Kanada Koncrete: Material Poetries in the Digital Age

Last weekend, I was fortunate enough to attend much of Kanada Koncrete: Material Poetries in the Digital Age, the Canadian Literature Symposium at the University of Ottawa for 2018, organized by Robert Stacey and Claire Farley. I’ve been to a number of the annual conferences at the University of Ottawa over the years, from the Long Poem Symposium back in 1996, to conferences on Modernism, Al Purdy, Postmodernism and Robert Kroetsch, but this was far and away the most vibrant and exciting conference I’ve attended (and I was able, in case you hadn’t seen, to produce some chapbooks specifically for the conference – Derek Beaulieu, Amanda Earl, Arnold McBay + Gregory Betts and Tim Atkins – as well as some very recent titles by other participants (who hadn’t actually mentioned “I’ll be in your city two weeks after you produce that”) – Dani Spinosa, Kate Siklosi and Sean Braune – so the whole conference, between them and a variety of others, felt awash with above/ground press authors (Porco! Barwin! Baker! Anstee! Schmaltz! Davey!).

There were some remarkable papers presented, from Tim Atkins’ paper exploring some of bill bissett’s early, pre-Vancouver influences, Cameron Anstee’s paper exploring some of his ongoing work on the late artist Barbara Caruso (specifically her presspresspress), Zane Koss on the poetry networks of Louis Dudek and Marshall McLuhan in the 1950s, Natalie Leduc’s paper on Rupi Kaur as poetry activist (she presented a great argument for such), Paul Barrett on Sandra Djwa’s digital work from 1970, and Michael Nardone exploring the differences and constructs of digital archives vs. repositories, specifically UBU Web, PennSound and the Electronic Poetry Center.

What was impressive, as well, was the fact that there were so many performances, all of which (unfortunately) I managed to miss, due to overload (and the requirements of children), including an evening of some twenty-one poets performing (all of whom were also presenting papers at the conference), and sound poetry by Gary Barwin and Stuart Ross, and jwcurry’s sound poetry ensemble Quatuor Gualuor. It would be difficult to highlight every paper that struck me, as that really would be the bulk of what I saw, but some of what I did find quite amazing included: Jessica Bebenek’s work translating T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” into a knitting pattern, exploring the canon of the male genius through textiles; Amanda Earl and Eric Schmaltz’s artists talks, both of which focused on their own works, from Earl’s work-in-progress “The Vizpo Bible” to Schmaltz’s debut poetry collection, Depths of Surfaces (Invisible); and David Jhave Johnson’s “Aesthetic Animism: A Synthesis,” which moved at such a rate and depth of knowledge and information that it left all in the room reeling. While I did miss a handful of papers, including Johanna Drucker’s talk on Saturday afternoon, the Closing Plenaries on Sunday by Gregory Betts and Derek Beaulieu were spectacular, with Betts exploring the origins of Canadian concrete and visual poetry emerging almost entirely and organically from visual art and an interest in the multi-discipinary (and almost completely unaware of international movements concurrently happening worldwide), while Beaulieu went through a series of contemporary female practisioners currently exploring new realms of concrete and visual works, including Helen Hajnoczky and Erica Baum.

And of course, jwcurry brought some prints of concrete/visual poems to display around the space, including works by P. Cob, Daniel f. Bradley, Judith Copithorne and Michael e. Casteels, such as a piece printed directly onto a cinder block.

All in all, stellar. I’m just disappointed that they couldn’t get funding for this conference. How the hell does such a conference not get funding? A book needs to happen from this conference. There was too much going on that requires recording, reading and further discussion.

I’m abuzz after so much activity, myself.

Call for submissions: Irving Layton Reloaded

LAYTON RELOADED

In conjunction with “Whatever Else": An Irving Layton Symposium, to be held at the University of Ottawa May 3-5, 2013, and in recognition of the centenary of Layton’s birth, we invite writers to respond—whether by way of homage, parody, retort, homolinguistic translation, or any other dialectical form (glossa, travesty, echo poem, etc.)—to a Layton poem of their choice. Our favorites will be published on the symposium website (www.canlit-symposium.ca), and we are exploring the possibility of other forms of publication as well. Please send your response, along with the title of the original poem, to Robert Stacey at rstacey@uottawa.ca or Cameron Anstee at cameron.anstee@gmail.com under the subject heading “Layton Reloaded.”

