David Bradford’s Dream of No One but Myself nominated for a Griffin!
Filed under: The Brouillon | Tags: Canadian poetry, David Bradford, Griffin Poetry Prize, poetry
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This year’s Canadian nominees for the Griffin Poetry Prize include friend and ex-student David Bradford‘s first book Dream of No One but Myself.
Bradford’s is one of a number I’ve been trying to get around to writing about here at Poeta Doctus. Now, I guess, there’s even more reason. Do yourself a favour, click on the title above, and get yourself a copy, so you can better appreciate that review/notice when it finally gets written and posted, or, better, support a poet whose words call out for close attention.
More from the archives…
Filed under: The Brouillon | Tags: Afghanistan, poetry, political poetry, The Capilano Review
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In honour of its fiftieth year, The Capilano Review is revisiting past issues and sharing some of their contents. Today, it shared some texts from its Winter 2002 grief / war / poetics issue, but somehow managed to overlook my contribution.
How the editorial team could have committed this oversight is beyond me: to my mind, the poem in question, Seventh Column, excerpted in that issue, is my most accomplished work in terms of its composition, its articulation of its linguistic material.
When the Western powers finally withdrew their forces from Afghanistan recently, I shared the complete poem with some introductory comments. Interested parties can read those comments and the poem, here.
Next reading: Montreal SpeakUp
The organizers of Montreal’s SpeakUp reading series have kindly invited me to read with two others, Tamara Nazywalskj and Derek Godin, Thursday 24 February 2022, 19h00 CST.
SpeakUp has a rewarding format: poets read only one or two short poems, shared with the audience, after which there’s a twenty-minute Q&A.
I’ll be reading a fun, mindbending poem from Grand Gnostic Central that goes by at the speed of thought!
You can get a Zoom link to the event my emailing MTLSpeakUp@gmail.com.
“We must be absolutely modern”: an anecdote for Kent Johnson
Filed under: The Brouillon | Tags: Kent Johnson, literary history, New American Poetry, poetics
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Over at his Facebook page, Kent Johnson continues to probe the legacy of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E in his inimitable way. His persistent concern with the movement and its wake prompted me to observe, among other things:
I think it needs be said, too, that, for my part, anyway, I don’t know a poet under, let’s say, 35 who would either recognize the terms of the dispute or even grasp the pertinence of the issue. Their concerns are either identity-political or ecopoetical (and that ‘or’ is not exclusive), and those with the conceptual apparatus would likely judge the whole discussion as formalist, all-too-formalist…
All of which brings to mind the following anecdote…
I’m fortunate to count among my friends a number of poets and scholars half my age, among them, one brought into our circle by a peer of mine, now a professor emeritus of German language and literature. One evening, this young friend, another peer of mine, and myself were carousing, as we poet-scholars are wont to do, this time at my peer’s place.
I forget now exactly how the topic came up, but I recall maybe it had something to do with American poet Charles Olson. Our young friend is a frighteningly-gifted and learned young man, a francophone Quebecer who speaks English and German like a native speaker and who, at the time, as part of his graduate work in Irish Studies, was learning Gaelic (he has since, last I heard, taken up learning Dutch, for the fun of it). Though steeped in the European literary Modernism of the first half of the Twentieth Century, Olson was new to him.
What ensued was a speed-seminar in the Poetry Wars of postwar American, anglophone poetry: Donald Allen’s landmark anthology The New American Poetry, the New Criticism oriented poetry then in power, Confessionalism and Projective Verse, etc. The impromptu seminar ended with a lively reading of Olson’s “La Préface”.
Our young friend’s reaction: “Why don’t they teach us all this in school?!”.
New poem online: “Exercise: Prospective Verse”
Filed under: Ecology, poems | Tags: ecopoetics, EcoTheo Review, poetry, poetry recordings
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The EcoTheo Review has been kind enough to publish and share a humble poem of mine online, which can be read, here.
Despite our best efforts, a recording of the poem I made wasn’t posted along with the poem; therefore, I share that recording, here:
Open Book sure likes David Bradford’s Dream of No One but Myself
Filed under: The Brouillon | Tags: Canadian poetry, David Bradford, Dream of No One but Myself, poetry
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Open Book shares a short interview with David Bradford about his “hotly anticipated debut poetry collection”, Dream of No One but Myself, “a work of stunning creativity and self awareness”.
Personally, I find such promotional copy a little embarrassing, as its hyperbole can’t help but unmask it as promotional copy, emptying it of any of the gravity that would anchor its persuasiveness.
That being said, Bradford’s book is provocative, both thematically (as a “lyric examination of his experience growing up in a racially [and linguistically!] diverse family”) and formally (with respect to the modes of composition deployed to develop and present that matter). Indeed, Bradford’s work would be afforded higher praise by a scrupulous reading of these dimensions, whose study would be a substantial appreciation (free from matters of mere preference—what I like or don’t) of Bradford’s unquestionably accomplished first book.
You can read the interview linked above, or another I conducted with him some time back, here. Of course, the best course of action is to click on the book’s cover, above, check out the sample of poems from the book, and buy a copy!
Grammar, linguistic and literary production, and related matters: a note for Kent Johnson
Filed under: Praise and Polemics, The Brouillon | Tags: discursive materialism, ideology, Kent Johnson, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, linguistics, poetics, Slavoj Žižek
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If there’s one thing that indefatigable gadfly of a poet Kent Johnson and I share it’s a stubborn, irritable tick of concern with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry and poetics and their “post avant” wake (so wide now few poets or critics seem aware how much they operate within its horizon…).
