1 Williams, “The Bloomsbury Fraction,” 148.
2 Creeley, “Alex’s Art,” 63.
3 Altieri describes the immanentist mode in his Enlarging the Temple: New Directions in American Poetry during the 1960s: “if he [the poet] stresses the revelatory power of the poem’s distinctive properties, he can imagine the primary function of poetic imagination as disclosing aspects of numinous experience not available to discursive acts of mind, which are trapped in a logic unable to capture the act of perception and thus incapable of reconciling fact and value” (31).
4 Consider how pervasive this tendency was among those philosophers still willing to evoke the term “community” after the Second World War. Examples include Georges Bataille, Jean-Luc Nancy, Maurice Blanchot, Georgio Agamben, Alphonso Lingis, and Jacques Derrida, who each had sought to reorient thinking of the ontological “ground” from whence theories of community arise. Perhaps most apparent in the discourse that emerges among them is a common suspicion of community’s reduction to a singular and totalizing essence. Nancy is perhaps most direct in The Inoperative Community: “[t]he community that becomes a single thing (body, mind, fatherland, Leader …) necessarily loses the in of being-in-common. Or, it loses the with or the together that defines it … [H]ow can the community without essence (the community that is neither ‘people’ nor ‘nation,’ neither ‘destiny’ nor ‘generic humanity,’ etc.) be presented as such? That is, what might a politics be that does not stem from the will to realize an essence?” (Inoperative xxxix–xl). Bataille speaks aporetically of a “community without community”; Blanchot similarly evokes the “unavowable community”; while Agamben names an “unrepresentable community”; Lingis the “other community”; Anderson the “imagined community”; and Derrida, the “indefinitely imperfectable” community “to come.” In each formulation, however different they may be in many respects, a discernible anxiety shades any and all talk of group formations. Derrida’s admission, for instance, is telling: “I was wondering why the word ‘community’ (avowable or unavowable, inoperative or not) – why I have never been able to write it, on my own initiative and in my name, as it were. Why? Whence my reticence?” (Politics of Friendship 304–5).
The quotation attributed to Bataille appears as the epigram to Blanchot’s The Unavowable Community (Derrida discusses the passage in Politics of Friendship, 48–9 and 295); the remaining passages appear in Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, 1–26; Georgio Agamben, The Coming Community, 86; Lingis, The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common, 10; Anderson, Imagined Communities, 6; and Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 306.
5 Among the numerous post-colonial scholars who address strategies of neocolonialism, see Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana’s first post-independence leader), Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism.
6 In particular, see David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (1991) and A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005).
7 See, for instance, Paul Hoover, ed., Postmodern American Poetry: An Introduction, 3.
8 See Arthur Redding’s exemplary use of the term “cultural fronts” in Turncoats, Traitors, and Fellow Travelers: Culture and Politics of the Early Cold War, 3–36.
9 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s theory of nomadology has proven particularly influential for critics who emphasize a celebratory rootlessness in contemporary literature. Édouard Glissant, for instance, valorizes the nomadic traveller of the French Caribbean: “exhaust[ing] no territory, he is rooted only in the sacredness of air and evaporation” (Poétique de la Relation 224). See Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation. See also, Pierre Joris, A Nomad Poetics; and Hakim Bey, T.A.Z: The Temporary Autonomous Zone. Yet Deleuze and Guattari advance a much more cautious explanation. The nomadic, Deleuze explains in an interview with Claire Parnet, has its “dangers.” Any “line of flight” capable of deterritorializing a rigid organization also has the capacity to replicate and maintain its violent hierarchies, and, “which is perhaps the worst of all[,] … they have yet another special risk: that of turning into lines of abolition, of destruction, of others and of oneself” (Dialogues II 140). In a word, there is always the possibility that Marinetti’s “words in freedom” will reterritorialize as so many fascistic slogans. See A Thousand Plateaus, 227–31, and Dialogues II, 124–47.
10 Badiou’s own political group, L’Organisation Politique (OP), may at first glance appear to qualify as the sort of network Hardt and Negri promote in Multitude, insofar as the group marshals political force without recourse to the state party or its general political program, assembling only to intervene in specific confrontations (such as their solidarity with the sans-papiers). Yet Badiou is just as sceptical of the spontaneous and unsustainable character of mass movements, their incapacity to establish organizing structures and non-exploitative forms of economic cooperation. He insists that political thought must be both local and axiomatic; only a prescriptive assertion expressed in a concrete situation can generate a sustained project of emancipation. For Badiou, the foundational axiom of an emancipatory politics is unqualified equality. However rhizomatic, heterogeneous, or dispersed the composition of a collective subject may be, the measure of any political sequence is its fidelity to the prescriptive truth that brings such a sequence into existence. See, Being and Event, Metapolitics, and The Communist Hypothesis.
11 By now the militaristic origin of the term avant-garde is well known. Derived from the French, the name designates a small faction of soldiers deployed ahead of an advancing army to map an unknown or dangerous terrain; in aesthetic terms, the avant-garde refers to artistic forerunners that test and traverse the boundaries of acceptable theories of literature and art – therefore, creating art “ahead of its time.” The hallmark of its practice is thus novelty in opposition to what it perceives as the static machinations of past traditions: “why should we look back,” Marinetti exults, “when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the Impossible?” (“Founding Manifesto” 187). Nowhere is this central modernist axiom declared with greater concision than in Ezra Pound’s dictum to “make it new”: “[m]y pawing over the ancients and semi-ancients has been one struggle to find out what has been done, once for all, better than it can ever be done again, and to find out what remains for us to do” (“A Retrospect” 11).
12 The pronoun “we,” riddled throughout the copious numbers of modernist declarations, elicits perhaps more controversy today than any other convention of avant-garde declarations. In Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern, Janet Lyon observes that subsequent feminist and post-colonial theorists have called into question the presumptuous deployment of the pronoun “we” as “an inherently colonizing construction” that homogenizes socio-cultural difference within societal groups (26). This contradiction characterizes the turbulent conflict within avant-garde formation in general between fierce individualism and collective praxis.
13 See, for example, Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde; Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, 341–417; and Lawrence Rainey, “The Cultural Economy of Modernism,” 33–69.
14 Despite a growing industry of criticism devoted to historical avant-gardes, Poggioli’s agonistic account of group practice has enjoyed a notable degree of continued acceptance. Rosenberg argues that “‘avant-gardes are by nature combative’” (qtd. in Lehman, The Last Avant-Garde 286). Describing the historical avant-gardes’ preferred genre, Mary Ann Caws remarks that the manifesto engages in “We-Speak”: “[g]enerally posing some ‘we,’ explicit or implicit, against some other ‘they,’ with the terms constructed in a deliberate dichotomy … set up like a battlefield … Its oppositional tone is constructed of againstness” (A Century of Isms xx, xxiii).
15 For an excellent account of the hierarchical social dynamics of the pre–First World War avant-garde, see Milton A. Cohen, Movement, Manifesto, Melee [sic]: The Modernist Group, 1910–1914.
16 For a comparison of the movement and the salon, see Voyce, “‘Make the World Your Salon’: Poetry and Community at the Arensberg Apartment,” 630–4.
17 Silliman is quick to point out that both scenes and networks manifest certain assumptions about class. These organizing structures differ by virtue of their members’ access to technologies of communication, requiring different amounts of capital. The fiscal disparity between a scene organized through a poetry reading, say, and a network through a system of correspondence may seem relatively minor, but the cost of producing an anthology or magazine may very well establish hierarchies of cultural dominance based on comparative capacities to disseminate materials. The academic poetry workshop, for instance, constitutes a scene according to Silliman’s distinction, but because it functions as an organ within a degree granting institution, the required capital to participate in such communities and the cultural currency it garners is of course considerably different than a poetry reading.
18 For an excellent reassessment of the gender politics of this era, see Davidson’s latest book, Guys Like Us: Citing Masculinity in Cold War Poetics. See also Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “Manhood and its Poetic Projects: The Construction of Masculinity in the Counter-Cultural Poetry of the U.S. 1950s.”
19 See, for example, Amiri Baraka’s critique of mid-century poets such as O’Hara and the politics of Bohemian culture, “Cultural Revolution and the Literary Canon,” 150–6.
20 For instance, Michael Davidson’s groundbreaking book, The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-Century, and other studies by critics like Daniel Kane (All Poets Welcome), Anne Dewey (Beyond Maximus), Thomas Fink (A Different Sense of Power), and Paul Hoover (The Last Avant-Garde) do not define this principal term, nor trace its discursive formation.
21 See Williams, Keywords, 75–6.
22 See Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Society.
1 Charles Olson, “Culture and Revolution,” manuscript of Culture and Revolution, c. 1952, Charles Olson Research Collection, Box 29, Archives and Special Collections at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut Libraries.
2 Robert Creeley, interview with Martin Duberman, 3 October 1967 (Audio tape). See Duberman, Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community, 390.
3 Olson first began teaching at Black Mountain in 1948, but would not become a full-time faculty member until the summer of 1951.
4 Paul and Percival Goodman argue that the monumentalist designs of Ebenezer Howard, Le Corbusier, and Frank Lloyd Wright forced preconceived models of society onto populations without consideration of the pragmatic ways in which individuals and groups occupy cities. Instead they privilege a model of “regional self-sufficiency … where the producing and the product are of a piece and every part of life has value in itself as both means and end … and each man has a chance to enhance the community style and transform it” (Communitas 220). In the preface, Paul Goldberger aptly summarizes the project of the Goodmans’ study: the book, he remarks, “is a testament to the idea that the city is a collective, shared place, a place that is in the most literal sense common ground” (xi).
5 Martin Duberman records in his biography of the college that by 1950 many of the members of the community were openly gay, but Goodman’s “ostentatious homosexual[ity] … was too much, even for Black Mountain” (331). Many at the college defended Goodman, including Dan Rice, Robert Creeley, Ed Dorn, and Joel Oppenheimer; nevertheless, the faculty voted against his full-time appointment.
6 The first twenty sections of Olson’s long poem, most of which is composed of “letters,” was first published in two runs by Jonathan Williams’s Jargon press: The Maximus Poems / 1 – 10 in October 1953 and The Maximus Poems / 11 – 22 in the fall of 1956. Olson read these selections in their entirety at Black Mountain College in August 1953.
7 The draft of this letter was composed 12 January 1945, and appears in Olson’s notebook, “Key West I, 1945,” Charles Olson Papers, University of Connecticut Libraries, Storrs. The cited passage also appears in Tom Clark, Charles Olson: The Allegory of a Poet’s Life, 94.
8 For an extended account of the administrative history of the college, see Martin Duberman’s cultural biography, Black Mountain College: An Exploration in Community.
