The space where authorial subjectivity and issues of social consciousness collide continues to be fraught—particularly when this space occupies the experimental sector of the poetic landscape. Take two of the strongest contemporary trends, documentary poetics and Conceptual Writing, both of which occupy strong positions on this issue. Documentary poets like Mark Nowak cultivate a form of curatorial subjectivity, back-stepping the author to third-person objectivity. For example, his project Coal Mountain Elementary uses solely the language of its subject matter, mixing miner testimony, newspaper reports, and educational materials. Conceptual Writers, on the other hand, famously express disinterest in authorial subjectivity and issues of social consciousness altogether provoking, with this rejection, conversation about the topic. A deep uneasiness over the representational properties of language underlies both positions, speaking to a post-modern legacy that requires one to wonder if it is ever possible to create an ethical representation of the “other” residing at the heart of most social and political issues. Even if one doesn’t write or read in these particular doc-po/con-po veins, it would be nearly impossible not to feel the pull of this uneasiness. It is our inheritance.

Because I’m not totally satisfied by most attempts to deal with this stressed space I have been particularly taken with Bhanu Kapil’s Schizophrene (Nightboat) and Cyrus Console’s The Odicy (Omnidawn). Here we have not only strong, engaging experimental texts, but also projects that openly confront subjectivity, writing, and social issues, providing us with two very different models of contending. While the reading experience of each book could not be more dissimilar, both projects ask the same question: in a world of collapsed and collapsing borders, what relation can the individual have to society, and how might a writer ethically—and effectively—render this relationality in language?

Kapil overtly frames her book—which is constituted by eight sequences (or chapters) of narrative poetic prose—as an undertaking driven by social consciousness and personal investment. As her introduction, titled “Passive Notes,” tells us, Schizophrene centers on issues of the self in a sate of extremity brought on by abusive structures of power. The book explores the effects of the partition of South Asia on the individual, addressing “the high incidence of schizophrenia in diasporic Indian and Pakistani communities; the parallel social history of domestic violence, relational disorders, and so on” (i). While the book contains substantial research, Kapil thoroughly penetrates the text with a first-person sensibility, providing us with a model of authorship that uses the self as experiential and empathetic instrument.

From “Passive Notes” through to the three-page “Acknowledgements and Quick Notes” that conclude the book, she makes no distinction between herself as writer and the “I” of the text, making clear that the author is, herself, one of the displaced. And, as much as the book is about mental illness and domestic violence it is also about the self as “other,” the self as a subjectivity deeply informed by never being “at home in one’s home.” Take, for example, this passage from the seventh sequence “Partition”:

I keep going back to what we ate, what we were fed. It is my way of communicating with you, the other children in your houses. Orbit the house as an adult but right now the spaces at the back of it and to the side are dense with neighbors. There are perhaps eleven faces pressed to the blood-specked window, banging on the glass with their foreheads. Being white, with the delicate skin that accompanies race, they bruise easily. They are looking at the unfolding scene with a boo and a hiss and a You fucking Paki, what do you think you’re doing? This is England, you bleeding animal. Later, they make a low roar when we, the two of us, back away from the table until our spines are pressed against the wallpaper, which is velvet and cream with a bumpy motif of paisley swirls as per the era.

These moments have the authority of first-person experience and work as a bridge to the “other children in your houses,” who are, if the accusers are to be “trusted,” from the “other side of the line” of partition than Kapil who nevertheless identifies with them. Such moments, in virtue of their fracturing trauma, also bridge to the radically Other: the schizophrenic or the victim of domestic abuse, subjects who have been largely undocumented and rendered essentially voiceless by extreme circumstance. This proposes a metonymic logic: the first-person experiences, as articulated in the above passage, allow Kapil to convey this Other-order fracture. Furthermore, these fractures speak to the larger psychosis of partition and displacement: “It is psychotic to draw a line between two places…Psychotic to live in a different country forever…It is psychotic to submit to violence in a time of great violence and yet it is psychotic to leave that home or country, the place where you submitted again and again, forever.”

Along with such empathetic movements from first-person experience to Other-order fracture, Kapil weaves the book through with passages about process, thereby bringing to the surface difficulties involved in representation of extreme circumstance. Some of these passages detail her primary research surrounding schizophrenia and domestic violence in London’s South Asian diasporic communities. Kapil tells us of visiting hospitals, interviewing doctors, and following police maps tracking calls of domestic incidents. Interwoven with these fragments of inquiry and search are notes and meditations on the writing process itself. We learn that Kapil initially tried to write the book as an “epic on Partition,” but that when this project failed, she “threw it—in the form of a notebook, a hand-written final draft—into the garden of [her] house in Colorado” (i). Again and again the motif returns: throwing the book into the garden, and later, after the ravaging of seasons, salvaging its fragments into the form of Schizophrene. As such, the book documents the fragmentation of self and society and is itself a fragmented document. This deep stitching of form and process, author and subject, narrative and performativity, not only has informational power, but also creates a compelling ethics of representation.

++

As with Kapil’s Schizophrene, Cyrus Console began The Odicy with the concept of creating a unified text, but abandoned this concept of unity for fragmentation. Consol remarks in an interview that the process of writing The Odicy “began with the goal of writing a coherent narrative poem, a poem that told the story of [a character named] Tony—it was going to deal with sugar and sugar substitutes, pollution, extinction, and Tony’s ‘personal odyssey’ through a collapsing world.” The finished text doesn’t discard all of these concepts: while not a “coherent narrative poem,” the book works more or less as a long poem built of tonally similar six or seven pentameter-line stanzas. This cascade of formal regularity is divided into five sections by prose passages sampled from Arthur Schopenhauer, Jack London, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, E.T. Jaynes, and William Cowper. The book also makes good on Console’s thematic concerns. Various forms of artificiality, pollution, and extinction appear throughout the book along with a consistent character named Tony. However, instead of narrating Tony’s odyssey, Console uses language to enact the texture and veer of collapse and Tony is limited to a motif—one type of proper name among many others. Consider the first four stanzas of the book:

I returned, and saw that the garden
Had not moved from me but that some illness
Of the garden carried it away
From me regardless. I saw its Mountain
Run to dissolution, whose bright garment
Flown from it in shame, whose hillsides lay

Uncovered, sodden. Drawn and beaten irons
Pestering and humbling the soil
Did recreate their brutal education.
All Nevada wept ill-colored water.
From the earth’s midsection, giant engines
Dull compacted slugs of gold removed.

Offering no resistance random night
Come at this odd hour, out of nowhere
One by one the lesser cattle took
Their knees amid contaminated forage
Depressed their breathing, and put out their eyes.
I have this against you, Westerners

Gladly, hurriedly, for sums now seeming
Insignificant (her liability)
To second thought a tiny skeleton
My love for the technician clothed in flesh)
The water component of my blood
I cast from me. Second thought, in fact

In these beginning stanzas we see themes of artificiality, pollution, and extinction. The garden, which of course we cannot help but read as Paradise, has become ill. We find nature and culture confused: Nevada weeps, cattle put out their eyes. And while the first three stanzas set up the scenario of an epic return, the fourth stanza swerves from the garden to develop, in the next stanza, into what seems to be a plasma donation (“This is my plasma, I remember asking / And this the money of which the less spoken”).

Not only do content and theme register collapse, but the work’s form itself also plays a large role in creating fracture. By using capital letters at the beginning of each line we are asked to read lines as discreet units, but rarely do the lines finish coherently. Instead we get fragments such as “Of the garden carried it away” and “Their knees amid contaminated forage”. Furthermore, this fragmentation is not always smoothed away by the sentence’s larger syntax. In moving us, for example, from “One by one the lesser cattle took” to the next line “Their knees amid contaminated forage” Console excises the expected “to,” leaving us with jostling elements that almost—but do not quite—add up.

This alignment of the “almost-but-not-quite,” a consequence of fracture well-known by anyone who has ever broken, and had reset, a bone, becomes a motif that holds the book together. In terms of content, Console works with the “almost-but-not-quite” in his critique of substitutes. For example, he writes of sugar substitutes: “NutraSweet’s another of Monsanto’s / Bright ideas like putting caffeine / Or vanillin in the soft drink Coke.” We also see the “almost-but-not-quite” in the book’s title. The Odicy is almost Theodicy is almost The Odyssey. Further, “The Odyssey Console” produced by Magnavox was the world’s first home video game console (just google The Odicy along with the author’s last name and see what you get). Among other such play in the text, the book’s five sections are similarly titled: “The Opathy” “The Omachy” “The Ophany” “The Oktony” “The Olepsy” and one can perform similar squint-of-the-eye tricks here. And as we break such words into various clusters of sounds, trying them out against possible meanings, we access the texture of breakdown and the attempt to nevertheless construct sense in the very fabric of the book’s language. “The Oktony”: Oak-tone-y, Octane-y, O.K. Tony.

Such language-use hi-lights the artifice of written representation, performing what the poetry articulates in subject matter and style (the tone of “I saw its Mountain / Run to dissolution, whose bright garment / Flown from it in shame” could hardly be more stylized). In the present poetic landscape, which often equates simplicity and the colloquial with the text of social consciousness, this form-content ethics runs the risk of seeming too difficult to do any “real” good. To my mind, however, the willingness to run such a risk speaks to a courage and integrity of thought and artistry that demonstrates the kind of inventiveness our time requires. Reading this text puts us face to face with fracture and it is well worth the thinking readers’ work to spend our time there.

++

In a 1996 interview with Kiki Smith in Bomb magazine, visual artist Barbara Bloom discusses, in the context of a serious accident she was recovering from, her “Broken” work, fragile objects she has broken and repaired with gold using kintsugi, a Japanese form of mending that foregrounds, rather than masks, fracture:

Rather than hiding something that’s broken, it aggrandizes it, saying that something that has a history, that is not perfect anymore, is more beautiful and more valuable than something which has no history. It’s the opposite of our culture. When I was in Japan and saw these for the first time, they were so beautiful that they made me cry. And then with this accident that I had recently where I—got so broken. This is the perfect metaphor: to think about objects that are repaired with gold. These objects are stand-ins.

Despite currents of panic and loss flowing through Saint Erasure, this book manifests quietly. It has the feeling of speech performed by a solitary speaker in an abandoned picnic shelter overlooking the sea. If you have driven any stretch of U.S. coastal highway you know the place: turn off the road and there you will find a concrete table and bench bolted to a concrete slab, the welded iron railing all that keeps you from the bluff and, below, the churning surf. For all of the highway’s traffic that you’ve just left, signs of humans, here, are consigned to some graffiti, a crumpled McDonald’s bag, perhaps a used condom or syringe. Such ravaged beauty, such waste. A sense of erosion happening under each surface. This is the atmosphere of landscape and voice that I find permeating Saint Erasure. For example, note the textures of “The High Note,” the book’s second poem. It begins:

began with
a frantic tapping

with a blurred
rush like wings beat

outside a window
a sustained note

(organ key that
cannot get unstuck)

(cannot once leave off
from its own ringing

flattened note)we were
by the seaon rocks

white motion and
spillagekept saying,

we should
live herebut that one

sustained note that
would not become

unstuckthe frantic
tappingthe click

—and continues this cascade for another page-and-a-half.

The voice articulating Saint Erasure is so particular, and it whispers its statements at such close proximity to the ear that I would recognize the voice anywhere. By this I don’t mean that the voice overly-announces itself by deploying a flashy persona. I don’t mean that it hinges on a solid, object-like subjectivity, or that it overtly delineates the cultural constructs that form voice. Were this so, the book, with its themes of the feminine, and of punctured subjectivity, would employ a different kind of voice, a voice that might fall along the popular trajectories of voice made intentionally excessive as in the gurlesque or else the dramatics of the Glückian conventional lyric (if I can say there is such a thing), or else the voice-as-tool-and-palimpsest of identity politics poetry (for lack of a more nuanced term). No, Saint Erasure refreshingly is not of any of these categories and treats language, world, and self with a sensibility reminiscent of H.D., but also shadowing the concerns of Eliot’s Four Quartets, although in the end the voice is most assuredly the book’s own. Here, subjectivity is always fluid, always slipping, always flowing out of punctured or broken containers. As such, it is a book that admits the terrifying aspects of being flung, as consequence, into the void, but it is nevertheless a book and a voice of strength and persistence in the face of, in the course of, dissolution.

The passage quoted above from “The High Note” attests to this fluidity and shows the way the book manages to embody, at one and the same time, the two seemingly-opposed characteristics of solidity and dissolution. Take the phrase that folds over couplets six through eight: “…we were / by the sea on rocks // white motion and / spillagekept saying, / we should / live here.” While the phrase feels quite smooth and tailored, we can read it in two significantly different ways depending on the grammatical role we assign to “white motion and spillage,” and upon where we place the agency of voice that keeps “saying we should live here.” The first reading of the phrase paraphrases as follows: “we were by the sea on rocks which were awash with white motion and spillage and we kept saying that we should live here.” The statement, read in this way, is fairly mundane and colloquial and feels like comfortable public speech. Who, when sitting on rocks by the sea, doesn’t say that they should live there? As such, this is the kind of moment one might recount to anyone: it is not intimate or personal and reveals very little. And despite its little flourish of “white motion and spillage” it risks little in its telling. In the greater context of the poem the moment, then, deflates the tension that precedes it.

At the same time, we can read the phrase in another direction, assigning “white motion and spillage” the agency of voice: “we were by the sea on the rocks where white motion and spillage kept saying we should live here.” This paraphrase, though just slightly different, hilights the intimate, mystical aspects of the moment—the speaker tells us of a “we” called to live by the sea not only by the environment (by the world), but by nature as “white motion and spillage”—nature not just as a solid state (rock), but nature as movement and excess. Juxtaposed with the colloquial version, this phrase electrifies—a command not to ignore, surely, and not mundane. A command that deepens and complexes the tension that precedes it. Furthermore, one would not be wise to tell just anyone that, while sitting on a rock at the coast, the white motion and spillage of the world told you that you should live there. One would only reveal this at great risk of being thought mad or fey or silly. And so, as readers, we are in this moment of apprehension either overhearing something we have not earned the right to hear—or, we are being trusted by the speaker with intimate information. Either way, the information is intriguingly folded into the colloquial, a hidden secret about the world revealed only to those who meet the phrase with its own aspect of looking.

This textural moment, along with others like it in the book, embodies the central opposition of the book between the solidly contained and the uncontainable. That de la Perrière does this in the self-same phrase creates not a plurality of voice, but, rather, the much more stunning circumstance of one voice pointing in two opposite articulations. One singular voice articulating an almost flat, public language, while at the same time beveling with the pull of the private—a simultaneous layering of the symbolic and the semiotic.

**

I know that “voice” generally gets a fraught wrap when we are contemporarily talking poetry, but when we (by which I suppose I mean I, because I really shouldn’t speak for you) aren’t being petty or boring, it is still an exciting concept. In general, “voice” inhabits a liminal space, for it is physical and yet insubstantial at the same time. Voice comes literally from containers, from physical bodies (voice boxes, instruments, natural and synthetic objects) and is apprehended by the physical body but is, itself, vaporous. In many ways, the act of speaking out loud is a form of breaking: breaking silence, breaking the boundaries of self-containment to enter into the mutability of the world which will inevitably translate and transform what has come from within. As such, beyond providing a tool for unpacking discreet moments, the notion of “voice” is important to Saint Erasure in ways that further reflect de la Perrière’s central tension between solidity and liquidity.

Heard sound’s significance comes to the fore in the poems’ sonic power and the use of small gaps of white space, enjambment, and—often—parentheses, which emphasize moments of speech set among the draw of silence. Listen to “‘The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved,’” which I quote in its entirety:

the only promise: you will lose
everythingthe only promise:
that you will passbreath on glass
wind on skinrain on
shoulders when you’re moving
fast(look now: you are moving fast)
every day acts as ballasta promise
a luremoving forwardif
fracturedif fallen(the ways we fled
before his face)the real
violence of bodiesand this ware-
housethese train tracksthese
full rain-slicked streetsstored up
inside ourselves for ages
become waterbecome bloodbecome
myths(the remaining)once
torn into piecesnow torn
into God

As with other poems in the book, de la Perrière uses the pause of white space as caesura and end-stop rather than using punctuation marks. This extends the line of speech over line breaks and pauses, creating a tension between continuous utterance and silence. This technique is also used on a larger scale within the book’s three, longer, series-based poems. As with the way the line works in tension with the whole, each moment of any given series is both autonomous and necessarily linked to the next movement. While such tactics of form are certainly not unique to Saint Erasure, they find a particularly apt home here, given the book’s central tension between solid and liquid, container and uncontained.

In addition to the poems’ formal makeup, Saint Erasure is everywhere full of the mention of sound. The following sounds of the world are among those recorded in the book: “a frantic tapping,” “sustained note,” “organ key that cannot get unstuck // cannot once leave off from its own ringing flattened note,” “click click click,” “the flat crack of rock falling / on rock,” “an awful roar,” “a whistling like wind,” the “sound of air rushing,” “breath,” “speech,” “dry rustle,” “the eerily flat / song that sang // through the wires,” “the sound of the ocean,” “a swift rushing of air.” Note aspects of onomatopoeia wherein the word is the sound, a weld of signifier and signified that allows text to emanate with world. Additionally, we also get overt description of moments of speech (or of difficulty speaking): there is a woman who “whenever she sought to speak, swore / she felt a darkness tightening in her throat.” There are “people talking around you,” and “it started with never saying never,” and “called sister sister.” Furthermore, the book ends with the following lines:

we remember that time
whenand remember

when we felland the
city looks all full

of light from up here
all beautiful up here

and you cannot imagine
the view here, we say

buried up to the neck
our patron saint is

windour patron
saint, erasure

Here we have not only the use of the spoken (“you cannot imagine / the view here, we say”), but also emphasis on the physical body—the container that houses speech. Here the “we” (which is perhaps a form of “I,” perhaps collective, perhaps both) are “buried up to the neck.” This image is both harrowing and colloquial at the same time. Colloquial because of the metaphorical expression that ghosts behind it (as in “I am buried up to my neck in work”). Harrowing because of the image of the body submerged under the earth—some sort of putative torture (remember Aisho Ibrahim Dhuhulow), a position completely devoid of agency that turns what is said about imagining the view, which is first given to us as a thing of beauty—ironic. What sort of view can be had, inches from the ground? Furthermore, note the shifting nature of this passage: is it the speaker that is buried up to the neck, or is it “our patron saint” that is stuck in the ground? As with the passage I quoted from “The High Note,” the text lends itself to both readings, creating a moment that holds contradictory elements within the very same articulation.

Locations in the work such as this, where container imagery (here of the body, of the earth containing the body) comes into tension with flux and voice, are among the book’s strongest. Along this line and also intriguing are the different ways de la Perrière figures the female body—and the bodies of this book (even the body of Atlas) are all feminine. In “The Glass Delusion,” for example, we get a series of women who “were persuaded they had glass buttocks” and a woman who “thought she was a shellfish; / another believed she was all cork.” In a different register, the serial poem “Still Life (Shirley in the House),” gives us a house as an extension of the body, and within that house “there is a landscape constructed inside a boxa box inside a box inside a box inside a box.”

In all cases, Saint Erasure’s figured containers are fragile, broken, permeated, penetrable, which lends the book its meditations on death, on the psyche’s container punctured from the outside by what might be sacred, but might be madness. Part of the circumstances of puncture is that one is not given to know the nature of the outside that so rapidly enters. And, while the failure to contain is as such not a cause for celebration, is not a liberation, is not an easy circumstance in this book’s world, it is a necessary one, for it is only in such failure that speech and movement—perhaps even grace (though here I may go too far)—can happen. This conviction manifests less as affirmation than as a coming-into-relation with a sober reality of being human. It happens more as undertow than assertion, but by the end of the book we realize we have been moved from figuration of the “glass body”—an artificial, errant configuration of embodiment that keeps the world out—to “the real body,” a body permeable and inclusive wherein

[...] there is always
the sound of the ocean

a frantic
tappinga dull

huma high rushing
of air [...]

And although there is terror in this form of the body, the book brings me to prefer this mode of rushing-through—as poem, as mode of existence—to the static containers we more often are told to strive for, and are more often, by our culture, asked to regard as natural, just, and given.

On the Road’s last long sentence concludes the novel with the (in)famous “scoping” from external observation to internal reflection created by Kerouac’s breath-taking spontaneous prose:

So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.

By prying apart syntax with sweeping gestures that observe and reflect and question, Kerouac’s style encompasses the mode and aims of the entire novel. Here we have syntax (convention) dislodged; we have a further overthrowing of convention via empathy with “all the people dreaming in the immensity” of America. We have, via parataxis, an emphasis on the connective moments of the journey, rather than on any sort of end-driven goal. We also have the friendship bond between Paradise and Moriarty reaching through the separation of distance via thought. If life-as-a-journey is one of our foundational conceptual metaphors, On the Road presents an exposition on what it is to live.

However, we also have, in this moment, the project’s failure, for regardless of the novel’s efforts, its protagonist remains infused with the values of the system he seeks to break from. Paradise’s empathy with what is other to him (what is not male, white, educated, and middle-class) is obtained by objectifying the other. His journey, while undertaken for the experience rather than a goal, nevertheless ends with the sentiment of “forlorn rags of growing old,” of an inevitable end, of death. And as to friendship bonds—in the end Dean Moriarty is abandoned to the rain, accessible only in thought. He is absent and, furthermore, drives home the absence of “the father” and what the father represents: country, language, law. The cause of this failure is the fact that the transcendence longed for in On the Road is one of individual transcendence, thus inevitably locking the novel into the foundation (individualism) of the very conventions of American culture that it seeks to break from.ⁱ

This failure may be old hat, bromidic sermon, but it is a failure that still presses on our culture as we continue to clutch our beloved sense of individuality. This grip continues to be particularly evident and painful in discourse around American poetry wherein the notion of a poem “mattering” is still often, unfortunately, directly tied to individuality via a New Critical concept of “voice.” Under this model of poem and self, if a “voice” doesn’t “speak to me” (read: “give me what I need,” or, in a less cynical version, at least “speak my language”) then I have no reason to “care.” Furthermore, as Jonathan Culler notes in his essay “Why Lyric,” (and elsewhere) the New Critical lyric—and its reception by critics—has encouraged us to think of voice in poetry in fundamentally narrative terms, as “a fictional imitation of the act of a speaker, and to interpret the lyric is to work out what sort of person is speaking, in what circumstances and with what attitude or, ideally, drama of attitudes.” ⁱⁱ Such handling of voice minimizes focus on the processes of artifice, language, and the construction of identity in order to hi-light a decontextualized, individualistic model of the self.ⁱⁱⁱ

And so, are we doomed, like Paradise, to continue to fall short of exiting the monolith in our poetry, and in our lives? The Wide Road, a collaborative multi-genre book by Carla Harryman and Lyn Hejinian, answers this question by presenting an alternative conception of life-as-a-journey. Here, rather than linear “voice”-driven narrative, we have fragment, conversation, “forays” into language’s “arrays” and an alternative, relational concept of self.^iv

Hejinian and Harryman began writing the book in 1991, and Belladonna’s website tells us that the composition unfolded over the following twenty years “by letters, by walking, in cabins, together and apart, and finally together again.” Given the fact that the text is a collaboration, the book immediately challenges the notion of individual authorship. However, the book does not simply blend the voices of two autonomous authors—its project goes much deeper than this. Here subjectivity (echoing Kristeva^v) is the effect of linguistic process, rather than something that comes into being before or apart from language. The collaborative nature of the book thus provides a completely different conception of the self in the world than that modeled both by the conventional journey narrative wherein man sets out alone—and by the new critical concept of the lyric, wherein the self of the poem speaks fully-formed from offstage. As such, Harryman and Hejinian’s text does not just propose, but, rather, performs relational subjectivity. Here, not only are the authors directly speaking to each other and to us, but what and who they are is created and informed by this process of relationality, thus creating a work that “has multiple centers of gravity.” These centers include investigations into the relationship between sexuality and violence; power and desire; humans and nature; politics of the self and other; friendship; and “compassion and animal exhaustion (death).” Here, life as a journey down a “wide road” does not circumscribe, but radiates out.

The book is given solidity and focus by its structure. Divided into four sections, each section performs a different mode of relational subjectivity, and I suspect that the different textures of the sections have as much to do with the processes of composition as they do with working to get at relation from various angles. Sections one and three are prose-and-poem hybrids that present a blended form of subjectivity and enact a collaborative stream of consciousness. For example, the book begins:

Late one afternoon, we find ourself wandering in our city, the site from which we have long regarded the distant horizon. It is always changing. We notice that we have been distracted by many days and minutes, many trees and malls and continents, many radiants and radicals, many names and figures of many men, children, women, goats—and that we have been walking in silence for such a long time that we have reached the ocean, where we encounter a little drama, a rescue in which someone is saved from drowning.

As is true of this passage, all of the writing in sections one and three employ third-person pronouns, and it is impossible to tell who authored which passage. In addition, the referent of the pronoun “we” is ambiguous and shifts. Sometimes “we” seems to mean “the multiplicity that is I” (as in “we find ourself wandering the city”). Sometimes “we” feels like it indicates the two authors (in the passage above I can easily imagine the two poets on a walk to the shore). And sometimes “we” seems to refer to larger groups such as “women” or “humankind” or “Americans” (as the list of “distractions” accumulates I feel as if these are our culture’s distractions, as well as those individually owned). This tactic of shifting reference shows attunement to nuances of intersubjective experience as it becomes constituted in language. It also points to the limitations and flexibilities of language, hi-lighting the complexities that undergird even the simplest of words: we.

The second section makes use of the epistolary form and includes three exchanges of letters between Hejinian and Harryman. The letters are dated, addressed, and signed, making it quite clear who authored each letter. The language of these letters is direct and often addresses the project itself. For example, the first letter, from Harryman, begins with the salutation “Dear Lyn” and proceeds to say:

It seems to me that this may be the right moment to start a correspondence; I think we need to take a break from accumulating fragments. The difficult aspects of sex or sexuality may have to do with the way the fragmented form has evolved to this point.

