Phillip Crymble Reviews John Wall Barger's The Mean Game

John Wall Barger. The Mean Game. Palimpsest Press. $18.95, 76 pp., ISBN: 9781926794095

As a poetry editor at The Fiddlehead, I’ve noticed a sizable uptick in the volume of resistance poetry that’s come over the transom in recent years. Considering the seemingly uncheckable ascendancy of reactionary populist governments throughout the western world, this trend is far from surprising. Pommeled by daily reports of cultural and political upheaval, we watch in disbelief as one after another the foundational norms underwriting our democracies are shattered. Protests, marches, and rallies aside, we look, as we have always done, to poets, writers, and other arts practitioners to articulate our grief and outrage, to shape it using figures, conceits, and mimetic gestures that broaden our understanding. And while it’s true, of course, that poetries of statement and direct reportage, too, can be used to effectively confront long-standing systemic abuses, and to expose the “fairytales of eternal economic growth” that continue to threaten our planet, I’ve read enough artless but well-meaning screeds to understand the inherent dangers of such approaches.

Don’t get me wrong: poems that rely on symbolism, ambiguity, and inter-textual allusion are liable to weaknesses, too, and in the hands of lesser poets, can come across as mechanical or over-determined. But when done well, they can also demonstrate the transformative possibilities of the art form, as well as how oblique strategies can be used to powerful effect. Last month, climate-crisis activist Greta Thunberg, (cited above), pilloried world leaders by condemning their collective allegiance to capitalist protocols as a misguided fantasy. Clearly, the “fairytales” global power brokers continue to endorse have brought us to the brink of annihilation, so what better way to undermine the worldviews of these malevolent serial fabulists and their poisonous followers than by creating a counter-narrative using invented mythologies and analogical thinking.

John Barger’s The Mean Game does precisely that, and “Urgent Message from the Captain of the Unicorn Hunters,” the very first poem in the collection, establishes the bizarre and deeply unsettling psychological terrain the book obliges us to traverse right from the outset. Arcane but familiar, the mixture of dark whimsy and absurdist nihilism in “Urgent Message” is reminiscent of the work of Maurice Sendak or Terry Gilliam. And like them, Barger always makes certain that his analogs are tethered to the empirical world as we know it, which is crucial, as it’s that torqued but specific frame of reference that provides the context necessary for us to recognize ourselves and our own experience within the surrealist landscape of his off-kilter anecdotes and vignettes.

“Release them. Those sealed in your attics,” the poem begins, and with this we’re immediately invited to draw an equivalency between unicorns (the explicit and nonsensical victims in the poem), and historical figures, like Anne Frank, or Harriet Anne Jacobs, who, because of their otherness, either hid in attics or were incarcerated and tortured in them. The litany of fictive abuses the poem accuses us of committing, delivered cleverly from the perspective of the Captain, our most accomplished unicorn hunter, is extensive, and includes such confessions and admonitions as: “We taught you to torture the unicorn” and “We have done enough. Baiting them with our virgins. / Cutting the heads off the calves & their mothers. / Planting birthday candles in their eyes.”

Contrite and newly woke, the Captain acknowledges the crimes he’s committed as the agent of a reactionary consensus culture and, in doing so, reminds us of Roy Batty, the replicant engineered for military deployment in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, who’s “seen things you people wouldn’t believe.” Implicated in the consequences of the Captain’s actions, then, the not-so-imaginary public of the poem is presented with a damning dispatch from the front lines, and is forced to acknowledge that by emulating his behaviour, or remaining silent, they have reified the toxic xenophobia underwriting their notions of civilization. Brilliant. And that Barger closes the poem with the Captain’s portentous proclamation that we “[f]irst, let them go. And then we wait” is truly chilling, as it not only turns the tables, but also functions as a bellwether for what’s to come.

Much like “Urgent Message,” “My Houseguest” leverages our shared cultural biases against us. As the poem begins, the speaker suspects that an intruder has invaded his home. The fact that “Neighbors swore / something stretched out my window / to nibble my lettuce” certainly suggests as much. As does the inexplicable appearance of Blind Willie Johnson’s Praise God I’m Satisfied on the turntable each morning. The houseguest in question is ultimately revealed to be an anthropomorphized giraffe, but before the giraffe comes out of hiding, its presence in the house is discernable only by “tapping” and “scratching,” which leads the speaker to imagine he’s hearing the sounds of “[a]n infestation.” And just before the giraffe is discovered, it’s described as having “slithered” into the speaker’s bedroom. Language like this, as we’ve learned, often appears in white-supremacist propaganda to dehumanize peoples from diverse populations, and to position them as a pestilence to be eliminated.

That the speaker pivots once the giraffe comes out of hiding, and from that point forward presents it as a helpless victim in need of sanctuary, serves as an object lesson in why prescriptive worldviews are so dangerous. It’s also important to note that after establishing a relationship with the giraffe, the speaker assigns it a female gender attribution. This creates yet another tension, as the presence of female precarity can be interpreted as something the speaker both desires and wishes to maintain. The implication, then, is that while the giraffe fears discovery because the capitalist hegemony “will … / … sell my fur / as toilet seat covers,” the speaker, too, in wishing to possess and objectify her, leaves her trapped between being fetishized as a victim, and having her physical otherness exoticized and turned into a vulgar luxury commodity.

When the “[m]en in uniform” inevitably arrive and drag “her out by the legs, / bumping her head on the stairs,” the speaker is left to extemporize:

I was alone. The objects in my room,

the jade plant, the old red chair,

assumed a wild clarity.

As if nobody was there to see them.

The giraffe, when taken from the speaker’s home, leaves a destabilizing vacuum that causes previously familiar domestic objects to take on a “wild clarity.” Such ostranenie is consistent with reports made by those suffering from intense feelings of shock or grief. And the fact that Barger pushes the boundaries of this dissociative gesture further still by troubling the very notion of lyric subjectivity itself in the final line adds yet another element of oddness and incongruity to the poem. As heartbreaking as it is ambitious, “My Houseguest,” to me, is the tour de force of the collection. Not only does it demonstrate the ease with which we can be led into pathologizing perceived difference, it also speaks to the fact that, regardless of how enlightened or welcoming we consider ourselves to be, the history of entitlement we try to deny continues to exert its seemingly inescapable agency on our actions and behaviours.

John Wall Barger is one of our most important poets, and The Mean Game, his fourth full-length collection, confirms that he has not only come into his own, but is now writing at the very height of his powers. If this isn’t a great book, I’m going to take up knitting.

Phillip Crymble is a disabled writer and literary scholar living in Atlantic Canada. A poetry editor at The Fiddlehead and a doctoral candidate at UNB, he received his MFA from the University of Michigan and has published poems in The Malahat Review, Poetry Ireland Review, The Literary Review of Canada, The Forward Book of Poetry 2017, and elsewhere. In 2016, Not Even Laughter, his first full-length collection, was a finalist for both the New Brunswick Book Award and the Writer’s Federation of Nova Scotia’s J.M. Abraham Prize.