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Afterword
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
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Afterword The 1980s proved an important decade for me. In 1986, my critical writings from 1973 through 1986 appeared collectively as North of Intention in a joint Canadian and American venture. It was also a decade in which some of my most substantial poetic texts appeared: the collaborative Legend (1980), the aphoristic Knowledge Never Knew (1983), Evoba (my poetic rescension of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, 1987), and The Black Debt (1989), whose two lengthy components (“Lag” and “An Effect of Cellophane”) realized my own poetics of recombination and phrase propulsion (in deliberate contrast to the New Sentence). The year 1988 was marked by the tragic passing of my dear friend and colleague bpNichol. During the two decades sampled here in Verse and Worse, I published eleven poetry titles through nine different presses based in four different countries. I mention these facts to underscore some fundamental proclivities in my writing that should be evident in the material republished here: a stridently anglophonic non-nationalism, a rejection of an ego-based poetry, and a deep commitment to formal innovation. Notions of “identity,”“self,” and “subject” have never been important factors in my writing. This is not to say that these do not inform my work, but that such matters have never been a focus or preoccupation . As a white heterosexual male, matters of identity are what one tries to escape and I’ve found my persistent commitment to collaboration (critical and creative) a mainstay to non-unity and decentredness. Georges Perec has always provided me with an inspirational model for writing and publishing: diversify, make each publication entirely different from the former. (As such, a publication such as Ron Silliman’s The Alphabet is utterly alien to my sensibility.) My friend bp constantly harangued me to gather together my former, current, and future poetic writings into a single work, The Abstract Ruin, and to make it “Panel III” of Carnival. This I have never done. However, I concur with him on one important credo: that those discrete units we call“poems”—gathered into those larger units we call“books” and sometimes partitioned into“decades”—are false discontinuities in that indescribable and unpredictable ontological praxis known as writing. I certainly do not think that any writing (be it Charles Olson’s or Christine de Pisan’s) divides rationally or purposefully into decades and such artificial chronologizing impedes as much as it facilitates a pleasurable (or otherwise) encounter. 67 In arriving at parameters for this section, I decided on a number of exclusions . First and foremost, none of my collaborative work is represented; hence, sections from the collaborative sound-text scores of the Four Horsemen and my part-published but ongoing collaboration with Karen Mac Cormack (From a Middle) do not appear. Equally, none of my collaborative and solo sound work is represented (an ideal Selected would include an accompanying CD). My visual, concrete, and non-linear poetry is similarly absent, although samples of this can be found in Seven Pages Missing and on the Coach House website . There are however two exceptions: the two Vico meditations can justifiably be considered “visual” poems, although I personally regard them as conceptual; the poems from Paradigm of the Tinctures are part of a collaborative work with British poet Alan Halsey, a collaboration in which Alan supplied stunning visual collages that match (often in odd ways) my own accompanying poems. As printed here they give a false presentation of the dialogism between word and image, but I judge them to stand as independent texts. These parameters were agreed upon with Darren and we arrived at a somewhat visually orthodox gathering of texts with prose blocks and ragged-right line endings providing the dominant visual impression. But hopefully the poems display a somewhat non-linear thinking. After my theorizing of Language poetics and the resultant poems, or rather creative manifestations (in such works as Theory of Sediment, 1991, and The Black Debt, 1989), my work took a philosophical turn in the late 1980s in the sense that the syncretism it always seeks shifted from socio-linguistic critique toward an inclusion of post-structural and post-phenomenological adaptations . Preeminently I sought poetic applications of primarily philosophical ideas. For instance, in “Lag” I applied Lyotard’s theory of “phrase universes” as outlined in his book The Differend, as well as Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of “becoming,” to a specific “becoming meaning” that reveals itself in a festive expenditure of persistent yet loose connecting phrases. A common...