Reviews

Michael Ondaatje, Warlight: A Novel

Immersed in the bewildering atmosphere of post-WWII London, Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight introduces the narrator, Nathaniel, a fourteen-year-old English boy, and his sister Rachel at the moment when they learn that their parents will abandon them to take up work in Singapore for an undisclosed amount of time. The parents leave the children in the care of guardians, a cast of shadowy figures whose names suggest espionage codenames (The Moth, The Darter, Olive, and McCash) and who have obscure connections to their mother’ s equally sketchy wartime activities. The children gradually acquire information about their mother, who operates as an occluded presence around which the events of the novel circulate. At the age of twenty-nine, Nathaniel tries to make sense of these bizarre events, imbuing the narrative with the character of both a memoir and an investigation, the outcome of which promises a fuller picture of his own past as well as the true identities of his parents and their associates. Indeed, Ondaatje’ s Warlight , which was longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize, is not only what Hermione Lee has called a “novel of chiaroscuro, ” which thematizes light and darkness in manifold ways, but also a narrative experiment that tests the availability of historical memory when one has only flickering candlelight by which to illuminate and interpret the materials of the past.

The most defining feature of Warlight is the overwhelming feeling of darkness that modulates across a range of registers. The title itself refers to the unlit atmosphere of the Blitz, a tense period when London (among other British cities) had to institute blackouts and curfews in order to protect itself from the sight of German bomber planes. Ondaatje heightens the sense that there was only the ghostly presence of warlight, which names the dim illumination that emanated from small orange lights on the bridges along the Thames during the darkness of the Blitz. Much of the novel labors to describe the metaphorical nature of this warlight, which seems to also penetrate the shrouded environment to reveal merely the silhouettes of the characters. As Nathaniel explains: “It was a time of war ghosts, the grey buildings unlit, even at night, their shattered windows still covered over with black material where glass had been. The city felt wounded, uncertain of itself.” Amid the dark setting of bombarded houses live the “war ghosts,” a descriptor that seems to apply to each character in the novel—and even to Nathaniel’ s sister, about whom we do not know much because, as Nathaniel admits, “we have separate memories. ” We learn more about the clandestine activities of The Darter, a welterweight boxer and friend of The Moth, whom Nathaniel assists in the trafficking of illegally imported race dogs along the narrow canals of the Thames. Agnes, with whom Nathaniel carries on his first love affair, also helps with the importation of illegal cargo. In a memorable moment of the novel, Agnes and Nathaniel break into an unlit three-story building in Mill Hill with a pack of greyhounds, and they sleep entangled on the floor. Nathaniel awakes to a paw on his face, and he asks the greyhound, “Where are you from?…What country? Will you tell me?” Unable to answer these questions for himself or those of others around him, Nathaniel later feels an unlikely kinship with the illegitimate race dogs. It is this basic line of questioning—requests for only the most elemental information—that drives the narrative. Deeper questions do not find traction. In many ways, Ondaatje crafts a novel that frustrates the reader’s attempts to dig beneath the surface; we are left feeling our way along the dark pages with our fingers outstretched, flailing in the absence of coherent meaning.

Indeed, the careful orchestration of this feeling-through-darkness marks the masterful achievement of Warlight. Just as Nathaniel feels lost amid his unlit memories, we read with a taut feeling of suspense that Ondaatje never relieves; like Nathaniel, we too feel unable to cohere the narrative events and make sense of them. This quality of suspense is of course a familiar feature of modernist war literature. But more specifically Ondaatje’ s novel revitalizes the genre of postwar novels of the 1940s that sought to mediate the boundless experience of war on the home front. The affective experience of wartime as a kind of darkness that disorients and constricts the human sensorium particularly distinguished novels about the Blitz. For example, the Irish novelist James Hanley conveys in No Directions (1943) the otherworldly nature of wartime London through the isolation that accompanies the threat of aerial bombardment on a block of flats in Chelsea. Fearing the impending destruction that lurks outside, the tenants retreat and are confined to the inside of the building for much of the novel; a painter continues to work on his enormous canvas during the blackouts, in much the same way that Nathaniel writes his memoir under metaphorical candlelight. Even though the characters yearn for the separation of inside and outside, Hanley disrupts this epistemological boundary such that the characters cannot come to grips with the material world. Through tropes of disorientation that short-circuit the nervous system, Blitz novels, such as No Directions and, I would argue, Warlight, intensify the question of mediation, as they contemplate the ways in which the experience of war forecloses the reliable formation of memory. How do you form a memory of a past to which you do not have access? What does it mean to know something when that process of knowing has been impaired?

By creating a character who desperately seeks to remember, Ondaatje insists on the unknowability of a life that is yoked to war. Although Warlight begins in 1945, after the ostensible conclusion of WWII, the most intimate events of the novel are wholly determined by the ongoing effects of the war. As the novel progresses, warlight seems to capture the ways in which the intensity of a totalizing event like war will continue to incandesce; war becomes the essential light source by which we read the world and understand ourselves. Part Two of Warlight, which jumps forward fifteen years to 1959, positions Nathaniel as the investigator of his own life, searching for partial answers to the ungraspable questions that have loomed over the novel, the most important being the identity of his mother and her relation to the war. The Foreign Office offers Nathaniel a job to review the archives from the war and postwar years. While at first Nathaniel sees the job as an opportunity to uncover details about his mother, who we have learned worked in some capacity for British intelligence during the war, he eventually recognizes “that an unauthorized and still violent war had continued after the armistice, a time when the rules and negotiations were still half lit and acts of war continued beyond public hearing. ” Nathaniel participates in what he calls “The Silent Correction, ” a censorship campaign waged on both sides of the war to destroy unsavory documents that might incriminate a country and thus pave the way so that “revisionist histories could begin. ” While his colleagues work to reinvent the narrative of the war, Nathaniel carries out his own revisionist project to discover the more accurate history of his own and his mother’ s lives. Ondaatje maintains over and again the irresolvable tension between life and war—that as a result of its boundlessness, war invades and determines all aspects of life. Nathaniel’ s act of self-discovery, which is tied as much to the war as to his mother, serves as a proxy for the comprehension of the war; just as the story of a life is fraught with silences and elisions, so is the epistemology of war and its effects.

By destabilizing the “post” in postwar through folding in the immediate aftermath with its lingering effects, Ondaatje provides a novelistic exemplar of what Paul Saint-Amour has theorized as the “perpetual interwar,” which describes the condition in late modernity of “the real-time experience of remembering a past war while awaiting and theorizing a future one.” Saint-Amour draws our attention to the historical analysis of “expectation, anxiety, prophecy, and anticipatory mourning ” such that we might avoid “the wartime-versus-peacetime binarism [and] the too simple rejoinder that now all time is wartime.” Ondaatje certainly can be said to participate in the post-1945 genre of contemporary historical novels about WWII that understand war as continuous and pervasive. But the temporalities of Warlight also attest to the affective experience of being suspended between the war’ s closure and its reanimation. This is why Nathaniel seems to remain in arrested development despite his arduous yearning for futurity, for filling in and overcoming the silences of his life. Even though by the novel’ s conclusion Nathaniel ascertains much about his mother’ s life, as well as the actual identities of the guardians who raised him, his comprehension remains partial, testifying to the impossibility of memoir, which he had early on acknowledged as not “a reliving, but a rewitnessing.” The idea of rewitnessing suggests that one does not so much inhabit the past as simply acknowledge it as always received through degrees of mediation. In the final pages of the novel, Nathaniel further develops this idea by declaring, “We order our lives with barely held stories. ” The act of barely holding something evokes the senseof tenuousness that Nathaniel cannot dispel when trying to comprehend his life in the midst of war’ s ongoingness. If Ondaatje means to provide a denouement to the bildungsroman of Nathaniel’ s life, then it is nothing more than this affirmation of incompleteness.

Naeem Mohaiemen, Two Meetings and a Funeral

Reviewed by Eli Rudavsky

La Coupole d’Alger Arena, still from Two Meetings and a Funeral.

In a ballroom in the Palais de Nation in Algeria, men remove shrouds from the tables and chairs. It’s as if they are unveiling antiques for an estate sale, or uncovering a corpse. Perhaps they are restoring the room to its original state, so that we see how it looked during the fourth conference of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in 1973. But really, why are they dusting off a forgotten building, and why are we now looking at a place and time long gone? The question remains unanswered for now—Naeem Mohaeimen’s camera floats through the room, sweeps past the men’s shoulders, and turns down a long corridor, leaving the men behind.

In Two Meetings and a Funeral, a three-channel film that Mohaiemen made in 2017 on commission from Documenta 14, the camera navigates space with a precision whose aim is wonder. As the camera stalks the curved exterior of La Coupole d’Alger Arena, we feel as if we are exploring a new planet or surveying the ruins of a lost one. Designed by Oscar Neimeyer and completed in 1975, the giant indoor sports complex is majestic even in its neglect.

The historian Vijay Prashad, who guides much of the film, walks alone onto the central court of the arena, which is painted in solid colors and demarcated by curved white lines. The gigantic La Coupole d’Alger Arena had once intended, perhaps, to project the power of Algeria’s post-colonial order, and its commitment to radical democratic inclusion. “Just like the Mayan ruins look like they came from outer space, so do these ruins,” he says. “They produced these giant buildings, they’re so hard to maintain, they looked shabby perhaps days after they finished constructing it…How were you supposed to maintain something so enormous?”

Prashad could just as well be asking about NAM itself. Created in 1961, NAM comprised a wave of developing countries emerging from imperialism, united to forge a path forward independent of US or Soviet influence.

NAM was fueled by the common struggle and successes of its member nations in the fight against colonialism. At the Bandung Conference in 1955—a meeting of African and Asian countries that helped lay the groundwork for NAM—Indonesia’s president Sukarno gave voice to the charged moment:

Irresistible forces have swept the two continents. The mental, spiritual and political face of the whole world has been changed and the process is still not complete. There are new conditions, new concepts, new problems, new ideals abroad in the world. Hurricanes of national awakening and reawakening have swept over the land, shaking it, changing it, changing it for the better. [1]

At NAM’s meetings, this feeling was molded into common principles and purposes. NAM advocated a radical shift away from its member countries’ colonial past, demanding “the redistribution of the world’s resources, a more dignified rate of return for the labor power of their people, and a shared acknowledgement of the heritage of science, technology, and culture.”[2]

Muammar Gaddafi, still from Two Meetings and a Funeral.

However, NAM’s spirited period was short-lived; though it flourished in the 1960s, the Movement soon began to unravel, splintering into more powerful orders. In The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, Vijay Prashad argues that the “Third World project came with a built-in flaw”[3]—the fight for national independence in former colonies required a unity across class and political order that proved brittle after independence was achieved. Once the colonial powers were uprooted, a complex reality came into being in the newly sovereign states. Former social hierarchies reestablished themselves and the class of elites that had ruled before independence reasserted their control.

Early on, pressure from the working classes and the lasting spirit of national liberation tempered political elites. But by the 1970s, the ruling class “compromise ideology…that combined the promise of equality with the maintenance of social hierarchy” was broken.[4] The people suffered a shortage of basic needs, and war and corruption begat economic crisis. Newly independent nations were encouraged to borrow capital at disadvantageous rates, and were soon pushed into default. In exchange for rolling over their debt, the International Monetary Fund demanded that their governments agree to neoliberal structural adjustments, including welfare cuts and the privatization of industry. These changes only twisted the dagger further into the heart of the Third World project:

The assassination of the Third World led to the desiccation of the capacity of the state to act on behalf of the population, an end to making the case for a new international economic order, and a disavowal of the goals of socialism. Dominant classes that had once been tethered to the Third World agenda now cut loose…An upshot of this demise of the Third World agenda was the growth of forms of cultural nationalism in the darker nations…Fundamentalist religion, race, and unreconstructed forms of class power emerged from under the wreckage.[5]

Mohaiemen charts these shifting waters in Two Meetings and a Funeral . His film is projected onto three screens side by side. In one sequence, he uses brief messages to describe how Western influence, global capitalism, and fundamentalist religion washed the Third World project away over time, and then took its place; on one screen is a title, another the year, and on the third an event:

Season of Tigers. 1975. Bangladesh’s president and family murdered in Islamist-allied coup, with alleged CIA backing. Pakistan and Saudi Arabia first to recognize new military regime in Bangladesh. 1977. As his Socialist alliance collapses, Pakistan’s Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto overthrown in CIA-backed coup. / Funeral Pyre. 1982. Bangladesh chosen as host for Nonaligned summit, starts building conference center. 1990. Nonaligned summit postponed…2013. Bangabandhu Center available to rent for events, celebrations, and trade fairs.

II.

Two Meetings and a Funeral considers how the buildings in NAM’s orbit bear history. The colossal structures that Vijay Prashad visits seem out of place, their motivating ideology abandoned. Rows of catalogue drawers at the United Nations once filled with information are now neat and hollow, and buildings like the Bangabandhu International Conference Center and the Palais de Nation are used for commercial purposes or visited as historical relics. It is uncanny to look at places designed to elevate meetings of great purpose now sitting lifeless.

How did we get here?

In conversation with Prashad, the archaeologist and writer Samia Zennadi reflects on the transformation Algeria has undergone since the era in which NAM thrived. For her generation, who lived through the charged period of anti-colonial struggle, it is now as if the ground has fallen from under their feet. Where did the Movement go? Its language remains, but the world looks so different. The older generation is split off from the younger one.

Mohaiemen’s film is split into three channels. Like the delegates of NAM—who saw their colleagues speak at the podium, but who understood their words by translation in their headsets—the audience of Two Meetings and a Funeral experiences a similar dissociation of image and language. The image of the speaker appears on one screen, and their words appear in English on another. Mohaiemen literally shapes and colors his subjects’ words, transforming them from subtitles into symbols. Language is spectacle in the NAM conferences, and in the present Algerian political discourse that Zennadi describes—so too in Mohaiemen’s film.

Still from Two Meetings and a Funeral.

Zennadi points to language as an example of the stunted political discourse in Algeria. “[I]n the 1970s Algeria was a nation of Africans. Sub-Saharan Africans were present in literature, cinema, theater. But now things have dissolved into nonsense, a void. And what’s left? Yes, we still chant “Pan-Africanism.” But…[y]ou often hear Algerians say: ‘We’ve never been to Africa.’ They forget we’re on African land.”

Two Meetings and a Funeral inquires about the nature of residue. What do we make of linguistic or physical structures when they have been emptied out? When language and architecture that once burst forth with a popular anti-imperialist movement in Bangladesh, or Algeria, are now empty, or swelling with capitalist enterprise?

At the end of the film, Vijay Prashad muses that the film might bridge the gap between the old generation of NAM that built a vigorous liberation movement, and the young generation that knows little of it. And maybe it will. However, the first aim of Mohaiemen’s film is not to bridge any gap, but instead to look closely at the residue of a movement that has practically died.

Perhaps in the ballroom in the Palais de Nation, under a chair or behind a curtain, the men cleaning will find something left behind from the fourth conference of NAM. Or, in footage of Fidel Castro applauding Arafat at the 4th NAM conference, in the curve of La Coupole D’Alger Arena, we might suddenly catch the glimmer of life that animated the Third World project. In Two Meetings and a Funeral, Naeem Mohaiemen trains his eye on the drama and spectacle of history, its unexpected twists and moments of personal grace. In so doing, he draws us closer to the embers of the Third World project and asks us what it would mean to kindle them again.

Notes:
[1] Vijay Prashad,The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (The New Press: New York, 2007), p.33.

[2] Ibid., xvii.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid., xviii.

Samiya Bashir, Field Theories

Reviewed by Kirsten (Kai) Ihns

In physics, field theory is a way of accounting for physical phenomena in terms of a field (where a field describes a space governed by a delimited set of rules and forces) and the interactions among fields and with matter. In Samiya Bashir’s Field Theories, the theories, and the fields they reach for, include not only the magnetic, gravitational, and electrical fields one might expect, but also America’s troubled racial history thought as a field, fields of influence, fields of human relation. Bashir thinks all these terms through each other and, by recasting lived experience in the terms of physics and physics in the form of the material details of human life, opens new ways of thinking about each.

One of the primary ways Bashir produces this recasting is her titling scheme—many of the poems have titles that use physics terminology and concepts. The book is broken into roughly eight sections, each headed by a quote from a prominent Black public figure, overlaid on a grayed-out and tilted version of the Planck equation in the background. The sections follow a kind of countdown through the laws of thermodynamics, from “Consequences of the laws of thermodynamics” to “Zeroth law,” punctuated by three historical persona-poem sections all titled “CORONAGRAPHY.” The poems in each of the sections have loose but traceable relationships to the physics concepts from which they take their names—the poem called “Second law,” for instance, deals with the frictions and losses of force that come with time, labor, and difficult love relationships, “spent matches with burnt-out / love —,” “print / disappearing disappearing.” The second law of thermodynamics dictates that changes in entropy of a given system can never be negative; systems tend to move toward increased disorder over time. Other representative titles include “Carnot cycle,” “Planck’s constant,” and “Radio ∴ Wave,” a poem interested in traversing time and space (“across the road”; “sail”; “roamed”; “nomads”) and whose references range from “black holes” and sailable “starlight winds” to “Eocene camels,” “damp desert nomads,” and “the radio.” Like the radio waves (and radio and waves) of the title, the poem’s thought travels freely, invisible but consistent in its frequency and the choreography of its stanzaic patterning (consistently three lines, which gently get longer as the poem continues).

Bashir’s graceful and idiosyncratic rhythmic and sonic sensibilities are part of what makes the poems energetic and a pleasure to read—they’re a study in high craft done with a light touch. Though it’s difficult to locate how Bashir does it exactly, I would say some of her major tools are heavily enjambed, short, spare stanzas (frequently couplets) and a consistent use of near rhymes, assonance, and consonance punctuated by moments of heightened sonic density. The degree to which the poems draw attention to their own sonic crafted-ness feels thoughtfully modulated throughout both individual poems and the book, and is part of what produces a feeling of effortlessness and grace. Bashir doesn’t do what many poets invested in craft do, which is to say, she doesn’t constantly insist that we notice that work is being done formally. I’ll point out two examples that help clarify, but mostly one gets a sense of this effect by moving through longer sections of the book. The first example is from one of the last poems in the book, “Zeroth law,” named for the thermodynamics principle that specifies that relations of thermal equilibrium work transitively. If A is in equilibrium with B, and B is in equilibrium with C, A is in equilibrium with C. The poem, similarly, uses a kind of 2–3 modulation in its sonic patterning. I quote the entire poem here to exemplify Bashir’s craft and also because I think it’s such a beautiful poem:

When leaning on the backyard beam
beneath a full wolf moon and my slippers
shiver under my nightdress as I happen
upon a reason for waking call it a snowflake

a belly-flop blue jay or even my own small toe
peeking through a not-yet-hole as it fissures into
my slipper’s future and I’m not out for a jog or
to find a misplaced piece of scoundrel lover

but to marry my morning coffee to
an old cigarette to the new blue-gray light
of an icy pacific year in mid-set

See how they swinghold hands and raise the sun?
Hey, you! Bluebird! Whatever will we do
— exhale — with all of these merciful gifts?

Often, two words sharing a vowel sound (e.g., “leaning” and “beam” in the first line) will occur close together, and then a later section of the poem will repeat this sound (e.g., “beneath” as the turnaround word in the second line), chiming across the poem’s lines and stanzas. Similarly, the first stanza ends with a strongly emphasized “-ake” sound: “upon a reason for waking call it a snowflake,” which the next stanza picks up as an echo in the long “a” in the “jay” of “belly-flop blue jay”—“jay” heard loudly because it works as a kind of landing place after the three modifiers preceding it. The effect of this is a smoothly transitive linkage—we hear the linkage of “leaning” and “beneath” across the line break, like two systems in equilibrium with each other through their relation to a middle system. Similarly, you can hear the linkage of “waking” and “jay” across the stanza break, sustained in their relation by the shared middle term. Also, like “belly-flop blue jay,” in this poem (as elsewhere in the book), Bashir will often formulate highly compounded nouns—“misplaced piece of scoundrel lover,” “new blue-gray light,” “a not-yet-hole,” “icy pacific year”—which have an effect similar to Hopkins’s sprung rhythm and concentration of stress (e.g., “dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon”). They function like prosodic intensifiers, which Bashir balances with smoothed, lower-stress regions around them. The effect is what might be called an elegant rollicking, as paradoxical as that might seem. It’s a rhythmic intensity that is unpredictable, resistant to monotony, a pleasure to think with. Bashir cites great blues and jazz artists and critics in the poems, and it’s of course hard not to place her work in relation to theirs, and perhaps also in relation to Charles Olson’s notion of Projective Verse and field poetics—by attending to the rhythms of breath, and engaging speech where it is “least careless—and least logical.” Bashir finds an intuitive and energetic way through the poems.

