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Haunted Canada: the Ninth Annual Trent-Carleton Graduate Haunted Canada: The Ninth Annual Trent-Carleton 2013 Graduate Conference in Canadian Studies. Held at Carleton University, March 15-16 ““The sparking of the insurrection:” Protoconceptualism & John Robert Colombo’s The Mackenzie Poems,” by Eric Schmaltz. In her 1852 account of settler life in Canada, Roughing It In the Bush, Susanna Moodie relays her conversation with the American Mr. D. who tells her that her “country is too new for ghosts” (271). Moodie concurs with the man, agreeing that “[b]ad spirits cannot be supposed to linger near a place where crime has never been committed” (272). Regardless of how we believe ghostly spirits to be created, Canada, according to Moodie and Mr. D., had not been an inhabited nation long enough for ghosts to dwell on its landscape. Earle Birney echoes this sentiment over a century later in his poem “Can. Lit.” in which he adapts Moodie’s statement into a metaphor that regards Canadian culture and poignantly articulates an anxiety widely felt by many mid- twentieth century Canadian authors; he writes, “[i]t's only by our lack of ghosts we're haunted" (15). Even a hundred years after Moodie’s statement, Birney’s speaker seems to believe that Canada’s cultural history remains devoid of significant national figures. While both Moodie and Birney have come to be significant Canadian cultural persons themselves, they both prompt us to search for Canada’s significant past. Both writers seem to agree that one does not exist. 1 Schmaltz. Despite this cynicism, many Canadian artists and critics have dedicated their creative and critical energies to disproving the arguments made by Moodie and Birney, among them being John Robert Colombo. Author of over two hundred books, Colombo has come to be known as Canada’s “Master Gatherer.” Much of Colombo’s work is dedicated to providing evidence of Canada’s own ghastly history. Noting this ambition, Kathy English writes that “Colombo collected all-Canadian tales of lost treasures and UFO's, haunted ships and sea monsters, sasquatches and poltergeists; disproving poet Earle Birney's statement.” Indeed, Colombo has produced numerous compilations of these types including Ghosts Stories of Canada, Haunted Toronto, Ghost Stories of Ontario, among many others. According to Colombo’s tales, Canada is in fact a very haunted country. Though these books of lore may be pertinent to a discussion of Canada’s hauntings, I would prefer to look upon some of Colombo’s earlier non-folkloric work, mainly his first book of poetry, The Mackenzie Poems, which has become a ghostly figment itself. The book, however, uniquely addresses the metaphorical level of Birney’s statement, revealing that significant ghosts do in fact haunt Canada’s cultural landscape. The Mackenzie Poems is not an entirely authentic or original or even creative composition by Colombo–it does not aim to be. Instead the slim hardcover volume consists of words written by the leader of the Upper Canada rebellion and publisher William Lyon Mackenzie. Colombo created the poems by resurrecting instances of Mackenzie’s highly politicized prose, and then recirculating it within a new aesthetic context as poetry. Clarifying his 2 Haunted Canada: The Ninth Annual Trent-Carleton 2013 Graduate Conference in Canadian Studies. Held at Carleton University, March 15-16 process, he writes “the poems […] are based on speeches, articles, sketches and letters that William Lyon Mackenzie wrote between 1824 and 1837” (17-18). According to Colombo, the shift from the rhetorical to the aesthetic gives the language a “new lease on life” (19). These poems are commonly known as found poems–poems consisting of language discovered by the writer, not written by the writer. The found poet is a ghost who haunts the house of language, defamiliarizing it from its “rightful” owners and reshaping its meaning. At one point in his career, this type of work earned Colombo a reputation as one of the leading Canadian poets working with found language, but this achievement has been overshadowed by his work as an anthologist, collector, editor, and translator. However, conceptual writing–considering its recent rise to popularity–provides an ideal critical climate in which Colombo’s work can be discussed. For those unfamiliar, conceptual writing, in some instances, is a vogue literary movement with proprietors who, like Colombo, resurrect, revive, and redistribute language for a variety of purposes. I would like to take this opportunity then to begin to revive discussion around Colombo by examining his early work, mainly The Mackenzie Poems, not as found poems but, retrospectively as an anticipatory conceptualism. Recognizing that Colombo’s writing in 1966 was well ahead of its time, I intend to initiate a discussion of his radical appropriative gestures and begin to show how they are similar to the practices and theories employed by today’s leading 3 Schmaltz. conceptual writers such as Kenneth Goldsmith, Vanessa Place and Rob Fitterman, Craig Dworkin, and derek beaulieu. By comparing Colombo’s work to these writers, I will demonstrate how he extracts Mackenzie’s language from its quotidian political use, creating an uncanny poetic that reveals one of Canada’s significant national specters. Furthermore, this paper seeks not only to examine the ways in which Colombo’s anticipatory conceptualism thrusts one of Canada’s most renowned rebels back into cultural consciousness, but also seeks to reinvigorate scholarly discussions around Colombo himself–one of our own national literary ghosts. Before looking at specific examples from The Mackenzie Poems, a brief comparison of the genealogies and definitions of found poetry and conceptual writing will assist to articulate the contours of this talk, but will also usefully reveal the significant overlap between the two approaches. In the Open Poetry anthology, Colombo defines found poetry as “[s]omething removed from one context and placed within an aesthetic context. An object valued more for its aesthetic than its utilitarian appeal.” Colombo traces found poetry back to William Butler Yeats for his lyrical adaptation of Walter Pater's prose essay on Leonardo Da Vinci’s the Mona Lisa. Among several other early twentieth century influences, Colombo also mentions Marcel Duchamp whose readymade artifacts reflect a similar practice in sculptural form. One of Duchamp’s most famous examples being his Fountain, a urinal placed on its side and signed by Duchamp as R.Mutt. I would also like to note that Colombo offers, an alternative title for found 4 Haunted Canada: The Ninth Annual Trent-Carleton 2013 Graduate Conference in Canadian Studies. Held at Carleton University, March 15-16 poetry. Borrowing from pop art Colombo coins the term “pop poem” which is a “found poem taken from a sub-literary source, especially advertising matter.” A very similar practice is born forty years after Colombo presents these definitions. In 2003, Craig Dworkin titles an analogous practice as “conceptual writing.” Dworkin writes a similar lineage for this contemporary analog, drawing attention to protoexamples of conceptual work by Duchamp with his readymades as well as pop art through Andy Warhol and his mechanical silkscreen paintings. Dworkin describes a conceptual writer as one who acknowledges that they do not need to “generate new material to be a poet: the intelligent organization or reframing of already extant text is enough” (xliv). Comparing these basic definitions and genealogies of conceptual writing and found poetry reveals that the practices are strikingly similar. Both found poetry and conceptual writing rely on the flexibility of language–on the writer’s ability to change the meaning of words without changing the words themselves. Furthermore, both the found poet and conceptual writer participate within an economy of resurrection and recirculation. They never rely on the production of their own original content, but on the zombification of already existing language. In his introduction to The Mackenzie Poems, Colombo is modest about impact of his poems, he “hope[s] the reader will enjoy reading these poems, if only as literary curious, as relics of a bygone age” (25). However, examining Colombo’s poetry retrospectively from within the 5 Schmaltz. discourse of conceptual writing usefully allows us to consider his poems more than written works that are simply meant to be enjoyed. A shining example of his appropriative work is his short poem “Cholera in London.” Colombo reports that he extricated the language from a paragraph written and published by Mackenzie in 1832 that describes his family’s struggle to fight off cholera while staying in England. After stripping away the context specific language the full poem reads as follows: Be this as it may, I have no intention of again changing my lodgings. I am here on what I believe to be a good, honourable, and proper errand; and if it pleases the Creator to cut me or mine off, while in what we consider the way of duty, we can bear in mind that he is able to raise up other fit and proper persons to fulfill his wise purposes. Here then we are, in the house with the Cholera, and no dismayed. (1-9) The language of this poem is no longer fixed to Mackenzie’s tale of personal struggle, but can now be read across a variety of contexts thus creating an uncanny poetic–the language of the poem is at once familiar and unfamiliar. We recognize that it is Mackenzie’s writing, but it no longer functions in the same way. The reference no longer indicates Mackenzie’s particular lodging–the house that is infected with cholera–but within this new context adopts new and 6 Haunted Canada: The Ninth Annual Trent-Carleton 2013 Graduate Conference in Canadian Studies. Held at Carleton University, March 15-16 unknown meanings. The phrase “the house with the Cholera” (8) opens into a critique and may be read as an extension of Mackenzie’s condemnation of Upper Canada’s rulers and his quest to depose the family compact.
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