The Repoetic: After Saint Pol Roux

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Where to Buy

From your local book store.
From the publisher direct.
From Indigo.
I do not advocate purchasing from Amazon.

Reviews

•Oct. 2023. John Colasaco: “I, Mean.”

*To the tune of the DuckTales themesong* Dug-Dale, a woo hoo.

•Dec. 2023. The /tƐmz/ Review. Jérôme Melançon: “Benjamin C. Dugdale’s The Repoetic: After Saint-Pol-Roux.”

Reading this book, it is not entirely certain that something like The Repoetic exists. In fact, the first section of the book, “Mortar/Morte err umm” mentions The Repoetic (no italics) repeatedly, circling it, making it into something intangible, almost aspirational. Thus, the Repoetic becomes self-referential, as a goal, a hope, an impossible object, a mystery. It may be a place, a movement, a book, the book we are holding and reading.
 
There the Repoetic is: like a plummeting lover; bust; unrealized; washing up on jean cuffs; an unstable tornado; a lone cathedral cast-iron bell; something to be built on Crown land, that has (is?) an apartment complex; something in which there are spots to land; known elsewhere as Ratlantis; something that undoes itself—it ceases to be a book, it rejects aspirations, it remains crawling with life. It also rhymes with itself: “Winter in the Repoetic is no picnic.”

•Jan. 2024. The Fiddlehead, Jamie Kitts: “Poetry Weekend: A Fall Harvest of Poets.”

Benjamin C. Dugdale, I am in awe of your smut. Reading The Repoetic: After Saint-Pol-Roux made me feel for the first time something like “This is so good I wish I’d written it.” I always wonder if it’s to my detriment that I foreground my queerness in my poetry, or if maybe I should tone it down. Nah. The Repoetic shows me that, in fact, I could stand to go way, way harder. The contents of page 36 made me scream, and then again when I read its explanation in the Acknowledgements. Dugdale did something here I have literally joked about doing with my peers.

•Jan 2025. ex-puritan, Tom Prime: “Dido to DOTA2: Benjamin C. Dugdale’s Repoetic: After Saint-Pol-Roux.”

Dugdale’s writing isn’t pity porn, rather it’s what no one in Canada seems to want to read; it’s anxiety inducing satire. According to Dugdale, in a world of “spineless cowards,” satire may be the only real vampire left to incite the kinds of extreme reactions that inspire real social change. And Dugdale’s book is funny and surprising and very, very messy. At times, even druggy to the point of Joycean incoherence. I don’t know how to read “a whistle out of sight so sh rill it cuts the mountains twain-cloud loud,” but it’s nice to read something that doesn’t try to make sense. In a publishing world where Hemmingway seems byzantine, even arcane, and everything is spelled out plainly, with those same oft-time repeated social justice axioms that appeared in the Butlerian ’90s; Dugdale tells us that we are all very small and limited by our human reference points. We can’t know everything, and no amount of simplifying literature to a kind of lobotomized modernism will change that.

In Conversation

•April 2023. autogynophiles_anonymous: “Notes for a Blurb on Benjamin Dugdale’s The Repoetic.”

I think about apocalypses a lot, apocalypses and nostalgia, the feeling of afterwards, like how in Futurama the 90s went on forever. This poem, this book, feels so full of befores-recollection that it is hard not to read it as a book length afterwards for the queer world I know. In terms of its relationship to the RePoetic it is an afterwards, if you factor in the fire and the published notes, it’s an afterwards for an afterwards. This of course raises the question of what will come from it. What comes from Canadian poetry?

•April 2023. All Lit Up: “Try Poetry:The Repoetic + Benjamin Dugdale.”

Poetry is an arena that anticipates and accepts sound-conscious writing, concrete and other conceptual sensibilities, “experimental writing” more broadly, and almost feverishly chases (usually didactically executed) marginalized experiences in a way that is a little frightening and renders me suspicious of the entire enterprise, though all of that ultimately parlays into my finding a place to share the true spirit of my writing (I call it queer haecceity, lately) with as little modification as necessary

Soundtrack

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