Bafflegab

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

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.