A correspondence rather in the Open Letter tradition on the “Canadian/New York School Question” has sprung up.

 

Tom Orange:

 

ron/louis,

 

very interesting exchange on the absence of ted berrigan and the NYS in canadian poetry.

 

reminds me of a thread that came up on a discussion list stemming from remarks christian bök made a few summers ago when he and natalee caple were in town and i put together a reading for them. amidst the post- reading chit chat christian claimed not to have much knowledge or interest in recent work by american contemporaries like lisa jarnot or anselm berrigan that problematizes the idea of "lyric voice" in their own interesting ways. some folks here found that claim to be problematic, whereas i insisted that while we here may hold lisa and anselm in a certain position of esteem there's no reason to assume that christian is working in a similar position or with a similar set of values -- both lisa and anselm can be seen in fact coming out of a NAP tradition that someone like christian would have very affinity with or use for. additionally, there's the very real matter of the distribution of small press poetry from the states to canada: i can say from experience that without SPD or bridge street mail order it's very difficult and costly to get small press poetry from the states in canada, literally get the books let alone follow what's coming out.

 

(along these latter lines, it strikes me that one book in the ted berrigan bibliography that would have had the best distribution opportunities in canada wdve been the grove press sonnets.)

 

so louis' initial responses aren't all that surprising to me. and i think the formula "canpo = NAP - NYS" is interesting as a thought- experiment (and i'd have to think more about louis' compelling notions of "second-order commodification" and metalanguage), but what it gains in immediate intrigue is lost almost as soon as you get into particulars.

 

to me, the particular figure absent from these discussions of absences, a presence that might be seen filling the NYS/berrigan absence, is bill bissett. born in 1939 (same year as coolidge, two years before grenier, three before padgett and greenwald) in halifax, bissett left the maritimes for vancouver and ran blewointment press from there, though also kept close ties in terms of publishing poetics and friendship with the toronto scene. his work seems to me to combine the countercultural hipness and attention to dailiness of berrigan with a black mountain poetics of speech (more duncan's than anyone else, tho you'd have to substitute duncan's gnostic/heretic mysticism for a kind of free-love pantheism) taken to an orthographic extreme that bleeds directly into the concrete, visual, sound and performance work of the four horseman.

 

he thus problematizes coastal alignments (toronto-vancouver being homologous, in a pretty loose sense and again with substantial qualifications, to NYC-SF), generations, schools/lineages, and issues of voice, speech and text in ways that are compelling and utterly unique in canada or the states. and in ways that make me wish bissett had a greater readership in the states.

 

allbests,

t.

 

 

*          *          *

 

Loui Cabri:

 

Tom,

 

For now let me just say, in relation to bill bissett, whom you raise as a potential example in Canada of NYS influence, that there’s no denying the idiosyncratic and wide-ranging reading lists of individual poets, and the many influences discernible on their work (so for example in the case of bissett, NYS may be one of them); but that to me is beside the point of how to understand the relation of influence, context, and socially-constituted metalanguage formations such as KSW, TRG – and NYS itself (a name obtains at least to a degree of metalingual function). It really comes down to this for me: If you’re in Calgary, Vancouver, Toronto, whatever, why would you care at all about the poetic expressions of any other city’s “lifestyle,” unless you were a tourist flaneur, especially an expression that is at times (to focus only on the critical for a moment) as self-involved (the word “American” in one of my emails to Ron should have been in quotes), gloriously vain and willfully naive as poetry from the “school” of the City of New York can be?* What saves NYS from such a critical dismissal is the function of the social in its work (but “NYS social” provides, also, its own unique limit). So much of what is great about NYS is the coterie feel, address to friends. Who does it worse than NYS? Who does it better than NYS?

 

You can make it anytime.

 

Words, sentences. Suffering

 

Is not where it’s at, in 1969.

 

Now, the heart. A breath. Holding back.

 

Is it necessary to spend long periods of time alone?

 

Dear friends: you have all been very good to me.

 

How to remain in 1 place for more than a few minutes.

 

Bill is snoring. It’s 6 in the morning.

 

Reading to learn to enjoy yourself.

 

Please stay where you are at all times.

 

What you do is draw everything together, Ted.

 

Reveal the dark side & the bright side too. Don’t

 

            be afraid to reveal what you’re feeling.

 

Ron, it’s a good time to be leaving New York.

 

It’s more difficult not to change than to change.

 

The problem thinking of you, Anne, is who am

 

            I thinking of?

 

----------------is thinking this?

 

That spells “Release” from Lewis Warsh’s Part of My History (Coach House, 1972) found the other month here in Calgary at one used bookstore for $10 and at another $20.

 

You don’t get that kind of enacted and taken-for-granted social address to intimates in bissett – instead you get the stretched, still somewhat formalized, “I,” and the political concerns, of NAP. It’s indeed a great “American” thing, NYS’s idea of a democratized coterie (compared to previous European notions of the salon), and is absent up north in part because of the, now I’m ranting, &%!!@#! British influence that NAPoets Davey et al griped about and that is still prevalent in public media (CBC announcers are still too frequently British accented, uniformly – sort of like a series of CBC regional antennae – across the country). bissett is great for reasons separate from the question of NYS.

