Prophetic Poetry from Canada’s Oil Patch: Naden Parkin’s “A Relationship With Truth”

When the Muses appeared to Hesiod on Mount Helicon, they put in his hand a branch of olive-wood and breathed into him a divine voice that he might celebrate the things that shall be and that were aforetime.  That a humble Boeotian farmer should make such claims for himself may surprise and shock those who regard the Greeks as the first rationalists and their poetry as a dawn breaking through the long Babylonian night.  But Hesiod was not alone even among the Greeks in asserting the poet’s dominion over so vast and so formidable a field.  Claims like his can be found in many ages and many places, and though not all poets were in the beginning prophets, there is abundant evidence for an ancient and intimate connexion between poetry and prophecy.
–Sir Maurice Bowra, The Prophetic Element, the 1959 Presidential Address to The English Association, p. 3.

Naden Parkin is a voice, crying in the wilderness of Canada’s Oil Patch, a Jeremiah forced by circumstances to live off the altars of the petrochemical Baal.  Naden Parkin is that perhaps most unexpected of creatures, an oil field mud-man prophetic poet.

Yesterday I was in the Chapters store in Sherwood Park – Sure White Park, as we like to call it, due to the largely pale demographics of this Edmonton bedroom community – browsing through the tiny “Arts and Letters” section, when I noticed a slim paperback with no lettering on the spine.  A Relationship With Truth: Poem and Verse Born in the Canadian Oil Patch was the title, by one Naden Parkin.  No publisher name. Must be self-published, I thought.  Parkin’s picture is on the back cover. Peaked cap, sunglasses. Round head, soft body, standing in snow in front of a Ford F150.  He looks like any of a dozen guys you’ll see in any small Alberta or Saskatchewan town standing outside the Co-op or the [Small Town Name] Hotel Tavern.  One of the thousands who end up working in the Oil Patch to support a young family, to make house payments, to pay for the case of beer on the two days out of twenty they aren’t working.  One of the thousands who do what they can in a perpetually un-diversified economy.

There are two testimonial blurbs on the back cover from poetry critics with whom I’m afraid I’m unfamiliar. One is from Logan Wild, of Discovery Channel’s Licensed to Drill.  The other is some very erudite words from Tim the thrashing machine Hague, UFC Heavyweight and former King of the Cage Heavyweight Champion:

A Relationship With Truth, offers an incredibly interesting and necessary glimpse into Alberta’s Oil-infused lifestyle.  We have the chance to see how Canada’s life blood has affected one man both negatively and positively.  This book is a treat to read from start to finish.

For anyone with preconceptions about Alberta and those who work in the Oil Patch, the whole package would seem surreal.  But here in Alberta we know the complicated contradictory truth.  Here in Edmonton, Oil Patch workers tend to be educated, are likely hipsters in their off time, collect art, go to live theatre, like to go out drinking with friends, enjoy sports, may well have voted NDP all their short lives, and are conflicted about Alberta’s and their own dependence on the fossil fuel economy.  And they may or may not drive a pick up truck.

It really shouldn’t be surprising to find a poet working in resource extraction — Robert Service in the Klondike and James Anderson in the Cariboo stand in that long line.  What I find startling and exciting is just how good Parkin’s poetry is.

A Relationship With Truth begins with a brief exhortation to the reader to “Listen”.  Whether he realizes it or not, Parkin is placing himself in the Prophetic poetic tradition occupied in English most particularly by Blake.  He has a profound message for us, if we have ears, and will,  to hear.

The second poem, “Wake Up”, is a cycling series of morning wake up calls which with remarkable economy show the generational cycle of domestic struggle and break up and hope and disappointment and perseverance of the Oil Patch life.  Here, at the outset, Parkin shows his rhythmic debt to Hip Hop, and it is clear that his poetry is meant not simply to be read aloud but to be declaimed and performed, a necessity made even more clear by “Something Inside”:

. . . Visions of mine,
A whole civilization blind, and victimized
As we lie below an invisible line
Beneath, the richest guys
Who bitch and cry over misplaced dimes
While we,
Risk our lives just to wish of times of bliss and pride
To see,
Retired at 65. Is it worth it? To work to die?
No please don’t believe those lies,
Slaves of our time
As am I. . . .

