In my life as a reader, Rat Jelly really stands out. I was twenty-four when I first read it, newly-minted as a poet, and newly-arrived in Canada. It was part of the welcoming committee. Welcome to Canada, Ken, and welcome to Canadian Literature.
In memory, I read both Rat Jelly and Coming Through Slaughter in the same year (1975-76). Rat Jelly introduced me to what we would call these days postmodern Canadian poetry,and Coming Through Slaughter introduced me to postmodern Canadian fiction.
I’ve told the tale of how I became a Coach House author in other places. In this essay, I want to mostly talk about what it meant to read Rat Jelly in 1975, and what it means to be rereading it in 2022, on the verge of the fiftieth anniversary of its publication.
In many ways, as a reader, Rat Jelly woke me up. Perhaps I’d been sleepwalking through texts. It was news, and it was new. I’d never encountered a poetry book like it before.
So the real goal of this essay is to “revisit” Rat Jelly. What I want to explore: How does it stand up, and how do I read it now? What is it still offering and giving a reader? To what extent is it still fun to be a pilgrim wandering through this text?
When he was my editor at Coach House, bpNichol taught me that Coach House Press books start at their cover and end at their back cover. Covers don’t have to be mere packaging. Title pages don’t necessarily have to be purely informational. Section dividers don’t necessarily only have to be dividing sections. Everything that a reader encounters in a book can be utilized towards the book’s total effect, and should be.
So the first point that I want to make is that, in that era, Coach House Press books were always different from other Canadian commercial and small press books. And, in 1973, Rat Jelly was a Coach House Press book. It was produced with love and attention. Every detail of the book was delved into. And a reader’s engagement with Rat Jelly begins with the cover. That amazing cover.
The pie man. I still adore the stained glass window cover with the pie man. And though he has a tray heaped high with (rat?) jelly tarts, I have always thought of him as “the pie man.” You can tell that he bakes with a real sense of commitment to the mission.
Was this cover my somewhat harsh introduction to The Age of Irony? Undoubtedly. I was a trusting soul. Maybe Ondaatje was telling me not to trust so much. Maybe he was telling me to always pay attention to the eyes of others in all of the various life transactions that would ensue. And maybe he was telling my twenty-four year old consciousness that life wasn’t always or really on the level. Nor was he.
Or maybe he was just having fun. The title of the book, Rat Jelly, is sort of a fun title, but not really. When it all comes down to it, it is an insidious title more than it is a joking title. And the cover image certainly deepens the darkness.
One opens the Coach House Press Rat Jelly to a blue inside cover and a matching blue endpaper. Nice. Blue is for boys, and I love blue. A somewhat different blue will be picked up for the book’s section dividers. But I am getting ahead of myself.
A half title page, and then a title page. The title page states the publishers as “The Coach House Press.” As in “the original” and as in “the one and only.” And we are not getting away from the title (Rat Jelly) anytime soon.
The Contents page divides the book up into three sections: “Families”, “Live Bait”, and “White Dwarfs”. In 2022, we know a lot more about all of these designations or “themes” in Ondaatje’s life’s work. He was thirty when Rat Jelly was published. Now he is almost eighty. At the time I first read the book (1975), I was struck by how the book was divided up into named sections, as opposed to just numbering them (he does this as well later on in Secular Love).
Looking back over the Ondaatje’s career, is there a theme or concern that looms larger in Ondaatje’s work than families? Probably not. It’s there in all the fiction, from Coming Through Slaughter right on down to Warlight. And it’s there is all of the poetry, from The Dainty Monsters through to Handwriting. And let’s not forget Running In The Family.
Then there’s “Live Bait.” Again, in what Ondaatje novel do we not see a character being offered as some version of live bait?
Finally, there’s “White Dwarfs”:
this is for those people
that hover and hover
and die in the ether peripheries
Buddy Bolden. Patrick Lewis. Almasy the English patient. Caravaggio. Etc.
Looking back, one can see Rat Jelly (and its Contents page) as being an encyclopedia of Ondaatje’s writerly concerns.
*
The blue divider of the first section in Rat Jelly, “Families,” features an epigraph from Richard Starks’ The Sour Lemon Store, in which a woman chastises a man (Parker) who is reticent to speak. Her command is ‘Talk to me, Parker, goddammit.’
