The idea that poetry is communal practice, in which poets work with and re-work forms and concepts that have accumulated through the writing of their colleagues and predecessors, concepts which are available to the use – or non-use – of all, has been circulating in Canada at least since Robert Duncan lectured in Vancouver in 1961, and paraphrased from an essay he was writing,“As Testimony,” that he welcomed “the end of masterpieces, the beginning of testimony.” It is with Duncan’s assertion in his H.D. Book that “the goods of the intellect are communal” and his claim that to be creatively “derivative” should be each poet’s goal, that Stephen Voyce concludes his study of what he argues have been four “poetic communities”: the Black Mountain College community in North Carolina in the 1950s, the Caribbean Artists Movement in London, UK, in the 1960s, the Women’s liberation movement (largely understood by Voyce to have occurred in the U.S., and to be different from the theory field known as ‘feminism’) in the 1970s, and the Toronto Research Group in the 1970s and 80s. He titles his book – newly published by the University of Toronto Press, Poetic Community: Avant Garde Activism and Cold War Culture.
Invocations of the Cold War as a partly determinative context for literature have been increasingly frequent in U.S. literary studies, as in Edward Brunner’s Cold War Poetry: The Social Text in the Fifties Poem (2001) and Michael Davidson’s Guys Like Us: Citing Masculinity in Cold War Poetics (2004). Voyce finds the Cold War directly relevant to all but the Toronto Research Group section, where it seems to be present only implicitly in his discussions of Steve McCaffery’s Marxism and his translation of the Communist Manifesto into Yorkshirese, and in his views of intellectual property. “The TRG’s experiments in multi-authorship, I argue, constitute a poetic activism challenging proprietary definitions of authorship” (206); “TRG’s ‘Kommunism’ sought to advance the principles of an egalitarian economic model with open, model with open, local, and playful experiments in artistic collective life” (207). The Yorkshireise “Kommunism” (Wot we wukkers want), though, was not published as a TRG work but on audiocassette as a solo performance by McCaffery. Overall, however, this is a very good book for those who would like to consider further the issues of collaboration and literary ‘property.’ Voyce handles the various poets’ declarations about community,
Invocations of the Cold War as a partly determinative context for literature have been increasingly frequent in U.S. literary studies, as in Edward Brunner’s Cold War Poetry: The Social Text in the Fifties Poem (2001) and Michael Davidson’s Guys Like Us: Citing Masculinity in Cold War Poetics (2004). Voyce finds the Cold War directly relevant to all but the Toronto Research Group section, where it seems to be present only implicitly in his discussions of Steve McCaffery’s Marxism and his translation of the Communist Manifesto into Yorkshirese, and in his views of intellectual property. “The TRG’s experiments in multi-authorship, I argue, constitute a poetic activism challenging proprietary definitions of authorship” (206); “TRG’s ‘Kommunism’ sought to advance the principles of an egalitarian economic model with open, model with open, local, and playful experiments in artistic collective life” (207). The Yorkshireise “Kommunism” (Wot we wukkers want), though, was not published as a TRG work but on audiocassette as a solo performance by McCaffery. Overall, however, this is a very good book for those who would like to consider further the issues of collaboration and literary ‘property.’ Voyce handles the various poets’ declarations about community,
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