"Sea roads": The Circulatory Poetics of The Song Fishermen's Song Sheet

Abstract

This thesis responds to Peter Thompson’s call for fieldwork that considers the circulation of conceptions and artistic representations of the Folk at home and elsewhere in early twentieth-century Atlantic Canadian literature. It turns to a relatively overlooked group of cultural producers: The Song Fishermen coterie and their 1928 to 1930 poetry periodical, The Song Fishermen’s Song Sheet. It proposes that The Song Fishermen’s Song Sheet’s poetic project is reliant on, engages in, and presents a circulatory poetics, a term which refers to the interaction of three distinct but interrelated forms of circulation: geographical circulation of the magazine; the social circulation of ideas among members; and circulation as it appears in the poetry, as in image, theme and poetic form. This thesis considers the combination of antimodernism, modernism, earnestness, irreverence, regionalism, and dislocation that underlies the Song Fishermen’s collaborative creative impetus.