McCaffery, Steve
McCAFFERY, Steve
Nationality: Canadian. Born: Sheffield, England, 24 January 1947. Education: Hull University, England, 1965–68, B.A. (honors) 1968; York University, Toronto, 1968–69, M.A. 1969; State University of New York, Buffalo, 1997–98, Ph.D. 1998. Family: Married 1) Margaret McCaffery in 1968 (divorced 1983); 2) Karen MacCormack in 1998. Career: Lecturer, University of California, San Diego, 1989; lecturer in English, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, 1993–95, and California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, 1997. Since 1998 assistant professor in English, York University, Toronto. Address: 1086 Bathurst Street, 2nd Floor, Toronto, Ontario M5R 3G9, Canada.
Publications
Poetry
Dr. Sadhu's Muffins. Victoria, Press Porcépic, 1974.
'Ow's Waif. Toronto, Coach House Press, 1975.
Intimate Distortions. Erin, Ontario, Porcupine's Quill, 1978.
Knowledge Never Knew. Montreal, n.p., 1983.
Evoba. Toronto, Coach House Press, 1987.
The Black Debt. London, Ontario, Nightwood Editions, 1989.
Theory of Sediment. Vancouver, Talonbooks, 1991.
The Cheat of Words. Toronto, ECW Press, 1996.
Novel
Panopticon. Toronto, blewointment press, 1984.
Other
North of Intention. New York, Root Books, 1986.
Rational Geomancy, with bpNichol. Vancouver, Talonbooks, 1992.
Imagining Language, with Jed Rasula. Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press, 1998.
Prior to Meaning: The Protosemantic and Poetics. Evanston, Illinois, Northwestern University Press, 2000.
Editor, with bpNichol, The Story So Four. Toronto, Coach House Press, 1976.
*Manuscript Collections: Getty Museum, Malibu, California; Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia.
Critical Studies: In Textual Politics and the Language Poets by George Hartley, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1989; in The New Poetics in Canada and Quebec: From Concretism to Post-Modern by Caroline Bayard, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1989; in Poetic License, Evanston, Illinois, Northwestern University Press, 1990, and Radical Artiface, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1991, both by Marjorie Perloff; in Art Discourse/Discourse in Art by Jessica Prinz, New Brunswick, New Jersey, Rutgers University Press, 1991; in Touch Monkeys: Nonsense Strategies for Reading Twentieth Century Poetry, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1994; Steve McCaffery and His Work by Clint Burnham, Toronto, ECW Press, 1995; Repositionings: Readings of Contemporary Poetry, Photography, and Performance Art by Frederick Garber, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995; A Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Steve McCaffery (dissertation) by Kent Richard Arthur Lewis, University of Victoria, 1997; ABC of Reading TRG: Steve McCaffery, bpNichol, and Critical Desire by Peter Cyril Jaeger, Vancouver, Talonbooks, 1999.
* * *For many years Steve McCaffery was principally known as one of the Four Horsemen, a group of experimental poets who performed their sound poems publicly. The group consisted of bpNichol, Rafael Barreto-Rivera, and Paul Dutton. Formed in Toronto in 1970, it disbanded with the death of bpNichol in 1989. McCaffery has also been active in the Toronto Research Group, which experiments with the innovative uses of language in a way somewhat similar to New York's language poets.
One problem with writing about McCaffery's work is that the texts, such as they are, are actually scores for rehearsed or improvised performances. Any meanings that may be gleaned from them are necessarily secondary in importance to the pure sounds of the words or syllables, and the aesthetic achievement lies in—and rises from—the performance itself, not in the words of the script. There are features both contemporary and traditional (dadaists and objectivists are part of the tradition) in McCaffery's work. It is work, not writing.
In England Now That Spring (1979) is a collaboration with bpNichol that offers scripts of performances and collaborations presented in the United Kingdom. The reader can see that the audiences had good reason to be amused, for humor is part of the poets' approach. Knowledge Never Knew (1983) is a collection of aphorisms, what the author refers to as "condensed ruins." Here are four of them:
to plan ahead is to punish yourself
to not plan ahead is to punish others
you can find many excuses for a poem
but only one reason for a word
never read
never write
always continue to learn
unthink the thinkable
Of these, perhaps the last could serve as McCaffery's motto. Panopticon (1984) divides the pages horizontally and vertically into columns and presents texts, both found and original, as channels: "If men are silent, books will find a voice."
The difficulty of writing about McCaffery's work is a problem that faces every commentator. In Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes (1993) the poet and critic Richard Kostelanetz devoted an appreciative entry to the work of the Four Horsemen. He identified three of its members, adding, "and Steve McCaffery (1948), a London-born writer who deserves a separate entry here, if I could figure out how to summarize his difficult, perhaps excessively obscure work (and so refer curious readers to Marjorie Perloff's 1991 book Radical Artifice)."
—John Robert Colombo