Unfettered Language: Poetries Old and New

The years 2021 and 2022—right on the heels of a most trying time traversed by a pandemic, Trumpism, and ongoing wars—brought much light to the shores of writing with the appearance of three exciting publications which, despite their differences, all respond with renewed urgency to the call to rethink the political work of language. They are three distinct works, coming from different poetic generations, but also sharing a relationship to the language-based concerns and politics of language that have characterized Canada’s writing scene since the late 1960s.

Eric Schmaltz and Christopher Doody have carefully curated the release of a collaborative book from the mid-1960s by poets Milton Acorn and bill bissett, I Want to Tell You Love. Acorn and bissett are literary icons of the counterculture literary scene, but they could hardly be more different. As the editors point out, the avant-garde aesthetic of bissett, poet and painter, shares little with the working-class ethos of poet and playwright Acorn, and this dissonance may have been the reason for publishers’ rejection of the manuscript at the time. Yet it is in this dissonant incongruence that the value of the work lies. Its release as a book brings to the fore the differences rather than the commonalities—as it was intended to do from the very beginning, according to the editors—producing a coarse texture in the friction between the two textualities. But friction is also productive, and the editors are correct in pointing out the dialogic nature of this work. In moving through the book, poem by poem, the reader will experience not déjà vu, but a refreshing awareness of the interconnection between the social concerns of an age so distant in time and those we face now—for the social and political issues that bissett and Acorn address in this book in two voices have not changed in substance. The lines that perhaps best summarize this relationship come from “Elaboration on a Text,” by Milton Acorn:

and I had to write poems
as you do . . . desperate signals
of my existence. (177)

The book opens with a critical introduction by Eric Schmaltz, which provides a useful entry into the work, despite the expected and unavoidable limitations. Schmaltz situates Acorn and bissett’s collaboration in the literary, cultural, and socio-political landscape of 1960s Canada, and, in particular, in the burgeoning counterculture scene that had its centre in Vancouver and in the West Coast Renaissance. Much is missing from the account of those complex years, but Schmaltz does a good job at keeping his introduction grounded in the positionality of the two authors and their shifting relationships to different poetic groups at a time when Vancouver was setting itself up in opposition to the institutionalization of CanLit. The introduction also includes a useful textual history and a discussion of the two poets’ collaboration in relation to their distinctive aesthetics and political ideologies, while the afterword, as well as the interview with bill bissett (191–99), further enrich the poetic concerns emerging from the book.

Lisa Robertson’s Boat extends the previously published Rousseau’s Boat (2010), which in turn included the earlier chapbook Rs Boat (2004), adding to the series of long poems-become-sections two new long poems at the beginning and the end of the book: respectively, “The Hut” and “The Tiny Notebooks of Night.” In her final section, Notes, Robertson describes Boat as “the accumulated record of a series of indexical readings of the sum of my quotidian notebooks” (173). The process of including earlier material, itself the product of reading her own notebooks at different stages in life, speaks to the ongoing, processual form of her writing and the poet’s sharp attention to procedures of reading and writing. Language is sedimented material that is uncovered and reassembled not archeologically but poetically. Each reading produces a resignification that becomes writing. Such temporality of the reading act functions as a hidden device in the examination of language, which at every turn takes on a different dimension. In “The Hut,” the central justification of the poem—which appears as a caesura or a gap that cuts through words and phrases—visualizes a temporal “cut” that unfetters possibilities of signification. Where the cut hits, a word is often disassembled grammatically and phonetically, producing unexpected perceptual and cognitive resonances. Time is introduced as a condition of meaning as well as a problem:

What I want to address here    is inertia, sloth, and drag.
What can a sentence do besid    es give more time to ideas?
the words become th    e room of experience
as I w    rite. (34)

For the reader interested in psychoanalysis, this is also a creative reminder of the way in which language functions both retroactively and through associations and displacements: like the cut of the analyst’s intervention, the gap unleashes rich horizontal movements. The problem of time—embedded in the form and raised at several moments as a question—also points to the philosophical texture of poetic work: poetry as philosophical method.

Robertson’s procedure also articulates a sense of the processual nature of language, which, per one of the epigraphs of the book from Émile Benveniste, one of Robertson’s most-cited theorists, forms the deep matrix of the living itself: “Far before it communicates, language is for living.” This is no autobiography but, like most of Robertson’s work, it bears the traces of the singularity of experience and of the unique situational formation of subjectivity: a subject can only and always be a subject-in-process, a questioning subject, and a subject in question.

Nicole Markotić’s After Beowulf tackles with humour and playfulness one of the foundational epics of English literature, which has been studied by generations of students mainly in modern English translations, rather than in its original Old English. Markotić probes less the archaeology of the medieval poem than the discourse that it has generated through its translations and adaptations. She proceeds parodically and subversively, poking fun but not dismissing. She disentangles and reassembles, thwarting fixed images and expectations about story and discourse, all the time amusing the reader by colliding the epic world, or the modern English tradition’s reconstruction thereof, with the world of pop culture. In this carnivalesque tornado, who is Beowulf if not a guy obsessed with celebrity status and suffering from andropause (90)? But amusement is not an end in itself, here. It is the (O)ther stories of the legitimized story that emerge in this process. Not surprisingly, Markotić’s sharp feminist tongue unleashes language to resurface the figure of Grendel’s unnamed mother—Ur-monster and Ur-m(O)ther—from the gendered constraints of canon and myth, where monstrosity can only be epitomized by motherhood. And, in following the heart-wrenching aching of a being deprived of her child, we cannot not think of the biases of storytelling and of the many other Others elided between its lines—be they under the guise of the abused S—, the boy-servant kidnapped from the Slavic regions (91), or the more monumental Dragon, the legendary, mammoth reptile. Markotić’s book-length poem is one of the most intriguing examples of poetries of re-assemblage I have encountered in these last years and a welcome intervention in the heroics-obsessed culture of our age.