Fabulous Freaks.

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

Stan Rogal’s biography is proof that an M.A. in English still has the power to transform lives and save people from careers in the Vancouver bowling business. Although he is best known as the organizer of Toronto’s Idler Pub Reading Series and is currently the artistic director of that city’s Bulletproof Theatre, he is also a prodigious author. Fabulous Freaks is his eighth book of poetry.

This collection’s major accomplishment is the creation, or intensification, of a schism within our literary community. The final section, “The Celebrity Rag: Opà!,” is clearly inspired by popular culture. Some poets, such as David McGimpsey, share his perspective. Others, such as George Whipple, look to traditional sources of inspiration. Readers can decide what sort of relevance they prefer.

The aforementioned section is “an interactive piece in which celebrity names are encrypted into the poems as homonyms.” An example of this technique is the phrase “Whoa Nelly! Furtive ado” that reveals Canadian singer Nelly Furtado. Even if that poem is lousy, Rogal maintains interest with a clever gimmick.

Some of his verse panders to the public, but other poems may baffle it. A clever reader who is unfamiliar with Canadian poetry may read “Haunts / for Heather Cadsby” and figure out the inferences contained in the line “Whatever cads be on this heathered moor.” Only observant insiders will know that the phrase “wool-soaked wind” is a pun on Wolsak and Wynn, the publisher’s name.

Rogal did not coin the phrase “banality of evil,” but effectively demonstrates its meaning in the title poem. He describes Adolf Hitler as “a horror whose favourite song was: ‘Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?’”; readers can laugh or cringe.

ARC magazine, Ottawa’s poetry journal, praised the poet’s previous erotic verse. His “Orlando” includes the line “& mouth harp bends to upright organ in the joint.” Some poets have dirty minds; he possesses a priapic intellect.

Sex, puns, puzzles—Stan Rogal offers fun, of one kind or another.