Toward. Some. Air. The title of this anthology, edited by Canadian poet Fred Wah and British (but Vancouver-based) poet Amy De’Ath, is drawn from Carla Harryman’s 2005 prose text Baby. The anthology’s title suggests a sense of movement, a direction “toward” a breath of fresh air — perhaps even toward the sign air as a metonymy for psychological, physical, and social health. For Christine Hume, Baby traffics in “polyvocality,” and Harryman’s text “reinscribes listening with both somatic impact and ethical response.”1 Much like Hume’s take on Baby, this anthology is marked by polyvocality, poetic and theoretical responses to the body, and a shared interest in politics. The writers collected here approach these topics from various perspectives and from numerous geographical coordinates and subject positions; Toward. Some. Air. is polyvocal to the extent that it includes a diverse range of generic forms, including poetry, translation, dialogue and interview, artist’s statement, critical essay, theoretical burlesque, collaboration, and personal anecdote. This generic plurality is complicated further by the anthology’s inclusion of shifting generational contexts, ranging from work by (or on) writers who began their cultural production in the 1960s, to writers who began publishing in the twenty-first century. Along with this generational pluralism, the anthology includes work by writers living in Canada, France, the Nawash Unceded First Nation on the Saugeen Peninsula, the unceded Coast Salish Territories, the UK, and the USA, and it further traverses co-ordinates not charted on standard maps, such as an Edmonton “underbridge” inhabited by homeless Indigenous people (as in Christine’s Stewart’s essay) and the “girls’ city [which] does not exist” (as in Anne Boyer’s poem). Several of the writers collected here are now living and working — at least physically, if not virtually and through publication — outside of their national milieu. Yet for all of its transnational, generational, gendered, queer, racial, and generic heterogeneity, the (mainly Anglophone) writers and artists represented in this collection share many similar poetic concerns.
The relationships formed among language, social activism, and politics have of course been an ongoing focus of innovative poetries and poetics in both the North American and British contexts since at least the time of the New American Poetry of the 1950s and the British Poetry Revival of the 1960s. What seems new here is a more supportive form of pluralism, which is not so much marked by a specific school or movement, but by a shared sense of cultural critique, produced in relation to formal innovation. This is not to say that previous “avant-garde” or “experimental” or “post-modern” or “post-colonial” or “language-centred” or “conceptual” (among other) literary groupings were entirely antithetical to each other — but that by the early twenty-first century the differences among these categories seem to have been subordinated to an overarching concern with our current ecological, economic, and related social crises. This anthology is not about legitimating a certain poetic stance or being prescriptive, but about considering the results of a particular set of developments in Anglo-American poetic practice, especially as they are placed in proximal relation to each other. Poetic response to our present situation remains varied in its formal and conceptual concerns, but if this collection provides any indication of recent cultural criticism in poetry, it is evident that a political engagement with social and environmental problems continues to inform a wide range of poetic practice, in both the North American and British contexts.
The anthology deploys a palpable sense of movement, an itinerant journeying toward and through different textual zones of thought and practice. And the borders among these textual localities and registers are porous, open to transfer, as they stem not only from politically sympathetic poetic traditions, but also from common areas of ethical reference. For example, Lisa Robertson, a Canadian writer now living in rural France, writes about Peter Culley’s Hammertown, a long poem set in the Vancouver Island ex-mining town of East Wellington. Robertson points out that Culley’s decision to write as a “committedly regional poet of situated materiality and comradery [. . .] has permitted him the ideological freedom to rigorously critique the various hegemonies and centrisms of even the most avant-garde cultural formations.” Yet Robertson also mentions Culley’s debt to the French Oulipian writer Georges Perec, whose 1978 novel Life: A User’s Manual provides the epigraph for Hammertown; while Culley’s poem is directly local in its frame of reference, the epigraph re-situates it within an international context of linguistically innovative writing, even though the text itself does not employ the constraint-based procedures espoused by Perec and the Oulipians. Perhaps this sort of migratory re-contextualization can also be seen in Robertson’s own peripatetic condition, writing as she does here about a regional Canadian poetics from a geographically distant European location. In any case, this sort of itinerant labour — moving as it does between the West Coast of Canada and the Southwest of France — parallels the labour undertaken by this collection as a whole, as the text highlights and traverses the localized situations of its contributors.
