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In The Real Made Up, Stephen Brockwell plays with the idea of mimesis or the relation between the 'real' and the 'reality of the imitation' in all its postmodern variations. Photography, resonance imaging, machine voice reproduction and other technological forms of mimesis supply the dominant strands of imagery in this fairly obsessed and thematically integrated collection of poems about the nature of perception and memory. Brockwell incorporates monologues by individuals in the community whom the poet-speaker has interviewed so that we, as readers, may infer the questions asked from the observations offered us. As well, a series of "randomized" Oxford Dictionary pieces in post-modern style juxtapose words or patterns of words in riddle-like arrangements that undo the simple assumption of a literal level of reference. Seemingly conjoining a quantum physics of random association to an applied traditionalism, the "Karikura" series imitates the ancient oriental style of haiku-type nature poetry while the title of the series ironically refers to a Japanese script and a discontinued comic series. Finally, poems not part of the aforementioned series employ the idea of mimesis or related subjects from unexpected and often striking angles of the poet-speaker himself.
The collection opens strongly with "Scarecrow," in which "an old codger" accompanied by his embarrassed daughter falls over the speaker's garbage cans that, in an impulse of mimesis, leads him to associate the old man's "shape" variously with " bag of potatoes," "a prop," and a "monument":
And your thoughts turn, like a crow in flight,
to his surprising weight, say four twenty-
kilo sacks of P.E.I potatoes
stitched with enormous skill into the shape
of an old man, a monument for some
forgotten autumn festival, or prop
for the Halloween play at an abandoned school. (5)
From these projected likenesses, the speaker suggests a hypothetical "for whom the bell tolls" resemblance to himself in years to come, and so we are introduced to the "real made up" which may not be true but which offers a possible, even plausible truth set in the future that allows us to consider alternate realities.
In "Socratic Communication Problem of the Twenty-Second Century," Brockwell reexamines the problem of applying language to the real world and the difficulty of defining objective reality in an alternate referential system of art. Although the tone is tongue-in-check, the images precisely evoke the problem of disentangling an object from the real world of which it forms a part and of defining it in a language that proves self-referential:
Do you remember
the word for
what I'm doing
scratching
the surface
of whatever
it is we call
this
with the tip
of a stick
that leaks
sky (17)
The interconnection of a dialectic of extremes becomes implicit while the speaker points at the earth with a "stick" made from a tree branch (that grows in the earth) and that, in an inverted rain image, "leaks" water from the "sky."
Another clever poem that dramatizes a related theme of communication and understanding using short dashes of lines and eloquent spaces is "California Letter." In the first part of the poem ("marin fern memory"), the speaker wonders how he may demonstrate to his daughter how the sundial works when there is no sun even though time progresses at the same rate regardless of the sundial's reading. In "flight prairie story," understanding is seen to depend on the viewer's first having identified the object from the real world and then having a familiarity with the word-image that describes it:
how would she recognize
the oleander or its shadow
if she never heard the word
never saw a petal? (35)
The speaker's coinage, that the "voice is the tongue's /shadow of muscular sound" concludes the poem with a near-iconic image that encapsulates this difficult concept of translating meaning through a physical medium of speech.
In "Abandoned Roses" of the section "Remote Memory Invocation," Brockwell considers the typos of the rose in the context of postmodern mimesis. From Robert Burns's association with "love" "like a red, red rose" "newly sprung in June" through William Blake's concept of the rose afflicted with "the invisible worm/That flies in the night," the speaker proceeds to remark on the paradoxical nature of rose fossils that are "real objects" at the same time that they are imprinted in stone. Reversing the rose's traditional association with love, the speaker inscribes each petal with the word "hate." In this way, Brockwell demonstrates the plasticity of the image and suggests how meaning and association may mutate within the poet's applied context (82).
Of particular interest in the postmodernization of cultural currency are the interspersed "Karikura" poems that bring together the suggestion of ancient Japanese nature poetry with a discontinued comic series. In the first part of "Three Poems," "River Reeds," the poet suggests that the beauty of art may gloss over the hidden danger / pain in the scene: Not only do the 'reeds' conceal a "crocodile" but they themselves are so "sharp they slice your legs" though they sound like a "harp." As the poem ends with the tongue-in-cheek whimsy that the reeds might once have been cranes who stood silently too long, the suggestion becomes that images may lose their significance in a too constant or repeated context and that words which describe with referential images may be cross-referenced so circularly that they run the risk of meaninglessness. (93)
Again, in the second poem in this triptych, "Mantella Frog," the warning that the viewer who irresponsibly mistakes the mantella frog for the romantically fraught image of "saffron" "deserves every dreaming moment / of his long visit to the infirmary" (94). For Brockwell, traditional typos and association should be tailored to suit the 'reality' of the occasion, in life or poetry.
In the last part of this triptych, "Beautiful Things," Brockwell creates a kind of modern riddle in which the idea of beauty is evoked but not mentioned outside the title:
Some seek it in the body of a lover,
others, in the handiwork of artisans.
Too many look into the mirror at it. (95)
Beauty, however, like happiness, and perhaps meaning itself, proves an elusive thing: "it can be found in the voices and footfalls / of children who have had little time / to think about it" and who may "sing a song they learned at school / or from their grandmother," but "do not know that they are singing."
While some of the poems in this collection, particularly the monologues in which colloquialism limits imagery, may seem a little thin literarily (expression limited to line breaks in some cases), other poems startle with their incisive imagery and ingenuity. Some of my favourite poems are those in the "Karikura" series that retain qualities of traditional minimalist nature poetry in the context of a postmodern understanding.
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