Who knows? Thoughts theoretical and otherwise on (im)Proper
Tales:
I am writing this in the interior of British Columbia,
on the outskirts of Kelowna, where I am staying in a tiny student residence
room for the month of July as part of a Summer Indigenous Intensive course that
the Secwépemc artist Tania Willard runs. Kelowna is not on Secwépemc territory,
it is Syilx; before, and still for some settlers, these nations were referred
to as the Shuswap and Okanagan, respectively. In the course, we learn about
what it means to be an uninvited guest on Indigenous territory, about how
land-based aesthetics and politics are taking shape today, and about what
possibilities there are for these discussions in a university.
This is what I have been offering for the past year or so, usually, by way of a bio, or part of a bio: I was born in Comox, British Columbia, which is on the traditional territory of the K’ómoks (Sathloot) First Nation, centered historically on kwaniwsam. I live on the traditional ancestral territories of the Coast Salish peoples, including traditional territories of the Squamish (Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw), Tsleil-Waututh (səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ), Musqueam (xʷməθkʷəy̓əm), and Kwikwetlem (kʷikʷəƛ̓əm) Nations.
Why am I beginning this way? In part, and the reason I am taking Tania’s course, is that many (or some) mid-career academics like myself are taking the prompts of discussions over the past few years, coming out of the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions’ reports on residential schools, or the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls Inquiry, or ongoing travesties like the Colten Boushie verdict in 2018, to educate themselves more fully in these matters.
*
But also the matter of names. This is my way into talking about Stuart Ross and his Proper Tales Press – thinking about his name, and how he has reclaimed, in his own goofy but never trivializing way, his father’s Jewish name, Razovsky, which was Anglicized (Celtized?), by Stuart’s father, I believe. Stuart began doing so in the late 90s as I remember it (I don’t have any of his books with me), culminating in his 2001 collection Razovsky at Peace. A very chatty review of that book at Goodreads includes this quote from the title poem:
On the street, a guy says to Razovsky,
“Over there, behind those buildings:
nature,” Razovsky goes.
In nature, it is much quieter.
There is no TV, but there's animals,
which are like TV but furrier.
In nature, Razovsky is damp.
His arms and legs itch. He is
covered in insects.
Razovsky talks, shouts:
in nature, he can't understand
his own words. They disappear
into trees, behind rocks, become
dew. Razovsky’s shoes slide
along the slick leaves that carpet
this enormous living room.
A squirrel comes round a tree trunk,
its head stretched out, its nostrils
twitching. Razovsky twitches back.
They stare, time passes,
they stare. The squirrel’s watery eyes
blink. Razovsky obeys.
He lies down in the moist leaves,
lets his limbs go limp.
Beyond the highest branches of the trees,
through the space the leaves leave,
he sees the sky, the clouds. He is
engulfed by screeches and scratchings
and thuds and buzzings. The song
of birds he cannot name. He was never
good at this stuff.
He closes his eyes, lets the sky
suck itself back into the sky.
Everything is orderly. For example:
a potato-chip bag bounces near in a breeze.
It becomes wedged between two rocks,
flutters, rustles.
Time passes. Razofsky becomes
part of the ground. The chip bag
becomes a butterfly, as ordained
by nature; it struggles from its
cocoon, bats its wings,
tugs frantically,
but still it is lodged
between the rocks. Razovsky
is not surprised
He looks up from the ground
at the same moment
he looks down from the trees.
His eyes meet his eyes.
There is a flicker
of recognition.
Junk food figures prominently in Ross’s poetry (another poem in the collection, “Ten Ways of Looking at Me,” includes the lines “I wonder what love is/while eating my/eighteenth bag/of potato chips,” and in another, “Meanwhile, in Costa Rica,” we learn that “The dictator/chose/between/soft drinks”) – but here the chip bag turns into a butterfly, “as ordained/by nature.” Ordained by nature. How, then, I wonder, is the Western lyric’s turn to nature similar to or different from a land-based aesthetic as promulgated by Indigenous art today?
