Thursday, September 1, 2022

Ken Norris: Rat Jelly, by Michael Ondaatje

 

 

 

 

 

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.