The Poetic Front (E-Journal)

Husain, Kasim

Husain 1 
A Poetics of Sparsity: Refusing Authoritative Interpretation in Souvankham 
Thammavongsa’s Found 
Reviewed by Kasim Husain 
 
 
Souvankham Thammavongsa’s explanation of her choice to publish her poetry with the small 
press Pedlar recalls Marx’s critique of the commodity. Marx decries the way consciousness of 
the labour that goes into the making of a commodity is abstracted in order for it to acquire 
exchange value, pointing out what gets left behind in this process: “existence as a material thing 
is put out of sight. Neither can it any longer be regarded as the product of the labour of the joiner, 
the mason, the spinner, or of any other definite kind of productive labour” (305). In a talkback 
session after doing a reading for the Test Reading Series from her collection of poetry, Found, 
Thammavongsa echoes this observation while contrasting chapbook publishing and working 
with Pedlar, saying “the paper people use is cheap and ugly and they s\tapled it together and I 
just wanted someone to put in the time and effort to make it look good because... I already put in 
the time and effort to make it what it is” (“Test Reading” 2006). This cohesion between both 
form and content strengthens her concern with physicality, particularly that of the labouring 
body. In other words, not only is Thammavongsa stressing the work that goes into writing and 
publishing poetry, but also her poetics places the emphasis squarely on the labour embodied in 
the images she chooses to represent in this collection.  
 
The unity of form and content is most immediately evident in the collection’s slight and austere 
physical appearance. A stylistic continuation of the presentation that won her 2003 collection 
Small Arguments the Alcuin Society book design award, Found’s typeface is small, and the 
poems themselves are presented with substantial open space both between and surrounding their 
brief stanzas. This arrangement lends them a quality of presence.  
 
By presence, I mean to suggest that the language of Found refocuses our attention on the 
embodied nature of language over and above the abstraction that takes place in transmitting 
meaning. Take “Thermometer, a Diagram of” as a case study; the poem situates the human body 
on a spectrum “between / two points” of boiling and freezing. The thermometer reminds us that 
the body occupies, or rather inhabits, space that is not of the mind, but is somewhere on a 
corporeal continuum between hot and cold: “This / is where / it lives / and how” (15). The 
poem’s title also introduces us to the poet’s strategic inversion of emphasis, placing the focus 
squarely on the object – as most of the poems are sentences, titles such as “Ideal Proportions, 
Male,” “The Bible, Notes On” and “House, A Sketch Of” remind us that these poems are 
gestures at interpreting a life in which she was too young to be an active participant. 
Souvankham Thammavongsa was born in 1978, in a refugee camp in Nong Khai, Thailand, the 
same year that her father put together the scrapbook that formed the source material for this 
collection. The objects that make up the scrapbook seem to occupy a privileged position over and 
above any retrospective interpretation she might make of them. 
 
Thammavongsa’s reluctance to speculate on her parents’ actual responses to the situation in 
which they found themselves is established in Found’s opening, an untitled poem in which she 
observes, “If you knew / love / these / do not say / but of life / your life / it was small and brief” 
(13). The emphasis here is on the material life of the body rather than the perceptive realm of the 
Husain 2 
mind, or the means by which human life is made knowable. The poems that follow break down 
the elements necessary for life into “The Heart,” “The Lung,” and “The Sun” (notably absent 
from this sequence is a poem entitled “The Mind”), which are marked out as different from the 
rest of the collection not only by their ambiguous connection to the scrapbook from which Found 
derives, but also by the way the stanzas cascade diagonally downwards across the page. All three 
poems reframe relatively standard tropes of lyric poetry in terms of (to borrow again from Marx) 
their use-value. In “The Heart,” for example, she dismisses the easy metaphor of heartbreak in 
favour of its role in circulation; “Nothing / here / can break, / or be broken / And nothing / can 
come / from here / but blood” (16-17). The heart here is involved in the maintenance of life, 
rather than its standard poetic figuration as the body’s emotional centre; in the context of life in a 
refugee camp, keeping the heart pumping “blood” acquires an urgency that renders the metaphor 
of the heart as the core of human feeling facile. Similarly, “The Lung” attends to the “work it 
does / it has done / and has been doing / all these years” (18), while “The Sun” emphasises the 
difficulty of living under conditions where it “built / shafts / and sent them / down to harm you” 
(20). Life is hard work, but applying themselves creatively kept her parents going. They “built, / 
to survive” (21), and her father’s scrapbook itself appears as a testament to that constructive 
basis for continued existence. 
 
The preface’s revelation of the fraught circumstances of the scrapbook’s compilation in a refugee 
camp in Nong Khai, Thailand, lends the poems an ominous charge. When might the heart’s 
“blood” stop pumping, or worse, when might it be pumped out of the body? This tension 
becomes particularly apparent in the sequence of calendar poems towards the end of the 
collection, which progressively move from a combination of descriptive poetry and visual 
reproductions of her father’s notations of time (crooked lines that cross off months and days), to 
simply the notations themselves and finally to blank space. Punctuated as this sequence is by the 
violently desperate image of dismembering a pigeon in “Warning,” which ends the collection, 
the chain of objects is shattered sharply, as she describes how her father “broke / its hard neck / 
cut open / its chest / dug out / a handful / and threw back / its body” (60). While the relationship 
of the pigeon to the scrapbook is unclear in and of itself, fitting it into Found’s overarching 
schematic is beside the point; the arresting quality of this moment of sheer human necessity 
returns our attention to the way all of these objects collected in the midst of privation acquire a 
sense of “particular purpose,” to borrow from the collection’s epigraph – in this case, it is a 
“warning,” a reminder of the fragility of life, and the ease with which bodies can become lifeless 
husks. 
 
In contrast with this dramatic finale, however, many of Thammavongsa’s poems seem to 
disavow interpretive representation altogether in favour of material presence, which is 
exemplified by the catalogue of units that make up “Tables of Weight and Measures, 
Equivalents.” Reading this poem against Found’s epigraph from Wittgenstein, which explains, 
“[t]he work of a philosopher consists of assembling reminders for a particular purpose,” the 
question becomes, why did her father choose these particular measures? Beginning with the 
conversion “1 chain / is 22 yards” (30) might carry a carceral connotation suitable to the refugee 
camp setting, but there is a sense of the poet’s careful abstention from narrativizing what is 
ostensibly a simple reference list. This question recalls the observation of poet Jan Zwicky – the 
source of Thammavongsa’s Wittgenstein epigraph – in attempting to define metaphor, that “it is 
impossible that all utterances should be metaphorical. But from this it does not follow that there 
Husain 3 
is always a reliable way to determine, in a given case, whether an utterance is metaphorical or 
not” (15).  
 
More importantly, perhaps, while the measurements above convert neatly into another form, 
some of the poems address the difficulty of attempting similar equations in terms of language. 
“The Bible, Notes On” focuses on the one word that is readable to the speaker in a Bible written 
in an unknown language. This poem follows closely on “What I Can’t Read,” which focuses on 
the appearance of language in the absence of understanding; Thammavongsa’s description of the 
way written Laotian is figured, a script in which “Each letter / wound / around itself / drawing / a 
small dark / hole / an / inner ear / tiny and landlocked” (26). The “inner ear” metaphor appears 
particularly appropriate with reference to the alphabet’s appearance, an example of which 
follows: 
 
 
 (Ager). 
 
 
Laos itself, a “landlocked” country, is embedded in the closed circles or “inner ear[s]” that 
punctuate each letter of the script. Here, the graphology of language takes the place of the 
typically linguistic basis for metaphor. This is wholly consistent with Thammavongsa’s poetics, 
as she refuses to mourn her inability to understand Laotian in favour of relating to the material 
body of the language itself. Such attention to the body of language appears as an affirmation of 
existence in “My Father’s Handwriting,” where she notes how “He carved / every letter / into / 
the sound / its / shape made / and every one took / a place / where nothing / stood” (25). While 
she is writing here about her father, her own poetry appears to make a similar claim of 
permanence in the midst of absence.  
 
According to Zwicky, a “good metaphor is the expression of a homology, an isomorphism, 
between the way two things gesture” (9). In this context, Thammavongsa’s refusal to abstract 
into narrative in order to establish a sense of connection with her past cannot be stressed enough 
– these poems appear as gestures at understanding informed by material artefacts of her father’s 
scrapbook, rather than making any claims to authoritative interpretation on her part. Think here 
of the connection between the senses of place both on the anatomical and geographical maps in 
“Thermometer, A Diagram Of,” and “The World, A Map Of.” In the earlier poem, life happens 
between two points on a thermometer, or, in terms of the latter, “If / it is round / or if / you can 
see / the sun / the other way / does / not matter.” Ways of seeing are less important than 
acknowledging the places we inhabit; for Thammavongsa’s father, this is “the country / and / the 
blue dot / inside” (42). In Found, the poetry itself inhabits a physical body that is consistent with 
its contents. The thick expanse of empty paper surrounding the poems presents them as objects 
laboured over; this setting allows for the abstraction of interpretive response to the past while 
insisting on consciousness of the crucial element of materiality upon which that process must be 
based. I might conjecture that Marx himself would approve of such a principled poetics, but that 
in itself would be immaterial speculation. 
Husain 4 
Works Cited: 
 
 
Ager, Simon. “Lao alphabet.” 2009. Omniglot. 10 Jan. 2009. 
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/lao.htm 
 
Marx, Karl. “Capital, Volume One.” The Marx-Engels Reader. Ed. Robert C. Tucker. 2
nd
 
Edition. New York: Norton, 1978. 
 
