“Stale, Mate”: A Review of Joe Blades’s Casement Poems (Collected)

 

Casemate Poems (Collected), the most recent offering from Fredericton, New Brunswick writer Joe Blades, collects the poems of the limited-edition casemate poems (Widows & Orphans, 2004), plus new “(reprise)” and “(coda)” casemate poems (constituting about fifty percent of the new volume). “All of these poems … appeared in first draft on brokenjoe.blogspot.com,” a fine-printed end-page belatedly informs the reader, “except for [the] ‘near ghazals nb’.” I suppose that’s why it receives the “nb,” nota bene, but what is really notable is that this single previously unpublished and elsewhere unavailable section of the book accounts for only two percent of it. As for the poems that were previously published, however, I failed to locate all of them on said author’s blog; but of those I did locate (the fifty-two “(reprise)” poems—located in the September 2005 entries, if you’re interested) and was able to compare with the final versions found in the book, I detected no noteworthy differences. In short, it is my first duty to forewarn you that this book is actually—it’s this you should “nb”—a blook. So if you fork out the $18.00 CDN, at least be aware of what you’re paying for: your physical book fetish, less eye strain, the convenience of not having to navigate a blogspot blog so rudimentary that it even lacks a topic cloud, your support for the author, your support for the publisher, and the fine material object that said publisher has produced. (Besides its overall high quality, it is the only soft-back book I have ever seen whose cover is so spectacularly glossy on the insides as well as outsides.) All of these are fine reasons—and perhaps, in a two-point-oh world, even better reasons than simply “for the content”—but that’s still assuming, of course, that the content is worthwhile to begin with.

This brings me to my other duty as reviewer: should you even read the poems online? Let me begin my answer by way of a seventh not directly content-related reason for buying the book: that the book form itself does, ironically, happen to provide an accurate way of quickly getting a good idea about the overall nature of the content. One does so by flipping through the book’s pages—not reading, initially, but simply noticing how little the contents of those 116 pages seem to change from page to page. The book begins with, as mentioned, “near ghazals,” but the rest of the book also consists entirely of some form of ghazal or ghazal-like form: “far ghazals,” one might call them, as they are not “not amorphous, but precise,” as Rob Winger characterizes the ghazal in his “Brief History” of the form in Arc Poetry Magazine’s ghazal issue (#62, Summer 2009), but rather not precise, but amorphous: the ghazals mask the absence of real ghazals. The form (but not the content) is John Thompsonesque, consisting of a set number of couplets (ten in all cases except the “near ghazals” section, where we get five) with set line lengths, and it goes on like this, uniformly, for 116 pages. The same could be said for many works of poetry, and in some cases favourably (e.g., the perfectly justified block paragraphs of Christian Bök’s Eunoia), but here such uniformity is strictly the herald of a more bone-aching, reader-assaulting variety of tedium whose cost is reading itself. The overall effect of flipping through—and even, as will soon become evident, of reading—the book and beholding the abundance of the same two-line stanzas, over and over again, is the same as that of regarding a grocery store’s power tower of canned tuna. The message is quantity, limitless sameness (indeed, “because there are always more stories to tell”), and that there’s probably a sale on, to convince you to buy more of what you never wanted. Casemate Poems (Collected)—like a “Greatest Hits” or “Best of” album. Moreover, the book is divided into five sections, and each of these is in turn divided into numbered poems, but these divisions, much like the relation of one stanza to another in the “Real Ghazal,” as Winger calls it, feel arbitrary, the units interchangeable. Indeed, this is only emphasized by the numbering of the poems themselves—not just in the sense of numbers’ general nondescriptness (much like that of the title of the collection itself, as we will see), but because there is exactly one poem per page, the numbering of each poem at the top left of each page only comes to resemble a superfluous, pseudo-disruptive pagination apparatus to parallel the numbers centred at each page’s foot. Are we at page 87 and poem 31, or page 31 and poem 87? Like much else conceptually in Casemate Poems (Collected), it doesn’t really seem to matter. Everything is dis/continuous—which is to say, nebulously neither here nor there. For example, poem/page 25/53 might just as well leak perfectly into poem/page 1/57, even though a whole double-page section-break divides them:

an abandoned song list ends with ‘archeazoa’  encore or not  i don’t know . . . wasn’t there have to fit everything here in two boxes  then take it home  ‘do not disturb . . . out celebrating’ because i’m back in the casemate of public art because there are always more stories to tell ^[1]