Deadline: April 1, 2013.

call for proposals: “Whatever Else”: An Irving Layton Symposium

“Whatever Else”: An Irving Layton Symposium
The University of Ottawa
May 3-5, 2013

In recognition of the centenary of his birth, the University of Ottawa’s English Department invites paper proposals on any aspect of the work and life of Irving Layton. Once a towering figure in Canadian culture, Layton and his legacy—literary, political, personal—have suffered a generation of critical neglect. It is the aim of this symposium to address what has become an embarrassing lacunae in contemporary Canadian literary scholarship. We are especially interested in new and alternative approaches to Layton’s work. Email 250 word abstract to Robert Stacey at rstacey@uottawa by Nov. 12th.

RE: READING THE POSTMODERNISM, ed. Robert David Stacey

Following the postmodern conference held in May, 2008 [see my note on the conference itself here] at the University of Ottawa, finally comes RE: READING THE POSTMODERNISM: Canadian Literature and Criticism after Modernism, ed. Robert David Stacey (Ottawa ON: University of Ottawa Press, 2010), a collection of some of the pieces presented, including pieces by Robert Kroetsch, Frank Davey, Linda Hutcheson, Christian Bök, Stephen Cain, Alexander MacLeod, Gregory Betts, Herb Wylie, Jennifer Blair, Jason Wiens, Pauline Butling and Susan Rudy. As editor Stacey writes in the introduction:

When I first encountered the term as an undergraduate at McGill University in the late 1980s, talk of postmodernism was everywhere. For me at that time the postmodern seemed virtually the property of Linda Hutcheon, whose books—The Poetics of Postmodernism (1988), The Politics of Postmodernism (1989), and The Canadian Postmodern (1988)—I eagerly took up as indispensable supplements to my course readings. It was through Hutcheon’s texts that I and many of my peers were first exposed to theorists such as Roland Barthes, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, and Jacques Derrida, whose writings, different and sometimes incompatible as they are, nevertheless characterize the so-called linguistic turn in the humanities with which the postmodern, as aesthetic, is broadly aligned. These thinkers and their associated literary and philosophical concepts are among the most cited in the present collection as well. That this is so suggests that their ideas remain relevant to an understanding of the postmodern, even when the effort has been made, as it has here, to broaden and complicate that understanding beyond the dominant Canadian view.

At nearly four hundred pages, I can understand why not every piece gets invited to participate in the post-conference collection, but I have to admit to being disappointed to not be able to further engage with a piece by Toronto poet and critic Andy Weaver. Still, the collection furnishes rare essays on selected works by Lynn Crosbie and the late Daniel Jones in Stephen Cain’s “Feeling Ugly: Daniel Jones, Lynn Crosbie, and Canadian Postmodernism’s Second Wave,” and bill bissett, the late bpNichol, Steve McCaffery and Judith Copithorne in St. Catharine’s, Ontario poet and critic Gregory Betts’ “Postmodern Decadence in Canadian Sound and Visual Poetry,” two essays which, by themselves, notwithstanding a single other piece, are more than worth the entire collection. As Betts writes:

In fact, as Johanna Drucker points out, Canadian sound and visual poetry was distinct from other concurrent manifestations precisely because of its self-conscious use of theoretical and philosophical implications within its radical aesthetics (128-129). Experimental poets such as Nichol, McCaffery, Judith Copithorne, and bissett, and sound poetry groups like The Four Horsemen, Owen Sound, and Re: Sounding, used their creative work as the embodiment and manifestation of radical manifestos for emerging postmodern tropes like deconstruction and poststructuralism. Their art, as Habermas predicted, was indeed a decadent explosion of the barbaric yawp, the wild grunt, and primitive howl—proprioceptive intensities amplified by an anarchistic transhistoricism. As Nichol wrote, “i break letters for you like bread […] this is the divine experience. that i have found my words useless to reach you” (Gifts n.p.). Though language is said to fail in this passage, its sacrifice is a devotional offering to Nichol’s invented neologistic gods. As such, it releases an unexpressed, elusive spiritual fulfillment: an imaginary order emerging through disorder. Postmodernism in Canada begins with this kind of pale utopian fire, with this kind of playful, self-conscious irony. The spirit of decadere, of falling away from established norms of language-use without falling toward anything—a systematic derangement of the senses—represents an embrace of the end of order, the end of stability. In lines such as these, Nichol remains optimistic about the experience of instability, of being beyond or outside of language and the language game.

