Showing posts with label Reviews. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Reviews. Show all posts
Monday, November 30, 2009
Ailbhe Darcy, review: Zawacki's "Petals of Zero"
Ailbhe Darcy
Review of:
Petals of Zero / Petals of One
by Andrew Zawacki
Talisman House, 2009
ISBN: 9781584980643
In a 2000 essay on Barbara Guest, Robert Kaufman described the two modes of resignation supposed available to poets since Baudelaire:
“[T]he poet can blithely sing away, as if capitalist modernity had never happened, had not profoundly affected the experiential preconditions for intellectual and emotional processing of lyric and its contents; or, in awareness of how drastically modernity has altered the conditions for aesthetic experience, the poet – not wishing to participate in false comforts and illusory consolations – can just throw in the towel on song-based poetics.”[1]
Recently, the fiction writer Junot Diaz visited our university and spoke to would-be writers about his career to date; one of the things he said he’d learnt from life went something like this: “If someone offers you a choice between two things, what they’re really asking you is: do you want to be f*cked this way or do you want to be f*cked that way?” And, Kaufman argues, Guest has chosen not to be f*cked at all:
“A third, admittedly paradoxical and ever-tentative alternative is the one Benjamin and Adorno try to chart in Baudelaire and the tradition of formal experiment associated with him. Here the poet begins with something like an attempt to sing, but does so haltingly fragmentarily, or with confessions of paralytic bad faith, and so forth; yet the poet also or thereby seeks to reconjure beauty while simultaneously representing the unprecedented complexity – in all too many cases, the out-and-out horror – of really existing society. The poet begins with an attempt to sing song’s impossibility.” (5)
As the title of Andrew Zawacki’s latest volume suggests, it is concerned with just such apparent binaries, and with choosing, instead, not to be f*cked at all, or to “sing song’s impossibility.”
Zawacki’s long poem ‘Arrow’s Shadow’, one of three in Petals of Zero / Petals of One, is literally pushed to the margins by song’s impossibility. It inhabits that side of the page where the lyric rarely ventures, its words repeatedly split in two by the force of the push. ‘Arrow’s Shadow’ itself suggests various explanations for its place on the peripheries. It is a “palimpsest”, perhaps, of another poem. It is “letting the limit appear” (33). Or it is the work of “the empress and the outcast” (34) –
“what ciph-
ered graf-
fiti they aero-
sol the walls with
the ana-
gram and gram
-mar of mar-
gins and mar-
igolds”
- that repeated “mar” harping on wilful damage, the poem as vandalism. Or, again, this is a hymn to marginalia,
“…the least, the last thing said
as prefix
as praise
as variorum and opus
minimus”
And yet, ‘Arrow’s Shadow’ inhabits a central position in this volume. “[P]eriph-/eries”, as the poem reminds us, “are the centers of other things.”
‘Arrow’s Shadow’ begins, like any poem, with the blank page. But it immediately insists on the fragility of that silence – “brittlewhite” – and shatters it: “a palimpsest of shatters / letting the limit appear”. What fills the white then is kaleidoscopic: stripes of colour that insist upon colour’s particularity – “eau de nil” replaced by “rose”, “china blue” replaced by “canary yellow” – and studded with many-coloured precious and semi-precious stones: “agate”, “tourmaline”, “chalcedony”, demantoid”. Portmanteau words – well-used, rare, or newly-coined – add to the sense of something intricately worked and jewelled: “bowstrung”, “silkscreen”, “gauntwater”, “alpenglow”, “japanimated.”
In other ways self-consciously cinematic, ‘Arrow’s Shadow’ moves, after blankness, into a scene in a palm house, a storm breaking out. It’s a scene preoccupied with fanning-out shapes, caught on “cardioid mic”, a kind of unidirectional microphone named for its heart-shaped sensitivity pattern. Chandeliers are “of folding fan”; vaults “trefoil”; fronds “pinnate”. This opening scene is a “zerologue” – presumably, a speech act without voice -- and it’s only in the next scene, by a “formica lake”, that a voice seems to enter at all. Then it’s only “sotto voce”, in parentheses.
Apart from that wall-scrawling “outcast” mentioned above, the marginalised seem hardly present in ‘Arrow’s Shadow’ at all, except perhaps in that parenthetical voice. However, Zawacki’s “shekel dropped among the asphodel” recalls, inevitably for this Irish reader, the epigraph to Derek Mahon’s masterpiece, ‘A Disused Shed Outside County Wexford’. Mahon’s epigraph – “Let them not forget us, the weak souls among the asphodels” – is in turn from George Seferi’s 1935 sequence Mythistorema. The “shekel” Zawacki adds has a double valence: it evokes the Jewish people, modern Israel, all of bloody, specific history. But it is also a generic word for currency, and currency is itself all about the generic – about flattening and standardising and, perhaps, forgetting what’s specific. Seferi’s poem, built from Odyssean materials, is – like Mahon’s, and like, I submit, Zawacki’s – about memory and forgetting, set in ruins. If Seferi’s poem asks, “who will calculate for us the cost of our decision to forget?” Mahon’s poem accuses the poet:
“Let the god not abandon us
Who have come so far in darkness and in pain.
We too had our lives to live.
You with your light meter and relaxed itinerary,
Let not our naïve labours have been in vain!”
In this context, the conclusion of Zawacki’s poem provides a horrifying and terrifically honest response. But, since it has all the power of the twist in a great movie, I won’t give it away.
It is doubly interesting to compare Mahon’s poem with Zawacki’s volume because, just as ‘A Disused Shed’ is invested with a double vision that invests a local setting with global horror, the ‘Georgia’ Zawacki addresses in his first poem moves between one Georgia and another in a way that allows vision to accumulate something like an object dipped repeatedly in wax. The word “Georgia” becomes, like the word “arrow” in ‘Arrow’s Shadow’ a cleverly shifting signifier. But Georgia, for all that, never loses its primary signifieds: the Southern state where we know the poet resides, and the country where a tense history recently played itself out bloodily on our television screens. ‘Georgia’, a long insomniac’s lament, is less of a departure from the physical world than is ‘Arrow’s Shadow’: we can imagine the speaker emerging restlessly from his house to address his disconnected thoughts to the night, and the place, that surrounds him: “I don’t sleep Georgia”. But it gradually becomes less clear whether Georgia is being addressed, or described. “[I]ts sugar Georgia” seems to clarify for the reader that it’s Georgia State we’re talking about here, but lines later “a lake effect Georgia” is surely the country Georgia. On the next page, “aurora borealis Georgia” could be either Georgia, but rarely; and what about “hence I wed Georgia” – a woman’s name?
These roaming thoughts range between thoughtful and fretful, fearful and maudlin – “assassin crouched at the front of the house assassin waiting in back” is followed shortly by “I buried a friend far away Georgia…I’m tired of talking about it”. Winner of the 1913 prize, ‘Georgia’ ends with a change in tone, a note of resolve: “I won’t sleep Georgia / I’ll wait up.”
The final poem in Petals of Zero / Petals of One can only be described as well-hinged. It is articulated sections like an insect, taking breaths only to begin again, and punctuated only by colons in a way reminiscent of A.R. Ammons’ Sphere. Susan Howe has described Zawacki as combining “the disciplined perception of a naturalist with the inspired perception of a poet,” and his back-cover blurb on Petals of Zero / Petals of One claims him for ecopoetics. Whether or not “ecopoetics” becomes, in this reading, a fashionable term for any poetry that engages with the world, the third poem of this volume, at least, does concern itself patently with the ‘natural’ world. There is an insistence on the existence of this world independent of the writer, and of us: the “…sun plays / satisfied with itself”, recalling the TV in an empty room of Michael Symmons Roberts’ ‘The World’s Pelt’. Importantly, the writer/speaker does not “know who / do not know why the wasp / the pebble purslane & / clotbur…” Human concepts are inadequate: they are “singular” things “that only happen / plural.”
Oddly, though, as the poem goes on, moments of anthromorphism – of nature understood through human categories – grow more frequent, not less so. A snowflake is “anorexic”, “epilepsies / of sunlight marry the floor”, a mirror refuses to shatter. And the poem ends with such an anthromorphism:
“goodbye
white flame in a white
fog in a windflower coming
to meet us”
This is an odd kind of ecopoetics, if it is one that collapses back into the human-centred understandings that have always dogged us. It’s hard to make sense of it: does the poem end in resignation, or a compromise? The latter seems possible, and perhaps a way of choosing not be f*cked at all, of giving the slip to both the consolation of the traditional lyric and the temptation to throw in the towel altogether, for immediately before that ending we are told:
“a winter
garden to keep the winter out
but not out of sight:
recycling what murmurs
volt after volt
goodbye
it’s okay”
_____
Note:
[1] Kaufman, Robert. (2000) “A Future for Modernism: Barbara Guest’s Recent Poetry”, American Poetry Review 29.4, July/August: 11-16.
_____
Ailbhe Darcy is from Dublin, Ireland. She is a student on the PhD and MFA programs in English and creative writing at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. She writes critically on poetry for Dublin’s Stinging Fly, and has published her own poetry in Britain, Ireland and the US.
_____
RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture, http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1938-3592, Volume Three (2009): Immanence/ Imminence
_____
Review of:
Petals of Zero / Petals of One
by Andrew Zawacki
Talisman House, 2009
ISBN: 9781584980643
In a 2000 essay on Barbara Guest, Robert Kaufman described the two modes of resignation supposed available to poets since Baudelaire:
“[T]he poet can blithely sing away, as if capitalist modernity had never happened, had not profoundly affected the experiential preconditions for intellectual and emotional processing of lyric and its contents; or, in awareness of how drastically modernity has altered the conditions for aesthetic experience, the poet – not wishing to participate in false comforts and illusory consolations – can just throw in the towel on song-based poetics.”[1]
Recently, the fiction writer Junot Diaz visited our university and spoke to would-be writers about his career to date; one of the things he said he’d learnt from life went something like this: “If someone offers you a choice between two things, what they’re really asking you is: do you want to be f*cked this way or do you want to be f*cked that way?” And, Kaufman argues, Guest has chosen not to be f*cked at all:
“A third, admittedly paradoxical and ever-tentative alternative is the one Benjamin and Adorno try to chart in Baudelaire and the tradition of formal experiment associated with him. Here the poet begins with something like an attempt to sing, but does so haltingly fragmentarily, or with confessions of paralytic bad faith, and so forth; yet the poet also or thereby seeks to reconjure beauty while simultaneously representing the unprecedented complexity – in all too many cases, the out-and-out horror – of really existing society. The poet begins with an attempt to sing song’s impossibility.” (5)
As the title of Andrew Zawacki’s latest volume suggests, it is concerned with just such apparent binaries, and with choosing, instead, not to be f*cked at all, or to “sing song’s impossibility.”
Zawacki’s long poem ‘Arrow’s Shadow’, one of three in Petals of Zero / Petals of One, is literally pushed to the margins by song’s impossibility. It inhabits that side of the page where the lyric rarely ventures, its words repeatedly split in two by the force of the push. ‘Arrow’s Shadow’ itself suggests various explanations for its place on the peripheries. It is a “palimpsest”, perhaps, of another poem. It is “letting the limit appear” (33). Or it is the work of “the empress and the outcast” (34) –
“what ciph-
ered graf-
fiti they aero-
sol the walls with
the ana-
gram and gram
-mar of mar-
gins and mar-
igolds”
- that repeated “mar” harping on wilful damage, the poem as vandalism. Or, again, this is a hymn to marginalia,
“…the least, the last thing said
as prefix
as praise
as variorum and opus
minimus”
And yet, ‘Arrow’s Shadow’ inhabits a central position in this volume. “[P]eriph-/eries”, as the poem reminds us, “are the centers of other things.”
‘Arrow’s Shadow’ begins, like any poem, with the blank page. But it immediately insists on the fragility of that silence – “brittlewhite” – and shatters it: “a palimpsest of shatters / letting the limit appear”. What fills the white then is kaleidoscopic: stripes of colour that insist upon colour’s particularity – “eau de nil” replaced by “rose”, “china blue” replaced by “canary yellow” – and studded with many-coloured precious and semi-precious stones: “agate”, “tourmaline”, “chalcedony”, demantoid”. Portmanteau words – well-used, rare, or newly-coined – add to the sense of something intricately worked and jewelled: “bowstrung”, “silkscreen”, “gauntwater”, “alpenglow”, “japanimated.”
In other ways self-consciously cinematic, ‘Arrow’s Shadow’ moves, after blankness, into a scene in a palm house, a storm breaking out. It’s a scene preoccupied with fanning-out shapes, caught on “cardioid mic”, a kind of unidirectional microphone named for its heart-shaped sensitivity pattern. Chandeliers are “of folding fan”; vaults “trefoil”; fronds “pinnate”. This opening scene is a “zerologue” – presumably, a speech act without voice -- and it’s only in the next scene, by a “formica lake”, that a voice seems to enter at all. Then it’s only “sotto voce”, in parentheses.
Apart from that wall-scrawling “outcast” mentioned above, the marginalised seem hardly present in ‘Arrow’s Shadow’ at all, except perhaps in that parenthetical voice. However, Zawacki’s “shekel dropped among the asphodel” recalls, inevitably for this Irish reader, the epigraph to Derek Mahon’s masterpiece, ‘A Disused Shed Outside County Wexford’. Mahon’s epigraph – “Let them not forget us, the weak souls among the asphodels” – is in turn from George Seferi’s 1935 sequence Mythistorema. The “shekel” Zawacki adds has a double valence: it evokes the Jewish people, modern Israel, all of bloody, specific history. But it is also a generic word for currency, and currency is itself all about the generic – about flattening and standardising and, perhaps, forgetting what’s specific. Seferi’s poem, built from Odyssean materials, is – like Mahon’s, and like, I submit, Zawacki’s – about memory and forgetting, set in ruins. If Seferi’s poem asks, “who will calculate for us the cost of our decision to forget?” Mahon’s poem accuses the poet:
“Let the god not abandon us
Who have come so far in darkness and in pain.
We too had our lives to live.
You with your light meter and relaxed itinerary,
Let not our naïve labours have been in vain!”
In this context, the conclusion of Zawacki’s poem provides a horrifying and terrifically honest response. But, since it has all the power of the twist in a great movie, I won’t give it away.
It is doubly interesting to compare Mahon’s poem with Zawacki’s volume because, just as ‘A Disused Shed’ is invested with a double vision that invests a local setting with global horror, the ‘Georgia’ Zawacki addresses in his first poem moves between one Georgia and another in a way that allows vision to accumulate something like an object dipped repeatedly in wax. The word “Georgia” becomes, like the word “arrow” in ‘Arrow’s Shadow’ a cleverly shifting signifier. But Georgia, for all that, never loses its primary signifieds: the Southern state where we know the poet resides, and the country where a tense history recently played itself out bloodily on our television screens. ‘Georgia’, a long insomniac’s lament, is less of a departure from the physical world than is ‘Arrow’s Shadow’: we can imagine the speaker emerging restlessly from his house to address his disconnected thoughts to the night, and the place, that surrounds him: “I don’t sleep Georgia”. But it gradually becomes less clear whether Georgia is being addressed, or described. “[I]ts sugar Georgia” seems to clarify for the reader that it’s Georgia State we’re talking about here, but lines later “a lake effect Georgia” is surely the country Georgia. On the next page, “aurora borealis Georgia” could be either Georgia, but rarely; and what about “hence I wed Georgia” – a woman’s name?
These roaming thoughts range between thoughtful and fretful, fearful and maudlin – “assassin crouched at the front of the house assassin waiting in back” is followed shortly by “I buried a friend far away Georgia…I’m tired of talking about it”. Winner of the 1913 prize, ‘Georgia’ ends with a change in tone, a note of resolve: “I won’t sleep Georgia / I’ll wait up.”
The final poem in Petals of Zero / Petals of One can only be described as well-hinged. It is articulated sections like an insect, taking breaths only to begin again, and punctuated only by colons in a way reminiscent of A.R. Ammons’ Sphere. Susan Howe has described Zawacki as combining “the disciplined perception of a naturalist with the inspired perception of a poet,” and his back-cover blurb on Petals of Zero / Petals of One claims him for ecopoetics. Whether or not “ecopoetics” becomes, in this reading, a fashionable term for any poetry that engages with the world, the third poem of this volume, at least, does concern itself patently with the ‘natural’ world. There is an insistence on the existence of this world independent of the writer, and of us: the “…sun plays / satisfied with itself”, recalling the TV in an empty room of Michael Symmons Roberts’ ‘The World’s Pelt’. Importantly, the writer/speaker does not “know who / do not know why the wasp / the pebble purslane & / clotbur…” Human concepts are inadequate: they are “singular” things “that only happen / plural.”
Oddly, though, as the poem goes on, moments of anthromorphism – of nature understood through human categories – grow more frequent, not less so. A snowflake is “anorexic”, “epilepsies / of sunlight marry the floor”, a mirror refuses to shatter. And the poem ends with such an anthromorphism:
“goodbye
white flame in a white
fog in a windflower coming
to meet us”
This is an odd kind of ecopoetics, if it is one that collapses back into the human-centred understandings that have always dogged us. It’s hard to make sense of it: does the poem end in resignation, or a compromise? The latter seems possible, and perhaps a way of choosing not be f*cked at all, of giving the slip to both the consolation of the traditional lyric and the temptation to throw in the towel altogether, for immediately before that ending we are told:
“a winter
garden to keep the winter out
but not out of sight:
recycling what murmurs
volt after volt
goodbye
it’s okay”
_____
Note:
[1] Kaufman, Robert. (2000) “A Future for Modernism: Barbara Guest’s Recent Poetry”, American Poetry Review 29.4, July/August: 11-16.
_____
Ailbhe Darcy is from Dublin, Ireland. She is a student on the PhD and MFA programs in English and creative writing at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. She writes critically on poetry for Dublin’s Stinging Fly, and has published her own poetry in Britain, Ireland and the US.