The first poem in the first section of the book is “War Machine.” Rat Jelly hails from the Vietnam era. I also can’t help but think that Ondaatje has been reading Leonard Cohen’s The Energy of Slaves (1971). The last line, “just listen to the loathing,” proves an odd introduction to Rat Jelly. Is that what we are going to do with this book: listen to the loathing? Happily, the answer is No.
Again, the title of this first section is “Families,’ and we get poems about wife, children, father. A handful of these poems have been persistently anthologized: “Billboards,” Notes for the Legend of Salad Woman,” “Dates,” and of course “Letters & Other Worlds.”
These poems have been repeatedly anthologized because they are among the stronger poems in Rat Jelly and because they embody much of the quirkiness of Ondaatje’s style and subject matter in this book.
“Billboards” is one of those great Ondaatje “conundrum” poems:
My
wife’s problems with husbands, houses,
her
children that I meet
at
stations in Kingston, in Toronto, in London Ontario
--they
come down the grey steps
bright
as actors after their drugged four hour ride
of
spilled orange juice and comics
(when
will they produce a gun and shoot me
at Union
Station by Gate 4?)
Reunions
for Easter egg hunts
kite
flying, Christmases.
They
descend on my shoulders every holiday.
All
this, I was about to say,
disturbs, invades my virgin past.
When I was nineteen, I dated a woman who was twenty-one and who had a four year old daughter. It kind of felt like this.
“With her came the locusts of history—.” Yes, indeed.
Nowadays I somehow get the feeling
I’m in a
complex situation,
one of
several billboard posters
blending
in the rain.
Are the billboard posters husbands? Probably.
The wife dominates his reality in seen and unseen ways.
I am
writing this with a pen my wife has used
to write
a letter to her first husband.
On it is
the smell of her hair.
She must
have placed it down between sentences
and
thought, and driven her fingers round her skull
gathered
the slightest smell of her head
and
brought it back to the pen.
Another quirky wife poem is “Notes for the legend of Salad Woman.” Images of green and gardens predominate. Here is the last stanza:
On our
last day in Eden as we walked out
she
nibbled the leaves at her breast and crotch.
But
there’s none to touch
none to
equal
the
Chlorophyll Kiss
When I was younger I was bowled over by this poem (and by women who loved salads). I still quite like it.
“Dates” is a poem I have taught many times. I still don’t quite have a handle on it. I hear the echoes of Auden’s “In Memory of W.B. Yeats.” And the poem is sort of a fiesta of poetry, invoking Wallace Stevens and his poem “The Well Dressed Man with a Beard” in its second stanza. The third stanza brings together Ondaatje’s mother being pregnant with him and Wallace Stevens engaged in the process of writing a poem, perhaps “The Well Dressed Man with a Beard.” Creation and fecundity. It’s a nice poem to trot out in a Creative Writing class.
“Griffin of the Night” is a small poem, but extremely effective.
I’m
holding my son in my arms
sweating
after nightmares
small me
fingers
in his mouth
small me
sweating after nightmares
The last poem in the “Families” section is “Letters & Other Worlds,” and is probably the most famous Ondaatje poem after “The Cinnamon Peeler.” It’s the first time that readers get to hear about Mervyn Ondaatje, Ondaatje’s father (there will be a lot more about his father in Running in the Family).
The poem is a tour de force of both style and subject matter. It is both intimate and panoramic, which is a hard combination to arrive at. The last stanza of the poem is deservedly famous.
There
speeches, head dreams, apologies,
the
gentle letters were composed.
With the
clarity of architects
he would
write of the row of blue flowers
his new
wife had planted,
the
plans for electricity in the house,
how my
half-sister fell near a snake
and it
had awakened and not touched her.
Letters
in a clear hand of the most complete empathy
his
heart widening and widening and widening
to all
manner of change in his children and friends
while he
himself edged
into the
terrible acute hatred
of his
own privacy
till he
balanced and fell
the
length of his body
the
blood screaming in
the
empty reservoir of bones
the
blood searching in his head without metaphor
After so much off-beat humour about families, the poems about Ondaatje’s son Griffin and his father Mervyn are compelling and astonishing.
