Watermelon Kindness, David Donnell
ECW Press, 2010
a metareview by Stan Rogal
I was wandering the aisles of BMV, the Annex, Toronto, recently [as is my habit] searching out titles, looking, as well, to see if any of my own books were present on the shelves of the ‘writers’ cemetery’ when I stumbled across a copy of Watermelon Kindness, poems by David Donnell. I was unfamiliar with the book, though not with the author. In fact, David and I used to be almost pals, sort of, back in the day. He’d show up on a Sunday night and order a burger and a pint of bitter at the Idler Pub where I acted as host for a reading series for several years. When I could dig up funds from one of the various arts’ councils to offer him a fee, he’d step onto the stage himself and perform for the crowd. We even read together on the same bill occasionally: The Scream in High Park, for example; Jill Battson’s Fringe venue of Poets on the Bus, for another. It was fun and relaxed times.
I purchased the book, went home, and did a quick Google search to discover that this was David’s final published collection, 2010. I did the math. David died in 2020. What happened in those ten years? Had he stopped writing? Unlikely. Had he passed out of favour, gone beyond his ‘best before’ date, failed to light a fire in the then-current poetry public’s fickle imagination and so ignored and allowed to fade unceremoniously into the CanLit tapestry of lost souls? I mean, David was a prize-winning author, including the GG Award; he helped organize the Old Bohemian Embassy reading series in Toronto alongside folks like Margaret Atwood, Milton Acorn and Gwendolyn MacEwan; he covered the country doing live readings; he wrote articles and reviews about art and literature; his work was widely anthologized in Canada and the US; his papers are stored in UofT’s Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library; he taught creative writing courses, ending at UofT; he wrote songs [which I was never aware of] that were performed in Toronto bars and The Music Gallery; he was a mover and a shaker in his time as well as a person with a big personality and terrific sense of humour. People liked him. So, what the hell happened?
Google had no ready answer for this question.
A further thought struck me: what if, say, I was to write a review on this book, how would I proceed? As a rule, I’m a strong proponent of the Structuralist Method of ‘close reading’ that focuses on the relationship between the ‘reader’ and the formal properties of a ‘text’ — its literary devices, language, structure, and style. This way of reading allows one to interpret a text without outside information such as historical context, author biography, philosophy, or political ideology. It requires putting aside affective (that is, personal and emotional) response to the text, focusing instead on objective study. Well, in this particular instance, and given my [albeit, somewhat loose and sporadic] association with David and his work, where/how would I even begin? I mean, I can’t un-see what I’ve seen, or un-experience what I’ve experienced, right? In fact, I’ve got a pretty strong notion of what I expect to find in the book even before I crack the cover and get to the first poem, so how objective could I hope to be?
It was — to me and my own particular [perhaps, idiosyncratic] state of mind at the time, you understand — an interesting, even intriguing, dilemma.
The back of the book jacket told me that “David Donnell is generally acknowledged as a master of the conversational intellectual poem. With more range than any other contemporary poet, Donnell ponders questions of art, history, and psychology while reveling in the sensory and all that makes us real.” The Globe and Mail obit read: “His poetry is accessible, pulsing with the realities of home, street, and working life. And although David was, par excellence, an urban poet, he also immortalized the characters of his small-town boyhood.”
I agreed with this assessment and felt there was a touch of Charles Bukowski in David’s investigations into the ‘reality’ of daily living, though less dirty blue collar, less profane, and the tales of sexual escapades generally more self-deprecating, awkward, almost apologetic in their portrayal [“I thought, who knows, what a lovely ass, so plump & shapely,/isn’t it too bad that we’re into a serious breakup.”]. There was also Buk’s habit of dropping esoteric allusions into everyday situations that provided interesting contrasts and strange juxtapositions, and which served to elevate otherwise banal circumstances. In his poem On Getting Over a Depression David writes: “Bergson’s theory of laughter is too superficial/you need those other faces around the table gulping beer and laughing.” In Platforms he says: “we flirted all over the place like a couple doing a tango,/she was talking to me about Einstein & stratospheric clouds/while she ran off 10 slices of seasoned turkey breast”. In Obama’s iPod, what begins as a simple gift of an iPod containing a selection of Canadiana tunes to President Obama, rambles from 49 pieces of music, to 49 states before Hawaii, to the 49th parallel [which is rightly pointed out to be more a symbolic than actual dividing line between Canada and the US, considering that the majority of Canadians live below this line [[though David adds, in his own playful and considered manner, “however, it’s the idea that counts”]] to Glenn Gould playing the Goldbergs while k.d. lang sings Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah…
There is no easy map laid out, no accurate GPS instructions presented in order to follow David’s active and curious mental peregrinations, though as in most of David’s poetic trips, destination is secondary, the journey is all the fun, and, as he says: “O there are some unexpected treats.”
So, yeah, I agree that David’ poetry is conversational and accessible, to a degree, though I also believe he had one large foot in the postmodernist camp. I also suspect [firmly] that many/most contemporary Canadian postmodernists would disagree with my evaluation, perhaps due to the fact that David didn’t have enough academic notches in his pomo belt to give him street cred; wasn’t a tenured professor, especially of lit theory; wasn’t a frequenter of conferences presenting lectures and rubbing elbows with the haut monde, and so on. In other words, he wasn’t a bona fide practicing member of the club. Yet, he employed several postmodernist techniques and tropes: an embrace of randomness, which included broken narrative and non-sequitur; playfulness and sense of humour; fragmentation; list poems; enjambment; mixed discourse; self-referentiality [“Check these new poems, it’s 2007, they’re fabulous”; “But no I’m not a pedant, definitely, no, I’m not, I’m amiable/Self-assured? Maybe,/but easygoing, pleasant, fun to be with — /you should invite me for a pleasant supper/I do fabulous grilled lobster”]; intertextuality with its consistent allusions to pop culture and its figures [“I don’t think M.G. Vassanji is the new Camus, I don’t think Jack White/is the new Little Richard”], sports figures, political figures, art and artists, philosophers and philosophies, and so on.
David also had a propensity for writing about food, its importance to us, both in terms of its physical manifestation as nourishment as well as imagistically/metaphorically, and — while the words on the page can sometimes come across as mere description [in the poem The Great Philosophers Don’t Listen to Enough Coltrane [[a poem, which, by the way, says nothing about Coltrane]] he sets the reader up by proclaiming his desire to consider abstract questions from the New Testament, then pulls the rug out from under: “but what I want most is eggplant with parmesan/& tomato sauce. Or/marinate some bite-sized chunks/perhaps,/& have them with chicken & fettuccine.” — when he read his poems out loud, with that magnificent mellifluous mouth-watering voice, well, the words took on a whole other level of sense and sensibility [think of some simple flat pop song lyrics that suddenly fly off the page when performed by a strong vocalist backed by a funky beat and shredded guitar licks, ie: Bang a Gong (Get It On), by T. Rex]. Even those of us who have never been overly fond of eggplant — “the testicles of Christ”, according to the Greeks according to David — or have never purchased eggplant, are suddenly prepared to dig deep into our pockets and head for the nearest market to secure a bagful and follow the recipe. In Jaffa Oranges Are Sweet he opines: “The cranes are flying & I’m eating strawberry cheesecake/at a little diner called Billy’s & I think confidence is just/a question of what you’ve had for breakfast.”
A comestible, a location, a casual comment or parenthetical observation that maybe is neither so casual or parenthetical.
As poetry books go, Watermelon Kindness is a decent [even large] size, at one-hundred-thirty pages, and there are several poems that I thought were weak, trite, and/or unnecessary in the volume [especially the shorter poems]. I wondered why they were included, as the faults seemed rather obvious. At that moment, I recalled being in London years ago where I saw a notice posted on a wall advertising a premier showing of David Hare’s film Paris by Night [with the fabulous Charlotte Rampling and the equally fabulous Michael Gambon] in which he would be present for a Q&A afterward. I went. I felt that the film was okay, not brilliant, and that there were several problematic issues with the script. It was a pleasant surprise to me when the interviewer raised these very same issues. David listened politely then replied [calmly, confidently] that he had written and directed the film to the best of his abilities and that, in fact, he was very pleased and satisfied with the result, that this was the film he’d intended to make, and that if others had a different view of it, they were entitled to their opinion.
I respected his response, though I wondered if he was maybe too close to the material — like the proud parent who blindly accepts faults in their own offspring whereas they wouldn’t do the same in others’ — and required an outside/objective eye. I wondered the same about Watermelon Kindness especially in terms of who the editor was who took it through the press.
I checked the opening pages and discovered that it was published by ECW as a misFit imprint, and edited by Michael Holmes. Say what? You could have knocked me over with a feather. Getting back to my earlier point as to how would I review a book ‘objectively’ when I had such close associations with the author, I was now confronted with the fact that Michael and I had also been writer pals back in the day, where we raised more than a glass or two together at various literary functions in various bars, the Café May [now kaput, sadly] on Ronscesvalles, in particular. In fact, he’d acted in a play of mine for The Rhubarb Festival. Moreover, I have always respected him as a writer and editor of small magazines and I know him to be a fine fellow as well as an astute and intelligent person. In other words, I can only surmise, he must have had his own proper aesthetic grounds for including all the poems in the collection and who am I to either argue or disagree?
It was a quandary, and a bit of a mind fuck, for sure. I recognized that — in terms of writing a review of Watermelon Kindness — as much as I would want to provide a nice ‘close reading’ of David Donnell’s text, I knew that I would go in wanting to enjoy the poems, wanting to hear David’s voice in my head. A memory suddenly flashed that dragged me back to a time when I was taking a first-year university course at SFU in psychology. The professor [a chain-smoker who vowed to happily quit the vile habit if doctors could guarantee he’d die tomorrow if he continued, BUT, since they could only hazard a wild stab in the dark based on shaky [even questionable] data maybe twenty or thirty years down the road, ha, well…] gave a lecture on how a rat mastered a maze in order to get to the cheese. The popular consensus — that the rat’s actions are determined by simple stimulus-response to its environment, plus positive reinforcement, involving no mental process whatsoever — was based on the theory of Behaviourism: Pavlov, Watson, Skinner, et al. However, the professor continued, as he took a deep drag from his cigarette and blew out a lungful of blue smoke, the more they tested, the more problem-solving the rat was able to perform, the more that many scientists were coming to the conclusion that the stimulus-response theory was maybe a tad too simple, that, in reality, the ‘real’ reason the rat is able to master the ever-shifting maze configurations is because in cold, hard fact, it wants the cheese.
It was then I took stock of my own ticklish situation and came to the difficult, though unmistakable, conclusion: I was… I am… that rat! I also want the cheese!
In the poem I’m Not Walking in Circles David writes: “…Derrida & Lacan. Lacan?/Derrida? This isn’t 1961. Hot head. Nobody sends a blue flare up unless they’re in trouble.”
I admit, I am in trouble. Deep trouble. I send up a blue flare.
Help! Help!
Stan Rogal hangs his hat in the quaint borough known as Toronto. He is the author of several books, the most recent — a novel titled Darkness at the Edge of Town — was launched virtually this past April. Stuart Ross once described him as a man-about-town and bon vivant. Judith Fitzgerald labeled him an intellectual redneck. The truth likely lies somewhere in between. In the words of Gertrude Stein: I am I because my little dog knows me. What greater recognition can one aspire to?