The Origin of the Term "Dirty Concrete"

March 12, 2011 - March 12, 2011

I've been working on an article for Open Letter on Steve McCaffery's "Carnival" which has been described by many critics (Marjorie Perloff among them) as an example of "dirty concrete." Yet nowhere have I been able to find who first came up with this term. In correspondence with Stephen Scobie, I learned that the English critic Mike Weaver may have been the one to first use "dirty" and "clean" to distinguish the clean aesthetic of the Swiss concretists from work that bpNichol, bill bissett, and Steve McCaffery were doing. However, in corresponding with other Canadian poets and critics such as George Bowering and Steve McCaffery himself, it seems that it was more likely that bpNichol came up with the term. However, the earliest written reference I can find to "dirty concrete" comes in a letter Nichol wrote to the editor of Stereo Headphones, Nicholas Zurbrugg, in 1970 in which he writes, "Stephen Scobie wrote to me from Vancouver and talked about the difference between 'clean' and 'dirty' concrete." Frank Davey was then kind enough to send me scans of two sets of letters that provide more context for Nichol's thinking on "dirty concrete" - the first is a series of letters Zurbrugg sent Nichol in 1967-68 and the second is a letter from 1965 letter from the monk Dom Sylvester Houedard to Nichol in which he talks about what would have been "clean" concrete as "abstract" or in McLuhan terms "cool" concrete poetry. These two sets of letters comprise this exhibit - enjoy!

Curators

• lori.emerson

Items in Exhibit

Files Available for Download	Size
1968frZurbrugg1.jpg	1.43 MB
1968frZurbrugg1b.jpg	1.6 MB
1968frZurbrugg1c.jpg	1.41 MB
1968frZurbrugg2.jpg	1.34 MB
1968frZurbrugg2b.jpg	1.49 MB
1968frZurbrugg2c.jpg	1.47 MB
1968frZurbrugg2d.jpg	1.48 MB
1968frZurbrugg2e.jpg	1.37 MB
1968frZurbrugg2f.jpg	1.41 MB
1968frZurbrugg2g.jpg	1.28 MB
1968frZurbrugg3.jpg	1.43 MB
1968frZurbrugg3b.jpg	1.51 MB
1968frZurbrugg4.jpg	1.26 MB
1965frHouedard.jpg	1.41 MB
1965frHouedard1b.jpg	1.43 MB