NOTE:
A shorter, incomplete, draft version of this essay appears in
The Capilano Review (Ser. 2, No. 34; Spring 2001).
To
read Aaron Levy's engagement with and response to this article,
click here.
hole
magazine
by Louis Cabri
Here are some
anecdotal, historical and theoretical contexts for hole.
hole was a project of the "experimental writing group"
(ewg) which met regularly to read poetry alongside critical theory
and poetics, and produce poetry seminars, talks and readings,
in Ottawa, from 1986 to 1995. Rob Manery and I organized ewg events,
and initiated and edited hole from 1990 to 1996 [1],
irregularly producing six issues, the first four formatted and
proofed afterhours on computers at work.[2]
ewg's goal was to create poetry as a public act, predominantly
by locating poetry in a site of dialogue, by attempting to create
conditions for dialogue-by valuing talk about poetry as much as
poetry itself. "Site" understood as constituted by dialogue:
but, for all that, ewg did not emerge from an existing local scene.
Poetry in Ottawa-Hull in the mid '80s seemed confined to subordinate
and instrumental roles as theatricalizing narrative for visually-based
performance art-at times, this was true even when poetry had no
prop other than the page it was written on. Poetry remained a
token reason (if that) for forming community. Nil public discussion
of poetry occurred outside the credentializing abstraction of
university classroom. At Carleton University, Christopher Levenson's
ARC magazine was preeminent-to us, Arnoldean; at University of
Ottawa, Seymour Mayne's influence was mythopoetically Laytonesque.
Interesting local page-based poetry (in our opinion) was the work
being translated by the expatriate Chilean community, notably
Jorge Etcheverry, who attended ewg gatherings and presented in
our Transparency Machine series[3].
ewg poetry/theory discussions were attended by twenty or so people
at best [4],
with a core of about five, including poet Robert Hogg. As former
TISH associate, Bob was our immediate connection to a live tradition
of formally innovative English-language poetries (the TISH poets;
The Four Horsemen, especially bpNichol; San Francisco Renaissance
poets, especially Duncan; Olson and Creeley, and the Buffalo poetry
scene).
Group enactment of "location" as dialogue, and the writing
of discursive prose on poetry beyond an academic frame-historically-have
been initiating premises, even goals, for many poetics group formations.
We knew group enactment was possible even in the '80s because
of Writing/Talks (Perelman, ed.), The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book (Andrews/Bernstein,
eds.), and Total Syntax (Watten), all published in the year of
Orwell, 1984. (I will indirectly address below the talismanic
quality these US texts and contexts had specifically for us, in
terms of "second-order commodification.") Rob came to
know of these texts through his friendship with Hogg (who is a
professor at Carleton University), and I from the New Left Review
(Fredric Jameson's now notorious flagship essay on the "cultural
logic" of "late" capitalism). We didn't realize
that Vancouver's legacy of group-enacted poetics was alive just
then, incorporating names these texts catalogued, into their own
context, at Kootenay School of Writing. In contrast, closer to
home, we only felt the presence of Toronto's scene of in-my-street
surrealism-a sort of alienated WASP parody of 'everyday life',
disconnected from surrealism's struggles either with Marxism (in
France) or, evidently, the Catholic church (in Québec).
But "ewg" was loosely modeled on the idea of "the
Toronto Research Group"-also, "OPOYAZ." We knew
little about TRG, except for some essays in Open Letter. I had
read about OPOYAZ in recent historical accounts of the Russian
Formalists. What excited us both about these formations was the
idea (the idea alone seemed to be enough) that an open-ended "group"
might be constituted by individuals practicing and/or talking
about poetry from many points of view-scientific, political, etc.
The kind of talk we wanted to generate aimed to intersect innovative
form with cultural critique and theory. We wanted to generate
talk from within a discursive site that was independent of institutional
filiations (universities, predominantly) and yet was also independent
of ideological exigencies to positively value "the local"
within a poetics of regionalism or place. Our first Canada Council-funded
event was inviting Steve McCaffery to read and be interviewed
in 1986. Subsequently ewg produced well over one hundred events
at artist-run centres, the municipal arts gallery and library,
and Chris Swail's Manx Pub, with poets invited from other parts
of Canada (by 1988, mostly Vancouver-mostly KSW-and Toronto),
the US (mostly "Language" poets, mostly from New York
State, some from California), the UK (Tom Raworth, Maggie O'Sullivan,
Aaron Williamson), as well as Ottawa itself (e.g., Hogg's week-long
workshop on Olson's Special View of History). Audience size ranged
from upwards of 45, to none (strangely, for a bilingual town,
French-speaking Quebec poets did not draw crowds).
