Alter/nations - long(ing) poems: reconfiguration of the nation-discourse in experimental Canadian poetry (1960s-1980s).

In Canadian literature, the discourse of the long poem has been both constitutive of, and excessive to, the formation of a national imaginary. The experimental poetics of this genre is evident in the poetry of Phyllis Webb, Roy Kiyooka, George Bowering and Daphne Marlatt from the early 1960s to the late 1980s. These poetics intervened critically at a powerful moment in the definition of a Canadian cultural identity, between the cultural and political nationalism marked by the institution of the Massey Commission in 1949 and anxieties around the demise of the nation-state marked by the Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement in 1987. Desires saturate the political language and socio-cultural representations of this significant period: national and cultural identity (the 1967 Centennial); national or provincial autonomy (the 1982 repatriation of the Constitution and Quebec separatism); regional identity; the management of ethnic diversity (official multiculturalism); contested sovereignties (First Nations); and globalism (free-trade ideology and NAFTA). The concept of "genre as social action" (Carolyn R. Miller) is valuable in demonstrating the ways in which experimental poetic practices enter signifying systems of cultural formation and, by making such desires inhabitable, subvert the fixity of meaning (and deployment of closure) of liberal nationalist ideologies. To the 'lack' posited by cultural nationalists, the contemporary long poem opposes a poetics of 'excess' which escapes the logic of fixity and containment, utility and consumption, and transforms notions of nationness and belonging. This strategy of poetic excess is also a textuality of desire, yet one that interrupts the powerful identifications produced by nationalist ideologies, no longer allowing for their safe habitation. As a creative discourse, it extends the textual possibilities of language and opens up spaces of critical intervention that help in rethinking the meaning of nationness and citizenship, as these become again highly contested notions in this time of late modernity and global capitalism.