Shaping Influency Salon: Some Notes
Writers are forever asked to describe our influences. It’s acknowledged we do not spring out of nowhere. It is understood that there is literary lineage. There is the umbrella influence of the big-name canonical writers under whose distant example our work is asked to be ushered into public discourse. Even in Canada our young writers are described as the new Plath, the new Ginsberg, Rich or Heaney. Closer to home. The new Purdy, Cohen, or Atwood. This is when the work of emerging poets is discussed at all in public discourse. For many of the emerging-to-established poets in Canada our work enters a smaller room, a hushed hall, where even after ten or fifteen years of professional engagement, perhaps a hundred specialized readers lurk and chat.
Each writer has her or his own direct narrative of influence and in Canada, many of us have come into the contemporary writing world with some formative interaction with a creative writing school. In these programs across the country a bunch of really good writers make (generally) a little parttime income teaching and a few are profs. There are also college and continuing education programs. In each, since the late 1970s, the norm is that a practicing writer teaches, often out of a highly personally relevant realm of influences—this writer is not commonly a tenured academic. Even where mentorship is transmitted at more of a community level, with senior or more visible local practitioners engaging their energies to respond to the work of the next generation of interested young writers, the signature of influence can be strikingly specific. In many cases what is transmitted is an exuberant confidence about poetry’s essential presence in the world. Also, there is the belief system that generations of writers are linked one to the next, almost through narrow port-holes of access. Climb through the window uncurtained by a powerfully persuasive mentor and it is unlikely that one’s sense of literature itself will ever de-centre the importance of all the writers who got the beloved mentor’s green light. Most of the contemporary Canadian writers I’ve met have experienced the direct influence of at least one, if not several, defining mentors. Their relationship to poetry as a viable cultural practice must often, on many a dark day, bend its small finger backward to gingerly and hungrily touch the memory of that vitality, that source.
Granted, the trace of the creative writing instructor can also be almost a gouge which may take the emerging writer years to heal from. To overgrow with a new patch of motive, voice, diction or genre-bias. So, I would like to start here, with this detail about the generalities of formative influence, that poetry instruction in Canada since the late 70s has generally taken the form of the writing workshop, in which emergent writing is looked at through the free-floating lens of the instructor writer’s set of often very specific and partisan opinions about what real poetry should be and do and how it should present itself to a “public,” that enigmatic critical mass everyone is taught to imagine to be waiting out there, fully formed, led by the tastemaking expertise of literary journal editorial boards and publishers’ whip-smart agented gatekeepers.
There’s not that much of that, honestly. Poets in the thick of it recognize that to sustain a writing practice in Canada often means to notice as important and seminal even the smallest, quietest microcosm of audience. The individual reader comes to hear the poet read live in many literary series and public reading contexts, and in each case generally the poet has twelve to fifteen minutes to communicate something salient about what he or she is working on currently. Often it is the poet’s voice or bearing that is appraised, fashion sense or lack of, ability to read well or otherwise into the mike, comedic value. Poetry is sometimes a form of stand up in Canada and that makes it hard to acknowledge that the deeper reason people write still has more to do with noticing life’s complexities than copping punchlines. “Hunch lines,” my own bpNichol [http://www.bpnichol.ca/] mentorship, offers up. The beauty of the “pun-line,” as a way of moving laterally, associatively in language, to extend, proliferate and resonate meaning.
Fluency is a word lapping on the shore of influence, that’s why this project is called Influency Salon. Moving fluidly through the output of an individual poet to narrate thematic and formal connections within a body of work is one practice I think is important; another is becoming fluent, becoming a skilled and informed reader of many bodies of work, of connecting poet to poet, to compare and correlate the terms of diverse writing. Somehow I think it is key to actually read the work of poets on the page, and often within the context of a book-length collection, and to put these experiences together with how the work enters one’s acoustic field, and that when this happens on the wing of the poet’s own voice there is an irrefutable intentionality that is instructive even as many contemporary poets may wish to distance ourselves from such notions. It is always a defining experience to listen to a poet read his/her own work, to see the relationship the poet’s bodily stance and lilt have to his/her oral presence.
For years the Canada Council has been proud of its literary readings programs whereby poets are tucked into tight, air-poor jets or allnight trains and buses and sent one by one to venues in small and large towns across the country. What one discovers as a poet is how very big Canada really is, and how many extraordinarily, sometimes poignantly, extreme differences of audience there are for poetry. It is not uncommon for an audience of three to camouflage itself in the stacks of a bookstore somewhere in Saskatchewan at 2 in the afternoon while a plate of cookies goes untouched and a poet reads for endless minutes from one of a stack of 35 copies of his or her brand-spanking new, again—entirely untouched—poetry collection , and then, as if part of an elaborate bureaucratic design that is set to honorably rescue poetry from the margins, to receive a cheque for $250 about five weeks later. Travel is reimbursed, as long as it’s under $300. You know how much it costs to fly from Toronto to Vancouver these days? Yes, publishers must become hot travel agents, scheduling multiple readings in different locales, generally, just to make costs sink to the right level. The three days on the road is never redeemed. We seem to esteem that moment, the face-to-face contact with a real live writer that Atwood now feels, on an international scale, is arduous and perhaps even a waste of creative time. Generally the poet is not interviewed by any local media, nor engaged by any regional critics or academics, and very often has had not more than one or two conversations while in town, and these are often quite stirring if wildly apoetical conversations in the hotel bar. Now, let me say it, I have enjoyed many of these ventures and would not trade them off completely for a digital signature opportunity. But how will the public engage more fully with contemporary poetry and poets if we do not shape our engagements in the image of the cultural salon, where it is imagined from the get-go that a text deserves a respondent, a set of real-time correspondences, and that a poet deserves an exchange at the level of both critical appraisal and community conversation to bring real inquiry and reception into the process?
