eric schmaltz

Haunted Canada: The Ninth Annual Trent-Carleton Graduate Conference in Canadian Studies. Held at

Carleton University, March 15-16

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““The sparking of the insurrection:” Protoconceptualism & John Robert Colombo’s The

Mackenzie Poems,” by Eric Schmaltz.

In her 1852 account of settler life in Canada, Roughing It In the Bush, Susanna Moodie

relays her conversation with the American Mr. D. who tells her that her “country is too new for

ghosts” (271). Moodie concurs with the man, agreeing that “[b]ad spirits cannot be supposed to

linger near a place where crime has never been committed” (272). Regardless of how we believe

ghostly spirits to be created, Canada, according to Moodie and Mr. D., had not been an inhabited

nation long enough for ghosts to dwell on its landscape. Earle Birney echoes this sentiment over

a century later in his poem “Can. Lit.” in which he adapts Moodie’s statement into a metaphor

that regards Canadian culture and poignantly articulates an anxiety widely felt by many mid-

twentieth century Canadian authors; he writes, “[i]t's only by our lack of ghosts we're haunted"

(15). Even a hundred years after Moodie’s statement, Birney’s speaker seems to believe that

Canada’s cultural history remains devoid of significant national figures. While both Moodie and

Birney have come to be significant Canadian cultural persons themselves, they both prompt us to

search for Canada’s significant past. Both writers seem to agree that one does not exist.

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Despite this cynicism, many Canadian artists and critics have dedicated their creative and

critical energies to disproving the arguments made by Moodie and Birney, among them being

John Robert Colombo. Author of over two hundred books, Colombo has come to be known as

Canada’s “Master Gatherer.” Much of Colombo’s work is dedicated to providing evidence of

Canada’s own ghastly history. Noting this ambition, Kathy English writes that “Colombo

collected all-Canadian tales of lost treasures and UFO's, haunted ships and sea monsters,

sasquatches and poltergeists; disproving poet Earle Birney's statement.” Indeed, Colombo has

produced numerous compilations of these types including Ghosts Stories of Canada, Haunted

Toronto, Ghost Stories of Ontario, among many others. According to Colombo’s tales, Canada is

in fact a very haunted country. Though these books of lore may be pertinent to a discussion of

Canada’s hauntings, I would prefer to look upon some of Colombo’s earlier non-folkloric work,

mainly his first book of poetry, The Mackenzie Poems, which has become a ghostly figment

itself. The book, however, uniquely addresses the metaphorical level of Birney’s statement,

revealing that significant ghosts do in fact haunt Canada’s cultural landscape.

The Mackenzie Poems is not an entirely authentic or original or even creative

composition by Colombo–it does not aim to be. Instead the slim hardcover volume consists of

words written by the leader of the Upper Canada rebellion and publisher William Lyon

Mackenzie. Colombo created the poems by resurrecting instances of Mackenzie’s highly

politicized prose, and then recirculating it within a new aesthetic context as poetry. Clarifying his



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process, he writes “the poems […] are based on speeches, articles, sketches and letters that

William Lyon Mackenzie wrote between 1824 and 1837” (17-18). According to Colombo, the

shift from the rhetorical to the aesthetic gives the language a “new lease on life” (19). These

poems are commonly known as found poems–poems consisting of language discovered by the

writer, not written by the writer. The found poet is a ghost who haunts the house of language,

defamiliarizing it from its “rightful” owners and reshaping its meaning. At one point in his career,

this type of work earned Colombo a reputation as one of the leading Canadian poets working

with found language, but this achievement has been overshadowed by his work as an anthologist,

collector, editor, and translator. However, conceptual writing–considering its recent rise to

popularity–provides an ideal critical climate in which Colombo’s work can be discussed. For

those unfamiliar, conceptual writing, in some instances, is a vogue literary movement with

proprietors who, like Colombo, resurrect, revive, and redistribute language for a variety of

purposes. I would like to take this opportunity then to begin to revive discussion around

