Steve McCaffery

Conceived in 1976 and published in 1980, LEGEND exemplifies the political and linguistic commitments of then-nascent Language writing. Coauthored by Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Ray DiPalma, Steve McCaffery, and Ron Silliman, the work was composed on typewriters and developed through the mail. The twenty-six poems of the volume bring together every possible permutation of collaborative authorship in one-, two-, three-, and five-author combinations, revealing the evolution of distinctive styles against and in conversation with others. Along with a complete reproduction of the original text, LEGEND: The Complete Facsimile in Context includes a critical introduction by editors Matthew Hofer and Michael Golston, a generous selection of material from the authors' correspondence, and a new collaborative piece by the authors. This book will be an essential resource to students and scholars in twentieth-century poetry and poetics.

By means of a dissonant fluidity and form Parsival conveys its readers along by now familiar trajectories: power, knowledge, absurdity, oppression, aporia, horror and uncertainty that comprise our contemporary. Parsival's quest of course is a non-quest (there is no Grail) or perhaps an inquest into the complexities of our century's paideuma. The pages' layout and typographic variations in style and size are designed to evoke Mallarm 's in Un Coup de Des. Yet Parsival morphs into Un Coup de Dada or even Un Coup de DNA intertwining four separate texts that can be read discretely or helixed into the composite fifth. >

It's been 150 years since Alice first entered Wonderland in Lewis Carroll's beloved classic book. My, how times have changed! Now, from the multi-award-winning poet and scholar Steve McCaffery comes Alice in Plunderland, a reimagining of Lewis Carroll's Alice books that will forever change the way readers negotiate Wonderland and its menagerie of characters. McCaffery is your tour guide to Plunderland, a rough-and-tumble world where theft, drugs, and gangs hold sway, and nary a tea party is to be found. Meet the Cheshire Cat (a junkie from the UK), and just try to keep your head on as the King and Queen reign over the land of Cocaine. Yes, in this remarkable land of drug addiction, looting, and civil disobedience, even Alice's adventures are transformed in her quest for a fix. Clelia Scala's translated collages beautifully annotate McCaffery's renewed vision of Wonderland. Just as McCaffery has plundered Carroll's original text, Scala uses John Tenniel's iconic artwork to create a new look for the world of Alice's Plunderland. Fans of McCaffery's work will find plenty of poetic marvel to sink their teeth into. In this, his first foray into prose-parody, McCaffery's innovative poetics (in tandem with Scala's provoking images in full colour) transform this classic story according to McCaffery's theory of "palindromic time" by which the past is contemporized and the present historicized. Alice in Plunderland is sure to break open an exciting new initiative for fans of experimental writing and linguistics in the years to come.

The Darkness of the Present includes essays that collectively investigate the roles of anomaly and anachronism as they work to unsettle commonplace notions of the 'contemporary' in the field of poetics. In the eleven essays of The Darkness of the Present, poet and critic Steve McCaffery argues that by approaching the past and the present as unified entities, the contemporary is made historical at the same time as the historical is made contemporary. McCaffery's writings work against the urge to classify works by placing them in standard literary periods or disciplinary partitions. Instead, McCaffery offers a variety of insights into unusual and ingenious affiliations between poetic works that may have previously seemed distinctive. He questions the usual associations of originality and precedence. In the process, he repositions many texts within genealogies separate from the ones to which they are traditionally assigned. The chapters in The Darkness of the Present might seem to present an eclectic fa\u00e7ade and can certainly be read independently. They are linked, however, by a common preoccupation reflected in the title of the book: the anomaly and the anachronism and the way their empirical emergence works to unsettle a steady notion of the 'contemporary' or 'new.'

Verse and Worse: Selected and New Poems of Steve McCaffery 1989-2009 presents texts from the last two decades of work by Steve McCaffery, one of the most influential and innovative of contemporary poets. The volume focuses on selections from McCaffery's major texts, including The Black Debt, Theory of Sediment, The Cheat of Words, and Slightly Left of Thinking, but also features a substantial number of previously ungathered poems. As playful as they are cerebral, McCaffery's poems stage an incessant departure from conventional lyrical and narrative methods of making meaning. For those encountering McCaffery's work for the first time as well as for those who have followed the twists and turns of his astonishingly heterogeneous poetic trajectory over the past four decades - this volume is essential reading.

In these essays McCaffrey works to undo the current bifurcation between theory and practice - to show how a poetic text might be the source rather than the product of the theoretical principles against which it must be read.

In two massive volumes, Steve McCaffery, Canada's most challenging, experimental and innovative poet/critic amasses the best of his previously published and ungathered work. From the early concrete and visual poems of Broken Mandala and Transitions to the Beast to the Ludwig Wittgenstein-inspired philosophical investigations of EVOBA, from the innovative novel Panopticon to the Governor General's Award-nominated Theory of Sediment and the recent The Cheat of Words, this comprehensive edition covers all phases of McCaffery's vast and heterogeneous poetic oeuvre. Many works that have previously only been available in small, privately circulated editions, such as Shifters and Every Way Oakly, are available in perfect-bound form here for the first time. Volume 2, following in the wake of the extraordinarily successful first volume, collects the best of McCaffery's ungathered work. Along with selections from his concrete and visual poetry, this book contains sound poem and performance scores, excerpts from early chapbooks, 'pataphysical essays and sections of the often-discussed but rarely seen text The Abstract Ruin. For new readers and long-time fans of McCaffery alike, Volume 2 of Seven Pages Missing is essential reading.

In two massive volumes, Steve McCaffery, Canada's most challenging, experimental and innovative poet/critic amasses the best of his previously published and ungathered work. From the early concrete and visual poems of Broken Mandala and Transitions to the Beast to the Ludwig Wittgenstein-inspired philosophical investigations of EVOBA, from the innovative novel Panopticon to the Governor General's Award-nominated Theory of Sediment and the recent The Cheat of Words, this comprehensive edition covers all phases of McCaffery's vast and heterogeneous poetic oeuvre. Many works that have previously only been available in small, privately circulated editions, such as Shifters and Every Way Oakly, are available in perfect-bound form here for the first time. Volume 2, following in the wake of the extraordinarily successful first volume, collects the best of McCaffery's ungathered work. Along with selections from his concrete and visual poetry, this book contains sound poem and performance scores, excerpts from early chapbooks, 'pataphysical essays and sections of the often-discussed but rarely seen text The Abstract Ruin. For new readers and long-time fans of McCaffery alike, Volume 2 of Seven Pages Missing is essential reading.

The Toronto Research Group was an eighteen year collaboration and friendship between the late bpNichol and Steve McCaffery. In addition to reports on translation; the book-as-machine; and the search for non-narrative prose; this collection includes an informative introduction by McCaffery; a new report on performance; 'Reading and Writing: The Toronto Research Game'; and much hitherto unpublished material. From scholasticism to pop-up books, the Book of Nature to comic strips, these frequently witty, often irreverent and methodically mischievious reports document a vital era, not only in the intellectual growth of two individuals, but in the history of critical collaboration in North America. With a revised format, additional bibliography and profuse illustrations, this book will prove to be of inestimable value to anyone tracing the poetic archeology of the seventies in Anglophone Canada.