Mark Grenon Reviews Gary Barwin's For It Is a Pleasure and a Surprise to Breathe: New & Selected Poems
For It Is a Pleasure and a Surprise to Breathe: New & Selected Poems. Gary Barwin. Wolsak & Wynn. $25.00, 256 pp., ISBN: 978-1-928088-95-0
One of Gary Barwin’s many collaborators, Gregory Betts, tweeted the following quote by Wisława Szymborska in late May: “I prefer the absurdity of writing poems / to the absurdity of not writing poems.” Barwin replied, “yes. And i also prefer the poetry of absurdity to the poetry of non-absurdity.”
At 256 pages, For It Is a Surprise and a Pleasure to Breathe is a generous selection of work spanning Barwin’s oeuvre, including 15 colour pages (and 13 in grayscale) of his wonderful visual poems, and around 30 pages of new and previously uncollected poems. The book is a testament to Barwin’s long career probing the pleasures and surprises of the absurd, extending the long tradition of the European avant-garde and its many offshoots in American and Canadian poetics.
As an object, it is a beautiful book, with a colourful cover created by the graphic designer Kilby Smith-McGregor[1], who incorporated Barwin’s original comics-framed artwork, which depicts an ampersand coiled through a ribcage—a memento mori we might intuit as macabre—but the symbolic agency of the ampersand builds a breathing bulwark against death. The ampersand takes the place of the heart and lungs, existing/breathing within these skeletal remains. As an emblem of linguistic addition, of amplification and amplitude, the ampersand’s near mystical import implies that through language and symbols we breathe with those who’ve come before us and those yet to come—a testament to the ethos of a seemingly indefatigable artist who produces music, visual work, novels, and poetry.
I discovered Barwin’s work via Twitter, where his digitally disseminated ampersand visual works are one of my favourite things on the internet. The remarkable “The Punctuation of Thieves” provides insight into Barwin’s singular fascination with the ampersand:
&
The ampersand dreams. Mother & child, the primordial &, a mother’s
arms around her child, the Möbius umbilical, the inside out, the turn-
ing a portrait of itself, the between one thing and another, the “and
other” connected, the hand and its other, the breath and its shadow,
the shadow’s curl, the ampersand.
Alphabetical adjunct and logogram for the conjunction “and,” the ampersand, for Barwin, serves as a source for endless invention. As he dreams the ampersand, it too dreams, reaching back into distant time like a pictographic Gaia, a liminal figure, joining life and death, light and shadow, inside and outside, eternally.
Reading this book is like rambling through a galaxy of forms and experimentation, which could be disorienting if you don’t have a background in the expansive constellations of Barwin’s influences and co-conspirators who have helped propel his apparent quest to infuse CanLit with jests, puns, gags, feints, that is, at times, an irrepressible license of levitas. Fortunately, in both his editorial selections and erudite intro, Barwin’s editor, Alessandro Porco, is there to guide us. Online resources to help us further map out the book include an insightful entry in rob mclennan’s blog[2] and an enthusiastic review by Matthew Gwathmey in Hamilton Arts & Letters[3], who, by the way, counted 1087 puns throughout the collection!
When Barwin leans too much towards levitas in his rebellion against gravitas—even though there may be sound reasons for doing so—the poems may lack the weight some wisecrack-resistant readers seek in their reading. This is not the case with “Rabbit,” whose contained energy binds the poem’s whimsy in the counter-rational sublimity of the absurd: “i am a point in the centre of the universe. i am like a pupil in the eye / of an infinite rabbit. I would like rabbits to define escape.” Intriguingly uncanny, while “The Birth of Writing” is rooted in the absurd, the impact of its restraint lingers in the mind when reading it, urging this reader to pass through the poem again and again, to enjoy the irreducibility of lines like these:
we call our first child
Qwerty
her thin bones
paper-thin skin
we name her in the river
waist deep
I hold her
above the water
like a small Olivetti
It would be a fool’s errand to parse the book for places where the jokes land and where they don’t, but some of the playful irreverence, clearly designed to undercut the reader’s expectations of what poetry is or ought to be, would be counter-productive if it were Barwin’s ambition to court readers confined to the potentially smug boundaries of sincerity and authenticity.
