The Square Root Of Himself, And Other People Besides
Michael Harris has been an elusive poetic presence in the past couple of decades. Oh, he’s been around, and as interested and interesting as ever, at dinners with so-and-so-who-knows-so-and-so, attending and even giving public readings now and again, as an anecdotalist leaning against the bar (ask him the one about Ted Hughes and the orgasm)…
Yet for a writer who was a poetic incontournable in Montreal poetry in the seventies and eighties, and who remained a potent influence as editor of the Signal poetry imprint of Véhicule Press until 2001, his own publication silence of eighteen years raises a few eyebrows. Whither the poet?
Silences also raise expectations. What was Harris up to when he not schooling cegepians or running his online bookshop. Toiling for the rebirth of poetry? Angsting in a garret?
But Montreal has for some time suffered from a dearth of garrets, and most likely Harris was just living, writing now and again, slowly. And so, Circus.
Circus is a slim book that begins with Harris at his best, cartwheeling between the self and the we; the positional I is stronger than the confessional I. Harris confidently embeds his own voice in peripheral places, thus inviting us in. This is poet as ringmaster and poet as dreamer in the stands; poet as the one who wants to run away; as the one who has run away, and returned, and knows better, or knows that he ought to.
Much of the book is vintage Harris: surprising metaphors and delightful non-sequiturs. In the circus, among the freaks, sellers and babes, the eponymous speaker of “Custodian” scats (sorry) on his circus mucking, musing that “the elephants’ / doo-doo-did-did-dung-dung-done-done” is piled up like an out-of-the-blue “Cheops’ pyramid on the walkway to the Hospitality Suite.” At a sideshow we are introduced to a fantastical “courtly scorpion at her brittle minuet.”
This is why we read poetry: it presents exactitudes we didn’t know we needed. As in his previous publications, Harris’s strength is his unapologetic and unsentimental compassion, and in Circus, freakshows and fairgrounds, far from being gimmicky, prove the perfect frame for an aperçu of common, human burdens. We feel for the flamingo history has forgotten among a mantle of flamingos, for the contortionist who “has gone so far beyond double-jointedness / he has become the square root of himself / and other people besides.” The bathetic plaint of the bearded lady (“I shaved, once,” the poem begins) manages to combine shtick and schick with a shivery sensuality, both in the young lover with whom she yearns to discover the pleasures of smooth skin and in her more pragmatic marriage to a man “with a skin condition”:
The soft moss of my belly,
the fur on my face—all titillate the scaly hide
of The Alligator Man. I’m prickly and hirsute.
He’s tough as shoe leather. Neat,
how things turn out.
The poems start to peter out as the book goes on, with a handful of perplexingly naïve verse. Despite some negligent line breaks and overwritten endings, however, and even when the poems verge into clever bric-a-brac, like a yarn about a college student who responds “Gesundheit” to the professor’s “Nietzsche,” we forgive it; we laugh with the poet, we agree with his lens on the world. The tales of Oliver the Chihuahua are hilarious, “Concentrate” is a near-perfect reckoning with fate, and almost everywhere the words are aflame and juggled effortlessly. Yes, give us the wit, the tender melting ice cubes, the death rattles and slant glances. Make us long for a makeout with a hairy chick; turn your magic turns of phrase. Give us the imbrications of amazements, each more unglaublich than the last until the whole teeters, empathy and enchantment always perilous.
Circus
Michael Harris
Signal Editions, Montreal, QC. 2010
62pages $16.00
ISBN 978-1-55065-286-4
