Fit to Print

by Karen Mac Cormack, Alan Halsey

Fit to Print is a collaborative series of poems whose format on the page is modelled on that most quotidian of reading materials - the newspaper. The writing itself displays a concern with daily events, and news factual and quasi-factual, emphasizing their information overload. Structured on patterns of meaning that foreground linguistic materiality, these poems negotiate the newspaper format to enact a fusion of mass culture with an innovative writing practice.

64 pages, Paperback

First published January 18, 1994

About the author

Karen Mac Cormack (b. 1956) is a contemporary experimental poet. She holds dual British-Canadian citizenship, and lived for many years in Toronto; more recently, she moved to Buffalo, New York, when her husband, the poet Steve McCaffery, was hired by SUNY-Buffalo for the David Gray Chair.

Though she was not directly part of the Language movement, her work shows many affinities with it, in its use of disjunctiveness at a within-sentence and between-sentence level, and in her interest in the interrogation of cultural norms and ideologies through the skeptical reworking of "found" materials and genres. In Fit to Print, for instance, the poems mimic and distort the format and themes of a typical daily newspaper, while in At Issue the poems are quarried from the pages of women's fashion and beauty magazines. The prose pieces in the recent project Implexures are somewhat atypical in their use of biographical and autobiographical materials, especially a series of letters written from a variety of Mediterranean locations by an unnamed female traveller (possibly to be identified with the author, possibly not).