During a pause in reading Peter Culley’s Parkway, I step out the kitchen door to play with my dog; the yard sycamore’s autumnal crackle, underslung by a low military plane whine and distant crop-duster, unspools in Culley’s intricate jumpcut. Central France sonically doubles Vancouver Island. I seem to have brought his close listening outside with me, so that I now hear in the grain of Culley’s vocables: “the filament of the weedwhacker / strums hard but damped.”1 The poem’s language and the ambient quotidian move in simultaneous tracks, so that two fields of attention braid or entwine in my experience of reading Culley, troubling or ruffling all the potential referentiality of each — referentiality to the complexity of economies: rural, urban, light industrial, post-agricultural, high or low (to the extent that such designations still hold at this late edge of capital), so class-marked, institutionally enabled or curtailed. Listening in Culley’s work is an economy that, while seemingly as at ease with its demotic setting as it is with a profound literariness, subtly undercuts itself with a sonically installed irony.
By irony I mean the reasoned and affective acknowledgement of a potent ambivalence: the positions from which we speak and write are complicit with histories that we would often rather repudiate or negate, and yet not only our aesthetic experience and judgements, but our varying abilities to position ourselves as subjects, can’t be separated from our historical implicatedness. The problem has deeply installed itself, to the point of silencing many writers. How do we continue, given the profound and ongoing violence of language’s institutions? I make this swift drop from a sonic phenomenology into the ethical stance of poetry because I feel that this is what has been deeply at stake in the twenty-year span of Culley’s extraordinary long poem, Hammertown. The poet’s listening, as situated and improvisational as it is, opens outwards and across the lexicons of the earth neighbourhood towards subjectivities and collectivities that are always historical, always incomplete. The poem plays out a sonic shaping and interrogation of this incompleteness, as the musical soloist forays out from the collective texture of the improvised composition. In these poems, style, replete with its figures — irony, end-rhyme, homage — performs a political query, where politics is the province of shared or competing subjectivities.
Parkway is the third and reputedly final book of Culley’s ambitious project, which was begun as early as 1993, when the first two sections, “Greetings from Hammertown” and “The Provisions,” were printed as an artist’s book by Cleave Press. In 1995 the two poems were reprinted, along with four newer ones, in The Climax Forest, a collection from the short-lived Leech Books, published by Stephen Forth in Kitsilano. Then the original six Hammertown poems were printed again, in the eponymous 2003 book from New Star Books, the East Vancouver–based poetry and leftist political press started in Kitsilano in the 1970s by the York Street Commune, and run by Rolf Maurer since 1990. The second volume of Hammertown, The Age of Briggs and Stratton, also from New Star, appeared in 2008, and now this final volume has appeared, in 2013. Such material and social specificities of publication are important to mention, because Culley has chosen to place himself as a committedly regional poet of situated materiality and comradery, whose poems are often in direct address with friends, neighbours, and colleagues, other books and historical writers and movements, and the trees, birds, and development plans of his province. His modest freelancer’s home in the quasi-rural Vancouver Island ex-mining town of East Wellington, near Nanaimo, has permitted him the ideological freedom to rigorously critique the various hegemonies and centrisms of even the most avant-garde cultural formations. What is East Wellington to a Torontonian, to a Conceptualist, to an Eco-poet? Culley crafts an ornate critical agency in his very consciously framed pastoral margin.
All the arcane details of Culley’s island base find an elegant echo in the name and play of Hammertown: this is a fictional place discovered in the pages of the French Oulipo writer Georges Perec’s 1978 novel Life: A User’s Manual. The novel is a representation of a Parisian apartment building; its lapidary descriptions include the histories of all of the building’s inhabitants, present and past, their decors and their transformations, and the gossip linking the ensemble. Bartlebooth, the building’s landlord, is a wealthy eccentric who, having learned the skills of a watercolourist in his youth, has travelled to 500 seaports all over the globe in order to make detailed watercolour renderings of each, which he will then send back to France to a master puzzle-maker who will laminate each paper image to a wooden backing, then jigsaw it to a 750-piece picture-puzzle. After twenty years of wandering, Bartlebooth returns to Paris and sets up in his apartment building where he painstakingly reassembles each puzzle. The place Culley claimed as Nanaimo’s doppelgänger is one such port, one puzzle: “it was a fishing port on Vancouver Island, a place called Hammertown, all white with snow, with a few low houses and some fishermen in fur-lined jackets hauling a long, pale, hull along the shore.”2 Bartlebooth’s eventual plan is to send each of the reassembled images back to its namesake, back to port as it were, where it would be chemically dipped to erase all traces of the image, then detached from the wooden support, leaving only a blank page, the same one the artist had begun with. He dies while finishing the 439th puzzle.
