This research blog is toward an upcoming conference presentation convened by TPRI at Experimental Writing in English (1945-2000). The conference has been organized by Hannah Van Hove and Tessel Veneboer, and includes keynotes by Anthony Reed and Georgina Colby.
Here I will present the abstract of the panel and presentations. The panel includes presentations by Brent X., Simon Eales, and Amanda Hurtado that each, in their way, challenge canonicity, and the canon-producing discursive zone of literary criticism.
A Panel Consisting of Three Anti-Canonistic Poetic Events: Undoing the Canon in Transreal Time
This panel proposes three unconventional ways of approaching anti-canonicity at the level of scholarly form, poetic engagement, movement, and making. With an eye toward scholarship, poetics, poetry, and poems in the sense of ποιητής (maker), we would like to suggest that to retain the power of anti-canonicity requires that we also re-think, or perhaps unthink, our conventional engagement with criticism and its objects, even going so far as to suggest that we dispense with convention altogether. One of the problems with any “canon” is the way the concept attempts to falsely fix what constitutes not just “the history” of poetic lineage(s), leading to oppressive and exclusionary historicities, but also the ways that canons attempt to arrest the poetic object itself, reducing it to a bounded “thing” with determined, agreed-upon qualities they are thought to possess that we go on to describe (lines, rhymes, meters, forms), rather than as ongoing processes that in our engagement with them we intervene in and co-create in critical/poetic acts. We suggest that retaining the subversive potential latent in a politics of anti-canonicity might be achieved not just by the important work of representing key texts that can be considered anti-canonical and describing their “qualities,” but that staying true to a politics of anti-canonicity might require shifting our understanding of what constitutes literary critical objects and our methods altogether. Perhaps we must understand that criticism itself is poetics. That is to say, rather than fixing representative works into a canon, anti-canonicity could be the ongoing generation of a contingent definition (and undefining) of what poetry and poetics is, as a non-teleological processural research program that cares for while inventing poetic events. These three presentations self-reflexively engage the form of the conference presentation and question what constitutes sufficient poetic objects of study. We hope to demonstrate a rigorous, scholarly, anti-canonical, heterogeneous mode of production in the spirit of anti-canonicity.
Retaining Anti-Canonicity Against the Critical Final Word: N.H. Pritchard, Republication, and Infrastructuralist Video Poetic Criticism
Brent Cox, University at Buffalo
N.H. Pritchard’s The Matrix and EECCHHOOEESS have recently been republished in
the United States by Ugly Ducking Presse, DABA Press, and Primary Information, constituting an anti-canonical event par excellence, because these publications are meant, in part, to point out the serious critical lacuna in “the canon” (both poetic and critical) surrounding these incredible works of visually inflected poetry. While recent critical work by Anthony Reed and Craig Dworkin, among others, have stressed the import of Pritchard’s work to experimental and innovative poetic history, and have rightly urged that we must take this work into account, Pritchard remains, in no uncertain terms, “anti-canonical.” Here, though, a difficulty emerges. On the one hand, we must engage with this work. On the other hand, one of the powers of Pritchard’s work is that it stands as a challenge to the canon’s ability to formulate an adequate history without reproducing those oppressive structural conditions from which it emerges; in this case, one of the reasons Pritchard’s work remains anti-canonical is its powerful indictment of the United States’ racist regime, down to what is permitted into the canon of “experimental literature.”
My question is: how do we discuss this work without neutralizing its power? How do we allow it to retain the power of its piercing anti-canonicity without being submitted to hegemony’s oppressive regime? We might put this same question into conversation with the recently published Women in Concrete Poetry 1959-1979, ed. Alex Balgiu and Mónica de la Torre, a gathering of republications that we might justly call an anti-canonical anthology. Using my ongoing development of a “video-poetic infrastructuralist style,” in this presentation I will argue that if we are to change the canon, and understand the power of anti-canonicity, we must also change our modes of engagement with the works that we study. Taking seriously Kamau Brathwaite’s notion of “interstanding,” my video-oriented presentation will combine animation, video, conventional scholarly prose, and poetic-image-making to provide readings of N.H. Pritchard’s work in relation to his notion of transrealism, while tacitly arguing for a poetics of ongoing interdependent development against any literary critical final word.