This collection also reminds me that I’ve seen a number of interesting and compelling critical pieces by Toronto writer and critic Stephen Cain that seem both academic and incredibly readable, exploring corners that so often otherwise would have gone unnoticed, including a magnificent piece on the Toronto geographies of bpNichol’s The Martyrology Book V (1982). I wonder, might Cain compile his essays into a collection at some point? Cain’s piece in the conference, and thus in this anthology, focus on Lynn Crosbie’s incredible novel Paul’s Case (1997) and Daniel Jones’ Obsessions (1992), writing of “These two novels, written by two friends living mere blocks from each other on College Street in downtown Toronto at the time, both illustrate the formal style and ideology of this new postmodernism, as well as share a similar affective expression (primarily that of paranoia and irritation) and, throughout, articulate a lack of social and political agency.” An explanation of much of the nihilism Cain talks about from this period could so easily be summed up in a quote he brings in by R.M. Vaughan, from an interview with him published in the anthology The Notebooks: Interviews and New Fiction from Contemporary Writers (eds. Michelle Berry and Natalee Caple, Toronto ON: Anchor, 2002):

When [Michael Ondaatje] got the Governor General’s Award for Anil’s Ghost he made a speech about how important it was for him in the 1970s to get the Governor General’s Award for Billy the Kid. He said that getting that award when he was in his twenties gave him validation, gave him access to a bigger audience, and gave him all that stuff that we all need at certain periods in our career. And I thought, well, good for you for putting this in context and giving people a sense of the importance of these sorts of things.

Then my second thought was, all the people I know who are currently writing the equivalent of the experimental book that you wrote in the seventies will never never never get near the Governor General’s Awards, or the Gillers, or the Griffin. It’s like that generation, with a few exceptions, got in and then slammed the gates shut. Of course, that’s the history of the boomers in all fields, that’s their economic survival strategy.

Still, why do we care about postmodernism? It’s already over, I’ve heard some suggest: why bother? But I’m far more interested in Stacey’s mention in his introduction that offers the same idea, footnoting that “A notable exception is Christian Bök who forcefully argues in “Getting Ready to have been Postmodern” that, at least in terms of literary criticism, genuine postmodernism has yet to begin in earnest here, having been aggressively suppressed within the dominant critical discourse of Canadian literature.” This, in my mind, is a far more compelling direction to move further of our writing and criticism in. Targeting Hutcheon, specifically her book The Canadian Postmodern, in a scathing defense of the postmodern, Bök writes in his essay:

While Hutcheon might argue that postmodern literature is “ex-centric,” insofar as it occupies a marginal position at the periphery of our culture, she nevertheless exacerbates the marginality of such literature by failing to discuss anti-classic, anti-mimetic fiction on the grounds that it has only a minor status among the major voices in Canada—and consequently, she forfeits the appropriate opportunity to study the work of avant-garde writers who have gone largely ignored in canonical narratives about our literary heritage. Even though a handful of critics have balked at these rhetorical manoeuvres, her book has nevertheless sanctioned exuberance among far too many scholars who now have permission to read, as postmodern, any realistic narrative that demonstrates even the merest degree of narrative aberrancy. Such scholars have adopted the catchy jargon of the “pomo,” but they have continued to evade any sustained encounter with the most obdurate examples of postmodern innovation, thereby ignoring the rare cases of a more experimental genre in order to depict as progressive the many cases of a more conservative genre.

Open Letter 14.3: Kootenay School of Writing

Long overdue, this special issue on the Kootenay School of Writing naturally begins with the old joke and the ongoing problem of situating the now 25-year-old group: they are not based in the Kootenays, they are not a school, and the work they produce disrupts and defamiliarizes recognized kinds of writing. Where and what is the KSW, then, geographically, institutionally, and in relation to literary history and criticism? Working through the name of Canada’s longest-running avant-garde collective provides a few startling points for coming to terms with the kind of paradoxes and problems that have shaped KSW’s poetics, politics, and history.

