Dina Del Bucchia and Daniel Zomparelli, Rom Com

Jennifer Lawrence

Jennifer Lawrence is your best friend, she makes you smile when the comical anvil slams down on your heart, and she told you once that you were all she needed. She taught you to dance when schizophrenia ghosted your body and garbage bag running suits tailored you in anger. Jennifer Lawrence saved a baby from a well once, took care of you while you had a fever, fixed a building after Hurricane Sandy. Jennifer Lawrence once saved you from a crumbling civilization. Jennifer Lawrence wrote a tell-all about your friendship, and told the world that you were the one who saved her. Jennifer Lawrence called to tell you she was thinking about you, late at night when you were certain the winter outside was leaking into your body, crystallizing your skin, turning your body into a plastic version of itself. Jennifer Lawrence taught you what love is, from a laptop glaring in the darkness, filtering through your eyes. The truth is, Jennifer Lawrence isn’t your best friend. You don’t have a best friend, just the rage sweating from your forehead.

From Vancouver poets and pop culture aficionados Dina Del Bucchia and Daniel Zomparelli come the wonderfully playful and dark poetry collaboration Rom Com (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2015). Del Bucchia, the author of Coping with Emotions and Otters (Talonbooks, 2013) and Blind Items (Toronto ON: Insomniac Press, 2014), and Zomparelli, author of Davie Street Translations (Talonbooks, 2012) [see my review of such here], also co-host the literary podcast Can’t Lit. Composed as a book “that both celebrates and capsizes the romantic comedy,” the poems in Rom Com are darkly comic, responding to a series of pop culture idioms, porn parodies, pop quizzes, actors and romantic comidies themselves (with repeated references to weddings, dicks and sex scenes), including poems titled “She’s All That,” “In a Movie about Weddings / No One Wants to Attend,” “When Harry Met Sally,” “Because You Watched 27 Dresses,” “Overboard” and “He Grasps at Emotion, or The Proposal.”

50 First Dates

You sang me a song

but I forgot.

You took me to the aquarium.

I forgot.

Took me on a boat.

Forgot.

I keep watching The Sixth Sense,

over and over again, waiting for the twist.

Every morning I wake up on a boat

next to a man

who tells me I love him

on a VHS

but I can’t remember.

Now the ocean surrounds me

and I never trusted

the open water.

Given their exploration into pop culture, humour and the sonnet, it would be impossible to think that the two haven’t been influenced by the work of Montreal poet David McGimpsey, author of his self-described “chubby sonnets,” especially through their five-poem “Sonnets for Supporting Roles,” that includes:

George, My Best Friend’s Wedding

For you, not for you, but for porcelain dolls

walking down the aisle. You are a cellphone

or an emergency lip gloss. You are the touch-up

rouge in her purse, you are the gay best friend.

The one who fusses over her hair, memorizes wardrobe,

waits in your apartment for whenever she is ready.

Filing nails, and sitting on your Barcelona chair,

watching Murder, She Wrote until she calls.

When she is ready, you snap fingers and make

jokes with flapping hands, tell her she has it all.

When she needed you most, you flew down

to save a dance at the wedding, a wedding you

could never have, legally, so instead you collapsed

back into a lipstick and a clasp purse.

They might be influenced by McGimpsey, but the poems here are far darker than his, and even their own individual works, writing out a sense of emptiness and loss behind so many of these poems composed for and after a series of light American movie fare, such as in the poem “So I Married a Poet,” that includes: “There was a time when romantic comedies were like jokes / about men versus women. They were everywhere.” One of my favourite poems in the collection has to be “A Series of Romantic Comedies / That Could Never Be Made,” dedicated to Winnipeg poet Jonathan Ball, that begins: “A woman dates every man on earth until she is too old to date. On her deathbed, she meets the man of her dreams: the doctor who pulls her off life support. “Ironic” by Alanis Morissette plays during the credits.” The poem ends with:

Kate and Steven never meet. They spend their entire lives just missing each other. One leaves a coffee shop just as another enters, one works the day shift, one works the night shift. They would fall in love if their paths ever crossed, but they never do. Love inhabits the spaces they never meet. It fills the blank spots.