Colombo by examining his early work, mainly The Mackenzie Poems, not as found poems but,

retrospectively as an anticipatory conceptualism. Recognizing that Colombo’s writing in 1966

was well ahead of its time, I intend to initiate a discussion of his radical appropriative gestures

and begin to show how they are similar to the practices and theories employed by today’s leading

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conceptual writers such as Kenneth Goldsmith, Vanessa Place and Rob Fitterman, Craig

Dworkin, and derek beaulieu. By comparing Colombo’s work to these writers, I will demonstrate

how he extracts Mackenzie’s language from its quotidian political use, creating an uncanny

poetic that reveals one of Canada’s significant national specters. Furthermore, this paper seeks

not only to examine the ways in which Colombo’s anticipatory conceptualism thrusts one of

Canada’s most renowned rebels back into cultural consciousness, but also seeks to reinvigorate

scholarly discussions around Colombo himself–one of our own national literary ghosts.

Before looking at specific examples from The Mackenzie Poems, a brief comparison of

the genealogies and definitions of found poetry and conceptual writing will assist to articulate the

contours of this talk, but will also usefully reveal the significant overlap between the two

approaches. In the Open Poetry anthology, Colombo defines found poetry as “[s]omething

removed from one context and placed within an aesthetic context. An object valued more for its

aesthetic than its utilitarian appeal.” Colombo traces found poetry back to William Butler Yeats

for his lyrical adaptation of Walter Pater's prose essay on Leonardo Da Vinci’s the Mona Lisa.

Among several other early twentieth century influences, Colombo also mentions Marcel

Duchamp whose readymade artifacts reflect a similar practice in sculptural form. One of

Duchamp’s most famous examples being his Fountain, a urinal placed on its side and signed by

Duchamp as R.Mutt. I would also like to note that Colombo offers, an alternative title for found



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poetry. Borrowing from pop art Colombo coins the term “pop poem” which is a “found poem

taken from a sub-literary source, especially advertising matter.” A very similar practice is born

forty years after Colombo presents these definitions. In 2003, Craig Dworkin titles an analogous

practice as “conceptual writing.” Dworkin writes a similar lineage for this contemporary analog,

drawing attention to protoexamples of conceptual work by Duchamp with his readymades as

well as pop art through Andy Warhol and his mechanical silkscreen paintings. Dworkin

describes a conceptual writer as one who acknowledges that they do not need to “generate new

material to be a poet: the intelligent organization or reframing of already extant text is enough”

(xliv). Comparing these basic definitions and genealogies of conceptual writing and found poetry

reveals that the practices are strikingly similar. Both found poetry and conceptual writing rely on

the flexibility of language–on the writer’s ability to change the meaning of words without

changing the words themselves. Furthermore, both the found poet and conceptual writer

participate within an economy of resurrection and recirculation. They never rely on the

production of their own original content, but on the zombification of already existing language.

In his introduction to The Mackenzie Poems, Colombo is modest about impact of his poems,

he “hope[s] the reader will enjoy reading these poems, if only as literary curious, as relics of a

bygone age” (25). However, examining Colombo’s poetry retrospectively from within the

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discourse of conceptual writing usefully allows us to consider his poems more than written

works that are simply meant to be enjoyed. A shining example of his appropriative work is his

short poem “Cholera in London.” Colombo reports that he extricated the language from a

paragraph written and published by Mackenzie in 1832 that describes his family’s struggle to

fight off cholera while staying in England. After stripping away the context specific language the

full poem reads as follows:

Be this as it may,

I have no intention of again changing my lodgings.

I am here on what I believe to be a good, honourable, and proper errand;

and if it pleases the Creator to cut me or mine off, while in what we consider the way of duty,

we can bear in mind that he is able to raise up other fit and proper persons

to fulfill his wise purposes.

