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Susan Rudy and Pauline Butling, eds., Poets Talk: Conversations with Robert Kroetsch, Daphne Marlatt, Erin Moure, Dionne Brand, Marie Annharte Baker, Jeff Derksen and Fred Wah. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2005.

Susan Rudy and Pauline Butling, Writing in Our Time: Canada's Radical Poetries in English (1957-2003). Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2005.

Reviewed by Roger Farr and Reg Johanson
The Rain 3:4 (November-January 2006): 6

In the 80s, Huey Lewis and the News told us it was “hip to be square”. In the new millennium, as Richard Brittain observed in the August-October 2005 issue of The Rain, it’s hip to be radical. As witnesses to the ongoing struggles against the occupation of Iraq, the apparent successes of indigenous-, peasant-, and worker-led movements in South America, and the seeming (temporary?) disorganization of World Bank and IMF-sponsored globalization, many people today are feeling a new relevance and urgency in advancing the cause of “radical” social change. Tapping into this current, in these companion volumes critics Susan Rudy (a professor at the University of Calgary) and Pauline Butling (professor emeritus of the Alberta College of Art and Design), endeavor to document, analyze, and evaluate the “radical” elements in Canadian poetry.

So, what does “radical” mean in the context of Can Lit? Butling and Rudy begin with the Formalist thesis that radical writing “unsettles habits of thought and perception, because it pushes language, because it offers points of ignition and resistance within and against the social order” (Poets xi). In Poets Talk they expand this initial definition by adding that such “innovative forms and processes are linked to ‘hard questions’ about citizenship, relationships, subjectivity, language, and power” (Poets xii). Many of the questions asked during the interviews in Poets Talk make use of a taxonomy of formal features that are often thought to give poetry a radical quality: they ask “why do [these poets] reinvent poetic forms? Why use unconventional punctuation, interrupted syntax, repetition, fragmentation, and disjunction?” (Poets xii). Radical, or oppositional, poets, we are told, differentiate themselves from other-not-so-radical-poets by their interest in “the production of meaning over its consumption”; moreover, they view “the poem as a construction—or reconstruction—rather than a vehicle for self expression” (Poets xii). Over the course of the interviews, many of the writers in Poets Talk also identify with postions and experiences that have come to be associated with “the radical”: “perceived outsider positions”, “feminist politics”, “lesbian consciousness”, “race-identified positions”, and “subject positions that are determined by working class conditions”.

Writing in Our Time goes further in defining or, as Butling puts it, “(re) defining”, the “radical”. Recognizing that notions of the “avant-garde” and the “new”, ensconced as they are “within the […] progessive narratives of modernism/capitalism” (Writing 18), have lost their utility as ways of talking about the radical, Butling and Rudy argue that “late twentieth-century radicality is more accurately characterized […] as a wide-ranging, historiographic project to reconfigure existing domains, reterritorialize colonized spaces, and recuperate suppressed histories” (Writing 19). They argue that literary opposition is “like a guerrilla action” occurring “within a history of community activism, little magazine and small press production”, all of which are documented in two chapters dedicated entirely to chronologies covering the period of 1957-2003, providing a kind of “who’s who” guide to the world of the radical Canadian literati. The authors are eager to stress, however, that the activity of this new poetic radicalism “includes minoritized figures (women, writers of color, or explicitly lesbian or gay poets)” and that it “avoids the implicit elitism that lies at the heart of the notion of an avant-garde” (19). This last statement is rather hard to reconcile with the earlier comparison to guerrilla warfare, which is, we would argue, exemplary of a vanguardist politics. Also, million-dollar conferences at the Banff Centre, for example, and expensive SSHRC residencies, would seem to be instances of a rather explicit elitism among practitioners of the so-called radical.