_____
RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture, http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1938-3592, Volume Three (2009): Immanence/ Imminence
_____
Tod Edgerton, review: Harmon's "Quinnehtukqut"
Michael Tod Edgerton
Review of:
Quinnehtukqut
by Joshua Harmon
Starcherone Books, 2007
ISBN-13: 978-0-9788811-2-2
“The tracks of my feet lead in circles.”
It can be traced, trailed, tracked, but never precisely determined: the point where place and identity meet. They are as intimately linked and co-extensive as the sides of a Moëbius strip; the point where one begins and the other ends cannot be located, although the shift is registered bodily. You might feel that you have a firm grasp of how one informs the other, but find that it cannot be articulated in any satisfying way. Joshua Harmon’s first novel, Quinnehtukqut, leads us in circles over just such a shifting topology and leaves us spinning and giddy.
One of Harmon’s key strategies is to undermine his own reliability as a narrator, to fragment his narration like memory and history. Here identity is so many floes of Antarctic sea ice, and the vast terrain of that which lies inaccessible beneath the currents haunts every page and gives the book a richness around which its surface whorls. The powerful and unsentimental affective force of this novel lies in the palpability of absence, loss, and mystery it places at the center of its skillfully drawn figures. It inflects the very sentences and paragraphs themselves as much as it does the larger formal strategies. Like the lyrical prose of a Virginia Woolf, Jamaica Kincaid, William H. Gass, or Carole Maso, Harmon’s writing is sensual both with the melancholic clarity of this absence and the rich-dark loam of a presence—the rhythm of this present moment, this body, this place—that hums through the language to (in)form its music. Quinnehtukqut is a gorgeous, intelligent, and extensively researched historical novel that far transcends the limits of any such generic designation (at least as the book-selling market tends to think of it today).
In the first of its four chapters, Harmon provides a cubist portrait of a small New Hampshire farming community along the Connecticut River. Legends circumambulate around a visitor of uncertain origins, a mythic persona that may or may not bear the mark of any real history. In the next chapter a man in Boston lies on his deathbed, caught in a whirlpool of memories of his lover and the Antarctic expedition he left her to join. Some of these memories are authentic, but more and more are imagined as the dementia that has taken hold of him begins to blur such distinctions. The titular middle section of the novel recounts a couple of generations’ worth of the town’s history. Long before the stranger of legend arrives, a family moves into the valley and builds a lodge on the lake, and through the anamorphic lens of their sidelines we learn yet more about the ever-shifting center of the community. In the final chapter, two literally parallel episodes show us one woman in her sixties who packs up her lifelong home and another who returns after decades to see it a final time before the valley is purposefully flooded to protect the surrounding region itself from flooding.
Coursing through the novel like a ghost, always at its heart and simultaneously at its periphery, is the character and the mystery that is Martha. Not the “real” Martha to whom the book is dedicated, but a Martha Hennessy who, like Jimmy, comes breezing by us, a mere whisper over the hills, half heard. “All my life I have been moving toward something I can’t see the shape of. At night I can feel it out beyond wherever I am waiting for me or even speaking my name Jimmy in a whisper no one else can hear.” Jimmy will become a key figure in Martha’s early life, and Quinnehtukqut opens with “The Legend of Jimmy Frye.” Martha in fact makes only a few brief appearances in these first seventy-odd pages, and we do not yet know how central to the novel her character will have been by the end.
According to one report, Jimmy arrives at the end of the summer in 1918 to this valley in northern New Hampshire, but no one really knows where he came from. His silent nods and terse answers to personal questions signal to the townspeople that he does not want to be asked. Such a dearth of information generates all kinds of gossip about his origins and nature. He boards at the widow Godfrey’s house, along with a retired school principal, and some wonder why she would take in such a man, such a sinner, such a man about whom it is said
“[t]hat he could summon the North Wind by speaking certain words over a fire of fir-cones.…That he had killed a man for each year that he had lived; that if ever a year passed when he did not take another’s life he would surely die. That he had fathered many children by different women, so that his seed would never be erased from the earth; that they walk untold miles not knowing the yearning in their own hearts.”
These stories created in lieu of fact take on larger-than-life proportions after his departure, and the townspeople wonder if he even really ever left or whether he may not be out there, deep in the woods in a shack, hoarding or still hunting the gold which they have concluded he came to find in the surrounding hills.
One of the many possibilities the novel entertains is that Jimmy leaves for Boston, and that the young Martha, who adamantly “will be no farmer’s wife,” leaves soon thereafter to meet up with him. Harmon indeed entertains many possibilities in this novel and confirms very little, though certainly more than it appears on the first read (a second read is almost a necessity for this book; a third waits with its own distinct pleasures). For instance, is the information we get from the journals of “Vince Bouchard,” Jimmy’s prospecting partner whom he passes off as French-Canadian, to be taken as objective truth, his diary as a trustworthy record? It tells us very little, but would seem to corroborate the stories of Jimmy’s prospecting for gold and his relationship with Martha: “Jimmy seems happy tonight singing of riches and a Pretty Girl.” We can presume that this is Vince’s diary only because he tells us that Jimmy exhorts him to keep quiet if he doesn’t know any French, and a Vincent Bouchard is elsewhere introduced as a Frenchman who speaks no English. We often, in fact, must piece together from clues, sometimes found many pages later, who is speaking in any of the almost modular paragraphs we find floating over the pages of Quinnehtukqut and after which we find ourselves hungrily running. Even when we read passages that seem to be in Jimmy’s own voice, and feel that we have finally encountered him directly, even as we think we have locked eyes with him—he is gone, dispelled by contradictory or fantastical claims.
We are not always even able to identify the speaker of a given paragraph, but he or she rather remains as evanescent as Jimmy, whose very name, it turns out, is likely made up. The paragraph captioned “THE TRUE STORY OF JIMMY FRYE” tells us little more than the fact that the unnamed speaker is “not sure if his name is Jimmy Frye,” since the strange visitor never actually told him his name, “but everyone else called him Jimmy, and Frye is a good name, as good as any, so we will call him that now.”
Like “Jimmy Frye,” the book’s title resonates with the absence it charts.
“Quinnehtukqut,” “Quonecktacut,” and “Quinatucquet” are only a few versions of the Abenaki name for the river which the English, unable to repeat precisely the Native American word, standardized as “Connecticut”. Like an unfamiliar combination of sounds, tickling our ears and confounding our tongue, Jimmy Frye slips away into the woods just as we think we have him firmly in our grasp, leaving us with only “the yearning in [our] own hearts.”
Continuing in a similar mode, “Toward the Interior” jumps forward to the 1970’s, the most recent period in the novel, when a man presumably with Alzheimer’s drifts between his past and the present. He is visited by a younger man, who comes and sits for long periods. “He says his name is Donald, David, Daniel, unless this is my name. Do you remember? he asks.” Renee, the nurse in Havenwood Manor, the long-term care facility in which he now lives, repeatedly tells him that his own name is Samuel, along with what day it is. “Today is Tuesday, October second, 1979” (85). Some days Samuel hears different years. “Today is Tuesday, October second, 1928. Home is back there now. Yesterday was the last day.” What is it that a name, a date, a face would lock down?
This is the visitor’s story as well as Samuel’s. All his life he has dreamed of meeting him. When Samuel left to join the Byrd expedition to Antarctica, his lover, Martha, did not know that he was leaving, and did not yet know that she was pregnant. “She told me once, long ago, that I was your final gift to her, as if you knew you would be leaving and wanted me to keep her from loneliness. […] Of course you never knew. Though some nights as I tried to sleep I wondered if somehow you had guessed, if that was why you left.” The young man came thinking he could reclaim something that was his, something of himself that he had lost before birth. “My name is Daniel, the man says.” Perhaps Daniel only wants to know why his father had left his mother, why they were not the happy, complete family he feels they should have been. “What could I have told Martha, then or ever?” Samuel wonders. “What can a sound do to change what has been?” Daniel asks him if he remembers his name. “I wanted to find you for her, the man says. Now it doesn’t matter.” Whatever a name or face momentarily pins, it cannot be locked down.
The titular chapter is formally the most traditional, divided into three numbered sections and following a linear mode of narrative progression, though it makes good use of flashback. The first section takes place in 1920 and the third in 1925 (the second spans 1893 to 1947) and these together provide us with perhaps the most intimate portrait of Martha in the whole novel. Martha and her mother work at the lodge for the Curriers while her father is fighting in WWI, and they return when he dies shortly after his arrival from the battle front. This section is the first time we see Martha at any length, the first full view we get of this young woman who is determined to escape her farming life, and of whom, up to this point, we have only managed glances.
After returning from war, her father takes her out into the woods to learn its trails; someone has to receive this knowledge, and she is his only child. In the woods we find one of the most remarkable aspects of this novel interspersed throughout this last section of the “Quinnehtukqut” chapter. “Let me tell you a story, she would write.” In the woods, Martha and her father morph into a king and a princess, his sole heir, whose stepmother would have her taken out into the woods and killed. This fable is seamlessly woven into the rest of the narrative, with not so much as a paragraph break to prepare for the shift. This is characteristic of the novel’s paratactic strategies, and its wondrous effect is to expose as blurry the distinction of myth and history which, threaded through as it is with cultural fantasy, we far too simply term “fact,” too vaguely call “reality.”
The interweaving of conversations, thoughts, and journals, of fictional episodes and material from historical sources, also serves to delay and thereby intensify the quiet emotional flashes of such scenes as the one in which Tom tells Martha that he knew she would reject him and didn’t know why he ever proposed, and which is interspersed with dialogue of her mother denouncing her foolishness over leaving (presumably not so long after this conversation with Tom) and telling her never to return if she does leave.
Meanwhile, we wait with anticipation, as we have the whole time, for Jimmy Frye’s reappearance and the affirmation of his existence, for his first true appearance, then, without the obfuscations of conjecture and myth, but our hopes are disappointed. There is no definitive validation of this prospector, vagabond, tramp; we are given no bedrock fact to support the legend, let alone his actual contours and colors, his scent and sentience, only a whisper lost in the upper branches of the kingdom of the woods.
“You must take her into the forest, the new queen told him, and there you must leave her. They walked into the woods. The clouds suggested snow. Dirt, dirt worn smooth, the twigs ironlike, the spruce bark and frozen pitch, the pattern of fallen needles, orange. All cold. Still. Lake a swept field of snowy ice. Drifted. In two years’ time, he said. And he, kneeling beside her. I won’t be gone long. I’ll write as often as I can. A letter describing the river and a round orange moon. I am sure she has it still tucked in a drawer. We walked those woods. Come with me, he said. I am certain of you. Four years I’ve waited. Martha turned the knob and stepped from the kitchen into the dooryard. Yellowed grass.”
Martha will wait no longer, will not heed her mother’s exhortations, and will leave for Boston, meet Samuel, have a child, and not return for twenty years. By this point we know that this is as much or more Martha’s drama as Jimmy’s or the Curriers’, that it belongs not only to them, furthermore, but also to this town of Pittsburg, New Hampshire, and perhaps even to the America of a certain crucial point in its history, of a certain way of life and community organization that industrialization would pave over.
The final act presents the most formally innovative chapter of the novel, the elegantly titled “Farmhouse in a Fold of Fields.” This chapter is the most formally ambitious in the novel. Based loosely on John Ashbery’s bicolumnar poem, “Litany,” we get two narratives simultaneously, or with as much simultaneity as the printed page and human eye can together provide, each running across the top or bottom of sets of couplet paragraph-stanzas, painstakingly designed to reach from margin to margin at every turn, as in this short excerpt:
“he and his wife saw in their garden in Maine—or her mother her- / her mother’s words. Now that she has returned, she cannot remember
self, twenty years old, leaving that foggy coast for a place which had / why for so long she has wanted to; nor, except to prove to her mother
been recognized as part of the United States for only thirty years, / how little she knew her own daughter, why she wanted to stay away.”
Like the structure of subjectivity, this form is split, polyvocal and “other” to itself. The running lines of Roman and italic type each constitutes a separate narrative unit diachronically, while at any given point the couplets together form a strange pact that also gives the whole a certain formal unity over and against its narrative bifurcation.
These narratives are very much the two sides of the proverbial coin, set spinning in the air by Harmon’s dexterous hand (it will not land, it won’t be “called,” heads or tails, and fate sealed). One woman only hesitantly comes back to the village for a few days and the other doggedly refuses to leave. The parallel lines are particularly rich when the narratives themselves happen to parallel or echo one another at seemingly arbitrary points, as in the passage above when thoughts of mothers resonate with one another, and with such parallels as Linnie’s mother, who leaves home as a young woman, just as Martha does.
In Roman type, the narrative running the first line of these couplets centers on Miss Linnie Abbott, a shotgun-toting, fence-climbing woman in her sixties who never married or had children. Since her mother’s death, she has lived alone in the same house her father built, the house in which she was born and in which she is determined, like her parents, to die, the house that she will not see destroyed, eminent domain be damned. She will instead use the government’s compensation to have it moved to a hill above the valley in which she has lived her whole life, the valley that will be flooded by the Connecticut River as part of the Murphy Dam project to prevent the larger region from ever again being vulnerable to the kind of flooding to which the 1938 hurricane (which we learn earlier damaged Idlewild Lodge) subjected it. As throughout, Harmon here sets our eye askew to reveal more than a direct gaze could render.
The second, italicized story is Martha’s, twenty-one years after her departure. Although unnamed, there can be only one “she” whose presence could activate the perspective from which we see, after a long absence, the landscape, the houses, the people sitting outside Baldwin’s store, even before enough details are given to make it obvious. She wants to see it one last time before it is flooded, and we get glimpses here of what life in the intervening two decades has brought for her. Reading it gives us a hint at her willfully estranged relationship with her mother, whom she feels failed her, and her feeling that she in turn has failed her son, who roams the country on his own search for something he feels he is missing. The sweep of the novel here fully impacts us, the restlessness and want of life that is so often pinned on a parent or some lost love, the restlessness that sets us roaming across landscapes and cityscapes, across pages, canvasses, and stages, and that produces great works of art, if such a designation any longer holds any purchase for us. If it does, then Quinnehtukqut may very well be such a work.
Quinnehtukqut is an incredibly moving and intelligent book, formally innovative and expertly crafted. It enacts for us the instability and ultimate mystery at the heart of individual identity and collective history alike, showing the extent to which myth or fantasy is always an element. It’s the kind of book that makes other writers want to go immediately to their favorite writing spot with pen or computer and write, to find the words that approach telling what can’t be said, to try, themselves, to produce something someone might find astonishing. “There were many things I never told Martha, many things I never told a soul.” We can only hope that Joshua Harmon keeps telling us stories for many years to come.
_____
Michael Tod Edgerton has won the Boston Review and Five Fingers Review poetry contests and has had his poetry published in such other journals as Denver Quarterly, Eoagh, New American Writing, New Orleans Review, Skanky Possum, and Word For/Word. His other articles and reviews have appeared in 3am Magazine, Electronic Poetry Review, Mantis: A Journal of Poetry, Criticism, and Translation, and Mesechabe: A Journal of Sur(region)alism. He holds an MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University.
_____
RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture, http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1938-3592, Volume Three (2009): Immanence/ Imminence
_____
Review of:
Quinnehtukqut
by Joshua Harmon
Starcherone Books, 2007
ISBN-13: 978-0-9788811-2-2
“The tracks of my feet lead in circles.”
It can be traced, trailed, tracked, but never precisely determined: the point where place and identity meet. They are as intimately linked and co-extensive as the sides of a Moëbius strip; the point where one begins and the other ends cannot be located, although the shift is registered bodily. You might feel that you have a firm grasp of how one informs the other, but find that it cannot be articulated in any satisfying way. Joshua Harmon’s first novel, Quinnehtukqut, leads us in circles over just such a shifting topology and leaves us spinning and giddy.
One of Harmon’s key strategies is to undermine his own reliability as a narrator, to fragment his narration like memory and history. Here identity is so many floes of Antarctic sea ice, and the vast terrain of that which lies inaccessible beneath the currents haunts every page and gives the book a richness around which its surface whorls. The powerful and unsentimental affective force of this novel lies in the palpability of absence, loss, and mystery it places at the center of its skillfully drawn figures. It inflects the very sentences and paragraphs themselves as much as it does the larger formal strategies. Like the lyrical prose of a Virginia Woolf, Jamaica Kincaid, William H. Gass, or Carole Maso, Harmon’s writing is sensual both with the melancholic clarity of this absence and the rich-dark loam of a presence—the rhythm of this present moment, this body, this place—that hums through the language to (in)form its music. Quinnehtukqut is a gorgeous, intelligent, and extensively researched historical novel that far transcends the limits of any such generic designation (at least as the book-selling market tends to think of it today).
In the first of its four chapters, Harmon provides a cubist portrait of a small New Hampshire farming community along the Connecticut River. Legends circumambulate around a visitor of uncertain origins, a mythic persona that may or may not bear the mark of any real history. In the next chapter a man in Boston lies on his deathbed, caught in a whirlpool of memories of his lover and the Antarctic expedition he left her to join. Some of these memories are authentic, but more and more are imagined as the dementia that has taken hold of him begins to blur such distinctions. The titular middle section of the novel recounts a couple of generations’ worth of the town’s history. Long before the stranger of legend arrives, a family moves into the valley and builds a lodge on the lake, and through the anamorphic lens of their sidelines we learn yet more about the ever-shifting center of the community. In the final chapter, two literally parallel episodes show us one woman in her sixties who packs up her lifelong home and another who returns after decades to see it a final time before the valley is purposefully flooded to protect the surrounding region itself from flooding.
Coursing through the novel like a ghost, always at its heart and simultaneously at its periphery, is the character and the mystery that is Martha. Not the “real” Martha to whom the book is dedicated, but a Martha Hennessy who, like Jimmy, comes breezing by us, a mere whisper over the hills, half heard. “All my life I have been moving toward something I can’t see the shape of. At night I can feel it out beyond wherever I am waiting for me or even speaking my name Jimmy in a whisper no one else can hear.” Jimmy will become a key figure in Martha’s early life, and Quinnehtukqut opens with “The Legend of Jimmy Frye.” Martha in fact makes only a few brief appearances in these first seventy-odd pages, and we do not yet know how central to the novel her character will have been by the end.