*
The second section of Rat Jelly is “Live Bait.” What surprises me, reading the book again in 2022, is that the “Live Bait” section is something of a soft middle in relation to the first and third sections. I don’t remember feeling that way back in 1975. There aren’t really any “anthology pieces” in this section.
The section opens with the poem “Rat Jelly,” which throws down some kind of gauntlet.
See the
rat in the jelly
steaming
dirty hair
frozen,
bring it out on a glass tray
split
the pie four ways and eat
I took
great care cooking this treat for you
and tho
it looks good to yuh
and tho
it smells of the Westinghouse still
and
tastes of exotic fish or
maybe
the expensive arse of a cow
I want
you to know it’s rat
steamy
dirty hair and still alive
(caught
him last sunday
thinking
of the fridge, thinking of you.
In part, the poem takes us back to the cover and to the insidious pie man. But if these are his thoughts. . .the poem remains something of a curiosity. Perhaps its provocation no longer provokes in 2022. Or perhaps I’m an old man reading this now, as opposed to an edgy young man.
This section of the book is certainly pushing against something. Its epigraph is taken from Howard O’Hagan’s Tay John, and concerns itself with words, speaking, lying and the ramifications of utterance.
They found the skull, fallen to the ground
and caught in the black twisted roots of a tree.
The
stone was still between its jaws. Yaada took a stick and pointed.
“See!” she said, “he was a great liar, and the word has choked him!”
For me, the three standout poems in the second section are the two dog poems—“Flirt and Wallace” and “Loop”—and the poem “King Kong.”
Dog poems are almost a sub-genre in Ondaatje’s writing. Dogs abound. “Flirt and Wallace” merits the whole poem being quoted:
The dog
almost
tore my
son’s left eye out
with
love, left a welt of passion
across
his cheek
The
other dog licks
the
armpits of my shirt
for the
salt
the
smell and taste
that
identifies me from others
With
teeth which carry broken birds
with wet
fur jaws that eat snow
suck the
juice from branches
swallowing them all down
leaving
their mouths tasteless, extroverted
they
graze our bodies with their love
The last line suggests what the deal between dogs and humans might be. Maybe this is why dogs accompany humans down through the ages.
The first line of the poem “Loop” promises that it will be “My last dog poem.” That Is a promise Ondaatje simply cannot keep.
I am not a dog person, but I love dogs when I read about them in Ondaatje’s writing. It needs to be said that one of my favourite poetry books of all time is Artie Gold’s some of the cat poems. Maybe poetry is one of the ways I have for interacting with cats and dogs.
Starting with The Dainty Monsters, Ondaatje proves interested in animals and in the animal world.
The poem “Loop” is a celebration of a dog and of the world that dogs inhabit. This dog has lost an eye, but still does all of the things that dogs do.
He
survives the porcupine, cars, poison,
fences
with their spasms of electricity.
Vomits
up bones, bathes at night
in
Holiday Inn swimming pools.
Of Loop, Ondaatje further says that “He is the one you see at Drive-Ins / tearing silent Into garbage / while societies unfold in his sky.”
The poem “King Kong” almost serves as a preamble to the more famous Ondaatje poem “King Kong meets Wallace Stevens,” which is in the third section of Rat Jelly.
In the
yellow dust
of the
light of the National Guard
he
perishes magnanimous
tearing
the world apart.
He
pitches his balls accidentally
through
a 14th storey window
gets a
blow job
from the
vacuum left by jets.
Ondaatje’s poem “King Kong” is a weird retelling of the movie, the movie that I watched eleven times one week as a child on Million Dollar Movie. I really “get” this poem, and its oddball perspective. And its ending makes perfect sense to me.
So we
renew him
capable
in the zoo of night.
As a child, probably the first tragic tears I ever wept were for Kong, shot by the planes and toppled from the Empire State Building. I lived in New York, and Kong died in my city.
*
The third and final section of Rat Jelly is “White Dwarfs.” Among other poems, it contains six of Ondaatje’s most powerful and recognized poems.
The very first poem in the “White Dwarfs” section is the exquisite “We’re at the graveyard.”
Stuart
Sally Kim and I
watching
still stars
or now
and then sliding stars
like
hawk spit to the trees.