Andrea Brady’s study of British poet Denise Riley’s writing begins with an analysis of her earliest poetry, in which “the space of the poem is crowded with personal circumstances, political interpellation, malicious inner voices, and theories of the lyric as the ‘animals of unease.’” Brady then notes that Riley’s temporary abandonment of poetry during the first decade of the twenty-first century was partially due to the hostility she found, as a woman, working in what at that time was an intensely patriarchal space in the British experimental poetry community. Although Reality Street Editions’ 1996 publication of Out of Everywhere: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America & the UK attempted to redress this gender imbalance, by the late nineties the anthology’s editor Maggie O’Sullivan had relocated to rural Yorkshire, and the presence of second-wave feminist writers was almost completely absent from London. When I first moved to London from Toronto in the late 1990s, the poetry scene was predominantly composed of men in their fifties and sixties. Many of these writers had broken new formal and conceptual ground, but compared to the highly politicized contexts of the Toronto and Buffalo communities that I had left, London at that time seemed to be on a different wavelength altogether. True, there were a few notable exceptions of feminist writers working in London at the time, but for the most part the poetry world here remained out of touch with the vital insights and poetic practices of feminist writers working in North America. One of these exceptions, Caroline Bergvall, contributed greatly to the poetic exploration of gender and language during the 1990s; Bergvall’s base at Dartington College of Arts in the Southwest of England, where she taught performance writing with cris cheek, made the college one of the most critically engaged sites for poetic production during the period. Her text in this anthology attests to the continuing importance and development of her ideas about language, materiality, gender, and the social. Similarly, Brady’s own early poetry, produced in Cambridge and London during the late nineties and early 2000s, provided an astute and politically active encounter with gender, especially in relation to U.S. and British foreign policy after 9/11. More recently, a new generation of feminist and queer writers, including Amy De’Ath before her move to Vancouver, have completely revitalized the London alternative poetry scene.
As Brady discusses the gendered “space” or “arena” of British poetry, Daphne Marlatt turns similarly to spatial metaphors by considering the “relatively open space of prose” as a means to transgress limitations of gender, class, and inherited culture. Where Riley turned away from poetry to critical writing, Marlatt writes that she turned to prose narrative “as an arena of transgression.” Marlatt further links her situation as a writer to what could be called an ecological or ecopoetical concern with questioning our implication in “the fragile overlapping eco-social webs of our world.” Toward. Some. Air. includes several like-minded statements about ecopoetics: Rita Wong writes that part of her work as a poet has been to “listen to the chronic and immense damage to the land” and to “cultivate courage — through dialogue, connectedness, sisterhood,” while Larissa Lai acknowledges not only historical contingency, but also the “human and nonhuman, galactic, planetary, tectonic, molecular, nanoscale, animal, vegetable, and mineral” actions of creation. Toward. Some. Air. situates contemporary writing practice firmly within the context of debates about contemporary ecocriticism. Jonathan Skinner has pointed out that this emerging critical discourse has tended to privilege the referential function of language, in which poets refer “outside” of the poem to a “natural topos.”2 Yet the statements on ecology collected here shift away from this more referential function, in order to focus instead on the interconnections among nature and the social, with a specific focus on the linked categories of formal innovation and political critique.
