Two Short Reviews: Bateman & Wilson

Dearst whomever,

Here are a couple of reviews as published in Calgary's local street weekly, Fast Forward. While both are intended to be positive on the whole, I've gotten quite a bit of flack from a certain local poetess who felt my review just wasn't glowing enough. (Yes, Sheri-D, not Bateman - sheesh! :) ) Good thing I didn't write what I was originally going to, or she might have sent someone to break my legs! I haven't been condescended to so badly since I was five and rode my bicycle into a lady by accident. Well, sorry to both of you ladies I've either literally or figuratively crashed into. Still, these were written for a certain audience, a mainly young, Fast Forward-reading, mostly non-poet audience, which perhaps ought to be considered. No matter who's reading, though, I stand by the fact that Wilson's poems on the page, for me at least, couldn't stand on their own at all until I heard her read. But after hearing Wilson read, one can at least tell what she's trying to do, whether one likes the results or not. 'Nough said. And, I also assert again that both book and CD are certainly worth checking out if you're into spoken word, thus encouraging people to buy both.

Anyhow, those reviews:

Invisible Foreground by
David Bateman
ISBN 1-897181-78-7
Frontenac House 2005

Poet, playwright, and bona fide Doctor of Creative Writing at the University of Calgary, multi-talented David Bateman recently won over The New Gallery at his excellent one-man-show Lotus Blossom Special. A glorious chameleon on page or stage, he tries on as many styles and forms of poetry in Invisible Foreground as he does costumes in his individualized spoof of Madame Butterfly.
Invisible Foreground is as balanced as a practiced set of gams in highheels. You laugh, you cry, you console yourself with Haagen Das. Different line lengths, stanza sizes, concepts, and a terrific instinct for line rhythm in both performance poems as well as page poems, all pieces complement one another rather than clash. Bateman’s creative works, through self-representation, lovingly address the similar joys and difficulties of an entire generation of closet outcomers who, if they dared so much as rattle hangers, faced even more homophobia years back than today.
Still, Bateman rarely makes specific cases for political action. Instead, he bravely opens himself up, through his art, to hurled flak or flowers, confessional and earnest as hell but with the dark protective edges of one whose very subject matter has prepared him to defend the publication of it.
In Storey and a Half, Bateman shows how to blueprint the ephemeral sense of one’s life between lines of the actual. Try applying today’s insight to memory’s cue images: “I lost my mind in these tyrannous locations / there was a white leatherette rocker / furniture was like countries to me then”.
Then Bateman launches into a humourous take on Elvis / Elvis paraphernalia sightings so we know it won’t all be heavy, but are still assured he might return to weightier subject matter. Order of presentation in a classic book can be as important as order of presentation in a classic album, setting reader’s expectation how Patsy Cline sets listener’s mood. We are thus prepared for Bateman’s poetry to dance between lighthearted observation and depth as different types of lover’s touches for the mind: Calgary airport begins “I like to go to the airport / check into Swiss Chalet…” and goes into one of Bateman’s spirited, magic interpretations of the usual commonplace.
In a poem like Terrain, however, Bateman reaches beneath the ribcage for startling observations on hard experiences. Of going to the funeral of a former lover, he writes, “…the big stone parlour, / like a large suburban home / imperfect, glistening, strange”. In Stark insane voice on some liminal horizon, the poet posits that experiences varying in depth affect one’s capacity of love.
Irony and synecdoche, or symbolism, are Bateman’s light and dark sinewy threads for sewing together narrative voice into a radiant living scarf, fabric as liable to choke you up as to feel you up. A poetry of extreme originality, intense muscle, dropdead honesty, tender titillation and gorgeous eclectic imagery, it will linger on the skin of all your senses til it sinks in for good.

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Re:view: Re: Zoom by Sheri-D Wilson
ISBN 1-897181-77-9
Frontenac House 2005

Saying that Sheri-D Wilson is better with music is like saying her friend and consistent backer, Jann Arden, is better with music. What do you mean, you ask; after all, Jann IS music. Well, same applies to Sheri-D. Listening to her excellent CD of five years previous, Sweet Taste of Lightning, you can’t help but wonder where the disc is for her latest book, Re:Zoom. Wilson virgins reading her verse accompanied by page silence is like finding the liner notes for music you’ve never heard – and, if you’re not familiar with it, not even knowing what genre you’re looking at, since the booklet’s shaped like a travel brochure or some other misleadingly familiar shape. (Such is spoken word poetry in page-poetry book form). Or it’s listening to television, seeing radio, smelling film. Okay, enough, I made my point; Sheri-D on paper alone just doesn’t feel right
Not having heard Sheri-D aloud, she may seem too rhymey without reason in book form. Lightning-sweetness sours, Between Lovers stays in the bedroom, Bull’s Whip and Lamb’s Wool to miss targets of thigh and eyeball, Swerve hits a curb and Girl’s Guide to Giving Head, well, good thing instinct instructs. Why have critics dubbed Sheri-D the high priestess of performance, the Mama of Dada, and Susan Ellis called her the post-hippie pre-Gen-X “action poet with roots in improvisational theatre”, practicing “jazzoetry style and poem-o-logue form”? These all jive like buzzwords when the page doesn’t ring.
Re:rejoice in blue hat bill, a cute tribute to poet bill bissett, carries its own on the page. Re:Connecting the Dots shows Wilson can communicate true honesty and tenderness, sans insulating humour and sexualized pouncing, to treat a personal story about meeting a Spanish boy when she was a girl traveling through Spain. Re:The Crime Fighter and the Lover is the best example of a jazz poem in this collection, paying homage to her schooldaze in Naropa, the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. Still, it’s Bertolucci perfume.
But wait! Pick up a copy of Wilson’s CD, Sweet Taste of Lightning, or get out to one of her live shows. With her voice in your head, undulating supernaturally up and down a fretboard towards spectrum ends like accompanying electric guitar, becoming electric guitar, Re:Zoom sings, rather than reads, in a whole new octave. One can respect more than the occasional interesting metaphor, as per “May spring bring / sundial on rotary phone”, (from Re:call Five Old Biddies On a Fifty) or “Wrought iron shapes / cast their shadow / a filigree dress / across her skin” (from Re:visionist Balcony). Suddenly the phrasing’s casing makes sense as framing, bass and drums that beat ba-dum the song along ka-plong and keep beep beep together.
Speaking of casing, I got a case of that Sheri-D onomatopoeic naming, punnified Dada-Mamafied rhymeword-gaming. Gotta go but let’s not miss the show: Sheri-D Wilson hosts her Spoken Word Festival this season, you know.