Site-as-dialogue really began with our friendship-and that's where,
in Ottawa, site-as-dialogue remained most of the time, contrary
to our wishes. It was out of a somewhat desperate, pathetic sense
of unaccountable loss that I postered the town announcing ewg's
first meeting to discuss language-centred and other 20th-century
writings, in 1986. I met Rob Manery at that first meeting (remembering
him from a previous event because of what he wore for it, a black
beret. He was gingerly reading Piers Plowman in a Penguin classics
edition, sitting by himself in an empty gallery of opened stacking-chairs,
waiting for the event to start. Rob was, to me, more memorable
than the event itself.). Rob closed down ewg ten years later,
leaving it and Ottawa (I left in '94); from the beginning, the
imaginary community wouldn't have continued for much longer than
a month without Rob. Arguably, the minimal unit of "community"
is two. That's what we, precariously (and somewhat homogeneously),
had. Viva homosocial bonding [5].
We were profoundly struck by Steve McCaffery's poetry, and essay
collection North of Intention (published 1987), by Writing magazine-run
by an editorial collective-which we discovered in 1987, and by
any essays or poetry of Jeff Derksen's and other KSW members,
whenever found (Raddle Moon, C Magazine, Vanguard). Our connection
to KSW really began with inviting, on McCaffery's suggestion,
Colin Browne to read. Browne performed with musician Martin Gotfrit
their intermedia work, Ground Water, in 1987, then Colin returned
on a second invitation from us the next year to read from Abraham,
present a Transparency Machine event (on Stein), and attend the
premiere screening of his first feature-length film. It was in
an interview with Browne that he suggested someone could start
a magazine [6].
To us, the word hole implied our poetics orientation-the
idea of the part, or fragment, was to be presented in/as writing,
as an absence of, or at least distancing from, ideas (lyrical,
etc.) of "wholeness," distancing that would convey
the necessary estrangement-effect art must have on "life."
-hole-ism, not holism. The word's everyday connotations
could also raise the principle that social conventions bound words
to contexts of use with ethical (particularly its slang usages)
and historical dimensions. -A holey, not a holy, hole.
Yet at the same time, when presented strictly on its own, in its
pure linguistic character as verbal sound and shape, the word
hole could reflexively pose the intrinsic and even utopic
idea of the word-as-such, innocently shorn of all contexts and
associations of use. -The holy hole, hole.
Our first issue scrutinized the practices, and construct, of "contemporary
Canadian poetry magazines," in editors' own words. We asked
over sixty Canadian English-language poetry magazines (i.e., all
we could find addresses for), "What is the poetics that informs
your editorial policy?" and under fifteen responded. We were
addressing those who either controlled or were affiliated with
means of periodical production (while realizing they were not
necessarily poets). Our intent was to "translate editorial
policy into discourse on poetics." We wanted to know what
kind of poetics and historical thinking was consciously motivating
editorial decisions, regardless of what we thought of the poetry
they were publishing. We also wanted to know the automatic pilot,
so to speak, and alibis it used, in the machinery of poetry magazine
publishing. To what extent was the journal in question a readerly
induction into the Canadian Stall of Time, rather than into hockey's
equivalent, in the poetry world, of a Hall of Fame? We published
all responses received, excepting those evidently composed from
a government funding application or publicity flyer. The other
extreme-to the bureaucratic rhetoric of application or flyer-was
captured in the boast, "I publish what I like." While
probably true, and possibly interesting (either as echo of Steve
Biko's apartheid-era oppositional "I write as I like,"
or in identifying poetics with the poetry itself along the lines
of the poetry speaks for itself!), it was nonetheless symptomatic,
in our view then, of how preconscious the rules of taste actually
were-rules we wanted explicitly articulated, and challenged by,
at the very least, talking about them.
Grandly, we imagined ourselves addressing poetry "communities"
in Vancouver, New York, and San Francisco-although, it was not
the cities attracting us, but the idea of a modeling of social
discourses (political, cultural, economic) in which poetry was
the prime motive force for all of it. In other words, it was not
the style of a single poet or poetry group we wanted to emulate-say,
Language writers (as much as we loved their work, and read it
carefully)-so much as the idea of a modeling of social discourses
on our own terms, where outcomes were still unknowns, the conditions
enabling outcomes, self-caused. The modeling we most admired seemed
capable of producing a shared reading horizon among writing individuals.
