“Bloody Jack” is Dennis Cooley’s attempt to make playful poetry while exploring the concept of lawless of poetry and language. The book is an attempt at searching the post-modern aspects of poetry that defies the boundaries of conventional poetic expressions. In “So Glad”, Cooley’s uses words scattered across the page of the book. The attempt is to show the extremity of the wandering minds of the persona in the poem.
The style of the poem evokes both elements of antiquity and abstractness. It’s an attempt to unify both the character and the reader of the poem. In “so glad”, Bloody Jack transcends and coalesces generic identity of textual space. Voices dissolve thus creating unique effect of dissolution of the boundaries between the reader and the said poem.
While reading this poem, one must reckon with the boldness of attempting a different approach for poetry. The vastness of the space in the poetry also embodies the concept the prairies in Canada, which allows for the brain and for the individual to roam as much as they can. The white of the background is the context of the persona’s mind and the consciousness of his world. Through the white background of the paper, we have a chance at realizing that individuality is still as powerful as the soul of the community.
Some of the other poems in the story with the same themes and concept include “God with his yellow teeth, St. Norbert, they leave their traces, and vulva jig. All these poems attempts at a post-modern concept of combining individuality with the identity of the human soul/desires. Space thus becomes the embodiment of reality. Ubiquity of words and descriptions perhaps fall short at showing the essence of the human course.
Work cited
Amheim, R. rev. ed. 1974. Art and Visual Perception. Berkeley: University of California Press
Bakhtin, Michail.1984. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Trans. Caryl Emerson.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press
Cooley, Dennis. 1984.Bloody Jack. Winnipeg : Turnstone Press.
