Sunday Feature: Jem Rolls - Fragments (Fringe: Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg)

Fragments

Jem Rolls has been stunning audiences all around the world and, especially, on the Canadian Fringe Circuit. He presents a kind of performance poetry where the artist is both part of and apart from his words. Those who have experienced his work have called it "intense", "inspired rants" and "powerful". You will see, from the three works below from his current show, that he also has a wicked sense of humour. Among the shows he has toured are JEM ROLLS IS PISSED OFF, Ten Starts and and an End, and the current JEM ROLLS ATTACKS THE SILENCE. 

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Now I intended for years to do two comic poems which were true stories about my childhood

I’ve never done pieces about my childhood
Which I’ve always thought of as very normal

So one would be called
My schoolmates were the children of future mass murderers.
And that ain’t normal

And the other one would be called
My childhood games were based on the paranoias of the British military intelligence political complex
And that ain’t normal either

But sometimes folks
The thing you got 
Is not
What
You’d’ve thought 
You’d’ve got
So I’m not going to do the second one
Because the first one got a bit big and serious on me Because I got this
Which is now called

MY INFANT SCHOOL

I always liked it
when I was told it was cool
there were kids of eighteen different nationalities
at my infant school
like Zambian, Pakistani, Kenyan and Dutch
Peruvian, Ugandan, and so on and such

Now that school was on a council estate and completely unmilitary

but why should it seem strange to five year old Jeremy?
that this ordinary school is where the army kids went

when their officer fathers got promoted and sent

to get the world famous military knowledge

at the world famous Sandhurst Military College

and only much later did I come to see

those fathers were high-flying to the top of their army 

for only an officer groomed for high rank would be
at this top flight international military academy

just down the road from our nice house in Camberley 

and the red brick and chalets of Lorraine County Primary

Yet many of those distant armies
were later horrific in their violence and cruelties 

the Pakistani and Peruvians certainly

went on to routinely, with infamy 

commit sustained campaigns of hideous brutality

For it was much later, one less innocent day at twenty
when it suddenly reared up and slapped and struck me 

Sandhurst-trained officers
could in all possibility
be the ones in charge of the future atrocity

and it abruptly jolted me

changed the world around me

for it was like something out of weird psychological thrillers 

maybe my mates’ Dads were future mass killers

back then getting toughened and steeled

in the stately rooms just over the playing fields 

where the seeds were sown for blood to yield

For I then read
there were over a million and a half dead
at the hands of the Pakistanis
in the Bengal atrocities
of the Early Seventies
one of the five worst mass killings
of the whole Twentieth Century
so if I think of the date
its striking to think that when I was eight
in nineteen seventy
that little Mohammed sat next me
at my right side
his Dad might next year commit
genocide

And me
like many
I grew up with the entire

Glorious Mythology of 

Glorious Empire
unconscious and oblivious
of what now seems obvious
that I grew up right next to one of history’s major exporters
of the techniques of brute power, of major mass slaughter

Which led me to take myself to task
and ask
those English army kids playing around me 

what their father did next

in Belfast and Derry

just about to explode in terror and misery 

in the dark days of sixty-nine seventy...

And its another story for another day
how I found the clues to see a way

to begin to doubt to make the suggestions

to do the thinking to ask the questions

the what the which the where the when and the why 

how I slowly saw the old English lie

and began to scorn

the myths of great empire into which I was born 

for I went to school with the sons and the daughters 

of a brutal history of brutal mass slaughter

Yes it brought it all home to me
to think of my old back ways into Sandhurst and Camberley 

my old playgrounds

those army woods and their surrounds

the ferns the straw the heather the gorse

the trenches the ranges the old assault course

and at the end of those trails and streams I still know so well 

find the flames were tempered long the very blades of hell

 the motherlode of gore

from the war-ravaged days of glory and yore

O If only more would
look back in time to then look forward

for it was telling to follow what has been

all the way back to eighteen thirteen

when the academy was begun

[being conveniently located between the Navy at Portsmouth and the Government at London]

and find the clues to make the suggestions

to do the thinking to ask the questions

how much innocence was lost on those old parade grounds?
how much suffering began in my home town?
and, still the real chiller...

how many boys walked in those doors who walked out men killers

Yes each of those years
the first trickle of a later flood of blood and tears
the men and boys marching through the centuries
out of and into blood death and savagery
for I went to school with the sons and the daughters
of a brutal history of brutal mass slaughter

And so
lastly

I would so

like to know

what of Mohammed from the military family 

the quiet little boy who sat right next to me
a long time ago at Lorraine County Primary 

well today in Pakistan
there are state-backed death squads in Baluchistan
so what of Mohammed and what now of his sons?
what cycles have ended and what cycles still run?

President Yahya Khan of Pakistan
to the journalist Robert Payne
on 22 February 1971

...

"Kill three million of them,

and the rest will eat out of our hands."

This next piece is pretty edgy folks

so I think it requires the authority of the script

impressive use of Technology...?

yes?