9 Fielding Dawson and Dan Rice make almost identical remarks: “Black Mountain was the people who were there, which explains its sudden changes. From 1950 or, for sure, ’51, it was Olson’s … as Dan [Rice] has said, … [i]t had an organic understanding of itself being transient. People came and went” (Dawson, “Black Mountain Defined” 273).
10 See Richard Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage, 265.
11 Don Byrd, Robert von Hallberg, and Rosemarie Waldrop comment on Olson’s reliance on Whitehead’s Process and Reality as a formative text for the poet’s writing and thought. Hallberg deftly summarizes the aspects of Whitehead’s ontology that Olson would certainly have accepted: “[a]ction and motion, in Whitehead’s philosophy, supplant the Aristotelian concept of matter as substance. At the center of the object is no nucleus of tangibility but instead a system of relationships” (“Olson, Whitehead, and the Objectivists” 93). Such statements help to clarify Olson’s concept of process and his emerging social theory of interrelations, but it is important to remember that Olson did not read Whitehead’s philosophy until 1955, almost half a decade after he had written his major theoretical prose relating to projective practice. Hence, Olson would have welcomed Whitehead’s materialist ontology as a parallel endeavour to his own.
12 A former friend of Olson’s during his involvement in the Roosevelt administration, Wilbur Hugh Ferry was the director of public relations for the CIO Political Action Committee and founded the center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in New York.
13 Commenting on an essay Olson penned in 1965 entitled “The Projective, in Poetry and in Thought; and the Paratactic,” Donald Allen observes that increasingly Olson’s interest in the projective became broadly “phenomenological” (Collected Prose 424), ranging beyond the catechism of Olson’s literary focus. These documents suggest that this was not a later development in Olson’s thought, but his motivation from the very outset.
14 For an excellent assessment of Fenollosa’s influence on Olson, see Sherman Paul, Olson’s Push: Origin, Black Mountain, and recent American Poetry, 40–3.
15 Duncan’s “Equilibrations” and his lecture with Michael Palmer entitled “Field Theory,” Denise Levertov’s “On the Function of the Line,” Amiri Baraka’s “How You Sound??” and several of Creeley’s poetic statements, but in particular, “Notes for a New Prose,” “To Define,” and “A Note on Poetry,” affords a shortlist of manifestoes that illustrate the use of field composition.
16 See Charles O. Hartman, Free Verse: An Essay on Prosody; Robert Frank and Henry Sayre, eds., The Line in Postmodern Poetry; and Rory Holscher and Robert Schultz, eds., “Symposium on the Theory and Practice of the Line in Contemporary Poetry,” 162–224. Frank and Sayre’s collection included several excellent articles by Perloff, Caws, Sandra M. Gilbert, Charles Bernstein, James Scully, and others. Holscher and Schultz’s symposium collates brief statements on the poetic line by approximately thirty poets.
17 Olson explains the role of the typewriter in notating voice: “[i]t is the advantage of the typewriter that, due to its rigidity and its space precisions, it can, for a poet, indicate exactly the breath, the pauses, the suspensions even of syllables, the juxtapositions even of parts of phrases” (PV 245).
18 Reference to the “Projective Verse” essay appears in their first exchange of letters (albeit with a slightly altered title); it does not appear in Poetry New York until October 1950. Creeley’s contribution to the final draft of the manuscript is substantial. The first version contains three sections and approximately 1750 words, while the final draft contains only two sections, extending to more than 4500 words in length. Fewer than 700 words from the original text (less than half) remain either verbatim or partially revised in the final essay. Most notably, Olson’s objectist stance is present in the early manuscript, along with a somewhat less clearly articulated statement on the significance of the typewriter for notating the rhythms of poetic speech, but the principles of field composition had not yet been written. He had formulated objectism as a stance towards reality, but he had not yet devised a system of versification that would correspond to his theory of being in the world. Analysis of Creeley’s letters to Olson during the intervening months demonstrates a substantial contribution in regards to this issue exactly. Between the time the first of their letters was sent on 21 April 1950, and the last time either poet mentions the “Projective Verse” essay before its publication, the two men had already exchanged a total of sixty-four letters. No fewer than sixteen of these afford substantial discussion of the essay and poetic method.
19 Olson relies on Pound’s concept of the “musical phrase,” a prosody the latter contrasts with verse composed “in the sequence of a metronome” (“A Retrospect” 3). In The Dance of the Intellect, Marjorie Perloff argues quite rightly that Pound’s aesthetic influence on a generation of American poets is radically undermined in subsequent decades by critics embarrassed by Pound’s valorization of Italian fascism. Both Olson and Creeley did understand the value, but neither could be apologists for Pound’s fascist sympathies or his anti-Semitic remarks. Olson might have simply disavowed Pound’s political leanings and appropriated elements of his aesthetic method, but to do so would presuppose that the political and aesthetic are separate spheres; instead, he affords a competing politicization of Pound’s method. In the passage cited above, Olson substitutes the “metronome” for the military “march,” giving Pound’s famous dictum “to break the pentameter” (LXXXI, Cantos 553) an additional meaning: poetic feet, like actual ones, are policed when subject to predetermined metrical formations.
20 Derek Attridge introduces the term “four-by-four” to describe all metrical stanzas in English containing four lines and four beats per line. See Attridge, “Dancing Language,” Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction, 43–62.
21 See Ralph Maud, What Does Not Change, 37; George Butterick, “Charles Olson’s ‘The Kingfishers’ and the Poetics of Change,” 56.
22 The excerpted letter also appears in Butterick, “Charles Olson’s ‘The Kingfishers’ and the Poetics of Change,” 58, n.15.
23 Butterick notes that Olson’s acquaintance and expert on Chinese politics Owen Lattimore was systematically alienated by the “power anti-Communist ‘China Lobby’” for pro-China remarks (“Charles Olson’s ‘The Kingfishers’” 40), while his friend and colleague Ben Shahn (with whom Olson would undertake an artistic collaboration at BMC) was investigated by the FBI and eventually blacklisted for making political posters dubbed “pro-communist.” See George Butterick, “Charles Olson’s ‘The Kingfishers’ and the Poetics of Change,” 28–69, and Frances K. Pohl, Ben Shahn: New Deal Artist in a Cold War Climate, 1947–1954, 1–2. For an account of the FBI’s investigation of BMC, see Duberman, Black Mountain College: An Exploration in Community, 495.
24 Cage describes the visit in an interview with Mary Emma Harris in 1974: “[t]hey agreed to put us up and to feed us … We had parked it in front of that building where the studies were, and hadn’t used it while we were there. So that when we drove it back, we discovered this large pile of presents that all the students and faculty had put under the car in lieu of any payment. It included, for instance, oh, paintings and food and drawings, and so on” (Conversing with Cage 14). Richard Kostelanetz’s Conversing with Cage collates numerous interviews with the artist over the course of his life. This very useful book for Cage scholars is organized thematically (excerpting no fewer than one hundred sources), many of which remained unpublished until the publication of Kostelanetz’s collection. To avoid confusion, I cite the original interviewer and give page numbers for Kostelanetz’s book.
25 Allan Kaprow coins the term in “18 Happenings in 6 Parts” (1959).
26 Faculty members at Black Mountain would have certainly been aware of Robert Motherwell’s The Dada Painters and Poets, published just one year earlier in 1951.
27 For general studies of the happening within the context of Fluxus, see Jon Hendricks, Fluxus Codex; Hannah Higgins, Fluxus Experience; and Ken Friedman, The Fluxus Reader. For studies that situate the emergence of the happening in relation to mixed media, assemblage, and environment art, see Allan Kaprow, “Assemblages, Environments, & Happenings,” 235–45; Adrian Henri, Environment and Happenings; and Mariellen R. Sandford, ed., Happenings and Other Acts (in particular, Michael Kirby’s article, “Happenings: An Introduction,” 1–28). For a study of the happening within the context of contemporary theatre, see Richard Kostelanetz, The Theatre of Mixed Means: An Introduction to Happenings, Kinetic Environments, and other Mixed-Means Performances.
28 In “McLuhan’s Influence” Cage makes a similar contention: “When, in 1961, I wrote my lecture Where Are We Going? and What Are We Doing?, which is four lectures heard at one and the same time, it was in awareness of McLuhan’s point that nowadays everything happens at once, not just one thing at a time.” See John Cage: An Anthology, 170.
29 The following description of Cage’s happening at Black Mountain is indebted to several sources. The most consistent representation of events comes from Cage himself, in a series of interviews I cite throughout this chapter. I am also indebted to accounts provided by five participants and audience members: Katherine Litz, Merce Cunningham, Francine du Plessix Gray, Carroll Williams, and David Weinrib. Martin Duberman assembles these crucial early records from various interviews. See his Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community, 352–7.
30 Foremost among these conventions is plot structure. The happening indeed has a beginning and an end, but it lacks linear progression and narrative closure. Michael Kirby aptly observes that traditional theatre virtually always “functions within (and creates) a matrix of time, place, and character,” realist conventions that ultimately assemble a “manufactured reality” (“Happenings: An Introduction,” 5).
31 Charles Olson, “The Present is Prologue,” 39–40.
32 The letter in question was sent to several poets, but only a few copies are extant. I quote from the letter Ignatow sent to Langston Hughes, dated 22 January 1960. Passages from the letter are reproduced in Brett Miller, “Chelsea 8: Political Poetry at Midcentury,” 93–4.
33 Readers can trace the poem’s genesis by consulting Olson’s notes and essays written between 1945 to 1953, collected in OLSON: The Journal of the Charles Olson Archives 5 (Spring 1976). The following selections are particularly useful: “Key West I” and “Key West II” (1945), “An Outline of a Projected Poem called WEST” (c. 1946), “WEST” (1948), “West” (1953), and “POST-WEST” (c. 1953).
34 Olson’s resistance to the totalizing project of the conventional narrative is equally apparent in the text’s structural logic. Olson would follow the first volume of The Maximus Poems with two more: The Maximus Poems IV, V, VI (1968) and The Maximus Poems: Volume Three (1975), the latter of which was published posthumously with Olson’s instructions. The 1960 edition of the first volume contains no explicit division into three sections, which would indicate continuity with the second volume. Similarly, volume three is not enumerated but written as a word, again disrupting any clear sequential logic with the preceding volume. Olson’s long poem bears no symmetrical structure or preconceived system; instead, the poem mutates formally along its own trajectory.
35 The inscription is taken from the nineteenth-century American poet Emma Lazarus’s poem “The New Colossus.” In the text, the quoted lines are spoken by the statue.
