Description
The Basho Variations gathers thirty-four translations of Basho's famous haiku. In doing so it enters an august (albeit scanty) lineage of maverick redactions of this poem that include (as inaugural) the "frog pond plop" by Dom Sylvester Hudard and the "fog prondl pop" by Gerry Gilbert. Inspired by Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style, it also joins the company of his earlier "Restricted Translation with Imperfect Level Shift (After Basho)" as well as the Frogments from the Frag Pool: Haiku after Basho by fellow ludicians de langage Gary Barwin and Derek Beaulieu; Beaulieu's solo ((plop)) and Basho's Frogger (a Zen video game) created by the Prize Budget for Boys.
About the author
Steve McCaffery was born January 24, 1947, in Sheffield, England. He came to Canada partly to work with bpNichol, and the two poets formed the Toronto Research Group. McCaffery and Nichol also combined talents with Paul Dutton and Rafael Barreto-Rivera as the Four Horsemen, creating and performing innovative sound poetry. McCaffery attended both the University of Hull and York University. During the seventies and eighties, he and Nichol were regular contributors to the poetic journal Open Letter. McCaffery's collection of critical writings, North of Intention, stands as one of the earliest and best collections of essays about experimental writing in Canada and the U.S., and it demonstrates and explores McCaffery's own affiliation with the practitioners of the so-called Language Poetry and poetics, often considered a uniquely American phenomenon. McCaffery has twice been nominated for a Governor General's award for poetry, and now holds the Gray Chair at SUNY Buffalo (Amherst).
Other titles by
Alice In Plunderland
Panopticon
Verse and Worse
Selected and New Poems of Steve McCaffery 1989-2009
Every Way Oakly
Tender Buttons
Seven Pages Missing Volume 2
Selected Ungathered Work
Seven Pages Missing Volume 1
Rational Geomancy
The Kids of the Book-Machine, The Collected Research Reports of the Toronto Research Group 1973-1982
The Black Debt
