“What could be romantic to Cam Scott?” asks the first line of “ROMANS,” one segment of the ongoing “life-poem” begun in Scott’s 2019 release, ROMANS/SNOWMARE, and now continued in MANOR’S RANSOM. “He’s just a skeleton, a cloud in corduroy, a stop sign” (7).
The question’s many answers furnish these two collections, the first written in Winnipeg and completed while Scott was living in New York, and the second assembled through the opposite process. Indeed, MANOR’S exudes a big-city agitation that contrasts with the earlier book’s take on the prairie long poem. Like “ROMANS,” which recurs in several installments across both collections, “SNOWMARE” picks up again six years after R/S with the zoetic line, “A watch actually ticks, like time itself were in the room. Clenched teeth on contact microphone; voice like a gavel on gravel” (11).
The writing method Scott employs here, which he calls “social collage,” involves collecting and documenting scraps of language overheard, read on the street, or occurring to him as he moves through daily life. In an interview at the launch event, he described losing interest in expanding on any particular one of these small fragments of inspiration and instead deciding to “compile them and suck out all the space in the notebook between these disparate sentences.”
The result is two dense prose poems that move deftly between contrasting layers of language, combining lofty, esoteric ideas with advertising patois, half-heard conversation, and stream-of-consciousness almost-non-sequiturs. The skitteriness of this approach could make for a disjointed reading experience, but instead the impression is of well-crafted background music, audience chatter, or an inner monologue broadcast in real time—“Was there meaning to that stairwell?” (17); “Now the city is a low E” (87); “I heart high art. Major fuckery afoot” (89).
Vibes dominate more than narrative, but rarely do any of these snippets feel completely out of left field (Scott elucidates on the stairwell line: “I come to galleries prepared for art, and this attunement can’t be turned off so abruptly”). The pages are packed with cleverly rendered observations and bewitching reflections like, “Seeing is sedimentary, like shale or concrete, heaping grey on grey” (12) and “How much of life should be construed as one unending gesture? Threading the needle with words” (15).
Scott has noted, “Ideally, everybody could write their own poem like this, and if you were to smash them all up against one another, I don’t think it would be easy to find the seams.”
If this paratactic process is notable for having a sort of punk rock accessibility, it won’t surprise readers to find there is both a strong anticapitalist momentum and a thrilling musicality permeating the collection. Illustrating both, “SNOWMARE” ends, “I don’t want to centre myself. I’d rather dissipate into a crowd of leaf-like co-conspirators and savour their seditious bustle, drift indifferently as wind requires” (26).
There is also a captivating aesthetic fluidity, though the flipside is occasionally a sort of jaded pithiness. Scott gets ahead of it, claiming, “I want this poem to negate the easy stasis of the fucking aphorism” (13), but his epigrammatic musings sometimes can’t help but read like tweets or adages from a delightfully misguided Chicken Soup for the Crustpunk Soul: “History is biased against the uncool” (23); “Objects of meditation may be closer than they appear” (17); “Mental hygiene doesn’t stop at hygge” (14).
Happily, this quipping never feels tired—probably because there’s so much substance to be found, from genuine wisdom to brilliantly acerbic burns, and sometimes both in one sentence. For instance, “It isn’t that the rich lack inner life, but that we’re all conscripted in their fantasies such that their bland interiority becomes our outer architecture. I resent that. Who cares how I spend my life’s vacation, in between earth’s mortal hiccups?” (12).
The book also deals in the kind of stunning imagery that transcends any reliance on wordplay, as “lean streets turn milky with direction / a staccato bird tells time, seven chirrups to the hour” (71), and “Two cities you see from one another make a wall of mediary air; a balance of departure and return. Unphotographable, the thick thisness of distance” (95).
“PAST BUFFLE” is an especially musical poem, though one stanza is devoted to denying the influence of live performance: “Live music hasn’t been a literary muse / For years, and let the record state / One can’t fix at the level of the text / That which remains deficient in reality” (43).
Still, Scott is clearly inspired by the lyricism of a rhythmical, alliterative sentence (“Roleplaying reinforcements / in a caravan careening non— // Executive both to and fro / skimming a frothy tome” [38]), by sound itself, as in “Wash bucket boiling, scuffling drum / Wind through a fluted room…” (47), and by life as a musician. “PAST BUFFLE” ends with the lines “Hands poised the keys depress / As lips pursue a part of tone / Silly or serious in which proportion / If to listen is to know the score” (50).
Speaking of scores, the next piece, “FAKEBOOK,” is a visual work comprised of empty musical staves warped, spliced, or overlapped, and evoking, perhaps, static, moving water, or barcodes. A fakebook is a trusted tool of jazz musicians to aid in improvising on an unfamiliar song, but this version leaves much to be interpreted by the player. (The meanings just keep layering up for any disillusioned jazz school grad who happens to be reviewing the book.)
Other visual pieces interleave the collection; “SPOOLS/BURRS” uses works by American poet and musician Clark Coolidge, distorted into enigmatic shapes that aim to express “flashes of preverbal feeling,” according to the afterword (101).
If Coolidge took inspiration from avant garde music and his experience as a jazz drummer, Scott’s poetry too might recall an experimental noise project, its tones and whistles offering glimpses of both the ephemera and core essence of everyday life. Annie Dillard famously said, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives”; here, the life-poem emerges from the clatter of the city, from the droning minutiae of each day in its banality or chaos or quiet resonance:
Heat sound to rhythm
Output function spirit plane
Beat mean note reading
Reeds pummelling palms
Life grants us many bars, we are
A finite section of the one
Commuting music (41)
