Abstract: A lot has been written on Robert Kroetsch in Canada and in Europe, throughout the past half a century, but curiously not in the United States. Reflecting on the possible reasons why Kroetsch is not better-known, more famous and influential in American literature is of import in this essay, since so much of Kroetsch’s poetry organically aligns with the movements and poetic practices across the border. This paper will look at three communities deemed essential to understand Kroetsch’s poetry: the first steps of a postmodern community in North America as a cross-border community, given to the exploration of new forms of thinking art and activism in the Vietnam War years and coalescing around the journal
Boundary 2; the Canadian Prairies and the network of writers with whom Kroetsch was in constant dialogue throughout his career; and the “transgeographic network” (Beach) of North American postmodern poets, influenced by the lesson of Charles Olson, that offers a new way of reading Kroetsch today by situating him within a wider intellectual ensemble.
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Abstract: This paper looks at the output of the Gauntlet Press, a poetic and artistic collaboration between Canadian poet Richard Outram and Canadian artist Barbara Howard. The paper outlines the history of the press, highlighting key publications in both its handpress and electronic phases. It looks at Gauntlet Press works in the context of both Outram’s trade publications and the Canadian publishing scene of the time. It examines the role the Gauntlet Press played in sustaining Outram’s career, arguing that this self-publishing venture of primarily artistic impetus took on the secondary task of cultivating an influential readership for his poetry.
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Abstract: Although Mathew Henderson’s 2012 poetry collection
The Lease has been credited as the first book of insider poetry about oil work, Peter Christensen’s 1981 collection
Rig Talk marks the beginning of an overlooked and growing tradition in Canadian literary history. Written during different oil booms and published three decades apart, both books incorporate rough, violent, misogynist, and racist “rig talk” to embody and subvert a toxic masculinity and its seeming opposite, an equally toxic settler-colonial ecopoetics. This article adapts theories of disidentification by Michel Pêcheux, José Esteban Muñoz, and Judith Butler to argue that the ambivalent speakers of both texts use petrocultural disidentification to perform, mourn, and resist the inadequate versions of subjectivity on offer. Considering recent calls for a just energy transition that leaves no one behind, and looking for alternatives to polarization and despair, it considers petrocultural disidentification as a mode for solidarity and resistance.
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