Review of Metropantheon
“Steven Artelle’s Metropantheon tags over and deconstructs the urban space and elevates the city to mythic proportions. The exposed streets and hidden alleyways are rewritten to erase the monotony of daily living to shift towards a reflection of our most embellished, hallucinatory fantasies. For a slim volume of poetry, Metropantheon contains so many implications and allusions we could come to regard it nestled comfortably in between the foreboding vibrations of Yeats’ “Second Coming” and the caffeinated exaltations of Ginsberg’s “Howl.” However, Metropantheon celebrates rather than gives caution to what the future holds.”
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“Steven Artelle's Metropantheon sprays over the commonplace literary tropes of Canadian poetry with the graffiti of the urban environment. Artelle asserts the raw, stressed but vibrant beauty of the metropolis in language tuned to the task: portmanteau words, paratactic syntax, funky irregular rhythms. In Metropantheon, paving stones, concrete walls, streetlights and the shades that inhabit them are an inventive source of mythology necessary for the urban universe that has become the natural habitat of human beings around the planet. For Artelle, the City becomes a concrete canvas for the mythic imagination.”
“Urban Legends
Poet helps you to see city life through a new lens.
There's a cult that's rising in the city, and its leader is Steven Artelle. Romantic rapture inspires an urban transcendence in his poetry collection Metropantheon, where skylines, roadwork, and even roller derby are sources of spirituality. Just as natural settings inspired flights of imagination for Keats and Cleridge, Artelle plays with myth to capture the beauty inherent in cities, and to encourage a divine communion between a population and their environment.
"The divine is present in how people conduct themselves or how they understand an interact with the environment," says Artelle. "I was reading a lot of eastern mythology and theological texts, and was struck by the way gods and goddesses can potentially function everywhere - in a grain of rice, in a doorway, in some aspect of daily routine, in a public shrine, in a legend associated with a particular place."
Like any enchanted tome, Metropantheon opens with a creation myth in which all cities are born from an encounter between a divine rabbit and dog. The dog, representing reckless love, consumes a desolate universe, represented by the rabbit, where each tooth incision creates a city space within the infinite compassion of the dog's mouth.
If the dog and the rabbit create a space for a population to occupy and flourish, Graffitichild is its culture hero. At the heart of the pantheon and indeed the city, Graffitichild is the mother of arts, language, and customs that inspires the individual and collective consciousness to "pick something you're good at and make them remember your name."
Despite often being a trickster, Graffitichild's story is immediately much more transparent that that of the rabbit and the dog, but perhaps that's the fun of mythmaking, to make sure to leave plenty up to the imagination.
"In the Hindu Rig Veda," explaines Artelle, "an entire pantheon is invoked, and meaning is obscure even in the very detailed context of the Hindu pantheon. I am really drawn to that kind of elaborate mystery, a sense that there is divinity within divinity, and that is it at once immediate and unknowable."
Throughout the text, Artelle builds a lens for readers that is liberating to wear, both creatively and personally, however they perceive their city. Though rooted in teh white noise, traffic, and alienation of an urban setting, Metropantheon offers a means of escape into an otherworldly realm, simply by imagining it. Thus, absolutely everyone is capable of transcending into the role of poet or mythmaker, and the city becomes a less boring, less lonely place.
"We can experience divintiy virturally anywhere through an engaged act of imagination," says Artelle. "Sure, most days we'll commute to work in the usual stupor, but once in a while we can also imagine that commute as part of something universal, something mythic. I think we need that kind of creative liberation." ”
“Down the rabbit hole: Subverting the urban world
In thinking about Steven Artelle’s Metropantheon, a debut collection of poetry that seeks to unsettle the sometimes droid-like existence of urban life, another piece of creative work leaps to mind. The 1998 documentary, “The Cruise,” delves into the problematic nature of the New York City’s grid plan, with social commentator Speed Levitch at the helm. In his estimation, the blueprint of Manhattan emanates from our weaknesses: the puritan system of ninety-degree angles is homogenizing in a city where there is no homogenization available. As Levitch walks down a back street, he declares that, “[In New York] there is only total cacophony, a total flowing of human ethnicities and tribes and beings and gradations of awareness and consciousness.” With the same measured and polemic wit as Levitch, Steven Artelle’s Metropantheon tags over and deconstructs the urban space and elevates the city, in this case Toronto, to mythic proportions. The exposed streets and hidden alleyways are rewritten to erase the monotony of daily living to shift towards a reflection of our most embellished, hallucinatory fantasies. For a slim volume of poetry, Metropantheon contains so many implications and allusions we could come to regard it nestled comfortably in between the foreboding vibrations of Yeats’ “Second Coming” and the caffeinated exaltations of Ginsberg’s “Howl.” However, Metropantheon celebrates rather than gives caution to what the future holds.
