Stephen Rodefer
Mon Canard
publisher: Hard Press Books, 2000
isbn: 1-930589-03-4
price: $12.50
Author of books as diverse as a celebrated translation of Villon under the pseudonym of Jean Calais (1968) to the spellbinding Four Lectures (1982), recognized by many as a distinctive masterpiece of Language writing, Rodefer has never been one to fit easily into a method or recognized "voice" -- indeed, into a stable reputation.
His most typical form of writing, as exhibited in several small-press books, has been the quick, though elegant, improvisational poem -- inspired by the examples of everyone from Olson to O'Hara, Baudelaire to Stein -- which is why this new selection of long poems from the past seven years is especially welcome.
In Mon Canard, Rodefer returns again to the large canvas of Four Lectures, each of the book's six poems exploring a distinctive style: the short, linked prose poems of "Daydreams of Frascati:, the Williamsesque three-step in "Erasers," and "Arabesque at Bar"; the projective, satiric apostrophe in "Answer to Dr. Agathon"; a high-flown language-salad pun-machine in "Mon Canard"; and -- in a sort of wicked inversion, signifying his embattled relationship to Language poetry itself -- the quasi-constructivist stanza suggestive of Barrett Watten's Progress form in "Stewed and Fraught with Birds."
This isn't to say that Rodefer is derivative; on the contrary, he needs these forms to reign in the various tones of address exhibits and which, one senses, society will never be entirely pleased with:
The ligaments
of your phraseology
will eventually get
put to some truth test or other
and you'll be lucky
if anyone reads
it with a big guffaw
or sneezes
[118-119]
This poet, like the modernists he most admires, and as distinct from the determinations of postmodernist gesture, is railing for a concept of value when the old, stable ones have vanished; as a result, his use of reference resounds with the need to shore up history and knowledge against personal dissolution:
I am come to your cartop Ajax, waxing toward an invitation to an opening in some hedgerow. Our Leninist principles have toppled, to become fabulous and Sylvan once again. We are the last metaphysical activists in American nihilism. We demand a Pope from the Bronx.
[10]
While some of the poems, like "Mon Canard" itself, can be faulted for a repetitiveness and a sameness of affect in the puns, the gesture of the effort can be appreciated for erecting particular reading challenges when least expected -- i.e. in the course of libidinous play and rhetorical directness.
In any case, the book offers depths to language and, most importantly, the range of human feeling -- from the dark to the bright, the indulgent to the ascetic -- that only a writer as dedicated to the poet's "free radical" life as Rodefer can provide.
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