Constant Critic

Memoir and Essay

admin — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 13:26:25 +0000

Michael Gottlieb’s Memoir and Essay is equal parts love letter to New York and knifetwisting account of how underground writing gets made. The thing about love letters to New York, though, is that New York doesn’t read anymore, and if it did, it wouldn’t pay attention to a love letter, unless it happened to be from someone young and pretty, or failing that, a rich friend from school. And the thing about writers’ memoirs is that what people really want to hear about underground writers is nothing at all, unless they themselves happen to be underground writers, in which case, why the knife?

Gottlieb’s poetry, if you’re not familiar it, is worth a look. Of the six collections in stock at Small Press Distribution, I prefer the 1993 book from The Figures, New York, and of that, I’d recommend taking more time with the first, longer sequence “The Great Pavement” than with “The Ulterior Parkways.” The signature of Gottlieb’s line accommodates both friendly shared allusion and sidelong quip. “It’s not colloquial, it’s ungrammatical.” He has a taste for obsolescent words and befuddled know-it-alls, and his stated resistance to prose sequence has never really camouflaged a love of narrative. As with the work of Armantrout, his west coast counterpart, or for that matter as with their true modernist model the satirist Pound, I don’t quite feel I’ve had the complete experience of the poems unless there’s a bitter finish:

You want to say,
“Yes, I was looking forward
to this abyss.”

Always believing
this was the just reward.

You realize then
no one ever puts it quite that way.

For good reason.

The problem
is not with the emotion,
or the recollecting.

It’s the tranquility.

(from “The Night Book” Gorgeous Plunge, 1999)

For whatever followers the Language writers may have left, Memoir and Essay confirms what anyone who has spent time among them knew instantly: Charles Bernstein acts superior and is a master delegator, Bruce Andrews is a born salesman, Ted Greenwald is not above revenge, the late Hannah Weiner defaulted to anger, Alan Davies is fragile. Gottlieb’s line drawings are true to life, and while it is likely some of his subjects are irritated by their portraits here, the person who comes off worst is Gottlieb himself. His continual comparisons to these other figures leave himself on the short side, and yet his confessions are self-praise by faint damns. He is a companionable narrator in the Ford Madox Ford mold, witty and oblivious by turns. At bottom, there is a fundamental belief in the value of the work he and his colleagues were writing, and below that, a conviction that what gives that work its value is the hostility and indifference of the world. The belief is debatable; the conviction is a laugh.

Gottlieb embraces self-doubt and carries on. He narrates transitions: how he left Union College for Bennington; how he left the US for Czechoslovakia to work as a conscientious objector; how he left painting for poetry; how he left conventional poetry for writing free of residual narrativism (his phrase); how he met his first publisher (co-publisher of the present volume); how he met his wife when she was fifteen; how he left everywhere else to live and work in New York; how New York left him; how, despite being present at the creation of Language writing, he’s been a minor character in the story so far.

If M&E follows any literary example from the American avant-garde, besides his colleagues’ group autobiography, The Grand Piano, it’s William Carlos Williams’s talkative, unreliable Autobiography. Of the memoirs of Gottlieb’s near-contemporaries, there’s a slight family resemblance to Rae Armantrout’s memoir True, and a fainter still connection to Ron Padgett’s Ted. Armantrout and Padgett are extremely economical prose writers, though. More than once in Gottlieb’s memoir, the sight of his Penguin paperbacks of Balzac novels serves notice that more is more. Take for example this representative passage from the 19th section, “Bulk Rate Permit”:

The job I remember in particular involved a number of tedious steps: there was a letter, or appeal, which had to be folded, and perhaps an envelope, and maybe there was a return envelope and an order slip too. All of the collated pieces had to be labeled and arranged, that is rubber banded, sorted, and bagged by ascending order of zip code so that the four or five mail bags that all of these dozens of man-hours, actually poet-hours, which stand against man-hours in the way that dog-years stand against people-years, so that each of them could be sent to a different quadrant of the country, to some super-mail sorting facility.

Having prepared a few larger-scale bulk mailings myself some years later, I can vouch for the tedium, not to mention the pathos and arrogance of the resentment that calculates poet-hours as dog-years. And all too believable, the scene that follows:

Everyone had shown up and at least was going through the motions—almost everyone, that is. [...] Charles never showed up on Saturday, which excited a certain amount of comment. By the time he did stroll in on Sunday half of the work day, however that had been defined, was over already, and when he sat down and joined the work circle it quickly became clear that he had no intention whatsoever of actually making much physical contribution to this effort. He was treating it as a social event, making barely a sketch at the sorting or folding or collating or stuffing that the rest of us were busily engaged in, more or less; all the while chatting away a mile a minute, giving every appearance of being simply delighted to be in this company and having the opportunity to see all of us at once. In short, he was negotiating the situation no differently than, say, an after-reading dinner.

There are times I wish my generation hadn’t had its aggression neutralized; observing Gottlieb’s rage and Bernstein’s self-importance, though, I cringed. Why should either of them have taken this volunteer work so seriously, when as Gottlieb points out earlier in the essay, it would eventually be rendered unnecessary by technological advances? To anybody who’s sort of been paying attention the irony is clear: the work Gottlieb labored physically and tediously to promote would lead to a major trade publisher producing a selected poems for Bernstein, with Gottlieb left to settle the score by means of this prose account published by the same fragile individual who first brought his work into print.

Here, by the way, is what Bernstein’s publisher has to say about printing him: “I thought it would be fun to have FSG publish something from the Language-poetry school. But you know, when you read his book, it’s not very different from a lot of other folks.” If you don’t already feel empathy for Bernstein, that interview will take care of it.

The late Richard Rorty was occupied with the conflict between authors “in whom the desire for self-creation, for private autonomy, dominates,” and those driven by “desire for a more just and free human community”:

One sort of writer lets us realize that the social virtues are not the only virtues, that some people have actually succeeded in re-creating themselves. We thereby become aware of our own half-articulate need to become a new person, one whom we as yet lack words to describe. The other sort reminds us of the failure of our institutions and practices to live up to the conviction to which we are already committed by the public, shared vocabulary we use in daily life. …Both are right, but there is no way to make both speak a single language. (Contingency, irony and solidarity, xv)

Who falls into which category should not be prejudged. Neither should Gottlieb’s book be read as the history of a community built around a shared interest in putting words to odd uses. Gottlieb makes some gestures toward the reasons behind those uses (aesthetic satisfaction, chance, perversity) but his larger purpose in writing the book, aside from staving off the terrifying insecurity that confronts every writer, is to remember what it was like to want to be a poet only to become one.

In Gottlieb’s exemplary case, becoming a poet meant inhabiting that terrifying insecurity. Throughout “The Empire City,” the memoir of the book’s title, Gottlieb constantly compares himself to everyone else while also recounting the unchallenging jobs he took to be free to think and write. When the objects of comparison are legends of art history, it’s entertaining writing, as when the man in the street with an interesting walk turns out to be Merce Cunningham, or when the basement at the Warhol opening turns out to be Gottlieb’s uncle’s industrial space where he used to store his books. There’s no actual interaction with these larger-than-life figures, though there is a remarkable moment on the subway when he realizes he’s wearing the same shoes as… but to say more would be to spoil it.

