editor Nicholas Bradley here terms both “pugnacious” and “sycophantic” (15). Much to his credit, Birney replies, with patience and good humour. The two poets’ correspondence continues until Birney’s devastating heart attack of 1987.

Bradley describes his aims in this collection as “primarily curatorial” (30). He has seemingly reproduced all currently available letters exchanged by the two, deleting only brief passages “that seem to me gratuitously offensive, tactless, or cruel about people who are not public figures” and a “few” that disclose “sensitive medical information about” Purdy’s wife, Eurithe (32). He notes that there are frequent gaps in the correspondence where letters appear to be missing – possibly lost, or not yet catalogued, or contained within the numerous cartons of Birney papers still under embargo. Birney was notoriously protective of his public reputation, and within his lifetime prevented researchers from accessing any materials associated with his first wife, the teenage Trotskyist Sylvia Johnstone, or lovers such as

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Fred Wah on TISH Poetics 1963 & Thereafter

8/11/2014

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Permissions : TISH Poetics 1963 : Thereafter, by Fred Wah. Vancouver: Ronsdale Press, 2014. 34 pp. $10.95.

Fred Wah’s Permissions was the 2013 Garnett Sedgewick Memorial Lecture, a lecture series that honours the first head of English at the University of British Columbia, who served from 1920 to 1948. It was an interesting event if only because the TISH writers have not been especially welcome on the UBC campus in the fifty years since 1963. This frostiness has occurred partly because of ideological splits within the English department during the TISH years, partly because TISH mentor and professor Warren Tallman viewed most of the department as “drones” (see my When TISH Happens 190) and in return was regarded, together with some of his students, by many of his traditionalist colleagues as insufficiently academic, and partly also because of hostility from UBC’s careerist Department of Creative Writing (see http://bcbooklook.com/2014/03/17/ubc-creative-writings-50th/) that was founded in 1964.

Not surprisingly Wah indicates some unease about his situation at the beginning of his lecture, noting that he’s been away from university teaching for ten years and is “feeling a little numb and rusty about the kind of discourse you might expect of me,” and confessing that even during his teaching years there had been “a necessary pretense in my critical writing” (9). Of the original five TISH editors, he was the only one, as I recall, who had not been a major in the Garnett Sedgwick-founded Department of English – an irony of which he was possibly aware.

Having noted his reservations, he then presents an accurate two-page summary of the 1960-63 TISH years and the North American literary context in which they occurred of “flare-ups” in search of "permission" to practice "a poetry

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Michael Morris and Concrete Poetry

The Earle Birney-Al Purdy Letters

Fred Wah on TISH Poetics 1963 & Thereafter

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