Chapbooks II Home

Jim Larwill

Canadian Shield Chapbooks II.
Text Box: Welcome to Chapbooks II. These three little booklets are virtual editions from my second wave of chapbooks published in 2008 under the Canadian Shield logo. Presented together here these three e-ditions combine to form a collection of 26 poems with one short story. While these 4¼ X 5½ inch “crapbook” editions were originally published in 2008, two of them “Escape From Love” and “o/D to the Ampersand” were first laid out during the winter of 2002/2003 in the larger manuscript form of a traditional 5½ X 8½ inch chapbook. This was just after my “Rag Doll” chapbook (ISBN 0-9684753-8-8) was published by Birdcage Booklets in 1999 and then in 2003 I self-published “The First Book of Her Story called: GENESIS” (ISBN 0-9733943-0-7) under the Canadian Shield logo also in the traditional chapbook format. “Escape from Love” was first conceived of as a full length manuscript and contained writing going back many years. Yet even at that time it was already becoming apparent that with the beginning of the internet and other technologies, traditional publishing was undergoing a massive paradigm shift. Small publishers and bookstores were disappearing. Increasingly the “information age” was about consolidation as everything in the world was turned into a commodity of some kind under the rule of Global Capital. The Corporate State slowly began to erode the nation state. Under this new world order, poetry associated with bling, is the only thing allowed to sing. So what to do? A lot of my energy in the years between publishing my first wave of chapbooks in 1996 and the start of this second wave of chapbooks in 2008 went into the development of my literary theory called “The Carnivoresque.” This insight into a possible human culture of origin, and the beginnings of language, was put together piece by piece while working towards my Masters degree at Carleton University and culminated with the publication of my Masters Thesis in 2002 “The Carnivoresque: An Essay in Literary Lycanthropology.” This theory uses literature as an archeological site of exploration: a huge field of words with ancient roots where noun and verb helix symbols, present in stories today, are linked to a lost story of origin and reach back to the very beginnings of language. Like the big bang universe itself, literature is a cosmos of fragments moving outward from an original metaphor. The unearthing of this “i Wolf” theory represents 10 years of my life energy. Often during this period poetry was not my main focus; however, it did continue with its own flight along side my academic adventure as I barged and hacked forward though university hoops. In addition to university in those years, I was also actively running my Omnigothic Neofuturist writing workshop as well as having the group publish in 1997 an anthology “Speak: Six Omnigothic Neofuturists” with Broken Jaw Press. It was during this period I became known as a Slam poet. In 2003 I won the Ottawa CBC Poetry Face Off. Performance became my focus. In many ways I still prefer the unmediated direct connection live poetry makes with an audience; yet, when I moved out of the city up to my cabin in the woods sitting on the carapace back of a little tor on this petite turtle lake, I then again began to think about publishing. So what to do? I decided to return to self-publishing in my smaller “crapbook” format. I will explain some of the reasons for this with my next installment to this website in Chapbooks III; but what ever the reasons were in 2008 I republished 2nd editions of my first six “crapbooks” from 1996 and went on to publish 13 new editions. These booklets presented here in Chapbooks II are the first three of the new 2008 first editions. Escape From Love begins with the poem “Neutral Ground,” and while this idealized memory of youthful connection between the sexes remembers a time before love was “a speeding car on/death ice streets hitting/every pedestrian possible” the rest of the book goes on to document a number of mangled crashes. Indeed memory itself is one of the themes of the book and in “Archeology of Impermanence” the romantic ideal of Wordsworth’s “emotion recollected in tranquility” is countered when the surface archeology of bruises on the body “displays artifacts of action” and transcendent emotional memory is confronted by violent material manifestation. Is a poem a passive mirror held up to nature? Or is a poem a cancer of words in a reader’s mind doing some kind of violence to memory? While the cover of this book takes its design from a paper back edition of Erich Fromm’s book Escape From Freedom, this book of poems does not present a theory of love in the way Erich Fromm does in The Art of Loving. If it is true, as Stalin says, that writers are the engineers of the human soul, what is a poet to do in a world addicted to a romantic ideal of love at the same time as the codified subject is increasingly being driven by external signifiers of desire and lust? There is no escape from the capital ‘L prison of love. So what is a poet to do? Try and provide a ten step program? Try and remove the sticky tic tack labels stuck to her body? Or just look at the floor, take another sip of coffee, and let thought and memory do its one-eyed winking thing with words and verse. The Divided Self takes its cover and title from R.D. Laing’s reflections on schizophrenia. In his existential analysis he observes: “Many schizoid writers and artists who are relatively isolated from the other succeed in establishing a creative relationship with things in the world, which are made to embody the figures of their phantasy.” In “The Politics of the Family” he also states: “Psychiatry is concerned with politics, with who makes the law. Who defines the situation.” Today people are mesmerized into constantly updating their profiles while being told to live in the moment. Self-help books and life-coaches of all kinds, from doctors to shamans, abound all around. This long poem presented here begins with the patient making the statement: “I guess I should give you a cheque.” It is a statement that dates the poem, and the irony of signing one’s name on a piece of paper being an act of fitting into capitalist society is only increased as one realizes today the self is confirmed by sticking your assigned chip into a key-pad machine. I do not live in the moment. I live at the end of history as a member of a species on the brink of extinction. My sanity is the cackling laughter of Raven flying over head. Thinking sanity (sanus) comes from inside one’s own mind is in fact insane. o/D to the Ampersand is a somewhat playful deconstruction of the tendency of experimental language poetry to attack and resist narrative. Meaning is bad. It demands an audience listen extra attentively while it attempts to say nothing. Cupidity and ego of the artist are its message. It is an angry scribble by a precocious child pinned by mommy to a ruh… ruh… ruh..... f.f.f.f.f... ridge..I..ate..her. On one level all poetry should be experimental; however, if insights are learned through experiment, the results should be used to increase understanding and not be used to destroy meaning. “o/D to the Ampersand” is perhaps best described with a quote from its back cover: The only people who will take this 14 frag ment poem seriously are fas ¢ ists. Unfortunately, every day across the free enter prise wor(l)d, poems like this one are taken seriously by a cade mics and dropout lumpen wel/fare po ets. A$ with most novelesque mega/meta parodies this poem may be the best e-pic x/ample ever written of the style of poem it sets out to mock. If you laugh at this poem you will have realised how fundamentalist the discussions of poetic$ has become in Kanada today.