Steve McCaffery
Seven Pages Missing, Volume One: Selected Texts 1969-1999
publisher: Coach House Books, 2001
isbn: 1-55245-049-X
price: $22.95
Long associated with the Language poets but often not given his due as a major figure, most likely because of his Canadian citizenship (born in England, he moved to Toronto 1968), McCaffery has carved out an impressive, distinctive oeuvre of visual, conceptual, lyrical and novelistic poetry for over three decades.
As opposed to his American peers, who were interested in a politically charged, experimental version of "realism," whether it be through the parataxis of the "new sentence" (Ron Silliman), offbeat stand-up theory (Charles Bernstein), mind-crunching collage techniques (Bruce Andrews) or diaristic experiments in self-knowledge (Lyn Hejinian), McCaffery has focused on an aesthetics based on theories of deconstruction and the Deleuzian rhizome, reducing the scale of his word-play not just to the level of the meme -- the smallest unit of meaning that language can possess -- but also to the level of mark of the very ink on the page.
Seven Pages Missing contains several of his poems in a "post-semiotic" style, which are in the "concrete" tradition but which are really purely visual images that force the viewer into a reading-like state, like deciphering the hieroglyphs of some lost civilization.
Also included are sections from his experimental novel Panopticon, which operates equally like a movie and a theoretical text, the mystery being to find the body in writing, which is figured as the excess of bodily economy:
WHEREVER A BOOK CLOSES A WRITING BEGINS. A BODY DIES AND GETS BURIED IN THE SPECIFIC HISTORY OF SOLUTIONS INSCRIBED WITHIN THE KNOWN GEOMETRY OF QUESTIONS. LET US NAME THIS CORPSE CALLIGRAPHY. LET US ENCODE IT AS A SPECIES. AFTER ALL IT'S ONLY IN A FILM. ABOUT A BOOK. SITTING DOWN. TURNING PAGES.
[256]
Evoba: The Investigations Meditations is like a companion to Wittgenstein's Philosophical Meditations. The poem takes the reader through every flaming hoop of meaning as evinced in language, from the cartoon thought bubble, several varieties of projective and language-centered verse, the indifferent doodle to the lyrical rumination:
In a dim lit room
you merely see the writing
a sign
a parrot sings
a sentence that enters
see the colour you say
turn your head in a peculiar direction
it is the eye that places you
before you point out faces
[169]
The section from The Black Debt is probably the most accessible -- puns, social detail, word games and philosophical fragments abound, conjoined only by the comma, his effort to avoid the closure of the sentence -- but several sections from the prose Theory of Sediment, a group of poems based on Stein's Tender Buttons, dada poems like the "Poem for Arthur Cravan," as well as an appendix of "documents" -- the poet's own writing on his individual works as they appeared in interviews, book jacket copy and introductions -- provide access to the novice reader into the works of this important Canadian poet.
This huge, gorgeously designed book -- too small to be a "collected" but large for a "selected" -- is the first volume of a two book series; the second, due next year, will contain works that have not previously appeared in book form.
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