36 Butterick records the slogans from advertisements in Time magazine, published on 16 March and 13 April 1953.
37 For an extended account of Olson and Corman’s discussion of Origin and the implications of the little magazine for the literary community, see George Evans, ed., Charles Olson & Cid Corman: Complete Correspondence, 1950–1964, 27–82.
38 In Career Moves: Olson, Creeley, Zukofsky, Berrigan, and the American Avant-Garde, the critic Libbie Rifkin chooses to read Olson and Creeley’s “alliance” as “a key axis of power in the poetry wars of the next decade and following,” arguing further that the impetus for their literary ambitions were “driven … by professional imperative” (44, 54). Rifkin’s method is to begin, as it were, toward the end of Olson’s literary career, taking his “Berkeley Lecture” as a key, reading backward through the development of his and Creeley’s sociopoetics. This method allows her to conclude that Olson’s plan to secure a spot in the canonical ranks of American verse is at the core of his poetic ambitions. Any act of community formation – by way of their correspondences, the Black Mountain Review, or Black Mountain College – she interprets as actions meant to promote their careers. Rifkin’s generally excellent book is meant to counter the honorific criticism of the American mid-century avantgarde, and should be read in this precise context. Yet it should be said that Black Mountain College functioned on the most modest of operating budgets, affording salaries to its faculty members that barely covered the cost of living. Accusations of careerism seem an exaggeration. Rifkin is talking of course about cultural currency, yet the poets under consideration were not canonized in Donald Allen’s anthology until 1960. The Berkeley lectures that Rifkin cites as evidence for their professional ambitions takes place in 1965, while the “years of Olson and Creeley” in the critical presses does not happen until 1979, almost twenty full years after their first contact. In contrast to this assertion, consider the following statement by Brian Kim Stefans: “I would ask you to return to the numerous staple-bound, yellowing and otherwise low-tech and low-print-run publications that were circulating in the 70s and 80s when they were first looking at each other’s poetry and seeing a common set of interests developing, and cite those instances where you think (1) any of the those poets thought they were writing in a style that would eventually become something like the norm in academic studies, [and] … (2) where you think that this ‘careerism’ seriously or even moderately compromised the general goal, aura or collective effort at investigation [?]” (http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/stefans-institutionalization.html). Stefans’s comment is directed at Standard Schaefer’s critique of the Language Group, yet his incisive questions are equally relevant here. (The essay in question is Schaefer’s “Preliminary Notes on Literary Politics.”)
39 Series 2, Box 4, Folder 8, Robert Creeley Papers, Stanford University Library, n.d.
40 After substandard performances in his course work, Creeley decided to take a leave of absence. Although the request was granted by the administration, university representatives later informed him that readmission was unlikely. See Ekbert Faas, Robert Creeley: A Biography, 27–31.
41 See Creeley’s essay, “On the Road: Notes on Artists & Poets, 1950–1965,” 367–76.
42 The perceived anecdotal quality of the lyrics in For Love prompts critics like Bernstein to favour those later texts that establish a clearer lineage with the “radical poetics” of the Language Group, or von Hallberg to read For Love’s formal procedures as nascent examples of the more mature sequential logic of texts such as Numbers. See Bernstein, “Hearing ‘Here’: Robert Creeley’s Poetics of Duration,” 87–95; von Hallberg, “Robert Creeley and the Pleasures of System,” 365–79; and Marjorie Perloff, “Robert Creeley’s Radical Poetics,” http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/commodious.
43 In “Hart Crane and the Private Judgment,” Creeley quotes a lengthy yet telling passage from Crane’s letters to Allen Tate: “[i]t is a new feeing, and a glorious one, to have one’s inmost delicate intentions so fully recognized as your last letter to me attested. I can feel a calmness on the sidewalk – where before I felt a defiance only. And better than all – I am certain that a number of us at last have some kind of community of interest. And with this communion will come something better than a mere clique. It is a consciousness of something more vital than stylistic questions and ‘taste,’ it is vision, and a vision alone that not only America needs, but the whole world” (14). Crane’s “vision” of a “community of interest” likely foregrounds his “visionary company of love” in “The Broken Tower.” Rather than probe “inward,” seeking a psychological explanation for Crane’s suicide, Creeley presses outward towards an external context for his suffering – to the community that let him down.
44 Otto Rank was a noted Austrian psychoanalyst and one of Sigmund Freud’s closest colleagues. Creeley’s letters to Leed suggest that he had read Rank’s Art and Artist in 1948.
45 Creeley rightly rebukes Grover Smith, who offers the irresponsible complaint “that the neurotic irresponsibility of his [Crane’s] private life and loves was directly synchronous with the undisciplined fancy manifest in his poetic images” (“Hart Crane” 14). The reader should note the subtext of homophobia in such a proclamation.
46 For extended bibliographic studies of Creeley’s earlier work, see Timothy Murray and Stephen Boardway, “Year By Year Bibliography of Robert Creeley,” 313–74, and Mary Novik, Robert Creeley: An Inventory, 1945–1970.
47 For a complete list of Creeley’s collaborations with artists, see the excellent exhibition catalogue by Amy Cappellazzo and Elizabeth Licata, In Company: Robert Creeley’s Collaborations, 102–7. See also Creeley’s most candid assessment of the artists who influenced his work during the 1950s and 1960s: “On the Road: Notes on Artists & Poets, 1950–1965,” 367–76.
48 Marjorie Perloff, “Robert Creeley’s Radical Poetics,” http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/commodious.
49 Novik records the following bibliographic description: “A Snarling Garland of Xmas Verses. By Anonymous. [Palma de Mallorca: The Divers Press, Xmas 1954.] ‘Handset in Menhart and Grasset Antijua types and printed on laid papers in a limited edition. This is a Wallet pocket-book.’ Booklet of poems, mainly for friends. Ca. 100 copies; unpaged, one sheet folded into several pages, attached to paper wrappers. MS: 1103. Contents: Poems: *Chanson, *Hi There!, *Don’t Sign Anything, *Sopa, *The Conspiracy” (An Inventory 5).
50 Creeley remarks to Olson: “yrself, one of the damn few concerned with a method/ that can get to the shape, be the shape, of yr content. Just there, for that reason, is my respect. Not knowing you, but for these letters, and they, much help tho they are, cannot make the point altogether. Well, that is why I should like to see you/ if & when you will be in NE” (Correspondence 1:118).
51 Gerhardt translated and published works by T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Basil Bunting, and Creeley, among others.
52 Creeley and his wife Ann had moved to France in the spring of 1951, just as Origin #1 appeared in print – first to Paris for a few days before settling in Fontrousse in the south of France. While in the city, Creeley encountered a multinational group of poets, which included the “obdurate and resourceful Scot” Alexander Trocchi; the British poet Christopher Logue; the eventual editor of Grove Press, Richard Seaver; and translators Austryn Wainhouse and Patrick Bowles (the latter of whom translated Samuel Becket’s first novel into English), who together published in the little magazine, Merlin (“On Black Mountain Review” 254). Creeley was most interested in the function of their magazine as a site of literary exchange and community; there was a collective will among the members of the Paris group, recounts Creeley, “to change the situation of literary context and evaluation … [T]heir brilliant critical writing, which extended to political thinking as well as literary, made them an exceptional example of what a group of writers might do” (254).
53 For an extended account of Creeley’s experience in post-war Germany, see Ekbert Faas, Robert Creeley: A Biography, 107–14.
54 Duncan makes this remark in the jacket copy of Roots and Branches (New Directions, 1969): “I am not an experimentalist or an inventor, but a derivative poet.” This assertion echoes his claim in “Pages from a Notebook” (1953), which appeared just after Olson’s “Projective Verse” in Donald Allen’s formative anthology, The New American Poetry: “I am ambitious only to emulate, imitate, reconstrue, approximate, duplicate” (406).
55 Duncan continues, “there is a virtu or power that flows from the language itself, a fountain of man’s meanings, and the poet seeking the help of this source awakens first to the guidance of those who have gone before in the art” (The HD Book 63–4).
56 On the subject of this correspondence, see Marjorie Perloff, “Poetry in Time of War: The Duncan-Levertov Controversy,” in Poetry On & Off the Page: Essays for Emergent Occasions, 208–21; Anne Dewey, “Poetic Authority and the Public Sphere of Politics in the Activist 1960s: The Duncan-Levertov Debate,” 109–25; and Michael Davidson, “A Cold War Correspondence: The Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov,” 538–56.
57 Levertov explains to Duncan in a letter dated December 1967: “[l]ecture and poetry-reading engagements provide an excellent opportunity for war-resisters to tell potential sympathizers what is going on, to activate the apathetic, to encourage isolated activists, and to alleviate their isolation by helping to put them in touch with one another” (The Letters 597).
58 The Public Broadcast Lab was a precursor to the Public Broadcast System.
59 Seth Rosenfeld, “The Governor’s Race,” http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2002/06/09/MNCF3.DTL.
60 The Berkeley Manifesto, “What People Can Do,” and Black Panther support button appear on pages 46 and 68 in Levertov’s To Stay Alive. The button has the words “Free All Political Prisoners”; the manifesto:
WHAT PEOPLE CAN DO
1. Be in the streets – they’re ours!
2. Report any action you have witnessed or been involved in that should be broadcast to keep the people informed. Especially call to report the location of any large group of people, so those people who may have been separated may regroup …
3. The Free Church and Oxford Hall medical aid stations need medical supplies, especially:
-gauze pads
-adhesive tape
-plastic squeeze bottles
4. PLEASE do not go to the Free Church unless you have need to.
5. Photographers and filmmakers: Contact Park Media Committee
6. Bail money will be collected at tables outside the COOP grocery stores:
-Telegraph Ave. store: Monday
-University Ave. store: Tuesday
-Shattuck Ave. store: Wed. & Thurs.
7. BRING YOUR KITE AND FLY IT. Use nylon strings. Fly it when you are with a crowd. A helicopter cannot fly too near flying kites.
8. Be your brothers’ and sisters’ keeper.
9. Take care.
61 See Robert J. Bertholf, “Decision at the Apogee: Robert Duncan’s Anarchist Critique of Denise Levertov,” 1–17, and Andy Weaver, “The Political Use of Formal Anarchy in Robert Duncan’s Ground Work Volumes” (conference paper).
62 R.J. Bertholf offers an excellent historical account of the anarchist influences that inform Duncan’s critique of Levertov’s protest verse, drawing from a host of writings from Trotsky, Kropotkin, and Rudolph Rocker. One should be cautious, however, not to assume that anarchism is a homogenous and organized body of thought. It is more accurate to say that Duncan synthesizes elements of individualism and social anarchism, but given his suspicion of highly organized forms of rebellion, its tendency to model the forms of oppression it sets out to oppose, it is unlikely he would have supported radical anarchist-syndicalism.
1 Stuart Hall, “On Postmodernism and Articulation,” 141.
2 Kamau Brathwaite, “Interview,” by Anne Walmsley, Papers of the Caribbean Artists Movement, 6/9 (35–6), George Padmore Institute, London, UK.
3 One might also point to the similarities between it and Foucault’s distinction between “subjugated” and “erudite” knowledges, by which the theorist refers “to a whole series of knowledges, as insufficiently elaborated knowledges: naïve knowledges, hierarchically inferior knowledges, knowledges that are below the required level of erudition or scientificity. And it is thanks to the reappearance of these knowledges from below … a particular knowledge, a knowledge that is local, regional, or differential, incapable of unanimity and which derives its power solely from the fact that it is different from all the knowledges that surround it, it is the reappearance of what people know at a local level, of these disqualified knowledges, that made the critique possible” (Society Must Be Defended 7–8; my italics).
4 Brathwaite frequently enjambs single words, either by line break or period stop, in order to accentuate a sign’s multiple, often contradictory, significations. Often this strategy exposes the power relations at play in a single word. See my extended discussion of this convention later in the chapter.
5 The older generation of Caribbean writers in London, such as V.S. Naipaul and George Lamming, expressed little interest in the group. Among the principal forerunners of Caribbean-born, London-based writers, C.L.R. James is the exception. Although he was not a regular participant, he gave enthusiastic encouragement to Brathwaite and others, and delivered a lecture at one of CAM’s public meetings.
6 S.K. Ruck, ed., The West Indian Comes to England: A Report Prepared for the Trustees of the London Parochial Charities by the Family Welfare Association, 51. Peter Fryer puts the numbers at roughly 125,000. See Staying Power: The History of Black Power in Britain, 372.
7 The novels of Colin MacInnes document the racially mixed communities of Notting Hill during the 1950s and 1960s. See, in particular, City of Spades (1957), Absolute Beginners (1959), and Mr. Love and Justice (1960).
8 In the following year, Claudia Jones began the West Indian Culture in St Pancras event, which would be the key predecessor for the Notting Hill Carnival. These events were conceived in response to the 1958 riot.
9 Brathwaite at this time published Four Plays for Primary Schools and Odale’s Choice.
10 For a fuller biographical account of Brathwaite’s activities during the 1950s and 1960s, see his “Timehri,” 35–44; Louis James, “Caribbean Artists Movement,” 209–27; and Anne Walmsley, The Caribbean Artists Movement, 1966–1972: A Literary & Cultural History, 39–43.
11 While in St Lucia, Brathwaite met and collaborated with Roderick Walcott, Dunstan St Omer, and Harry Simmons.
12 See Bridget Jones, “‘The Unity is Submarine’: Aspects of a Pan-Caribbean Consciousness in the work of Kamau Brathwaite,” 86–100.
13 Salkey would interview King, Jr three times.
14 See Walmsley, Caribbean Artist Movement, 1966–1972: A Literary & Cultural History, 20.
15 See Walmsley, The Caribbean Artists Movement, 1966–1972: A Literary and Cultural History; Louis James, “The Caribbean Artists Movement,” 209–27; The John La Rose Tribute Committee, eds., Foundations of a Movement: A Tribute to John La Rose on the Occasion of the 10th International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books; and Brian W. Alleyne, Radicals Against Race: Black Activism and Cultural Politics, 31–40.
16 New Beacon relocated to 76 Stroud Green Road in 1973, and is still open today.
17 For a comprehensive account of the Black Parents Movement and the George Padmore Supplementary School, see Brian W. Alleyne, “Cultural Revolutionaries,” in Radicals Against Race, 51–78.
18 Hall states further: within “black cultural production, we are beginning to see … a new cultural politics which engages rather than suppresses difference and which depends, in part, on the cultural construction of new ethnic identities” (“New Ethnicities” 446).
19 I use Peter Hallward’s translations of Glissant. See Hallward, “Édouard Glissant between the Singular and the Specific,” 441–64.
20 Brathwaite’s terminology shares features with “transculturation,” a term originally coined by the Cuban sociologist Fernando Ortiz during the 1940s, and later adapted to literary study by critics like Angel Rama, Mary Louise Pratt, and Michael Taussig. The concept refers to the ways in which subordinate groups select and modify materials imposed on them by dominant cultures. Thus, Pratt describes the reciprocity between cultures as “contact zones,” where “disparate cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of dominance and subordination” (Imperial Eyes 7). See Fernando Ortiz, Contrapunto Cubano; and Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation.
21 Nancy remarks: “[I]n a mêlée there are meetings and encounters; there are those who come together and those who spread out, those who come into contact and those who enter into contracts, those who concentrate and those who disseminate, those who identify and those who modify – just like the two sexes in each one of us.” He continues, “[c]ultures, or what are known as cultures, do not mix. They encounter each another, mingle, modify each other, reconfigure each other. They cultivate one another; they irrigate or drain each other; they work over and plough through each other, or graft one onto the other” (Being Singular Plural 151).
22 John La Rose, “Poetry” (A reading and discussion), Papers of the Caribbean Artists Movement, 5/3/2 (2), George Padmore Institute, London, UK.
23 See Gates Jr, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism, 44–88.
24 Kamau Brathwaite, “Glossary,” 271.
25 For accounts of Brathwaite’s treatment of historical themes, see Paul Naylor, Poetic Investigations: Singing the Holes in History, and Gordon Rohlehr, Pathfinder: Black Awakening in The Arrivants and “The Rehumanization of History: Regeneration of Spirit: Apocalypse and Revolution in Brathwaite’s The Arrivants and X/Self,” 163–207; for studies that place Brathwaite’s work in relation to Caribbean poetics, see Jahan Ramazani, The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English, Edward Chamberlin, Come Back to Me My Language: Poetry and the West Indies, and Emily Allen Williams, Poetic Negotiations of Identity in the Works of Brathwaite, Harris, Senior, and Dabydeen; for T.S. Eliot’s influence, see Lee M. Jenkins, “The t/reasonable ‘English’ of Kamau Brathwaite,” 95–125, and Charles W. Pollard, New World Modernisms; for an appraisal of Brathwaite’s use of the epic form, see June D. Bobb, Beating a Restless Drum: The Poetics of Kamau Brathwaite and Derek Walcott. Additionally, editor Stewart Brown’s The Art of Kamau Brathwaite and Timothy J. Reiss’s For the Geography of a Soul: Emerging Perspectives both contain excellent essays devoted to a wide range of works spanning several decades, while editor Emily Allen Williams’s The Critical Response to Kamau Brathwaite collects contemporary reviews of the author’s major collections.
26 Sometimes referred to as “Bussa’s Rebellion,” the leader was born a free man in Africa, captured by slave traders, and sold to a plantation owner in Barbados. The revolt began on 14 April 1816, and was carried out against several sugar estates by four hundred drivers, field workers, and artisans. Bussa died during the uprising, but the symbolic value of an organized rebellion against colonial rule encouraged and emboldened future victories for equality in Barbados. Bussa later became a figure of national heroism for Barbadians.
27 See J. Omosade Awolalu and P. Adelumo Dopamu, West African Traditional Religion; E.A. Ade Adegbola, ed., Traditional Religion in West Africa; E.B. Idowu, African Traditional Religion: A Definition; A. Adogame, R. Gerloff, and K. Hock, eds., Christianity in Africa and the African Diaspora: The Appropriation of a Scattered Heritage; Melville Herskovits, Life in a Haitian Valley; Zora Neal Hurston, Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica; Roger Bastide, African Civilizations in the New World; and Robert Farris Thompson’s Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy.
28 Ananse becomes “Aunt Nancy” in the Uncle Remus stories of southern United States folktales.
29 The Mau Mau uprising took place between 1952 and 1960, and precipitated Kenyan independence from British Colonial rule in 1963. The resistance was formed by a combination of Kikuyu, Embu, and Meru ethnic groups. Brathwaite cites the revolt as the first major African opposition to European imperialism. The author likely drew upon the pan-ethnic movement as a model for the culturally diverse Caribbean region.
30 The stories given to Ananse have come to be known as the Anansesem. See Stephen Krensky, Anansi and the Box of Stories: A West African Folktale.
31 For an extended account of Ogun’s function in Haiti’s religious and political culture, see Sandra T. Barnes, ed., Africa’s Ogun: Old World and New, 2nd ed.
32 Peter Hallward, “Our Role in Haiti’s Plight,” http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jan/13/our-role-in-haitis-plight. See also Hallward, Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment.
33 See Aimé Césaire, Toussaint Louverture: La Révolution Française et le Problème Colonial; and C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution.
34 I paraphrase Rohlehr’s description of the ceremony, who in turn cites Robert S. Rattray, Ashanti, 109–10.
35 See Octave Mannoni, Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization; Frantz Fanon, Black Skin: White Masks; Philip Mason, Prospero’s Magic; Aimé Césaire, Une Tempete: Adaptation Pour une Théâtre Negre; and Rob Nixon, “Caribbean and African Appropriations of The Tempest,” 185–206. For specific reference to Brathwaite’s work, see, in particular, Silvio Torres-Saillant, “Caliban’s Betrayal: A New Inquiry into the Caribbean,” 221–44, and Gordon Rohlehr, “‘Black, Sycorax, My Mother’: Brathwaite’s Reconstruction of The Tempest,” 277–96.
36 Milton justifies his choice of blank verse in a prefatory note to Paradise Lost: “Not without cause … both Italian and Spanish poets of prime note have rejected rhyme both in longer and shorter works, as have also long since our best English tragedies, as a thing of itself, to all judicious ears, trivial and of no true musical delight; which consists only in apt numbers, fit quantity of syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another, not in the jingling sound of like endings, a fault avoided by the learned ancients both in poetry and all good oratory” (4).
37 Forty-two tonnes of toxic methylisocyanate gas was released in a densely populated city of more than half a million people. See Ingrid Eckerman, The Bhopal Saga: Causes and Consequences of the World’s Largest Industrial Disaster.
38 I retain the term “Third World” where members of the Caribbean Artists Movement employ this term, and also to reflect the significant role of globalization in Cold War politics.
39 The Havana Cultural Congress took place in 4–11 January 1968 in Cuba’s capital city. The two symposia, “Cuba of the Third World” and “Second Symposium on Havana Congress,” took place on 5 April and 3 May 1968 at the West Indian Student Centre.
