Steven Maye Reviews:

Jim Johnstone, Bait & Switch: Essays, Reviews, Conversations, and Views on Canadian Poetry, The Porcupine’s Quill, 2024
Joel Katelnikoff, Recombinant Theory, University of Calgary Press, 2024

Printer, publisher, editor, anthologist, poet and critic, Jim Johnstone has done as much as anyone to facilitate the endurance of Canadian poetry as it molts old names and habits, revealing a new body of writing underneath. His recent book of criticism, Bait & Switch, gathers writings from the past 15 years, most previously published in literary journals. The book’s core is a 100-page stretch of reviews, prefaced by four essays, and followed by a series of occasional pieces, including several interviews. The title wryly presents criticism, perhaps book reviewing specifically, as an oscillation between carrot and stick. But the writing that follows is both kinder and more straight-faced than the titular pun suggests.

The reviews that make up the book’s central section appear out of chronological order, foregrounding some longer pieces on bigger names and ending with a spate of cluster reviews. That’s a shame, because the latter are among the most intellectually lively, attempting to identify the germ from which tomorrow’s poetry might spring. Johnstone draws out trends among micro-generations of Canadian poets (idiosyncratic diction, 21st-century naturalism, off-kilter play) while remaining alert to each author’s signature style and forms. He also writes thought-provoking appraisals of Nyla Matuk, Souvankham Thammavongsa and Michael Prior, poets he would go on to anthologize in The Next Wave. While Johnstone tends to judge poems by their music, the way sound guides phrasing and thought into novel formations, these pieces press his aesthetics toward more modern concerns: poetry’s relation to history, identity, the photographic image and filmic montage. As Johnstone wrestles with these poets, his sense of poetry expands. For the poet, it becomes a tool for reaching a fundamentally external self-knowledge, documenting how the self is formed under pressure from the world. For the reader and critic, such poetry is a threshold between subjectivities. It rearranges parts of the familiar world, yes, but to make the very process of experience uncanny.

The pieces on more established poets are even-handed and sometimes critical, but their focus on passing judgment leads to unsurprising conclusions—the older poets are not as good as they once were. One mid-career poet (Karen Solie) is at her best and evolving; another (Christian Bök) is more traditional than he’d like us to believe. The review form is part of the problem here: it obligates Johnstone to judge a poet’s recent output even when his interests lie elsewhere. Nonetheless, his appraisals rely on a familiar shorthand, one he sometimes employs with younger poets as well. Good poems are ‘rigorous and considered,’ ‘detailed’ and ‘unusually dense’; they show ‘linguistic dexterity,’ ‘intricacy’ and ‘masterful use of diction.’ These qualities, wonderful as they are, don’t capture why we love a particular poet, the alchemy of style and subject matter that makes reading a poet feel essential to life. While Johnstone approaches such revelations in his writing on younger poets, the older poets are surveyed like fully formed athletes, whose only claim, if they still have one, is being the best in the game.

Bait & Switch is haunted on several fronts by the presence of Carmine Starnino, who co-edited the book, and whose collection of selected poems, Dirty Words, receives an enthusiastic review. Twenty years ago, The Porcupine’s Quill published Starnino’s A Lover’s Quarrel, another book of astute criticism with a punny title, and Johnstone shares many of Starnino’s commitments: to a medium-specific conception of poetry that balances language and sound, to poetry as a craft, to assessing literature as a national product, to separating the wheat from the chaff. Starnino’s book began, appropriately, with a defense of negative reviews, and his subsequent attacks could be mean, catty, coordinated, witty, ideological and hilarious. They had the appeal of good gossip: it was a thrill just to find out what had been said. 

Johnstone’s reviews offer none of these baser pleasures. Instead, the overarching feeling is one of deep-seated responsibility—to readers, writers and the idea of a Canadian canon. That responsibility is felt most intensely in Johnstone’s introduction to The Next Wave, included here among the essays, in which he defends his desire to create an anthology at all. His apprehension is understandable; so many anthologies look in retrospect like exercises in gatekeeping, even if they were originally made to redistribute a reading public’s attention. But a similar ethos pervades the reviews. There is too much superego in some pieces, as if Johnstone is trying to view the reading situation from outside, and it occludes the poetry’s more idiosyncratic pleasures.

Nonetheless, reading Bait & Switch made me see this decades-old debate about critical reviews differently. I realized I wanted to learn how to like these poets, whose work I was familiar with but which I sometimes found underwhelming. I wanted to know how to experience the pleasures, solaces, provocations and aftereffects other people gained from their poems, how to live a richer life in dialogue with them, perhaps how Johnstone himself had done so.

