Long-Shortlisted, ReLit Award (Poetry)
The poems of The End is in the Middle: MAD fold-in poems by Daniel Scott Tysdal invent a form of poetry where the last line of each poem is “found” by folding the poem together, tab A to tab B. The reader must participate, collaborate in the physical meaning-making.
There is a way out: the back side of the page of each one-page poem shows the last line of the poem, if you don’t want to origami the page to see the words that are revealed by folding the page from A to B. This origami structure is a homage to Mad magazines, which personally I never read but I have made flutter books which involve folding.
The poems are about omission, erasure, and madness so it is a fitting form. Within the form is a rondeau, a pantoum, and erasures of excerpts of a speech by Barack Obama (reduced to 2 words) and the DSM-5.
I can’t begin to imagine how much time it took to create the book but I can imagine easily how obsessively engaging the challenge could be. More intricate than the average form, it is checkers that make sonnets look like checkers.
It is not a theme book where each poem repeats but each a discrete story/feeling or essay into ideas. One poem is an homage to the magazine more directly “like parodies of pop-song-dreck/the self-absurding gag” (p. 79). That must give you a taste for the animation in his language.
His poems recount tales of being high, drunk, and imposed on by diagnosis, such as in (p. 19) “Our Kind”, “marked as afflicted, afflicted with treatment” and “dismissed as weak, feeble shirkers” or diagnosed and (p. 29) “Prescribed “cheer up,”, the chronic salvo/as salve for You’re-just-down-in-the-/dumps-sclerosis.” Or (p. 45) “Maybe the remedy isn’t catching a flick rife with/toy-hawking avengers who quip, “You get killed,/ walk it off.”
As you can tell, the language is quick, incisive, suffering no fools gladly. He speaks against the prejudice that has real consequences including suicide by barn beam (p. 21) or subway, the inconstant self-harm nattering in the head yet it adds up to not survival but leaning into thriving, as as he might coin, thrivalal. The reader gets a real sense of connection with the lived experience.
The End is in the Middle has a sometimes overflowing excitement of lines, a process that “helps stem/the outbreaks of trashitis, of treasurnoma’s coziness,/prescribed by the geegaw of being” (p. 67). That frenetic breakneck pace isn’t the only gear. A tribute poem to Don, and the chain of teaching, Don to Mike to him, to Katie. “cupped hands passing water into/cupped hands passing this water, without/breaks, into another cupped pair.” (p.71)
There’s the awareness of the “mind/as the first model of incarceration” (p. 63) yet the mind kind does not mean being shut away from beauty and full life and “a voice that plunges from dust to star” (p. 66).
Poems don’t stand apart from their making, nor remain in navel-gazing. They engage internal and external worlds. The process of making poems is also examined as a poem. Another poem is the questioning of itself (p. 57) “Why bother writing a poem? The future,/breaking away, doesn’t want it.” He concludes, and I paraphrase, poems are a practice, like breadmaking that sustain us.
Within the struggle there’s a gratitude for support, despite feeling “the stigmata of mental illness” they’ll scare everyone off” yet (p. 81-84) people love him anyway. He is valued anyway. By speaking he refuses the shame, acknowledges the fears and opens a path for others to not live behind their full-time happy-joy-joy masks. It gives permission to admit both success and failure and the grey areas in between.
Daniel Scott Tysdal is an award-winning writer, filmmaker, and teacher. He is the author of three poetry collections, including the ReLit Award-winning Predicting the Next Big Advertising Breakthrough Using a Potentially Dangerous Method and the widely acclaimed Fauxccasional Poems, as well as the poetry textbook The Writing Moment and the viral-trending TEDx talk “Everything You Need to Write a Poem (and How It Can Save a Life).” Tysdal teaches at the University of Toronto Scarborough.
- Publisher : icehouse poetry (Sept. 27 2022)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 114 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1773102710
- ISBN-13 : 978-1773102719