This we thought might pop our respective individual "orbits,"
releasing that photon of social energy we felt was necessary for
writing to begin to find a way beyond an otherwise private, rotating
blank [7].
In one sense, "modeling" was time-honored poetic communizing.
In another, we were interested in structuring what might be called
live proceduralisms. ewg's so-called Transparency Machine series
(the name referring to both the actual overhead projector machine,
and to a linguistic metaphor) would invite a poet to present her
poetry in a context of other texts and images distributed as a
package in advance and then projected by means of overhead for
the poet's informal talk about them. Michael Gottlieb's poetry
in hole 4 appears alongside collages presented during his
Transparency Machine event (for a sample collage, see fig. 1).
He made the collages from materials found on New York City streets;
they are the found basis of his poems, and they were left out
of the poetry book that subsequently collected the poems [8].
While not published in hole, these newsletter-style packages
of texts from the Transparency Machine series provide interesting
documentation by Peter Culley, Jeff Derksen, Dorothy Trujillo
Lusk, Erin Mouré, Melanie Neilson, Tom Raworth, Jed Rasula,
Fred Wah, as well as McCaffery, myself-among others. [9]
We thought of hole as purposefully negotiating expanded
value for the term "language poetry" as primary writing.
To our thinking, we combined Steve McCaffery's sense of "Language
Writing" (from his essay in North of Intention) with Jackson
Mac Low's description of a "language-centered" analysis
and practice of poetry (we found Mac Low's essay in In the American
Tree, the 1987 anthology edited by Ron Silliman), to arrive at
the politicized word-as-such, localized through poetic activity.
We persisted in homologizing the political with the aesthetic,
as a poetic practice. The paragram, for instance, was of interest
to us for what it might disclose of the social word.
Paragram as gateway to language became important to the proofreader
of hole's first issue and reviewer of The Black Debt, Christian
Bök. I think there was a split in Canada on how to read McCaffery's
poetry and theoretical statements (e.g., on the paragram). We
favoured what we then thought of as "the Vancouver reading,"
and emphasized the political-aesthetic axis of McCaffery's writings,
and his brave homologies. In contrast, "Toronto," to
where Christian moved, seemed to emphasize McCaffery's "pure"
word and sound, as if in spite of his "social" word
(as if they were separable). The same poetic value of purity which
generally pervades the first-wave reception of bpNichol seems
now, ironically, transferred to McCaffery. I think Vancouver and
Toronto communities still continue to split the good maple this
way.
Using "language-centred" and related terms required
facing in the direction of where this aging term was already going
according to those with claims on it at the outset of the '90s.
Our second issue includes Kit Robinson's "Dayparts."
His line, "the prospect / of a simple, straightforward /
communication," seemed to us to profile the spectre recently
come from within this writing community to haunt the various poetries
subsumed under its "language" rubric. Such a prospect,
of "straightforward / communication," had been most
complexly argued by Alan Davies since the mid '80s. Davies was,
I think, in large measure responding to a condition of poetic
discourse-its "second-order commodification" I'll awkwardly
call it [10]
-that had historically inflected our magazine's moment and trajectory
from the start (in a way that it had not in other communities,
to the same degree).
Part 24 of "Dayparts," from hole 2 (p. 19):
After the
difficulties
or correct spelling, serial
murder, and extravagant
gestures inappropriate to
any context, the prospect
of a simple, straightforward
communication possesses
a disarming appeal.
That flight, however,
is booked, and we are
forced to go by ground,
wending as we make
up our way. In this
way, we actually discover
more to say, although half
of it gets lost in translation.
Finding places to stop
and rest can be
the best achievement of
an ordinary day-
an occasion fit
to be tied up
by a redoubling
of every effort
until the moment spills over
and it's time to get back
to luck. Late arrivals form
the basis of a new
century, part figment, part
chill, a situation no one
could have predicted.
The apparently
self-evidently damning title of the language-centred magazine,
The Difficulties (ed. Tom Beckett), Charles Bernstein's poetic
device of the spelling error, serial poem as "murdering"
sequential lyric-Robinson's opening lines can playfully conjure
a list of criticisms of what very loosely they invoke as a metalanguage
of "extravagant / gestures inappropriate to / any context"-i.e.,
the metalanguage "Language Writing"-in order to oppose
it to a redeemer, "straightforward / communication."
