Frank Davey

Everybody's Martyrology provides commentary and analysis for almost every page of bpNichol's meandering nine-volume lifelong poem, The Martyrology -- a poetic pondering of the inevitable extinction of the human species. Taken together, it became one of the five longest canonical poems in English. Like Caroll Terrell's A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound or George Butterick's A Guide to The Maximus Poems of Charles Olson, Everybody's Martyrology will attract students seeking information about particular passages, scholars interested in coherent readings of the overall work, and poetry readers fascinated by the idiosyncrasies of individual volumes. Davey brings to the book not only his own experience as a much-published poet and expert in Canadian avant-garde writers of the 1960-2000 period, but also his close friendship and collaborations with Nichol. Davey was often the first to hear a new passage of The Martyrology when Nichol dropped by his house to read and discuss it. He remembers.

Written by one of his friends and confidants, a close reading of bpNichol's poetry aka bpNichol is the biography of the major Canadian poet bpNichol, who was a practising lay psychoanalyst and vice-president of one of the largest and longest-lasting communes in North America for more than a decade. Though he died at the young age of 44, Barrie Nichol was internationally influential as a visual poet and sound poet. Nichol authored the multi-volume The Martyrology, one of the most substantial long poems of the 20th century; four novels; two musical comedies; six children's books; hundreds of hand-drawn visual poems; and 10 episodes of Fraggle Rock. Written by Frank Davey, one of Barrie's numerous literary collaborators, aka bpNichol reveals the close connections among Nichol's various activities, and includes a close reading of Nichol's poetry. Davey examines how the autobiographical inquiries and Freudian dream analyses linked with the young Nichol's biographical self-awareness, ultimately producing a writer whose main psychoanalytic client had become his own writing, and who could explore its slips, accidental puns, "unintended" meanings, and implications for the communal future of the human species both in high literature and the comic forms of prime-time television.

For thousands of years, formal compositional rules of rhyme, metre and rhetorical devices have shaped the language of poetry, creating "meaning" through the interplay between these culturally determined aesthetic prerequisites imposed on its syntax, and the "other" intelligence of the poet pushing against these constraints. Bardy Google reinvents these formal boundaries within the frame of our wired world. With only one hidden exception, each of the texts in this book was constructed through Frank Davey's use of speci?cally devised Internet searches. The "rules" for their composition varied: "Love + 560" began at the 560th line of the search results; most selections excluded incomplete sentences; most included only the ?rst sentence of a search result; all excluded sentences in which all the terms searched for did not occur; and all except two sequenced the sentences in the order found. Some, such as "Time Lapse Action," "Sorry" and "The Imaginaries," contain tonal shifts enabled by an abrupt change of the search protocol during their composition. In all cases, any re-composition of the pieces was done only by revising the initial search protocol and generating a new text to replace a previous one. Because the content of the Internet, and the search-engine priorities assigned to that content, change continuously, these texts are unique and unrepeatable. The same search protocols used in a later month or year could produce quite different results from those assembled here--or distressingly similar ones. These texts are part of Davey's ongoing work on the use of the sentence as the basic structural unit of poetry--to create poetic texts, as they have always been created, out of the materials of prose. They also constitute another of his forays into cultural commentary--in this case, disclosing how our engagement with globalized culture creates meaning as it "speaks through itself."

A passionate believer in the power of artâand especially poetryâto influence and critique contemporary culture, Louis Dudek devoted much of his life to shaping the Canadian literary scene through his meditative and experimental poems as well as his work in publishing and teaching. All These Roads: The Poetry of Louis Dudek brings together thirty-five of Dudek's poems written over the course of his sixty-year career. Much of Dudek's poetry is about the practice of art, with comment on the way the craft of poetry is mediated by such factors as university classes, public readings, reviews, commercial presses, and academic conferences. The poems in this selectionâwitty satires, short lyrics, and long sequencesâreflect self-consciously on the relationship between art and life and will draw readers into the dramatic mid-century literary and cultural debates in which Dudek was an important participant. Karis Shearer's introduction provides an overview of Dudek's prolific career as poet, professor, editor, publisher, and critic, and considers the ways in which Dudek's functional poems help, both formally and thematically, to carry out the tasks associated with those roles. Comparing Dudek's reception to that of NourbeSe Philip, Marilyn Dumont, and Roy Miki, Frank Davey's afterword locates Dudek in a pre-1980s version of multiculturalism that is more complex than many critics would have it. According to Davey, Dudek broadened the limits on the possible range and type of poetry for subsequent generations of Canadian writers.

More than 30 years in the making, Frank Davey's careful archaeology of the catalogue of innocence his youthful imagination assembled growing up in and immediately after World War II is a work of astonishment. This is no lyrical work of sentimental nostalgia, no attempt to return to a romanticized "simpler past," no rediscovery of "the child within," but rather a careful reconstruction of "the child without." The reader moves through these poems, neither sanitized nor updated by their passage through experience, as one would through a gallery installation of intensely personal epiphanies, both frightening and ecstatic, lucid and obscure. They are stripped of any cultural preconception, a Blakean vision of the good and evil men and women do as they engage the other in a world at war--a world where the war is always somewhere else, but where the enemy, unseen, is everywhere present in the invented surrogates of combat.

Cultural Mischief is a collection of prose poems on the hyperbolic absurdities of multiculturalism in action. Whether digging up the midden under Greg Curnoe's house, revisiting Hiroshima, attending a dog breeder's show or retelling the history of Quebec from the point of view of its founding nations, the Mohawks and Algonquins, Davey delivers startling vignettes at their funniest and most thoughtful. This book is delightfully--and deceptively--simple. It provides the reader at one and the same time the most exquisitely enjoyable bedtime reading, and a wake-up call with a better hit than the best designer espresso.

This book of prose poems strips down the codes and conventions that make up our society's "popular narratives." A revealing and witty, exploded view of our culture.

A rambunctious long poem about North American myths, the West and the Canadian psyche, with appearances by Louis Riel, Wacousta, Davy Crockett and assorted disembodied literati.

Margaret Atwood's writing, according to Davey, reveals not only an extraordinary facility with language, but also a deep mistrust of it as something shaped by an instrumental and largely male culture. Her language directs its readers to a hidden level of itself -- unspoken, symbolic, gestural -- and away from denotative meaning. In discussions of her poetry, fiction, short stories, and criticism, Davey offers a 'glossary' of recurrent Atwood images and symbols that can open this hidden level in nearly all of her writing.

This volume includes work selected from six of Frank Davey's books of poetry--Weeds, Four Myths for Sam Perry, Griffon, Arcana, King of Swords and The Clallam--as well as the manuscript edition of his War Poems.