Last Instance
Dan Farrell
publisher: Krupskaya, 1999
isbn: 1-928650-01-5
price: $9
Each of the twelve longish prose poems of Last Instance, by Canadian-born poet Dan Farrell, is an exploration into the dilemmas of agency amidst a world dominated by routine, the ubiquitous plays of technology and other narrowing systems (even the innocent one of the days of week), and the failure of memory to fully relive one's past to create one's present.
While maintaining close ties to the linguistic explorations of the Language poets, Farrell's work departs strongly in that his surfaces are backed by the cold drama of an existentially hindered subjectivity which bobs its head and breaks the pure play of syntax and grammar, such that even in its most heavily-reduced moments, the poetry creates an atmosphere reminiscent of Beckett in his novels, and Kafka in its ever-recursive replays of alienating social formulas.
Indeed, the poem "K" resembles fiction in that it centers around the narrator's "phone tag" relationship with the ever-ambiguous "K":
So K would call, begin to leave as though a message, then get me. Would K's roommate pass on this message, any? For the while, exchanging mail seemed a way. Letter, number, letter; number, letter, number. Letters add up to nothing."
[15]
Even the paratactic "Avail," composed entirely of sentences from questionnaire-answers with people about their health, builds by Oulipo-inspired excessive repetition into a deadpan, sometimes Stephen-Wrightish character that just can't determine what the hell he means:
My current level of physical fitness is very pleasing to me. I have positive feelings about the way I approach my own physical health. Whether I recover from an illness depends in large part on what I myself do. My feelings of anger do not interfere with my work. In order to have good health, I have to act in a pleasing way to other more powerful individuals.
[27]
"My Recognizance" is a wonderfully rich, possibly autobiographical (but most likely as constructed as "Avail") skitter through Joycean sentence constructs and surface play, a sort of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man that never gets past the childhood stage to maturity:
And around geared Tom Swift, grasping for switches to toggle, tactics to jettison. Somewhere sprawled. Then to flood with haggard drops the reminder of an awkward cough, syrup or sticky camphor, resin to excessive phlegm. While outside in crowed cards of skilled hockey players I saw my own reeling life clasped and slipped to clipping spokes."
[33]
This sort of neologistic wordplay -- he later describes himself as "Pufferbluffing like a blowfish in a chowder" -- seems as effortless as the excessive flatness of "Avail" and the last poem in the collection, "366, 1998," whose main modus operandi is the linear recounting of the days of the week, such that the cumulative effect is one of a rich desperation among the passage of time.
The sameness of "366, 1998" makes even minor linguistic and narrative events oases of suggestion: "Saturday, floor sawing, Sunday, dust making, Monday, thrust frump and center, Tuesday, Wednesday, last and relived, Thursday, flutes on backward, try again, flukes on forward ..." [59], it continues for five jammed pages.
Last Instance is a confident trek into both language's capacity for creating boredom and anxiety -- a parody of the most domestic version of late-capitalist life -- and its potential for explosive, neologistic self-creation --approaching utopian drive of the most radical Modernists -- whose cumulative effect is as a sort of comprehensive essay on poetry, one that is fun as it is responsible, elegant and classical as it is -- like punk rock or a slacker's stoicism -- gleefully nihilistic.
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