I think an urgent need to address the problem and prospect of
direct address, of straightforward communication, propelled Davies's
post Candor (1990) critique of language-centredness as much as
it initially propelled (e.g.) Barrett Watten's language-centred
writing in the '70s through to his late '80s poem "Direct
Address." To explain why would digress from my immediate
point here-that Robinson's text discloses where a significant
difference lies between the popular criticisms of language-centred
writing Davies seems to confirm (but does not, I'd argue) and
Watten. The shared urgency for (the seeming impossibility of?)
direct address is socially apprehended and situated in Robinson's
lines, in a way that it is not in the popular critique of language-centred
writing's various poetic and theoretical responses (responses
that invoke mediating concepts such as ideology, materialism)
to the problem of direct address. Straightforward communication
is not available for all, Robinson says in these lines, insofar
as it is something-a technology-one must buy. While I can't go
into Davies's own critique at length, I think its gist is that
"straightforward communication" is not mediated by technology,
nor does it specifically require a "social" apprehension;
it is a pure affect, experienced in words, of unmediated addressor-addressee
contact. But, for Robinson, "That flight ... / is booked,
and we are / forced to go by ground...." And insofar as "straightforward
communication" is something one buys into, Robinson poses
an alternative ideal; admittedly "part figment, part / chill,"
it is, nevertheless (the poem's claim goes) "the basis of
a new / century." That new basis obtains agency in the poem
as, paradoxically, "late arrivals" lingering in "places
to stop / and rest," and in the figure of local production,
addressed as "the best achievement of / an ordinary day."
Robinson's poem circuitously anchors for his reader a sense of
social space that we prized in the discourse modeling we thought
was taking place under the name of Language writing, social space
locally carved out of corporate flux and state devolution in the
everyday, "although half / of it gets lost in translation."
Which is to say that, theoretically at least (. . . leaving the
ground for a moment, as if that flight mentioned in Robinson's
poem were not booked. . .), what made us stick to (although eventually
feel deeply stuck in) Ottawa was the self-justifying conviction-we
felt it as ideologically "real" at the time-that the
leveling effects of global capitalism rendered redundant any modernist
yearnings to locate oneself in a "cultural capital"
(felicitous pun intended) or centre in order to come to terms
with capitalism's processes.
hole 2 also includes an interview with David Bromige [11].
In an extended footnote written for the issue, Bromige elaborates
on how Language Poetry ("LP") critically addressed a
contradiction in Projective Verse ("PV") between subjective
and objective expression:
[T]he fetish
PV made of the utterance-of the specific person, the poet's,
utterance-led to a similar fetishization of the written word,
because of the need to preserve the utterance (and the utterer)
in writing. It had to be on the page just so.
Just so,
it had to be on the page.
This [was
a] liberating turn-around [by LP, that] left PV behind, enmeshed
in its struggles to perpetuate the subjective, the person of
the poet, and this despite early successes and the best of intentions.
(hole 2, p. 51)
"Second-order
commodification" is a condition of reception of the cultural
"new" (a relative matter) where the emergence (of the
new, from "here") and the arrival (of the new, from
"elsewhere") intersect in a contested site-as-dialogue.
That condition existed for us in employing the term "language-centred."
Second-order commodification refers to a myth-inducing condition
in which there is simultaneously (a) the emergence ("here")
and arrival (from "there") of primary writing only later
to be identified as "new" (for instance, as "language-centred")
with (b) the emergence/arrival of a metalanguage (in this case,
conveyed by the term "language-centred") identifying
the work as new. Second-order commodification results from a cultural
context in which primary language without a name, and its metalanguage
that brings a name, temporally co-exist. One reception-effect
of second-order commodification, particularly in Canada, is to
have poetics stances appear clearly staked, already amplified,
distinctly audible, a critical lexicon already worked out and
available to draw from in identifying aesthetic tendencies in
possibly opposing, even reductive, ways. Determining the direction
in which the term "language-centred" was headed required
that we realize how effects of the processes of second-order commodification-which
we felt inflected our belated context-could be defined, engaged
(as in Bromige's narrative of formal succession) and critiqued.
When a poet
knows second-order commodification to be an "inevitable"
condition of her work's production and reception, causal chains
can be set up, or broken. One such poetic knowledge of second-order
commodification takes the form of resolute intransigence towards
the "received standard," whether that might be represented
by KSW specifically (its own standard), or more broadly by the
ideology of discursive-prose contextualizing, itself. Deanna Ferguson's
"Received Standard," in hole 4, is a good example
(for a page from the poem, please see fig. 2). These lines desire
to "lift out into its own consequence" the field of
reception itself, in which the reader/writer "hangs"
like an "ornament" and, by dispelling second-order commodification,
return with the reader to a primary condition of engagement with
verbal process. The reader is beckoned to exempt herself by deliberately
recontextualizing the processes of second-order commodification
as a "rigged game" ornamentalizing the importance of
context-critique-itself.
