from Report from the Reid Society, Vol. 1, No. 1
Flat Side brims with humour and
bereavement.
The humour is everywhere evident and
invigorating, and it can be laugh-out-loud
entertaining. It
is always fresh, and it flirts with the absurd and the macabre. Endowed with
Reid’s folksy and extended personifications, things dwell in very human ways on
their prospects and their successes. Curling rocks aspire to what they suppose
are their fitting places on the ice. They watch with apparent dismay as other
uppity rocks arrive at more satisfactory sites, “whispering their thank yous /
and condolences.” Telephones abandoned in an orgy of new technology wait in
storage with their wires and diaphragms to hear despondent messages and faint
greetings. The telephones, rendered obsolete, speak only in murmurs and
whispers.
The book is full of such whimsy, but
it also treats the comic scenes as occasions of pain and loss. The telephones
never connect, not really, not in any sustained way at least, and they are “depleted
to the heart.” Even the smart-alecky pun that accompanies the telephone story
registers a sudden sadness at having lost what most matters: “they can no
longer remember what it feels / to be held in someone’s hands.” The zucchini, “bruised
souls,” who in another poem drag themselves cumbrously across the dirt, feel “nothing
more / than . . . left behind.” It’s a playful notion, the race of the
zucchini, but the zucchini who languish in disappointment have in some way to
make up for their defeat. In the poet’s mind that means learning “how to /
imagine themselves as something else.” The eventuality is realized in “Flat
Side,” which outlandishly announces that the poet is transfiguring into a
flat-sided man. In free-roving gests and meditations the poet tries out the
permutations. The flat-sidedness, we soon learn, can be accounted for within
scientific discourse. The terms that abound—”interstitial fluids” and “thermal
gradient” and “laminar passages” and “the bonds dissolute among the spicules /
and microscopic cavities” and “aggregated molecules”—seem to be based in firm
no-question understandings. They also sound like a mad parody—a voice that is
too much of, too satisfied with, such authority. In any event the poem does not
settle for the jocularity or the erudition it enjoys. It arrives, like so many
poems in Flat Side, at a quiet wisdom: We “release and spring back
resolutely,” because “we are only remembering / the persistent order of
ourselves.” Though “unbalanced,” our identities are “persistent.” And so the
poet can ask the question of the day that defines our lives: “is it also not
misshapen / but ours nonetheless?”. How
like are we to the curling rocks that risk a long and precarious way across the
ice: “now that all of those who promised / to come with us are gone / how will
we return?”. How are we to deal with such loss? How are we not to see ourselves
in the rocks and the telephones, their yearnings and disappointments?
The book attends to what for Reid
abides beneath, or within, the world’s satisfactions and vexations. It thinks
of the self as variously necessary, mislaid, unfound, or unrealized. Though the
guffawingly funny “Atkinson’s Ghost” laughs at a dotty spiritualist, it
acknowledges “the unfinished part of everyone, the surplus aura that every host
leaves behind.” In another poem “the most necessary / version of ourselves is
always brought back to us,” even “when we thought / we could let it go.”
Another poem, “Near the Beisecker Bio-Medical Waste Incinerator” hears in the
steam issuing from the windy “throat of the world,” and from an incinerator
that is spilling sooty particles into the air, “some music that really did call
the presence of each / living thing onto itself.” The poet does not turn from
the dreck of the facility, or the horrific details of an illness, or from his
own pain in losing something of his son into the fire. In a religious
vocabulary distributed across the poem—”retributive,” “innocence,” “ceremonial,”
“snake,” “ritualistic,” “cask,” “cairns,” “cadaverous,” “smoke,” “fire”—it
names the mutualities of life. The experience culminates in the intimate terms
of personal loss. The skinny bewildered son who has died beyond the reach of
the father’s arms is held in the poem “as if love is always the knowledge / of
what it has not accomplished.” The sacramental sense is powerfully realized, no
easy matter, here and elsewhere (as in another poem the family gathering around
the table, say).
The world, we see, may be renewed in
the seasonal turns which we experience in simple concrete words: the trees will
“stir with the first warm rains.” There are returns, there are recoveries.
There are discoveries. Many of the poems end on a high note. This is especially
true of “Previous Owners,” a brilliant comedy about visitors who arrive
unexpectedly on the poet’s doorstep. Their incredulous stories about the house’s
remakings and occupyings gather force until the current occupants are swept
into a fervor of renovation. “We restored,” “We planted,” “We made.” The latest
effort is so determined and so thorough it is almost laughable. In a bout of
enthusiasm the new occupants “scraped down / through . . . through the coral
and lime and cream, down through / the undercoat”—all the way through the
flotsam of earlier inhabitants—until at last they reach “the original wood, and
/ started over again.” They reach bedrock, Reid might well have said. The
repetitions in grammar (we did, we did, we did) and in preposition (“through”
and “through” and “through” again) draw out the undeterred force of their
intentions. We feel amused at their susceptibility to the story, but we see
that the stressings also articulate a reaching for something else. They bring
the almost dottering gestures of those who had once lived in the house to a
poignant connection. They are portrayed as silly in their ardor, true, but they
are construed as sympathetic too in looking toward a larger life: “trying to
remember / What it is they left behind,” where “they had penciled in / the
small additions of their love. Elsewhere a strange woman, who impossibly sees a
new-born or unborn infant as “crying down towards the earth,” decides “there
must be more of you somewhere / . . . left behind, or escaped.” Here, as so
often in Reid, the route to meaning lies down and through. The trajectory is
strongly felt in a line that fuses the natal and the Edenic: “And then you fell
alone into the dilated world.” Loss and jeopardy permeate Reid’s book. He
searches for meaning or a smidgeon of innocence to help when you are “out here
on your own” among “old messages, unlisted.” Wisdom lies in the forgotten or
the not-yet perceived. The stance is certainly elegiac for Reid, but it is
never regressive. In his writing we live uncompromisingly in the present.
