Gary Barwin and Lillian Nećakov, DUCK EATS YEAST, QUACKS, EXPLODES; MAN LOSES EYE: A Poem

 

1.

we fly but have not yetarrived
a suspended moment
the possible one
of the provinces of truth
it’s delightful

what you say, you say asa duck
you can say nothingoutside of this
let us now consider theother eye

Gary Barwin and Lillian Nećakov’s collaborative DUCK EATS YEAST, QUACKS,EXPLODES; MAN LOSES EYE: A Poem (Toronto ON: Guernica Editions, 2023), is aproject that takes its prompt from a story that ran through American newspapersacross January, 1910, about Des Moines, Iowa’s Silas Perkins, who was said tohave lost the sight in one eye after his prize-winning duck, Rhadamanthus(named for the wise demigod king of Crete from Greek mythology), ate a plate ofyeast and exploded (a check on Snopes suggests that this story might be apocryphal).Through one hundred and forty-four sequentially-numbered poem-sections, Hamiltonwriter, poet and composer Barwin and Toronto poet and editor Nećakov, friendswho first began to interact through a small group of self-declared surrealistpoets in Toronto during the 1980s, playfully pull and extend their narrative threadfrom that singular headline. They compose a collaborative riff of quickmovement and verbal gymnastics, akin to a variation on Fred Wah’s suggestion of“drunken tai chi,” allowing their individual writing skills to articulate whatis so clearly a gleefully-extended wordplay through and against dark humour,narrative expectation and strains of surrealism. This poem is very much a playfulexploration via a kind of ongoingness, working to see where the poem might gonext and how far, seemingly less concerned with where it might end up. “somethinghappened in Des Moines involving a duck,” part 11 writes, “some yeast, a man / hiseye // it’s still happening [.]” The poem exists in the present, allowing the storyof a century past remain as a kind of fixed point. Or, as they write, furtheron:

91.

we are always laughingwith
or for the dead
the burden livewires mustbear

the body begins tomultiply
a bag of laugh explosions
illuminate the wound

I’mfascinated with how Barwin has seemingly been working a multitude of simultaneousdirections over the past few years, from producing award-nominated novels tovisual poetry, musical composition, poetry collections [see my review of his latest here] and a slew of collaborative efforts, a thread in his work that hasreally ramped up over the past half-decade, including his full-lengthcollaboration with Gregory Betts, The Fabulous Op (Ireland: Beir BuaPress, 2022) [see my review of such here] and a second full-lengthcollaboration with Tom Prime, Bird Arsonist (Vancouver BC: New StarBooks, 2022) [see my review of such here], as well as multiple chapbook-lengthcollaborations with writers such as Amanda Earl and myself. How does he manageto keep track? jwcurry once offered that bpNichol was a great writer not purelybased on what he accomplished with his work, but that he was willing to fail,which provided such further possibilities in his writing, and this kind offearlessness is something that Barwin’s work employs as well. For her part, I’mless aware of Nećakov’s collaborative works [see my review of her latest collection here], although I know she’s worked a number of smaller,self-contained works for years, and a quick Google search provides that a further book-length collaboration she did with Scott Ferry and Lauren Scharhag,titled Midnight Glossolalia, appears later this year with Meat For Tea Press.

And,of course, the final poem in the collection does acknowledge their extended playon ongoingness, an echo of Robert Kroetsch’s poetics of perpetual delay,perhaps, or even the “say yes” structure of improv, offering: “to being andbegin and begin / in the middle of a sentence / after the final yes / ofyesness [.]” A few poems prior, number one hundred and thirty-seven, theywrite:

my grandfather’s town so small
if you said its name
as you walked in
you’d have walked out
before you’d finished

Mark Twain said
those who are inclined toworry
have the widest selectionin history

if the rich could hire
other people to die forthem
the poor could make
a wonderful living