Johnstone himself provides a blueprint for this kind of criticism within Bait & Switch, in a memoir-essay about editing Tolu Oloruntoba’s The Junta of Happenstance. The essay quotes at length from drafts of Oloruntoba’s poems, which Johnstone animates by recalling his own illnesses, his experiences with treatment and his training in physiology. It also documents their collaborative process, reproducing excerpts from their correspondence and showing how later versions of a poem varied or intensified the draft’s effects. In doing so, Johnstone’s essay offers an unusually direct and tangible account of how poetry can be, in Kenneth Burke’s phrase, ‘equipment for living.’ It helps us to capture the intensities of experience, to manage and externalize them in language and to draw certain people into a shared world. By offering an account of that process, Johnstone makes that world available to others, a task for which aesthetic judgment alone does not suffice.

Joel Katelnikoff’s Recombinant Theory offers a different way out of the burden of critical reception. The book’s premise is that its 10 short chapters are each forged out of the words of one North American experimental poet. Each chapter opens with a collage of sentences taken from that poet’s works, then extends the discourse by splicing together their phrases to form new sentences, until the chapter concludes six pages later. These borrowings are encumbered with neither quotation marks nor citations, so the language blends seamlessly in each sentence. Even if you are long acquainted with a poet’s work, and recognize lines and phrases, reading Katelnikoff’s assemblages will test the limits of your memory. While composed of existing language, each chapter feels largely new.

Katelnikoff’s conceit means that his chapters are unconcerned with existing criticism, the poet’s influences, their peers or their historical moment. Nor does Recombinant Theory explicitly address broader stylistic trends, although the poets Katelnikoff ‘writes-through’ mostly belong to the tradition of disjunctive poetics. Nonetheless, his book indirectly reveals how frequently these poets use sensation, or unexpected imagery, to interrupt or destabilize a thought. Katelnikoff’s practice of sampling, in contrast, sutures their isolated statements into an almost rational flow. The rewriting becomes weirdly narrative and unmistakably lyrical. Noncommittal about the truth value of its statements, Recombinant Theory still promises sense and transcendence through the beauty of its borrowed prose. 

I say almost rational because Katelnikoff’s essays are ambient in both their method and their form. The opening chapter on Lisa Robertson feels closest to a critical essay, although this is a bit of misdirection. As the sentences and paragraphs amass, signature phrases begin to repeat. The prose seems to be feeling out the ways a sentence might end or other preambles that might have led to the same phrase. Sometimes this results in anaphora. The sentence ‘What I want to do here is infiltrate X’ appears four times in the opening chapter, twice in one paragraph, where X is variously ‘sincerity’ (Robertson’s original), ‘a place that has disappeared,’ ‘nervous phrases’ and ‘reading’s audacity.’ (The last two variants are plausible slogans for Recombinant Theory as a whole.) Sometimes the signature phrase reappears at a statement’s end, a little like a villanelle or pantoum. In either case, the refrain’s aesthetic force unravels the performance of rationality and accumulating argument. Still, the work of making and revising statements goes on.

It’s tempting to say each chapter is about the poet whose phrases comprise it, but neither the poet nor their works are named within Katelnikoff’s prose. There are moments where the recombined language seems to comment knowingly, even humorously, on the texts it came from. But the picture that emerges across chapters is, unexpectedly, autobiographical. This is partly because the recombined phrases so often describe a reader’s attempt to grasp a hermetic text. Nonetheless, if each chapter’s phrases amount to a core sample of the poet’s language, that sample is not entirely arbitrary. References to cities, cafés, cigarettes and universities recur across these plotless chapters. There is a weird emphasis on conference going. Indeed, in surprisingly literal terms, Recombinant Theory narrates the experiences of an urban Canadian graduate student, who smokes too many cigarettes, and both frets and muses about signification. 

This is, of course, a type, one that isn’t necessarily confined to universities. And some of these poets inhabited it, to varying degrees, long before I could infer it upon Katelnikoff. The formal device that organizes these chapters is how the collaged prose can seem to refer at once to the poet, who authored its phrases, and to Katelnikoff, who sequenced them. The prose manifests a kind of duplicate subjectivity, where the difference between the citer and the cited draws a heightened scrutiny to each statement without quite disavowing it.

Obviously, there are many ways that Katelnikoff is not these authors, whether that author is Steve McCaffery or Charles Bernstein, Marie Annharte Baker or Sawako Nakayasu. But he shares with these authors an ambivalence toward academic institutions and their norms, a feeling that reappears in almost every chapter. Once could read Recombinant Theory just to sit with this connection between higher education and experimental poetry, which both its proponents and its critics oversimplify. While many conference papers affirm the transformative power of innovative poetry, both the genre of the conference paper and the norms that govern its reception are, as Katelnikoff knows, metonymies for all that remains unchanged by these poems. Given the chapters’ conference-paper length, it’s natural to imagine Katelnikoff reading them at professional gatherings and the mixed reactions that might follow. His book, like a wrench in the system, is meant to force us to attend to how these poets fit into our world rather than produce the usual affirmations.

—Steven Maye