Read, Rob, and Souvankham Thammavongsa. “Test Reading: Question and Answer Session.” 23 
Oct. 2006. Test Reading Series. 10 Jan. 2009.  
http://ia331316.us.archive.org/2/items/ReadThammavongsaReadThammavongsaQA_0/O
ct23QA.mp3 
 
Zwicky, Jan. Wisdom & Metaphor. Kentville NS: Gaspereau, 2003. 
 
 
 
 
Kasim Husain is a Master’s student in English at SFU. Among his many interests are 
contemporary British novels, Asian North American literature and Marxist theory. 
 


English

A Poetics of Sparsity: Refusing Authoritative Interpretations in Souvankham Thammavongsa's Found

Collis, Stephen

Singing the Song from the Outside: Peter Gizzi's Outernationale

Burnham, Clint

I Cut My Finger by Stuart Ross 
Reviewed by Clint Burnham 
 
 
 
Lacan once said that the perfect complement to a castrated man was an incredibly beautiful 
woman, since each would have what the other lacked. If this is so, then Stuart Ross deserves a 
roll in the hay with a goddess, with Charlize Theron or Parker Posey, for, as the title of his new 
poetry collection, I Cut My Finger (Anvil, 2007) suggests, Ross gives up everything he can 
afford to in writing his poems. And there’s more Lacanian grist for the mill in that title, of 
course, as it alludes to the Mel Brooks quote: “Tragedy is when I cut my finger, comedy is when 
you walk into an open sewer and die.” That is to say, what Ross’s title (and I’ll get to the poem 
with that title in a minute), what Ross’s book’s title signifies is our inescapable narcissism – 
what happens to me is always more important than what happens to you. And yet – and yet, what 
happens to us never really happens to us, or to me, for there also is no us or me or I except in 
language, in the poems, in that relation with the other (Stuart Ross, we will see, is the Big Other 
of small press).  
 
Let’s dive into a poem, shall we, and see how this works out. The poem “I cut my finger” works 
with a number of reversals, of deflations, of unexpected minor happenstances and unexpected 
major philosophical thoughts. It begins with the banal: 
 
A mountain was on the ground. 
I don’t know how it got there, probably a thing 
regarding the earth. 
 
This is Ross’s trademark use of simple language and self-deprecation (hence the castration thing 
I’m fixated on), which all of it conceals an immediate profundity: the idea of a mountain being 
on the ground, as opposed to, say, being the ground. That is, the mountain here, in this poem, is 
the monstrous Thing of Lacan, that manifestation of the Real, the harbinger of desire, the objet 
petit a. For this is the mountain regarding which  
 
I thought 
maybe Mom and Dad and Owen would be there, 
or at least floating above it. 
 
– Ross has included his dead parents and brother, a common enough trope in his work of the past 
decade as his family started passing away. (Most notoriously, in a nod to how his father had to 
“anglicize” [celticize?] his name Razovsky, Ross published a book in 2001 titled Razovsky at 
Peace.) Indeed, the floating here, and my polite euphemism of “passing away” are 
overdetermined, as in the Jewish high holiday/tradition of passover, which Ross alludes to in 
“Passed Over” (in Hey, Crumbling Balcony! [2003]). The mountain is a marker for Ross’s 
family’s absence, for his desire to see his family again, a desire that can never be attained, and 
thus that can remain as a desire, authorizing the poem.  
 
In the poem’s second stanza: 
 
I tried calling Dana but there wasn’t any phone 
and I cut my finger 
dialing a rock. 
 
So the tragedy that is entailed here is not merely the narcissistic thesis of Brooks, but 
inextricably bound up in the other, the desire for the other, not only for the dead, but the living, 
and for the symptom of the living, of the other, the symptom-as-technology (the dated, rotary-
dial, phone), which here has its stand-in as, again, the monstrous Thing, the rock that is the 
mountain.  
 
Indeed, this desire continues to be staged here: 
 
dialing a rock. The bad thing was 
there was nobody up there, 
and nobody floating above. 
Not even a store when I felt like Chiclets. 
 
But desire is about to encounter the Real, and indeed displays fear and trembling: 
 
… I sat down and got ready to think: 
and then I thought: I thought that for me 
mountains are big solid things poking into the air, 
like at god, 
but for people for whom solid 
is the absence of solid, 
then they’ve got upside-down mountains 
pointing towards earth. 
 
As I said above, Ross gives up almost everything he can afford to in writing his poems – indeed, 
his years as a punching bag for every freak on Toronto’s Yonge Street (in the 80s and early 90s 
he sold his self-published chapbooks on the street, 7,000 of them by his count) have toughened 
him up, and, since his father met his mother when he challenged an anti-semite in 1940s 
Toronto, Ross, we can be sure, is one tough Jew.  
 
A word on Ross’s ethics. A tireless activist in the literary field of small press (as I argued fifteen 
years ago in West Coast Line), Ross has edited, published, collected, contributed to, been 
excluded from, reviewed in, been reviewed in, and criticized virtually every material (and 
virtual) form of textual production, from self-stapled pamphlets to corporate textbooks, Canada 
Council pimped magazines to blogs, Harper’s to The Globe and Mail, Coach House to his own 
Proper Tales, Mondo Hunkamooga to Who Torched Rancho Diablo to Harlequin Romances 
(from which he “appropriated” the Rancho title). Like his co-religionist, Ross is the “subject 
supposed to know” of small press. And so, unlike the “typical” small press zinester (to wax 
Lukacsean for a moment), who disingenuously avers that he/she is just interested in helping the 
community, man, Ross instead ingeniously proclaims his desire, his lust-for-power, in the 2001 
pamphlet, “I Am the King of Poetry.” There, in true super-ego fashion, Ross declares (it is 
performative, a speech-act) that he is “the king of poetry. I can make or break you.” Power in the 
literary world is both a matter of production but also one of arbitration. Poetry king as ward boss. 
As Big Other, in the sense that “You will not write a haiku before I give the thumbs-up.” That is, 
Ross’s satiric poem envisions poetry as a system, a structure of power and production that is 
eventually all filed, in greedy fashion (more narcissism), so that “everything is under ‘R’. Under 
‘Ross’”. In fact, at the level of the name, Ross’s politics (of the small press) and poetics can be 
divided into two tendencies (or, rather, they divide themselves, as language, at the level of the 
letter): “Ross” is the libidinal superego tendency, while “Razovsky” is the Old Testament 
superego. 
 
A similar bifurcation can be found in terms of how tragedy figures in Ross: as either (or both) 
revolution (the political) or the ethical (the philosophical/psychoanalytic). In the mock-epic 
“Sitting by the Judas Hole” (in Farmer Gloomy’s New Hybrid [1999]), he writes: 
 
The front of my shirt is bloodied. 
I am aghast – I’ve just had it dry-cleaned. 
I have the receipt to prove it. 
Please replace my door.  (31)  
 
The effect of tragedy – the bloody shirt – is deflated (dry-cleaning anxiety) but in a pragmatic 
way (he still wants his door fixed). By this reckoning, Ross’s is a psychoanalytic art – blood is a 
stain (Ross studied with Robin Wood, the film critic well known for his exegeses of Hitchcock 
and Haneke).  
 
But, then, we also see in Ross a sense of the tragic that is more social, more to do with the 
revolution. Again, we can turn to a pamphlet for confirmation: “the big chair”, from 1999 
(written and published during the publicity tour for Farmer Gloomy’s New Hybrid). 
The bulk of the poem reads: 
 
A man causes chaos in his house. 
His family flees, finds shelter. 
Here there is much light.  
Here the clocks function. 
Here the children learn to hunt. 
Meals are served on plates. 
The earth does not shift. 
A woman has a hat of fruit; 
she sings into a microphone. 
Each morning a calf is born. 
Children may select their facial features.  
It is safe here. 
 
Here, then, what begins as if an “issue” poem (as Adorno put it) – about spousal abuse? – offers 
us the utopia of a halcyonic shelter for battered women and their families, with light, clocks, 
dishes, entertainment (Carmen Miranda?). But also a place where children learn to hunt (a 
rebuke to the pacifist left which prefers to forget the inconsistencies of history?) with an 
extraordinary satire on “user-friendly” radicalism: “Children may select their facial features.” 
But, as if to further torque the levels of plausibility – “It is safe here.”  
 
The subject’s choice of its own body, of course, is part of the new, postmodern era of pay-with-
plastic surgery: it is also, in Ross’s poem, seen as the subjectivity of hysterical demands: instead 
of safety, we get consumerism. But the blunt instruments with which I am interpreting Ross’s 
work should not mislead you into thinking that the writing is often unknowingly propagandistic. 
  
For, as a photographic project that Ross undertook during repeated visits to Nicaraugua (an 
object of leftist fetishism during the early 80s, a time of anti-apartheid activism and Central 
American support committees), “Dead Cars,” demonstrates in its fine attention to decayed 
automobiles, Ross’s revolution is as much aesthetic as it is social. And just as Ross’s revolution 
lies between the aesthetic and the social, his poetics, those of Ross – Razovsky – lie between 
these two versions – the psychoanalytic and the political – of the tragic. 
 
I want to finish up with a reflection on the irony of the small press, DIY, self-publishing world 
having a “Big Other,” a “Subject supposed to know,” as I argue with respect to Ross. With the 
current fetish for craft and Etsy-esque kitsch-punk, for decentralized entrepreneurialism and 
wiki-epistemology, however, has proceeded apace the ideological function of that neo-
liberalism. As I argued recently writing on the poetry of Robert Manery in Rain, the ideology of 
anarchy, of libertarianism, of automatism and self-direction, only masks the practice of 
totalitarianism. Even small press must have a big king, and it is to Ross’s credit that his work 
never hesitates from underscoring its own arbitrariness. 
 