Bashir also develops rich networks of consonantal patterning. Briefly tracking how they work can help draw out some of the ways one can see “fields” operating formally in her poems. Here’s the ending from “Planck’s constant”:

the sun went down forever so

what else made sense but to
climb one another hand over

hand and cleave to whoever was
left and near enough and would?

The couplets are very comfortable with leaving dangling connective words (“so,” “to,” “over,” “was”) at the ends of their lines and with delaying closure of the sense unit to the next couplet, which, combined with the internal sonic balance of the lines, produces a kind of forceful but casual propulsion from couplet to couplet. Also important here are the subtle and nested consonantal and vowel patterns—there is a remarkably high frequency of words that use “ve” (“forever,” “over,” “cleave,” “whoever”) and each of these words also participates in networks of vowel patterns happening in the section. These networks make the “ve” words feel like nodes where patterns or fields, if you will, intersect, lifting them higher in the reader’s attention—there are a lot of long “o” sounds in relational words (“over,” “so,” “who,” “to”) that draw them together, and many short “e” sounds as well (“left,” “sense,” “-ever,” “enough,” “else,” “went”). And though these sounds are common enough, their repetitive occurrence here, in ways that circulate around the less common “ve” words, produces a fluid but perceptible field—a space defined by delimited rules, a space where movement is possible. I think this ending is so satisfying and effective (as many of Bashir’s endings are) partially because its last line, allowing for a “headless” catalectic first foot, also crystallizes a ghostly iambic patterning that floats around elsewhere in the poem—“__left | and near | enough | and would”—the line falling into iambic tetrameter. The effect is at once one of closure, as the pattern rises to the threshold of perceptibility, and also springing-forward—iambic tetrameter being often the energetic meter of children’s rhymes and 4/4 song lyrics.

The last line also asks for a flexibility of sense-making that produces a kind of pleasing intellectual swiveling (also something Bashir does well), which I think is available to experience as itself a kind of motion. Specifically, I refer to the lines “cleave to whoever was / left and near enough and would”: in this formulation, “left,” “near enough,” and “would” all ask to be read as modifiers of “whoever.” But they are quite different words, both in the implied relation they produce between the “whoever” and the world, and in the degree to which they resist their grammatical status as modifiers. Whoever “was left” suggests that the participation of “whoever” in the cleaving is the result of the world’s action (“whoever was left” suggests simply a state of affairs—the existence of the whoever is a marker of what has happened in the world). “Near enough” suggests relational placed-ness; “whoever” may be identified based on their position (in a field of action) relative to the speaker; we think their identity relationally. And then, finally, “would”—here the “whoever” is summoned as an agent, they may be identified based on their inclination. But the formulation places all these terms on equal footing, forcing the reader to encounter them in the same framing and to think quite differently in order to make sense of each of them. In so doing, the line seems to point to the fact that the action of sense-making might really be described as understanding the relational field produced or suggested by the behavior of the terms within it. The friction between the identical framing and the kind of sense-making each word asks of the reader makes the fields of the poem’s form perceptible. That’s to say, it helps to show, at a granular, formal level, the complex ways one can project relation through language, and how the “world” and/or the “I,” can swivel into and out of place as the frame of reference, the field of orientation.

In addition to enriching the ways one can think about human experience under the sign of physics, one of Bashir’s major projects in this book is to think about how race, and the ways Western colonialism and capitalism have operated to produce and then to exploit race, affect the daily lived experience of Black people. History and race, in other words, are also fields for theorizing here. For example, “Law of total probability” notes—through a text riddled with white holes (blank circular spaces that partially obscure the words—perhaps recalling the scattering and reflective “white bodies” of physics)—that “i cross the street away from cops of / my being black.” The “CORONAGRAPHY” series represents two lovers struggling under slavery, with the term “slavery” louder for being unspoken, as one covers the sun in a coronagraph to be able to see the fainter light at the edges. Or consider the ways the texts ask the reader to hear or perceive the human “Black body” in poem titles like “Blackbody curve” (a physics term having to do with the amount of radiation emitted by a black body, in physics an ideally absorptive entity from which no radiation escapes). Field Theories makes its reader think about their own position in these fields, and how that position affects their possibilities of relation to the text. For example, about midway through the book, a poem called “You don’t have to pump the breaks you just gotta keep your eyes on the road”—possibly referring to the 1980 South African Apartheid-era film The Gods Must Be Crazy—describes the nonchalant cruelty of “white people”:

Coke bottles falling from the sky to
an old man’s village and the white people just

laugh and laugh and line up to pay and laugh
and get paid and laugh. That’s what they made.

Just a few stanzas later, a “we” (i.e., not the “white people” of the above-quoted stanza) emerges, a “we” that becomes increasingly present in the second half of the book. While Field Theories engages throughout with issues of race, it is at this moment that it seems to ask the reader most directly to think about the ways race and racism and history impact life not only in the abstract, but to think about where they situate themselves within these fields, to identify their own position in the field because, as the previously quoted ending of “Planck’s Constant” shows, it is only in terms of the field that one can be in relation. More directly, the racially marked “we” here necessitates reflection on the politics of identification—can you identify with or operate within the “we,” itself a kind of space or field?

What makes this work particularly remarkable and interesting is the way that, even as the poems demand that you reflect on and identify your own position (one possibly outside the first-person plural position they mark for themselves) they allow a movement-alongside and sustain a relation, one whose terms include an awareness of the multiple kinds of fields the poems work to make perceptible. You just have to stand, as a body, aware of the terms of the fields acting on you, to do so. Overall Bashir’s book is beautiful, thoughtful, graceful, and strange. It is a book that makes the conditions of sense-making, the conditions of life in a system with an inherited racist history, the conditions of formal movement in a poem, available to sense in new ways.

This review is in Chicago Review 62:4/63:1/2.

Daniel Owen, Restaurant Samsara

Reviewed by Sotère Torregian

“Something Happens Under the Bridge”: Three Recent Books by Gay Trans Men

We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan, edited by Ellis Martin and Zach Ozma

Zach Ozma, Black Dog Drinking from an Outdoor Pool

Oliver Baez Bendorf, Advantages of Being Evergreen

Reviewed by Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué

The marble ass that covers the new publication of the diaries of Lou Sullivan, the gay and trans activist and writer who passed away from AIDS complications in 1991, is a useful hint at the person we are about to meet within the book’s pages. Sullivan is the definition of boy-crazy. From his beginnings as a young Christian child ravenously obsessed with the Beatles (“Paul-Ringo-Paul-Ringo they keep bouncing around my head. They’re so perfect […] This is a love so strong and real. Oh, love me, too, anyone”) to the adult cruising San Francisco’s leather bars, Sullivan writes with awe about men and the love men might share. “The beauty of a man loving a man just takes away my breath,” he writes in a late entry.

As hinted by its title, We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan is a deeply erotic book. Sullivan’s diaries record in great detail his sexual exploits, romantic infatuations, and complex personal relationships. These reminiscences are written in a style somewhere between childlike giddiness and deft description, where you can sense that Sullivan is turning himself on with every entry he writes. His life and diary are committed to gay sex, seeing in it the embodiment of the challenge and passion of life at the margins. “What has it been about male / male love that has made me desire it so?” Sullivan asks himself in a late entry, “the fact that it didn’t happen—that the two people involved really wanted to be with each other, and that the other person chose to love him […] despite all forces against them, they clung to each other with desire.”

But the sex Sullivan records in these pages is not always so affirming and so brave as he idealizes gay sex to be. Though Sullivan often describes sex as a useful tool towards learning truths about his own manhood, the reader is made painfully aware (more aware, it seems, than Sullivan was at times) of the way sex becomes an obstacle to Sullivan’s becoming. His lovers, especially the “T” who is the last major relationship of his life, often use sex as an arena to debate Sullivan’s transition and to propose certain ideas about how he should embody his gender. It is often saddening and frustrating to read the ways Sullivan’s lovers leverage their own sexual identities against his still-blossoming gender identity, or to read his lovers using sexual pleasure against his plans for transition, as when he writes “[T] said I shouldn’t get the cock operation because I am enjoying my pussy. I agreed and told him what a special person he is.”

This selection of journal entries, which Sullivan always imagined being published, makes for an essential record of the daily frustrations and pleasures of coming into a sense of self. Importantly, it is a useful record of a scene (specifically, 70s and 80s queer San Francisco, both its activist networks and its sexual ones) and a record of how an individual came to understand themselves as an individual within a scene. But at the moment when Sullivan finally holds the most crystal-clear sense of himself, he is diagnosed with HIV. Sullivan has said both in the diaries and in public interviews that his greatest sadness upon diagnosis was fear that his bottom surgery (begun, but not healed properly, in 1986 before diagnosis) would never be fully finished and corrected, as he feared doctors would be unwilling to do surgery on him.

In a book textured by humor, pleasure, ecstasy, giddiness, and sadness, this “final chapter” is obviously dominated by pain. Though his always charming and funny style remains surprisingly present, there is a clear loss of energy and life excitement in this last section, as Sullivan details some of his medical routines, new difficulties, and friends’ deaths. But, at the very least, Sullivan dies having definitively answered major questions about himself that have been puzzled over for the hundreds of pages that make up this selection. He dies, to use his own terms, “finally a MAN!” having fought long and hard for a place in the gay community he has admired since he was a child. It is perhaps this knowledge that lets him write, with characteristic goofiness:

I heard this remark on television tonight and thought it so appropriate, I wish I’d have thought of it myself back in the olden days, when Dad used to ask me, “What’s it all about?” The answer:

You do the hokey-pokey
And you turn yourself around
That’s what it’s all about…

Susan Stryker, in her heartfelt introduction to the selection, is exactly right when she says, “get ready to meet a great soul.” That’s what this book feels like, an opportunity to meet someone great. The sleek editing work by Ellis Martin and Zach Ozma, the campy but handsome design by Joel Gregory, and the joint publishing work of Nightboat Books and the now-departed Timeless, Infinite Light, together make that meeting both possible and deeply pleasurable.

We Both Laughed in Pleasure is only half the reason why its co-editor Zach Ozma is having a good year. 2019 has also brought the release of his debut poetry book Black Dog Drinking from an Outdoor Pool, a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age narrative told in verse through a small group of characters named simply by their roles: “mother,” “father,” “dog,” “boy,” and “i.” Its language is plain and quietly sad, with moments of evocative tension. For these reasons and others, the book’s most obvious ancestor is The Book of Frank (2009) by CA Conrad. Readers familiar with The Book of Frank will recognize its precise mix of melancholy, desire, repulsion, and wonder in Ozma’s poems such as “Garbage Man”:

father accuses mother of an affair with the garbage man

but it’s dog that licks the slime from between

the trash collector’s wicked fingers

Ozma shares with Conrad an ability to make every ingredient of a scene feel confoundingly meaningful, communicative in ways that unsettle rather than answer questions. It’s an ability that makes the formal simplicity of the lines in this queer biography feel resplendent, as Conrad’s sparse free verse did in The Book of Frank.

The narrative seems to tell us how an “i” comes into selfhood in an upbringing with a difficult, distant, and hard-to-read father, and in the aftermath of that father’s suicide. The “dog” overlaps with several of the character’s embodiments, working as a particularly mobile image and emotional site. We get scenes where father becomes dog (“father licks himself clean / father curls up by fire / father crawls under house to die”), or scenes where the “i” becomes dog (“it leaves soft impressions in my fur”). The “dog” might be the comforting companion during grief, or the lived, furry embodiment of grief’s complexity.

In a series of puns on the phrase “good boy,” the “i” and the dog are in some form of allegiance, the phrase marking a category they would both like to belong to, sometimes even do. Becoming “dog” is mapped onto become “man/boy,” so that the struggle over the image of the dog that organizes this book is based in the fact that “father” represents a “garbage man” and a “bad dog” (“we lied and said father doesn’t bite”), while the “i” is struggling to fit into being a “good boy.” But even as I say that, I am aware that there is a kind of stretchiness to the images struggled over in this book, and that such a reading fails to account for all of the textures “dog,” “father,” “boy,” and “i” take up.

Through all this stretchiness, it is clear that Black Dog Drinking from an Outdoor Pool is a book about death as an instance for becoming, where becoming might mean something like animalization. Its pages are peppered with transformations:

father’s dog died when i was born
house too small for many pups
dog curled up in mud
became a redwood

i curled up in low pile carpet
became a boy

Without making any guesses as to the timeline of the editing of We Both Laughed in Pleasure and the writing of Black Dog Drinking from an Outdoor Pool, it seems to me that Ozma either learned from or appreciates Sullivan’s critical attention to the way events, especially sex and death, catalyze or frustrate the process of personal becoming. While Sullivan’s book is a record of the ordinary, a record of his becoming over time, Ozma’s is a bestiary of the ordinary, somewhere between fairy tale and memoir.

Animalization, becoming, and death as a set of questions for trans life is a problem set encountered in another 2019 poetry collection. Oliver Baez Bendorf’s Advantages of Being Evergreen is a brief collection of woodsy lyrics published by the Cleveland State University Poetry Center. The book’s central concern seems to be the difficult task of imagining sanctuary for a body heavy with memory, catalyzed into change, and charged with desire:

Earth not even buried

in the earth. So many gay
bodies on fire, offerings to
gods who don’t deserve us,
gods of punishment, gods of plight.

The land in the holler weeps.
Still we dream of sanctuary,
follow a hand-drawn map
up the mountain.

On the quest to “put on a self,” the speaker in Advantages of Being Evergreen takes a deep dive into the ecosystem, looking to nature for a model of self both wild and preservable. Its style is primarily in-line with the contemporary lyric styles that CSUPC has published in recent years, though the book is also populated by some experiments in form. In its sound and its images the book strives for consonance over dissonance, though always upholding “wildness” as a form for life. Baez Bendorf writes: “I inject, grow a beard, bleed a while… I become my wildest self / through make-believe—to the river with this thunderous me[…].”

Rainwater, the river, foxes, and bears all repeatedly appear in these poems in the context of grief, transition, queerness, their presence received with something akin to awe or desirous curiosity. The river is the star of one of the collection’s most impressive poems “River I Dream About.” The poem is a repetitive structure of fragments using the word “river” (“River that curve down a backbone./River through which I particle heat.”), sharing an interest with a few other poems in the collection in a more procedural, patterned, and mechanical language. But the poem, as it continues, breaks its form with the I’s transition to the sentence’s subject, moving away from phrases like “River I dream about” to something like the poem’s final lines: “I will be there, printing textures of rock / on the skin of me, belly down, face down. / My god it is good to be home.” What starts as a kind of scenic and recurrent exploration of a variety of rivers is slowly made into a home by the appearance and the movement of the I within the network of rivers. What the poem slowly builds with this grammatical shift is a sense of belonging, the feeling of one’s body belonging in an environment, and the feeling that one’s body belongs to oneself, wild or otherwise: “river where/my fur belongs to me.”

I recall Lou Sullivan’s journals when reading the closing lines from Baez Bendorf in another standout poem “Who Spit into the Pumpkin, Who They Waiting For”: “What I want from the river is what I always want: / to be held by a stronger thing that, in the end, chooses mercy.” It is the sensitive portrayal of gay desire’s risky tenderness that seems shared between Baez Bendorf and Sullivan. I mean by that both the feeling of the love existing “despite all forces,” to use Sullivan’s words of worship, and the danger always associated with the act of loving men. The erotics in Advantages of Being Evergreen are relatively subtle and smartly written, even when they seem to be the innocent and clumsy desires of summer camp and the wilderness. Gay writing has always been obsessed with how to precisely catch and describe our desires, especially the love and sex that moves through the summer heat. In this ongoing debate, Baez Bendorf has landed somewhere productive. “something happens under the bridge. I come up singing,” he writes in “Who Spit into the Pumpkin, Who They Waiting For.” “something” might be a personal transformation, an interpersonal act of desire, an interpersonal act of violence, or something more mundane, the ambiguity capturing some of the subtle but uncensored description of gay desire. The line’s placement in the middle of a nearly-prosaic stanza makes its central transformation, its “something” that “happens,” feel ordinary, as much a part of the landscape as the eggs, hens, peppers, marjoram, and pumpkin that surround it.

In the connection between desire, the animal, the natural, and trans life, Advantages of Being Evergreen—along with recent books like Ozma’s collection, Chely Lima’s 2017 What the Werewolf Told Them, CA Conrad’s 2014 ECODEVIANCE, and The Criminal: Invisibility of Parallel Forces by Max Wolf Valerio—is not exactly unprecedented. But in Baez Bendorf’s version, this thematic connection is staged, perhaps deceptively, as the connection of all things. He writes of a kind of congregation of “everything under the moon” in a form of relation that is pleasurable, mysterious, and productive. The book’s finish occurs in the great ecstasy of this congregation: “the earth is my home and there is / much to cry about. It always helps / to look up, look all the way up // look up, look up, look up, we look / up, up, up.” The repeated words, along with the mapping of earth/heavens along issues of sanctuary, makes this conclusion the most explicit revelation of the book’s aesthetics of the spiritual.

Baez Bendorf’s book is aesthetically and thematically working over the issue of belonging, a theme Sullivan mapped constantly in journal entries throughout his life. Sullivan felt, by turns, an unprecedented sense of belonging and a confounding sense of exclusion amongst his scene of San Francisco queers. He worshipped gay men’s love, of which he endlessly desired to become a part, but was often reminded (by lovers, by friends) of his difference from the cis gay men that he gave so much care to. The writings of Sullivan, an ancestor for all of contemporary queer community, but especially for trans gay men, clearly offer a set of tools, anxieties, dreams, and desires to the many trans gay talents writing now: Ozma, Baez Bendorf, Stephen Ira, Ely Shipley, Jay Besemer, Ari Banias, to name only a limited few in poetry. In these publication’s coinciding in 2019, this lineage is made resplendently clear.

October 2019

Nikki Wallschlaeger, Crawlspace

Reviewed by Jose-Luis Moctezuma

The history of the sonnet is, among many things, a history of a composure derailed at an alarming moment of epiphany. Despite the message being trammeled in fourteen lines, or in the period-speciﬁc coding of its medium, the sonnet’ s epiphany is based less in the form than in the activation that the form engineers. In the Petrarchan tradition, the sonnet is a dichotomous structure that plays on a balancing of inequalities; in the Shakespearean, it terminates in a couplet that ties together divorced rhymes at its endpoint like strings bridging the tongue of a shoe. In Nikki Wallschlaeger’ s Crawlspace, a book composed of ﬁfty-ﬁve sonnets (some unnumbered, some missing), the sonnet is none of these things, nor does it care to be. Instead, the function, divorced of its form, is approached from an angle of vision that disrupts the sonnet’ s usual allegiances and skillfully deconstructs its historical baggage. Here, the sonnet is nothing more, nothing less, than an unlocked room, a deterritorialized space in which extraordinary incidents and minor violences might occur, or have already happened, if you look closely enough. As Wallschlaeger writes in “Sonnet (3) ”: “What is the difference between / a house and a mall really? ” A critical difference that points at the deleterious effects of a metastasized capitalism, in which human interiority becomes perilously entwined with corporate sprawl: “You and your family can live here / pay rent and/or mortgage. ” The tenancy, in this case, is the fraught real estate of the sonnet space.

