Greg Rhyno : Ordinary Eternal Machinery, by Jeremy Luke Hill

Ordinary Eternal Machinery, Jeremy Luke Hill
845 Press Chapbooks, 2021

 

 

 

In 1966, Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers was a scandalous flop. Critics found it confusing and sexually excessive. Robert Fulford called it “the most revolting book ever written in Canada.” Ultimately, it was the big, wooden horse of Cohen’s music career that smuggled the novel onto Canadian bookshelves and eventually, into the comfortable respectability of the Canadian canon. The fact that the novel succeeded in spite of snobby critics gave it a kind of street cred you just can’t buy.

Reading the novel for the first time in 2021, I was expecting a genre-thrashing work of counter-culture. Certainly, Cohen doesn’t disappoint. His prose is endlessly inventive, and his story is playful and provocative. Nevertheless, I couldn’t help but find myself siding—occasionally—with the snobs. At times, the novel’s postmodern chicanery seems to be (in the immortal words of Moe Szyslak) “weird for the sake of weird.” What’s more, while Cohen’s use of bisexual protagonists might centre marginalized people, his portrayal of Indigenous characters is troubling. And even though Cohen’s libertine excesses may have anticipated the Summer of Love, the novel’s sexualization of minors is decidedly ungroovy.

So what do we do with a novel like this? Do we—to use the latest Orwellian parlance —deselect it? Do we drop it into the Aegean Sea? Or, do we engage with it, talk about it, and risk becoming complicit ourselves?

In Ordinary Eternal Machinery, Jeremy Luke Hill revisits Cohen’s novel to address these difficult questions. Hill’s chapbook is an unusual discourse: a collection of found poems culled from the pages of Cohen’s novel, and paired with essays which incorporate additional analysis by Hill’s “friend, poet, and early reader” John Nyman.

At first, the idea of pulling poetry out of Cohen’s already lyrical prose seems a bit like making ice cream out of ice cream cake (Cohen himself cannibalizes an image or two of his own poetry in the novel). But Ordinary Eternal Machinery is more than just a dance floor remix. In the essay “Play Therapy,” Hill posits that his found poetry is a means of processing  language that both impresses and distresses him. He starts “playing with it, copying out passages” as a kind of physical therapy, a working out of what’s not working for him.

Hill’s essays provide further commentary on this process. In “Distance and Complicity,” he explores the critical distance between the novel’s narrative voice and what he calls Cohen’s “most distressing subjects—incest, child abuse, Indigenous genocide, female circumcision.” Hill admits, “I distrust this distance. Even as I’m drawn to the stylistic virtuosity that helps create it.”

John Nyman suggests that Hill’s fascination with the novel is rooted in “a tradition of privilege: that instead of being triggering, these problematic things evoke almost the opposite response.”  Nyman keeps Hill honest throughout the chapbook, and—perhaps most interestingly—allows Hill to reassess his project within the parameters of the project itself. “How do I understand the luxury of artistic and critical distance,” Hill asks, “that accrues to me because of my privileged social location?”

You can’t help but admire Hill’s sincerity throughout Ordinary Eternal Machinery. The poet exposes his conflicted love of Cohen’s novel, and allows Nyman to poke at its underbelly. What’s missing from this exchange, though, are the marginalized voices Cohen co-opts: the survivors of personal and historical horrors. As it is, this chapbook represents one kind of privilege interrogating another. Some external oversight would be welcome.

So, does Hill answer the difficult questions he poses? Is Beautiful Losers still worthy of its place on Canadian bookshelves? In a way, Hill, Nyman, and Cohen mirror the novel’s own love triangle between the narrator, the character ‘F’, and the narrator’s wife, Edith. One trio is fascinated with a body, the other, a body of work. In the end, they all allow themselves to believe in a flawed, impossible tale which—above all else—reveals their stalwart faith in its teller.

 

 

 

Greg Rhyno’s first novel To Me You Seem Giant was nominated for a ReLit Award and an Alberta Book Publishing Award. His writing has appeared in a number of journals including Hobart, Riddle Fence, and Prism International. He completed an MFA at University of Guelph and lives with his family in Guelph, Ontario.

D.A. Lockhart : The Algonquin Park Experiments, by Brittany Renaud

The Algonquin Park Experiments, by Brittany Renaud

845 Press Chapbooks, 2019

There was a time, decades ago, that I lived close enough to Algonquin Park and that near north of Ontario that I would often find myself slipping up the highways past Bancroft, past Maynooth to that great wild place that seems to rest at the centre of Ontario’s notions of itself. And it was as glorious and breathtaking as the best A.Y. Jackson or JEH MacDonald painting, but it was also mundane, infuriating, and full of the humour and pleasure of being loose in the world. I suppose if one were to experiment with the physical place that is Algonquin Park and do so in the form of poetry, one would only be successful in doing so by encapsulating all of that in words. And this is precisely London-based writer Brittany Renaud accomplishes in this deeply experiential poetry chapbook.

          I say that the work is experiential in that Renaud utilizes the truly everyday aspects of our speech and writing acts to craft an ongoing engagement with the physical place of Algonquin. These pieces come in the form transcribed snippets of conversations, receipts from travel, lists, and notes. Take for example “Camping by the Numbers 2016,” in which the speaker lists dates, times, prices and items in transaction lists that while odd in first light give way to an arching narrative of a voyage. The reader revisits this camping trip in the very familiar fashion that often follows campers or travelers around for years. This is the receipt trail we often carry with us. Each one of them glimmers to the experiences around those transactions. 

           Make no mistake that these are not just simply found poems, but rather wonderfully constructed engagements with their subject material. We as readers are brought through their familiarity to the experience of an act visit and trip through the park. Yet the strength and reliability afforded to the collection of these foundish poem moments opens up a seeming veracity of more sustained prose sections such as “It Was a Dark and Scary Night.” Here we witness the absurd violence that Canadians often hint at existing in the woods. With flesh hungry trees and flamethrower toting park rangers, the exercises reads as possible, somewhat horrifying, The form here does mirror the campside joke and story telling experienced in campfires. And in the end we are left with the hazy sense that even most absurd could be real because it was spoken into the world.

          In its experiential and rooted nature I see much in common between Renaud’s work here and the great American nature poets of Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen. All three of these writers take us along on their voyage into the world outside our towns and cities. Although Renaud’s work does not follow into the romantic vistas of zen infused nature of her American counterparts, there is an openness to her work that lets the experience of it all to filter in between what is being shared and who is receiving it. In this way the work provides for the same sort of meditative space that the physical space of Algonquin affords all so many of her visitors. And in this, I would say that you would be remiss if did not spend time with this work by emerging Souwesto wordsmith.   

D.A. Lockhart is the author Devil in the Woods (Brick Books, 2019), Wenchikaneit Visions (Black Moss Press, 2019), and Breaking Right (Porcupine's Quill, 2020). His work has appeared widely throughout Turtle Island including Best Canadian Poetry 2019, The Malahat Review, Grain, CV2, TriQuarterly, The Fiddlehead, and Belt. He is pùkuwànkoamimëns of the Moravian of the Thames First Nation. Lockhart currently resides at Waawiiyaatanong where he is the publisher at Urban Farmhouse Press.