This overt discussion of the project underlines the constructed nature of the language that speaks to us from the page (it is a made thing that we, and the authors, can stand back from and analyze). In addition, the epistolary form allows the authors to draw thematic concerns to the surface. One of the most striking moments is Harryman’s mediation on a photograph from Bataille’s journal Documents of two children who share the same hair.

I am looking at the reproduction of a photograph of an 18th century drawing of two children who share the same hair. By necessity, they are standing so close together that it is difficult to discern if they are joined in any other part of the body. In any case, they are not facing the same direction: one child offers the viewer a profile and the other a semi-frontal view: they are rendered as specimen. Perceiving them in this way is uncomfortable, at least to me.

In her analysis of why the photograph arrests her, Harryman does not arrive at any conclusions. Rather, her letter to Hejinian provides an example of the mind in the act of consideration, that is to say, in the act of constructing relation. The work Harryman does with the photo not only brings it into the epistolary conversation, but also employs it as a vehicle to drive relationality. Furthermore, the energy of the contemplation does not stop with the end of Harryman’s letter, but infuses later moments in the text both implicitly and explicitly, as when Hejinian takes up the theme of the photograph of the children in a later letter. As such, this section shows us the ways in which the act of writing is an act of creating relationships rather than an act of reporting relationships that are already established. Furthermore, the fact that this is performed in letter mode draws the reader’s attention to the extent to which we all engage this relation-making act daily via letters, emails, texts, Facebook status updates, etc.

If the first three sections invite reader participation through the difficulty of fragmentation and reference (sections one and three), and the concept of text-based exchange (section two), the final section of the book pushes the reader’s involvement in performing relation one step further. The section is constituted of double-columned pages. The right-hand column is titled “Array” and the left-hand column is titled “Foray.” The columns are divided one from the other with a black line, and each column has a distinct style that is carried through the remaining twenty-four pages of the book. The style of “Array” includes dates, lists, and anecdotes. The style of “Foray” includes literary allusions and precise visual details of the natural world. This typographical division between the columns and the distinctness of the two styles does not invite us to easily read the text in the normative way, all the way across from left to right. Rather, the natural path through the page is vertical, column-by-column.

The effect of this division is that it asks us, the book’s readers, to perform the role of relation-making that we have witnessed in the other sections of the book. What, we must ask ourselves, is the relation between the passage on the left (such as “Let’s remember the place in the woods where we stopped to compare a shrubby ravine extending uphill under leaning tree trunks with certain paintings by Cezanne…”) and the passage on the right (“Loneliness is nothing, encompassing abandon. In loneliness the past seems vast. As a wife has said, it often seems that the husband is lost in the grass.”)

Whether or not (and how) we can create linkages between such passages leads directly into (and back to) the notion of mattering—of whether or not poetry, or anything else, can “matter.” This subject of “mattering” is directly addressed by Hejinian’s July 10th letter to Harryman and, not surprisingly, does not revolve around an individualistic voice coaxing readers into a state of care:

In my last letter I continued with the notion of “mattering” that you raised in your first letter—where “matter” refers to literal materializing and to significance, importance, something worth caring about (emotionally, intellectually, ethically, amorously, etc.). The linkages you imagine when you speak of one’s thanking a mountain for the use one makes of it—or, as I would hope one might, thanking it simply for being there, for making an appearance (as the white-tailed kites we saw together above a coastal meadow did, to our mutual delight)—I want to forge and continuously feel such linkages. To live in a disenchanted world is to live at a dead-end. In The Wide Road “we” finds enchantments.

_____

ⁱ See Haslam, Jason. ” ‘It Was My Dream That Screwed Up.’ The Relativity of Transcendence in On the Road.” Canadian Review of American Studies, 39 (4), (2009) pp. 443-464.

ⁱⁱ See Culler, Jonathan. “Why Lyric?” MLA 123 (1) (2008), p. 201.

ⁱⁱⁱThanks to Noah Eli Gordon for sparking this branch of thought…and to putting Facebook to intelligent use.

^iv Appreciations to Enikő Bollobás and Zoltán Kövecses for kindling thoughts about relational subjectivity and conceptual metaphor.

^vThis echoing of Kristeva, as well as other aspects of this review, shows the extent to which the book rewards reading as a feminist text. I hope to see conversations in essays and reviews that focus on this regard.

Ugly Duckling Presse has just published a translation of Uruguayan poet Marosa di Giorgio’s 1965 book, The History of Violets. The press’s website, which has not-to-be-missed audio clips of the author reading her work in the original Spanish, bears quotes from Kent Johnson and the Argentine poet Mercedes Roffé citing di Giorgio as one of the most important and “spectacular” Latin American poets of—if not the 20th century—then at least of the past 50 years. Despite this fact, Jeannine Marie Pitas’ UDP translation, which includes both the English and Spanish texts, is the only one of di Giorgio’s 18 books that is in print in English.

A visionary poet, di Giorgio gives physical form to what does not tangibly reveal itself to the senses: the past (the book both begins and ends with poems starting “I remember…” and often focuses on childhood), dead ancestors, the spiritual. With the use of vegetal imagery, angels, monsters, dream, and myth these forces become embodied. For example, in poem “XV” (all 35 poems are titled with roman numerals), mushrooms bear “the initials of the corpse” they come from. The poem ends with the arrival of a mushroom buyer: “My mother gives him permission. He chooses like an eagle. This one white as sugar, a pink one, a gray one. My mother does not realize that she is selling her race.”

However enticingly psychotropic, such surreal angling is not the primary element that makes The History of Violets of interest. The work’s merit resides in the craft that yokes the terrifying and pretty fantasies with an arc that advances the reader’s experience of the supernatural through the book’s poems. As such, di Giorgio not only offers an eccentric view of the world, but enacts an epistemology for arriving there by moving us from descriptions of a reality we can apprehend as literally based—to fantastic narrative. And in this respect, the hybrid in-between of the prose poem makes it the perfect form for this journey.

The book begins with the shortest prose poems often anchored in description of tangible, everyday things and works its way outwards towards visionary experience. For example, “II” includes nothing supernatural, but sets up both the fantastic imagery that will appear in the later poems, and one of the primary tactics that will be employed to launch the poems away from literal description into the extra-ordinary:

When I look toward the past, I only see perplexing things: sugar, jasmine, white wine, black wine, the strange country school I attended for four years, murders, weddings among the orange blossoms, incestuous couplings.

That towering old woman who walked by our orange trees one night with her long white gown, her hair in a bun. The butterflies that left us when they flew off to chase her.

From a speaker raised in the countryside in the mid-twentieth century Uruguay there is nothing remarkably strange about the list of things di Giorgio ascribes to her past. There isn’t even anything remarkable about the appearance of the “towering old woman.” However, the poem employs a tactic that I’ve come to call the “And suddenly—” maneuver, for many of the early poems in the book include a trigger phrase (“and suddenly” or “and then”) or the unexpected appearance of a figure (as in “II”) to catapult the poem from one state of affairs to another. Although nothing overtly supernatural happens, we are led to know that significant changes ensue after the appearance of the woman: the butterflies leave, marking the gap in the poem from the way things were to the way things are, thus pointing to shifts in experience that are always already there when the present moves into the past.

As we progress deeper into the book, di Giorgio transports us further into the supernatural by heightening a second tactic, that of simile. This tactic is most pronounced in the very middle of the book, in poems “XIX” and “XX,” which almost entirely depend on figurative yoking for their substance and movement. Poem “XIX” begins:

Beyond the land, through the air, in the full moon’s light, like a lily’s stem, it loads its side incessantly with hyacinths, narcissi, white lilies. The wolves draw back at the sight of it; the lambs get down on their knees, crazy with love and fear. It moves on, goes off like an errant candelabra, a bonfire; it goes towards the house, passes the cabinet, the hearth; with only a glance it burns the apples, illuminates them, wraps them in candied paper; it flings colored stones into the rice; it makes the bread and pears glow…

Here di Giorgio not only focuses on the intangible substance of moonlight, but hi-lights the movement of the moon in all of its shape-shifting glory. The piling up of verb and figure speaks to the gap between language and vision as well as a sense of continuous experience that cannot be encapsulated by nouns. The poems work to pry apart experience, seeing a world, so to speak, in a grain of sand.

In the last twelve poems of the book di Giorgio employs a third tactic: narrative. Through narrative she makes good on the list of “perplexing things” that she provides us with in poem “II” (“sugar, jasmine, white wine, black wine, the strange country school I attended for four years, murders, weddings among the orange blossoms, incestuous couplings”) by forming stories around these subjects. “XXIV,” for example, features “The bride” who “is covered completely in tulle; even her bones are tulle”—here we have a wedding. There are also darker plots of abduction and murder.

As the book draws to a close and comes to feel more solid because of its narrative technique (it feels as if the “And suddenly—” maneuver and heightened figures accrete in story, a sort of magical excess), di Giorgio at the same times begins to destabilize the poems by shifting point of view from poem to poem. Some of the poems are written in the third person, narrating a “she” that is and is not the speaker. Other poems employ the “I,” but this “I” is not always human. In “XXXIV” the “I” is a hare who meets its demise: “At dawn he came from me, lifted me; the blood ran down my sides.” As such, the arc of the book is completed, moving the reader from a description of the world that feels known, to new territories where even the location of subjectivity is subject to doubt and to change.

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At this point in writing, I find it impossible not to engage in my own “And suddenly—” maneuver and turn from talking about what the poems in the book do to the physical fact of the book itself. In particular, the book begs attention to be paid to its paratextual materials. Before the 35 poems begin we move not only through the usual table of contents, title pages, etc, etc but also traverse a 5-page introduction, a 2-page translator’s note, and a full page of acknowledgements. After the poems’ end we move through 3 pages of notes before we hit the colophon. This averages out to roughly 1 full page of introductory-type apparatus for every 3 poems. If preface is to book as vestibule is to architecture this book’s lobby, threatening to overwhelm the house, raises the question of why the small book needs such prefacing.

The begging escalates with the first paratextual item, a full page devoted to a photo of Marosa di Giorgio and her dates (1932-2004). The photo shows the bust of a striking young woman with long black hair, large gypsy earrings, and a bare shoulder-line (think Senior Yearbook Picture, where you can imagine the girl naked because the photo cuts off just before the place the strapless dress would appear). Her gaze is direct, sad, and it is no surprise that she has been called a Uruguayan Emily Dickinson. To add to the romance, the introduction begins, on the facing page, with the following quote from Marosa di Giorgio talking about herself in third person:

That girl wrote poems: she placed them near the alcoves, the cups. It was the time when the clouds were floating through the rooms, and a crane or an eagle was always coming to drink tea with my mother…That girl wrote poems; she placed them near the alcoves, the lamps. Sometimes, the clouds, the April air came in, lifting them up, and there in the air they gleamed. And then the saints and butterflies crowded around, filled with joy, to read them.

The body of the introduction, written by Pitas, goes on to tell us that di Giorgio never doubted “her calling.” We learn she never married and that, while “she took an office job managing the Civil Register of the Salto city government” she “devoted free time to her creative work. Each day she spent several hours reading—everything from classic, Golden Age Spanish texts to American and English poetry to world mythology—and writing what would become her fifteen collections of poetry, two collections of short stories, and one novel.”

From this information and other details revealed in the introduction we are led to see Marosa di Giorgio in a compellingly contradictory light. She is both the mystic that is “called” to write, rather than just a writer with literary ambition. She herself reinforces this myth by talking of “saints and butterflies” reading her work. Additionally she was, alas, unmarried, although there is a “mysterious figure named Mario who makes many appearances through her work.” In terms of visionary poetesses it doesn’t get much better than this: all of these assertions render her transcendent. However, at the same time, we are assured that she was productive in her writing, publishing, and—a recipient of “grants that allowed her to travel to the United States, Europe…and Israel,”—a cosmopolitan artist taking part in literary culture work. Furthermore, she not only managed to put out a lot of work and to sufficiently educate herself in her craft, but was gainfully employed until her retirement in 1978.

As such the photo, the quote, and the biography, while contradictory, all seem to be in service of authenticating the text, of letting us know that di Giorgio is serious in her visionary stance (the work is not “just literature”), and that she is serious in her literary stance (the work is not “just visionary”). If the introductory material is not enough to create authenticity, the translator’s note and acknowledgments go even further in this direction. We are told that the translator learned of di Giorgio while studying at Sarah Lawrence, worked on the translation while on a Fulbright, and not only spent “hours in Salto’s public library reading di Giorgio’s work” but also “spent hours conversing with di Giorgio’s friends and relatives.” Acknowledgements further vet the work with thanks to the likes of Maria Negroni, Jen Hofer, and a series of Spanish literary professors who led a seminar on di Giorgio’s work. From these sentiments we see that the translation is backed not only by prestigious institutional support and by important translators and scholars, but also by the labor of primary research into the person and place of di Giorgio.

