Avant Canada: Poets, Prophets, Revolutionaries by Gregory Betts and Christian Bök (review)

In 2013, the University of Toronto Press published The Avant Garde in Canada: Early Manifestations, Gregory Betts's thorough study of artists and movements from the early to mid-twentieth century. A year later, Betts and his fellow experimental artist/academic Christian Bök hosted a conference at Brock University called Avant Canada: Poets, Prophets, Revolutionaries, at which a variety of presenters picked up where Betts's book had left off, examining texts from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in terms of their "avant-garde" elements. Over the subsequent five years, Betts and Bök assembled a full-length book with the same title as the conference, which they offer as "a kind of snapshot" of the gathering and its exchanges.

Beyond merely conveying the spirit of the conference with revised selections, however, Betts and Bök also solicited new essays and artworks to extend the book's field of vision. They have adroitly shaped this presentation of key perspectives on avant-garde writing in Canada and framed it conceptually with a concise, insightful introduction titled "Time for the Avant Garde in Canada." Their essay features the rhetorical parallelism characteristic of Bök's critical work Pataphysics: The Poetics of an Imaginary Science (2001) and his poetry book Eunoia (2001) while integrating and updating the paradigmatic approach to avant-garde writing around which Betts's previous scholarly text was structured.

Betts and Bök take "time" as their conceptual motif, addressing the ambiguous sense of the French word "avant" as "before" and "beyond." They refer to a schema positing four "chronotopes" in Canadian literature (imperialist, postcolonial, emigratory, Indigenous) and propose an anachronous and speculative "avant-garde time" capable of agitating the other four. Having thus handled the historical problematics of their central term, Betts and Bök organize the collection of essays to "reflect four dispositions of avant-garde practice" in Canada: "concrete poetics," "language writing," "identity writing," and "copyleft poetics." Essays on bpNichol and Leonard Cohen have been added as a preamble that is focused on the counterculture around Canada's centennial moment, and each "disposition" is illustrated with creative texts from contemporary writers, including Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Derek Beaulieu. This multidimensional, yet abstract, assemblage is given a personable wrapping with impassioned commentary by poets Lisa Robertson and Liz Howard on their own formative experiences and by Andre Alexis and Jordan Abel on the problematics of cultural appropriation and the intersection of experimental and Indigenous writing. Critically clear and concise essays include Kristine Smitka's overview of the "avant-garde marketing" of Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers (1966) and Katie L. Price's 'pataphysical reading of Dan Farrell's The Inkblot Record (2000).

The assemblage of Avant Canada: Poets, Prophets, Revolutionaries is held together conceptually by its geometrical organization, linking divergent perspectives as though facets of a single, refractive crystal. The result is more integrated than an anthology and more engaging than an encyclopaedia. In spite of the editors' problematizing of chronology and foregrounding of Indigenous perspectives, however, the five-year lag between conference and book has curiously rendered the text less "timely" than it might have been. Musings on conceptual writing in regard to digital culture, and on the relationship of poetics to neoliberal economic order, seem overmatched in the face of pervasive cybernetics and social media manipulation, while the lack of references to the Anthropocene, climate crisis, or ecological disaster limits the reach of contemporary social and political critique. Nevertheless, the book's clear thinking on avant-garde literary artistry leaves its readers with a multidimensional paradigm for making sense of the next wave of avant-garde responses to the accelerating upheaval of our world. Still more valuable is the commitment to creative resistance on the part of the editors, contributors, and the artists whose work they critique, in offering a source of inspiration and sense of solidarity to anyone engaged in literary acts and arts in an era of unprecedented...