And so begins the introduction to Open Letter, Fourteenth Series, Number 3, summer 2010 focusing on Vancouver’s Kootenay School of Writing, guest-edited by Gregory Betts and Robert David Stacey. The issue exists as a follow-up, if you will, to the work started in Michael Barnholden and Andrew Klobucar’s anthology Writing Class: The Kootenay School of Writing Anthology (Vancouver BC: New Star, 1999), built as an attempt at a necessary and long-overdue overview of a collective that, often and even deliberately, has defied simple description. If you don’t know anything about the Kootenay School of Writing, the loose-collective of members over the years have included Lisa Robertson, Catriona Strang, Jeff Derksen, Donato Mancini, Michael Barnholden, Kevin Davies, Dan Farrell, Gerald Creede, Peter Culley, Deanna Ferguson, Christine Stewart, Dennis Denisoff, Meredith Quartermain, Colin Browne, Fred Wah, Susan Clark, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Nikki Reimer, Pauline Butling, Stephen Collis, Colin Smith and so many others, with the collective organizing readings, lectures and even a few conferences. Editors Betts and Stacey have compiled a series of essays focusing on members including Robertson, Strang and Derksen, as well as pieces on the history of the collective, and a collaborative piece on the current floating membership as well, including Mancini, Butling, Collis, Barnholden and Reimer, exploring the poetries and multiple histories of a disparate non-group group. Part of the strength of the Kootenay School of Writing, arguably a continuation of some of the aesthetic conversations previously held in Vancouver through the 60’s infamous newsletter TISH, has been the apparent contradictions of its ongoing engagements with the immediate local, and the international avant-gardes of, predominantly, the United States and England, as well as an engagement with social politics, as through the works of Derksen, Culley, Barnholden or Collis. As Clint Burnham writes in his “Empty and Full Speech: A Lacanian Reading of the Kootenay School,” citing a list of “sites of production for Kathryn MacLeod’s work”:

This list spans 13 years and includes magazines that were essentially photocopied typescript, saddle-stitched or stapled at the corner (JAG, early Writing, Motel); those with more polished offset printing in book form (Raddle Moon, The Capilano Review, later Writing), two key Vancouver anthologies (East of Main, Writing Class) and a stand-alone book (mouthpiece). All of these sites were local. Or, more accurately, they were regional. JAG billed itself as a magazine for DTUC émigrés (David Thompson University Centre was the Nelson, B.C. liberal arts college shut down by the provincial government in 1984, as part of the cost-cutting measures that led, on the one hand, to the Solidarity movement of social protest and, on the other hand, to DTUC students and faculty relocating to Vancouver and starting the KSW). Raddle Moon itself had moved over from Vancouver Island to Vancouver (Raddle Moon had its origins as the Uvic student writing magazine From an Island [1978-1981]; the mailing address for Raddle Moon shifted from Sydney, B.C. to Vancouver). Writing, long the house magazine for the KSW, was at first published out of Nelson at DTUC (Writing was saddlestiched for its first 22 issues; it was then perfect bound until the end of its run in 1991). The Capilano Review has been, and continues to be, based at Capilano College (now University) in North Vancouver. East of Main situated itself resolutely, and perhaps controversially, in the eastern half of Vancouver. MacLeod’s work also appeared in American magazines that were, as it were, fellow-travellers of KSW or post-Language poetry: Big Allis (New York), How(ever) (San Francisco), Avec (California), and chain (Buffalo).

This issue reads as an important opening salvo for what should really be so much more, so much further ground to cover; why not pieces on Lusk, Smith, Stewart, Ferguson or Clark, for example? Will someone take the ball these two have started and continue, run with it even further? I would certainly hope so.

One thing that encourages though is that somehow KSW always manages to stay KSW. Joining KSW – even simply collaborating with KSW from the outside (W2) – has always been a process of learning KSW. It takes time – no one sits you down and says “KSW is this and not that: like it or lump it.” But its outlines come into view as you work within it and I’d say this really boils down to its being about collectivity (:Ohhhh…you really mean it isn’t about ME?”). As we’ve all been saying, collectivity is always a struggle – especially under current conditions – but we continue to struggle with it (otherwise we would do something other than KSW). (Stephen Collis, “By the Collective, For the Collective, On the Collective”)

call for submissions: Writing KOOT

Open Letter is seeking critical, literary-historical, and creative submissions for a special issue dedicated to the Kootenay School of Writing.

“Writing KOOT” will be guest edited by Gregory Betts and Robert Stacey.

