-- Midwest Book Review, the Poetry Shelf, June 2012
As Bloomsday approaches (June 16th), a worldwide celebration of James Joyce's Ulysses, a novel that was first serialized from 1918 - 1920 in the radical arts magazine The Little Review, it's good to look at contemporary works such as Joseph G Peterson's Inside the Whale which pays poetic homage to Joyce and other great literary masters.
Joyce created his own lexicon with Ulysses, and filled the book with puns and obscure gags, quips, and witticisms that made the book unlike anything that had been published before. Set in Dublin, Ireland during a single day (June 16th), it chronicled the odyssey of its main character Leopold Bloom as he proceeded through his day, and Joyce brilliantly draws mind-blowing parallels to Odysseus, the main character of Homer's epic poem The Odyssey.
Peterson created his own epic with his main character, Irish-American Jim O'Connor, described by poet Gregory Lawless as "a whorl of grief, reckless charm, and surly poetic ambition." Peterson is the author of two traditional novels (Beautiful Piece & Wanted Elevator Man) but this book was his cat. Same way Robert Graves, acclaimed author of I Claudius and a slew of other books, including The Greek Myths, considered poetry to be his true calling. And so Peterson broke a few rules of fiction here by recounting his plot in stanzas that, according to poet Lawless, "watch the antiheroic O'Connor churn through misadventures, ocular bursts of poetry and failed loves ..."
One more significant thing. The Little Review, the arts magazine that first serialized Joyce's Ulysses, was born in Chicago in 1914 by editor Margaret Anderson. Peterson's novel-in-verse is set in Chicago, and according to poet Lawless "Inside the Whale's most moving passages are about Chicago, captured in Peterson's beautiful coda to this boisterous yarn." Recalling the biblical story of Jonah and the whale, the Old-English epic Beowulf, and even Herman Melville's Moby Dick, Perterson's book imagines a bardic drone chanting the mnemonics of rhythm and rhyme to entertain, lyre in hand, a group of ruffians gathered around a keg of beer and the red-hot coals of a dying fire.
Read more about Peterson's Inside the Whale here http://www.wickerpark-3ibooks.com/insidethewhale.html
