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SwiftCurrent: Tangled Histories and Bodily Poetics

Volume 32, Number 2 (2007)

Machine-Age Discourse, Mechanical Ballet, and Popular Song as Alternative Document in Dorothy Livesay’s "Day and Night"

  • Brenda Carr Vellino
Submitted
December 5, 2008
Published
2007-06-06

Abstract

Dorothy Livesay's "Day and Night" has often been cited as the proof text for her 1969 essay on the Canadian documentary poem, but its "documents" are not those conventionally incorporated in the documentary film and literary traditions. Livesay creates a documentary effect in the poem through dialogic popular culture citation and recontextualization. Documentary poem theory, such as that of Michael Thurston and Tyrus Miller, offers a point of departure for understanding the musical and film intertexts in "Day and Night" within the tradition of documentary modernism practiced by the socialist left. The poem participates in a horizon of "Machine Age" discourse prominent in a variety of art forms, in race politics in the labour movement, and in what Candida Rifkind sees as the disavowal of a bourgeois life of leisure by the socialist intelligentsia, who came to see their intellectual/artistic work as a form of labour positioned alongside the common worker.