What can be made of this? On the one hand, the beguiling photograph, biographical details, and institutional authenticity are troubling features for the foyer of this book. Critics have suggested that di Giorgio can be read as a writer who seeks to subvert gender and patriarchal hierarchies. Why must her prefatory materials entrench them? On the other hand, the paratext of this book might be a logical and necessary extension of the author’s original project. If di Giorgio’s work takes us on an arc from tangible description of daily things to the altered state of being and point of view of the visionary, what greater extension of her quest than to begin the book with the most tangible of aspects: with the author’s very own, very human, face. If the book serves to pry open our reality, what better crowbar than the image of a woman who is both off cavorting with the butterflies and holding down a 9 to 5? Or, on a third hand, perhaps the paratext serves to counter the expectation that a sharp-eyed contemporary reader may be turned off by the book’s floriated vocabulary, the moments of the text that dive into preciousness too sincerely to be cool. “It’s a translation” the paratext excuses, “there are contextual and linguistic aspects that you can’t understand.” “She’s a visionary,” the paratext mutters, giving us permission to indulge in flowers, doves, angels and tears. “What do you expect?”

On the eve of the second decade of the twenty-first century we are confronted by the potential passing of the print book in for-profit publishing. While small presses specializing in books that require paper bodies may sit at some distance from the fray, challenges to the book bring the fact of being printed and bound into the center of form and content. At issue is not only why this particular book-body of such-and-such dimensions employing such-and-such font and such-and-such cover stock, etcetera—but why the body of the book at all. Presses such as Kyle Schlesinger’s Cuneiform have always addressed these matters, folding the how of the book into the what and the why. Haecceities, written by Michael Cross (himself the extraordinary chapbook publisher that is Atticus/Finch) and typeset and designed by Schlesinger, proposes no exception.

Haecceities measures an oversized 7 ½ inches by 11 inches. Occupying the left half of the canary-colored cover hulks a black-and-white sketch of a drape-covered marble monument (or a marble-drape covered monument). The title HAECCEITIES, printed in imposing caps, paces the right upper corner. “Haecceity,” a term coined by the medieval philosopher Duns Scotus, describes a thing’s essence, its “this-ness,” or individuality, singularity. It is a non-qualitative, non-relational property responsible for making something a particular thing rather than another. The concept has always been fraught: we are hard pressed to assert that this intangible thing exists, but we are harder pressed to say that it does not. What, philosophers ask, but haecceity can account for the fact that if the universe were to contain two qualitatively identical spheres, and only two qualitatively identical spheres, we would still insist on the spheres’ individual difference? Something—let’s call it haecceity—must maintain. The thought experiment deepens and convulses when applied to language, to the nature of words and to the particular this-ness of a text. Stein addresses something like this when she redresses the worn out rose: “When I said./ A rose is a rose is a rose/ And then later made that into a ring I made poetry and what did I do I caressed completely caressed and addressed a noun.” (Lectures in America)

Cross continually addresses the “this-ness” of reading by putting enormous pressure on the language of his poems. We are offered little framework beyond the physical body of the book, the epigraphs heading each section, and the work’s title. There is no narrative here and pronouns make scant appearance only in the later parts of the work. As such, we arrive inside of Cross’s language, and with no Virgil to map and navigate we must face the raw syllables of what is given. We are dropped into “wares laden partially with silhouette enmasse, the lime trees” and “beside its anomos the christ’s vulpine/ sonance, sea-foam, brume” and “how I speak for a posse/ is steam purls, and that’s my word.” You will need a dictionary to read this book. You will also need to listen, for here we have extreme rhythm, more compressed than sprung as it navigates Zukofsky’s upper level speech/lower level music more intensely than any book that I have read this year. You will find hints of ekphrasis (Cy Twombly is featured as proper name and via color: tangernines and whites) but as gesture rather than depiction. The book requires emersion and work, but rewards intense focus. Think of it as counterpose to the sensibility of frittering you have cultivated by spending too much time on facebook.

The book, closed, wants to be displayed on an oaken podium. The book, open, provides ivory-cream expanses for the poems, all of which are double-spaced and none of which take up the entire page. Poems range from 4 to 14 lines; line lengths are fairly regular within individual poems but vary from a (roughly) 6-word line to a 14-word line within the course of the book. This gives the poems a solid rectangularity. We can say of the width of the page that it accommodates the longest lines without seeming cramped, but that the typesetting is so immaculate that the poems never feel spare or slight upon their expanse. The poems appear etched, perfectly crafted panels of a monument inscription. Take, for example, the first poem from the first sequence, “The Pales.” In its entirety it reads:

•

alacrity at time and yet the hulkish ness

silt licks modality means better ness there

belied how marshal made hon

there catch and mannered tone

A sense of monument inscription is born out not only by the consistency of lower casing (a sort of inverse Roman capital) but also by the interpunct beginning the poem. Cross heads all poems in this particular section with such a mark and they are reminiscent of interword separation in Latin script. Additionally, the word “hon” works both as abbreviation of “honorable” and of “honey” (the endearment as in “hey hon, grab me a beer”—not the substance). The gesture of abbreviation is Classical: Latin inscriptions used abbreviations to save space and to pack more sense into a square of stone. Cross abbreviates to similar effect: collapsing high and low, honorable and honey, into the selfsame body of “hon.” And it is in moments such as this collapse that Cross addresses the conundrums folded into the concept of haecceity: if “hon” is “honorable” and “hon” is “honey” what makes this particular “hon” the abbreviation of one word rather than the other? The reader and his/her labor, the text seems to insist, echoed by one of the sequence’s 3 epigraphs: “It is as labor, and not as communication, that the subject in art comes into its own” (Adorno).

None of the individual poems have titles, but the book is parceled into 7 titled sections: “The Pales,” “Plinth Course,” “Cardinal,” “Cede,” “Sacred,” “Throne,” and “Pax.” The poems within each section work both autonomously and interconnectedly—carved into their fields, the poems feel discrete. But absent of capital letters and completely devoid of periods (and continuous in tone and mode) page moves into page as the eye, confronted with an inscribed monument, moves from marble panel to marble panel in order to complete the reading of an etched text.

This sense of the continuous-discrete is born out in the movement from word to word as well as the movement from page to page. And from word to word (carefully) is the way one must read this book in order to experience more than a surface rush. Take the first line of the first poem: “alacrity at time and yet the hulkish ness”. The words of the line accrete to an overall sense of contrasted qualities: briskness or liveliness (alacrity) at time, and yet a heavy, hulking quality. We have a contrast between the light/fluttery and the heavy. We have the admission of a contradiction: the experience under consideration here is both quick and weighted. As such the line culminates in a continuous sense. At the same time, however, the words insist that we take them as discrete entities and the syntax of the line disrupts the continuous sense I have just proposed. Consider the phrase “alacrity at time”. At time? The choice of “at” rather than the preposition that we expect, “in,” disrupts a continuous reading of the phrase. “Time” is not considered a location, though particular o’clocks often are as in: I will see you at 9 o’clock but you must be in time for me to do so.

The separation of “hulkish” from “ness” performs a similar action. We can go for a sense of continuity and elide the white space, reading this as a noun, “the hulkishness.” But, given the philosophical tradition of explaining haecceity as a “this-ness,” we ought to sit up and take notice when the author draws our attention to the morpheme. By inducing white space Cross puts pressure on the words as independent entities: “hulkish” (hulk: an old ship stripped of fittings and permanently moored; a clumsy or unweildly object or person) and “ness” (a headland or promontory; a suffix denoting a state or condition that allows one to form nouns, denoting this state, from adjectives). “Ness” as a promontory has purchase—a hulkish promontory—but “ness” as a noun-making suffix has even more resonance. Using white space to isolate the suffix draws our attention to the action of nouning, of making a solid state out of a quality, suggesting that haecceity is constituted of such movement.

While the book’s individual poems are all equally austere and subtle in the ways they manifest the continuous-discrete, the book also includes a large-scale typographical demonstration of this theme. The word H-A-E-C-C-E-I-T-I-E-S is broken into its individual letters and threads through the body of the book. Schlesinger has set the letters in large, 5 inch by 5 inch ornamental caps (Terry Wudenbachs’ Dürer Caps from IHOF) designed after Dürer’s 1525 “Of the Just Shaping of Letters,” a handbook outlining instruction for the geometrical construction of Roman capitals. The letter H begins the book (directly after the title page), and the very last page of the book is adorned with the word’s last letter, S. Each section is set off by a page devoted to the section’s title coupled with one of the stylized letters.

This threading amounts to more than fancy flourish, for it mirrors the continuous-discrete nature of the text: each of the capitals is beautiful architecture on its own, but also performs a function within the context of the whole wor(l)d. Additionally, Schlesinger’s selection of Wudenbachs’ Dürer Caps resonates with the questions of individuality embodied by the concept of haecceity. Wudenbachs’ caps are based on Dürer’s Roman capitals, which are, themselves, created by applying geometry to Classical letter forms. What individuates the letters as they appear in Cross’s book from Wudenbach’s digital forms? From Dürer’s careful geometric renderings? From a stone inscription?

As sculptors are said to chisel away aspects of stone to release the figure that has always resided within, Cross lays his text bare, proposing a continuous-discrete nature of language and of being. Through and through the body of this book, moments of this-ness exist as singular entities always moving into the flux of multiplicity. Such work has the energy of Delezue and Guattari’s interpretation of haecceity, articulated in A Thousand Plateaus, wherein “[c]limate, wind, season, hour are not of another nature than the things, animals, or people that populate them, follow them, sleep and awaken within them. This should be read without pause: the animal-stalks-at-five-o’clock. The becoming-evening, becoming-night of an animal. Blood nuptials. Five o’clock is this animal. This animal is this place.”

By definition the prose poem arises from a site of struggle and composes a union of opposites. We know that a prose poem succeeds when we discern the struggle and see the way in which the tension inherent in the genre reveals something essential about the opposing forces. And ultimately the prose poem has the power to resolve, on the page, something that cannot otherwise be solved. In his 1987 book, The Poverty of Objects: The Prose Poem and the Politics of Genre, Jonathan Monroe deepens the thinking around this fundamental aspect of the genre, connecting genre tensions with “socio-aesthetic” oppositions and conflicts. In other words, the prose poem works out—or furthers the struggle of—what we cannot see ourselves through off-page.

Of particular interest to me is the struggle Monroe taps between the lyric “I” and everyday life. He makes the compelling argument that the prose poem appears and reappears “at those moments—such as the close of the age of the new criticism in America in the early 1960s—when the lyric and the lyrical self seem most sublimely autonomous, detached, set apart from reality” (28). The prose poem serves to do what the individual genres cannot do in isolation: it yokes this lyricism, this lyric self, with the everyday of prose, creating a necessary dialectical tension between the two extremes. In a further turn he prophesies that the prose poem will “disappear or decline in importance when the verse lyric begins again to address the more prosaic aspects of daily life it has often tended to ignore” (28). Once the lyric and the lyric “I” becomes the territory of the everyday—the territory of what used to be the province of prose—the prose poem hybrid will no longer be necessary. The genre will be submerged because it will no longer be needed to fulfill its primary function.

Thirty years later we can see at swift-glance that we have more prose poetry than ever before. If we believe Monroe, this would indicate a verse lyric and a lyric “I” that continues to eschew the daily. However, yet another swift glance will reveal that, to the contrary, the verse lyric increasingly feeds on the “more prosaic aspects of daily life” and lyric “I’s” are now quite often constructed and read with the socio-cultural contexts of their authors in mind. Indeed, the versified lyric sensibility of the everyday has taken the center stage. Furthermore, while a good chunk of the prose poetry written today may be hashing out genre tensions that no longer need hashing, I am pretty sure that much of today’s prose poetry gets something out of being prose poetry rather than a lineated thing.

Because I am convinced by Monroe’s larger picture of the connection between the genre’s dialectical tension and life-as-we-know-it (and you really should read his book because I wager that you will be convinced too), this indicates to me that the prose poem of today is working out of a new tension. A tension that speaks to contemporary 21st century extremes not only extant in genre, but of course also prevalent in, and born of, society at large. I will call this the tension and problem of artifice. For while we are very well aware that the “I’s” we create when social networking (for example) are part-fictive or all-fictive constructions, Facebook posts have physical non-fictive consequences. We still point to the Franzen debacle as an object of shame while we, with the other hand, shell out the cash to purchase David Shields’ Reality Hunger. There is something going on with artifice: it still has the power to absorb us and then, in the next moment—or, in a prose poem, at the very same time—to spit us back out.

Enter Jane Unrue’s Life of a Star, a book-length series of prose poems* voiced by the same persona, all centering around the art and artifice of self-presentation projected towards attention-getting ends. The speaker, every bit of her a fictive character, charges and lingers through the highly artificial landscapes of a formal garden, a museum, a cruise ship, the boarding house of childhood memory, an un-named lover’s bedroom, and the non-space of embroidery (she works on stitching a “simple study of a bumblebee” onto a pillowcase)— all the while recounting memory, fantasizing about romantic adventure, and voicing sexual encounter. The speaker’s aim is to style herself in a way that captivates the attention of lovers. For example, a sequence of poems set in a museum weaves through the book and features the speaker posing for attention in museum galleries:

Dark, twisted people on the beach among the sticks and timber of a storm-wrecked ship, I stood right in the center of that grand old hall of devastating paintings of the poor and pitiable survivors of the largest shipwreck ever, panels hanging clockwise starting at the door through which newcomers wandered. On that spot inside the Gallery of Art I practiced an entirely silent scene, and, of those passing through, there was, there had to be, one couple on whom I made quite a deep impression. He, I knew, was bothered by the image of me standing almost motionless: my body turning slowly so as to confront each painting, otherwise no movement whatsoever. It awakens something in a married man to see such beauty, grace, allure. Not just in contemplation of that kind of agony (eyes: shut), but deep down in the trenches of it (still shut), with it. He could see it on my face: I suffered (deadeye: floor).