Since its founding in 1984, the Kootenay School of Writing has pursued an ambitious program of radical politics and poetical experimentation, making it one of the most significant avant-garde movements in the history of Canadian literature. Even so, critical response to the movement has been slight and, generally speaking, insular. With hope of redressing this situation, Open Letter seeks submissions from a wide range of scholars regarding the history and practice of KSW, its writers, group affiliations, and associated publications. KSW has been described as a “centre of avant-garde writing in Canada”—yet one that that seemingly rejects avant-gardism, along with centrism, aesthetic purity, and the values and assumptions underpinning the neoliberal nation-state. The special issue will address and reflect the various complexities and paradoxes that make KSW such a rich field of enquiry.

Possible Topics could include (but are not limited to):

- KSW in relation to avant-garde aesthetics/movements
- KSW and work
- KSW and postmodern media
- KSW in relation to radical politics
- KSW socio-political histories
- Internal/external tensions
- spaces and places of KSW
- Individual author studies

Completed papers are due no later than 1 November 2009. Please send copies to either Gregory Betts or Robert Stacey. For more information, please feel free to contact the above (full contact information below).--

Gregory Betts
Assistant Professor
English Language & Literature
Brock University
500 Glenridge Avenue
St. Catharines ON L2S 3A1
(905) 688.5550 x 5318

Robert David Stacey
Assistant Professor
Department of English
University of Ottawa
352 Arts Building
70 Laurier Ave. East
Ottawa, ON K1N 6N5

Re: Reading the Postmodern; The Canadian Literature Symposium, May 9-11, 2008, University of Ottawa

Over this past weekend I was in Ottawa at the Re: Reading the Postmodern Conference at the University of Ottawa, organized by Professor Robert Stacey. How does one continue to talk about postmodernism, especially Canadian postmodernism? The conference included a heavyweight list of names including Fred Wah, Robert Kroetsch, Pauline Butling and Susan Rudy, Andy Weaver, Christian Bök, Gregory Betts, Stephen Cain, Christine Stewart, Jason Wiens, Dennis Cooley, Lindy Ledohowski (who has just moved to Ottawa for a 2 year post-doc at U of O), Louis Cabri, Karis Shearer and Russell Morton Brown. How do we continue to talk about postmodernism, and whatever it is that might come after? What even is it we should call what might come after, or perhaps already has? A number of the papers walked around it, talked around it, talked all the way through it, and even directly responded to the question around such; how do we still talk about a thing that isn’t the same as what it was twenty years ago?

A number of ideas and suggestions were brought forth, including "digital native," "outpost literature," "neo-postmodernism," that "fractals are the dna of form," and the idea of "imagining the better story," as well as the fact that publishing in Canada is far more corporate than it was twenty years ago, so how does the experimental writing in this country have any chance at all? Still, there was simply too much to take in and have already processed by this early a time; here are some notes on at least a few of the papers:

Thursday, May 8; The Mercury Lounge

The first night was a reading of Ottawa poets at The Mercury Lounge organized by Max Middle, with readings by many of the usual suspects, including myself, Pearl Pirie, Sandra Ridley, Amanda Earl, Marcus McCann, Roland Prevost, Monty Reid, Gregory Betts (the one non-local on the list) and jwcurry. There are a couple of people who have suggested that the readings, whether this one or the one on the Saturday night (Monty's strange and rambling pre-amble that became his whole performance was a particular Friday night high...), were the best parts of the conference, and I think I agree. There's something wonderful about having a whole slew of quality readers and writers come into the city and be able to hear what the locals have been up to over the past few years. Check out bywords or ottawater if you want to know more about what these and others have been doing in Ottawa.