This is an enormously smart and witty collection, playing with stereotypes and a love of bad film. And yet, are Del Bucchia and Zomparelli celebrating the genre or pulling away the curtain, and revealing its inherent shallowness? The answer, I think, is, somehow, incredibly, both.

Reviewers on Reviewing: mclennan, Webb-Campbell, Marchand, Zomparelli + Del Bucchia

At Erin Wunker's request, I recently wrote a short blurb on why reviewing matters for the CWILA site, posted this week alongside similar pieces by Shannon Webb-Campbell, Philip Marchand, Jonathan Ball and Daniel Zomparelli and Dina Del Bucchia.

As Wunker writes over at Facebook:

Reviewing as feral practice, as the strike-out and slow carve. Reviewing as necessary in a world where books seem to matter less and less. Reviewing as joyful dissent and a refusal to be 'boring as fuck.' Check out what Shannon Webb-Campbell, rob mclennan, Jonathan Ball, Daniel Zomparelli & Dina Del Bucchia, and Phillip Marchand have to say about why book reviews matter.

Have thoughts of your own? Send me a message and we can get your views on why you review up at CWILA's Reviewers on Reviewing site!

Renée Sarojini Saklikar, children of air india

Introduction

This is a work of the imagination.

This is a work of fiction, weaving fact in with the fiction,

merging subject-voice with object-voice, the “I” of the author,

submerged, poet-persona: N—

who loses her aunt and uncle in the bombing of an airplane: Air India Flight 182.

This is a sequence of elegies. This is an essay of fragments:

            a child’s battered shoe, a widow’s lament—

This is a lament for children, dead, and dead again in representation. Released.

This is a series of transgressions: to name other people’s dead, to imagine them.

This is a dirge for the world. This is a tall tale. This is saga, for a nation.

This is about lies. This is about truth.

Another version of this introduction exists.

It has been redacted.

And so opens Vancouver poet Renée Sarojini Saklikar’s first poetry collection, children of air india: un/authorized exhibits and interjections (Gibsons BC: Nighwood Editions, 2013), recent winner of the 2014 Canadian Authors Association Award for Poetry. children of air india: un/authorized exhibits and interjections is an investigative book-length study into the facts and fractures of what has been referred to as “Canada’s worst mass murder”—the bombing of Air India Flight 182 on June 23, 1985 that killed 329 people, including 82 children. Working from a vast archive, from newspaper reports to personal stories, Saklikar’s investigation through the material left behind and generated by such an event to create a rich and complex tapestry of grief, absence, rage, incomprehension, compassion and all the internal and external systems that surrounded the trajedy, including the “Commission of Inquiry into the Investigation of the Bombing of Air India Flight 182,” which wasn’t released until 2010, and the subsequent trial and acquittal of the accused: “there is not reconciliation. There is plausible and implausible. / Catastrophic and unreasonable, / Eighty-two children under the age of thirteen. There is time-consuming and / inconvenient. / There is manual and reasonably balanced. There are costs.” (“from the archive, the weight—”). Throughout the collection, poems exist as examinations of what remains, composed as a sequence of autopsies, archaeological studies, explorations and regret at such a loss of human life and potential, reported to and by the narrator, described only as “N”:

Informant to N: in the after-time

My name is [redacted] and my mother was [redacted].

I was three months old when my mother died.

I am without memory of my mother. I am not familiar with this record of events.

June 23, 1985 and after.

I get older. I am her only child.

For such a weighty subject matter, Saklikar’s thoughtful questioning works through language as much as it does through subject, managing a playful display of sound and shape, allowing form and function to ebb and flow, strike and slice as required. Saklikar’s book-length investigation of such a tragic event through poetry is reminiscent of other recent titles by Vancouver poets, including Jordan Abel’s The Place of Scraps (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2013) [see my review of such here], Cecily Nicholson’s From the Poplars (Talonbooks, 2014) [see my review of such here] and Mercedes Eng’s Mercenary English (Vancouver BC: CUE Books, 2013) [see my review of such here], each of which explore, engage and challenge a series of dark histories through various experimental poetic forms. As Saklikar writes in the poem “C-A-N-A-D-A: in the after-time, always, there is also the before…”: “each story-bit / a laceration / inside her deep down / secrets / dismembered / one limb after another— / incident as saga, saga as tragedy, / tragedy as occurrence / so what a plane explodes / so what people die, they die every day / in her body, blast and counter blast / (Air India Flight 182) / her story and the stories of other people / interact—a toxin?” As Saklikar, who lost an aunt and uncle in the attack, responded in a recent interview conducted by Daniel Zomparelli for Lemonhound: “My hope for children of air india, which by the way comes to me only now, after the fact of writing it, is that readers/listeners will view it as a site of query, of contemplation: what does it mean to lose someone to murder, on both a micro-level, that is, on a personal level, but also within a macro-context, within a public event.”