Here then we are,

in the house with the Cholera,

and no dismayed. (1-9)

The language of this poem is no longer fixed to Mackenzie’s tale of personal struggle, but can

now be read across a variety of contexts thus creating an uncanny poetic–the language of the

poem is at once familiar and unfamiliar. We recognize that it is Mackenzie’s writing, but it no

longer functions in the same way. The reference no longer indicates Mackenzie’s particular

lodging–the house that is infected with cholera–but within this new context adopts new and



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unknown meanings. The phrase “the house with the Cholera” (8) opens into a critique and may

be read as an extension of Mackenzie’s condemnation of Upper Canada’s rulers and his quest to

depose the family compact. Or, it could, as Colombo suggests, be read as a critique of “all the

houses of Canada” (20) or “the state of the universe” (20). As a result, the poem offers the

language of protest for any place at any time. This is an especially timely gesture considering

that in 1966 (the year the book was published) the counter cultural movement was sweeping

across North America, responding to a wide variety of social and cultural issues taboos such as

the war against Vietnam, the assignation of JFK, the Bay of Pigs, and more. To put this in

dialogue with a more contemporary version of this type of conceptual strategy, Goldsmith

performs a similar action in “The Kenny G Letters” when he performs fan mail that is mistakenly

sent to him instead of Kenny G, the famous saxophone player. Goldsmith performs letters in

which Kenny G’s fans confess their love for his music and in some cases expose very personal

details about their own lives. Here's a quick example:

Dearest Kenny,

My name is Jess Phillips and my email address is "[email protected]". I just adore your

music and often dance to it at cool parties where me and my friends play Yahtzee and eat

cookies while listening to your Christman album....Most of all I love your hair and the

way it flows freely like your music..please write me back so that I can gain information

about your fan club, and why it has been disbanded.

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Thank you,

Jess

p.s. I am impatiently looking forward to your new Christman Album." (Kenny G Letters)

The content of these letters becomes estranged when filtered through Goldsmith’s voice. The

context of the poetry reading, rather than the saxophone player’s own private setting, also

estranges the original author’s intent to praise their favourite musician. Goldsmith effectively

reveals some of the absurd aspects of celebrity culture and prompts us to rethink confessional

modes of writing. These types of conceptual exercises are not simply “bad jokes” as the user Rain

Delay states on Ron Silliman’s blog (qtd in Sucking on Words, 2007), but they are actually

calculated critiques of each writer’s contemporary moment.

While The Mackenzie Poems estranges language in ways similar to Goldsmith's "Kenny

G letters", the look and feel of these poems starkly contrasts work by contemporary conceptual

writers such as derek beaulieu. beaulieu’s book How to Write employes an arsenal of

appropriative and conceptual writing strategies that are unlike the techniques employed

Colombo. For example, beaulieu’s poem “How to Edit: A” is an “exhaustive record of every

incidence of the word ‘edit’ in the over 1,000 different English-language texts stored at Project

Gutenberg [www.gutenberg.org] which are indexed as starting with the letter A” (68). For this

poem beaulieu establishes the parameters of his project in advance and then, like a machine,



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isolates and appropriates without disrupting the process that he devised. beaulieu does not edit or

omit any part of the culled text. A similar strategy is used in his “Wild Rose Country” which is a

catalogue of all of the text beaulieu could find near his home. The text appears as a two-page

block that includes license plates, street names, advertisements and more. In contrast, Colombo

does not leave the decontextualized sections of Mackenzie's language untouched. Colombo

lineated the speeches, letters, and sketches. With each excised section (picked according to his

own judgment), he inserted line breaks to rhythmically and typographically rearrange the text to

give it what he calls “the look and feel of a poem” (19). It is this interventionist editing that

distinguishes Colombo's work from beaulieu's conceptual practice. Vanessa Place and Rob

Fitterman usefully draw distinctions between different forms of conceptualism, which has three

manifestations: “[p]ure appropriation,” “[h]ybrid [or] impure,” and “baroque” (16)–in essence,

each designation determines a different level of authorial intervention. According to Place and

Fitterman an impure conceptualist project “might invite more interventionist editing of

appropriated source material and more direct treatment of the self in relation to the ‘object,’ as in

post-conceptual art wherein the self re-emerges, albeit distorted or alienated” (22). On the other

end of the spectrum pure conceptual writing does not permit authorial intervention as seen in

beaulieu. In Place and Fitterman’s terms, The Mackenzie Poems is a hybrid or impure form of

conceptualism. This is a satisfying alignment for Colombo's writing, leading me to position it as

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a protoconceptual project. Colombo's appropriation arrives at a time in Canadian poetry when it

was still acceptable to allow the ego to intervene and present work in a more traditional free

verse form.

