Readings by Robert Majzels and Erín Mouré – Play Chthonics: New Canadian Readings, a 1-hour Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted by Green College in March 2012.
What is the provisional avant garde? Here are a few things: the provisional avant-garde melts in your hand not in your mouth. It writes on rather than about the city. It will not dig deeper. Is neither clever, nor ironic nor warm-hearted. The small black squirrel. Not the small black squirrel but the leaping. Or my presence and implication on the leaping. Is environmentally friendly.
Here’s the Provag call for a poetry strike to protest war in Afghanistan.
Here’s another article on provag: Anne Boyer.
The first 11 minutes is on the provisional avant garde, then they share translations they’re working on of Nicole Brossard to be published by Coach House next spring.
…A ledger was an enemy, a tongue, an accent, a place an enemy, in the Ukrainian, Austrian, Polish histories…
Lots of interesting stuff. For example, she says in oral cultures, a spoken promise is more viable than one written down, which is fixed. The world changes around paper, but living people adjust their agreement and understanding in principles.
What is writing? Writing is not the peak. Oral precedes and gesture precedes that.