Poetry and Infrastructural Critique: On the Kootenay School of Writing

The Kootenay School of Writing, active in Vancouver from 1984 to the 2000s, is usually narrated as an avant-garde: a coterie of writers and publishers loosely cohering around an antagonism towards official verse culture, and a critical view of language as a mode of social power. What gets downplayed, in other words, are the KSW’s activities as a school. This talk proposes to re-narrate the Kootenay School as an experiment in self-organised literary education and a political struggle over infrastructure. Founded in the wake of drastic cuts to arts education and a broader programme of economic “restraint,” for the KSW the question of access to literary education was inseparable from a larger contestation over the forms of life being made and unmade at the end of the twentieth century. Drawing on the terms of what Marina Vishmidt has called “infrastructural critique,” this talk reconsiders the material conditions that enabled and constrained the KSW’s formation, and ask what patterns of circulation their poetic, critical, and organisational practices made possible.

Fintan Calpin is a writer and researcher from London interested in the relationship between poetic form and social form.