They should have allowed Carmine to type his response and had a digital voice recite them. Somehow that would have been fitting, if not a indication of the victor in this debate--obviously Bök.

Some observations regarding this self-important and culturally irrelevant discussion:

Although Christian Bok (whom I never heard of until today) appears to have the most on the ball, and is probably the most visionary and amicable of the two men, please keep in mind that both of these fellows are archetypal academics. They are obviously published by government-subsidised houses, and are therefore in bed with Stephen Harper—i.e., they are aeshetically and thematically compromised.

I can handy about imagine the sort of bland, pointless, academic free-verse junk that Starnino's New Canon largely consists in! I'd bet he's never heard of even Elizabeth St. Jacques or Tom Dawe, let alone Edward Baranosky or myself! The greatest North American poets out there today are those who—like myself, of course—straddle several fences: between academic and underground, formal and experimental, sociopolitical and self-serving, forms Eastern and Western, online and off.

My most essential and confrontational question for both Bok and Starnino would have to be this: Would the work of either of you get a politician shot in Ottawa? According to this criterion, Have either one of you written anything as good as my ‘Wanted Dead: The Federal Minister of Justice’ or ‘The Poet Laureate of Canada is a Government-Arse Licker’? What does your work have to do with Welsh independence or adolescent suffrage...? Obviously, both Misters Bok and Starnino are part of the problem, not part of the solution. They've been bought and paid for by Ottawa.

Mr. Bok expresses an interest in producing futuristic experimental poetry for robots and aliens and the like. If he'd like to see a true example of this, maybe he should track down a copy of my concrete poem ‘2001: A Space Haiku’. It has appeared in several places over the years, both online and in print journals. A small (and faulty) reproduction of it can be found by clicking on the ‘Various Concrete Haiku and Senryu’ link in the topmost installment of my blog at MySpace (it's in the upper left corner of the page one arrives on). It's written in binary so it can be sent as signals to potential aliens throughout outer space. The resulting frog-and-cicada image can be ‘read’ as “amidst dropped blossoms / a cicada's shadow floats / —a frog leaps from shore”.

I have a particular bone to pick with Mr. Starnino. Apparently, he's a real ostrich and hypocrite, at least from my experience. Here's a section from a Google page of mine entitled ‘The Government Owns You’:

II. Emperor Barton has no Drawers: Scapegoating in the Age of Disillusionment

I often wonder just how many of those essays and tomes that whine and mourn the loss of higher culture and talent are actually the products of self-fulfilling prophecy, editorial convenience, and artistic arse-covering. I especially wonder when considering such matters in the Canadian literary context.

A little over a year ago, Books In Canada published an essay by poet and Malahat Review editor John Barton, entitled ‘Where Have All the Poets Gone?’. The piece bemoaned the fact that nobody seems to bother submitting poems to the literary journals anymore, with Barton asking rather desperately, “Whatever happened to mentorship or even peermanship?” and pointing out that years ago it was a “thrill” to be published in the same context as Phyllis Webb or Richard Outram. I immediately e-mailed Mr. Barton and informed him that I didn't consider publishing in the same contexts as Phyllis Webb (who published free-verse poems and erroneously dubbed them ‘ghazals’) and Richard Outram (Richard who…?) to be in the same ‘thrill league’ with my own experience of publishing in (mostly) American journals and anthologies alongside Agha Shahid Ali, W.S. Merwin, John Hollander, Jane Reichhold, Elizabeth Searle Lamb, etc. I also pointed out that publications like The Malahat Review are losing a large chunk of their potential submissions from the under-40 age category because of their almost-exclusive reliance on ‘academic’-style free verse for publication—this in an era when a high percentage of younger poets are concentrating on Asian styles, traditional western closed forms, visual poetry, etc., and are turning to the specialty poetry journals, internet e-zines, and more open-minded U.S. magazines, resultingly. That was over twelve months ago, and I am yet to receive a response from dear, dear Mr. Barton. I also e-mailed one of the Books In Canada editors, Olga Stein, sending her a response to Barton's article to consider publishing as a letter-to-the-editor in an upcoming issue, and requesting that she ask poetry editor Carmine Starnino to contact me regarding my proposed composition of an official essay of rebuttal. Ms. Stein got back to me, and was initially very nice, agreeing with me that U.S. editors and publications take submitters more seriously and are a delight to deal with in comparison to their Canadian counterparts. She said she would get in touch with Starnino for me, and would try and get something of mine regarding Barton's essay into a future issue. Again, that was over a year ago, and I am yet to hear a peep from Carmine Starnino; not even a letter of mine materialised in Books In Canada—let alone a full-fledged essay, and I never heard from Olga Stein again—I get the impression that Starnino ‘got to her’.

My take on all of this…? John Barton was merely covering his own sorry arse (and others like his)—making excuses for his publication's shoddiness, anachronistic perspective, and failure to attract yet more adherents to its ‘academic’ free-verse agenda and unofficial guidelines. One might say that he was ‘shifting the blame’: attempting to make younger or burgeoning poets look initiative-lacking and lethargic when they fail to comply with his backdated criteria for perpetuating mediocrity, or when they abstain from participating in the submissions process altogether. He needs an excuse to justify his publication's continued existence (not to mention continued funding via provincial and/or federal arts councils!) in what is essentially an antiquated, obsolete vein. Carmine Starnino would certainly throw in with Barton and allow such convenient trash-theory to go to press: he's an ‘academic’ poet himself—he knows which side his bread his buttered on. And nice, obliging Olga Stein…? She obviously had to be set straight—she was showing too much U.S. influence in her mannerisms; she needed to be reminded of what it means to be a part of today's Canadian literary establishment.


If anyone is interested in reading the rest of this essay and/or reading my poetical take on the Harper regime, then please google for “KCN: Kurtail Conservatives Now / R. W. Watkins”. More links to online essays and poems of mine might be found by visiting my site at damnable MySpace.

Fight the powers that be!