A few days ago a manila envelope arrived in the mail from Vancouver. Inside was an 20 page book of poetry decently printed on 8 ½ x11 paper that made it seem more a magazine than a book, notwithstanding the collographs included with the text.

It’s a book that makes me feel uneasy in several ways, not the least of which is that it points to the fact that I’m getting fairly ancient. The sender was Jamie Reid, a poet I’ve known for 40 years. The author of the book is Richard Rathwell, a man with whom I went to university briefly, and whom I have not seen or heard from since about 1970. The collographs accompanying the text were provided by Pierre Coupey, who I first met in about 1972 or 1973, and with whom I still enjoy a warm social and artistic friendship.

Unfortunately, Coupey’s collographs, which aren’t reproduced well or described clearly enough in the introduction to allow anyone to make heads or tails of them or the compositional method by which they were constructed, end up as disconnected decorations, and thus the book renders a small disservice to a very good visual artist. I should note that several of his paintings hang in my house, including a very large one that overlooks the dining room table. It is the same painting that nearly ended our friendship twenty years ago when I hung it from the ceiling in the living room of another house. Painters get touchy about that sort of thing, I learned.

My relationships with Reid and Rathwell have been quite different from my relationship with Coupey, and on the whole, much more chilly. Both are men whose lives have moved from poetry to radical leftist politics and back—if one can return from years spent under the crushing intellectual and emotional discipline of radical Marxism. Reid, who I knew well enough in the late 1960s to share a house with him for a few months, was a gifted poet with a demagogic streak that landed him with Hardial Bains and the Communist Party of Canada-Marxist Leninist, which was, in its day, Canada’s most doctrinaire and disciplined Maoist splinter faction. Reid worked for the Maoists as an obscure operative-organizer until sometime in the mid-1980s, when the Party found him, as he put it, “unreliable”.

Yes, of course I asked what in hell that meant, and also requested information on exactly what it was he had done for the CPC-ML, and why. Reid offered no answers except to hint, darkly, that he remained subject to party discipline, so don’t ask. I’d pretty much decided that “party discipline” and poetry were fundamentally at odds at the time Jamie and I parted social and intellectual company in the late 1960s, so I didn’t pursue the issue with him. Instead, I wondered aloud without thrusting it in his face whether it was possible to successfully return to art after close to two decades buried under ideology. I’d admired Reid’s vitality while we were young poets and not just because I couldn’t quite match it. But when he returned in the 1980s, most of that vitality seemed gone, and I mostly just felt shamed by what he’d done, and a little sorry for him for having wasted all those years inside the Marxist nightmare.

Richard Rathwell was not, in my recollection, a poet, but a student who liked to hang around poets and subject them to a peculiar sort of rhapsodizing that continually crossed back and forth over the boundaries of the erotic and the philosophical in ways that I had difficulty making sense of. I confess he wasn’t a person I felt comfortable around. When I was in aggression mode—most of the time then—he struck me as a mixer, one of those people who always seemed to be trying to pry his way inside the intimacies between those around him. That he seemed to do this without a detectable program of his own made him a little frightening. I was then reading Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed, and Rathwell reminded me of the character Peter Verkovensky, who was the quasi-revolutionary who contracts with another character—the suicidal, delusional and somehow wonderful Kirilov—to carry out some killings on behalf of Verkovensky’s revolutionary movement.

Then I lost track of Rathwell, and I have the impression that he’d joined a Maoist splinter group called the Partisans, who were, ridiculously, trying to eek out a niche to the left of the CPC-ML. I knew and liked several of the members of this faction even though I thought their political goals were totally crazy, and I even shared a house with them for a few weeks while my first marriage was breaking up in 1972. I don’t recall Rathwell being present during this period, so I assume he’d either left the city by then, or had learned to steer clear of me. The entry on him in Wikipedia, likely written by Rathwell himself, reveals that he is now living in London, England. It also confirms his membership in the Partisans, describes him as an award-winning fiction writer and poet in Ireland and both the first Canadian to visit Albania under Enver Hoxha and the first one in after Hoxha’s death. From there, according to Wikipedia, he went on to become an aid worker and literature teacher in Nigeria, Lesotho and Zimbabwe. He’s also noted for having a street named after him somewhere in Uganda, a tree named after him in India, and appears to have more or less been running the local United Nations aid programs. In all, Richard Rathwell sounds a little like Mr. Kurtz from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness—without, I guess, the fatal moral implosion in the jungle, and with more than a faint whiff of Arthur Rimbaud.