According to one report, Jimmy arrives at the end of the summer in 1918 to this valley in northern New Hampshire, but no one really knows where he came from. His silent nods and terse answers to personal questions signal to the townspeople that he does not want to be asked. Such a dearth of information generates all kinds of gossip about his origins and nature. He boards at the widow Godfrey’s house, along with a retired school principal, and some wonder why she would take in such a man, such a sinner, such a man about whom it is said
“[t]hat he could summon the North Wind by speaking certain words over a fire of fir-cones.…That he had killed a man for each year that he had lived; that if ever a year passed when he did not take another’s life he would surely die. That he had fathered many children by different women, so that his seed would never be erased from the earth; that they walk untold miles not knowing the yearning in their own hearts.”
These stories created in lieu of fact take on larger-than-life proportions after his departure, and the townspeople wonder if he even really ever left or whether he may not be out there, deep in the woods in a shack, hoarding or still hunting the gold which they have concluded he came to find in the surrounding hills.
One of the many possibilities the novel entertains is that Jimmy leaves for Boston, and that the young Martha, who adamantly “will be no farmer’s wife,” leaves soon thereafter to meet up with him. Harmon indeed entertains many possibilities in this novel and confirms very little, though certainly more than it appears on the first read (a second read is almost a necessity for this book; a third waits with its own distinct pleasures). For instance, is the information we get from the journals of “Vince Bouchard,” Jimmy’s prospecting partner whom he passes off as French-Canadian, to be taken as objective truth, his diary as a trustworthy record? It tells us very little, but would seem to corroborate the stories of Jimmy’s prospecting for gold and his relationship with Martha: “Jimmy seems happy tonight singing of riches and a Pretty Girl.” We can presume that this is Vince’s diary only because he tells us that Jimmy exhorts him to keep quiet if he doesn’t know any French, and a Vincent Bouchard is elsewhere introduced as a Frenchman who speaks no English. We often, in fact, must piece together from clues, sometimes found many pages later, who is speaking in any of the almost modular paragraphs we find floating over the pages of Quinnehtukqut and after which we find ourselves hungrily running. Even when we read passages that seem to be in Jimmy’s own voice, and feel that we have finally encountered him directly, even as we think we have locked eyes with him—he is gone, dispelled by contradictory or fantastical claims.
We are not always even able to identify the speaker of a given paragraph, but he or she rather remains as evanescent as Jimmy, whose very name, it turns out, is likely made up. The paragraph captioned “THE TRUE STORY OF JIMMY FRYE” tells us little more than the fact that the unnamed speaker is “not sure if his name is Jimmy Frye,” since the strange visitor never actually told him his name, “but everyone else called him Jimmy, and Frye is a good name, as good as any, so we will call him that now.”
Like “Jimmy Frye,” the book’s title resonates with the absence it charts.
“Quinnehtukqut,” “Quonecktacut,” and “Quinatucquet” are only a few versions of the Abenaki name for the river which the English, unable to repeat precisely the Native American word, standardized as “Connecticut”. Like an unfamiliar combination of sounds, tickling our ears and confounding our tongue, Jimmy Frye slips away into the woods just as we think we have him firmly in our grasp, leaving us with only “the yearning in [our] own hearts.”
Continuing in a similar mode, “Toward the Interior” jumps forward to the 1970’s, the most recent period in the novel, when a man presumably with Alzheimer’s drifts between his past and the present. He is visited by a younger man, who comes and sits for long periods. “He says his name is Donald, David, Daniel, unless this is my name. Do you remember? he asks.” Renee, the nurse in Havenwood Manor, the long-term care facility in which he now lives, repeatedly tells him that his own name is Samuel, along with what day it is. “Today is Tuesday, October second, 1979” (85). Some days Samuel hears different years. “Today is Tuesday, October second, 1928. Home is back there now. Yesterday was the last day.” What is it that a name, a date, a face would lock down?
This is the visitor’s story as well as Samuel’s. All his life he has dreamed of meeting him. When Samuel left to join the Byrd expedition to Antarctica, his lover, Martha, did not know that he was leaving, and did not yet know that she was pregnant. “She told me once, long ago, that I was your final gift to her, as if you knew you would be leaving and wanted me to keep her from loneliness. […] Of course you never knew. Though some nights as I tried to sleep I wondered if somehow you had guessed, if that was why you left.” The young man came thinking he could reclaim something that was his, something of himself that he had lost before birth. “My name is Daniel, the man says.” Perhaps Daniel only wants to know why his father had left his mother, why they were not the happy, complete family he feels they should have been. “What could I have told Martha, then or ever?” Samuel wonders. “What can a sound do to change what has been?” Daniel asks him if he remembers his name. “I wanted to find you for her, the man says. Now it doesn’t matter.” Whatever a name or face momentarily pins, it cannot be locked down.
The titular chapter is formally the most traditional, divided into three numbered sections and following a linear mode of narrative progression, though it makes good use of flashback. The first section takes place in 1920 and the third in 1925 (the second spans 1893 to 1947) and these together provide us with perhaps the most intimate portrait of Martha in the whole novel. Martha and her mother work at the lodge for the Curriers while her father is fighting in WWI, and they return when he dies shortly after his arrival from the battle front. This section is the first time we see Martha at any length, the first full view we get of this young woman who is determined to escape her farming life, and of whom, up to this point, we have only managed glances.
After returning from war, her father takes her out into the woods to learn its trails; someone has to receive this knowledge, and she is his only child. In the woods we find one of the most remarkable aspects of this novel interspersed throughout this last section of the “Quinnehtukqut” chapter. “Let me tell you a story, she would write.” In the woods, Martha and her father morph into a king and a princess, his sole heir, whose stepmother would have her taken out into the woods and killed. This fable is seamlessly woven into the rest of the narrative, with not so much as a paragraph break to prepare for the shift. This is characteristic of the novel’s paratactic strategies, and its wondrous effect is to expose as blurry the distinction of myth and history which, threaded through as it is with cultural fantasy, we far too simply term “fact,” too vaguely call “reality.”
The interweaving of conversations, thoughts, and journals, of fictional episodes and material from historical sources, also serves to delay and thereby intensify the quiet emotional flashes of such scenes as the one in which Tom tells Martha that he knew she would reject him and didn’t know why he ever proposed, and which is interspersed with dialogue of her mother denouncing her foolishness over leaving (presumably not so long after this conversation with Tom) and telling her never to return if she does leave.
Meanwhile, we wait with anticipation, as we have the whole time, for Jimmy Frye’s reappearance and the affirmation of his existence, for his first true appearance, then, without the obfuscations of conjecture and myth, but our hopes are disappointed. There is no definitive validation of this prospector, vagabond, tramp; we are given no bedrock fact to support the legend, let alone his actual contours and colors, his scent and sentience, only a whisper lost in the upper branches of the kingdom of the woods.
“You must take her into the forest, the new queen told him, and there you must leave her. They walked into the woods. The clouds suggested snow. Dirt, dirt worn smooth, the twigs ironlike, the spruce bark and frozen pitch, the pattern of fallen needles, orange. All cold. Still. Lake a swept field of snowy ice. Drifted. In two years’ time, he said. And he, kneeling beside her. I won’t be gone long. I’ll write as often as I can. A letter describing the river and a round orange moon. I am sure she has it still tucked in a drawer. We walked those woods. Come with me, he said. I am certain of you. Four years I’ve waited. Martha turned the knob and stepped from the kitchen into the dooryard. Yellowed grass.”
Martha will wait no longer, will not heed her mother’s exhortations, and will leave for Boston, meet Samuel, have a child, and not return for twenty years. By this point we know that this is as much or more Martha’s drama as Jimmy’s or the Curriers’, that it belongs not only to them, furthermore, but also to this town of Pittsburg, New Hampshire, and perhaps even to the America of a certain crucial point in its history, of a certain way of life and community organization that industrialization would pave over.
The final act presents the most formally innovative chapter of the novel, the elegantly titled “Farmhouse in a Fold of Fields.” This chapter is the most formally ambitious in the novel. Based loosely on John Ashbery’s bicolumnar poem, “Litany,” we get two narratives simultaneously, or with as much simultaneity as the printed page and human eye can together provide, each running across the top or bottom of sets of couplet paragraph-stanzas, painstakingly designed to reach from margin to margin at every turn, as in this short excerpt:
“he and his wife saw in their garden in Maine—or her mother her- / her mother’s words. Now that she has returned, she cannot remember
self, twenty years old, leaving that foggy coast for a place which had / why for so long she has wanted to; nor, except to prove to her mother
been recognized as part of the United States for only thirty years, / how little she knew her own daughter, why she wanted to stay away.”
Like the structure of subjectivity, this form is split, polyvocal and “other” to itself. The running lines of Roman and italic type each constitutes a separate narrative unit diachronically, while at any given point the couplets together form a strange pact that also gives the whole a certain formal unity over and against its narrative bifurcation.
These narratives are very much the two sides of the proverbial coin, set spinning in the air by Harmon’s dexterous hand (it will not land, it won’t be “called,” heads or tails, and fate sealed). One woman only hesitantly comes back to the village for a few days and the other doggedly refuses to leave. The parallel lines are particularly rich when the narratives themselves happen to parallel or echo one another at seemingly arbitrary points, as in the passage above when thoughts of mothers resonate with one another, and with such parallels as Linnie’s mother, who leaves home as a young woman, just as Martha does.
In Roman type, the narrative running the first line of these couplets centers on Miss Linnie Abbott, a shotgun-toting, fence-climbing woman in her sixties who never married or had children. Since her mother’s death, she has lived alone in the same house her father built, the house in which she was born and in which she is determined, like her parents, to die, the house that she will not see destroyed, eminent domain be damned. She will instead use the government’s compensation to have it moved to a hill above the valley in which she has lived her whole life, the valley that will be flooded by the Connecticut River as part of the Murphy Dam project to prevent the larger region from ever again being vulnerable to the kind of flooding to which the 1938 hurricane (which we learn earlier damaged Idlewild Lodge) subjected it. As throughout, Harmon here sets our eye askew to reveal more than a direct gaze could render.
The second, italicized story is Martha’s, twenty-one years after her departure. Although unnamed, there can be only one “she” whose presence could activate the perspective from which we see, after a long absence, the landscape, the houses, the people sitting outside Baldwin’s store, even before enough details are given to make it obvious. She wants to see it one last time before it is flooded, and we get glimpses here of what life in the intervening two decades has brought for her. Reading it gives us a hint at her willfully estranged relationship with her mother, whom she feels failed her, and her feeling that she in turn has failed her son, who roams the country on his own search for something he feels he is missing. The sweep of the novel here fully impacts us, the restlessness and want of life that is so often pinned on a parent or some lost love, the restlessness that sets us roaming across landscapes and cityscapes, across pages, canvasses, and stages, and that produces great works of art, if such a designation any longer holds any purchase for us. If it does, then Quinnehtukqut may very well be such a work.
Quinnehtukqut is an incredibly moving and intelligent book, formally innovative and expertly crafted. It enacts for us the instability and ultimate mystery at the heart of individual identity and collective history alike, showing the extent to which myth or fantasy is always an element. It’s the kind of book that makes other writers want to go immediately to their favorite writing spot with pen or computer and write, to find the words that approach telling what can’t be said, to try, themselves, to produce something someone might find astonishing. “There were many things I never told Martha, many things I never told a soul.” We can only hope that Joshua Harmon keeps telling us stories for many years to come.
_____
Michael Tod Edgerton has won the Boston Review and Five Fingers Review poetry contests and has had his poetry published in such other journals as Denver Quarterly, Eoagh, New American Writing, New Orleans Review, Skanky Possum, and Word For/Word. His other articles and reviews have appeared in 3am Magazine, Electronic Poetry Review, Mantis: A Journal of Poetry, Criticism, and Translation, and Mesechabe: A Journal of Sur(region)alism. He holds an MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University.
_____
RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture, http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1938-3592, Volume Three (2009): Immanence/ Imminence
_____
Roy Exley, review: Daive’s “Under the Dome”
Roy Exley
Review of:
Under the Dome: Walks with Paul Celan
by Jean Daive
trans. Rosmarie Waldrop
ISBN-13: 978-1-886224-97-1
Jean Daive offers an extended series of temporally disjointed ‘Aides Memoires’, emulating, perhaps, the faulty, and often random, workings of memory and the consequently flawed nature of recollection. This absorbing text is very much poetic prose, rather than prose-poetry. These disjunctions, which often give it a halting rhythm, are only one of the layers in this work that keep the reader on his or her toes. Never quite sure whether or not Celan is dead or alive as we read Daive’s aphorisms and reflections on life in Paris around his friendship with Celan, the presence of Celan nevertheless carries the same weight, whether the recollections are pre- or post-suicide. Celan’s work, as an extension of the man seemingly transcends the bounds of mortality.
There are very poignant and moving passages which relay the depth of Daive’s grief at the loss of Celan, for instance, while he was still missing after his yet undiscovered suicide, his wife, Gisele told Daive:
“Paul left his watch on his night table. Paul is dead.
Ah? Why?
Paul always kept his watch on his wrist. He told me: the day I take of my watch, I’ll have decided to die.”
This struck Daive like a thunderbolt.
Daive tells us that Celan wrote, “Eternity is grey”. All colour washed from his life by the harsh and abrasive nature of destiny. The noose of melancholia seems to tighten as the writings progress. Davie describes how, “In a café, Paul Celan goes through his identity with me, in a neutral, toneless voice, the acoustic equivalent of an automat.”
No colour, no tone, the only relief silence. Davie notes how ‘He weighs his words carefully. Every moment he evaluates the word. I should add: every moment he evaluates silence.’ Something of John Cage’s supercharged modernism is in evidence here. Without those silences, the words would stumble into that meaninglessness from which Celan is fleeing. His writing of poetry was a purging process, an attempt to exorcise the demons that tormented him. Writing was also an escape - as it often is - as he tried to evade the memories of loss. He finally made good his escape by way of the Seine – plunging, through its sparkling embrace, on through into its abyss below – its grey eternity.
Daive tells us that Celan is thought to have jumped off the Pont Mirabeau, as this is the bridge named in several of his poems – his body was found several days later in the sluices further down the river – his point of entry into the Seine remains uncertain. His enigma was perpetuated – no suicide note, the site of his death unknown, no signs, traces of, or witnesses to, the event.
It is somewhat distressing to read of the last days of such a great writer. It was his bitter experiences, his grievous losses through the holocaust, that provided the fuel for the engine that drove his poetry, but to finally discover that it was this very same engine fuelled by this same anguish that drove him down the final slippery slope to suicide is ultimately a saddening realisation.
The reader gets the feeling from Daive’s words that Celan never really allowed anybody to get too close to him – it is obvious, however, that he felt a certain empathy with Daive as a fellow writer. Nevertheless, ultimately, Celan was, and remains, an enigma, he lived a peripheral, bohemian existence in Paris, while, incongruously, dressing like the bourgeoisie. Daive describes him, in one passage, as wearing ‘an impeccable gray-black suit. White shirt, tie. Heavy walking shoes’, and in another, sporting ‘his ironed handkerchief: white square, perfect square, square without fold’. To contrast with this image, Daive later describes his place as ‘a barely furnished apartment (there’s only the table and a few chairs)’ - to retain the ambience of enigma, one has to maintain a distance from mainstream life, refuse to adopt any of its stereotypes, Celan, it appears, carried this out with aplomb.
As the text shunts backwards and forwards through his memories of Celan, Daive maintains the reputation of Paris as a place dominated by the seasons and conveys a strong sense of Celan himself being influenced by the seasons there. These seasons wink in and out of the text blinking like a strobe on only a marginally longer rhythm than day and night, an existential dizziness lies in wait here for the reader who is off guard, this can sometimes, also, be a source of frustration.
Tantalising might be the most appropriate adjective to use in connection with Under the Dome. We are offered lots of tasty little insights and intimacies into this friendship between Daive and Celan, malleable, and often embellished, recollections of fleeting moments and events that gather their own momentum as their interplay intensifies from page to page. We get to know Celan as a recurring figure in a restlessly shifting crowd, but this figure is more like a ghost unable to move forward from the epistemological trauma that keeps it earthbound.
A German speaker in Paris, Celan never really adjusts, we sense that his smart impeccable dress is a sort of armour to protect him from further dissipation - you get the feeling that he is grimly holding onto a sense of self that is continuously threatened with erasure by the recurring trauma of his tragic personal history.
Daive writes:
“After a long silence punctured with noise, he continues:
‘The world is of glass.
And disappearance is within us.’”
The fragility of existence can only be protected by a perpetual vigilance.
This vigilance is reinforced in the words of many of Celan’s poems.
As a German writer who was, through necessity, obliged to use that language of those who were the perpetrators of his parents deaths was an incongruity that continued to haunt him and was the basis of many conversations with Daive. Their regular walks ‘under the dome’ of chestnut leaves, as they criss-crossed Paris set the scene for many of their most fruitful conversations and provided the opportunity for Daive to try and plumb Celan’s hidden depths – a quest that did not always meet with success, he writes, “There is a symptom of Paul’s that I would like to analyze, that of avoidance.”
Daive seems genuinely compassionate and concerned for Celan while, at the same time, being restrained both by a sense of awe and a sense of deference. This awe sometimes colours Daive’s words to the extent that they read like the notes of a stalker watching his quarry’s every move and watching every nuance of every move.
In his 1960 ‘Meridian’ address, Celan wrote:
“Poetry today ….. exhibits an unmistakeably strong tendency towards silence.” [1]
This statement seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy that filters into Celan’s life itself.
Daive picks up on this phenomenon quite frequently in his negotiations with Celan and his work.