Wallschlaeger’ s incredible technique blueprints the sonnet’ s fourteen-line structure in several formally innovative ways, some lines longer and laden with decolonial insight, others breaking off toward alternate freedoms, to reveal startling lacunae or risky omissions in a rhetoric of United Statesian pathos. As such, Crawlspace should be considered a new entry in the tradition of anti-sonnets, along the lines of Ted Berrigan’ s, Bernadette Mayer’ s, and Clark Coolidge’ s postmodern sonneteering and, most recently, in the work of Sandra Simonds, Ian Heames, and Terrence Hayes, which powerfully redeﬁnes what the sonnet can assemble and do. In disassembling the form, Crawlspace goes further in interrogating and reconstructing the constrictions of a tradition complicit with what Wallschlaeger calls “the constraints of your oppressors.”

Part of the beauty of Wallschlaeger’ s intervention in the history of a form is its construction of an unhistory, a turning-upside-down of a vessel that spills out the contents of an occluded discontent. In “Sonnet (8), ” she writes that “we should all be oyster joyous & keyless / when we have our geometries managed / & the intersections waiting on tables / showing us how to be better at patience. ” In the widening gap between labor classes and derivative classes, and in the racialization that ensues, the career ambitions of everyday people are reduced to waiting for tips and promotion in the service industry, and it is in service to the crude reductions of capital’ s “layers & layers of prison care ” that negativity is ﬂipped (obscenely) into positivity. Wealth is whited out and wiled away, while silence and complicity are malignantly posited as a virtue: “we are going to be abundantly / pleasant & quiet on a payday afternoon. ” There are no persons or personalities here (not even personae): instead, personhoods, disconnected voices, instructions, and actions default or ﬁnish in irremediable frustrations. The joys are minor but consumerist: “My joy, privately owned. ” Pointing her weapon at the sonnet’ s cagey form, carceral capitalism rears its head: “The most crafted ending of all / is usually the electric fence. ”

Ultimately, part of Wallschlaeger’ s critique is about whiteness and its heralds, the historical investiture of prosodic form. Colonialist paragons are incinerated into blurs of white sameness: “George Washington’ s mouth comin at you / yappin some bullshit about honesty or was / that Abe Lincoln I dunno they start to fade. ” What Claude McKay had queried of the nation’ s “tiger’ s tooth ” sunk into his throat in the sonnet “America, ” Wallschlaeger pursues in her navigations “about White Satan & the reign of Ira Glass ”:

No boudoir photo in this country
could convince me
that America is the best place
to fuck. Cities sprouting
out of my skin & I tug
at your famous teenage welts.

Wallschlaeger’ s polemic is a necessary one, charged by a deep knowledge of the hazards of whiteness in everyday life. Whiteness isn’ t (just) a person, a politics, or a color (the terrifying “visible absence of color, ” as Melville says), but it’ s also the invisible ﬂag bearing the arms of the capitalist mechanism, the ideological whiteout that displaces difference and remarks on it in the same manner that people shopping at Target remark on the linen count in a bedding package or the argyle design in a cheaply and brutally manufactured cardigan imported from Sri Lanka. Whether a skin for the phone, or a template for the small business website, the whiteness of everyday life creates a crawlspace for the bifurcated, disaffected mind.

More importantly, whiteness is a zone of tensions and resistances where personal history becomes dangerously imbricated with colonialist, corny-as-fuck, hegemonic forms of thinking, which Wallschlaeger is asked, often forced, to adopt:

When I hurt I think about
the racism of my white mother in rearview mirrors,
who suggested I read The Color of Water & believed
in the joy of Hattie’ s enslavement & how because
of this I keep my blackgirl magic protected protected
their souvenirs from this nostalgic scene: a brunette
on perky roller skates pumping up the muzak gaslight,
decorative plate ordered from Fingerhut, the iconic ‘50s
inspired Coca-Cola kitchen set.

The everyday detritus of capitalist spectacle covers over the everyday casual racism of cultural assumptions and reconciliation fantasies. If it isn’ t the unspoken, yet heavily policed, codiﬁcations of race, it is patriarchy and mansplaining that arrest the speaker in the mire of the sonnet’ s assumptions concerning mastery and voice:

You liked the book I was reading
matched my blouse & said so approvingly.
Girls with portable accessories then a gentle
corrective in the authors I should read next.
I’ m wondering what you have in mind for my
next set of outﬁts that rhyme with poetry.

The identiﬁcation here of form with sexism, rhyme with “commercial femininity, ” effectively analogizes the tremendous “Weight grabbed onto/into me ” that Wallschlaeger holds up, tears up, and ﬂings out. Wallschlaeger effectively dismantles the sonnet form, blows it up and distends it to its breaking point, as a way of disputing the tacit linkages between whiteness, patriarchy, and prosodic form. Although this might be interpreted to be an anti-traditional move, Wallschlaeger’ s use of the sonnet as a vehicle of feminist intersectional potential might be related to a long tradition of women poets who have used the sonnet to question male authority and heteronormative desire. As Lisa L. Moore has argued, the sonnet is a space that “often exceeds, reverses, doubles, or even contradicts ” its syntactic and historical lineages because it is in the sonnet’ s “famous doubleness, tension, and sense of internal difference ” that it performs empowerment through subversion and voltaic reﬂexivity, especially for women and queer poets in the Sapphic tradition. The sonnet, in Wallschaleger’ s hands, contributes to such a tradition, but also complexiﬁes it in the inclusion of intersectional vectors that a sentimentalized (and frequently depoliticized) prosody might leave out.

It is in this spirit that the microaggressions of everyday life (patriarchal, racial, classist) are itemized at the level of the sonnet’ s line-by-line metrical ﬁnitude. It isn’ t enough that liberal culture makes room for new and marginal voices in the tradition of a form, but that these voices answer back at the presumed innocence of a “woke ” gentry:

That I’ ve been refused service at diners
in northern Wisconsin so I’ m supposed to be grateful
that you’ re liberal enough to serve me in a restaurant.

[…]

That I’ m nervous now about writing the
line about Los Angeles and New York disappearing
because white supremacy has a way of making folks
disappear.

The secret life of a form might also be the concealed supremacy of a way of thinking, leaving out the exhaust of a burned-up margin only barely discernible in what the history of a form omits or undervalues. That “adding / a black cartoon princess is considered progress ” is what Wallschlaeger wants to unpack and refute: it is not enough to copy or mimic a popular form (the belletristic sonnet as much as a Disneyﬁcation of race relations), there must also be a total derangement of the polite capitalist sensorium. The ﬁnal “sonnet ” of the book (“Sonnet 55 ”) implements this in a complete and excessive exploding of the sonnet form, extending itself like a wild growth running rampant through a ﬁeld of carefully pruned ﬂowers and plants, tearing up the ground not through desecration but through more and more growth, more and more sacred rage.

Ultimately, Wallschlaeger exhausts the sonnet form because she is herself exhausted: “I’ ve been exhausted my entire life // I hate telling you / how I really feel. ” Like the impactful Lucille Clifton quote that begins the book (“all of us are tired / and some of us are mad ”), Crawlspace rehearses its conﬂicts and historical trajectories in a shimmer of intersectional resistance and “blackgirl magic. ” Asking “what of the world’ s municipal mistakes / that are stored in us? ” the book carefully weaves together a picture of the “marked women ” who “transform / ourselves. We are the wood violets & roses stretching in the rain. ” These are not sonnets; they’ re better than that: ﬁercer, freer, and loosened as the wood violet is of the murky ground. Held, yet uncontained.

This review is in Chicago Review 62:4/63:1/2.

Dawn Lundy Martin, Good Stock Strange Blood

Harmony Holiday, Hollywood Forever

Duriel E. Harris, No Dictionary of a Living Tongue

Reviewed by Tyrone Williams

Based in part on an “experimental libretto ” for a multimedia operatic project that never came to fruition, Dawn Lundy Martin’ s Good Stock Strange Blood explores the conundrum of heritage and choice, what we might summarize as the age-old problem of determinism vis-à-vis the freedom of the will. In this book the drag effect of “history ”—a dystopian resignation to determinism—on Martin’ s ﬁerce utopian drive implies less a tug of war than gothic haunting, the residue of personal and collective trauma. That Black female writers as various as M. NourbeSe Philip, Toni Morrison, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Gayl Jones, Helen Oyeyemi, and Yvonne Vera have also examined the everyday causes and effects of racist violence and patriarchal abuse does not mean Martin’ s writings are to be lightly taken or summarily dismissed. As the emergence of Black Lives Matter and #MeToo attests, Good Stock Strange Blood is old news that remains all too new.

As in her previous collections of poetry, Martin returns to scenes of trauma, to the legacies bequeathed by blood (e.g., light skin and nappy hair moralized as good and bad, respectively) and what we might simply call the “world, ” ﬁgured here as boxes within boxes (“When you leave the com- / pound, you discover a larger / compound. You’ re traveling in / the wrong direction”). Since enjambment traditionally functions as both a mode of inertia and mutability—the pleasures of narrative reduced to a simple dialectic of familiarity and change—Martin invokes lyric parataxis and prosaic musicality to, respectively, countermand and reinforce vehicles of transformation. And as the book’ s title implies, transformation is just a few cells (and, in writing, a few letters) away from transmogriﬁcation. The book is thus organized according to time-lapse techniques rather than narrative epiphanies. For example, the last section, optimistically named “Operatic, the Book Escapes the Book,” is cut, as if unadulterated hope was too lethal a drug, by the ambivalent last line of the book: “Tightrope from which we emerge.” Here, as a few pages before, ﬂights of fancy (“To mutate is to live”) take off from the decks of civilization (“Call it a shoe worn over whole magics”), serve as “Counterband” (the name of another section) to the “com- / pound ” box labeled Afro-pessimism. On the one hand, Good Stock Strange Blood posits “black” against “they,” acknowledging the obstinate objectiﬁcation of the African Diaspora by colonizing subjects (Black and white). On the other hand, inasmuch as “black” is just another “com- / pound,” an enforced with-ness (i.e., “we”), Martin detaches her narrator from a composite “black”—as well as from a reductive “female”—in order to defer, indeﬁnitely, the dovetailing of culture and biology at the nexus of race and sex. Against this historical positivism, Martin invokes negation: “I am not a boy in anyone’ s body. / / I am not a black in a black body.” Had it not been commodiﬁed as the go-to badge of a proud ambivalence, queerness might be a word for what Martin is attempting here. Still, as a placeholder for “what can be accessed only because it cannot be reached,” queerness may have to do.

But “to be” queer and to queer something is, in both cases, to give in to the inﬁnitive. For Martin, being, the inﬁnitive par excellence insofar as it appears as history, must be reﬁgured, transformed into that which ﬂirts with monstrosity (another name for the divine). Thus, the opening metaphor of the book as a “house” with a “foyer” (here, the Prologue) immediately gives way to the book as “a long, thin, wavy tendril” attached to “a small spot at the top of [the narrator’ s] head.” However, the Prologue, cast as an interview, appears inadequate as it is followed by a second “prologue,” or the second part of a divided Prologue: a set of poems titled “To Shed the Traces of Catastrophe…?” Here, “we,” a more capacious term than, if all too presumptuous as, “black,” is posed against “they” in a series of lyric vectors, zigzagging between bafﬂement (“What is our name?”) and afﬁrmation (“We shut shades”) that will recall, for some readers, certain sections of Zong! or Beloved. The key ﬁgure in the opening section, however, is neither “we” nor “they” but “Mother,” an apt “origin” not only because the next section is called “The Baby Book,” but also because the mother is both a ﬁgure of reprobation (“‘blackened’ skin, / her ‘tarnished’ ‘whiteness’ ”) and object of asexual fantasy: “to be born of Sarah’ s head, through / sieve, seized wreckage.” The queering of the father ﬁgure—here, Zeus—only seems to freeze-frame disaster, for as the above inﬁnitive reminds us, the narrator can only posit a subjunctive voice in opposition to a positive history. For every dream of an “I…made of many arches and windows… / entrances to the many houses of god,” there is “each morning a ﬁreheart grief coming out of sleep.”

It would be too true and too simple to attach causality to the “father,” a word which, like the homily “beloved husband,” ﬁnally obfuscates history as the past and present site of trauma. “Father” is only one of several veils that the poem “Obituary” attempts to lift: “I love you like a saw / into barely beating / heart, my body hard / and ﬂat against the coffee table…” Excavating terror and torture from repressed memory, Martin merges this ﬁgure with, and poses it against, “my stranger,” “Some Black Unknown,” as she names one section. The stranger, like the father, may only be another ﬁgure of the past but, unlike the father, may be the possibility of a future; that “other baby book,” (section three) an alter pre-ego and subconscious “man/woman” that, for example, Martin might have become but now exists only as introjected trauma. Given the actual men that “be” in this world, this ﬁgure, one foot in the ego, one in the id, cannot be named as such, can only be hinted at as if “S/he” does (and does not) “exist,” a shadow that haunts these poems and doubles down on both collective and personal trauma. The single slash mark demarcates and yokes together not only gender pronouns but also gender and race. The “logic” of the slash implies that Martin’ s “S/he” is, here, a fucked-over Black / female / / person Janus-faced: the “wrong” and “right” directions. The double slash marks an absolute difference between female and person. The slash, single and double, is given a name, however mythic, at the opening of “Some Black Unknown”:

   Once I wrote into being an imagined ﬁgure named Perpetuus, whose
   name is Latin for “continuous, entire, universal. ” Perpetuus is necessarily
   liberated from gender and without attachment to skin or color.
      S/he is only reﬂection.

The companion and predecessor to this piece is “To be an orphan inside of ‘blackness,’” a prose poem which immediately precedes “Obituary.” A takedown of racial microaggressions across cultural and social landscapes (including the publishing and marketing sectors of the poetry business), “To be an orphan” registers Martin’ s distance from the scenes of instruction she nonetheless incessantly rehearses. No mother’ s amniotic ocean to swim back to, s/he can only contemplate the Atlantic, that absence named the Middle Passage by the descendants of those who did not ﬂy—voluntarily and not—off the decks of slaveships. And as Langston Hughes (cf. The Big Sea) discovered when he recrossed the Atlantic to go “back home,” one cannot recross this body of water without dragging along the bodies buried at sea: “Ocean ﬂoor ﬁlled with dead wings and tar. The slaves blink their slow eyes.” Still too close to be put behind us, those long-dissolved skeletons are perhaps too easily recalled as “history.” In Good Stock Strange Blood, not even the stories of ﬂying Africans can pull the book, an abscessed tooth, out of the book.

§

Clarence Major’ s ﬁrst compilation of Black colloquial expressions, published in 1970, was simply titled Dictionary of Afro-American Slang. The second, vastly expanded edition, titled Juba to Jive: The Dictionary of African American Slang and published in 1994, demoted the original title to subtitle status. Reversing alphabetical order, the second edition’ s title served as a synecdoche for the backwater blues of the African diaspora. As Ralph Ellison might have said, we go forward by going backwards. Or as Harmony Holiday would have it, relearning what we have forgotten, remembering what we have suppressed, is key to our going-forward survival, to getting through—not over—the trauma of Black life in the West. Of course, to be “Black” is to be a child of the West whether one lives in the United States, France, or Somalia, but Holiday, like Harold Cruse, deploys that trope of modernity—Negro—as often as she uses Black. As the narrator of Ellison’ s novel Invisible Man learns at great cost to his dignity, and as Holiday puts on display in Hollywood Forever, the absurdity of living while Negro/Black in the West must be taken seriously, but not too seriously. Because he was invested in the novel as a genre, and thus in the only “literary” aesthetics available to him at Tuskegee, Ellison took the plunge into “history,” defending and celebrating Euro-American culture in general. He could do so because he understood that American culture—if not American politics—was driven by African and Negro linguistic, musical, and social values and tastes that would soon multiply—or from the perspective of so-called “red-blooded” Americans—metastasize into what we so easily call multiculturalism.

Holiday’ s reaction to this history of mutual, even dialectical acculturation is, as she writes, ambivalent, not only or primarily due to her own mixed-race blood but also due to its effects on African American society at large. This ambivalence can manifest itself as humor, as dread (not fear), and even as ennui. Hollywood Forever showcases all of these reactions. As Holiday observes in her own online notes, Hollywood Foreveris a book to be read while listening to its soundtrack: a Spotify playlist Holiday named “Cantaloupe in the Club ” after witnessing a dapperly dressed brother holding a cantaloupe aloft as he moved around the dance ﬂoor of an East St. Louis nightclub. “Cantaloupe in the Club ” is, as I read it, another subsidiary of Holiday’ s ongoing mixtape project Mythscience, which primarily features snippets of speeches, interviews, and dialogue from major, minor, and anonymous players in the Black Power and Black Arts Movements. The textual version of Mythscience in this book is titled “The Afterlife and the Black Didactic: Seven Modes for Hood Science,” and includes meditations on, among other things, the social meanings of the music of Charles Mingus and Sun Ra. Holiday’ s insistence on the relevance and popularity of “jazz” is meant to bracket changes in what constitutes “popular music” even as the motif of “running” as change (of sets, of costumes, etc., the basic shtick of a one-woman show) afﬁrms the inescapability of temporality. In brief, the total voice of Black cultural expression is, and the present tense of the inﬁnitive “to be” (which also points forward) encapsulates what Amiri Baraka, writing about the totality of Black music, once named “the changing same.”

Like Holiday’ s earlier book Negro League Baseball (2011), Hollywood Forever explores the Black public sphere as didactic uplift anchored by a stoic undercommons. The book begins decades after commodiﬁed Black musical expression had entered the general public sphere. Holiday reminds us that the domineering appeal of Black music’ s porous and promiscuous genres (e.g., the blues reconﬁgured as a subset of R&Band country and western) leads to exoticism and backlash: negrophilia and negrophobia as two sides of the same coin. Thus, one of the book’ s motifs is the billboard-cum-ﬂyer scare tactic ubiquitous throughout the pre- and, yes, post-rock ’n’ roll era: “Help Save The Youth of America / DON’ T BUY NEGRO RECORDS.” This once-popular circular is merely the ﬂip side of that other mode of white anxiety regarding the visibility of Black bodies in public forums. The subtitle of Holiday’ s book, taken from a magazine headline, is “Will Hollywood Let Negroes Make Love?” Jesse Owens and Jackie Robinson aside, the fear that Blacks might be nothing more or less than human still hangs over public discourse today (e.g., the analog and digital rhetoric about the bodies of Michael Brown and Michelle Obama). Few will recall—but Holiday is, if nothing else, a committed archivist—that even as late as 1977 the question of Black-Black sexuality being expressed in popular ﬁlm and on television was grist for the mill, never mind Black-white sexuality (e.g., the controversy surrounding the love scenes between O. J. Simpson and Elizabeth Montgomery in the pre-Lifetime but all-too-Lifetime, made-for-television movie A Killing Affair).

So, from the minstrelsy of Blind Tom to the niggerdom of Kanye West, here we are, in the age of hip-hop ubiquity. Today freedom of expression means the right of Black and white men and women to mock rap music in speech idioms borrowed from hip-hop culture. And as always, a Black body in public remains, if not an exotic nexus of wonder and fear, a curio on display, splayed out on magazine covers, splayed out in the streets, on social media, and so forth. There is nothing new under “the sun [that] kills questions.” And yet the new mythology demands a response, a risk, and so Hollywood Forever tries to outrun the cameras and screenshots by repurposing them. Integrity is, here, the totality of actual history: Martin Luther King Jr.’ s adultery, for example, must be sutured to his assassination, not in causal but human, all too human, terms: “He stepped out onto the balcony for a private cigarette after sex with a woman who wasn’ t his wife (so what) (does that make him) when they shot him.” Ditto for Holiday’ s insistence on remembering that Miles Davis was both pimp and pioneering artist, wifebeater and victim of police brutality (“He’ s gonna fuck his wife tonight when they get home / tender then harder he’ s gonna fuck her up… ”), that Bill Cosby is both a serial rapist and pathbreaking comedian and actor (Holiday reproduces the iconic photograph of Davis and Cosby having a chat at a party). Her kamikaze sorties (because she too is acquainted with ambivalence) are no more attacks on “all” Black men than the recent #MeToo solidaritycirculating on social media reads as misanthropy (despite the predictable blowback of All Assaults Matter).

