Daniel Scott Tysdal, The End Is in the Middle

 

     Ballad of the Mad Bomber

                A bomb is not a story, though
                                 Metesky claims to soothe
     with rumour-spurring, blast-fed tales,
throning the search for truth.

                   Through telephone and movie seat
              and subway coined with bombs,
     George liens the wrongs and dastard debit
          yet owes each flame-scorched palm.

      Sedate a dream with waking then
                                   rebrand each corpse a calf.
Explore “Mad Bomber”-planted visions,
                        just slice your eyes in half.

           Though George elates he never killed,
   designed his bombs to goad,
                if terror’s free of fuse and charge

Toronto poet Daniel Scott Tysdal’s work has long been engaged with an irreverent and conceptual structural inventiveness and play on and through poetic form, offering a particular flavour unique in writing and publishing generally, but very much unique through Canadian writing. Anytime I’m moving through a new collection of his, I wonder: exactly where did this guy come from? The author of the poetry titles Predicting the Next Big Advertising Breakthrough Using a Potentially Dangerous Method (Regina SK: Coteau Books, 2006), The Mourner’s Book of Albums (Toronto ON: Tightrope Books, 2010) [see my review of such here] and Fauxccasional Poems (Fredericton NB: Goose Lane Editions/icehouse poetry, 2015) [see my review of such here], as well as the short story collection Wave Forms and Doom Scrolls (Hamilton ON: Wolsak & Wynn, 2021) and the poetry textbook The Writing Moment: A Practical Guide to Creating Poems (Oxford University Press, 2013), his latest title is the poetry volume The End Is in the Middle (Goose Lane Editions/icehouse poetry, 2022). His work exists as a curious outlier, coming at form and pop culture from the seemingly-oddest angle, and his outlier status seems moreso through his publishing books with presses not known for producing experimental work (it isn’t lost on me that one of the blurbs on the back cover is by Saskatchewan poet Sylvia Legris [see my review of her latest here], arguably another Canadian poet outlier). Tysdal’s latest, The End Is in the Middle, works through the structure of the infamous Mad Magazine fold-in, something just about everyone of at least two or three generations would be entirely familiar with, as he writes to introduce the collection:

The fold-in poetry form was inspired by one of my childhood heroes: Al Jaffee. For fifty-six years, his illustrated fold-ins comprised the back inside cover of every issue of MAD magazine (Jaffee retired in 2020, when he turned 100). A page-filling image, with a brief caption at the bottom, would be transformed by folding the page to reveal a visual and textual punchline. Borrowing Jaffee’s fold-in technique, the fold-in poem is characterized by three features: 1) the poem does not end at the bottom of the page, 2) the reader completes the poem by folding the page in so that the A guide meets the B guide, and 3) these folds reveal the final line of the poem nested within the original lines. For accessibility reasons, the final, post-fold line also appears after each poem.

the final line of "Ballad of the Mad Bomber"

Arguably, most if not all poetry exists with a requirement for the reader to make connections not overtly in the body of the poem, however directed their reading might be by the author, rarely is the requirement of the reader so physical. I’m reminded of bpNichol’s unreleased and burnable mimeo poem Cold Mountain (no date, but circa 1960s), a visual poem built to be curled, stood up and set with a match; although, in comparison to Tysdal’s folding structure, nothing new is specifically revealed in or through Nichol’s text by the reader doing such a thing. For Tysdal, the requirements for such a piece are immense, offering a narrative echo of the Jaffee’s jumbling visual collage that offered a final reveal that provided a gag as well as new insight into that original, sprawling page. That original A to B is hardly as uncomplicated as it sounds, and to even be a single line, a single letter, off would mean the entire piece might fall apart. And for the benefit of those who don’t wish to mangle their copies, as well as for accessible reasons, the final revealed text is also offered on each following page. It would be curious to know, down the road, how many readers actually did attempt to fold the pages together to reveal the final, hidden line of each poem as it is meant to be experienced. Even jwcurry, bpNichol bibliographer, has said that Cold Mountain was best experienced as a pair: one copy to burn, and one copy to keep pristine.

There’s almost something of the rhyme and joyful metre in certain of these pieces that echo Toronto poet Dennis Lee’s classic poetry titles for children, whether Alligator Pie (1974) or Jelly Belly (1983), as Tysdal bounces and riffs in rhythm in a poem such as “Ballad of the Mad Bomber,” although most pieces exist as extended, singular, stretches. “Why bother writing a poem?” he begins, in the poem “Make,” “The future, / breaking away, doesn’t want it. Even if / your lines are a monument to their moment, / tomorrow’s fools will legislate new rules and / blast your statue, or extinct themselves into / stillness, the levelling left to sand and time.” Set in five sections of poems, each with single-page poems, including the occasional visual poem, and verso final line reveal—“MAD ME,” “MAD MEN,” “MAD MAKING,” “MAD COMPANIONS” and “MORE MAD ME”—the poems are composed with wit and vigor, attention to small moments and grand gestures alike. They are expressive, hopeful and compassionate, even in poems such as “Suicide,” suggesting “A pact signed with such force / it breaks.” Or, as the poem “Snowflake” offers: “it’s because we will melt / that we don’t fear the light.”