In the title of his forthcoming book, Please, no more poetry: the selected works of derek

beaulieu pleads today’s writers to stop producing poetry in traditional and conventional forms,

encouraging writers to appropriate and experiment. While creating poetry that looks like

traditional poetry may be taboo for writers like beaulieu, the significance of Colombo’s

appropriative project requires the use of conventional poetic form. In his 2002 biography,

Mackenzie, John Sewell states that Mackenzie’s reputation has become clouded by a “forest of

adjectives” (11) that misrepresent and denigrate Mackenzie’s contributions to Canadian history.

Illustrating several of Mackenzie’s more eccentric qualities, poet Dennis Lee writes,

Mackenzie was a crazy man

He wore his wig askew,

He donned three bulky overcoats

In case the bullets flew.

Mackenzie talked of fighting

While the fight went down the drain

But who will speak for Canada

Mackenzie, come again! (4-32)

As if he was issuing a direct response to Lee, Colombo allows Mackenzie to speak again and this

time without the eccentricities and folly that occludes Mackenzie’s reputation. At one point in



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time, a very longtime ago, poetry was written and performed to praise and honour the legacy of

warriors and important figures. In part, Colombo is attempting to acknowledge this tradition and,

like Homer did for Odysseus in The Odyssey, his poems seek to immortalize Mackenzie by

elevating his language from the utility of prose and into what was once perceived as the highest

form of linguistic expression, poetry. Colombo suggests The Mackenzie Poems have all of the

necessary elements of good poetry, he writes “[a]ll the ingredients of a good poem are in the new

work: poetic diction, high seriousness, passion, movement, intelligence, imagination, an apriori

(or timeless and universal) statement, and a statement that is inseparable from its structure” (20).

Indeed, the poems do work to elevate Mackenzie’s status as a Canadian icon, making visible

some the politics of Mackenzie. Colombo’s resurrection of language reveals Mackenzie's

engaging ideas about rebellion, the complexities of war, loyalty, corruption, labour and wealth,

nationhood, among other topics. Undoubtedly, many of these ideas would have resonated with

audiences in 1966 and maintain relevance today.

It is through observing one more dissimilarity that we can see a connection between the

politics of Colombo's appropriation and politics of the conceptual writers who proceed him.

Colombo credits Mackenzie as an additional author of the text, acknowledging that the words are

not entirely his own and that he is in fact haunting Mackenzie’s language. This is unlike

contemporary writers, like Goldsmith, who plagiarize entire works and publish them with only

their name on the cover. It is only through paratext and the discussion of Goldsmith’s work that

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his source text is revealed. For example, Goldsmith has not hidden the fact that his book, The

Weather, consists of a year’s worth of transcriptions of hourly weather bulletins from New

York’s 1010 WINS forecasts or that his book Day consists of an entire issue of the New York

Times. While this strategy seems opposed to Colombo’s decision to include Mackenzie’s name, it

turns out that they are working towards a similar goal: they both strive to offer a rallying point

around which communities can be formed. Goldsmith frequently argues that his books do not

need to be read; rather one only needs to know the concept of the book to understand it. His

books, he suggests, create a thinkership. In this way, a literary community is formed to discuss

his and similar writers’ works. This is apparent by the high volume of conversation that has

occurred over facebook, twitter, on blogs, in journals, and in books during a period where

interest in poetry has waned and has frequently been announced to be dead. Similarly, Colombo

has published the language of Mackenzie’s poems during the 1960s, a period often characterized

by its rebellious spirit and counter cultural events. By ensuring Mackenzie’s name appears on the

cover of his book, Colombo pushes Mackenzie’s rebellious reputation back into the cultural

consciousness of a new generation of Canadian rebels. Furthermore, it serves as an answer to the

challenge made by Birney and Moodie. Canada, according to Colombo, does in fact have ghosts

and very significant ones at that. Mackenzie’s body may be at rest, but through these poems, his

language will continue to haunt Canada’s landscape.