 
 
Clint Burnham’s latest book of poetry, Rental Van, was also published by Anvil. He teaches in 
the department of English at Simon Fraser University. 


I Cut My Finger, by Stuart Ross

Klobucar, Andrew

Changing the Subject: Rae Armantrout’s Next Life  
Reviewed by Andrew Klobucar 
 
 
 
Armantrout’s literary origins within the poetics of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E confirms her work’s 
appreciation of the sentence as a semantic unit. However, a somewhat less abstract relationship 
to language structure, compared, say, to the work of Barrett Watten or Susan Howe, enables 
Armantrout to launch a much more focused and often dramatic exploration of semantics, voice 
and aesthetic sensibility. Armantrout begins Next Life (2007), her most recent book, with a 
particularly apt set of opening metaphors concerning language and subjectivity that ably set the 
stage for an intricate performance of rhetorical play. Lest we, her readers, mistake the 
significance of the lines before us as a literal voice, personally directed to a literal audience, the 
opening title reminds the reader of the inevitable “Tease” of tone and position that is about to 
take place. Thus the narrative proceeds, the book begins – a complex set of ever shifting poses 
and pretences, not unlike 
   
a cop’s place 
  as he puts himself 
  inside the head 
  of a serial killer rapist 
 
Like a string of prize chess moves, the opening sequences draw the reader in with a mixture of 
intrigue and apprehension. Whether we identify with either side of this particular dialectical 
struggle, the cop or the killer rapist, is irrelevant. One cannot exist without the other, and 
inevitably we will recognize both in the process of reading her work. Engaging Armantrout in 
her role as writer, we retain much of the cop’s moral function and the surveiling eye that goes 
with it – the eye that cannot assess or judge without convicting. Yet, we also possess the 
convict’s own desire to stay one step ahead of any and all judgement, as only the capacity to 
elude interpretation effectively limits the cop’s critical hold (and moral sway) over the struggle at 
hand.  
 
If the tension between the two orientations seems perpetual, it is, for Armantrout, exactly this 
quandary that best articulates the complex relationship between aesthetics and language – 
especially with respect to the role of the former in determining both perspective and position in 
writing. In fact, such dilemmas in philosophy have remained stubbornly consistent since the mid- 
19th century. As Robert Hullot-Kentor reminds us in his introduction to Adorno’s Aesthetic 
Theory (1997), Moritz Geiger’s original complaint on the elusive character of aesthetics as a 
field of study is as relevant today as it was almost 150 years ago: “[t]here is scarcely another 
philosophical discipline that rests on such flimsy presuppositions as does aesthetics. Like a 
weather vane it is ‘blown about by every philosophical, cultural, arid scientific gust; at one 
moment it is metaphysical and in the next empirical; now normative, then descriptive; now 
defined by artists, then by connoisseurs; one day art is supposedly the center of aesthetics and 
natural beauty merely preliminary, the next day art beauty is merely second-hand natural 
beauty’” (xv). To interpret voice in writing as a literary or aesthetic device (as we must) is to 
negotiate the very limits of our own subjectivity according to the boundaries of the “licit” – in 
other words, according to what is deemed “legitimate” within one’s social context.  As these 
tenets exist primarily as prohibitions, it is no wonder that the facility to hear the author in a work 
recalls first and foremost the opportunity to evaluate them. Yet, returning briefly to Adorno, the 
fact that the determination to identify and thus proscribe that which is socially unacceptable is at 
the same time the determination to represent indicates the extent to which aesthetics preserves at 
the very limit of its negation its critical autonomy and, a bit like the serial rapist, its subsequent 
capacity to escape ideological capture. Poet and critic Jeff Derksen makes explicit this particular 
claim for poetry (and art) as an ideologically harsh mistress. “Poetry,” he writes, “as a creative 
practice can aim at an ‘actual freedom’ through a language that challenges and negotiates a 
neoliberal structure of feelings; this project would designate ‘the site of intervention’ while 
rejecting the formal freedom of what culture should do in neoliberalism (and post 9/11)” (5). 
 
It is by preserving this capacity for intervention that Armantrout’s poetry, though often lyrical, 
conforms less to the law of the lyric voice (with its neoliberal attachment to “feeling”) than the 
particular demands and challenges of the lyric as an aesthetic device. The result is a poetics that 
not only centres its position in its uncertainty but insists that uncertainty remain at the centre of 
any position. Unaware of this inherent doubleness, the “tease”, as she terms it, we inevitably 
clamber upwards into a moral, idealised position; we forego performance for abstraction and 
“put ourselves / in a cop’s place,” which, in a supreme show of irony, remains forever dependent 
upon the position of our imaginary enemy, the one we must prohibit – the “… serial killer rapist / 
who appears to be / teasing the police” (1). Thus we have in the opening “stanzas” as clear a 
summary of Armantrout’s distinct take on subjectivity and language as any theory of her work 
can offer. The tone is suitably sparse, almost acerbic, identifying the practice of reading with the 
very forces that invoke culture as a mode of social regulation and language as law. However 
ruthless this comparison may seem, it duly provides the structure of metaphor in all of its 
inherent ambiguity with a direct and necessary role in knowledge construction.  
 
Bare tree 
is to human skeleton 
 
as the holy spirit 
likens objects 
 
briefly 
 
to make the world up 
of provisional pairs (1) 
 
What allows mimesis to represent the “bare tree,” however “briefly”, as a human skeleton quite 
literally endows it with the capacity to define and normalize. In this way, Armantrout’s common 
poetic use of juxtaposition stands historically and culturally framed within a wider 
epistemological tradition of nominalism. Yet, the key word here for Armantrout remains 
“briefly,” mapped as it is to the term “provisional” two lines below. The ever shifting points of 
definition that dart between the various locutions and voices within the collection do not just 
imitate consciousness, but instead literally construct it. Thus we find subjectivity in an 
Armantrout poem constantly on the verge of transformation, especially when gripped in the 
midst of the everyday swirl of our media-saturated lives. 
 
  I was just going to click 
  on “Phoebe is changed 
  into a mermaid  
tomorrow!” when suddenly 
it all changed  
into the image 
of a Citizen watch. (18) 
 
There may be humour in such lines, but there is no irony, for the experience is as real as one can 
expect any moment to be sitting captivated in front of the various screens (television, computer, 
film, etc.) that increasingly command our attention. Real enough, one might argue. Armantrout’s 
semantic juxtapositions ably mimic the everyday experience of interpreting the world through a 
language that at best provides fragments for a theory of meaning, but never the active facility 
itself. The poems in Next Life (a title that cleverly conflates the metaphysical promise of an 
afterlife with the standard reward in video games) offer no pretence of rescuing some long 
suffering pre-mediated consciousness from the dazzle of language, whatever forms or rhetorical 
guises it may inhabit. Rather it is precisely in the limits of these representations as provisional 
moments of awareness and identity that the important (perhaps only) possibility of autonomy 
resides. As Armantrout succinctly advocates in the title poem that closes the collection: “Don’t 
be a commodity; / be a concept” (77-8). In other words, in an eerie echo of Spicer’s earlier 
command for the poet to “be like god,” it is precisely in the “ghostly,” uncertainty of language, 
in its relativity and inconstancy that one’s subjectivity stands any chance at all of being free. 
 
 
 
Works Cited 
 
 
Derksen, Jeff. “Poetry and the Long Neoliberal Moment.” West Coast Line 51 Vol. 40 No. 3 
(2006). 4-11. 
 
Kentor-Hullot, Robert. “Introduction to Aesthetic Theory.” Aesthetic Theory. Theodor Adorno. 
St. Paul’s MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. 
 
 
 
Andrew Klobucar is a writer and lecturer in the English Department at Capilano University, 
Vancouver. His critical work remains based in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and the 
Digital Humanities, exploring various issues and innovations in new media, electronic 
publishing and the increasingly important role technology plays in today's literary and 
pedagogical fields. 


Changing the Subject: Rae Armantrout's Next Life

mclennan, rob

Stephen Brockwell's The Real Made Up and David McGimpsey's Sitcom

Accumulation Strategies: Roger Farr’s Surplus 
Reviewed by Stephen Collis 
 
 
 
I have at times (actually most of the time) felt quite dismissive of the sonnet form. For one thing, 
the sonnet evokes for me an elitist, court culture in which gentleman-poets attempted to out-do 
one another in “wit,” competing for patronage and social position. To write a sonnet in today’s 
world, I’d argue, is on par with the activities of the Society for Creative Anachronism or re-
enactments of Civil War battles: it is, quite simply, to fetishize and play-at dead cultures and past 
glories. Or so I thought. Roger Farr’s Surplus (LINEbooks 2006)—a long sonnet sequence 
written and published this decade—has (mostly) convinced me otherwise.  
 
The very portability and continuity of the sonnet—from Sidney and Spenser in the 16th century, 
through Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Baudelaire in the 19th century, to Ted Berrigan in the 
20th—its continued use value—marks the sonnet as a collaborative project. Historically, one 
makes sonnets by reading others’ sonnets—thus it is the response genre par excellence. 
Connectivity is the key: one “understands” a sonnet by its relationship with other sonnets (either 
the sonnets of other poets the sonnet is a response to—Shakespeare to Spenser, for instance—or 
other sonnets in the sequence the sonnet in question is a part of—because sonnets have most 
characteristically been written in sequences). Farr’s sonnets are both a departure and a 
continuation, as he détournes the sonnet sequence; where Spenser’s “Amoretti” or Browning’s 
“Sonnets from the Portuguese” explore the many-sidedness of love (the sonnet’s chief theme), 
Farr’s are a paean to the resistance to capitalism, from its origins as “primitive accumulation” to 
its present day globalization.  
 
