Intimate Distortions - Softcover

McCaffery, Steve

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0889840814 ISBN 13: 9780889840812

Publisher: Porcupines Quill, 1997

Synopsis

On a hard rock in the past, overlooking a wonderful blue sea with the hot sun shining down, somebody writes a love poem and puts it to sea in an old bottle. Centuries later, with the same sun shining, someone else picks up the bottle in a dark bar and drinks the contents. `Bring back the future', shouts a cloud in the sky. It is from the central predicaments staed in this anecdote that this book springs. Employing a translation system known as `allusive referential' McCaffery invents a way of avoiding the strictures of classical translation. Developing all the suggestions and connotations of Sappho's words and phrases, new texts are produced which are at the same time vital re-readings of the originals. Irreverent, yet executed in a spirit of love and respect, Intimate Distortions curves gracefully (and occasionally naughtily) away from the strict linear dictates of authorized translation to produce poems of delightful misprision.

About this title

Review

The book ... moves gracefully like a dream sequence into the story of relationships. Those relationships are sometimes direct and human, sometimes they are described as language, as dream, as the interaction of isolated words, murmurs.'--Marty Gervais "Windsor Star "

About the Author

Steve McCaffery was born January 24, 1947, in Sheffield, England. He came to Canada partly to work with bpNichol, and the two poets formed the Toronto Research Group. McCaffery and Nichol also combined talents with Paul Dutton and Rafael Barreto-Rivera as the Four Horsemen, creating and performing innovative sound poetry. During the seventies and eighties, he and Nichol were regular contributors to the poetic journal "Open Letter". McCaffery's collection of critical writings, "North of Intention", stands as one of the earliest and best collections of essays about experimental writing in Canada and the U.S., and it demonstrates and explores McCaffery's own affiliation with the practitioners of the so-called Language Poetry and poetics, often considered a uniquely American phenomenon. McCaffery recently completed his PhD at SUNY Buffalo and is now teaching at York University.

Edition details

• Publisher: Porcupines Quill
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0889840814
• ISBN 13: 9780889840812
• Binding: Paperback