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Poetry launch: Clockfire by Jonathan Ball & The Semiconducting Dictionary: Our Strindberg by Natalee Caple
Auburn Saloon
Sunday, November 21 - Sunday, November 21

More in: Literary

Have you ever been to a play where the theatre went up in flames? Or where the actresses slit their throats? Or where the cast set about transforming you into an animal of your choice?

The answer, hopefully, is no. And you’re probably glad. But then you’re not Jonathan Ball, who envisions all of these macabre events and many others in his new book, Clockfire.

Presumably Ball, a professor and writer who lives in Winnipeg, doesn’t really wish he could incinerate dozens of theatregoers. But that didn’t stop him from writing about it, although he set out with more mundane intentions. While completing his PhD at the University of Calgary, Ball attempted to write a conventional play, but found himself stymied by the constraints of the stage. He never published the play, but his frustration spurred him to create Clockfire, a collection of 77 “impossible” stagings.

“I decided I'd write 100 plays that would be impossible to produce,” says Ball. “Why not? Why not see where you can take the theatre if you just abandon this idea that you have to be able to produce the plays ever. So, that kind of morphed eventually into making a collection of poetry that would be structured around this idea of impossibility.”

While the varied and outlandish nature of the poems might suggest their conception in a stream of consciousness, Ball says there was method behind the apparent madness, and that he carefully considered how all the poems could fit together into the book. He further argues the scenarios aren’t all wildly improbable, noting the poem “Any Animal” and that an American state recently passed a law banning human-animal hybrids.

It’s not surprising, therefore, that Ball was pondering how to stage the plays before he’d finished writing them. And Mark Hopkins, co-artistic director of Swallow-a-Bicycle Theatre, was happy to help him try — though the company’s still deciding which one they’ll present at the Clockfire book launch..

“It’s been a real challenge because the plays are impossible in every sense of the word,” says Hopkins. “It’s a really interesting challenge for us to look at these plays and try to figure out ‘OK, we can’t do it.’ What can we do that represents it in a way that is genuine and authentic and interesting.”

In addition to Ball’s work, the evening will also feature the poetry of Natalee Caple, author of the new collection The Semiconducting Dictionary (Our Strindberg), and musical performances by the Ogden Owls and The Huntress. Caple, a friend of Ball’s and a fellow U of C graduate, sounds less defiant than Ball about breaking theatrical and poetic conventions in her work, though it’s no less unconventional.

“It’s a book that deliberately kind of defeats those boundaries between poetry, drama and fiction, and that tries to collapse the distinction between experimental and traditional forms," she says. "It’s a play that concerns the life of modern playwright August Strindberg, although he’s reimagined as a woman living as a man.”

Asked whether Caple’s poems will be any easier to stage than Ball’s, Hopkins acknowledges they contain more character development, but maintains they’ll be just as challenging to interpret (a term he uses rather broadly).

“It doesn’t mean necessarily we’re going to be reading that poem,” he says. “Afterwards, you may not be able to tell what poem we interpreted.”

It may be a mystery even to Ball, who’s taken a hands-off approach to the show because he wants to be surprised. But he is planning on reading some of his poetry towards the evening’s end, assuming, as he says, “everyone’s still alive” at that point.

Hopkins, for one, is hoping they will be, for the unique experience they’ll have as much as for the fact they’ve avoided a fiery death.

“I’m hoping the audience is just going to come to this event really excited to experience a sampling of the broad survey of culture that exists in Calgary. In a lovely bar downtown you can experience theatre, music and literature all in the same evening."