Streaking!

by Gary Botting

80 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1974

About the author

Born in England, Gary Botting is the author of about 40 books ranging from novels, poetry and plays to legal tomes on extradition and wrongful conviction. Formerly a journalist for the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong and the Peterborough Examiner in Ontario, Canada, he later became a professor of English and creative writing at several Canadian universities before turning his attention to the law. Obtaining his JD, LLM and Ph.D. degrees in law, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington School of Law in Seattle before returning to his practice of extradition law and dangerous offender law in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Reviews

[Kevin Stebner · Rating 4 out of 5]

A curious discovery found on the "local history" shelves, and amidst the beige and "prairie" scenes that adorn most poetry books from the area, this shock of pink really stood out. And how could one not be curious about a local poetry book entitled "Streaking!" (with exclamation mark in tow), and from Red Deer College Press (of which I had also gone). A delightful piece of 70's pop-poetics containing a swath of some joyful (if dated) forays into vispo, most interestingly the McLuhan/headline-esque pages juxtaposed to the poems, and also the striking purple ink used for the text - it's a delight even as book-object. The few forays into language play remain fresh even now, and certainly the strongest and most playful in the collection. The afterword idiotically claims that humour was a rarity in Canadian poetics (humour was the major charictaistic from ALL the good stuff from this era - see anything related to TISH, etc), but Streaking has more than a handful of wry moments. I highly doubt the single poem about streaking within actually lead to the proliferation of the actual act, as his wikipedia (so very clearly written by the author himself) claims - very dubious - But a competent effort, a curious time-capsule, and a reminder that poetry books need not be so boringly designed, because this thing had charm and ideas, and is well worth a revisit.