The Invention of Poetry

Terry Goldie is an associate professor of English at York University and
author of Fear and Temptation.

Not long ago, trade publication of Canadian plays was limited to
Talonbooks, Simon & Pierre, and a very few others. Many plays
successfully produced never became available as scripts. Thus it is
particularly pleasing now to have small presses like Summerhill offering
works by people like Joan MacLeod, Wendy Lill, and Paul Quarrington.

Quarrington has had success in many genres—radio, stage, screen, and
fiction. (He won the Governor General’s Literary Award for his novel
Whale Music, which is primarily about popular music.) Most of his work,
however, is connected to sport, as is this play. The character
descriptions sum up the play: “Gary Kennelly, late 30s, a failed
baseball player; Moon, 50, a failed minor poet.” Sitting in a cheap
hotel room, they drink, philosophize, and lament the past. As Gary says
at one point, “We’re just two guys in a room, what does it
matter?”

That seems familiar. The existential conversation of Becket and Pinter
has had a vibrant life (or, given its nature, death-in-life). In Canada
the best-known example is perhaps Rex Deverell’s Boiler Room Suite,
but there are many others. Just take two losers, a decrepit room
cluttered with poverty, and stir.

To my reading, The Invention of Poetry is not a very interesting
example. Its assorted themes—lost manhood, writer’s blocks, and
baseball as cosmic insight—could come alive on stage, but it has
little unusual to offer on the page. Quarrington’s best work to date
remains the screenplay for the film Perfectly Normal. It operates from a
similar premise—two male losers, one a hockey player, the other an
operatic restaurateur—but the tensions, combinations, and ruminations
are much richer. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with men, sport,
and poetry, but there has been so much said about them that a new
version should be a bit more inventive than Invention.