Self-Defence for the Brave and Happy

This was a very fun poetry collection. Good points were made amidst good writing, humor, cultural references, and more. I really liked it.

Self-Defence for the Brave and Happy: Poems by Paul Vermeersch is the poet's sixth collection of published poetry. Vermeersch is a poet, professor, artist, and editor. He is the author of several poetry collections, including the Trillium–award nominated The Reinvention of the Human Hand and Don't Let It End Like This Tell Them I Said Something.

Self-Defence for the Brave and Happy begins with the paranoia of the 1950s science fiction movie. The opening poem reads like a Soviet view of 1950s America. The poems move to a world without modern technology like transportation and architecture and into computer prompted poems. Radioact follows up with interesting but random poems. Nursery Rhymes for Nuclear Children continues the 1950s paranoia with redacted nursery rhymes like Doctor Doctor Oppenheimer and Hush:

Hush, little planet,
nothing to fear.
Papa’s gonna buy you
an atmosphere.

And if that atmosphere
has costs,
Papa’s gonna buy you
a holocaust.

The collection continues on with a mix of humor and an undercurrent of fear. This is a fun, sometimes campy, and nostalgic look at the world we once knew.

“Dystopias are scary because you see

people struggling, but Utopias are scarier

because you see they have stopped.”

(from “The Birthday Chamber”)

Science fiction often gets confined to the fringes of the literary world. In bookstores, you will find it in a separate section, apart from the respectable, so-called “literary fiction.” Sci-fi is a genre to which some refer with disdain, confining it to the realm of nerds and reclusive individuals who use it to escape the challenges of reality, finding comfort in the imaginary. In his new collection, Self Defense for the Brave and Happy, Paul Vermeersch challenges and dispels such biases with poems that capture the concentrated spirit of the genre. He demonstrates that the realm of the imaginary is coming ever closer to merging with everyday life, giving the reader a glimpse into possible outcomes that will occur if, or when, dreams cross over and become reality.

Self Defense for the Brave and Happy presents its reader with a premise: imagine the future, the third millennium, where humanity has found itself in a dystopia and must now navigate its way out of it. Vermeersch’s poems don’t give clear answers but provide clues and reflections to their reader, who embarks on a journey through the collection in a narrative unraveling that is reminiscent of classical sci-fi. The collection’s main focus is to explore the boundaries and spaces between dreams and reality, presenting nightmares as a condition that arises when the two sides fail to coexist or, worse, when the individual is unable to come to terms with this complex seesaw mechanism.

Vermeersch draws on the feeling of awe that many readers or viewers experienced when they read sci-fi books or watched series like Star Trek and saw technological innovations such as spaceships. Self Defense for the Brave and Happy takes a step beyond that sensation. The poems not only point out that we’ve already lost that initial sense of amazement for the most part, but also remind us of the dangers that the new dismissive and even passive attitude to such situations or inventions can conjure, like the speaker who:

“remembered the robot
that remembers the robot that remembers your birthday.”

(from “We Were the Sentinels”).

Wit is Vermeersch’s stylistic signature, and it is present at full power in this collection. He uses it as a stylistic approach for engaging the reader’s attention and as a means of weaving in more ominous warnings into the poems. To get a sense of the collection’s diapason, it is best to begin with the section “Nu — Rhymes for Nuclear Children.” Situated on the lighter side of the humor scale, these poems invoke erasure poetry by mixing children’s rhymes with social commentary and political satire. They are comparable to Tim Burton’s collection, The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy, though perhaps with a slightly less grim tone. In this section, Vermeersch catches his reader mid-laugh by planting a seed of doubt in the mind: should one be laughing at the surface-level humor of the words, or should the deeper implications be the focus and therefore a source of worry? The poem “Hush” treads this line perfectly and was my favorite in this section, the initial desire to chuckle quickly replaced with self-consciousness and even a sense of guilt for wanting to laugh in the first place:

“Hush, little planet,
nothing to fear,
Papa’s gonna buy you
an atmosphere.

And if that atmosphere
has costs,
Papa’s gonna buy you
a holocaust.”

Not all of the poems in Self Defense for the Brave and Happy have as strong of a “dark side” to them, or at least not in as overt a way as the nursery rhyme poems. Some, like “Extinction Schedule,” use humor to make way for a growing trepidation and sense of panic that builds inside the reader. It is not Vermeersch’s intention, however, to scare his reader under the bed permanently. A sense of wholeness characterizes his poetry, a narrative quality that is interested in not simply entertaining the reader, but also in exploring the strange ironies we tend to overlook in fantastical or impossible situations. The poems seek to unpack the implication and seemingly harmless and fun side of sci-fi, stressing that trouble begins right in the imagination and, where possible, suggesting solutions to the reader:

“If you do it right, the birch grove will surround you,
and the predators will never know that you are there.”

(from “Standing in Front of Antlers Mounted on a Wall so It Looks like They’re Growing From Your Head”).

Each poem in the collection is a response presented in the form of a story, and while there is some sense of a happy-go-lucky tone to Self Defense for the Brave and Happy that may not be for everyone, Vermeersch handles it with a touch of finesse that avoids cliché. Whether you are into plastic laser blasters or not — although by the end of the collection it’s hard to imagine that you won’t at least take them more seriously after reading a poem like the titular “Self Defense for the Brave and Happy” — there is a strong mix of cultural references and cultural criticism to please any reader. For me, Vermeersch’s collection filled a gap in the poetry world by demonstrating that sci-fi can and should be taken seriously. He reiterates the power of storytelling by reminding the reader that a truly moving and good story, whatever your subjective criteria may be, is like the seed of a fruit, and whether it is hidden inside or on the exterior or even unseen to the naked eye, it is still there, despite the different circumstances it wears as a skin. Most importantly, Vermeersch reminds us that

“[o]nly stories want us to live. The wolf will lie in wait
to devour us. Do not blame it for doing what wolves do.”

(from “Don’t Wait for the Woodsman”).