And, several pages later in the book, the following poem, brief in its entirety:

I was arresting on that day; exhilarating; dangerous. All that I saw were husbands wishing they could steal away from their encumbrances and go away with me.

Here we have not only woman-as-art-object, but woman-as-intentionally-offering-herself-as-art-object. The speaker of these poems knows not only how to pose her body to particular effect, standing such-and-such a way among art objects, but also knows the particular people to manipulate with her effect: married men, cruising galleries with their wives. Here she will not only play on the man’s sensibility for beauty, already triggered by the beautiful shipwreck depicted around her, but she will also prey on his married state, urging him to see his wife as an “encumbrance.” Additionally, there is an interesting indeterminacy to the phrase “All that I saw.” Does the speaker mean that she became blind to all other people—so deeply seeped in her manipulation she only sees the objects that can project herself back to herself? Or, does she mean that her very presence transformed “all that [she] saw” into husbands? Artifice as self-blinding or other-transforming—or both, at the very same time?

In Unrue’s use of persona, unabashed indulgences of artifice, and tropes of an actress on the stage—all packaged within a book-length project—Life of a Star bares more than a passing similarity to Louise In Love, Mary Jo Bang’s 2001 book that chronicles the love affair of a character, Louise, an actress who both is an is not Louise Brooks. For example, here is an excerpt from Bang’s poem “Louise sighs, such a long winter, this”:


Dollish and dressed in pretense, Louise turns
to the window: in one eye, she sees fir trees
circling a suspicious white house,
a peevish pink shed; in the other, a helicopter

distinguishing itself from five geese flying in form.
O the crippled government of love, love love.
Numb now, why she’s just a young thing,
a fillip of the ghostly habit of on and on.

Here we have similarities to Unrue’s museum passage in Bang’s presentation of a woman caught in a moment of solitude, in the attention to Louise as physical artifice (“Dollish and dressed in pretense”), in the passage’s focus on the character’s gaze (though Louise’s gaze registers objects rather than aims at the effect of being an object), and in the linking of the pose of a woman-in-solitude to musings over the nature of love. There is also a sense, in both passages, that while we see a particular feminine figure featured, these women are part of a whole fabric of artifice: Unrue’s speaker is an extension of the shipwreck painting behind her and works to transform her beholders’ wives into encumbrances; Louise is a “fillip,” that is to say, a stimulus of what goes “on and on.” There are, however, significant differences to the projects and these differences point to what Unrue is doing with artifice in the prose poem genre.

Most recognizably, Bang employs the framing technique of a third person speaker who can tell us more than the characters that she describes—moving us in and out of the layers of the story, never fully unfolded but rather gestured towards, stylized. Louise and the other characters in the book have lines of dialogue, but the third person speaker serves as a structural apparatus that draws our attention to the artifice of the work and allows us to see the way it is constructed and held together. As such, we can become both absorbed in the textures of the love affair, but we can also be pulled up to the surface, made aware of the act of telling and observing because of the outsider status of the story’s teller. In this way, the speaker enacts a tension also employed in the poems’ form. If the sentence-to-sentence action creates the thrust of the story, the lineation of the poem breaks this thrust, doubling the language back on itself.

Life of a Star has no such advantage, for we encounter no lineation and are locked into the head of the book’s first-person narrator. This allows Unrue to take full advantage of the absorptive aspects of prose work. For example, I have rarely been so annoyed with a first-person narrator than I am with this speaker’s palpably cloying and manipulative forays into love. The fact that I am annoyed with her means that I have in some major way “bought in” to her, even during poems such as the following:

Encounter number one: “Don’t let me conquer you,” you said. I said, “Already have.” (No blinking: mouth: relaxed.)

And the following:

“No whore,” you said, “Has ever been fucked like that.” “You’d better go,” I said (eyes: down) in hopes that you would tell me I’m not going anywhere. It was encounter number two.

Both of these moments are set on their own pages and sound, aptly for a book titled Life of a Star, like bad dialogue from some star’s blog. They work to create a layering to the persona, allowing Unrue’s speaker to come across as both highly artificial and strikingly real. By weaving moments such as these “encounters,” which are raw and minimal, between moments such as the museum passage (notice the repetition of parentheticals linking the two different types of experience) or moments of high fantasy (“When I looked over, I discovered sea pearls on the floor, and reaching in between my legs, into the warmth and wetness, it seemed I was filled up with those sea pearls”) Unrue creates a sort of psychological, New Sentencey effect—not between sentence to sentence, but between poem and poem. If the New Sentence, as described by Ron Silliman, works so that in prose poems the leaps between sentences create and reveal gaps for readers to engage, Unrue’s leaps between poems create a space for readers to fill with a sort of virtual psychology, thus becoming attached. (Here we might remember our Stein: Paragraphs are emotional while sentences are not!) Further compounding this effect are about a dozen poems, placed near the beginning of the book, in which the speaker tells about her childhood. Here we see a formative and scarring experience with a boarder named Jeanette (the speaker’s family rents rooms), another little girl who is favored above the speaker. We get a morbid dream-like encounter and the family suddenly moves out, but our “star” never tells us exactly what happens—does she threaten Jeanette? Hurt her? Scare her? Unrue gives us just enough information to perform an amateur psychological evaluation on the narrator, but not enough information to tell how far our little star will go with her manipulations.

The attachment Unrue’s speaker wrests from her readers is, however, ultimately disrupted by the “poetic” aspects of the text. And this is the way in which Unrue performs the tension of artifice—that of absorbing us into a fictive world while at the same time spitting us back out. Unrue breaks the dream by calling attention to the surface of her language through her range of diction—we get “fuck” and “whore” on one page and “seed pearls,” which may or may not be related, but in terms of diction are from a different sphere—on another. We also get self-conscious, nearly meta-poetic moments where the speaker talks about her wiles of manipulation:

The one who simulates attraction to herself by molding her complexities to meet a given situation and by demonstrating, at the same time, the effect her having on the situation has upon her own self, wins.

Notice here that not only does the speaker confess her intentions, but she shows her hand with the awkward phrasing of “her having.” The use of “her having” rather than the smoother “she has” deploys the merits of the continuous form of the verb, “to have,” thus enacting the “at the same time” that the sentence describes. Such finely-embroidered phrases leave us to wonder if the book isn’t also a metaphor for literary persona-making. Of course it is.

Other poetic aspects of the book include gaps between the poems and the varying amount of space each poem takes up on the page. Gaps and space here create a sense not exactly of silence, but of something going on off-page, another life lived that we cannot hear in the circumscribed (and so lyric) world of the speaker. In addition, Unrue does not give us scenes in successive settings but rather jumps around from museum to cruise ship to childhood to lover’s bedroom, etc. This jostles engagement with the action (usually sexual, sometimes violent, sometimes conversational) that happens in the scenes, shooting us out of any sort of narrative of cause and effect we might feel lingering under the surface.

As such the book explores the tensions of artifice that we face daily: knowing that we encounter constructed identities, we still buy into them. Perhaps this is akin to believing, contra quantum mechanics, that the cat-in-the-box is always either dead or alive but never any mixture of both. Perhaps this is because we know that, ultimately, within artifice resides a certain truth: by deconstructing these fictions we find the materials and impulses—the origins—from which they are made. Out of this we can study the drives and values that construct a made thing. However, this is not the sort of truth that settles anything: if we admit all speakers, and not just in novels, to be fictive things what we are becomes ever more complexed and murky. If Unrue’s book does resolve this contradiction it is with moments of self-recognition such as the following single-line poem. For better or for worse

It seems I have no feelings I can call my own.

_______
* In full disclosure I must reveal that the book has the genre “fiction” written on its back cover. And who am I to argue with the genre designation given the book by its author and/or publisher—all of which are prose poets par excellance? However, quibble I will. I think it is because of the persona-based aspect of the book that it has been designated “fiction.” This shows how far outside of the mainstream a blatantly fictive, psychologically absorptive lyric “I” is considered to be. If the lyric “I” of the New Critical lyric was not likely to be found messing about in the everyday (and so needed the prose poem to do it!), the lyric “I” of the contemporary versified lyric is just as likely not to be found indulging the drama of a fictive, palpably artificial persona. Admittedly, both examples are reductive (there was more going on in the early 60s than New Critical lyrics!), but we are talking official verse culture. If we consider today’s experimental breakthroughs into the “mainstream” (the obvious example being Rae Armantrout’s recent awards), we will notice that the works that do the breaking thrive on identification of author-and-speaker and take on the language and aspect of the everyday. This, my friends, is something to think about.

Readers familiar with Quarantine (Ahsahta Press, 2006) and Stripping Point (Counterpath, 2007)—Brian Henry’s most recent books until Wings Without Birds came out from Salt—will immediately see this book as a departure. First, Quarantine and Stripping Point both strongly hinge on inviting us to think of the speakers of the books as personae. Quarantine’s speaker is dying of the plague and he comes to us as though through 17th century London; the speaker of “More Dangerous Than Dying,” Stripping Point’s long first poem, speaks to us from a 20th century corporate paper mill. These speakers feel intentionally fictive and Henry builds his personae in a way that invites the questioning of such a device: Quarantine is punctuated with contemporary details and the paper mill of Stripping Point reads more as metaphysical setting than as actual setting. Both books engage taboo scenarios: the plague-stricken speaker of Quarantine is shockingly cold towards his wife and son’s deaths, slips down to the river to meet his male lover. The speaker in Stripping Point is having an affair.

In contrast, the speaker of Wings Without Birds does not feel fictive in the least and readers will likely think themselves ridiculously indoctrinated into New Critical workshop etiquette if they call the entity voicing the poems “the speaker” rather than “the poet himself” speaking as the poet himself. The book, dedicated to Henry’s family, moodily circles around domesticity and domicile, directly addressing family members as in: “Daughter who tells me the hills are a moon” (“In the Neighborhood of Horses”). In these poems Henry names, by proper name, his wife “Tara, sleep-nursing” (“Wings Without Birds”) and dispenses with pretense, bringing to the surface the fact that the writer of these poems is writing poems. Henry directly addresses the reader at times, and also directly addresses other poets such as Tomaž Šalamun, a poet who Henry, Šalamun’s translator, obviously knows. We may, of course, remember that all written I’s are precisely that, written, and therefore naturally papery-versions of ourselves with all the fictive qualities this entails. But this book overtly challenges the eye-diverting decorum we develop when we talk “speaker” instead of “poet,” inviting us to read this poetry as work that puts the stuff of nonfiction at stake. For example, the following passage comes in the middle of “Where We Stand Now,” the 16-page poem that centers the book:

The Royal smashed beyond fixing
during the move, I set to it
with a screwdriver to remove as much
of it from itself as I can. Arrive.
I arrange the screws to spell “pain”
and photograph the word with the type-
writer’s husk surrounded
by pieces of its former self then
throw it all into a box and drive
to the Clarke County landfill.
The car has new tires, new belt,
its floor covered with raisins
Cheerios barrettes pretzels
paper and if I were a crying man
I would cry I swear I would.

The second primary departure is one of form and structure. Both Quarantine and Stripping Point perform marvelous structural feats and cannot be properly read without taking into account the relationship between structure and content. Quarantine comes to us in two sections, “Quarantine” and “Contagion,” and “Contagion” literally rewrites “Quarantine” backwards, reversing the order of the poems and the order of their lines. Stripping Point, also a two-part book, deploys a similar tactic in its second section, “Stripping Point.” Here we begin with 13 6-line poems. As the section moves on lines are recombined and stripped away, moving us through 12 5-line poems, 11 4-line poems, 10 3-line poems, and 9 2-line poems. After the first set of poems are established new language is not added; rather, the poems advance by diminishing. In each of these projects Henry helps the reader move through these structural permutations by establishing and then maintaining a fairly simple form of line and stanza across each book. It is impossible to read either book without confronting its structure, thinking through the way in which form/structure and content manifest a whole and culminate in a complete poetic project.

Wings Without Birds, to the contrary, is light on structure and deploys a variety of free verse forms. Poems range from eight lines long—″Bad Gardener” reads in its entirety:

Butterfly bush
ravaged by inept hands
—inept hands with sheers—

so deformed
even the bees
stay clear

—to the 16-page long “Where We Stand Now” which has a narrative, peripatetic movement and works its way through a single, unbroken stanza. And, while the book has a pleasing symmetrical structure, it does not employ any rewriting or recombinatory techniques. This architecture is much simpler: the book both begins and ends with two-page fragmented lyrics. In between span three sections of nearly equal length: the first section is 16 pages long and is comprised of more-or-less stand alone poems, the second section is the continuous long poem “Where We Stand Now” and the third section again moves back to more-or-less stand alone poems and spans 17 pages. Not only does this simple structure create solid containers for the varying poetic forms, but it also argues for the primacy of the poem-moment, rather than the poem-project. For a book so seeped in the rhythms and details of the everyday, this organization gives the work a feeling of authenticity that would be undercut by a more intricate structure.

