Beginning in 1963 and continuing through the late 1980s, a loose coterie of like-minded Canadian poets challenged the conventions of writing and poetic meaning by fusing their practice with strategies from visual art, sound art, sculpture, installation, and performance. They called it “borderblur.”

Borderblur Poetics traces the emergence and proliferation of this node of poetic activity, an avant-garde movement comprising concrete poetry, sound poetry, and kinetic poetry, practiced by poets and artists like bpNichol, bill bissett, Judith Copithorne, Steve McCaffery, Penn Kemp, Ann Rosenberg, Gerry Shikatani, Shaunt Basmajian, among others.

Author Eric Schmaltz demonstrates how these poets formed an alternative tradition, one that embraced intermediality to challenge the hegemony of Canadian literature established during the heydays of cultural nationalism. He shows the importance of intermediality as a driving cultural force and how its proliferation significantly altered Canadian cultural expression. Drawing on a combination of archival research, historical analysis, and literary criticism, Borderblur Poetics adds significant nuance to theories and criticisms of Canadian literature.

Schmaltz Eric :

Eric Schmaltz is Writer-on-the-Grounds in the Department of English at York University’s Glendon College. He is the author of the poetry book Surfaces, editor of Another Order: Selected Works of Judith Copithorne, and co-editor of I Want to Tell You Love: A Critical Edition by bill bissett and Milton Acorn.

Suzanne Zelazo, writer and critic, co-editor of Body Sweats:
Borderblur Poetics traces a sensualized paratradition in Canadian literary history in which meaning is made between the body and the word, language and living, the mundane and the transcendent. By documenting this practice within a community of radical experimentation, Eric Schmaltz reveals an underexplored aesthetic aim of inclusivity and connectivity—with one another, with audience, and with the very process of meaning-making. These poets sought out, forged, and revealed openings where hierarchal systems diametrically opposed the expansiveness of borders that blur. Schmaltz’s rigorous study is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand 20th century poetic revolution in Canada and beyond.

Gregory Betts, author of Avant-Garde Canadian Literature:
Bless Borderblur Poetics for its abundance of obscure ephemeral publications, collected from public and private archives of a paratradition in the field of Canadian Literature, bless its exhumation of this space outside of normative lingual habits and conventions. Blast the normative tradition! Dr. Schmaltz provides a rare critical examination of the radical fringe in the context of its own internal logic. Bless this book! The scholarship is sound and makes an impressive contribution to the field—expanding the terrain of Canadian Literature into the realm of the Avant-Garde—and the field of Avant-Garde literature even further into Canada.

Myra Bloom, literary critic, The Walrus:
Through methodical research and deft close readings, Borderblur Poetics presents a vivid history of Canadian experimental poetry the mid-to-late 20th-century. Brilliantly situating their work within international aesthetic and theoretical currents, Eric Schmaltz provides a subversive counter-narrative to the received view of Canadian literature as singularly focused on nation building, revealing Canlit’s wilder side. This is an essential resource by one of the field’s most exciting scholars.

Charles Bernstein, author of Pitch of Poetry:
Borderblur Poetics offers a wealth of information about some of the most significant North American poetry and poetics of the late 20th century. Eric Schmaltz provides illuminating socio-historical contexts for a stunning spectrum of unconventional Canadian poetry that averts national narratives while staying tuned to local contexts and the plural event of the poem.