The plot line reads like a pastiche avant-la-lettre of Conceptualist procedures, as well as a black farce on Perec’s own Oulipian constraints and games, with a Melville-like tint. Bartlebooth dies attempting to finish, while Bartleby the scrivener would simply rather not. And the description of the Hammertown puzzle seems like a faded print of some sub-arctic place, a European cliché of a mythologized Canadian climate entirely unlinked to the temperate coastal rainforest. It’s a glorious perversity for Culley to insistently recognize his home in this sparse cold beach of fur-clad fishermen, as unlike Nanaimo and its temperate rain forest as possible. But for Culley, as for Perec, description is the device that floods the spatial premise with the richly observed non-sequiturs that transform the text to a productive generator of ironical feint, critique masquerading as comedy, as well as a tender and sometimes lyrical concern to document the disjecta of market centrism.
Such lumpen disjecta appears in the opening lines of the very first Hammertown sequence: “A tim’rous grader halts / before an overflowing ditch, its / big bad boy body slumped / as if thwarted at its gigging.”3 Culley inflects development’s banal landscape and its ubiquitous heavy equipment with an archaic poetic contraction, a baroque excess of affect, a metrically emphasized alliteration. He recycles old-world literary cliché to lift the slightness of the image beyond simple signification and towards an almost allegorical grandeur, much as Perec riffed on the new-world cliché in his invented image of Hammertown. For both Perec and Culley, stylistic hyperbole lovingly inflates the quotidian, converting margins to emblems. Culley begins Parkway on similar terms: “A widow’s walk with an ashtray; / a “sleeping room” / in the old parlance”4; we’re situated in a theatrical and self-announced archaism of diction, imaginably a voice-over from a late-night screening on Turner Classic Movies or a sprig from an idly acquired library-cast-off novel — something fashionable in the 1920s, maybe. Such “old parlance” is a recurrent yet inconsistent diction throughout Hammertown, tempered by hip hop rhythms, the language of contemporary urban planning, the varied idiolects of an intensely listened-to dailiness. In this sequence too the “r” makes its appearance — “walked past today a grader / working over the loamy slash / like a chimp taking notes.”5 Here again is “old parlance” — the inversion in the opening phrase, “walked today past,” a frequent device of Culley’s, permits a more textured sound pattern, and importantly announces his non-acquiescence to the plain-speech imperatives of the free verse tradition since Imagism and the early Williams, imperatives that even now very few poets submit to questioning. (Among Culley’s contemporaries, notable exceptions would be Lisa Jarnot, whose poems are strongly inflected by the work of mythological poet-thinkers Robert Duncan and Helen Adams, and Lee Ann Brown, who often brings the archaisms of the American ballad tradition into her poems.) While the gleeful artifice of Culley’s syntax points to a pre-modernist history of literary style, and the eccentric company of certain of his milieu, it’s also part of the vocal play of a writer who simply loves to coax and fiddle with the endless resourcefulness and productiveness of vernacular speech, to make a poem that frames and honours the freedom of that spoken agency. For Culley, the vernacular is a polytemporal resource that turns towards the writer’s, and thus a reader’s, pleasure.
