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By Frank Davey Rampike 15/1 _____________________________________________________________________________________________ INDEX Paul Dutton: “Narcissus A, 7” p. 2 Editorial p. 3 Frank Davey: Interview p. 4 Frank Davey: “Postcards from the Raj” p. 12 Jeanette Lynes: “Frank” p. 17 Michael & Linda Hutcheon: Interview p. 18 Joyce Carol Oates: “The Writer’s (Secret) Life” p. 22 Paul Hegedus: Two Poems p. 29 Darren Wershler-Henry: from The Iron Whim p. 30 Robert Dassanowsky: Three Poems p. 35 George Bowering: “Sworn to Secrecy” p. 36 Gregory Betts “The Geopoetics of Tish” p. 42 Jürgen O. Olbrich: Two Texts p. 55 rob mclennan “Notes on a Day Book” p. 56 Charles Bernstein: Argotist Interview p. 58 Brian Edwards: “Ce n’est pas la guerre!” p. 62 Penn Kemp: “Night Orchestra” p. 66 Matthew Holmes: Two Texts p. 68 Carl Peters: “Writing Should Not Sound Like Writing” p. 70 D. King: “Driving Wheel” p. 72 Louis Cabri: “Foamula” p. 74 Nicole Markotic: Two Poems p. 76 Sandra Alland: Six Poems p. 78 Stan Rogal: “The Celebrity Rag” p. 80 Tanis MacDonald “Practice Lessons” p. 82 Sarah Bonet: “VIP at liquid” p. 83 Anne Walker: 3 Poems p. 84 Lindsey Bannister: “The Tombstone Vandal” p. 85 Photos from the Conference p. 88 1 Rampike 15/1 _____________________________________________________________________________________________ ”NARCISSUS A, 7” BY PAUL DUTTON 2 Rampike 15/1 _____________________________________________________________________________________________ Editorial: This issue of Rampike is dedicated to Frank Davey in response to the conference on “Poetics and Popular Culture” held in his honour at the University of Western Ontario (2005). Keynote speakers at that gathering included Charles Bernstein, Lynette Hunter, and Smaro Kamboureli. Poets who read at the conference included Charles Bernstein, Daphne Marlatt, Marlene Nourbese Philip, Lenore Keeshig- Tobias, Roy Miki, and Fred Wah. Many of the conference proceedings and responses are published in special issues of Essays on Canadian Writing, Open Letter, and Rampike. In this issue of Rampike, we feature a number of the participants at that conference as well as writers, artists, and thinkers who have either collaborated with Frank Davey, or those whose views resonate with his perceptions of aesthetics, politics, poetics, cultural studies and/or criticism, or those who are “fellow travellers” through writing. Frank Davey is well known as the long-standing editor of Open Letter magazine, a dynamic vehicle for the promotion and advancement of innovative thinking on contemporary literature and the arts. Along with his other salient critical statements, Davey’s breakthrough essay “Surviving the Paraphrase: Thematic Criticism and its Alternatives” (later published in Surviving the Paraphrase: 11 Essays on Canadian Literature), transformed the way Canadians perceive Canadian Literature. Prior to that, along with George Bowering, Daphne Marlatt, Fred Wah and others, Davey initiated Tish magazine which, among other things, forwarded an Olsonian and Black Mountain aesthetic while simultaneously advancing new poetic forms in Canada. Davey’s own poetic achievements appear in over two dozen books stretching from 1962 to the present. In 1984, along with Fred Wah, Frank Davey developed Swift Current, the world’s first electronic literary database which provided an open electronic forum for writers and theorists to instantaneously air new writing and criticism. More recently, Davey has developed non- fiction and cultural criticism that is engaged with what bp Nichol identified as “notions of responsibility and duty.” Frank Davey’s recent polemics are engaged with the validity of fact, and have influenced both critical theory and cultural studies. Stephen Scobie has called Davey’s criticism “among the most individual and influential ever written in Canada.” And then, there is Frank’s penchant for raising prize- winning, champion show-dogs, specifically, Great Danes. For more info on Frank Davey’s dogs, his writing, publishing and criticism, and his numerous achievements, we refer you to his interview in this issue, and his web-page at: http://publish.uwo.ca/%7Efdavey/c/daveymain.htm We are delighted to present this special issue of Rampike, in honour of Frank Davey featuring interviews, statements and expressions by noted authors, artists and critics including, Michael and Linda Hutcheon, Joyce Carol Oates, Charles Bernstein, George Bowering, and Brian Edwards (Australia). This issue includes fiction, poetry, visual graphics, theory, arts commentary and trans-genre texts by Canadian and international authors who share the individualistic and forward-thinking ethos, aesthetics and poetics that Frank Davey has advanced throughout his career. We trust you will find this homage to Frank Davey to be in the