Get Well Soon by Jamie Sharpe (ECW, 2024) delighted me beyond words, but I shall have a go anyway. Let me say that when I ordered this, it was received with a GetWell Soon card. Because why not.
All Lit Up posted Get Well Soon‘s backstory on YouTube, which is a montage of generic corporate video clips, cousin to demotivator posters. This tickles me so very much.
Poetry in general is often an artifice of straining or control, or a chute for raw emotions. These pick that up, set it aside and say, hmm, naaahh, what else can we do. Or interpreted another way, taking the piss out of that preoccupation with profound precision with an arch look.
It’s divided into 4 parts, “Poems of Cauntpaux”, “The Half Mirror”, “Poetry & the Common Life” and “Afterword.”
The first strikes me as homophonically “count paws”, while spelled as if with sophisticate airs. The second poking fun at mirror poem tropes. The third brings to mind the satirical song of Bill Shatner’s cover of the alt rock band Pulp’s “Common People.””Poetry & the Common Life” also emulates the feel of authority of a textbook, while spoofing seriousness. The fourth section is an extended flarf essay of literary reviews boasting “Sharpe writes with a hard instrument on a hard surface”.
The illustrations give a sense of the tone: a phenakistoscope of Muybridge’s horse and a woman at a whipping post; a Sumarian planisphere overlaid with the moon and the 1750 Elisha White House of Connecticut. (Thank you reverse image search.) Another is entitled “film clips” and is photo of cut hair labelled “hair cut off in 2021m watching the 2005 film, Sahara.” Further, the book is indexed under writing style as “unreliable narrator.
I shared about his book on Instagram on a first read through in April/May.
Absurd, dark, surreal and funny. It mashes deep history or hyper-contemporary, In “The Ship of Theseus”, p. 24, “In the aughts my nudes were leaked on to the internet. Which is to say I posted them. Often. I was very leaky.” The Ship of Theseus, also known as Theseus’s Paradox, is a thought experiment and paradox about whether an object is the same object after having had all of its original components replaced over time, typically one after the other. That in context of selfies is a probe of probable or improbability of constancy of self.
He goes broad in time in space. Similar to Kevin Spenst’s poetry you never know where the poem might turn next. If you predict where a poem is going, the poem is hardly doing its work, is it? Take for example, in “Half-Life”, p. 29, “Pentii Saarikoski/the great Finnish poet,/never saved//a Cinnabon”— Saarikoski, a communist bohemian, was a translator of Homer and James Joyce, incidentally, and the only person in the world to translate both.
Get Well Soon includes a “Sunrise with Sea Monsters” poem, which includes the lines “your days dawns on/a vainglorious anagram.” Fun to see those pop up over the year in various books across Canada since Paul Vermeersch did the call for responses to the title of Paul Theroux. There’s a heap of intellectual engagement and wryness. p. 44 “Golden Glove Award for/Best Blurry Product Placement” while playing around with lines
How to remain
in both camps,
Resting
On a line,
Connecting
You to a few.
Tiny Pasolini’s
Wisdom grew
Until arthritic
magpies sang”
p. 48
That’s an intriguing poem to try to unpack. As Alan Cumming said, “say yes to things you don’t entirely understand.” Pasolini I assume is the queer poet and film maker known for disturbing films. Arthritic magpies? Those old ones who mimic. Does the song grow tired and old? Then what happens to the avowed wisdom? Does it become diluted?
There’s so much that avails itself to both fast and slow reads. I rather like not knowing entirely what is going on, to catch what I catch. Perhaps its the depressive cynical edge of things that keeps the poems anchored and not float off as superficial. It’s opening poem has a stand-alone line “Hate the natural” and yet it also reveres the natural and the beauty in the world, but doesn’t let them stand and block the light that gives shape to the shadowy bits.
