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

Donato Mancini at Work

5/21/2013

0 Comments

 
Picture
Donato Mancini’s ironically titled You Must Work Harder to Write Poetry of Excellence could have been a big contribution to Canadian literary studies – the first to identify, analyze and theorize the limitations of the many current and late twentieth-century reviewers of Canadian poetry. It comes close, and will likely be built upon. But it appears to have been sabotaged by careless editing – by both its thesis supervisors at Simon Fraser and the copy editors at its Toronto publisher Bookthug.

The numerous punctuation and spelling errors (including the misspelling of Victorian poet A.E. Housman’s name several times) should not greatly trouble a reader, but they do index a persistent editorial indifference that extends to the book’s structural awkwardnesses – such as its abrupt shifts of vocabulary and implied audience, and its odd chapter-long discussions of poems by Bob Perelman and Yevgeny Yevtushenko where readers have been led to expect a focus on Canadian poetry and the ideologies of its reviewers.  References generally to Canadian poems or reviews are in fact disappointingly few in most of the first nineteen short unnumbered chapters of this thirty-seven chapter book, despite the wonderfully entertaining analysis of a J.R. Colombo review with which the book begins.

Mancini has several strong arguments, the central one being that most contemporary Canadian poetry reviewers appear intellectually and ideologically equipped to read and discuss only poetry based on pre-World War 2 Anglo-American poetics. They prefer such poetry, and they lament its 


absence when they are asked to review poetry that assumes a more recently conceived poetics. They ‘conscientiously’ (in their own minds) judge poetry by such bourgeois moral standards as how much difficulty the poet seemsto have overcome in writing it, how many presumedly widespread ‘human values’ it appears to affirm, and how much ‘craft’ appears to have gone into the adornment of this humanist ‘content.’ These judgements then influence the public ranking of poets and the awarding of prizes.

Mancini makes this argument with both wit and utterly convincing evidence, as when he amusingly unpacks the gender and class assumptions of David Solway’s defence of poetry’s “intelligent middlebrow reader” (128).  But he does this mostly in the second 120 pages of his book, following eight chapters of theory that would likely baffle or exasperate most of the reviewers he critiquing. Many readers, I suspect, will be also baffled – if not stopped in their tracks – and be unable to connect his discussions of Kant, Hegel, Schiller, Zizek, contemporary Developmental Psychology and “aesthetic conscience” to the reviewers’ practices. Mancini does little here to help them – little to signpost the relevance of his theory chapters, or to address the effects of the abrupt shifts in reference and discourse that they bring.

Mancini also argues early in his book that Canadian reviewing practices resemble what Charles Bernstein has identified in the US as a pernicious “official verse culture” (12). His later analyses, particularly those in his eighteenth chapter, create some implicit contrasts between the verse culture (or “ideolect,” Mancini’s usual term) of those Canadian reviewers and the US one theorized by Bernstein, but he never specifically juxtaposes the two or comments on their differing national imperatives. A more systematic account of the values of a Canadian “official verse culture” (if indeed he believes there is one) than the list he identifies as “normally used to construct value for [John] Newlove’s work – Essential Canadianness, Individual Voice, the Human, Accessibility, Depth, Craft etc.” (125), together with some evidence of its ‘officialness,’ would have been helpful. He suggests as well that one of the causes of such formulaic reviewing in both countries is the lack of a resonant name for post-World War 2 poetics – that the various names it has received such as ‘avant garde,’ ‘experimental,’ ‘projective,’ ‘innovative,’ ‘research,’ ‘language-centered,’ ‘vanguard,’or ‘radical’ are each arguably limited or flawed, and easy to attack. He proposes that all should be known as “postmodern” because this term is more periodizing than polemic, and is aesthetically inclusive. The proposal makes sense to me, and will likely indeed become common practice – in five or ten decades. (Question: why has no one yet undertaken to edit or produce a Canadian anthology of postmodern poetry similar to the Norton one of postmodern American?)

But I don’t agree with Mancini’s characterization of conventional moralistic reviewing as the current Canadian dominant – I think it is more likely residual (as the Victorian was in the Canadian modernist period) and that his “postmodern” will eventually be seen to have been the present-day dominant. That is, I prefer Raymond Williams’ residual-dominant-emergent model of cultural change to the pervasively binary “two broad territories or camps” (17) model that Mancini adopts here while also unconvincingly arguing that, because this is not a “sealed binary,” and contains “multiply relative” positions (18), it is not a real binary. Well, there are also numerous species of duck, and almost all of them quack.

One realization the book caused for me was of how fractured the Canadian poetry scene must be. I had never noticed that many of the convention-upholding reviewers whose work Mancini interrogates – Burt Almon, Bert Archer, Derik Badman, Michelle Berry, Stephanie Bolster, David Carpenter, Weyman Chan, Dennis Crawley, Leona Gom, Alex Good, Katia Grubisic, John Lent, Andrew Lesk, Nathaniel Moore, Lyle Neff, Norbert Reubsaat, Bruce Serafin, Carmine Starnino, Jan Zwicky – were writing book reviews, and in many cases could not remember having seen their names. I follow a number of Canadian literary magazines and websites, but evidently not the ones in which they publish. In turn their reading paths seem not to have crossed with my publications.

Mancini’s book received a strange review from Alan Reed on the Lemon Hound website (http://lemonhound.com/2012/11/23/donato-mancinis-you-must-work-harder-to-write-poetry-of-excellence/). I couldn’t decide whether Reed was pretending not to understand Mancini’s arguments or genuinely misunderstood them – a possibility, considering the book’s awkward structure. One does have to work hard to read it. The review received 29 followup posts from 8 different writers – posts that often were repetitive and misunderstood the other responders as well as the book. Alas, this overall response may have been a signal of the book’s limitations in communicating with even a mostly (except perhaps for Reed) friendly audience. That would be quite unfortunate.

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