same stimulating and rewarding spirit as his many continuing contributions to literature and criticism. – Karl Jirgens/Editor PHOTO (K. Jirgens): Frank Davey with Roy Miki, Jeff Derksen & colleagues at the Poetics and Popular Culture Conference (University of Western Ontario) 3 Rampike 15/1 _____________________________________________________________________________________________ FOR THE RECORD: INTERVIEW WITH FRANK DAVEY by Karl Jirgens KJ: I wanted to talk about a number of ground-breaking or pioneering initiatives you’ve been involved in. I’ll try to proceed chronologically, although there are overlaps. The first area involves recent debate on the idea of trans-nationalism as a condition of contemporary literature, including Canadian Literature. Could you cross-reference the present with earlier notions of trans-nationalism as it involved Warren Tallman, the Black Mountain poets and the founding of TISH magazine in Vancouver during the 1960s? FD: ‘Transnationalism’ may not be the best term here, since it presupposes the national or nationalism. There’s a similar problem with words like ‘international’ or ‘paranational.’ Cultural forms have tended to be more general – as indicated in words such as ‘Graeco-Roman,’‘Western,’ ‘European,’ “Middle- Eastern,’ ‘South Asian,’ ‘Sub-Saharan’ – with national forms usually being particular instances of the larger ones. I grew up in the Western period of modernism – Euro-American modernism, I suppose (although it’s often been called ‘international’ modernism). There’s an extremely rich Dada exhibition touring at the moment, which I saw in Paris last fall and which will be in New York and Washington this year. What is remarkably clear in this exhibition is how complex was Dada’s relation to the nation state. To some extent national boundaries were irrelevant – one month an artist might be working in Paris and the next in Geneva or New York. Yet there were also strong national inflections – in Germany they concerned political resistance, in New York they often concerned industrialization. My cultural inheritance has been of this kind – European romanticism, European Victorianism, Euro-American modernism with all of its ‘isms’ from Russian constructivism to American abstract expressionism. In the years immediately before Tish my stronger interests included Dostoevsky, Lawrence, Ionesco, Pinter, Camus, Sartre, Chagall, Jaspers, Heidegger, Ferlinghetti, Kerouac, Earle Birney, Jack Shadbolt, plus whatever was appearing in the Tamarack Review (I had a subscription from issue 3 onward). While nationalism has been for the past few hundred years a condition of the commercial dissemination of literature, and often for its funding, it has not seemed to me to be a major condition of the theorizing of the literary. The national didn’t seem to me to be particularly relevant to either Black Mountain or Tish – that is I wasn’t aware at the time that I or others such as Warren Tallman might be being deliberately ‘transnational’ or that the national was something that might need to be transited. Quite the contrary – the question for us at the time of Tish was how to write a poetry out of the local (with ‘Canada’ understood as an aspect of that local). Black Mountain was attractive because of its critique of humanism and instrumentalism, its literary extensions of Jaspers and Merleau-Ponty, its links to the European modernisms of Dada, Futurism, Constructivism, and – above all – Olson’s theorizing of the local. It theorized that process of particular local (and arguably national) inflection. Those who currently see “transnationalism as a condition of contemporary literature” strike me as showing ignorance at least of twentieth-century literature and some naivety about the nation and literature. Literature and literary ideas have never been contained by the national. What has been lessening has been the national inflections of the literary, particularly in nation-states that lack a unique national language, and particularly in fiction. The homogenization of commercial fiction, and the convergence of national best-seller lists (with an inevitable reduction in the number of books on them), I would argue, is better understood as an aspect of neoliberal globalization than of transnationalism. KJ: Along with Fred Wah and others you were one of the driving forces behind Swift Current. I believe Swift Current was initiated in 1984 using UNIX-based VAX computers, one at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, and one at York University in Toronto. The project linked writers from Ontario to BriTish Columbia using UUCP (unix to unix copy), providing electronic mail, enabling live, “virtual” collaborative projects, and creating an electronic forum for current linguistic expression. The inter-active nature
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