Clockfire

by Jonathan Ball

Shortlisted for the Manitoba Book Awards in the category of Most Promising Writer

Talented newcomer Jonathan Ball’s Clockfire is a suite of poetic blueprints for imaginary plays that would be impossible to produce – plays in which, for example, the director burns out the sun, actors murder their audience, and the laws of physics are flagrantly violated. The poems in one sense replace the need for drama, and are predicated on the idea that modern theatre lacks both 'clocks' and 'fire' and thus fails to offer its audiences immediate, violent engagement. They sometimes resemble the scores for Fluxus 'happenings,' but they replace the casual aesthetic and DIY simplicity of Fluxus art with something more akin to the brutality of Artaud’s theatre of cruelty. Italo Calvino as rewritten by H. P. Lovecraft, Ball’s 'plays' break free of the constraints of reality and artistic category to revel in their own dazzling, magnificent horror.

Genres: Poetry, Plays, Canada

80 pages, Paperback

First published September 30, 2006

About the author

Jonathan Ball is the author of three books: Ex Machina (BookThug, 2009), Clockfire (Coach House Books, 2010), and The Politics of Knives (Coach House Books, 2012). He also wrote the academic monograph John Paizs's Crime Wave (University of Toronto Press, 2014) about the cult film classic, and co-edited (with Ryan Fitzpatrick) Why Poetry Sucks: Humorous Experimental Canadian Poetry (Insomniac, 2014). He holds a PhD from the University of Calgary, with focuses in Canadian Literature and Creative Writing. He is the former Managing Editor of Dandelion magazine, the former film/video section editor at Filling Station, and the former short films programmer for the Gimli Film Festival. He writes the humour column Haiku Horoscopes (http://www.haikuhoroscopes.com), and can be found online at http://www.jonathanball.com and on Twitter @jonathanballcom.

Reviews

[Natalee Caple · Rating 5 out of 5]

LOVE this inventive uncanny book of poetry!!

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

"...the pool of energies which constitute Myths which man no longer embodies, is embodied by the theatre."

- Antonin Artaud

When you enter the theatre, you find yourself alone. You take your seat, but the rest remain empty. The curtain does not rise. The play will not begin unless you leave.

- Alone, pg. 15

* * *

The play a success, the audience receives what it requires, and empties. They empty. And will never fill again. The play hollows them. What they once were bleeds out, from their eyes and their mouths, from the now-silent depths of their once-screaming hearts.

- Catharsis, pg. 26

* * *

The actors take the stage and begin to dig. They break through its boards and hammer through the theatre floor, and the audience, curious, joins them. Together they chip away at the basement, tunnel through the theatre's foundation until they reach packed dirt, then scrabble, deeper, expanding the hole as they dig, so that it funnels in, funnels down. Into the punctured earth. Stil they scramble, desperate, to burrow deeper, to dig up something lost and covered over, something that has seeped away by now, rotted apart and carried off in sundry directions, washed out by the diggers, their blood and tears the currents of underground rivers.

- Dig, pg. 36

* * *

The actors take the dreams of the audience. Take these dreams in hand and carry them away. When the audience leaves the theatre, they leave such thoughts behind. They do not cry, and they tell no one, feign sleep.

- Dreams, pg. 40

* * *

The theatre, empty. Stage bare, lights out. Doors barred. The play waiting, undreamt.

- Empty, pg. 42

* * *

The audience sits, silent, and little by little the world outside the theatre is stripped away. Perhaps the audience will be distracted from these events by the mounting of a play. Perhaps not. When the time comes for the audience to leave the theatre, there is nothing left to which they might return.
The world has been erased. Where have things gone? What could have caused this? The answers do not matter, or at least will never be known. What matters is that they must build a new world, using only the things that they brought into the theatre, in the nameless time ago.

- Little by Little, pg. 57

* * *

Drama thrives, the theatre grows, until the audience is outnumbered, until actors become the majority. The audience amuses now, their silence, the way they sit and wait. They look to the stage, as if something might soon happen, not wondering what that something might be, never considering that they should turn away, that this next scene might destroy them, they would be better off to rise, to run.

