Poetry Friday: Tales From Outer Suburbia

Tales from Outer Suburbia by Shaun Tan is one of those books you wander through and marvel at the sights along the way.  What IS it? one is tempted to say. Nominally, it's a collection of short stories and poems, but it reminds me more than anything else of the cantina scene in the original Star Wars. Perfectly weird in every way.  Characters with depth of story behind them and a sense of humor around them. And you can't take it all in on the first viewing.

My favorite discovery was his story/poem, "Distant Rain," which he says was done in "pencil, acrylic, oil & paper collage, using other people’s handwriting." In it, abandoned words gather, form a semi-cognizant mass, and then rain from the sky, transforming the world below. If that's not a description of the poetry-making process, I don't know what is.

The poem begins like this:

Have you ever wondered

what happens to all the poems

people write?

the poems they never

let anyone else read?

and continues later with...

naturally many poems 

are immediately destroyed

burnt

shredded

flushed away

occasionally they are folded

into little squares

and wedged under the corner of

an unstable piece of furniture

The poem then rolls on over six pages (two of them wordless) before concluding with:

No one will be able to explain the

strange feeling of weightlessness

or the private smile 

that remains

after the street sweepers 

have come and gone. 

But what I'm leaving out (and you'll have to see the book to appreciate) is how these words are placed on the page. The poem itself is a collage of word scraps, which makes the whole thing read like you're piecing it together in the aftermath of a paper storm.

Here's the last page of the poem.

Spread from Tales From Outer Suburbia © 2008 by Shaun Tan. Published by Arthur A. Levine Books. Posted with permission of illustrator. All rights reserved.

Shaun Tan also says on his site:

"This idea began when I was thinking about Jewish stories of the Golem, an artificial being made of clay that could be animated by spoken or written words (‘golem’ in Hebrew means ‘shapeless mass’, also ‘unformed’ or ‘imperfect’). This lead to the idea of a being made out of words – particularly those written on scraps of paper, thrown away or lost. Eventually the story evolved into something a little like the narrative of a wildlife-documentary, and the ‘paper being’ simply became a large ball with some kind of vague consciousness."

 (More thoughts from him are here. Click on the book and then the comments link.)

Poetry Friday is hosted today by Adventures in Daily Living.