*
What does it mean to reclaim your ethnic name – Ross has never been shy about his Jewish identity, about playing with it, in his poetry – and how is that different for an immigrant or settler or refugee to do so from, say, an Indigenous reclamation, on the one hand, or another kind: an adoption, say?
In the early 1970s my family adopted an Indigenous baby girl into our family when we were living in Edmonton. We were living in Edmonton, on the air base, because until just before then we had been living in Bagotville, Quebec, on another airbase, and when we were living in Quebec, my mother gave birth, prematurely, to triplets – two girls and a boy. The babies all died – I think within hours? a few days? – and the air force decided the way to help us deal with that grief was to move us. Basically, how the air force took care of the families of its airmen was to move them a lot so we would not get too attached to any one place, form relationships or communities. So, we were in Edmonton and my parents adopted a baby as some kind of sad recompense. When my parents told my father’s parents that they had adopted a baby, my grandfather asked over the phone, “is she blond and blue-eyed?” No one in my family is blond: they meant, is she white? What’s interesting about that exchange is that it would have been the perfect time for my grandparents to tell my father that he, too, was adopted. Instead, he only learned this more than thirty years later, in the early 2000s, when a drunk at a wedding told my sister that he and my father were both orphans, and the truth came out. My father ended up meeting his birth mother, which is kind of amazing, since he was in his 60s and she in her 80s. His father, an Icelandic-Canadian soldier who died at Dieppe, was not named Burnham – which is the name of the people who adopted my father and never told him (my grandfather had died before my father learned the truth, and my grandmother was in the throes of Alzheimer’s – so neither ever learned that he knew).
So we have these different kinds of false names – colonial mis-hearings of Indigenous names (the name of August Jack Khatsahlano, or Xats'alanexw, a Squamish chief, becomes Kitsilano, the Vancouver neighborhood; Secwépemc becomes Shuswap), translations of a Jewish name into a Celtic one, or the replacement of one family name with another. If, as poets, we deal with language, and with names, what do we do with these mis-namings, without flattening them all out (all language is violence)?
Stuart’s nickname: for a while he went by Stuart “Pods” Ross – named by Opal Nations, because he didn’t like fruit with seeds in them? This was way before iPods.
*
But what readers may want – what I am damn sure rob mclennan wanted, when he asked me to write about Stuart’s Proper Tales Press – is for me to talk about the press itself. To offer some reminisces. Such as: In the late 1980s, I moved to Toronto, and one of two things happened first. Either I went to a Small Press Book Fair at St. Paul’s-Trinity church on Bloor street, and met Stuart there, OR I met Stuart on Yonge Street, where he was selling his books. If the former, it was, I think, because I read about the fair in the newspaper, the morning it was happening (even thought I was only a few blocks away, living then on Major street, in Toronto’s Annex neighborhood). Maybe this was April 1989? OR, I had already run into Crad Kilodney, then also selling his books on Yonge Street, because I had already read Crad’s 1980 short story collection Lightning Struck My Dick. On Yonge Street, where he would stand with some profane sign hung around his neck, for hours at a time, selling his self-published chapbooks. And Crad suggested I talk to Stuart Ross, who was down the same street, a block or two away, doing the same thing.
This was a weird moment in Toronto, in its literary and urban history: between the halcyon days of Coach House Press as a hippie enterprise, which from its start in the 1960s and Rochdale College made such unclassifiable book-objects like bpNichol’s Journeying & the Returns (1967), and today’s transnational conglomerations of corporate publishers (Penguin-Random-Doubleday-McClelland & Stewart), a Toronto where Yonge street had porn shops and skinheads and Queen street was still some kind of punk scene (see the early work of Daniel Jones and Lynn Crosbie), where dub poetry, like Crad’s rants, like Stuart’s early sound poetry, was available on cassette (in 1984, De Dub Poets - Lillian Allen, Clifton Joseph, and Devon Haughton challenged the League of Canadian Poets over their book-only criteria). Soon after running into Stuart we met for coffee at, as I remember, Café Cappucino, on Charles street, just off Yonge and just south of Bloor. I probably brought him some poems – I remember him telling me he wasn’t going to just read them and offer feedback right away. Stuart was a radio DJ then, his show was called the Upper Room, and he played doo-wop from the 1950s. I wonder what Stuart would make of me writing this while listening to the 90s R&B group Mint Condition?
