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I Cut My Finger

By Stuart Ross

Reviewed by Alessandro Porco

In 2004, poet Stuart Ross edited Surreal Estate: 13 Canadian Poets Under the Influence (Mercury Press, 2004). As Ross explains in his introduction, the anthology -- which includes poets Daniel F. Bradley, Alice Burdick, Kevin Connolly, Ross, and Steven Venright -- is not in any absolute terms a book of Surrealist poetry but is rather a book that more humbly seeks to document poetry "influenced [to varying degrees] by the literary phenomenon spearheaded by Breton, Jacob, Eluard, & Co. from 1924 until the second world war." Emerging from the rubble of Dada, Surrealism aimed to contest, or to use Breton's more suggestive term, to "revolt," against the strictures of Reason and Rationalism, embodied in capitalist, religious, and political institutions as well as in the institution of Bourgeois literature that emerged in the late 19th century. Surrealism's concerns are simultaneously ethical and aesthetic: the conditions of living and the conditions of art are inextricable; and, for Breton, they demanded a response. As far as Breton is concerned, if Surrealism succeeds, it succeeds precisely because it unconceals the deceptive myth of order that checks the individual's imagination and, corrspondingly, the individual's potential as a politicized subject: in other words, Surrealism would unconceal (if I might borrow from Jean-Luc Nancy) the myth of foundation, and the foundation of myth," upon which coercive strictures of a Western "façade of order" depend.

Not surprisingly, many of Ross's comments in his introduction to Surreal Estate as well as his artistic statement from the anthology echo sentiments of first-wave European Surrealists he admires. He "embraces the possibilities of randomness, absurdism, chance, error, and the unconscious" because they mark him as "happily out of step" with norms, norms both ethical and aesthetic. Surrealism, for Ross, is a means of accessing and inhabiting the "out of step" or interstitial times and spaces, the lacunae within Western metaphysics: "Surrealism," as the "Declaration of January 27, 1925" states (most notably signed by Aragon, Artaud, and Breton), is not "a metaphysic," but a challenge to it. For Ross, occupying the "out of step" enables his paradoxical and powerful imagining of the citizen as both God-like and, at the same time, as decidedly human in a world increasingly disarticulated from humanity. Breton calls for "total liberation of the mind," which Ross articulates, in his own words, as the absolute "absence of boundaries[,] the freedom to mine...continue reading

Featured Review

U.S. Sonnets By George Bowering

Reviewed by Alex Boyd

Canadians have an odd relationship to the U.S. We define ourselves against them, first of all. Many of us in urban centres find guns appalling, our history is closer to compromise than conflict, possibly born out of the need to accommodate both French and English, and the same need has introduced a greater love -- at least in theory -- of diversity, and a recognition diversity is a strength, not a weakness. There is a distinct Canadian identity that Canadians...continue reading

Featured Interview

Chris Banks

By Paul Vermeersch

Your second collection of poems, The Cold Panes of Surfaces, is out now. Your first book, Bonfires, won the Canadian Authors Association Poetry Award in 2004. Did winning a national award for your first book bolster your artistic confidence while working on your second, or did you find it daunting, as though you had more to live up to than other poets working on a second collection?

I think it certainly gave me a boost of confidence and the permission I needed to do what I wanted to do artistically with the second book. I didn't feel any outside pressure because of winning the CAA award, or feel that I had any expectations to live up to. Winning the award was terrific, and it was good publicity, but it was also an education on how fleeting such praise can be, and how it leaves your writing life virtually...continue reading