It is the sonnet’s relationship to capitalism that is key in Surplus—the crux of the formal 
contradiction that has mostly left me an anti-sonneteer. On the one hand the sonnet seems pre-
eminently closed: its form (always 14 lines, iambic pentameter, a limited set of rhyme schemes) 
appears to mirror its historical stage (the limited social mobility under totalizing monarchist 
regimes). It is interesting in this light to note that the sonnet comes into English usage around the 
time that the enclosure of the English common lands—and thus the “primitive accumulation” of 
capitalism’s opening phase—becomes recognizable (the 16th century). However, as my above 
comments on the sonnet’s “connectivity” and seriality might suggest, the sonnet is also “open” to 
the extent that its sequences have no necessary limits (Spenser’s “Amoretti” includes 89 poems, 
Berrigan wrote 77, and Shakespeare’s top out at 154), and to the extent that other’s work in the 
form is consistently viewed as a common resource for further poesis. It might just be possible—
in light of Farr’s sonnets—to see the historical sonnet as a working out of the dynamics of 
enclosure: the contesting pressures to privatize (the single sonnet as self-expressive lyric par 
excellence) and to common (the open sequence and practice of working variations upon others’ 
formal innovations).   
 
Appropriately, Farr’s “35 Sonnets” begin with accumulation: “Each day the late-capitalist cache 
accumulates.” The accumulations—primitive and otherwise—of capitalism are mirrored by the 
accumulation of sonnets in Surplus—for 35 pages, the same 14 line blocks of text. But in the two 
later sections of the book—“Sorry to be Late” and “Secure Channels”—the sonnet form (like late 
capitalism?) begins to disintegrate and dissolve. In “Sorry to be Late” the 14 line poems are 
broken into seven couplets, with glaring syntactic ruptures fissuring everywhere. In “Secure 
Channels,” the book’s final poem, 14 “lines” can still be counted down the page, but they are 
scattered about a projective field in typically one or two word units; all real sense of the “line” as 
a unit is gone, and a flood of disconnected details swarms the reader.  
 
Back in “35 Sonnets,” where the accumulations appeared to be proceeding apace, we read: 
 
  Nevertheless, this series can go no 
  Further without declaring its intent 
  To annul itself as time. 
 
This ironic call to be “annulled…as time” is, I think, related to Marx’s notion that capitalism is 
impelled to “annihilate space through time”—to turn all human activities into time-based 
calculations of wage labour, and to erase all spatial barriers to the flow of capital (to, essentially, 
make capital circulate faster and more freely—for quicker and more consistent returns on 
investment). As a politics of poetic form, such resistance to temporal dissolution is registered 
both in the sonnets’ becoming a spatial “field,” by the time we get to “Secure Channels,” as well 
as the use of the serial form which extends the sonnet in space. Thus Surplus can “go no further” 
without refusing the temporal pressures of the very accumulation it is engaged in.  
 
The contradictions I have located in the sonnet form—that it is both closed and open, an 
“enclosure” and a “commons”—mirror the same contradictions we find in capitalism—that it 
erase all spatial borders (annihilating space through time) and, at the same time, that it stake its 
claim to geographic spatiality (as specific zones to be exploited and unevenly developed). 
Returning to the first poem in “35 Sonnets,” we see the contradiction set out at the sequence’s 
point of origin as a tension between “more” and “less”: 
 
  Each day the late-capitalist cache accumulates more 
  Data with less hardware, more shoes with fewer 
  Factories, more condos with less down, more 
  Windows but less air, more leaping but 
  Less and less to leap for, or to. 
 
The categories are fairly traditional Marxist ones: as capital accumulates “more,” it does so by 
leaving workers with “less.” This is the calculation of “surplus value,” which of course hovers 
blatantly behind Farr’s title. Marx writes, in the Grundrisse, 
 
 Capital is the endless and limitless drive to go beyond its limiting barrier 
 …. [I]t is the constant movement to create more of the same. The 
 quantitative boundary of the surplus value appears to it as a mere natural  
 barrier, as a necessity which it constantly tries to violate and beyond 
 which it constantly seeks to go. 
 
The early poems of “35 Sonnets” repeatedly take up the issue of the historical enclosure of the 
commons, both because it relates to capitalism’s origins and because it is such an excellent 
image for capitalism’s “endless and limitless drive” to eliminate barriers by, paradoxically, 
making enclosures—a process, as Farr details, that continues today, in accelerated fashion.  
 
 So this is how it begins— 
 A simple line, drawn to make a point 
 Of entry. And by that act 
 “Something” is enclosed. An accumulation 
 Is set in motion. Properties, holdings 
 Estates of the Real, impenetrable 
 In their familiar frames 
 (maquiladoras) (coffee plantations) (protest pens) 
 Intelligible, but only in an account 
 “Written in letters of blood and fire” 
 Of the continuity, of the long transition 
 Between what was common 
 And what is quantifiable 
 In the order of signs. 
 
That initial mark that encloses “something” is crucial—for both the poet and the political 
economist (which Farr clearly is, both, simultaneously, in every instance). David Harvey, writing 
of the problematics of social change in Spaces of Hope, outlines the issue faced by both 
revolutionaries and poets: 
 
 Closure of any sort contains its own authority because to materialize any 
 one design, no matter how playfully construed, is to foreclose…on the 
 possibility of materializing others. 
 
So once again, in Surplus, what “begins” here, with a “simple line, drawn to make a point of 
entry,” is both a recording of the history of capitalist enclosures and the resistance to them—and 
the long serial poem “35 Sonnets.” Taken as paradigmatic of the creative act itself, or as a 
gesture in a particular tradition of protest poetry, Farr recognizes the dilemma that any move 
against power is itself a deployment of power—that to “draw a line” is to enclose “something,” 
and to “set in motion” a process of accumulation. The trick, as he quips elsewhere, is to be 
“helpful and avant-garde.” This is where the anarchist-Farr takes over from the Marxist-Farr, 
quoting Gustav Landauer’s comment (in sonnet XXII) that “We are the state, we destroy it by 
behaving differently.” The value of Farr’s sonnets—of Surplus generally—is their attempt, 
everywhere, to “behave differently,” to realize that to make any sort of mark is to court 
“authority,” but that, at the same time, such authority can also be the authority to change what 
seems inalterable.  
 
I want to return to Farr’s formal play with the sonnet form (though continuing to track the 
paralleling of poetics and politics the book works so fluidly). The quotation above of sonnet II in 
its entirety may cause one to wonder if “sonnet” here means nothing more than “a poem of 14 
lines.” But the poem includes the sonnet’s traditional argumentative “turn” or “volta,” right 
where it should be—after the octave: the process outlined in the first half of the poem is 
“Intelligible, but only in an account / “Written in letters of blood and fire.” The quotation is from 
Marx’s Capital, the chapter on “The So-Called Primitive Accumulation,” and refers to the 
enclosure of the commons by forceful expropriation. Thus a poem that begins almost 
incidentally, with a “simple line” and the ambiguous enclosure of “something” turns, after the 
volta, into an argument that the seemingly inevitable process is “intelligible” only as a violent 
and exploitive historical expropriation.  
 
Other poems similarly stage significant volta’s, as in sonnet X—which is composed entirely of 
monetary exchanges (“A pula for a peso, a peso for a kroon / A kroon for a dinar, a dinar for a 
shekel”)—which places the “crown jewel” of currencies, the “dollar,” at the eighth line 
(sandwiched between the “euro” and the “pound”). From this point it’s all downhill—back to the 
original “pula” (with, presumably, surplus value extracted in the process). In sonnet XIV (an 
address to G8 Genoa protest victim Carlo Giuliani)—a poem dripping with the affect of the first 
person lyric address—the speaker abandons his search for the missing Carlo after the octave: 
“But you were not there / On that hot street.” The poem becomes not a lament for an individual 
victim so much as one for a world in which capitalism’s “Hegemonia” is “encircling the globe.” 
 
In terms of the argument (again, both one of poetics and political economy) I see Surplus making 
about the “annihilation” of the spatial, poems XVI and XVII make a striking juxtaposition. The 
former poses a familiar issue we face under Empire: “There is no / Outside here. Each sector 
joins another.” Capital’s urge to expand the market into ever new sectors is reaching its ultimate 
limit (the entire globe); the ideological wing of this fact is often expressed (enthusiastically) in 
terms reminiscent of Margaret Thatcher’s famous remark that there is “no alternative” to the free 
market (once the “barrier” of Soviet communism was broken down). Sonnet XVII appears to 
counter such claims: “Poetry constructs its utopian themes in an obsolete space.”  
 
I find this one of the most interesting lines in Surplus. Poetry (and especially the sonnet), in this 
formation, is “obsolete,” literally a surplus—a remainder, leftover, vestigial remnant. If rhyme 
and meter evolved in poetry as mnemonic devices, as is typically supposed, their carryover into 
the era of print culture is as a remnant and anachronism. Further, poetry as “obsolete space” is a 
waste—an unimproved (where “improvement,” the watchword of the historical enclosures, 
means both “made better” and “made profitable”) domain and forgotten backwater within 
capital. As poetry became “intellectual property” (in the waves of capitalism converting 
everything into some sort of property), it nevertheless remained a property no one has managed 
to squeeze any surplus value out of. Poetry is a vacant lot. So while there may be “no outside” to 
capital, there are abandoned spaces (physical and cultural) within its uneven geographical 
development.  
 
Farr is holding poetry up as a gap or waste within the body of capital—an “obsolete space” 
whose improbable persistence enables the construction of “utopian themes.”  Where “the market 
prefers narrativity,” poetry offers condensation, compression, and fragmentation. Poetry 
functions as a sort of commons, long after the historical common lands have been enclosed. This 
literary commons appears in part, in Surplus, in the form (typical of the sonnet tradition) of 
responses to other poets: William Carlos Williams makes his appearance (“So much depends 
upon…”), as does Rainer Maria Rilke (sonnet XVII is written “after Rilke”). Phyllis Webb—a 
key influence on Farr’s work—makes several appearances, first in sonnet XIX, where her “I am 
sorry to speak of death again” becomes Farr’s “I’m sorry to make of poetry a mockery again,” 
and then again, in sonnet XXX, where Farr gestures towards the same poem (Webb’s “Poetics 
against the Angel of Death”), his “Last night I read Kropotkin” leaping off her “last night 
Wordsworth’s ‘Prelude’ / suddenly made sense”—and leaping directly into her never-finished 
“Kropotkin Poems.” (Indeed, I’d argue that Surplus, as a long poem, is built within the ghostly 
wreckage of that lost Canadian classic—as I’d like to think some of my own efforts have been. 
No doubt this is true for other Canadian poets too.)  
 
If poetry is a commons it is so for two main reasons, as far as I can see. First, as a form of 
“property,” it is thoroughly ignored and marginalized within capital (this is not a complaint or a 
wistful desire to finally get paid for all my surplus literary labour). Second, it seeks everywhere 
to make connections to other works, either indirectly, though the use of commonly held formal 
resources (no one has exclusive intellectual property rights to the sonnet), or directly, though 
responses, allusions, and intertextual ligatures.  
 
There is much more that could be said about this excellent book (for instance, its connection to 
“protest literature”—one way in here would be through a close reading of “Secure Channels,” 
using Farr’s own essay, “Protest Genres and the Pragmatics of Dissent” as a jumping off point). 
Farr has long been a crucial thinker and poet for many in the Vancouver literary community (and 
the wider anarchist community). To call this a “first book” isn’t very accurate; I, for one, have 
been reading him for over a decade now. The real pay-off with Surplus—why this book matters 
(and such a book, coming amidst extraordinary new enclosures, neoliberal machinations, and a 
war without borders or end, could not help but matter)—is the way in which Farr has been able 
to write simultaneously a book of poetry and of political theory, without one in any way 
interfering with, or depleting the resources of the other. If “the best lines of this generation are 
quotations” (yes, another commoning—this time out of Ginsberg), then I can do nothing more 
appropriate than conclude with a quotation—this one from a recipe for hope: 
 
 
 
   The rest is easy— 
 Add water, bring to a boil, and simmer. 
 Distribute to each, according to need. 
 
 
 
Works Cited 
 
 
Harvey, David.  Spaces of Hope.  Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. 
 
Marx, Karl.  Grundrisse.  Trans. Martin Nicolaus.  London: Penguin, 1973. 
 
 
 
Stephen Collis teaches in the English Department at SFU and edits The Poetic Front. His most 
recent book is The Commons (Talonbooks 2008). 


Accumulation Strategies: Roger Farr's Surplus

Minkus, Kim

Souls of the Labadie Tract by Susan Howe 
Reviewed by Kim Minkus 
 
 
 
I wished to speak a word for libraries as places of freedom and wildness. 
 
Susan Howe’s Souls of the Labadie Tract invites the reader to sift through the “forest of letters, 
theories and forgotten actualities” catalogued and classified in archives and libraries. She 
continues on her palimpsestuous journey in Souls, assembling the scraps of various local and 
personal histories, including her own, into a visual and musical celebration of the word.  Howe’s 
acts of poetic possession and resurrection have traversed human subjects as diverse as Emily 
Dickinson in My Emily Dickinson, to pragmatist and semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce in 
Pierce-Arrow.  Souls of the Labadie Tract carries all the hallmarks of Howe’s poetic practice: the 
pinning or placing of unrelated or found portions of text to create a lyric line; the use of 
assemblages or collages of either words or image; the presence of facsimiles of archival 
documents; and finally a generous use of white space. Souls, however, marks a significant shift 
in Howe’s work to a sparer, more minimalist approach. This book does not look like an historical 
essay; it looks like poetry.  In Souls Howe moves closer to the purity of the blank page; essays 
are brief and the use of image is scant. The final poem appears as a vertical cut in the page, with 
portions of letters barely showing through – a broken mark on the purity of the paper. 
 
Souls of the Labadie Tract is neatly divided in two.  Each half of the book begins with a section 
called “Errand.” These errands (or missions) are strongly connected to Howe’s own process of 
creation and to the double-hinged meaning that Perry Miller, a strong influence on Howe, 
describes in his essay “Errand into the Wilderness.” Errand implies both a short journey and an 
“actual business” that is undertaken.  In the first errand she describes how the Minister Jonathan 
Edwards pinned small pieces of paper to his clothing as an insight or idea occurred to him while 
traveling.  When he reached his destination he would unpin the pieces, the location of the paper 
on his body serving as a reminder for the insight which he then wrote down. In the second half of 
the book Howe’s errand relates Wallace Steven’s method of working with ideas and perceptions 
that he had written down on scraps of old envelopes or laundry bills while strolling to work. 
These scraps were handed to an assistant who typed them up and then returned to Stevens, who 
transformed these miscellanies into poems during his evenings and on weekends.  Both Edwards 
and Stevens perform the double meaning of errand by simultaneously being on a journey and 
completing the business that lead to their creative work. Each of these writers’ creative processes 
were collage-like, similar to Howe’s own creative process of pulling together a singular work or 
poem from the disparate papers, scraps and notes of an archive. Both Edwards and Stevens also 
mined their own personal archives, stored on their body, scribbled on scraps, in inspired acts of 
spiritual and poetic invention. 
 
In the first essay, “Personal Narrative,” Howe performs a similar task of self-archiving. This 
essay includes poems and prose portions from “Articulations of Sound Forms in Time” which 
appeared in Singularities (1990).  The essay “Personal Narrative” also became part of an MLA 
paper that Howe delivered in 2006.  Howe is performing multiple palimpsestic strategies here: 
she reworks two old essays and at the same time reinserts past poems and new images for a new 
work.  Howe, in effect, is turning to her own body of work in a continuance of her creative 
process. Just as Edwards and Stevens mined their own archives, stored on the body, so Howe 
becomes her own archive or source for her work. 
 
Using the history of an obscure utopian sect known as the Labadists, the titular piece Souls of the 
Labadie Tract is a spare, jewel of a work.  Here is pure love of language; its presence on the 
page, its meaning and its sound weaving into short lyric pieces that are gorgeous in their 
singularity, yet also resonant of each other.  This can be seen (and heard) in the following two 
pieces:  
 
Now go back to sleep we 
can’t be crazy the truth is  
we couldn’t we couldn’t 
 
we’re the past – we’re too 
close – to covet – you’re 
not to be afraid – breathe 
 
Compared to:  
 
There it is there it is – you 
want the great wicked city 
Oh I wouldn’t I wouldn’t 
 
It’s not only that you’re not  
It’s what wills and will not 
 
You, we, I – the multiple voices coalesce in the repetitive use of the words not and the rhymes 
and repetition of couldn’t and wouldn’t. Howe’s spare lyric line resonates with the past and a 
ghostly you. Like a prayer each poem invokes and pleads to something outside itself, taking the 
form of a chant. The Labadists as persons are barely present in these poems; instead we 
encounter fragments and hints that speak to their spiritual practice.  Howe once again uses single 
words with double meanings to generate an aura or sense that reaches beyond these actual 
meanings. The word rapture is one that carries not only the general meaning of ecstasy, but also 
the specific religious meaning of “meeting Christ on his return to earth,” and it is used in the 
following lines to connote a spiritual calling out. In these lines there is the sense both of an 
impending meeting and the ecstasy the meeting with generate. 
 
silk moth fly mulberry tree 
Come and come rapture 
 
The second half of Souls echoes the first. In “118 Westerly Terrace” Howe reworks a piece that 
was published in 2005 as a Belladonna chapbook with the same title.  She continues her 
historical research into the lives of Wallace Stevens and his wife in the Souls version but there 
the similarities stop.  The Belladonna version of “118 Westerly Terrace” is a concrete poem.  
The words spill, weave, tumble over one another and overlap in the chapbook as to make the text 
virtually unreadable.  The Souls version resembles the poems in the “Labadie” section, spare and 
highly readable and also personal.  The spiritual, the prayer weaves through these poems as well.  
In reading the poem below, the reader must wonder whether Howe is addressing an individual or 
a god. 
 
I began to feel you turned  
from me – if only turned 
round then why not stay – I 
cannot stay quiet as an old 
woman why can’t you stay 
quiet in your corner what 
sails do you use for flight 
 
In the final poems of Souls, “Fragment of the Wedding Dress of Sarah Pierpont Edwards,” Howe 
returns to her customary practices of collage and assemblage.  A photocopy of the dress fragment 
begins the piece and each page thereafter presents a different visual with language as its medium.  
These ‘image words’ are painterly in the way they are strewn over the canvas of the page and can 
be appreciated by the viewer/ reader as either one distinct image or as an object that can be 
disassembled with each part a separate and appreciable idea/poem/sound. Howe returns to her 
artistic roots as a collage artist in pieces such as this.  These poems cannot be read in the 
traditional sense, since words disappear, overlap each other, are stretched, flipped upside down 
and reversed.  Each page is reduced to an image until the final poem, already described in the 
introduction to this review as a ‘broken mark’ on the page. Howe, with this final gesture, is close 
to what she considers perfection, as she describes it in an interview with Lynn Keller that 
appeared in a 1995 issue of Contemporary Literature: “I would say that the most beautiful thing 
of all is a page before the word interrupts it.”  
 
In Souls of the Labadie Tract the reader is less a witness to Howe’s autobiography than to her 
love of the aural and visual presence of language.  Unlike her previous book, The Midnight, that 
was rich with stories from her Irish past and drew upon her mother’s library as visual media, 
Souls returns to the poem and the collage.  In The Midnight there was a strong sense of an I; in 
Souls of the Labadie Tract there is less essay, less sense of an autobiographical I and more 
extraordinary poetry.  The poems in Souls are pure, scintillating, minimalist compositions 
distilled from Howe’s favourite haunts – archives and libraries. 
 
True wildness is like true gold; it will bear the trial of Dewey Decimal 
 
 
 
Works Cited 
 
 
Howe, Susan. The Midnight.  New York: New Directions, 2003. 
 
---. Souls of the Labadie Tract. New York: New Directions, 2007. 
 
Keller, Lynn. “An Interview with Susan Howe.” Contemporary Literature 36.1 (1995):   
1-34.  
 
 
 
Kim Kinkus is a librarian and PhD candidate at Simon Fraser University. Her first book of 
poetry, 9 Freight, was published by LINE books in 2007. 


Souls of the Labadie Tract by Susan Howe

Byrne, Ted

Stewart, Christine

Reading McCaffery: A Discussion of Seven Pages Missing

Mancini, Donato

1 
 
THE YOUNG HATE US {3}      
Donato Mancini 
 
 
 
A text secretes its own structure. Which is to say that form, in poetry, is a process of memory-
sedimentation, or de-sedimentation, that takes place in time. Form isn’t form as vase-shaped 
artefact. Form in poetry is as form in music-shaped experience. Revising now: the form of a text 
secretes its own structure, conditioned by time.  
 
It's impossible to prove that form exists, or to prove a theory with a fact. 
 
* 
 
Subjects produce poetry, poetry produces subjectivity. Texts produce the subjectivities they are 
often thought to capture, reflect, record, annote, register, champion. Poet in writing blinks his/her 
way towards a new subjectivity, in the flicker of the dark marks over white ground. Notice how 
many poets don't know what they love/think/know until they write it down.  
 
* 
 
To the music-lover who says “I like both kinds of music: country and western”, do you answer 
“It's just a matter of taste"? Taste is malleable, dissoluble, not a substantial ingredient of a 
person's subjectivity. Taste is an indice of ideological constitution—70% water. Opinion, then, is 
ideological, indigestion. To understand ourselves as subjects, we need, therefore, in 
introspection, to work backwards through our tastes, dissolving them as we go like superstitious 
fats, like burnt speech.  
 
Good Taste (GT) is good self-discipline. GT is a militant self-absorption into an inherited 
condition. The model music-lover above has only heard the kinds of music s/he's heard: both 
kinds. Good poetry—poetry as a social intervention—not just "quality stuff", offends GT, by 
directive. Erect no counter-myth. Or let's say: wear taste as a badge and wind up in a uniform.  
 
* 
 
In his effort to overcome sidestep petty reason, Mallarmé was only partially right when he said 
"poems are made of words, not ideas." Poems are made of the idea of language. Each word is an 
idea about language. The idea of language as it manoeuvres readers towards thinking, without 
determining just what must be thought.  
 
* 
 
In accord with the knowledge that poems can only be re-read, poetry (the poem?) only lives as 
long as it can be read. The bleeding of public libraries, then, like book-burning, is ideocide.  
 
* 
2 
 
 
Enthusiasm is obscene.  
Publishing is obscene.  
Jargon is obscene.  
Theory is obscene.  
Success is obscene.  
Optimism is obscene.  
Poetry is obscene.  
Lists are obscene.  
 
Should the obscene remain off-stage?    
 
* 
 
Poetry thrives in coterie. Its strongest position is marginal. (Monk or guerrilla?) Coterie can be a 
powerful form of collectivity. A work is not more powerful, or more political, more effective, 
more moreso, because it reaches a numerically larger number of readers. To the story of a 
million copies sold we prefer the story: everyone who bought a copy of that book wrote a book 
of his/her own. No readers vs. writers; just actors.   
 
* 
 
Don't show or tell; do.  
 
* 
 
If poetry—or any text—had ever been something that can speak for itself, stands on its own two 
feet, serve no master, jump no flaming hoop, there would have been no criticism. Who tells you 
poetry speaks for itself, that person speaks for poetry. Critical silence = poetic silence. No good 
poetry without good readers, no good readers without good writing about reading.  
 
Injunction: write new readings. Readers who take refuge in the poem's mere existence, words-
on-the-page, are dumbfounded. If nature is not something simply there, to be read, neither is the 
poem. A poem won't stand on its own, has no legs. In discursive fact, let's say: poetry that would 
speak for itself should shut up.  
 
* 
 
For prodigal returns, there are many terms I would see banished from poetics.  
 
Aesthetic.  
Craft.  
Creative.  
Depth.  
Excellence.  
Honesty. 
3 
 
Rigour.  
Unity.  
 
As (deserved) terms of praise, especially.  
 
* 
 
Writing that there is no more ‘Avant-Garde’ (AG) is nothing like saying that younger AG poets 
are posthumous. AG is abandoned, recognising that the cultural position of “inventive” poetry 
has shifted. Younger generations no longer relate to the older ones in terms of the inter-
generational struggle AG implies. The “post-avant” is not (at its best) post-revolutionary. It is (at 
its best) a phase of permanent revolution. Poetry now demands a re-start, a splintering at every 
turn. Each new work of inventive poetry redefines, redescribes, and expands the poetic. All of all 
of all of previous poetry + 1.  
 
* 
 
Poetry’s best hope for remaining a viable, and vital, practice into the future is to pluralize until 
‘poetry’ is difficult to identify, impossible to define.  
 
* 
 
Variable canonicity (VC). There is no longer a single canon, there are competing canons. VC. 
The past has not passed, it is a variable and contingent reality. The past is now. With VC, 
traditions are in competition with each other and within themselves.  
 
In understanding the current confusing, pluralistic, splintering phase of poetry, VC is the crucial 
factor.  
 
* 
 
Why do poets who know better, for example, still write about sentences as if they are containers? 
Her sentences are full?   
 
* 
 
Because we’re slaves?  
Because we like to buy shoes with money?  
Because writing is a mode of social edict if/when it can be attached to speech?  
Because the program runs on spatial and economic metaphors?  
 
* 
 
And who wants to retain the evaluative containers of 'good poetry' and 'bad poetry' except in the 
knowledge that they are totally dependent upon each other? They produce each other, in a more 
direct way than saying that, for example, readers couldn’t identify good poetry without bad 
4 
 
poetry available for comparison. At a basic level, as with categories like cliché/truth, they are 
exactly the same thing. There is no inherently good or bad poetry, since nothing inheres. Cliché 
is truth. Truth is money. "Is" produces a truth-affect. Categories are produced by the criteria of 
measure. Aesthetic response rehearses the aesthete's training. 
 
* 
 
Liberal individualism is, mainly, a denial of community. For poets, it is a denial of the social 
predicates of poetry. Individualism produces the belief that poetry is created in geniuscious 
isolation, heroic solitude, ivory condos. Poetry, books, etc, are produced by, written by, 
communities, not scenes. Poetry arises as a product of intersecting social factors—reading being 
foremost (maybe), but also friendship, school days, publishing, libraries, histories, traditions, 
learnings, leanings, ideologies. All depend on highly complex forms of social organisation and 
co-operation. Individuality is pure—possibly necessary—phantasm. 
 
* 
 
"The use of words is a definition of words" (R. Creeley).  
 
* 
 
Direct, unmediated experience can’t exist. Sensation does not inscribe the horizon of the Real. 
The painful surprise of an electric shock is only experienced in the context of previous 
experiences, the sedimentations of which mediate new experience. Subjects are subject to 
discursive articulation, here. Think of how much Freud hated spinach as a boy, and how it 
became the chief vegetable of his manly plate.  
 
* 
 
If the (boring) task of criticism is judgement, the mercantile evaluation of goods, then critics are 
just taste-testers. Poetry itself is then no more culturally important, or socially potent, than 
Spaghetti w/ Bacon & Garlic Cream (And Other Poems).  
 
* 
 
Religion is only tolerable to the extent that its paraphernalia is beautiful. The insane are tolerated 
as long as they remain entertaining. Superfluous? 
 
* 
 
The poetics of moral crisis is (today) suffused with irony, sarcasm, parody, vulnerability, 
urgency, commitment. The best poetry (today) is in continual moral crisis. It is galvanised by 
self-doubt. Its fundamental strength grows as it labours to undermine its own position. Self-
heresy (Robert Duncan) is more productive than self-consistency (Billy Collins). Morally self-
assured poetry is today's blistering wallpaper. 
 
5 
 
* 
 
All publishing is a project of amassing symbolic power. All publishing poets are power-seekers. 
The totality of a poet’s positions, tastes, opinions, etc, should therefore produce a grotesquely 
paradoxical self-incompatibility—interlocking and solid.  
 
* 
 
Would you rather not? Some of the most politically potent poetry is in appearance the most 
useless, the poetics of abdication, of refusal. The moment of politics in poetry is in unmovement, 
when poetry says: "I prefer not to."  
 
* 
 
Context. Choice. Struggle. Poets are labour activists. The daydream of poetry isn’t of a Divinity. 
The fantasy of poetry is of non-alienated labour, of work that doesn't consume the worker, that 
doesn't make of his/her lifetime a perishable commodity. "I'm in Heaven...." Poets’ 
individualism, then, is reactive, like the individualism of the oppressed: "I want my slice of the 
symbolic pie"—publishing emerges as the scene of territorial war.  
 
Poets’ most significant social struggles, however, are in the arena of compositional choices. 
Choices are made in the context of all available knowledge, from which a concept of poetry’s 
social potential (as either motivator or abdicator or _______) arises. Local time + historical time 
= after that, it’s a question of persistent tastes, and residue of work-habits. These traces are then 
reviewed in the little magazines.  
 
* 
 
Most obvious = most misleading. 
 
* 
 
Other possible terms:  
 
Subversive. 
Experimental. 
Innovative. 
Inventive. 
Weirdo-po. 
PoMoPo.  
 
"PoMoPo" places poetry in a post-political circus, the cultural Olympiad. "Weirdo-po" marks the 
writing as harmlessly deviant. "Inventive" makes the poet an entertaining hobbyist. "Innovative" 
sets down the poetic artefact as a station on a teleological trainline. "Experimental" transforms 
the poem into a lab report. "Subversive" makes the poem a pipe-bomb.  
 
6 
 
Rather than strict subversion, then, the task is perhaps one of vigilance—sentiments of the 
sentinel. In hindsight, times have always been tough, vigilance about the language, as corrupting 
and as corrupted, has always been necessary. Because language doesn’t have a clean and well lit 
place to sit, poets dream of such a place.  
 
* 
 
A word's use is an action. 
 
* 
 
Theory is indispensable to poetry today. Most of what is valuable in "criticism" emerges in 
theory with new force. Theory is sometimes indifferentiable from poetry, today.  
 
What is the function of theory?  
What is the function of poetry?  
 
Answer either question in terms of: the struggle over definitions. Poetry and theory unhook 
definitions from their objects. Re-hook a new definition to an old object, or break the hook.  
 
* 
 
Meaning is an effect inseparable from the experience of consciousness itself. (Whenever I write 
"meaning", I wish I could write: implications, ramifications, consequences....) Word-as-object 
indicates that anything in the field of consciousness enters the semiotic chain. The avalanche 
always ignites the category "avalanche", but never reconciles with avalanchitude.  
 
* 
 
Rejecting the asociality of deconstruction doesn’t mean rejecting its basic insights into the 
human condition. Humans are creatures of ideology. Ideology is textuality. The human condition 
is textual. Ideology arises from a congress of emotional habit (Pavlov?) with linguistic practices. 
If humans were fish, they’d swim in ideology, eat and excrete language. The social-space, where 
the wo/manfish swims, is viscous and discursive. The fish in this case would have a tendency to 
swim to where they already know to get the food they already know how to get.   
 
* 
 
As small business owners, what poets must resist is not commodification as such. A poem is 
already a supreme symbolic commodity, like a prayer. What poets must resist is the urge to 
produce anything Liberalism might find useful.  
 
* 
 
Reading is a social act. Writing is a social act. Sexual activity is social action, like reading. 
Intensely private and interpersonal. Performative, mutually stimulating, productive.  
7 
 
 
* 
 
It is not forbidden to write a meaningless poem, it’s impossible. Every sign is attended by the 
many servants of competing semiotic claims. A civil war divides every word, overflows its 
borders. An event—a movement against, away-from—meaning is ever incommensurate with 
intent. Meaningless poem isn't.   
 
*  
 
A unitary message is prose, the crack of nightstick + skull prosaic.  
 
* 
  
1) Does eclecticism in reading habits always entail a regression into absorptive pluralism, the 
neo-psychedelia of post-political culturism-ism?  
 
2) If, as they—critics and historians—say, art history is a history of misunderstandings, how can 
the same critics hold to a pedagogy of correct interpretation, of correct reading?  
 
[Answer: by keeping the disciplines segregated. In this diorama poets are cattle, critics collect 
milk.]  
 
3) Does a poetics driven by an ambition to be a force of good in the world veer towards a well-
oiled utility (i.e. Cornelius Cardew) or towards squeaky excess (i.e. John Coltrane)? 
 
4) Is it possible to write a perfectly generic poem?  
 
5) Stockhausen serves imperialism? 
 
6) How to be dogmatic, intolerant, serious, rigorous, demanding, angry, ambitious, threatening, 
dangerous but not proscriptive?  
 
 
___=-_=|=_-=___ 
 
 
 
 
 
**[- with some sentences paraphrased, borrowed or stolen from Patrick F. Chan, Cornelius Cardew, 
Stephen Collis, Roger Farr, Morton Feldman, Andrew Klobucar, Ernesto Laclau, Herman Melville, 
Jordan Scott and Mark Wallace]** 
 
 
 
8 
 
Donato Mancini is the author of two books of poetry Ligatures (New Star 2005), and Æthel 
(New Star 2007). The Young Hate Us {3} is an excerpt of a long poetics-poem still in progress. 


The Young Hate Us (3)

Farr, Roger

The Democracy Service  
Poetry and Pedagogy: The Challenge of the Contemporary 
Edited by Joan Retallack and Juliana Spahr  
Reviewed by Roger Farr 
 
 
 
I teach among some passionate advocates of something called “Liberal Education,” in an area 
that reserves for itself the task of “initiating” young people into their “future roles” as “educated 
citizens.” These young people, the story goes, after having completed the 60 or 120 “credit 
hours” we have put aside for our difficult but rewarding task, will have acquired certain 
intellectual “capacities” which will “empower” them to “participate” in “the democracy.” But 
before they can assume their positions in “the democracy,” they first must come to college, 
where, if they haven’t already, they can be interpellated as incapable, inarticulate, low-level 
outsiders. “Anything you say in class these days is ‘news’ to students,” a colleague opines. Our 
students are “sweet bumblers,” generalizes another. 
 
It’s a good way to protect one’s career: once we’ve established that our students are empty 
vessels who don’t know anything, we can set about filling them up with what we think we know. 
Curiously, while we are preparing our students for “the democracy” – predicated as it is upon the 
designation of the inferior by the superior – these inferiorized subjects can be tried in court and 
sent to prison; yet, under the educational apparatus, they are not regarded as fully “capable” 
citizens. They are not our equals. And in an amazing reversal of the social and political 
aspirations of the contemporary avant-garde, “difficult” poetry is regularly invoked as evidence 
of this pedagogical axiom, the site of the failure of the inferior mind – “it’s not suitable for their 
level.” 
 
But if there is one thing such writing teaches, it should be that it has no native speakers. None. 
Prior to its appropriation as a tool used to buttress the hierarchies embedded within our 
educational institutions, and the society they reproduce, avant-garde writing is defended by those 
who produce it as an equalizer of relations between language users. 
 
So what if one was to teach from this perspective, from the assumption of what Jacques Rancière 
calls equality, in which “there are not two levels of intelligence…[for] all human works of art are 
the practice of the same intellectual potential”? And further, as a rejoinder to the deferred 
emancipation promised by humanist pedagogy (in both its Liberal and Marxist incarnations), 
what if our teaching was predicated upon the idea that before one can “emancipate someone else, 
one must be emancipated oneself…one must know oneself to be a voyager [a non-native 
speaker] of the mind, similar to all other voyagers: an intellectual subject participating in the 
common power of intellectual beings”? Tellingly, a “pedagogue” is, literally, a slave who 
supervises children. 
 
It is with such questions in mind that I read Poetry and Pedagogy: The Challenge of the 
Contemporary, a collection of twenty-two essays originally delivered at a symposium held at the 
Bard Institute for Writing and Thinking in 1999. Taken together, the works collected here make 
a convincing argument for the importance of “contemporary” (i.e, “avant-garde, experimental, 
innovative, language-centred, marginalized, oppositional, minoritarian,” etc.) poetry in an 
academy that is mostly indifferent, and occasionally hostile, towards it. In making its case for the 
necessity and relevance of a pedagogy informed by the collaborative, experimental, and “cross-
cultural infusions” that constitute avant-garde poetic practices, the collection will be very useful 
to anyone in need of good arguments and evidence to support their work in an institutional 
setting (I’m already citing passages in various course and program proposals). That said, the 
collection’s necessarily defensive rhetorical frame (what avant-garde poet working in Corporate 
U isn’t a little defensive?), a strategy that no doubt stems from an assessment of the precarious 
conditions in which we work, leads to a generally celebratory tone, which in turn results in some 
unanswered questions about the political agency of contemporary poetry and the pedagogy it 
might inform. 
 
Poetry and Pedagogy is divided into two sections. The first (“What’s the Use of Contemporary 
Poetry”) “is composed of critical essays on specific poetries and their pedagogical implications”; 
the second (“A New How To”) provides “practical, text-centered strategies for teaching poetry in 
today’s classroom.” Six essays are allocated to the first section, and sixteen to the second, which 
gives some indication of the book’s overall gist.  As it isn’t possible in this short review to do 
justice to all the essays included here (reviewing an anthology compounds exponentially the 
omissions required in editing one!), I will focus on pieces that I read as representative, or which 
struck a chord for me, given my own commitments. 
 
Tackling directly the precarious position of the avant-garde in the academy, the opening essay by 
Alan Golding, “‘Isn’t the Avant-Garde Always Pedagogical’: Experimental Poetics and/as 
Pedagogy,” examines the ways in which American poets have negotiated their “oblique” 
relationship with “the pedagogical situation,” and more specifically with an institution they have 
historically repudiated, but which has become an important site for the distribution of their work 
(this latter fact, I would add, leads many commentators to describe avant-garde poetry as 
“academic,” thereby mistaking the parasite for its host). Golding cites Olson’s “Letter for 
Melville 1951” as exemplary of a previous era when the poet could maintain an 
“unproblematized outsider” stance to the academy. The contemporary avant-garde poet (here 
Golding focuses mainly on the work of Bob Perelman and Ron Silliman), on the other hand, 
appropriates the discourse of the classroom, and rearticulates it as material within the poem, in 
order to directly “engage, rather than turn [his] back on, these conditions.” 
 
Augmenting Golding’s argument, Lynn Keller’s essay “FFFFFalling with Poetry: The 
Centrifugal Classroom” employs Bakhtin’s distinction between centrifugal and centripetal 
discourse to describe “these conditions” as unstable and contested. For her, the pedagogical 
situation is not fully decided until a text is introduced: “more open and polysemous texts 
generate more centrifugal classrooms.” By “centrifugal classroom,” Keller means a site that 
moves its attention “outward into the world,” is “collective rather than privatized” (the latter 
condition is produced by confessional, lyrical texts and reading strategies), is “less hierarchical” 
because of the shared responsibility for making meaning from a difficult poem (which, again, has 
no “native speakers”), and is “liberating.” Keller concludes with a reading of Joan Retallack’s 
“Icarus FFFFFalling” to show how the piece performs the “centrifugal dynamics” that shift 
attention away from absorption (“falling in love with the poem”) and towards contemplation of 
the ways language shapes social conditions. 
 
Morris Young’s “Beyond Rainbows: What Hawai‘i’s ‘Local’ Poetry Has Taught Me About 
Pedagogy” is one of several places in the collection where what Spahr and Retallack call 
“community located poetries” come to the foreground. The editors stress that this category does 
not designate “regionalism…[or] a sort of updated identity politics” so much as “investigative or 
critical modes that take environmental, ecological, social, and/or political awareness into their 
framework.” Here, pedagogy-as-poetics begins to counter the liberal project of “initiation,” as 
Young describes how “local” pidgin writing (his example is “Coloring a Rainbow” by Hawai’i 
poet Wing Tek Lum) can be used to move “beyond initiating students into a dominant American 
discourse and toward a more productive engagement with their community.” Young teaches 
from a presupposition of equality in his classroom, through his use of student writing to critique 
the classroom, and in his belief that “students are participants in constructing their education if 
not the producers of their education.” This essay also opens a number of possible horizontal 
linkages between avant-garde poetics and sub-altern / minoritarian speech communities, an 
oppositional affinity to what Arjuna Parakrama elsewhere calls the “ways in which the 
standardized languages steadily fucked over the users of other forms.” 
 
In the second section of the book, the essays are more detailed in their accounts of specific 
classroom procedures and strategies. Charles Bernstein’s “Creative Wreading: A Primer” 
includes a pragmatic “Poem Profiler” – a heuristic device for analyzing the rhetorical features in 
a poem – that made it into my writing class within hours of my receiving this book. Lyn 
Hejinian’s “Stages of Encounter with a Difficult Text,” a kind of phenomenological meta-
narrative about reading Oppen’s “Discrete Series,” is also very useful, especially in a writing 
class, for it anticipates and responds to many of the problems (and pleasures) students encounter 
when they are presented with avant-garde writing: “Faced with a difficult text,” she writes, “how 
can one trust that it will be worth the work required to ‘get it’”? 
 
The desire to “get it” is taken quite literally in Jerome McGann and Lisa Samuels’ “Deformance 
and Interpretation,” which proposes an ambitious new mode of critical reading called 
“deformance.” Here, readers are prompted to “break beyond conceptual analysis into the kinds of 
knowledge involved in performative operations.” Deformance, or deformative interpretive 
procedures, much like Rob Pope’s practice of “textual intervention,” involves disassembling, 
reading backwards, erasure, reordering, etc. While these procedures are probably not going to 
surprise anyone familiar with avant-garde poetics, the way McGann and Samuels historicize and 
theorize this practice as pedagogy might.  The deformative approach, they explain, assumes that 
“the poem’s intelligiblilty is not a function of the interpretation, but that all interpretation is a 
function of the poem’s systemic intelligbility. Interpreting a poem after it has been deformed 
clarifies the secondary status of the interpretation.” They conclude with a number of examples of 
deformative readings of Wallace Stevens’ “The Snow Man” and Coleridge’s “Limbo.”  
 
The last article I will mention here is Maria Damon’s “Post-Literary Poetry, Counterperformance 
and Micropoetries.” Of all the works collected in Poetry and Pedagogy, Damon’s essay 
addressed most directly my own concerns and commitments. She writes: 
 
The inarticulable poetic experience I want to facilitate in students is directly 
related to empowering citizenry, though what this citizenry does with its power 
remains open. By ‘citizenry’ I do not mean that a people imbued with high culture 
through a formal education constitute the entirety of those fit to govern 
themselves. On the contrary, the poetry that inspires this putatively charged 
citizenry certainly does not have to be academic or even the product of educated 
literacy and, in fact, the citizenry I have in mind overlaps considerably with what 
Rachel Buff has called the ‘denizenry,’ a looser term that implies the ambiguously 
embodied/illicit/disempowered socius that may not reach the radar screen that 
acknowledges the ‘citizen.’ The academy can be an environment in which these 
expressions can be understood and reflected on as poetry. That is, the ‘ill’-literate, 
extra-literary, alter-literary, or post-literary need to train the conventionally 
literate in new ways of hearing, reading, seeing, experiencing, making the 
transparent opaque and the opaque transparent. 
  
From here, Damon attempts to radically alter – even reverse – our understanding of both 
“poetry” and “pedagogy” (“a discourse founded on condescension”). In making this case, she 
argues for increased attention to “post-literary poetry,” where “there is writing without words 
[and] sidewalks burn with language.” This configuration of the field of “poetry” Damon draws 
from the Situationists, whose understanding of poetry was decidedly non- or even anti-literary: 
 
poetry must be understood as direct communication within reality and as real 
alteration of this reality. It is liberated language, language recovering its richness, 
language breaking its rigid significations and simultaneously embracing words 
and music, cries and gestures, painting and mathematics, facts and acts. Poetry 
thus depends on the richest possibilities for living and changing life at a given 
stage of socioeconomic structure. (“All the King’s Men”) 
 
Damon includes, problematically I think, in the category of the “post-literary” the “new oralities: 
slams, zines, and open-mike readings with their uh-oh-so commodifiable underground cachet 
and unpredictable energy.” I say problematically because if these forms are recuperable as 
“commodities” they are recuperable as “literary”; and with their prizes and stars and rituals, they 
have already strayed quite a long way from the burning sidewalks where they may have once 
been considered “underground.” Nevertheless, Damon’s challenge that these works have the 
potential to put “academic discourse about poetry, not to mention academic poetry, into crisis” is 
certainly worth testing in the classroom. 
 
Which brings me back to an earlier point. If Poetry and Pedagogy has a limitation, it is that few 
of the essays comment directly on potentially conflicting aims and practices within the slippery 
aesthetics of “the contemporary.” This becomes especially apparent when the editors (along with 
some of the contributors) invoke terms like “global interconnectedness” and “cultural 
awareness” as part of what often appears to be an emancipatory model of culture and education 
under global capitalism. 
 
For example, they write in the introduction that “educating for this world [international, 
intercultural, etc.] is the most pressing challenge we face.” There’s quite a lot riding on that 
preposition “for,” given the operations of culture in what Jeff Derksen has called “the ideological 
software of neoliberalism.”  Like the deferral of equality and “citizenship” that underlies liberal 
pedagogy, when read on a global scale, the promise of democracy – and its cultural poetics of 
interconnectedness, communication, exchange, etc. – is what “we” in the North offer, and “they” 
in the South need (whether or not “they” want “our” “democracy” is another question). We can 
deliver the democracy-service, but only after they recognize and admit to their inequality, their 
lack, and only after they achieve sufficient credits for carrying out the various assignments and 
reforms outlined in our program (the SAPs). This is the ruthless and manipulative “pedagogy” of 
global economics (which is no stranger to the lash, either, when it needs it). 
 
While Retallack and Spahr identify the tensions between “an overly optimistic concept of the 
global village [and] increasing concerns about the politics of globalization,” tensions that can 
create conflicting imperatives in the classroom, and while they make a much-needed and 
“unabashedly utopian” case that “education must be in touch with the historical-contemporary 
intersection that forms the world in which we live,” there is more to be said, I think, about how – 
or which – radical poetry and pedagogy might meaningfully contest the ongoing globalization of 
social and economic disequilibrium, and about how we might, for instance, develop our affinities 
with the social movements already involved in this struggle. 
 
Without this account, I fear that those of us labouring in educational institutions will be stuck 
with the task of fixing the problems of citizenship and cross-cultural communication that capital 
needs fixed. 
 
 
 
Works Cited 
 
 
“All the King’s Men.” Situationist International Anthology. Trans. Ken Knabb. Berkeley, CA:  
Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981. 
 
Parakrama, Arjuna. De-Hegemonizing Language Standards: Learning from (Post)colonial  
Englishes about "English." London: Palgrave, 1995. 
 
Rancière, Jacques. The Ignorant Schoolmaster. Trans. Kristin Ross. Stanford, CA: UP, 1991. 
 
 
 
Roger Farr is the author of the long-poem Surplus (Linebooks, 2006), and the editor of Parser: 
New Poetry and Poetics. His writing on radical social movements and the avant-garde appears 
or is forthcoming in Anarchist Studies, The Encyclopedia of Protest and Revolution from 1600 
to the Present (Blackwell, 2009), Fifth Estate, Perspectives on Anarchist Theory, The Rain 
Review, West Coast Line, and XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics. He is Convener of the Creative 
Writing Program at Capilano University. 
 


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