I once gave a co-worker a copy of Frank's Wild Years by Tom Waits. It was his first Tom experience, and after a few days when I asked what he thought of it he shrugged, sighed, and said "It's tough to get through, bud." I was near speechless, wondering how anyone could not see the genius of this album, which is such a perfect culmination to Waits' Frank trilogy. How could he not immediately fall in love with "Cold Cold Ground" or "Yesterday is Here" like I had?
JP King's We Will Be Fish (PistolPress, 2008) is a sprawling and ambitious project from a young author who obviously has a wealth of creative talent and vision. Not one of these poems fails to bounce with energy across the page. At times King's sharp lines of text can evoke a smile, at others a wince. Consistently however, these poems inspire curiosity and wonder at how we, as readers, are carried through time across obliterated borders and into a classically dystopian mirror of our own lives. As a whole, these poems are like a burr -- difficult to deal with but stuck to you nonetheless.
Fish is a sequel for Tortoise Stampede, the as-of-yet unpublished novel from King in what is planned to be a trilogy. This isn't a fact that I gleaned from the text alone however; a bit of detective work was needed. The first hint is in King's bio, which rewards readers by telling them he is hard at work on a prequel to Fish. My next visit was to Concordia University's student newspaper, which has a fantastic article about the release of King's Fish as well as Deanna Fong's Butcher's Block. The article by Jackson MacIntosh provided some vital inside information that helps to knit Fish's broken narrative together. King's intentional splicing and cross-referencing is a subtle technique that he puts to work ingeniously. After my second and third readings I began to realize that by taking an active role as the reader and knitting these places, times, images and characters together I was enjoying Fish more and more.
Throughout the text King provides his own visual accompaniment, predominantly in the form of outdated textbook and catalogue images sliced from their original context to create a new, often unsettling new object. Section two of the text begins with a set of visual instructions originally intended for some type of window opening device, but they've been re-ordered and split by a lone picture of a bird in flight. Why? I was flipping back and forth amongst those four or five pages wondering the same thing. "Missing Panes" is the poem that follows it however and it fills the reader in on how this contributes to the development of our enigmatic protagonist, Leopold:
Missing Panes
I now have the marbled hands of a butcher.
Thick, chunky scars,
maps of striated fat.
I started stealing windows when I arrived.
In my pockets I carry a wide chisel
a small hammer, a razor blade.
I hop fences, walk through open gates, and trample flower beds.
I pry off the casing,
drive any nails through the jambs into the studs,
and let the window fall into my arms.
I carefully wrap the corners
with a heavy rope
and hang the windows from tree branches.
At the end of the day
I gather the fist-sized limp bodies
of sparrows, larks, and veldifers,
and bury them in a colourful pile.
"Missing Panes" provides a good example of King's unconventional style of poetic storytelling, constructing an off-kilter meta-fiction that can entertain as often as it confuses. This poem proved to be pivotal for my reading experience, because it brought me to the realization that I shouldn't be working so hard to reconstruct the narrative. Whether or not King intended for readers to string the poems together, I began to read each poem as its own unique story, a glimpse through a peephole at what will surely become a massive work of art. I've never selected Rain Dogs or Swordfishtrombones on my iPod because I wanted to hear a story; I wanted to hear the songs.
Fish faces a similar predicament to Frank's in that as a singular work of art, it has flashes brilliance and certainly entertains, but constantly wrestles against being pinned down into a digestible narrative. Frank's was the final release of the trilogy, and therefore had the luxury of filling gaps in a style already familiar to a loyal audience of listeners. Fish however is in the unenviable position of pouring a foundation for future instalments in the trilogy.
I highly recommend you track down We Will Be Fish, whether online or through an independent bookseller. JP King's text will surely spark debate and provide a fresh new reading experience for anyone, regardless of how long they've been a poetry lover. PistolPress and King push typical publishing convention aside by putting every sheet of paper to use from cover to cover, not to mention the quirky folio intermission on pages 41-63, none of which are numbered. As a whole, and much like the response of my co-worker when he returned my CD, Fish may be "tough to get through" but the journey will surely spark a love affair with this ambitious young brand of poetry.
Brock Warner lives in Mimico, Ontario and is a contributor to The Danforth Review and Broken Pencil magazine in addition to Northern Poetry Review.
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