Nancy Shaw, The Gorge: Selected Writing, ed. Catriona Strang

    Born in Regina on May 24, 1962, and raised in Vancouver, Shaw was fully immersed in the vibrant Vancouver art and writing communities of the mid- to late 1980s and early 1990s, and spent several formative years as a member of the Kootenay School of Writing collective (which is where I met her), arranging readings, talks, workshops, and classes. During this time she began writing poetry, and was also a visual artist, editor, and curator, serving as artist-in-residence at Vancouver’s Western Front, co-editor (with Jeff Derksen) of Writing magazine, and curator of the Or Gallery; throughout her career, she produced for art catalogues and magazines insightful essays that display her characteristic blend of intellectual clarity and playful curiosity. In the early 1990s she moved to Montreal to attend McGill University, where she earned both her master’s (1995) and doctorate (20000) in communications (she wrote her master’s thesis on West Coast style, while her doctoral thesis examines the Museum of Modern Art’s Television Project, 1939-55). She completed a post-doctoral fellowship at New York University, and taught communications at McGill, Rutgers, Wilfred Laurier, Simon Fraser, and Capilano Universities. All of which is to say that when Shaw describes the Canadian art collection N.E. Thing Co.’s “constellations of collapsing and interacting territories, calling attention to the hidden interdependence of corporate, artistic, and domestic spheres” (“Siting the Banal,” 33), she could be describing her own method. Her intricate, dense texts are at once cinematic and spatial; read as a whole, they construct “constellations of collapsing and interacting territories” (68), a shaky, impermanent site of resistance, rigorous inquiry, and potentially spanning three decades and multiple genres, which crucially comes to no definitive conclusion, but is only cut short by her untimely death from cancer, in 2007, at age forty-four. (Catriona Strang, Introduction, “‘Constellations and Contingent Networks’: Nancy Shaw’s Structures of Possibility”)

               

One of the first elements that strikes around Nancy Shaw’s posthumous collection The Gorge: Selected Writing of Nancy Shaw, edited  by Catriona Strang (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2017) is the short sentence etched at the bottom of the back cover: “The Gorge: Selected Writing of Nancy Shaw resumes the affordable and carefully curated Selected Writing series Talonbooks began in the 1980s.” If you aren’t familiar with the series, the first seven titles (a Gerry Gilbert selected was suggested, but declined by the author) were released during 1980-82 as small paperbacks, aimed to capture university and college course-lists, and included: bpNichol, As Elected; Frank Davey, The Arches; bill bissett, Beyond Even Faithful Legends; Fred Wah, Loki Is Buried at Smoky Creek; Phyllis Webb, The Vision Tree; George Bowering, Particular Accidents; and Daphne Marlatt, Net Work. Each volume opened with a critical essay on the individual author’s work, and the series can easily be seen as a precursor to the ‘critical selected poems’ series by Wilfrid Laurier University Press, through their Laurier Poetry series, or The Porcupine’s Quill, Inc.’s The Essential Poets Series. While Talon might have produced multiple volumes of ‘selected poems,’ and even collected poems, over the years (by poets including Barry McKinnon, Artie Gold, Sharon Thesen and Roy K. Kiyooka, with more recent Fred Wah, Phyllis Webb and Daphne Marlatt volumes), their return to, as they say, “affordable volumes,” is an intriguing shift to that original goal of getting as many copies into readers’ hands as possible, including as potential classroom texts.

