Robert Allen “The Encantadas”

Having just stayed up all night writing an essay on the final work of my professor’s recently deceased poetic mentor (a short-sightedly-made nerve-wracking decision, I mean, how the fuck can you and your puny undergraduate brain hope to do justice to this man’s magnum opus, finally completed and published as recently as 2006 with virtually no critical essays written on it other than a small section of an essay in a book assigned for the course), I have an urgent book recommendation:

The Encantadas by Robert Allen.

Look, it’s fucking $15 on this website if you can’t find it in your local bookstore (which is probably the case). Or, if you know me and I’ll see you again, some time, I can get you a copy here and bring it to you with the appropriate re-imbursement. If you’re not sold, I’ll loan it to you when I see you, but I’ll demand I get it back before I leave town, and will hunt you to the gates of Hades to get it.

It’s one long poem about Jack the oceanographer from les Cantons d’est of Quebec, his body-double Teddy the Antediluvian Vaudevillian (a tap-dancing turtle), and then Jack-as-Dionysus, smuggling wine from Crete to England.

Fear not it’s “Canadian poetry” categorization, you will not be assaulted with boring-ass Canadiana, word-paintings of the prairies or la fleuve St-Laurent. No mention even of Toronto or New Brunswick (a handful of Montreal references, never explicit), only Hollywood, New York, Hotel Gobernador on the jungle coasts of Mexico, Crete, and the islands of the title piece, The Galapagos Islands — as well, for those of you who resent Canadian literature or poetry that disdains its own geographical location, the Eastern Townships, and an acute awareness of its Anglo-Quebec context. In other words, whatever your opinions on “Canadian poetry,” you will hard-pressed to get pissed off about anything, either present or absent.

It’s also the best piece of “Canadian” poetry I’ve ever read. It’s one of the best pieces of poetry I’ve ever read, holding up against the works of any American, British, French, Chilean, Greek, Latin or Russian poet, dead, alive, or zombie.