40 See David Craven’s excellent survey, Art and Revolution in Latin America, 1910–1990, 92.
41 Brandon, “Attack us at your peril, cocky Cuba warns US.”
42 For an excellent assessment of the internationalist project of Cuban painters and poster art, see David Craven, Art and Revolution in Latin America, 1910–1990.
43 This transition from national to international concerns is best demonstrated by comparing Salkey’s first book of poems, an epic entitled Jamaica Symphony (1953), with his poetic writings from the 1970s. His collections Away and In the Hills Where Her Dreams Live typify a new internationalist politics.
44 For surveys of Caribbean and Latin American Marxism, see Donald C. Hodges, The Latin American Revolution: Politics and Strategy from Apro-Marxism to Guevarism; Armando Hart, Marxism and the Human Condition: A Latin American Perspective; Michael Löwy, ed., Marxism in Latin America from 1909 to the Present: An Anthology, trans. Michael Pearlman; Charles D. Ameringer, The Socialist Impulse: Latin America in the Twentieth Century; and Holger Henke and Fred Réno, Modern Political Culture in the Caribbean. For a study of the socialist impulse in Latin American literature, see David Craven, Art and Revolution in Latin America, 1910–1990.
45 For a concise account of the organization and its effects on Trinidad’s history, see Colin A. Palmer, Eric Williams & the Making of the Modern Caribbean, 290 ff.
46 Salkey’s allusions to a “New Havana” and the traces of “Che Guevera[’s]” trip through Chile should remind readers that in addition to being fervently anti-Marxist and pro-capitalist, Pinochet drew “inspiration” from the National Security Doctrine. Historian Lois Hecht Oppenheim observes that the “U.S. anticommunist counterinsurgency training of Latin American militaries” was formulated in direct response to “the Cuban revolution of 1959” (Politics in Chile 111).
47 In the 1970 election, Salvador Allende, representing the Popular Unity party, led a coalition that included the Communist Party, the Socialist Party, the Radical Party, the Movement for United Popular Action, Independent Popular Action, and the Social Democratic Party. Allende’s coalition won 36.2 per cent, securing a minority government (the right-wing candidate, Jorge Alessandri, received 34.9 and the centrist candidate, Radomiro Tomic, 27.8 per cent, respectively). Tomic’s Christian Democrats threw their support behind Allende, casting their congressional votes on his behalf. See Lois Hecht Oppenheim, Politics in Chile: Democracy, Authoritarianism, and the Search for Development, 36.
48 The 1991 National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation Report put the death toll at 2,279. Perhaps even more shocking than the number of dead is the precision with which Pinochet’s Junta targeted subversives. Members of the Allende government, the Movement of the Revolutionary Left, the Socialist Party, the Communist Party, union leaders, and members of peasant-run cooperatives were systematically executed, while thousands more were subject to torture.
For studies of Chilean history and politics during the Allende and Pinochet years, see Oppenheim, Politics in Chile: Democracy, Authoritarianism, and the Search for Development; Sergio Bitar, Chile: Experiment in Democracy; Paul E. Sigmund, The Overthrow of Allende and the Politics of Chile, 1964–1976; and Manuel A. Garretón Merino, The Chilean Political Process.
49 In December 1971, affluent women associated with the right-wing opposition to Popular Unity staged what is now an infamous demonstration known as the “March of the Empty Pots.” Wealthy elites protested the so-called food shortage by having their maids march in Santiago’s downtown sector. Oppenheim recounts that “although they were far from without food, the government’s policy of increasing workers’ salaries, coupled with its efforts to ensure that food reached grocery stores in popular neighborhoods, had, in fact, decreased the food supplied to the more well-to-do areas” (Politics in Chile 64).
50 The group launched a failed coup (known as the Tanquetazo) in July 1973; attempted to sabotage government infrastructure projects; successfully assassinated a pro-Allende naval official, Arturo Araya; and routinely received strategic and fiscal support from the U.S. government. Historians Michael Stohl and George A. Lopez record that “at least $7 million was authorized by the United States for CIA use in the destabilizing of Chilean society. This included financing and assisting opposition groups and right-wing terrorist paramilitary groups such as Patria y Libertad (‘Fatherland and Liberty’).” See The State as Terrorist: The Dynamics of Governmental Violence and Repression, 51. Ex-leader of the group’s military operations Roberto Theime confessed to U.S. marine involvement in plots to destroy bridges and pipelines. See Confesiones de un ex Patria y Libertad, Television Nacional de Chile (TVN), 12 February 2006.
51 Notably, Fatherland and Liberty was created in 1970 by Pablo Rodriguez Grez in the hallways of the Catholic University of Chile. This is important because the Catholic University had been for twenty years the academic front for American interference into South American economic planning. Two decades previously, Santiago had become the centre of a post-war Keynesian-style New Deal in the Southern Cone. Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile elected socialist governments that drastically increased funding subsidies for small businesses, funding for public infrastructure, schools, and health care, while they implemented heavier tariffs on foreign imports. Fearing the spread of socialist economic theory throughout the continent, Albion Patterson, director of the U.S. International Cooperation Administration in Chile, and Theodore W. Schultz, chair of the Economics Department at the University of Chicago, sought to establish a school espousing free-market principles in Santiago. Together the two men established a program known as “The Chile Project.” The U.S. government, along with corporate interests such as the Ford Foundation, funded an exchange programme that brought South American students to the University of Chicago to be trained by Milton Friedman and his colleagues. Emerging from this partnership was the Center for Latin American Economic Studies and the “Chile Workshop.” And indeed, this is what Chile became – a workshop for the Chicago School to impose its economic doctrines. By 1970, students educated at Chicago arrived back in Santiago with Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom as their guidebooks (in 1963, twelve of thirteen economics professors at the Catholic University received degrees from the University of Chicago) (Klein 72). For a concise history of the Chicago School’s activities in Chile, see Klein, “The Other Doctor Shock: Milton Friedman and the Search for a Laissez-Faire Laboratory,” Shock Doctrine, 56–83.
52 See Oppenheim, Politics in Chile, 61.
53 Unsurprisingly, the American government and the multinational concerns were furious. The United States retaliated by attempting to destabilize the Chilean economy: first, by withholding loans and credits from international lending organizations; and second, by secretly funding opposition groups within the country, including Fatherland and Liberty and the right-wing newspaper El Mercurio.
54 Contrary to some accounts that characterized this decision as theft, farm owners were compensated for lost land and retained all livestock and machinery. During the initial years of Allende’s rule, there were more aggressive land seizures, particularly by Mapuche Indians who capitalized on the legal reform to reappropriate lands previously occupied by native communities (Oppenheim 54–6).
55 Mariategui famously stated that “Inca communism … cannot be negated or disparaged for having developed under [an] autocratic regime.” Seven Interpretive Essays, 35] Clans (or “ayllus”) within the Incan empire practiced communal ownership of land and resources. Often these clans would ignore genealogical bloodlines and cooperate together. Mariategui is specifically referencing this social structure within Incan society as a proto-communist indigenous economic system.
56 Victor Jara was a figure with whom writers like Salkey, Brathwaite, and La Rose identified. A teacher, theatre director, writer, singer, and activist, his writing was never a separate activity from politics and community, and like Neruda, he was a supporter of Allende’s Popular Unity government. Along with thousands of other Chilean leftists, Jara was imprisoned in Chile’s soccer stadium during the coup, where he was tortured and ultimately murdered.
57 Anne Walmsley affords a more sympathetic account of CAM’s endeavours in the Caribbean. See The Caribbean Artists Movement, 1966–1972, 190–222.
58 See Horace Campbell, Rasta and Resistance: From Marcus Garvey to Walter Rodney, and Walter Rodney, Groundings with My Brothers.
59 The organization was founded by Trinidadian economist Lloyd Best in Georgetown, Guyana, in 1963. Walmsley quotes a passage from the New World group’s membership form: “New World is a movement which aims to transform the mode of living and thinking in the region. The movement rejects uncritical acceptance of dogmas and ideologies imported from outside and bases its ideas for the future of the area on an unfettered analysis of the experience and existing conditions of the region” (qtd. in Walmsley, Caribbean 195). For discussions of the New World group, see also Selwyn D. Ryan, Race and Nationalism in Trinidad and Tobago: A Study of Decolonization in a Multiracial Society, 384 ff, and Herman L. Bennett, “The Challenge to the Post-Colonial State,” 129–31.
60 For discussion of Yard Theatre’s contribution to postcolonial theatre, see Christopher B. Balme, Decolonizing the Stage: Theatrical Syncretism and PostColonial Drama, 51 ff and 233 ff.
61 Brathwaite provides a detailed account of the theatre in “The Love Axe/1: Developing a Caribbean Aesthetic – Part Three,” 181–92.
62 The final draft of this book will go to press just after the insurrectionary “riots” of August 2011 in London and throughout Britain. Sad, but entirely predictable, members of the ruling government and mainstream media immediately set to work dehumanizing the largely (but not exclusively) black rioters drawn from the nation’s poorest communities, all the while applauding the revolutionaries in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya taking up arms against their illegitimate, violent, and incompetent regimes. The abuse and subsequent self-immolation of a poor street vendor in the Arab world justifies insurrection on a national scale, but the fatal shooting of a young Black man in Tottenham does not. The racist polemic was as fervent as it was instantaneous. British historian David Starkey, apparently more perturbed by the multiracial backgrounds of the rioters, decreed: “the whites have become black; a particular sort of violent, destructive, nihilistic gangster culture has become the fashion” (Newsnight, BBC). Of course, these actions by disaffected youth come on the heals of countless student protests, university occupations, and union marches challenging ruthless austerity measures enacted to dispossess further the very communities taking to the streets in London. Violent, destructive gangsterism aptly describes the predatory lending practices and securitization schemes of a U.S./European financial sector dutifully rewarded by the world’s most powerful states. This is the backdrop to the riots the eminent British historian refuses to acknowledge. And although many commentators do indeed recognize this more immediate context, undoubtedly these events are part of a much longer political sequence. One could cite, for instance, the Notting Hill Riots of 1958 (in which four hundred white youths, many associated with neo-fascist groups, terrorized Caribbean immigrant communities), but it would seem that broadcasters at the BBC had the 1981 Brixton riots much on their minds, as Darcus Howe, a former member of the Race Today Collective, was summoned to play native informant to the political events unfolding. The interview is telling. What seems to rattle the interviewer most of all is Howe’s comparison of London to ongoing insurrections in the Arab world, indeed, his explicit claim that these events are related.
1 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 55.