But maybe this silence is also an antidote to his frequent bouts of dementia that his wife Gisele reports to Daive, who subsequently visits Celan in hospital during one of these episodes of dementia, during this visit silence is not given a chance by Celan’s constant torrent of words, leaving Daive feeling mentally exhausted.
Some of the clues Daive provides us with are vital to that picture we are able to build up of Celan’s last years in Paris, others are merely dressing to decorate and enliven our passage through this text. Each reader will get a different message, but only the most discerning will decipher the truths of Celan’s last years. I love Celan’s writings but, personally, I struggled here, through these writings, to warm to him as an individual.
There is balancing act being performed here, that between this work as a document and this as a work of art, as an expression of Daive’s creative and rich imagination and as a documentary of a brief friendship. It is a fascinating read for followers of Celan, but one which feels a bit like a starter with only tempting hints of what the main course might be.
It is difficult, but maybe not necessary, to separate the man from his poetry. He became his poetry and now his poetry has become him. Paul Celan may well have ceased to be, but his poetry lives on and maybe even transcends the man. Like an hourglass, he and his work was filtered through a narrow defile, only to be diffused and transmitted into an amazingly recipient and grateful literary world beyond, a world that seemed, serendipitously, to be waiting for such a significant input.
This is modernist alchemy, from the base materials of banal everyday experiences, shared with a unique individuality, Daive has translated and distilled the spiritual power of Celan’s thoughts and writings into a text that we can visit and re-visit, at will, navigating and re-navigating the existential significance of Celan’s orientation to a harsh but nevertheless creatively potential world. Celan was the progenitor of an increasingly engaging and challenging oeuvre, of which academics, commentators and poets alike, never seem to tire – we progressively analyse the minutiae of our everyday experiences but at a speed that ultimately skims over the detail and ends up with a superficial, bland synopsis. Let Celan’s writings rescue us from such banality. Let Jean Daive’s memoirs give us the kick-start and the enthusiasm to delve in there.
Note:
[1] Beda Allemann & Stefan Reichert [Eds.], Gesammelte Werke, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt, 1983. Volume 3, page 197.
_____
Roy Exley is a freelance art critic and writer based in London.
_____
RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture, http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1938-3592, Volume Three (2009): Immanence/ Imminence
_____
Review of:
Under the Dome: Walks with Paul Celan
by Jean Daive
trans. Rosmarie Waldrop
ISBN-13: 978-1-886224-97-1
Jean Daive offers an extended series of temporally disjointed ‘Aides Memoires’, emulating, perhaps, the faulty, and often random, workings of memory and the consequently flawed nature of recollection. This absorbing text is very much poetic prose, rather than prose-poetry. These disjunctions, which often give it a halting rhythm, are only one of the layers in this work that keep the reader on his or her toes. Never quite sure whether or not Celan is dead or alive as we read Daive’s aphorisms and reflections on life in Paris around his friendship with Celan, the presence of Celan nevertheless carries the same weight, whether the recollections are pre- or post-suicide. Celan’s work, as an extension of the man seemingly transcends the bounds of mortality.
There are very poignant and moving passages which relay the depth of Daive’s grief at the loss of Celan, for instance, while he was still missing after his yet undiscovered suicide, his wife, Gisele told Daive:
“Paul left his watch on his night table. Paul is dead.
Ah? Why?
Paul always kept his watch on his wrist. He told me: the day I take of my watch, I’ll have decided to die.”
This struck Daive like a thunderbolt.
Daive tells us that Celan wrote, “Eternity is grey”. All colour washed from his life by the harsh and abrasive nature of destiny. The noose of melancholia seems to tighten as the writings progress. Davie describes how, “In a café, Paul Celan goes through his identity with me, in a neutral, toneless voice, the acoustic equivalent of an automat.”
No colour, no tone, the only relief silence. Davie notes how ‘He weighs his words carefully. Every moment he evaluates the word. I should add: every moment he evaluates silence.’ Something of John Cage’s supercharged modernism is in evidence here. Without those silences, the words would stumble into that meaninglessness from which Celan is fleeing. His writing of poetry was a purging process, an attempt to exorcise the demons that tormented him. Writing was also an escape - as it often is - as he tried to evade the memories of loss. He finally made good his escape by way of the Seine – plunging, through its sparkling embrace, on through into its abyss below – its grey eternity.
Daive tells us that Celan is thought to have jumped off the Pont Mirabeau, as this is the bridge named in several of his poems – his body was found several days later in the sluices further down the river – his point of entry into the Seine remains uncertain. His enigma was perpetuated – no suicide note, the site of his death unknown, no signs, traces of, or witnesses to, the event.
It is somewhat distressing to read of the last days of such a great writer. It was his bitter experiences, his grievous losses through the holocaust, that provided the fuel for the engine that drove his poetry, but to finally discover that it was this very same engine fuelled by this same anguish that drove him down the final slippery slope to suicide is ultimately a saddening realisation.
The reader gets the feeling from Daive’s words that Celan never really allowed anybody to get too close to him – it is obvious, however, that he felt a certain empathy with Daive as a fellow writer. Nevertheless, ultimately, Celan was, and remains, an enigma, he lived a peripheral, bohemian existence in Paris, while, incongruously, dressing like the bourgeoisie. Daive describes him, in one passage, as wearing ‘an impeccable gray-black suit. White shirt, tie. Heavy walking shoes’, and in another, sporting ‘his ironed handkerchief: white square, perfect square, square without fold’. To contrast with this image, Daive later describes his place as ‘a barely furnished apartment (there’s only the table and a few chairs)’ - to retain the ambience of enigma, one has to maintain a distance from mainstream life, refuse to adopt any of its stereotypes, Celan, it appears, carried this out with aplomb.
As the text shunts backwards and forwards through his memories of Celan, Daive maintains the reputation of Paris as a place dominated by the seasons and conveys a strong sense of Celan himself being influenced by the seasons there. These seasons wink in and out of the text blinking like a strobe on only a marginally longer rhythm than day and night, an existential dizziness lies in wait here for the reader who is off guard, this can sometimes, also, be a source of frustration.
Tantalising might be the most appropriate adjective to use in connection with Under the Dome. We are offered lots of tasty little insights and intimacies into this friendship between Daive and Celan, malleable, and often embellished, recollections of fleeting moments and events that gather their own momentum as their interplay intensifies from page to page. We get to know Celan as a recurring figure in a restlessly shifting crowd, but this figure is more like a ghost unable to move forward from the epistemological trauma that keeps it earthbound.
A German speaker in Paris, Celan never really adjusts, we sense that his smart impeccable dress is a sort of armour to protect him from further dissipation - you get the feeling that he is grimly holding onto a sense of self that is continuously threatened with erasure by the recurring trauma of his tragic personal history.
Daive writes:
“After a long silence punctured with noise, he continues:
‘The world is of glass.
And disappearance is within us.’”
The fragility of existence can only be protected by a perpetual vigilance.
This vigilance is reinforced in the words of many of Celan’s poems.
As a German writer who was, through necessity, obliged to use that language of those who were the perpetrators of his parents deaths was an incongruity that continued to haunt him and was the basis of many conversations with Daive. Their regular walks ‘under the dome’ of chestnut leaves, as they criss-crossed Paris set the scene for many of their most fruitful conversations and provided the opportunity for Daive to try and plumb Celan’s hidden depths – a quest that did not always meet with success, he writes, “There is a symptom of Paul’s that I would like to analyze, that of avoidance.”
Daive seems genuinely compassionate and concerned for Celan while, at the same time, being restrained both by a sense of awe and a sense of deference. This awe sometimes colours Daive’s words to the extent that they read like the notes of a stalker watching his quarry’s every move and watching every nuance of every move.
In his 1960 ‘Meridian’ address, Celan wrote:
“Poetry today ….. exhibits an unmistakeably strong tendency towards silence.” [1]
This statement seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy that filters into Celan’s life itself.
Daive picks up on this phenomenon quite frequently in his negotiations with Celan and his work.
But maybe this silence is also an antidote to his frequent bouts of dementia that his wife Gisele reports to Daive, who subsequently visits Celan in hospital during one of these episodes of dementia, during this visit silence is not given a chance by Celan’s constant torrent of words, leaving Daive feeling mentally exhausted.
Some of the clues Daive provides us with are vital to that picture we are able to build up of Celan’s last years in Paris, others are merely dressing to decorate and enliven our passage through this text. Each reader will get a different message, but only the most discerning will decipher the truths of Celan’s last years. I love Celan’s writings but, personally, I struggled here, through these writings, to warm to him as an individual.
There is balancing act being performed here, that between this work as a document and this as a work of art, as an expression of Daive’s creative and rich imagination and as a documentary of a brief friendship. It is a fascinating read for followers of Celan, but one which feels a bit like a starter with only tempting hints of what the main course might be.
It is difficult, but maybe not necessary, to separate the man from his poetry. He became his poetry and now his poetry has become him. Paul Celan may well have ceased to be, but his poetry lives on and maybe even transcends the man. Like an hourglass, he and his work was filtered through a narrow defile, only to be diffused and transmitted into an amazingly recipient and grateful literary world beyond, a world that seemed, serendipitously, to be waiting for such a significant input.
This is modernist alchemy, from the base materials of banal everyday experiences, shared with a unique individuality, Daive has translated and distilled the spiritual power of Celan’s thoughts and writings into a text that we can visit and re-visit, at will, navigating and re-navigating the existential significance of Celan’s orientation to a harsh but nevertheless creatively potential world. Celan was the progenitor of an increasingly engaging and challenging oeuvre, of which academics, commentators and poets alike, never seem to tire – we progressively analyse the minutiae of our everyday experiences but at a speed that ultimately skims over the detail and ends up with a superficial, bland synopsis. Let Celan’s writings rescue us from such banality. Let Jean Daive’s memoirs give us the kick-start and the enthusiasm to delve in there.
Note:
[1] Beda Allemann & Stefan Reichert [Eds.], Gesammelte Werke, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt, 1983. Volume 3, page 197.
_____
Roy Exley is a freelance art critic and writer based in London.
_____
RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture, http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1938-3592, Volume Three (2009): Immanence/ Imminence
_____
Crag Hill, review: Gizzi’s "New Depths"
Crag Hill
Poetry of Many Movements: Michael Gizzi’s “New Depths of Deadpan”
Review of:
New Depths of Deadpan
by Michael Gizzi
Burning Deck, 2009
ISBN-13: 978-1-886224-96-4
Michael Gizzi’s New Depths of Deadpan engenders more possible readings than most contemporary books of poetry. These poems gather strength from the new sentence, unfold in Cubist simultaneity, as bursts of fractured flash fictions, with many poems wearing their poetics on their sleeves. It is fitting that New Depths of Deadpan was published by Burning Deck Press, the venerable, eclectic press whose goal is not to bring out poetry by one movement, one coterie of poets, but to publish an array of poetries from the United States and Europe.
Much has been written on Ron Silliman’s concept of the new sentence, so I will only mention three characteristics: sentences are constructed for increased polysemy, syllogistic movement within the poem is minimized, and this suppression of syllogistic movement maintains the reader’s attention at the sentence level or below. Silliman positions William Carlos Williams’ Kora in Hell as an early example of the new sentence. His own Tjanting and Ketjak, Bob Perleman’s Primer, Barret Watten’s Progress are other books exploiting these poetics. Today, Rae Armantrout’s and Michael Gizzi’s work is steeped in such practices, proving their continued viability.
In New Depths of Deadpan, “Irony vs. Reality” exemplifies the new sentence. “Life, as if you didn’t know, is an open book,” the poem opens. This cliché, somewhat allayed by the aside, “as if you didn’t know,” is tossed into chaos by the second line: “Eggs possibly heavy at times.” Do those eggs suggest menstruation, a tenuous connection to the life in the first line? Or is it some kind of surreal weather prediction? Instead of rain, eggs will possibly be heavy at times during this evening’s commute. If “life” is the anchor of the poem, something the reader might hold on to as he/she negotiates the subsequent lines, then the third line may hookup with it: “Car crashes remain the leading cause of information.” Car accidents are a fact of modern life; they provide information in the forms of obituaries and accident reports, filling in the open book of the first line. And maybe the accidents were caused by the rain of eggs. The next line, “Maybe your son is a physician, I’ve no idea how,” loosely links with the previous line, physicians tending the victims of car crashes, but the next clause disrupts that syllogism. I indeed have no idea how the son has become a physician, nor can I ever be certain how this idea connects with the other ideas this poem generates. The next line, “The imperial worm turns,” scatters all previous lines to the wind. Echoing the soap opera “As the World Turns,” is the imperial worm the hegemony of meaning in the rich loam of reading? If so, what is reading turning toward? I’ll let you read the rest of the poem on your own. Suffice it to say, my reading swims in the continual present, trying to hold on to the elusive rafts of these sentences.
Many poems are built of twisting Cubist surfaces, Gizzi’s strategy to defeat Medusa–don’t look directly at the object, at the subject. Each line of the title poem displays many facets, producing different views of themselves simultaneously:
New Depths of Deadpan
Mane thickness is a response to climate control.
Your therapist, an empiricist, sends you a horseshoe magnet.
A friend of the family offers his duck blind.
Description ends at death.
A robotic realm of light bears this out:
tears don’t fall in outer space.
Delivered in classic deadpan, devoid of expression, the first line could refer to man, woman, or animal whose hair or fur length is adjusted to the climate, i.e. a woman who keeps her hair cropped short in a humid climate or a Siberian husky growing fur in the fall to prepare for winter only to shed it in summer. If my therapist is an empiricist, grounding her practice in scientific research, why did she just send me a horseshoe magnet, a symbol of good luck? Is this, too, a response to climate control or lack thereof? Following that shifting surface, the next line offers another solution to my unlucky ennui, a day of duck hunting, security in camouflage I cannot create myself. Yet that friend may be offering me his duck blind not to hunt, but so I can hide from all those caterwauling quacks in my world. I can hunker down to absent myself. The next line flips me onto another slippery edge entirely. What description ends at death? Whose death? The death of description? Of dying? Is the next surface, robotic light, the ethereal tunnel of light at the end of life, if I am even still in the poem, subject blurred, or am I transfixed in a parking lot scorched by towering light fixtures that blaze on automatically at dusk and flick off at dawn? Or am I drifting away from Hal, jettisoned in space by my guidance computer? How did I get sharp Picasso tears stuck to my cheeks in zero gravity? Each sentence of this prose poem adds to the preceding (receding) and approaching (encroaching) lines, to each reflection/deflection. Together, they create content that resists unification.
Many poems can be read as fractured flash fictions. “To A Pixie” begins with a character, Uncle, exhibiting a painting entitled “The Port of Missing Men,” which draws an unusual reaction: “Someone/aims an aqueduct his way.” If the aqueduct even has any water coursing through it, this could be the classic hose the loser off the stage routine. In actuality, the aqueduct may be dry, “the bounding main,” the sea, “stuffed under his/mattress.” Uncle has either shrunk, dehydrated, or his tall peaked hat has grown, the brim of which “seems to be everywhere/at once.” One wonders whether these lines refer to the content within the painting or in the surrounding exhibition space, or whether the setting changes at every turn. Then the narrative leaps: “Abundance//gives the air a blank stare.” Abundance of? Enough of something so the setting now has a living blankness, a passive-aggressive stare. Abundance, whatever it is, becomes the main character, acting on the scene to disappear Uncle. Looking up, one sees an archangel striding “with a harvest hook, its blade/toothmarked by stars.” Who is this archangel gleaning stars? What the hell just happened? The narrative tells us parenthetically that it occurred while we napped. But how did those stars end up “burning in an alien jam jar”? The archangel’s appearance constitutes the climax of this flash fiction. We must make our own resolution. Once we wake from our indeterminate nap, we will decide what to do with the burning jam jar. Spread it on our morning toast? Install it bedside to guard our future naps? Whatever we do, are we then complicit with the archangel hooking stars out of sky?
Lastly, the poems abound with declarations of their poetics. For example, words have been knocked off their pedestal, language no longer a precise map: “one can’t adventure with images anymore. The inner pictorial/person is pushed aside” (15). The images foisted upon us during reading, mimesis, no longer have direct representations. Or, as the title of one poem declares, “Only You Know What This Means,” meaning not absolute, dependent on the mindset/s of the reader. The first line of that poem shows the poet nudging the reader toward meaning: “I’ll tell you about it, what each syllable says,/Doors opened.” Now the reader, suspending disbelief or judgment, must enter even if he doesn’t know what awaits him within the poem. Many other poems gesture toward their poetics, exposing the creator behind the curtain, theory practiced out in the open.
No matter what approach taken in reading these poems, everyone must appreciate Gizzi’s ear. He can pile up assonance and alliteration–as in “Sap becomes shellac” (18), and in “The father in exile stripped of his sundial borrows the equator for a belt” (19), in ways that stop readers in their tracks to savor sentences for the quality of their sound before sense is pursued.
Though the book seems to lose its intensity in the last fifteen pages– sentences lose their ambidexterity, sound slackens, the poems do not sustain their spontaneous simultaneity. Yet if you read only one Michael Gizzi book in your reading lifetime, make it New Depths of Deadpan. This book embodies many of the poetic impulses of the last twenty-five years. That, my dear reading friend, is worth the price of admission.
_____
Crag Hill until recently edited SCORE, one of the few American journals dedicated exclusively to concrete/visual poetry. In the last three decades his work has appeared in over 100 journals and anthologies, including many available on-line. His creative and critical works in-progress can be found at http://scorecard.typepad.com.
_____
RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture, http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1938-3592, Volume Three (2009): Immanence/ Imminence
_____
Poetry of Many Movements: Michael Gizzi’s “New Depths of Deadpan”
Review of:
New Depths of Deadpan
by Michael Gizzi
Burning Deck, 2009
ISBN-13: 978-1-886224-96-4
Michael Gizzi’s New Depths of Deadpan engenders more possible readings than most contemporary books of poetry. These poems gather strength from the new sentence, unfold in Cubist simultaneity, as bursts of fractured flash fictions, with many poems wearing their poetics on their sleeves. It is fitting that New Depths of Deadpan was published by Burning Deck Press, the venerable, eclectic press whose goal is not to bring out poetry by one movement, one coterie of poets, but to publish an array of poetries from the United States and Europe.