Up there
the clear charts,
the
systems’ intricate branches
which
change with hours and solstices,
the bone
geometry of moving from there, to there.
And down
here—friends
whose
minds and bodies
shift
like acrobats to each other.
When we
leave, they move
to an
altitude of silence.
So our
minds shape
and lock
the transient,
parallel
these bats
who
organize the air
with
thick blinks of travel.
Sally is
like grey snow in the grass.
Sally of
the beautiful bones
pregnant
below stars.
Canadian poetry doesn’t get much better than this.
*
If I ever had any doubts about the poems in “White Dwarfs,” they are completely eliminated by the fact of the section’s epigraph being taken from Herman Melville’s The Confidence Man, possibly my favourite novel. Here’s the epigraph:
So
saying, the merchant rose, and making his adieux, left the table with the air
of one
mortified at having been tempted by his own honest goodness, accidentally
stimulated into making mad disclosures—to himself as to another---of the
queer,
unaccountable caprices of his natural heart.
This is great stuff, and enhances the atmosphere of Ondaatje’s own “mad disclosures,” which take the form of poems in this last and final section of Rat Jelly.
“Burning Hills” is a poem that hooked me during my first reading of Rat Jelly back in 1975. It is very much a poet’s poem. I taught it on and off (mostly on) to Creative Writing students for thirty-three years.
So he
came to write again
in the
burnt hill region
north of
Kingston. A cabin
with
mildew spreading down walls.
Bullfrogs on either side of him.
The poem is cinematic, influenced by movies. And it reminds me that movies have always done a lousy job of showing the writer at work. In part, they do a lousy job because they try to present an exterior view of an internal process. Back in the age of smoking there were a lot of stubbed-out cigarettes in the ashtray. And the pounding of typewriter keys. And the crumpling of paper.
I love the particulars of getting organized that Ondaatje presents.
Hanging
his lantern of Shell Vapona Strip
on a
hook in the centre of the room
he
waited a long time. Opened
the
Hilroy writing pad, yellow Bic pen.
Yes, that sounds like the work we prepare to do. For me, it’s a notebook and a different kind of Bic pen, clear and see through. I always get stuck on “a long time,” since my own process doesn’t work like that. But I am quite sympathetic to Ondaatje’s process, and the whole idea of waiting for inspiration.
After this enumeration of process, the poem takes an unusual turn.
Every summer
he believed would be his last.
This
schizophrenic season change, June to September,
when he
deviously thought out plots
across
the character of his friends.
Creative people have a lot of crazy thoughts rattling around in their heads. I don’t know why he believed every summer would be his last, but I believe him. And the idea of writing in the summer, when school is out, and one is no longer on campus and functioning as a professor—I know that one.
For me, the poem gains a lot of its power from the use of the third person. It’s ‘he” not “I”. Though the poet is clearly the narrator.
Embedded in the routine of writing, there’s the fear of writer’s block.
One year
maybe he would come and sit
for 4
months and not write a word down
would
sit and investigate colours, the
insects
in the room with him.
At the age of twenty-four I valued Ondaatje’s admission of the fear that goes hand in hand with writing. And at the age of seventy-one I value it as well. He is revealing his process, and he isn’t concealing anything.
Writers are a superstitious people, like baseball players. They value their routine, and they honour what works. Ondaatje tells us more more about what he brings with him, and how he enhances his environment.
What he
brought: a typewriter
tins of
ginger ale, cigarettes. A copy of StrangeLove,
of The
Intervals, a postcard of Rousseau’s The Dream.
Tools of the trade, refreshment, and those ubiquitous cigarettes. Two books of poetry written by friends for inspiration, and a work of visual art to help with the envisioning.
Having mapped out the preliminaries, Ondaatje dedicates the second half of the poem to an exploration of the actual writing process. This is the part of the poem I have always found invaluable as a writer. It also was an excellent way to introduce creative writing students to what it actually means to write poetry and to be a poet.
Eventually the room was a time machine for him.
He
closed the rotting door, sat down
thought
of pieces of history. The first girl
who in a
park near his school
put a
warm hand into his trousers
unbuttoning and finally catching the spill
across
her wrist, he in the maze of her skirt.
She
later played the piano
when he
had tea with the parents.
He
remembered that surprised—
he had
forgotten for so long.