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The comparison between found poetry and conceptual writing presented here is not

intended to minimize the differences between the two practices, but to emphasize the contiguities

of their politics and aesthetics. Each practice rightfully possesses its own genesis, genealogies,

and practitioners; however, by acknowledging their similarities we can began to create new and

significant connections. The contemporary and fashionable discourse of conceptual writing has

allowed me to–like Colombo did for Mackenzie in 1966–reintroduce an audience to a ghostly

figment from Canada’s cultural landscape. Richard Kostelanetz notes in his Dictionary of the

Avant-Gardes that Colombo’s “achievements are so numerous they are foolishly taken for

granted” (43); however, reframing Colombo as a protoconceptualist as I have begun to do here

links his work to an engaged and engaging international literary movement and, I hope, resurrect

an interest in one of our own literary ghosts.

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Works Cited

beaulieu, derek. “How to Edit: A.” How to Write. Vancouver: Talon, 2010. 39-44. Print.

___. “Wild Rose Country.” How to Write. Vancouver: Talon, 2010. 21-22. Print.

___. Please, No More Poetry: the selected works of derek beaulieu. Ed. Kit Dobson. Waterloo:

Wilfred Laurier UP, 2013.

Birney, Earle. "Can. Lit." The New Oxford Book of Canadian Verses. Ed. Margaret Atwood.

Toronto: Oxford UP, 1982. 116. Print.

Colombo, John Robert. "A Found Introduction [originally written for Open Poetry: Four

Anthologies of Expanded Poems,1973]. Ubuweb. Np., nd. Web. 8 March 2013.

___. Ghosts Stories of Canada. Toronto: Dundurn, 2000. Print.

___. Ghost Stories of Ontario. Toronto: Dundurn, 1995. Print.

___. Haunted Toronto. Toronto: Hounslow, 1996. Print.

___. The Mackenzie Poems. Toronto: Swan, 1966. Print.

Dworkin, Craig. “The Fate of Echo.” Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing.

Ed. Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith. Evanston: North Western UP, 2011. xxiii-

liv. Print.

English, Kathy. "Colombo's Believe It Or Not." Toronto Star [Toronto] 29 Oct. 1988, SA2 ed.:

M16. Print.Goldsmith, Kenneth. Day. Great Barrington: Figures, 2003. Print.

Goldsmith, Kenneth. Day. Great Barrington: Figures, 2003. Print.



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___. “The Kenny G Letters.” WFMU Studios, Jersey City. 2006. MP3.

___. The Weather. Los Angeles: Make Now Press, 2005. Print.

Kostelanetz, Richard. “Colombo.” The Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes. Pennington: a capella

books, 1993. Print.

Lee, Dennis. “W.L.M./1838.” The Toronto Book. Ed. William Kilbourn. Toronto: Macmillan

of Canada, c1976. 31. Print.

Moodie, Susanna. Roughing it in the bush, or; Life in Canada. Toronto: Hunter, Rose; Montreal:

Dawson, 1871. Print.

Place, Vanessa and Robert Fitterman. “Notes on Conceptualisms.” Notes on Conceptualisms.

Brooklyn: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009. 12-56. Print.

Sewell, John. Mackenzie: A Political Biography of William Lyon Mackenzie. Toronto: James

Lorimer & Company LTD, 2002. Print.

Sucking on Words. Dir. Simon Morris. Perf. Kenneth Goldsmith, Bruce Andrews, Barbara Cole,

Robert Fitterman. Information as Material, 2007. DVD.

Pater, Walter. “Mona Lisa.” The Oxford Book of Modern Verse: 1892 -1935. Ed. William Butler

Yeats. Oxford: Clarendon, 1936. 1. Print.

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