London Open Mic Poetry Archive
  • Home
  • Frank Davey Blog
  • Stan Burfield Blog
    • Fred Burfield's Homestead Memoirs
  • Our Events
  • News
  • PHOTOS & SUMMARIES
    • Season 5: 2016-2017 >
      • June 7th, 2017: Summary & Photos featuring Stan Burfield
      • May 3rd, 2017, Summary & Photos featuring Jason Dickson
      • April 5th, 2017 Summary & Photos, feeaturing James Deahl & Norma West Linder
      • Mar. 1st, 2017: Photos & Summary featuring Andy Verboom
      • Feb. 1st, 2017: Photos & Summary featuring Ron Stewart
      • Dec. 7th, 2016: Photos & Summary featuring David Stones
      • Nov. 2th, 2016: Photos and Summary featuring Don Gutteridge
      • Oct. 5th, 2016: Photos and Summary featuring David Huebert
    • Season 4: 2015-2016 >
      • June 1st, 2016: Photos and summaries: featuring Lynn Tait
      • May 4th, 2016 Photos and Summary: featuring indigenous poetry
      • April 6, 2016 Photos & Summary, featuring Steven McCabe
      • Mar. 2nd, 2016 photos, summary: featuring Andreas Gripp
      • Feb. 3rd, 2016 photos: 3 Western students.
      • Dec. 2, 2015 photos: featured reader Peggy Roffey
      • Nov. 7, 2015 photos: Our Words Fest open mic
      • Nov. 4, 2015 photos: featured reader Charles Mountford
      • Oct. 7th, 2015 photos: Madeline Bassnett featured
    • Season 3, 2014-15 >
      • Aug. 16, 2015 photos: The Ontario Poetry Society's "Sultry Summer Gathering"
      • June 3rd, 2015 photos: John B. Lee featured
      • May 6th, 2015 photos: Laurie D Graham featured
      • Apr. 1st, 2015 photos: John Nyman & Penn Kemp featured
      • Mar. 4th, 2015 photos: Patricia Black featured.
      • Feb. 4th, 2015 photos: feature Gary Barwin
      • Dec. 3rd, 2014 photos: Feature Debbie Okun Hill
      • Nov. 5th, 2014 photos: feature Julie Berry
      • Oct. 1st, 2014 photos: feature Roy MacDonald
    • Season 2, Sept. 2013 to June 2014. >
      • June 4th, 20114, featuring Monika Lee
      • May 7th 2014, featuring Susan McCaslin and Lee Johnson
      • Sept. 4th, 2013 featuring Frank Beltrano
      • April 16th, 2014, featuring Penn Kemp and Laurence Hutchman
      • March 5th, 2014, featuring Jacob Scheier
      • Feb. 5th, 2014: featuring four UWO students of poetry; music by Tim Woodcock
      • Jan. 2nd, 2014: featuring Carrie Lee Connel
      • Dec. 4th, 2013, featuring M. NourbeSe Philip
      • Nov. 6, 2013 , featuring Susan Downe
      • Oct. 2nd, 2013, featuring Jan Figurski
    • Season 1: Oct. 2012 to June 2013 >
      • June 4th, 2013 featuring David J. paul and the best-ever open mic
      • May 1st, 2013, featuring Sonia Halpern
      • Apr. 24, 2013 featuring Frank Davey & Tom Cull
      • Mar. 6th, 2013, featuring Christine Thorpe
      • Feb. 6th, 2013, featuring D'vorah Elias
      • Jan. 3rd. 2013: John Tyndall featured.
      • Dec. 5, 2012: RL Raymond featured
    • Dig These Hip Cats ... The Beats
  • Poet VIDEOS (open mic & featured readers)
    • 5th Season Videos (2016-2017)
    • 4th Season Videos (2015-16)
    • 3rd Season Videos (2014-2015)
    • 2nd Season (2013-2014) videos
  • BIOGRAPHIES - Featured poets & musicians
  • INTERVIEWS & POEMS (featured poets)
    • SEASON 6 - Interviews & Poems >
      • Kevin Shaw: Poem & Interview
      • David Janzen - Interview
    • SEASON 5 INTERVIEWS & POEMS
    • SEASON 4 INTERVIEWS AND POEMS
    • SEASON 3 INTERVIEWS AND POEMS
    • SEASON 2 INTERVIEWS & POEMS (only from Dec. 4th, 2013)
    • Season 1 INTERVIEWS & POEMS (& 1st half of Season 2) >
      • INTERVIEWS of Featured Poets
      • POEMS by Featured Poets (1st Season & to Nov. 2013)
  • Couplets: Poets in Dialogue
  • Future Events
  • Past Events
    • 5th Season: 2016-2017
    • Season 4: 2015-2016
    • Season 3: 2014-2015
    • Season Two: 2013-2014
    • Season One: 2012-2013
  • Who we Are
  • Testimonial
  • Our Mission
  • Links
  • Contact us

