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Saturday, May 09, 2020
Wednesday, May 06, 2020
Friday, December 08, 2017
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The sound of aggregate activity
Breezy in the late, stabbingly bright
blue
Of an afternoon
Soft yellows caress
The late-out-of-the gate lilacs
Smelling sensual, lurid.
What rest can be got from this swirl
Of smells overpowering
Malefactors everywhere
Actors and blinks, nods, and who’s
hooligans.
Read them the Cactus riot act.
She flowers every seven years
Or if the new moon follows on the
first
Friday after Easter infection,
Then, only then, will she spread her.
. . petals
It was in a photograph, or –gram
Heavy metal pelt stain melt brain;
ham radio
Operator; one caught in the
electricity
Wires.
I saw him on my walk home from world.
Singing ‘ole glory to the world,
A face turned murderous
As if a cloud smirched the soulful
sky.
In the corner of the photograph,
A figure in sticks, wrapped in the
dangerous
Sourcery of the exorcism,
Darkness swirling off him in colour
grids
Dextrous fingers of the toppling
dominoes
In the foreground, under the table,
Barely visible.
Flim flam, hone it for the street
corners.
In the hides of summer, wearing
Sun’s great glory on the
sweat-sheened skin
We can write about life,
Or we can write about life.
Precipitating the “oh, not the ‘we’
shit again.”
II
The happiness of a single fuck not
given
The apathy trickle-down vectors
Swerving high on unpredictable
Ever veritably new, improved
Dazzling desuetude.
III
Suet in a fur-trap.
A straw, balanced on a camel’s back,
Photographed.
For a response to a query
Responded to and refuted
From every corner of the
crypto-verse.
The cacti, in a row, made a fence
To keep the cattle in,
Some do it,
Some don’t.
IV
The next time she appeared,
A blue streak ran rampant around
The orbituaries climbing out of the
newsstands.
Surprise factor, attention disperser.
Social facts uncalled upon.
This is poetry’s rent.
Tantamount to a slope of fine
powdered salt
To cushion our 20 feet jumps
Down a steep incline.
Don’t think too much
Or you will start to smell the
cowpaste
Piling up in the meadow.
Piling up in the meadow.
Saturday, February 14, 2015
Valentine's Poem by Trevor Cunnington
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love, a flying buttress supporting
Life's Debris
love,
a catafalque
decorated
with celtic knotwork
bearing
a loved one, soon to rest
under
epitaph blankets
love, a flying buttress supporting
the
ceiling of our aspirations, sistine
cages
that entrap soul-vapours that
should
disappear up the chimney's
conglomerate,
the gates of sinuses
flush
with that histamine rush
love,
a dorian pillar embellished
by
gargoyles, guardian angels
long
since deserted, absent, on
a
pilgrimmage to pleni-potential.
love,
an arched proscenium, a window
between
observer and observed
occluded
by thick clouds, delicate
light
grey billows weighing on
lungs
during a scene change
love,
the doorway you huddle in
during
an earthquake, plaster hail
raining
all around, plunging a trail
through
floating, churning dust
love,
that bitter metal taste
of
carbonic acid after drinking
a
vanilla coke.
love, the unending war
against dust.
love,
that idol of idols,
that
fire inside,
that
phoenix
singing
songs
that
resound
through
the ages,
ever
anew.
______________________________________
Glossary
catafalque - a raised platform on which a dead body is placed
pleni-potential - a play on "plenipotentiary," a person with the authority to act on behalf of another
histamine - a chemical released by cells damaged or inflamed by allergies
conglomerate - a pebble and rock composite held together with cement
______________________________________
Glossary
catafalque - a raised platform on which a dead body is placed
pleni-potential - a play on "plenipotentiary," a person with the authority to act on behalf of another
histamine - a chemical released by cells damaged or inflamed by allergies
conglomerate - a pebble and rock composite held together with cement
Monday, December 29, 2014
A Review of Frank Davey's Biography of bpNichol (2012), by Trevor Cunnington
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These
lines are redolent of the “preconceived notion of wisdom” bp (and
others such as Charles Olsen) rebelled against in poetry. While it is
true that people certainly change their views as their experience
changes them, it is Davey's job to elucidate this development in
Nichol's poetry. Instead, Davey returns to this youthful rebellion
several times, making it a central point or major departure for his
poetic work. For a dedicated avant- gardist, the first stanza of this
quote in particular has a harmonious sense of meter and rhyme (if
partial, or slant). Most of it is insightful and “wise” as well.
