web.archive.org

B. W. Powe

️Wed Oct 20 2010

B. W. Powe is a Canadian author and teacher. Lived in Toronto from 1959 until 1996; he attended York University for English studies where in 1977 graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree. Powe received a Master of Arts degree from the University of Toronto in 1981; he studied there with Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye. He received his Ph.D. from York University in October 2009. He was tenured and promoted to Associate Professor of Literature at York in July 2010. His Ph.D is on Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye, their crossings in history, their agon and complementarity (their conflicts and harmonies), and the stirring alchemy of their thought. He currently teaches English in the Department of English at York University. His courses there have included Visionary Literature: from Hildegard von Bingen and Dante to Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell, and Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye: Two Canadian Theorists. He continues to teach the first year introduction to literature course. B. W. Powe is also a prolific author: his work has been profiled on CBC-TV, TVO, CITY-TV, Bravo-TV, ACCESS and CTV. His novel, Outage, was listed as one of the best ten novels of the year by Philip Marchand in The Toronto Star, in 1995/96; it was also an editor’s choice novel in the Globe & Mail in 1995. His book, A Tremendous Canada of Light, was selected as a notable book of the year by the Globe and Mail in 1993. His book of poems, The Unsaid Passing, was shortlisted for The ReLit Prize in 2006. His novella, These Shadows Remain: A Fable, is to be published in the winter of 2010 by Guernica. His writings have been translated into French by Derrick de Kerckhove and Michelle Tisseyre.

Back in the 1960s, McLuhan claimed that specialism no longer held in an age of information. Do you think he was right? What’s the value of eclecticism in this day and age?

A better word is comprehensivist. Is there such a word, truly? We are trying to become seers and teachers, poets and pilgrims in the cosmopolis. There are no borders in this process. Nation states are just as obsolete as specialization. Hybrids thrive; purebreds falter and decline. The electronic world connects us to electromagnetic source, the very energy fields of the cosmos. What borders can there be in such a sway? Specialization still forms the protective territoriality of most Universities. That it is still part of the academic process is a sign of how threatened people inside major institutions feel by the openings of energy and crossings in our time. The one value of specialization is intensity of focus. The drawback is obvious: narrowed fields of attention, no crossover. McLuhan was ahead of his time on this. Electrons jump; atoms always behave in ways almost impossible to predict. The cosmpolis—noosphere of emergent mystical consciousness—is a pulse. Pulses are universal.

Do you see yourself primarily as an author, a teacher, or both? How do your two careers reinforce each other, and in particular, how was your teaching style influenced by your writing/literature background?

Writing, teaching, reading, studying my time and place, experiencing the electrosphere, dealing with students, organizing events, public speaking, raising children—these have become all one activity for me. I see no separation between the processes. At one time I did. Now I see how my writing often comes from my teaching, and how my writing inspires and impels my teaching. The experiences in my life drive my writing, and my family and friends and contacts and connections with others also inspire and mould my teaching and lecturing. It’s all about inspiration, trust, stamina, patience, courage, receptivity. If there are no borders in the noosphere, so there can be none in the processes of your life. Everything influences, everything connects. Still because this is the case, the cultivation of solitudes I think is essential; time to rest. If I’d characterize the work I do now, I’d say it is still High Romantic, with attempts to track the visionary company and traces, cracked (eccentric) and solitary, coupled with deep recognition of the electrified space/time that enwombs us, in the post-literate atmospheres of neon and screens, images and icons.

In your experience, how did the role of the author evolve since you began writing for a living in the mid 80s?

I was more specialized when I began. Somehow I thought it was imperative to be a great writer—in the tradition of, say, Thomas Wolfe, D.H. Lawrence, Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow—all of whom were the idols of my teenage years and my early years of writing. I began publishing when I was 15; and I surely saw the future in terms of being a writer of cultural influence (the result of youthful arrogance, and innocence). But one of the elements that McLuhan taught was the shift from alphabet to digital byte and cipher. The culture has changed—rapidly; and more so in a mere decade, when we have jumpstarted into the phenomena of kindle and e-book and e-page, Skype and Facebook. I’m not sure it’s possible for a writer to have the kind of massive cultural significance that, say, a Victor Hugo or Hemingway could: Margaret Atwood may be one of the last of this kind. Most of the most arresting authors, say Anne Carson or Cormac McCarthy, have an almost samizdat following—word of mouth, plus rarefied articles in increasingly obscure literary journals; small print runs of books that are handed from person to person, and whispered about. Sometimes an author breaks through to cultural consciousness when a movie is made of their work; or a scandal erupts over their writings (Salman Rushdie is a troubling example). But for the most, we work in the electric light, doing what we can, sleepless as ever, tapping source, sending out words, in the possession that is the necessity of our mad craft. That’s a way of saying that it’s difficult to make a living out of writing alone.

As a teacher, how do you manage to command attention in the classroom in an “age of interruption” characterized by information overflow? What makes a good teacher these days? What advice would you give to young and aspiring university professors?