Memoir and Essay comes very close to being required reading for new recruits scanning Craigslist for a share someplace no more than a fifteen minute walk from a subway an hour from the temp agency. The greener grass is the last thing the underground has going for it, and this book pretty much demolishes whatever romance might be left for the life of a poet without credential. Perhaps some survivor of the writing camps will do the same hatchet work for that side of the world some day.

In the meantime, better to let Gottlieb continue to attempt to justify himself:

Was it all those bad choices, mine as much as any other’s, that are, more or less, called out in the memoir, which shaped the argument that appears in the essay? Or, was it surviving—to the extent I have—my bad choices and watching others, survive or fall beneath the wheels of their own, that gave form to The Jobs of the Poets?

Perhaps the natural course of the diseases, or the oppressions, if that is what they were, which fell and befell, which continue to afflict so many of us, may not appear so to those coming afresh upon the events and individuals populating this memoir.

I couldn’t put it down.

Ventrakl

admin — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 15:48:34 +0000

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:

Interest in translation, both as overtly stated theme and as mode of composition

Collaboration and a problematizing of monological authorship

Use of ekphrasis, both as an occasion and as a tool for prying into the nature of representation

Use and problematizing of biography, of how to represent a life

Interest in overtly exploring intertextuality

Explicit articulations of a poetics, while, at the same time enacting this poetics figuratively (or by rejection of figure), formally, extra-lexically

Recognizing the necessarily political implications of language, a weariness and despair of facile articulation

The hybrid (the book, part of UDP’s Dossier Series, includes lineated poems, prose poems, invented conversations, biographical sketches, photographs, and quotations)

Documentary poetics

Procedural poetry

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.

No Content, in which will be discussed Volume One (Selected Anonymous Marginalia) Liam Agrani (ed.) (BlazeVOX Books); Autobiography: Volume One (1975-1993), © Ryan M. Haley (Ugly Duckling Presse); Servants of Dust, Gary Barwin (No Press).

admin — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 21:34:19 +0000

Today, and if you were children, I would call you children, we are going to consider the attractions of nothing that is very much worth considering. I have picked three books in the random fashion of things that appear in my mailbox, determined that they are, if not emblematic, interesting, and that they provide a platform for me, the reviewer, to opine freely about things about which I am inclined to opine. Nothing, in a word. For these are books in which content, that sausage-stuff so beloved by so many, is kept to a minimum. Allowing for the free play of materiality, in my book. Or in these books. So this is my vulgar plea for more that is less, for that which is sans lyric, sans meter, sans form, sans author, sans polemic, sans poetry, sans poet, sans everything but poetry. So that one may come to bury Barwin, and stay to praise him. There’s really no reason to read any further.
However, if you must:

To synopsize (for what is a paean to minimalism if not an invitation toward reduction and its best friend, hyperbole), Volume One is a collection of “found language;” as described on the back of the book, the poems therein are composed* “solely of direct transcriptions of marginalia from libraries, used bookstores, and various other places.” Various other places is my middle name, and the collection here is as dear to me as the musty relative whose middle name I bear. The poems in Volume One are titled with their source-text, e.g., “Transcription Of Selected Marginalia Found In A 1963 Copy of The Poems of John Milton Published In 1953 The Ronald Press.” A delightful example:

p 35Caligula

(“Complete Transcription Of The Marginalia Found In A 1975 Edition Of How To Do Things With Words By J.L. Austin (Found In a Western Massachusetts Bookstore).”) Proving Eliot correct, the lesser poets cede the greatest derivative rewards:

p 2Nonsense
You know you’re in for human
degradation, perversion through ignorance’s
human perversity

p 4waxes, lyric,
carried away
by his own
logic.

p 5science
likened
learn
gets nervous

p 7arm in arm
pilferers
manner
womb
stomach

p 10again, negative humor

p 11the extra dishes
bring on trouble

p 13lusty?
sexy?
courageous?
proud?

p 15In Chaucer there
is a great animal
chase at this point

p 16No great
lover is ever
jealous

who

p 90dismal
full of care

caused
to fall

p 91sexual desire

p 93in haste
outcast

p 94oh Blasphemy!

p 95like a bully

p 96down
shows off
hope vs. despair
one eyelaughs
one weeps

to comb your golden hair
a sign of idleness

p 97the moon closest
to the earth is the
most fickle of
planets.

(“Transcription of Marginalia Found In A 1963 Copy Of Robert Henryson’s Poems, Published BY Oxford University Press and Formerly Owned By John Collins.”) The negative space, in this case, proving more positive than that occupied by paint. (See, “p 148 lack of/air in painter’s/place,” from “Transcription of Selected Marginalia Found In A Copy of Franz Kafka’s The Trial (Translation By Breon Mitchell) Published by Shocken In 1998.”) *

In a reversal of this chatty paradigm, Gary Barwin’s Servants of Dust is a collection of the punctuation of Sonnets 1 through 20, rendered spatially (oh, Mallarmé!), so that Sonnet 18 (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”) becomes:

18
inverted commaquestion mark
colon
comma
inverted commacolon
comma
inverted comma semicolon
colon
inverted commainverted comma semicolon

semicolon
inverted commacomma
colon
comma
period

And in that way, one can see the play of punctuation across the page, fitting like the darling buds of May, or any buds, for that matter, Sonnet 2 being particularly dashing, though full of caught breaths, while Sonnet 20 is more dense, love’s own woolen thicket, pudding-proof of the rush and pause and interpolations that is not only love, but is love that picks its own inversions, its sweet pushmi-pullu.

On the more temporally linear front, Autobiography is apparently a collection (what happy magpies we, sorting out eternity) of words introduced in la langue during each of the relevant years. “Apparently” because I could find no explanation in situ or on line. I imagine these are words that have entered through some entrenchment—OED or somesuch. I could be wrong about this, as I am about so many things. However, assuming I am right, as I am about so many other things, it is a work of great happiness. (And this is true in either case, just as being right or wrong is so often irrelevant to one’s pleasure.)* Haley, editor of UDP’s fine Lost Literature Series is also a librarian in the “Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs at the Stephan A. Schwarzman Building of the New York Public Library,” and the work—to whom the volume is dedicated—is full of giddy pops and serious punctums:

pooch
poopy
post-feminism
pre-AIDS
prebender
prenup
propeller-head
protoctistan
pseudy
ptaquiloside
pum-pum
quadrathlon
rate-capping
razz
reader-friendly
repost
retroposon
Ruby Murray
SCART
sin-bin
softnomics
spell-check
surtitle
sysadmin
sysop
tech-head
telerobotic
threequel
toppish
trannie
transgendered
transgenderism
trimnasium
ubiquinate
upskill
urgicenter
veganic
voice-over
Waldsterben
WAN
word-wrapping

(excerpt from “1983″) While a worthy way to while away the socio-historical hours (transgendered (+) = trannie, (-) = transgenderism, providing a retrogressed understanding of why we believe an emoticon will suffice, and why it does, in fact, do), and a fine forum for lexi nostalgia (veiled in merciful mist is the year that brought both “big whoop” and “multifractal”) and word-hoarding (must have pum-pum), these poems are yet poems, by which I mean they are encore a manner of witnessing via language, a rhetorical transcription of the then that always serves as now. And vice versa.

