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"Blunt Chorus": Ken Badstock's Methodist Hatchet

Olga Mexina

The speaker of Ken Babstock’s Methodist Hatchet is both anxious and confident. Confident because he knows there is no hope, yet the show must go on if only for the purposes of pure aesthetic description. Anxious because he realizes how constructed our world is, how unreal and illusive. In his poem “The Decor,” he experiences a desire familiar to most of us to:

    Slide an arm right through
the surface of this picture,
    into whatever spatial realm lies
behind the illusion of depth, to hold
the hand of the person

wanting so badly to be seen precisely
    as they feel themselves
to be: launching, from over there, starched
    murmurs, mere vibrations
of air, in hopes they can correct the distorted,
over-adorned version

they fear you’ve displaced them with.

This desire to break out of the patterned routine, to scream, “I am real, I can describe this world, I can describe you,” seems to be the implicit theme that structures Methodist Hatchet as well as the driving force that keeps pushing the reader forward. Babstock constructs his world with an astonishing range, where New York is located right next to London, and the trip from one place to the other is narrated by Social Democrats and Wehrmacht, with Odin, the Norse god of war, as an omniscient observer.

The reader has no trouble traveling the distances and following the ever-changing focus of Babstock’s poetics. In fact, the whole ofMethodist Hatchet reads like an ars poetica with nervous, almost painful moments of self-consciousness. Babstock writes in “West Range,” “You’re reading this, or the inverse / is happening.” Often we are taken out of the language and forced to look at ourselves as we are, on the verge of being just a construct. We never leave the speaker. We empathize and stay with him as we travel from one corner of his world to another. As in “The Décor,” the speaker constantly signals to us with a “semaphore, or prayer.”

Babstock manages to interweave politics with life so completely that we can’t differentiate where politics stop and life begins, or vice versa. Methodist Hatchet  is so permeated with politics that we become unsure whether God is the president or whether the president is God, as in “Caledonia”:

Our kids came out in numbers to stand in solidarity with

us into megaphones demanding we throw rocks and a few choice
Canadians without access to that road as our only route through

anger with flags aloft alongside placards and our kids angry to be
blocked by them with special treatment to be angered by rocks

thrown in Canadian solidarity with megaphones and our kids
in numbers aloft in a wind over patience our only route you don’t

have to live near them as Canadians drunk with rocks. We came out
in numbers at night as Canadians around barrel fires singing.

We believe the speaker’s political broodings because his voice and diction give the poems a deeply human sense of urgency. In Babstock’s world, we are surrounded with everyday things that seem familiar but are not. Words take on new functions, connotations and, finally, significance. Kids are not cute little people, but faceless army troops both terrifying and heartbreaking in their implicit vulnerability. People are “drunk with rocks,” drunk with the power of numbers, plugged into the outlet of the collective unconscious.

Through his repetitions, leaps in diction, and imagery, Babstock creates a world structured like a snake biting its own tail. There are no answers in this world, only observations, descriptions, and strange consequences of everyday actions. Babstock’s poetic world and rhetoric is postmodern in the best way possible, as in “Lee Atwater in Blowing Snow”:

Strangely, things sharpen visually,
gather mass into themselves, hugging colour as though
their own physical  limits were arms.

Methodist Hatchet is permeated with the presence of a strange god, a creature who is powerful and omniscient, yet recognizably human and vulnerable. This god is presented variously as an “art director” (“The Decor”) arranging the world according to his strange aesthetic or an ambivalent Odin, who is closely associated with the concepts of inspiration and poetry, as well as madness and wanderlust. As we finish reading “Futility Music,” the last poem in the collection, we are left with the feeling that life is just a series of strange images. As we keep moving, pushed forward by wanderlust, we ask the existential question contained in “Futility Music”: “Why must Now end Here”? Babstock answers with a description enticing enough for us to stop asking and just get lost in the futile beauty ofMethodist Hatchet:

Sun coined on rhubarb, the current
speaking Russian to ears cut in half.

Skeena’s headwaters, the Stikine,
the Nass nickel-plated, nulled in rock gas,

blunt chorus I heard while lifting
the warped door gnawing the threshold

to boil cabbage, mop with a capful of vinegar.
If it’s on its way, we should greet it.