Week of November 8, 2006, Issue #577
Hopscotch
Josef Braun / hopscotch@vueweekly.com
One of the peculiar pleasures in reading arises from the way each individual reader—if not each reading—of a book forges paths leading to other, non-existent—or not yet existent—books. Without ever having to lift a pen or strike a key, readers are writers of innumerable appendices, alternate versions, prefaces and afterwords, prequels and sequels to every story they come across. Their imaginary books emerge vaguely formed from the fog of their minds and, most of the time, return to that same fog, never to reappear quite the same way.I wonder how many readers have composed their own endings for Kafka’s Amerika or The Castle, despite the unnerving sort of perfection these incomplete novels arguably attain in leaving readers stranded. I wonder how many condensed versions of the Bible, Don Quixote, War and Peace or Gravity’s Rainbow have come to life in the faulty memories of readers trying to relive their reading experience.
But what I’m really wondering about just now are books most people don’t care about. Lost books that hold the promise of other, perhaps better books within them, ones ripe for appropriation and revision, the end points that become starting points. Like being given a godawful ugly necktie for your birthday, tossing it in a drawer, and only much later discovering that it makes a terrific belt. Okay, awkward fashion references aside, I guess I’m thinking about something akin to the creative recycling of literature.
Some years ago, while doing photo research for a company that produced popular history books, Winnipeg-based poet KI Press came across Types of Canadian Women, Volume I, a 1903 illustrated biographical dictionary of society women. The biographies described the subject’s families, what charity work they did or social pastimes they excelled at. Glancing through the texts and photos, Press was, initially, only drawn to the hats.
“Most of the time they’d be pretty boring and predictable,” says Press. “But once in a while there’d be a line alluding to some aspect of these lives that was far more interesting. I remember one that suddenly read, ‘and she won a medal for saving a park warden from a bear,’ before returning to something dull. And I thought, surely that deserved a little more exposition.”
Press sought the promised Volume II, but it seems to have never been written. Press decided to remedy this, creating a new volume that, while observing certain stylistic dictates of the original, would be composed exclusively of the interesting parts the original barely mentioned. But these interesting parts, sometimes wildly fantastical, would come not from historical but something we might call poetic research.
Types of Canadian Women, and of Women Who Are or Have Been Connected with Canada, Volume II (Gaspereau Press, $19.95) begins with a playful introduction explaining the benefits of the new volume’s extraordinarily slow emergence: “The century’s delay allowed us to work incessantly year in and year out, until each biography was distilled down to the true essence of the laudable female’s worthy life.”
Though tongue-in-cheek, this in fact describes the approach Press has taken. Accompanied by antique portraits of women Press had collected over the years —some formal and rather impenetrable, some quite arresting—Types is a series of poems that eschew data collecting entirely, expressing instead something of the preoccupations, adventures or inner-life of its subjects, poems rife with hyperbole, subjectivity, humour and dream.
Choosing not to update her subjects (if Volume III comes out in say, 2109, will it too still feature women from 1903?), Press engages in a self-conscious fabrication of history, though through fabrication, there’s a sense of history being far more accurately evoked. Types subtly alludes to the claustrophobia of living in a patriarchal, chauvinistic society, the unspoken oppressiveness of “growling, puffy men” who “lumber home as if they’d turned to bears.”
Press discourages feminist readings of her work however, and at the reading she gave at Toronto’s Victory Café on Tuesday night, she seemed happy to see her audience more often in stitches than solemnity. Indeed, what makes her approach to feminist and gender themes so persuasive is the absence of didacticism and the use of unexpected flights of irony and weirdness. (In one poem, after having a horse die under her, a woman turns into a man. This is based on a story Press’s father used to tell about being a girl until the age of three, when he had an accident on his tricycle, fell unconscious, and woke up a boy.) Impossible imagery is relayed through mannered language, characterized by bits of anachronistic terminology. A man in Types wears not a moustache, but “moustaches.”
“I like to use formal language to talk about things that are funny or horrible and violent,” Press explains with a laugh. “I did not take this book nearly as seriously as the marketing copy did. I really just wanted to have fun with these different personas, to see where they’d take me.”
The accumulation of personas in Types is itself a sort of single poetic persona, a fluid line of voices that merge into one multi-layered voice. And the book’s final line elegantly summarizes the phantasmagorical quality all these fragments of imaginary lives leave you with: “Endless eyes slink from their sockets, follow you across the snow.” V