GALLOWS HUMOUR
ed. Mike Spry
Lindsay Tipping
Zoe Whittall
Ryan Bigge
Christopher Doda
Pasha Malla

COLUMNS:
The Self-Esteem Workout by David McGimpsey
Alienated by Darren Wershler-Henry
Mean Old Man in Training by Joe Ollmann
Billy Fong Parade by Ian Orti & Sophie Caird
Movie Mythos by Vincent Tinguely
Dictators and their Favourite Toys by Evan Munday & Jon Paul Fiorentino

REVIEWS:
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by derek beaulieu
Revolver by Kevin Connolly
Water Strider by Karen Hofman
The Work of Days by Sarah Lang
The Withdrawal Method by Pasha Malla
Willie & Joe: The WWII Years by Bill Mauldin.
THEREFORE REPENT! by Jim Munroe and Salgood Sam
The Rush to Here by George Murray
Occupational Sickness by Nichita Stanescu, Translated by Oana Avasilichioaei

Read by Jakub Stachurski

“From a crack in the dark wall hang loose wires: / give a tug and watch society start / to unravel,” writes George Murray in “A Moment’s Autograph,” one of the opening poems of his fourth collection.  It is a fitting introduction, as the four sequences of poems offer a kind of unraveling, an examination of the unseen, unaccounted moments of our lives: “The soft applause of snow on the window / has left you with the impression of being / watched.” Though many of the poems are borne of the speaker’s internal condition, they are never elusive or heady, as Murray moors his complex, often unanswered questions in evocative imagery.  The three quatrains and closing couplet are recognizable and the form of the sonnet lends cohesion to an astounding range of subject matter, as Murray moves from Greek mythology to urban paranoia to god and the secular world.

Straying from a traditional sonnet’s rhyme schemes, Murray employs thought-rhymes, at times clear synonymic or antonymic pairings, at other times conceptual parallels or contrasts.  This format is not apparent at the outset of most poems but slowly builds to create a level of tension within each piece.  Conflict is an integral part of the sonnet form and this is perhaps the strongest aspect of the collection, as Murray’s speakers are often alone, unrequited and unanswered (“you spend an extra night alone with the lust / that keeps you lonely, and nothing new comes / of it, no catastrophic difference”).  There are no easy answers, no pseudo-revelations be found here.  There is an underlying sense of hope but it is hard-won.

The expansive subject matter and intensity in Murray’s discourse leave the reader in a reflective state, akin to the trance-like state one enters, having covered vast tracts of space, on a road trip.  As with any good road trip, one finishes the rush to here affected in an inexplicable manner, even shaken, and all the better for it.

Read by Susan Briscoe

Many of the stories in The Withdrawal Method feature some version of a young male failing to achieve heroic status.  Generally, the young man seems a nice-enough guy — a book store clerk, a daycare or social worker, the kind of guy who doesn’t like to fight; the disappointed party is a child or a woman with fairly reasonable expectations; and the required noble deed is perhaps no more demanding than not falling asleep on the job, not accelerating towards a child on the road, or not watching what you’re pretty sure is child porn. The moral inadequacy of these characters, therefore, raises uneasy questions – which Pasha does not attempt to answer – about the male psyche and our socially constructed expectations of men.

The first story, “The Slough”, which claims some degree of autobiographical status by identifying its narrator as Pasha, nevertheless maintains an emotional distance from the reader with the narrator’s unlikely belief that his girlfriend is about to lose her entire skin at once.  It then makes a couple of turns back upon itself to veer a little closer towards the pathos of a young woman dying of melanoma, though the narrator’s withdrawal also keeps the reader detached.  Other stories frustrate a full engagement too.  One, set at three points in the past linked by a failed invention, is too cursory with each to be satisfying.  Another relies rather heavily on play-by-play accounts of basketball games to carry meaning.  But many of these stories are expertly handled and offer other elements to vary the good-guy-being-not-that-good theme: the setting of “Being Like Bulls”, a near-future Niagara where the falls have dried up, is disturbingly credible, and the subtle shade of humour in “Pet Therapy” works well.

Pasha, however, is at his best with stories about children.  He never falters with various children’s points of view, and his development of these uncontrived plots is seamless. “Pushing Oceans In and Pulling Oceans Out” is wonderfully written, and “Big City Girls” is completely convincing.  These are strong stories that confront complex, irresolvable moral problems.  Definitely worth reading.

