Sundog Rising
Reflections on the living the life literary by the Urban Sundog
Ron Romanowski released a new book of poetry this year! All of him!
In the grand ongoing Post Modernist experiment that is New Festival Theory, I was tasked to write a review of Ron’s new book, as I’d already done for his previous three books. Thus further complicating the infinite weirdness of me already being the human avatar for one of Ron’s six distinct poetic voices, John G. Carmody. Certain personalities -- both Ron’s and my own -- had to be set aside so I could do the reviewing job properly. Here we go.
Incantations From the Republic of Fire
Ron Romanowski
Augustine Hand Press, 2013
Incantations From the Republic of Fire continues Ron Romanowski’s New Festival Theory experiment begun in 2011’s the big book of canadian Poetry. Incantations features Ron writing as five different poets: himself, Ruth Rachel Cyprian, Siegfried Jerusalem, Marina Stepanova, and John G. Carmody. This is down one from the big book, as June Summer Jones is apparently off otherwise engaged as Poet in Residence at the Moose Jaw Library. According to Ron.
Let’s establish a fact up front here once and for all. Jones, Cyprian, Jerusalem, Stepanova and Carmody do not exist. The only writer involved here is Ron Romanowski. Since beginning the experiment in 2011, Ron has appeared at a number of public readings with a group of friends performing the other parts. Even though he clearly announces he has written all the poetry and identifies the real names of the people playing the other poets, there are always members of the audience who leave convinced the other New Festival writers are real.
Ron states on the back of Incantations that he’s trying to explore “definitions of authorship and identity.” With his experiment taking on identities of their own in some of his audience’s minds, those distinctions become more blurred with every new addition to the program.
As with the big book, the question that first has to be answered is: does Ron legitimately sound like five different people in his writing? Again, the answer is yes. Ruth, Siegfried, Marina and John G. all sound convincingly real. We assume Ron was to begin with.
A new challenge Ron sets himself in Incantations is making each voice continue to sound unique while confined to the sometimes limiting poetic format of the sonnet. Almost half (35 of 75 by my count) of the pieces presented are sonnets, or only a line or two off the form. By employing a mode of expression limited by accepted conventions, Ron runs the risk of the poem primarily expressing the form, not the voice. Yet a sonnet by Ruth Rachel Cyprian is uniquely hers as much as one by Siegfried Jerusalem belongs to his particular point of view.
Which leads to another question. The poetry attributed to Ron Romanowski concerns the “real” world. Such as a tribute to Winnipeg activist Nick Ternette, a lyrical evocation of landscape around Grand Beach, or a long memory of childhood Saturday afternoons spent in now defunct Winnipeg movie theatres. Real people in real places in real time. By the real author.
Likewise Ruth Rachel Cyprian writes of her concerns regarding political hotspots in Syria, and Siegfried Jerusalem offers his take on various genuine paintings to be seen at the University of Manitoba’s School of Art Gallery. Again, real events, real objects in real places. But not real authors.
Further, in Ruth Rachel’s “Her Part in Halloween,” detailed notes give the point of view of an unidentified “Jane” that seems to also share history with Siegfried, as he quips in his section “What did Jane have to say? Which Jane?” Unreal poets speaking of unreal times with unreal people? Does this render the poem any less valid as a poem?
John G. Carmody sums it up in the last sonnet at the very end of the book: “Apprehension, (as the metaphors swell), / Consummation, (about reading as act), / Fulfillment, (take it on home with you), / (And all bouncing on Shakespeare’s vasty bed!)”
The fact is Ron Romanowski’s experimentation renders Incantations From the Republic of Fire a rich, multi-leveled, mind bending delight, disorienting its readers yet smacking them right down in the centre of art making both language and poetry come alive.
To give you a better idea of where all that was coming from, here’s my review of Ron’s first New Festival Theory book.
the big book of canadian Poetry
by Ron Romanowski
Augustine Hand Press, 2011
Sometimes a new book is just a good read, and sometimes it is an event. Ron Romanowski’s fourth book of poetry from Augustine Hand Press definitely falls into the event category – in fact, it invents a whole new classification for such events.
On first inspection, the big book of canadian Poetry is the publication of a group of six poets, including Ron, announcing the creation of what the group styles New Festival Theory, an attempt to instigate a more public focus on Canadian Poetry. But really, it’s not – really. It’s really all Ron Romanowski, writing alternately as June Summer-Jones, a Dorothy Livesay-ish matriarch of the art who has been publishing acclaimed collections of poetry for six decades; Siegfried Jerusalem, opera fanatic and inveterate blogger; John G. Carmody, an Irishman living in Brandon writing in the Japanese forms of haiku and tanka; Bulgarian Marina Stepanova living in asylum in Canada from her doubtful past; Ruth Rachel Cyprian, a history major from the North End of Winnipeg; and paradoxically, Ron himself.
