Steve McCaffery
Lise Downe
Trevor Joyce
New Works Studio, 23 October 2003
Our first reader is Steve McCaffery. After a hard day’s instrumental reason and linguistic utilitarianism, it’s always a profound pleasure to sit down with Steve’s Seven Pages Missing, a two-volume cabinet of linguistic wonders. To read McCaffery is to constantly stumble across poetic worlds you didn’t previously know of, and any one of them would have been enough to satisfy a less restless and fertile pen. If he weren’t so well known as a poet, he could have easily earned a rep as one of Canada ’s best experimental fiction-writers: take a look at Panopticon, “Hegel’s Eyes,” “Deliberate Follicles,” and the remarkable Derridian mystery novel “An Effect of Cellophane” for proof. The same could be said of many other facets of his activity, from sound poetry to visual poetry to his work as a critic and theorist: all of these could, Pessoa-like, have been hived off into entire heteronymic careers of their own, if it weren’t for his deep suspicion of such convenient coherencies. This is a body of work that aims both to unsettle and to delight. Steve McCaffery . . .
* * *
Lise Downe is the author of three books: A Velvet Increase of Curiosity, The Soft Signature and most recently Disturbances of Progress, the language and prosody of each book more delicately, purposefully broken than the last. Not “broken” as in a smashed teacup, but as light is broken by a prism, fanning out in front of the reader’s eyes. I hear echoes of, or parallels to, many other authors in Downe’s work – of Clark Coolidge’s Space in “Driven,” a sequence from The Soft Signature; or of Marjorie Welish’s iterative loops and sampled backtalk, in Disturbances of Progress. But one would hardly mistake Downe’s work for anyone else’s: t hese are some of the most scrupulous and beautiful of contemporary poems, possessing a tough unreasonableness underneath the slight lyric grace, as Eliot didn’t say of Andrew Marvell. Lise Downe . . .
* * *
Without intending a slight to the first two readers, allow me to state that Trevor Joyce is the reason we’re here today. I’d kept up an occasional correspondence with Trevor after meeting him in New Hampshire at Romana Huk’s Assembling Alternatives conference in 1996, where I found myself intrigued by the man and by his then brand-new book of poems stone floods, whose lean music immediately struck the ear even as the book’s busy crossweave of ideas and counterideas only sunk in gradually. In his work after he’d attended that conference, as he responded to the many experimental poetic practices brought together there (including much of what we call, with massive if convenient simplification, “Language Poetry”), that poetic crossweave became more like a threshing-machine, in a long two-part poem called Syzygy which he sent me and which did more than intrigue me – floored me, is more like it. In 1998 he sent me another new text, the first two parts of the prose triptych Hopeful Monsters, and enough was enough: I decided to get this work out by whatever means I could. & what better means than creating a new magazine as a showcase? So there’s the truth: Trevor Joyce is responsible for conjuring The Gig into existence – Hopeful Monsters went into the first issue, & I even managed to hammer out a one-paragraph review of Syzygy for the back – & for the subsequent series of 15 issues and counting, for the other books I’ve done under The Gig’s imprint (including The Gig’s most recent publications, Trevor’s Take Over and Undone, Say), and ultimately for this reading itself.
Nate Dorward
; more info about the site is available