Lisa Robertson's poem from hole 6 demonstrates another
order of poetic knowledge of second-order commodification, one
that is opposite to resolute intransigence: resolute participation:
My premise
is simple. All method is a
demonstration of history. All change
is substitution. "Yesterday was a
new day."
"We
are enraptured," the stage-direction says.
And why
should we not live near the beauti
ful streets, have and like the meaning of our
pleasure and its measurement. But let us
leave aside the question of the
material dream, not out of tact, not
from the need to figuratively dim
inish the little drama of sensitive
expenditure, but in order to get
familiar with the civic minimum.
Longueurs of desperate truancy
name an idea about the "un
governable" world. Yet here I am not
extending the maudlin phantasy of
limits. Sure, a person will have-at their
own admission-and penultimate
before the marvellous environment-
real material romance. Today I
want to address those of terrifying
enthusiasms and meaning's ordinary
jobs-those for whom both origins and
limits repeatedly fail. Oh ardent
transgressors whose walls are also my own;
what country, good friends, what forest, what
language, is not now smothered by our sobs?
Or I could
pose the matter otherwise.
What are the terms of our complicity?
We cannot definitely know, for
reasons of faulty appearance and mis
managed debt. Our apparent sameness
leads elsewhere than to cause or origin. . . .
(from "The Device," hole 6, pp. 1-2)
Here the collective
pronoun "we" is at once fiercely singular and empowered
in a sort of garishly triumphalist way to resolutely participate
in, if only to play with and differ from, history's method acting.
Resolute participation is a necessary response because second-order
commodification is always already a condition of the discourse-field,
however primary the claim for writing may be (there is commodification
at all levels of language). Ferguson's resolute intransigence
occurs within the domain of poetry as a claim for poetry's exemptability
from discursive contextualizings, while Robertson's resolute participation
brings poetry and prose together, stylizing that which is not
poetry as material for poetry.
Contrary to both positions, Alan Davies gestures towards a nonverbal
outside of poetry-from within poetry. Distinguishing primary writing
from second-order commodification misses his point, which I think
asserts, in an almost lyrically nostalgic mode, referent as absent
referent. To what "level" of language does a word such
as "life" belong, when used in a Davies poem? This question,
its possible answers, creates a dialogue within poetry and its
discourse genre-and is therefore beside Davies's point. Against
poetry (he calls it "poesie," below), Davies paradoxically
uses poetry in an aesthetic maneouvre to gesture beyond its own
rules, towards the limits of dialogue. In "Life," Davies
determines to mark poetry's limits, inscribing those limits within
poetry itself, thereby displaying what are for Davies the aesthetic's
best poetic resources:
Some of
my friends are contented to plot the little movements of their
minds. They think poetry is an art.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
.
If somebody has written some poems and you read some of them
you can tell pretty much right away whether they concentrated
on the poesie or the life.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
.
There is something pathological about the usual attachments
towards words but writing at its best has to do with doing without
them. (hole 3, pp. 40-2)
To what does
"them" refer? Is it that "writing at its best has
to do with doing without" the "usual attachments towards
words," or in a zen-like paradox, doing without words themselves?
If the former is true, then Davies's pre and post Signage work
remains connected by a modernist impulse to "free" words
of their everyday affects, their "usual" and "pathological"
attachments. If the latter, then Davies pushes towards internal
limits of dialogue within writing, limits that establish zen-like
balance between art and life, and introduce to writing the role
of maintaining health. The larger implication of these lines (and
of his post Signage work), for Davies, I think, is that some of
his poet-friends follow a modernist impulse to make language new
at the expense of a goal of "healthful" living: poetry
is, as Louis Zukofsky argued, "for the well-being of sense."[12]
I think Rob Manery's own poetry is very
much interested in pursuits of similar ratios and "balances"
between art and life.
Resolute
intransigence; resolute participation; and in Davies's case, the
resolute itself-squared. These are three theoretical routes from
hole's poetry, image-texts, reviews and essays.
