Ariadne

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

R. Murray Schafer is best known as an experimental and outspoken musical composer. But he has broader interests and abilities that include other arts as well, and Arcana Editions publishes his poetry and drawings as well as his music.

Ariadne might best be described as a poem designed for intellectual crossword-puzzlers. It also represents an unusual yoking of verse narrative with concrete poetry. An early section refers to Theseus, and the poem recounts the loose story of a modern Theseus-like figure who embarks on a labyrinthine journey (assisted by a half-comic lisping character who combines the roles of classical Charon and Dante’s Virgil) in quest of an elusive Ariadne figure. The thread upon which the whole depends is the writer’s (and reader’s) ingenuity.

This book is fun to read in both the literary and physical senses. It begins with a prose dedication that initially appears as gibberish but is eventually seen to be written in anagrams that become increasingly simpler as the (repeated) text continues. Then off on the bizarre journey. Sentences create elaborate patterns. If the subject-matter involves a maze, the reader has to turn the book around and upside-down to follow the twists and turns of the text over the page. When a “little tune” or “pure melody” is mentioned, a musical score is actually provided. Sometimes, when the action turns this way and that, we must read the lines in bous-trophedon fashion, alternately from right to left as well as from left to night. There is a map of words reproducing the lay-out of a discotheque. Languages change suddenly. There is a parody of mathematical objectivity. Scattered phrases spider across a page to represent words heard in fragments in a public place. Once, we are offered alternative routes to meaning, depending on whether we answer the opening question with “yes” or “no.” Generally, I find concrete poetry more irritating than memorable; Ariadne is an exception. It is both elegant and witty, and the artistic designs that form an integral part of the text are similarly graceful and attractive. This is an idiosyncratic book, but one that I shall treasure.