Dido to DOTA2: Benjamin C. Dugdale’s Repoetic: After Saint-Pol-Roux

I read Barbara Guest for the first-time way back in the second year of my BA. Oblique and venomous, her poetry attacks sentiment and plaintiveness. It exposes the rickety scaffolding of the puerile capitalistic society she was a part of. Benjamin C. Dugdale does this too. The Repoetic: After Saint-Pol-Roux is Dugdale's debut collection of poetry and is a long poem. The Repoetic is ostensibly a translation of Saint-Paul-Roux’s La Repoetique. And like Saint-Pol-Roux’s poetry, there is a symbolistic element to the collection that is most visible with Dugdale’s repeated motif of the figure of the vampire. As is well documented, throughout modernist and postmodernist history, more specifically in pop culture, the vampire has been constructed to instill a sense of dread about perceived social threats. For Murnau, whether intentionally or not, Nosferatu has often been thought of as representing WWII antisemitic anxieties about Jews. And in the 80s and 90s the vampire symbolized the threat of the transmission of AIDS through non-hetero-binary sexual intercourse. This is most evident in The Lost Boys, replete with its gay iconography, but also in the bisexual exchanges of blood in Coppola’s Dracula and Interview with the Vampire. (This persists somewhat with Twilight’s moronic characterizations of horny bloodsuckers and emo werewolves).

Dugdale satirizes the vampire and does so in a particularly self-reflexive manner. On one of the final pages of the collection, Dugdale refers to a non-existent film, entitled “SUPERVAMP D-LUXE,” which he claims was released in 1925. After a brief wiki-search, I found that there were no vampire films released in 1925. But a 1925 silent Polish crime film Vampires of Warsaw, directed by Wiktor Biegański, was released (though this film is now considered lost). Vampires of Warsaw is said to contain no supernatural vampires. But it does have characters who act out in vampiric ways. On the same page, where they refer to this 1925 vampire film, Dugdale describes a vampire-like figure, who is probably human, as a “piteous idiot baby” who is “the wannabe-normie vampire…and always [will] be.” Though I am hesitant to make a holistic argument about Dugdale’s collection, it does seem that Dugdale understands the vampire—once a symbolic mechanism, used by alt-right conservatives, to inspire moral panic—to be an emptied image that has been co-opted for contemporary capitalist purposes.

More broadly speaking, the revolutionary spirit of the written word (in this case, poetry) seems to have, like those anxiety inducing vampires, crumbled into an ashy residue, having been torched by the stupefying sun of “middle-class cultural enforcers.” Popular literature, for Dugdale, is a force of antipathy, a half-hearted effort to please a publisher, whose sales experience an eternity of diminishing returns; it’s a dumbed down and placid “Tinder Poem.” It’s an attempt to package “counter-culture” to gain social clout. Literature’s howl for social change, something that has resounded throughout the centuries, from Plato’s Republic—which Dugdale refers to in their manuscript—to figures like Maya Angelou, Reinaldo Arenas, and Italo Calvino, has devolved into a whimper of carnal desperation, something that no one reads, but the narrator hopes will assist them in getting laid.

I was initially confused by their introductory focus on this “Tinder-poem” intermixed with considerations about Dada. But the collection is cyclical and pulls us down into its vortex. Like light eaten by gravity around a black-hole, this whirlpool inevitably destroys the potential for any easy conclusion about what Dugdale's rationale is for their entropic translation/post-truth Bell Mental Health PR-stunt/satire of the Wasteland. But for Dugdale, it’s clear that poetry, at least the poetry average people read—do they read it?—while scrolling through Instagram posts, is a desiccated husk, a pretty face produced by artificial intelligence in search of a credit card number.