French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan speculated famously that the unconscious is structured as a language, and that a sense of self arrives externally, from the imaginary – or in Ron’s case a sense of six selves. However, Lacan would agree that we are all imprisoned in a hall-of-mirrors world of signifiers that practically imposes multiple identities. Ron obviously embraces that idea on the one hand, while rejecting it on the other – hence Siegfried Jerusalem’s “I Murdered Jacques Lacan & Slept with His Mother” (p. 27). Welcome to the Postmodern Poetical Playground.
Reading the book raises two important questions: can one poet write convincingly in six different voices, and, even if he can, are the poems any good? The answer to both questions in the big book of canadian Poetry is defiantly “yes!” Summer-Jones’s working class humanism comes through clear and poignantly in “A Red River’s Boy” (p. 9); Jerusalem’s strident edginess is evident in “Die Meistersinger von Mississippi” (p. 26); Carmody’s environmental and social lyricism sings throughout his Goldfinch tanka and bee haiku; Stepanova’s darker Eastern European sensibilities make their grimly insightful statements in “Elegies for Stargazers” (p. 59); Cyprian manages to express her concern with the importance of the past in pieces such as “A Natural History of Radical Moths” (p. 85) and also creates some intriguing cross-referencing amongst the group in “Head, Too – For Siegfried. Farewell.” (p. 82) ; while Ron still manages to sound surprisingly like Ron and not the other five, in his signature cascading imagery and heartfelt messages, such as in “Crown Us the Snowy Valentines”. (p. 104)
At times, the poetic stance taken by one of the poets inspires disparate reactions from the others, employing and redefining the same image. In “December Island” (p. 19), the elderly June Summer-Jones makes her distaste for winter in Winnipeg quite evident, commenting on the snowmass making “an ocean of snow stretching back to the Rockies” (p. 19). Ruth Rachel Cyprian steps in with a different point of view in “Winter: I Promote You to Look Rustic” (p. 88), in which she exults “Let December be the ocean of winter” (p. 88), and is made a child again by the season, “winter’s dearest confidant” (p. 88). Then Ron, the ultimate unifier of any experience in the book, has the last word in “Returning to December Island” (p. 98), where “December contains oceans of snowflakes/ attached by threads to gravity/ like melting pearls”. (p. 98)
Thus the concept of the book automatically gives the reading experience a deeper context than the average poetry collection can supply. The reader either asks “Can he do it?”, and if so, then “Who are these other people?”; or misses the trick completely and comes away with a fascinating impression of six different sensibilities, topped by a “What the – !” moment when the reality sinks in.
Ultimately, the book is successful because the first five poets in the supposed anthology do come across as so convincingly real – and that makes the message of what they write satisfactory and real as well, as good poetry should be.
At the end of the event, the only one I’ve got serious doubts about is this Ron Romanowski guy. Let’s see some I.D. there, please.
Let me explain further. When Ron presents poetry from these books in public, he assembles a small, consistent cast of friends to physically channel the other poets he writes as. Including me as John G. Carmody, the Irish expatriate now living in Brandon, Manitoba with his wife and daughter, contentedly writing haiku and tanka about goldfinches and other lovely natural subjects. I even fake an Irish accent. Which got me in a lot of trouble the first time we did this and a lady with a real Irish accent came up to me afterwards to congratulate me on my reading and writing.
We’ve done some four or five events this way now. I was under the impression that most people knew what was going on by this time. But at the last launch, Ron’s own Dad came up to me afterwards and enquired if I’d be driving back to Brandon that night. Literature, taking on so many lives of its own!
*******
REALITY FICTION TOO! THE ODDBALL EDITION UPDATE
Our Contestants move warily into Episode Ten this week: WEREWOLVES. Should be a howl. Check it out at:
realficone.blogspot.ca
And what is Reality Fiction, you may well ask?
Simple. The concept of the Reality Television Series translated to the printed page. 40 characters from my backlog of generally unpublished material are gathered together to compete in a different theme each Episode, with one or two characters being eliminated each sequence until there are only two left to fight it out in the final. The winner gets a short novel of their own as the grand prize.
But somehow, things always seem to go horribly wrong ...
REALITY FICTION TOO! EPISODES TO DATE
EPISODE NINE: WRESTLING
EPISODE EIGHT: JANE AUSTEN ROMANCE
EPISODE SEVEN: THE JAZZ AGE
EPISODE SIX: SUBMISSION
EPISODE FIVE: MASQUERADE
EPISODE FOUR: SELF HELP
EPISODE THREE: NUDIST
EPISODE TWO: FRENCH BEDROOM FARCE
EPISODE ONE: STEAMPUNK
A J.H.B. Original!