Perhaps you can tell where the section break whose ellipsis I have heuristically omitted occurs (namely, before the fourth stanza), but probably you would not notice if I had not told you. This is not the artfully and precisely accomplished “radical openness” of John Thompson’s Stilt Jack, as Winger judges; it is, rather, lyrical meandering: there is nothing significant gained or lost whichever way we read it; there’s only the fact that it doesn’t seem to matter which way we do. This dis/continuity would be neither necessarily a problem nor indicative of a larger deficit of quality in itself, except that the unproductive, self-cannibalizing feast of self-referentiality that is the book’s content only confirms it to be such. The above passage, unfortunately, is representative on this front: the “abandoned song list” means this list-like book of couplets and lyrics itself, the “i don’t know” and ellipses record writerly lapses, and the “two// boxes” are the two last stanzas into which the poet has “to fit everything” in order to comply with his established ten-stanza form—even though, as mentioned, we wouldn’t much notice if the section break were omitted, and even though the poems read as though their stanzaic form might have just as easily been imposed superfluously, after the fact. This then leads into the “because” stanza, where “i’m back in the casemate of public art” is just the tip of the even more explicit self-indulgence to follow:

because i said i would write new poems here because caine left his painting easels because liz left a $10.20 bag of carded wool because my name is spelt jo on the sign out front because i have a tech pen and steady eye-hand because the knight of cups is often well-travelled because this is on paper purchased in beograd because this is in my travelling manual typewriter

And on and on, in the classic case of the writer with writer’s block or nothing to say avoiding writing and thinking by writing and thinking about how he has nothing to say. In this case, it’s even worse for the fact that Blades was writing this while enjoying “several short-term public artist residencies” from the Fredericton Arts Alliance. (These take place in casemates of the Historic Garrison District in Fredericton.) It’s a really bad joke: a writer-in-residence writing about his residency:

because i’ve written the first poem by 10:50 am i now want to try the laptop for a wireless signal it works i can blog and email from within this artist residency casemate two ways to write

Thus, as I hinted earlier, we would better understand these poems not so much as poems that were published on a blog, but as blog entries to which were applied some basic poetic form (some solution called “Just Add Line and Stanza Breaks”). As a result of all this, the poetry achieves all the piquancy of the religious status updates of that high school acquaintance whose life details you never cared for to begin with but now inevitably get regular flashes of through your Facebook newsfeed. Joe Blades, 10:50 am: “i’ve written the first poem.” And I am feeding my cat. Do we care? (For an interesting poetic treatment of Facebook, see Bill Kennedy and Darren Wershler’s status update.) Indeed, even the author himself poses this question—albeit, like the fine print of the end-page, belatedly—as this long anaphoric section continues:

because i’m yawning while writing this poem how can i expect any reader to get excited? because i’m too tired to chomp at the bit because i suspect i’m drifting into autopilot cruise control autosave autorun homestretch because i just might be catching up to myself because the woman who read my wall of casemate poems has returned to read my (reprise) on the same wall

