Poetry for the Potty

Ronald Charles Epstein is a Toronto-based freelance writer and published poet.

With this book Victoria poet David MacLennan is trying to establish
himself as “The Bathroom Bard.” Crude people may be disappointed
because they expect a literary version of a dirty-joke book. Instead,
they get doggerel of the “I see England, I see France / I see
Sally’s underpants” variety, except that it’s “A dancing member
of the troupe” whose “crotch blew from his tights” who gets
exposed.

The book has its share of bathroom poems, including “Ode on a
Commode,” in which the poet offers “more apologies to John Keats.”
MacLennan’s verse may be vulgar, but it cannot be dismissed as
pornography because it is too soft-core for smut and a few poems even
have “redeeming social value.” “In a Civilized World Gone Mad,”
for example, contrasts the Dachau commandant’s party with the active
death machines, illustrating life’s terrible simultaneousness. This
may be a poetic version of Holocaust accounts, but it reaches the
ahistorical.

The poet’s social consciousness sometimes turns didactic. In
“Dwindle They Do in the Dingle”—here “dingle” is synonymous
with “dell”—he mourns vanishing wildlife and suggests that
humanity will follow. This is yet another example of
environmentalists’ “We, the vanishing species” theme.

Despite its virtues, Poetry for the Potty may be shelved in the
“Humour” section, among items classed as “non-books” in the
publishing trade.