2 Alain Badiou, “The Communist Hypothesis,” 38–9.
3 Robin Morgan, Going Too Far, 60–1.
4 Polly Joan and Andrea Chessman, Guide to Women’s Publishing, 4.
5 For a historical overview of the Women’s Liberation Movement, see Myra Marx Feree and Beth B. Hess, Controversy and Coalition: The New Feminist Movement Across Three Decades of Change; Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967–1975; Barbara Ryan, Feminism and the Women’s Movement; Kimberly Springer, Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968–1980; and Katie King, Theory in its Feminist Travels: Conversations in U.S. Women’s Movements; for an excellent collection of autobiographical accounts, see Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Ann Snitow, eds., The Feminist Memoir Project: Voices from the Women’s Liberation Movement.
6 See Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Blue Studios: Poetry and its Cultural Work, 66. No doubt antagonism between a feminism of “sameness/equality” and a feminism of “difference” persists as one of the chief debates in feminist poetics today. Kim Whitehead’s critique of Alicia Ostriker’s work is representative of this divide: “Ostriker assumes that a coherent, autonomous subjectivity is the only lived and poetic goal of women and that the end of the search for this subject position is the discovery of a single authentic femaleness that corresponds to an authentic maleness … While Ostriker and other critics like her consider this to be progress toward equality, I side with those critics who recognize differences among women and perceive feminist forms of liberal humanism as just additional acts of erasure” (The Feminist, 51).
7 Lorde, “Above the Wind,” 62; Rich, “Conditions for Work” and “Origins and History of Consciousness,” 205, 7–8; Judy Grahn, The Work of the Common Woman and Really Reading Gertrude Stein, 289.
8 See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth; Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community; Paolo Virno, Grammar of the Multitude; Slavoj Žižek, First as Trajedy, Then as Farce; and Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis.
9 In Margaret Benston’s groundbreaking essay, “The Political Economy of Women’s Liberation” (1970), the author sets out to critique the material conditions in capitalist societies “which define the group ‘women.’” Benston points to an interesting passage in Ernest Mandel’s Workers Under Neo-Capitalism on the unique status of domestic production: “[d]espite the fact that considerable human labor goes into this type of household production, it still remains a production of use-values and not commodities. Every time a soup is made or a button sewn on a garment, it constitutes production, but it is not production for the market.” Household production has an obvious use value, but because it is not exchanged on the market, it is not a commodity. Household labour, Benston observes, is not only excluded from definitions of work as such because it lacks an exchange value, nor is it only that a capitalist economy is wholly dependent upon this exploited workforce, but further: such work, Benston insists, provides the very basis on which society “define[s] women,” their relation to production, “as that group of people who are responsible for the production of simple use-values in those activities associated with the home and family” (18–19). Note also how this critique anticipates the autonomist Marxist notion of “affective” or “immaterial” labour.
10 See Carol Hanisch, “The Personal is Political,” Kathie Sarachild, “A Program for Feminist ‘Consciousness Raising,’” and Irene Peslikis, “Resistances to Consciousness,” in Notes From the Second Year, 76–8, 78–80, and 81. See Pamela Allen, “Free Space” and “Consciousness Raising,” and Jo Freeman, “The Tyranny of Structurelessness,” in Radical Feminism, 271–9, 280–1, and 285–99. See Hyde Park Chapter of the Chicago Women’s Liberation Movement, “Socialist Feminism: A Strategy for the Women’s Movement,” in Documents from the Women’s Liberation Movement: An On-line Archival Collection, Special Collections Library, Duke University. For an assessment of consciousness-raising’s limitations, see Carol Williams Payne, “Consciousness Raising: A Dead End?” in Radical Feminism, 282–4.
11 Robin Morgan, “Letter to a Sister Underground,” 24–5.
12 Morgan elaborates: “in Michigan, the denunciation of Sinclair disappeared; in Boston, ellipses replaced my attack on the Progressive Labor Party; in Berkeley, the Weatherman section was deleted” (Going Too Far 121).
13 See Morgan, “Goodbye To All That,” 121.
14 See Morgan, “Three Articles on WITCH,” 72–81, and “WITCH Documents,” 538–53.
15 See, for instance, Marvin A. Carlson, ed., Performance: A Critical Introduction, 180–1.
16 See Debord’s founding essays, “A User’s Guide to Détournement” and “Theory of the Dérive,” Situationist International Anthology, http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/index.htm.
17 See William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison, eds., Slave Songs of the United States (1995) and Lauri Ramey, Slave Songs and the Birth of African American Poetry (2008). The Little Red Songbook was first published in 1909 and more than thirty-five editions have since been published; see Songs of the Workers to Fan the Flames of Discontent: The Little Red Songbook (Centenary Edition, 2005).
18 Baraka, like Rich, had come under the influence of Olson and Creeley’s poetic technique early in his writing life. Baraka’s (Leroi Jones) contribution to Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry (1960) records: “there must not be any preconceived notion or design for what the poem ought to be. ‘Who knows what a poem ought to sound like? Until it’s thar [sic].’ Says Charles Olson … & I follow closely with that” (“How You Sound??” 424–5). Historian and critic of Black Arts William J. Harris observes, “ironically, avant-garde ideas of form cohered perfectly with the new black artist’s need to express his or her own oral tradition; the free verse and eccentric typography of the white avant-garde were ideal vehicles for black oral expression and experience” (xxvii).
19 The original text of the song reads: “I have an ear for music, / And I have an eye for a maid. / I like a pretty girlie, / With each pretty tune that’s played. / They go together, / Like sunny weather goes with the month of May. / I’ve studied girls and music, / So I’m qualified to say: / A pretty girl is like a melody / That haunts you night and day, / Just like the strain of a haunting refrain, / She’ll start upon a marathon / And run around your brain. / You can’t escape she’s in your memory. / By morning night and noon. / She will leave you and then come back again, / A pretty girl is just like a pretty tune.”
20 The following records the OED entry: “The being in child-bed; child-birth, delivery, accouchement …. 1774 MRS. DELANY Corr. Ser. II. (1862) II. 15, I feel uncomfortable not to be able to come to her when she is under her confinement. 1811 PARK in Medico-Chirurg. Trans. II. 298 Mrs. S. whom I was engaged to attend in her first confinement. 1861 F. NIGHTINGALE Nursing 41 Women who had difficult confinements. 1870 E. PEACOCK Ralf Skirl. III. 211 Just recovered from her confinement.”
21 Adrienne Rich, “Arts of the Possible,” 164.
22 A consortium of legal scholars, theorists, and digital activists has recently begun to revive discussion of the commons. I am indebted to several scholars on the topic; in particular, see James Boyle, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind; David Lange, “Recognizing the Public Domain,” Law and Contemporary Problems; Jessica Litman, “The Public Domain,” 965–1023; Lawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World; Carol M. Rose, Property and Persuasion: Essays on History, Theory, and Rhetoric of Ownership; David Bollier, Silent Theft: The Private Plunder of our Common Wealth; and Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action.
23 Rich’s account of the reading appears in “Power and Danger: Works of a Common Woman,” 247–58.
24 Judy Grahn, Really Reading Gertrude Stein, 289.
25 Corey Marks, “The Descriptive-Meditative Structure,” 123–46.
26 Anzaldúa lists the following eight languages and dialects: (1) Standard English, (2) Working class/slang English, (3) Standard Spanish, (4) Standard Mexican Spanish, (5) North American Spanish dialect, (6) Chicano Spanish, (7) Tex-Mex, and (8) Pachuco (also called caló). Anzaldúa notes further: “Tex-Mex, or Spanglish, comes most naturally to me. I may switch back and forth from English to Spanish in the same sentence or in the same word … From kids and people my own age I picked up Pachuco. Pachuco (the language of the zoot suiters) is a language of rebellion, both against Standard Spanish and Standard English. It is a secret language. Adults of the culture and outsiders cannot understand it. It is made up of slang words from both English and Spanish” (Borderlands/La Frontera 77–8). Borderlands’ publication in 1987 anticipated a burgeoning field of estudios de la frontera (border studies) over the course of the next decade. Héctor Calderón and José Saldívar’s Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture and Ideology (1991); Emily Hicks’s Border Writing: The Multidimensional Text (1991); and Ruth Bejar’s Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza’s Story (1993) all appear within a decade of Borderlands’ first published edition (1987).
27 “Coal” first appears in In the First Cities (1968), and then again in slightly altered form in Coal (1976). I cite the 1976 version. Revisions are largely minor, but significantly Lorde removes the period after line four. In her exemplary reading of the poem, Sagri Dhairyam refutes conventional interpretation of the text’s purported celebration of “an intrinsically Black vision.” She observes that the speaker’s initial identification with the “total black[ness]” of the coal is immediately “sabotaged”: I / is the total black, being spoken / from the earth’s inside. / There are many kinds of open / how a diamond comes into a knot of flame / how sound comes into a word, coloured / by who pays what for speaking (“Coal” 1–7). “‘There are many kinds of open,’ the comment immediately following the opening lines, re-marks the ambivalence of their agenda.” The relation between coal and the subsequent image of the diamond, Dhairyam argues, generates deliberately antagonistic associations “so likely to be passed over as different forms of the same mineral essence” (“Artifacts” 233). Indeed, according to this reading there is no carbon subject. The organic materials that make up a mineral such as coal are amorphous and take shape only according to unique geological and atmospheric pressures. Hence Lorde’s clever metaphor: human subjects too are formed under historical pressures. If the association between fuel and Black bodies intimates slavery, the reference extends rapidly to include the exploitation of wage labour. Notice that in the poem “a diamond comes into a knot of flame” and “a sound comes into a word,” but the transformation of coal into energy is deliberately left unspoken. The rhetoric of capitalism presents the aesthetic beauty of the diamond (and its associations with prestige and luxury) cut off from the oppressive scene of its production. Of course, presenting the process is determined “[b]y who pays what for speaking.” Lorde’s poem labours to expose the means of control over our mineral resources and our cultural symbols.
28 See, for instance, Honor Moore, Poems From the Women’s Movement, xxiii–xxiv.
29 For instance, no selection of Grahn’s work appears in Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann, and Robert O’Clair, eds., The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Verse; Paul Hoover, ed., Postmodern American Poetry; or Dana Gioia, David Mason, Meg Schoerke, eds., Twentieth-Century American Poetry.