More broadly than she did in Negro League Baseball, Holiday attempts to jump-start the dreams of cultural generalists such as Baraka and Lorenzo Thomas to recapture African American culture as one sector of a totalizing voice that will never complete itself insofar as it remains open to a future over which it has no control. Holiday envisions this total voice as already always a timeless continuum embodied in prophets like Sun Ra and Alice Coltrane, and the new/old things of Kendrick Lamar. This total voice, which might be called Afrocentric feminism, also embraces non-Western cultural practices and values (e.g., a Honduran doctor who claimed to have cured AIDSthrough allopathic medicinal remedies and culturally based polygamy as a prophylactic against pedophilia and adultery). Writing and dancing are Holiday’ s individual embodiment of this diffuse totality, methods that might serve to access a “hidden language” articulated in movement per se (her Vimeo production in which she reads a selection from the book over collages from Black ﬁlms and videos is titled “To be running and not in fear”), in the representation of movement via ads, photographs, and movie stills.

How to “show” writing as dancing, dancing as writing? Holiday uses unconventional spacing—sometimes phrases, sometimes words, and even letters—to depict the rhythms of self-interpreting dance, the dance of a jazz-inﬂected intellect. The stuttering rhythms also manifest themselves in the larger formal patterns—repetition of certain pages and phrases (“Do Not Buy Negro Records”) and sentences that show up several times in different fonts, colors, and cultural contexts. However, the most arresting facet of Hollywood Forever is Holiday’ s deployment of montage and palimpsests. She embraces spectacle as the inevitable consequence of the African Diaspora even as she critically engages the salacious spectacle of Black people in the public eye. For example, in siding with Black women who suffer physical and emotional abuse from Black men, Holiday nonetheless admits that she is “tired of the resin in every great preacher’ s voice, the / perfect sanctimony of manhood is better pimps are better than holy men… . ” Inasmuch as Holiday links the sartorial splendor of both preachers and pimps with the bling of Black entertainers in general, she interprets spectacle as style, as élan, ﬂair, and above all, as the afﬁrmation of dignity and pride long displayed in popular Black magazine titles (Ebony, Jet, Tan, etc.). Fashion and style are also modes of (out)running without fear.

Nonetheless, as Ellison knew, and as Holiday repeats here, Black survival in the West has always depended on accepting ambivalence as a stance, however wobbly, however buffeted about by the clarion calls of certainty (hence her hostility to religion). Holiday’ s ambivalence is mounted in the frame constituted by the opening (“I want a land where the sun kills questions”) and the penultimate sections (“But then where do we bury the questions killed by our benevolent sun”) of the book. This motif might be understood as the recourse to Afrocentric resources hidden behind or as one plane (one page) of the palimpsest that is Black history. And as Negro League Baseball made clear, the American myths we forge from African and European myths already have a long tradition, however buried under the sediment of history. In that sense, Holiday’ s multiple projects are scholarly: historical recovery as essential to our knowledge about the past and, consequently, to our orientation toward the future. Hollywood Forever is a contribution to this science of myth, an untimely reminder of our humanhood.

§

Despite two previous very good books of poetry, Drag (2003) and Amnesiac (2010), Duriel E. Harris is probably best known for her one-woman performanceproject Thingiﬁcation. A theatrical sojourn from the present to the past (and back again), Thingiﬁcation deploys call-and-response tropes to deconstruct congealed concepts of race, gender, and sexual orientation, positing in their place a spectrum of intersexual and intertextual positions. Harris demonstrates these possibilities in her chameleon-like transformations into, and through, a historical network of eight characters. In No Dictionary of a Living Tongue Harris revisits some of the themes of her previous books: the intersections and divergences of racial and sexual identity, the self and the body, and the relationship between remembering and forgetting. No doubt part of Harris’ s relative “invisibility” is that her poetics and motifs are quite similar to that of her Black Took Collective compatriot Dawn Lundy Martin, and indeed parts of No Dictionary of a Living Tongue may remind readers of Martin’ s 2015 book, Life in a Box Is a Pretty Life. Both Harris and Martin use inscribed boxes to showcase the relationship between history, the written par excellence, and the enclosed body of a person, of experiences, etc. However, as Thingiﬁcation suggests, Harris wears her multiple selves on her sleeves, and unlike Martin’ s more insistent sense of self, Harris seems more ambivalent about the possibility of a self even as she insists in the title section of the book that despite “…The thing we are / cut off / /…speech inhabits a body / making and hearing sound / its deciding witness: / skin, a throat unwound.” Of course, if the skin, an external organ, is “a throat unwound,” inner and outer are indissociably linked. Yet, the possibility of an unalienated integration of the body as a coherent self is counterpoised by the very structure of the book and the way that Harris deploys the preposition “from.”

Despite the apparent discontinuity from poem to poem, a structural pattern can be detected in this collection. We begin with childhood trauma (“A child’ s face swollen from abscess shining like a good beat down”) and end with adult hope (“I want to escape you who I may have once been”). And I’ ve already noted that the two sections of inscribed boxes frame the book, though the ﬁrst section is called “Decorus” while the second is called “self portrait with black box and open architecture.” In “Decorus” we are still adrift in early trauma, but by the time we get to “self portrait” the narrator has internalized the violence of youth and now “awaken[s] into memory chased with whiskey and wine.” What stuns the narrator later is that even as an adult the mere presence of soldiers and guards casts her back into the past. Thus “from ‘History’ ” begins:

More tunnel than room, in her childhood mind the cellar was a giant snake, a long black constrictor prone to swallowing and squeezing unruly children to stillness… . She didn’ t know what about the guide had reminded her of the cellar. It was something about the way he stood behind them at every destination, his massive frame: square, dark, and heavy like a fortress door.

As a synecdoche of the inscribed boxes, themselves tattooed skin or skin unwound to expose the throat, guards, policemen, and soldiers remind the narrator that the patriarch is ever present, and it goes without saying that his manifestations can be either male or female, can be both a man killing his wife in front of their son (“A man jawed tightly in owning”) and a policewoman who locks herself in a bathroom, fearful for her life after her ex takes her gun. And this goes for the narrator herself, acknowledging the sadism at the edge—or perhaps at the center—of her relationship with her lover (“Blood Fetish”).

So all of this is well-documented “history,” but why, we might ask, “from ‘History’”? At about forty pages, this is the longest section in the book; “from Simulacra” comes in at about thirty pages. In the most literal sense, the preposition merely indicates that the poems included here do not comprise the entirety of either “History” or “Simulacra” (the same caveat applies to the nine pages “from No Dictionary of a Living Tongue”). This is the standard procedure for selected collections of poems. However, typically the “from” refers to material culled from other books. Here, they presumably refer to folios, chapbooks, and programs for Harris’ s other artistic, musical and theatrical interests. Most signiﬁcantly, the preposition here has the same effect as an ellipsis; it points to an absence, primarily of other poems or writings, as well as the events that can only be inscribed or represented by the “throat unwound.” Not only is our traumatized narrator able to recall only certain events from both her childhood and adult life but also history itself; we ourselves are composites of presences and absences, selves we display and selves inaccessible or suppressed. Harris’s encyclopedic interests and references—philosophical, theological, musical, theatrical, etc.—certainly reﬂect her many selves, but she is under no delusion that they in toto comprise “herself.”

Loss and absence, then, are not aberrations; they deﬁne what it means to be human. To be human is to be blessed and cursed with incomplete memory. We are always haunted by the ghosts of selves, repressed or “present.” Of course, accustomed as we are to this thematic in both our arts and the lives we live, the unanswerable question still haunts: is this dispersal of selfhood “natural,” a function of the irreconcilable drives and fears as psychoanalysis would have it, or is this “historical,” as T. S. Eliot, quoted in the last section of her book, would have it, a function of social, cultural and economic changes—loosely called modernity—that have led to dissociative human beings? And if both, the old chicken-and-egg problem, is our desire for a coherent self merely a fool’ s errand otherwise known as the history of the world?

This review is in Chicago Review 62:4/63:1/2.

A Surprised Queenhood in the New Black Sun: The Life and Legacy of Gwendolyn Brooks

Reviewed by Harris Feinsod

A few days after the 2017 presidential inauguration, hundreds of defeated Chicagoans packed into an Art Institute auditorium. There, each of the five African American poets who have won a Pulitzer Prize since 1950—the year in which Gwendolyn Brooks shattered that ceiling—gathered for the first of many centenaries honoring Brooks’s birth. The readings moved the crowd, but the setting felt slightly off, in that Brooks did not locate the Art Institute at the center of Chicago’s cultural life. Her poem “The Lovers of the Poor” chides “The Ladies from the Ladies’ Betterment League” who took interest after she won the Pulitzer. They “attend, / When suitable, the nice Art Institute,” but never truly widen their sphere of obligations. When Gregory Pardlo recited these well-chosen lines, I thought I detected seat-squirming and jaunty laughter in equal measure.

Perhaps that double reaction was a fitting tribute to “Miss Brooks.” In 1967, observing the unveiling of Daley Center Plaza’s “Chicago Picasso,” she wrote: “Does man love art? Man visits Art, but squirms. / Art hurts.” In more than thirty books between 1945 and 2000, Brooks wove together high praise for Chicago’s Black cultural life and searing observations about the city’s logics of exclusion. By the 1960s, her lyric virtuosity, her skill at dignifying what Richard Wright called “the pathos of petty destinies,” and her embrace of the “new black consciousness” had earned her an inarguable reputation as the greatest poet of Chicago, a reputation confirmed by her lifetime appointment as Illinois Poet Laureate from 1968–2000 and as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1985.

Keen to serve as a literary citizen, Brooks shared these ever-larger platforms with the young poets she shepherded through workshops. Southsider Angela Jackson first attended Brooks’s 1967 writing workshop through the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC), at a moment when Brooks assumed a matriarchal role in the Chicago wing of the Black Arts Movement (BAM). Gladly, we now have Jackson’s slender biography of her friend and mentor: A Surprised Queenhood in the New Black Sun: The Life and Legacy of Gwendolyn Brooks. A broad-mindedly appealing and well-researched account, it interprets the achievements of Brooks’s poetry for new readers, and contextualizes them in the city’s history. Though some episodes hew closely to George E. Kent’s 1990 biography, it is among the strongest reassertions, since Brooks’s 2000 death, of her importance to civic life, cultural politics, and literary expression in the city she called her “headquarters” and in the lines that she traced beyond it.

Brooks was born in July 1917, two months after the US entered World War I and two years before the Red Summer of 1919. Her family supported her literary talents—her mother Keziah dubbed her “the lady Paul Laurence Dunbar”—even when they became Depression-era “bean eaters” or when Brooks came to know both racism and “the sting of colorism” at school and work. In the 1930s, the Black-owned newspaper the Chicago Defender published seventy-five poems from her juvenilia, but in 1937, publisher Robert Abbott rejected her application as a journalist, showing a bias against dark-skinned “Negroes.” Resiliently, the young Brooks briefly published her own mimeograph newspaper and years later invented a new genre of “verse journalism.”

Despite such sources of alienation, Jackson argues that Brooks’s writing emerged from a progressive matrix of Chicago community activism and African American institution building. She joined the liberal NAACP Youth Council in 1937, serving as its publicist, and the Marxists in the South Side Writers’ Group influenced her as well. In the 1940s, librarian Vivian Harsh’s reading forum amplified her voice, and the “Visionaries” writing workshop, led by rebellious Gold Coast socialite Inez Stark, nourished her talents. In Stark’s circle, Brooks explored modernist techniques, an education that sharpened the elbows of the poems in her first book.

The ballads, obituaries, persona poems, and sonnets of A Street in Bronzeville (1945) paid humane attentions to the plaints and petitions of lives in Black Belt Chicago. These taut and tonally diverse poems record the wartime heroism of Negro conscripts, Bronzeville nightlife and the pretensions of its zoot suiters, and romantic love as a seed of experience. They honor the social experiences of those cramped into the kitchenette apartment buildings caused by urban housing shortages and segregation, those who dream “through onion fumes” and “think of lukewarm water, hope to get in it.” Others represented the kitchenettes (one thinks of Charles White’s stunning WPA-era paintings), but Jackson emphasizes Brooks’s talent for expressing “drylongso,” a hard-bitten idiom of African American ordinariness.

Acclaim for A Street in Bronzeville came with some demurrals. Richard Wright wrote a glowing endorsement for their shared publisher, but he felt that Brooks should not publish “The Mother,” a complex portrait of a woman who has aborted a child. Langston Hughes insinuated that the impressive debut was undercut by the resentment expressed in “The Ballad of Pearl May Lee,” in which a Black woman recounts her colored lover’s death after his affair with a white woman goes bad. Disagreeing with Wright and Hughes, Jackson regards Brooks as the “revolutionary black feminist” of her time for addressing these themes.

If A Street in Bronzeville married technical skill to social commitment, Annie Allen (1949) intensified Brooks’s concern with technique. The central poem, a mock epic entitled “The Anniad” (after Virgil’s Aeneid), links the volume to that anxious midcentury corridor when many American poets wrote modernist statement poems valuing their own difficulty. High seriousness partly earned Brooks her Pulitzer. As the poet Vievee Francis has recently remarked, the white judges seemed relieved to praise her technical dexterity above her concern for Black life. Jackson points out that Iowa poet Paul Engle offered backhanded praise of A Street in Bronzeville for transcending the racial specificity of African American poetry, and that he may have first established this too-frequent pattern of response to Brooks.

Despite her newfound stature, Brooks struggled through the early 1950s. Married to Henry Blakely Sr. since 1939, in 1951 she gave birth to her second child, Nora, and the family sought to advance out of their kitchenette. Balancing the twin labors of motherhood and literature, Brooks churned out reviews, the experimental novel Maud Martha (1953), and searching essays explaining racism to her children. Finally, she and Henry put together the down payment on a house. Some of Brooks’s great poems belong to the subsequent decade of civil rights organizing, when she held an integrationist outlook even while protest reigned in her striking poem for Emmett Till or in the anticipatory elegy for the seven anonymous billiard boys in her signature poem “We Real Cool.”

Jackson’s biography comes alive after the key year of 1967, when Brooks discovered her “surprised queenhood in the new black sun,” as she put it in her 1972 autobiography. Jackson, like many before her, describes Brooks’s attendance at the 1967 Fisk Writers’ Conference as an “epiphany.” Confronted by a fearless generation of young Black artists such as Amiri Baraka, who favored Black unity over the politics of respectability, the fifty-year-old Brooks devoted herself afresh to “Black Familyhood, Black Community, and Black World.” The same month that Brooks satirized the Chicago Picasso, her poem “The Wall” instead held aloft OBAC and Jeff Donaldson’s Wall of Respect, a public mural painted on an exterior at 43rd St. and Langley. Simultaneously, Brooks began to withdraw from her longtime New York publisher Harper in order to embrace the BAM’s radical Midwest publishing ecology, especially Dudley Randall’s Broadside Press in Detroit, and later Haki R. Madhubuti’s Third World Press in Chicago.

Madhubuti, known in the 1960s as Don L. Lee, was another young writer who joined Brooks in the OBAC workshop. There, Brooks encouraged writing from even the young men of the Blackstone Rangers gang in Woodlawn. Later, she complexly regarded the Rangers as “Sores in the city / that do not want to heal” but also as “a monstrous pearl or grace.” Over the next decades, Brooks’s literary reputation often seemed susceptible to high cultural pluralism, but Jackson shows how she remained focused on promoting creative expression in public primary schools, community arts organizations, prisons, and working-class public universities. She later taught alongside Madhubuti at schools hardest hit by recent austerity, such as Chicago State University.

Her greatest literary achievement from the “surprised queenhood” era is In the Mecca (1968), her last book with Harper. The youthful Brooks had worked in 1934 as the assistant to E. N. French, a predatory “spiritual adviser” at the Mecca Flats Building. A grand hotel built for the 1893 Columbian Exhibition, the Mecca had subsequently depreciated as a Black tenement. As George Kent once noted, she felt complicit as she delivered the minister’s “Holy Thunderbolts” of spiritual fakery to the residents. After she quit, it took her decades to organize these reflections into poetry. Jackson is uncharacteristically spotty on this important detail, but by then the Mecca had long been demolished, making way for Mies van der Rohe’s Illinois Institute of Technology campus. Brooks opens In the Mecca by inviting readers to “Sit where the light corrupts your face, / Mies van der Rohe retires from grace. / And the fair fables fall.” As in her “Two Dedications” to the Chicago Picasso and the Wall of Respect, Brooks sought a vision that refused to dichotomize the “fair fables” of ordinary African American life from Chicago’s clean slates of modern architectural and artistic experiment.

I wrote above that Brooks traced lines beyond Chicago. These included the Great Migration’s complex lines back to the South, and lines of white flight to the suburbs. As early as 1949, “Beverly Hills, Chicago” mused on a wealthy neighborhood as viewed by Black passersby: “We do not want them to have less. / But it is only natural that we should think we have not enough.” Lines of international solidarity also forged Brooks’s community vision. Jackson recounts Brooks’s travels to Kenya and Tanzania in the Pan-African mood of the 1970s, her strong support of South African poets such as Keorapetse “Willie” Kgositsile, and her poetic contributions to the anti-Apartheid movement. Jackson further details a Cold War cultural diplomacy mission to Kiev and Moscow in 1982, in the odd company of Studs Terkel, Erica Jong, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and Susan Sontag. Brooks fearlessly advocated for worldwide Blackness, and amusingly got the better of a sanctimonious Sontag when Sontag interrupted her to answer a journalist’s question about the meaning of being Black.

A stray line from Annie Allen reads: “How pinchy is my room! how can I breathe!” For Jackson, “eerily, these words call to mind the ‘I can’t breathe!’ cry of Eric Garner,” and she frequently suggests that Brooks is a “foremother” of the contemporary movement for Black Lives. Jackson also hears these politics whisper in the softly-pronounced we of “We Real Cool”; she hears them weep in “The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till”; and she hears them roar by 1969, when Brooks published “Riot,” a poem imagining the Black anger following the Martin Luther King Jr. assassination as it destroys a wealthy North Shore white man:

Because the Poor were sweaty and unpretty
(not like Two Dainty Negroes in Winnetka)
and they were coming toward him in rough ranks.
In seas. In windsweep. They were black and loud.
And not detainable. And not discreet.

Extraordinary lines like these rang out for many during the Ferguson and Baltimore uprisings of recent years. But the strength of Jackson’s biography, in reclaiming Brooks as a literary-political “foremother,” is to attune us to the whispering, weeping, and breathing in every Brooks poem. For Brooks, the cultural center of Chicago was forever in the ordinary insistences of Black lives.

This review is in Chicago Review 62.4/63.1/2.

By Law In Sound: J. H. Prynne’s Recent Poetry

Reviewed by Luke Roberts

Since the appearance of the startling Kazoo Dreamboats in 2011, J. H. Prynne has published a further five volumes: Al-Dente (2014); Each to Each (2017); Of the Abyss (2017); Or Scissel (2018); and Of Better Scrap (2019).[1] None of these books have received particularly sustained critical attention, though each has been met with enthusiasm from the cognoscenti. It’s hard to judge the quality of this enthusiasm, but it seems to rest on: a) the sheer existence of such late-late work, which manifests in a kind of wide-eyed appreciation for Prynne’s poetic stamina; and b) the fact that the fluctuating lyricism of these poems and sequences appears to be less claustrophobic than the punishing phase of writing between Unanswering Rational Shore (2001) and To Pollen (2006). Added to these have been the useful reissues of the 1969 volume The White Stones, an annotated edition of the 1983 work The Oval Window, plus a long interview with the poet by Jeff Dolven and Joshua Kotin, published in The Paris Review.[2] I don’t exempt myself from this enthusiasm. To quote an early line, the night is young / and limitless our greed—to which we might add, these things take time to digest.[3] And yet it seems to me that the critical reception of Prynne’s poetry has stalled. How should we account for this?