Parkin’s poetry exudes what might be seen as a rough socialism, but it’s actual a gentle communitarianism, a deep desire to get along fairly and honestly in a world in which dishonesty and greed are not rewarded.  He’s not calling for an overturning of the classes, but an idealistic, perhaps utopian, humane leveling, where everyone has enough and no one hoards at the expense of others.

I have written elsewhere, in the context of Irving Layton’s work,  about what Sir Maurice Bowra termed the Prophetic Element in poetry.  As well as clearly being in the Prophetic tradition, Parkin has something of the goaty Layton about him, in love poems such as “Goodbye”, “The Cutest Girl”, “After Love”, and “Fly Like That”, and in poems interested in chemical recreation such as “My Stoned Bliss” and the powerful and surprising earthy blend of “What I Love Doesn’t Matter”, a list of the worldly and not-so-worldly loves of the poet and an indictment of the narrowness of societal definition of the individual.

Parkin is  man of a very particular location, the oil lands of Saskatchewan and Alberta, once the bison killing-fields.  In “Northern Man” he says of the locations he lists as home:

You ask me, I’d invest in that
It’s natural gas and the oil patch
Western Canada, we’re blessed with that
And cursed with that
And if you think not, then you’re immersed in facts.

In 1959, when describing poets engaged in the Prophetic Element, Bowra wrote:

They feel that the ordinary methods of scientific or logical analysis are quite inadequate for the vast and terrifying issues befoe them and that their own kind of vision is a better way to the truth than the statistics and generalities with which publicists forecast .  ,  .
The Prophetic Element, p. 5

Immersed in facts, indeed.

Throughout the book, Parkin scatters short untitled poems, like the little gem on p. 17:

A flat land with a painted sky
Graced by the great herds
But all the grazers died.

The final line is a shock of banality because the grazers didn’t simply die – they were deliberatly exterminated, and everyone knows that fact.  And so we wonder: are the bison the great herds today? Or are human workers the grazers these days?  And we remember from “Something Inside”

. . . Is it worth it? To work to die?
No please don’t believe those lies,
Slaves of our time
As am I . . .

More than a hint of childhood trauma is buried in “The Pit”.  Parkin draws a nightmare vision of slippery references to let any childhood trauma fit and to make a definite become a universal claim of survival and reintegration in the last line:

He’s whole.

(with a play on “hole” as in “pit”, of course.)

Two poems use the image of a Heart of Gold: “Mortal’s Globe” which begins with the wonderful line:

You’ll never know whether I’m clever or slow

and the poem titled “Heart of Gold”.  I find no reason to doubt that, among other things, both poems reference Neil Young and his remarkably unnuanced opposition to Canada’s Oil Patch and it’s miners, so many with their hearts of gold.  Not only does “Heart of Gold” have an earthy whiff of Layton, it also mentions Optimus Prime, one of the more unexpected images of spiritual transformation in modern poetry.

A fascinating aspect of Parkin’s poetry is that from this young man, so immersed in the work of the Oil Patch, comes the constantly echoing warning that when it comes to living on this earth and saving it for future generations, “It’s Up To You”:

. . . gotta use yer main nerve

or crater

What ya do when ya lose and the music takes yer
Shoes to the moon cause the view is great there
But lose old blue and we’re in
Danger
And the way we use crude you can’t blame her
Neck through the noose boots down and hand her
See the future’s looking screwed
When the few control the huge
And when the few control the fuel
The few control you
It’s lose lose unless you choose to
Save her.

And in “I Know” the poet is prophet again:

. . . know that I chose to show this
to let my soul expose what all of you already know
But you hold in.

And, in “Use Your Noodle”:

You’ve got to lose the fools and use your tools
And use your noodle to search for truth,
Instead of just using Google.

And so on, through “Why I’m Here”, “My Prayer for Humanity and “I Knew a Man”, which reminds me favourable of Leonard Cohen’s “The Captain”, Parkin the prophet strolls until the end of “Surviving” in which he flicks his mantle blue and takes his leave, with just a brief untitled envoi to the reader:

As this page closes I hope you’ve taken notes
You’re a day closer to laying under roses
A shame moments fade as we grow older
So
Feel as what I’ve shown you and make love before it’s over.