*
I was looking at an online pdf of bpNichol’s Journeying & the Returns and came across this citation: “I always think within myself/that there is no place/where people do not die.” This, we are told, is a “Kwakiutl song.” The interest of avant-garde poets in Indigenous poetry (or songs, or chants) is longstanding, of course, and Deanna Fong recently defended her dissertation where she situates a reading of Jordan Abel’s work in the history of how the Dadaists sought to emulate (or appropriate, or steal) non-Western traditions. bill bissett’s chants and rattles. The “Eskimo songs” included in Bernadette Mayer and Vito Acconci’s 0-9 magazine. And does it go both ways? When I first heard Joshua Whitehead read his poetry (at Knife Fork Book in Kensington Market, Toronto, in 2017) it really seemed like he had grabbed some of what bill does performatively. To return to bp, “Kwakiutl” is, again, a mistranslation of the Kwakwaka’wakw nation, on the West Coast.
*
In a review I wrote of Stuart’s I Cut My Finger in a 2008 issue of Poetic Front (you can find it online if you do some digging), I called Stuart “the big Other of small press,” fusing together Lacanian theory and the ephemeral literary. In that essay I wrote the following:
This is what I have been offering for the past year or so, usually, by way of a bio, or part of a bio: I was born in Comox, British Columbia, which is on the traditional territory of the K’ómoks (Sathloot) First Nation, centered historically on kwaniwsam. I live on the traditional ancestral territories of the Coast Salish peoples, including traditional territories of the Squamish (Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw), Tsleil-Waututh (səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ), Musqueam (xʷməθkʷəy̓əm), and Kwikwetlem (kʷikʷəƛ̓əm) Nations.
Why am I beginning this way? In part, and the reason I am taking Tania’s course, is that many (or some) mid-career academics like myself are taking the prompts of discussions over the past few years, coming out of the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions’ reports on residential schools, or the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls Inquiry, or ongoing travesties like the Colten Boushie verdict in 2018, to educate themselves more fully in these matters.
*
But also the matter of names. This is my way into talking about Stuart Ross and his Proper Tales Press – thinking about his name, and how he has reclaimed, in his own goofy but never trivializing way, his father’s Jewish name, Razovsky, which was Anglicized (Celtized?), by Stuart’s father, I believe. Stuart began doing so in the late 90s as I remember it (I don’t have any of his books with me), culminating in his 2001 collection Razovsky at Peace. A very chatty review of that book at Goodreads includes this quote from the title poem:
On the street, a guy says to Razovsky,
“Over there, behind those buildings:
nature,” Razovsky goes.
In nature, it is much quieter.
There is no TV, but there's animals,
which are like TV but furrier.
In nature, Razovsky is damp.
His arms and legs itch. He is
covered in insects.
Razovsky talks, shouts:
in nature, he can't understand
his own words. They disappear
into trees, behind rocks, become
dew. Razovsky’s shoes slide
along the slick leaves that carpet
this enormous living room.
A squirrel comes round a tree trunk,
its head stretched out, its nostrils
twitching. Razovsky twitches back.
They stare, time passes,
they stare. The squirrel’s watery eyes
blink. Razovsky obeys.
He lies down in the moist leaves,
lets his limbs go limp.
Beyond the highest branches of the trees,
through the space the leaves leave,
he sees the sky, the clouds. He is
engulfed by screeches and scratchings
and thuds and buzzings. The song
of birds he cannot name. He was never
good at this stuff.
He closes his eyes, lets the sky
suck itself back into the sky.
Everything is orderly. For example:
a potato-chip bag bounces near in a breeze.
It becomes wedged between two rocks,
flutters, rustles.
Time passes. Razofsky becomes
part of the ground. The chip bag
becomes a butterfly, as ordained
by nature; it struggles from its
cocoon, bats its wings,
tugs frantically,
but still it is lodged
between the rocks. Razovsky
is not surprised
He looks up from the ground
at the same moment
he looks down from the trees.
