Tuesday poem #115 : Daniel Scott Tysdal : Fable Express

Composed on the occasion of Easy Blue's Oscar win, the first non-human victory in the category of Best Actor in a Leading Role.

Of course Tarintino would do it, write the role

that wins an Oscar for a dolphin. We should have

seen this coming after he liberated—through

the fantasy of epic revenge—one wronged population

after another: women, Jews, blacks, Scientologists

(if the latter seems surprising, re-watch Pulp Fiction

with an eye to Travolta's Vega as a sort of thetan-

aiding martyr). From who else’s palm would audiences

have lapped the far-fetched pulp of Fable

Express? Eastwood would have added a too precious

patriotism, making an honourably discharged, Yankee

marine out of animal rights activist, Fletch Fable,

purging the truly global spirit that pulled viewers

world-wide to the edges of their seats when DiCaprio

as Fable was mortally wounded while protesting

a dolphin slaughter in Taiji, and then had his mind

transferred into a dolphin's body for 24 hours

by an expert in ancient Japanese techno-mystic arts.

Cameron would not have cast Easy Blue at all,

contriving a CGI dolphin and filling its beak

with heavy-handed clunkers like, “I’m here for

the express purpose of revenge,” “I’ve got one day

to off these murderers, so get on the express

or dive off,” lacking totally Tarintino’s sylistic pop

and syllabic cool (Quentin’s alpha example being

the salty samurai geisha’s exegesis of Flipper

as a modern day “Book of Revelation”).

Of course, none of Tarintino’s genius and trust

would have been worth a damn without Easy’s

absorbing performance, or, better, without Easy’s range

of expressive squeaks and squeals, without the angel

of avenging fury he became, breaking the wake

of the escaping mariner genocidists, staring down

the baddie captain (played to perfection by

George Takei) with a “soft steeliness” Ebert likened

to Yul Brynner circa The Magnificent Seven

(an apt comparison considering Easy’s six-strong posse,

which included an eagle, panda, and koi). Without all

of that there would have been no trust on Tarintino’s part,

no delphinidal medium for his genius to mount

and propagate. With this glass, cage, and net ceiling

now shattered, imagine the future revolutionary work

Easy’s performance will inspire: the first iguana to win

for a Female Supporting Role, the first monkey-penned

Best Adapted Screenplay, the first entirely CGIed

Best Director. Maybe new categories will emerge:

Best Animal as Animal, Best Shaft of Light as Shaft

of Light: the crucial yet unrecognized elements

finally getting their ego-authenticating due. Or will

each revolution require its own individual instigator,

Easy being too species-bound to have a fin it? Or is Easy's

big break not radical enough? Perhaps the true

revolution won’t come to pass until he cracks

his golden, hominal trophy in half and stabs it, brain-

deep, through his visionary maker’s star-making eyes.

Daniel Scott Tysdal is the author of three books of poetry, Fauxccasional Poems (forthcoming from Icehouse 2015), The Mourner’s Book of Albums (Tightrope 2010), and Predicting the Next Big Advertising Breakthrough Using a Potentially Dangerous Method (Coteau 2006). Predicting received the ReLit Award for Poetry (2007) and the Anne Szumigalski Poetry Award (2006). Oxford University Press recently published his poetry textbook, The Writing Moment: A Practical Guide to Creating Poems. He is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Toronto Scarborough.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan