Restaged Debate

Five years after the event, Richard Harrison's report on my "cage match" with Christian Bök is finally online.

As is almost always true of such staged debates, much was said. And much was left unspoken. Then we all went to the lobby for refreshments. It might have ended there. But between what was discussed and what was left unsaid that night, in the nature of the audience drawn to two poets whom many regard as antagonists, and from all that led up to the event—including Starnino’s Writer-in-Residency at Mount Royal and the publication of the second edition of Bök’s Eunoia—emerged a wide-ranging, deep and fascinating discussion about the nature of poetry and of the mind that writes it. What follows are the conclusions I’ve come to so far as a participant in a symposium spread out across the offices, hallways, bars, classrooms and various virtual spaces in the community created by the Cage Match itself.

It's a long essay, but well worth your time.

The Nativity of BookThug

It seems I played a part:

“The milieu that BookThug comes out of is the late ’90s and early 2000s, and there’s this famous argument that was going on at the time after Christian Bok won the Griffin.Carmine Starnino had his famous response review to Eunoia, ‘Vowel Movements.’ There was this very curious thing that was going on where people were choosing whether something was good or not based on style.

"So you had the experimental poets over here saying these people were wrong because they were doing what they were doing and then there were the New Formalists … There was The New Canon which Starnino edited and there was Shift and Switch which was edited by Beaulieu and Christie and Rawlings,” Jay Millar told me. “There was this mad grab of defining that was going on, but it had to do with camps. What I was interested in was that poetry is a very vast spectrum between these things, and I don’t think that just because something has a stylistic experimental thing or a stylistic New Formalist thing, that it is better than the other things. There’s good examples of both and there’s a really interesting place in the middle. That’s the most fascinating. The good examples of things on the extremes are also fascinating, for different reasons. That’s kind of the aesthetic that I was interested in curating at BookThug. The discussion between things is much more interesting to me than what everything is, which is why I set up the press the way that I have.”

VPC125

Vancouver was fantastic. Everyone came ready to play. The panels crackled. And the conversations—which often went into the wee hours—were partisan and passionate. Some of the best four days I've had in a long time. I feel very lucky to have been a part of it. For the curious, I've gathered up some of the (mostly blurry) iPhone pics that have been circulating.

(Left to right: Gillian Jerome, Ben Doller, the back of my head, Sandra Doller, Melanie Siebert, Christian Bök, Silas White, Katia Grubisic, Srikanth Reddy, Matthew Zapruder)

(Left to right: Jeramy Dodds, George Murray, Ken Babstock, Helen Guri, David Seymour)

(Michael Lista, Ken Babstock)

(Christian Bök, Darren Wershler)

(David McGimpsey, Darren Wershler)

(George Murray, Damian Rogers)

(Ken Babstock illustrates Matthew Zapruder in action)