Influency occurred to me some years ago when I realized that many of my mentors and most of my own generation of colleague poets—all of them serious, bright communicators, engaged thinkers, kind, vivid literary experimenters—on the publication of a salient, interesting book of poetry, would receive only a handful of reviews, and rarely more than a handful of performance opportunities. When reviews occur at all, brief summarizing articles in newspapers totalize the success of the book with unexpurgated enthusiasms or its failure with a shake of the head and a scornful sniff. The great new genius is declared, quickly, and the dud is let to drop, quickly. These popular occasions virtually never invite readers to understand the context and process of the book’s making, of the work’s spiralling interrelationship with its own precursors and earlier influences, and never begin to trace the creative path taken by a poet in the midst of his or her practice to move along a trajectory of production.
Toronto is no small town, and there is a remarkable spectrum of literary activity that happens on and off campuses, in and out of bookstores, in relation to art galleries, restaurants and clubs, in dialogue with other cultural forms, in high faluting institutional settings and in grungy bar venues and lowtech librairies and community centres. Poetry reading series happen weekly at numerous venues, organized for the most part by individuals or small dedicated collectives of highly energetic poets. By following listings given on, say, www.patchysquirrel.ca, it’s easy to have the sense now in this city that concurrent gatherings are taking place, roomfuls of people who do care about poetry and making an evening of it.
What is similar to most of the reading series about town, in bars and bookstores, is that anyone who comes thinks of the evening as almost completely accessible, outside a market economy. Rarely do people pay for poetry readings, and rarely do people feel that buying a poet’s book is not just the tiniest bit of a bother. Poetry seems to be offered up by bohemian loosey-gooseys who float above the material realities of urban life; it flutters into public discourse. Really, though, it is a tremendous amount of cultural volunteerism that ensures that it is sustained at all.
Toronto has been the incubator of much of Canadian writing and publishing’s ascent to the now institutionalized CanLit, since the early sixties on. What has happened in this town has generated identity and aesthetic predilections for all of us as contemporary poets. Its success has created as well a trenchant multitiered hierarchy of establishment and multiple margins, and much of the most lively and intriguing contemporary poetry occurs in what must be considered these margins. The small and medium literary press publish hundreds of books of poetry every year knowing if they sell at all they will sell “moderately” (I’ll be kind)—that they will not generate profit. And as the site of immigration and refugee influx particularly through the sixties, seventies and eighties, Toronto has been a context in which notions of privilege, assumed priority and mainstream homogeneity could be closely questioned and rebuilt, continually, in a gradual rescripting of reality, of point of view, of narrative authority and authorship, and of, most crucially, a widespread acceptance that fixed notions of the “centre” must be rattled and splintered and unfolded to become always plural, perforated, winged, open to relocation.
As a result there are intense intersections in Toronto writing with narrative, with theory, with vernacular, with multiple literary traditions, with the exploratory measures of other artistic disciplines, with aesthetic hybridity across genre, and with social context. There are fascinating distinctive corners of practice, in which the “experiment” is fashioned according to particular desires; art is being made to reflect many visions and versions of the past, present and possible futures. Many phases and turns of such inquiry can be traced out in the work of Toronto poets. Often, though, work that claims or praises or laments or seeks a particular view of things is never heard alongside work that perhaps contests such a view, or which kaleidoscopes it; but when it does occur, I find it brings great energy and insight to all present.
The salon takes the idea of reading across schools or traditions of writing as a good one. Toronto is big enough now to have many almost segregated poetry communities with wide gulfs among them. Given that many of these poetry scenes attract their own social crowd, and often are formulated as a space where a certain poetic is seen as preferred, Influency hoped to create a context that assumed that diverse poetries can artistically enhance each other when given a good airing, when uncorked and let to sit in the room together long enough for the savoury whiffs to intermingle. For each Influency salon I approach 8 poets whose work I respect and admire, and who might be described as coming from a diversity of traditions and schools of writing . I start from the notion that it might benefit all of us to read more frequently across our more usual paths of influence, to in fact attempt to cross whatever artificial divides there might be among us.
There does tend to be a primary notion of the poem, though, among most groups that care about it. Something, I will say, as innocently as possible, “magical” about how poetry transports us. Or makes our sense of body in mind and intellect in body more dense or intense, more saturated. Perhaps with the rush of being in time, or is it the sudden awareness of blood in tissue. A plenitude. How to say all of it is half the pleasure and the task. There’s something too about making palpable the shape of thinking.
