Issue archives

#210-211 (Autumn/Winter 2011)
21st-Century Poetics

Add to Cart ($29.95)

Editorial

Margery Fee

• Editorial: 21st-Century Poetics (p. 6 - 8)
• Subjects: Poetry

Clint Burnham and Christine Stewart

• Afterword: 21st-Century Poetics (p. 263 - 266)
• Subjects: Poetry, Twenty-First Century

Articles

Scott Pound

• Language Writing and the Burden of Critique (p. 9 - 26)
• Abstract: Show/hide

  This essay examines language writing’s investment in critique as a standpoint for poetics. Focusing on the work of Ron Silliman, my analysis attempts to draw out procedures that are latent in language writing’s use of critique and the consequences that follow. I argue that while there is no doubt the turn to critique has done much to unify and radicalize language writing as a movement, it is also responsible for introducing a culturally reductive set of discriminations into conversations about poetics.

• Subjects: Language/Linguistics, Literary Criticism, Literary Theory, Poetry

Katie L. Price

• A ≠ A: The Potential for a ’Pataphysical Poetic in Dan Farrell’s The Inkblot Record (p. 27 - 41)
• Abstract: Show/hide

  This paper argues that Dan Farrell’s The Inkblot Record (Coach House, 2000) exemplifies the political possibilities of a pataphysical poetic. To compose The Inkblot Record, Farrell collated and alphabetized one-sentence responses to Rorschach’s famous inkblot test from six source texts. To understand the implications of such a conceptual project, I turn to Alfred Jarry’s 'pataphysics, outlined in his 1911 novel, Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician. In the novel, Jarry appropriates Lucretius’ notion of the clinamen—an unpredictable swerve of an atom—for literature, arguing that the clinamen’s existence means that even our most fundamental beliefs, that A=A, may not be true. Farrell’s clinimatic gesture of placing the language of psychology into the discourse of poetry enacts the paradox outlined by Jarry. The politics of Farrell’s poetic are small but palpable. He does not claim a “revolution of the word” or of the world, but rather performs an irreversible clinimatic swerve within them.

• Subjects: Literary Criticism, Poetry, Twenty-First Century

Sarah Dowling

• Persons and Voices: Sounding Impossible Bodies in M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! (p. 43 - 58)
• Abstract: Show/hide

  I argue that in her book Zong! (2008), which concerns the 1781 massacre of 150 enslaved Africans incarcerated on the ship Zong, M. NourbeSe Philip turns toward lyric and legal concepts of personhood in order to theorize poetic voice as bodily emission. Zong!’s politics lie in this historiographic challenge: it must create forms appropriate to the legal nonperson, and must use them to transform this figure “back into human.” Thus, Philip confronts the longstanding philosophical conception of personhood as the ownership of oneself in three ways: first, through “affective possession,” where personhood is not an effect of property in the self, but is conferred upon others through the investment of affect. Second, Philip uses lyric modes such as apostrophe to confer personhood upon the murdered slaves. Third, she proposes a conception of poetic voice as physical utterance, not as expression of interiority, acknowledging the ways in which the body persists beyond and is shaped by its nonrecognition by regimes of power. Thus Zong! returns to concepts of personhood whose promise remains unfulfilled.

• Subjects: Poetry

Ryan Fitzpatrick and Susan Rudy

• "These marked spaces lie beneath / the alphabet": Readers, Borders, and Citizens in Erín Moure’s Recent Work (p. 60 - 74)
• Abstract: Show/hide

  Erín Moure’s recent work invites us to think about the ways that our reading practices affect how we move in the world.  Do we stay put? Move across borders? Force others into (or out of) (our?) spaces? Facilitate free movements? Do we see the world as given and unchangeable or as something, in Clarice Lispector’s words, “torturously in the making”? As Moure says explicitly in several essays collected in My Beloved Wager (2009), and as she challenges us to think about in O Cidadán (2002) and Expeditions of a Chimaera (2009), how we act as readers affects how we act as citizens and both are intimately tied to what we make of borders.  How are we citizens not only of cities or nations but also of books?  By considering Moure’s recent work, we explore the ways that, in learning to be different kinds of readers, we can learn to be different kinds of citizens.

• Subjects: Authorship, Canadian Studies, Cultural Geography, Feminism, Gay/Lesbian, Gender, Globalization, Landscape/Space, Literary Theory, Poetry, Twenty-First Century

Sonnet L'Abbé

• North of Invention: Interview with Charles Bernstein and Sarah Dowling (p. 84 - 95)
• Abstract: Show/hide

  Charles Bernstein and Sarah Dowling are the co-organizers of North of Invention: A Festival of Canadian Poetry. Taking place over four days in January 2011 at Kelly Writers House in Philadelphia and Poets House in New York City, North of Invention aimed "to initiate a new dialogue in North American poetics, addressing the hotly debated areas of 'innovation' and 'conceptual writing,' the history of sound poetry and contemporary performance, multilingualism and translation, and connections to activism."

