Outside Magic

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.

Many of the poems in this collection suffer from needlessly convoluted
language. “Invisible Hands” is an example of incoherence on a grand
scale. It rails about corruption in economic and political matters: “$
/ some people make strange money / some people make strange money /
parliaments bankrolled / by people who etcetera etcetera / by
incorporated paper bodies.”

Etcetera etcetera, in the case of “Invisible Hands,” is four
tiny-font quotations from various newspapers, followed by four tiny-font
source notes, on the topic of the 1995 murder of Dudley George at
Ipperwash, Ontario. These notes immediately follow the poem’s last
line: “Ipperwash and the Ontario Provincial Police.” This so-called
line comes straight out of the blue, no relationship having been
established in the poem between the nasty capitalists and the nasty
Ipperwash situation, let alone between this line and the one preceding
it.

My question is, who does Leznoff think is going to read eight lengthy
footnotes referring to one line of a poem that doesn’t even fit with
the poem? My hypothesis is that he believes his stream of consciousness
is so cool that all by itself it makes poetry and as such deserves to

be footnoted. It doesn’t. The collection’s title says it all. Poetry
is magic; this book is outside magic.