Mud Is Mud: Ongoing Notes Toward An Essay On The Art Of Fiction
Clarity is not accessibility. Accessibility is not simplistic. Brevity isn’t minimalism. Oblique is often too much distance. Less is not always more. Excess is not experimental. One room needs to be in relation to the next. Quantity is not quality. Distillation takes time. Ideas in abundance are not enough. Murky is not mysterious. Language isn’t...
Aisha Sasha John: What to do about it
On how to proceed How to proceed is about going. The the the first step of proceeding is beginning. How to proceed is to begin, and how to begin is to direct your attention to the object in question. My dance teacher says the first thing one does when doing improvised dance based on a...
No Archive is Neutral: Basements and Attics, Closets and Cyberspace: Explorations in Canadian Women’s Archives
From “Introduction: No Archive is Neutral,” Basements and Attics, Closets and Cyberspace: Explorations in Canadian Women’s Archives (edited by Linda M. Morra and Jessica Schagerl). You can read one of the chapters, by Daphne Marlatt, that we posted earlier this week. Buy the book. It’s really great. Basements and Attics, Closets and Cyberspace is,...
Rob Winger on Al Purdy
The People’s Poet: Al Purdy as Organic Intellectual In recent years, I’ve been looking for a contemporary figure who might qualify as what Antonio Gramsci once hopefully envisioned as an “organic” intellectual: a grassroots leader rising up from the exploited masses to lead a proletariat revolution against the ruling bourgeoisie. But does – and could...
Daphne Marlatt: Of Mini-Ships and Archives
To think about women’s archives is to think about how recently (say, in the last century and a half) women’s lives in the Western world have moved from the private and domestic sphere to the public cultural-political one, becoming “collectable.” This transit from private to public is embedded in the origin (or at least as...
Margaret Christakos: Slay it Again, Anne
Anne Carson’s new “re/verse-novel” re-spins time, grief, thinking, psychoanalysis and the poem by Margaret Christakos Spin One: Time Anne Carson is a writer whose compulsion to understand time is bottomless. One of the few poets in North America obsessed with the ancients, Carson delivered in 2006 her intimate, profoundly contemporized translations of Euripedes under the...
Carmine Starnino: Steampunk Zone
In our mashup-mad era, we yearn for unpigeonholeability. We don’t want to be different. We want to be weird. We want to be total category-killers. As a result, it’s hard to find a poet – free-versifier and formalist alike – who doesn’t believe at heart that he or she is far too heterodox to be...
Abstract/Concrete #3 – Natalie Czech
I’ve written in several places about erasure texts (most recently in the latest issue of Evening will come) as typified by Jen Bervin’s nets. Berlin’s Natalie Czech creates uncanny limit-case poems that point to the end of erasure texts, each piece a seemingly impossible conjuring of texts within texts. Czech’s Je n’ai rien à dire....
How Some Folks Would Do: Satire in CanLit
Classical satire has two distinct streams. The first, following Horace, is gentle and urbane, with a soft, self-effacing mien. The second, derived from Juvenal, is nasty, vicious, and angry. Both take aim at what they see as the foibles and failings of society, but they employ very different tonal registers to do so. As Roger...
Lisa Robertson & Catriona Strang
Here, we find an archival gem that illuminates the pinnacle of an exceptional moment for women’s writing in Canada, in Vancouver in particular. Here, in the thrum of the Giantess (a chapbook series I am trying hard to bring to you) at the birth of Debbie, of Debbie: An Epic, in a moment of Raddle...
Vanessa Place: The Allegory and the Archive
The Allegory and the Archive/ Vanessa Place But I must constantly repeat that I say all this in connection with repetition. Kierkegaard Je ne suis point la justice. PlaceWith luck, I ended yesterday on guilt and shame; now that you are in a proper frame of mind, we will consider—thankfully more briefly—allegory and the archive,...
Donna Haraway: from “A Cyborg Manifesto”
Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), pp.149-181. AN IRONIC DREAM OF A COMMON LANGUAGE FOR WOMEN IN THE INTEGRATED CIRCUIT This chapter is an effort to build an ironic political myth faithful to feminism,...
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