The thing is, like all good writers, Blades has already by this point done a fine job of showing all this, without now having to tell. I, for one, only happened upon this instance of Blades’ “yawning” by mitigating my own: by skipping ahead, setting peepers to “scan.” Another related problem is that these poems do not read like someone really “writing the moment,” which is in large part what Blades thinks he is doing, in both this book and elsewhere: “most of the poetry in my recent books—Casemate Poems (Collected) … and Prison Songs and Storefront Poetry … —was written in public artist residencies, on the spot, mostly with a manual typewriter, with the immediacy of an artist-journalist, or an explorer-scientist writing fieldnotes in my journals” (4 December 2011). I cannot speak for the other book, but in Casemate Poems the reason why this self-analysis is off, the reason why the poems do not read as such, is that they are too fashioned within a poetic form and the normative conventions of spelling and grammar and writing—in a similar way as Wordsworth’s poetry could hardly be called “spontaneous.” Blades’ poetry is not Dada—it refuses to radicalize itself in the way of Kenneth Goldsmith, for example. Blades’ “because there’s a 60% chance of thundershowers,” and other occasional weather reports, simply cannot compare with the quotidian and mundane immediacy of Goldsmith’s The Weather—nor, for that matter, with Lisa Robertson’s The Weather. Blades is not, therefore, an “explorer-scientist.” The book takes no experimental approaches to the writing itself, and the only subject for “exploration” that it seems interested in is the residency itself. His approach to writing immediacy only becomes a pretext for a more indulgent writing of self. Hence the title: Casemate Poems—poems written in the casemate of a public artist residency. Unfortunately, the concept and ideas don’t extend much beyond that. If the casemate forms a metaphor for something, then, it’s that of a lyrical self-enclosure. This book is not “art as good protection against its own internal threats,” as Steve McCaffery writes in his introduction to the second panel of Carnival, but art as a self-fortification against the countless external non-selves that pose a threat to the lyrical self. In the fifty-or-so-page “because” section, the sense of suspension effected by the anaphora is occasionally relieved, and then continues on into the “next” poem, but it quickly gets resolved for good as the self-referential content transmits the sense that the overarching answer to the “becauses” (the because why) is always Mr. Blades himself and the casemate itself and the residency itself. The reasons? I might as well use Blades’ words: “[B]ecause the ringing sound of this manual typewriter/ is being heard in brick-walled craft college rooms”; “because rob [mclennan, of Chaudiere Books] asks ‘will all the casemate poems// be published in one book?’” At worst, the book reproduces the Romantic cliché of the misunderstood, self-entitled artist: “what can i say?/ because i’m no longer fit for public consumption”; at worse than worst, it descends into shameless self-advertising: “while i was typing/ poem 25 into brokenjoe.blogspot.com … ” A final testament to his resistance to actual poetic exploration is that, every so often, Blades does flirt with some ideas for more interesting poems that come to mind as he is writing this one—but only flirts. For example, following the penultimate “because” passage I cited, Blade ponders the idea of a poem written using two keyboards:

… could even try typing one hand on each device and see just how bad i could write the potential to make so many mistakes beyond typos my hands not independent like playing two pianos simultaneously

This reminded me of an idea I’d had, for a poem along the lines of a Mad fold-in or a musical catch—interesting! But unfortunately, Blades only mentions the idea, rather than carrying it through. At moments like this, I thought Blades’ book perhaps some dead pauper’s tapeworm foundry. Darren Wershler-Henry’s tapeworm foundry works, though, because the whole book consists of such unrealized artistic proposals—the book is conceptually unified, in other words, and moreover by what in itself is a good idea for a book. With Casemate Poems, by contrast, since such artistic or epistemological proposals are not at all the focus of the work but only sneak their way in every so often in the same way that lines of Shakespeare sneak their way into monkeys’ typewriters, they only serve to remind one of how comparatively uninteresting the non-idea is that Blades did decide to materialize. In the above example, the reference to the two keyboards only becomes another glance in the mirror on the wall, and reminds one that these are essentially diaristic blog entries, glory-branded as poetry. But at least Blades has the decency to include some such interesting ideas at all, including even a reference to a more interesting book: “mathematics / and the roots of postmoddern [sic] ^[2] thought by tasić.” I see this as a kind of escape clause: a “Get Out of Casemate Free” card. To his credit, though, Blades proves himself at times if not a “master of the image” (as Linda Gregerson, in her introduction to We Don’t Know We Don’t Know, says of Nick Lantz), then at least an image hopeful. For example, “this much garlic could rip perspective.” By striking such images, Blades literalizes his namesake and carves up the reader’s perspective into poetry. But I do struggle to locate other images as quotable: they shine through the text more sparsely than the author through the bars behind which he is pictured on the back cover—only we’re left in no doubt of what side of the cage we, with our Get Out Free card, are on. Blades should have, in this respect, heeded the words of TV culinary poet Emeril Lagasse: “More garlic!” After all, perspective, like romaine for a Caesar, begs to be ripped, not chopped. In sum, on a scale of case to mate, this poem is a to: neither a case for study nor a thing to hastily befriend. But I suspect a few of you, too, might be able to circumvent the dilemma by securing a free reviewer’s copy, should your fingers wish to caress the softness of the book’s glossy insides. I found myself touching this inside cover, becoming fascinated by this, quite often as I was reading Blades’ poetry—hence lending credence to the theory that adjudicators (educators) will grade work printed on soft or higher-grade paper more kindly than work printed on inferior, commonplace paper (such as virtual paper). In the case of Casemate Poems (Collected), however, it was only enough to distract me, only enough to call more attention to the reason for such distraction (“yawning,” which Blades, in a single moment of “explorer-scientist,” proves is contagious even through words)—and that’s not enough to seduce me.