PJ Harvey's Rid of Me: A Story

admin — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 11:47:00 +0000

Rid of Me is the latest addition to Continuum International’s 33 1/3 series, which takes seminal albums of the last 40 years and allows writers of various bents to write about, around, through and over the music that informs the books. Rid of Me takes its cue from PJ Harvey’s album of the same title and appropriately veers away from its surface toward an unusual and fictive adventure into the irreverently dark psychology(ies) that made the album popular in the first place.

There is a tendency in reviewing an interdisciplinary project like this, to weigh the “derivative” text (Schatz’s Rid of Me) against the original work (Harvey’s Rid of Me), but it’s been awhile since I was really into the album (even back then it wasn’t one of my mainstays). Not to mention that to evaluate the book in this way would too readily presuppose that it is necessary to have some insider knowledge of the album in order to appreciate Schatz’s book (which is, frankly, not true), and it also tends to overvalue the original album instead of considering the generative potential of the intermingling of creative forms.

Certainly, for the knowing reader, the lyrics are weaved into Schatz’s text, but what is more interesting is the way that the story disembarks from the album through a detour into the troubled backstories of two “characters” (Mary and Kathleen) mentioned on the album. In Schatz’s story, having struggled in a patriarchal world that disavows their subjectivity, both Mary and Kathleen are escapees bound together in their troubled pasts as much as in their desire to leave the world that traumatized them behind. As their histories and scarred psychologies are revealed to us through dream, hallucination, flashback and narration, I became increasingly unsure of the boundaries between reality and hallucination, between utopia and dystopia. I suspect this suspension of disbelief, evoked by the text, is meant to mimic in the reader the tenuous link between self and world that both Mary and Kathleen experienced in their lives, and continue to struggle with even in their escape. The implication is that one cannot really leave trauma behind, but can only watch it burn and “go on,” and, in this sense, the story is as much about female love and reconciliation as it is about the violence and struggle of being a woman in a patriarchal world.

Written by: Kate Morris, June 27th 2007

Emergency Contact

admin — Mon, 07 May 2007 01:36:00 +0000

By Tara-Michelle Ziniuk

McGilligan Books

If there is a politic of poetry at stake in Emergency Contact, it stems as much from the a politicized urban landscape, as it does from the poetic representation of that setting. Against the familiar backdrop of a neighbourhood in the process of an irrevocable gentrification, Ziniuk records the objects, people and small hi-stories―perhaps otherwise unregistered―of Toronto’s west end neighbourhood Parkdale. This is not nostalgia for an idea of authenticity via poverty, but a poetic document that condemns both the past ―remembering “the holiday season when the notorious…landlords” abandoned “31 floors of families without heat or electricity for almost a week”―and the future, symbolized by the novelty shop that sells “$30 felt-letter shirts claiming “Parkdale is for Lovers.” Without an acceptable past or future, Ziniuk carves out a space in the present to search for something “more long-term than Emergency,” something that is markedly aware of the problems of contingent plans and temporary solutions (“I live my life in increments./ Trish says we should stop that.”)

Collected into four parts, this is poetry to be reckoned with. It tackles political themes like poverty, gentrification, mental illness, gender and substance abuse through a ferociously poetic vision that handles themes of love, loss and identity with as much conviction. Participating in those age-old questions about the social and political obligations of poetry, Ziniuk reminds us that “people who decide their politics are also, usually also/ the ones to leave them,” and that “anarchy is not inherently against love.”

This is poetry as the expression of a personal politics that won’t allow itself the complacency of obvious definitions yet still grants us “our distinct ability to identify one another.” The question Ziniuk seems to ask is “based on what?” The politics presented in this collection resist the facility of either/or definitions and refuse a homogeneous signification of identity even (and especially) if identity politics is central.

Idealism ends fast. I am peeling stickers that say 'Feminists Fuck Better' and 'Violence Against Women, No Excuse' off my coffee table. Not that I don’t still believe it, I just don’t need the stickers anymore.

This reluctance to buy into the rhetoric of stickers, trademarked revolutions and marketing ploys rather than the substance of a political position has particular importance at the local sex worker drop-in centre, where Jane Doe is “not here simply for the good of/ the hookers.” Rather she is a “confident, capital ‘F’ feminist, card-carrying” utterly different from the girls living “outside the system without/a card to say they’ve politics, or a joke to explain/ themselves with” and utterly foreign to the poet and politics defined by Emergency Contact.

Written by: Kate Morris, May 6th 2007