http://www.midwestind.com/dustcontrol-5.htm

At that KSW thing, I read Lawson Fusao Inada’s poem, “Kicking the Habit” (in Premonitions, edited by Walter Lew), a poem which opens the possibilities that are too often blocked by Angloholicism. “and the pines said/ ‘Clackamas. Siskiyou.’” Interestingly enough, Kaia Sand came up to me after the reading and mentioned that she recognized those indigenous words as being from the place where she lives. So the language that comes from the land can invite the possibility of affiliation too.

The very wonderful Wayde Compton also came up and generously read a poem with me. http://www.waydecompton.com/

And another of the poems made me think of the Redress Conference (which ended up happening in Sept), on the 20th anniversary of the Japanese Canadian Redress Settlement. A poetry reading is as good a place as any to slip in an important public service announcement now and then. Discourses want to mingle and hybridize. Let there be friction and sparks. Camaraderie and cultural memories!

Not just the reading, but hopefully also the panel, where Juliana spoke along with Peter Cole, Pat O’Riley, and Reg Johanson, might be relevant to a discussion of affiliation. The panel addressed the challenge of negotiating with english as an imposed, colonial, expansionist language, and asked what shifts could happen when both indigenous and non-indigenous writers work to respect indigenous cultures, languages and perspectives. How can poetics align with First Nations cultures, given that cultural and linguistic diversity also relates to ecological diversity and preservation? Does using the name “kootenay” (or even canada, from the Huron-Iroquoian word for village, kanata) involve some invitation to give back to the land, and to its original peoples?

In his book Coyote and Raven Go Canoeing, Peter Cole writes, “this english language aligns us so and so conjugates parses declensions us/ so that we put ourselves in places of author/ity/ because certain grammars act like viruses/ and they move from language to acting in the world otherly (than otherly).” I’m looking forward to reading the anthology that he and Pat have been editing, Speaking for Ourselves: Constructions of Environmental Justice in Canada. Affiliations with the raccoons, wolves, sea otters, sturgeon, fiddleheads, matsutake, baiji, pta:kwem, qukin, gaak, gwawis, and more, kudasai.

The affiliation that a book like CME suggests between workers in China and the US. There are a number of examples of this. (And I think there is some critical discussion of this issue in Chris Nealon’s recent work, “the Poetic Case” around a poet such as Moxley, whose work is less directly about affiliation.)

And then the affiliations that a poet might suggest, the story outside of the poem itself. I am thinking here of Rita Wong’s reading at the recent Kootenay conference where she began each poem with a dedication to a certain concern/organization or told a story about it being written for a certain protest moment. (Going on memory here; maybe Rita could provide more info).

And then the affiliations that might get suggested or explored by critical writing. At UofC question period we had briefly discussion about the sort of work that critical writing can or cannot or does not do. And I think suggesting affiliations that poets themselves might ignore for a variety of reasons might be one thing it can decide to do. Or my talk was attempt to say that their might be much to be learned from putting disparate poets together and thinking about what they might all say together rather than buying into the “schools” or geographies models.

I’m sure there are more varieties.

I’ve noticed heightened traffic here at the blog since your post (from poetry people, as far as I can tell–the traffic from people researching mining disasters is fairly constant) — and would of course be interested in what others think. And I’d love it if you’d be able to send me a copy of WIG when it appears!

As always, I’m impressed, downright moved, by your continued efforts to push two seemingly opposite practices closer–to amplify the ways in which the materials and methods of progressive politics and poetics resonate. I very much wish I were back in “the motherland” for this event. As you know, this is where I come from.

I want to respond to your open question.

I’ll begin, like a good post-language poet, by noting the irony that you are so far ahead of the pack in terms of activating the nascent politics of certain poetic practices, of doing some justice to the claims that have been made on behalf of “radical modernist” poetry and theory. You should know very well what it means to be avant garde! But I understand that irony misses the mark, too. The punch line of Antin’s talk-poem itself bears this out.

The other day I went down to Hyde Park for a lecture on multilingualism and “other Englishes” in USAmerican poetry of the 1990s, by Juliana Spahr. It was a wide-ranging talk, and I won’t presume to offer a summation. But the argument was a brave one, that reached across certain aesthetic affiliations (avant-garde poets of recent decades subordinating their practices to high modernist Euro-centric ideals / the rejection of these ideals by “conservative” artists and institutions, e.g. the Poetry Foundation / post-colonial vs. anti-imperialist struggles in the decade of English-only fervor and neoliberal clampdown). I hope Juliana can respond for herself to your question, or chime in about the talk. But I want to focus on the context of the Q & A that followed.

A tenured professor at said Ivy League university English Department held forth at length following the talk, about the need for “clarity” as expressed in a certain problematically multilingual poet of high modernism, Ezra Pound. Admitting he knew little or nothing about the authors discussed in the talk, he suggested the aesthetic value of their work be delineated according to Pound’s notion that the poet’s refined language be put in service of the adjudication of ideas of social harmony. I pointed out that the implication, which is nothing new to students of Pound, is that multilingualism and other disjunctive practices are detrimental to “the poet” and “his” role in the polis, so defined. Yet Pound’s own work (often arrogantly, and with a large degree of machismo) contradicts this in so many ways. Hence, it seemed to me that the ostensible fascism underlying Pound’s aesthetic ideology is not a valid gauge of the motives or impact of the poetries Spahr wished to outline (and whose affinities seem, in retrospect, really something new to consider). I think I offended him personally, somehow, as there then began a hectoring having to do with the notion that one merely and freely CHOOSES to move between languages, discourses, idioms, etc., and that therefore it is a question of tact to do so as/when one will. I had to say, no, one can’t really see it that way from the subject position of those oppressed by the language police. You don’t just step out of the subordinated position. And by aping implied languages, you don’t step into them either. This seemed to me to have everything to do with class. With everything I want what I write to have to do with…certainly everything that propelled my longstanding commitment to certain practices of the “avant garde.”

I’m not sure where this leaves us. But I wanted to respond. It’s a necessary question. And you’re not alone in asking it! Some of us, less auspiciously, have been at it for a long while, too.

I wanted to mention that I have a short piece coming out in a NYC zine called WIG, on my own writing practice, literary activism, and training in English departments as labor–it’s a special issue of the journal devoted to writing and/as “work.” I’ve long wanted to understand how identifying as working class and the methods employed relate in my writing. I hope this issue gets around, at least as far and wide as XCP does. And I hope to move from the question of these relations “in my writing” to the relative impact of that writing in my world.

Best,

Patrick