Mar
26
By Stephen Harrison
Like many James Bay residents, Marlene Jess uses her bicycle as her primary mode of transportation. Jess is a local artist and writer, and for a year she chronicled her two-wheeled travels in James Bay and beyond. She published her observations in Bucolic Battery, a book of prose poems that makes this familiar neighbourhood jump off the page.
You may remember Jess as one half of the couple that was married at Niagara Grocery in 2010, and her love of community is readily apparent as she cycles past local landmarks and interacts with strangers and clerks. Overheard conversations help create a picture of a diverse neighbourhood through amusing anecdotes and everyday exchanges.
Reading the text puts you right on the bike (both town and mountain) with Jess. As she moves from landmark to landmark, places you pass every day without a second thought come to life, with Jess as a helpful guide. After reading several entries in a row I began to see a more complete neighbourhood than I had before.
Jess started this project as an online blog, and in print it is transformed. In response to poetry collections that can seem impenetrable and disconnected, Jess offers multiple points of entry through detailed indexes and tables of contents. Browsing by location or subject, it's easy to enter into and out of the text as you please, and there's bound to be something that appeals. Skimming the subject headings, I stopped at "crude cashier" and immediately wanted to know more.
The text is peppered with allusions that are significant to Jess, and when I shared a cultural or geographic point of reference it made for a more complete experience. Her unusual helmet is a recurring character, and in the first entry she calls it "Jack Nicholson cool." It took me a moment, but then I was back in Easy Rider with Nicholson's patently uncool, football helmet-wearing self. Not to knock Jess's unique style choices - nerdy and retro are in.
Jess is not just a Victorian, but a Victorian on the move. Her travels in Bucolic Battery take her to Seattle, Portland, and the Kootenays, always with the same keen sense of observation. Anyone who's been to the Seattle library will identify with her "otherworldly" description of its interior architecture.
It's not just geography and community that come across in Bucolic Battery. Jess is also interested in cultural behaviour related to technology, consumerism, and accessible drinking water. In the past she has set up exhibits next to public drinking fountains, bottling the water in reusable containers and distributing it for free. "12 pack of nestle bottled water on sale for $1.99," she writes, with biting irony. "They're giving it away."
I spread out the book over a few days, letting the descriptions wash over me in fits and starts. Jess's observations and vivid storytelling have given me a better appreciation of the neighbourhood in which I live. Taken together the entries add up to a more complete whole, and if you have a sunny afternoon outdoors or a rainy one inside, you could always read it straight through. It would be an afternoon well spent.
Bucolic Battery is available for purchase at Niagara Grocery, Munro's, and Russell Books.