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6. Collaboration and Convention in the Poetry of Pain Not Bread
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
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6 Collaboration and Convention in the Poetry of Pain Not Bread Alison Calder The Afterword to Pain Not Bread’s poetry collection Introduction to the Introduction to Wang Wei (2000) begins as many afterwords do, with a description of how the poet became interested in the subject he or she writes about. “The first collection of Tang Dynasty poetry I came across was called The Jade Mountain” (120), it reads, and goes on to describe how the poet found the book in a local library and took it home only to discover, mysteriously, that a copy of it was already on the bookshelf. The poet, bemused, had no recollection of purchasing the book, though distinctly recalled gazing at the colour of its spine before going to sleep at night. It is not until the next page that the reader learns that there is no poet: the first-person narrator is instead an invention standing in for the complex identities of a three-person poetry collective. It is my argument in this paper that this kind of unsettling maneuver , directly challenging the idea that a lyric voice originates in individual experience , speaks directly to basic reader expectations about the lyric, and that a similar unsettling occurs repeatedly throughout the body of Pain Not Bread’s poems, both in text and in performance. The result is a postmodern poetry that uses hybrid narrative agents to produce a dialogic or polyphonic layering of concealed voices that challenges notions of the individual poet and re-views the relation between artist, material, and audience. All literary writing is in some sense collaborative; unless writers live in isolation, reading nothing, putting their writing into the material form of a book or other publication entirely by themselves, and perhaps being the 95 only reader of their works, they are going to be involved with others in the course of their work’s production. This is not to say that all works can be considered equally collaborative. It might be helpful to imagine a collaborative spectrum with the individual author producing work in negotiation with his or her editor at one end and two or more authors working together to initially generate a text at the other end. Everybody may be doing it, but everyone is not doing it in the same way, a diversity stressed by Marjorie Stone and Judith Thompson in their anthology Literary Couplings. Stone and Thompson suggest that we are at a point in literary history where the romantic model of composition in isolation is gradually being replaced by a model of composition as inherently collaborative. This changing model, however, reflects the changing interests of the present rather than an actual changing literary practice, as scholars and writers are influenced by a myriad of ideas and practices, including “poststructuralist theories of textuality and subjectivity proclaiming the ‘death of the author’; new paradigms of scholarly editing and textual production; interdisciplinary research on the history of copyright and changing constructions of authorship; feminist, postcolonial and queer reframings of literary histories; studies of contemporary compositional practices in business, science, and education; and the proliferation of collaborative electronic hypertexts” (Stone 9).1 Stone and Thompson argue against what they see as two dominant though contradictory beliefs about the history of literary authorship. The first assumption is that literary authorship follows an evolutionary line that began with corporate authorship in the early modern period, evolved into the individual inspiration of the romantic genius, and was finally consolidated through legal and market-driven means into a “regime of the author” in the Victorian period ; while the second assumption is that literary collaboration is a recent development produced by experimental and avant-garde writers (15). Both of these assumptions, the first that literary collaboration used to happen but now does not, and the second that literary collaboration never used to happen and now does, are challenged by the essays in their collection, which look at diverse collaborative practices in a variety of historical periods but still maintain a focus on a Eurocentric literary tradition. Turning to other literary traditions, as Pain Not Bread do in their work with classical Chinese poetry, suggests some different understandings of the implications of collaborative practice and literary allusion. Stone and Thompson’s focus is on what I might call extraordinary literary collaboration, that is to say the deliberate working together of authors to 96 COLLABORATION, CROSSTALK, IMPROVISATION [3.95.233.107] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 09:24 GMT) produce a single text, which goes...