The Poetics of Scraps: Colonialism, Conceptualism, and Hauntology in Contemporary Canadian Poetry
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over the last fifteen to twenty years, poets writing in Canada have made use of the techniques typically associated with the conceptual writing movement to write poetry that engages with pre-existing text in order to respond to the enduring legacies of the past. These approaches use found language in poetry as a way of symbolically representing the ideologies embodied within those pieces of text. The relationship that this creates between their carefully selected source texts and the poetry those authors create is best understood as hauntological, because it uses literary form to highlight the implicit presence within the present of ideological spectres that might otherwise be thought of as being confined to the past. This connection allows poets like Jordan Abel, M. NourbeSe Philip, Shane Rhodes, and Syd Zolf to use found language conceptual poetry as a formal technique that helps to interrogate and examine the settler-colonial legacies haunting our contemporary existence and to encourage readers to do the same in order to break free from those haunting influences and work towards a different future than those textual records of the settler-colonial archives might prescribe for us. As such, this dissertation argues that, rather than generating an anti-affective, apolitical poetics through a retreat into the conceptual, these poets generate emotionally impactful and activist conceptual poetry that reckons with the unjust past and present in the service of decolonial and anti-racist futures.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.030 | 0.049 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".