Know Your Monkey

Thomas M.F. Gerry is chair of the English Department at Laurentian
University and the editor of Arachne, Laurentian University’s
bilingual interdisciplinary journal of language and literature.

Here are some clues about this poet’s ethos to help orient a
prospective reader of Know Your Monkey. Elyse Friedman has written for
CBC Radio’s Definitely Not the Opera. She attended the Canadian Film
Centre and made a movie. She would like to be stranded on a desert
island with Tom Waits and Charles Bukowski. She has written and
published two novels.

Friedman’s poems are predominantly colloquial as they craft
detail-packed stories or momentary shots of insight and emotion. Many
are humorous; the opening poem, “19 Minutes Until You,” begins
statistically: “Studies show / that men think / about sex / every 7
minutes. / I think / about these studies / every 4 minutes.” Along
with their informality, though, almost every poem simultaneously flashes
concern with language. In “The Writer,” a man jotting notes while
washing socks in a laundromat writes “Magic, manic, miracle words /
that would make / daisies scream / snowflakes bleed / fish leave the
ocean.” Showing up uninvited at a friend’s party is “a clique
breach” (“The Always Illicit Blue Boy”).

Similarly, Friedman’s work frequently is self-reflexive about the
roles of narrative. In “Screenwriting 101,” she meditates on the way
“each celluloid journey follows / the same dreary map…. An arc.”
Readers are thereby attuned to her poems’ beginnings and endings. What
are her ideas about closure, we wonder. “Focus,” for instance,
perfectly enacts its subject, the speaker’s lack thereof. Friedman’s
rebellious desire for uniqueness, evident particularly in her frequent
value judgments—“I don’t’ believe the poor are noble. I think
Doris Day was a great comedienne” (“Portrait”)—is, fortunately,
balanced by her concerns with poetic form, as mentioned, and also by the
poems’ more mature and more startling insights about people whom she
meets, and also about herself.

“Folklorama,” for example, describes a Portuguese dinner-dance
taking place in a gym in wintertime Winnipeg. As the poem progresses,
the details seem to be adding up to a judgment of utter hokiness. But
something else occurs: “As the band plays / and the men drink / the
hard edges of / the gymnasium fade / The grayness goes / and suddenly
there is heat / and light / in Winnipeg.” Such human insights, which
include humour and pathos, irony and youthful brazenness, are the
outstandingly attractive feature of this book.