Consider Cohen’s “The Captain”:

There is no decent place to stand
In a massacre;
But if a woman take your hand
Go and stand with her.

Throughout A Relationship With Truth, Parkin makes clear that society is headed for a massacre of some degree, but always the horror of past, present and future is tempered by the gentleness of love, the simple things of life, and the free pleasures, like the Aurora Borealis on a crisp winter night.

A Relationship With Truth is a profound collection of poetry from an unexpected source that should be sought out, and Naden Parkin is an Oil Patch mud-man whom poets, poetry editors and poetry readers would do well to watch.

Star Wars

 

In February 1977 I was 15 years old, a little more than half way through grade ten, and a fan of Science Fiction.  I read Science and Science Fiction books voraciously.  I had a subscription to Analog Science Fiction|Science Fact magazine.  A year earlier I had been excited to read Frank Herbert’s Children of Dune, the third volume in the now never ending Dune series, serialized in Analog.  I must have first read Dune when I was 11 or 12.

In those days Science Fiction, with the rare exceptions like Star Trek, on television, and Kubrick’s 2001 in cinema, was almost purely a literary phenomenon.  And Science Fiction fans were readers above all else.  We — well, they — I never got to a convention — they went to Science Fiction conventions to meet their favourite authors and editors, to get books autographed by superstars with horn-rimmed glasses or massive side-burns or, in the case of Asimov, both.

Those superstar writers and editors had started their careers as fans, and generations of Science Fiction writers have followed that path to a career as an author.  I remember a number of authors from my Analog subscription and wonder what ever became of those lucky souls whose first publications I read in those pages.  I wonder if youngsters like Orson Scott Card or George R. R. Martin ever went on to do anything else.  And the cover art!  I wonder what ever happened to artists like Rick Sternbach and Mike Hinge, whose covers consistently blew me away for vastly different reasons.

In February 1977 I read the book reviews in Analog.  The reviews were Lester del Rey’s usual feature, “The Reference Library”, at the end of the issue, just before “Brass Tacks”, the letters to the editor.  The first book reviewed was Frederik Pohl’s Gateway, the beginning of what would be a series of novels by Pohl.  The second book is something called Walkers on the Sky by David J. Lake.  And the third book . . .

Well, the third book is a little thing the hero of which is, as del Rey writes in reference to the previously reviewed book, “oddly, named Luke Skywalker.”

Here is the first encounter I and a great many Science Fiction Fans had with this thing called Star Wars:

  This book called Star Wars was credited to a new author named George Lucas.  It was, as most know today, ghost written by Alan Dean Foster, now well known as a Science Fiction writer.  Foster’s career had received an early boost with the commission to “novelize” the animated Star Trek as the Star Trek: Log series of paperbacks.

But, back to Star Wars and del Rey’s review and as a Science Fiction fan my experience of the years since 1977.

In May 1977 I saw Time magazine’s “Film of the Year” article about Star Wars and thought “this could be interesting”.  Soon after it opened in Edmonton — at the Odeon on Jasper Avenue, I think — I went to see the film with my mother.

I liked it.  It was fun.  The dialogue and science were equally crappy. It was not a thought provoking stumper like 2001 nor a discussion novel made SF TV like Star Trek. The best thing about it was something pointed out in the Time article: the world of Star Wars was battered, grubby, and lived in. Otherwise, it was a crappy space opera and I enjoyed it.

And I was fifteen.

I felt it was the precursor of something.  Star Wars seemed parallel to the cheesy, often badly written pulp fiction Asimov celebrated in his anthology Before the Golden Age.  I figured that we’d have some cheesy pulpy Science Fiction films for a bit, but surely a Golden Age of intelligent Science Fiction cinema was on the horizon.

In the fall of 1977 I moved to Grade 11, still fifteen until December.  My new English class was taught by Mr. Mallet, one of the finest teachers I ever had.  Part way through the year he completed his Masters thesis (Symbolism of some sort in Hawthorne).  At some point that year he was advisor on a “special project” I did for credit.  I wrote my first novel — Science Fiction, of course, and, of course, unpublished.

I don’t know how he arranged it, but Mr. Mallet designed the entire Grade 11 English program around Star Wars.  Except Macbeth. Macbeth was done separately.  But Mr. Mallett made a point of reading the Porter scene, which had been excised from our texts, aloud to the class.  Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead with the alcoholic impotence!