Friday, May 9; the conference, & the Avant-Garde Bar

I have to say, I was very taken by American MA student Erica Fischer from the University of West Florida; she had the "fortunate" luck of being the very first speaker at the conference, talking on "The Fallacy of Canadian Postmodernism: The Absence of National identity in the Works of Douglas Coupland" which was very interesting. How can you not love a paper on a Canadian (so called, for the accident of birth, I suppose) writer by an American critic? How can you not love a paper by someone so obviously taken by Coupland and his work? (She referred to him at one point as "Mr. Coupland.") And no matter how well someone might do, there is always that extra something, I think, for whoever it is who has to go first. One of my favourite papers of the conference had to be by Calgary's Jason Wiens, writing on George Bowering's A Short Sad Book (1977), which even managed to be referenced a couple of times over the weekend, despite the fact, as Wiens discussed, the book was almost completely ignored when it came out, and almost completely since. There's no way you can do such a work justice without being smart, wickedly clever and even outright funny, and Wiens managed to do all of that, as well as be one of the few who actually kept to the limits of the twenty minute time-frame. I know that Talonbooks, the original publisher of the novel, is reissuing Bowering's Kerrisdale Elegies (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 1986) this fall; is it worth reissuing this book as well?

Given that many of the papers were dealing with Linda Hutcheon's work The Canadian Postmodern (1989), which even Russell Morton Brown later argued in a question-and-answer session wasn’t originally meant to be a be-all, end-all study but was instead a collection of disparate pieces collected into a single body, it was entirely appropriate that she came through to give the keynote address on Friday. Her talk "The Glories of Hindsight" included conversation about how there were certain things, as she wrote in the 1980s, that simply didn’t exist that are now essential to the postmodern lexicon and consideration, including interactive video games, graphic novels and the internet. How, she argued, could she have known? Still, it was great that she mentioned Chester Brown's Louis Riel (2003) and even Maus and Maus II, but if you're going to talk about the mainstream "adult" graphic novel and it's beginning in North America, how can you not talk about Alan Moore's The Watchmen (1987) and still expect to be taken seriously?

During his reading/visual presentation, Fred Wah talked about how his new book of collaborations with visual artists, Sentenced to Light (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2008), is "a book that works off the sentence." I thought it interesting that, through two different collaborations in the same collection (including one I was able to watch him perform a few years back, when it was originally produced as part of the Powell Street Festival in Vancouver), Wah referenced Zocalo (1977), both as place (where one of the poems was written) and as the title of a Daphne Marlatt "travel narrative" he had recently become reacquainted with (Dennis Cooley had quite an interesting paper on same). How is it a text can stick in the mind? Sometimes, how can one not? One poem he read that wasn’t part of the collaboration was from his book Music at the Heart of Thinking (Red Deer AB: Red Deer College Press, 1987):

Music at the Heart of Thinking 6

SENTENCE THE TRUE MORPHOLOGY OR SHAPE OF THE mind including a complete thought forever little ridges little rhythms scoping out the total picture as a kind of automatic designing device or checklist anyone I've found in true thought goes for all solution to the end concatenates every component within the lines within the picture as a cry to represent going to it with the definite fascination of a game where the number of possibilities increases progressively with each additional bump Plato thought

Saturday, May 10; the conference, & The Atomic Rooster

How do I boil down an entire day of papers into a few short paragraphs? Christian Bök gave a paper that gave hell to various of those that came before him, including Linda Hutcheon, Frank Davey and Robert Kroetsch, arguing that Hutcheon's real failure in her text was talking about the fringe elements of a literature, and then refusing to talk about the best examples, the actual writers and writing that existed furthest on that fringe.

At the end of the conference, when Frank Davey complained that there wasn’t anyone, probably, who even thought of presenting papers on Steve McCaffery (he listed some others) at the conference, he managed to forget that Gregory Betts spoke for a while on McCaffery during his presentation of visual/concrete, including a neat little handout of bill bissett, bpNichol and Judith Copithorne works; is it worth having someone collect some kind of Judith Copithorne selected/collected in a trade volume? According to jwcurry later on, the only two people who have been publishing her work for years have been himself and Daniel f. Bradley. What about the rest of publishing?

Andy Weaver was another who gave one of the best papers of the entire weekend, talking about the sublime and Darren Wershler-Henry's the tapeworm foundry (Toronto ON: House of Anansi, 2000), and about how the only real poem is in the idea of what the piece could be, and the piece itself only the explanation of that original, nearly uncapturable, idea. And Christine Stewart, now at the University of Alberta, is simply brilliant; her piece was "Participatory Discrepancies: a Spinozist Reading of Catriona Strang's Low Fancy." You should see what she did in the recent anthology of Canadian Experimental Women's Writing published by Nate Dorward, or in the Lisa Robertson issue of The Chicago Review.