Despite this invocation of militant armed struggle, however, it seems fair to say that Butling and Rudy theorize literary opposition to “hegemonic systems” (Talk xii) in less combative terms. Poetic opposition is characterized by activities that require the prefix re-: “redefining, rewriting, reclaiming, rearticulating, reconfiguring, reinventing, reterritorializing, reformulating” existing structures. One example of this occurs in an important chapter on “Literary Activism”. Here Butling writes that during the 1970s and 80s in Canada, “class, gender, sexuality, and race-based critiques” meant that “alternative poetics networks were reconfigured to include these subjectivities” (229). We are not sure that the term “reconfigure” captures the spirit, or the history, of this important moment. Taking the example of feminist writers, it seems more accurate to say that they organized their presses and journals autonomously, more or less outside, or perhaps beside, existing literary networks; they organized “rooms of their own”, to borrow a title of one of the better known feminist publications to emerge from this period. The important story here, then, is not about how the instituted, white, male literary world (avant-garde or otherwise) adjusted itself to accommodate and “include” these oppositional forces, but rather how a once subordinated group pooled their courage and resources together to create autonomous and parallel poetic communities of their own.

The good news is that Butling and Rudy dedicate a substantial amount of space to recording the ways in which various social movements informed and were informed by literary activism. The bad news, however, is that they circumscribe and severely limit the scope of said activism, even when they appear to want to situate it within “the broader social and political justice movements of the past few decades that sought self-government, territorial rights, redress and legislated equality by and for historically disadvantaged groups” (229). They write that “the difference” between activism in social movements per se and “editorial activism” is that the latter “works toward a share of discursive territory, for ownership of cultural property, and for the right to self-representation (self-government) in the social imaginary” (229). Thus “editorial activism”, and perhaps by extension literary politics in general, is theorized as being both “within” broader social struggles, but also as being in some way separate from them, in that editorial activism imagines it is able to represent those struggles somewhere else. It also appears from this account that literary opposition in Canada has been directed primarily towards legislative and institutional reform rather than developing a deeper critique of the state and its role in maintaining the Canadian colonial legacy and other forms of social stratification.

Maybe the greatest strength of these two collections lies in the admirable attempt to describe the radical in terms of how different lines of struggle overcome the seemingly unpassable categories of race, gender, and class. To attempt this within the “literary world”, an apparatus which even today often prefers to ignore its role in the reproduction of social hierarchies (take the language of “emerging, mid-, and established”, or of “mentoring”, for example), is very impressive. Butling's critical auto-biography “Who is She” a brilliant chapter in which she records the way in which she was excluded from the very milieu she now has the authority-and guts-to criticize, is especially worth reading. We hope more such projects are taken up. But still we find ourselves coming back to the same question: why the separation between “editorial activism” and other forms of struggle? What keeps these forms of opposition apart?

One possible answer can be found in the way in which the interface between poetry and politics is imagined by many contemporary “radical” poets. A recurring idea in these collections is that poetry can and should be used to bring about cognitive effects; that is to say, for many, poetry is political in the 1960s and 70s sense—it is linked to the classical Marxist-humanist (and activist) project of “consciousness raising”. Erin Moure, for example, explains that she approaches “language with a feminist consciousness, consciousness of the history of women, of how women are sited” (Talk 51). This approach in turn becomes a poetics informed by the Formalist idea that “through perception, we construct reality”. Thus, Moure sees her poetry as committed to a kind of cognitive restructuring, or reprogramming, of “the subject”. This is necessary, she explains, because “most people are only attentive to the expected” (55), which sounds very much like the “false consciousness” thesis. Similarly, Fred Wah notes that for him “writing is only interesting if it offers possibilities for shifts in consciousness, and hopefully shifts in the way we experience the world” (167). Curiously, however, Wah also explains that his writing did not become “political” until later in his life, after the struggles of the 60s and 70s: “certain notions of social change just weren't possible”, he explains, “now a writer like Dionne Brand comes fully set-up”, presumably because radical social movements have created a foundation upon which radical writers can take “a position”.

So it seems that we are left with something of a chicken/egg scenario here. Are social conditions transformed first by radical social movements, which then permit poets and other literary activists to articulate, represent, and orchestrate the movement’s “consciousness”? Or, do the poet-activists parachute in to the emerging movements, helping non-literary folks “expand their perceptions of reality”? From this perspective, theories of radical change that allow writers to “change the system from within”, and to concern themselves merely with “culture” and “discourse”, must seem rather self-serving. Either way, it seems that radical literary circles, to the extent that they understand their work in the terms laid out by Butling and Rudy, are troubled with the same contradictions plaguing other types of activism: by imagining themselves to be occupying the roles of specialized leaders, and by directing their energies into reforming a society that can’t be reformed, they may be removing themselves too far from the struggles they claim to represent.

Read the books and decide for yourself.