The smallest phrase can proliferate into such a complex referentiality, where the arcane data of marginalized literary histories jostle against jazz and popular music reference, the lesser figures of British Romanticism (such as woodcut book illustrator Thomas Bewick — “a shaven hedgeloafer out of Thomas Bewick”6), and the products and brand-names of late-capitalist entertainment, fast-food, and consumer industries. There’s a refusal to rank this very wide lexicon according to any high/low scales of value. This is the quotidian diction of the wide-reading populist who knows that the specificity of any vernacular is the historical material. Insofar as Hammertown is a history of the present, and I feel strongly that is one of its important tasks, that history must be anachronic, combining and weaving the wild variability of linguistic traces that move through the mind of any reader, any consumer, as they move also within any poet. This anachronistic historicity has for its precedents Charles Olson’s The Maximus Poems and Ezra Pound’s The Cantos. In The Maximus Poems, likewise situated in Olson’s hometown of Gloucester, Massachusetts, Gloucester becomes a compositional device for a dynamic exploration of the narratives and economies of maritime historiography, among much else, and in Ezra Pound’s Cantos, the Western myth of the voyage of exploration launches into a broad series of quests into economics, the relation of East and West, lyric desire, and the problem of the movement of time in the subject — “And then went down to the ship,” the 800-page poem begins. But where these modernist epics in part fix their seriousness through their close relation to the generic tropes and images of classical epic, Hammertown begins not with a ship, but a mock-heroic grader.
Here I have tried to indicate the extreme richness and historical reach of Culley’s style, not just to point to the ongoing experience of intellectual and sensual pleasure I feel in reading Hammertown, but because in Culley, poetic style is an approach towards an ethical problem.
Two
1. Through Culley’s work, it’s possible to think of irony as sincerity’s qualifier rather than its opposite. Here sincerity is not a fixed moral value in the guise of an aesthetic, but a thoroughly situated yet moving historical and social stance that makes tactical use of irony to mark the ambivalence, difficulty, complicity, and play of the subject in language:
like the third eye of realism
squinting through the low cloud.7
2. Another important qualification I find in Culley’s work locates itself in the relation between popular and mass culture. Although mass culture strives for and often, because of its currently superior distributive power, assumes the role of the popular, Culley’s poems open a critical view on this faulty elision through their insistently garrulous inclusivity. Every register belongs in the poem. In terms of language, the popular is the zone where the products of capital are rigorously assigned new uses and values, ones that remain contingent and in process. This continuous reassignment is the task of the popular. It is not without dry humour, which is one of its important tools:
Tough to do
the working class
in wide screen:
the interiors
don’t quite add up,
tables bump lumpy chairs bump
bumpy walls & let’s face it
this potato-textured
distressed distress
is something you
don’t want to see
in letterbox HD —8
3. Related to the crucial differentiation between popular and mass culture is the even more vital social space opened between markets and communities in Culley’s work. Where mass culture pertains to markets, popular culture is the work of communities. And here it’s necessary to insist on community as a contentious, often conflictual or equivocal social grouping whose bonds are the problematic and constantly shifting ones of a collectively produced subjectivity, a subjectivity whose site is not fixed within the person, but produced in the relations among persons: a circulating corporality. Where the movement of money is the agency of the market, the movement of embodied subjectivity is the agency of a community. In a community, agency can move in several directions at once:
Missing though: the persistent
sense of misdirection, the relaxation
of muscles associated
with certain vocabularies,
the slow rounding off
of matter under successive waves
of daylight & water.9
4. Language is the charged site of the ongoing struggle between markets and communities. Who shall speak and how, which desires motivate a syntax: for Culley the poem maps a social cathexis, and through this mapping his language explores its fundamental relationship to history as a politics. In this work, the poem is a place where language’s historicity is seized for the duration necessary to inflect the voice with the full potential of its desire. Here desire is how the body, a subject, moves in the time of its community:
An interval then
diastem
as you step through
this rip of surface tension
into another world —10
5. This “other world” is partly the Utopia of the great literary political project set in motion by Thomas More in 1516, then pursued by the radical writers of England’s revolutionary seventeenth Century. Fragments of utopia do glitter through the movements of Hammertown, where, wishfully, in a poem where the utopian concept enters by way of the futuristic design of a Marimekko pullover, “[e]very third car on the monorail is a small library.”11 But Utopia is also the difference, the swerve within the present, the potency of the closely lived and observed quotidian to produce a striated, vivid density. There the sensation of newness shimmers, ghost-like.
1 Peter Culley, Parkway (Hammertown, Part 3); (Vancouver: New Star, 2013), 14.
2 This passage is cited as epigraph to the first Hammertown book, Hammertown (Vancouver: New Star, 2003).
3 Hammertown, 1.
4 Parkway, 3.
5 Ibid., 4.
6 Ibid., 4.
7 Ibid., 28.
8 Ibid., 76.
9 Ibid., 84.
10 Ibid., 90.
11 Ibid., 12.