Avant Canada
Poets, Prophets, Revolutionaries
- Publisher
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
- Initial publish date
- Jan 2019
- Category
- Poetry, Canadian, Canadian
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9781771123525
- Publish Date
- Jan 2019
- List Price
- $39.99
-
eBook
- ISBN
- 9781771123549
- Publish Date
- Jan 2019
- List Price
- $27.99
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Description
Avant Canada presents a rich collection of original essays and creative works on a representative array of avant-garde literary movements in Canada from the past fifty years. From the work of Leonard Cohen and bpNichol to that of Jordan Abel and Liz Howard, Avant Canada features twenty-eight of the best writers and critics in the field.
The book proposes four dominant modes of avant-garde production: “Concrete Poetics,” which accentuates the visual and material aspects of language; “Language Writing,” which challenges the interconnection between words and things; “Identity Writing,” which interrogates the self and its sociopolitical position; and “Copyleft Poetics,” which undermines our habitual assumptions about the ownership of expression. A fifth section commemorates the importance of the Centennial in the 1960s at a time when avant-garde cultures in Canada began to emerge.
Readers of this book will become familiar with some of the most challenging works of literature—and their creators—that this country has ever produced. From Concrete Poetry in the 1960s through to Indigenous Literature in the 2010s, Avant Canada offers the most sweeping study of the literary avant-garde in Canada to date.
About the authors
GREGORY BETTS is a poet, editor, essayist and teacher, originally from Vancouver and Toronto. Since his first published poem, an anagrammatical translation of a short poem by bpNichol, Betts's work has consistently troubled individual authorship through such mechanisms as anagrams, collaboration, found-texts and response-text writing. If Language presents paragraph-length anagrams that explore the formation of meaning within a recombinant linguistic system. Haikube was part of a collaborative art project with sculptors Matt Donovan and Hallie Siegel in which six of Betts's poems were carved into an ebony movable (a la Rubiks) cube. The text was carved in negative relief, which allowed the cube to function as a press block to print new poems as they were 'discovered' by moving the sides of the cube. Betts currently lives in St. Catharines, where he edits PRECIPICe magazine, curates the Grey Borders Reading Series and teaches Avant-Garde and Canadian Literature at Brock University.
Christian Bök is the author of Crystallography (Coach House Press, 1994), a ’pataphysical encyclopedia nominated for the Gerald Lampert Award for Best Poetic Debut, and ’Pataphysics: The Poetics of an Imaginary Science (Northwestern University Press, 2001). His book Eunoia won the 2002 Griffin Poetry Prize and is the best-selling Canadian poetry book of all time. Bök has created artificial languages for Gene Roddenberry’s Earth: Final Conflict and Peter Benchley’s Amazon. His conceptual artwork has appeared at the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York City as part of the exhibit Poetry Plastique. He currently teaches at the University of Calgary.
Editorial Reviews
This collection of academic essays and creative pieces takes an enthusiastic, engaged attitude to the unrolling of Canadian literature, starting with an intelligent introduction by editors Gregory Betts and Christian Bök [...]
Canadian Notes and Queries, 2018
Other titles by Gregory Betts
Finding Nothing
The VanGardes, 1959-1975
They Have Bodies
They Have Bodies, by Barney Allen
A Critical Edition
Space Between Her Lips
The Poetry of Margaret Christakos
Counterblasting Canada
Marshall McLuhan, Wyndham Lewis, Wilfred Watson, and Sheila Watson
This is Importance
A Students' Guide to literature
Avant-Garde Canadian Literature
The Early Manifestations
RUSH
what fukan theory; a study uv language
The Obvious Flap
After Exile
A Raymond Knister Poetry Reader
