the book of smaller, by Rob Mclennan (reviewed by Mark Spitzer)
From the start, we know this collection of postmodern prose poetry (none exceeding a dozen lines) is quirky. Like all the poems in the book of smaller, the first one, “Beware the failure of imagination,” deliberately confounds its audience by kicking off with “Civilization is neither prose.” This prompts a WTF moment in most readers, stopping us in our paths. We then mull this over, move on to questions lacking question marks, and after a few intentional ambiguities, we get to something specific on ants. The moral of the story: “We are never at rest.”
This, of course, is a sentiment we can all agree on, along with the fact that these poems have a way of ending satisfactorily. You get a bunch of mysteries (i.e., “Stardust, atoms, Barcalounger”), and the last lines put things into perspective (i.e., “What needs not be written”).
Collectively, we can’t help trying to make sense of what this verse is striving to do. Hence, we see this work as the poet journaling his day-to-day activities while plugging in sporadic thoughtservations (meaning a cross between “thoughts” and “observations”). Mclennan does this whimsically, while employing “gaps” (or “erasures”) in the popular style of the lyric essay.
For example, in the poem “Postcard for Gil McElroy,” there’s something purposefully missing between the penultimate lines of “If this should be hand-delivered. By you, to you. Posted” and the quintessential line “But the stars.” Such juxtapositions take us out of the familiar, the local, the micro (or “smaller”), and out and into the Macroverse, where human insignificance becomes even more apparent. Thus, by boiling various scenarios down to their essentials and by leaving standard transitions out along with piddly points that tend to meddle, the poetry becomes omnipotently Olympian in a quasi-Whitmanesque way, thereby arriving at “A wicked truth that does no harm” (another last line), which can assist us (or at least the poet) “To know more than nothing” (also a last line).
The result is that the book of smaller operates like a concept album in which readers “Smell the ink through the page.” That is, we’re asked to employ our sensory abilities to decode metaphors and cryptic language, because girlfriend, this Canadian ain’t giving it away for free.
Perhaps this is Mclennan’s objective, to toss out clues, then guide us to a definitive message. But maybe that’s me trying to find an equation to explain the logic of how these poems function—when actually, whatever’s driving this solid, experimental bus is something simply natural.
As Mclennan notes in one of his multiple poems entitled “journal entry,” “My thinking is all out of order.” But that’s not unusual; his thinking is basically a reflection of our own since we all meditate in bursts and bytes, moving forward and then back in time. That’s how we create order from disorder. The only difference is Mclennan does it on the page as practice, whereas most of us say whatever pops into our heads. Or we don’t.
The poem “Failed senryū” provides an appropriate segue for getting at what I’m talking about when it asks, “Is this, or is this not, about the appropriation of forms.” To which I reply: Nope, this is not entirely about appropriating forms. What it’s about is mutating forms while deviating from and innovating on appropriations in order to get to instances like “The sidewalk has no taste for anecdote,” “Privilege: the luxury to ignore,” and other zinger dismemberments.
Meanwhile, Mclennan reflects on his process: “Every work a hymn. A set of amputated limbs.” This is the method he employs for designing a selection of sacredly profane yet truncated thoughtservations in which readers decipher “A series of commentaries on muteness.” Because we’re small.
This answers my main question of why Mclennan did what he did in the way he did, but I’m a bit miffed at the publisher for not providing any framework for understanding the poet’s aesthetic. This could’ve been accomplished through a preface or a note or a blurb or whatever, but Calgary UP just went ahead and published the book without trying to place the poetics into context; they just shoveled it onto our plates and said, “Hey you, figure this out.”
This not-so-user-friendly approach is also reflected on the book’s epigraph page, where minor errors in the capitalization and lowercasing of book titles are easily missed. Typically, things like these are added last minute, and it’s not uncommon for such snafus to escape the eyes of editors. Still, it’s always a bummer when this happens because it comes off as disinterest. However, as Mclennan discerningly states in the only one-line poem in the collection (entitled “Policy”) this is “The cost of our language.”
University of Calgary Press, paperback, 114 pages, 2022
Mark Spitzer is the author of 30-plus books, some about "monster fish," another about writing pedagogy, plus novels, memoirs, poetry collections and literary translations. As Editor in Chief of the poetry series Toad Suck Editions (an evolution of the legendary Toad Suck Review), he has been a creative writing professor at the University of Central Arkansas and Truman State University, but now spends the brunt of his time in New York's Hudson Valley walking his dog, hunting wild fungi, and renovating a 322-year-old farm house. More info at sptzr.net.