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Busted
Nancy Shaw and Catriana Strang
publisher: Coach House Books, 2001
price: $16.95 paper
isbn: 1-55245-0791-1
"What a messy, bloody, capricious business. Is lineage iced, or boarded, or unchecked?" Shaw and Strang ask -- no, demand to know -- in their book-length poem, a sort of cerebral evisceration of the givens of culture in the time after postmodernism's hypnotizing simulacra, its seductive cult of schizophrenic, ever-generative presentness, seems to have fallen away:
But exactly when did the lucid rink around our discourse? And for which shift did all our plays lace up with capital? Ever more distant, ever more expansive. Was there ever a simple goal?
[46]
Alumni of Canada's determinably unofficial Kootenay School of Writing -- a group that took a heavy lead from the Language poets but added an almost punkish edge -- Shaw and Strang write from a point of strong conviction, from deep within that first moment in which one believes everything's truly gone wrong.
Nonetheless, a strong degree of ambivalence infiltrates their protest, and the ironies of this work, lofted like slags of kryptonite, have a certain pathos that is lacking in someone they are no doubt influenced by, Bruce Andrews.
Some poems seem like outlines of new ways to curse, such as "Gripe: A Social Column for the Republic," which contains phrases like "Come in and stuff my take-off," "Coin a reasonable sequence of funking new conjunctions," "Brown up your daily high-brow," and "Swarm-scampy" [34].
But the final line of the poem, "This is a formal innovation," takes some aim at the authors themselves, who -- stripped of the "origin story" that is heritage of (male) Romanticism -- revel in the monstrous, hybrid, even cyborgian identity they have created between themselves, and saunter gleefully outside the tradition, beyond innovation, beyond even authorship, though never letting you forget that their parallel universe, a utopia, is growing dangerously large.
Like their Canadian peers, poets Lisa Robertson and Deanna Ferguson, Shaw and Strang seem to be interested in composing negative feminist anthems, poems with a tremendous amount of strident affect that -- rather than outline materialism's determinning role in the world, like the Language poets -- raze through a series of value categories, like "stoicism," "nationalism" and the "lout boot or darling league of pro-moral verbal barge," capturing perhaps some of the drama of public speaking from more revolutionary times.
While some of the language seems a residue of some deep graduate level reading -- "I crave triangulation, too" [67] and "A paradigm of intellectual command concurs in plunder" [81] seem humorous and eventful only to the most initiated -- the words jump off the page in this book with little slackening of energy, and no straying from the target: getting past the alienation of individuation in an age when only global capitalism seems to have the sheen of inevitability and eternity, and hence the last word.
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