Wednesday 3 June 2015

readers guide to the unnameable






Sundog Rising!
Reflections on living the life literary by the Urban Sundog




Cubist Poetry?





Anyone who reads Ron Romanowski’s new collection of poetry A Reader’s Guide to the Unnameable will know I’m not an unbiased reviewer, as soon as they look over the acknowledgements. Where Ron states that I and a few others were early readers of some of the works included in the book.

I won’t say I had any effect on the development of the book, as I didn’t have a clue where Ron was going with it from the eight or so poems he sent me during the book’s gestation. I merely gave him the most honest impressions I could of what I read, as a poet of his status deserves nothing but the objective truth. If I thought the piece worked, I said so, if I thought what he was showing me didn’t, I told him that too and tried to explain why.

It was too long ago for me to remember the process well enough to know if he took my advice or not regarding the final form of the poems I critiqued in the book, but I do know this: I like the book. And I’m more inclined to give the credit for that to Ron for pulling the collection together the way he really wants it to be rather than to anyone who might have given him out-of-context suggestions along the way. There’s too much of a coherent thread running through A Reader’s Guide for that not to be the case.





But being in on a book’s genesis does give a reviewer a little background insight someone who doesn’t know the poet might not have. As it happened both Ron and I tackled the same series of biographies on Picasso around the same time, and I gave up before he did. I complained I found the biographer too focussed on miniscule detail and gossip, rather than larger themes. Ron phoned me up sometime later and said I was right! But that was okay! That was a cubist approach to biography, and he didn’t mind that at the moment, because he’s writing cubist poetry in the new book!





The back of A Reader’s Guide to the Unnameable mentions that among other themes, Ron is continuing to work on “definitions of authorship and identity”. His last two collections, the big book of canadian poetry and Incantations From The Republic Of Fire, took these issues much to heart, as Ron wrote the works as if they had been produced not just by him, but also by five other distinct poets, the New Festival Theory group, with their own distinct histories and personas.





The displacement of authorship isn’t so clearly delineated in A Reader’s Guide, but is still there. Many of the pieces are not from the point of view of Ron Romanowski, but reflect the experience of a persona within the poem. I’m not even certain if you can call this persona a character per se, as in a novel or play, as Ron seems to be taking the exploration of authorship beyond that dimension. Ron creates the character and situation, and then the character writes the poem. Except it’s really all Ron. Or is it? How far does he get lost in these people’s lives?

The first poem, “The Fall Girl”, lays out the theme of the title, A Reader’s Guide to the Unnameable. An unthinkable event occurs that must be dealt with by those who are left behind. Ron’s book is here supposedly to offer some guidance on how to do that. “His granddaughter was found hanging in a garage, right up and over the beam. / This loose carousel of a season had dangled her, / symbiotic lost-and-found month rustling life to the ground.”

Despite the horror, life must go on, as illustrated in “The Fall Girl (Coda)”:

If her death was not inevitable there is no cure.
If her death was inevitable there is no cure.
It was inevitable but that is no cure.
It was not inevitable but that is no cure.
Go on.

This isn’t a black and white world. States seemingly in contradiction exist simultaneously, and every aspect of their existence must be granted weight equally. So it doesn’t matter if the crime against your sensibility is unnameable, still you go on, carrying that fact with you. Every angle seen at once — a cubist existence.





He examines the concept head-on in one of the central poems from the book — “One Minute Date Night: Cubic Woman May I Introduce Cubic Man”:

We are all Cubists, let us not wrong the thing
Because of perspective. Let us set our own pace
Touch lips in the freedom of cubist space
In which the effort of our condition reads
The fuzziness, collage, shadow, just where we
Want it.





The book goes on in the same manner, happy moments, more tragedies, different personas, deep personal insights, all juxtaposed on the pages creating a strange balance which might leave some readers feeling somewhat unsettled if they can’t accept this isn’t the usual sort of rhythm one might expect in a single point-of-view poetry collection. 

Ron’s is a voice out of order challenging assumptions of the accepted angles of approach. He provides imagery that finds its own path, circling the poems’ themes and leaving the reader feeling surrounded. He can leap from the fine detail to the grand cosmic view in the slip of a line or turn of phrase. Any conclusions suggested on the micro-level always leave larger unresolved implications on the macro.

Ron supplies the reader with tight shifting pictures, with one thought rapidly taking up a continuing argument before the last one’s done simmering. His language can dare you to keep up and sometimes might annoy you when you want to go a different direction then it  generally takes you. But I think one of the most important themes at the heart of this book is that Ron Romanowski is not afraid to remind us of the broken people, and take up their easily dismissed tragedies as matter for deeper emotional connection. As in “The Fall Girl”, “1400 CC’s Stricken at the Crossroads”, “For the Lake Boys”, and others.

And then to balance the cubist composition again, he also provides us with “Great-grandmother’s prize zucchini casserole”.





I found my favourite piece to be the four page “North America”, which I think best exemplifies the cubist theme in one poem. The language tumbles across the page in a quiet, entrancing tangle of dynamic equilibrium, resolving near the end finally in “all the facts / footnotes / a reader’s guide / with fettering author’s footnotes

Is that the most we can hope for from a collection of poetry to explain the simultaneity of conflicting events our non-linear lives constantly throws at us? In an attempt to guide us through the unnameable, can any author give us anything more significant than “fettering footnotes”?

I would say no, in Ron’s case. I think A Reader’s Guide to the Unnameable reveals a more liberating experience in its reading than fettering us in its creator’s formal references.





No, I would say instead Ron Romanowski is more an accomplished practitioner of song and dance storytelling, providing us with a narrative thread through the disparate works to lead us in, and then performing a bit of the quick soft-shoe to tap us out. Because while we all keep on dancing to keep ahead of the unnameable, the tragedy, and the approaching fire, Ron doesn’t let us forget we never stop loving and smiling either.


A Reader’s Guide to the Unnameable
Ron Romanowski
Augustine Hand Press, 2015




*****

REALITY FICTION AND BEYOND!

The Electric Detective continues with Chapter Twelve on Monday, June 1st, while we take a new look at an old story, care of Jack Finney (who?) in Episode Thirteen, starting Friday, June 5th. Reality Fiction Three: The Interrupted Edition continues at:

http://realficone.blogspot.ca/

Surprise murders, witchy metafictional existential discussions, and strange visits to a hotel’s greenhouse …

Episodes to Date:

Episode One: Dante-Ish — Mak’s Inferno
Episode Two: Chaucer-Ish — The Hermit’s Tale
Episode Three: Malory-Ish — Le Morte de Mak
Episode Four: Doyle-Ish — Mak the Kipper
Episode Five: Carroll-Ish — Madelyn in Wonderland
Episode Six: Stoker-Ish — The Down For The Count Shimmy
Episode Seven: Tolstoy-Ish — Anna Makerena
Episode Eight: Lem-Ish — So there is …
Episode Nine: Hoffman-Ish — Dr. Hoffman’s Happy Gene Machine
Episode Ten: Shakespeare-Ish — Hamlet the Barbarian
Episode Eleven: Poe-Ish — The Usher Motel
Episode Twelve: Kafka-Ish — Metamorphos-Ish
Episode Thirteen: Finney-Ish — The Invasion of the Hotel Detectives

All with illustrations by the author. The complete roster of 34 Contestants have now appeared, so we move on to the supporting cast, the Judges, and the Guest Judges.



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