Read by Jesse Ferguson

Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions is conceptual literature for the hard-core visual poetry aficionado.  As with most good conceptual work, it’s not likely to end up in the hands of the guy sitting next to you on the bus, but it will register in small coteries of informed readers.  This book consists of roughly one hundred pages of “superimposed seismographic images,” which plot the physical occurrence of letters on the pages of a source text.  The source here is Edwin A. Abbott’s 1884 science fiction novella of the same title, in which anthropomorphised polygons inhabit a two-dimensional world.

Purists in visual poetry demand that each piece stand on its own—without glosses, without biographical information about the author, or even without a title.  beaulieu’s graphical work here passes the test.  His stark black and white images are always on the verge of mimesis — of suggesting spiders’ legs, architectural forms, saw blades, EKGs, maps of constellations, etc., but they shirk any simple one-to-one signification.  It is also significant that he has plotted these intricate graphs by hand, therefore responding to Abbott’s typed text with that imperfect apparatus, the human body.  This yields slight yet noticeable imperfections, signs that the author has been here.

Yet, though no two poems are identical, the average consumer of visual poetry would likely be satisfied with but a few of these — they appear quite repetitive.  To answer this charge, we appeal to the various paratexts.  In the spring 2007 issue of Qwerty magazine beaulieu explained his rationale for this project, stating his desire to subsume Abbott’s content into a “graphical representation of how language covers a page.”  In layman’s terms, beaulieu, like many visual poets before him, exploits the printed page to interrogate the way we consume and are defined by the written word.  To do this, he translates Abbott’s entire text into a non-textual, non-semantic language of peaks and valleys.  For some readers, then, the concept behind beaulieu’s Flatland will be more interesting than the poems themselves, but such is often the plight of innovative literary work.

Read by Aaron Giovannone

Sarah Lang’s first book The Work of Days captures the intimacy and alienation of domestic existence in supple and surprising language.

Lang’s writing bristles with quiet energy even as it reproduces the monotony of domestic routine. Subtle rhythms surface in unadorned diction, as in the following short poem:

The fruit, flower of
The shape
The use of (15)

By carefully pruning and peeling her language, Lang reveals the music in articles and prepositions: those mundane words that usually perform the unglamorous chores in our sentences.

The subtly of this language is thrown into relief, however, when it is injected with a specialist’s discourse:

Folding blueberries into batter; the dog’s nose
is up my skirt. The taste of benzodiazepine and/or paroxetine (12)

Like the dog’s nose, the techno-latinate vocabulary surprises. In this context, we also find the names of drugs inducing the condition they treat and performing the cure: while initially worried by these difficult words, the reader slows to pronounce each syllable and is finally tranquillized.

In its finale, The Work of Days shifts to an outdoor environment. The metaphorical language in this section is, however, still consistent with the domestic ambiance of the rest of the book. Here the body is projected outwardly, but nevertheless a domestic interior impinges on the scene:

The city has drawn a blank. How big
You are; a tarmac in the cool summer…

I never claimed
Gravity, strength. From the left, a cot

Has great significance. Like the city
We squeeze in tight for a photograph (75).

The frame of the photograph finally constrains us to intimacy inside of it. It’s not that the Romantic project, which domesticates the outside world, fails or is ignored here. Rather, this project is so thoroughly complete that an outside no longer exists: “we” figuratively become the city, the very space we inhabit.

Read by Jenny Sampirisi

In her introduction to Occupational Sickness, translator Oana Avasilichioaei states that a translation is “a dialogue on paper. Between two languages. Between two generations. Between two cultures.” The result of that dialogue suggests that each of these linguistic rotations is routed in a translation of bodies.

Nichita Stanescu began writing in Romania in 1960 and published fifteen books of poetry in his lifetime. His poetry has been rendered in many languages, but English translations are rare. His work is at times surreal and, at others, comical, but always seated in the viscera, always embedded in the translations of body and place.

In “Self-portrait” he writes:

I am nothing but
a stain of blood
that talks.

And as we read through, it is clear that words, too, occupy this position. Man becomes a rock or a tree and this is treated with pain and longing. The rock or the tree bleeds. The man bleeds. Most importantly the words themselves seem enveloped by the flesh. Words bleed. And this is at the centre of Occupational Sickness. The physical anguish of words.

In one poem the cry “Mother, I fear words!” breaks through all the other listed fears so that we see words as potentially violent and transformative objects (and subjects in this case). In another poem a soldier dreams of a horse and when questioned by a child about the details of the horse, the soldier only repeats “a horse, a horse, a horse, a horse, a horse.” Signifier and signified tear from one another, leaving the word to carry the surreal emotional weight of the poem.

The body is central in Stanescu, but the body is not limited to an ego; it is also attributed to landscape and to words themselves. The sickness that infects the occupation of writing is the somatic nature of Stanescu’s words, the palpable blood-flow through them as they talk.

