Writing In Our Time: Canada's Radical Poetries in English (1957-2003) (review)

Writing in Our Time makes a paradoxical yet persuasive case that 'radical' writing is not a margin of contemporary Canadian poetry but its centre, the site of its most characteristic concerns. Pauline Butling and Susan Rudy offer a remarkably encyclopedic history of the contemporary Canadian poetic avant-garde, including two detailed timelines spanning six decades; broad overviews of poetics, publishing, and literary communities; and individual essays on ten authors, including bpNichol, Fred Wah, Daphne Marlatt, and Lisa Robertson. But the book's ambitions go far beyond that of a reference book. It advances three distinct arguments about contemporary poetry; the third, and most provocative, is the subject of the book's most revealing dialogue with itself.

The first argument is suggested by the book's title: that the most important poetry of 'our time' in Canada can be found not in the work of canonical authors, but rather in work variously labelled avant-garde, experimental, or innovative. Such writing, according to Butling and Rudy, 'emphasizes the construction rather than the reflection of self and world – the production of meaning over its consumption.' The term Butling and Rudy prefer for this poetry is 'radical,' suggesting that 'extreme changes' in poetic style can be linked to revolutionary political and social change. Apart from a single essay on landscape poetry and the dominance of 'British/central Canada aesthetics,' there is little mention of the 'mainstream' writing against which radical Canadian poetry ostensibly reacts.

The book's second argument can be found in its timelines, which depict literary history not as a catalogue of individual achievements but as a collective endeavour. Events in these chronologies are communal and institutional, from the founding of influential little magazines like TISH (1961) and publishers like Coach House Press (1965) to the establishment of the Writing in Our Time reading series (1979) and the Kootenay School of Writing (1984). Each entry includes invaluable information such as location, beginning and ending dates, publication details, and lengthy lists of participating poets. Borrowing Deleuze and Guatarri's concept of the 'rhizome,' Butling argues that readings, magazines, and small publishers form 'a network of multiple, asymmetrical, interconnected nodes' that offer a 'working ground' for 'investigative, experimental writing.' The book's dialogic structure, with alternating essays by Butling and Rudy, itself embodies this collaborative impulse, although there is a wide gap between Butling's well-argued, broad-based pieces and the close readings offered by Rudy.

Perhaps the book's most striking move, though, is to redefine avant-gardism – historically dominated by white male writers – to include the work of women, writers of colour, and gay and lesbian writers. In doing so it follows the work of scholars such as Ann Vickery, whose Leaving Lines of Gender traces a feminist genealogy for us experimental writing. Butling and Rudy's use of the term 'radical' thus includes 'the introduction of new subjects as well as new forms.' In contrast to the modernist pursuit of aesthetic novelty, Butling argues that 'late twentieth-century radicality is often signified as much by class, gender, sexuality, and race-based critiques of power relations as by "new" forms and countercultural positioning,' and the book pursues this claim by exploring the complexities of black subjectivities in the work of Claire Harris, the 'unfixed and variable erotics' of Robin Blaser, and Erin Mouré's addresses to a female readership. But the book also testifies to the vexed relationship between radical form, content, and politics. Butling notes that it took 'many years' of work in the avant-garde for Daphne Marlatt to explore sexuality and feminism in her work or for Fred Wah to address questions of race directly. Butling's own compelling account of her life in literary communities is jolted by her realization that her own role was often 'peripheral' because of gender. The inclusiveness of Writing in Our Time is welcome and needed, but we may fairly wonder whether it relies...