His eyes meet his eyes.
There is a flicker
of recognition.
Junk food figures prominently in Ross’s poetry (another poem in the collection, “Ten Ways of Looking at Me,” includes the lines “I wonder what love is/while eating my/eighteenth bag/of potato chips,” and in another, “Meanwhile, in Costa Rica,” we learn that “The dictator/chose/between/soft drinks”) – but here the chip bag turns into a butterfly, “as ordained/by nature.” Ordained by nature. How, then, I wonder, is the Western lyric’s turn to nature similar to or different from a land-based aesthetic as promulgated by Indigenous art today?
*
What does it mean to reclaim your ethnic name – Ross has never been shy about his Jewish identity, about playing with it, in his poetry – and how is that different for an immigrant or settler or refugee to do so from, say, an Indigenous reclamation, on the one hand, or another kind: an adoption, say?
In the early 1970s my family adopted an Indigenous baby girl into our family when we were living in Edmonton. We were living in Edmonton, on the air base, because until just before then we had been living in Bagotville, Quebec, on another airbase, and when we were living in Quebec, my mother gave birth, prematurely, to triplets – two girls and a boy. The babies all died – I think within hours? a few days? – and the air force decided the way to help us deal with that grief was to move us. Basically, how the air force took care of the families of its airmen was to move them a lot so we would not get too attached to any one place, form relationships or communities. So, we were in Edmonton and my parents adopted a baby as some kind of sad recompense. When my parents told my father’s parents that they had adopted a baby, my grandfather asked over the phone, “is she blond and blue-eyed?” No one in my family is blond: they meant, is she white? What’s interesting about that exchange is that it would have been the perfect time for my grandparents to tell my father that he, too, was adopted. Instead, he only learned this more than thirty years later, in the early 2000s, when a drunk at a wedding told my sister that he and my father were both orphans, and the truth came out. My father ended up meeting his birth mother, which is kind of amazing, since he was in his 60s and she in her 80s. His father, an Icelandic-Canadian soldier who died at Dieppe, was not named Burnham – which is the name of the people who adopted my father and never told him (my grandfather had died before my father learned the truth, and my grandmother was in the throes of Alzheimer’s – so neither ever learned that he knew).
So we have these different kinds of false names – colonial mis-hearings of Indigenous names (the name of August Jack Khatsahlano, or Xats'alanexw, a Squamish chief, becomes Kitsilano, the Vancouver neighborhood; Secwépemc becomes Shuswap), translations of a Jewish name into a Celtic one, or the replacement of one family name with another. If, as poets, we deal with language, and with names, what do we do with these mis-namings, without flattening them all out (all language is violence)?
Stuart’s nickname: for a while he went by Stuart “Pods” Ross – named by Opal Nations, because he didn’t like fruit with seeds in them? This was way before iPods.
*
But what readers may want – what I am damn sure rob mclennan wanted, when he asked me to write about Stuart’s Proper Tales Press – is for me to talk about the press itself. To offer some reminisces. Such as: In the late 1980s, I moved to Toronto, and one of two things happened first. Either I went to a Small Press Book Fair at St. Paul’s-Trinity church on Bloor street, and met Stuart there, OR I met Stuart on Yonge Street, where he was selling his books. If the former, it was, I think, because I read about the fair in the newspaper, the morning it was happening (even thought I was only a few blocks away, living then on Major street, in Toronto’s Annex neighborhood). Maybe this was April 1989? OR, I had already run into Crad Kilodney, then also selling his books on Yonge Street, because I had already read Crad’s 1980 short story collection Lightning Struck My Dick. On Yonge Street, where he would stand with some profane sign hung around his neck, for hours at a time, selling his self-published chapbooks. And Crad suggested I talk to Stuart Ross, who was down the same street, a block or two away, doing the same thing.