The idea of talk, site-as-dialogue, was central to ewg. ewg predates
the formation of the Buffalo poetics listserve. A listserve in
Canada is yet to be created. I wonder if we would have begun this
imaginary group, for the reasons we did (to publicly immerse ourselves,
as speakers, writers, within contemporary poetry), if poetry listserves
were already in place, and if we had access to them (computers,
modems). What is talk, finally? Poet Nick Piombino recently writes
this ambiguous assessment:
Perhaps
an aspect of the astonishing success rate of groups like Alcoholics
Anonymous is that such a group allows for an ongoing possibility
of talking among people, with an unusual degree of freedom,
for very long periods of time-no doubt in some cases, for a
life-time. Artistic uses of talking do not afford for this dailyness
and gradualness, particularly poetry. Our culture will no longer
support this for poets. (Theoretical Objects, p. 123)
Is this the
reason why the ewgroup remained more imaginary than it intended,
because "our culture" no longer supports the idea on
which it was fundamentally based-poets' talk?[13]
Conspiracy theory, or leisure wear? But what is it exactly
that "our culture" no longer supports: artistic/literary,
or ordinary/usual uses of talking by poets, and is there a difference?
In what sense to understand "support"?[14]
Is Piombino drawing a possibly insulting analogy from poetry-group
to AA-group, or drawing a possibly flattering one to transindividual
values for artistic and nonartistic uses of talking "through"
societal pathologies? Either way he writes: "Our culture
will no longer support this for poets."
But this fact is itself not only poetry's symptom. If that were
so, the symptom would be private-an individual's somewhat desperate,
pathetic sense of unaccountable loss, mine, for example, driven
to poster the town, announcing "ewg." It's the culture's
symptom (that poetry articulates). There, was Rob (Rob lost the
beret pretty quick, as I did my visual encoding of Rob once we
began to talk-I don't know if Rob did likewise, his encodings
of me!). It's "The Sustained Siege," as Michael Gottlieb's
poem title has it, a phrase reiterated in the first line:
The sustained
siege.
The great
teeth and
the mighty jaws.
Pretending
that these tails are not lashing,
that these blows
are not coming fast and low,
that these are not
our vitals, so stapped.
Like a fervid
gift
for deflection.
"If
it's not yours
perforce
it's mine,
even if I never use it."
"I
can't carry you anymore,
you don't weigh enough."
Orphaned
all,
a descending
series
we are obliged to appraise,
like a kind of metrical test,
the dreadfully
unkeyed
mirrored phrasings,
the anguished, somnolent draughts
streaming back empty,
the smoking cliffs,
the empty loges,
the halls where the insults
were first tossed.
All of us
entirely under-rehearsed.
The atrophied,
antic, strophes.
The arbitrarily
endurable,
the purblind tolling,
the graven, wan,
detuned verging.
These gravid,
"posthumously born."
The giving
up
-that makes it official.
The suspicious
rising
and the cheered fall.
The stingy
padding,
the lack of anything we would recognize
as insulation.
Jinking
left and right,
availing not.
"I
can't shake them."
Sunk to
the axles.
"This
time
it's not different."
("Gorgeous Plunge 7. The Sustained Siege," Gorgeous
Plunge [Roof, 1999], p. 35)
Gorgeous Plunge
is the first poetry book, that I know of, to enact and reflexively
address-from within-the idea of the poetry community as a specific,
lived, historically time-bound, objectifiable structure of near-absolute
subjective relations. The book will especially resonate, I believe,
with almost anyone who has written, read and talked about poetry
with others for some time, outside of an institutional and officially
pedagogical context. Gottlieb's poem hints that the poet's education
takes place in a self-made context ("Orphaned all")
independent of official educational structures and canons. Is
this still true, or possible? What the book fully explores is
the current state of such an idea of community in relation to
the pervasive economism driving "our culture," as well
as in relation to the demise of the idea of the avant-garde that
such a community once aspired-to without question. While ewg was
from one perspective a successful group formation-in that, for
example, its poetry magazine has been remembered by a reader-guest
editor in another city, years later-from another perspective ewg's
political and community ambitions remained largely unrealized
and unrealizable.
The political unconscious haunting any aspiration to an avant-garde
practice-since the 1950s at least, if not earlier-is that of failure.
Perceived by their political unconscious, aspirations to avant-garde
status might appear reducible to "amateur therapy,"
as Robert Hughes would characterize it-the loudest critic since
the '70s to proclaim the death of the idea of the avant-garde,
but not the only one to do so.[15]
Is "amateur therapy," then, the political unconscious
of Piombino's analogy to AA? Is poets' talk an avant-garde practice?
