Steve McCaffery
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Steven McCaffery (born January 24, 1947) is a Canadian poet and scholar who was a professor at York University, but now holds the Gray Chair at SUNY Buffalo (Amherst). McCaffery was born in Sheffield, England and lived in the UK for most of his youth attending University of Hull. He moved to Canada to attend graduate school at York University in Toronto. In Toronto he met other poets of the era and in 1970, he began to collaborate with fellow poets Rafael Barreto-Rivera, Paul Dutton, and B. P. Nichol, forming the sound-poetry group The Four Horsemen. McCaffery's poetry attempts to break language from the logic of syntax and structure to create a purely emotional response. He has created three-dimensional structures of words and has released a number of sound and video works, often in collaboration with other poets.
Works:
- Dr. Sadhu's Muffins - 1974
- Ow's Waif - 1975
- Intimate Distortions - 1979
- Knowledge Never Knew - 1983
- Panopticon - 1984
- Evoba - 1987
- The Black Debt - 1989
- Theory of Sediment - 1991 (nominated for a Governor General's Award)
- The Cheat of Words - 1996
- Seven Pages Missing - 2000 (nominated for a Governor General's Award)
- Prior to Meaning: The Protosematic and Poetics - 2001