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Rob Manery, It’s Not As If It Hasn’t Been Said Before (Vancouver: Tsunami Editions, 2001)
Reviewed by Clint Burnham
With a letter from Rob Manery

The Rain 5:1 (Summer 2007): 4


“Political emancipation is the reduction of man, on the one hand to a member of civil society, an egoistic and independent individual, on the other hand to a citizen, a moral person.” - Marx, On The Jewish Question (1843)

I: turn right at ultra-leftism

That the anarchy of form in the book is more workable than an anarchy of politics (or rather, that the anarchy of form in the book is an anarchy of politics except that when anarchy is a political movement as movement, its commodification returns as the fetish of the non-structure [Žižek], non-control, that totalitarianism—thus the notorious ego for product of the non-ego’d chance ologists).

It’s Not As If It Hasn’t Been Said Before (INAIIHBSB) possesses an anarchy of form: the anarchy of form of the texts creates a discourse around the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919—one of the country’s first general strikes—not excepting that in August 1918 in Vancouver when Ginger Goodwin was murdered—the general strike as political weapon—I have a button calling for one on my kid’s backpack—but what it would take for it to happen—labour as political weapon—trainworkers in Britain declining to move munitions now (January ‘03)—trainworkers in the uk & the us voting against the war (RT)

The political struggle the iteration of the book’s title—but also its defeatism—how it has been said before, what that means in the sense that accusation, document, rallying cries—also lyrix?—have been said before thus the history—with some connection—was also—before—but more relevant then is the form of the phrase, the double negative (yeah right—the Province joke about sfu linguistic professor) a gentle reminder or correction, subtle, and in the oral—the iteration of the book’s title—but also its defeatism

S=L=A=C=K(=S=W)=E=R

history is both our solace and our
trouble spear in the wound,

Manery’s earlier Dr. Donne work: chronic

Manery is to Farrell as Cabri is to Derksen: Thus what 5-10 years ago was apolitical aleotic formalism (sternly fought for) in the work of DF became in the meantime (and no doubt that popular [Pantera/Nirvana] plays a role) a historical method for RM’s generating anarchic verse; and what was the ripped headlines-exchange rate high disjunction in JD became the antiocularcentric formalism of such media mixage in LC. Thus the process of history: what was political loses that over time as it is commodified, and what was arid suddenly acquires meaning; requiring, in all of these cases, a necessary re-reading of the work as a way to inquire into the relation of poetic form to history. No doubt questions of the brain drain, the academy, and the push-pull of Canadian geography are all manifest, and thus the method that the book’s title iterates: appropriation &/as/of history.


II: Dewdney-hole anecdote (fragments of a memoir)

Something that connects Kevin Davies and myself is that we both took writing classes from Chris Dewdney in Toronto in the late 80s. Dewdney at that time taught a night class at George Brown College, on the east side of downtown Toronto. Mine was in the first couple months of the 90s, and a week or two in Dewdney came in talking about this new magazine starting in Ottawa, these guys who are doing hole magazine. Meanwhile he’s recommending Ron Padgett, Clark Coolidge, McCaffery, Raworth, getting people to think about form—something often easier for middle class writers w/nothing to write about—a woman who’d taught elementary school in Chicago’s south side had great stories to tell but couldn’t turn those narratives into poems.

I picked up on what Rob Manery and Louis Cabri were doing, getting into sectarian tiffs over what I saw as the disingenuousness of their opening literary survey (which was actually a work of cultural-capital detective-work worthy of E. Bloch) or Cabri’s characterization of McCaffery as language pioneer—I, in my purist bourgeois deconstructivist phase, saw such tropes as tripe. Eventually I realized this magazine was the career-maker for Canadian language poetry, second micro-gen—since Writing was now a closed first-gen shop—and insinuated first my criticism, then sonnets, and a chapbook.

But what hole and all that surrounded it managed to do was to be the only semblance of a community or intervention based on materialist poetics outside of Vancouver. I’d drive or take the train up from Toronto, to see Raworth put his pocket change on an overhead projector (which sounds worse than it was) or Bromige, Alan Davies, and also a shared interest it seems in what came out of the British scene.

[Sept/01-Jan/03.]


III: “Some Notes on Method” from Rob Manery to Clint Burnham (10 Feb 2003).

... The source texts for the poems are drawn from documents surrounding the Winnipeg General Strike as well as pamphlets that were more or less contemporaneous with the strike. The first piece used a passage from a talk by Jackson Mac Low as its source. The source texts are as follows.  “Without Society I Pause”: passage from “The Poetics of Chance & the Politics of Simultaneous Spontaneity, or the Sacred Heart of Jesus (Revised & Abridged)” by Jackson Mac Low in Talking Poetics from Naropa Institute Volume 1, a talk delivered in 1975 and published in 1978. “Even indirect language carefully selected in hope”: Crankshaw’s Criminal Code of Canada 1935, Section 98. “If Seditious Words Are Spoken”: Crankshaw’s Criminal Code of Canada 1935, Section 87. “A Common Purpose”:  Crankshaw’s Criminal Code of Canada 1935, commentary on Section 87. “Merely and Any”: “An Open Letter by J.S. Woodsworth”, published in Western Labor News. “Bloody Saturday”: “Bloody Saturday”, unattributed though likely penned by J.S. Woodsworth, published in Western Labor News. “Under the Bludgeonings of Chance”: a passage from “Dixon’s Address to the Jury”, published as a pamphlet in 1919 to raise money for the defence fund of the arrested strike leaders. “The Pirc”: “Sabotage” by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a pamphlet published in 1912. “Goldman Variations”:  “Anarchy: What It Really Stands For” by Emma Goldman, published in 1911.

Thinking of Silliman’s use of the Fibonacci series to create a text whose form resembled the dynamics of class struggle, I devised a means to use chess openings (taking a cue from Duchamp who said that chess, like art, was a struggle) to generate texts based on sources from the Winnipeg General Strike. Obviously this method is reductive and somewhat arbitrary. For each source text, I chose a chess opening which to me was suggestive of the characteristic of the text or the situation surrounding the text. For example, the opening I chose for Gurley Flynn’s “Sabotage” was an opening which is characterized by good counter-attacking opportunities. This step, of course, was subjective and based on my own limited understandings of the chess openings. Modern Chess Openings, 13th edition was the source for the lines of the chess openings.

I used three basic methods for generating the poems.
1. I subjectively chose a word list of 64 words from the vocabulary of the source text. Placed the 64 words on a grid of 64 squares to mirror a chess board. Played out the moves of the opening and recorded each word that was in the square which corresponded to the square into which a piece had moved.
2. I typed the entire text across several grids of 64 squares. For each grid I played out the moves of one line of the opening (a line of an opening consisted of between 12 and 20 moves), recorded words as above. Each grid became a section of that poem.
3. I chose 64 phrases from the source text and assigned them a square on the grid. I played out the moves and recorded the words as above.
Each poem was then edited usually by deleting words, especially where the opening called for pieces to repeatedly take and re-take the same square (which would mean that the same word or phrase would appear in the text several times in a row). The first piece had very little editing as did the last two pieces (at least as I recollect).

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