Insurrection: A Commemorative Publication, The Winnipeg General Strike 90th Anniversary 1919-2009
by Ron Romanowski
Winnipeg: Augustine Hand Press, 2009, 88 pp., $14.95 paper.

This poetry honours Winnipeg's working class and its involvement in the general strike that catapulted it to the world stage in 1919.

Perhaps scrutiny of the corporate class bosses and focusing on the workers' struggles has experienced a bit of a renaissance in 2009 with, for example, director Michael Moore's film Capitalism: A Love Story.

Still, other than the similar class-conscious theme present in the work of both Moore and Romanowski, in some ways this poetry can be more aptly compared to the that of the poet's fellow Winnipegger filmmaker Guy Maddin work than to the American movie maker's celluloid offerings.

In fact, the first line of "55 Flickers of an Insurrectionary Flame," the book's initial poem, states clearly that: "History is not enough." Romanowski, by writing this, may as well have declared that Marxism, which has always been fixated on history, is not enough.

Then, not unlike a Maddin film, he deftly goes about elaborating on the sights and sounds of a hodgepodge world where history collides with fiction or, perhaps more precisely, with narrative poetry such as:

Flower shops for the ends of cigarettes
the same new people to meet in stammering seasons,
holiday themes pass like thorns,
in duets of illusion
almost touch the bubble, sometimes prick it away (37)

Occasionally, it is difficult to know where to 'look' or how to feel with all these vibrant images to distract the reader especially in this poem which is also a long one. Yet life is like this especially in the heart of a city.

Things are more clear concerning what history has left out and also in the message that Romanowski wants to get out when he brings the feminine into "55 Flickers of an Insurrectionary Flame":

With all the malice of betrayal
she was dragged protesting through her street--
the calumnies of media bulldozer clichés
collared around the neck so richly faultless in ads
civilization in flickering columns while it lasts--
the joys of home ownership
where she coddled her violent husband,
tried to raise baby,
worked for her union, the local daycare
believing the basis of true wealth is real estate,
the burden of holding a great house against decay,
she is missing,
one night when no one saw anything, a woman
desolate and abandoned in peril--
on posters, in the memorial pages (15)

Of course, Romanowski has fast-forwarded history in some places here. There were no daycare centres, for instance, in 1919 and most working class people did not own houses.

This poet is nothing if not courageous, though. He plays a nice post-modernist trick when he goes back in history to what some believe to be the beginning:

if not Boss Moon then Boss Adam,
day being as corrupted as night,
beyond plague, flood, kingdom, landholder,
capitalist . . .

Adam committed the primal oppression
Forcing labor upon his own children--
Eve wanted to share, but sharing would not do--
Together they derailed creation, work damns all (18)

Even Louis Riel makes a cameo, if puzzling, appearance on the day he was hanged, in this long poem that fills most of the book.

As in Romanowski's other books, Sweet Talking and The Great Buffalo Republic, he not only draws on Winnipeg but goes poetically to settings that he has visited in his travels. In "Continental Drift 1976":

He held Italy as an exemplar,
now rapidly shrinking in possibility,
dim as a national dusk, the news is grave hard news
--a tourist sight with cast members,
let him walk among fountains while they still run,
check their hours, are they running now
he has hot water at his hotel,
in the streets a banner or two of protest--
if forgotten legions, of mysterious Etruscans
where is the sphere that once was--
the land of passion now land of law and bylaw
and zoning obstructions (78-9)

Here, there is a longing for history, for the past or how we might feel it was. History is more than enough. The poet would gladly substitute it with the contemporary.

History, Romanowski seems to say in this book, can beckon us like an out-of-body experience when the present disappoints but when we embrace it, it can also disappoint. Going back to his long poem, the poet writes:

she had been watched for a very long time,
he could only observe what she was,
and guess at what she had done (55)

Tanya Lester lives and writes on Salt Spring Island.

Buy this book at McNally-Robinson Booksellers.

Back to Reviews Index