I frame this discussion of the book in terms of Quarantine and Stripping Point not because Wings Without Birds cannot stand on its own, but because the work that it does can be more clearly seen in contrast to the other projects. First, it still feels rare to find a poet who is comfortable with making such departures: if Quarantine and Stripping Point have set up a trajectory of project and personae, Henry is unafraid to waylay this movement with lyrics of the everyday, with himself as speaker. Second, despite my insistence on framing Wings Without Birds as a book that does not operate via persona and project, but focuses in on an authentic everyday, it is interesting to take the opposite point of view and look at this work as an extension of what Quarantine and Stripping Point do. For example, if we look at the packaging of Quarantine we will see that Henry was careful to remove as many references to himself as author as possible: we have no author photo, no blurbs, no bio. Wings Without Birds, in contrast, not only has such paratexts, but the author photo is by Tara herself. What if the book were to be read as a performance of authorial subjectivity? And, last, while the everyday subject matter and simple structure of Wings might at first seem unadventurous to fans of Quarantine and Stripping Point, I hope that the following thoughts on the poetry of everyday life show Henry’s approach to the quotidian, with all of his moody flourishes, to be, in fact, quite extraordinary in our particular moment.

**

Our culture’s continued and ever-entrenched fascination with everyday life hardly asks for remark, for status updates and tweets create an everyday that constantly comments upon itself. As such, writing has become integral to the digestive practice of everyday life. As pre-factory farming cows once stood in their fields grazing on grass to digest, re-digest, and digest yet again only to shit out fertilizer for more grazing, more digesting, many of us suffer the everyday kindly only insofar as it provides fodder for texting, tweeting, facebooking. Which in turn informs our cooking, eating, walking, talking, reading writing (etcetera) habits, fingers twitching for keyboard and keys. Given this obsession with articulating the everyday, it is no surprise that the best-selling genre is non-fiction, and documentary modes of entertainment have superseded the overtly fictional.

As such, it should not be a surprise that much of what is attended to in contemporary poetry responds to this interest in the everyday. The everyday and its attendant mixture of detritus and significance hovers behind the following much-remarked upon modes of contemporary poetry. First, we have the following project-oriented manifestations:

Poetry written from the lineage of the Objectivists, of Williams and of Creeley, as opposed to the lineage of Stevens.

In recent essays published in the Boston Review Stephen Burt promotes both of these last two trends, employing in “Smothered to Smithereens” the work of Rachel Zucker to exemplify the poetry of motherhood. In “The New Thing” Burt promotes the work of contemporary writers such as Rae Armantrout, Graham Foust, Devin Johnston, and Jon Woodward to exemplify a trend in contemporary poetry that pursues

compression, compact description, humility, restricted diction, and—despite their frequent skepticism—fidelity to a material and social world. They follow Williams’s “demand,” as the critic Douglas Mao put it, “both that poetry be faithful to the thing represented and that it be a thing in itself.” They are so bound up with ideas of durable thinghood that we can name the tendency simply by capitalizing: the New Thing.

Such writing attends to the things of the everyday, accentuating fidelity to the texture of life as it is lived, as opposed to the imagined life. The supreme importance of fidelity to life “actually” lived, rather than imagined, is exemplified by Armantrout’s statement that she uses material from her dreams, but would not feel comfortable making up dreams. As such, poets of the New Thing zero in on the landscape of contemporary objects as they are experienced, as opposed to the interior landscape of the self.

While the intensity of our fascination with everyday life feels particular to this contemporary moment, discourse on “everyday life” is itself nothing new. Everyday life studies blossomed in France during the 60s and 70s, Henri Lefebvre’s Critique de la vie quotidienne dates from 1947, and anthologists track predecessors back to surrealists (see Michael Sheringham’s Everyday Life) and to Freud (see Ben Highmore’s The Everyday Life Reader). And, although such study has deep roots, theorists are far from over such concerns. As Sheringham notes, “the period between 1960 and 1980 is a phase of active, if often invisible, invention and the period from 1980 to 2000 (and beyond) a phase of practice, variation, and dissemination” (14). I bring this point up because I think it provides intellectual context for contemporary poetry’s fascination with the everyday and deepens the stakes of its pursuit. At their best, writers pursuing everyday life have the ability to challenge the status quo and effect change. As such, it deeply matters whether or not, as a contemporary poet, you are invited to participate in the poetics of the everyday.

One of the most intriguing aspects of the everyday vis-à-vis contemporary poetry is the tension it brings to the surface surrounding the concept of subjectivity. Notice that there has been the most hype around poetry of the everyday that eschews lyric subjectivity: Conceptual Poetry, Flarf, and Documentary Poetry are built on a rejection of such sensibility. Furthermore, on the lyric end of the spectrum not just any kind of speaker is invited to talk about his or her subjective experience (by which I mean emotionally, physically and intellectually embodied) of the everyday. Poets writing from a still-marginal position (such as that of motherhood) can pull off speakers who engage in the everyday as needing, wanting, proclaiming subjectivities. We even like it when they tell us their secrets and get pissed off.

Not so the speaker who comes from the position of power we associate with non-mothering, straight, white, middle class culture which of course includes men but also women when they aren’t mothering, or when they aren’t featuring their mothering roles. If you read Burt’s essay on the “New Thing” you will notice that he is careful to note that poets of the “New Thing,” most of whom write from this position, are interested in objects in the world—not in the subject that apprehends them. One of the traits of New Thing poets is that subjective emotion is so submerged that Burt notes that readers will likely have to re-read such poetry to pick up their affect. For example, “We may have to reread to see, amid these scenes, the grief (for Woodward’s dead friend Patrick) that guides the whole book.” Indeed, the New Thing poets of the everyday are interested not in interiors but in what they can clearly see before them. Subjectivity, it seems, for these speakers, is off-limits. Where Rachel Zucker might write that she

can barely hear above the clicking of my why thinking why
               

am I so obsessed with paint color and the properties of seasons


material objects I’m crazy, so lazy and driven, relentless, no one could stand this
                   

they call it cyclical negative thinking the constant self-checking
 am I okay now?

and we listen with interest because she is a mother, because she is ostensibly writing from a margin, would such articulations be considered boringly self-indulgent if they came out of the mouth of a different speaker? Can any reader here imagine praising a poet of motherhood, writing elegies for a lost son, for so submerging her grief that readers would need to read the poems twice in order to pick up on the emotion? I ask these questions not to challenge’s Burt’s notions—he is spot-on in his recognition of poetic trends. In fact, two comments on his “New Thing” article show that even the amount of subjectivity allotted to New Thing poets is too much for the contemporary reader. One comment complains, “how do these quoted poems differ from earlier conversations about subjectivity (ie imagism/Frost/Williams)—why are we still having this conversation?” Another quips: “Because we haven’t yet moved onto another.”

**

While thinking about these matters of taste, of who is and who isn’t invited to the party du jour, the party of “interesting poetry of the everyday,” of the fact that many Conceptual Writers are straight white males who couldn’t bring their subjectivities to the party even if they wanted to, which they obviously don’t, but what if they did, I began to read Brian Henry’s Wings Without Birds. The book first struck me because it was so different from his most recent two books, and then struck me again because the way in which it is different from those books is that it intentionally engages a poetry of the everyday—and a poetry of the everyday that in all of its ordinariness has come to inhabit the taboo. That is to say, not only does Henry write about the thinghoodedness of everyday life, and about actual encounters undergone (à la the New Thing poets), but he also writes about these elements without damping down any of the emotional, physical, and intellectual aspects of his relationship with his world. The poem “Family, Portrait” the third-to-last poem in the book, ends:

Our June song makes peace
with lack of sleep, enforces
idleness. Bites, burns, the film
of the outdoors that covers us,
family, as soon as we rise
unshowered and uninterested,
unready for everything around us.

]]> http://www.constantcritic.com/karla_kelsey/wings-without-birds/feed/ 2 http://www.constantcritic.com/karla_kelsey/ventrakl/ http://www.constantcritic.com/karla_kelsey/ventrakl/#comments Fri, 13 Aug 2010 15:48:34 +0000 ccadmin http://www.constantcritic.com/?p=1105

Ventrakl, Christian Hawkey’s latest book (out October 1st from UDP), centers around the late 19th /early 20th century German Experssionist poet Georg Trakl, and self-identifies, via subtitle, as a collaboration between the two poets. Here, Christian Hawkey works to authentically communicate with Georg Trakl. To read him, to hear him, to channel him, to understand him.

Concerned with translation, influence, and the intersubjective space opened by the act of reading, the book presents a paradoxical occasion of unique identity and supreme interdependence.* This book manages to be at the same time an overheard emotional utterance that comes from a particularly felt subjective location (that is to say, the lyric as conventionally described) and a discourse on language, identity, politics, and the making of life and of art. The book is a “ventricle,” having to do with the heart. It is ven (latin root: to come) + Trakl, having to do with the summoning of a ghost. It is a Ven diagram, wherein Trakl is Set A and Christian Hawkey is Set B and Ventrakl is the intersection of Hawkey and Trakl, the spaced occupied by the reader. By collaborative identity.

If this sounds like the book is taking on a lot, it is. Ventrakl takes on an authentic quest (by which I mean that the author actually discovers something in the act of writing) and, as such, the book must necessarily challenge the assumption that poetry can either inhabit private, circumscribed space, or it can inhabit a space of public discourse that is aware of its own construction. This book needs to do both. We might say that the project aims to have its proverbial Sachertorte and to eat it too.

In our well-and-often-soliloquized post-postmodern hybrid third-way moment, most readers will not be surprised by this orientation. In addition, readers of today’s poetry will find many of Hawkey’s tactics for creating this condition familiar. In fact, a list of Ventrakl’s tactics and concerns will read as a description for what it is to be a book of poetry du jour:

The poetic project

Drawing out these currencies is not in any way to suggest that Ventrakl is passé. To the contrary: in comparison with so much—with exhaustingly too much—contemporary work that bargains on it being “enough” to simply tactic-du-jour, Hawkey uses these tactics to specific, resonant ends. Ventrakl sets up the quest to commune with Trakl and to allow such communion to express and shape Hawkey himself. The tactics Hawkey employs to this end are necessary modes, part and parcel of his project and to the life-quests of its tasks. Here there is no separation between reading, writing, and living, which makes all of the difference in the world for, as Hawkey writes, “To read is to animate words, let them speak within you, alongside you, as you.”

This statement, pulled from the book’s preface, expresses what is at stake in the project. Hawkey asks himself not only to animate and hear Trakl’s words, but to become the words themselves. What difficulty! Not only does Trakl write in German, Hawkey in English, but Trakl has come to contemporary readers through our culture’s fascination with his tortured biography and cultural context.* How much of this biography colors the hearing of his poems? Should some of this biography be filtered out? Or left to remain? In addition, Trakl’s work, informed by his nature, place, and time, is fractured and intense. What sorts of psychic toll does reading such utterance “as” oneself—does becoming such utterance, risk? Such questions require Hawkey’s variety of compositional tactics and linguistic surfaces to create an authentic relation between author and author, reader and text. And, while a quick flip through the book will provide such a variety of form and linguistic texture as to seem chaotic, an actual reading of the book (and, yes, this book wants to be read, not only conceptually considered) will prove to be a remarkably coherent experience. Not only do certain emotions and ideas require different tactics for investigation and expression, but tactic gives on to, necessitates, and informs, subsequent tactics, creating a tightly-woven book.

Let’s take the first item on the list and look at the role translation plays in the book, as well as the way that translation-as-tactic leads, of necessity, to other modes on the list. The centrality of translation to the book is built into the book’s occasion. In his preface, Hawkey sets the book up as a conversation between two ghosts: the ghost of writing that is his book, and the ghost of Trakl, for “Books—of the living or the dead—are the truest ghosts among us, the immaterial made material.” This conversation immediately foregrounds the concept of translation. When Hawkey began the project he “did not yet speak or read German. This made it somewhat hard to talk! And this was a precisely why I wanted to talk: to cross a boundary, a border. Translation in the general sense occurs in any encounter with a text, and image, a face, a sound, an idea, a traffic light.”

The book takes on this widened sense of translation, incorporating pictures of Trakl, Trakl’s family, and, at the end of the book, of Hawkey himself. As the book progresses Hawkey reads each image, zooming in on details both visual and biographical, panning with narrative both supposed and actual, and pushing out with the areal view of consideration informed by Barthes’ Camera Lucida.

Hawkey also employs translation in the specific sense, as a rendering from one language to another. However, even in this sense the idea of “translation” is stretched and problematized, for the book includes poems that were translated by a variety of procedures. Hawkey translates some poems by “homographiconic drafts…where a word (or words) from one’s own native language is identified within a foreign word or text by either sound or sight.” Other poems are translated by using search engines. Radically material translation tactics are employed such as shooting a copy of Trakl’s poems with a 12 gauge and “translating, with a dictionary, the remaining text” as well as leaving a copy of Trakl’s poems outside in a glass jar to decompose for a year and rearranging the pieces that remain. Here we also find at least one traditional translation in the very last poem of the book.

Exploring a variety of translation procedures is catchy in a du jour sort of way (particularly procedures that take the notion of language-as-material to radical places such as shotguns and glass jars full of rain, leaves, and mosquito larvae) and leads to enormous linguistic variety across the text. Take, for example, the beginnings of two poems, both composed in tercets, that face each other on pages 94 and 95 of the book. The poem “Rosencrantz: A Western” begins:

Without a gesture or word of understanding
I am pulling, verbed and bent, a taut wire
Through the glazed, blue eyes of summer.