GENERIC DEFICIT

(1999)

hidden bust somatic lay torn

grvitous honey pun so

posi vandal for the eviction

hypotactic come bleek out convivial herd

overloard gag tad des deux gaggle

as if to offer truth when

over-exquisite with a shameful bargain

canonical hunter circa post price

serial generic pit minority

gloat and glory truesome funeral fantasy

perp the meritorious decorum (“TWO VERSIONS OF SIX POEMS”)

As her friend, editor and frequent collaborator Catriona Strang writes in her incredible introduction, Vancouver poet, scholar, curator and art critic NancyShaw (1962-2007) was an important part of the informal group of poets around The Kootenay School of Writing for a number of years, and collaborated with a wide group of writers, artists and curators over the length of her creative life, including, as Strang writes: “[Stan] Denniston, but also Gerald Creede, Jeff Derksen, Eponymous Productions and Management, Monika Kin Gagnon, François Houle, Jacqueline Leggatt, Eric Metcalfe, Lisa Robertson, me, and Mina Totino (the results of several of these collaborations are included in this collection).” Reinforcing just how important Shaw’s connections to others were, in both her life and her art, Strang continues:

Collaboration is at once a shared labour, an acknowledgment of community, of the fruitful conversations, side-tracks, and pleasures we share with friends and colleagues, and a lapsing or slipping away from the seemingly omnipresent notion of a single, distinct creator. Thriving as it does on co-operation and discussion, collaboration can be messy, challenging, and difficult. It can also be a sustained and sustaining act of love, friendship, and support, a sharing of the weight of creative labour, and indeed of living. It acknowledges the relationships often overlooked when works are attributed to single creators, giving credit to the contributions of our children, our friends, our neighbours, our lovers, not to mention the media we consume, the conversations we overhear, and the detritus of daily life, so that the distinction between a creator/producer and her surrounding community becomes blurred or even unimportant. The collaborative text becomes a terrain of relations and possibilities, “constellations and contingent networks” (“Idea File,” 34); at the same time it is a method of inquiry – “we want to unravel the conditions of our engagement” (Light Sweet Crude, 111) – producing works that, as Christine Stewart puts it, “investigate how we come to know and be and mean” (Stewart 2000).

This current collection selects from a range of Shaw’s published works, including Affordable Tedium (Vancouver BC: Tsunami Editions, 1987), Busted (with Catriona Strang) (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2001), Light Sweet Crude (with Catriona Strang) (Vancouver BC: Line Boks, 2007) and Scoptocatic (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 1992), as well as a variety of pieces pulled from catalogues, journals and anthologies, and even an array of previously unpublished works, including “ARCADES LETTER” (below). Part of what becomes immediately clear about going through the work in this volume is how fresh the pieces remain, presenting both a critical eye and a lively sense of language, meaning and sound, still able to remind one just what might be possible in writing. Even for those of us who might already have copies of all her trade collections, such a selected, especially with previously unpublished and uncollected works included, allows for such a wonderful opportunity to revisit the work of an author one might not have looked through in some time; and, too, to mourn such a significant loss.

ARCADES LETTER

(2004)

January 22, 2004

Dear Catriona,

“The state of grief is (not) a democracy.” Committee of memory. This resolution. That resuscitation. Some officials wondered at the refusal to let go. I freely admitted that we didn’t get away with what we wanted. Quite simply a custodian of resources. In denying the rumour, he refused to say what it was about. They cruise through the geography of war. Most said they wished for a burial site that was local. “We understand that you have different needs and obligations but we have no knowledge of how to mourn your loved ones. We hope for an agreement, but we don’t have a position.” Punctually cringed. Constantly tugged. Takes epic command by capitulating, adding confessions, metaphors, and distortions. Aimed to demonstrate the emotional pull.

To transform aggressive energies into states of industrial alchemy involves weather, musical structure, and improvisation. This goal was reflected in her posthumous memoir. It isn’t just that they cultivated accents and customs of speaking in full, grammatically correct sentences patched with droll tributes. From the very first bar, it was a parenthetically broken fantasy. In an opal fog, he travelled with one of his few salvaged possessions. It was a copy of a rare letter. He sold it and opened a tiny shop. They wear pumpkin-orange and pale-green profiles with watches that follow the seasons. In an off-axis aural crease, we pulled at her collar. The gesture suggested prim – alluring and disposable. She avoided discrepancy. Her gamboling angel took heed with every step and pose this was suited to the astounding repertory. Often this angle would lie on the floor, long and uneven.