Derek Beaulieu Deplores 'Hopelessly' 'Tired' & Irrelevant Poetry

1/8/2015

0 Comments

 
Picture
transcend   transcribe   transfigure   transform   transgress, by Derek Beaulieu. Ottawa: above/ground, 2014. 36 pp.

If Derek Beaulieu fans (myself included) have a sense of deja vu as they begin this chapbook-prosepoem-essay-manifesto, it’s because its first page or so expands statements he made in the last pages of his interview by Lori Emerson in his 2013 selected poems, Please, No More Poetry.

Those pages left Beaulieu with a few things to sort out and clarify, particularly the passage


                the “golden arches,” the Nike “swoosh” and the Dell logo best represent the
                descendants of the modernist poem. Poet Lew Welsh famously wrote the
                ubiquitous Raid slogan “Raid kills bugs dead" as a copywriter at Foote Cone
                and Belding in 1966. Vanessa Place argues, “we are in an age that  understands
                corporations are people too and poetry is the stuff of placards. And vice versa."
                Like logos for the corporate sponsors of Jorge Luis Borges’ library, my concrete
                poems use the particles of language to represent and promote goods and
                corporations just out of reach.


Among those things this passage left suspended was the question of whether Beaulieu likes modernist poems. And what poems does he consider modernist? Does he know that the 'famous' story that claims that Lew Welch wrote the Raid 'poem' is undocumented, and at best an urban legend? Should he perhaps, like Margaret Atwood several decades ago, incorporate himself? Has he noticed that the 1942 “Loose lips sink ships,” created by the War Advertisers Council, is a modernist precursor of the Raid poem and like it had a corporate author? Does he think Lew Welch should have stayed in advertising? I am of course pulling Derek’s chain, but I do wish that he had undertaken in that interview to be as careful on some of these points as he has been in creating his artwork.

One change Beaulieu makes to this passage in his new book – seemingly following both Cummings and the once continually revising Earle Birney – is to remove all capital letters and to replace all his punctuation with spaces. Another – perhaps following Charles Olson’s use of large caps – is to use boldface for emphasis, thus overall making his text appear more ‘poetic’ than academic. (So much for “no more poetry,” eh, Derek?) Another is to raise the intensity of


his rhetoric, and of his disapproval of poetry that is unlike his own current creations. His opening paragraph begins (my exclamation marks),

                if poetry is going to reclaim even a shred [!] of relevancy for a contemporary audience
                then poets must become competitive for your readership and viewership    as graphic
                design advertising and contemporary design culture expand to redefine and rewrite
                how we understand communication poetry has become ruefully [!] ensconced in the
                traditional. .... the vast majority of poets are trapped [!] in the 20th (if not the 19th)
                century hopelessly [!] reiterating tired tropes    mcdonalds golden arches the nike swoosh
               and the apple logo best represent the contemporary descendants of the modernist poem
               poet lew welch famously wrote raids ubiquitous advertising slogan raid kills bugs dead
               as a copywriter at advertising firm foote cone and belding in 1966    los angeles-based
               vanessa place argues that

                            today we are of an age that understands corporations are people too
                            and poetry is the stuff of placards. or vice versa
                the stuff of poetry – craftsmanship and handiwork – as opposed to the industry of
               advertising relegates poetry to a role out of touch with the driving economies of the culture
               advertisers and graphic designers use the fragments of language to fully realize emotional
               social and political means – and in doing so have left poets with only the most rudimentary
               tools in doing the same

All manifestos are self-serving – Victor Coleman will have something to say about this at the end of this post. But many effective manifestos conceal that by saying little about the art or artists that they would displace, or by speaking humbly about their own efforts. Tzara in his “Dada Manifesto” writes “I speak only of myself since I do not wish to convince, I have no right to drag
others into my river, I oblige no one to follow me and everybody practices his art in his own way.” Borduas in the Refus Global makes no mention of rival art or artists. Wordsworth in his preface to Lyrical Ballads immediately after having condemned his contemporaries for “their frantic novels, sickly and stupid German Tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse” writes:

                When I think upon this degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation, I am almost ashamed
                to have spoken of the feeble endeavour made in these volumes to counteract it; and,
                reflecting upon the magnitude of the general evil, I should be oppressed with no dishonour-
                able melancholy, had I not a deep impression of certain inherent and indestructible qualities
                of the human mind, and likewise of certain powers in the great and permanent objects that
                act upon it, which are equally inherent and indestructible; and were there not added to this
                impression a belief, that the time is approaching when the evil will be systematically opposed,
                by men of greater powers, and with far more distinguished success. [Perhaps Wordsworth was
                foreseeing Derek Beaulieu.]

