Rental Van
by
Anvil, 2007
Reviewed by Aaron Tucker
The complaint about "airport
fiction" is that it is killing reading. The breezy, overtly
accessible novels bought and devoured during three hour lay-overs
instigate a purely linear approach to reading. Such texts turn analysis
into a plot based, reductive version of story and undercut the slow and
beautiful precision of interpretation.
Current developments in Canadian poetry
have fought to counteract this method of reading. Recent works such as
Rachel Zolf’s Human Resources and Donato Mancini’s Aethel
are texts that are concerned mainly with slowing the reader down and
forcing a consideration of each poem in its many splintering multiple
threads and themes. Zolf’s work uses a dense prose line packed with
excess phrases to stall the quick skimming look while Mancini’s book
of concrete poetry is so tangled and impenetrable in terms of access
points that a reader can (and should) read each poem for hours.
Rental Van
too engages in this vein of reaction. It is a slow and careful read. It
is a dense, thick book, populated with tangled, pop-littered phrases, a
work that is constantly challenging its readers to re-think and re-shape
their own understanding of the poems in front of them. It is an
impressively difficult book, but also one that is worth the effort.
Burnham forces the reader to be patient
and slow by asking his audience to constantly consider how they read. Rental
Van is very good at shifting its own entry points with each poem.
The pieces are constantly moving. For example, the book begins in
columns, long strips of vibrant and opaque phrases. The poem is further
complicated by whether the reader decides to digest the poem
horizontally or vertically. The reflection on reading practice is pushed
further by Burnham’s numbering of sections within the poem (a
technique he repeats throughout other poems). Are the readers expected
to read in numerical order then? Immediately the reader of Rental Van
is confronted with decisions and multiplicity of readings that are both
self-reflexive and difficult.
The book then is constantly morphing.
Some poems, such as "98 Ruskin" and "inverted-V" are
written so that the reader must flip the book sideways in order to read
the words. Mixed in throughout the work are large blocks of prose-line
poetry, devoid of regular punctuation. These texts create lines that run
continuously into each other. The reader is forced to be deliberate in
these poems, to consider each phrase first as one larger unit, then in
the smaller chunks, then in combination with each other. Then the actual
content is disjunctive, forcing the reader to make abstract connections
between phrases and ideas. It is difficult then to step back and look at
the poems and whole, complete creatures: these works are better
considered in their smaller chunks, and when stepping back, to
understand the evolution of an idea from the beginning to the end of a
poem.
This mode of reading re-contextualizes
each word and phrase, effectively shining new light on what may be tired
or worn phrases. The reader then begins to see the phrases as somewhat
new, divorced from their standard meanings and infused with a vibrancy
that carries throughout the rest of the work.
What keeps this book from becoming
tired or perhaps too dense is its constant sense of play. The book is
littered with puns and funny intelligentsia, most of which comes from
the immediate contrast of conflicting reactions. Much in the same way as
poets like Jeff Derkson or Reg Johanson do, the humor and play in Rental
Van act as a pacing device, giving the texts room to breathe and, in
turn, lending the reader space to reflect while giggling. While these
are not necessarily jokes but are pockets of relief from the difficult
work of decoding the rest of the book.
Again, this is a hard book. But Rental
Van does reward the reader with a deliberate and dense text, placing
the reading as the foremost important action in the work, and ultimately
encouraging the sort of reflective slow analysis that has fallen out of
fashion. |