Brent Cox is a PhD Candidate in University at Buffalo’s Poetics Program. Work has recently appeared or is forthcoming at the Electronic Literature Organization’s 2020-2 conferences, in P-Queue, and in OEI. He is the recent recipient of a Race and Technology grant from University of Boulder’s Media Archaeology Lab (MAL) to research Kamau Brathwaite’s use of the MAC SE30 computer in creation of his Sycorax Video Style, research that lead to a conference presentation at “What Does the Poem Think?” at University of Cambridge. He helps run Buried Text, a podcast devoted to poetics. Buried Text is part of the Topological Poetics Research Institute (TPRI, www.poeticsinstitute.com).
email: brentmichaelcox@gmail.com
Susan Howe: A Poetics of Motion and Measure, Material and Media
Amanda Hurtado, University of Boulder
Much has been written about the feminist foundations of Susan Howe’s anti-canonical poetics. Her way of collaging archival materials not only foregrounds the gaps and lacunae of unrecorded histories—most often the voices of women and indigenous American peoples—but also literally shreds the canon. However, less has been written about the significant ways in which her inscriptive tools mediate the historical materials that inspire her. Xerox, scissors, and tape pattern, trim, and refit measures of textual material in a way that literalizes the idea of what poetic measure might mean. Susan Howe has been included in the short-list of major players of the post-modern language poetry movement because of the way she foregrounds the materiality of the work, while also considered a poet in the modernist lineage of Pound, Eliot, and Oppen because of her work’s citational nature. To the lineage of Dickinson and Stein with which Howe herself identifies, I would like to add the Dadaist tradition of collage as another layer to the materialist lineage of Howe’s work, whose poetic styles and formal modes reflect the process of cut and paste composition. Echoing the formal processes of a mode of production becomes central to Howe’s poetics of space and thereby enables a shift from one aspect of measure to another—that is, from poetic measure to material measurement, thus redefining altogether what we might come to study as poetic measure. Her process of splicing creates impossible new spacings, soundings, and perspectives that undo any possibility of a linear canon, and insisting on an anti-canon of simultaneous material multiplicity. By attending to the affordances and limitations of her inscriptive media, (xerox, scissors, and tape), my paper will consider the specifics and particularities of Susan Howe’s poetic process at various points spanning her career.
Amanda Hurtado is a PhD Candidate at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her research focuses on 20th and 21st century poetry and media poetics. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Washington, Bothell and a BA in English from the University of Utah. She is the author of S ACE P (Timglaset, 2020 & Editions Eclipse, 2014) and CELL (Mono-D Press, 2015).
Making Anti-Canon Poetics Dance: Leslie Scalapino and Choreographic Poetics
Simon Eales, University at Buffalo
This paper, while challenging what an academic conference paper might be, proposes that anti-canonicity is embedded in the choreographic poetics of the transatlantic avant-garde. In order to say as much, the paper defines choreographic poetics not only as an “act of making” at the intersection of dance and poetry, as one might expect, but as “writing that is doing what it says it is doing.” It defines the transatlantic avant-garde as the innovative aesthetic and poetic movement which has developed not only between and including Europe and the Americas as geo-political entities, but also as inextricable from the temporal and historical field demarcated by colonial crossings of the Atlantic ocean. The choreographic and the transatlantic are important to invoke in a discussion of the canon and the possibility of anti-canonicity because of the way that canons condition the body. At the level of the body, canons are designed to carry law/lore and (religious) order from a central locus—one posited as intelligent and/or proper—to alternative zones. Poets I consider deploying a choreographic poetics use it to identify and decondition this canonisation of the body. They also use it to position the Atlantic ocean as a measuring device for the canon’s center-to-limit extension over geographical, political, and cultural space. The paper will focus on examples from the work of Gertrude Stein and Leslie Scalapino, and consider them against a backdrop of work by Jackson Mac Low and St. Augustine. It will take the form of a performed academic paper: read exactly, from memory, accompanied by demonstrative gestures, thus making my own body along with and the conference situation into something like an inscriptive, poetic surface of anti-canonicity.
Simon Eales is a PhD candidate in the Poetics Program at SUNY Buffalo, where he is a Presidential Fellow. He received a B.A. in English Literature and European Studies, and a M.A. in English Literature from the University of Melbourne, Australia, earning the Percival Serle Prize for his Master’s thesis on radical Australian poetry. Simon researches at the intersection of contemporary poetics, bio- and geo-politics, modernist theory, and gender and sexuality studies. He co-organises EcoPoetry Workshop, a poetry and theory residency near Milan, Italy, and co-constitutes Buried Text podcast.