Much has been written on Ron Silliman’s concept of the new sentence, so I will only mention three characteristics: sentences are constructed for increased polysemy, syllogistic movement within the poem is minimized, and this suppression of syllogistic movement maintains the reader’s attention at the sentence level or below. Silliman positions William Carlos Williams’ Kora in Hell as an early example of the new sentence. His own Tjanting and Ketjak, Bob Perleman’s Primer, Barret Watten’s Progress are other books exploiting these poetics. Today, Rae Armantrout’s and Michael Gizzi’s work is steeped in such practices, proving their continued viability.
In New Depths of Deadpan, “Irony vs. Reality” exemplifies the new sentence. “Life, as if you didn’t know, is an open book,” the poem opens. This cliché, somewhat allayed by the aside, “as if you didn’t know,” is tossed into chaos by the second line: “Eggs possibly heavy at times.” Do those eggs suggest menstruation, a tenuous connection to the life in the first line? Or is it some kind of surreal weather prediction? Instead of rain, eggs will possibly be heavy at times during this evening’s commute. If “life” is the anchor of the poem, something the reader might hold on to as he/she negotiates the subsequent lines, then the third line may hookup with it: “Car crashes remain the leading cause of information.” Car accidents are a fact of modern life; they provide information in the forms of obituaries and accident reports, filling in the open book of the first line. And maybe the accidents were caused by the rain of eggs. The next line, “Maybe your son is a physician, I’ve no idea how,” loosely links with the previous line, physicians tending the victims of car crashes, but the next clause disrupts that syllogism. I indeed have no idea how the son has become a physician, nor can I ever be certain how this idea connects with the other ideas this poem generates. The next line, “The imperial worm turns,” scatters all previous lines to the wind. Echoing the soap opera “As the World Turns,” is the imperial worm the hegemony of meaning in the rich loam of reading? If so, what is reading turning toward? I’ll let you read the rest of the poem on your own. Suffice it to say, my reading swims in the continual present, trying to hold on to the elusive rafts of these sentences.
Many poems are built of twisting Cubist surfaces, Gizzi’s strategy to defeat Medusa–don’t look directly at the object, at the subject. Each line of the title poem displays many facets, producing different views of themselves simultaneously:
New Depths of Deadpan
Mane thickness is a response to climate control.
Your therapist, an empiricist, sends you a horseshoe magnet.
A friend of the family offers his duck blind.
Description ends at death.
A robotic realm of light bears this out:
tears don’t fall in outer space.
Delivered in classic deadpan, devoid of expression, the first line could refer to man, woman, or animal whose hair or fur length is adjusted to the climate, i.e. a woman who keeps her hair cropped short in a humid climate or a Siberian husky growing fur in the fall to prepare for winter only to shed it in summer. If my therapist is an empiricist, grounding her practice in scientific research, why did she just send me a horseshoe magnet, a symbol of good luck? Is this, too, a response to climate control or lack thereof? Following that shifting surface, the next line offers another solution to my unlucky ennui, a day of duck hunting, security in camouflage I cannot create myself. Yet that friend may be offering me his duck blind not to hunt, but so I can hide from all those caterwauling quacks in my world. I can hunker down to absent myself. The next line flips me onto another slippery edge entirely. What description ends at death? Whose death? The death of description? Of dying? Is the next surface, robotic light, the ethereal tunnel of light at the end of life, if I am even still in the poem, subject blurred, or am I transfixed in a parking lot scorched by towering light fixtures that blaze on automatically at dusk and flick off at dawn? Or am I drifting away from Hal, jettisoned in space by my guidance computer? How did I get sharp Picasso tears stuck to my cheeks in zero gravity? Each sentence of this prose poem adds to the preceding (receding) and approaching (encroaching) lines, to each reflection/deflection. Together, they create content that resists unification.
Many poems can be read as fractured flash fictions. “To A Pixie” begins with a character, Uncle, exhibiting a painting entitled “The Port of Missing Men,” which draws an unusual reaction: “Someone/aims an aqueduct his way.” If the aqueduct even has any water coursing through it, this could be the classic hose the loser off the stage routine. In actuality, the aqueduct may be dry, “the bounding main,” the sea, “stuffed under his/mattress.” Uncle has either shrunk, dehydrated, or his tall peaked hat has grown, the brim of which “seems to be everywhere/at once.” One wonders whether these lines refer to the content within the painting or in the surrounding exhibition space, or whether the setting changes at every turn. Then the narrative leaps: “Abundance//gives the air a blank stare.” Abundance of? Enough of something so the setting now has a living blankness, a passive-aggressive stare. Abundance, whatever it is, becomes the main character, acting on the scene to disappear Uncle. Looking up, one sees an archangel striding “with a harvest hook, its blade/toothmarked by stars.” Who is this archangel gleaning stars? What the hell just happened? The narrative tells us parenthetically that it occurred while we napped. But how did those stars end up “burning in an alien jam jar”? The archangel’s appearance constitutes the climax of this flash fiction. We must make our own resolution. Once we wake from our indeterminate nap, we will decide what to do with the burning jam jar. Spread it on our morning toast? Install it bedside to guard our future naps? Whatever we do, are we then complicit with the archangel hooking stars out of sky?
Lastly, the poems abound with declarations of their poetics. For example, words have been knocked off their pedestal, language no longer a precise map: “one can’t adventure with images anymore. The inner pictorial/person is pushed aside” (15). The images foisted upon us during reading, mimesis, no longer have direct representations. Or, as the title of one poem declares, “Only You Know What This Means,” meaning not absolute, dependent on the mindset/s of the reader. The first line of that poem shows the poet nudging the reader toward meaning: “I’ll tell you about it, what each syllable says,/Doors opened.” Now the reader, suspending disbelief or judgment, must enter even if he doesn’t know what awaits him within the poem. Many other poems gesture toward their poetics, exposing the creator behind the curtain, theory practiced out in the open.
No matter what approach taken in reading these poems, everyone must appreciate Gizzi’s ear. He can pile up assonance and alliteration–as in “Sap becomes shellac” (18), and in “The father in exile stripped of his sundial borrows the equator for a belt” (19), in ways that stop readers in their tracks to savor sentences for the quality of their sound before sense is pursued.
Though the book seems to lose its intensity in the last fifteen pages– sentences lose their ambidexterity, sound slackens, the poems do not sustain their spontaneous simultaneity. Yet if you read only one Michael Gizzi book in your reading lifetime, make it New Depths of Deadpan. This book embodies many of the poetic impulses of the last twenty-five years. That, my dear reading friend, is worth the price of admission.
_____
Crag Hill until recently edited SCORE, one of the few American journals dedicated exclusively to concrete/visual poetry. In the last three decades his work has appeared in over 100 journals and anthologies, including many available on-line. His creative and critical works in-progress can be found at http://scorecard.typepad.com.
_____
RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture, http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1938-3592, Volume Three (2009): Immanence/ Imminence
_____
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Susan Scarlata, review: Nakayasu's "Hurry Home"
Susan Scarlata
Review of:
Hurry Home Honey
by Sawako Nakayasu
Burning Deck, 2009
ISBN-13: 978-1-886224-98-8
In Sawako Nakayasu’s newest collection of poems there are balconies and there is hockey, there is heat (the word not the substance), and there is love and at times all four meet up. It is gratifying to have hockey (pucks, zamboni’s and all) appear in poetry –sports rarely seem to make entrance in to current poetic fields. Nakayasu starts this collection, which she subtitles Love Poems, with a series of balcony poems, forcing readers to think deeply about just what a balcony is can and might be: a slit of outside-ness; an urban place of escape. Considering balconies my mind always recalls this set of buildings in this certain part of Denver, likely erected in the 60s or 70s that seem to pay tribute to the architectural achievements of communist-block Russia. The balconies on these buildings make substantial contributions to making them uninviting. Each building’s balconies are ugly in their own private way, but all reinforce a feeling of being closed in, which is in effect quite an integral part of balconies, and also, when compared to the feeling of other spectator sports, of hockey. Hurry Home Honey continually moves toward, inspects and inhabits these spaces that people use to get away from one another while remaining wholly surrounded by people. The balcony (as the hockey rink) is just that –the space used to escape to an “outside” without going anywhere at all. This feeling of enclosure runs throughout Nakayasu’s collection.
In the poem Personal Balcony we are given a bit more direction concerning the specific relationships to hockey and balconies than in some of the other poems. The “you” in this poem is “some sort of high-traffic balcony,” while the “I” is “at a hockey game.” This interplay of the balcony during a party with people in and out/on and off is later referred to when the “I” inserts itself in to the hockey game it had just been watching. In running out to chase the puck the “I” forgets “that you are too crowded right now.” This becomes a locus for these poems in direct reference to the “high-traffic balcony,” but more broadly to relationships in general where one has to know when exactly one can reach their other, how to track, trace, feel for the times when that other is not “too crowded.” Also pertinent in this poem is that the “I” cheers for “the forces of time and memory,” making hockey itself (and the balcony too?) more a stage than something to focus all one’s energy on watching or being in or on.
Raised in a city where sports have long been the most constant currency, I have spent much time watching sporting events; at the age of fifteen I had the inkling of a feeling that I was getting some of my best thinking done at sporting events surrounded by thousands of other people. Sporting events are an easy thing to participate in as a spectator particularly when compared with most other types of social endeavors –no one expects you to talk, and lack of response can be seen as reservation instead of outright rudeness. Considering Nakayasu’s Hockey Love Letters, at base she asks us to wonder would (are?) relationships lived as sporting events easy or the worst type imaginable? This is perhaps what Aaron Kunin is getting at with his blurb of the book: “A weird rewriting of negative capability?” For throughout Hurry Home Honey Nakayasu tangibly holds highly contradictory actions, things, emotions, and ideas in mind and on the page at once. My quality thinking done at Steelers games is an element of what Nakayasu intends through this text; the descriptions of her “I” and “You” exist consistently hemmed in by layers of other people. This view of relationships, a continual joining, separating and then finding one another again (or sometimes not) is threaded throughout Hurry Home Honey. In a long sequence that resounds with varied uses of the word balcony Nakayasu writes “getting used to saying it our our balcony.” As in this quote, at times the relationships hinted at in these love poems are intimate, but other passages demonstrate the ridiculous-ness of the “rules of play” people abide by in more formal relationships. Ice Event: for 14 performers and 1 audience member is prime example of this more formal work or acquaintance type of relationship. In this poem, made up largely of directives and cues has one of the performers inside the hockey puck trying to manipulate the other players. This event was apparently actually staged in San Diego as part of the show, Tending the Keep. I hope IT (the person inside the puck) was either a scrapper or generously compensated –as an aside how did they shrink this person down to puck-size?
In Hurry Home Honey the enclosure even in the title (borrowed from clichéd relationships the world over) of this book speaks to the falseness that can exist in facades of “domestic bliss.” The title poem is an apt example with its synchronous list of prose poems. It is semi-narrative; events seemingly lead to other events, but then that too is a ruse, as it all (a best selling novel entitled Hurry Home Honey and T-Shirts with title branded on them!) leads only to “A man reads the writing on the shirt, and looks at his watch.” In its meta-ness Nakayasu’s book of poems is the antidote to this novel written by a woman whose mate walked out on her one day with no explanation. This novel does not exist, and so will not be on the front tables of Barnes and Nobles the world over. Nakayasu’s Hurry Home Honey is for all the honeys that defer their hurrying home.
_____
Susan Scarlata’s work has appeared in Coconut, Conduit, Fence, Parcel, Sous Rature and various other magazines. She recently completed her PhD at the University of Denver, and she holds an MFA from Brown University. Susan is the Editor of Lost Roads Publishers, and lives in Wyoming.
_____
RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture, http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1938-3592, Volume Three (2009): Immanence/ Imminence
Review of:
Hurry Home Honey
by Sawako Nakayasu
Burning Deck, 2009
ISBN-13: 978-1-886224-98-8
In Sawako Nakayasu’s newest collection of poems there are balconies and there is hockey, there is heat (the word not the substance), and there is love and at times all four meet up. It is gratifying to have hockey (pucks, zamboni’s and all) appear in poetry –sports rarely seem to make entrance in to current poetic fields. Nakayasu starts this collection, which she subtitles Love Poems, with a series of balcony poems, forcing readers to think deeply about just what a balcony is can and might be: a slit of outside-ness; an urban place of escape. Considering balconies my mind always recalls this set of buildings in this certain part of Denver, likely erected in the 60s or 70s that seem to pay tribute to the architectural achievements of communist-block Russia. The balconies on these buildings make substantial contributions to making them uninviting. Each building’s balconies are ugly in their own private way, but all reinforce a feeling of being closed in, which is in effect quite an integral part of balconies, and also, when compared to the feeling of other spectator sports, of hockey. Hurry Home Honey continually moves toward, inspects and inhabits these spaces that people use to get away from one another while remaining wholly surrounded by people. The balcony (as the hockey rink) is just that –the space used to escape to an “outside” without going anywhere at all. This feeling of enclosure runs throughout Nakayasu’s collection.
In the poem Personal Balcony we are given a bit more direction concerning the specific relationships to hockey and balconies than in some of the other poems. The “you” in this poem is “some sort of high-traffic balcony,” while the “I” is “at a hockey game.” This interplay of the balcony during a party with people in and out/on and off is later referred to when the “I” inserts itself in to the hockey game it had just been watching. In running out to chase the puck the “I” forgets “that you are too crowded right now.” This becomes a locus for these poems in direct reference to the “high-traffic balcony,” but more broadly to relationships in general where one has to know when exactly one can reach their other, how to track, trace, feel for the times when that other is not “too crowded.” Also pertinent in this poem is that the “I” cheers for “the forces of time and memory,” making hockey itself (and the balcony too?) more a stage than something to focus all one’s energy on watching or being in or on.
Raised in a city where sports have long been the most constant currency, I have spent much time watching sporting events; at the age of fifteen I had the inkling of a feeling that I was getting some of my best thinking done at sporting events surrounded by thousands of other people. Sporting events are an easy thing to participate in as a spectator particularly when compared with most other types of social endeavors –no one expects you to talk, and lack of response can be seen as reservation instead of outright rudeness. Considering Nakayasu’s Hockey Love Letters, at base she asks us to wonder would (are?) relationships lived as sporting events easy or the worst type imaginable? This is perhaps what Aaron Kunin is getting at with his blurb of the book: “A weird rewriting of negative capability?” For throughout Hurry Home Honey Nakayasu tangibly holds highly contradictory actions, things, emotions, and ideas in mind and on the page at once. My quality thinking done at Steelers games is an element of what Nakayasu intends through this text; the descriptions of her “I” and “You” exist consistently hemmed in by layers of other people. This view of relationships, a continual joining, separating and then finding one another again (or sometimes not) is threaded throughout Hurry Home Honey. In a long sequence that resounds with varied uses of the word balcony Nakayasu writes “getting used to saying it our our balcony.” As in this quote, at times the relationships hinted at in these love poems are intimate, but other passages demonstrate the ridiculous-ness of the “rules of play” people abide by in more formal relationships. Ice Event: for 14 performers and 1 audience member is prime example of this more formal work or acquaintance type of relationship. In this poem, made up largely of directives and cues has one of the performers inside the hockey puck trying to manipulate the other players. This event was apparently actually staged in San Diego as part of the show, Tending the Keep. I hope IT (the person inside the puck) was either a scrapper or generously compensated –as an aside how did they shrink this person down to puck-size?
In Hurry Home Honey the enclosure even in the title (borrowed from clichéd relationships the world over) of this book speaks to the falseness that can exist in facades of “domestic bliss.” The title poem is an apt example with its synchronous list of prose poems. It is semi-narrative; events seemingly lead to other events, but then that too is a ruse, as it all (a best selling novel entitled Hurry Home Honey and T-Shirts with title branded on them!) leads only to “A man reads the writing on the shirt, and looks at his watch.” In its meta-ness Nakayasu’s book of poems is the antidote to this novel written by a woman whose mate walked out on her one day with no explanation. This novel does not exist, and so will not be on the front tables of Barnes and Nobles the world over. Nakayasu’s Hurry Home Honey is for all the honeys that defer their hurrying home.
_____
Susan Scarlata’s work has appeared in Coconut, Conduit, Fence, Parcel, Sous Rature and various other magazines. She recently completed her PhD at the University of Denver, and she holds an MFA from Brown University. Susan is the Editor of Lost Roads Publishers, and lives in Wyoming.
_____
RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture, http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1938-3592, Volume Three (2009): Immanence/ Imminence
Jess Wigent, review: Greenfield's "Tracer"
Jess Wigent
What is discovered by the tracer is a duck-taped vacancy:
A ‘review’ of Richard Greenfield’s “Tracer”
_____
Tracer
by Richard Greenfield
Omnidawn, 2009
ISBN: 9781890650384
_____
What is discovered by the tracer is “not the fist stopped / in the mouth.”
What is not said can be traced.
A voice can be what is not said.
What is traced marks the location of the voice that is a trace: “this voice speaks only to itself, makes decisions without / considering others, / and some decisions cost.” This cost becomes the origin to be newly tracked. Because it is what survives that becomes. The sketch of what was.
(“blast shields” “patriot noise” “unapologetic power”)
A trace of something that no longer is.
This is what the trace becomes: the voice without a mouth, the landscape that is all edge and no record, the fruit without a core.
Does the tracer tracing the voice, the horizon, the event, destroy the voice, the horizon the event?
“For every new notion, the detonation of the old.”
It does.
What survives is the location of what’s missing. (A location is not an event.)
But a location can be traced. In the dips off roadsides, in the detritus to be removed from the rims of driveways, in the forms of debris on shores.
(But the trace of an event is not an event.)
The beginning of the event to be traced. What is not found. What is does not leave an outline. The origin is the absence that the outline becomes.
This could be a small amount of precipitation.