Did ewg aspire to a sense, however imaginary, of the "avant-garde,"
as the name might suggest? Inevitably, naively, unapologetically,
I think ewg did (and was not alone in this).
The idea of poets' talk, in its multiple histories since World
War II, from speech-based poetics to variations on the poet's
talk as genre, extends and modifies the manifesto form. The modernist
manifesto derives its own avant-garde rhetorical caché
from the French Revolution, and on, back to 17th-century Diggers
and Levellers tracts.[16]
Talk, collective/collaborative practice, avant-garde-these have
historically overlapped as interdependent functions of the same
event: (at risk of being overly schematic) talk requires at least
two people, two people talking implies a form of communal endeavour,
communal endeavour for change used to be capable of utilizing,
in the right context, the idea of the avant-garde.Values for collective
action and for collaboration no longer require the rhetoric of
the idea of a vanguard in order to ensure actualization-as they
once did, in some specific instances in order to withstand threat
of identification as "communist." Avant-gardism once
ensured the politicization of art (for good, and ill). Collectivist
aesthetic values no longer pose the same order of symbolic cultural
threat; unions still do. Politics and aesthetics are divided.
"Our culture" may no longer support poets' talk, if
it ever did; poets' talk continues.
_____________________
Endnotes
[1]
hole
has become a chapbook series: Alan Davies, sei shonagon (1994,
o.p.); Clint Burnham, Pandemonia (1996, o.p.); Deanna Ferguson,
ddilemma (1997); Ammiel Alcalay, A Masque in the Form of a Cento
(2000); Jeff Derksen, But Could I Make A Living From It (2000);
Jackson Mac Low, Struggle Through (2000). Please order ($9 ea.;
all 4, $30) from Rob Manery (cheque made to his name), 2664 William
St., Vancouver, V5K 2Y5.
[2]
Rob Manery's input and friendship has been invaluable to me in
writing this essay, which is my reading of our collaborative project,
ewg/hole. I'd also like to thank Fred Wah for inspirational
discussions, Nicole Markotic for her fine editing, and Jason Le
Heup for inviting hole to be a part of his small presses
in Canada guest-edited issue of The Capilano Review.
[3]
The Ottawa poetry scene was more populated than I describe it,
but my focus is on that scene (subjectively) perceived as a dialogic
social space. A lot of the Ottawa scenes, that we knew, rejected
dialogue implicitly or outright (e.g., the musician in a sound-word
performance group wrote of the dictator-genius role of artist
vis-à-vis audience/society), or else dialogue did not arise
as a prospect for poetry worth pursuing in a public way.
[4]
These included musician, poet, performance artist Scott Moodie,
frequently, and cultural critic, theorist Jody Berland, infrequently-among
others.
[5]
Please read-in the intended irony. No pairing is "freely"
chosen in the peculiarly fraught trials of mutual recognition
and tests of exchange through which one discovers the poetry-world
beyond its façade of publicized prize names and educational
anthologies. It is nevertheless true that such pairings are a
common literary phenomenon, and historically have tended, in the
most celebrated male examples, to reinforce identity over difference
(Michael Davidson writes of this with respect to the '50s San
Francisco scene, and there are other examples).
[6]
See The Carleton Literary Review for 1988; guest issue editor,
Rob Manery.
[7]
Today, with the widespread use of poetry listserves, the situation
might actually be reversed. Contrary to what I imagined on first
hearing about poetry listserves, and to my initial enthusiasm,
my experience of them is that they sometimes enhance, if not actually
induce, the sense of a private, rotating blank-nevertheless (or,
should I say: "even worse"), a "blank" of
poetic discourse, rather than a blank of "silence."
By silence, I mean a buried-alive feeling, in which, as Eugene
Jolas once wrote, "There is no more talk" and "All
the mouths are pinched with waiting."
[8]
New York (The Figures, 1993).
[9]
Two Transparency Machine events have since taken place at the
Kelly Writers House in Philadelphia, one featuring British poet
Tony Lopez, the other, US poet Rae Armantrout.
[10]
The term "sec.-o c." is modified from Barthes's
1957 theory of the ideology of myth as a second-order semiotic
system.
[11]
Incidentally, hole 2 contains uncollected work by Daniel
Davidson (from his manuscript, "Shine"), who since has
passed away.
[12]
Zukofsky writes specifically: "The universals of poetry are
for the well-being of sense: the five senses of different individuals,
in whom Aristotle's 'singulars' of history grow and decay, no
less than for 'common' sense-the world where a tongue may talk
about it all with its fellows" (Bottom: On Shakespeare).
[13]
But if "our culture" did support such talk, what would
one get-"table talk," as the genre was called in England,
of the so-called literary greats, in "timeless conversation"?
For Charles Bernstein, the 'freedom' of the innovative poetry
world lies in its having evaded the commodifying, reifying attentions
of "official culture." "It is a measure of its
significance that it is ignored," he emphasizes (see his
introduction to Close Listening). This statement has to be translated,
however, since there will likely always be "official culture,"
and the problem, which Bernstein does not have, is the way this
statement may be interpreted in Canada to mean that a private-funded,
consumer-driven official culture that 'ignores you' is better
than a state-funded official culture that says, on principle,
it will not. While there is no doubt in my mind that Language
poetry has provided a set of tools with which to critique and
articulate effects of global capitalism, it is obvious that a
critique from inside America will be inside the narrative of capitalism-e.g..,
the narrative of Coca-Cola in Olson's 1958 poem, "Being Altogether
Literal, & Specific, & Seeking at the Same Time to be
Successfully Explicit"-in a way that is not quite the same
for someone who lives outside America-whether that's "America,"
the imaginary community, or nation-state. The PhillyTalks series
of poets' dialogues I've curated since 1997 (www.writing.upenn.edu/~wh/phillytalks)
offers a different order of engagement with poetry than either
the Buffalo poetics listserve-with its implicitly broad democratic
hope of dialogue and of community-or the "Great Conversation,"
as Barrett Watten calls it, between the elect few. PhillyTalks
attempts to offer more than the poetics listserve, by focused
dialogue (it wants to be great conversation, as in worth listening
to and participating in, and open to as many as possible), in
a context of way fewer pretenses of "literary" conversation
(e.g. of the latter, the imminent conversation, as of this writing,
between Anselm Hollo and Lisa Jarnot at $25 a ticket: one wonders
how venue and audience will negatively affect their actual discussion)
by providing a newsletter of dialogue and poetry available in
advance of the talk so as to encourage informed audience participation,
by ensuring the event is free, and by having it occur at a volunteer-run
site at arms-length from funders.
[14]
hole had little financial support from arts funding bodies;
we thought the work of applications and of civic duties the funding
entailed would lead us wide of our primary motivations for starting
the magazine. The poetics survey of Canadian poetry magazines
(hole 1) taught us that funding bodies frequently created
an automatic-pilot panel for the editorial chair. We didn't take
the "official culture" route.
[15]
See Paul Mann's bleak, yet remarkable The Theory-Death of the
Avant-Garde (1991), a book that analyses Hughes's critique of
post-WWII avant-gardism in a page or so.
[16]
I am suggesting that the history of the manifesto form, as recently
outlined for instance in Janet Lyon's Manifestoes: Provocations
of the Modern (1999), be considered as extended and modified by
postmodern versions of poets' talk.
_____________________
hole 1 (1990): art, Marie-Jeanne Musiol; poetry, Gerald
Burns, Peter Ganick, Karen MacCormack, Steve McCaffery, Melanie
Neilson, Jena Osman, Hannah Weiner; reviews, Christian Bök,
Allison Fillmore; essay, Jeff Derksen; survey, contemporary Canadian
poetry magazines.
hole
2 (1990): poetry, David Bromige, Frank Davey, Daniel Davidson,
Karen MacCormack, Kit Robinson; David Bromige interview, Louis
Cabri; review, Kevin Killian; correspondence, Kevin Killian/Kit
Robinson.
hole
3 (1991), poetry/review issue: poetry, Bruce Andrews, Dennis
Barone, Alan Davies, Jeff Derksen, Edmond Jabès, Eric Wirth;
reviews, Barone, Davies, Derksen, Wirth.
hole
4 (1993), image/text issue: cover art, Louis Cabri and Rob
Manery; poem/collage, Susan B., Charles Bernstein, Ray DiPalma;
poetry, Ray DiPalma, Deanna Ferguson, Michael Gottlieb, Jed Rasula;
essay, Franklin Bruno.
hole
5 (1995): cover art, Rob Manery; poetry, Bruce Andrews, Clint
Burnham, Louis Cabri, Peter Culley, Stacy Doris, Gerry Gilbert,
Harryette Mullen, Ted Pearson.
hole
6 (1996), poetics & reviews issue: cover art, Germaine
Koh; poetry, Lisa Robertson, Johan de Wit; reviews, Clint Burnham,
Nathaniel Dorward, Susan Holbrook, Mike Magoolaghan; essay, Fred
Wah.