Shooky Session 2: Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks, 12 May 2023, Parc Trenholme

A review of Shooky Session 2 by Jason Camlot and Stuart Ross

Published on October 29, 2026

On a park bench in NDG’s Parc Trenholme, Jason Camlot and Stuart Ross took turns reading aloud from Franz Kafka’s The Blue Octavo Notebooks while the other composed poems. I imagine it was a sort of newfangled séance for the modernist writer, in which Kafka gifted the poets his penchant for absurdity, then hung back, amazed at how they exercised it with both humour and heart.

Shooky Session 2
Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks, 12 May 2023, Parc Trenholme
Jason Camlot and Stuart Ross

Vallum
$12
paperback
28pp

The result of this practice is the chapbook Shooky Session 2: Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks, a part of a larger manuscript titled THE SHOOKY SESSIONS: A Litany. This second installment features simplified snippets of Kafka’s work, such as the pithy “Everyone is a room” as opposed to Kafka’s “Everyone carries a room about inside him.” However, “an indestructible / plastic bazooka that / fires kosher chickens” and recording artist “David Bowel” are certainly the poets’ own, along with the shirking of sense in favour of play. One poem promises to define meaninglessness in its very last line. A large cast of picaresque characters such as the neighbour of the Senior Inspector float through the text like spectres, punching imperatives through rules of decorum: “Walk into a wall. / Climb into a cauldron.” In other words, there is value in feeling the world viscerally, rather than cerebrally, of inhaling the odd lush scents of the free-association swamp without the “thong / of knowledge” riding up, so to speak.

Shooky Session 2, at an easily digestible twenty-eight pages, is not so much a “distillation” of another’s work, with all the word’s sterility – it is a romp in and around the meaning of meaning, of the interplay between art and truth. The full manuscript is sure to be a testament to what can happen when two poets simply listen.mRb

Jade Palmer is a poet living between Toronto and Montreal. She is the managing editor of carte blanche and is pursuing a master’s degree in creative writing from the University of Toronto. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in CV2, The Fiddlehead, The New Quarterly, and Prairie Fire.