Pain Not Bread : Pain Not Bread is a collaborative writing group formed in 1990 by poets Roo Borson and Kim Maltman and visual artist Andy Patton. The name is derived from the circumstances surrounding the death of French critic Roland Barthes (who was himself responsible for the concept of the "death of the author" and who was hit by a bread truck and killed in 1980). Pain Not Bread produced a collection of poetry titled, Introduction to the Introduction to Wang Wei (Brick, 2000). The group won the 1993 Malahat Long Poem Prize, was short-listed twice for the National Magazine Awards, and was awarded the Earle Birney Prize for Poetry by Prism Magazine.
Borson, Maltman and Patton started to work together in 1989, because they found it curious that each of them was playing with others' texts to create new poetry. All three were using "found" texts like advertisements (e.g. Roo using Mastercard ads) and began to make collages. The early poems in Poetry Canada Review reflect this stage.
In 1990, Roo and Kim were in China where they encountered English translations of Chinese poets. They bought a copy of a translation of the poems of Wang Wei for Andy Patton. From this point on, they incorporated portions of this text to construct poetry. In generating the early parts of the collaborative book they used only the words found in the text. Each was looking at word placement rather than reading for meaning. When one participant found a snippet of interest s/he would immediately send to the others and all participants would decide on all of the parts of the text. The first twelve poems formed a group: these they sent to the CBC Literary Competition and received positive feedback.
The poems are not composed of individually authored portions but each member worked collaboratively on each bit. At different junctures, new parts to the text would be suggested. If the process stalled, a member of the group would find a new vein and begin the process again. Every now and then other poetic voices would insert themselves into the work: e.g. Matthew Arnold or Ovid, and Borson checked meticulously that they had not inadvertently borrowed words from other authors. When Roo Borson and Kim Maltman went to Australia, there was more email involved and hence more communication about the texts.
Once the final structure of the work was decided and the group had looked at writing an afterword, they then generated 5-10 additional poems to fill the work out. As part of the process, Roo, Kim, Andy and Andy's wife Janice Gurney made a stencil of characters from Doo Foo poetry which they painted in an abandoned building in Georgetown (a direct link to Andy Patton's previous installation work in abandoned buildings). Pain Not Bread considered their poetry to also to have a strong element of group performance, evident in their group readings.