. . until the last line quoted. I find the frozen associations of the
word “image” do an injustice to his previous line about history
being more verb than noun. A photograph, after all, is an image
extracted out of the flow of time. I suppose you could argue that
this line is a subversion of the “preconceived wisdom” of the
poem, but I think it weakens its internal coherence. I also think he
missed an opportunity for a playful self-reflection of the line “tho
it is more mystery than fact” as itself a fact, considering the
always incomplete nature of archives. And by extension, this line and
its implications allude to the challenge of writing a faithful
biography, which by and large Davey has done.
This
biography, that connects the poet's life with his work, is a welcome
addition to the corpus building around Nichol. It explores the
relationship between Barrie Nichol - the living breathing human
being, as excavated from conversations with friends, relatives,
colleagues, and acquaintances; from letters; and from archives –
and bpNichol, the authorial persona created by Nichol to pull himself
out of the dreamworld he inhabited, according to Davey.
It
forwards the theory that Barrie's psycho-therapeutic work is a
crucial tributary of his poetic work. While I am not qualified to
evaluate this theory (I'm not versed enough in Nichol's poetry,
having read only Zygal and
some excerpts of the Toronto Research Group, bp's theoretical, albeit
playful collaboration with Steve McCaffrey in a course I took with
Christian Bök
at the University of Guelph in 2002), I would still like to offer
some reactions and thoughts.
My
initial reaction to the book was “I think this is the first
biography that has made me less interested in the person it's about
than I was before I picked the book up.” However, I persevered, and
I'm glad I did. Davey is an engaging writer, although his thoughts
are sometimes muddled. For example, take this passage:
“He
[bp] told Bowering he was creating the whole narrative out of a
series of images that would constitute a two-week period in the life
of a family, a period in which, as one would expect, nothing is
resolved. The reader enters and leaves the narrative in the middle,
and 'hopefully' will experience a resolution through the leaving of
it. The images will be all that the reader knows about it. That's why
he's calling the novel 'idiomatic,' he told Bowering, because it's
the normal 'family' story. The explanation, however, seemed to say as
much about Barrie's understanding of family, or about what is usual
in a family, as about the novel” (238).
Um,
what? Seriously, what just happened here? Some of the clarity problem
in this particular instance may have been inherited from Nichol
himself, as he's the one being paraphrased, but if you're writing a
biography, you better have enough of a grip on your subject to
clarify some of the subject's more incoherent thoughts. Nothing is
resolved, but the reader will hopefully experience a resolution? Is
he talking about relating to the aimless structure of life portrayed
by the in media res technique
as itself some kind of resolution? Furthermore, idiomatic is a word
used in linguistics to refer to expressions in language that are
“more than the sum of their parts,” so to speak. Translating each
of the parts of the expression literally will not produce the
intended meaning of the expression. How does this relate to “normal
family experience?” Idioms, I guess, are common expressions. So if
you consider “normal” and “common” synonyms, this metaphor
works. Ok, so with some very close reading, I could figure out that
much. But what Davey means by the next sentence (beginning “The
explanation, however. . . “) needs more elaboration as the logic is
unclear.
Furthermore,
Davey makes a big deal out of Nichol's intent from the 1960s onward
to subvert the arrogance of many poets' preoccupation with precious
(with that word's pejorative connotations culled from writing
workshops) wisdom as the occasion for the writing of poetry. To
express such wisdom, as an author with the mastery of experience,
Nichol objected to stridently, apparently. However, in the sections
detailing Nichol's work at Therafields, the experimental therapeutic
community for which he served as vice-president, and Nichol's
discussions of this work, he adopted the founder's discourse of
mastery. Lea Hindley-Smith, the founder, “had been moved by
Bergler's book to 'change her own destiny rather than blame others'”
(82).This contradiction between his lived experience as a therapist,
proclaiming mastery of experience and himself in a privileged
position to help his clients do the same, and his avowed poetic
intent to eschew such arrogant language, is a thorn in the side of
Davey's poetry-therapy theory.
Furthermore,
some of his poetry contains some of these golden nuggets he finds so
repugnant and arrogant. Take, for example, these lines quoted by
Davey, from “Book V” of The Martyrology Book 6 Books:
moving
reservoirs of cells & genes
stretches
out over the surface of the earth
more
miles than any ancestor ever dreamed
.
. .
tribal,
restless, constant only in the moving on,
over
the continents
thru
what we call our history
tho
it is more mystery than fact,
more
verb than noun,
more
image, finally, than story.
Criticism
aside, I found this book fascinating because of the connection it
explores between Nichol's deep involvement with psychotherapy and his
poetry. It was also edifying to learn about Nichol's peripatetic
childhood, his hermetic “dreamworld,” and his relationships with
other Canadian literary figures. I was familiar with his relationship
with Steve McCaffrey, but his relations with other poets and writers
such as Daphne Marlatt, Michael Ondaatje, Dennis Lee, and bill bisset
came as a surprise and a delight to me.
I
was also surprised at how high-profile his sound poetry projects
were, such as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. For a
Nicholophile, to learn about how he felt like his creative input was
constantly marginalized in that project is a must. The last chapter
provides a useful summary of some of the main critical responses to
Nichol's work: the “theological reception,” those that emphasize
his “ideopoems” that merge comic strip art with conceptual visual
poetry, and those that focus on The Martyrology
as the keystone of his creative output. This summary is indispensible
for those interested in a critical engagement with Nichol's work.
Despite its shortcomings, Davey's biography was well worth the time.
Images from Zygal (1985), Coach House Press.
Tuesday, December 09, 2014
An Ecclesiastical View on Visual Culture (if you will excuse the pun)
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So it's been a while since I posted anything. If any of you are disappointed, I apologize. Sometimes the lemonade that life throws you can't be turned into lemons. Anyhow: busy is busy. Here's something I wrote in 2009 about the "new" academic field of Visual Culture. Trigger warning: academic language ahead.
So it's been a while since I posted anything. If any of you are disappointed, I apologize. Sometimes the lemonade that life throws you can't be turned into lemons. Anyhow: busy is busy. Here's something I wrote in 2009 about the "new" academic field of Visual Culture. Trigger warning: academic language ahead.
The
Insufficiency of Linguistics in the Age of the Machine
Visual
Culture is a discipline that tries to put in a comprehensible
framework images, which are visual data that have been interpreted,
endured in memory, become represented, and have accrued significance
in the processes of interpretation, remembrance, and representation.
It is somewhat analogous to Saussure’s seminal work on linguistics,
but rather than focus on language as
language, it analogically expands analysis of the structure of the
communicable into the field of images, and their manipulation through
techniques and technologies of seeing and looking. As culture is a
way of life, as well as shorthand for organized and intentional
sensual experience in the form of various arts, Visual Culture’s
object is how visual data inform the practice of culture. How do
configurations of visual data cohere as signs through structures of
meaning? What kind of strategies do encoders use to enframe
interpretation and to what ends? What strategies do decoders use to
interpret, with what motivations, and to produce what results?
On
the other hand, an image is fully communicable in language. Ezra
Pound’s poem “In the Station of the Metro” or William Carlos
William’s poem “The Codhead” are proof positive of this.
Furthermore, in literate society the visuality of language
irrevocably changes its use, as scholars from Eisenstein, Havelock,
and Ong to Innis and McLuhan have noted. In Visual Culture, then,
the problem emerges of the insufficiency of linguistics to
interrogate visual data and its tendency to collect significance like
a magnet collects iron filings. This metaphor is apt both because a
sign, a certain distillation of sensory – in this case visual –
data, starts off as many disparate parts, but in the process of
encoding or decoding it joins parts into a whole, a whole which is
greater than simply the sum of its parts. The magnet is
consciousness. The extrapolation of linguistic concepts into a wider
field of sign production, observation, and interpretation, such as
that accomplished by Barthes, is the essential act of Visual Culture,
and it is predicated on the irreconcilable hybridity of human, machine,
and perception.
