To my enormous delight, I recently received a whack of titles from Chaudiere Books, one of the many projects of Canadian poetry powerhouse rob mclennan (in collaboration with Jennifer Mulligan and, later, Christine McNair; now available as backlist items through Invisible Publishing).
Amanda Earl’s Kiki, which came out in 2014, is a concept book tracking the progress of Alice Ernestine Prin, aka Kiki, through the nightclubs and artists’ studios of 1920s Montparnasse (a word I hastily misread as “Menopause”—an error that I share with you as it raises some interesting resonances in relation to the text). The characters of the era are all there—Jean Cocteau, Tristan Tzara, Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita, even Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Into this world comes the teenaged Alice/Kiki, a destabilizing force in a scene dedicated to rulebreaking.
This is a very female book, a book of the body. Kiki is all appetites (for strawberries, for drugs, for the sediment at the bottom of the wine glass). She laughs at the intellectual icons she’s caught in her glance (“I fiddle while Man Ray burns”). Even the book’s cover design evokes tension between mechanical modernity and the embodied female, with an understated typographic motif that, in its repetitions, may be read as a phalanx of tightly belted hourglass figures or, alternatively, dozens of red-soaked maxipads.
Kiki is a work of historical scholarship, based on extensive reading and research. The opening section, “Alice,” takes us through days and years in diary form. “This is Alice. This is fucked up,” she repeats, day in and day out. The repetition becomes at once exhilarating and exhausting, a continual reassertion of self against the play of dissolution. “I am quick silvered glass, made of mercury. / I can throw you off balance in the swing of a mood.”
Section two, “Tales of Montparnasse,” is constructed from existing texts using Tristan Tzara’s cut-up method. Marvelous juxtapositions result, such as “Marcel Duchamp and / Marcel Duchamp mirror / faces with blackbirds.” (Mirrors are a recurring theme). Another: “Grandmamman’s cliffhanger breasts / are languorous as Ariadne and Salomé.”
Things really start to fall off the rails for Kiki in the final sections, “Opium” and “In Which K Meets B in a Dream,” a dialogue between the author and William Burroughs in the form of edited cut-ups from Naked Lunch. “Sincere rabies are archetypal of balls, sailor,” suggests one voice, to which the other responds, “It’s prophetic. A sea of necks bleeding. Lush killed tea-rooms screaming hungry in the berserk aisle.”
The pleasures of this book are likely greatest for those who’ve some familiarity with the era and its major and minor figures. Still, if this is your introduction, there’s a bibliography to get you started, and you could do far worse in getting a feel for the radical, freeing, frightening ethos of the time (a time which, in its rush to futurity, ended in fascism and war; a time with strong parallels to these new 20s we live through today).
In the end, Kiki is just far more fun than you generally see in a poetry collection. She’s for reading in your bedroom and in public places, for savouring alone and for passing around. She’s simply too good to keep her all to yourself.