Masks by Victor Coleman

Victor Coleman has played with and explored the subtleties of Oulipian procedures for many years, bringing his own imagination and impeccable ear to the revivifying possibilities arrangement offers poetry in lieu of the predictable outpourings of “identity” in the Commercial Poetry Product. With Masks he has reached a point that leaves you breathless in the face of mastery. These Masks confront us with the reality of language’s creative production, pushing identity aside in a celebration of composition – dare I say — as explanation. Joy, he writes, “must have been / of a different nature / while enjoying the beauty / of the clear blue moon / clothed in old pillars / with awe-inspiring light.” Here, old pillars shine again in the light of the blue moon, and joy dances among them, weaving delightful masks out of the language that composes us all.

—Michael Boughn

Victor Coleman was born in 1944 in Toronto. His workload included being a mailroom and copy clerk (where the night editors of the Toronto Star mocked him for reading Joyce and Olson), a virtual apprenticeship in book design and the business of publishing at Oxford University Press, linotype operator with Coach House Printing Co. and simultaneously Coach House Press`s editor in chief (from 1966-1975). He was Executive Director of A Space and publicist/programmer for The Music Gallery in Toronto. Between 1999 and 2004 he was the text editor for the Centre for Contemporary Canadian Art’s Canadian Art Database (www.ccca.ca). He taught CanLit and Creative Writing for the Toronto District School Board and at York and Queen’s Universities. He has received grants from all three levels of arts councils, and in 2001 was given the Harbourfront International Writers’ Festival Prize. In 1996, he and Stan Bevington started up Coach House Books and www.chbooks.com, the world’s first simultaneous print and online publishing venture. Over the years he has broken bread, smoked dope and otherwise hung out with such significant contemporaries as bpNichol, Milton Acorn, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Raymond Souster, Al Purdy, Gerry Gilbert, Daphne Marlatt, George Bowering, Fred Wah, Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Edward Dorn, joel oppenheimer, Paul Blackburn, Philip Whalen, Robert Kelly, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, William S. Burroughs, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Stephen Rodefer, Philip Whalen, John Wieners, Jonathan Williams, Diane di Prima, Anne Waldman, Kathy Acker, Joanne Kyger, Ted Berrigan, Barbara Guest, Robin Blaser, Basil Bunting, Jeremy Prynne, Andrew Crozier and John Temple.

He has been known to summer with his wife, Kate Van Dusen, in Rieux-Minervois, near Carcassonne, in the Languedoc region of France.

Coleman’s most recent publications are Miserable Singers and ivH: an alphamath serial (both BookThug), How to Become a Good Dancer and Hard Boiled Egg Heads (both shuffaloff / Eternal Network joints), and as editor (with Michael Boughn) of Robert Duncan’s The H.D. Book (Univ. of California Press).

Book Information:

· Paperback: 72 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-233-4

$16

Masks by Victor Coleman Boo… by Geoffrey Gatza