The New Pulp Mill

Martin Singleton was a poet living in Toronto.

In his introduction, editor John Harris, searching for commonalities in this anthology of B.C. writers, posits loneliness as a crucial factor. The toughness necessary to endure the loneliness is then seen in political terms: “if you write well, you are a member of the resistance.”

All these writers are from Prince George, or have studied or taught at the College of New Caledonia, or both. Harris’s own story, “Are You Alright,” depicts two middle-aged men, one whose job is about to be replaced by a computer, the other recently separated, as symbols of the sexual and economic uncertainty of the ‘80s. One does not write at a desk any longer, but in public places: “I needed the sense that there are other people doing other things.” The need for people, and the simultaneous need for solitude, can result in flat writing such as Eleanor Wilmot’s “Everett”; but in Brian Fawcett’s brief sketches of Prince George the two needs can attain graphic realism depicting the aimless violence this tension engenders.

Among the poets, resistance can result in Robert Riggan’s “Just the Thought of It,” in which a group of young friends climb out in joyous defiance onto an uncompleted bridge, only to discover “someone had been there before us.” Similarly Paul Shuttleworth uses the B.C. interior as backdrop for not only despair and death but beauty: drunk, he discovers that “by the time I reach Summit Lake, I love the moon / for all its worth.” A lighter note comes from Barry McKinnon, whose “Lust Lodge” — a head-on collision between porno and Harlequin novels, interspersed with the thoughts of a nervous narrator, and complete with Coles notes-type questions — has deservedly become an underground classic. The despair is more obvious in his fine, contrapuntally arranged poem “The Organizer.”

The final three poets’ work is very fine. Sharon Thesen, whose Confabulations was short-listed for the GG last year, stretches the tension between sentimentality and toughness drum-tight: “watch out for ladies like me... writing / sentimental poems / on a rainy, terrified night in March.” There is a sense of real terror at the end of “‘Till Then”: Thesen is aware of the aging of both herself and her son, a process against which the artifacts of her youth become bitterly ironic. Harvey Chometsky identifies the real killers: “there are no wolves at our door // There are only bloodless faces / that would steal your passion / for themselves.” This poet has the ability to give real weight to abstractions: “how will you wear your beauty // Love too / leaves its mark.” Finally Meryl Duprey, amidst drunkenness and hopelessness of rural life (“when you’re born here you / don’t have a choice”) affirms a tough belief in the need to survive: “you’ve / discovered that life is stupid, / not funny, / but that it is / an alternative to death.”

This is a Pulp Press book: the typeface is thick, often smudged, sometimes faint. But the book costs $3.00, fits in your pocket, and belongs in your library — and possibly your heart as well.