In an online interview with rob mclennan about his poetry, Steven Artelle reveals that his writing “always circles back to the nature of cities, encounters with divinity in a secular environment, wrestling with individual identity in a collective culture.” Metropantheon, for, instance, is a space where Artelle has “tried to overwrite the secular experience of cities in western culture by inventing an urban mythology, rituals, supernatural interventions.” In Metropantheon, the poet channels the grit and grime of a dystopic city through graffitichild; a being who grapples with his / her relationship to the collective culture of the city space. graffitichild is a mythic personality on the urban periphery, a kind of trickster god who is at once a creator and a destroyer, a giver and a negator, who misleads and is misled. To make this work, Artelle corrals language suited to the chaos and density of the urban: portmanteau words (“gladhands”, “nightchurch”, “heartjawed”) gospel-like repetition (O blessed infidelity / O candles collapsed into swans), and erratic, staccatoed rhythms. The “lines and cracks of every sidewalk” become Artelle’s source for creativity. Something like love, like art, is happening “somewhere behind the drywall” and it “smells like a manifesto.” In Metropantheon the new and revolutionary mythology slouches out from behind the concrete curtains.
In the ancient world, a pantheon is a space dedicated to the gods. Roman consul and noted historian, Cassius Dio, remarked that Rome’s Pantheon, because of its vaulted roof, “resembles the heavens.” If Artelle’s collection is like the Pantheon’s portico, then graffitichild is the oculus: the structure’s central opening and a feat and wonder of human effort and ingenuity. However, in Metropantheon the bones of the city are not as dependable as one might think. The city, as rendered in the poem “heat”, is “constructed with slabs of fat / the whole thing slathered together / and wobbling under the eyeless mortar of the sun.” Beings either emerge above the city’s surface or are submerged. In this case, graffitichild states simply: “I am an outline” and at the margins of the speaker’s own sense of identity and relationship to the “splintered skyline.”
Interestingly, one of the strongest poems in the collection carries with it the most substantial emotional infrastructure. It is a break from the turbo-charged, dense imagery injected with Artelle’s mythic imagination. The poem, “the evidence of windows” begins concretely by placing us at “hinton north and wellington” in Toronto amongst “bikes and uncertain traffic” and then shifts to become an existential lament on love:
……….and it was your name over and over that afternoon and so it was
……………maybe you as I eavesdropped and maybe missed my calling
……….until the part about how we make the wrong decisions and
……………live with it or not in the acoustic dark and the part about love
It is an accessible piece redolent of the fluctuating doubt and melancholy we feel in relationships and in loss. It is a poem “about you and me unable to lean out.”
Artelle’s overarching project is less about narrative, less about understanding what exactly happens to, say, graffitichild than it is about refashioning language itself. The burning core of Metropantheon lies in the attempt to deconstruct and rebuild a pantheon of reinvigorated, resonant mode of expression fit for the gods. It should be noted that stamina is required in reading Metropantheon in the same way it is harnessed when slogging between subway, tram, and office building. In “half-skinned rabbit”, however, the speaker reminds us that we “stretch [our] hand into whatever new glove this is.” The reader follows a similar path to familiarity as they move through the collection. Metropantheon becomes our city, our experience, our new glove that molds, breathes, and expands to our daily elation and struggle.”
Read the full review at Vallum.
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