The Language Revolution: Borderblur Poetics in Canada, 1963-1988

This dissertation examines the emergence and development of a radical node of Canadian poetic activity known as the Language Revolutionthat is, a movement concerned with the creation and proliferation of largely non-lyrical poetic modes by a number of Canadian poets whose careers mostly began in the 1960s and early 1970s. These poets include well-known writers like bpNichol, bill bissett, and Steve McCaffery alongside lesser-known but equally important figures such as Judith Copithorne, Martina Clinton, Gerry Shikatani, David UU, Susan McMaster, and Penn Kemp. As a loose affiliation, they gathered around shared values of poetic experimentation and small press literary culture, but they also actively pushed the boundaries of writing by exploring concrete poetry, sound poetry, and haptic poetrythe core topics of this dissertations three chapters. These poets described their work as borderblur, a term that acknowledges a broad range of poetic and artistic activity that seeks to dissolve boundaries between language, visuality, materiality, sound, and bodies.

Over the course of this study, I examine how the poets of the Language Revolution develop a borderblur-based poetic as a reaction to problems posed by the expression of feeling during a period when human life was being standardized by emergent telecommunication technologies, a rapid increase in consumerism, and major shiftsdocumented by Marshall McLuhan and othersin human psychic and social life. This is the rise of what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri refer to as postmodernity and the formation of third-stage capitalism, ushered in by the transition from industrialization to informatization. These poets produced work in dialogue with these conditions. They did so by working in deeply affective and expressive modes that were predicated on openness of poetic form, cultural production and circulation, community, and feeling. As a result, the Language Revolution figures as a significant, under-examined movement in Canadas literary history that stands in stark contrast to the emergent mainstream of Canadas literary public that was formulating at the time. In effect, their poetic activitiesat the micro-level of writing and the macro-level of publishingradically blurred the borders of art, literature, genre, economy, and community in search of alternative modes for the expression and endurance of life and language.