Rather, Barwin’s poetics often stem from how language can break out through surrealism and dreams. At the same time, not all dreams, or poems based on their jarring logic, can propel the mysterious catalyst of their content for readers; I find this to be the case with some of the fabulist strains to be found throughout the book. However, “Palace/Palate of Night” is an example of a poem which is convincingly charged with the affective potential of the dream. The title of the poem is a pun, one of Barwin’s go-to tools for rupturing language / daytime consciousness. The night, the time of dreams, when our consciousness veers into the staccato mischief of sleep, is a palace, a place of luxury and retreat. But there’s also a certain horror in the repeated symbolism of losing one’s teeth, as when the diabolically mechanical speaker, a “red dentist,” says
I used to clean my son’s teeth with a pocket
knife, maintained a clean son with measurement. I remember we had
dinner on the lawn. We were a bird on the grass. We buried my wife
when it was raining. She was flying under the leaves.
The palate of the poem’s title is another pun, referring both to the roof of the mouth and having refined taste, the kind of snobbiness Barwin’s poetics of the absurd rails against. Another sample of the horror:
Beneath his white coat, my dentist is the only entirely red dentist in
town. His skin and eyes are red as a barber chair but not so adjustable.
Red as an emergency but not so adjustable. Behind his paper mask
he’s making small talk. His skin and eyes are acres of talk.
There’s something diabolical in this clinical authority figure’s merging with his environment, and the “paper mask” also raises the surreal spectre of the pandemic we’re all currently navigating. Even “small talk” takes on a predatory quality with the malign proximity of the words “measurement” and “adjustable,” as if there’s something monstrous lurking within the slide of pronouns and blurring of memories, beneath the smooth quantifiable surface of rational language.
For me, much of Barwin’s strongest work refers to language itself, the very shape of letters and punctuation marks, as in the “Punctuation of Thieves” discussed above. He possesses fine lyrical and plastic sensitivity to the calligraphic beauty of letters, their supple form, the arcs of their shapes. He mines these to great effect in his exuberant concrete/visual poetry, which we may sample as viewers by touring the second and fourth sections of the book, entitled “The Wild and Unfathomable Always (I) Grayscale” and “The Wild and Unfathomable Always (II) Garyscale.” The former, which functions as a paper-bound art exhibition, is in grayscale, and so limited to shades of black and white.
There’s excellent work here, including a piece created for Derek Beaulieu entitled “Door Sonnet,” a creation made entirely with the architectural symbols for doors. Barwin’s sonnet is a 14-line labyrinth of escape routes, left at the level of the concept. It is the viewer’s business to complete the poem, not by being bound to the rigour of fixed form but by renovating it at the crystalline point of the concept, a playful tool the viewer may imbibe in an instantaneous gestalt.
The second section of visual poems is in full colour, which must be why it’s been punningly dubbed Garyscale, as if the quasi-mystical power of the very letters of Barwin’s first name bring colour to the world of images, and letters, and language. These works draw from comics, anatomy, quantum mechanics, landscape painting, photography, Hebrew, modern artists such as Miró and Mondrian and pop artists like Lichtenstein. Why do I get the feeling that amidst this panoply of interests there are arcane strains of gematria running through it?
Perhaps a “best of…” can’t quite capture the esprit & spontaneity of Barwin’s embedded presence in the virtual world or in the many literary communities he’s helped build and enliven, but this selection of work does a formidable job of pressing the blooming garden of his poetics into the vessel of this volume, which supplies its raison d'être in its title, For It Is a Pleasure and a Surprise to Breathe:
&
Mark Grenon's poetry and reviews have appeared in The Antigonish Review, filling Station, Matrix, The Puritan, and Vallum, among others. His collaborative video poetry has been screened at the Visible Verse Festival, the Rendez-vous cinéma québécois, and the anti-Matter Film Festival. Although his home town is Ottawa, he's a long-term Montrealer, and has lived in the Czech Republic, Taiwan, and Chile.
[1] https://alllitup.ca/Blog/2019/Beautiful-Books-For-It-Is-a-Pleasure-and-a-Surprise-to-Breathe
[2] http://robmclennan.blogspot.com/2019/10/gary-barwin-for-it-is-pleasure-and.html
[3] https://halmagazine.wordpress.com/2020/05/14/book-review-matthew-gwathmey-gary-barwin/