30 Slavoj Žižek has recently spoken of the “universality embodied in the Excluded” (First as Tragedy 100), an argument he partly draws from Susan Buck-Morss’s Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History. Note Susan Buck-Morss’s evocative reference to our “common humanity”: “rather than giving multiple, distinct cultures equal due, whereby people are recognized as part of humanity indirectly through the mediation of collective cultural identities, human universality emerges in the historical event at the point of rupture. It is in the discontinuities of history that people whose culture has been strained to the breaking point give expression to a humanity that goes beyond cultural limits. And it is in our emphatic identification with this raw, free, and vulnerable state that we have a change of understanding what they say. Common humanity exists in spite of culture and its differences. A person’s non-identity with the collective allows for subterranean solidarities that have a chance of appealing to universal, moral sentiment, the source today of enthusiasm and hope” (133). For Žižek’s account of Buck-Morss’s book, see First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, 111–25.
A section of chapter 5 appears in Open Letter 13, no. 8 (Spring 2009).
1 Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, 95–6; Capital, vol. 1:478.
2 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth, ix.
3 Steve McCaffery, Wot We Wukkerz Want, liner note.
4 The first TRG manifesto was composed in May 1972 and subsequently lost. A second manifesto was written 5 January 1973.
5 Dates for these poems and collections are as follows: “Parallel Texts” (1971), “Collboration” [sic] (1971), “In England Now that Spring” (1979), Crown’s Creek (1978), Edge (1975), Legend (1980), CaNADAda (1972), Live in the West (1977), Six Fillious (1978), 8 × 8: La Traduction A L’Epreuve (1982), and Translating Translating Apollinaire (1979).
6 Jacket copy, bpNichol, art facts: a book of contexts.
7 The wedding took place on 25 February 1978 at the loft of Jean Depuys. Both Maciunas and Hutchins wore gowns.
8 For scholars who give more than a marginal consideration of the TRG, see Adeena Karasick, “Tract Marks: Echoes and Traces in the Toronto Research Group,” 76–89; Caroline Bayard, The New Poetics in Canada and Quebec: From Concretism to Postmodernism, 60–7; Peter Jaeger, ABC of Reading TRG; Susan E. Billingham, “Inscription vs. Invocation: The Martyrology as Paragram,” 85–133; Christian Bök, “Canadian” Pataphysics: A ’Pataphysics of Mnemonic Exception,” in ’Pataphyscis: The Poetics of an Imaginary Science, 81–97; and Miriam Nichols, “A/Politics of Contemporary Anglo-Canadian Poetries: The Toronto Research Group and the Kootenay School of Writing,” 66–85.
Peter Jaeger provides astute readings of the TRG reports in relation to the single-authored creative texts of Nichol and McCaffery; in particular, Jaeger contextualizes Nichol’s The Martyrology and McCaffery’s Carnival and Panopticon. Christian Bök’s study provides a provocative comparison between the TRG and Alfred Jarry’s concept of ’pataphysics. Of equal merit is Nichols’s article, which seeks historically to contextualize the TRG’s rejection of nationalism in favour of a “local-global split” (68). Interestingly, this argument coheres with Silliman’s distinction between “scene” and “network,” the local and the transgeographic as substitutes for the movement (see my introduction for an extended assessment of these terms).
9 For examples of this tendency, see, in particular, Read the Way He Writes: A Festschrift for bpNichol, special issue of Open Letter 6, nos. 5–6 (Summer/Fall 1986), and Susan E. Billingham, Language and the Sacred in Canadian Poet bpNichol’s “The Martyrology.” Frank Davey argues that “[w]hat often happens on the death of an author is that an institutional group of textual custodians comes into being – scholars and editors who present themselves as caring as passionately about that author’s text as the author once did … Much of this kind of activity … is celebratory rather than productive or critical, even, or perhaps especially, when it purports to offer no more than readings or explications … Most of those interested in continuing to author Nichol texts have been other writers. Most of these have been writers of his own generation, and most have been his friends.” Davey continues, “many of us in my generation need to release the texts known as ‘bpNichol’ from our friendships with Barrie the bpNichol author, and from the privileged place those friendships have given The Martyrology in many of our view of his writings, because of our continuing to read it as autobiography or as metaphors for autobiography” (8–9). See Davey, “bpNichol + 10: Some Institutional Issues Associated with the Continued Reading of Texts Known as ‘bpNichol,’” 5–13. Davey makes similar arguments with particular reference to The Martyrology in “Exegesis / Eggs à Jesus: The Martyrology as a Text in Crisis,” 38–51.
10 See Lori Emerson, “Nicholongings: because they is,” 27–33, Darren Wershler-Henry, “Argument for a Secular Martyrology,” 37–47, and Christian Bök, “Nickel Linoleum,” 62–74.
11 The special issue of Open Letter 6, no. 9 (Fall 1987) devoted to McCaffery’s work features four essays that discuss his poetic texts, and, among them, three specifically address Panopticon.
12 See Statistics Canada, “Estimated Population of Canada, 1605 to Present,” http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/98-187-x/4151287-eng.htm.
13 See Cy Gonick, “Strategies for Social Change,” 39–40.
14 McCaffery, “Trans-Avant-Garde: An Interview with Steve McCaffery,” http://www.raintaxi.com/online/2007winter/mccaffery.shtml.
15 The commentary in question comes from John W. Wornock’s “Why I Am Anti-American.” See Bryan D. Palmer’s judicious assessment of anti-Americanism in Canada’s 1960s: The Ironies of Identity in a Rebellious Age.
16 On the origins of the Eternal Network, see Filliou, Teaching and Learning as Performing Arts.
17 Higgins, “The Mail-Interview with Dick Higgins,” http://www.fluxusheidelberg.org/dhint.html.
18 Nichol and McCaffery use a quotation mark rather than an inverted apostrophe (“pata- instead of ’pata-) to indicate the word’s decontextualization.
19 Alfred Jarry notoriously defines ’pataphysics as “the science of imaginary solutions, which symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their lineaments” (22). See Jarry, Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, ’Pataphysician.
20 The letter to McCaffery is dated 13 April 1979.
21 Bayard makes the following claim in The New Poetics in Canada and Quebec: From Concretism to Post-Modernism: “what we are witnessing is a qualitative jump from one contemporary thought system (from a deconstructionist perspective which rejects the fetishism of reference) to an animistic one (wherein divination is practiced in order to interpret signs derived from the earth: topographies, soils, hills, and rivers – geomancy being the reading of the natural alignment of signs)” (64).
22 William Wordsworth advocated enthusiastically for copyright reform in the British parliament. In 1837 he lobbied on behalf of his friend Thomas Noon Talfourd, who introduced a bill that would extend the term of copyright to sixty years. For an extended account of the interconnected development of Romantic concepts of creativity and intellectual property rights, see Martha Woodmansee, The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics. For a selection of pre-Romantic theories and practices of authorship, see Heather Hirschfeld, “Early Modern Collaboration and Theories of Authorship,” 609–22. See also John Feather, “From Rights in Copies to Copyright: The Recognition of Authors’ Rights in English Law and Practice in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries” and Max W. Thomas, “Reading and Writing the Renaissance Commonplace Book: A Question of Authorship,” both of which appear in Woodmansee and Jaszi, The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature, 191–210, 401–16.
23 For accessible overviews of American copyright history, see James Boyle, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind; Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture; Jessica Litman, Digital Copyright; and Siva Vaidhyanatha, Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity.
24 McCaffery, “Trans-Avant-Garde: An Interview with Steve McCaffery,” http://www.raintaxi.com/online/2007winter/mccaffery.shtml.
25 See note 22 above.
26 For commentaries on the influence of Coleridge and Dorothy Wordsworth on Wordsworth’s writing, see Jack Stillinger, “Multiple ‘Consciousness’ in Wordsworth’s Prelude,” in Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius, 69–95; also, Wayne Koestenbaum, “The Marinere Hath His Will(iam): Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads,” in Double Talk: The Erotics of Male Literary Collaboration, 71–111.
27 This tendency to reduce the Four Horsemen’s group practice to a “single consciousness” still occurs. Recently the performance troupe Volcano staged an ambitious and largely successful show called The Four Horsemen Project, synthesizing their sound poetry with visually engaging multimedia and exceptional choreography; yet, among the thirty-six sound pieces, visual poems, and film footage clips used during the performance, no less than twenty were either solo-composed pieces by bpNichol or filmed interviews of him speaking.
28 McKenzie explains, “[t]he principle I wish to suggest as basic is simply this: bibliography is the discipline that studies texts as recorded forms, and the processes of their transmission, including their production and reception … In terms of the range of demands now made on it and of the diverse interests of those who think of themselves as bibliographers, it seems to me that it would now be more useful to describe bibliography as the study of the sociology of texts. If the principle which makes it distinct is its concern with texts in some physical form and their transmission, then I can think of no other phrase which so aptly describes its range” (Sociology of Texts 4–5).
29 This definition is more specifically related to prose. In the second report, McCaffery and Nichol acknowledge that poetry and prose involve distinctly different reading experiences: “[p]rose as print encourages an inattention to the right-hand margin as a terminal point. The tendency is encouraged to read continually as though the book were one extended line. In poetry, by contrast, the end of each line is integral to the structure of the poem whether it follows older metrical prosodic models or more recent types of breath-line notation … In poetry, where the individual line is compositionally integral, the page is more often than not itself integral” (60–1). Whereas in prose, the page functions as an “arbitrary receptacle,” in poetry, it becomes instead a “frame, landscape, atmosphere within which the poem’s own unity is enacted” (61). Poetry, therefore, is more visually oriented; prose is unavoidably linear. Importantly, McCaffery and Nichol would reject this assumption shortly after the composition of their second report, arguing that it fails to account for the prose poetry genre. See Rational Geomancy, 60–2, 92n.1.
30 Billingham chides Alan Knight and Caroline Bayard for failing to distinguish between TRG reports co-authored by McCaffery and Nichol and related pieces authored independently. This objection is ultimately legitimate if one acknowledges that the co-authored pieces generate a synthetic authorial subject irreducible to either author. Compromising this position is her selection of cover art – a comic piece produced collaboratively by both poets but ascribed to Nichol alone! The text in question, “Fictive Funnies,” appears in “The Search for Non-Narrative Prose” in Rational Geomancy, 111.
31 This is a method that Jerome McGann would later employ in studies like Black Riders.
32 A shorter version of the report was published in Portico 5, nos. 3–4 (1981): 67–75. Authorial contributions are distinguished by colour: the upper band in blue, the lower band in red.
33 McCaffery expresses a similar interest in the dialogic possibilities of recension and the footnote, in which text and note occupy and compete within the same textual field of the page. See McCaffery, “Richard Bentley: The First Poststructuralist? The 1732 Recension of Paradise Lost” and “Johnson and Wittgenstein: Some Correlations and Bifurcations in the Dictionary and the Philosophical Investigations,” in Prior To Meaning: The Protosemantic and Poetics, 58–74 and 75–104.