Recently, his most recent online persona linked an article he had written for absent, “competence, linguistics, politics & post-avant matters”. Therein, he rightly takes to task Charles Bernstein et al. for their loosey-goosey way of discussing (and thinking about) language, grammar, ideology, and society. I can’t say I’m in full agreement with Johnson on all points, but the drift of his argument is surely in the right direction.
It was with no little delight I read in a recently acquired copy of Slavoj Žižek’s 2012 Less Than Nothing the following passage, which sums up pointedly and neatly the fundamental misunderstanding of language (the identification of linguistic or literary production with that of commodities) that underwrote, at least, the early days of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E:
The basic premise of discursive materialism was to conceive language itself as a mode of production, and to apply to it Marx’s logic of commodity fetishism. So, in the same way that, for Marx, the sphere of exchange also obliterates (renders invisible) its process of production, the linguistic exchange also obliterates the textual process that engenders meaning: in a spontaneous fetishistic misperception, we experience the meaning of a word or act as something that is a direct property of the designated thing or process; that is, we overlook the complex field of discursive practices which produces this meaning. What one should focus on here is the fundamental ambiguity of this notion of linguistic fetishism: is the idea that, in the good old modern way, we should distinguish between “objective” properties of things and our projections of meanings onto things, or are we dealing with the more radical linguistic version of transcendental constitution, for which the very idea of “objective reality” of “things existing out there, independently of our mind” is a “fetishistic illusion” which is blind to how our symbolic activity ontologically constitutes the very reality to which it “refers” or which it designates? Neither of these two options is correct—what one should drop is their underlying shared premise, the (crude, abstract-universal) homology between discursive “production” and material production. (7)
I am skeptical Žižek’s characteristically canny observation settles the question (one that extends back to the advent of philology (the science of language) and literature-as-such), but it is surely sharp enough to cut through much of the underbrush!
To praise, that’s the thing
Filed under: The Brouillon | Tags: Cactus Press, Canadian poetry, domesdaynotebook, Frog Hollow Press, James Dunnigan, poetry, poetry criticism, The Stained Glass Sequence, Wine and Fire
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A while back, I ventured a few words on James Dunnigan’s The Stained Glass Sequence. As chance would have it, another set of notes, appreciative of the chapbook’s virtues, has turned up, which can be read, here. The anonymous reviewer (who seems to hail from Ireland) shares my appreciation for the sequence’s reflexive dimension:
Stained glass itself is like a decoration hung on perception, one that refracts the light and shadow of the reality behind, transforming it into a more ornate version. Poet James Dunnigan leverages that quality as the foundational conceit for The Stained Glass Sequence, a chapbook plunged in reflection on another primordial creative force: language. But it’s not for the sake of an academic lesson so much as a means to show how poetry transfigures society into civilization.
High, and well-deserved, praise.
Readers whose interest has been piqued can follow up on The Stained Glass Sequence by getting a hold of Dunnigan’s markedly uncanny and no less accomplished follow-up, Wine and Fire (Cactus Press, 2020), whose launch can be viewed, here.
Now the only question is which acquisitions editor will be canny enough to grab the manuscript of Dunnigan’s first, full-length collection…
Five Minutes at Montreal’s Expozine 2021
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: As on a holiday, Expozine 2021, poetry, poetry readings, POP Montreal 2021
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Montreal’s Expozine and POP Montreal were kind enough to invite me and other Montreal poets to perform in support of our respective micro- and small presses. You can catch my brief contribution (until the end of October 2021, anyway) around the 35:00 mark, here.
The chapbook I’m reading from is As on a holiday. You can view the Zoom launch here and purchase a copy from the publisher, Cactus Press.
“Poetry is news…” &c.
Two decades back, in the shadow of the 9/11 attacks, when the United States and its allies were rattling their sabres mobilizing to invade Afghanistan, many were critical of such an ill-advised adventure, including myself. I cast around for a way to articulate this critical unease, happening, finally, on a column from The Globe and Mail (as described below) that provided the material and impetus to compose a work of verbal art (a “poem” or, in this case, more properly, a “text”) that answered my need.
As I wrote in way of preface at the time:
Saturday 22 September 2001 The Globe and Mail published an essay article by John Barber ‘Wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains’ (F4). Despite its critical stance toward the then impending invasion, the terms of its discourse were so pedestrian my frustrated and bored eye wandered across its six columns. The article read thus, against the grain, oracularly clear, and the experience of that reading what I want to communicate. The sense it made to me leaves its trace in minor editorialisations (where the text has been stepped on). This vision into the essence of our imagination of Afghanistan is as forbidding as the country itself: a land of glacierous and desert mountains and sandstorms and tire-melting heat that swallows whole armies. “Cut the word lines and the future leaks through.” Here, English speaks this vision: in dead or obscure words, new compounds and coinages. Syntactically, at root (or so Norman O. Brown told John Cage) the arrangement of Alexander’s soldiers in a phalanx (the Great, too, stopped in Afghanistan), the language has been demilitarized.
Some stanzas of the resulting poem, Seventh Column, were published in The Capilano Review, in an issue devoted to poetic responses to 9/11. The entire poem was issued in a very limited edition, hand-stitched chapbook, long since sold out. On the occasion of the withdrawal of western forces from Afghanistan, the time seemed ripe to share the poem in its entirety, readable in the PDF, below.
Poeta Doctus 