Theseus: A Collaboration
by bpNicol and Wayne Clifford
Toronto, ON: Book Thug, 2014
$18, pp 104
The Poet bpNichol died in 1988 but continues to thrive in the influence he has exerted on Anglo-Canadian poets as varied as Michael Ondaatje and M. NourbeSe Philip, and on all who love experimentation in poetics; indeed, “beep nickel” was almost a one-man avant-garde. Yes, “almost.” In 1966, bp began to collaborate on a long correspondence-poem with his first editor, Wayne Clifford. However, by omitting the dates of their stamp-and-envelope exchanges of material as well as signs of individual authorship, the poem (which originally existed in two parts) assumed a composite, organic sensibility, if not personality.
After Nichol’s death, Clifford completed the first two parts of Theseus: A Collaboration. He’s added now a last third. The book seems seamless in blending its doubled author’s singular wordplay. Theseus is more smooth than clear: It’s glass to be stroked for its texture, not a window on a view. To accept the work’s jests and suggestions, nix the dictatorship of grammar. Because Theseus doesn’t communicate meanings clearly, the poetry becomes an art of beautiful phrases, the dance of imagistic clauses. So, “the slant I see / before night, your knee / caught in it, comes to mind.”
But bp & Clifford also explore the play of ideas: “Beast rears up in its sleep. / It senses the trickle of air / uncomplicated thru the throat. // Beast only asked / what language built itself / syllable by syllable into the scrub, // to grub out what meal it contains. Its claws / pried out by Mothertongue.” bp & Clifford attain an accidental, but rich lyricism: “White without direction .., / blizzard of the poisoned vision, white of the stare into sun, white, white, a bottomless white, the page a / well of white in which memory falls away like a coin tossed / in….”
bp & Clifford amble vaguely within the labyrinthine Greek myth of Theseus, Ariadne, and the Minotaur. The mythic underpinning underscores the poetry’s maze of semantic surprises. No churl should think that Clifford is getting a free ride on bp’s posthumous back. The final section of Theseus—all Clifford’s work—is fine in its own “write.”
Our Obsidian Tongues
by David Shook
London, UK: Eyewear Publishing, 2013
$21, pp. 66
David Shook’s first collection, Our Obsidian Tongues, appeared in 2013, and is experimental too, but not for linguistic games, but rather for its deliberate stretching of credibility. Reading Shook, one can’t be certain what is surreal—or real—or a joke. He follows Mike Ondaatje in this regard, and has a similarly exotic background, having grown up in Mexico City, gone to Oklahoma to specialize in endangered languages and to Oxford to study poetry. Maybe there’s a touch of Malcolm Lowry’s novel, Under the Volcano, in Shook’s meshing of fact and fiction.
Shook now lives in Los Angeles, a site of many collisions between the theatrical and the factual. He presents several poems that purport to be found postcard messages, but with the recipient’s name and address included. The scripts are grisly: “He was vomiting / by then, thin pink strings that striped the sand…. / He heaved at night…. / I’ll just say it. Your husband died.” One could be tempted to address a postcard to the same individual and address, just to see what would happen…. Another postcard poem concludes vividly: “This evening we saw a boy wrestle / a gull to the sand. He held its wings, free / to fly at arm’s length like a toy plane. Each / shoulder snapped. He blessed his meal….”
Another poem, following the style of Nichol, presents two thick question marks (one inverted), representing a woman’s breast and a pregnant woman’s belly: The punctuation marks are the poem.
“I Know Your Body” recalls Ondaatje’s “Cinnamon Peeler’s Wife”: “If you were a city / I would get lost every day / down some new corridor. / I would toss my map, hitchhike / your suburbs, wander your downtown.” Shook’s showstopper poem is “Mutt Ghazal,” a playful look at Mexican street dogs: “No dog // will win Congeniality, they’re all bitches here.” Many poems—untitled—are glimpses, presumably, of Mexico City: “the sky over the city like a / tongue cream with thrush.” This handsome, hardcover volume, issued by London-based, Canuck poet Todd Swift, marks Shook’s remarkable debut.