The disturbance that Kazoo Dreamboats presents to the schedule of Prynne’s writing can’t be underestimated. If The White Stones and The Oval Window have been tacitly positioned as boundary-markers in the development of his style and method, Kazoo Dreamboats must surely also be nominated as a crucial twist-point in his work of the last two decades. Written during a period of political revolt—the student movement and London riots in the UK, the Occupy movement in the United States, and the Arab Spring—the poem is a visionary work of passion and fervor. For close to thirty pages of long-lined verse, edging towards prose, Prynne details a kind of ecstatic righteousness. Here is a sample from the first page:

Always desired by zero option
wide-eyed node employ cloud droplets en masse phantasmal, near in
to scar friable distinct cash-back nexus, on the plate. What’s to
be got contagious dendrite hit conductance ran fast even flash-like,
punished in stupid glory by ever the same to say.[4]

One common critical approach to Prynne’s work, established in the 1990s, has been to identify the various discourses and registers that the language either draws on or refers us to. So in this passage we have the realm of human agency (desire); the structure of power, both juridical and moral (punishment); the ever-present cash-nexus; the human body and cellular biology (the scar and the dendrite); topped off with a détournement of Lenin (“what’s to / be got”). There’s also nature (“cloud droplets”), the economy and game theory (“employ” and “zero option”), and there’s a kind of energetic sweep tying it all together: the contagion, the fast running, and again the threat of punishment. This entanglement is also musical: “desired” leads to “friable” leads to “dendrite,” “cash” glances on “flash,” and the passage is bookended by the rhyming of “Always” with “same to say.” The vowels keep the pulse going in prophetic urgency, the consonants like so much grit in the teeth.

But what was most surprising about Kazoo Dreamboats when it first appeared was its reliance on the formula “I saw,” and the inclusion of what seems to be the direct recall of autobiographical material. These were aspects of composition that Prynne had jettisoned long ago, and have yet to fully surface again. The alibi for the return of this personal pronoun was the poem’s thematic and textual conversation with Piers Plowman—the great Middle English poem of the Peasant’s Revolt—and a genealogy that would also include Milton and Blake. There were other surprises. I remember the night he read from it in an occupied lecture hall in Cambridge during the widespread student protests again tuition fees in 2010-11. The whole thing was amazingly weird, an audience equally puzzled and rapt, the atmosphere crackling with energy. Prynne was an enthusiastic supporter of the student occupiers, going out to fetch ice cream and snacks, writing letters against both the university bureaucracy and the government spokespersons for the free market in higher education. The context for the reading was appropriate. And I remember reading the poem avidly during that period and feeling—a feeling I think I shared with others—that I understood it completely. There was no need to itemise the discourses or to look anything up in the dictionary. The poem felt generous, optimistic, and open.

Readers of Prynne, both casual and dedicated, will appreciate how strange my claim to complete understanding might sound. Part of the prestige of Prynne’s poetry is its much-vaunted (and perhaps equally derided) difficulty, and the usual claim about reading Prynne’s work involves the experience of bafflement, frustration, doubt, and dead-ends, all exhilarating in their own way. But Kazoo Dreamboats, at that time, was different. At the risk of overreaching: in the context of high social disturbance on a local, national, and international scale, the poem skipped right over the problem of comprehension and explication: it just made sense. And the sense it made was reliant, absolutely, on what gets called in critical shorthand the social and historical context. The poem was equal to the turbulence of the time, participating joyfully in the rupture of normal life.

But after ten years of stagnation, the violent absurdity of our present political crisis, the social catastrophe provoked by austerity, and the ever-growing presence of fascism across the globe, it’s hard to recover the turbulent clarity of the poem’s early reception. The central argument of Kazoo Dreamboats is focused on a specific and controversial element of the Marxist tradition: the presence of the dialectic in nature, following Engels, and the inherence of contradiction in all things, following Mao. But that makes it sound too stern and admonitory and solemn. Really it’s a wild work, which goes in excess of any one theme or method. But nevertheless. Western Marxism has tended to follow the example of Georg Lukács, who, writing in a footnote in 1919, dismissed the idea that dialectics could exist or inhere in nature or in things.[5] For Lukács, dialectics are a historically contingent operation of thought, and have little to nothing to do with ontology. The ideas that Prynne explores in Kazoo Dreamboats are about being and non-being, the circulation of forces in subatomic particles, forays into force field physics. Prynne’s adherence to the Engels/Mao branch of the Marxist philosophical tradition is at this point more or less heretical. But perhaps Prynne isn’t a Western Marxist at all. Prynne’s interest in Maoism and in China dates at least to the early 1960s and his friendship with the Cambridge Sinologist and polymath Joseph Needham. But it also emerges from the era of the Vietnam War and liberation struggles across the Global South, to say nothing of the Black Panthers or the prevalence of Maoism in France post-1968. It’s not all that heretical, anachronistic, or unlikely.

I want to set aside the dialectics of nature for the moment. Several essays now exist that dissect that aspect of the poem, and it’s my hope that recent ecocritical approaches to Prynne might take this in new and unexpected ways.[6] In his introduction to the reissue of The Oval Window, Richard Kerridge provides a wonderfully clear account of the dialectics of reading, or at least of reading Prynne, making specific reference to the use of specialized language and unmarked quotations from numerous sources:

These lines, passages, and fragments are mixed together so that their relations are dialectical. That is to say, their poetic effect consists of the interaction of contrasting and opposing elements that continue to challenge and transform each other. The term ‘dialectical’ here should not suggest a progression from the encounter with two opposing elements to a single powerful synthesis that resolves the opposition.… What sort of synthesis could resolve this opposition? All that is available in the present circumstances is synthesis—and song—of the most provisional kind, emerging tentatively and warily in the gaps between thesis and anti-thesis, and always subject to imminent dissolution.[7]

This is, I think, a useful starting point. But the object of Kerridge’s further enquiry is how data retrieval through Google can illuminate the argumentative matrix of the text.[8] By identifying the collaged substrate of the poem and chasing up the manifold allusions and quotations, we enter into a process that proliferates the textual material under discussion. Google sends us to the newspaper, which we bring back to the poem, a little like a well-trained dog. This procedure of reading is undeniably called for in many of Prynne’s poems: the annotations to The Oval Window are evidence enough. But in Kazoo Dreamboats, Prynne seems to anticipate this method: the major quotations from other sources appear as inset blocks of text, and he provides a set of “reference cues” at the conclusion. These might work as prompts, sending us off, for example, in search of the piano music of Christian Wolff. But there’s an uncanny sense, too, that this set of references actually works to stress the finished integrity of the textual object. There’s no need, just yet, to race off in search of who said what. It’s all there.

The books that follow on from Kazoo Dreamboats each seem more resistant to, or less interested in, this type of reading, and I think call for a slightly different conceptual approach. Take this stanza from “Morning” in Al-Dente:

To the or so then for all for on, both for
these an or then, down as before in fond and
too sound by, this. Then from ever bring
along but far but, to under the this better
then to be along, few for some, not of or
at first so. Let by so ever go to, bind with
this the, these given same for him, off far.[9]

What are we supposed to do with this hesitant and mysterious concatenation of articles and prepositions? At a surface level, the closest analogue I can think of is some of the work of the American poet Clark Coolidge, whose The Crystal Text (1986) Prynne has long held in high regard. Perhaps the common progenitor is Beckett. Here there are no “reference cues” and the poem seems almost comically resistant to Google: you are on your own and with the language. If this is song, however provisional, what relation does it have to sound? Do we read it inwardly to ourselves or try it outwardly to the world? Are these divisions so secure? Is it too sound meaning too complete, too whole? All these little word-particles clatter against each other, making the work of representation radically uncertain. With no immediate referent to the world of high finance, of biology, or journalism, the eager scholar is left with little to do but a little head-scratching. Is it too sound because too much sound and not enough sense? What about the strong current of feeling and emotion provoked by the fondness, and the “let by go so ever go to,” the “off far”? Next to the tempests of Kazoo Dreamboats, held together through bravura travesty and aggressive scepticism, what shines through here is sentiment. I can tell you I find the poem moving, but I can’t tell you why this is so. I can’t annotate or seek referent for the delicate catches that happen in the ear or mouth, or how I feel the commas.

After the death of R. F. Langley, Prynne once talked to me about the presence of song within the course of a life. He asked a surprising question: Where do all the songs a person knows and carries go when that person dies? The answer might come readily to the materialist. But since those songs and tunes never wholly belong to the human organism, it’s worth considering that they are released back into the still vibrating world, transformed into some other substance. The books since Kazoo Dreamboats play themes on known tunes, half-rhymes from the history of poetry from Wyatt onwards. Some of these (“Dear heart how like you this?) will be picked up by the antennae of the reader more or less swiftly, with others—say, shreds of Elizabethan lyrics—waiting to be found. This has long been a feature of Prynne’s work, but quotations and allusions used to be brandished with an imperative, or scattered like traps. The quality from Al-Dente onwards is different. A poem like the one quoted above seems to intervene in the region of immateriality—memory and everything lost on the air—and so in the act of writing rematerializes sound, or emphasizes that sound is material.

In the book Apophthegms (2017)—Prynne’s compendium of useful quotations, another addition to the post-Kazoo corpus—he cites the Ninth Bridgewater Treatise of Charles Babbage:

The air itself is one vast library, on whose pages are for ever written all that man has ever said or even whispered…. No motion impressed by natural causes, or by human agency, is ever obliterated.[10]

Something like this idea forms, I want to suggest, the counterpart to the dialectic in nature for Prynne’s recent work. Here human agency, the history of which is recorded in the language, joins in with the motion of the natural world, right down to the level of the particle. If contradiction does inhere in things, language inheres in things, too, registered as the motion of sound. One way of thinking about Prynne’s recent work is to say it tries to tune into all of this, making song from the scraps he picks up. But maybe that would look more like the NSA than any profound confirmation of the dialectic as worldview. In fact, Prynne has already complicated this whole line of inquiry. His 2010 essay “Mental Ears and Poetic Work” stressed that the poet works with “mental ears” to create a textual intermediary between the sound of actual and potential performances of speech alongside the sounds of “real work in the material world” and also “bird-song, weather sounds, and the cognates,” and “raw phonetic data.” But crucially, Prynne argues that the sounds poems make are not acoustic events, rather “semi-abstract representations of relations and orderings between and across sounds within a textual domain.”[11] To mistake the representation of sound for sound itself is to prematurely short-circuit the tension between song and text.

But the high abstraction of Al-Dente isn’t entirely representative of the prolific work of the past five years. In Of the Abyss, Prynne is quite clearly responding to what is called, in the politesse of the news, the European migrant crisis. The ten poems in Of the Abyss train on the spectacle of the mass death of displaced refugees at the hands of Western border regimes. The first poem begins:

Lead-glance ranking, plank splintered in turn
alone to want living forward, across desert
attending traffic long possible fleet in late
averse to vessel still foremost child penchant,
many after all displayed fluke after, in the roof
cling disbar galena by instance, it must be
flood even so trimmed up as all the rest, flow
all at last better, to crown for sure, for shore
traffic now alight go in open field. [12]

Each poem of the sequence returns us to the outrage of the crowded boat on the open sea and the expanse of desert crossings: these form two poles of constricted movement that the poem variously imagines and charts. In this poem there’s no interest in airy speculation of the kind I’ve just offered above. It is, at its most simple, a poem about paying attention. It proceeds methodically and heavily, frequently landing blows at the line break. The poems run a continual risk of unearned pathos: “to want living forward” is painful compassion, held onto under duress. But Prynne knows this, taking deliberate cheap shots (“for sure, for shore”) and leaving no Western reader exempt from the scene. After 9/11 and the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, critical thinking about Prynne’s work and the work of other Marxist poets in Britain, perhaps especially Keston Sutherland and Andrea Brady, tended to focus on complicity. Complicity was the watchword: so much so that the reader might even expect in advance to have their complicity confirmed by the poem.[13] I still find myself reaching for it almost as a reflex, but Of the Abyss resists this by now too-easy payoff by stubborn compassion and patient insistence. Prynne’s internationalism—which extends well beyond European literature—might encourage us at this late stage to think of solidarity as a more useful paradigm.

The title is drawn from Jack London’s socialist masterpiece The People of the Abyss (1903), which documented the wasting of life in the East End slums at the height of the British Empire. So again, this work makes an explicit intervention into the political conjuncture, thinking through the cycle of austerity at home and poisonous racist indifference radiating out from the shorelines and islands of Europe. There is also a link back to Kazoo Dreamboats, via the earlier text’s referential schema. One of the reference cues leads to the fragment by Simonides of Ceos, the “Lament of Danaë” or “Danaë in a Box Upon the Sea” in the version sung by Ed Sanders. This is the mother’s song sung to calm the sleeping Perseus after having been cast out to sea in a wooden box. Children and childcare occur in nearly every poem. This origin-lament seems to set a kind of boundary on Prynne’s own lamentation, checked and checked again. I wonder here about my own investment in Prynne’s work when it is open to more or less direct political commentary. Am I simply hungry for consolation, however specious? If a poem is “about” a crisis that is still developing, does bracketing it off into a discrete sequence present an ethical dilemma? Or would the real moral failure be to say nothing at all?

Yet Of the Abyss, like Each to Each (also published in 2017) and Al-Dente, is not a strongly referential text in the order of Prynne’s earlier work, or at least it isn’t referential in the same way. Thinking about these poems, and thinking about how to read them, I’ve found a concept developed by the Gertrude Stein scholar Ulla E. Dydo to be helpful. Dydo writes:

With the words, there enters into her work referential detail that speaks of the world and to herself. Such detail challenges us, as does all referential matter, to read representationally. Pointing out from the composed text to the world, they become centrifugal elements. But joined as words in a text, they become centripetal, creating patterns that point inward, to the composition. Reading Stein becomes both a centripetal, compositional task and centrifugal, referential task, the two in constant, creative opposition.[14]

The dialectic Dydo identifies between centrifugal and centripetal elements comes close to my experience of reading the works at hand. This is perhaps easier to see in Stein, where the nouns are caressed and obsessed by the pull of syntax: but a similar operation is, I think, identifiable in Prynne’s late work. In the passage from “Morning” quoted above, I gravitate to the words I can make reference-meaning with, however few: fond, sound, better, given. They have some centrifugal force. The prepositional phrases and definite articles are centripetal, drawing me back again into the composition. Throughout Of the Abyss, the language that I can make refer to the migrant crisis points me out into the world, but the non-semantic or not yet semantic elements—syntax, the sound, the patterning of vowels and consonants, the falling of stress at the line break, the way the words are joined—push back to the composition.

The idea of centripetal and centrifugal forces as a property of language holds further appeal, because Hegel writes about them at length in The Science of Logic. Marx wrote to Engels about it while sick with flu in 1865.[15] It’s both beyond the scope of this essay and beyond my philosophical competence to offer any summary of these arguments. But it’s one way of registering how the ideas explored in Kazoo Dreamboats have continued to resonate across the books that follow, though the emphasis has shifted. It also suggests a modification of the kind of referential process that Kerridge and many other critics have practiced on Prynne’s writing. That’s to say: before the process, or within the process, of the semantic dialectical argument outlined by Kerridge, there is a contradiction that registers phenomenologically, in the first order of reading. Our attention is subject to centripetal and centrifugal forces. What I’m suggesting here isn’t a call for any kind of formalism, or for the inflection of deconstruction of which Dydo makes such great use. It is perhaps simply a way of acknowledging the scope of what happens in the vivid concentration of reading these poems. The forces as outlined by Dydo work best as an analogy: but perhaps a better term would be imaginary. In a lecture written after Kazoo Dreamboats and before Al-Dente, Prynne raised the possibility that poems are not written by poets but by “a more or less distinct and separate poet-self,” which he terms the poet’s “imaginary.”[16] The corresponding force to the poet’s imaginary must surely be the reader’s imaginary: the self we become when we read, open to disturbance and possibility. When I read a poem I am not entirely myself and my thoughts are not verifiably my own.

Let me try and explain what I mean by this. Hovering near the ledge of such speculation, Prynne has recently offered a quotation from the psychoanalyst W. R. Bion, which serves as an epigraph to Each to Each, and makes an additional appearance in the Apophthegms:

All thinking and all thoughts are true when there is no thinker.

To which I nod my head and knot my brow, wondering if the joke is on me or on my imaginary. An objection might be raised to the poems here: that making qualitative judgements about them becomes close to impossible. Are the poems Prynne has published in the last five years good or bad? What makes one of these poems, considered discretely, better or worse—or more or less successful—than any of the others around it? Perhaps it’s a cop-out to say that this misses the point, being the idle work of the wrong kind of speculation. Yet one of the strange pleasures of Prynne’s writing is the experience of variable readerly incompetence. On the arrival of a new pamphlet sometimes I feel like I’ve forgotten how to read, or that I’ve forgotten what I’m supposed to do. I may reassure myself that I’m simply being encouraged toward a new or different kind of reading, or, more spitefully, I might think that Prynne has lost it, fucked the whole magnificent project up. In that case I need not be troubled. But what happens next is thought, neither mine nor Prynne’s nor strictly the property of the poem itself. What I want to say is that the poem springs into life, but also that life springs into the poem, and the implication from Bion—that untruth and falsity is the property of the thinker—becomes part of the drama. What in my thinking is true? What in my thinking is false? On what assumptions and habits does my thinking rest? And more, in what social arrangement does this truth and falsity play out? Can it be changed and how is it changing? This is not a process of question and answer, but of uncertainty, testing, humor, and lively play and tracking.

All of this is by way of saying that Of Better Scrap arrives as the luminous climax of a certain recalibration in Prynne’s writing of the past decade. These poems are like high-wire acts: the daring work of putting one surprising word after another to set the mental ears spinning. It calls to mind Lisa Jeschke’s excellent summary in her discussion of Unanswering Rational Shore:

Prynne’s late poetry is, not least, funny, because it dares to allow words and meaning to crash, continue, crash again, get up again; it is a funny response to the new media communication show spreading the simultaneously naive, cynical and brutal assumption that understanding can be improved and community achieved without any actual change in the organisation of labour and work.^[17]

Jeschke’s point here not only feels true to the slapstick delight that reading Prynne’s poems can offer; it also usefully historicizes the terrain on which search engine technology rests. Over the past decade any residual utopian vision of the internet has surely been tested out of all consideration: perhaps these even later works, through their marked ambivalence towards the knowledge-form of the search bar, present a distinct noncooperation with Silicon Valley. We turn instead to the vast library of the air. And there’s an improvisatory passion to the poems, a conviction that what comes next is part of the order, an event in space. There are forms Prynne has never used before, strings of words that have never been put together before, joyful in language performance:

Resume not set, torn and bred, addle bird on briar or meddle
limber bromide, not metal meant yet primal to uncial grid

It’s not my intention to offer proof by way of close reading. But it’s clear here that the unfamiliar word uncial is centrifugal, and the rhymes of “set,” “metal,” and “yet,” are centripetal. And one thing that I think Prynne’s poetry holds is the further possibility that these forces or positions can be reversed: what was once pointing out to the world now points us into the interior of the composition, and vice versa.

Searching for other analogies for the experience of reading Of Better Scrap, I thought of bell-ringing. Each word seems assigned a musical value that rings out and joins the word next to it and the rest of the words that follow. If this is too close to ceremony or alarm, think of a child’s toy set. But perhaps this model is too static: Prynne is wary of harmony, and the tones must change as we read the poem a second, third, or tenth time, making the tune up for ourselves. What I’m trying to articulate is this: that while the difficulty of Prynne’s poetry has long been acknowledged, we need to find a way of talking about the simplicity of the poems too, the moments of shining clarity activated in reading that are so hard to reconstruct in prose analysis. The book closes with what must be one of Prynne’s shortest poems:

Land Flown So Few

Now known nor new, one mend or mind attune
how so for more to do, where lend and saw
by law in sound, to fend or done where found,
to send in pair and bond, low or snow-bound
land flown so few, as near to (so) kind or there
and bind, appear by care in fund. Or end.