So, the class had a field trip to the Odeon to see the film and then the readings were assigned: Dune, for the desert planet, The Wizard of Oz, for the Tin Man, The Hobbit for the quest and the wizard . . .

Two students raised their hands.  “Read ’em already” Jenny and I said.  Jenny’s an Egyptologist in New Zealand now.  We were friends then.

Mr. Mallet replied: “Lord of the Rings.”

“Read it.”

“Twice”

“Right.”  Mr. Mallet paused a moment.  “You two will spend class time in the Library researching and writing essays on subjects I assign.”

As the rest of the class belly-ached about unweaving Lucas’ rainbow and “only two weeks to write 250 words?! Impossible!” Jenny and I skipped off to the library with Mr. Mallet’s wonderful gift of time to read and write with unheardof freedom combined with sympathetic direction.

My best friend Dan was a huge fan of Star Wars although he had never been a particular fan of Science Fiction.  He liked cars and girls. And cinema.  While still in High School he was working at an Edmonton television station, coming up with some innovative set and prop ideas.  Today he works in the film industry in Vancouver as a property master.

Dan had a Darth Vader action figure and a classic sports car.  I had a storm trooper action figure and a battered Ford Custom when I could get permission from my father to use it.  We hung our action figures from our rear-view mirrors.  My heart was never really in it.  Dan’s heart seemed to be in every thing but perhaps was really in nothing much other than career in those days.

We lost touch.

In 1977 Science Fiction fandom was about reading.  In 2015 it is about cinema, television, and gaming — and Star Wars is the colossus that bestrides every convention, every consciousness.  Yes, there are still readers of Science Fiction, but the money — and the fans — are in the films and their tie-ins — the action figures Dan and I hung in our cars, the novelizations, and occasionally in the novels that script the visual presentations.  Do fans read the novels that seeded the blockbusters?  From what I’ve seen of the recent cinematic versions of Tolkien, the novels are only skimmed by the film makers.  As a friend said to me once of Lynch’s film of Dune, “It’s as though he filmed the first page of each chapter and the last page of the book.”

I can’t help but look at fans today, idolizing the actors and ignoring the imagination behind the actors, indeed, ignoring their own imaginations and their own potential.  I can’t help feeling something has been lost in a Golden Age still-borne.

Are young people still inspired by the Dragons of Pern? Do they need a movie or TV show to take them to Earthsea?  Will they ever puzzle over Bombadil now that fandom is about blockbuster films rather than words on a page?

I look around at the society we have created, the internet, the International Space Station, the Artificial Intelligence in every toaster and coffee maker.  I look at our Brave New World of reproductive technology and multiplicity of gender. I look around and I read myself into Heinlein, Clark and Asimov, Le Guin, Tiptree and Russ.  The world around me is the world I read before Star Wars.  It is also a world like and unlike 2001.  But it is not a world at all like contemporary blockbuster Science Fiction films.

Before Star Wars, Science Fiction fandom was about imagination and its freedom.  After Star Wars fandom has become about imagination structured, about cannon, and, above all, about consumption.

About a decade ago, my old friend Dan’s partner sent me a note before his fortieth birthday, asking for a thought, a wish, a memory.  I don’t remember what I wrote.

We drift from our childhood friends and childhood things.  I’ve not heard from Jenny or Dan or Mr. Mallet in forever.  I no longer have my copy of Foster’s Star Wars. But then, I’m reading Dune again right now.  And I still have my original paperback copy.  I hope there’s a young person somewhere out there reading Dune – in paperback – for the first time.

Del Rey, in the penultimate paragraph of his review of Star Wars, the book, writes:

“Maybe the book is all right for some of the juvenile audience, but it certainly isn’t for sophisticated readers.”

Not long after Star Wars my subscription to Analog lapsed.  Reading is no longer analog for most – it is digital.  I’ve lost touch with much of contemporary Science Fiction.  Gibson and Stephenson are pretty much just names.  I’ve read The Hunger Games but seen none of the films.  I expect the special effects are spectacular.

I think I might try to reconnect with Jenny and Dan.  We are no longer the juvenile audience of the original Star Wars. We now live in the grown up Science Fiction I read as a kid.

 

And these days I should still be able to make the Edmonton/Vancouver/Auckland Run in less than twelve parsecs.

“Mote”: a New Play by José Teodoro

Spoiler alert:

Marion dies in the shower.

José Teodoro’s new play Mote, now playing at La Cité Francophone, is in the workshop stage, so I’m willing to give it a little rope.  The first unusual  item to notice is the sign reading “Balcony seating only”.  The seats have been removed and the floor has become the stage.   La Cité’s theatre is an unusually narrow, high space, so this change makes an interesting space even more interesting, but it limits the audience to little more than thirty seated in a single row on three sides of the action — unless the second balcony, partly used for technical tasks, were also opened to audience members willing to risk vertigo.  If one is sitting on the side, much of the action will be missed unless one leans far forward over the railing, which is not a terribly severe criticism as the play is mostly words rather than actions.

The set is a minimalist black box with projections and a few pieces of furniture – chairs and tables.  The projected material designed by Max Amerongen was something less varied than I had expected coming in – the white centre line flashing past representing driving, a sort of paisley shadow on the floor representing a seaside, the moon representing moonshine.  But the projections were quite effective in setting scene, and, particularly in the case of the opening green squigglies, in setting the mood.

I have a suspicion that the make up design is the work of costume designer Megan Koshka, fresh off a stint as assistant costume designer on Catalyst’s Vigilante.  Between Nevermore, Vigilante, and now Mote, this make up design is becoming a bit of an Edmonton signature. We need to be careful but the dark shadowed eyes and black lipstick are very effective here, making the characters seem like stark marionettes rather than agents of their own destiny.  On Luc Telier, who plays Norman, the make up accentuates his more than passing resemblence to a young Klaus Kinski, notorious for playing Nosferatu. This accentuated resemblance makes Norman just a little more disturbing for audience members with a longer cinematic memory.

The performances were uniformly solid, with the melancholy singing duets of Telier and Twila MacLeod (Marion) a bit of stand-outs.  Brian Dooley as Arbogast the flatfoot pursuing Marion had me spellbound during his brief, gentle telephone exchange with his young daughter from whom he’s separated by his work.  The rest of the cast provide rock solid support to these leads.

A criticism I will offer is that the pacing is thrown off by Marion’s outfit changing.  I realize that Hitchcock took some time with similar scenes in Psycho, but on film he was able to direct our gaze, to the suitcase, to the envelope of money. As we look down on the stage, we’re just looking at a woman changing her clothes. I’m not sure that any symbolism of changing clothes/changing character outweighs the loss in pacing.

The first part of Mote largely follows the course of the opening of Psycho, with one particular film studies student exception. As Marion and her co-worker Caroline (Andrea Rankin) kibbutz about the office, Caroline suddenly notices  a fat man on the sidewalk outside the window and goes out to shoo him away.  This is, of course, Alfred Hitchcock’s cameo appearance in Mote. In Psycho, Hitchcock is outside the window, but not noticed by the characters.   I have a suspicion there’s another Hitchcock cameo in the later scene in the bar between Norman and Sam (Chris Schulz), but I’ve not nailed down what film is referenced.

The second part of the play, after the lady vanishes with Norman’s help, strikes me as also a bit of a film studies student piece, with a frenzy of Hitchcock, film and Hollywood references. For example, Arbogast’s voice over mentions that Norman goes to Hollywood and hangs around on a set with Ava Gardner. Is this a reference to Hitchcock’s Norman, Anthony Perkins’ roll in On the Beach opposite Gardner and Gregory Peck? Norman’s repressed homosexuality is presented without a shadow of a doubt but perhaps with less exploration than would be ideal. I worry that reference may be overshadowing exploration.

In the end, Mote is most interesting and very enthralling and original, but I can’t help thinking it needs tightening.  That, of course, is the point of workshopping.

Mote, by José Teodoro, directed by Wayne Paquette, is playing at La Cité Francophone in Edmonton until May 17.

As a sidenote, it was so nice to finally meet (my #yeggie nominee) Jenna Marynowski in real life last night at Mote.  I’m looking forward to reading her take after seeing the play – which I’m sure will show up soon at After the House Lights.