Unapologetically telling “the vast majority” of his contemporaries that they are “trapped” and their poems are “hopeless,” as Beaulieu does, is usually not good literary politics – especially when the vagueness of “vast majority” allows all writers who don’t at least hand-draw their poems or work for an ad agency to imagine that they have been included. But Beaulieu may not be addressing as large an audience as Wordsworth was accurately imagining. Much more likely he is performing his manifesto mostly for other conceptual poets, such as the ones he discusses a section of text at time in the following 31 pages, and thus asserting and re-asserting his affiliations with them and their “readership and viewership.” This is a transnational audience from the US, Britain, Norway, Germany, and a couple from Canada, and reflects both the concurrent globalizing and fracturing of literary audiences since Wordsworth’s time, and the changing conditions for audience-address. Those 31 pages, incidentally, are the best parts of the chapbook. There’s lots of information there that some poets, readers, and viewers might want to look further into.

Beaulieu is also good on explaining some of the links between visual and conceptual poetry and on suggesting that visual poetry is conceptual. Of course these links have been visible in Europe since Dada, and in Canada since the early concrete and pataphysical works of bpNichol (although most Nichol readers at the time mistook them as concurrent rather than related productions).

 

But I have other comments for Derek. I don’t understand where in this text he stands on matters of what he calls on that first page “the stuff of poetry – craftsmanship and handiwork” and whether he was being ironic there. Two pages later he quotes concrete poet Haroldo de Campos, seemingly favourably, as having “posited concrete poetry as a notion of literature not as craftsmanship but [...] as an industrial process where the poem is a prototype rather than the typical handiwork of artistic artistry,” and appears to praise “contemporary concrete poets fiona banner jen bervin and erica baum” for having created works that “trouble the line between craftsmanship handiwork and industry,” and 12 pages later openly praises them for having chosen a “tradition that discards the fallacy of craftsmanship and handiwork as antithetical to industrious poetics.” Did he mean to write “industrial” here rather than “industrious”? Was his earlier word “industry” an unproductive pun?  Or is he pulling a fast one on us by appearing to dissolve de Campos’s dichotomy between “craftsmanship” and “industrial process” while not really doing so? It’s pretty clear that he would like to dissolve it (and I’d to see him do that) but can’t quite find a way.

Then there’s Beaulieu’s apparently gratuitous slam of Charles Olson and Robert Creeley for having been “contemporararies with [the visual poets] gomringer   the de campos brothers and pignatari” while also using “the typewriter” as “an office machine ... to create and measure the male voice.” Olson and Creeley were also contemporaries with Denise Levertov who used typewriter spacing as much as did Creeley to represent voice. Daphne Marlatt learned partly from all three to use typographic layout to represent voice, in fiction as well as poetry – a voice, like Levertov’s, not often read as “male.” Beaulieu’s slam here appears to be much less one of Olson and Creeley’s masculinism than it is of all non-visual poetry – i.e. how dared anyone create non-visual poetry once Gomringer, Pignatari and the two De Campos boys had created poems otherwise. (And how dare they now that Derek Beaulieu creates poems otherwise?)


As Victor Coleman wrote of bpNichol’s much more tolerant endorsement of visual poetry in 1966, “bpNichol defends Concrete poetry; like the civil servant will defend his job; we don’t want to put all those cats on the welfare payroll out of a job, do we?” (Open Letter 7, Nov 1966: 18).

FD

0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Author

    FRANK DAVEY: Poet, former Coach House Press editor, co-founder of TISH newsletter in 1961, co-founder of e-mag Swift Current in 1984, editor of poetics journal Open Letter, 'author' of Bardy Google in 2010 (Talonbooks), author of the tell-much biography of bpNichol, aka bpNichol in 2012 (ECW), and author of the recently published poetry collection Poems Suitable to Current Material Conditions (Mansfield). He has two other websites: a personal one at FrankDavey.net and one (co-managed with David Rosenberg) focused on poet bpNichol at  akabpNichol.net -- have a look!