Students still respond to passion, presence, openness, and the urging to rise and create. I am entirely low-tech. (No cellphone, no watch, no use of overheads or PC displays.) That way you must spend your being directly with them. This way you ask them to be present with you: in the crucial moment. I ask students to engage this thought, try to be different. I hope, always hope, that this idea fills them. It may take them to the frontier that they (not so) secretly crave to visit. Dialogue and participation, then, rather than monologue and packaged ideas…To achieve presence with students, you must prepare, though. A great foreground is necessary. Reading, studying, memorizing, experiencing, living words: so that when you go before your students, you can be truly spontaneous, and riff on the lines of thought that you’ve been evolving over long periods.

All agendas and programs should be subject to change when dealing with students. Forceful imposition works with some kinds of students who crave authoritarian direction. But I find it better to urge a light-through approach—work through dialogue, sparks of ideas, debate, seeds of speculation, encouragement of their intuitions, riffs, and personal engagement. Of course, students must be aware of the systems that are in place. (I always urge them to read Kafka closely: he’s a good guide for the way institutions often act.) But the primary whim must be, try to be different. If you can communicate this, then you have made a start.

Students may not be literary anymore—or, rather, it’s only a very few who are so—but they are enthusiastic and keen to learn; they are dreamers and users of the new machines. They carry a great light in them; you can sense it. They are inside the great light of the noosphere. So I often find myself in the position of also learning much from them. They are my guides too. At the end, when students are ready to move on, they should obey Zarathustra’s injunction: “Now do without me.” Good teachers then become ground, not figure. It’s always important to be guidepost, not a fence or a prison. Cults of the teacher should be avoided, at all costs.

In the late 70s you studied at the University of Toronto with Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye. You then took a rather long break from university, but returned decades later to complete your PhD at York U (2009). Why did you leave academia, what did you do in between, and what do make of the present tendency to rush through graduate school? Or, put slightly differently, how did your time away from academia inform your experience as mature doctoral student?

I was in the last class that Marshall McLuhan taught in 1978. At the same time, I was attending Frye’s Myth Criticism course. One was at the Centre for Culture & Technology; one was at Victoria College. Their offices were mere meters from one another. They were both part of the Department of English. Robertson Davies was the Master of Massey College then. Jay Macpherson was also on campus. It was a heady time. I took it for granted, sadly. I thought this is the University as Kosmos. But it wasn’t always to be the case, I’d find, in subsequent years and experiences with large teaching institutions. All my attempts to encourage energies of invention at universities—three conferences, new kinds of courses, interactions with students, interdisciplinary possibilities, outreach events with the Moses Znaimer Museum of Television—have been an attempt to recreate that vortex I first vitally encountered in the late 70s. I thrived (more or less) inside academia and outside for many years—working on contracts, writing books and articles. Single parenting soon demanded a steady income. When I became tenure-tracked at York in 2005, I thought all was well. Then I was, abruptly, told I must finish my Ph.D., or tenure would be impossible. This is part of the new accreditation zeal of major institutions. (Northrop Frye never had a Ph.D.)

I rarely thought of teaching or writing in terms of career. Ambitious though I surely when I was in my 20s and early 30s, when my first books were being published, I did think of what I did in terms of calling, or vocation. I rarely read the fine print. This had its drawback, so I learned, dramatically. The result was an accelerated Ph.D. I went from field exams to dissertation and defence of the thesis in what is likely a record-time of around 18 months. There was a cost, on health and family. But it was done by October 2009, when I received my doctorate. The tenure process then went into high-gear. And I was officially tenured and promoted to Associate Professor in 2010. My experiences have told me that one should be clear about institutional demands, if one intends to work within them. Still, now I have the liberty to continue to teach what I want, and to write my books, and to set up new initiatives—the McLuhan Centre for the Study of Literacies (www.mcluhanliteracies.ca); and to explore and contemplate the configurations of electric information and source-flow. Is it a highly privileged position? Yes. I’m aware, with some humility (I admit), how much it costs to achieve such a position of privilege. It’s a battle. Few get there now. Tenure isn’t handed out the way it once was—the way it was when McLuhan and Frye began at the U of T in the 1930s and 40s. It requires a lot from you; but once there, a degree (as it were) of liberty has been granted to you in your culture. It’s a position I intend to use to the maximum.

Not only did you study under McLuhan and Frye, but you wrote your doctoral dissertation about them – “their contact, conflicts, harmonies, alchemy,” as you put it. What were some of the most important points of contact between them?

My doctoral dissertation looked at the conflicts and complementarities between Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye over the thirty years or so of their contact at the University of Toronto. The thesis sees them as our primary visionary—seer cultural critics and thinkers. It also sees them as prophetic—their work is massively influential, and deeply prescient. They are at the core of our originality. And they are still ahead of us. They met at a Victoria College social gathering in 1946. They were shaped by literary studies—and their first point of contact was likely a mutual fascination for the dissident visionary William Blake. They were colleagues in the Department of English for thirty years; they discussed curricula, helped students, guided readings, developed reading lists. It’s been said that they were once asked to conduct a joint seminar on Finnegans Wake, a book of pivotal importance to both. Frye centres his visionary intentions for the future of literary criticism in finding the “keys to dreamland”, a reference to the Wake, on the last page of the Anatomy of Criticism; every book McLuhan composed after 1969 has references to the Wake. McLuhan instructs us in media ecology; he is the pioneer for this primary 21st century activity. Frye supplies us with Blakean imagination and the great code narrative—the eternal quest for identity. McLuhan’s mission: to guide us towards reading and absorbing our hyper-evolutionary whirlwind…Frye’s mission: read books not for escapist pleasure, but to conceive and recreate the world according to the singular disciplined dream that is literature. They were both visionary humanists, who sought to restore spiritual and intellectual nourishment to their readers and audiences. They are shifting figures and grounds to one another.