“Terror has its imitations.”
This could be the footprint of an absence.
The sketch of the event to be.
Even if absence can become, even if “the lack was the vest pocket charm,” there are omissions once were paths in voices, in bodies, to be traced.
Is the origin of the “I” an absence?
If the ancestors of the “I”, if their “bones have been the hoax of blood.” If the origin of the “I” is an absence untrue?
Can the “We” not trace itself back to the “I”?
Or “Is decay behind the answer, a lasting epiphany?”
The answer of what became the “I” is what’s been decayed, not the trace of what’s left.
The “I” become “We.”
Because the trace is the outline of an absence.
To make a frame. Capital could be needed. To mark the path of an absence.
This is why the flower “turned financial.”
This is why “The acre became an acre only in the moment of its purchase.”
This is why the “I” could become what it buys is only absence is not an outline.
Or the “I” and its body become the capital, “here to / add episode in the soil record.”
This record the outlined the absence of civilians the “I” survived. The tracer discovers their voices cannot be said. (The trace of an event is not an event.)
It is a very small quantity, a surviving mark, the body in the soil becomes a cost that becomes a trace. A signal.
The “We’ that is “Already I” is no longer. The “We” that will “turn the noon into an archived document of torture.” A signal. Of memory signals what will not survive.
A voice can be what is not said. To dissent.
It is what is not said “which demarks the elsewhere” which needs a future which “needs a signature signed out of strife” which needs what capital brings to make a not absence, to make an event, not a location, so the trace could prove what has been.
It’s no different when “loud nailholes in the drywall leak autobiography.”
The body. The soil. The “I.” The voice. The “We.” The future. “The history of the block before detonation will be abbreviated into the name of its replacement.” The body. The soil. The “I.” The voice. The “We.” The future replaced by its trace.
This is sometimes to be lamented.
Because “We can’t tell ourselves / from those whose loss is actual.”
What’s been replaced by its trace “would be absorbed into background.” Reabsorbed into absence.
This is sometimes to be lamented.
Where it is not to be is in the event that is the inbetween where the “I” becomes. The event that cannot be traced. Where the “I” becomes “nothing I do is witnessed, nothing I build lasts, I am happy.”
The becoming the event the location of the event that is the origin that cannot be outlined.
What was discovered by the tracer was.
“(one such thought turns once only)”
_____
Jess Wigent lives in Colorado where she teaches poetry to elementary school students and organizes public art/writing projects. She won the Memoir(and) Grand Prize in non-fiction and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize for her poetry. She is currently a PhD student in the Creative Writing program at the University of Denver.
_____
RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture, http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1938-3592, Volume Three (2009): Immanence/ Imminence
_____
What is discovered by the tracer is a duck-taped vacancy:
A ‘review’ of Richard Greenfield’s “Tracer”
_____
Tracer
by Richard Greenfield
Omnidawn, 2009
ISBN: 9781890650384
_____
What is discovered by the tracer is “not the fist stopped / in the mouth.”
What is not said can be traced.
A voice can be what is not said.
What is traced marks the location of the voice that is a trace: “this voice speaks only to itself, makes decisions without / considering others, / and some decisions cost.” This cost becomes the origin to be newly tracked. Because it is what survives that becomes. The sketch of what was.
(“blast shields” “patriot noise” “unapologetic power”)
A trace of something that no longer is.
This is what the trace becomes: the voice without a mouth, the landscape that is all edge and no record, the fruit without a core.
Does the tracer tracing the voice, the horizon, the event, destroy the voice, the horizon the event?
“For every new notion, the detonation of the old.”
It does.
What survives is the location of what’s missing. (A location is not an event.)
But a location can be traced. In the dips off roadsides, in the detritus to be removed from the rims of driveways, in the forms of debris on shores.
(But the trace of an event is not an event.)
The beginning of the event to be traced. What is not found. What is does not leave an outline. The origin is the absence that the outline becomes.
This could be a small amount of precipitation.
“Terror has its imitations.”
This could be the footprint of an absence.
The sketch of the event to be.
Even if absence can become, even if “the lack was the vest pocket charm,” there are omissions once were paths in voices, in bodies, to be traced.
Is the origin of the “I” an absence?
If the ancestors of the “I”, if their “bones have been the hoax of blood.” If the origin of the “I” is an absence untrue?
Can the “We” not trace itself back to the “I”?
Or “Is decay behind the answer, a lasting epiphany?”
The answer of what became the “I” is what’s been decayed, not the trace of what’s left.
The “I” become “We.”
Because the trace is the outline of an absence.
To make a frame. Capital could be needed. To mark the path of an absence.
This is why the flower “turned financial.”
This is why “The acre became an acre only in the moment of its purchase.”
This is why the “I” could become what it buys is only absence is not an outline.
Or the “I” and its body become the capital, “here to / add episode in the soil record.”
This record the outlined the absence of civilians the “I” survived. The tracer discovers their voices cannot be said. (The trace of an event is not an event.)
It is a very small quantity, a surviving mark, the body in the soil becomes a cost that becomes a trace. A signal.
The “We’ that is “Already I” is no longer. The “We” that will “turn the noon into an archived document of torture.” A signal. Of memory signals what will not survive.
A voice can be what is not said. To dissent.
It is what is not said “which demarks the elsewhere” which needs a future which “needs a signature signed out of strife” which needs what capital brings to make a not absence, to make an event, not a location, so the trace could prove what has been.
It’s no different when “loud nailholes in the drywall leak autobiography.”
The body. The soil. The “I.” The voice. The “We.” The future. “The history of the block before detonation will be abbreviated into the name of its replacement.” The body. The soil. The “I.” The voice. The “We.” The future replaced by its trace.
This is sometimes to be lamented.
Because “We can’t tell ourselves / from those whose loss is actual.”
What’s been replaced by its trace “would be absorbed into background.” Reabsorbed into absence.
This is sometimes to be lamented.
Where it is not to be is in the event that is the inbetween where the “I” becomes. The event that cannot be traced. Where the “I” becomes “nothing I do is witnessed, nothing I build lasts, I am happy.”
The becoming the event the location of the event that is the origin that cannot be outlined.
What was discovered by the tracer was.
“(one such thought turns once only)”
_____
Jess Wigent lives in Colorado where she teaches poetry to elementary school students and organizes public art/writing projects. She won the Memoir(and) Grand Prize in non-fiction and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize for her poetry. She is currently a PhD student in the Creative Writing program at the University of Denver.
_____
RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture, http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1938-3592, Volume Three (2009): Immanence/ Imminence
_____
Sunday, November 04, 2007
J’Lyn Chapman, "BlazeVOX & the Post-Avant"
J’Lyn Chapman
University of Denver
BlazeVOX and the Publishing Practices of the Post-Avant
Joseph S. Cooper. Autobiography of a Stutterer. Kenmore, NY: BlazeVOX, 2007.
Amy King. I’m the Man Who Loves You. Kenmore, NY: BlazeVOX, 2007.
Jared Schickling. Aurora. Kenmore, NY: BlazeVOX, 2007.
Geoffery Gatza, the chief editor at BlazeVOX, has clearly made the press and its online magazine a “refuge” as its subtitle claims. The press exerts an incredible energy about its writers and what it calls “post-avant poetries and fiction.” Gatza and his crew make creative work free and conveniently accessed because they want the work to be read widely and taken seriously. What distinguishes BlazeVOX is not only the ease of procuring a book—whether by purchasing it or downloading it—but that BlazeVOX proudly advertises itself as part of a literary vanguard in both the books it publishes and through the modes of their production. Most small presses use print-on-demand (POD) practices; BlazeVOX suggests that such practices are commensurate with the post-avant-garde. This review might begin to speak of the kind of attention BlazeVOX hopes to construct and the attentions it challenges by looking at three recent poetry titles from the press: Joseph S. Cooper’s Autobiography of a Stutterer, Amy King’s I’m the Man Who Loves You, and Jared Schickling’s Aurora.
While it’s not clear how BlazeVOX defines “post-avant,” we might assume something about the experimental nature of the work, that it challenges the dominance of bourgeois art through both the practice of making art and the production of it. The BlazeVOX website works as a hub for several different poetic routes, routes that offer different modes of engagement. There is the BlazeVOX “blogoscope,” which produces more immediate conversation, links, and notes from Gatza; the free PDF issues of the BlazeVOX literary magazine; and a link to the Podcast, which features one of the press’s authors reading his or her work. The press is only one facet of BlazeVOX. While BlazeVOX offers some free titles, downloaded directly from its website as PDF files in the “Mobilis in Mobili Series,” most titles are purchased, including the ones under review, through Amazon (with the exception of Schickling’s book, which can be downloaded for free or purchased as a book). Whether by going to the Amazon website or by purchasing the book directly from BlazeVOX, the book is printed and sent to the customer.
POD, used by small presses and some university and academic presses, publishes books digitally when they are ordered rather than in bulk. It is important to note that POD assumes digitization, but print-on-demand might also include books made the old-fashioned way—hand bound or letter-pressed. The value of such books lies in what amounts to their inconvenience, in their object-ness; thus, the mode of their production determines in part how the book is cared for as well as how the work within it is read. (This fetishism in the so-called age of mechanical reproduction is very much at stake in a discussion of POD and, if not for space limitations, would be taken up here). While POD is a common practice among small presses, it also seems to be a point of debate. The aspersion realizes itself in two understandable contentions: that POD books are of poorer quality; and that POD potentially gluts the small-press, experimental-poetry world and that this glut is made possible by the ease of publishing that comes with POD.
In a recent post on the DIY Poetry Publishing Cooperative blog (Sunday, July 1), Shanna Compton offers a series of rebuttals to those attitudes that view POD as a lesser form of publishing. The blog post serendipitously intersects with this review of BlazeVOX by addressing the very assumptions and values that BlazeVOX uniquely forefronts and demonstrates—that POD is a practice worth reckoning with if not only as a mode of production but also as a discourse through which to discuss art.
The method coincides with the other kinds of POD publishing—like the New York Public Library’s “Espresso Book Machine.” Beginning on July 2, 2007, library patrons have access through the internet to physical, bound and cut reproductions of the 200,000 titles in the public domain, within 6 to 10 minutes. The machine looks a little like a prototypical computer from the 50s. Couple this (soon-to-be obsolete) bulk with the book machine’s name, and it is no wonder why one angle of reproach comes from the fear that convenient publishing and the impending obsolescence of other kinds of printing produces off-handed work and consequently off-handed reading.
Compton addresses such a fear in her DIY post: not only do some mainstream presses use POD strategies, but also POD maintains a responsibility to the book and the work that mass production cannot. Compton’s reasoning is compelling. POD produces less waste, saves warehouse and shipping costs, and enables a single person or a small group of persons to make books they care about because it is cheaper from the start. Given these attributes, it makes sense that BlazeVOX would tout itself as a refuge for writers whose work demands careful attention (partly because its experimental nature garners little attention from traditional publishers) and for those who already value the ethics of small presses—such ethics being a commitment to innovative writing, to involving the writer with the production of his or her work, and to encouraging risky behavior/ideas that might otherwise have poor economic repercussions.
All three of the BlazeVOX books under consideration in this essay enact these values. These are Cooper’s and Schickling’s first books, both of which demand open spaces—generically and formally—through which to read. King’s is one of four of her titles available on BlazeVOX, suggesting that the writer and her work have found a harbor—not only a place of refuge but a space in which to cast off.
As the first page of Joseph S. Cooper’s Autobiography of a Stutterer reads, “The purpose of the text is to give readers the opportunity to experience a speech impediment firsthand.” Cooper makes a legend of diacritical marks that instruct the reader to read as if she were stuttering. What results is not only a forced failure of orality, so to speak, but also a jettisoning of the lyrical poem back to its pre-literate roots via its visual structure on the page, a visual structure made possible by type symbols that become phonemes (as when one symbol instructs the reader to repeat or prolong the sound of a word or a syllable). For example, the following lines from the “Uvula” section of the book:
"His tongue was never the same; it grows thickens d←←etaches and dies. The structure it builds is d←←←oomed to collapse. Digital manifesto. There are at least two d←←←ifferent ways of doing this. The mouth as project incarnated as utterly inexpressible."
The collection of prose poems opens with an anatomical diagram, identifying the parts of the body that produce speech, the tongue, soft and hard palates, the teeth. Each section of the book is titled after one of these features of the body, and in some ways, this very important image becomes the self of the autobiography as the voice in the poems shifts pronouns and experiential distance, bites its tongue, making the body abject, and at the same time signifies something in its resistance to totalization. Autobiography becomes not a genre, as Paul de Man writes in “Autobiography as De-Facement,” but “a figure of reading or of understanding that occurs, to some degree, in all texts.” Cooper’s poems continually deface themselves, risking, even beckoning the anonymity of the anatomical diagram. This diagram should be primary; rather, the image is pixilated and somewhat indifferently printed. If this diagram became the cover image, how would it affect the already smart and lyrical work?
Despites its rather large size, measuring 10” x 7.5”, and faint and fuzzy text, an obvious result of digitally printed pages, Amy King’s book, I’m the Man Who Loves You, features a striking cover, another kind of defacement—this time of animal and bride painted over and, thus, stripped to their bones, making anatomy a common denominator of the human and animal. The poem “Animals Elsewhere” corresponds and speaks to the threads of desire and gender that weave through. King’s first book, Antidotes for an Alibi, came out on BlazeVOX in 2005 and was a finalist for the Lambda Book Award. Her work has a commanding presence in the avant-garde poetry community because of its quality and her commitment to contribution.
The title of the book comes from a Wilco song, and, in part, follows the structure of the Wilco album titled Yankee Hotel Foxtrot in that the poems in her book are arranged in alphabetical order. The book strains under its own bulk, and because of this the poems that dissipate stanza structure by allowing the poem its buoyancy feature King’s language beautifully, as in the poem, “I Prefer Not”:
"As an absence
in the hand that holds
no chalk
swims out through the eyes
of shuttlings
sore with blank
ampleness
and cannot know
the underlined breeze,
a masterpiece,
the palm’s undusted words
such as
this careless violin,
more easily a cello,
a leaving sound
to part the presence,
nearly"
In the poems that use traditional stanzas, there are those whose syntax and lineation draw attention to the singularity and aurality of words in a way that recalls Stein. Stein is evoked specifically in the poem, “Gertrude for Girls,” but resemblances show up elsewhere. For instance, the title of the poem “One Bright Thing” recalls the experiments of Tender Buttons, and the lineation of “We tiny parasites of the relatively unseen feel / this looks like yesterday and not the day / I challenged it to be” disjoints the declarative statement. But the rest of poem is characteristically King’s in its strange images that stop just short of anecdote, actually suspending such linearity.
Finally, the poems of Jared Schickling’s Aurora are distinguished by their parenthetical titles, titles which serve as interludes as in “(war in the street) / (or, Note To Self)” or as digressions, suggesting that the poem functions beyond or without its frame, this frame of the title being ancillary rather than constitutive. In this way, the parts might be read as a long poem, split into three parts and these “titles,” lines of the poem.
There is a bird’s-eye cohesiveness to the book in that even the visceral moments of the lyric “I” or the attentiveness to others and the banality of the everyday are situated on the earth. The title suggests a kind of cosmic order. Aurora is the dawn or the Roman goddess of the dawn, a figurative gesture at keeping time. Yet, “aurora” can also be read scientifically as the luminous phenomenon of emissions of light excited by the planet’s magnetic field. Science and poetry, cosmic order and the quotidian bear a resemblance to new science; Schickling greets such a resemblance not by expounding on order or ideas of order, as such, but by focusing on the relationship of nature and civilization as in the poem “(unnumbered)” that begins, “when I passed through a populous city”:
"tongue concealed, dissolving voice, where are these shifting riverbeds / of rainbow light, human skin and their crystal industry / what is that vague reflection of glass / and above, the steel sky glinting"
The poems have an eye toward geography, place names and places, and time, the way it is marked by human behavior as in “(lunch hour)” and “(a day at the lake).”
These books read like explorations of style, like the writer’s personal experiment, and, with the exception of King’s work, like beginnings (but not necessarily like beginners). BlazeVOX seems to be the place for such beginnings; its editing offers a kind of faith in the work and what seems like a commitment to making a place for it in the world, and in this way it does not glut the poetry world so much as broaden it. (As Shanna Compton writes, if a book isn’t good, then don’t read it. POD actually makes such discrimination possible by making books cheaper and more accessible.) It is fitting, then, that BlazeVOX and its publishing methods should also be at the beginning of something, progressive in its modes of production and in its promotion of work that might otherwise go unnoticed. The progress POD will surely make as an activity and process should also be tempered and challenged by shifting considerations about the production of poetry in both the small-press community and in a larger consumerism.
_____
J’Lyn Chapman is a doctoral candidate at the University of Denver. She is working on a dissertation that investigates text and image in the novels of W.G. Sebald. Her own exploration of text and image can be read in the forthcoming issue of Conjunctions.
University of Denver
BlazeVOX and the Publishing Practices of the Post-Avant
Joseph S. Cooper. Autobiography of a Stutterer. Kenmore, NY: BlazeVOX, 2007.
Amy King. I’m the Man Who Loves You. Kenmore, NY: BlazeVOX, 2007.
Jared Schickling. Aurora. Kenmore, NY: BlazeVOX, 2007.
Geoffery Gatza, the chief editor at BlazeVOX, has clearly made the press and its online magazine a “refuge” as its subtitle claims. The press exerts an incredible energy about its writers and what it calls “post-avant poetries and fiction.” Gatza and his crew make creative work free and conveniently accessed because they want the work to be read widely and taken seriously. What distinguishes BlazeVOX is not only the ease of procuring a book—whether by purchasing it or downloading it—but that BlazeVOX proudly advertises itself as part of a literary vanguard in both the books it publishes and through the modes of their production. Most small presses use print-on-demand (POD) practices; BlazeVOX suggests that such practices are commensurate with the post-avant-garde. This review might begin to speak of the kind of attention BlazeVOX hopes to construct and the attentions it challenges by looking at three recent poetry titles from the press: Joseph S. Cooper’s Autobiography of a Stutterer, Amy King’s I’m the Man Who Loves You, and Jared Schickling’s Aurora.