While the pop-culture references are omnipresent throughout—I love Dugdale’s repeated Sirkean (Circean) focus on the wonderful Rock Hudson—they directs us towards the vapidness of our love-bombing, profit-hungry culture where identity politics are commodified; so much so that the notion of the fangless vampire—symbolic or literal—is representative of most of the population (myself included and we can assume Dugdale themself). Dugdale points to humanity's insouciant commitment to its own collusion in our mutually assured demise. This occurs most obviously with global warming. But they posit that we are passive lemmings in a hypnagogic state.

Dugdale's vampires become about as frightening as the blindfold one dons prior to taking a Pepsi challenge. Because Dugdale’s vampires are us, and the blood we drink isn’t blood. It’s Coca Cola produced by the 'Coca-Coalition.'

For Dugdale, with enskied indifference—as “Mountain Dew-green” youth—we embrace meaninglessness. We ignore the blatant cynicism of the institutions we hope to profit from (i.e., the capitalistic benefits associated with selling wholesale bachelor’s degrees, irradiated cellphones, video games, fast food, etc. while at the same time embracing the sentiment that we are all victims through the poorly defined parameters of either YouTube self-diagnosis or the ever-partitioning DSM). Dugdale's vampires become about as frightening as the blindfold one dons prior to taking a Pepsi challenge. Because Dugdale’s vampires are us, and the blood we drink isn’t blood. It’s Coca Cola produced by the “Coca-Coalition.” We are rebellious only because we understand the basic meaning of the anarchy symbol imbrued in the ink of a “Punk Rock Bingo” stamp (or at least, what this image gestures towards).

According to the “thinning and grinning” of the neo-liberals, who’ve co-opted the revolutionary spirit of the TSLGBTQIA* movement to hock Scotiabank credit cards, revolution amounts to nothing more than picking Pepsi in the Pepsi challenge. They can still glean profits from genocide while virtue signalling multiculturalism in a Timbit commercial. But Dugdale exposes this while admitting that the word “generation,” once synonymous with social change, is “a shrinking category” in the “hellbroth world” they inhabit. To be complicit in this hypocrisy is a social obligation, even a legal one. And that’s the way it’s been constructed by execs and their PR teams. Paying our taxes amounts to funding the war machine. We are permitted to write “pity porn” poetry and not earn a profit. We exsanguinate digital bodies on OnlyFans. Our “Cheeto fangs” drip with “t r a u m a.”

But Dugdale’s writing isn’t pity porn, rather it’s what no one in Canada seems to want to read; it’s anxiety inducing satire. According to Dugdale, in a world of “spineless cowards,” satire may be the only real vampire left to incite the kinds of extreme reactions that inspire real social change. And Dugdale’s book is funny and surprising and very, very messy. At times, even druggy to the point of Joycean incoherence. I don’t know how to read “a whistle out of sight so sh rill it cuts the mountains twain-cloud loud,” but it’s nice to read something that doesn’t try to make sense. In a publishing world where Hemmingway seems byzantine, even arcane, and everything is spelled out plainly, with those same oft-time repeated social justice axioms that appeared in the Butlerian '90s; Dugdale tells us that we are all very small and limited by our human reference points. We can’t know everything, and no amount of simplifying literature to a kind of lobotomized modernism will change that.

Dugdale asks us to embrace satire as the only artistic resource left for effective protest. I wish that he had embraced more severe editing techniques, but maybe the rushed nature of some of the poems works with their oblique proposition. Publishers have a quota to fulfill to justify their existences to granting agencies. Because writing poetry doesn’t make money and grants do, poetry takes the back seat. But at least, in the back seat, there’s no pressure, because there’s less responsibility to capitalistic institutions, and a poet can do what a poet should do, criticize corruption and hypocrisy and the bourgeoisie (i.e., the middle class). And maybe, because of that unacknowledged work, someone, somehow, who has a little more power than a “prescription bottle and its peeling sticker,” will have a thought. We can only hope. What’s certain is that the world, especially Canada, needs more satire. Like any good jester knows, you don’t lose your head, if you don’t matter. This is especially true if the “Checkmate Fascists” haven’t figured out how “to assemble their IKEA guillotine.”