The honours student I’m co-supervising (and what a lucky introduction to supervising students!) likes Anne Swannell’s 1993 book of poetry, Mall. She’s interested in writing poems about places that aren’t particularly “poetic”–nice to look at, complete, obvious subjects for contemplation–and recommended Mall as an example of the kind of thing she would like to write. (Her poems are much different and, I think, a world of ambition away from Mall, but that’s another story–one I’ll tell when my student’s first book comes out.) Since Mall considers the West Edmonton Mall, which is, as Wikipedia tells me, the second-largest mall in North America, with more than 800 stores, services, and attractions, her interest makes sense. Who would choose to write poems about a massive shopping mall? Anne Swannell, that’s who. And why not?
This student found a review from Books in Canada, written by that publications poetry columnist, which savages Mall–unfairly, she argues, and I would agree. “I admit that the very idea of a collection of poems about the West Edmonton Mall made my eyes roll,” he (it has to be a man) begins. He goes on to complain about the design of the book (the small press that published this collection likely couldn’t afford a trained designer) and to call the book’s social satire “broad and obvious” and its poetry “dreary,” unredeemed “by any obvious talent for image or rhythm or form.” Only the presence of a blurb by Phyllis Webb, who gave Swannell suggestions about the manuscript and encouraged her to continue, kept this book out of the reviewer’s “no” pile, he says.
Well, nobody likes everything, but if you set out to review something with which you have no sympathy at all, you might be better off deciding to write about something else. Mall just isn’t that bad. Swannell sets out to find stories about the West Edmonton Mall. Some are found stories, I think, but most are imagined. It’s part of an attempt at turning what the French anthropologist Marc Augé calls “non-place”–a location without stories or connections–to place. If we evaluate Mall against that intention, it’s reasonably successful. It’s certainly not the abject failure the Books in Canada reviewer complained about.
Mall turns non-place into place using several different strategies. One is to bring the history of Edmonton into focus, as in the book’s first poem, “Lessons in Cartography,” which presents five vignettes about that city: four about transportation (trains and airplanes), and the last one about oil, Gretzky, and the Mall. Another strategy involves considering what’s missing from the Mall: crime, unhoused people, winter weather, broken glass and cigarette butts. Yet another is looking at what is there: bronze and plaster statues, rides, video games, the poor people who visit to avoid the heat or the cold.
One poem, “Balls,” describes (in two columns) a device that drops coloured balls through a complicated Rube Goldberg-like contraption and then hauls them back up to the top to drop them again. The right-hand column consists of verbs that give us the balls’ movements: “roll,” “fall,” “clunk,” “spin,” “climb,” “drop.” The left-hand column describes the parts of the machine in which those actions take place. It might be the book’s most successful poem, and since my student likes to write columnar poems that can be read both vertically and horizontally, I can see why she would have an affinity for it.
Another strategy considers commercialism more generally, starting with the fur trade (Edmonton’s Plains Cree name, amiskwaciy-waskâhikan, or “Beaver Mountain House,” alludes to that commercial enterprise) and then moving indoors, into a juxtaposition between the sacred (the Mall’s chapel) and the profane (the items for sale in the Super Love Boutique), along with objects and locations that might fit either category, like the statues that seem to be strewn everywhere. Is that art sacred? Maybe. It’s shabby, broken and vandalized, and its subjects (Venus, the Emperor Augustus) stand near the food court. Maybe, if it was sacred, it’s been profaned. One poem reflects (what a terrible pun! mine, not Swannell’s) on the plethora of mirrors in the Mall, quoting Rudy Wiebe:
No one can endure
so many copies of himself.
Read one way, the result of the sacred/profane disjunction is an easy irony, the kind of thing the Books in Canada was complaining about. Read another way, though, the distinction between the sacred and profane begins to wear away, to erode into something new. Maybe one thing can be both. The final section, for instance, imagines the goings-on in the Fantasyland Hotel, where the lovemaking of human guests is both sacred (it’s love, after all) and profane (the round bed, the polyester sheets). The theme rooms in the hotel are simultaneously tacky and energized by their fantastic, expressive decor. Not bound by standards of “good” taste or restraint, they are exuberant, silly, and fully of grotesque life:
In the Polynesian Room,
there’s a small erupting fiberglass volcano
molded into one wall
with an electric light inside
that causes lava to glow and pulsate
while wisps of steam belch out.
The speaker imagines other rooms, perhaps in Polynesia, that present similar scenes of western Canada: a skating rink; the Rockies; grain elevators, train tracks, cows, and gophers–ideas that have less to do with the reality of the prairie provinces than the Mall which suggests their possibility.
So, why can’t the West Edmonton Mall be a subject fit for poetry? Why can’t anything? Why should poets limit themselves to serious subjects? Swannell’s Mall answers those questions. Maybe it was ahead of its time, or at least ahead of its reviewer.