 

Instead, in Canada the social is represented as a “concern.” Charles Reznikoff’s techniques of manipulating a historical document is affiliated with a long-standing documentary genre in Canada, and is evident most recently for example in Kevin Connolly’s title poem in Happyland (ECW, 2002), which was “very pointedly inspired by Hilton Obenzinger’s New York on Fire (The Real Comet Press, 1989)” and “published a year before the East Tremont fire,” which the poem is about, “modeled on a Roman Catholic novenario, a nine-day period of prayer preceding an anniversary mass”:

 

IX  STICKS

 

In another city they might have

bulldozed it into the ground.

But this is New York,

the building is still sound,

and the loft craze may yet wind

its way through the Bronx

to Southern and East Tremont,

where the Hondurans used to

dance to Los Gaetos Bravos,

Tito Puente and the Garifuna Kids,

and blue sky about home.

 

At Happyland the single door

remains boarded, the sign

that smiled over the bodies,

shoulder to shoulder, taken down

the day after, the irony

lost on no one, and with everything

else, too much to take.

 

There’s even a memorial,

though rarely flowers – most

of the families went home

after the settlement in ’95.

It’s ringed by a high fence,

the names etched

onto a concrete obelisk:

Alvarez, Denny; Alvarez, Hector;

Alvarez, Jose; Benavides, Victor…

 

From a distance, they resemble

sticks, or the strokes made by sticks

to stand for numbers:

Castro, Janeta; Chavez, Carla;

Colon, Elias – not frightening in

themselves, just rows of names

with a memory looming over them,

an item list, in inverse order:

obelisk, fence, street,

sidewalk, threshold, boarded

door, hallway, stairwell,

grave.

 

Addressing the social in this poem involves structuring and setting a narrative scene. The “item list” of nine narrative elements mirrors the nine sections of the poem – sections which are also structurally presented in reverse order, beginning with section IX and working forwards to section I. The address to the names mentioned in the poem is necessarily moot. The narrator’s knowledge is not owned by any particular person – who knows “where the Hondurans used to / dance”? (The narrator of City Confidential would claim to know...) The implicit and very modest social critique of New York finance capital in Connolly’s poem is nevertheless derived from a traditional metalanguage of what constitutes “a social address.” This metalanguage is not, however, reflexively tied into a specific poetics at the level of form, and the reason is because of a Canadian understanding of “the social.”

 

That is, I want to convey a sense of how the divide between Warsh and Connolly on the question of how to address the social, and on what scale (from intimate, to omniscient, narrator), is historically shaped by the border.

 

The only poetic good thing that ever came from Britain to Canada before WWII is socialism in its 30s variant in the work of Earle Birney and a few others connected with the formation (by many Europeans) of the CCF, with a Trotskyist critique of Stalin, and eventually the NDP (these three elements are related). But their poetry – the tradition that Connolly is tapping – is, for all that attention to social address, either direly ornamental in an uninterestingly clarified sense, or else unabashedly conventional in its use of (well-crafted) dramatic narration. That very British influence of the social as in socialism (as distinct from idealist German socialism which prevailed more extensively in the US) prevented modernism from ever establishing itself in Canadian poetry except as decorative stylization (that belated decorativeness, as in F.R. Scott’s imagism, a sign of the important function that Cdn. poetics plays as metalanguage clearinghouse – in critical terms, part of its colonial heritage). There is no equivalent here of “the New York intellectuals” – the closest you get to Partisan Review is Montreal’s Canadian Forum, and that’s a stretch (I mean there is no endorsement whatsoever of “revolution” in form: socialism actually existed in Canada as a social program, and had a tempering effect on word-world homologies).

 

Circling back to the question I started with, idiosyncratic reading lists and habits, I do think I only read Berrigan in the 90s, and with some difficulty. Ashbery however was one of my first great motivating interests in poetry. I read all of Ashbery right through to his early eighties work, including The Tennis Court Oath and Three Poems, the aforementioned having a tremendous impact on me concerning what poetry could be (as did the devastatingly hilarious spoof in A Nest of Ninnies concerning “Canadian heritage”) – well before I had ever heard of Language Poetry. Actually I did not think of Ashbery as a “New York School Poet,” but read him within the Canadian English/French bicultural divide as someone who, like Hamburger’s translated anthology of surrealist poetry, was reawakening the France-French traditions of Artaud, Roussel and others, including the Surrealists (I was reading these French traditions well before hearing of McCaffery or Nichol).

 

As to the worldly Christian Bök and his Toronto Oulipoian cohorts, aside from the connection they extend in their work to conceptual art (via McCaffery, Fluxus, etc), their poetic word is stridently a-social. The social is neither enacted “NYS style,” nor represented “Cdn style.” The social as such has been Haussmannized (Brecht considered "asocial" far worse than "antisocial") through their avid absorption in “the new medium” of internet computer forms. That distinctly a-social word results again, to me, from the metalingual inter-border role of Canadian poetics, which can often reduce the social complexity of differing tendencies to their most essential (unreal) terms with success (for example, the role of Oulipo in the literary history of France: there, Oulipo was arguably intended to subvert the role of author as genius, but here, Bök’s reception in particular has been largely in terms of his genius for conceiving a project such as Eunoia and for his seven-year steadfastness at scratching its numbers). A precedent I can think of for the a-social poetic word of the Toronto boysy boys is found in what I call the “inertial word” of Zukofsky’s index (largely of nouns) to ”A” and these words’ roles in the book.