A piper of unspecified dignity eschewed access to security. Yet to detect. Yanked. Is deceptively less classical, in a smaller square of light. The data shrunk in comparison, nuzzling, rotating in exquisite patterns. Retribution and lust collide. The tenor of a once-stable custom.

Catriona Strang, Corked

PROLOGUE

Just a Little Bit of Bad News

Lax makes a deft pass

forward – devoured or

devouring – (no animals

were harmed) apparently it all stands

for “how far back can

these traces be?”

            (none but me)

Once again, I show no

fortitude. Shall we now

origin-up a brilliant intake

extrovert – Nothing

                  is

                  happening

Oh, this way to no

where, circuitously

revealed: henceforth I am

my own

personal exit

Vancouver poet Catriona Strang’s fourth trade poetry collection is Corked (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2014), following her solo trade collection Low Fancy (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 1993) and two collaborations with the late Nancy Shaw: Busted (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2001)and Light Sweet Crude (Vancouver BC: LINEbooks, 2008). The poems in Corked are built on politics and domestic patter, articulating both a language of personal spaces as well as a wider engagement with the surrounding world. In the title section, she writes: “Deposits have been made, and faults / are probable, which constitutes only a fraction of the weight / women carry daily.” What appeals about her engagements is in how inclusive her perspective, soaring across boundaries, purpose and reference in condensed, even staccato, spaces. “Perhaps our moments are / as much as we can hope for, little hopeful portals. In which / case, what shall we constitute?” Her language is a sing-song cadence that propels, bangs and pings about, as she writes to end the fourth part of the first section/sequence, “Unsettling”: “Hatsies ditch stick / odour has much berucked / Dance much? I knock unseined // Nun’s wiles out-magazine / – I get my drift – / what I suck, I happily fund / way-simmer’s my scene[.]”

Dear Proust,

You’ve been dawning on me. Gradually, by the charm of all your explanations, our lives have come to be constituted through art, though not without strain. We have made several realities, far beyond the reach of terrible conservative eyes, which grow greater, or are illuminated. Consequence really lives thus, I mean all the time.

The book is constructed in two sections, the introductory sequence “Unsettling” (that includes prologue and twenty numbered sections) and the extended title section which takes up the bulk of the collection, constructed out of a collage of fragments, prose poems and short lyrics. “Corked,” dedicated to Marcel Proust, is a mix of short pieces and letters-as-chorus addressed to Proust himself, writing through and around Proust, composing a series of bouncing-off point towards further considerations. By engaging Proust, Strang speaks of contemporary through an historical lens. As she writes: “Of course we are for sale. It’s an / imperfect reconstruction of the past, okay? Imagine a little / outstanding detail, in image or language formed.”

The Capilano Review 3.22 / Winter 2014

TB: How Should a Person Be? is very much a novel that deals with the idea of contemporaneity, making visible your present place in the world. We can look at the question, How should a person be? in relation to a number of themes in the book: sex, being a young woman, an artist, a moral person, but the idea of being contemporary seems to encompass all of that. The two themes I picked up early on in your prologue are themes of ugliness and of fame. And again, that made me think of Stein who said contemporary art always looks ugly at first and then it becomes beautiful over time. So could you speak about that preoccupation with ugly art in relation to being contemporary?