Susan Rudy and Pauline Butling, who were responsible for that recent book of interviews with Canadian poets, Poets Talk [see my review of such here], gave a collaborative keynote address on what/why postmodernism now. What I found interesting was that Butling was probably one of the only people to even reference such writers as Jeff Derksen, Lisa Robertson, Rita Wong (talking very much on the new book, Forage) and Erin Moure. Still, they both talked about how much better the conference could have been if Moure and/or Robertson had been there to participate in the conversation. Why weren’t either of them invited?

What does Finland have
that I don’t have?

Soft power over borders
absorb boredom, the future

had domes -- we offer you drones.

Nature
what have you done
for me?

-- Jeff Derksen, "The Vestiges (Or, Creative Destruction)" (39). West Coast Line
40.3 (2006): 32-40.

The reading that night was massive, magnificent and one of the finest I've been to in a long time, with performances by Christian Bök, Gregory Betts, Wanda Campbell, Dennis Cooley, Christine Stewart, Frank Davey, Louis Cabri, Robert Kroetsch and The Max Middle Sound Project. Where else does an author like Kroetsch, reading from The Snowbird Poems [see my note on such here] get not only one standing ovation but two? And these readings, by the by, were recorded, so there is someone out there who has a copy of this somewhere. Would it be Max? Would it be Robert Stacey? And the more Max Middle performs (with his cohort, fiction writer John Lavery), the better he gets.

Sunday, May 11; the conference, & what came after

What happens at conference stays at conference. Is that entirely true? I am disappointed that Misao Dean (University of Victoria) wasn’t able to show up to present her "George Bowering and Peonies," but I wasn’t up for a 9am session anyway, so my guilt and disappointment simply turned into disappointment. Another highlight during the conference was Stephen Cain and his piece, "Feeling Ugly About the Postmodern Condition: Two Novels by Lynn Crosbie and Daniel Jones." In his paper, Cain argued for a post-1985 new wave of darker, Ontario-specific postmodern writing. It seems almost rare that either of these two writers are given any proper critical consideration, but it does happen every so often; he talked about how, after Paul's Case (1997), the overwhelmingly ugly response to her novel made Crosbie turn to more mainstream fiction. How does something like this happen? This is a novel that caused Crosbie to have a restraining order against a Toronto Star columnist, and, when she read at a PEN Canada benefit, a significant portion of the audience walked out. How does this happen in Canada? Why do we treat these small essential works so poorly, unless they're written by someone from an earlier generation? Cain talked about the ugly through the fact that both texts (Jones' novel Obsessions) were extremely dark, and Toronto of the 1980s/1990s was extremely darker than what had come before, both city and provincially for the City of Toronto, through the first Gulf War, and through works by the baby boomers overshadowing those of their younger equivalents. These were writers, he argued, that knew their work wasn’t going to get any attention, no matter what they were doing.

At the end, it was Davey and Kroetsch who gave their own "conclusions" (as it were) to the conference, with Kroetsch's "Boundary 2 and The Canadian Postmodern" and Davey's "Misreadings & Non-readings of The Canadian Postmodern." There were a number of questions he posed, including the cheeky suggestion that Canadian Postmodernism started in the year 2000 with Christian Bök and Darren Wershler-Henry, or that there isn’t even such a thing as Canadian postmodernism. Or too, that the Canadian postmodernism came out of and is best exampled in poetry, but Linda Hutcheon's book dealt predominantly with fiction. How do we reconcile that, if at all?

And, as Kroetsch noted, citing the fact that his line was quoted and requited over the weekend, when he suggested that Canada went straight from Victorian to Postmodern, that Dennis Cooley had tried to convince him for hours that Canada had a modernist period, but in the end, he just couldn’t say it.

What comes after;

God knows. There will be a chapbook edited by Max Middle that I'm producing sometime before the end of the month with poetry (supposedly, I'm told) by all the writers who performed during the conference weekend in Ottawa. Send me a note if you want to be reminded of such when it appears.

One thing that Robert Stacey was extremely impressed by was the fact that there were over thirty people registered for the conference that weren’t presenting papers and weren’t academics but simply writers from the community, including myself, Amanda Earl, Pearl Pirie, Sandra Ridley, Emily Falvey and numerous others. You should even see what some of these folk have been blogging about from said conference, including Amanda, Pearl, Charles Earl and John W. Macdonald. Isn't this part of what we seem to do best, in Ottawa?