Read by Vincent Tinguely

The glory of science fiction and fantasy is the “what if?” factor. In Therefore Repent!, the authors gleefully explore one deceptively simple premise: “What if the Rapture actually happened?”

The graphic novel has a fairly obscure geneology, beginning with a comic book originally conceived as the invention of a couple of characters in his previous (non-graphic) novel, An Opening Act of Unspeakable Evil.  A 24-page comic was conceived and written by Munroe, rendered by Michel Lacombe, and posted online.  Having invented the post-Rapture scenario for this project, Munroe was interested in pursuing an expanded narrative about the comic book characters, Raven and Mummy, and the strange world they find themselves in.  When Munroe was ready to go ahead with Therefore Repent!, Lacombe was no longer available to do the graphics, but Salgood Sam, who’d collaborated previously with Munroe on other small projects, was eager to take on the task.

The result is a sumptuous feast for the eyes (all in black and white), and a pleasingly complex plot that takes its sweet time in unfolding.  Munroe lends the fantastic notion of the Rapture a believable texture by introducing the no-less fantastic “reality” of earthly magic, telepathy, transmigration of souls, inner visions, shape-shifting, prestidigitation, and talking dogs.  In a sense, he’s taking on a very real anxiety – that the most powerful military industrial complex on earth is currently controlled by people who believe in fundamentalist quackery – and proposes that the power of such a belief system isn’t as monolithic and indestructable as it might sometimes seem.

Salgood Sam’s drawing skills never flag over the epic sweep of the tale, and he feels free to try any number of innovative framing and sequencing techniques.  The characters, bizarre as they might seem – a woman with a bird head and a man who goes about wrapped in bandages like a mummy – become fully-rounded in the course of the story, and even the minor characters feel believable to the reader.  The result is a spectacular graphic novel, full of angels, demons and unclassifiable creatures, with a brainy subtext that never interferes with the fun.

Read by Jmae Barizo

This book is not about insects. A solitary six-legged creature does grace the cover however, and Karen Hofman’s debut collection seems to take a few lessons from water striders, which live on the surface of the water and need to push backward in order to generate forward motion. It is this “pushing backwards” that propels the book, which reads almost like a family narrative, chronicling the past with startling audacity.

Hofman’s poems are infused with a bona fide lyricism which emerges remarkably from often harrowing childhood scenes. Through her exploration of erasure and memory, the reader is faced with the absurdity of the human condition, though Hofman never writes of such abstractions; she rather graces the page with details such as “the way the hills, yellow in June, resemble the carcasses of camels” and “the car-alarm scent of the coyote, lifting his leg against a trunk”.

The tone of the poems, wavering between stringency and sentimentality, expound on subjects as varied as the female orgasm, Persephone, and the penis of a coyote. With unflinching elegance, Hofman surprises the reader with her seemingly fearless confrontations with mortality. In “Fructis Ventris” the narrator “sealed it in sterile jars. / They ferment now, on my cellar shelves, malignant siblings.” In “Cherries”, Hofman writes about “young fruit-pickers … savagely beaten,” ending the same poem with a reference to her sister’s “belly round, delicately veined and ripe to bursting.” It is such paired dichotomies that fuel the language, charging each poem with a type of dark and enigmatic sophistication.

Ironically, I lost interest in the few poems named after insects (“Damselfly”, “Mantis”, “Caddis Fly Larvae”, to name a few). Their literality paled to the longer poem which the first section is comprised of, entitled “Perk Test.” A percolation test is a method for determining soil suitability before one installs a septic field; it measures the ability for soil to absorb liquid. Written in finely crafted couplets, Hofman’s opens the reader to a remote and sensual world:

God is a barbed-wire fence over your shoulder.
A rosebriar stripped of its ruby fruit.

(Where has the young bear
gone, its tender paws, stained mouth?)

I sample a missed berry.
Its flesh furs my tongue.

Read by Nick Thran

Kevin Connolly’s 2005 collection, drift, delivers more immediate pleasure than any Canadian poetry collection in recent memory.  The poems don’t rely on a voice or personae to carry their momentum forward so much as buzz “like a bee on a psychotropic leash”: what is glib can turn earnest quick, the pastoral can back-flip into a surreal dreamscape, and the more rigid forms feel like aquariums perfectly suited to watching his multifarious digressions swim. drift is so good precisely because it satisfies a certain expectation for multiplicity. His fourth collection, the muscularly titled Revolver, is packaged as a challenge (I’m quoting the back-cover) “to the idea that an honest poetic voice need be singular, static, egocentric, and bound by convention”.  45 different revolutions through form or vocal register, 45 shots from 45 chambers.  I’m not sure how many readers out there still wholeheartedly adhere to the idea Revolver confronts; I thought that the modernists sunk that “singular, static…” stuff years ago.  It might be important for readers already familiar with his work to ask if we even have a sense of what Kevin Connolly’s voice singularly would be?  Would we know, without being told, when it was being subverted?  In keeping up with the quick wit and “angular logic” of his poems, part of the pleasure of reading him is already wrapped up in expecting the kinetic, the unconventional — that his vocal registers and forms could change from poem to poem.

“Terre Haute” opens things up where drift left off, a trip back through the seasons, heading south through the States, where “it suddenly makes no sense in reverse”.   Connolly’s poems are strongest moving at this speed, where his surface inventories — plates “piled up with straws and Jell-O and the ends / of fish-sticks” and “White Castles and / giant inflatable gorillas colliding in the dark” — can be stacked one on top of the other in a bizarre kind of syntactical jumbo-burger.  At this speed the occasional lyric postulation, such as “what could they really know/ (if that’s even a word anymore) about us, / about themselves” gives way quickly to the “I”-negating “bright bristling rushing /  surfaces” — or what another poem calls “the underrated glamour of being”.

For all of their supposed variation, the voices in Revolver spend a lot of time wrapped up in the recurring question of how best to destroy the idea of a poetic self.  In “Powder Keg”:

“The violins declare
my death wish uninteresting.”

In “Counterpane”:

“…Interpretation
that’s where the problems start”

In “Company”:

“Bloom says it’s about erasing others,
digesting them, spitting them out as you.
Really it’s more about smothering yourself,
your shaky lines…”

Yet it’s these knowing winks to the project “at large” that come across as authorial and detract from what the collection seems to be trying to accomplish.

I don’t mean to imply that there’s not a lot to like about Revolver’s variety.  “Litany” is a poem that manages to come across as both deliciously hyperbolic and sincere, with a killer pun or two to boot: “Did their throats emit anything resembling a pun?/ No. /So they took their punishment honourably?”  “Pellucidar” beautifully pits the light world of childhood storybook fantasy against the dark realization of violent culpability, where a baby sitter tripped with a booby-trapped skipping rope never comes back again, and:

Steve King was my best friend, until he
boiled down a raptor’s bone and beat my extinct
and endangered species drawings at the science fair.
The okapi and white tiger, reduced to tribes of dozens;
panda, fragile bamboo porn star; the passenger
pigeon, whose flocks once darkened the sun…

Here again we see that Connolly is most successful when carried by the torque and momentum of the individual poem.  Then a childhood story can fan out into broader implications, or in the midst of playing games the voice or personae can openly acknowledge a moment when its guard is down: “I really need Ted Lilly to throw the hook. / It changes nothing, but it’s suddenly important now.”

One also wonders why many of the more overt language experiments in Revolver, such as “Three Sonnets (Assembly Required)” “Three Songs” “Antonia Is Not the Plasterer” and “Fatherly” are jumbled together in the book’s second section, rather than being interspersed with poems such as “Injury” “Revolver” and “Love Song”, which rely more on shifts in vocal register within standardized stanza forms.  This book seems to beg even more for the kind of random alphabetical organization that drift had.  As is, the poems in Section II seem relegated to a gallery of their own, the majority of them being constructed in three takes or sections, inadvertently (I think) establishing a predictable pattern to his experiments.  It feels like a revolving door, to go back to possible connotations of the book’s title: problematic not because the poems experiment so wildly, but because in the final three sections — with the exceptions perhaps of “Rewind” “No Windows” and “Pull” — the more overt language experiments seem like they’ve already been given their pink slips and been ushered back out.

These quibbles aside, there are moments in Revolver when the collection feels less like a “challenge” or “high-wire act” and more like what I imagine it was intended it to be: the work of a poet in love with the sheer range and abundance of tools available to anyone who practices this art.  Connolly’s poetry is suspect of the lyric impulse, of canonical dogma.  Much of the pleasure that arises from his work comes from the difficult twists and turns he takes in an effort to “[scare] that/ cynic heart you worship straight” (“Last One on the Moon” ). Tear the cover off this book (well, don’t really, it’s beautifully designed) and you have a book that buzzes — albeit more self-consciously and a little less frenetically than drift — over the same commendable theme, what to make of: “the / mother lode, the surfeit of beauty, / which on this day is just a fancy way/ of saying lots, too much, skidloads, plenty.”