You mentioned before this interview that you were working on a McLuhan/Frye book. Is it an extension of your PhD thesis?

My book on McLuhan and Frye is tentatively called Apocalypse and Alchemy: Visions of Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye. It is an expansion and revision, a deepening and a refreshing (through more reflection and research), of the dissertation. I hope to restore to public view the necessary vision of the essential conjunction of our two most original figures. I look at their apocalyptic turns of thought, at their critiques of one another (often trenchant). The book chronicles their latent harmonies of thought, and their shrewd and sometimes passionate appraisals of each other’s genius, their shared literary heritages and their sense of being at the start of an audacious invisible school of communications. The latter sections of the book present how “the medium is the message” can be merged with “the great code” narrative in an alchemy that could fuel a new philosophical approach to understanding. Call the last chapters an attempt to evoke (and invoke) electricity and grace.

In 1997, you organized an event at York University in Toronto entitled “Marshall McLuhan: What if He Was Right?” What was it about and what other events is York University organizing to commemorate the McLuhan Centenary?

The 1997 McLuhan Conference was the first of three—and of a projected four—that I helped to initiate and direct at York University. The other two conferences were on The Trudeau Era; and the Living Literacies’ Conference of 2002. The fourth is tentatively planned for 2012. It is to be on the McLuhan/Frye Conflict and Complementarity. We will be looking a media transformations of culture—context; and at how the narrative of quest and identity endures—content. I believe the 1997 Conference was the first of its kind on McLuhan (though you would have to check this to confirm my belief.) The McLuhan/Frye event in 2012 will be to extend the McLuhan centenary celebrations for one more year; and to honour Frye’s centenary, which is that year. I’m hoping to initiate lectures through the McLuhan Centre by Doug Coupland, among others, to mark the 100 year anniversary. I continue to teach the course, Two Canadian Theorists: Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye, in the Department of English at York.

The next sessions begin in January 2011.

What are you currently working on and when is your next book coming out?

What am I working on? Living, at the moment. Or: Facing eternity, each day. My children have moved out into campus residence at York; call this time la vita nuova. There are two new trees planted in my back yard to honour my children’s move, a Linden for my daughter, a Maple for my son. The trees need nurturing if they are to stand on their own through the coming storms of late autumn and the winter. I’m going on Sabbatical in 2011/2012, so I can travel to Cuba, Italy, Spain. Sometimes you just have to live, not write or teach.

Still: there are projects underway:

There is the McLuhan/Frye book (see above).

There is a novella-fable, called These Shadows Remain, to be published by Guernica in the winter of 2010/11.

There is a new book of poems, likely to be called Haloes & Hieroglyphs, almost done.

There is a book of fragments, aphorisms, lines, parables, glimpses and musings. (No title yet.)

There is a trilogy of novels, called The Forking of the Ways. (One novel set in the 18th century at Ferney, with Voltaire, Casanova, Rousseau, and de Sade, as speakers; another novel set in the contemporary political world in Canada; the last, a science fiction work set 300 years in the future, concerning a scientist-dreamer, a hermaphroditic figure who is in pursuit of the music of the spheres, with a side-panel story about Pythagoras and his daughter, who I am suggesting was Sappho, and his son Elijah, who I am suggesting founded the Middle-Eastern Mysteries.)

There is a speculative-image work on evolutionary consciousness and the noosphere, called Opening Time: On the Energy Threshold.

There is a possible book on Cuba, and how its cusp-country, on the edge of the digital revolution: what happens when the socialist revolution meets the power of the screens and cells?

There is the nurturing of the contacts with the University of Havana.

There is the McLuhan Centre Initiative for the Study of Literacies.

There is the development of ties and alliances at York with the Founders College International Centre and with the reviving Canadian Studies’ Program.

There is the development of new courses for the Department of English when I return to teaching in 2012.

…An agenda, then, for many lives to live and many miles to go before I sleep (to rewrite Frost).

—

© B. W. Powe and Figure/Ground Communication. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to B. W. Powe and Figure/Ground Communication with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Your feedback is welcome and appreciated! If you like what you see, please consider voting, commenting or donating to help us grow and expand. Figure/Ground is currently on the outlook for collaborators to help with the expansion of this section into the largest repository of scholarly interviews on the net. For specific suggestions regarding future/potential interviewees or to obtain permission to republish any of the interviews already on the site, please contact me directly at laureano@alumni.sfu.ca.