I’m reluctant to add anything to this, except that the “law in sound” flings me centrifugally not only to Charles Babbage, but to Prynne’s claim in a letter from 1968:

Rhyme is the public truth of language, sound paced out in the shared places, the echoes are no-one’s private property or achievement; thus any grace (truly achieved) of sound is political, part of the world of motion and place in which language is like weather, the air we breathe.^[18]

Prynne gave up on grace long ago, and the air we breathe grows more toxic by the day. The cover of Of Better Scrap, bright yellow, features a gigantic lightning storm. These are Prynne’s noisiest poems yet.

Notes:
[1] J. H. Prynne, Al-Dente (Cambridge: Face Press, 2014); Each to Each (Cambridge: Equipage, 2017); Of the Abyss (Cambridge: Materials, 2017); Or Scissel (Bristol: Shearsman, 2018); Of Better Scrap (Cambridge: Face Press, 2019).
[2] J. H. Prynne, The White Stones (New York: NYRB, 2016); The Oval Window, ed. N. H. Reeve and Richard Kerridge (Hexham: Bloodaxe, 2017); “The Art of Poetry No. 101: J.H. Prynne,” Paris Review, 218 (Fall 2016): 174–207. See also The Collected Letters of Charles Olson and J.H. Prynne, ed. Ryan Dobran (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2017
[3] J.H. Prynne, “Love,” Poems, 3^rd edn. (Hexham: Bloodaxe, 2015), p. 118
[4] J. H. Prynne, Kazoo Dreamboats. (Cambridge: Critical Documents, 2011), p. 5.
[5] Georg Lukács, “What is Orthodox Marxism?,” in History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Merlin, 1971), 1-26 (24, note 6). See also Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (London: NLB, 1976). For a defence of Engels see Sebastiano Timpanaro, On Materialism (London: NLB, 1970).
[6] See Gerald Bruns, “Dialectrics; or, Turmoil & Contradiction: A Reading of J. H. Prynne’s ‘“Kazoo Dreamboats,’” Chicago Review Vol. 57, No. 3/4 (2013), 57-74; Robin Purves, “For-Being: Uncertainty and Contradiction in J.H. Prynne’s Kazoo Dreamboats” in On The Late Poetry of J.H. Prynne, eds. Joe Luna and Jo Lindsay Walton (Brighton/Edibnurgh: Hix Eros, 2015); Duncan McKay, “Open & Active Uncertainty: J.H. Prynne’s Kazoo Dreamboats and the physics of an indeterminate reality,” Journal of Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 1 (2019), 59-76.
[7] Richard Kerridge, Reading The Oval Window, in J. H. Prynne, The Oval Window, ed. N. H. Reeve and Richard Kerridge (Hexham: Bloodaxe, 2017), 7-33 (10-11).
[8] Ibid., 19.
[9] J. H. Prynne, “Morning,” Al-Dente. (Cambridge: Face Press, 2014).
[10] Quoted in J. H. Prynne, Apophthegms (Cambridge: Face Press, 2017).
[11] J. H. Prynne, “Mental Ears and Poetic Work,” Chicago Review, Vol. 55, No. 1 (2010), 126-157 (129-30).
[12] J. H. Prynne, “Abyss: 1,” Of the Abyss. (Cambridge: Cambridge Materials, 2017).
[13] See for example John Wilkinson, The Lyric Touch (Cambridge: Salt, 2007), and the essays collected in Complicities: British Poetry 1945-2007, eds. Sam Ladkin and Robin Purves (Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2007).
[14] Ulla E. Dydo, Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises, 1923-1934 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern, 2003), 19.
[15] Marx to Engels, 19 August 1865, online: https://marxists.catbull.com/archive/marx/works/1865/letters/65_08_19.htm
[16] J. H. Prynne, “The Poet’s Imaginary,” Chicago Review, Vol. 58, No. 1 (2013), 89-105 (90).
[17] Lisa Jeschke, “Late Early Poetry: A Commentary on J. H. Prynne’s Unanswering Rational Shore,” in On the Late Poetry of J. H. Prynne, ed. Joe Luna, Jow Lindsay, and Keston Sutherland (Brighton: Hix Eros & Sad Press, 2014), 61-76.
[18] J. H. Prynne, “Letter, 14^th March 1968” [to Ray Crump], in Certain Prose of the English Intelligencer, ed. Neil Pattison, Reitha Pattison, and Luke Roberts (Cambridge: Mountain, 2012), 183-185 (185).

July 2019.

Uljana Wolf, Subsisters.

Translated by Sophie Seita

Belladonna*, 2017. 186pp. $18.

Reviewed by Geoffrey Wildanger

Responding in 1961 to a bookseller’s inquiry about his attitude regarding multi-lingual poetry, Paul Celan writes that while he does not believe in “bilingual” (Zweisprachigkeit) poetry, he does at least acknowledge that “duplicitous” (Doppelzüngigkeit, “double-tongued”) poetry exists. The wordplay packed densely into Celan’s brief letter toys with the multiple senses of the word “tongue” in French, senses readily distinguishable in German; it moves not only between languages, but also diachronically through the history of the German language. Celan’s apparent condemnation of “Zweisprachigkeit” is ironized by the word’s original reference to “dialogue,” which later comes to mean “bilingualism.” His turn to “duplicitousness” becomes tenuous when one recognizes its earlier meaning as “chatter” or “gossip,” seemingly the opposite of Celan’s philosophically rich poetry. The surface meaning of Celan’s text—a rejection of multilingual poetry as duplicitous—opposes that produced by a close reading: true multilingualism consists in having a strong sense of the history of one’s own language. As a refugee himself, and long stateless, Celan meditates on the relation of multilingualism to exile—a central question in the 1950s and 60s, as it is today. Compressed into just a few lines, it is both dense and playful.

I thought of Celan’s letter as I ﬁnished the new volume of selected poetry from Uljana Wolf, Subsisters, translated by Sophie Seita. The book offers profound dialogue across, between, and within languages, one that transgresses borders geophysical, political, and historical; it is a dialogue to which the reader—dictionaries in hand—is invited. With original and translation printed together, readers lacking German may also think about the relation of Seita’s translations to Wolf’s poems, which often contain some English already. The translations are nearly autonomous texts abutting the original—drawing from multiple languages to simultaneously illuminate and opacify the text. This liminality between legibility and opacity delineates both an aesthetic and a political aspect of the work.

The book comes with a postcard-sized sheet with the poem “Dancing Double Speech” in English on one side and in German on the other. Jack Henrie Fisher designed the card and the book, and he should be commended for the thoughtfulness with which his design engages with the literary work. Against the white paper of the card, the yellow font of the English text is inscrutable—its brightness captures the light such that even having the card lie on a table strains my vision. One might take this card as a visual analogue for a cliché about translation—even a successful translation is something of a discoloration. Indeed, ﬂipping the card over, the German poem is printed in a cool, blue font that is easily legible. The book’s cover is a multiply offset printing of maroon, white, and black, with parts of the individual letter blocks variously coloured in a manner that seems systematic yet deﬁes system. If the at times painful and enticing card metaphorizes conventional translations, the asystematic systematicity of the book’s cover instead serves as an analogy for the role of languages in Wolf’s poetry and Seita’s translations. Hardly a stain on Wolf, Seita’s is a process of transferring and thickening the texts.

The book is composed of six sections, a preface from Yoko Tawada, and an afterword by both Wolf and Seita. The ﬁrst ﬁve sections comprise poems both lineated and in prose blocks, while the last contains four prose texts by Wolf on her own ideas about translation and multilingualism—including on Shakespeare and her own translation of Ilse Aichinger into English in collaboration with Christian Hawkey. The delightful third section is called “Method Acting with Anna O.,” based on Joseph Breuer’s patient Bertha Pappenheim, who became an international activist for women’s rights, an acclaimed lace collector, the subject of Freud’s famous case study, and a translator of Mary Wollstonecraft. Poetically appropriate, one of Anna’s symptoms was partial aphasia in which she could only speak English, having lost German, her mother tongue. Wolf explores this fascinating case in two cycles. The ﬁrst, “Annalogues” contains two texts: “Annalogue on Oranges” and “Annalogue on Flowers.” Each combines lineated verse and prose poems, with the lineated verse sitting en face of the prose blocks, like an analyst might write commentary about the transcription of a patient’s speech. This section neatly offers the broad extent of the linguistic play in the volume, and what, I suggest, is this play’s political consequent. Here is Seita’s translation of “Annalogue on Flowers”:

das principle case is called face blindness

“Je ne dirai a [sic] personne que mon père n’est pas mort.
C’est une de ces vérités pour lesquelle je n’ai pas encore
de mots.”

that a promise? ich erinner

oder

a fan! mich nicht

oder

a ﬂeur! have we not before?

In Wolf’s original, it reads:

das principle fach heißt face blindness

,,Ereignisse dieser Art werden oft vergessen, vor allem dann,
wenn kurze Zeit später das vorzeitige Ableben des betreffendnen
Vaters auf sie folgt.“

ob das ein versprechen ich erinnere

oder

ein fächer! mich nicht

oder

ein ﬂeur! haben wir uns schon mal?

One notices Seita’s strange introduction of French into the English translation, not the only case where French translates direct speech from German. Redoubling the strangeness, Seita simply introduces novel text. She writes, “I won’t tell a soul that my father is not dead. It is one of those truths for which one has no words,” where Wolf offers, “Occurrences of this kind are often forgotten, particularly in cases when the premature demise of the father in question follows upon them.”

Is Seita’s transformation of the passage—from a discursive, scientiﬁc German into an artful French—merely arbitrary? And what about her choice to retain bits of German, even introducing dialect (“erinner”)? At the beginning of the book, one ﬁnds two epigraphs, a couplet extracted from Nelly Sachs’s Flight and Metamorphosis (1959): “Against the place of home / I hold the transformations of the world—,” and from Antillean poet/theorist Édouard Glissant, “To leave traces in language means to lay a trail into the unpredictable within the shared conditions of our lives.” These epigraphs contextualize Seita’s translation decisions. She tells me that the text cited in Wolf comes from an out of print edition of Hélène Cixous’s Anankè. Because Wolf lost the precise reference, however, and neither Wolf nor Seita could relocate it, Seita inserted the French from a passage in Cixous’s Dedans, simultaneously untranslating and transposing the text. Not all readers know English, French, and German, so instead these moments of illegibility—particularly within the context of a cycle on the experience of the “founder” of the talking cure, Bertha Pappenheim—become moments when the female voice is not transparent, is not offered to the reader as an object for consumption. To recall another motif in the work of Glissant, one that remains implicit throughout the collection, Seita’s translations, as do Wolf’s poems, dwell on the question of the “right to opacity.”

The other cycle in the Anna O. section, entitled “Tatting”/“Spitzen,” makes a convincing case for the feminist stakes of this practice of opacity. The mythological connotations of textile production are diverse. To name a few: Penelope’s weaving and unraveling of her father-in-law’s burial shroud; the Fates; the terrible story of Philomela, who, after her tongue is cut out, weaves the story of her rape so that her sister can take revenge. Tatting, unlike these classical examples, produces a textile that seems deceptively transparent. Lace hints toward what lies behind, but the veil occludes far more than the perceiver assumes. Tatting similarly creates a parallax experience in which focusing the eye on the pattern of the cloth requires letting what is behind fall out of focus—and vice versa. This multimedia cycle includes text in English, German, and other languages and dialects. It also prints images of various tools of the craft, and on the bottom of the page offers a pattern allowing the curious reader to tat along. (Sadly, I have not explored this possibility yet.) This section also allows the full extent of Wolf’s multilingual wordplay to come into view. Seita’s bit reads:

w anna say               a pine pattern collar                             ist der name
für lace                 a moving face              made by me or
by means of repeating holes (ear) pierce
& close those never          tired mouths like
die frauen tattern die schiffchen rattern their teeth
what did they tattle about what did they need etc.

Wolf’s:

in annan worten          pine pattern collar in tatting is a name
for   a   lace              a moving face made by   me or
means of repeating holes (ohr) öffnen
u schließen niemals müder münder wie
the    women           tattled the     shuttles       rattled their teeth
what did they       tattle about what did they need etc.

The monolingual English reader may feel an equivalent level of befuddlement here as would the monolingual German reader of Wolf’s original. The translation of this richly allusive passage works on the improbable level of the syllable to depart from a traditional translation of the determinable content of Wolf’s multilingualism. Due to Wolf’s play—with German, English, and syllable groupings of uncertain origin—Seita is compelled to ﬁnd a way to translate all three—including Wolf’s English—into “English.” One could fairly say that Wolf’s original draws no less deeply from the history of the English language than Seita’s translation. In a moment of estrangement, Seita develops Wolf’s reinvention of a very old German verb “tattern” in order to translate Wolf’s originally English line “the women tattled.” According to the dictionary, “tattern” refers to the “chattering” of Geese. Wolf cites this as a fanciful etymology of “tattle”—although, in Seita’s translation of this passage, “die origin ist nicht very.” “Not very what?” one might ask, and the answer to this question falls aside amongst the ongoing tattering of the poem, lost amidst the voices summoned by Wolf and, as it were, channeled by Seita.

The gaps in the poem, graphically represented by the text layout, and the paratactical conglomerations of language are not a falling silent, a Verstummen, but an abrupt transition between voices. The lack of clarity about the sources of the voices creates a moment of opacity in the text, but this multivocality is only one form of the collection’s political engagement. The political stakes of Wolf’s poetry, while clearly rooted in a strong feminist tradition, extend to a timely engagement with the politics of asylum. In her poem, “Three Arches: Böbrach,” Wolf describes the inhumane conditions in an asylum center located in Bavaria. The ﬁrst poem in the cycle contains an epigraph from the Grimm’s dictionary and a note beneath the poem from Bavaria’s laws regarding asylum. In Jacob Grimm’s early essay “On Poetry in Law,” he argues—through a careful comparison of German legal codes with myth, fairytale, folk sayings, epic, and lyric poetry—that German laws derive from poetry. Pace Grimm, Wolf demonstrates that poets not only establish law but are also its critics. By combining multiple languages, while remaining attentive to the historical alterity within German, Wolf illuminates the inherent falsity of understanding the refugee, and their language, as constitutively other. The ﬁrst alterity a language confronts is not the obvious one found in speakers of a foreign language, but rather the internal alterity within each individual language. Wolf’s poetry draws out the deep history of the German language in order to display those moments in which the language is—even to native speakers—opaque. In the very act of meditating on this alterity internal to languages, Wolf denounces the system that isolates and abuses the refugee qua other.

Stefan George famously called his volume of Shakespeare translations Umdichtung rather than Übersetzung, which literalizes the Latin “trans-latio,” meaning roughly “to set across.” “Umdichtung” contains the German word for poetry, Dichtung, yet it is really a process of rewriting, renovation, or thickening, of taking things apart and reconstructing them in odd ways, rather than a translation that aims for clarity—maybe the pieces won’t all ﬁt back together, or at least not in a recognizable way. To quote a fragment from Celan, it strives to be “the poem that really bears something (in no means transports): not metaphor, but metabasis.” Wolf’s poetry and Seita’s translations approach languages in a manner highly attentive to the histories of the tongues, and to the histories of those who have used them. Like the work of Celan, this expresses a delicate practice of thinking deeply about these histories in order to reﬂect on aesthetic, philosophical, and political questions today. The results do not lend themselves to summary, nor the poems to translatability; but in an era of data analytics, algorithms, and targeted advertising, the value of opacity is becoming increasingly clear.

July 2019. This review is in Chicago Review 62.1/2/3.

Jorie Graham, Fast.

Ecco, 2017. 84pp. $26.

Reviewed by Andrew Osborn

Jorie Graham’s twelfth book of new poetry whelms with ruin: the death of the poet’s father, her mother’s dementia, her own body’s cancerous mutiny, ecological “systemicide,” the erosion of humanity by tools that mimic our curiosity and extend our reach beyond our care. Rather than lamenting it, or (like Eliot) shoring fragments of some former order against it, Graham negotiates with ruin on its own impersonal terms in run-on sequences of often fragmentary phrases. As language in the title poem’s opening line indicates, the book’s title, Fast, holds in tension the senses of reckless speed (“too much”), sought-for stability (“not enough”), and involuntary abstinence (“starve”). It bespeaks the challenge of slaking our thirsts at the information era’s ﬁber-optic ﬁre hose. What might have been a conventionally intimate study of personal loss instead foregrounds the mediation of various technologies—instrumental, algorithmic, grammatical—by which we render the unseen visible.

As she signaled with the Nietzschean title of her ﬁrst book, Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts (1980), Graham is an earthbound perspectivist who seeks to know this world by passionately probing it from as many points of view, armed with as many measures and analytical means as she can devise. In Fast’s “Self Portrait at Three Degrees,” whose title almost certainly refers to the average Kelvin-scale temperature of outer space, she asserts, “I want to touch things till they break → that / is how to see them → all the points of contact → entropy, diminishment, pressing / and then pulling back and looking, leaving alone → unimaginable → a meaning in / every step.” Before ostensibly conversing by phone with her father’s afterlife in “The Medium,” she mediates the Charles River’s “channeling scribbling erasing / itself while all along chattering self-wounding self-dividing, slowing at bank, at / streamline, at meander, then quick now trying-out scribbling again—why not—one must / keep trying / to make / the unsaid said.” (Why not, indeed. Fast is full of unmarked, uninﬂected questions as she lets description catch in the eddies of its objects.) Graham is less keen to share the particulars of a parent’s or her own personality than to explore how personality may arise from inert form, ﬂout entropy, and persist after inspiration abates.

The four-part collection’s short opening poem, “Ashes,” retains the spine-and-rib lineation of much of Graham’s twenty-ﬁrst-century work. But the form and syntax of the second poem, “Honeycomb”—with its variously line-spaced, wide verse paragraphs and phrasing that modulates between periods, dashes, and vectors—is new. One of two “bot” poems, it sets the book’s tone of ﬂattened affects before Graham peoples parts II, III, and IV with the posthumous and otherwise “post human.” Having introduced “Honeycomb” as an “Ode to Prism”—that is, PRISM, one of the NSA programs that Edward Snowden made public in 2013—the poet speaks to and for the algorithmic agents that she presumes are tracking her through the computer at which she writes:

      You have the names of my friends my markers my markets my late
      night
queries. Re chemo re the travel pass re where to send the photo the side
      effects the
distinguishing features—bot says hide where—bot does not know, bot knows, what is it to know here

One might expect Graham to decry this invasion of privacy. Instead, she invites it—“Here at my screen, / can you make me / out? Make me out,” “can you please / track me I do not feel safe”—so as to articulate what facets of interest and intuition resist such tracking and thus help to deﬁne the boundaries of our humanity. Even if some searching engine could detect “the smell of these stalks and the moisture they / are drawing up → in order not to die // too fast,” it is not likely, she implies, that it would relate, as she does, the scent of ﬂoral rot to the moderation of mortality’s blossoming. Nor will its stalking discover that “ﬁrst love is taking place” as Mrs. Ramsay does in her desktop copy of To the Lighthouse. Graham does not explicitly link the lighthouse’s beacon to the bot’s surveillance. Nor does she cite Lily Briscoe’s likening of others’ minds to hives that one may visit as a bee. Of Lily she writes merely that she “moves the salt”; later, Graham challenges the bot to track “the bees that did return to the hive today” and “what neural path the neurotoxin took”—presumably in the disoriented brains of the bees that did not return—trusting her human readers to connect the ellipses’ dots. Whereas The Errancy’s disembodied guardian angels anxiously cared for their human wards from on high, the “emblematic subjectivities” in this and other Fast poems lack empathic imagination, to say nothing of benevolence or the lung-warm inspiration that sounds through (per-sonare) a genuine person. Narrowly acquisitive, they mine what is ours for data divested of givenness.

In her previous collection’s “Lapse,” which is among the most compelling and encapsulating poems of her career, Graham recovers a several-decades-old experience through a lapse of judgment, a mistaken feeling. For Seamus Heaney, her predecessor in Harvard’s Boylston Chair, a pen’s thickness in the hand had been “snug as a gun” but recalled his father’s handling of a spade. Graham’s writing implement takes her back to early motherhood because its touch triggers a manual memory of the thick chains of a playground swing on which, in the early 1980s, she pushed her infant outward and thereby upward as a full-body, physical education. Rainwater accumulated under the swing where human strivings for elevation and foot-dragging alike had eroded the soil. As if to show that from such erosion even our acutest organs may have evolved, the poet announces—in the ﬁfty-sixth of the ﬁrst sentence’s eighty-three lines—that the child’s ﬂeeting reﬂection in the puddle “giv[es] me for that instant an eye you its iris blinking.”

