TRAVESTIES, Karl Jirgens
Exile Editions, 2025
After many years of publishing and promoting poetry and poets (note the effective use of alliteration here) through his Rampike magazine and his role as professor at several universities, it’s nice to see that Exile Editions has seen fit to publish Karl Jirgens’ first poetry collection, Travesties. The book is divided into five sections: Travesties (covert irony), Homages (gentle humility), Lingo (language play), Raptures (oceanic pieces), and Dreamscapes (embracing surrealism). The descriptors make it clear that Karl is exploring a lot of territory in terms of subject matter, as well as form, including two very amusing rhyming sing-song poems in Raptures that deal with ecological concerns.
While one section is titled Homages, it is typical of Karl’s humble and generous nature to mention and celebrate numerous characters — either named in the title, or dedicated to, or arising within a poem — throughout the book. In other words, while the poems are obviously personal, they are more about the ‘other’ than the ‘self,’ and it is several of these “tip-of-the-hat” poems that mostly grabbed my attention. The opening poem, Moment, has a Dr. Seuss quality to it, dedicated to Louis Dudek, mentioning Beckett’s Not I, a small boulder is confused for a cat and vice versa, until, in the end, the two images merge: “But, just a rock sitting / at the sidewalk’s side, / its grey fur glistening in the rain”. There is a droll, gentle (even surreal) sense of humour at work here, as in other poems within the collection, also typical of Karl.
The poem He Said is dedicated to Eugene McNamara, and Karl opens by noting (flatteringly, I believe) that the man “never spoke of praise for his own writing” while later lauding the fact that Eugene never said to anyone “your poems are awful… / …go home, find work in a bank.” Karl includes words of wisdom to young writers, using Phil Hall as back-up: “[Eugene] explained how single words can serve as stones / in a stone wall, and how a stone can be a grace note.” Trust Karl to offer teaching moments to poet wannabes, even as he manipulates words and language to fashion his own various walls of sound and vision.
Other writer/artist names appear in further poems. It’s a long list of folks Karl had associations with, either personally, or through their work, and which obviously affected and/or influenced him and his work: Nicole Brossard, Alistair Macleod, Robert Kroetsch, Ray Souster, Margaret Atwood, bill bissett, Jack Kerouac, Judith Fitzgerald, Erin Moure, rob mclennan, Kathy Acker, Al Purdy, Nonal Morriseau, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Alanna Bondar, George Elliott Clarke… the list goes on (and on).
An image that especially tickled me is from a poem lifted and reconstructed from one of Karl’s short stories in his book, The Razor’s Edge, where superstar Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, semiotician, psychoanalyst, feminist, and novelist Julia Kristeva “waltzed out of the elevator inside an upscale Toronto hotel gripping a large chalice of Shiraz. The hotel lobby was lined with enormous mirrors which reflected her pirouette. She gazed at me and said, ‘I know in Canada, one mustn’t drink wine on the elevator but I… I am Julia Kristeva!’” Bravo, Julia! After this shameless flourish, we’re presented with a brief history of lit theory that includes the Tel Quel group: Sollen, Levi-Strauss, Lacan, Derrida, Cixous, followed by how she embraced Samurai culture. It was a bold reminder that there once was a time when intellectuals (and artists/writers) were invited to be interviewed on radio and TV, treated as celebrities — rock stars, in fact — and that their words and ideas were respected and deemed worthy of consideration. My, my, how times have changed! Or am I, in actuality, lost in some alcohol-induced haze where I merely imagined that such events ever occurred in my lifetime? It’s possible, yes, even likely.
Anyway, speaking of intellectual thinking (and a brave ((these days)) step into the murky waters of postmodernism), check out Karl’s take on the Jack and Jill children’s verse as Jill voices her displeasure at being stereotyped and forced to endlessly tumble down the hill after Jack. “You’ve fallen endlessly,” she bemoans. “Broken your crown repeatedly. Don’t you realize that concussions cause dementia, pathological verbosity? I worry about you, Jack. But what about me?” Well, I’ll allow you, dear reader, to discover what transpires.
Perhaps my favourite piece in the book is a prose poem titled Father’s Day: Homage to Robert Kroetsch. wherein the narrator (Karl?) is visiting his 90-year old father — who is suffering from Parkinson’s, losing his physical and mental faculties — in hospital. The piece is written in a manner that manages to convey the awkward sadness and helplessness of the situation, though without becoming maudlin and cloyingly sentimental. We are given the facts as the narrator responds in the only way possible, given that the events are not only repetitive, but incurable: “He thinks he’s 99. He’s not. He thinks he’s going to work today. He’s not. He thinks he’s late for work. He’s not… He thinks his wife works every day. She doesn’t. He thinks people are stealing stuff from his bathroom. They’re not.” There’s nothing to be done and we return to Julia Kristeva again, and her notion of Samurai culture, “that for a true martial-artist, / life is a race against death and paradoxically, towards death.”
As with all of Karl’s creative writings, there’s a lot to mull over in this collection, a lot to consider and think about. Fortunately, he also provides a fair amount of humour to keep the journey pleasant and eventful. As my pal Paul Lisson says, “Crushing and righteous thinking and writing. Strong. Not sad. Not sentimental. Adult, with a cigar.”
Congratulations Karl.
Stan Rogal lives and writes in Toronto along with his artist partner Jacquie Jacobs. His work has appeared almost magically in numerous magazines and anthologies. The author of several books, plus a handful of chapbooks, a 13th poetry collection was published in March 2025 with ecw press. Co-founder of Bald Ego Theatre and former coordinator of the popular Idler Pub Reading Series.