• Subjects: Canadian Studies, Literary Criticism, Multiculturalism, Nationalism, Poetry, Transnationalism, Twentieth Century, Twenty-First Century, United States

Meredith Quartermain

• T'ang's Bathtub: Innovative Work by Four Canadian Poets (p. 116 - 132)
• Abstract: Show/hide

  This paper asks whether poets' forging of new literary forms or uses of language should be determined by the usefulness of these innovations for effecting political change. Statements of poetics by William Wordsworth and Ezra Pound show that major poets in the past regarded linguistic innovation as essential to the work of poetry. The essay then discusses statements of four contemporary Canadian poet/innovators: Jeff Derksen, Roger Farr, Erín Moure, and Lisa Robertson. Derksen and Farr offer a poetics of intervention and resistance to neoliberalist policy whereas the writings and poetics of Moure and Robertson open a visionary field of playful experimental form where critique of neoliberalism is but one thread. The paper suggests that highly accessible language is more likely than innovative language to effect political change, but that each generation must invent a language it can think in, in response to the social conditions of its time.

• Subjects: Art, Cultural Studies, Poetry, Politics

Karl Jirgens

• Neo-Baroque Configurations in Contemporary Canadian Digital Poetics (p. 135 - 151)
• Subjects: Art, Language/Linguistics, Literary Theory, Media & Communications, Multimedia, Politics, Postmodernism, Twenty-First Century

Geordie Miller

• “Shifting Ground”: Breaking (from) Baudrillard’s “Code” in Autobiography of Red (p. 152 - 167)
• Subjects: Autobiography, Language/Linguistics, Poetry

Sonnet L'Abbé

• “Infiltrate as Cells”: The Biopolitically Ethical Subject of sybil unrest (p. 169 - 189)
• Abstract: Show/hide

  In sybil unrest, Rita Wong and Larissa Lai bring the techniques of avant-garde formalism and the sensibility of the transnational subject together in their project to "re-subject" the "i." Their book-length poem is a sharp critique of twenty-first century local-global scales of capital flow that provocatively proposes the figure of the Asian female body as a more robust figure of humanist universality than, say, Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. This playful provocation is not quite a call to a representational coup, but an illumination of the cultural specificity of wholisms underwriting discourses of species and interspecies interaction. In their pursuit of a strategy of ethical (self)-representation,Wong and Lai fortuitously produce a critique of “human” as the species and identity category whose ideological underpinnings inform and are informed by Euro- and androcentric post-Enlightenment humanist values. Ultimately, Wong and Lai propose political action as occurring at the moments where the subject literally composes herself—nutrionally, affectively and narratively—as living material.

• Subjects: Asian American, Asian Canadian, Asian Culture, Authorship, Canadian Studies, Cultural Studies, Ecocriticism, Feminism, Gender, Globalization, Language/Linguistics, Literary Criticism, Literary Theory, Media & Communications, Multiculturalism, Nationalism, Poetry, Politics, Postcolonialism, Postmodernism, Twenty-First Century, Western

Sean Braune

• Enantiomorphosis and the Canadian Avant-Garde: Reading Christian Bök, Darren Wershler, and Jeramy Dodds (p. 190 - 206)
• Subjects: Poetry

Oana Avasilichioaei and Erín Moure

• Translation, Collaboration, and Reading the Multiple (p. 207 - 218)
• Subjects: Language/Linguistics

Poems

Michael Aird

• Of Proximity (p. 42)

Natalie Helberg

• lustral (p. 59 - 60)

Ken Belford

• I thought this day would never come (p. 75 - 83)

Shane Rhodes

• The Promise/Broken Land: mediatation on Treaty Three (p. 96)

derek beaulieu

• rectangle 4 (p. 115)

Stephen Collis

• New York Visitation: 29 July 2009 (p. 133 - 134)

Gregory Betts

• 40—Shaped My Voice (p. 168)

Robert Majzels

• Olam Habah: The avant-garde and the World-to-come, or the failure of art and the art of failure (p. 219 - 229)

Book Reviews

Becoming Woman (p. 249 - 250)

by Amanda Lim

Book(s) reviewed:

1. Girlwood by Jennifer Still
2. Just Like Her by Louise Dupré and Erín Moure

Subjects: Poetry, Women's Literature

Composing Nature Decomposing (p. 250 - 251)

by Travis V. Mason

Book(s) reviewed:

1. Decompositions by Ken Belford
2. Nature by Mark Truscott

Subjects: Poetry

Lost in the Staging (p. 251 - 252)

by Ryan Fitzpatrick

Book(s) reviewed:

1. Every Day in the Morning (Slow) by Adam Seelig
2. How to Write by derek beaulieu
3. Open Air Bindery by David Hickey

Subjects: Poetry

News from New Star (p. 252 - 253)

by Meredith Quartermain

Book(s) reviewed:

1. Buffet World by Donato Mancini
2. Mannequin Rising by Roy Miki
3. Robin Blaser by Brian Fawcett and Stan Persky

Subjects: Poetry

Opinions & Notes

derek beaulieu and Gregory Betts

• Copy Paste Publish: On Appropriation (p. 254 - 259)
• Subjects: Authorship, Poetry, Publishing

Rachel Zolf

• Noone Bears Witness (p. 259 - 262)
• Subjects: Poetry, Politics

Influency Salon

Margery Fee

• from Influency Salon (p. 230)
• Subjects: Poetry, Science, Twenty-First Century

Rachel Zolf

• “Like plugging into an electric circuit”: Fingering Out Erín Moure’s Lesbo-Digit-O! Smut Poems (p. 230 - 241)
• Subjects: Gay/Lesbian, Poetry
• PDF available

Erín Moure

• On Zolf's Neighbour Procedure (p. 241 - 248)
• Subjects: Poetry
• PDF available