bagne, or, Criteria for Heaven, rob mclennan
Broken Jaw
Press, 2000
“slipping easily
to the quick & more banal
i refuse to
believe this is all accidental”
— sorrow side
I let my fingers do the walking, across the dusty book shelves, among the yellowed pages, until they fall upon a whack of rob mclennan offerings: acka bracker soda cracker, acka bracker… boo! — a finger drags a volume from the collection, bagne, or, Criteria for Heaven, published in the year 2000. Ouch! Time flies and the fact of it being 26 years later puts my powers of recall and recollection severely to the test, and — no surprise — I come up short in terms of details. On the plus side, it’s as if reading an entirely new book through a present-day lens. I flip to the postscript where the author kindly informs me that the titles of the 93 poems contained are taken from the last lines of another author’s poems. So, new poems sprung from the endings of other poems. A fascinating literary conceit. I’m further led to understand that the 93 poems “are interconnected, moving through history, religion, mass culture, and the immediate ‘I/eye’; through shifting voices and the unknown ‘she,’ who is ever permanent” as mclennan looks backward and forward from his shaky position at the turn of the century and the millennium.
Hm. Intriguing. And what of the title word “bagne”? Well, I discover it means prison or labour camp and mclennan regards this image as a duality; a construction that both frees and restrains us (the book cover is a rough drawing of a pear in a cage, though the pear closely resembles a bird and the cage is shaped like a ribbed human torso, or else one of those sewing mannequins used by clothing designers. I’ll allow you, dear reader, to contemplate the symbolic and metaphoric implications of such an image). A title can be looked upon in such a manner, yes? As something that may both restrain and free? Maybe yes, maybe no? He offers a quote from jwcurry at the outset of the book: “if you start with a title, in a case like this, it would tend to direct things, rather than leave things open.” It’s obvious mclennan wants to explode this proposition, perhaps leaning more toward Hamlet’s pronouncement that: “O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space.” The spirit of which, I believe, mclennan fully accepts and explores with gusto.
Considering his intention further, I can’t help but be reminded of those several folks I’ve come into contact with over the years who write and call themselves poets but admit (proudly) to never reading other poets (except like-minded friends) or taking an interest in the history of poetry as they are afraid that it will interfere with their own unique and individual voices. To which my reply is often tosh and poppycock, or words to that effect. After all, anyone serious about becoming a musician studies and copies other musicians. Beginner artists do the same. Plumbers. Electricians. Joan Didion is known to have copied out pages of Hemingway verbatim in order to discover why and how he was considered the master of sentence structure, yet no one would ever confuse the writing of these two, just as no one would confuse the particular writing style, the voice, of rob mclennan with any of the poets (Victor Coleman, Lisa Robertson, Dennis Cooley, bp nichol, Jack Spicer, Dionne Brand…) he alludes to in his book. But, I digress. Though, not really, not much, as everything — in the words of mclennan — is interconnected, yes?
Ludwig Wittgenstein said: “Think of the tools in a tool-box: there is a hammer, pliers, a saw, a screwdriver, a rule, a glue-pot, nails and screws. The function of words is as diverse as the functions of these objects.” Which leads me to commend mclennan’s practice, for not only does he admit he reads other poets, he openly acknowledges and even exalts in the fact, offering a tip-of-the-hat to all and sundry who have influenced and/or inspired him and his craft; expanded and improved his collection of tools; a practice which (in my humble opinion) has served to broaden his poetic world view rather than kept it narrowed to the shape and size of his own navel. I mean, how pretend to offer poems that move through history, religion, mass culture, and so on, if you refuse to widen your scope; hone your craft; expand your vocabulary?
In the poem “with dark coming on and the cold” (fr August Kleinzahler), mclennan takes us back to 1999 when all manner of end-of-world disaster scenarios were being promoted: “dancing like the sky is falling, / like its 1999 // catching the quill of myth.” Note the clever allusion to the popular Prince song, “Party Like It’s 1999” even as the threat of doomsday looms nearby, a doomsday that only survives today as newspaper footage written by the “quill of myth.” As for religion and its close relationship to exploitation and scam artists, read “and how we slowly began to look like her” (fr Linda Rogers): “hundreds of believers appear / to pay homage,/ pray / as psychic hotlines go under / in quebec & elsewhere,” the word “pay” operating in its monetary sense, the personage of Jojo Savard next mentioned — a popular Montreal-based psychic of the 1990’s famous for her infomercials and pay-per-call phone line — followed by “who says religion / is a fading negative” wherein “negative” can stand for a photograph or an attitude or an entire belief system, Jojo relocating to greener pastures in Miami where she hosted an astrological hotline program known as The Power of Love. Taking a quick poke at history’s habit of repeating itself (or, perhaps, remaining unchanged through the decades), mclennan writes in “shards, fragments, detritus” (fr David Arnason): “being canadian, that inherent racism / we all have but do not talk about / i just keep quiet.”
Of course, many of the major themes in the book overlap in single poems, and no way to example this without including and examining a poem in its entirety, as they are generally short, limited to a page or less. Maybe take my word for it. Better yet, find yourself a copy of the book and give it a read. You’ll discover that mclennan not only tackles big issues, he also has a deft hand when it comes to documenting the everyday or banal, able to make such keen observations seem almost transcendent, as in “like a moon among all things” (fr Don Coles): “today i have marks on my forearms / , an unfamiliar script / that none of my friends can read / & i don’t know how they got there.” How what got there, the marks or the friends?
Returning to jwcurry’s comment, I wondered if mclennan ever circled back and made reference to the original poem, apart from the final line, or to the poet’s history/biography? While I’m familiar with many of the names in the book, as well as with some of the poetry, I’m at a dead loss to determine which final line belongs to which poet’s specific poem. Except in the case where one of my own final lines was employed: “the dream dreaming itself out of control” which I managed to track down and identify as “The Corruption” in my book Geometry of the Odd, 1999, and after re-reading (several times) I can honestly say that mclennan’s poem bears no resemblance to my poem whatsoever, nor do I myself appear on any recognizable level (though there is the ghostly (re)appearance of the unknown “she,” spooky, and who is this mysterious “she” anyway?). The new poem is entirely separate and fresh: all mclennan all the time! I can’t offer the same insight about the other 92 poems.
I mentioned earlier my slight digression, while providing a sort-of disclaimer, even walking back a step or two as I enlisted mclennan’s notion of interconnectedness. And what is this interconnectedness that allows me to compare the art of the poet with the slap-dash of the poetaster? Let me once again return to mclennan where he writes in the poem “into remarkable clouds” (fr Steven Heighton): “free // as a word, she croons. that bird. / these wings / she gives me // cant lift me nearly high enough.” Meaning, I surmise, that the work of a poet is not easy, in fact, it’s goddamn difficult, and requires some not small amount of knowledge and expertise. As mclennan posits in his postscript: “you have to learn the rules before you can break them.”
Bravo to rob mclennan for showcasing this fact (these facts) in this book and those many books that followed. And thanks for his generosity and inspiration to others. Oh, should I add that I stole a title from one of his books, If Suppose We Are a Fragment, and used it to create a poem, after which the title morphed into If Suppose We Are a Figment, which grew to a second poem? Paying it forward, as it were, and why shouldn’t he be made aware? I expect he’ll be tickled with the news. As he reminds us at the end of his postscript: “here, we can get away with anything we want.”
Cheers to that.
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.
