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Old Hat
Old Hat is the third book of poetry and first collection of occasional poems by the author of the 2007 Globe 100 book, Muybridge's Horse : Governor General and Trillium Awards nominee, Rob Winger. Driven by an attempt to understand how to reorder common experience, the book's transitional sections - "Set," "Re/Set," and "Lect" - all intertwine and overlap, thematically and intuitively linked by the extensive range and depth of Winger's poetics.
While each section is discrete, each is also in harmony with its neighbours. The "Re/set" sections revive clichés of Canadian lyricism--landscape and maple syrup, Icarus falling and human-rights rhetoric, war and ancestral migration, death, love, and disease--not only to critique but also to validate the experiential urgency of poetic reflection, while the "Set" sections harness Winger's vernacular voice in a struggle for self-definition against powerfully pedestrian political and economic systems. "They signed Yu Darvish without seeing his fork," Winger writes in one poem. "They signed their books without looking up at us./ They gave you fries with that without even asking." Such a balance of agency and inaction is also central in Old Hat 's final section, "Lect," a simmering simulation of grad-school jargon, sailor slang, plumbing terminology, and GPS directives that exposes the limitations of esoteric linguistic ontologies by moving from general observations to those of increasingly expert understanding.
While rich with advice to "Keep your personal longings with you at all times," Old Hat is also generous, incisive, boisterous, and funny, a book about place, but also about understanding and situation. Spoken through clichés, vernacular, and jargon, Old Hat is just as familiar as it is odd, just as comforting as disquieting, an exceptional meditation on what it means to think about writing.
While each section is discrete, each is also in harmony with its neighbours. The "Re/set" sections revive clichés of Canadian lyricism--landscape and maple syrup, Icarus falling and human-rights rhetoric, war and ancestral migration, death, love, and disease--not only to critique but also to validate the experiential urgency of poetic reflection, while the "Set" sections harness Winger's vernacular voice in a struggle for self-definition against powerfully pedestrian political and economic systems. "They signed Yu Darvish without seeing his fork," Winger writes in one poem. "They signed their books without looking up at us./ They gave you fries with that without even asking." Such a balance of agency and inaction is also central in Old Hat 's final section, "Lect," a simmering simulation of grad-school jargon, sailor slang, plumbing terminology, and GPS directives that exposes the limitations of esoteric linguistic ontologies by moving from general observations to those of increasingly expert understanding.
While rich with advice to "Keep your personal longings with you at all times," Old Hat is also generous, incisive, boisterous, and funny, a book about place, but also about understanding and situation. Spoken through clichés, vernacular, and jargon, Old Hat is just as familiar as it is odd, just as comforting as disquieting, an exceptional meditation on what it means to think about writing.
- GenresPoetry
96 pages, Paperback
First published March 31, 2014
10 people want to read
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June 17, 2014Hi, Everyone! Please check out my interview with poet Rob Winger as we discuss his latest collection, Old Hat (Nightwood Editions). Read the interview and 3 poems now on my TTQ Blog. http://thetorontoquarterly.blogspot.c...
November 28, 2023
Read at Trent- he was one of my instructors. Really enjoyed his style and creativity
June 12, 2014
Whoops I finished this ages ago but forgot to update it.
Disclaimer: I'm kinda biased because I've studied under Rob Winger (Canadian Lit, woot!) and he's a lovely and enthusiastic professor, who also has wicked taste in books.
Also he's a great poet. Hearing him recite "The Mirror Stage" had me (and everyone else who had ever studied literary/cultural/philosophical/ect theory) pretty much sobbing with laughter. Also now I can't read these poems without mentally reading them in his voice.
But the poems themselves, they're fresh, they're funny, and they are very, very good. Give Canadian poetry another chance and read though them. I promise you won't be disappointed.
Disclaimer: I'm kinda biased because I've studied under Rob Winger (Canadian Lit, woot!) and he's a lovely and enthusiastic professor, who also has wicked taste in books.
Also he's a great poet. Hearing him recite "The Mirror Stage" had me (and everyone else who had ever studied literary/cultural/philosophical/ect theory) pretty much sobbing with laughter. Also now I can't read these poems without mentally reading them in his voice.
But the poems themselves, they're fresh, they're funny, and they are very, very good. Give Canadian poetry another chance and read though them. I promise you won't be disappointed.
May 31, 2014
Smart, funny send-ups of literature and language. Sometimes the satire is biting, sometimes exhortatory like a disappointed funny uncle. All of it is full of wit and invention.
September 10, 2014
alert intelligent, at turns comic. sharp language and ideas. tight.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews