Shane Rhodes’ Err searches for new poetic ground

W.H. Auden once described a poem as “a well-made verbal object.” Brilliantly, Auden wanted us to realize that the poem is not a catalogue of something, but is in fact a creation made out of the material of language. The most tedious poets are invariably the ones who forget this, and bury the crafting of language under gimmickry or confessional melodrama.

At the other end of the spectrum are authors like Shane Rhodes. His latest book, Err, is his conscious quest to explore the underpinnings of what he practises as an art form.

“If you look at the etymology of the word, we use ‘to err’ as a mistake,” says Rhodes. “But it actually comes from the old knights errant and the idea of wandering.”

For example, for some poems Rhodes reverses the traditional method of composing – adding piece onto piece – and explores a different and fascinatingly startling method.

“I found a specific phoneme that I wanted to concentrate on,” Rhodes explains. “Then I would search for that specific phoneme through the English language… I would start with a list of around eight or ten thousand words, and… begin to whittle that down into something that would make a narrative sense but also a ‘sound’ sense.”

The rest of the book echoes this same technique – exploring new ways to liberate poetry through use of language, and always trying to get away from the kind of omnipresent poetry

that is “stuck in the lyrical ‘I,’ the idea that ‘I‘ have a story to tell. What I wanted to do is look at what I can actually do with the English language.”

Originally Published in the Ottawa XPress,  March 31, 2011: http://www.ottawaxpress.ca/books/books.aspx?iIDArticle=21453