Is
Visual Culture new, emergent,
or any of the other modifiers that reveal the coy
imbrications of academia with the market (new and improved!)? Emphatically no. The
political cartoonist extraordinaire
of enlightenment England, Cruikshank, in the process of observing
politics and culture through various degrees of mediation – which
necessarily implies representation – must have employed some of
the same strategies, or at least trod in similar cognitive footsteps,
as contemporary cultural critics have in their analyses in order to
draw his cartoons in the first place. One must interpret visual
aspects of culture at large in order to consolidate visual data and
subsequently encode such a complex but simple-seeming formulation as
a cartoon.
For example, in this cartoon, Cruikshank depicts people from various classes working together to export orphans to the colonies. In the nineteenth century, children were not guaranteed the same rights as they are now. Corporal punishment was the norm, and orphaned children were a social problem that warranted, to some, an easily solution: ship them out to the far reaches of the empire. It was common practise also to ship unwedded and pregnant women to the colonies in the interests of "social hygiene." With a nod to Jonathan Swift's satirical essay "A Modest Proposal," Cruikshank here lambastes the practise as dehumanizing. The top hat and erect stance of the man in the centre emblemizes "polite society," that of refined gentlemen. The other man's stance, slightly stooped, and his raggedy bowler testify that he belongs to the working classes. A woman, in the background, also pitches in. This cartoon shows the co-operation of different social groups, often in conflict in other arenas, all working together to rid their society of a group beneath them all -- unwanted children. The tension between the emblems of civilization and an obviously barbaric act -- shoveling children into a cart -- shows the active nature of Cruikshank's "reading" of his visual environment, and then redeploying its parts for persuasive purposes.
With regards to "newness," I usually side with the author of Ecclesiastes, who laments “there is nothing new under the sun.” To claim there is something new is at the same time to claim complete and total knowledge, an act of arrogance, and further, of ignorance of one's own ignorance. However, the pixilated milieu of contemporary existence, especially with regards to communication, has made it such that these liminally conscious processes should be brought into the foreground and conceptualized, following Marcuse’s notion that the image and its superabundance militates against conceptual thinking.
For example, in this cartoon, Cruikshank depicts people from various classes working together to export orphans to the colonies. In the nineteenth century, children were not guaranteed the same rights as they are now. Corporal punishment was the norm, and orphaned children were a social problem that warranted, to some, an easily solution: ship them out to the far reaches of the empire. It was common practise also to ship unwedded and pregnant women to the colonies in the interests of "social hygiene." With a nod to Jonathan Swift's satirical essay "A Modest Proposal," Cruikshank here lambastes the practise as dehumanizing. The top hat and erect stance of the man in the centre emblemizes "polite society," that of refined gentlemen. The other man's stance, slightly stooped, and his raggedy bowler testify that he belongs to the working classes. A woman, in the background, also pitches in. This cartoon shows the co-operation of different social groups, often in conflict in other arenas, all working together to rid their society of a group beneath them all -- unwanted children. The tension between the emblems of civilization and an obviously barbaric act -- shoveling children into a cart -- shows the active nature of Cruikshank's "reading" of his visual environment, and then redeploying its parts for persuasive purposes.
With regards to "newness," I usually side with the author of Ecclesiastes, who laments “there is nothing new under the sun.” To claim there is something new is at the same time to claim complete and total knowledge, an act of arrogance, and further, of ignorance of one's own ignorance. However, the pixilated milieu of contemporary existence, especially with regards to communication, has made it such that these liminally conscious processes should be brought into the foreground and conceptualized, following Marcuse’s notion that the image and its superabundance militates against conceptual thinking.
Saturday, April 26, 2014
Letter from Tom Thomson to the world
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I have found enlightenment.
My body was never found
Because I absconded
To the muskeg
Further north
North further than the last
road.
I am not rotting in the muck
In tea lake.
Ironically, perhaps,
enlightenment
Lurks in places
Unlit.
Thoreau is here,
We discuss
Our proud sons,
Lawrence Harris and Mahatma
Ghandi.
If you wonder
How I got this letter
Through, if my
Situation is as I say;
Suffice it to remark
That here we don’t
Need any radio, laser,
Telegraph, phone,
Smoke signal,
Or even seanceer.
We live in your minds,
Which wrote this.
Monday, September 02, 2013
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