The poem “Totenberg” begins:

No one home. Summer inheres.
A monad shells out sonatas
And ewoks along some never-ending Walden.

Both stanzas employ the seasonal setting of summer and begin with negation: “without a gesture” and “no one home.” While the second poem doesn’t employ pronouns, both poems voice from a private-feeling “I.” However, “Rosencrantz” bears a much more fluid sense than “Totenberg”—the stanza provides a single through-gesture and describes a movement through time. We do not know what the “taut wire” pulled through summer is, but it is easy to imagine that it might be the project of Ventrakl itself. The taut wire of translation, the taut wire of communing. “Totenberg,” on the other hand, works more associatively and blocks a settling of sense with surprising verbs (the “monad” “shells out”) and nouns (ewoks? Walden?). Here we have relation—the monad shelling out such varieties as sonatas and ewoks, but we cannot as easily translate this relation into logical sense.

In the face of this variety, it is important to note that Hawkey doesn’t use variety for variety’s sake but rather as tool to contend with different aspects of discovering-relation. What mode of translation, for example, might allow one to come into authentic relationship with the fact that Trakl’s dearly beloved (incestuously beloved?) sister Greta “steps into a side room and shoots herself” three years after Trakl’s death? Shooting a book of Trakl’s poems, and translating the remains, is an intriguing attempt at such a task. It takes into account the fact that the suicide post-dates Trakl’s end (Hawkey shoots a published copy), but still informs our reading of Trakl’s work (Hawkey shoots a published copy). There is resonance, also, in the act of translating Trakl—so ravished by his temporal moment, by the First World War, through what remains.

In many respects, these linguistic and tactical varieties open the book to great vulnerability because they make it impossible for the book to carry across a singular texture. However, Hawkey does the work necessary to lead us through the book by dividing the book into digestible sections, by repeating modes across the whole of the book (particularly effective pacers are prose poems wherein Hawkey thinks through the large-scale questions of the book, often addressing his thoughts to Trakl), and by giving the project a distinctive arc. This arc moves us from the outside to the inside. The book begins by presenting a photograph of Trakl, taking us through a consideration of the photo’s basic occasion as Hawkey addresses the first non-prefatory thought of the book to Trakl, writing, “You are, clearly, on a beach, and judging by the diminutive waves and the soft, brushed surface of the water it is a lake, or a small sea, Lake Como perhaps, or the Black Sea.” The book moves through the interior of Trakl (even going so far as to imagine moving into his mind, via his ear) and out, into the world through Hawkey’s consideration of himself as reader, as writer, as individual. As such, the book organizes along the trajectory of relation and the way we apprehend the world, carving a path that is distinctive to Hawkey’s experience, but that is also wide enough for the reader to follow. Such a project, authentically performed, entails plurality laced with the “taut wire” we might call identity.

_____
* This tension in relationship is also born out by the book’s implied relationship to Jack Spicer’s After Lorca. Ventrakl would not be possible without After Lorca, yet it seeks to forge its own, unique relationship to its subject. So, while Ventrakl would not exist without After Lorca, the mode of relation Ventrakl expresses is unique and quite independent of the relation that After Lorca expresses.

* Those unfamiliar with Trakl’s biography should specifically not be afraid to read Ventrakl.In fact, the contrary is true. Hawkey does an exemplary job of weaving in enough information, at the appropriate times, to initiate the uninitiated but does not bore, in any way, those familiar with Trakl’s biography and work.

]]> http://www.constantcritic.com/karla_kelsey/ventrakl/feed/ 0 http://www.constantcritic.com/karla_kelsey/the-bride-of-e/ http://www.constantcritic.com/karla_kelsey/the-bride-of-e/#comments Sun, 27 Jun 2010 17:25:57 +0000 ccadmin http://www.constantcritic.com/?p=899

I have been thinking about how to talk and write about Mary Jo Bang’s new book, The Bride of E, for quite some time. It is one of those books that I immediately took to, but had a hard time articulating how it was doing its work on me. Which is exactly the indication I look for to see whether or not I want to spend time on a book—whether or not I want to absorb or articulate its properties.

The Bride of E is an abecedarian engaging in existential questions in a post-post-modern context. If you are thinking that this is the territory of what is supposed to be oxymoronic (how can you go through post-modernism without negating the game of existentialism?) you are correct. And you’ve already tapped into the nature of the book’s difficulty and delight: the audacity of taking a box cutter to that Pandora’s box.

Further, the poem titles alone snag me: “ABC Plus E: Cosmic Aloneness Is the Bride of Existence.” Cool. Funny. And how damnably true. And then there is “B Is for Beckett,” which reads, in its entirety, “There is so little to say.” To which I reply: yes and exactly. What I appreciate here is the taking up the childhood pedagogical play of attaching figures to letters in the alphabet, and how very wickedly different “B Is for Beckett” is to the usual “B is for ball.” Here Bang re-instruct us in the attachments of association, gives us an adult existential primer, gives us a little glimpse of the way her own mind associates, toggling the “for” from “stands for” to “is for” into a dedication: this poem, this B, is for Beckett. A whole page, one sentence, just for him. Further, the phrase “There is so little to say,” alone on the page as a poem, is so very Beckett. The phrase might have been said by Beckett, but is also an optimistic (perhaps) response to the end of Ohio, Impromptu, which finishes: “There is nothing left to tell.”

Here, the subtle difference between “telling” and “saying.” “Telling” connotes a relationship with a listener; “saying” has undertones of personal reservoir. Here, the tremendous difference between there being “so little” to say, and there being “nothing left” to tell. Because of Beckett’s work, we have a little to say—not nothing. We have followed his direction, have gone on when we couldn’t and so, by his lead, he has, in some small part, delivered us from nothing. Yes, “B” is for Beckett—we should dedicate a whole alphabet to him, or at least a cheer. Give me a “B” give me an “E.” Give me a “C-K-E”—a “double T.”

In addition to my attraction to the book itself, there is the book’s circumstance driving me to write, although more than a little part of me is inclined to agree with Ray when he proposes that “the books which you consider [good] are likely to make the case for their arguments and preoccupations via the poems they contain more effectively than can your prosaic assessment of them.” However, this particular book follows Bang’s award-winning book Elegy—a book that charts the year of grief following the death of her adult son. With immediately accessible subject matter and a pared-down range of language, Elegy is more typically lyric in a New Critical sort of way. Elegy has many fans, as it should, but the overwhelmingly positive reception of Elegy has made me anxious about its younger sister. Much of The Bride of E resists the clean lines of the New Critic’s lyric and, so, it will likely receive less attention than Elegy. Which is, I suppose, OK, except for the fact that there is so much here to be missed.

Additionally troubling, this allotment of attention seems to have much to do—even over 100 years after such wild poetic energy as Tender Buttons was released on the reading public—with what the average poetry reader (which means the average poetry writer) seems able to read. Or, maybe readers can “read” books like The Bride of E, but we still don’t have a way to usefully talk about them and, so, tend to wax apophatic. This fact (among other things) makes me bristle at reception such as the following from a review on The Bride of E: “But perhaps most of all, remembering the power and focus of Elegy, with its amazing ability to connect with readers and provide clarity to anguish, we may be disappointed by the occasional solipsism and obfuscation of these lines, resulting in a sense that this volume, an accomplishment in its own right, may appear premature and incomplete when seen in the poet’s oeuvre.” Asking for “more” is not a problem: what is a problem is expecting the values of one text from another without explaining why such expectation is apt.

Let’s look at another poem, titled “And as in Alice”:

Alice cannot be in the poem, she says, because
She’s only a metaphor for childhood
And a poem is a metaphor already
So we’d only have a metaphor

Inside a metaphor. Do you see?
They all nod. They see. Except for the girl
With her head in the rabbit hole. From this vantage,
Her bum looks like the flattened backside

Of a black-and-white panda. She actually has one
In the crook of her arm.
Of course, its’ stuffed and not living.
Who would dare hold a real bear so near the outer ear?

She’s wondering what possible harm might come to her
If she fell all the way down the dark she’s looking through.
Would strange creatures sing songs
Where odd syllables came to a sibilant end at the end.

Perhaps the sounds would be a form of light hissing.
Like when a walrus blows air
Through two fractured front teeth. Perhaps it would
Take the form of a snake. But if a snake, it would need a tree.

Could she grown one from seed? Could one make a cat?
Make it sit on a branch and fade away again
The moment you told it that the rude noise it was hearing was rational thought
With an axe beating on the forest door.

As I wonder if meta-poetic gestures, such as the Alice moment at the beginning of the poem, are what the reviewer considers “solipsistic,” I am first caught by the charm of Alice speaking to me through the poem, and then notice the sadness that Alice’s refusal has evoked in me. For readers who know Bang’s work, Alice’s refusal to be in the poem will resonate as betrayal. A familiar figure in previous books, Alice was there for us when Bang took on the problem of representation in The Eye Like a Strange Balloon, Bang’s fourth book of ekphrastic poetry. Alice even appeared in Elegy. Now, when we expect her to be here (for, other pop culture figures such as Cher, Mickey Mouse, Jackie O, Freud, etc) make appearances in The Bride of E)—she refuses to show. What does she mean she “cannot be in the poem?” How dare she. We knew she was a metaphor all along, but one that we loved and that previously refused to neglect us. What do we do when even our broken images refuse to appear? At the same time, I appreciate the irony of my response: by saying she won’t be in the poem, Alice puts in an appearance. Bang is so very sly this way, offering us an imaginative moment, and then pulling the rug out from underneath, provoking questions like what does it mean for something (someone?) such as Alice to be present?

In many of these poems Bang dramatizes what we already know from so much theory: the emptying of the sign of its meaning. We know intellectually that figures such as Alice have been over-used, but it is still surprising to find a writer who is able to convey what that loss means—how it feels to be abandoned even by one’s own used-up images and to what extent they can still be of use. To address, imaginatively, the question of what we do without them? “What is there to think?” asks characters in other poems from the book. “How shall we live,” “what shall we do?”

In many ways, the girl with her head in the rabbit hole can be seen as a mock-up of the poet who “goes on” nevertheless and assumes Alice’s story, even without her. Written in the form of “perhaps,” the rabbit-hole girl narrates her possibilities along the same storyline as Wonderland’s, speaking to the power of narrative to guide us—for better or worse—even when its images have worn out its imprint is present.

The Bride of E comes to us from the ends of things—from a position that well-knows the death of god, the death of the author, and the death of the conventional lyric subject. As such, this “end” is no more personal to Bang as a poet as it is to her contemporary, American readers. The work of course reflects her image reservoirs and gestures, but it does not have the autobiographical focus that Elegy (and elegies in general) demand. The book is much more about the way we still can make use of worn-out images and phrases to ask existential questions of the post-postmodern world.

***

As I am thinking through Bang’s book and my reaction to its work, I have also been considering the question of the review, addressed in such different ways by Ray and Vanessa’s recent contributions. Do I feel it is my job, as reviewer, to rectify the fact that many readers will wish The Bride of E to be a different sort of book than it is—that (to repeat myself—but I can never get over it) over 100 years after Stein we have a hard time reading work that angles out at the edges, that shows up the opacity of language even while it makes use of its transparent properties?

Further, to my mind, reviewers have almost always done a rather mediocre job with Bang’s work. Positive reviews consist mostly of quotation, as if the work can’t be unfolded. Negative review-moments (and there really aren’t many) seem to object to the work on the basis that it does not cleanly fit into a poetic camp. And I suspect that, like much work that has been sloppily handled, this is because experimentally engaged reviewers won’t know what to do with her work’s deployment of personae, imagery, chiseled poetic form—and reviewers engaged with the New Critical lyric will persist in wanting all of her work to be Elegy. Reviewers like categories, and Bang is bad at staying in them.

***

In his 2003 review of work by Mary Jo Bang, Michael Collier, and Stanley Plumly, David Biespiel quotes a passage from Bang’s third book, Downward Extremity of the Isle of Swans, and proceeds with the following critique:

This is the hyperventilated opening of “It’s Winter in the Eye, and Like Ophelia.” It is certainly quirky if quirky means turning nouns into verbs, inverting syntax, or referring to the vision of only one eye. But the relentless drive toward oddity quickly wears thin (though oddity is what constitutes these poem’s originality.) Bang’s approach is to plunge through abrupt cacophonous bursts of language…Much of the time Bang’s crazed vision luxuriates in giddy extremes and frivolous, cheery spiels—cheery because they’re oblivious to life. Control is what’s lacking, and its’ too bad…After three books Mary Jo Bang shows an extraordinary, if uneven, talent in poems that are imbued with a sever but flippant charm.

The review then proceeds with a paragraph beginning: “But at the other side of Bang’s inconsistency are exceptional strokes…” and the review ends with phrases of praise such as “extraordinarily good, irreverent deadpan.” In employing both positive and negative evaluation the review comes across as being objective about the book and does not explicitly lay bare the reviewer’s ethics and aesthetics. However, even through the guise of impartiality, the reviewer’s orientations are easy to read into (as likely are mine)—one can tell by tone that speakers in poems ought not to be “oblivious to life,” that “control” is an unquestionably positive value, and that “originality” is a premium divine that ought not to rest on nouning the verb, inverting syntax, and other such forays into the material of language.