How much of this blah-blah is worth the powder to blow it to hell is open to debate, and even Wikipedia troubles itself to note that the biography lacks citation and footnotes--code for “we have no idea whether this is bullshit.” My first question is why, after so illustrious a career, has he come back to his post-adolescent and pre-politics roots in poetry? My second question is why hasn’t he learned anything? Or maybe what I’m really asking is this: why is this man annoying me in exactly the same way he did 35 years ago?

The first I heard of Richard Rathwell’s return to poetry was in a puzzled enquiry about six months ago from my first wife, Sharon Thesen. Apparently Rathwell tried to make contact with her, and in trying to be witty, mysterious, and seductive, he managed to merely turn on her creep alert. Her memory of him, once we got a collective bead on who he was, was similar to mine, and I’m pretty sure she wasn’t very receptive to his overtures. But I didn’t hear any more from her about it, and I assumed that Rathwell had redissolved into the murk from which he’d emerged. When I opened the envelope a few days ago and saw it was a book by him, I must admit my response wasn’t delight. But I decided to read the poems anyway, and to write something about them.

The Rules of the River begins with a “Notes from the Editor”, which is confusing because the book lists two editors, one a “Daniel Rathwell” and the other, Jamie Reid. These “notes” begin with a quote from Rathwell’s Internet blog that helped me recall why I hadn’t liked Richard Rathwell 35 years ago. “I never chose a spot or a context.” Rathwell blogs, “I just went promiscuously from one landscape to another, one discourse to another. I have origins but no place. Therefore no network, no magnifiers, no social capital, no machine.”

The simultaneously aggrieved and superior tone of this firmed my recollection of Rathwell as one of those people who are perpetually and frantically trying to crowd their way into whatever inner circle or sanctum they imagine exists, all the while whining about not being adequately appreciated or looked up to, or whatever response they want in the moment and aren’t getting. In the part of my life Rathwell crowded his way into, it was into a group of young, moderately talented poets who were themselves crowding uncritically around Robin Blaser, the American poet who’d arrived at Simon Fraser University in 1966. It really wasn’t much of a circle, and it certainly had no sanctum or exclusivity, which seemed to infuriate Rathwell. Blaser, to his credit, believed that art and ideology were mortal enemies, and that one’s personal agenda, whether neurotic or demagogic, was as destructive to poetry as it was difficult to locate and jettison. He practiced his pedagogy with those notions firmly in the forefront, too.

Not surprisingly, Rathwell didn’t hang out long. I suspect that like Jamie Reid, he was already in search of a parental ideology, one that took care of all contingencies, emotional, intellectual and otherwise. Reid found his in the addled dialectics of the CPC-ML, and Rathwell found the same thing among the Partisans, more temporarily, I think, although I think it’s fair to say that the emotional and intellectual proclivities that lead people to submit to radical discipline of any sort—Marxist, Baptist or Islamic seem little different from one another—leave behind scar tissue that can’t be eradicated. Both the CPC-ML and the Partisans, incidentally, worshipped the completely crazy Maoist regime of Enver Hoxha in Albania, which I’ve written about elsewhere on this site: http://www.dooneyscafe.com/content/view/283/2/.

My specific recollection of Rathwell is of interest here, because what he says about himself in 2007 is what he said 35 years ago. If case you didn’t get it, I’ll translate: he is superior to but misunderstood by the people whose attention he desires, and he resents those who are comfortable homers and insiders. Never mind that 35 years ago he wandered off and spent years among the Maoists, who were the ultimate insiders and intellectual homers (and never mind that the home they built was based on a series of murderous illusions and delusions that glorified a country that spent more than 20 years as humanity’s best approximation of hell outside of sub-Saharan Africa). Rathwell is therefore a man who doesn’t appear to have altered his intellectual procedures or his attitudes towards others in three and a half decades. So why is he publishing a book of poetry and sending it around to people he alienated with his arrogance all those years ago?