Under
raincoats in the park on hot days.
Stepping into the time machine, what does the writer, in his aloneness, discover and remember? Moments of sexual intimacy. Using his hands to write, he remembers acts that the hands have performed. He surprises himself, and he surprises the reader too with this.
Everyone knows and understands that writing is a solitary profession. For the first half of the poem we only encounter one individual: this representation of Ondaatje the poet, Ondaatje the writer.
Now, as he begins to write, other people start to appear.
The
summers were layers of civilization in his memory
they
were old photographs he didn’t look at anymore
for
girls in them were chubby not as perfect as in his mind
and his
ungovernable hair was shaved to the edge of skin.
His
friends leaned on bicycles
were 16
and tried to look 21
the
cigarettes too big for their faces.
He could
read those characters easily
undisguised as wedding pictures.
As he’s writing, and smoking cigarettes, he is carried back to the past and the friends smoking cigarettes that are “too big for their faces.”
He could
hardly remember their names
though
they had talked all day, exchanged styles
and like
dogs on a lawn hung around the houses of girls
waiting
for night and the devious sex-games with their simple plots.
Sex a
game of targets, of throwing firecrackers
at a
couple in a field locked in hand-made orgasms,
singing
dramatically in someone’s ear along with the record
‘How
do you think I feel / You know our love’s not real
The one you’re mad about / Is just a
gad-about
How do you think I feel’
He saw all that
complex tension the way his children would.
In his solitude, in his time travel, he is now linked to other people. Male friends, girlfriends, his own children and their dispositions. With distance, he is exploring adolescent sexual intimacy. He’s an adult, looking back at a previous self—Michael Ondaatje at the age of 16, concerned with friends, personal style and yes, “hand-made orgasms.” He recognizes adolescence as a time when human beings are preparing to have sex and are going through the initial explorations, which are often both beautiful and awkward.
The past is contained in photographs, or in images that present themselves as photographs. Is he looking at actual pictures as he writes? Yes, I think so.
There is
one picture that fuses the 5 summers.
Eight of
them are leaning against a wall
arms
around each other
looking
into the camera and the sun
trying
to smile at the unseen adult photographer
trying
against the glare to look 21 and confident.
The
summer and friendship will last forever.
Except
one who was eating an apple. That was him
oblivious to the significance of the moment.
Now he
hungers to have that arm around the next shoulder.
The
wretched apple is fresh and white.
“The wretched apple” is what separates him from his friends and makes him “other.” Apple resonates with knowledge, Garden of Eden. After all of this discussion about adolescent sexuality, this photograph is about friendship, camaraderie, being linked with others and integrated into the group. But, of course, “he” is the writer, the solitary, the isolato, the one who stands alone oblivious to the moment, but, in later years, now is reenacting it, valuing it, hungering for it.
For me, the last stanza encapsulates the whole writing process, as it is meant to.
Since he
began burning hills
the
Shell strip has taken effect.
A wasp
is crawling on the floor
tumbling
over, its motor fanatic.
He has
smoked 5 cigarettes.
He has
written slowly and carefully
with
great love and great coldness.
When he
finishes he will go back
hunting
for the lies that are obvious.
As a young writer, this poem totally instructed me in what was necessary. “Great love and great coldness” nails down the writer’s predicament and the writer’s orientation. The state that the poet needs to achieve. The novelist and short story writer as well.
The last line resonates and echoes. “He” isn’t just hunting for the lies. He is “hunting for the lies that are obvious.” The subtle lies he will let pass. Or so I think that that is what the poem says.
*
For me, “King Kong meets Wallace Stevens” is amusing. It reminds me of Grade Z Japanese horror flicks like King Kong Versus Godzilla and Mothra Versus Godzilla (not so sure the second one exists, but you get my point). In certain light, King Kong looks a little bit like Wallace Stevens, and maybe that is a bit at play in the poem.
It’s another photograph poem:
Take two
photographs—
Wallace
Stevens and King Kong
(Is it
significant that I eat bananas as I write this?)
The poem is a compare and contrast.
Stevens
is portly, benign, a white brush cut
striped
tie. Businessman but
for the
dark thick hands, the naked brain
the
thought in him.
