Bourgeois Pleasures

Michael Williamson was Reference Librarian at the National Library of Canada in Ottawa.

Mr. Stange’s fourth collection or, as he unabashedly refers to it, his “Hypothesis 7” (“I choose to call my major works hypotheses”), contains both poems and prose written on the theme of integrity — or lack of it — in the face of the onslaught of “bourgeois pleasures.” The book begins as a letter might open, addressing a person named Benjamin who is clearly the poet’s alter ego: “...I am also writing to you because I need to write to someone.” Benjamin is an idealized creature — someone who has not sold out, who affects a bohemian lifestyle (spontaneous, impractical, angry, certainly not materialistic) and, oh yes, who fools around with women a lot and predictably suffers for it. Yet Benjamin is not simply drawn as the poet’s conscience: Mr. Stange is much too clever to create such an obvious fiction; instead he opts for a kind of personal/impersonal dialectic which accommodates contradictory value systems while retaining vestiges of at least relative truth: “things coalesce at random /making sense.” This intellectual and philosophical framework, which is derived from Heraclitus (again!) and developed in Kant’s writings, is an interesting enough concept — if a little shopworn by now — but does not good poetry make. The poems and prose move along as if someone were arguing with an amalgam of logic and cleverness; then the reader realizes that the argument is prima facie because it falls to pieces and emerges as a mean-spirited testament to cynical self-indulgence. Why this baffling work has been widely anthologized is a further mystery. At least that is this reviewer’s hypothesis.