| July 2010: Despite numerous examples of national and international poetry presences—Lisa Robertson, Erin Mouré, Nicole Brossard, Leonard Cohen, Anne Carson, Priscila Uppal, Dennis Cooley, Christian Bök, Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Robin Blaser and Margaret Avison, to name just a few—there is still this Canadian resistance to celebrate the margins of our own writing; we prefer eat our own young, it seems.
Now that we’re one hundred and forty-three years old, you’d think we’d be old enough to not feel so intimidated by our impressively-large and sometimes overpowering neighbour/sibling. Two hockey gold in our Vancouver Olympics, and a previous Prime Minister, Jean Chretien, who pointedly declined President Bush’s guilt-trip to join one of his misguided wars; we are our own country, he said, and can make our own decisions (we were, on all political sides, pretty chuffed about that).
That being said, so many of our more daring voices are celebrated abroad far more than within, with the Canadian norm a more conservative, mainstream flavour; perhaps this is simply the norm in any country, and why should I expect anything else? Yet the publishing world in Canada is relatively small enough that one notices the absences; Toronto writing and publishing still predominantly achieves national attention while all else is regional, no matter the flavour, no matter the content. We are a country of regions, and the real strength of such only comes through acknowledging and connecting such, to those rare moments of outright celebration.
Of the 1970s, poet and publisher jwcurry has said that Toronto held more self-proclaimed avant-garde poets per capita than anywhere on the planet. Over the past couple of decades, Canadian writing has included such diverse and rich strands as the working-class ideological, social commentary and avant-garde language experiments of Vancouver’s Kootenay School of Writing, the prairie long poems of Winnipeg’s Turnstone Press, the focused experiments and energy of Calgary’s poetic, the ying/yang avant-garde from the 1960s-onward between Vancouver’s Talonbooks and Toronto’s Coach House, the long lined narrative landscape of Saskatchewan, Montreal’s song of lyric prose stylings, to the tall tales of Newfoundland. We are a nation of stories so often fighting to be told, of language fighting to be heard, and the myths of a country from the variety of voices that do speak, whether or not they are heard, from Michael Ondaatje’s Ceylon, Barry McKinnon’s Prince George, Barbara Gowdy’s Toronto, Meredith Quartermain’s Vancouver, Carol Shield’s Winnipeg, Margaret Atwood’s Ontario, Lisa Robertson’s sentences, Jon Paul Fiorentino’s Transcona, George Bowering’s British Columbia trickster wit and Christian Bök’s computer languages.
We feel threatened by every side, from the onslaught of the box stores (national and foreign) bludgeoning and even outright killing independent bookstores and publishing, and a terrifying lack of reviews reducing the whole conversation of literature, to the increasing regionalism this brings; the angry young formalists insisting on every last word.
Books may have a hard time crossing borders, but fortunately, writers and writing haven’t had to endure the same limitations, such as when Christian Bök’s Eunoia (2001), which sold a record-breaking 8,000+ copies in Canada, was reissued by UK publisher Canongate, it was selling some thousand copies a week for the first couple of months. There have been the Reality Street reissues of Lisa Robertson’s work, as well as the 100 pages on her writing in The Chicago Review to a new title with University of California Press (publishers, too, of two Robin Blaser titles and a recent Nicole Brossard selected), as well as Canadian-themed issues of Las Vegas, Nevada journal Interim, edited by Vancouver poet Jen Currin, and Swiss online journal Dusie, edited by myself, and Australia’s Jacket magazine publishing individual features on Canadian poets George Bowering, Margaret Avison and Douglas Barbour. As well, there are now a number of Canadian poets with individual author pages at SUNY-Buffalo’s Electronic Poetry Center. Why does it sometimes feel that the only ones holding us back are ourselves?
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About our Correspondent
Born in Ottawa, Canada's glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa. The author of more than twenty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles are the poetry collections Glengarry (2011), wild horses (2010) and kate street (2010) and a second novel, missing persons (2009), An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, Chaudiere Books (with Jennifer Mulligan), The Garneau Review, seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics and the Ottawa poetry pdf annual ottawater. He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and expects to spend much of the next year in Toronto. He regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com
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