The easy observation here is that each of these minimalist poetries acts as rhetorical snapshots—something capturing the movement of language within language itself. How words frame off other words, or in the punctuated spaces that serve as connotation. This seems very Derrida to me, and insufficiently interesting. What is more marvelous is that the play of negative space is felt as negative space itself; I don’t reach for the source-text in either Servants of Dust or Volume One, don’t knit some narrative from Autobiography, don’t, in toto, go beyond the sheer material of the material presented. For while a great deal of jouissance may be had in discursing the Master (and polyvocalizing the University) in each of these texts, this is nothing, and much less, than staying on the surface. (It’s Clement-time, children, if you are children.) The problem with so much of what passes for poetry these days is that it drives itself home to the tune of cowbells and gjallarlhorns, and while I love a good toot as much as the next fellow yelling “What side are you on?” it is also often necessary that there be a good deal less for there to be more. I want the inability to thumb up or down, the lack of “reading,” the actual absence of author and authority rather than a set of backflips and belly-beats that prove one’s modest virtuosity. Singularity all around me, and not a drop to drink. What these books do is make me think. Not about them, but about that speck that is me. You, too. Not in the trans-narcissism of what passes for intersubjectivity, but in the awful gape of what cannot be but merely—comma, comma, inverted comma, quotation mark. That existence is had in the infra-thin chasm between “abductee” and “web site,” that my tombstone may well bear (if I am very lucky) many marginalia. That excrescence is the base of all art, and that what is multiple is the one carried about inside the cranium, the one that needs room to seethe.

____
* Agrani is described as poet/editor, and the slash is apt, for while some of these poems are self-executing (complete marginalia, e.g.), some are more carefully culled (“selected marginalia”). I have no opinion on the preferability of one technique over another, but note that they are wildly different aesthetics performed in the space of a single conceit by a (as far as I know) single author-function. This is admirable in my book, and well-played in his.

* It should be duly noted that this book was the subject of Ray McDaniel’s review this month, in which Mr. McD expresses a fair amount of ambivalence with regard to the poetry or not of this volume. Inasmuch as Mr. McD is addressing “readers,” he is wrestling in the right trunks. Inasmuch as I am uninterested in reading relative to this kind of work, I keep my hands to myself. I would note, however, that Mr. McD’s big-sister analogy with regard to conceptualism is incorrect: conceptualism is more akin to the one who asks you why you’re flinching when you’ve not been hit. Note, too, that I did not write “yet.”

* Later, I would learn that I was right. Again.

Volume One

admin — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 16:08:32 +0000

I usually have no sympathy for readers (suddenly tempted to end the sentence right there) who voice their objections to poetry they don’t like by fretting about how the poems don’t seem to care about the reader, or serve the reader, or give the reader a happy ending and a box of chocolates. One of the reasons I reject these plaintive moans of readerly victimhood is because I find it at least as oppressive to have a poem smother me with its concern for the sugar-fine fragility of my intelligence or the bloated sensitivity of my sentiments. Who’s a good reader? You are! Yes you are!

Is it too much to ask that the poem just shut up and play?

And yet, I do understand how a reader could grow irritated at the poem that pretends the reader isn’t there, all the while conducting itself with the kind of icy deliberation that gives the lie to the posture of disinterest. Ignoring someone is the most conspicuous way of paying attention to them. Miles Davis never did, exactly, turn his back on an audience while playing, but when the audience suspected he was, they turned on him.

Of course, once you are aware of this dilemma, you’ve snapped it into being, since management of awareness is, itself, the problem. The ideal solution would be the poem that cannot betray awareness of a reader because it was never actually written, which is the pleasure of found poetry. A poor name, that: found poetry really should be called not-poetry, to be read as if it were.

What this little device of the imagination circumvents is the writer. Anyone who has ever met a writer knows that writers deserve circumvention, even though – like snakes – they are more afraid of you, reader, than you are of them. But in the formulations I make above, it’s logically impossible to spurn and berate the poem for its neglect of your welfare; it is really the writer you resent. You cannot quite come out and say so, however, because you know that the writer doesn’t exactly exist the way a person does. Even the most preening narcissist might have a hard time vocalizing a complaint about a writer in terms selfish enough to suggest that any given writer has a personal obligation to any given reader. You can fuss about the writing, then, or you can expand the trembling membrane of your selfhood to include, a la The Blob or communism, all readers.

(The stalking horse of the writing as ridden by the writer = the illusion of a you as a proxy for the act of reading: yes, got it.)

Personhood, on either end of the equation, thus presents a problem. A great jolly big dumb exhausting problem.

Liam Agrani, whose Volume One is so anxiously personless as to forego photo, substantial bio, blurb and justifying note, understands the appeal of not-poetry so well that he doesn’t even identify himself as the author of the book, but rather its editor. A sweetly ironic gesture: he isn’t claiming to have written these not-poems, but by claiming editorship he slyly admits that his method (he collects marginalia, just as the title indicates) suggests a more self-conscious authorship on the part of the writers of the marginalia than is perhaps appropriate. But what his “editorial” choices reveal is that marginalia itself is a kind of dress rehearsal for authorship. Whoever writes in the margin does so with at least as many motivations as whoever writes for publication, but obviously without the limitation of presuming readership (however, pardon me, “marginal” it might be). Whatever motivates the note-taking thus influences the adoption of whatever tone or function corresponds to that motivation. Reading these not-poems is like watching someone try on different outfits and practice their flirt, or listening to someone try multiple vocal registers to find out just which sound induces what effect. Because they presume no one is there, they can commit to the imagination of otherhood more freely, and in some ways more effectively, than can the writer who must either solemnly pretend readership or ignore its possibility.

In “Transcription of Selected Marginalia Found in a Copy of Dante’s Inferno…” the marginaliaist or marginaliaista notes

p 31the
moral
death

p 37Instrument of grace, elevation of beauty

p 60embarrassment
of oneself

and in this we hear an approximation of a certain critical tone and rhetoric, a version of literary criticism redolent of the classroom. Yet later on in the same not-poem the marginaliaist writes

p 210Bad news
for
Dante

This takes the question of authenticity and authorship and pulls it inside-out, a twisty taffy knot of how impossible, and possibly how stupid, it is to invest unduly in the aura of the writer and wonder about what the writer wants. Bad news for Dante: it’s unlikely this matches the diction of the classroom, and it doesn’t much “go” with Dante, but it does create a sweet immediacy in terms of our fabrication of the margin-writer, who seems to have let a little concern for Dante into this rehearsal for a clinical analysis of his work – a care pleasingly and confusingly doubled, since there’s no way to distinguish the fiction of Dante the poet from that of Dante the protagonist, two illusions equidistant from the auctorial “fact” of Dante.

And sometimes, of course, the marginalia doesn’t match a traditional diagnosis of the text at all. Even better! “Transcription of Writing Found on the Inside Cover of a Copy of The Trial by Franz Kafka…” begins with an annotation of an assignment:

(inside front cover)

Write an essay exploring the underlying
meaning of the weird relationship between
Huld and Block

But this rapidly shifts to a more conversational exchange.

