Bafflegab

Description

166 pages
$19.95
ISBN 1-895837-79-0
DDC C813'.54

Author

Publisher

Year

2001

Contributor

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

Review

Toronto novelist Stan Rogal is also a poet and theatre director who
turns his artistic sensibilities into literary ideology. Bafflegab, a
fiction writer’s journal, champions art’s power and poetry’s
importance in a prosaic society.

Rogal exhorts poets to claim their rightful social position, sometimes
in an overzealous manner. When his diarist alter ego views French author
Jean Cocteau’s avant-garde film Orpheus, even the artists in the
audience laugh at the fact that its titular protagonist is a national
literary hero. He denounces the poets in the “so-called experimental
... clique” as writers who “shit on their own heads.” The author
may have hastily branded these patrons as pathetic self-haters; it is
possible that they responded to Cocteau’s projected alternate universe
with cynical derision.

This poet’s social commentary invites interpretation. His hero refers
to himself as “Peter Pan with a penis in search of
Never-never-land,” but readers may subconsciously spot a Michael
Jackson reference. Rogal can create subtle double-edged observations
that attack both author and target. The best example of this skill is
his statement that “Their preference is usable empty vessels & I am
full of myself.” Rogal’s ideas sometimes fail. When he forms “new
phrases for lovers, like ... She kissed my pottle. I toddled her
gymrack,” one may wonder if these are the ravings of a “droog”
punk from Anthony Burgess’ novel, A Clockwork Orange.

It is premature to appoint Irving Layton’s successor, but Stan Rogal
has picked up the rebel icon’s Dionysian standard.

Citation

Rogal, Stan., “Bafflegab,” Canadian Book Review Annual Online, accessed December 11, 2024, https://cbra.library.utoronto.ca/items/show/9482.