While it’s not clear how BlazeVOX defines “post-avant,” we might assume something about the experimental nature of the work, that it challenges the dominance of bourgeois art through both the practice of making art and the production of it. The BlazeVOX website works as a hub for several different poetic routes, routes that offer different modes of engagement. There is the BlazeVOX “blogoscope,” which produces more immediate conversation, links, and notes from Gatza; the free PDF issues of the BlazeVOX literary magazine; and a link to the Podcast, which features one of the press’s authors reading his or her work. The press is only one facet of BlazeVOX. While BlazeVOX offers some free titles, downloaded directly from its website as PDF files in the “Mobilis in Mobili Series,” most titles are purchased, including the ones under review, through Amazon (with the exception of Schickling’s book, which can be downloaded for free or purchased as a book). Whether by going to the Amazon website or by purchasing the book directly from BlazeVOX, the book is printed and sent to the customer.
POD, used by small presses and some university and academic presses, publishes books digitally when they are ordered rather than in bulk. It is important to note that POD assumes digitization, but print-on-demand might also include books made the old-fashioned way—hand bound or letter-pressed. The value of such books lies in what amounts to their inconvenience, in their object-ness; thus, the mode of their production determines in part how the book is cared for as well as how the work within it is read. (This fetishism in the so-called age of mechanical reproduction is very much at stake in a discussion of POD and, if not for space limitations, would be taken up here). While POD is a common practice among small presses, it also seems to be a point of debate. The aspersion realizes itself in two understandable contentions: that POD books are of poorer quality; and that POD potentially gluts the small-press, experimental-poetry world and that this glut is made possible by the ease of publishing that comes with POD.
In a recent post on the DIY Poetry Publishing Cooperative blog (Sunday, July 1), Shanna Compton offers a series of rebuttals to those attitudes that view POD as a lesser form of publishing. The blog post serendipitously intersects with this review of BlazeVOX by addressing the very assumptions and values that BlazeVOX uniquely forefronts and demonstrates—that POD is a practice worth reckoning with if not only as a mode of production but also as a discourse through which to discuss art.
The method coincides with the other kinds of POD publishing—like the New York Public Library’s “Espresso Book Machine.” Beginning on July 2, 2007, library patrons have access through the internet to physical, bound and cut reproductions of the 200,000 titles in the public domain, within 6 to 10 minutes. The machine looks a little like a prototypical computer from the 50s. Couple this (soon-to-be obsolete) bulk with the book machine’s name, and it is no wonder why one angle of reproach comes from the fear that convenient publishing and the impending obsolescence of other kinds of printing produces off-handed work and consequently off-handed reading.
Compton addresses such a fear in her DIY post: not only do some mainstream presses use POD strategies, but also POD maintains a responsibility to the book and the work that mass production cannot. Compton’s reasoning is compelling. POD produces less waste, saves warehouse and shipping costs, and enables a single person or a small group of persons to make books they care about because it is cheaper from the start. Given these attributes, it makes sense that BlazeVOX would tout itself as a refuge for writers whose work demands careful attention (partly because its experimental nature garners little attention from traditional publishers) and for those who already value the ethics of small presses—such ethics being a commitment to innovative writing, to involving the writer with the production of his or her work, and to encouraging risky behavior/ideas that might otherwise have poor economic repercussions.
All three of the BlazeVOX books under consideration in this essay enact these values. These are Cooper’s and Schickling’s first books, both of which demand open spaces—generically and formally—through which to read. King’s is one of four of her titles available on BlazeVOX, suggesting that the writer and her work have found a harbor—not only a place of refuge but a space in which to cast off.
As the first page of Joseph S. Cooper’s Autobiography of a Stutterer reads, “The purpose of the text is to give readers the opportunity to experience a speech impediment firsthand.” Cooper makes a legend of diacritical marks that instruct the reader to read as if she were stuttering. What results is not only a forced failure of orality, so to speak, but also a jettisoning of the lyrical poem back to its pre-literate roots via its visual structure on the page, a visual structure made possible by type symbols that become phonemes (as when one symbol instructs the reader to repeat or prolong the sound of a word or a syllable). For example, the following lines from the “Uvula” section of the book:
"His tongue was never the same; it grows thickens d←←etaches and dies. The structure it builds is d←←←oomed to collapse. Digital manifesto. There are at least two d←←←ifferent ways of doing this. The mouth as project incarnated as utterly inexpressible."
The collection of prose poems opens with an anatomical diagram, identifying the parts of the body that produce speech, the tongue, soft and hard palates, the teeth. Each section of the book is titled after one of these features of the body, and in some ways, this very important image becomes the self of the autobiography as the voice in the poems shifts pronouns and experiential distance, bites its tongue, making the body abject, and at the same time signifies something in its resistance to totalization. Autobiography becomes not a genre, as Paul de Man writes in “Autobiography as De-Facement,” but “a figure of reading or of understanding that occurs, to some degree, in all texts.” Cooper’s poems continually deface themselves, risking, even beckoning the anonymity of the anatomical diagram. This diagram should be primary; rather, the image is pixilated and somewhat indifferently printed. If this diagram became the cover image, how would it affect the already smart and lyrical work?
Despites its rather large size, measuring 10” x 7.5”, and faint and fuzzy text, an obvious result of digitally printed pages, Amy King’s book, I’m the Man Who Loves You, features a striking cover, another kind of defacement—this time of animal and bride painted over and, thus, stripped to their bones, making anatomy a common denominator of the human and animal. The poem “Animals Elsewhere” corresponds and speaks to the threads of desire and gender that weave through. King’s first book, Antidotes for an Alibi, came out on BlazeVOX in 2005 and was a finalist for the Lambda Book Award. Her work has a commanding presence in the avant-garde poetry community because of its quality and her commitment to contribution.
The title of the book comes from a Wilco song, and, in part, follows the structure of the Wilco album titled Yankee Hotel Foxtrot in that the poems in her book are arranged in alphabetical order. The book strains under its own bulk, and because of this the poems that dissipate stanza structure by allowing the poem its buoyancy feature King’s language beautifully, as in the poem, “I Prefer Not”:
"As an absence
in the hand that holds
no chalk
swims out through the eyes
of shuttlings
sore with blank
ampleness
and cannot know
the underlined breeze,
a masterpiece,
the palm’s undusted words
such as
this careless violin,
more easily a cello,
a leaving sound
to part the presence,
nearly"
In the poems that use traditional stanzas, there are those whose syntax and lineation draw attention to the singularity and aurality of words in a way that recalls Stein. Stein is evoked specifically in the poem, “Gertrude for Girls,” but resemblances show up elsewhere. For instance, the title of the poem “One Bright Thing” recalls the experiments of Tender Buttons, and the lineation of “We tiny parasites of the relatively unseen feel / this looks like yesterday and not the day / I challenged it to be” disjoints the declarative statement. But the rest of poem is characteristically King’s in its strange images that stop just short of anecdote, actually suspending such linearity.
Finally, the poems of Jared Schickling’s Aurora are distinguished by their parenthetical titles, titles which serve as interludes as in “(war in the street) / (or, Note To Self)” or as digressions, suggesting that the poem functions beyond or without its frame, this frame of the title being ancillary rather than constitutive. In this way, the parts might be read as a long poem, split into three parts and these “titles,” lines of the poem.
There is a bird’s-eye cohesiveness to the book in that even the visceral moments of the lyric “I” or the attentiveness to others and the banality of the everyday are situated on the earth. The title suggests a kind of cosmic order. Aurora is the dawn or the Roman goddess of the dawn, a figurative gesture at keeping time. Yet, “aurora” can also be read scientifically as the luminous phenomenon of emissions of light excited by the planet’s magnetic field. Science and poetry, cosmic order and the quotidian bear a resemblance to new science; Schickling greets such a resemblance not by expounding on order or ideas of order, as such, but by focusing on the relationship of nature and civilization as in the poem “(unnumbered)” that begins, “when I passed through a populous city”:
"tongue concealed, dissolving voice, where are these shifting riverbeds / of rainbow light, human skin and their crystal industry / what is that vague reflection of glass / and above, the steel sky glinting"
The poems have an eye toward geography, place names and places, and time, the way it is marked by human behavior as in “(lunch hour)” and “(a day at the lake).”
These books read like explorations of style, like the writer’s personal experiment, and, with the exception of King’s work, like beginnings (but not necessarily like beginners). BlazeVOX seems to be the place for such beginnings; its editing offers a kind of faith in the work and what seems like a commitment to making a place for it in the world, and in this way it does not glut the poetry world so much as broaden it. (As Shanna Compton writes, if a book isn’t good, then don’t read it. POD actually makes such discrimination possible by making books cheaper and more accessible.) It is fitting, then, that BlazeVOX and its publishing methods should also be at the beginning of something, progressive in its modes of production and in its promotion of work that might otherwise go unnoticed. The progress POD will surely make as an activity and process should also be tempered and challenged by shifting considerations about the production of poetry in both the small-press community and in a larger consumerism.
_____
J’Lyn Chapman is a doctoral candidate at the University of Denver. She is working on a dissertation that investigates text and image in the novels of W.G. Sebald. Her own exploration of text and image can be read in the forthcoming issue of Conjunctions.
R.G. Evans, review: "Sweet Masses / Anxious Heart"
R.G. Evans
Cumberland County College
Sweet Masses on an Anxious Heart: Luigi Anderlini’s A Lake for the Heart
Luigi Anderlini, A Lake for the Heart. Trans. Serena Anderlini d’Onofrio. Albany: Gradiva, 2005.
American poet Stephen Dunn has remarked that no one would hand a violin to one untrained in that instrument expecting that person to play a sonata, but that the same is not true when it comes to poetry. Common wisdom indicates that anyone can write a poem. Consider politicians who have taken up the poet’s pen—one might imagine former U.S. President Jimmy Carter snatching the bow from a fiddler’s hand and attacking Prokofiev with the same misguided verve with which he penned the lamentable Always a Reckoning and Other Poems.
One approaches such politician/poets cautiously (if at all). How refreshing, then to find in the late Italian congressman and senator Luigi Anderlini’s posthumous collection of poems A Lake for the Heart / Il lago del cuori that the man behind the poems was first a poet and second a politician.
The only overt reference to politics comes in a comic moment in “Dreams” / I Sogni where the poet presents this scene in the scattershot imagery of dreams: “I climb on clouds and aerial cliffs, / to land at the Senate’s podium / where I speak with wild passion” only to find later in the poem that “My microphone / is not working: how hopeless!” (131).
Occasionally Anderlini’s poems sag under the burdens of solipsism and sentimentality, as in “My Mother / Mia madre”: “Full of sweets the long stockings at Christmas, / the subtle smells of apples around the house” (33). Other weak moments occur when Anderlini grapples with broad abstractions, as in the poems “Time and Life / Il tempo e la vita” and “Questions / Interrogativi,” which announces its rather tedious form in its title (“Is energy matter? . . . Does the universe ramble?”). And what to make of such a puzzling line as “You spoke Danish like Hamlet” (83)?
Anderlini’s real strength in these poems—his frank use of an aging man’s memory and the lovely phrasings that arise from that memory—permit much forgiveness for some of the book’s more indulgent shortcomings. Consider, for example, these four passages:
“The thread of my life thins away.” (“Smile” / “Sorriso,” p. 53)
“. . . it swells my arteries
and floods, powerful,
my body’s rubble” (“The Heart” / “Il Coure,” p. 55)
“You are paving my difficult path
to the nameless nothing.” (“Women” / “Donne,” p. 91)
“At times a cataract is but a sign
of laziness or disquiet,
the sad and barren veil of tedium
the fog that clouds every thought.
This is the cataract to be removed
and no doctor can do it
but the light one bears inside,
the flash that glimmers and doesn’t die
and still explodes within at seventy,
young and aggressive.” (“Cataract” / “La Cateratta,” p. 143)
Regret and mourning creep through these poems, but always these darker effects of age are tempered by an abiding sense of beauty, a sense that the world, whether or not the poet still inhabits it, will remain beautiful. One may see this place where light and darkness meet most clearly in this poem presented here in its entirety:
“On the Nineteenth Birthday of My Granddaughter Paola”
(“Nel Diciannovesimo Compleanno Di Mia Nipote Paola”)
“Ancient error, celestial gift.”
--Leopardi, “On the Wedding of his Sister Paolina”
"Behind me the long slime
of a snail. Very soon I will
be rolling toward the lake of oblivion.
Farewell to the light that inundates my days
to my works, to all things a sweet goodbye.
A quiet separation, only a gesture.
Still, the slime will stay, I hope.
In its humble silver
I see my children’s faces.
In the tangled stories of our kin
I see signs of my works,
of past and future years.
Then it will happen:
Paola’s tummy and breasts
will swell effortlessly
and my leaving will be more peaceful." (109)
Notice the epigraph that accompanies the poem above. Each of the poems in this volume has its own epigraph, a strategy which the poet himself explains in a note at the beginning of the text:
"The lines readers will find in each poem’s epigraph do not always refer to the poem’s content. Yet those quotations provide a fairly specific structure for my texts, which repeat the metrical structure of the quoted poem, including stanzas, lines and the position of rhymes."
It appears that Anderlini’s structural vision for his poems has been lost to some extent through the process of translation (the translator is Anderlini’s daughter, Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio). Rhyme schemes and other formal patterns evident in the Italian originals are not presented in the English translations, a translation decision which seems peculiar for such form-bound poems as “A Sonnet’s Rhymes” / “Le Rime Del Sonetto” and “Petrarchan Rhymes” / “Sestina.” Anderlini-D’Onofrio overcomes this shortcoming by presenting both Italian and English versions of each poem on facing pages. In this way the power of the poems remains intact and the original rhymes are presented for any readers who care to compare the two versions.
A Lake for the Heart ends on a note typical of the collection as a whole. In “She”/ “Lei” (written in the last year of Anderlini’s life), death is personified as a woman, a lover who comes to claim the speaker who responds to her by saying:
“'I didn’t know it would be so sweet.'
'Close your eyes and everything will be over.'
Just one little flame going out, while
six billion candles are still burning." (157)
Clearly, this poet was a lover of Life with a capital “L,” aware of its power even as his own “little flame” was extinguishing.
Luigi Anderlini presents great elegiac sadness in these poems, but Anderlini’s is a sadness tempered by the sweetness of a great love of life with its burden of memory that is also a source of delight. This sense of sweet elegy is conveyed most clearly in the collection’s long central poem titled “Women” (“Donne”) which serves as both anchor and touchstone for the book’s tone:
"You smile, hold me and breathless
you almost cry from joy. Then you
happily smack a kiss on my forehead.
I’m still looking for it among my wrinkles
for that hot kiss must still be there,
the last gift of my adolescence." (75)
Later in this same poem, Anderlini writes of another of his many lovers “Since then, your name, Albertine, has been / a sweet mass on my anxious heart” (79). A Lake for the Heart is filled with such sweet masses conveyed to us with both delight and loss from the weight of the poet’s rich and fertile heart.
_____
R.G. Evans’s poems, fiction, and reviews have appeared in journals such as Paterson Literary Review, MARGIE, Valparaiso Poetry Review, The Literary Review, The Best of Pif Magazine Off-line, and Weird Tales. Evans holds an MFA from Fairleigh Dickinson University. He teaches English at Cumberland Regional High School and Cumberland County College in southern New Jersey.
Cumberland County College
Sweet Masses on an Anxious Heart: Luigi Anderlini’s A Lake for the Heart
Luigi Anderlini, A Lake for the Heart. Trans. Serena Anderlini d’Onofrio. Albany: Gradiva, 2005.
American poet Stephen Dunn has remarked that no one would hand a violin to one untrained in that instrument expecting that person to play a sonata, but that the same is not true when it comes to poetry. Common wisdom indicates that anyone can write a poem. Consider politicians who have taken up the poet’s pen—one might imagine former U.S. President Jimmy Carter snatching the bow from a fiddler’s hand and attacking Prokofiev with the same misguided verve with which he penned the lamentable Always a Reckoning and Other Poems.
One approaches such politician/poets cautiously (if at all). How refreshing, then to find in the late Italian congressman and senator Luigi Anderlini’s posthumous collection of poems A Lake for the Heart / Il lago del cuori that the man behind the poems was first a poet and second a politician.
The only overt reference to politics comes in a comic moment in “Dreams” / I Sogni where the poet presents this scene in the scattershot imagery of dreams: “I climb on clouds and aerial cliffs, / to land at the Senate’s podium / where I speak with wild passion” only to find later in the poem that “My microphone / is not working: how hopeless!” (131).
Occasionally Anderlini’s poems sag under the burdens of solipsism and sentimentality, as in “My Mother / Mia madre”: “Full of sweets the long stockings at Christmas, / the subtle smells of apples around the house” (33). Other weak moments occur when Anderlini grapples with broad abstractions, as in the poems “Time and Life / Il tempo e la vita” and “Questions / Interrogativi,” which announces its rather tedious form in its title (“Is energy matter? . . . Does the universe ramble?”). And what to make of such a puzzling line as “You spoke Danish like Hamlet” (83)?
Anderlini’s real strength in these poems—his frank use of an aging man’s memory and the lovely phrasings that arise from that memory—permit much forgiveness for some of the book’s more indulgent shortcomings. Consider, for example, these four passages:
“The thread of my life thins away.” (“Smile” / “Sorriso,” p. 53)
“. . . it swells my arteries
and floods, powerful,
my body’s rubble” (“The Heart” / “Il Coure,” p. 55)
“You are paving my difficult path
to the nameless nothing.” (“Women” / “Donne,” p. 91)
“At times a cataract is but a sign
of laziness or disquiet,
the sad and barren veil of tedium
the fog that clouds every thought.