(title page)

Now the school thinks Sarah Clark was the 3rd person last night they want to drug test all of them Sarah should go to Shauna and tell her that she should confess because of Sarah is tested well you know

(back cover)

I’m really surprised Shauna
didn’t do this. She thinks
she has a really
good voice

This fits more elegantly with “The Trial” than intent could ever allow. You simply cannot make shit like this up, though I don’t know if that is because you don’t exist or because making prohibits serendipity. Chance may favor the prepared mind, but a prepared mind chases all chance into contrivance.

Most of the pieces in Volume One, however, hew more closely to the kinds of notes meant to keep track of thoughts about the text, perhaps because their, uh, authors will have to write about it later – for the audience of an instructor, maybe – or perhaps because they want to explain what they are reading to themselves, for themselves. Sometimes these purposes intertwine in ways that are both charming and insightful, and I can only assume that Agrani edits to accentuates those relationships. For instance, “Transcription of Marginalia Found in Cyril Connolly: Journal and Memoir…” includes more or less conventional notes, such as

p 34Mrs. Wilkes’ distress at her portrait

and

p 111on his qualities as a reviewer

but the writer also admits more raw and uncritical responses:

p176C. on sex is painful.
impossible—

and

p 254famous encounter w/
V. Woolf – nobody can
outdo the English in this

p 296wonderful
fantasy monologue

No matter how well-conceived the contrivance of auctorial invention, an idea for a poem cannot replicate this, I think. Yes, there are many things that sustained, self-conscious and reader-directed can do that these kinds of assemblages cannot, but there’s tremendous value in the presence of the private, even if by the irony of acquisition (or the agent of textual accident that is Agrani himself) they have become public.

Flarf, recently institutionalized in our newspapers of record, does recognize the vitality of these energies. And Conceptualism excels in designed contraptions for harnessing them. But Flarf, wonderful as it can be, is like a little brother who tells knock-knock jokes ad nauseam and then farts on you when you tell him to scram, and Conceptualism is like a big sister who sits on your chest and pummels you with your own fists, all the while asking why you keep hitting yourself. Both siblings are dear to my heart, but sometimes I just want! To be left! Alone! – a desire equivalent to wondering whether the poem can just shut up and play.

Unfortunately, we cannot actually achieve a sense of solitude by pretending to be alone when we know we are not. And that’s exactly what “immersion” in poetry, particularly lyric poetry, asks us to do. To circumvent the artificiality of this request, we would have to secret a recording device under our sibling’s bed to catch whatever they mumbled to themselves. These mumblings, mundane as the may seem, can compete (on some levels, at least) with the most powerfully articulated and thoroughly buffed poems. To demonstrate this, consider the whole of “Transcription of Marginalia Found in a 1963 Copy of Robert Henryson’s Poems…”

p 2Nonsense

You know you’re in for human
degredation, perversion through ignorance’s
human perversity.

p 4waxes, lyric,
carried away
by his own
logic.

p 5science
likened
learn
gets nervous

p 7arm in arm
pilferers
manner
womb
stomach

p 10again, negative humor

p 11the extra dishes
bring on trouble

p 13lusty?
sexy?
courageous?
proud?

p 15In Chaucer there
is a great animal
chase at this point

p 16No great
lover is ever
jealous
who

p 90dismal
full of care

caused
to fall

p 91sexual desire

p 93in haste
outcast

p 94oh Blasphemy!

p 95down
shows off
hope vs. despair
one eyelaughs
one weeps

to comb your golden hair
a sign of idleness

p 97the moon closest
to the earth is the
most fickle of
planets.

It’s hard to say who is responsible for this. Agrani, to a certain extent, certainly, and of course one Mr. John Collins (well, presumably), one-time owner of the book. And we shouldn’t neglect Robert Henryson. Or maybe we should neglect all of them.

Hard to say, and irrelevant. Not quite found, not quite made. A mechanistic theology states that a god or divinity acts as a watch-winder or domino-pusher; this precludes the void of the random and preserves the comfort of authorship, without making the author or god sit through the humiliating trial of our preferences and judgments. Of course, what good is a god we cannot judge? It is easy enough to claim that all writing is conceptual, and that the only distinction is between those who confess to merely selecting which domino to tumble and those who insist they are the actors and the actions, the inventors of the tiles, the lines they describe, gravity itself. What you gain if you believe this is someone to blame or praise, but what you lose is control. Why should a poem erase the reader in the idolatry or demonization of the author? Marginaliaist, writer, editor, poet. I would rather surrender my idea of each and all, of poetry itself, if I thereby gain the action of the not-poem above. Indeed! One of my favorite not-poems of the year.

Poetry’s just fine, as long as we don’t ask after it. As long as we can continue to find cures for poets, remedies for absentee gods. I think I’ll call them readers. I think I’ll call them you.

Dreamless and Possible: Poems New and Selected

admin — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 13:28:40 +0000

Books of selected poems, especially if the writer isn’t overbearingly well-known, have a lucky feeling to them. As it happens, Christopher Howell’s first collection is called The Crime of Luck; the title refers to the coming of winter, when “Soon cold will step from hiding, / the bears stagger comically to sleep, poor / beggars die out the crime of luck.”

A typical Christopher Howell poem—but it’s not clear there is any such thing. There is a genial, self-incriminating persona, and it would be unlikely for Howell to publish random lists of words, truly embarrassing personal stories or confrontational talk poems. He might be called a metaphysical poet for all his mention of the soul, his favored emblems for which are boats, birds and kites—free to travel but needing to come back to land. There are stable frames of reference in his poems, but he’s good for a substantial surprise almost every time. There is an intractable need in Howell’s poems to appeal to the reader’s tender feelings, as he says in 1997’s “The Cry,” to implore the reader to “come to me / because I cannot come to you.”

Episodes from his Vietnam-era stint in the Navy recur in his poems, in particular the job of writing letters to the families of soldiers killed in action. The first such poem, “Dear Mrs. Terry” (1976), recounts the awkwardness, tedium, and frustration of the sailors on a ship

in the lead-hot
Gulf into which Cadet Pilot Terry shot
his plane, the impact of the catapult
socking him forward, his gear
snagging the stick. “I don’t know, Captain,
he cleared the flight deck and went down
like a goose, sir.” Fifty fathoms. Enough
oxygen for half an hour.

The poem ends with another sailor sleeping, “book / over his face, the writing of that next-of-kin letter / making a wide slow approach through the dead / chain of command.” The intense sitting-duck feeling of the metaphor of the letter approaching its writer might seem a little callous; the enjambment, though not as epochal as Donne’s lines about the bells, gets, as we all do, to the point.

Death often looms over Howell’s poems. His 1991 collection Sweet Afton speaks of the last days of an imaginary Pennsylvania town before the power company flooded it for a reservoir. (It is typical of Howell’s imagination both that the town has been named by a lover of Burns’s poems as well as that no mention of Burns appears in the work.) His early poems show the strong, sometimes overpowering influence of James Wright, and even in his later poems he sometimes drops Wright’s words like keys: blossoms are everywhere, and even iron bars threaten to burst into song. He seems to be aware of the issue; in his direct nod to Wright’s best-known line, “I Have Wasted My Life,” he counters that in his case, “I hope I haven’t wasted it.”