- Outnumbered, pg. 68

* * *

The play is over. Applaud or jeer. Step out into the street and pick a path. Meanwhile, the play begins again, in your absence. Without you.

- The Play Is Over, pg. 70

* * *

As the members of the audience enter the theatre, their memories are wiped clean. This is all advertised on the posters, and the actors warn the audience members again as they enter. And still, the line extends for many miles.

- Tabula Rasa, pg.

* * *

The audience enters and is changed. Interchanged, rather - switched one with another. They go back to different families, who pretend to notice nothing. Even after the troubles begin, no one dares to name this play that changed the world.

- Untitled, pg. 93

[Brandon Sitch · Rating 3 out of 5]

A book that's better before you read it. The writing itself is pretty average, which here isn't actually a huge deal—there's something vaguely mythic to the entries and as Lévi-Strauss notes: "the mythical value of the myth remains preserved, even through the worst translation. ... Its substance does not lie in its style, its original music, or its syntax, but in the story which it tells." Unfortunately, many of the stories are not that interesting, with a lot being banal. Nonetheless the book's premise is creative and worth a go just for that.

[Benjamin Niespodziany · Rating 5 out of 5]

One page plays. if you asked me what I'm trying to read these days, I'd say one page plays. I bought this book on Amazon halfway through reading my library copy. It's a dazzle, a delight. Demented and dark, yet comic and refreshing. Each page is a new fable. A new blank canvas. If I was a professor, I'd teach this one in class.

[Zenith · Rating 5 out of 5]

A mind-bending read, I found myself pausing after each play to try and tease out the deeper meanings. Each one is akin to a poem, written not for a narrative but for the overarching symbolism.

I recommend this book to anyone looking for something completely different from what you’ve read before. This book is the epitome of surrealism.

[Donald Armfield · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not what I was expecting but enjoyed the outcome. A sketch of unusual plays in front of am audience or the audience takes part in the strange plays.

Let me give you a peek behind the curtains.....

"The clock displays the correct time and is in perfect working order. The actors sneak behind the audience and set the theater on fire. Exeunt."

"Doppelgangers; Only one from each pair may exit the theater. The other must remain, dead or alive, to attend the next performance."

"The audience enters the theater. One at a time. As they enter, they are slaughtered. The curtain hangs in mid-air"

"A magician appears onstage. The audience disappears, and is never seen again. Though arrested, imprisoned and tortured, our magician reveals no secrets."

"Offer your life to the labyrinth, your eyes to its endless, impossible walls"

[Michael · Rating 2 out of 5]

Quite disappointing. While a few of the plays are interesting and creative, the whole collapses in upon itself due to avante-garde pretentiousness. First, Ball continues the idiotic tendency of modern literature to confuse single words with sentences. Second, most of the plays are simply wisps of ideas, little more than phrases, which works a lot less than the author thinks it does. Even when the plays are developed enough to be effective, the points made by the author are childish. Last, the author propounds his political views, where he believes inanimate objects bewitch people into murdering each other.

Conclusion: two points for the few plays that worked, and their unsettling atmosphere.

[Holly Raymond · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reminded me a bit of Artaud, a little bit of that one Koch book, a little bit Einstein's Dream, a little bit Sum, a little bit (sorry) Infinite Jest. Perhaps less radically inventive than Ex Machina, but still enormously clever and ferocious and exciting. It will make you want to write something, promise.

[Adam Thomlison · Rating 4 out of 5]

This managed to be both breezy and thought-provoking, a rare combination in any writing, but especially in something that calls itself poetry (I take issue with the label because I loved this and I very rarely love poetry).

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Impossible theatre plays that outline the absurd and the macabre. Would be amazing performance art pieces if possible.

[Meredith Baker · Rating 4 out of 5]

A dynamic view of theatre and poetry! Some of these ideas are simultaneously intriguing and horrific.

[Aiyana McKenzie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved it. I loved it so much. I finished the entire book in one night.