SH: I thought a lot about that quote. I thought it was Picasso but maybe they both said it in different ways. I know that Picasso said an original work of art is always ugly at first to its creator. So I guess they were both thinking a lot about that, and I was thinking a lot about that when I wrote this book: how you have to sometimes break down your ideas of what beauty is in order to have some air flowing through your process. If you’re just trying to make something beautiful, which we all are—beauty is compelling—you’re going to go towards a certain shape, let’s say, or towards a certain narrative structure. You’re trying to do something well. But the only way you can do something well, I think, is if at first you have some model in your mind of what the good is. To do something that doesn’t move towards this picture that you have in your head of what you want the work to be, that’s a very difficult thing to do. And you kind of have to trick yourself, and be vigilant. I mean all editing is always in the direction of greater clarity, towards communicating in a more precise way that’s related to beauty. To try to edit, not in the direction of beauty is really hard. But all of that felt really necessary for me because, I mean it seems crazy to say that this is true of somebody so young, but I felt that I’d reached a dead end. When I was working on Ticknor I was really trying to make something absolutely perfect and I knew that I couldn’t do that again. I felt it would be dead if I tried to do that again. In truth, How Should a Person Be? isn’t the book of mine that I like the most. I prefer Ticknor or even The Middle Stories. How Should a Person Be? is very much against my innate aesthetic. It makes me uncomfortable to have put out something that isn’t, in my mind, beautiful or perfect, even though this book has had the biggest response. So I think there is something to be said for making yourself uncomfortable, and for questioning your instinct to please some internalized aesthetic criteria. Maybe there’s something lifeless about that, on some level.

One of the most compelling interviews I’ve read in some time has to be Thea Bowering’s interview with Toronto writer Sheila Heti, “’a portrait of thinking’: Sheila Heti and Thea Bowering on the phone,” in the new issue of The Capilano Review (3.22 / Winter 2014) (an excerpt of which exists on their website). What fascinates about Heti’s work generally is a sense of innate curiosity, one so wide that one never entirely knows just what she might end up producing next, and her books (I reviewed her third title, here) end up showcasing a curiosity as well as an incredible fearlessness—moving in directions that might not immediately make sense, or read like anything previous she might have produced.

4

It breaks

in your hands/ the long break comes cleanly/ splays itself/ before you

some same sake is/ no name at all – the warm up gropes for it/ says

nothing – therein lies the voice/ of things the itch that turning/ softly

sounded page (Mark Goldstein, “Poems for Alice from Medium Point Blues”)

Of course, the issue also includes a whole slew of poetry, fiction, critical work and visual art, including pieces by Mark Goldstein, Lisa Robertson, Lyndl Hall, Cecilia Corrigan, Adam Frank, Deborah Koenker, Paul Nelson and Dorothy Chang, as well as a short story by Sheila Heti, from her collection, The Middle Stories. The issue also includes a tribute to the late Vancouver poet Nancy Shaw, “Reading/Writing for Nancy Shaw,” as friend, Shaw-collaborator and poet Catriona Strang writes:

The late Nancy Shaw, poet, curator, art critic and scholar, was an integral member of the vibrant and influential Vancouver poetry and art scenes of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Her books include Affordable Tedium, Scoptocratic, Busted, and Light Sweet Crude. She also wrote bracingly on art, dance, and popular culture, and undertook fruitful collaborations with musicians, composers, dancers, and other poets. Her death from cancer in 2007 was a great loss to the Canadian art community; she is still much missed.

            The Vancouver New Music Society’s October 2013 re-mounting of composer Jacqueline Leggatt “Cold Trip,” originally written in 2007 and dedicated to Nancy, was the catalyst for the “Reading for Nancy Shaw,” which took place at The Apartment Gallery in Vancouver on October 20, 2013. Louis Cabri, Amy De’Ath, Jeff Derksen, Christine Stewart, and Catriona Strang read selections from Nancy’s writing and their own, as well as pieces written for her and in response to her work. Amy’s and Louis’ pieces are published here. All the readings were interspersed with Jacqueline Leggatt’s audio recordings of Nancy reading her own work—a rare chance to hear Nancy’s voice again.

From her own response to Light Sweet Crude, the second section of Amy De’Ath’s “Security Cloak” reads:

A kaleidoscope is a prudent safety hazard

As much as I as much as I can get.

I have pissed, and what I’ve become is tendered.

Effectively constructed myself.

On a period, blazing ruins.

            Nothing extraordinary

            Nothing empirically justified

            Still the affect-bleached, impossible co-star-

I resign from my shelter

absolutely sovereign

very much civil and betrayed I

never saw I never saw it coming.

