Montage for an Interstellar Cry

Robert Merrett was Professor of English at the University of Alberta.

This interesting and experimental volume contains a single extended poem. As a collage of fragments of letters, journalism, and textbooks and of dialogue, monologue, and other narrative forms, the poem has a minimal topical structure and an elusive authorial presence. Despite the deliberate lack of discursive transitions, the topics make a good deal of sense because they concern various forms of violence and various ways of dealing with it. The forms of violence include private, public, international, and mythical ones — for example, the violence of sexual assault, of everyday street behaviour and slang, of modern technology, and of nuclear war. The ways of dealing with violence include apathy, escapism, and political and imaginative reaction. With regard to this last way, the poem presents its minimal thematic and formal structure as a correlative of the psychic and social confusion caused by violence. Surrendering logic, lyric expression, and traditional generic ideas, the poem tries to make its disconnected fragments into a futuristic song. Certainly, the fragmentary expression takes attention away from poetic language in order to distil out of non-standard and non-literary forms the essence of things and issues. The poem, then, seeks to get the reader to consider his disorientation as an image of the madness of the modern world and to incite him to contain it imaginatively without relying upon traditional forms of authority. Referring to himself, the writer does not come across as a poet. He presents himself, rather, as a mundane fellow living a fully communal life and frankly sharing his disorientation. It is importantly the case, however, that the poet shows himself and his fellows to be social outsiders, just as he makes his poem outside literary tradition. In this way, the poet can make the language of his poem socially offensive and metaphorically violent. This contempt for social standards allows the poet to infiltrate radical political slogans into his poem. For instance, he assumes that received English is inevitably associated with capitalism and racism. Thus, while he attacks linguistic and literary conventions, he is not opposed to smuggling into his collage radical assumptions that pass unchallenged. Granted the poem does not offer itself as a political model, it still, somewhat questionably, seems to assume its own political integrity.