Richard Rathwell, not very surprisingly, has an eponymous website you can check out. On it are roughly a hundred blogs, along with a revealing set of links to other websites. The blogs are, well, mostly impenetrable self-aggrandizement or cognitive contraptions: taken together, they’re a self-serving record of a conversation he’s likely now been conducting with himself in front of an imaginary audience, after years of what appears to be self-imposed or institutionally imposed silence. For Jamie Reid, the imposed silence was inflicted by his Maoists colleagues—or captors. What silenced Rathwell for three decades isn’t clear, The most simple explanation is that he was busy having a life, or that he was locked up in some institution for 30 years, either figuratively or literally. I hope it’s the former, but the website links he offers reflect an intellectual cosmology that derives primarily from the late 1960s at Simon Fraser University: William Blake, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Albania and a host of other Maoist-derived interests. Some later influences appear, like the Government of Zimbabwe’s website, and a number of experimental blogsites, along with some NGO websites add up to a man who’s lived a life of artificially narrow dedications.

A note on blogging before I get to what's in Rathwell’s book: blogging is a composition form that most people think was invented on the Internet. Essentially, it is composition without intellectual responsibility, discipline or research: egomaniacal monologuing. Blogging has lots of relatives, and all of them tend to turn out badly or have destructive consequences. Among the near relatives are bad poetry, which our civilization is drowning in, and political dictatorship—Stalin and Mao, for instance, ran the Soviet Union and China as physical blogs. People who think they ought to be able to operate outside the conventional rules of discourse and social interaction find blogging a natural format.

As far as I can penetrate it, The Rules of the River appears to consist of just two poems. One is the title poem. The river, I think, is the Nile River, although who can really say, because the poem is obscure and insinuative rather than articulative, and it comes with no accompanying contextualizations. My reasons for supposing that the poem concerns the Nile River are a.) that a satellite photo of the Nile is on the book’s title page, and b.) that the quasi-mystical tone of the poem implies that the poet has some special experiential knowledge of the river that permits him to explain its intentions, (the poem's rhetorical stance implies that the poet has been conducting espionage for some Maoist NGO in Egypt or Somalia, or wherever, which is distractingly irrelevant). The river has eleven rules, none of which I can parse because they come in evocative rather than disclosive statements unlocated in a delineated physical or cognitive landscape. No, I have no idea why anyone would be interested in any of it. But then, I’m the poet who stopped publishing because I couldn’t make poetry come out from underneath the dung-heap of self-referential obscurity, remember?

The second poem in the book is a little more interesting, even though it is also obscurely insinuative in tone, and intellectually hermetic. Rathwell, typically, tells us that it is “translated” from something titled, “The Beak”, but offers no clue as to what “The Beak” might be or who wrote it. What’s sort-of interesting about the poem is that Rathwell then subjects it, as a “base” text, to one of those Internet-based translation programs: he’s input his poem into the translation program, which then renders the poem in various different languages: Japanese, “Chinese” (sic), French, German, etc., and then, presumably by a separate operation, he’s had the same program translate the text from the designated language version back into English.

That's an arid but moderately interesting exercise in the comparative distortions built into different languages, in other words, because each version of the poem offered is recognizable but different, occasionally profoundly so. Had the original poem  been comprehensible, it would have been really interesting, and if we had any assurance that the translational process was clean—that is, that Rathwell hasn’t been screwing with the computer translations to smooth them out or make himself look smarter, it would border on the profound. But we don’t have that assurance, because the poet--surprise!--doesn’t make his methods and his prejudices transparent. It's fair to say that few poets do, and probably fair if not very kind to point out that Richard Rathwell, having sat behind the corrupting wheel of the tractor of dialectical materialism is even less characteristically disposed than most poets to give up any rhetorical advantage.

I did try to input Shelley’s “Ozymandias” to the same program to see what it would do with a poem that is widely understood, but I think the system wanted money to do the work, and I wasn’t about to indulge it with my visa card number. That left me high and dry and vaguely annoyed, because I have irresolvable questions about what Richard Rathwell was trying to accomplish, and why. And as usual, I’m also left with a whole lot of other uncertainties that makes me a sitting duck if I were to engage Rathwell on the book. But of course, that’s it, right? That’s how it has been done for decades (or is it centuries?): You publish poetry that doesn’t offer readers any context other than the aesthetic ones, and if you aren’t treated like a genius, it’s the reader’s fault, because they’re philistine, or intellectually or spiritually indolent, and the poet wanders off into the warm and fuzzy feelings he or she wants to have about him or herself, with his or her head firmly stuck up his or her own behind.

Thirty five years in the wilderness and he’s settling for that? What a waste, Mistah Kurtz.