The wide generic diversity of this anthology often occurs through its contributors’ deployment of inter-media and/or interdisciplinary practice. To list a few examples: Keith Tuma’s article on Tom Raworth calls attention to Raworth’s poetry as well as to his work as a visual collage artist; Kaia Sand hammers archival found text onto scraps of copper and pewter and sets reading as a visual, material, and textual encounter with social power; Sina Queyras lyricizes conceptual procedures; Eileen Myles further destabilizes the leaky boundaries between poetry and prose; Darren Wershler outlines Johanna Drucker’s key role in extending the “book” over multiple disciplines and sub-disciplines; Steven Ross Smith’s essay on bpNichol provides both a literary history and a personal reminiscence of this important figure in the development of Canadian writing; J. R. Carpenter’s orchestration of critical dialogue among a number of digital artists includes the insertion of digitally-generated poems, programmed by Stephanie Strickland and Nick Montfort. The blurring of borders collected in Toward. Some. Air. performs the continuing permeability of literary genre. I am using the term “performative” in the sense given to it by Mieke Bal in Travelling Concepts in the Humanities (2002). Central to Bal’s discussion of performativity is the concept of the theatrical mise-en-scène, which she redefines provisionally as “the materialization of a text — word and score — in a form accessible for public, collective reception.”3 Mise-en-scène is performative in Bal’s terms to the extent that it provides a space or environment in which something takes place on a social scale, in a “limited and delimited section of real time and space.”4 Many of the texts collected here similarly perform content at a formal, material level, and function as textual mise-en-scènes for the enactment of critique within our current social situation.
Poetic activism is sometimes foregrounded in these essays through the figure of silence. Reg Johanson discusses the evolving trajectory of silence in Marie Annharte Baker’s writing, and considers how her recent work “draws together the silences of an identity and experiences of sexual violence that can’t (yet) be spoken.” For Johanson, Annharte’s work articulates the struggle to speak against gendered violence and a racist social order. Silence here is not equivalent to the nihilistic despair found in the European modernist conception of an existential endgame (e.g. Beckett’s pessimistic “every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness”5). Instead, silence is figured as a direct result of political resistance, or as a holistic area of non-linguistic experience. “One thing I know,” writes Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm, “is that Anishinaabek listen to and understand silences at a much deeper level. We’re fluent in it!” In this account, to read silence is to commune with “everyone, every being, every thing,” and in doing so to reject the reductive languages of exploitation. In “NORTH NORD GIIWEDIN” Liz Howard similarly employs the trope of silence by linking it to the body: “for each breath has a birthright / of extinction where I cannot say / all our silence is a uterine conduit,” and the poem employs references to language, cultural identity, and dream imagery in order to foreground an “abject territory of words,” and to question how that area might represent “an Indigenous or occidental dream.” Areas, Words, Silences, Questions: these elements also contribute to Christine Stewart’s consideration of the “home and homeless” Indigenous population living in the “underbridge” at Mill Creek Ravine (kâhasinîskâk, or “place of stones,” in Cree) and in the hundreds of similar “underbridges” in Canada. As a non-Indigenous writer who acknowledges her own embedded and implicated subjectivity in white settler ideology, Stewart asks how to honour the treaties, the obligations of sharing Indigenous land, how to be here — and concludes with a powerful call for listening: “The Elders ask that we take care to listen to the land and to the stories of the people from that land. This is our obligation to our hosts.”
Toward. Some. Air. provides us with a sample of recent politicized thinking about poetics. Although the collection is varied in character and context, and has been produced in numerous locations and by writers with deeply different subject positions, much of the work has been conceived and written as a direct response to the instability of our shared social, political, economic, and ecological situation. With these differences and similarities in mind, would it be oversimplifying to say that Jeff Derksen’s desire for a return to a poetics of militant sincerity, as an affect dangerous to neoliberalism, might articulate the collective desire of this anthology?
1 Christine Hume, “Carla Harryman’s Baby: Listening In, Around, Through, and Out” in How 2 3.2 (2013): 1.
2 Jonathan Skinner, “Statement on ‘New Nature Writing,’” in Ecopoetics no. 4/5 (2005): 128.
3 Mieke Bal, Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 97.
4 Ibid.
5 Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: A Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), 631.