This is the cataract to be removed
and no doctor can do it
but the light one bears inside,
the flash that glimmers and doesn’t die
and still explodes within at seventy,
young and aggressive.” (“Cataract” / “La Cateratta,” p. 143)
Regret and mourning creep through these poems, but always these darker effects of age are tempered by an abiding sense of beauty, a sense that the world, whether or not the poet still inhabits it, will remain beautiful. One may see this place where light and darkness meet most clearly in this poem presented here in its entirety:
“On the Nineteenth Birthday of My Granddaughter Paola”
(“Nel Diciannovesimo Compleanno Di Mia Nipote Paola”)
“Ancient error, celestial gift.”
--Leopardi, “On the Wedding of his Sister Paolina”
"Behind me the long slime
of a snail. Very soon I will
be rolling toward the lake of oblivion.
Farewell to the light that inundates my days
to my works, to all things a sweet goodbye.
A quiet separation, only a gesture.
Still, the slime will stay, I hope.
In its humble silver
I see my children’s faces.
In the tangled stories of our kin
I see signs of my works,
of past and future years.
Then it will happen:
Paola’s tummy and breasts
will swell effortlessly
and my leaving will be more peaceful." (109)
Notice the epigraph that accompanies the poem above. Each of the poems in this volume has its own epigraph, a strategy which the poet himself explains in a note at the beginning of the text:
"The lines readers will find in each poem’s epigraph do not always refer to the poem’s content. Yet those quotations provide a fairly specific structure for my texts, which repeat the metrical structure of the quoted poem, including stanzas, lines and the position of rhymes."
It appears that Anderlini’s structural vision for his poems has been lost to some extent through the process of translation (the translator is Anderlini’s daughter, Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio). Rhyme schemes and other formal patterns evident in the Italian originals are not presented in the English translations, a translation decision which seems peculiar for such form-bound poems as “A Sonnet’s Rhymes” / “Le Rime Del Sonetto” and “Petrarchan Rhymes” / “Sestina.” Anderlini-D’Onofrio overcomes this shortcoming by presenting both Italian and English versions of each poem on facing pages. In this way the power of the poems remains intact and the original rhymes are presented for any readers who care to compare the two versions.
A Lake for the Heart ends on a note typical of the collection as a whole. In “She”/ “Lei” (written in the last year of Anderlini’s life), death is personified as a woman, a lover who comes to claim the speaker who responds to her by saying:
“'I didn’t know it would be so sweet.'
'Close your eyes and everything will be over.'
Just one little flame going out, while
six billion candles are still burning." (157)
Clearly, this poet was a lover of Life with a capital “L,” aware of its power even as his own “little flame” was extinguishing.
Luigi Anderlini presents great elegiac sadness in these poems, but Anderlini’s is a sadness tempered by the sweetness of a great love of life with its burden of memory that is also a source of delight. This sense of sweet elegy is conveyed most clearly in the collection’s long central poem titled “Women” (“Donne”) which serves as both anchor and touchstone for the book’s tone:
"You smile, hold me and breathless
you almost cry from joy. Then you
happily smack a kiss on my forehead.
I’m still looking for it among my wrinkles
for that hot kiss must still be there,
the last gift of my adolescence." (75)
Later in this same poem, Anderlini writes of another of his many lovers “Since then, your name, Albertine, has been / a sweet mass on my anxious heart” (79). A Lake for the Heart is filled with such sweet masses conveyed to us with both delight and loss from the weight of the poet’s rich and fertile heart.
_____
R.G. Evans’s poems, fiction, and reviews have appeared in journals such as Paterson Literary Review, MARGIE, Valparaiso Poetry Review, The Literary Review, The Best of Pif Magazine Off-line, and Weird Tales. Evans holds an MFA from Fairleigh Dickinson University. He teaches English at Cumberland Regional High School and Cumberland County College in southern New Jersey.
Tiel Lundy, review: "A Man You Could Love"
Tiel Lundy
University of Colorado, Denver
John Callahan, A Man You Could Love. Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 2007.
John Callahan’s first novel, A Man You Could Love, is nothing if not ambitious. At over four hundred and fifty pages, the novel is a compendium of the nation’s political history, racial and partisan, from the late nineteen-sixties to the infamous 2000 presidential election debacle. Callahan’s fictive reflections upon the events of the intervening years—the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and of John and Bobby Kennedy, Vietnam, Watergate, the Cold and Gulf Wars—suggest his own sense of historical belonging to our nation’s turbulent twentieth century. In many ways, Callahan is participating in the long-established American literary tradition of exploring the yoked nature of personal and national identities—think Walt Whitman, William Faulkner, or Ralph Ellison—and his book is the product of many years of ruminating upon the subject.
With meditations that are plainly heartfelt, it’s clear that A Man You Could Love satisfies for its author a mission of real personal as well as civic importance. The very earnestness of voice that makes one think Callahan is a genuinely decent and deeply moral person—indeed, a man you could quite like—is the same thing, however, that renders the work (at times) somewhat didactic. Which perhaps should come as no surprise since Callahan has spent his professional life in the role of educator and scholar. Morgan S. Odell Professor of Humanities at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon, John Callahan is best known for his contributions to African American literary scholarship, most specifically his work on Ralph Ellison. Close personal friend and executor of Ellison’s estate, Callahan finished the task that bedeviled Ellison himself for some forty years, publishing in 1999 Ellison’s unfinished novel Juneteenth. It is Ellison’s influence that is most keenly felt in A Man You Could Love; his opus Invisible Man is one of the best examples from the twentieth century of a novel’s ability to render the social, racial, and psychological complexities of modern life in America.
Like his friend and colleague, Callahan betrays a penchant for storytelling, something, he says, that can “advance a common eclectic democratic identity.” He begins In the African-American Grain, his 1988 collection of essays demonstrably influenced by William Carlos Williams, with a longish personal account of the events that shaped his political sensibilities, in particular his commitment to the Civil Rights Movement. Clearly, Callahan feels the need to explain his motivations for and authority to declaring kinship with African Americans, perhaps not unjustifiably as he is a white Irish American Catholic. With a series of anecdotes about the ways in which the histories of African Americans and Irish Americans have been linked, Callahan suggests a complicated and taut, if essential, relationship between the two ethnicities.
Race is a central theme in A Man You Could Love, and protagonist Mick Whelan, the Irish American politician from Oregon, is tied to the African American community both by chance and choice. Having parted with his girlfriend Rebecca after a romantic weekend retreat in the mountains, Mick finds himself caught in the apocalyptic eruption of a volcano. In his frantic efforts to drive back and save Rebecca, he practically runs over Jonas Fitch and his son, who, stranded and about to become the victims of the volcano’s smoke and ash, jump into the car. Commanding Mick to “turn that sorry-ass car around and drive like there’s no tomorrow,” Jonas functions as Mick’s navigator and savior. In what is the beginning of a long friendship, Whelan is made an honorary member of the Ship of Zion A.M.E. Church where Fitch serves as Deacon. Praising Whelan for having saved his life and his son’s, Fitch says that “the Lord sent a man to lift his servant Jonas out of the belly of the fire. That man is named for the archangel Michael and the whale that spouted Jonah out onto dry land.” Callahan the scholar understands the vital role of orality to African American culture, as evidenced by the novel’s use of black vernacular, call and response, the blues and gospel music. In these close relationships between black and white characters, the writer illustrates what Ellison called the “true interrelatedness of blackness and whiteness.”
Where Callahan runs into trouble, though, is in his representations of black women, who figure in the novel as exotically beautiful “sisters” but who exert no real influence beyond their physical charms—a curious problem for a book about power and influence. If African American women are excluded from the ranks of power brokers, they are not alone; women in general remain largely irrelevant in the novel. Admittedly, Callahan does draw female characters who wield a certain amount of leverage within the walls of the Capitol. But A Man You Could Love suggests that much of lawmaking remains sequestered in the smoky corners of the almost exclusively male-patroned D.C. restaurants where the real job of ruling a nation takes place over martinis and little cigars.
If anything, it is this, the novel’s emphasis on the homosocial dimension of politics that is most interesting. There is a kind of intimacy between Whelan and his friend and political strategist Gabe Bontempo, as there is among many of the novel’s male characters, an intimacy entirely absent in the male-female relationships. Whelan and Bontempo’s friendship takes on a destructive quality, though, as Bontempo, oblivious to his wife’s growing alienation as he spends countless days on the campaign trail, fails to stop the disintegration of his marriage and family. Beginning the novel with an epigraph from Invisible Man—“and could politics ever be an expression of love?”—Callahan clearly wants to explore the obsessive, demanding, even aphrodisiacal nature of politics. (He himself dabbled in politics, running a valiant but failed campaign for the Oregon House Democratic primary in 1970). By contrast, the relationships between men and women are subordinated to the political realm. In one scene recalling Rebecca’s words of encouragement for Mick, the language of politics trounces any hint of romance:
"Then . . . [you said] that if the FBI violated the constitutional rights of the Panthers or anyone else while you were in Congress, you’d introduce a bill to cut off appropriations. You knew it wouldn’t pass, but you’d keep pushing until you got the president’s attention. You said you couldn’t stop FBI harassment by yourself, but you’d try under the authority Congress had under the Constitution. I was so proud of you."
Callahan shows little interest in exploring heterosexual love—fair enough, as this is a book about politics, not marriage. In one telling passage, Bontempo, who also serves as the book’s narrator, confesses, “I could not separate [Whelan’s] story from the politics that lay ahead.” This, it seems, is both the novel’s strength and weakness, for Callahan struggles to balance story and politics, often sacrificing craft to ideology. In one of many scenes in which Whelan addresses Congress, he delivers the following speech:
"A few mornings ago, uncertain what I would say, I walked the mall—behind me, the Capitol, which Lincoln insisted go up during the Civil War as proof that the Union would not perish; ahead, the Washington Monument, ramrod straight and upstanding—like the man who was his country’s surveyor as well as its father; and in the distance, Lincoln’s Memorial, that true resting place of the American spirit. For the first time, I was struck by how the spaces in between—the grass, the paths, the reflecting pool—stand for the open space in the American mind."
These frequent rhetorical posturings may (for some readers) make the book feel too much like a civics lesson. Indeed, one begins to suspect that, like Bontempo, Callahan cannot separate his own story from the story he tells. The author could have trusted his readers to do more of their own work, to fill-in the gaps, which may have granted a more provocative indeterminacy to the book’s overall structure.
The events of the novel are tragic, as are most of the background historical moments, and yet A Man You Could Love is not a tragedy. Rather, Callahan maintains an optimism that feels strangely anachronistic in an American political scene defined in recent years by the travesties of the Bush Administration. Callahan doesn’t do irony, something that postmodern readers have come to demand. Again, though, the ideological clarity that over-determines the novel’s sense of craft and audience is the same thing that makes its author admirable, for his book is one of those “literary acts of citizenship” he speaks of, that, successful or not, demands the possibility of a better America.
_____
Tiel Lundy is Instructor of Literature and Film at the University of Colorado at Denver. She specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature and film studies.
University of Colorado, Denver
John Callahan, A Man You Could Love. Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 2007.
John Callahan’s first novel, A Man You Could Love, is nothing if not ambitious. At over four hundred and fifty pages, the novel is a compendium of the nation’s political history, racial and partisan, from the late nineteen-sixties to the infamous 2000 presidential election debacle. Callahan’s fictive reflections upon the events of the intervening years—the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and of John and Bobby Kennedy, Vietnam, Watergate, the Cold and Gulf Wars—suggest his own sense of historical belonging to our nation’s turbulent twentieth century. In many ways, Callahan is participating in the long-established American literary tradition of exploring the yoked nature of personal and national identities—think Walt Whitman, William Faulkner, or Ralph Ellison—and his book is the product of many years of ruminating upon the subject.
With meditations that are plainly heartfelt, it’s clear that A Man You Could Love satisfies for its author a mission of real personal as well as civic importance. The very earnestness of voice that makes one think Callahan is a genuinely decent and deeply moral person—indeed, a man you could quite like—is the same thing, however, that renders the work (at times) somewhat didactic. Which perhaps should come as no surprise since Callahan has spent his professional life in the role of educator and scholar. Morgan S. Odell Professor of Humanities at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon, John Callahan is best known for his contributions to African American literary scholarship, most specifically his work on Ralph Ellison. Close personal friend and executor of Ellison’s estate, Callahan finished the task that bedeviled Ellison himself for some forty years, publishing in 1999 Ellison’s unfinished novel Juneteenth. It is Ellison’s influence that is most keenly felt in A Man You Could Love; his opus Invisible Man is one of the best examples from the twentieth century of a novel’s ability to render the social, racial, and psychological complexities of modern life in America.
Like his friend and colleague, Callahan betrays a penchant for storytelling, something, he says, that can “advance a common eclectic democratic identity.” He begins In the African-American Grain, his 1988 collection of essays demonstrably influenced by William Carlos Williams, with a longish personal account of the events that shaped his political sensibilities, in particular his commitment to the Civil Rights Movement. Clearly, Callahan feels the need to explain his motivations for and authority to declaring kinship with African Americans, perhaps not unjustifiably as he is a white Irish American Catholic. With a series of anecdotes about the ways in which the histories of African Americans and Irish Americans have been linked, Callahan suggests a complicated and taut, if essential, relationship between the two ethnicities.
Race is a central theme in A Man You Could Love, and protagonist Mick Whelan, the Irish American politician from Oregon, is tied to the African American community both by chance and choice. Having parted with his girlfriend Rebecca after a romantic weekend retreat in the mountains, Mick finds himself caught in the apocalyptic eruption of a volcano. In his frantic efforts to drive back and save Rebecca, he practically runs over Jonas Fitch and his son, who, stranded and about to become the victims of the volcano’s smoke and ash, jump into the car. Commanding Mick to “turn that sorry-ass car around and drive like there’s no tomorrow,” Jonas functions as Mick’s navigator and savior. In what is the beginning of a long friendship, Whelan is made an honorary member of the Ship of Zion A.M.E. Church where Fitch serves as Deacon. Praising Whelan for having saved his life and his son’s, Fitch says that “the Lord sent a man to lift his servant Jonas out of the belly of the fire. That man is named for the archangel Michael and the whale that spouted Jonah out onto dry land.” Callahan the scholar understands the vital role of orality to African American culture, as evidenced by the novel’s use of black vernacular, call and response, the blues and gospel music. In these close relationships between black and white characters, the writer illustrates what Ellison called the “true interrelatedness of blackness and whiteness.”
Where Callahan runs into trouble, though, is in his representations of black women, who figure in the novel as exotically beautiful “sisters” but who exert no real influence beyond their physical charms—a curious problem for a book about power and influence. If African American women are excluded from the ranks of power brokers, they are not alone; women in general remain largely irrelevant in the novel. Admittedly, Callahan does draw female characters who wield a certain amount of leverage within the walls of the Capitol. But A Man You Could Love suggests that much of lawmaking remains sequestered in the smoky corners of the almost exclusively male-patroned D.C. restaurants where the real job of ruling a nation takes place over martinis and little cigars.
If anything, it is this, the novel’s emphasis on the homosocial dimension of politics that is most interesting. There is a kind of intimacy between Whelan and his friend and political strategist Gabe Bontempo, as there is among many of the novel’s male characters, an intimacy entirely absent in the male-female relationships. Whelan and Bontempo’s friendship takes on a destructive quality, though, as Bontempo, oblivious to his wife’s growing alienation as he spends countless days on the campaign trail, fails to stop the disintegration of his marriage and family. Beginning the novel with an epigraph from Invisible Man—“and could politics ever be an expression of love?”—Callahan clearly wants to explore the obsessive, demanding, even aphrodisiacal nature of politics. (He himself dabbled in politics, running a valiant but failed campaign for the Oregon House Democratic primary in 1970). By contrast, the relationships between men and women are subordinated to the political realm. In one scene recalling Rebecca’s words of encouragement for Mick, the language of politics trounces any hint of romance:
"Then . . . [you said] that if the FBI violated the constitutional rights of the Panthers or anyone else while you were in Congress, you’d introduce a bill to cut off appropriations. You knew it wouldn’t pass, but you’d keep pushing until you got the president’s attention. You said you couldn’t stop FBI harassment by yourself, but you’d try under the authority Congress had under the Constitution. I was so proud of you."
Callahan shows little interest in exploring heterosexual love—fair enough, as this is a book about politics, not marriage. In one telling passage, Bontempo, who also serves as the book’s narrator, confesses, “I could not separate [Whelan’s] story from the politics that lay ahead.” This, it seems, is both the novel’s strength and weakness, for Callahan struggles to balance story and politics, often sacrificing craft to ideology. In one of many scenes in which Whelan addresses Congress, he delivers the following speech:
"A few mornings ago, uncertain what I would say, I walked the mall—behind me, the Capitol, which Lincoln insisted go up during the Civil War as proof that the Union would not perish; ahead, the Washington Monument, ramrod straight and upstanding—like the man who was his country’s surveyor as well as its father; and in the distance, Lincoln’s Memorial, that true resting place of the American spirit. For the first time, I was struck by how the spaces in between—the grass, the paths, the reflecting pool—stand for the open space in the American mind."
These frequent rhetorical posturings may (for some readers) make the book feel too much like a civics lesson. Indeed, one begins to suspect that, like Bontempo, Callahan cannot separate his own story from the story he tells. The author could have trusted his readers to do more of their own work, to fill-in the gaps, which may have granted a more provocative indeterminacy to the book’s overall structure.
The events of the novel are tragic, as are most of the background historical moments, and yet A Man You Could Love is not a tragedy. Rather, Callahan maintains an optimism that feels strangely anachronistic in an American political scene defined in recent years by the travesties of the Bush Administration. Callahan doesn’t do irony, something that postmodern readers have come to demand. Again, though, the ideological clarity that over-determines the novel’s sense of craft and audience is the same thing that makes its author admirable, for his book is one of those “literary acts of citizenship” he speaks of, that, successful or not, demands the possibility of a better America.
_____
Tiel Lundy is Instructor of Literature and Film at the University of Colorado at Denver. She specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature and film studies.
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