This was a weird moment in Toronto, in its literary and urban history: between the halcyon days of Coach House Press as a hippie enterprise, which from its start in the 1960s and Rochdale College made such unclassifiable book-objects like bpNichol’s Journeying & the Returns (1967), and today’s transnational conglomerations of corporate publishers (Penguin-Random-Doubleday-McClelland & Stewart), a Toronto where Yonge street had porn shops and skinheads and Queen street was still some kind of punk scene (see the early work of Daniel Jones and Lynn Crosbie), where dub poetry, like Crad’s rants, like Stuart’s early sound poetry, was available on cassette (in 1984, De Dub Poets - Lillian Allen, Clifton Joseph, and Devon Haughton challenged the League of Canadian Poets over their book-only criteria). Soon after running into Stuart we met for coffee at, as I remember, Café Cappucino, on Charles street, just off Yonge and just south of Bloor. I probably brought him some poems – I remember him telling me he wasn’t going to just read them and offer feedback right away. Stuart was a radio DJ then, his show was called the Upper Room, and he played doo-wop from the 1950s. I wonder what Stuart would make of me writing this while listening to the 90s R&B group Mint Condition?
*
I was looking at an online pdf of bpNichol’s Journeying & the Returns and came across this citation: “I always think within myself/that there is no place/where people do not die.” This, we are told, is a “Kwakiutl song.” The interest of avant-garde poets in Indigenous poetry (or songs, or chants) is longstanding, of course, and Deanna Fong recently defended her dissertation where she situates a reading of Jordan Abel’s work in the history of how the Dadaists sought to emulate (or appropriate, or steal) non-Western traditions. bill bissett’s chants and rattles. The “Eskimo songs” included in Bernadette Mayer and Vito Acconci’s 0-9 magazine. And does it go both ways? When I first heard Joshua Whitehead read his poetry (at Knife Fork Book in Kensington Market, Toronto, in 2017) it really seemed like he had grabbed some of what bill does performatively. To return to bp, “Kwakiutl” is, again, a mistranslation of the Kwakwaka’wakw nation, on the West Coast.
*
In a review I wrote of Stuart’s I Cut My Finger in a 2008 issue of Poetic Front (you can find it online if you do some digging), I called Stuart “the big Other of small press,” fusing together Lacanian theory and the ephemeral literary. In that essay I wrote the following:
Ross
gives up almost everything he can afford to in writing his poems – indeed, his
years as a punching bag for every freak on Toronto’s Yonge Street (in the 80s
and early 90s he sold his self-published chapbooks on the street, 7,000 of them
by his count) have toughened him up, and, since his father met his mother when
he challenged an anti-Semite in 1940s Toronto, Ross, we can be sure, is one
tough Jew.
A word on Ross’s ethics. A tireless activist in the literary field of small press (as I argued [25] years ago in West Coast Line), Ross has edited, published, collected, contributed to, been excluded from, reviewed in, been reviewed in, and criticized virtually every material (and virtual) form of textual production, from self-stapled pamphlets to corporate textbooks, Canada Council pimped magazines to blogs, Harper’s to The Globe and Mail, Coach House to his own Proper Tales, Mondo Hunkamooga [and now Bloggamooga] to Who Torched Rancho Diablo to Harlequin Romances (from which he “appropriated” the Rancho title). Like his co-religionist, Ross is the “subject supposed to know” of small press. And so, unlike the “typical” small press zinester (to wax Lukácsean for a moment), who disingenuously avers that he/she is just interested in helping the community, man, Ross instead ingeniously proclaims his desire, his lust-for-power, in the 2001 pamphlet, “I Am the King of Poetry.” There, in true super-ego fashion, Ross declares (it is performative, a speech-act) that he is “the king of poetry. I can make or break you.” Power in the literary world is both a matter of production but also one of arbitration. Poetry king as ward boss. As big Other, in the sense that “You will not write a haiku before I give the thumbs-up.” That is, Ross’s satiric poem envisions poetry as a system, a structure of power and production that is eventually all filed, in greedy fashion (more narcissism), so that “everything is under ‘R’. Under ‘Ross’”. In fact, at the level of the name, Ross’s politics (of the small press) and poetics can be divided into two tendencies (or, rather, they divide themselves, as language, at the level of the letter): “Ross” is the libidinal superego tendency, while “Razovsky” is the Old Testament superego.
A word on Ross’s ethics. A tireless activist in the literary field of small press (as I argued [25] years ago in West Coast Line), Ross has edited, published, collected, contributed to, been excluded from, reviewed in, been reviewed in, and criticized virtually every material (and virtual) form of textual production, from self-stapled pamphlets to corporate textbooks, Canada Council pimped magazines to blogs, Harper’s to The Globe and Mail, Coach House to his own Proper Tales, Mondo Hunkamooga [and now Bloggamooga] to Who Torched Rancho Diablo to Harlequin Romances (from which he “appropriated” the Rancho title). Like his co-religionist, Ross is the “subject supposed to know” of small press. And so, unlike the “typical” small press zinester (to wax Lukácsean for a moment), who disingenuously avers that he/she is just interested in helping the community, man, Ross instead ingeniously proclaims his desire, his lust-for-power, in the 2001 pamphlet, “I Am the King of Poetry.” There, in true super-ego fashion, Ross declares (it is performative, a speech-act) that he is “the king of poetry. I can make or break you.” Power in the literary world is both a matter of production but also one of arbitration. Poetry king as ward boss. As big Other, in the sense that “You will not write a haiku before I give the thumbs-up.” That is, Ross’s satiric poem envisions poetry as a system, a structure of power and production that is eventually all filed, in greedy fashion (more narcissism), so that “everything is under ‘R’. Under ‘Ross’”. In fact, at the level of the name, Ross’s politics (of the small press) and poetics can be divided into two tendencies (or, rather, they divide themselves, as language, at the level of the letter): “Ross” is the libidinal superego tendency, while “Razovsky” is the Old Testament superego.
But the blunt
instruments with which I am interpreting Ross’s work should not mislead you
into thinking that the writing is often unknowingly propagandistic. For, as a photographic project that Ross undertook during repeated
visits to Nicaraugua (an object of leftist fetishism during the early 80s, a
time of anti-apartheid activism and Central American support committees), “Dead
Cars,” demonstrates in its fine attention to decayed automobiles, Ross’s
revolution is as much aesthetic as it is social. And just as Ross’s revolution
lies between the aesthetic and the social, his poetics, those of Ross –
Razovsky – lie between these two versions – the psychoanalytic and the
political – of the tragic.
We might reflect on the
irony of the small press, DIY, self-publishing world having a “big Other,” a
“Subject supposed to know,” as I argue with respect to Ross. With the early
2000s fetish for craft and Etsy-esque kitsch-punk, for decentralized
entrepreneurialism and wiki-epistemology, [and now social media run amok],
however, has proceeded apace the ideological function of that neo-liberalism.
As I have argued writing on the poetry of Robert Manery in Rain, the
ideology of anarchy, of libertarianism, of automatism and self-direction, only
masks the practice of totalitarianism. Even small press must have a big king,
and it is to Ross’s credit that his work never hesitates from underscoring its
own arbitrariness.
*
Stuart will claim that he is not the big Other, that he isn’t the ward boss of small press. And in a way he’s right: in Lacanian theory, the big Other doesn’t exist, except where we presume they do (thus the Sujet supposé de Savoir, the subject supposed to know). But I think he does know, and I am right.
Clint Burnham, Syilx Territory, July 2019
Clint Burnham is Professor and Chair of the Graduate Program
Professor in English at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada; he is
also an Associate Member of the SFU Geography Department. He was born in Comox, British Columbia,
which is on the traditional territory of the K’ómoks (Sathloot) First Nation,
centered historically on kwaniwsam. He lives and teaches on the traditional
ancestral territories of the Coast Salish peoples, including traditional
territories of the Squamish (Sḵwx̱wú7mesh
Úxwumixw),
Tsleil-Waututh (səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ), Musqueam (xʷməθkʷəy̓əm), and Kwikwetlem (kʷikʷəƛ̓əm) Nations. Clint is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry, fiction, and
criticism, including his most recent book of poetry, Pound at Guantánamo
(Talonbooks), and the
chapbook Volume C (Proper Tales Press). He has poems in the
inaugural issue of Some magazine, edited by Rob Manery.
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