What else might a Howell poem be. He invented a classical Chinese poet given to parables, and his fabulist streak continues in later poems about various encounters with animals. It’s not as hokey as that sounds—what, after all, is “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” but a poem about an encounter with an animal—and in fact his 2003 poem “The Dove” is a level-headed nautical tale contemplating eating a bird that “flopped out of the sky, exhausted, onto the fantail” of a boat lost at sea for weeks. It’s no “Rime,” but it is an attractive and memorable poem, both for its modest loathing for the bird’s “scorched white plastic-seeming shit” as well as the mildly crazed fantasy that during a squall, the bird, “below in an orange crate / where he would plummet immediately into the pigeon unconscious,” might watch over and protect the ship, “fly / the entire vessel then, soar high over the spume and pitching moil,” from inside his dream. Most poets would give you one or the other, the fouling of the decks or the “darkly joyous bird asleep / and dreaming of a bird.” For Howell, the real and the ideal both appear to be necessary conditions for poetry.

A reader can be forgiven for thinking his 1997 book, Memory and Heaven, my favorite of his single collections, bears a resemblance to the quirky investigations of Dean Young, Mary Ruefle and others. Like Young and Ruefle, Howell has always grounded lightness with heavy facts. Those who seek Howell’s book out will find a poet who over time has grown more and more comfortable with surprising word choices, comparisons, and lists. He’s so sure the force of his narratives will carry the reader through to the end, so sure the feelings that come through in his poems are real and undeniable, he can risk what looks at first like irrelevance, as toward the end of the elegy “You Sailed Away, Oh Yes You Did”

Like a proton parking meter filled with mischief and stars,
like a fig bar the rain disapproves of,
like a window becoming a zip-lock bag when no one is listening.

I’d prefer that series without the clause beginning with filled, but I’ll take it as a package deal with the fig bar, token of an outright Ashberyan tendency I wouldn’t mind seeing him develop further, if it might mean more poems like 2004’s “He Writes to the Soul.” There, his native impulse to hold the reader’s attention somehow coexists with his other great will, to daydream: “Anyway, / at every crossing I kneel and say ‘Excelsior!’ / and light a little fire in a jar and drink it down, / hoping if fire’s a prayer no one will answer it just yet.” The close of the poem makes me want to encourage this fluent silliness in Howell and almost nobody else on the planet:

Don’t fret about my safety; if the weather
doesn’t suck its trigger finger while it hunts for time,
or if something huge and golden lets me have its keys,
I’ll be ok. Lake or no lake, some days I feel
perfectly disguised in front of you, like intention
around an iceberg or sunlight on the skin of the rain.
And I’m happy now, happy as a jungle, happy as a wisp
of dreaming melon and I cry only on your days off.

In a dramatic monologue from 1991’s Sweet Afton, Christopher Howell ends the speech of the town painter with what might serve as a motto for his art:

The few things I do sell
I sell for no great golden fee.
Most of my sad companions here will never know
the single object of the work
is joy.

While that’s a reasonable mission statement for small town painter and well-published poet alike, I think it puts too low a price on Howell’s inventions. Reading back through Howell’s books for this review, and prompted by his new poem, “Time Travel,” I noticed several anticipatory borrowings from popular culture in poems not included here. For example: His “monster that ate Sandusky,” included in a science-fiction anthology in 1977, was at the very least likely something in the air breathed by the creators of “The Creature that Ate Sheboygan,” a 1979 computer game. The poem “Chance,” with its weasel “rattling the stargate of an infant’s sleep,” is from the 1985 collection Sea Change, and therefore only predicts what most men think of James Spader. And as for his appalling 1997 pun title “Christian Science Minotaur”—the band of the same name that began recording in 2002, it turns out, may be able to plead that their use of the name is merely a literary reference.

Dreamless and Possible is Howell’s ninth volume. He teaches English and Creative Writing at Eastern Washington University, and most of his books have been published in the northwest; by his current press, University of Washington, by Eastern Washington U’s now-closed press, by Idaho’s Lost Horse Press, and by L’Epervier, then of Seattle. He’s no more a regional writer than his fellow northwesterner the late William Stafford was, though. I first came across his work in The Gettysburg Review; his near-annual appearances justify a subscription.

Howell writes as if he believes both that art cannot be willed, and that it never comes without a sacrifice. This refusal of the will sometimes gives his work a self-diminishing quality, and it is not always clear that his best, most characteristic poems are on offer here. For example, of the 25 poems he’s published in The Gettysburg Review in the last decade, by my count he’s only collected ten in books so far. My favorite poem of 2006 is one of those uncollected poems: “Rachel,” a psychological thriller monologue in the voice of a patient of Freud’s who’d lost her child. Maybe he’ll put it in the next book. In this book there are nine or ten poems at least as good as that one, one of which, “The New Orpheus,” is an elegy for his daughter Emma. The poem is both beautiful and excerptible, but it would be irresponsible to just pull a quote. It’s worth getting to the end of the book to read the last three lines in context.

As devastated and clear as Howell can be, singer of sad songs is not exactly the writer I see when I look at his work in the round. That character I see more clearly in one of the new poems. “Letting Things Go” relates a trip the poet took in his baby-poet pre-first-book days to the annual conference of John Muir Publications, a press run by an engineer-hippie carrying on the family name of the legendary environmentalist. (JMP’s best-known book remains How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive.) Ever the ambitious poet, Howell secures an invitation to read for the “principal mavens of the group”:

We gathered around a huge table out
under the stars
and I opened my manuscript…
but first, Muir said, we should “get into the mood”
and began to load his pipe with a weed
and Psilocybe Mexicana mixture which everyone
smoked until their eyes were huge, pulsing zeros.

Then I read. It was like hollering
into a vat of butter, like singing to Martians
about the stock exchange.

When, after three hundred years, I finished,
they nodded into themselves, looked around
and went off toward the beach.
Two days later the managing editor collared me
and said, “Well, they thought I should talk to you
because we’re about the same height. So,
it’s like this, we know you’re a good poet
and we’d really like to help you out, but
you’re into holding onto things

and we’re into letting things go.

The Dirt Riddles

admin — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 17:23:16 +0000

I watch cows, like small, sleepy dinosaurs, swish their tails as they masticate grass in the field across from my house. Every day the same. Swish, chew, swish, chew. I confess: I have been charmed by a vision of rural life that requires no spit, sweat, no blood or shoveling shit. I look happily on, from my kitchen window, at a safe and seductive one hundred yards. A flock of geese fly over a hill staggered with bales of hay, and I’ll admit, I feel sentimental. It’s a register of emotion that the city version of me would have sardonically mocked, but I’d be a liar if I said that I didn’t find it all rather lovely, in a genuine if largely aesthetic kind of way.

I am offering myself up as a classic example of the problematic idealization of the bucolic. Much critique of the pastoral is rooted in the feeling that our pastoral poets, in their idealization, fail to see what is. Worse, what is is eschewed for an aesthetic of what we would prefer (pretty lambs on a hillside; wolves kept at bay). In preparation for this review, I reread Virgil’s Ecologues, a few poems by Thomas Gray and Wordsworth’s more famous pastoral poems, and in all of them I honestly failed to find a representation of the bucolic that was unmitigatedly idealized (though surely they exist, just not by very good poets). I found, rather, poems haunted by death, apocalyptic in tone (Virgil), or at least acknowledging the roughness of the natural world:

Alas, the mountain-tops that look so green and fair!
I’ve heard of fearful winds and darkness that come there;
The little brooks that seem all pastime and all play,
When they are angry, roar like lions for their prey.

—Wordsworth, “The Pet Lamb”

I wonder if, in many cases, we have been persuaded by our idea of what the pastoral is, rather than specific, complex readings of pastoral poetry. In other words, what the pastoral is may be much richer than what we imagine it to be, and much more fraught.

Michael Walsh’s first book, The Dirt Riddles (winner of the 2010 Arkansas Poetry Prize) offers a corrective to the hyper-romanticized vision of rural life that has long dominated the American imagination. He does this through short, delicate lyrics that observe life on and around a dairy farm, crafting an anti-pastoral pastoral marked by an attitude of tenderness towards their land, even as our speaker(s) eye does not flinch from the ugly, gross, aggressive or uncomfortable. It’s possible that many poems we consider classically pastoral contain these anti-pastoral threads. In this light, Walsh does not eschew a tradition as much as he simply updates its expression. Furthermore, while the pastoral is indeed aesthetic, “farm life” is experiential, and these poems write through the latter even more than it adopts the conventions of the former.

In these poems, bales of hay smell, not of “sweet, green field” but “mold” (“Haying the Fields”). Walsh’s unsettling next and final line, “I feed the herd this bread,” invokes the classical symbol of bread as nourishment even as it subverts it. Earlier in the poem, the speaker watches his father:

…high on the John Deere,
the baler chewing row after row
to cut alfalfa, mustard, thistle.
I can’t tell, as I lift and stack,
how many small lives
die here, mangled under twine.

Here, the speaker recognizes the disruption of the human in the natural world, the casual violence of machines. Sympathy is one of the book’s most pervasive emotional motors, and here we see the speaker’s tendency to see the unseen, and to feel with them. It is, in part, this sympathy that drives the speaker to treat the pastoral with a guarded skepticism.

In a poem unambiguously called “Against Pastorals,” for example, the speaker tends to newborn calves:

plastic tags popped through their ears
and black scabs in between
where I burned off their horns,
white nubs soft as roots.
That scorched fur stank like human hair.
I turned and knew what I had to celebrate.

As in “Haying the Fields,” the speaker’s role on the farm feels somewhat discomfiting. That the fur “stank like human hair” suggests an unsettling empathy (would we feel comfortable doing this to a human?) and makes the language of celebration that follows feel ironic, hollow, inexplicably sad. It is one of the conventions of the pastoral that the animal/human relationship is symbiotic and uncomplicated (the lamb may eventually get eaten, but we don’t have to see the mess of killing). But Walsh suggests that the relationship is complicated at least in part because humans intervene—not for the animals’ own interest—but for the humans’. Unlike the happy lambs of the 19th century (at least, so we imagine), Walsh’s cows seem to lament something:

Now here’s sorrow
pushed from young ribs.
One part bassoon
two parts howl…

And again, the speaker feels something of himself in the animal’s bellow:

…comes
to rest in solar plexus
long enough for you
to bellor likewise.

This is not the pastoral rendered through the eye of an idealizing observer, but someone who knows this world too well to idealize it; this is particularly potent in Walsh’s poems that foreground the queer, poems that see this world through the sometimes anxious eye of a man whose sexuality targets him for potential violence in a homophobic world:

It’s a dirty peck
quick as a feather.
And now no one else in line
can bear to look at us.
Their gazes flutter to bottles
or keys they clutch, careful
until we step to the counter.
Then their eyes lock
hard and blank on our backs.

(“On Kissing My Husband at a Gas Station”)

The homoerotic is certainly familiar to the pastoral, dating back at least as far as Virgil’s “Alexis” Ecologue. But whereas Virgil effuses unabashedly to his beloved, Walsh’s poems are anxiously infused with the barely submerged threat of violence:

He lifts me to his brother’s face
Those sweet and full lips.
I love Tim’s fist.

Queerness, in these poems, radically disrupts the cultural vision that one might expect from poetry concerned with the agricultural Midwest. In this way, the vantage point of Walsh’s speakers seem as much outside as inside, intimate as foreign (would that this were not the case; it seems a shame we identify rural America with staunch heterocentrism). By writing the queer into his poems, Walsh foregrounds the popular idea of the rural United States as excluding the queer (and, by extension, emphasizing cultural homogeneity). Perhaps this explains the intensity with which Walsh’s speakers “see the unseen,” and empathize with them (see Reinhart’s A History of Shadows for a discussion on the history of invisibility of homosexuality in the rural Midwest). Walsh thus conceives the American pastoral as a genre that witnesses complexity of many kinds (social, cultural, economic, and personal).

A blurb by Paul Zimmer on the back of the book contends that these poems are “about strong, feeling people as they sense their way of life slipping away, even as they struggle to maintain themselves and find their own identity.” This sounds pleasant, but not entirely like the book I read, which does not seem to lament the slipping away of a way of life at all, as much as simply recount the moments and days and artifacts that make a life, letting them resonate with the reader according to the reader’s sympathies. Moreover, I wasn’t sure what this “way of life” means exactly, and honestly, I’m (gratefully) not sure Walsh does either. It is, in part, what makes reading this book a rich experience.

Despite the fact that these poems explicitly and consistently treat encounters with the natural world, Walsh does not render a world entirely outside the modern, the industrial.

Rust blooms across my land:
Spots like mold on white cars,
Their spark plugs cold as insects
Poisoned in orange powder.

(“Inheritance”)

What is interesting is that Walsh doesn’t fall very easily into the common dualism of natural/unnatural (often manifest in rural/urban dichotomies); in fact, the rural world never quite feels as natural as our cultural imagination might have us believe. In a poem called “Surrogates,” for example, the speaker writes of the impregnation of a cow:

Mother would push her hand inside the cow
slow, up to the elbow,
make the animal arch its back

to the right curve
for her silver gun
steady and quick as a stud.

This is hardly “natural,” but it doesn’t condemn or place a value on the natural over the unnatural either. We live in a world where easy delineations between the natural and unnatural quickly blur, and we adapt to the landscape we shape as much as we are shaped by it.

Reading these poems, I was struck by the fact that aesthetically, these spare, delicate lines may act in analogy to our popular imagination of the bucolic. They speak plainly, often narratively, they employ music that is subtle (“iridescence spinning, /holding still”) rather than hard or cacophonous. It is for this reason, I suspect, that Zimmer gives them the bizarre compliment of not trying “to dazzle us with poetic footwork.” At times, they can tip a bit into the precious (“I say, River, let me breathe you.”). But much as Walsh never writes the pastoral in too easy or clean a way, he is also inclined to disrupt the prettiness of his lines with a surprising sound, syntax, or image (“Even my skinny/chest would wobble/fake with breasts/ until I got comfortable” or “Spare parts,/ I lay experimental in his place” or “In storm light, everything’s hinge”). I often think that one of the unique gifts of the poem is the ability to surprise, both to let us see a thing in a new way but also to surprise the poem itself with a word or image that recasts what came before. Walsh’s poems, at their best, deftly accomplish this.

