And in "I sit down in my easy chair" (np) he is an office worker with a wife, children, pipe and slippers, but with a twisted side as well. This constant playing with persona is confusing. He is like someone trying on flamboyant hats in front of a mirror. Both Vegetables and Under the Skin show a considerable amount of technical skill, but do not have enough to say. Exuberance outstrips content.
eferring to his third collection in the
Quarry interview, Norris says
that "I wrote the first book in the series and called it
Report on the Second Half of the
Twentieth Century, not realizing that it
wasn't a complete document. It was, in fact, only the
entranceway to a much larger construction" (7). That "much
larger construction" is, of course, his Report on the Second Half
of the Twentieth Century1. His plan is to write a
long poem, spread out over several books, that tells the
story of the last fifty years of the century: "To write
about myself/Is to write about the age.../I am writing the
poem/The way these fifty years are/Writing me"
(Report 23).
ike Vegetables, Report
(1977) is written with a book
length structure. Norris places himself in time--"Born/In
April '51, child/of the second half"--and in a tradition:
"The Wasteland was only a beginning." To illustrate that his
project is a product of the contemporary world, Norris
employs newspaper clippings as sources for his poems. These
clippings include a suicide in Quebec, an earthquake in
Guatemala that kills nearly 19,000 people, the presence of
large quantities of mercury in fish eaten by Native peoples
in Ontario and Quebec, and the arrest, on political grounds,
of Ghanian poet Kofi Awoonor. The general thrust of the
poems is that in the modern world all one can do is fight
to
