Coleman, Victor (Art)
COLEMAN, Victor (Art)
Pseudonyms: Vic d'Or; Lee Enfield. Nationality: Canadian. Born: Lvov, Poland, 11 September 1944. Education: State University of New York, Buffalo, 1963–65; University of California, Berkeley Poetry Conference, summer 1965. Family: Married 1) Elizabeth Toon in 1963 (divorced 1967), two daughters and one son; 2) Sarah Miller in 1968 (divorced 1972), one daughter; 3) Jan-Marie Cooke in 1970; one daughter. Career: Copy clerk, Toronto Star, Toronto, 1962–64; assistant production manager, Oxford University Press, Toronto, 1965–66; senior editor/production manager, The Coach House Press, Toronto, 1967–74; artistic director, A Space, Toronto, 1975–78; programmer/administrator, National Film Theatre, Kingston, Ontario, 1980–82; programmer/publicist, The Music Gallery, Toronto, 1983–86; producer, Coach House Talking Books, Toronto, 1989–90. Since 1992 executive director, Toronto Small Press Group, Toronto. Awards: Canada Council Arts award, 1974, 1977; Ontario Arts Council Writer's Project grant, 1990, and Works in Progress grant, 1991.
Publications
Poetry
From Erik Satie's Notes to the Music: "Nine Poems." Toronto, Island Press, 1965.
one/eye/love. Toronto, Coach House Press, 1967.
Light Verse. Toronto, Coach House Press, 1969.
Back East. Montreal, Quebec, Bowering, 1970.
Old Friends' Ghosts: Poems 1963–68. Toronto, Weed/Flower Press, 1970.
Some Plays: On Words. Buffalo, New York, Intrepid Press, 1971.
Strange Love. Toronto, Coach House Press, 1972.
Parking Lots. Vancouver, Talonbooks, 1972.
America: A Government Publication. Toronto, Coach House Press, 1972.
Stranger. Toronto, Coach House Press, 1974.
Speech Sucks. Vancouver, Talonbooks, 1974.
Terrific at Both Ends. Toronto, Coach House Press, 1978.
Captions for the Deaf. Toronto, Rumour, 1979.
From the Dark Wood: Poems 1977–83. Toronto, Underwhich Editions, 1985.
Corrections: Rewriting Six of My First Nine Books. Toronto, Coach House Press, 1985.
Honeymoon Suite, with David Bolduc. Toronto, Underwhich Editions, 1990.
Waiting for Alice. Toronto, Eternal Network, 1993.
Lapsed W.A.S.P.: Poems 1978–89. Toronto, ECW Press, 1994.
Letter Drop: An Alphabet of Lipograms. Toronto, Coach House Press, 1999.
The Exchange: Poems, 1984–95. Toronto, Eternal Network, 1999.
Recording: Nothing Heavy or Fragile, Coach House/Music Gallery Talking Books, 1990.
Plays
The Party (produced 1981).
Screenplay: 125 Rooms of Comfort, 1974.
Radio Play: Audiothon, 1975.
*Manuscript Collections: The National Library of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario; Simon Fraser University Library, Special Collections, Burnaby, British Columbia.
* * *Perhaps the truest lines ever written about Victor Coleman and his work come from the American poet Allen Ginsberg:
Head music for study
Tun'd after Zukofsky
Syllables broken to the eye
Ear rythm [sic] choppy mind very high
Acerb repugnant honesty.
These lines, titled "Coleman's America," are reproduced in his collection America: A Government Publication (1972). It is worthwhile pondering each of the insights in turn, for, despite their age, they are as apt today as when they were originally penned. "
Head music." Coleman enjoys playing games, rather in the manner of the French composer Erik Satie. In Terrific at Both Ends(1978) there is a poem called "Flood: Hologram," which includes these lines:
I separate
my thoughts
with stars
What the poet has in mind are not the stars in the heavens but the asterisks on the page that separate the pensée s.
"For study." Much thought is given to the appearance of the words and lines on the page. In fact, positions are calculated in advance. The books themselves seem to be archives of attitudes. Speech Sucks (1974), for instance, includes the line "This book exported to Mars." Why Mars? No reason is given. Either the poet is engaging in foolishness, or he has the expectation that his work will endure and be studied when there are flights to the red planet.
"Tun'd after Zukofsky." Ginsberg's reference is to the American objectivist poet Louis Zukofsky, who fine-tuned the sounds of his own work, even rewriting phonetically Shakespeare's sonnets. Coleman is definitely writing in the wake of Zukofsky's literalism.
"Syllables broken to the eye." Ginsberg sees the words rather than hearing the poems. In the poem "Flood: Hologram" Coleman writes about survival: "Victor, victim/of vacuity." Everything here is reduced to alliteration. Elsewhere the poet chops at the words, extracting their syllables of sense.
"Ear rythm [sic] choppy mind very high." Ginsberg, like Whitman before him, enjoys misspelling the word "rhythm." Nonetheless, there is something "choppy," or intermittent, about Coleman's way of writing. At the same time the poet is quite aware, though certainly not "high-minded," about this. He is very observant, as in "From the Realms of the Unseen Father" in Terrific at Both Ends, "to convince us that the form is legitimate/a uniform is worn," "we all call it home no matter what/the numbers on the houses," and "one sixteenth of a second on the celluloid/a burp in time made permanent by chemicals."
"Acerb repugnant honesty." Ginsberg's words are well chosen. Acerbity is hard to take in quantity, and repugnance may be based on what is said, on how it is said, or on both. Yet it may be worth enduring both acerbity and repugnance if they are coupled with honesty.
Coleman's debt to Zukofsky is apparent in "After Reading Spring & All, All in All, & All," included in Old Friends' Ghosts: Poems 1963–68 (1970):
Zuk
of
sky's
lyre's
no liar
no
Lear
no
lair
I
sing
one
air
Coleman goes beyond the objectivist stance in the imprecation or exorcism called "Disengagement Ritual," which in the summer of 1976 was performed at the Parachute Centre for Cultural Affairs in Calgary. The work consists of lines like "I want to forget your face, your hands." There are seventy-three such lines, culminating in a gridlock contradiction: "I can't/Forget & I won't/Forget." It leaves the reader or listener about where he or she began in the first place.
—John Robert Colombo