Otherwise, Toronto writer, designer and publisher Mark Goldstein includes a powerful short essay on the dissolution of book-as-object through digitalization, and the true realization of just what is being lost, as he discusses the gift economy of the chapbook, the Toronto Antiquarian Book Fair and the works of the late Glenn Goluska. Set at the end of the issue in the “see to see—“ section, with works by Clint Burnham, Sonnet L’Abbé, Oana Avasilichioaei, Rebecca Brewer & Tiziana La Melia and Julian Weideman, the opening piece by Tracy Stefanucci, “Making space for artist publishing,” provides a context for the small grouping of essays, writing about Vancouver’s Project Space: “Situated at an intersection of disciplines—namely the visual arts, literary arts and/or graphic design—publication presents a unique space of inquiry that is often complemented by interdisciplinary practice, collaboration, or co-production. With an interest in this particular context, Project Space explores publication as an artistic medium.” There is something magnificent about how this issue brings together a myriad of ideas, disciplines and approaches, all of which provide their own challenges. The best thing any reader (and writer) needs to keep asking themselves: how do we approach text (and writing), and what might we be missing? From the interview with Heti to the essays included at the very end. Goldstein’s piece includes:

            Goluska was a designer and typographer of the highest order (he died in 2011), and in his hands A Change-ringing of the Mind became the perfect marriage of text and texture. The translation is sublime, with Goluska’s artistry and total vision apparent throughout. A work such as this could not survive the digital realm—the pleasure of the letterforms, their special arrangements on the page, the touch of the papers themselves, the subtle echoing of word-stuff would be lost in such transference. A Change-ringing of the Mind best exemplifies the necessity of the small press, one where the difficulty of creation and dissemination is met with vitality.

            Unfortunately, both the work’s beauty and scarcity has pushed it into the rarified air of the antiquarian bookseller. This divide between reader and collector keeps works such as these in private libraries, out of reach of those laboring writers who need them most. It is obvious that A Change-ringing of the Mind was meant to be read and yet, with a $100.00 asking price (a bargain compared to other items at the fair), it is beyond reach

            Yes, a digital version would provide the content of the work but the total power of the book would be lost. The bitter irony here is that Goluska’s superb translation has now been rendered mute.

Stephen Collis, To the Barricades

The first principle of The Barricades Project, to which To the Barricades belongs, is taken from Robert Duncan: “We begin to see that the intention of the boundless is manifest in the agony and restoration of pages or boundaries or walls” (“The Delirium of Meaning”).

A second principle can be found in Walter Benjamin: “This work has to develop to the highest degree the art of citing without quotation marks. Its theory is intimately related to that of montage” (The Arcades Project).

If there is a third principle, it may be contained in the following passage from Rancière:

Suitable political art would ensure, at one and the same time, the production of a double effect: the readability of a political signification and a sensible or perceptual shock caused, conversely, by the uncanny, by that which resists signification between opposites, between the readability of the message that threatens to destroy the sensible form of art and the radical uncanniness that threatens to destroy all political meaning.

(The Politics of Aesthetics)

To push through boundaries towards the boundless (which is tangled there) – to mix appropriation of found material with lyric expression to the point that the one becomes indistinguishable from the other – to practice a dialectic of “readable” political signification and uncanny shock – these are the pathways of this poetry. A lyric voice takes up procedures and citations because they are the world in which it finds itself embodied, a co-embodiment of the address “Dear Common” that someone calls out to anyone else there. “Lyric,” writes Thom Donovan, “relates the body of the poet to a poetics of collective affects” (“Lyric’s Potential,” Jacket2). So we try here, in a lyric space in which we must continue building resistance.