* * *

This most recent cycle of Constant Critic reviews has undertaken, in various ways, a critique of the genre of the review. The most pragmatic function of a review, it seems, is simply to give a reader a sense of whether or not he or she would like to read a particular book. But it strikes me that the review can also be a site of guerilla literary criticism, using a single book as a lens through which to say something about literature or poetics more broadly. Of course, as Karla noted in her most recent review, our aesthetics and ethics are as much implicit as explicit, and surely sometimes masked by the endeavor of rendering the book’s concerns (which may not, actually, be our own). I have never felt especially connected to the post-confessional voice (which Walsh arguably employs), but I appreciate a book that challenges me to think about a genre in a new way (which The Dirt Riddles most certainly does).

The Bride of E

admin — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 17:25:57 +0000

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.

Collective Task

admin — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 18:19:51 +0000

After reading the following statement from Dorthea Lasky’s chapbook, Poetry is Not a Project, please fill out the short survey below and read the review of Collective Task that corresponds to your answer. Lasky writes:

“I would argue that a poet who has a project that he can lucidly discuss is a pretty boring poet, at best. I would argue that a poet with a project might not be a poet at all. Or at least a baby poet, not a great one…. I would argue that a poet who says he has a project probably has no sense of the idea of habitus and its intersection with the act of creation. Yeah. I think the term “project” has nothing to do with poetry.”

Agree

Disagree

If you selected “Agree,” click here for a review of Collective Task.

If you selected “Disagree,” click here for a review of Collective Task.

Clamor

admin — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 17:29:21 +0000

I get a lot of books of poetry in the mail. Since I know how hard it is for poetry presses to stay in the black, how hard it is for poets to get their books reviewed, how hard it is to realize how very few people will read one’s poetry even if it gets widely noticed, I read each book that arrives (even though many of them come to me from people who have clearly never read a review I’ve written) simply because someone took the trouble to send it to me. I could build a small yet sturdy dwelling out of the books I’ve received, and living inside that edifice would be like inhabiting a little igloo of guilt, for the dismay of not being able to review them all is only compounded by my appreciation of how few of their authors would even want my attention if only they knew how unpleasant it might be.

Don’t get me wrong: it isn’t that I dislike most of these books. I just have no use for them. That has everything to do with my experiences as a reader and very little do with the work itself. I can usually identify what aspects of any individual book might appeal to a certain subset of readers, which means that I can engineer what preferences and convictions a reader would need to have in order to extract that value. While that might seem like useful skill for a reviewer to have, it actually complicates the act of reviewing immeasurably, because it enables the reviewer to at least attempt an occupation of the mind of both the writer and the reader, and set them up on a kind of aesthetic date. This is a complication because Jesus, God, why would anyone want to spend a Sunday night doing that?

Of course, some reviewers just settle for using those skills as a kind of targeting mechanism, and savage books that they wish hadn’t been written as a way of punishing readers who they wish didn’t exist. While it might be understandable, if not excusable, to do this every once in awhile, anyone who makes a career out of it is simply an ass. They may claim to be serving the greater good, but since there is not and never can be agreement as to of what the greater good obtains, they are simply serving their own delight in being an ass, a creature that brays its love of itself loudly, with no tonal variety, at extraordinary length.

Unfortunately, it’s equally indulgent to write only about those books with which you share notions of that indeterminate good, not least because the books which you consider 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.

Thus, many critics find themselves working the margins, waiting for books that represent an interesting trend, or pose a provocative question, even as they ignore the reality that with a little attention and ingenuity, any book can be made to represent any trend or ask any question the reviewer wants.

Of what use is the reviewer? What is the reviewer for? How is it possible that this review can be 550 words in without having once mentioned the title of the book under review?

Every now and again a book arrives in the mail that so perfectly concentrates the reviewer’s dilemma that it deserves scrutiny, even as that scrutiny must inevitably suffer either one of the problems listed above or else result in claims of such competitive and exclusionary provenance that the review will offer no direction whatsoever. Well, I warned you.

Elyse Fenton’s Clamor is a primer on the temptations of lyricism. You want the poet to surrender to those temptations, you see beauty; you want the poet to resist, you see beautification. Too mechanistic? Let’s take a look, then: “Outside, light // and snow clung to the windows like the paper / edges of a hive crushed in” and “(…) frost whittles the grass // to shards, the pear tree breathes / beneath a shroud of ice” and “Ice cauls our windows. Snow / paraffins the trees.”

Yeah. Okay. See? If you think of the pre-lyricized object as inert, you might see these lines as necessary upgrades, activations of the mundane into the poetic: beautiful, striking, strange, rich. But if you don’t think of any language or object as inherently inert, or as inherently anything, you might find these formulations precious, twee, unnecessary, distracting. If the former, your defense could run as follows: what? Ice is ice! Frost is frost and snow is snow! If the latter, your attack could ask what? Ice is ice! Frost is frost! Snow is snow!

Don’t look at me. I can’t help you.

Unless, of course, you find it helpful to know the context from which I’ve extracted those lines. However, you’re only likely to find that helpful if you believe context exists. So for those who do, know that Clamor marks the spot where war poetry meets love poetry at the sub-genre of war bride poetry. If you would prefer that I place those categories in scare quotes, then you don’t believe in the categories at all, and what I tell you next won’t move you an inch, for when I say that its disingenuous of us to refer to “the speaker” of these poems, since it’s damn well obvious that she’s Fenton herself, and that her subject is not a merely a lingual representation of an army medic but her lover and husband, you’ll likely retort that such truths are irrelevant, because the poems must either prove themselves as felt or stand as constructions unfortified by truth-value. Which would make sense, sort of, were it not for my suspicion that the very readers who would insist on the unimportance of real-world context would be those very same readers who would roll their eyes at the ice-cauled windows.

Too mechanistic? Okay, let’s try again. Here’s a lengthy excerpt from “Word from the Front”:

His voice over the wind-strafed line
drops its familiar tone to answer,
Yes, we did a corkscrew landing down
into the lit-up city, and I’m nodding

on my end, a little pleased by my own
insider’s knowledge of the way
planes avert danger by spiraling
deep into the coned center of sky

deemed safe, and I can’t help but savor
the sound of the word – the tracer round
of its pronunciation – and the image –
a plane corkscrewing

down into the verdant green
neck of Baghdad’s bottle-glass night (…)

Let’s assume some suspicion of the lyrical. Note, with that suspicion, of how the professed pleasure of the “insider” (which, were you as cynical as you were suspicious, you might consider a warning sign) quickly gives way to the pleasures of the immediate lyric upgrade. Instead of corkscrewing, they spiral, not down into the lit-up city but down first into the coned center of sky. The speaker, or Fenton, cannot help but return to corkscrew as an occasion for poetry: she savors its sound, and even goes so far as to characterize its tracer round (another bit of “insider” knowledge?) sound, though it might be odd even to the generous to liken an optical effect to a word’s sound, even as one mixes one’s military metaphors. In any case, the plane isn’t landing in the lit-up city anymore, anyway; it’s the verdant green neck of Baghdad’s bottle-glass night. A heartless reader might well ponder the effect on military operational language such fancies might have, but if you think a reader heartless for such a speculation, I reckon you don’t even think it’s appropriate to wonder.

So do you regard the translation of the soldier’s report of fact into the war bride’s lyric elaboration of it as a central function of poetry? Or do you read that excerpt and wish fervently that poetry would cease functioning in that way? Beauty, or beautification?

Fenton, or the speaker, nods towards this question in “Refusing Beatrice,” in which she suggests “Maybe it’s time to stop comparing–” though the comparison she refers to isn’t between the experiences and their lyric component but between she and her husband and Beatrice and Dante. But immediately after, she writes

I could never be Beatrice, couldn’t harbor such good faith.

And I won’t be there in the Tigris basin to watch
heat flake cinders of paint from the Chinook’s body
like a rug shook out

or see it hasten to the sky’s surface
like an untethered corpse –

My curse or gift is blindness;
I’ve never read this story before.

My response to this is to suspect that however heat flakes cinders off a Chinook, it is almost exactly not like shaking out a rug, just as I think it hastens to the sky’s surface in a fashion that almost but not quite fails to resemble that of an untethered corpse. To which you may reply: Yes! Exactly! The power of poetry! Ha ha! Or perhaps you may simply wonder, as does the speaker, or Fenton, whether the blindness those lines accidentally describe is, indeed, a gift or a curse. It isn’t hard at all to decide which you believe is the case, but it’s hard to prove, if the evidence you muster for the defense is indistinguishable from that of the prosecution.

A few years ago I noticed that people had begun to terminate conversations about upsetting or uncertain matters by claiming “It is what it is.” I noticed shortly thereafter the rage this inspired. Really? It is what it is? There’s a work of fucking deductive genius. Neither point can be disputed. I can see the ways in which Clamor is a deeply serious book as well as a silly one. It is what it is, even when it isn’t.

Ghost Fargo

admin — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 14:44:13 +0000

Missing brother
Her child’s late father
Recurring name
(A city they made a movie about as a joke)
Carnivals
Blood oranges
Winter as the unmentionable omnipresent (like skyscrapers and hostility in New York)
Vanished sea
Chuckling, disgusted
“Gods are so cool”

I’ve been trying to put my finger on what in Paula Cisewski’s Ghost Fargo keeps getting to me. I make lists, but the lists are subjects, and names of subjects are more like paint chips than the eventual mood of a room, and besides, lists are overrated. I reread the book from back to front to see if any unresolved drama in the work (such as the first few lines of the list above) is leading me to read warmth where what might equally be there is what Roland Barthes called writing degree zero. The vibe (what is it) is still there. I turn to other readers for help. She loves language, one says, and she is unsentimental. Ok. Another, a poet I read, says: fate (yes) and that, in her first book, when she makes an interesting leap, she doesn’t always give the reader time and space to understand it. Another critic sees jumps too. I don’t see jumps, though. I show her work to my friends, but my friends don’t want to hear about poetry not by them. Fuck ‘em.

You think everyone knows
all about a thing so you don’t

write it down, don’t say.
Everybody does know

about it. It is difficult.
In the backs of our minds,

while several separate
groups of humans try

to entertain one another,
to be novel or bright,

a similar thought spider crouches.

(beginning of “Vintage Blue Anywhere”)

I can tell you what I don’t like: now and then she mixes up transitives and intransitives, uses an adjective as a noun (“his foolish heroic”), overdoes it with the praise of disappointment and thrift stores, or commits an asinine bout of all over the page a la cummings. And then, just as I’m ready to set the book aside, she issues an apology in the form of telling a truth, not a great one, only so-so, but recognizably true all the same:

O good parents of Fargo!

How you fret, and yes!

Your teens are smoking weed

in the Taco John’s parking lot,

all the windows rolled and fogging.

(The dusk is not funny, Paula. Don’t be an ass.)

(from “the poor choruses”)

Everybody wants the credibility that comes with being real, but very few people put up with all the crap being real requires. Incidentally, I learned recently that the Wikipedia munchkins monitor articles there for “peacock words”—unsubstantiated terms of praise. I bring it up because the word true as I’m using it is sounding more like a peacock word to me than best or greatest usually do. It probably embarrasses the poet, who is quick to give away any truth-gotten gains: “Oh, sincerity. Let’s not / train our grief to resemble a parlor trick.” A sincere person would say that, wouldn’t she. Yes, but only an awesome writer would change the subject like so:

Recall The Loverboy girls.

The Loverboy girls! A triumvirate
Strut through the mezzanine
in their groupie band T-shirts,
festooned with bandanas!
Now, I am happy again.

(from “the poor choruses”)

It would be an achievement along the lines of widening the frame on Larry Clark photographs or following the interview subjects of “Heavy Metal Parking Lot” home if Cisewski simply stacked up 90 pages of the happy and unhappy dumb things kids do in small Midwestern cities, and it would probably sell a lot of copies. This would be a hypothetical book. The book Cisewski actually wrote does something else.

Are all mothers headless
like mine?
How she hated
to see her face
in a photo. It never
turned out right.
She Exacto knifed it.
She made a neat box
of nothing there.
Sometimes hair rollers
floated above the void,
sometimes a spoon aimed at it.
Mother, we are new in Fargo
and cannot show this album
to prospective friends.

(from “Ode to Tethers”)

Cisewski has the fun and horror of telling the truth about herself and the city and everyone around her, and at the same time she reconciles herself to the good and the bad, at some cost. It doesn’t look easy. It reminds me of some writers I usually think of as inimitable: Bishop, Schuyler, Wright (fils).

Consider: the artist who was famously ironic

about being ironic. By each show’s end,
the whole audience felt stupid. We loved it!

But some of the crowd was only pretending,
you find out much later. It’s no wonder,

when even the family cat’s on
Prozac, we’re tired of emotion in art.

(middle of “Vintage Blue Anywhere”)

Speaking of the good and the bad: that bit about the cat is probably not immortal poetry. I accept it because by this point in the book I’m conditioned to expect something likely. As when she suddenly discloses some kind of medical intervention, then lets the inland sea of her discretion close over it: “The nurse who has to read the journal I have to keep / tells me I am a good writer and I begin to like her some.” As when, in a poem about visitors to the zoo providing orangutans with lit cigarettes, she pays homage to Russell Edson’s primates inadvertently or on purpose, and then backs away from the experience. As when she follows the apparent platitude “Sometimes dusk / is just a day’s punch line” with a few lines that feel strong as a punch:

In the darkening I lie beside my love.
Steeped in separate pasts,

we muster together one
good, deep laugh.

(from “the poor choruses”)

I’m resigned to the fact that for now I don’t know what makes me want to reread this book. Maybe it’s just one of the best books of a very good year not over yet, one in which there’s about as much time to reflect as Cisewski gives at the end of “Vintage Blue Anywhere”:

That antique sadness is the new
inside joke. It’s irrevocable, like when driving home

one night, the stranger who pulls up to the red light
next to you is weeping, both your windows

rolled up. You just begin to have a human reaction,
and then the light’s green.