Posted: Thursday May 13, 2010

A Meditation on Asian Skies

by Garry Thomas Morse

“ Beer-bottle on the statue’s pediment!
“ That, Fritz, is the era, to-day against the past,
“ Contemporary.” And the passion endures.

– Ezra Pound

In the third and most satisfying installment of Ken Norris’ Dantean trilogy, Asian Skies follows the journey of a global citizen (not necessarily Norris himself) who indulges in what a variety of locales in “The East” have to offer. The style takes directly after Gérard de Nerval, who did much to advance the form of travel reportage, blurring the line between autobiographical self and fictional self.

I have no job, no role, so no native identity.
I am one of those drifting wanderers
that make no impact on Asia.

Given the popularity of the travel genre and its excess material produced in general, even upon the now banalized topic of Dante’s home town of Tuscany and its food and wines, the question posed is what a poet would do with such travel material when arriving at it with a critical eye.

You can buy worthless trinkets
worldwide now, eat Kentucky Fried Chicken
or McDonald’s just about anywhere.

Norris answers this question in Asian Skies, surprising his travel companions with a simple writing style that still manages to echo the form of many of the Ancients, moving nimbly from the elegaic to the epigrammatic, all the while adopting the libidinal expressiveness of an Ovid while maintaining the poetical restraint of a Li Bai or a Du Fu. However, he rarely retreats to stereotypical representations of a “Spiritual East”, instead providing wry ironical observations concerning commodified entertainment.

We go off to Fantasy World where we ride the rides,
shake hands with the clowns,
eat at yet another McDonald’s,
and get really wet
riding Arung Jeram.

There is certainly more Sextus Propertius than sex tourism in these poems, as Norris often makes indirect commentary through the actions of other characters such as Nooch or Noi, who are reminiscent of the highly fictionalized mistresses in Ancient Roman poetry. This technique helps to underline one of the poet’s points, that however hard we search for our ideal, we are nonetheless obliged to choose to face or ignore glaring reality directly in front of us.

I’ve given up looking for Noi.
She’s one of those absolutes I’ll never touch.

A key member of Montreal’s Véhicule Poets who dared to collaborate to fashion a parody of Allen Ginsberg’s HOWL, in this series of poems, Ken Norris exhibits a supersubtle refinement of this parodic instinct, providing a crafty indictment against societal ills and imbalances without appearing on the surface to be so.

Five minutes later we pass two high-rise buildings
that look even more opulent than the Hyatt.
“More hotels?” I ask.
“Bank offices,” he replies.

The poems in Asian Skies also offer themes that have appeared frequently in Asian cinema over the past few decades, namely the “anomie”, the universal loneliness, alienation and isolation we can experience as individuals due to the uncontrollable expanse of technological, economic and globalized entities, where the nightmare is merely our own embracing of such a spiritually hollow materialistic world.