This volume is part of an ongoing long poem project that always seeks “plausible deniability” that it is in fact a long poem project. Everything I write is thus part of some inaccessible and inconceivable totality outside the work itself. Part of its fight is thus with itself, and with “culture” as such. The barricade made of language is both boundary and call for “beyondery” – an outside still to be practiced. But there’s that other boundary looming everywhere here too: how and when do we cross over from word to world, from text to action? Does the poem barricade us from a world of “doing things,” postponing action? Does it wall us up in the “merely cultural”? These poems, increasingly, have been written between actions in the streets. They hover there – a boundless boundary around the bound. The gaps and spaces between poems and pages and books are inhabited by “activism,” by a body amongst bodies in streets. Dear Common. Let’s speak our way into action, into each other’s arms, into new shared futures, into new speeches at new barricades thrown.

If this is “documentary poetry” – and it is certainly as much researched as it is lived – it is a documentary of social affects, past and present, of collective expressions of desire, of hope, of outrage, of solidarity, of defiance, of the endless call from the commons for “liberty or death.” It is a documentary of the spirit of resistance and revolution. The address of the insurgent impulse, to all potential insurgents, to all tomorrow’s insurgent parties. (Stephen Collis, “Notes and Acknowledgements”)

It’s difficult to begin to discuss Vancouver poet and critic Stephen Collis’ poetry collection To the Barricades (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2013) without first quoting at length from his “Notes and Acknowledgements,” placing this collection in a context larger than itself. Collis is the author of a number of books, including two previous poetry collections which form the first two sections to his ongoing “Barricades Project” – Anarchive (New Star, 2005) and The Commons (Talonbooks, 2008). Over the space of five trade poetry collections, Collis’ work explores a series of short-phrased stretches of sentence-stanzas in an ongoing project writing Vancouver specifically, Canada generally and social issues throughout.  In his “12 or 20 questions” interview (posted September 7, 2007), he talked about his work-in-progresss, “The Barricades Project,” and the subsequent volume of such, to be titled “The Red Album,” which appears to have since shifted into fiction, given that The Red Album is the title of his forthcoming novel with BookThug. As he writes in the interview:

I always work on books or series of books. The book is the main unit I think in terms of—my unit of composition. At the same time I do write short, occasional lyrics, and I publish a few of these in journals, but whenever I’ve tried to group them as a possible book it’s been entirely unsatisfactory. I just don’t work that way. I have to have the concept for the book to work towards, to think through. Writing in general usually begins with the making of collages—word assemblages that come out of the research I’m doing for the book in question. These often don’t make it into the book, but at some point the playing around with my research stops, and something else takes over, as I find my way into the language I want to use—or be used by.

There has long been a history of politically-engaged poetry out of Vancouver, something that, in comparison, seems lacking in much of the rest of the country, and something that has been given far less critical attention than it deserves. What is it about Vancouver that makes so many of their writers, especially language writers surrounding the past couple of decades of the Kootenay School of Writing, so engaged? One can point to such socially and politically-engaged poets such as Aaron Vidaver, Roger Farr, Maxine Gadd, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Jeff Derksen, Marie Annharte Baker, Reg Johanson, Peter Culley, Nancy Shaw and nikki reimer, among others. To the Barricades is a book that works to document protest and other civil action, including the “Paris Commune” or “Fourth French Revolution,” a working class revolution that ran from March to May, 1871. The collection contains critical poems of self-protection, poems working to protect human interest and interaction, constructed out of ready-made material, quotes that speak of action, such as the Fredric Jameson quote that opens the poem “RELUMINATIONS 1”: “Barricades involve a kind of bricolage, a provisional cobbling together of whatever bits and pieces come usefully to hand … this may also serve as a perceptive account of the poetic techniques of a Rimbaud, indeed of the revolutionary avant-garde in general.” In the second part of the poem “La Commune [1871],” he writes:

Revolution

is the search for happiness

we know history

repeats itself

thanks

to all the dead anarchists!

I make you a chain of flowers

a grave of roses

now let’s not lack audacity

in dealing with the banks

even in a democracy

we aren’t free to demonstrate    freely

things kept germinating

long after the event

it’s time we stop being

represented and start     being

the commune echoes

we’re still at the same point

[Stephen Collis reads in Ottawa to launch To the Barricades alongside Margaret Christakos on April 20, 2013, as part of the A B Series]