 

Best,

Louis

 

cc Ron, Kevin

 

* Why NYS caught-on in other areas of the US is another question entirely – and worth exploring. Is that wildfire a form of US regionalism (regionalism needs to operate within a proud national frame)?

*          *          *

 

Kevin Davies:

 

I offer here only the abstract-with-footnotes of the argument I would make if I had more time, primary materials, and brain cells:

 

* The first two generations of the New York School (I will argue another time about why I believe there are _only_ two) have had significant and widespread effects on vanguard Canadian poetry of the past forty years. * These effects are unlikely to be registered at the level of the archive, present-day scholarship, or institutional formation, for reasons that have a lot to do with the nature of the NYS itself. * Only one Canadian poet -- David McFadden(1) -- is unimaginable without the existence of the G1 NYS, but several other poets -- Artie Gold, for instance -- and at least one local formation -- the Vehicule (sp.?) poets of (Anglo) Montreal - were decisively "influenced" by both generations. (I hesitate to use the "I" word for reasons that should be apparent to all of us.) * Though often difficult to disentangle from the various strands of projectivist, SF Renaissance, Beat, (latterly) Langpo, and other forces at play, the work of poets as diverse as George Bowering, Victor Coleman, Christopher Dewdney, Robert Fones,(2) Gerry Gilbert, Alan Davies, Dorothy Lusk Trujillo, Erin Mouré, Peter Culley, Lisa Robertson, and Stephen Cain shows unmistakable markers (stylistic and otherwise) of decisive engagements with the poetry and (implicit) poetics of the NYS. * While I agree that the work of bpNichol and Steve McCaffery can, for the most part, be coherently related only to the Oulipolian fringe/extension of NYS practice,(3) two things need to be noted: -1- the collaborative ethos of their early work has clear precedent in the well-known collaborations of the NYS, and -2- the extreme radicality of _The Tennis Court Oath_ had a powerful influence on the entire English-language avant-garde, and its surface dynamics can be seen in the work of both poets, particularly McCaffery. * Canada, despite being the most urbanized country in the world, is a land of hicks (takes one to know one), and any "influence" of the pseudo-cosmopolitan NYS is likely to be sifted through a hick filter that will obscure its provenance, though it is no less real for all that. * Two poets -- Paul Blackburn and Clark Coolidge -- need to have their positions in relation to the G2 NYS refigured, and when this refiguring is effected the lines of (if not influence, then) relation will highlight different relations to Canpo. * Finally, the poets of NYS, particularly O'Hara, Ashbery, Berrigan, and Mayer, were crucial to the emerging poetry and poetics of _all_ the older members/associates of the Kootenay School of Writing, and their influence (there, I said it without scare quotes) cannot be importantly distinguished from that of early(ish) langpo.(4)

 

_______

 

(1) I don't mean to imply that David McFadden would not be a poet without the NYS. He would. His major influences would have been Al Purdy and Irving Layton. He would have hanged himself at the age of 37.

 

(2) Fones is, I believe, no longer active in poetry, devoting his labours instead to visual art. He was a major poet of the 70s.

 

(3) At least glimpsed in, for instance, Locus Solus.

 

(4) Mayer, of course, "invented language poetry." I'll leave her claim alone for now. In my own case, Berrigan was crucial to my education. The first thing of his I read, in the year after high school (while working desultorily at the local mill), was "Tambourine Life," in an anthology at the local community-college library. This event was, I think, similar to what Ron describes when he first encountered The Desert Music: the sense that there was a writing practice that could account for the vagaries and particulars of the life I was living, one that was not tied to the prosody of either the Romantics I adored or the academics I abhorred. Not long after, Peter Culley was writing a long series of "Things to Do in [Nanaimo, Kabul, etc.)" poems, Gerald Creede was poring over Mayer's Studying Hunger and insisting that everyone else do the same, and Dorothy Trujillo was reading everything.

 

*          *          *

 

Louis Cabri:

 

McFadden, of course! I knew there was somebody major overlooked (had thought the other year of pairing McFadden with Luoma, in a PhillyTalk). Already knew, though, I had a myopic view on Canadian poetry: Gold, Fones (as poet) I, the hick, don't know. Are you thinking of Moure's early work, Empire York Street, and Wanted Alive, for instance? All my books are in boxes in Philly, frustratingly, and it's been a long time since I looked at a Vehicule book, but I remember them as performance group orientated. On the rest, would love to read now, including your own work, in view of these questions of NYS influence and of metalanguage. Pause Button already makes more sense just thinking about it from this angle (the social porousness of the "I"). But "influence" is such a bugbear! In my case, no greater set of poets than the Language Ps has "influenced" "me" -- but can or should one "tell" this in the book?

 

Louis