Nothing in Fast is nearly so evocative of personal and planetary self-overcoming. What initially sounds like energetic dancing or “birdchatter” in one poem is “everything being sung in the magnetic ﬁeld’s no-upward-rung / unswerving tiny dwelling” of an MRI. This foreclosure of ascent, and of lyric clinamen, is typical. The horizontal arrows with which she punctuates some serial phrases stay horizontal. Having visited the Shroud of Turin, she reﬂects on the grungy physicality whereby it preserves the image of Christ’s face:

                     we leave a lot of stain → we are wrapped and wrapped in
                     gossamer days → at
the end what is left is a trail → of bodyﬂuid → of all this fear → can you
      feel

it → it beats under my shroud → I have to stop the lullaby → when
      questioned said yes → said I
almost believe you are there → you are there → said the season of
      periods is over → said hold
each of us up to the light after our piece of time is cut off we are the
      long ribbon of our days
nothing more → do you mind → and a crowd comes and looks at the
      long worm of our
bodytrace → in this light → they will see the stainage of our having lived
      and think it has a
shape → it is dirt → it is ooze’s high requiem → becoming

“Ooze’s high requiem” is about as close as these poems ever get to uplift. What we get instead is signiﬁcant ambiguity. Are the “periods” no-longer-in-season punctuation? Or is she writing of menopause? Who is the questionably present “you”? Is it Christ in his shroud? Or as his shroud? Or her father in his stained blanket of a body?

Such ambiguities—and the high stakes of distinguishing the right pronoun or preposition among options—make the second of the collection’s four parts the most moving and most engaging. When Graham is awakened by a dog in “Vigil,” she recognizes that it may be alerting her to a change of being in another room. Gender-neutral references to the dog (“It stands and breathes and makes me / look”) become indistinct from references to death (“Is it come this time”). As she follows “it” through the residence, Graham considers what conditions of being may pertain “afterwards” if her mother’s life has ceased, writing of the air’s ongoing doings and qualities as “ﬂow, cluster, possibility, speed—stirred but / not stirred-for.” That dispositional for will cease with the loss of its object. Likewise, toward the end of “The Post Human,” she interrupts the assertion “There on the bed just now—” to implore her just deceased father parenthetically: “(look, all of a sudden now I cannot write ‘your’ / bed).” It takes a fastidiously honest, formal feeler to imagine and ﬁgure her parents’ deaths grammatically.

Whitman’s “Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night” is clearly a precursor for this cluster in part II. America’s original maestro of expressive syntactical extremes addresses his fallen Civil-War comrade as “you” even after the young man has perished, shifting to third-person reference “just as the dawn appear’d” to imply that while a persistent presence remained local in the dead body throughout the night, the soul has then risen with the sun. “Reading to My Father” most meaningfully pushes against Whitman’s transcendentalism. Graham, too, feels compelled to shift pronouns: “here comes my you, rising in me, my feel- / ing your it, my me, in- / creasing, elaborating, ﬂowing, not yet released from form, not yet, / still will-formed, swarming, mis- / informed.” Instead of waiting for dawn, however, she waits for the embalmers, feeling the not-quite-rightness of the titular preposition to, feeling her own automatism kick in apparently because the “thin machines that ticked and hummed until just now / are off for good,” feeling the reach of human artiﬁce as “the hissing multiplying / satellites out there I took for stars.” The poem’s closing gesture is literally as well as emotionally touching. Having propped “our open book on you” (her father’s corpse) and read ﬁrst it (“where we left off”) and “then, one last time, the / news” (because Curtis Bill Pepper had been a journalist and bureau chief), she reveals that she has tacitly shifted from consumption to production:

—Once upon a time I say into my air,
and I caress you now with the same touch
as I caress these keys.

As she begins to tell a new story with no-longer-shared air, she types on her laptop as if to embalm the shared minutes and thus stay decomposition herself.

Although most of Fast’s poems are so long-lined and so arbitrarily enjambed as to resemble prose poetry, Graham is far more phonetically playful in this book than she has ever been. Cancer is ﬁgured as prosodic redundancy: “in my ﬂesh these / rapid over-rhyming cells…want us to go faster, faster, headlong with / mirth ruth glee.” She riffs off Emma Lazarus’s “The New Colossus” to address herself from the point of view of a hospitable chorus of oncologists: “give me your / mass, your teeming cell-dividing / mass—give me your poverty, / your every breath is screened.” Later she has her doctor reassure her in an improbable rap:

you are a shoo-in as the heroine, new citizen, back since the pleistocene,
being touched up like a virgin engine in the squeaky clean saline,
punchline, your soul at plumb-line, magic marker written in in print
to make sure LEFT is left, it’s not benign this timeworn
zone in you, no not benign this fast archive,
surgical thread making its dragline in the artiﬁcial
moonshine—how supine must the whole apparatus of being get

A consent-seeking inquisition of identity ﬂuidity entitled “Self Portrait: May I Touch You” answers this morpheme drip of -in, –ine, -ene with its copious -tudes and -ides and -hoods.

Fast’s meditative, mediated maximalism serves up too much and not enough: a feast of privations. Graham’s early poems often had an arcing grace for which a stuttering discontinuity has come increasingly—and in Fast pervasively—to substitute. Shotgun sequencing’s inelegant advancements upon the Human Genome Project come to mind as an analogy. And other disconcerting analogies lurk in the book’s exhaustive, exhausting inclusiveness. Fast’s readers ﬁnd themselves in a position akin to that of her bots and her deepwater “ghostﬁshing” nets. Before we can take Fast in, we are made to mine or trawl it:

the coil of the listening along the very bottom—the nets weighed down
      with
ballast—raking the bottom looking for nothing—indiscriminate—there      is nothing in
particular you want—you just want—you just want to close the
third dimension—to get something which is all—becomes all—once you
      are
indiscriminate—discards can reach 90% of the catch—am I—the habitat
      crushed
and ﬂattened—net of your listening and my speaking we can no longer
      tell them
apart

Although Graham has frequently testiﬁed to the human knack for atrocity, she trusts that readers of her poetry are not indiscriminate. We will process the serried phrases, seeking the chronic ideas, the thematic threads of concern that connect often nonsequential packets of observation, inquiry, and emotion. By implication, however, there’s a lot of “bycatch” that could be or must be discarded.

Why invite such criticism by supplying the ﬁgures for it? There’s a common term for the literary mode that foregrounds the interpretive frame it seeks to assail. But this isn’t satire. Whereas Alexander Pope implicitly mocks any morality that could suffer his yoking of stained fabric and stained honor, Graham implies that such meting out of quanta and qualia (“clumps of feel/think”) is nigh inevitable—“the order of the day,” a symptom of our now’s sickly ghost. She would relay her jeremiad otherwise if she could. It’s just that “the words don’t grip-up into sentences for me, / it is in pieces.” The piecemeal it is owned up to, owned. Hybrids’s title poem concluded by asking, “And if I break you are you mine?” The answer is yes.

Once I have overcome my initial frustrations with each of Graham’s books since Erosion, I have found myself thankful for her refusal to settle. In the long run, one learns from her ﬁgural and syntactical stress tests to value intuition above instinct because the latter relies on, and internalizes, a static world while the former welcomes new life and insight by embracing change. Earnest foot-dragging may serve evolution no less than upward striving. What wells in Fast’s resulting declivities is not rain but time. Other than in and own, the book’s most interrogated word may be now. “I am the temporary → but there is also the permanent,” she tells the bot of “Honeycomb,” then concludes by asking with ponderous skepticism, “have you looked / to it → for now → ” “The sun and the bedrail—do they touch each other more than you and I now,” she asks her dead father in a season of periods; “Is that a place now. Do you have a now.”

By the book’s end, much of what might have been discounted as an inadequately curated stream of consciousness may instead be esteemed as a tender tribute to Graham’s disoriented yet persistently creative mother, for the rest of us an emblem of our Earth. The ﬁnal poem, “Mother’s Hands Drawing Me,” draws further upon the plenitude of that manual mistake in PLACE’s “Lapse” by not pushing beyond or above, by not exacting distinctions, by letting the whole apparatus of being be supine. It could have been titled “My Hands Writing about Mother’s Hands Drawing Me,” but as Graham asserts in the course of a very long, “cursive” sentence, “I want this to not be / my writing of it, want my hands not / to be here also, mingling with hers / who will not take my hand ever into / hers.” Does she seek to compensate for hand-holdings denied or to respect her mother’s irrational refusals? The layered negatives leave the answer ambiguous, but it’s evident: Graham wishes to write as the object, to share her unselved mother’s unmooring from subjecthood even as she makes. Published three decades earlier, The End of Beauty (1987) ends, in “Imperialism,” with a heart-wrenching dismissal of her mother’s body as “a plot a / shape, one of the ﬁnished things, one of the // beauties” that she could further impugn by reducing synecdochically to “all / arms no face at all dear god, all arms—”. At the end of Fast, Graham gives that body, those arms, and, extending further, their hands and digits their due:

the mind
does not—I don’t think—know this
but the ﬁngers, oh, for all my life
scribbling open the unseen,
done with mere things, not
interested in appraisal, just
seizure—what is meant by
seizure—all energy, business-
serious, about direction, tracing
things that dissolve from thingness
into in-betweens—

The hands have a mind of their own, and memory. They “have / known what to ﬁnd in the unmade…and / dragged it into here—that it be / visible.” One can hear in Graham’s description of their drawing as dragging the moiling of the River Ganges in “Imperialism,” of the oft-ﬂooded Iowa, and of this latest volume’s Charles. Graham’s aim all along has also been seizure—what Wallace Stevens called “the intensest rendezvous”—not the faux action-at-a-distance of appraisal. To appraise such serious business seems beside the point.

June 2019. This review is in Chicago Review 62.1/2/3.

Malika Booker, Pepper Seed

Peepal Tree Press, 2013. 84pp. £9.

Nick Makoha, Kingdom of Gravity

Peepal Tree Press, 2017. 82pp. £9.

Reviewed by Isaac Ginsberg Miller

Malika Booker’s and Nick Makoha’s poetics embody two African diasporic migrations (from the Caribbean and from the African continent) that together comprise the context for contemporary Black British poetry, and Black British life more broadly. Makoha, born in Uganda, left the country to escape the dictatorship of Idi Amin, and has lived most of his life in the UK. Booker, whose parents are from Guyana and Grenada, was born in London but spent her early life in Guyana before moving back to Britain at age eleven. In their debut collections, Booker and Makoha narrate the multiple crossings—both forced and “voluntary”—that bring the Anglophone African continent and Caribbean into conversation in their former colonial metropole. However, in contrast to previous generations of Black British writers, Booker and Makoha did not experience the era before Britain’s colonies gained formal independence, and so their perspectives on the “postcolonial” are different from (though informed by) that of the Caribbean Artists Movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

Makoha marks his engagement with this previous generation by beginning his collection with an epigraph from Derek Walcott: “How can I turn from Africa and live?” This line takes on a different meaning in the work of a postcolonial African immigrant than it does in that of Walcott, a Caribbean writer born in Saint Lucia under British colonial rule. Walcott looks to the African continent as a descendent of those who were kidnapped and enslaved (as well as the enslavers), while Makoha, who left Uganda as a child, considers Africa not from the standpoint of the postplantation West Indies, but from the experience of a contemporary African immigrant to the Global North. As such, in framing his poetics through Walcott’s question, Makoha gestures toward both the linkages and speciﬁcities of African diasporic writers across the English language and the British colonial empire that spread its usage across the world.

The conversation between Black writers of African and Caribbean heritage is one that shapes contemporary Black British poetry. Booker and Makoha have been fellow travelers in this regard: both are members of Malika’s Poetry Kitchen (founded by Booker), fellows in The Complete Works, a program for British poets of color, and the ﬁrst two Black British fellows in Cave Canem (founded as a retreat for African American poets). Furthermore, both Kingdom of Gravity and Pepper Seed were published by the Leeds-based Peepal Tree Press, which has been one of the premier homes for Caribbean and Black British writing since 1985. According to founder Jeremy Poynting, the editorial focus of Peepal Tree Press is on “what George Lamming calls the Caribbean nation, wherever it is in the world,” a mission which resonates with scholar Rosamond King’s concept of the “Caribglobal.” As such, Makoha, with his opening epigraph, positions Africa within the political geography of the Black Atlantic, providing a corrective to the lack of attention to the African continent itself in Paul Gilroy’s inﬂuential theoretical framework (as noted by scholars such as Simon Gikandi and Yogita Goyal).

Kingdom of Gravity, as the title suggests, is a book concerned with the question of sovereignty, of who or what is sovereign to the characters that inhabit the collection’s poems. The title gestures towards Lake Victoria, the source from which the River Nile ﬂows, with the Ugandan portion of the lake acting as its headwaters. Layered upon this landscape, the collection reckons with another kind of gravity: the devastation of Idi Amin’s rule and his impact on Uganda and its people, including those—like Makoha—who have left the country’s borders.

Kingdom of Gravity examines both lived experiences and mediated representations of political violence on the African continent. In this way, Makoha interprets the afterimage of the colonial in the postcolonial traumas of African states. Makoha is deeply concerned with the question of mimesis, or how an image is made, and what that might say about the one doing the making. In the collection’s title poem, Makoha writes:

What makes a man name a city after himself,
asking bricks to be bones,
asking the wind to breathe like the lungs of night.

Here, the city’s built environment becomes the sovereign’s political body. If the “inanimate” city is also a product and extension of its polity’s socio-political life, then the language (“the wind”) of that body becomes a problem for politics. In “Executioner’s Song,” the speaker asks:

How do I curse in my father’s language
when the world and all its dangers
watch me from a bedroom window?

This poem, which opens with a question, contains another question at its end: “Dear body of mine / where are you from?” Here the reader might be reminded of Frantz Fanon’s conclusion to Black Skin, White Masks, where he writes, “My ﬁnal prayer: O my body, make of me always a man who questions!” Even the executioner yearns for another story, another song to sing, answering his own question of the (corporeal and political) body’s origins with these three lines:

As the dark moves towards a body that is better
than myself, draw me a map where leaves fall,
where every song is not a song of war.

Makoha’s poetics utilizes a strategy of repetition and reversal. In “Comrade,” he writes: “Take our sleep as it narrows and what it drinks, / ourselves losing ourselves and now repeat.” In “Resurrection Man,” Makoha claims, “A man must have two faces: one he can live with / and one he will die with. The second face is mine.” In “MBA,” the collection’s opening poem, Makoha describes two men being watched by a cameraman: “They are moving by memory / of a stolen blueprint tattooed on their minds. / I have the same tattoo.” Here Makoha interrupts the chiasmic loop of memory. His attempts to reach the past are frayed, because that past no longer exists. He is uncertain whether or not he can lay claim to memory’s “stolen blueprint,” though he continues to try. “MBA” is the acronym for the Moi International Airport in Mombasa, Kenya, the country Makoha and his mother ﬂed to from Uganda. The poem (one of six throughout the book that is titled with the name of an airport) begins: “Minutes after the airbus took off, a German girl in 1st class / starts talking about the afterlife and things that belong to the dead.” This poem implies the question: Does Makoha’s former life still belong to him? Is he, indeed, living a kind of afterlife (the airplane a portal to another world)? Later in the poem Makoha writes, “the world is connected by a circle. / The same circle a man might make folding his arms around / another man’s shoulder.” Through this series of concentric circles (a world, an embrace), Makoha suggests that the past is remembered in order to be reckoned with, but it is—by deﬁnition—an altered memory, shrunken by temporal and geographic distance. Makoha’s uses of repetition both reﬂect and trouble the monolithic narratives of violence and/on the African continent, and instead—in their reversals—convey nuance, uncertainty, and complexity: precisely the forms of interiority which African people are denied under the Western gaze.

Cameramen and reporters are a leitmotif throughout Kingdom of Gravity. Their function in the text reﬂects Achille Mbembe’s claim in On the Postcolony that, “discourse on Africa is almost always deployed in the framework (or on the fringes) of a meta-text about the animal—to be exact, about the beast: its experience, its world, and its spectacle.” In “Black Death,” Makoha writes of

A note whispered in earshot of a New York Times news crew
as man sets ﬁre to himself. The body now an animal bent double,
a shadow of vague form promising to raise itself from the earth.

With “The body now an animal bent double” in the news crew’s lens, Makoha aptly illustrates Mbembe’s claim that the two signs governing narratives of African life are “the sign of the strange and the monstrous,” and the sign of intimacy, where the monstrous is brought into proximity through the act of domestication and experimentation: the gaze of the voyeur. It is in this way that Makoha writes of the images taken by war reporters:

Tonight they will make
the weekend edition of People. Tomorrow
our city, or some version of it, will be as
familiar as the dark side of the moon.

Like Makoha, Malika Booker, in her collection Pepper Seed, interrogates the ways in which violence is remembered and repeated. Namely, many of her poems confront racial-gendered patriarchy in its hydra-headed forms. The poem “Warning” interrogates the histories of domestic violence that cause a great-grandmother to advise:

Never let no man hit you and sleep,
pepper the food, boil hot water and throw,
use a knife and make clean cut down there,
use cutlass and chop, then go police.

Elsewhere, Booker explicates how patriarchy is so pervasive as to manifest even between Black women, even between a grandmother and granddaughter. In “Red Ants Bite,” the speaker recounts her grandmother’s use of language to wound:

You will be a whore just like your mother
Granny told me all the time,
like saying good morning.
I tried to make her love me,
But her mouth was brutal,
Like hard-wire brush.

However, after the speaker’s lament of her grandmother’s bitterness and cruelty towards her and her mother (while she heaped adoration and praises on the speaker’s father and brothers, her son and grandsons), the poem’s ﬁnal section is written in the voice of the grandmother (now deceased). Speaking in Guyanese Creole, the grandmother tells of what she endured:

I lived till me turn one hundred and one,
live through back-break in backra sun.
I was a slave baby mixed with plantation white.
[…]
I was the lone woman every man want to advantage,
I had was to sharpen meh mouth like razor blade,
turn red in seconds till bad word spill blood.
Scunt-hole child, you want sorry?
[…]
I toughen you sofﬁe-ness, mek man can’t fuck you
easy so. So fuck off, leave the dead some peace.

The poem that follows, “Pepper Sauce,” is one of the most powerful, disturbing, and unwavering poems in the collection. In it Booker depicts the relationship between another grandmother and granddaughter with an outcome far worse. The poem includes a series of lines beginning with “I hear,” describing how the grandmother responded to her granddaughter’s theft of small change from her purse with methodical and violent sexual torture. Signiﬁcantly, the poem begins with the words, “I pray for that grandmother,” which leads the reader to question what traumas the grandmother might have experienced that would cause her to harm her granddaughter in this way. The collection answers this unspoken question with the following two poems: “Death of an Overseer” and “Minetta Speaks,” which depict the barbaric conditions, including the rampant sexual violence, of Caribbean plantation slavery. Booker describes the rejoicing that follows the overseer’s death:

The overseer dead and he whip sprout
scarlet lilies. Whole cane ﬁelds bowed
and weeds run riot,
mosquitoes stop suck blood
and ﬁreﬂies lose their light.

In the ending lines of “Minetta Speaks,” Booker conjures the myth of enslaved Africans ﬂying home across the Atlantic, famously invoked by Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, as well as Robert Hayden’s poem, “O Daedalus, Fly Away Home.” Booker writes:

Singing, I’ll ﬂy away home, them elders took ﬂight,
gone just so. Flocks of runaway slaves ﬂew back
to Africa, dressed in calico like angels.