Because folks

I’m really not sure about this piecs

especially about the start

because it begins

babararacucudada

mamacacarerenana

cacatatamamaranran

mamadadagasgascarcar

gagalalapopogosgos

Which is a bit unsophisticated really so

I reckon what we need most right now is a

sophisticated yet innovative literary device

so I’d like to take this opportunity to turn into

possibly

The World’s First Backstage Poem

You know, like you get a backstage musical

a musical about the staging, the creation, of a musical

Then this is maybe the world’s first ever

poem about how it came to be a poem

or not

Shakespeare’s Shall I Compare Thee To A Summer’s Day

can be regarded as being about itself

But if this is a first

I believe it possesses that quality essential to many a first

complete bleedin' failure shambles balls-up and never to be tried again

sometimes you have to try something out to find out what a bad idea it is...

Because

without giving the plot away

its rumoured this poem didn’t close after the first performance

or even the first verse

no its rumoured this poem collapsed during rehearsal

and it was tentatively entitled

SCRAMBLED WORDS ON BOAST

Because
BEING A POET IS TOUGH!!! ...
when its hard to find a word you can trust
they fray at the edges
they blur

they arrive with all manner of baggage 

and then they change their costume

And if one word alone is a bit of a handful

then when there’s a few of them

it quickly gets to be a nightmare

they gang up against you and start to

do their own thing

its like The Lord Of The Flies in there

and I’m hiding in the jungle from my own poem

Or they sashay into the

far reaches of

high pretension like an

existential French movie...

and come back to haunt you like

the Bastard Sons of the Mongol Bleedin’ Horde

and it’s like all the bits they’ll cut from the

next Tarantino because they’ll be

too violent

Or you think you’ve got the balance just right and then the

line tips up at the end

and all the words fall off into the sea

And what you wanted to write was an

hour-long piece about traffic jams

...aaah

... maybe next year

but instead

one moment it’s the entire cast of The Wizard Of Oz

in the retreat from Moscow

that’s every retreat from Moscow there’s ever been, simultaneously

and the next it’s a cartoon dictionary jumping in the paper shredder

and firing out words like bullets

babararacucudada

mamacacarerenana

cacatatamamaranran

mamadadagasgascarcar

gagalalapopogosgos

Yeah

words can be mean

they say nasty things

they ruin the party

you throw ‘em out the door

they come back in the window

you shore up the leaks against them

and the next thing you know

they’re on the inside, the possibilities have started multiplying by the second

and before you can say Umberto bloody Eco the place is

bursting at every seam like the pilot of

The Walking Dead

Or they get an overly high opinion of themselves

and start claiming descent from the Latin or the Greek

and start adding extra syllables just to be poncy

Luck stands up one day and pronounces

from now on you can call me Serendipity

Complicated gets all Social Realist and says from now on its TOUGH

Then you come in one awful day to find they’ve got all

purist and earnest and Hemingway

and they’ve thrown out all the adjectives

who picket me
on the way in

all aggressive

malevolent and
gargantuan

Or, or

they exercise their own freewill and have

suddenly all decided to vote republican

but first

they all want to use the bathroom

except a couple of them take me aside and talk about

William Carlos Williams

and Lacan

and the current developments in Modern Poetic Theory and

why isn’t their poem like this?

...

and the word coy starts flirting with me just to get his-her own line

...

then two weeks later I come in after a lovely weekend in Reykjavik to find

they’ve all had a vote

and have decided to reject the tyranny of the author

in favour of the great democracy of the reader, the audience

where they the words are the conduits, the vanguard, of said great

syndicalist revolution

and I find myself

me!

talking like a bitter tory and saying

if I’m out of a job

everyone is out of a job

And you know that in German the nouns are capitalized?

well my nouns suddenly do

because I was just saying

Go out there and do your best nouning...

When they say

German nouns are capitalized

why aren’t we?

We demand capitalization

...

But the verbs

are the verbs having it?

no?

they say

We are the words of action

We are the workers

Down with the capitalist nouns

Verbs of the world unite and march to the front of the sentence

So I’m stuck standing there between them saying

Oi, it’s me

I’m trying to write a bloody poem here

So then,

just to spite them

I decide to write an ‘orrible

ghastly

song’n’dancey

Boney M meets Soft Rock version of

babararacucudada

mamacacarerenana

cacatatamamaranran

mamadadagasgascarcar

gagalalapopogosgos

Bloody hell

this backstage poem is a farce

Even worse, it’s the kind of backstage musical

where everything falls apart in

severest acrimony

before the first performance

and most of the words go out and get jobs in

banks and arts centres and

sometimes wonder about what might have been

so all the best words have gone out and got jobs in “proper” poems

meanwhile all I’m left with is the odd

blimey

and fin de siècle

and

white noise and grunting

And even

barracuda

macarena

by catamaran

from madagascar

to galapagos

which cannot get work anywhere

no matter what it does to itself

Well none of that’s happening in my backstage poem

Yes it is

No its not

Yes it is

No its not

In my backstage poem

which isn’t really a poem

Yes it is

No its not

Yes it is

No its not

In my backstage poem

the writer is going to have an old-fashioned artsy-fartsy fit of pique

join the writer’s bloc

and go on strike

And here the script says

Ten seconds of defiance

Followed by ten seconds of hopelessness

Well I’m glad that’s over

aren’t you?

The End

Isticism

I've honestly done my best not to be

sexist

or homophobic

or racist

bu I can't say I haven't been ageist

Which is a bit of a shame

seeing how

I'll always be white

I'll very likely always be male

I'll even more likely always be straight

yet unfortunately

I will undoubtedly

get old