Testimony: her name was [redacted]

She was seven years old.

Her mother said: she was full of life.

Her mother said: she was very pretty.

Her mother said: she loved to dance.

Her mother said: she loved music.

Her name was [redacted].

She was seven years old.

Daniel Zomparelli, Davie Street Translations

My short review of Daniel Zomparelli's Davie Street Translations (Talonbooks) is now online at Bywords.ca

12 or 20 questions (second series) with Daniel Zomparelli

Daniel Zomparelli is the editor of Poetry Is Dead magazine. His first book of poems, Davie Street Translations was published in the Spring of 2012 from Talonbooks.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I’m not sure it necessarily changed any aspect of my life. I guess now people stop asking me when my book is coming out.

My work continues to change as I try out different styles and forms, but my book’s artistic style already feels foreign to me. I have trouble sticking with anything, and am usually embarrassed at anything I do. I want to be the Madonna of Canadian poetry, thus reinvent myself over and over again until I’m just writing shitty pop songs.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I had applied to be in a fiction program, but they thought I was better suited to poetry. I guess the poems I spat off in 10 minutes were better than the three short stories I spent months on. Now I spend months working on individual poems.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
I can only speak to the one book I have but, it takes me a long time to work on any project. I usually obsess over things for about three months, trying to think of every angle of the project. Then, with this book, I wrote for a few years and edited some older poems I had. After that I spent a year editing. That being said, my next book probably won’t be done for another eight years.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
Sometimes poems come from just random themes that come up in conversation. Then I try to understand the language around that theme and build from there. Sometimes that concept can be a potential book or sometimes a single poem is enough to satisfy me, but usually I am focused on a book or project (not necessarily to be put into the medium of book).

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I like public readings because it helps when I’m writing humouristic work. I need to hear people laugh to confirm I am hitting the right notes. I enjoy readings for the writing process, but I actually dislike poetry readings in general. I get bored intensely fast. I’m still in that age where I think I’m missing out on something by being at a poetry reading, I blame every app on my iPhone.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
I’m going to do a writer faux pas and quote myself, “Is it the gays or / the gaze?” That is usually what I'm trying to concern myself with theoretically, but I'm terribly unread when it comes to theory. I spend my evenings watching Zizek youtube videos instead. He reminds me of my dad.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
I’m here to entertain. Whatever anyone takes from my work is up to them.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Working with Garry Thomas Morse was exceptionally easy. I fear any other editors after him.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
I’m paraphrasing but, “If you actually have something to say, write an article or call the media. Don’t write a poem.”

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
It’s difficult for me to write in prose. My brain has lost any ability to keep a linear path. I’m working on a prose book, but it involves an intense amount of experimental poetry. I enjoy when writers don’t concern themselves with genre. Genre reminds me of gender, something enforced upon people without any real benefit.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I write when I’m not working one of my 19 jobs.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
If I’m stalled, I read. If that doesn’t work, beer.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Garlic pan fried in oil.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Social interactions. Anything on the internet.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
bill bissett’s work.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I really want to curate an art show entirely made up of contemporary Canadian visual poets. I’m still working on this, but it probably won’t happen for another couple of years.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I work so many jobs that I can barely identify myself as a writer. If I didn’t write, I would probably be in marketing. I also really wanted to be a stand-up comedian when I was younger.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Like most writers, social anxiety.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Hagiagrophy by Jen Currin. I have a lesbro crush on her.

20 - What are you currently working on?
Long poems, speculative fiction, visual poetry, finding a boyriend and the perfect Whisky Sour.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;