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Harold
Rhenisch
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- The cover features a painting
of Shakespeare by Australian artist John Hagan,
reconstructed from Shakespeare's skull. For illustrated
details on the process of reconstruction, check out
John
Hagan's
site.
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Rhenisch's first artistic love
was the theatre. 28 years after first playing Puck, he
brings him alive for us in this sparkling and inventive work
fusing drama, poetry, and consumate clowning. These poems
are onstage, under the lights, dressed in greasepaint and
tights. Some of them are vaudeville acts, others are new
stagings of Shakespeare's plays, scripts for punch and judy
puppet theatre, stand-up comedies and carnie shows, while
others include versions of Shakespeare's sonnets set on
prime time TV, Hamlet written by 10,000 monkeys locked in a
room, and a review of Macbeth played in the City of Fools.
Settings range from the London Blitz, to Chernobyl and the
Cariboo, and from Berlin in 1933 to the Globe Theatre in
London, where the actors and their roles change places and
are faced, at last, with the choice of free will. In these
alternately satiric and elegaic poems, crossing the line
between dreaming and waking, Rhenisch plays Puck in A
Midsummer Night's Dream, giving us the world as a tragicomic
theatre and a provocative and alluring vision of human
intelligence and transformation. Along the way, Rhenisch
teases truth, recasts Shakespeare's major tragedies so they
focus on their women, and puts on and takes off masks,
always with the goal of freeing Will Shakespeare and
releasing the passion of the poetic and dramatic traditions
from the cloak of habit. This is Rhenisch the trickster at
his best, in poems that both renew the lyrical and satiric
traditions, and move them into a renewed sense of myth and a
light-footed irony.
Reviews
Obsessive and dark, Free Will twins
Shakespeare with Fellini -- all the world's a stage where
we're trapped as participant and witness at the precipice of
time. This is a cultural ragbag, exuberant, vicioius and
tender. Rhenisch says, 'To have a mind is madness,' and then
goes on to show how it carves out survival.
Marilyn Bowering.
With this book, Harold Rhenisch
confirms his status as one of the most inventive and witty
poets on the Canadian scene, and while there are cognitive
delights aplenty here, he has not sacrificed readability or
accessibility to the making of this fine Mulligan stew.
Richard Stevenson, The Danforth
Review
We are theatre, actors, clowns, and
consequence, floored by Rhenisch's magnificent liturgy.
Kat erina Fretwell, Prairie
Fire
- Harold
Rhenisch is a much-admired poet, fiction writer,
translator and writer of "bioregional essays" about the
Cariboo. Before all that began, he was a teenaged
Shakespearean actor. His Free Will is certainly one of
the year's singular poetry collections, a work of both
charm and power, two qualities not often found together.
He writes about Shakespeare, about playing Shakespeare,
about reading and interpreting Shakespeare -- and,
astonishingly, it's all fascinating, thanks to the vigour
of his reinventive imagination and the breadth of his
technique.
George Fetherling, The Vancouver Sun
Sample
The Hall of Mirrors
- Things
aren't what they seem.
- Right
now you look eight feet tall,
while I, beside you, am a dwarf.
I come up to your knees and grin.
A minute ago I was fat and heavy
and you were my twin,
and further down the hall
here in the dark we will both
be impossibly thin, like two trees
that have put on rags or two scarecrows in a garden,
their blind eyes mad with birds,
that whirl and peck the crop
before we can take it in.
We came here for some fun,
so let's have it. Oh look,
here around the corner our bones are bent,
our heads don't sit where we're used
to seeing them, but off to the side,
and our spines, that should hold us up straight
as our mothers always told us, tucking us in,
are bent like lightning forking down to a lone
elm in a field and splitting it.
We should both fall down,
but don't. We move on,
straighten out, shrink, twist, and laugh
at what we see, not because we're having fun
but because I have forgotten what I am:
man, or tree or twisted thing that jumps
up in the dark. When I look at you,
you're no help, as I'd hoped you'd be &emdash;
the mirrors reflect you as well.
We came in here knowing who we were,
and still know it. It's who we are that's troubling.
Things are what they seem.
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Introduction to
Free Will
Pun Intended
"The clown is the center of the
ceremony"
Stefan Schütz, Peyote
This book began in 1975, when I drove off
the farm to Victoria in a 1957 Ford Sedan with four colours of paint
and a bullet hole in the back window. Who knows where the bullet hole
had come from. I bought that old beater off my brother for $150. He
used the money to buy himself a Honda 450, with a roll bar and lots
of chrome. He was into Easy Rider. I was off to play Puck in A
Midsummer Night's Dream, on the strength of a passion for the
absurdist theatre of Ionesco. I thought it best not to ask about the
bullet. Slipping the blue toque off my long golden hair and clearing
my head of Leonard Cohen's "Songs of Love and Hate", which were
rolling around in there like a piece of gravel in a hubcap, I thumped
around a minimalist set for six weeks, speaking spells, making magic,
and acting that I was acting. Fifteen years later, I woke up with a
start in the middle of the night, sweating, repeating lines from the
play, but this time voicing them as they cried to be voiced &emdash;
singing, laughing them out, teasing, calling, taunting. The dreams,
if they were dreams, continued for years. I was no longer
acting.