    Postal Address: Books for review or other mail may be sent to FD at OPEN LETTER, 102 Oak Street, Strathroy, ON N7G 3K3, Canada

    -Bio/interview by 'Open Book'
    -Shorter bio/interview
    -Biography, online

    Categories

    All
    Adeena Karasick
    Agnes Threlkeld
    Aka Bpnichol
    Alan Edward McCartney
    Alan Reed
    Alice Munro
    Al Purdy
    Amodern
    Art Deco
    Artist's Homes
    Avant Garde
    Avant-garde
    Barack Obama
    Barbara Godard
    Barnicke Gallery
    Basil Bunting
    Battle
    Beauty
    Bill Bissett
    'Black Mountain'
    Bookthug
    BpNichol
    Buddhist Ecopoetics
    Canada At War
    Canadian Art
    Canadian Literature
    Canadian Pacific Railway
    Canadian War Lit
    CanLit Institution
    CanLit Teaching
    Ceramics
    Charles Bernstein
    Charles Olson
    Charles Olson
    Christian Bok
    Christine Miscione
    Christl Verduyn
    Climate Change
    Coach House Press
    Cold War
    Collaboration
    Conceptual Art In Britain
    Conceptual Poetry
    Concrete Poetry
    Creative Writing
    Daphne Marlatt
    Dennis Cooley
    Derek Beaulieu
    Devil's Artisan
    Donato Mancini
    Earle Birney
    Ecopoetry
    Emily Carr
    Epistolary Poems
    Eternal Network
    Eva Zeisel
    Ezra Pound
    Fetish Objects
    First World War
    Flarf
    Fluxus
    Frank Sanderson
    Franz Karl Stanzel
    Fred Wah
    Garry Thomas Morse
    General Idea
    George Bowering
    Gertrude Stein
    Greg Curnoe
    Gwendolyn MacEwen
    Gwynne Dyer
    Hart House
    Identity
    Indigenous Poetics
    Industrial Poetry
    Installation Art
    Irving Layton
    Jackson Mac Low
    Jacqueline Du Pasquier
    James Schuyler
    John Cage
    J.R. Colombo
    Judy Chicago
    Juliana Spahr
    Julian Assange
    Jussi Parikka
    Kathryn Mockler
    Kenneth Goldsmith
    Kevin Mcpherson Eckhoff
    Kit Dobson
    Language Poetry
    Laura Farina
    Laura Riding
    Lea Hindley-Smith
    Lemon Hound
    Leonard Cohen
    Lionel Kearns
    Lisa Anne Smith
    Lisa Robertson
    Literary Celebrity
    Literary Marketing
    Lola Tostevin
    Louis Dudek
    Louise Bourgeois
    Louis Zukofsky
    Love Letters
    Lyric Poetry
    Lytle Shaw
    Manifestos
    Mansfield Press
    Margaret Atwood
    Marjorie Perloff
    Max Laeuger
    Media Archaeology
    Michael Davidson
    Michael Morris
    Michael Ondaatje
    Mimesis
    Mina Loy
    Minimalism
    Misogyny In Poetry
    Modernism
    Nadezhda Tolokonnikova
    National Anthologies
    Nelson Ball
    Norman Yates
    Open Letter
    Pataphysics
    Paul Martin
    Peter Jaeger
    Peter-quartermain
    Philippe Petain
    Phyllis Webb
    Pierre Coupey
    Poetic Community
    Poetics
    Poetry Readings
    Procedural Art
    Public Poetics
    Pussy Riot
    Pussy Riot
    Rachel Blau Duplessis
    Rae Armantrout
    Robert Creeley
    Robert Duncan
    Robert Fitterman
    Robert Kroetsch
    Robert Lallemant
    Robert Lecker
    Ron Silliman
    Second World War
    Sharon Thesen
    Sherrill Grace
    Slavoj Žižek
    Smaro Kamboureli
    Stan Bevington
    Stan Dragland
    Stephen Voyce
    Steve Mccaffery
    Susan Bee
    Swiftcurrent
    Telidon
    Thea Bowering
    The Martyrology
    Theodor Adorno
    Tim Inkster
    TISH
    Tomson Highway
    Toronto Research Group
    Trg
    T.S. Eliot
    U-331
    U-Boat Surrenders
    Us Fiction
    Vimy Ridge
    Vincent Massey
    Visual Poetry
    Walter Benjamin
    Warren Tallman
    W.C. Williams
    Weardale
    Wikileaks

    Archives

    September 2020
    August 2017
    August 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly