Accounting for the contemporary avant-garde in Canadian poetry, and American poetry for that matter, comes with the challenge of how to mitigate the rhetoric of vanguardism—a rhetoric historically driven not only by catchwords like innovation and experimentation, but opposition and antagonism. In fact, the divisive aspect of such rhetoric proves neither productive nor accurate in accounting for the contemporary avant-garde. Rather, what compels me about contemporary writing is, as Marjorie Perloff writes, “less [or as much] a question of novelty as such than of coming to terms with specificity and difference.”1 Or, to further Perloff’s suggestion, poetry compels me when it deals in specifics of the moment, not just for the moment, and when it strives to make a difference, not just make it different. Perhaps, I am suggesting that the stakes for the avant-garde fall not within the realm of revolutionary politics or aesthetics but within the realm of ethics, in which poets maintain a certain conviction that poetry has a singular capacity, and therefore responsibility, to make a difference. In what follows, then, I want to trace a certain trajectory of Canadian avant-garde writing that evolves not by a logic of opposition, antagonism, and resistance, but by extension, refinement, and transformation—an innovative poetry with an ethical-political imperative.
This trajectory begins in part with the TISH poets—a small coterie of writers, who published the TISH poetry newsletter in Vancouver during the 1960s. The trajectory also includes the role that Canada and particularly Steve McCaffery play in the development of Language writing—an aesthetic associated with various poets, who published mainly in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine in New York, and in This magazine in San Francisco,2 during the 1970s. Finally, this trajectory culminates, at least for the time being, with the Kootenay School of Writing (KSW)—a “not-for-profit … volunteer collective of practising writers” based in Vancouver since the 1980s.3 While this trajectory includes a reassessment of the role that Canada plays in the development of Language writing, this trajectory also demonstrates how the KSW, as one facet of the contemporary avant-garde, arises not as the result of a conscious break with its predecessors, but as an effective transformation of them and how the KSW represents what we may now consider a post-Language aesthetic—an aesthetic that evinces the political and theoretical sensibilities of Language writing, but that aims to extend and refine these sensibilities in an effort to contend with the specific exigencies of the present.4
As I offer a brief historical review of this trajectory in the first half of my essay, I focus particularly on how TISH poetics, and then Language writing, consider poetry’s responsibility with regard to its engagement with the world, with the reader, with the writer, and with the text. This treatment, I hope, can narrow the historical scope, rehearsed many times elsewhere, but also emphasize the continued, but evolving, commitment among these writers to an ethics of responsibility. To suggest that the stakes for the continuing avant-garde are ethical, I am also positing that what remains consistent among the TISH poets, Language writers, and the KSW is a belief that poetry should help continually to renew our ability to respond to personal and political circumstances. In the second half, I explicate a provisional manifesto of the KSW entitled “Coasting.” This explication highlights how their approach to world, reader, writer, and text refines and extends a Language aesthetic and sustains a political-ethical focus.
TISH represents a group of writers—initially Frank Davey, George Bowering, Jamie Reid, Lionel Kearns, and Fred Wah—who published TISH: A Poetry Newsletter in Vancouver in the early 1960s. While the inspiration for the newsletter came from a desire to publish and share one another’s work, TISH also resulted from excitement after a reading of Donald Allen’s New American Poetry in Warren Tallman’s class “Studies in English Poetry” at UBC. Moreover, visits to Vancouver by the poet Robert Duncan spurred excitement among the young Canadians. Such excitement culminated in the fabled Vancouver Poetry Conference in 1963—a combination of lectures, workshops, and readings—in which Duncan and a few Black Mountain poets shared the proverbial stage with the likes of Warren Tallman and Margaret Avison. While I do not intend to rehash the history of the TISH poets in any more detail, they do represent an experimental forebearer that the so-called contemporary avant-garde must contend with, as students, as friends, and as critics, in the continued effort to enliven poetry’s responsibility—a responsiveness to the specificity of our knowledge and our experience. Still, to write of the TISH newsletter and the events in the summer of 1963 does present certain problems, because such analysis anchors the poets originally involved with TISH to a set of ideas, which evolved when these poets went on to careers of their own; moreover, such analysis presents a point of stagnation whereby the following generation of the 1980s attempts a vanguard break.5
I would argue that the TISH poets, at least in their earliest pronouncements, demonstrated a poetics that preserved as much as it explored our conventional notions about how poetry engages the world, the reader, the writer, and the text. In general, the TISH aesthetic revealed “an anti-lyric, speech-based, processual, open-form poetics combined with a historicized approach to the local.”6 In orienting themselves toward the local and the factual—what Frank Davey calls “the social fabric of [the poet’s] human settlement”7—the TISH poets offered the poem as a subjective, though no less mimetic, approach to the world. In modelling their work on a projectivist aesthetic—what Jamie Reid calls a “discharge of unretainable energy”8—the TISH poets delivered an affective, though not necessarily assimilable, gift to the reader. In proffering a poetics open to the immediacy of experience—what Warren Tallman calls “a direct projection of the inner reality”9—the TISH poets still validated an organic and unmediated notion of subjectivity. Also, in espousing an open form of poetics—what David Dawson calls “a poem [as] an expanding structure of thought”10—the TISH poets pushed beyond the formal, generic aspects of language in an effort to present the genuine rawness of human experience, with little attention paid to the relation of politics to language itself.11 No doubt, the specificity of place informed the TISH aesthetic, and this aesthetic challenged more mainstream poetics at the time, but the influence of critical theory by the 1970s forced poets to reconsider the assumptions behind this aesthetic.
While Frank Davey’s magazine, Open Letter, represents a key outgrowth of TISH, the magazine also contributes in two significant ways to the role that Canada plays in the development of Language writing.12 First, Open Letter published the reports of the Toronto Research Group (1973–1982)—a collaborative investigation of poetics by Steve McCaffery and bpNichol; second, Open Letter published “The Politics of the Referent” in 1977—an inaugural collection of poetic statements by “language-centered” writers.13 “The Politics of the Referent” collected “attempt[s] … to bring to a wider audience theoretical notes on language-centered, de-referential writings.”14 Such notes presented seminal works by Steve McCaffery, Bruce Andrews, Ron Silliman, and Charles Bernstein. McCaffery’s “The Death of the Subject,” Bruce Andrews’s “Text and Context,” and Charles Bernstein’s “Stray Straws and Straw Men” all appear in the Open Letter collection. Overall, Language writing represents an investigative approach consistently attuned to how politics inflects all processes of language, down to its semiotic nature. McCaffery clarifies this notion when he writes of politics not as “an issue of extralinguistic concerns to be discussed by means of language, but one of detecting the hidden operation of those repressive mechanisms that language and the socio-economic base actually share.”15
McCaffery’s theoretical efforts have a central place in a history of Language writing, from both an American perspective and a Canadian perspective. His early essay “The Death of the Subject” still stands as a lucid introduction to the tenets of language-oriented work. Moreover, his remarks reflect how critical theory influenced Language writing and how theory impelled changing views of poetry’s responsibility to world, reader, writer, and text. Overall, he argues that Language writing’s “main thrust” is “political, rather than aesthetic.”16 He writes, for example, that “writing must stress its semiotic nature through modes of investigation … rather than mimetic, instrumental indications”;17 writing must alter “the socially defined functions of writer and reader as the productive and consumptive poles of the commodital axis”;18 writing must “show the essential subjectless-ness a text might be”;19 writing must “stress the disemotional and dereferential possibilities of language as fragmentary.”20 Certainly, Language writing revolutionised how poetry might function as political critique, and while part of that revolution includes how Language writing worked to deconstruct the assumptions about language that might be operating in the New American poetics, including TISH, what compels me about Language writing is its renewed commitment to poetry—as a specific, refined discourse capable of responding to, and being responsible for, the world, the reader, the writer, and the text itself.
In 1982, Steve McCaffery’s reasserted his role in bringing Language poetry to Canada when L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine republished the issue entitled “The Politics of the Referent” as a supplement for Open Letter. Carolyn Bayard notes: “One derives from these exchanges between Open Letter and L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E [sic] magazine the sense of a new North American community of Post-modernists, of a different generational phenomenon.”21 Unlike TISH—whose aesthetic is often seen as a derivation of the New American poetics—Language writing arose in Canada at nearly the same time as it arose in San Francisco and New York. Still, general assumptions that Language writing came to Canada and asserted an influence only after the fact continue to pervade accounts of experimental writing after TISH. As Christian Bök notes, similar creation stories abound about the influence of the New American writing on TISH, and the influence of Language writing on the Kootenay School of Writing, in which both Canadian strands of writing emerge only after the American presence at seminal conferences (1963, and 1985 respectively).22 In 1984, the closure of the David Thompson University Centre (DTUC) in Nelson, British Columbia, prompted the Kootenay School of Writing to open its proverbial doors (despite lacking any actual doors to open). Importantly, however, the DTUC represented a continuation of TISH in part because it provided writers like Fred Wah an opportunity to teach and work with those who would become the founding members of the KSW.23 The DTUC also hosted visits by Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, and Steve McCaffery—all of which suggests that the KSW arose rather organically, not as a deliberate break from its predecessors.24 By 1984, a second “campus” of the KSW opened in Vancouver. Founding members of the Vancouver campus included Tom Wayman, Jeff Derksen, Gary Whitehead, Calvin Wharton, and Colin Browne. While the KSW continues as a writer-run centre devoted to all aspects of the literary arts, its inception also owes much to the political milieu of British Columbia in the 1980s.25 Furthermore, the poetic concerns of the KSW continue to exhibit an overt political consciousness, of both local politics and global politics. In its original mandate, the school’s founders describe the school in terms that reflect an ethical commitment to the immediate community: “the School represents a new hybrid: a form of parallel gallery and centre of scholarship, open to the needs of its own constituency and alert to the possibilities of all disciplines that involve language.”26 On the one hand, an alertness “to the possibilities of all disciplines that involve language” appears intentionally vague; but, on the other hand, an attention to the primacy of language itself also resembles what Language writing attends to. In fact, “Language, the practice of writing and the politics surrounding this practice … signified for KSW writers the very foundation of social interaction. To write is to engage in social discourse—an activity that is a culturally viable as it is political.”27
Critics often draw parallels between the KSW and the Language movement because of the 1985 New Poetics Colloquium in Vancouver, advertised as a “celebration of new writing” that included readings, workshops, and performances. Most critics, moreover, characterize the presence of the Language writers as “nudg[ing] a new cohort of Canadian poets into open flower.”28 Participants at the Colloquium included such Americans as Bob Perelman, Michael Palmer, Barbara Einzig, Ron Silliman, Susan Howe, Michael Davidson, Diane Ward, Charles Bernstein, Bruce Andrews, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, and Barrett Watten. Canadian participants included Michel Gay, Nicole Brossard, Daphne Marlatt, Sharon Thesen, and Steve McCaffery. In his unpublished dissertation, however, Jason Wiens rehearses various claims by Ann Vickery, Russell Smith, Andrew Klobucar, Michael Barnholden, and George Bowering, all of whom make a point about the effect of Language writing on the younger, yet-to-be established KSW poets.29 According to Russell Smith and Ann Vickery, the KSW poets represent a spin-off of the Language movement. Smith refers to the KSW as a “Canadian bastion”30 and Vickery calls them a “new generation.”31 Klobucar, Barnholden, and Bowering provide more comparative assessments, implying influence over correspondence. Klobucar and Barnholden refer to the “touchstone” of Ron Silliman’s New Sentence,32 and Bowering describes the relationship between the KSW and the Language poets as a corollary to the relationship between the TISH poets and the Black Mountain School.33 By contrast, Wiens argues that “prior to the 1985 colloquium [KSW] writers such as [Colin] Browne and [Jeff] Derksen were pursuing idiosyncratic projects that shared ongoing concerns with the projects of many of the American participants at that conference.”34 The core of his argument rests on explications of early and later work by Browne and Derksen.35 According to Wiens, Browne’s “language-oriented” concerns occur simultaneously with the early formulations in This and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, and Derksen’s politically oriented focus occurs throughout even Derksen’s earlier more lyric-driven work. In any case, both poets demonstrate a “language” aesthetic and politics before the 1985 Colloquium. Wiens also speculates that the use of the term “post ‘language’ writing”36 in one of the conference’s promotional posters suggests how “the relationship between generations” demonstrates “an affirmation of already existing practices” rather than “one of direct influence.”37
“Coasting,” by Jeff Derksen, appears in Writing from the New Coast (1993), a double issue of the literary journal o•blék, collecting the proceedings from the Writing from the New Coast conference held at SUNY-Buffalo in the Spring of 1993. A version of “Coasting” also appears in A Poetics of Criticism, a collection of essays that explore “alternative modes of critical writing—essays in dialogue, essays in quotation, essays in poetry, essays in letters.”38 The revised version includes the contributions by the three actual presenters at the conference—Lisa Robertson, Nancy Shaw, and Catriona Strang.39 As the preface to the revised version suggests, “Coasting” represents a manifesto on behalf of the Kootenay School of Writing—“the only writer-run center in Canada”—to which Derksen, Robertson, Shaw, and Strang all belong.40 Despite a “collective” authorship, however, “Coasting” does not boast a homogenized platform.41 In fact, the altered version maintains the personal pronoun of Derksen’s original claims, while including the plural pronoun to reflect additional claims. As the authors argue in the preface: “Community is not an agreement to share a style.”42 For these writers, community is an agreement to challenge the metaphysical and “political assumptions” of discourses and to act “heretical[ly]” toward those assumptions, exposing their contradictions and ironies.43 In a series of juxtaposed statements—some poetic, some polemical, some autobiographical, some quoted—“Coasting” defends a poetic practice that investigates assumptions about the world, about reading, about subjectivity, and about textuality. Ultimately, their practice refines and extends the approach to Language writing, seen in McCaffery’s early formulation.
In scattered claims throughout “Coasting,” Derksen, Robertson, Shaw, and Strang, all demonstrate that irony provides an invaluable tool for such an “interrogatory” poetics.44 Such irony is present in the very title of the piece. On the one hand, the title “Coasting” alludes to the presentation at the Writing from the New Coast conference. On the other hand, the title suggests a body moving without exertion or resistance. Overall, “Coasting” is quite ironic because the manifesto argues for an antagonistic poetics rather than for a complacent one. For the authors, “irony” serves as a “context stripper”:45 “The authoritative word cannot tolerate irony, for irony, by pointing to competing contexts, shows the reductions necessary in propping up authority.”46 Although the authors do not cite him directly, Mikhail Bakhtin argues that the “authoritative word” represents the discourses of moral, religious, and political institutions.47 When irony “lay[s] bare the context of meaning,”48 this exposure challenges the claim to narrowly defined meanings. The authors employ irony when they cite the following fact: “‘Patriot’ missiles bomb Baghdad on the night Clinton’s inaugural festivities begin.”49 The authors juxtapose the clearly patriotic festivities of inauguration and the seemingly patriotic festivities of destruction. In a reductive view, the imperialist act of bombing Saddam Hussein does not interfere with the democratic act of celebrating Bill Clinton. This short statement of fact, and the quotation marks around “Patriot” demonstrate the overdetermined nature of “democracy” in the West. The authors see poetry as a platform for exposing such ironies; but the authors also believe that “[t]here are possibilities for irony to go past being a ‘trope that works well from within a power field but still contests it’ ([Linda] Hutcheon).”50 A poetics can contest a “power field” by illustrating ironies at the level of ideas, but a poetics can also employ irony at the level of form. The authors subscribe to the notion that disrupting the flow of syntax and logic—effectively disjoining and rejoining language “ironically”—also disrupts the political assumptions inherent to such structures of language.
At the beginning of “Coasting,” the authors attack the “assumption of a common world” and a “common humanity.”51 In the authors’ view such assumptions are problematic because they efface the “specificity” of an individual’s political circumstances.52 The assumption of commonality, the authors argue, demonstrates “the luxury of the landed.”53 Being “landed” or “enfranchised” implies feeling naturalized within a particular cultural milieu, in which one can implicitly forget about the political details of one’s identity.54 According to the authors, the “landed” propagate universalist views of history and literature—views that the authors liken to a “an unencumbered brush stroke from the flatbed of a railroad car.”55 In order to challenge “assumption[s] of a common world,” the authors suggest that poets must investigate “language systems—literary genres, visual representation, the practice of historiography.”56 By this the authors mean that poets must not only examine how “artistic and abstract systems” construct our understanding of the world; poets must also expose how such constructions often propagate “patriarchal” agendas.57 Furthermore, poets must attend to what is “liminal” in our “language systems”—what such systems expel, suppress, repress or ignore58—not simply to make the world more “perceivable,” but to expose the political agendas in those systems.59 In other words, attending to the “liminal” does not simply raise consciousness, but enacts the beginning of a “politics of transformation and resistance.”60
When the authors state that their work investigates the politics of signifying systems, the authors engage a primary concern of Language writing. Language writers believe that ideology not only informs the content and forms of communication, but also the transactional model of communication itself. Language writing problematizes the traditional relationship between writer and reader by creating texts that oblige the reader to produce meaning actively, rather than passively consume information. Such texts often utilize the “liminal” elements of discourse—the nonsensical, the obscene, the non-expressive, the disjunctive—in an effort to help readers take responsibility for the construction of meaning. The authors of “Coasting” claim that viewing readers as “‘agent[s] of production’” implies “utilitarian values.”61 McCaffery also articulates this claim.62 He states: “Language writing should be encountered at the bifurcation of … two orders of value: productive utility on the one hand, and sovereignty on the other.”63 In the first order, we “produce a reading” and in the second order, we “proceed further in the textual experience of the unreadable.”64 The authors of “Coasting” refer to this second order as a “node of excess” and, like McCaffery, they find this order to be a viable “space of desire and political potential.”65 Derksen, Robertson, Strang, and Shaw all suggest that their work confronts the limits of discourse, exploring “nodes of excess,” in an effort to activate the reader, both as a producer of meaning and as a political agent.
For the authors of “Coasting,” excess represents both an object of their research and a quality of their work. Moreover, the authors consider excess to be a characteristic of subjectivity. Subjectivity exceeds the moment of writing and the scope of representation—what they call a “constructed clarity”66—because subjectivity is not an identity with a “boiled down center,”67 but a process with a “partial” and “momentary” existence, like “jello in a willow tree.”68 This view of subjectivity leads the authors to distrust “sincerity”69 and “authenticity,”70 and to advocate for a poetics in defiance of a lyric voice issuing from a solitary, poetic imagination. “When we speak of excess,” they report, “we do not hearken to a reactionary expressionism: we are uninterested in elevated or enervated feeling and emotional authenticity per se, but in the study of the limits of discursive systems figured as impossibility—a space of desire and political potential.”71 In other words, the authors see their poetry as investigating subjectivity as much as representing subjects, by which the authors mean two things. First, poetry represents a counter-discourse in which marginalized subjects, or so-called “proscribed autonomies,”72 can both explore and articulate their experiences. Poetry can mark the specificity of a subject’s experience as a sexually, racially, and socioeconomically determined being—determinations that hegemonic discursive systems often circumscribe in the name of a “common humanity.”73 Second, poetry also represents a discourse in which subjects can both inhabit and explore alternate identities.74 Poetry can depict the provisionality of subjectivity, as an inhabitable, rather than as a completely determined, position—a position that enables agency in a way not readily available.
The authors argue that poetic texts must demonstrate a commensurate complexity.75 Interrogating “language systems”76—which construct how we perceive the world and how we imagine our own subjectivity—must include the production of alternate models, even anti-systemic texts. Anti-systemic texts utilize a form and logic in opposition to our conventional “language systems.” The authors of “Coasting” refer to their anti-systemic poetics as “[w]ork[ing] at the level of signification.”77 The presentation of “Coasting,” for example, as a series of disjointed sentence-length paragraphs continuously displaces the reader’s point of reference and destabilizes her ability to build a coherent meaning hypotactically. The text demonstrates a “shifting from code to code”—a shifting that disallows “unification” among the text’s collective declarations, personal statements, credited citations, and ironic observations.78 In other words, the text does not refer to a single context, but “wobble[s]” between discursive registers. Overall, “Coasting” articulates a poetics of “constant information activity”—a poetics that registers not only the complexity and specificity of the information that inundates us, but also the complexity and provisionality of our engagement with such information.79
In “Coasting,” Derksen, Robertson, Shaw, and Strang all report that their poetics transgresses “conventional pieties” in an effort to explore the “frontier of the present.”80 The authors stake a claim for a project that they do not find readily available, and they offer “Coasting” as a defense of this developing project. Still, “Coasting” does respond to both Modernist poetics and Language poetics—two poetics that represent precursors in the struggle to break from “conventional pieties.” First, the authors state: “‘to make the stone stony’ or to make the world perceivable and other ocular metaphors are no longer the imperative of poetry.”81 Making the “stone stony” refers to a belief of the Russian Formalists that artistic responsibility requires defamiliarizing everyday materials in order to improve our perception of them.82 Second, the authors state: “it is not enough to lay bare the contexts of meaning.”83 Stripping the “contexts of meaning” alludes to a belief of the Language writers that poetic responsibility involves reclaiming the materiality of language by sabotaging transparent referentiality.84 The authors of “Coasting” acknowledge the goals of defamiliarization, and “context-stripping,” even as the authors wish to expand these modes. The authors acknowledge the possibility of pushing these techniques further, as part of a larger project to make the “enfranchised … recognize their complicity” in maintaining oppressive political situations.85 While the authors reassert a suspicion of “official verse” and an appreciation for a poetics of “excess”—both of which figure heavily in Language writing—the authors also desire a specific, political investigation that moves beyond textual politics and enters activist politics.86 For example, when the authors proclaim themselves to be “feminists,” intent on “interrogat[ing] the social construction of gender in language systems,”87 the authors do so in order to specify their political focus.
Similarly, when the authors ask, “How can a generational identity transgress nation?,”88 this question becomes an open call for contemporary poets not only to transcend but to resist the “anthropological tropes of national literature.”89 Such tropes tend to underestimate the localized, existential, and sociopolitical factors that inform a generation’s poetics and politics. In another sense, the call expresses a desire by the authors to transcend both provincial accounts and nationalist accounts of art and history. But even while the authors express a desire to “transgress nation,” they also report: “Our reading of the New American poetics … was a process of transculturation, as we came to them first through the [Canadian] TISH poets, who include Daphne Marlatt, George Bowering, Gladys Hindmarch, Fred Wah, Jamie Reid, Frank Davey, Dan McLeod, Lionel Kearns, and David Dawson.”90 This tension, then, between a desire to “transgress nation” and to acknowledge “national literature” suggests that the KSW would not advocate a vanguard notion about their own evolution. Rather, this tension attends to the particularities of local, national, and global politics, while contending with such exigencies by all means necessary.
According to Caroline Bayard, in her study of experimental poetry in Canada and Quebec, the Canadian avant-garde demonstrates “the capacity to fuse and celebrate what has been previously separated; that is, narrative from textual process, pleasure from scientifically established assertions, representations from non-representational elements.”91 This characterization defies the logic of vanguardism, but in a way that seems appropriate for characterizing not only experimental Canadian poetry but also post-Language writing in general. Pauline Butling makes a similar observation about “radical” poetries in Canada. She forgoes the avant-garde moniker in favour of what she and Fred Wah refer to as a “re poetics”—interested in repetition with a difference: “redefining, rewriting, reclaiming, rearticularting, reinventing, reterritorializing, and reformulating.”92 Butling elaborates:
Re posits lateral, spiral, and/or reverse movements rather than the single line and forward thrust of avant-gardism. Re disarticulates the forward imperative (as in disconnecting the links between cars on a train) and rearticulates by jumping the tracks and hitching up trains that have been sitting idle or are rusting away on abandoned tracks.93
In one sense, avant-gardist works in Canada often seem to demonstrate a hybrid of Canadian influences and American influences. In another sense, hybrid tendencies in such avant-gardist works do not abrogate the value of such works. We should not, in other words, see the contemporary avant-garde in Canada as either ahead of the pack or derivative, but as Butling suggests, we should see the avant-garde as a “guerilla action.”94 We must see reconfigurations, like Butling’s, as the beginning of an ethical account in the avant-garde. The stakes for experimental work in Canada are not only about formal innovation (or about transcending the parochial view of Canadian literature), but also about maximizing the ethical impact of such work.
1 Marjorie Perloff, “After Language Poetry: Innovation and Its Theoretical Discontents,” Contemporary Poetics (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 34.
2 I will be using the term “TISH” to refer to the poets themselves, while “TISH” refers to the magazine itself. Also, I will be using the broad moniker “Language” in order to identify writers who, while initially or in part associated with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine, still represent a broader constituency and aesthetic.
3 “About KSW,” kswnet.org.
4 In effect, what we refer to as “post” suggests not only what occurs afterward but what also exists in post, en route, or in transition.
5 In his study comparing the Kootenay School of Writing with the TISH poets, for example, Christian Bök posits: “Even though both coteries follow a parallel heritage … the relationship between these two coteries involves no genealogy of hereditary succession.” (“TISH and Koot”), 97–98. In fact, Bök argues that the KSW represents an agonistic response to the TISH movement. See Christian Bök, “TISH and Koot,” Open Letter 12.8 (2006): 97–104.
6 Pauline Butling and Susan Rudy, Writing in Our Time: Canada’s Radical Poetries in English (1957–2003) (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2005), 50.
7 Frank Davey, “Introduction,” The Writing Life: Historical and Critical Views of the TISH Movement (Coatsworth: Black Moss Press, 1976), 19.
8 James Reid, “Editorial,” TISH No. 1–19 (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1975), 71.
9 Warren Tallman, “‘When a New Music Is Heard the Walls of the City Tremble’: A Note on Voice Poetry,” TISH No. 1–19 (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1975), 67.
10 David Dawson, “A Poem Is an Expanding Structure of Thought,” TISH No. 1–19 (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1975), 26.
11 By the 1970s and 1980s, many poets will refer to this relation as “the politics of poetic form.”
12 Between 1965 and 2013, Open Letter offered scholarship on both Canadian and experimental literature, including two recent issues on the Kootenay School of Writing (2010) and Lisa Robertson (2011).
13 The Toronto Research Group (1973–1982) represents a tangent in the narrative arc that I am giving for Language writing in Canada, despite the fact that the TRG shares similar interest with Language writing. The TRG, for example, desires to alter “the textual role of the reader”; to extend “the creative, idiomatic basis of translation”; to “jettison the word in favour of more current cognitive codes”; and to provide “a material prose that would challenge the spatio-temporal determinates of linearity.” Steve McCaffery and bpNichol, Rational Geomancy: The Kids of the Book-Machine, The Collected Research Reports of the Toronto Research Group, 1973–1982 (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1992), 9.
14 Steve McCaffery, “The Politics of the Referent,” Open Letter 3.7 (1977): 60.
15 Steve McCaffery, North of Intention: Critical Writings, 1973–1986 (New York: Roof Books, 1986), 150.
16 Steve McCaffery, “The Death of the Subject: The Implications of Counter-Communication in Recent Language-Centered Writing,” Open Letter 3.7 (1977): 62.
17 McCaffery, “The Death of the Subject,” 61.
18 McCaffery, 62.
19 McCaffery, 61.
20 McCaffery, 61.
21 Caroline Bayard, The New Poetics in Canada and Quebec: From Concretism to Post-modernism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), 60.
22 Bök, “TISH and Koot,” 97.
23 Michael Barnholden and Andrew Klobucar (eds.), Writing Class: The Kootenay School of Writing Anthology (Vancouver: New Star, 1999), 18.
24 Barnholden and Klobucar, Writing Class, 25.
25 See Klobucar’s and Barnholden’s introduction to Writing Class for a general overview of this milieu. See also Jeff Derksen, “Kootenay School of Writing in the Expanded Field: Retrofitting and Insider Knowledge,” Annihilated Time (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2009), 285–330.
26 “About KSW,” kswnet.org.
27 Barnholden and Klobucar, Writing Class, 6.
28 Bruce Andrews, Paradise and Method: Poetics and Praxis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 93.
29 Andrews, Paradise, 113–115.
30 Russell Smith, “So You’ve Never Heard of This Important Movement in Poetry? Don’t Worry—the Poets Don’t Care,” Globe and Mail (11 March 2000): R5.