The result is this book. Shakespeare rattles
around in it, as he does in my head, with his fools and lovers, his
cross-dressers, his heroes who aren't heroes, his tragedies that
aren't tragedies, his comedies that often have more in common with
Monty Python and La Cage aux Folles than with high art. Ionesco is
never far behind. The whole avalanche of poetry that has come down
off the mountain of Purgatory with surrealists skiing madly before
it, absurdist playwrights digging up somnambulist lyricists, and
visual poets and sound poets tramping in with their dogs and their
barrels of brandy, end up tumbling into the après-ski chalet
of this book, where Puck tends bar. Here, though, their stunt acts
and special effects, a world of hallucinatory dreams and silent-movie
utopias, are brought back to the world of reason, and bed
it.
Puck is a fairy, a trickster, the one who
stands outside of all stories and causes them to take place,
capriciously. He is also a trick himself, a piece of sleight-of-hand.
Shakespeare-Houdini, that master of mirrors and disguise, set up his
sonnets as Chinese boxes. The only escape from them is the point at
which physical and spiritual love cross. In the same spirit of
pulling rabbits &emdash; or himself &emdash; out of hats, Shakespeare
set up his plays as mazes of mirrors, out of which there is only one
avenue of escape: theatre &emdash; a thing as light as air.
Rapacious, driven, compulsive, unpredictable, impulsive, vital,
frightening, transient, sexually ambiguous, and dangerous, Puck is
the creative imagination itself. The card huckster that is Puck has
his own mirrors, too: Lear, who mocks himself; the sinister but
smiling Iago; the indecisive Hamlet, who plays his own fools. They
differ from Puck only because the space created for them forces their
energy into different straight jackets, as our different bodies do to
our own souls. United by an urge to live, and to live freely, these
characters fight their fate &emdash; Will Shakespeare, who penned
them in. By pulling the rug of tragedy out from under their feet, he
is forcing them, the actors who play them, and any of the others of
us who let them pound the boards in our minds, to think for
ourselves, and to free him, Will, from death. The plays are great,
complex, incantatory and alchemical engines. God help us
all.
Any combination of reason and unreason is
absurd, of course. The city of this book is populated by clowns and
fools. Punch, Coyote, Charlie Chaplin, Robin Goodfellow, Black Adder,
Marcel Marceau, and the shriners on their scooters in small town
parades, all take their turns behind the camera, directing a scene
from the show. The tragedy is common to them all &emdash; Shakespeare
and his audience trapped within the house of mirrors of their minds,
finding escape by putting on masks of themselves. In each scene, the
mind shows up in a different mirror, each poem a different glint of
light cast off a forest leaf or a stream in moonlight. In irreverent
reverence, every poem collected here circles around, fills, and
ultimately retreats from silence, a finger on its lips. Randomness,
and the ability of the mind to outrun its snapping jaws, to dance
around it, daring it to do its worst, is all. Reason, in this
universe, is not a prison.
This vision of Puck has roots in the old
definition of infinity: if you were to lock 10,000 monkeys in a room
with 10,000 typewriters, they would eventually write Hamlet. In this
book, they do &emdash; and a lot of other plays besides: comedies,
tragedies, romances, histories, gallows humour, the works. These lab
chimps finally get their own say, free of surgical implants and
double-blind controls. In their plays, though, as in Shakespeare's
own, the tragedies are not about tragic heroes. Instead, they detail
the repercussions of tragedy upon people, how it constrains them, and
how, by joy, delight and by playing roles they can be released from
the cage of living alone in a vast, unknowable universe, where
scientists wear identification badges and white coats and bring
medications on steel trays. Hamlet is not Hamlet's play, for
instance, but Ophelia's. Her play appears here, stripped of
Shakespeare's distorting lens, that gave us Hamlet's story instead.
Iago's play is here as well. So is Puck's. And Desdemona's. Here,
too, are actors identifying with their parts, until the two are
indistinguishable. The stage becomes the audience, the audience the
actors on the stage. A new sequence is added to Shakespeare's
sonnets, bringing them into the world of prime time sitcoms and cop
shows. The major genres &emdash; and some minor ones &emdash; of
western literature are put on stage, to do their vaudeville act, and
Puck makes his magic, or reaches out his hook. In this universe, the
subconscious mind will not be contained and takes equal stage with
its conscious twin. I call that art. Shakespeare appears, dressed in
the monstrous garb of free will. It is the choice he can offer. The
magic is real. I have followed Puck's lead and have picked it
up.
Welcome to the show!