Kong is
staggering
lost in
New York streets again
a spawn
of annoyed cars at his toes.
The mind
is nowhere.
Fingers
are plastic, electric under the skin.
He’s at
the call of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
Kong is an imaginary being. Stevens is a poet engaged with the imagination.
Meanwhile W.S. in his suit
is
thinking chaos is thinking fences.
In his
head the seeds of fresh pain
his
exorcising,
the
bellow of locked blood.
The line “is thinking chaos is thinking fences” is quintessential Ondaatje. His imagining of the poet’s consciousness illustrates his own. But the comparison in the poem remains that between Kong and Stevens. A poet and a sympathetic monster from the realms of horror.
The meaning contained in the last two lines eluded me in 1975, and it continues to elude me now.
The
hands drain from his jacket,
pose in
the murderer’s shadow.
Why do I suddenly think of Peter Lorre and Mad Love/The Hands of Orlac? Is he talking about Wallace Stevens, and the hands of Wallace Stevens? Who is the murderer? I wind up with a mind full of questions.
*
‘The gate in his head’ has often been presented as an illustration of Ondaatje’s postmodern poetics. It is dedicated to Victor Coleman, the original Coach House editor (circa 1965-1975).
Victor,
the shy mind
revealing the faint scars
colored
strata of the brain
not
clarity but the sense of shift
I have always found the poem interesting but elusive. For me, as reader, it stays somewhat in realms of abstraction. I can’t quite get a handle on “the shy mind.” I’ll concede that “not clarity but the sense of shift” begins to sound like postmodernism. As does what comes next: “a few lines, the tracks of thought.” The poem continues:
Landscape of busted trees
the
melted tires in the sun
Stan’s
fishbowl
with a
book inside
turning
its pages
like
some sea animal
camouflaging itself
the
typeface clarity
going
slow blonde in the sun full water
There used to be a fishbowl with a book in it at the upstairs offices of Coach House Press. That’s “Stan’s fishbowl,” presumably constructed by Coach House’s owner, Stan Bevington. Early Coach House books used to have a “Printed at Coach House Press by mindless acid freaks” notice on its business page. There isn’t such a notice on the business page of Rat Jelly, but there could have been. The book is postmodern, alternative, drug-influenced, psychedelic.
The next stanza lays some claim to being an expression of Ondaatje’s poetics.
My mind
is pouring chaos
in nets
onto the page.
A blind
lover, don’t know
what I
love until I write it out.
And then
from Gibson’s your letter
with a
blurred photograph of a gull.
Caught
vision. The stunning white bird
an
unclear stir.
“Caught vision” is a good two word definition of a postmodern poem. And here is another photograph, and another poem in Rat Jelly that is built upon a photograph. Why Coleman sends Ondaatje this photograph. . .we don’t quite know. Except that it is “Caught vision.” So maybe that is the reason it is sent. “My mind is pouring chaos / in nets onto the page” is again, perhaps, a definition of poetic process.
The poem concludes
And that
is all this writing should be then.
The
beautiful formed things caught at the wrong moment
so they
are shapeless, awkward
moving
to the clear.
“The beautiful formed things caught at the wrong moment”—it bears repeating.
The poem lays claim to a process and to an aesthetic even, though perhaps it’s as slippery as mercury. And perhaps it is only the aesthetic for this poem, not the entire collection. For this poem, it works.
*
The poem “Spider Blues” is either a strange success or a beautiful failure. It reminds me a lot of Herman Melville, who wasn’t afraid to try something elaborate. It’s a poem with large scope and intriguing moves.
The poem dives into compelling territory right from the outset.
My wife
has a smell that spiders go for.
At night
they descend saliva roads
down to
her dreaming body.
They are
magnetized by her breath’s rhythm,
leave
their own constructions
for
succulent travel across her face and shoulder.
My own
devious nightmares
are
struck to death by her shrieks.
What is going on here? The proposition of the poem, as set out in the first line, is engaging, somewhat appalling, somewhat fascinating. The poem proceeds in an atmosphere of horror film. A woman, attracting spiders to her by scent, a sleeping woman, a sleeping partner, and an atmosphere shattered by “her shrieks.” Hitchcock yes, but maybe more William Castle.
Ondaatje now dives into the spiders, who they are and what they mean.
