15th Canadian Challenge - 12th Review - Midnight Stroll

Janice Keefer's Midnight Stroll is essentially three completely separate poetry sequences in one book.  To further emphasize the differences, each section is illustrated by three different artists with radically different styles.  

The first section was inspired by the paintings of Natalka Husar, who mostly painted domestic scenes of a middle-aged man and a much younger mistress or domestic scenes of a possibly discarded mistress caring for her brood.  Most of these poems are about a kind of looking-glass domesticity with a strong undercurrent of anger that it is (almost) always men who are in the position to exploit younger women in this way.

The second section is illustrated by Claire Wilks, the Toronto artist who had two exhibits in Yorkville in June, as I reported a bit over a week ago.*  The poems are inspired by the diary of Etty Hillesum, a Jewish woman from Amsterdam who was killed in the Holocaust.  As one might expect, this is a very heavy set of poems.

The final section is called The Waste Zone, which is basically a reworking of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, but in this case explicitly commenting on (and condemning) the police action at the Summit of the Americas held in Quebec City in 2001 where the neoliberal order was further expanded.  This section (and he accompanying footnote section!) are illustrated with Goran Petkovski's photographs of the event.  I would say for better or worse, most of the outrage that probably motivated these poems is drained by the overt pastiche and the fairly dry footnotes.

All three sections offered up something a bit different.  Despite the somewhat pervy topic, I think the first section was the one I appreciated the most.  Some of the poems had flashes of irony, and while the content was disturbing, it stayed at the level of domestic tragedy and wasn't crushed by the weight of the Holocaust (as articulated by Adorno and others).like the second section.  

One somewhat interesting angle is that the paintings themselves have a bit of a Lolita-vibe to them, as if the mistresses are underage, but that isn't the impression I got from the poems.  Given that some of the women advertise themselves in "Ukrainian Girls International," this is a path more typically followed by young women and not underaged girls.

That said there are plenty of cues that the women are focused on material gains and/or securing a visa and romance is far from their minds.

"Imitation Marriage" is written in the form of a personal ad.  "No strings attached, / no promises necessary, just / the goods, on demand."  It ends "Imitation divorce / guaranteed."

In "Cinderella After Midnight," it is again a Ukrainian ingenue who is an interloper: "the wife's off at the cottage with the kids / and there's no one left to make trouble here."  She is enjoying herself, essentially playing dress-up in someone else's nest: "If they could all / just see you, swaddled in mink / on a red velvet pillow."

Not that this life doesn't have plenty of pitfalls and drawbacks.  In "Beloved Enemy" not only is there "the cancelled boyfriend back in Zhytomyr" that may still cause some anguish, but more ominously "the teenaged daughter / she'll be saddled with in fifteen years."

As I alluded to above, the tone shifts substantially when Keefer develops poems drawing from Etty Hillesum's writing.  In "Our Common Fate," she writes about her decision to not take a "safe" job while her fellow Jews were being deported: "I will not hide myself / like a rat in a wall.  I refuse / a job's short safety, / selling my people in job lots."

While it is certainly admirable, Hillesum found grace and even beauty in the most tragic of circumstances, it was quite difficult for me to read most of these poems.

I did find "Bicycle Thieves" moving and tragic.  "Yellowstars [Jews] are now forbidden bicycles / as well as trams."  She recalls the freedom that her bicycle brought her, but due to the gratuitous cruelty of the Nazis "I consign you to rust / and quiet."

Wilks's illustrations complement these poems but are not as directly and explicitly tied to the poems as in the first section.

As mentioned, the final section is somewhere between a parody and reworking of Eliot's The Waste Land.  Given that Eliot was a fairly arch traditionalist, it is highly unlikely he would have appreciated this appropriation.  Here is how it opens: "April is the cruelest month, breeding / protest in the lulled land, mixing / tear gas and champagne..."  Later on Keeler substitutes "O O O O that Noam Chomskyan Rag" for Shakespearean Rag.  It is a clever if somewhat exhausting performance.  I'd say the major failing is that Keeler's poem really can't exist in the absence of The Waste Land, and it doesn't really work without a very, very thorough grounding in Eliot.

The other two sections are interesting and quite strong but do require a willingness to read about the victims of the Holocaust or, probably less emotionally exhausting, to put oneself in the shoes of a Russian -- or Ukrainian! -- mail order bride and/or mistress.

* And in fact I only heard about Midnight Stroll through the Wilks' connection.