31 Ann Vickery, Leaving Lines of Gender: A Feminist Genealogy of Language Writing (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2000), 129.
32 Barnholden and Klobucar, Writing Class, 29.
33 George Bowering, “Vancouver as Postmodern Poetry,” Vancouver: Representing the Postmodern City (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp, 1994), 136.
34 Jason Wiens, “Kootenay School of Writing: History, Community, Poetics” (Ph.D diss., University of Calgary, 2001), 126.
35 Wiens, “Kootenay,” 116–126.
36 Wiens, 128.
37 Wiens, 113.
38 Juliana Spahr, Mark Wallace, Kristin Prevallet, and Pam Rehm, A Poetics of Criticism (Buffalo: Leave, 1994), 7.
39 Derksen left the conference “unexpectedly” and could not deliver the paper, so in its final form “Coasting” presents additional contributions by Robertson, Shaw, and Strang intermixed with the original statements by Derksen.
40 Jeff Derksen, Lisa Robertson, Nancy Shaw, and Catriona Strang, “Coasting,” A Poetics of Criticism (Buffalo: Leave, 1994), 301.
41 Derksen et al., “Coasting,” 301.
42 Derksen et al., 301.
43 Derksen et al., 301.
44 Derksen et al., 302.
45 Derksen et al., 302
46 Derksen et al., 303.
47 Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011), 341–344.
48 Derksen et al., “Coasting,” 303.
49 Derksen et al., 302.
50 Derksen et al., 302.
51 Derksen et al., 301–302.
52 Derksen et al., 301.
53 Derksen et al., 301.
54 Derksen et al., 301, 303.
55 Derksen et al., 302.
56 Derksen et al., 302.
57 Derksen et al., 301.
58 Derksen et al., 302.
59 Derksen et al., 302.
60 Derksen et al., 302.
61 Derksen et al., 303.
62 See Steve McCaffery, “Language Writing: From Productive to Libidinal Economy,” North of Intention, 1973–1986, 143–158.
63 McCaffery, “Language Writing,” 157.
64 McCaffery, 157.
65 Derksen et al., “Coasting,” 303.
66 Derksen et al., 303.
67 Derksen et al., 303.
68 Derksen et al., 301.
69 Derksen et al., 302.
70 Derksen et al., 303.
71 Derksen et al., 303
72 Derksen et al., 301.
73 Derksen et al., 302.
74 Derksen et al., 302.
75 Derksen et al., 301.
76 Derksen et al., 301.
77 Derksen et al., 302.
78 Derksen et al., 301.
79 While I cannot find a specific source for “‘constant information activity,’” the term refers to Information Science, how we become informed, beginning with our desire for knowledge, but including the sources and channels by which information reaches us. As a model for poetics, information activity suggests a manipulation of the sources and channels of information in an effort to deliver knowledge better. See Brian Vickery, “What Is Information Activity” from “Meeting the Challenge,” Information Science in Transition, ed. Alan Gilchrist (London: Facet Publishing, 2009), xxii.
80 Derksen et al., “Coasting,” 302.
81 Derksen et al., 302.
82 See Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique,” Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, ed. and trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reiss (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 3–24.
83 Derksen et al., “Coasting,” 303.
84 See Bruce Andrews Paradise and Method, particularly the essays “Text and Context” (6–15) and “Revolution Only Fact Confected” (137–152).
85 Derksen et al., “Coasting,” 302.
86 “Official verse” is Charles Bernstein’s term; “excess” is Steve McCaffery’s term. See Charles Bernstein, “The Academy in Peril: William Carlos Williams Meets the MLA,” Content’s Dream: Essays, 1975–1984 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 244–251. Also see Steve McCaffery, “Bill Bissett: A Writing Outside Writing,” North of Intention 1973–1986 (New York: Roof Books, 1986), 93–109.
87 Derksen et al., “Coasting,” 302.
88 Derksen et al., 303.
89 Derksen et al., 302.
90 Derksen et al., 301.
91 Bayard, The New Poetics, 4.
92 Fred Wah, Faking It: Poetics and Hybridity (Edmonton: NeWest Press, 2001), 203.
93 Butling and Rudy, Writing in Our Time, 21.
94 Butling and Rudy, 19.