It is interesting to compare such values with Stephen Burt’s 1998 review, published in The Boston Review, of Susan Wheeler’s Smokes, which unveils the attributes of the “Elliptical Poets,” and praises the very sort of gesture Biespiel undercuts:

Elliptical poets try to manifest a person-who speaks the poem and reflects the poet-while using all the verbal gizmos developed over the last few decades to undermine the coherence of speaking selves. They are post-avant-gardist, or post-”postmodern”: they have read (most of them) Stein’s heirs, and the “language writers,” and have chosen to do otherwise. Elliptical poems shift drastically between low (or slangy) and high (or naively “poetic”) diction. Some are lists of phrases beginning “I am an X, I am a Y.” Ellipticism’s favorite established poets are Dickinson, Berryman, Ashbery, and/or Auden; Wheeler draws on all four. The poets tell almost-stories, or almost-obscured ones. They are sardonic, angered, defensively difficult, or desperate; they want to entertain as thoroughly as, but not to resemble, television.

This review is relevant not only in showing the differing responses attached to the same kind of gesture, but because Bang is classed by Burt as one of the “Ellipticals.” What can be said of Wheeler can more or less be said of her work. Furthermore, I offer this juxtaposition because Burt’s review differs from Biespiel’s not only in valuing what Biespiel sees as a symptom of what is wrong with poetry, but also differs in the use of making evaluative claims. Biespeil’s work serves to show the ways in which Bang’s book fails to meet a New Critical aesthetic (although he does not say so in so many words, this is the subtext) and to suggest ways in which writers such as Bang could amend their ways. Burt’s review serves to carve a new space for work that does not fit into old categories.

Burt’s review of Wheeler’s work is a landmark piece, for it is here that Burt coins the Elliptical “school” of poetry—a “movement” that had a fairly good run of attention: an essay and special issue or two of American Letters and Commentary devoted to the “school,” lively debates between poets and poetry students about how to “be elliptical,” discussions of what constitutes a movement and what doesn’t. Whether or not you “believed” in the movement, you had to notice that nearly all of these poets were absorbed into the discussions that became anthologies such as The American Hybrid and Lyric Postmodernism. We might call this moment of anthologizing the Ellipticals’ heyday before the movement died, more than a little, when, in a 2009 issue of The Boston Review Burt announced that “The New Thing” had succeeded Ellipticism. Ellipticism is now old news and we are on to the poets of the New Thing who

observe scenes and people (not only, but also, themselves) with a self-subordinating concision, so much so that the term “minimalism” comes up in discussions of their work, though the false analogies to earlier movements can make the term misleading. The poets of the New Thing eschew sarcasm and tread lightly with ironies, and when they seem hard to pin down, it is because they leave space for interpretations to fit.

Biespiel’s review was published in The Sewanee Review, Burt’s in The Boston Review. For many readers, this is all that needs to be said. These readers know that The Swanee Review is/was the seat of the New Critics, who created and solidified the notion of the circumscribed lyric utterance. The ideal lyric is one whose speaker is without history or context—one whose edges are neatly chiseled off, object polished. These readers know that The Boston Review believes in the importance of debates about the political, invests in shaking up notions of identity, voice, and the activist power of art. Such values necessarily throw into question the ideal of the perfected lyric object.

In many respects my rendition this small slice of review-literary-history reads as a bad imitation of Bolano’sThe Savage Detectives. What do I hope to achieve by taking you down this memory lane of reviews and movements? I certainly don’t want to devalue the idea of the review (or the work of Biespiel and Burt), but to remember that any given review is in service of many different things—often including, but not exclusive to, the book. To quote Ray: It is what it is. Except when it’s not.

]]> http://www.constantcritic.com/karla_kelsey/the-bride-of-e/feed/ 1 http://www.constantcritic.com/karla_kelsey/the-gray-notebook/ http://www.constantcritic.com/karla_kelsey/the-gray-notebook/#comments Mon, 24 May 2010 01:44:58 +0000 ccadmin http://www.constantcritic.com/?p=782

The Gray Notebook did not originate as a book of poetry. Rather, it was, literally, a gray notebook that Russian avant-garde writer, Alexander Vvedensky, kept from 1932-1933.

At 17 pages long (excluding the endpapers, a “Translator’s Note,” and the colophon which brings the published version to 24 numbered pages), the Ugly Duckling Presse edition presents the entirety of Vvedensky’s notebook. Like the original, the UDP version has a gray cover—hence its name. The original was found with two loose pages of prose: one piece addresses “Stomach grumblings during the confession of love” and the other the terror of “Contracting syphilis, amputation of the leg, extraction of the tooth.” The UDP version includes two loose prose pieces as inserts and they have the feeling of “authenticity” for they are typeset, errors included, in Myriad (typewriter font) on dove-gray paper of a different stock than the rest of the book.

While the UDP book is not a facsimile edition, it gives the sensation of being so throughout. The soft covers of the book are sewn with a rough machine-stitch, the endpapers of the book are graphed composition notebook paper, there is no title page, and the book is 6 by 7 inches—notebook sized. The poems, translated by Matvei Yankelevich into English, are not presented with the Russian originals and the book designers have used an innocuous sans-serif font (Caslon), which feels both slightly “early-twentieth century” and personal. If you squints your tactile and mental eye, suspending disbelief, it is fairly easy to pretend you are holding the actual artifact in your hands. As such, UDP offers what is as close to a piece of this history as we can likely get. The book, part of UDP’s Eastern European Poetry series can be purchased for $10.00 ($8.00 direct from the press).

What does the possibility of possessing such faux-historical artifacts say about our present moment and its relationship to the past? Is this book an indication that we feel the past is something we can possesses, in artifact form—a sort of poetic-chic that I can display on my bookcase with all of my other beautiful Ugly Duckling Presse books? Does the fact that when I hold the book in my hands I feel as if I were holding a little bit of history account for my immediate and physical attachment to the book? These questions show my unease with the object, but I must confess to being obsessed with it anyways.

Such questions are particularly to the point, here, for much of the book’s immediate resonance hinges on its historical context. Vvedensky’s biography and the circumstances by which he came to write his book* are in many ways why we, in the 21st century, care to have access to the thing. In addition, the historical circumstances of the book inform the great length to which Ugly Duckling Presse has gone to in creating the book’s unique physical body—to give us the feel of the thing as it must have been in the writer’s hands.

Born in St Petersburg in 1904, Vvedensky studied art and poetry under the Russian Futurists in Leningrad during the early 1920s. Along with Daniil Kharms he founded the avant-garde group OBERIU (Union of Real Art)—practitioners of absurdist literature, performance, and children’s literature. In 1931 Vvedensky found himself imprisoned for anti-Soviet activity and was detained, along with Kharms, until 1932. After his release from prison he lived in Kharkow and died—or was killed (the “Translator’s Note” at the back of the book provides this suggestive “or”)—in 1941 during the evacuation of the Ukraine. His poetry was not published in Russian until glasnost and the majority of his writing has been lost. Writing that we do have, we have because it was stored in a suitcase Kharms had given, in 1941, to a friend for safekeeping.

What does it mean that I can—and very much want to—possess a book that encourages me to pretend that I own such a piece of history, so personally and socially resonant? In some ways the impulse feels a bit like logging on to ebay to bid on a piece of the Berlin Wall that you are pretty sure, because it is so cheap, is not legitimate. But it would look really cool mounted on the living room wall and so you want it anyways. A conversation piece, to be sure, and who can afford the real thing? Besides, in a time when the hyperreal status of Disneyland and virtual reality is nearly passé, what would it mean for such a thing to be “real” anyways?

After entertaining such thoughts I underwent a guilty shudder over my American capitalist tendency towards possession and tucked the book into my book bag muttering something along the lines of “well, its not just the packaging…I mean, the language in this book is just gorgeous.” And it is. The book opens with a poem beginning: “Above the dark good sea/ the boundless air rushed here and there,/ it flew like a blue falcon,/ silently swallowing night’s poison.” The book includes a philosophical-poetic dialogue, a meditation upon the inadequacy of language to engage with the reality of time (“Our human logic and our language do not in any way correspond to time, neither in its elementary, nor it its complex understanding. Our logic and our language skid along the surface of time”). Meditations on verbs (“They are like swords and rifles piled together.”), objects, animals, nature. But, if I have to be honest, as much as the language intensifies my desire to possess the book, my feeling for the object goes beyond its sentences and phrases.

**

Such puzzles of desire and possession rarely settle with a shrug and a sigh. Long after I dismissed my attachment to the book as pure capitalist impulse I continued to carry The Gray Notebook around with me. At great misfortune to my back I soon added Harvard University Press’s 1088-page edition of The Arcades Project to the books tucked into my book bag and one day, by chance or good fortune, the following passage of Convolute N reopened the questions I had about the resonance of Ugly Duckling’s edition of Vvedensky’s book. Benjamin writes:

It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is a purely temporal one, continuous one, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: is not progression but image, suddenly emergent” (Benjamin 2002: 262).

While Benjamin does not give an analytical account of what exactly constitutes the dialectical image, he insists upon its centrality to the methodology of The Arcades Project. From his writings we know that the dialectical image is not a literal image, but emerges in language. And it is not simply a linguistic representation of the moment that the past meets the present, but, instead, renders a dimension of reality recognizable to the reader/viewer in a moment of language. Furthermore, if we follow this line of thought, we might say that the dialectical image is necessarily made of quotation—made of historical material itself. And we might say that the power of such a methodology is to lift language from one context to another, allowing us to see it—to relate to it—anew.

***

The Gray Notebook doesn’t employ direct quotation, but there is traction here. UDP’s publication of the book imbues the book with the power of a shift in context akin to the shift in context created by Benjamin’s method of excerpt and quotation. In a way, we can see UDP’s publication of a near-facsimile book as a “quotation” of the original, transported from its unique, initial historical context into our mailboxes, book bags, libraries and homes.*

In an essay titled, “The Measure of the Contingent: Walter Benjamin’s Dialectical Image,” Eli Friedlander parses the shift Benjamin creates in the following way: As Benjamin’s quotations move language from their original context to the context of the project, the text is raised from a relation to reality by means of language, to the plane of language itself. Furthermore, “whatever truth can be wrested from [the] material…emerge[s] not from the correspondence of factual content and independently given reality, but from the relationships formed between the ways of meaning.”* As such, the dialectical image—the relationship between present and past—is not made, but is revealed through the shifting of historical material from original context to quote.*

Applying this logic to the shift Vvedensky’s work undergoes when it is taken from one-of-a-kind-notebook to UDP’s mass-produced-near-facsimile, we arrive at the following: the “truth” that we get from the UDP book is not simply a product of the ways in which Vvedensky’s notebook jottings correspond to his lived, historical moment. Rather, “truth” emerges from the relationship between Vvedensky’s original, singular notebook and the “quotation”—the mass-produced-near-facsimile—that UPD has produced. As such, the UDP rendition of the book is actually a far cry from my initial analogy of part of the Berlin Wall up for sale on ebay. The body UDP has given the book is not merely a fancy extra, but is a necessary vehicle for the revelation of the relationship between the past and our present.

Herein resides the power of UDP’s version of the book. This power resides in relationship and contrast. Note the vast distance between the circumstances surrounding the original and the circumstances surrounding the beautiful copy that we can hold in our hands. Imagine: a one-of-a-kind original notebook that—made in the image of its maker who suffered the fate of so many artists of his time—was shoved into a suitcase and almost did not survive. Contrast this with the freedom and wealth of small-press publishing in contemporary America that can create such a thing as a beautiful near-facsimile (flash to the AWP bookfair here). The distance between the two is dizzying, demanding that we ask: to what purpose can we put our current wealth? Three cheers go up for the editors of presses such as UDP, who have given work, like Vvedensky’s, back to the world. The fact that such a work must be re-given, and that we are at a point in time where a publisher might (with, admittedly, great effort) do so, speaks precisely to the relationship we hold with the past.

Further: the power of the book resides in what the UDP version, despite the wealth that it embodies, cannot achieve. Vvedensky, a poet of apophasis, would appreciate this, for parallel to the way in which he shows us that language cannot embody the reality of time, near-quotation can never hold the aura of an original. So much is lost in translation from Russian to English. So much is lost in translation from the imperfection of the hand to Caslon’s machine perfection. So much is lost in the fact that this poet—imprisoned for his work and forbidden to publish poetry after his release—will never know that his notebook has been translated into English and disseminated, as The Gray Notebook, to unexpected places, such as rural Pennsylvania, where I sit and read. The power resides in such loss, of knowing that what you clutch onto for dear life is a near-facsimile. What truth in this.

__________
* For a biographical sketch and an insightful overview of Vvedensky’s context and work, see Thomas Epstein’s essay in The New Arcadia Review.
* This shift is interesting in relation to Conceptual Writing such as Goldsmith’s Day, which relies on just such a shift to do its work. Perhaps UDP creates a variation on this theme, providing us with a model of editor-as-author of the conceptual aspect of a text.
* Friedlander, Eli. “The Measure of the Contingent: Walter Benjamin’s Dialectical Image.” boundary 2 35:3 (2008).

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