It may seem surprising to lean that
Reid’s world—crammed with its obdurate materials—is not untended. But in
unperturbed moments we do see that “the stars twinkled their / inevitable
advice towards us” when we are born, and that “switch after switch of starlight
/ blinks on as if it would light the way” for the zucchini going to
who-knows-where. The speaker in these lines smiles in small equivocation—Is the
twinkling for sure “inevitable”? and is the perky intercession of the stars
only an “as if”?—but the caring, frisking lights do turn on. From even the
bleak and dispiriting incinerator (“paid for by my tax dollars” Reid dryly
notes), which consumes remnants from human bodies, the steam “falls tenderly /
upon us all.” And so, he measures the ordinary and extraordinary world in
ceremonial ways. For all the mockery and all the mad inventiveness in the book;
for all its erudition; for all the wonderful vital and parodied voices (think
of the confiding, hectoring, ingratiating mother in “Lost”) Reid’s poetry lays
itself in simple risk and hope before us. The earnest and perplexed visitors to
the poet’s home, who see and do not see, in the visionary terms that end “Previous
Owners,” are prepared to step
over the threshold, with all their dates
mixed up
and still, as they enter the persistent
light
of this old house, they say they
recognize everything.
Staunch
though the poems may be, they invite us into tenderness and a quiet hope that
we might invent, if not come upon, glimpses of a fine and beloved place. They
do so in simple words and in rhythms that are almost iambic.
About the long poem. Reid loves the
form, as we can see and he attests. He uses it well to expand and to enrich a
site. The term is handy enough to allow a large latitude in subject, treatment,
and instance. Most of Reid’s long poems in Flat Side might be usefully
called “serial.” Four of those included (“Flat Side,” “La Gunilla,” “The Shale
Disparities,” and “Near the Beisecker Bio-Medical Waste Incinerator”) seem to
be directed by personal and perhaps professional narratives, and to stretch out
alongside the rest of the book in comparatively flexible, expanding, and
frequently redirecting forms. The other pieces (“Burning the Back Issues,” “Lost,”
“Previous Owners,” “Atkinson’s Ghosts,” “Five Smaller Dreams,” “Draw Weight,” “Migration
of the Zucchini,” “Learning to Play ‘Blackberry Blossom’,” and “Phone Lesson”)
appear to have been created within a serial mode. Their numbering of
subsections does not by itself distinguish them from the other ones, which
observe the same practice. However, what is set within those numbered parts is
different. The most obvious instance probably comes in “Five Smaller Dreams,”
whose parts seem almost nailed together. The dreams are tenuously related and
only loosely gathered under the topic. And under the assurance that there are
five of them. The whole poem that includes but never subsumes the five dreams
is structured upon addition: here’s one, two (a spectacularly funny and alive
piece, by the way), and a few more. The strategy could carry a poem
indefinitely as a series of variations on a theme.
Others of this sort are more strongly
focused on a site. “Atkinson’s Ghosts” portrays a series of hilarious anecdotes
which concern a professor recently arrived on campus, a recently departed
professor, and an interloping spiritualist. “Previous Owners” provides the
buoyant histories, story after story, that gather around the poet and his
spouse’s understanding of their own occupancy. In composing the poem Reid must
have been asking what other stories he might remember or invent. “Lost”
assembles seven bizarre parts that circle stories of the narrator’s infancy and
bits of his later existence. And so on. The most focused of the serial poems, “Burning
the Back Issues” (a facetious play on one of William Carlos Williams’ poems)
renders the act as a witty and troubling comedy which passes through many
shifting voices.
Reid’s poems rustle with rambunctious
humour and large shifts in tone and register. In some ways they are also
unperturbed. Many of the poems, especially the serial poems, are visually
organized within neat shapes. The stanzas in those poems tend to replicate one
another, sometimes in small units of two lines, or in larger units that in size
and shape are close to one another. They also observe left justification and
fairly consistent right margins. Cumulatively they create an impression of
steadiness, as if the expansive imagination and the anarchic energy so
characteristic of Reid’s poems were somehow managed or at least lessened within
them. The clear and frequent spaces that open between the stanzas and the
numbered sections allow a reader to ease across the poem, a chance to come up
for air and to regather in brief repose.
The point may seem more cogent when we
consider the topography of those poems that are not so modally organized. Take “Flat
Side.” The eight subsections in it feel more destabilizing, though their parts
are comparable in bulk and so, we might suppose, comfortable in their own skin.
What happens within them represents a drastically different cast of the
horizontal. The lines stretch far across the page to create a strong sense of
fullness, as if whatever impels the words needs more room, perhaps as if there
is lesser room (physiologically) for the reader. The effect is intensified by
irregular and sometimes large indentations that fling us off the margins. The
fissures imbue the text with torque:
Or there is the alternative
possibility that we sleep this way because
so many others have
and we are only remembering
the persistent order of ourselves
which is both out there and within us.
Have you not also
felt it?
The
pages persist margin to margin, and they open gaps dramatically within
themselves. The results are compounded by a high level of abstraction,
scientific vocabulary, and latinate diction, the work of an erudite poet who
releases the philosopher in him. Compared to the more symmetrical and briefer
parts of the serial poems, they show strain and require effort. Even their
stanza- or sections-breaks feel less self-sufficient.
These poems, too—all of the poems—flash
with humour and invention.
Dennis
Cooley’s
latest book is Gibbous Moon with At Bay Press. Body Works is
forthcoming at University of Calgary Press. Photo courtesy of Pat Sanderson.
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