34 “The Body: In Light” is second in a mini-sequence of three that also contains “The Body: In Darkness” and “The Body: Disembodied.” These gestural pieces were subsequently added to the larger sequence making up the TRG’s third report, “The Language of Performance of Language” (Rational Geomancy, 229–38, 245–53, 255–71).
35 For a brief survey of the historical antecedents and contemporary modes of sound poetry, see Dick Higgins, “A Taxonomy of Sound Poetry,” 40–52; Steve McCaffery, “Sound Poetry: A Survey,” 6–18; and Richard Kostelanetz, “Text Sound Art: A Survey,” 14–23.
36 McCaffery argues that “[s]ound poetry prior to the developments of the 1950s is still largely a word bound thing. For whilst the work of the Dadaists, Futurists and Lettrists served to free the word from its semantic function, redistributing energy from theme and ‘message’ to matter and contour, it nevertheless persisted in a morphological patterning that still suggested the presence of the word … Important too, in this light, is the way meaning persists as a teleology even in zaum. Khlebnikov, for instance, speaks of new meanings achieved through by-passing older forms of meaning, of meanings ‘rescued’ by ‘estrangement.’ Hugo Ball, too, speaks of exploring the word’s ‘innermost alchemy’” (“Sound Poetry: A Survey” 10).
37 Higgins formulates these categories in “A Taxonomy of Sound Poetry.” Here, a slightly expanded paraphrasing: (1) Works in an invented language: works that are “purely without reference to any known language.” E.g., Iliazd’s “zaum” poems, Stefan George’s “lingua romana” works. (2) Near-nonsense works: works that involve the “interplay between semantically meaningful lines” and “nonsense.” Such pieces often involve strategies of collage and found materials, e.g., Kurt Schwitters’s “To Anna Blume.” (3) Phatic poems: “poems in which semantic meaning, if any, is subordinate to expression of intonation, thus yielding a new emotional meaning which is relatively remote from any semiotic significance.” In this case, a semantically conventional word is expunged of its residual meaning through repetition or verbal manipulation of the signifier, e.g., Antonin Artaud’s “To Be Done with the Judgment of God.” (4) Un-written-out poems: A sound poem that is improvised, e.g., Henri Chopin’s tape-recorder pieces. (5) Notated ones: A sound poem that is notated. As a subcategory of this class, Higgins includes vocalizations of visual poetry, e.g., Kurt Schwitters’s Ur Sonata. See “A Taxonomy of Sound Poetry,” 40–52.
38 The tape recorder has had a significant impact on developments in sound poetry – most obvious is that the sonic variations of orality become reproducible. Voice is liberated from the human body; it can be technologically modified, reorganized, and augmented. Among the pioneers of tape-recorded sound poetry, Henri Chopin’s “poesie sonore” and Bernard Heidsieck’s “poem-partitions” are the most formidable. For an extended analysis of this practice, see Chopin, “Open Letter to Aphonic Musicians,” 11–23. In a letter to Dick Higgins dated 21 June 1976, McCaffery records that the Four Horsemen “don’t as a group use microphonic support or extension – hence our ostracisation from the poesie sonor [sic] scene by such inflexible (though respected) voices as henri chopin” (Box 21, Folder 41, Dick Higgins Papers).
39 McCaffery was also likely aware of the multi-voice compositions of Fluxus artists like Yoko Ono, La Monte Young, Phil Corner, and George Maciunas’s “music for lips.” Multi-voice performance was often a component within “happenings” and their collectively created “sound environments” (the latter an element of the “Flux Amusement Center”). See Jon Hendricks, ed., Fluxus Codex.
40 Dick Higgins, “A Commentary by the Poet on ‘Conceptual Forks,’” 155.
41 Steve McCaffery, “Proem: The Logic of Frogs #383,” 3.
42 See McCaffery’s Every Way Oakly (Xerox publication by Stephen Scobie, Edmonton, 1978; selections were republished in Seven Pages Missing: Volume One, 97–119) and Intimate Distortions: A Displacement of Sappho. McCaffery also wrote a number of homolinguistic adaptations of Shakespeare, Marvell, and Sidney. Many of these poems went unpublished until the publication of Seven Pages Missing: Volume Two, 157–96. For Nichol’s creative translations, see Translating Translating Apollinaire, which subjects the French poet’s poem “Zone” to no less than thirty-four subsequent permutations and transformations. He also wrote a series of translations of Catullus’s poems, many of which are collected in zygal: a book of mysteries and translations.
43 Cicero describes his approach to translation in De optimo genere oratorum: “[a]nd I did not translate them as an interpreter, but as an orator, keeping the same ideas and forms, or as one might say, the “figures” of thought, but in language which conforms to our usage. And in so doing, I did not hold it necessary to render word for word, but I preserve the general style and force of the language” (364). Horace’s often quoted observation on the subject of translation etiquette can be found in his Ars Poetica: “[i]n ground open to all you will win private rights, if you do not linger along the easy and open pathway, if you do not seek to render word for word as a slavish translator, and if in your copying you do not leap into the narrow well, out of which either shame or the laws of your task will keep you from stirring a step” (461).
44 Jeremy Munday argues that despite the importance of Dryden’s taxonomy for “translation theory, [his] writing remains full of the language of his time: the genius of the S[ource] T[ext] author” (Introducing Translation Studies 25).
45 Fitzgerald reveals in a letter to E.B. Cowell, “[i]t is an amusement for me to take what Liberties I like with these Persians, who (as I think) are not Poets enough to frighten one from such excursions, and wholly really do want a little Art to shape them.” See Andre Lefevere, ed., Translation/History/Culture: A Sourcebook, 80.
46 Peter Jaeger argues convincingly that McCaffery and Nichol had likely read Jakobson’s influential essay. Although they do not explicitly cite it, Jaeger observes that George Steiner’s After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation appears in the TRG’s “catalogue” of jointly discussed readings, a book that gives extended consideration to Jakobson’s typology. The TRG’s reading list appears in Rational Geomancy, 313–20. For Jaeger’s assessment of the TRG’s translational strategies (particularly in relation to Nichol’s The Martyrology) see his ABC of Reading TRG, 105–8.
47 See Benedetto Croce, The Aesthetic as Science of Expression and of the Linguistic in General, 76.
48 Referred to as a “treated” text, Phillips subjects the little-known nineteenth-century novelist W.H. Mallock’s A Human Document to a process of selective concealment whereby painted images replace sections of text so that a new narrative emerges. Johnson uses a comparable method of deletion in Radi os, revising the first four books of Milton’s Paradise Lost. The result, however, is decidedly more minimalist, transforming the dense columns of Milton’s blank verse into the exposed page of projectivist aesthetics. William Burroughs and Brion Gysin’s “cut-up” technique is more widely acknowledged due to Burroughs’s comparatively greater fame; their method, which bears similarities to Tristan Tzara’s early experiments, involves cutting and rearranging passages of text to generate meaning aleatorically. See Tom Phillips, A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel; Ronald Johnson, Radi os; and William Burroughs’s “cut-up trilogy” (The Soft Machine, The Ticket that Exploded, and Nova Express). See also Gysin’s description of their method in “Cut-Ups Self-Explained,” 132–5.
49 Dick Higgins records that 14 Chansons et 1 Charade was initially conceived by Filliou as “a set of rock and roll lyrics which … proved too risqué for commercial broadcasting” (“The Strategy” 129). Alternatively, he published the poem along with English and German translations by Brecht and Roth respectively. With Filliou’s involvement, Higgins, Nichol, and McCaffery expanded the text.
50 See, in particular, Higgins and McCaffery’s correspondence during 1976 and 1977 in Box 21, Folder 41, Dick Higgins Papers. On 14 July 1976, Higgins observes: “you’ve put a real idea into my head, this intralingual translation concept, and it annoys me not to know the person who did so. As I work farther into that field, I’ll send you some examples of what I come up with.” In “A Note on Intimate Distortions,” McCaffery contends: “Higgins and I saw allusive referential as a facet of a wider notion we termed ‘Creative Misunderstanding’” (Seven Pages Missing: Volume Two 452).
51 At some point during the late summer of 1977, Higgins sent to McCaffery his essay entitled “Teleology: Some Incomplete Thoughts,” in which Higgins summarily dismisses post-structuralist theory, referring pejoratively to several French theorists (including Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida) as the “Paris Mafia.” McCaffery’s response to Higgins is instructive: it affords a rich account of the relationship between Derrida’s theory and Language poetics. Furthermore, it aptly characterizes the mutual development of Higgins and McCaffery’s thinking on the nature of language. The latter’s comparison of allusive referentialist writing to Derrida’s concept of the trace is convincing enough that Higgins abandons the essay (the manuscript of Higgins’s essay features the following hand-written note: “trash, for reasons s.m. said” [Box 41, Dick Higgins Papers]). The letter in question is dated 30 September 1977, Box 21, Folder 41, Dick Higgins Papers.
52 The following is the full text of Sidney’s Sonnet XXXI: “With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb’st the skies! / How silently, and with how wan a face! / What, may it be that even in heav’nly place / That busy archer his sharp arrows tries? / Sure, if that long with love-acquainted eyes / Can judge of love, thou feel’st a lover’s case; / I read it in thy looks: thy languisht grace / To me that feel the like, thy state descries. / Then, ev’n of fellowship, O Moon, tell me, / Is constant love deemed there but want of wit? / Are beauties there as proud as here they be? / Do they above love to be loved, and yet / Those lovers scorn whom that love doth possess? / Do they call virtue there, ungratefulness?” (49). I use the text as it appears in Sidney, Sir Philip Sidney: Selected Poetry and Prose.
53 In Nicholodeon, an elaboration of bpNichol’s visual poetics, Darren Wershler-Henry offers the following sonnet (which readers can find online: http://www.chbooks.com/archives/online_books/nicholodeon/sonnet.html):
?8
u6
This playful poem aptly demonstrates the logical progression of a Petrarchan sonnet: its organization into octave and sestet (the number of lines represented by its accompanying exponent), and an initial invocation by the speaker, followed by an address to the beloved.
54 McCaffery also cites this trip to Robert’s Creek with Filliou and Kaprow in a letter to Dick Higgins dated 7 November 1977: “talk: eternal network, the speed of art, much on performance which has certainly stretched my mind more towards performance as meta-reading” (Box 21, Folder 41, Dick Higgins Papers).
55 Qtd. in Kenneth Goldsmith, “Meme Museum,” http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2011/04/the-meme-museum.
1 Robert Duncan, The HD Book, 63.
2 See Stephen Voyce, “Toward an Open-Source Poetics.”