About
the spiders.
Having
once tried to play piano
and
unable to keep both hands
segregated in their intent
I admire
the spider, his control classic
his
eight legs finicky,
making
lines out of juice in his abdomen.
The reader notes that the spider is a “he,” and that the poet speaking “admires” the way that the spider creates “lines” (like the poet) which are strands of the spider web (poem?).
A kind
of writer I suppose.
He
thinks a path and travels
the
emptiness that was there
leaves
his bridge behind
looking
back saying Jeez
did I do
that?
and uses
his ending
to
swivel to new regions
where
the raw of feelings exist.
Is Ondaatje talking about writers or spiders, or both?
Spiders
like poets are obsessed with power.
They
write their murderous art which sleeps
like
stars in the corner of rooms,
a mouth
to catch audiences
weak broken sick
Spiders—spider webs—flies.
Poets—poems—audience.
And
spider comes to fly, says
Love me
I can kill you, love me
my
intelligence has run rings about you
love me,
I kill you for the clarity that
comes
when roads I make are being made
love me,
antisocial, lovely.
Spiders kill flies for food. This spider sounds more like a poet.
And fly
says, O no
no your
analogies are slipping
no I
choose who I die with
you
spider poets are all the same
At the time of the poem’s writing, the insignia of House of Anansi Press was Anansi, the spider. And Ondaatje was a “spider poet,” having published The Collected Works of Billy the Kid with House of Anansi.
you in
your close vanity of making,
you
minor drag, your saliva stars always
soaking
up the liquid from our atmosphere.
And the
spider in his loathing
crucifies his victim in his spit
making
them the art he cannot be.
In Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers, F. tells I. not to be a magician, but to be magic. There is maybe an echo of that in this (Ondaatje wrote a critical monograph about Cohen and his work). I can’t decide if the poem is trying too hard at this juncture, or whether Ondaatje manages to nail down his point. I note that the word “loathing” from the poem “War Machine” is making a reappearance here.
Does the dead fly become the art the spider “cannot be”? That is left for every individual reader to decide. In a way the poem hits a wall here, needs to shift gears in order to proceed any further. And does.
So. The
ending we must arrive at.
ok folks.
Nightmare for my wife and me.
Why must the poem end in nightmare? Isn’t that a choice the poet is making? Is it the inevitable choice? Is it what the poem demands? Is it what the reader demands? That’s the reader in me, raising questions. The writer in me knows that, of course, the poem needs to end in nightmare.
It was a
large white room
and the
spiders had thrown
their
scaffolds off the floor
onto four walls and the ceiling.
They had
surpassed themselves this time
and with
the white roads
their
eight legs built with speed
they
carried her up—her whole body
into the
dreaming air so gently
she did
not wake or scream.
The strands of web are now “roads,” and the spiders do their work in relative silence, carrying up Ondaatje’s sleeping, undisturbed wife.
What a
scene. So many trails
the room
was a shattered pane of glass.
Everybody clapped, all the flies.
The flies are applauding the artistry of the spiders. In this instance, it does not involve them. The spiders are inflicting their artistry upon the human.
They
came and gasped, all
everybody cried at the beauty
ALL
except
the working black architects
and the
lady locked in their dream their
theme
The poem has to end, and this is how it ends. Is it too compact or tidy? Maybe. Every reader needs to decide. The reader is left with work to do.
*
The last poem in Rat Jelly is “White Dwarfs,” and it is well-covered territory. The perspective of the poem has given birth to key works of Ondaatje’s fiction: Coming Through Slaughter, In the Skin of a Lion, The English Patient. It isn’t that the poem is dated or uninteresting. It has merely been eclipsed by the fiction. It’s been expanded upon, at length.
*
As a reader, Rat Jelly blew me away when I read it in 1975. In 2022 (and 2023), it still possesses a compelling power. And it’s fun. Long may it run.
Toronto
June—August 2022
Ken Norris was born in New York City in 1951. He came to Canada in the early 1970s, to escape Nixon-era America and to pursue his graduate education. He completed an M.A. at Concordia University and a Ph.D. in Canadian Literature at McGill University. He became a Canadian citizen in 1985. For thirty-three years he taught Canadian Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Maine. He currently resides in Toronto.