The poems in Pepper Seed trace African diasporic movement, not only in their themes, but also through their order, moving from Guyana to Grenada to Britain to the United States and back. Connecting the legacy of Britain’s Anglophone empire to its successor, the collection examines the impact of US imperialism in a series of poems that includes “Sauteurs” (about the 1983 US invasion of Grenada), “Sestina for Grenada,” “Lament for the Assassination of Comrade Walter Rodney,” and “Guyana.” In Booker’s writing, the political devastation of US racial capitalism and empire—as well as the legacy of British plantation slavery and colonialism—is paired with the environmental devastation of Caribbean hurricanes. In “Island Grief After Hurricane Ivan,” Booker imagines the hurricane bringing to life the plants, animals, and elemental forces of the island, which she anthropomorphizes, giving human agency to their actions and capitalizing their names:

Bay Leaf
and Cinnamon stop making joke
and start to pray hard until Breeze drag

off her clothes and bawl for Moonlight
to sing a lullaby, sing on and on
till her voice grows hoarse. Then Bitter Aloes
start ﬁghting with Black Sage bush,

throwing hard cuff as dropping coconuts
thump voop vap, and it is madness.

Booker aptly captures the devastating ﬁgure of the hurricane as embodying the Caribbean’ s social and environmental forces. Strikingly, the hurricane as sign of political-ecological catastrophe is taken up in Sonya Posmentier’s recent monograph, Cultivation and Catastrophe: The Lyric Ecology of Modern Black Literature. Posmentier theorizes ecology as a mode of reading the environmental, geographic, and economic histories shaped by the legacies and afterlives of plantation slavery. In particular, Posmentier describes “the shared path of the hurricane and the Atlantic slave trade.” This “shared path” allows us to understand the depth of violence that the island mourns when Booker writes:

Meanwhile Manicou

and Jack Fish lament Nutmeg’s demise
   as bazoodee island parrots stand numb
like statues, their claws curled
   around branches of pommerac trees.
Moonlight is paged to cradle the moaning
   wounded. Oh Spice Isle, let it not die here.
Oh Lord, there is pepper int he deads’
   mouths and coffins fly overhead.

Both Pepper Seed and Kingdom of Gravity offer prayers of mourning for the catastrophes of a de jure postcolonial era that repeats and redoubles many of the de facto conditions of colonialism. Though the “shared path” of a hurricane following the route of the Middle Passage is not the same path followed by African immigrants ﬂeeing to Europe in an attempt to escape political violence and economic immiseration, the works of Booker and Makoha bring these geographies into urgent dialogue, and inquire into their common origins. Among the most pressing concerns raised by these collections are the themes of movement, migration, and displacement: experiences that have enduringly shaped global Black life. As such, Booker’s and Makoha’s work enacts the question of what is shared, and what is incommensurable, across diaspora. In these signal texts of contemporary Black British poetry, the lingua franca of the British Empire is also the language of that empire’s subversion—a bridge between the authors of these poems’ searching and ceaseless journeys.

May 2019. This review is in Chicago Review 62.1/2/3.

Paul Celan, Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry

Translated by Pierre Joris

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014. 654pp. $40.

Reviewed by Charlie Louth

If the Romanian-born poet Paul Celan were a compass point, he would be north. He has long represented a kind of absolute of what poetry is capable of, and stands as an exemplary ﬁgure for other poets, many of whom have incorporated aspects of his work into their own. In the postwar years until his suicide in 1970, he extended conceptions of what poetry could be and do, drawing radical conclusions as to what it meant to continue the tradition of the German lyric even though he was using the language of those who had murdered his mother and father and attempted to eradicate his people entirely. It is often assumed that this amounted to a dismantling of German, a way of writing it that worked against its natural proclivities and patterns, but in fact it is at least as accurate to say that Celan worked with and in German, revealing expressive seams and veins that had hitherto lain neglected.

Around 1960 Paul Celan began making notes for a lecture on the “darkness or obscurity of the poetic,” which was soon superseded by his being awarded the 1960 Büchner Prize, Germany’s main literary award, which he accepted. This necessitated a speech, and several of the assembled thoughts and formulations for the lecture were adapted into what became his most important statement on his poetics and on his life as a poet. But the core idea of the darkness (Dunkelheit) of poetry wasn’t really developed in the Büchner Prize address, better known under its title, The Meridian. Possibly the original idea had been to explore a particular aspect of (his) poetry, which then got subsumed in the larger statement or exploration; possibly one should regard the abandonment of the theme as an indication that he wished to pursue it no further; but the idea of poetry, and particularly Celan’s poetry, bearing or concealing an intrinsic darkness, something that inhabits it that cannot be elucidated or dispersed, something without which it would not be what it is, still seems a useful way of approaching Celan’s work. This is not of course to say that nothing about it can be elucidated—as Pierre Joris’s new translation and edition shows, that is far from the case—but that it brings with it an essential darkness or obscurity that will always have to remain part of any interpretation. The sources and allusions that a commentary can point to are part of the darkness into which the poems enter (and which we enter as we read), but which they also hold.

Celan’s insistence on the darkness of lyric can be read through his quarrel and fascination with Heidegger, whose thinking about poetry and being makes much of the term Lichtung a “clearing,” which more prominently than English carries with it the word for “light.” Poetry for Heidegger takes us toward a “clearing,” a light place that only exists because of the darkness of the woods around it, threaded by paths, some of which lead into the clearing and some of which peter out at woodcutters’ piles. The term implies transﬁguration and reconciliation, in the broadest sense an emergence from the “dark wood” into a place of openness where “being ” can enter into itself, where it can dwell. Celan is suspicious of these implications even as he is interested in them, and so prefers to emphasize the intrinsic darkness of the poem; but that is not to say that clarity and a preoccupation with light are absent. Several of the poems even seem to lead toward a lightness or clarity, such as the well-known poem “Eroded” (“Weggebeizt”), which arrives at

a breathcrystal,

your unalterable

testimony

or “Slickensides” (“Harnischstriemen”), which ends “Northtrue. Southbright” (“Nordwahr. Südhell”), both of these from the volume Atemwende (Breathturn, 1967). But the word Lichtzwang (which Joris gives as “lightduress”), ﬁrst used in the poem “We already lay” (“Wir lagen”) and then as the title for Celan’s last authorized volume (prepared before his death in 1970 and published a few months later), makes light seem less desirable, and in the poem it ends appears to prevent a positive “darkening” movement of recovery or sympathy:

But we could not
darken over toward you:
there reigned
lightduress.

This large and handsome book of Celan’s “later” poetry gathers all the published work from Breathturn onwards, that is, ﬁve substantial collections, plus a cycle—Eingedunkelt (1968), rather questionably translated by Joris as Tenebrae’d, though he does indicate that a “more obvious” possibility would be Endarkened—which Celan published separately. This is work written from late 1963 onwards, and Joris presents it as constituting a turn away from the earlier work, the most obvious signs of which are shorter lines, shorter poems, and a “through-composed” style where the poems form (usually chronologically arranged) cycles rather than standing on their own with separate titles. The volume that preceded Breathturn, Die Niemandsrose (Nobody’s Rose, 1963), is generally made up of much longer poems, richer in texture and more literary in their allusions—a signiﬁcant aspect of the collection is a dialogue with Osip Mandelstam, and Celan’s French context—from 1948 he made his home in Paris—is also very apparent. From Breathturn onwards, references and allusions are essentially of a private or at least far less obvious nature: Celan’s reading is still a large component of the poems, but it is not of a sort that anyone can be expected to notice immediately; the sources are too various and multiple. Favored sources of words are geological handbooks and newspapers. Many of these have been painstakingly identiﬁed—especially by Barbara Wiedemann, whose complete edition of the poems Joris rightly makes liberal use of—but it is axiomatic for a reading of Celan that to trace a word back to its origin is not to determine its meaning in the new location in the poem. Celan was always on the lookout for new words, and what look like neologisms are often in fact, strictly speaking, not at all, even if in their new context they effectively function as if they were. In “Eroded” the words “Büßerschnee” (“penitent’s snow”), “Gletscherstuben” (“glacier-parlors”) and “Gletschertischen” (“glacier-tables”) are, as Joris points out, all bona ﬁde geological terms. Joris complements this practice in his translations: the word “slickenside,” while also geological in origin, doesn’t correspond to the German term exactly, but it is “more interesting.”

Breathturn into Timestead is a culmination of Joris’s long engagement with Celan’s poetry—he tells us that it has accompanied him “for some ﬁfty years,” and that he began translating Atemwende when it ﬁrst appeared in 1967. It is evident that many years of work have gone into this book, which provides us not only with scrupulous and attentive English versions of all the poems, but extensive notes on matters such as dates, sources, and explications of uncommon words or combinations. Altogether this makes for an invaluable compendium of Celan lore, as well as giving insight into his working methods and his manner, especially in his later work, of alighting on words and using them as starting points for poems. Joris has made available to the English reader a signiﬁcant part of the considerable help that was available to the reader of Celan in German, as well as adding insights of his own.

For all this help, however, reading Celan requires no less attention and has become no easier. The extra material is fascinating, but it almost needs to be forgotten again if one is to make one’s way into the poems. Celan once quoted Malebranche, via Walter Benjamin, to the effect that “attention is the natural prayer of the soul,” and certainly the attentiveness he demands of his readers is total. His advice to the reader was simply to “read and reread,” whereupon understanding would “come of its own accord.” In the idiom of the poems, we could take the imperative that closes one of the last to be written: “hör dich ein / mit dem Mund” (“listen your way in / with the mouth,” as Joris faithfully has it). Reading these poems, like any others, is not a matter of ﬁguring out the difﬁculties, elucidating the obscurities, resolving their questions, smoothing their rubs. It is more importantly one of taking part in them, ﬁnding your way into them, an intent listening to their silent hints and murmurings. To listen with the mouth is to voice what lies unspoken in the words, to feel your way through their textures and echoes. This is also what the work of translation entails, and it is, of course, in the translations that Joris’s and our attention is most strongly focused.

The difﬁculties are very great: the title Fadensonnen, which Joris gives as Threadsuns, was translated by Ian Fairley as Fathomsuns, and there are hundreds of less prominent examples of possible divergences where the options presented by a German word cannot with any certainty be narrowed down. Perhaps one of the chief problems is how to deal with composite words, especially if they are also, or have the appearance of, neologisms. German is naturally rich in such words—many common words are made up of two elements that have clear and separate existences on their own. So Flugzeug means aeroplane, but literally “ﬂight-thing”; Herzkammer means ventricle, but literally “heart-chamber.” German carries its etymological roots much closer to the surface than most languages: many medical and scientiﬁc terms are made out of common elements where in English we tend to use a term from Latin or Greek. So when Celan invents a word such as “Pfeilschrift” (if indeed it is an invention), he is doing something very much within the domain of how German operates. Joris’s way of handling these varies a bit, but on the whole he takes the Joycean route and gives us unhyphenated English equivalents, such as “arrowscript” for the last word quoted. The general effect of this is to make Celan appear odder than in fact he is: “lifetrees” is far stranger than “Lebensbäume,” which could just be “trees of life ”; and “screemace,” for “Geröllkeule,” seems barely legible. Perhaps it can be argued that one reads one’s way into this too, and learns to negotiate a Celanian idiom, but I think there is a danger in making Celan seem more estranged and less in sympathy with the rhythms and laws of German than he is. In a few places, Joris even seems to want to out-Celan Celan, as when he takes the word “Schläfenzange,” which as he comments in a note is an “immediately obvious” neologism deriving from the word for obstetric forceps, and turns it into “templeclamps.” At another point, Joris winningly admits he “may be overplaying [his] hand,” and his notes are useful also for the generous glimpses they give of the decisions involved in the processes of translation.

Altogether this is a ﬁne and necessary volume, a labor of love and knowledge, and pretty much essential for anyone wanting to get to grips with late Celan. The poems here are moments of clarity, of in some ways Petrarchan “dark light,” extracted from what Celan in late 1969 referred to as “the debris of my existence.” They are often minute forms of words creating renewed possibilities, new holds on life, precise etchings of feeling, inquiries into the intelligence of language. With tact and sure-footedness Joris has “listened in” and sent us reports from a terrain that often seems inaccessible or even uninhabitable but in fact can offer dwelling places, however temporary.

May 2019. This review is in Chicago Review 62.1/2/3.

Peter Gizzi, Archeophonics

Wesleyan, 2016. 108pp. $16.

Reviewed by David Grundy

Peter Gizzi’ s Archeophonics unfolds in short line and staggered refrain, shot through with submerged sound, recorded archaeologies and the archaeologies of recording, haunted by the smoke and ﬁre of the archive, woven on the “linenlike thread ” uniting poetry and song. This collection, the follow-up to 2011’ s Threshold Songs and 2015’ s selected poems, In Defense of Nothing, comes in at just over eighty pages and consists of twenty-two poems, some of which are sequences containing further, individual poems. Ordered into ﬁve sections, it is concise but rich, in a mode that will be familiar to those who’ ve followed Gizzi’ s work over recent years. It is achieved and an achievement, inhabiting but not hardened into style.

Most of these poems are spoken by an insistently foregrounded ﬁrst person, but this “I ” is not simply one.

If I saw you and the I said,
my poetry is changing,
I would say my life is changing.

So who is the “I ” who dominates these poems? Or (and this might be the same question), who are “you, ” reading it? I say that this might be the same question, given that sometimes the “you ” here is really “I ”: the classic “personal impersonal ” familiar from the work of John Ashbery, at once singular and plural, myself and another in the same word. In an interview with Ben Lerner about Threshold Songs—of whose mournful twilight, inﬂected and working through intense personal loss, Archeophonics is in part a tonal continuation—Gizzi argues that the poet must

Embrace the ampliﬁcation of self by standing next to oneself, outside of one’ s life, to look at one’ s self in and through the world—a form of discovery within the bafﬂes of pronominal reality.

Belatedness and survival are concerns here: the poems as tentative answers to the questions of what to do when you survive your loves, your losses, the “names in me, ” tuning in and out like a (Spicerian) radio, with the precision of high gain (“the gain and its foliage ”). This, perhaps, is one of the meanings of “the old language ” that forms a frequent refrain and a thematic of the book. But, more generally, the old language raises the question of what to do if the “you ” to whom these poems speak survives the “I ” that writes: as Gizzi puts it in the interview with Lerner, “to imagine the ‘you’ speaking back to me when I am no longer here to read it. ”

The poet is surrounded by world and word: “the world around me / Around me are words saying this. ” To quote the resonant lines of Anglo-Welsh poet John James, whose 1977 “A Theory of Poetry ” shares something of Archeophonics’ s combination of urbanity, roughness, and melancholy deadpan: “wherever you turn / you are surrounded by language / like the air. ” Or, as Gizzi writes: “I wanted out of the past so I ate the air, / it took me further into air. ” Eating air is, in its simplest sense, breathing; like “the old language, ” it is also song, as a ﬁgure for that which is shared, breathed in and out by ecosystems and humans. Such interpersonal and planetary connections, which reach back to the history of dead letters and dead people, as well as forward into whatever future these poems afford, sometimes exist with the full weight of fervent belief in poetry’ s transformative power, sometimes as near-infantile bathos: “This ball in space emitting cries / into space. ”

World as word, word as world; air as breath, song, or cry; at one point, Gizzi asks, “what if it were all music? ” In Archeophonics, music functions as a transmutation of loss and an antidote to political violence, but also as something that replaces living, an “inhuman conch in the ear. ” It is both metaphor and operative sonic principle. The poems’ lines often follow a melancholy, descending cadence, leading to and landing on single-syllable words with open vowels like “song. ” In person, this effect is emphasized by Gizzi’ s deeply resonant, vulnerably authoritative readings. Indeed, it’ s almost impossible for me to read this book without hearing Gizzi’ s speaking voice, reciting the poems during his 2015–2016 UK sojourn. Despite the apparent authority afforded by a cadential movement towards a goal, however, the poems are always uneasy in their arrivals, more comfortable departing from the givens they ﬁnd. As Gizzi writes in a poem simply entitled “Song, ” “I am willing to walk / away. ” The poet is always getting up and leaving. The spaces he moves through are always suspended between mourning and freshness: spring’ s green laced with the pathos of distance enacted by the technologies of Google Earth and Skype, the virtual barrier both reducing and enacting separation and distance; summer’ s heat on the verge of turning into autumn and being wrapped in a “winding sheet ” of mourning. Such spaces form a kind of indeterminate, melancholy pastoral which refers less to real locations and more to the space of poetic language: a language that describes the world but also contains and replaces it, a constricted, echoic plenitude based on short lines, on words’ slow morphing and return.

The book’ s title, a neologism about the archaeology of recorded sound, refers to a very early form of recording technology (the “phonautograph ”) in which sounds were captured on smoke. Such smoke connects to the “archive, ” which, in these poems, is often “on ﬁre ”: ﬁre trailing into wisps of smoke, containing the traces of other voices, always on the verge of disappearing even as new technologies of printing and recording try to press them into permanence. Likewise, the practice of “Field Recordings ” to which the book’s opening sequence refers involves taking something out and bringing it back, where it transforms. Here we come to the question of ﬁdelity: Whether in the archive, the ﬁeld recording, or the phonautographic record, what does it mean to bring things in from the “ﬁeld ”? Such questions are reminiscent of the concerns of composers associated with the post-Cageian Wandelweiser School, such as Michael Pisaro, whose work often exploits the effects of playing the sound of one exterior space (the “ﬁeld ”) in another interior one (the concert hall). I’ m reminded in particular of Pisaro’ s exquisite recent composition July Mountain, which pays homage to Wallace Stevens’ s late poem of the same title through the combined use of ﬁeld recordings, electronics, a solo piano part, and multiple percussionists bowing normally struck percussion and rubbing snare drums to make a sound between wind and sea, rhythmless noise and pattern-based rhythmic recurrence. Pisaro’ s piece skirts close to the tradition of the Romantic-era piano concerto, whose conventions of drama and development leak into the general vocabulary of stasis and ambience. This interplay between dramatic or lyric declarations and a less ostentatious ﬂattening out of affect has similarities with Gizzi’ s own practice in Archeophonics. Similarly, Marigold and Cable (originally published in a limited edition by Shelter Press in 2014, republished by Materials in 2016) pays homage to a piece of ambient music by Alex Cobb: music of environment, designed to constitute an environment, a background rather than a foreground, which the listener inhabits like a room. Like Brian Eno’ s original deﬁnition of ambient music in the liner notes to Music for Airports, Gizzi’ s poetry might be said to inhabit and create suspended states, as much ﬁlled with uncertainty and doubt as with calm acceptance.

Yet, however much such concerns dovetail with the post-Cageian questions of the “ﬁeld, ” Eno’ s ambient environments, or song more generally, Archeophonics’ s epigraph (from James Schuyler) makes clear that poetry can’t simply be reduced to an analogy for music or recorded sound: “poetry, like music, is not just song. ” Read in the light of Gizzi’ s previous work, this epigraph functions as a gently questioning response to the premises of lyric. Against the notion of song as redemptive, or as a melancholic cocoon against loss, there is a sense that the “old language ”—poetry as burning library, ﬁre fuelled by air, the resonant carrying through of syntax on syllable, sense on sound—might at times be a muzzle. “Reverb, ” from the “Field Recordings ” sequence, thus ends:

It’ s the same but different,
different now.
the mouth knows the bit,
the taste of it.

Like the bit put in a horse’ s mouth to clamp the reins, the poet is ridden beyond their control. In this poem, the old language-as-archive becomes a record of murder and the knowledge of “murder…all that blood in the mouth, ” recalled and somehow relived by the poet, who acts as something between exorcist and medium. This is the secret horror, the originary trauma that language half invokes but can never quite fully bring itself to disclose: “none of its letters / produce the horror / at the heart of the index. ” In response to this, the “old language ” becomes knowing, even snarky, but such knowledge is useless: the old language speaks forever from the point of recursive retrospection, mocking the poet who it’ s using and who’ s using it for the personal losses it impersonally records.

The old language
could have told you,
it’ s too late,
we watched you die,
watched you move
through shocking losses
and the solo ﬂight
you are taking back
into the old language.

In response to this, the poet must work through the process of transmuting melancholy into mourning, the absence of the loved object leading them to look “for other structures to love. ” Hinging on conditional terms such as “when ” and “if ” (a Gizzi speciality), these poems appear to be searching for something that they cannot always name. At its simplest, that thing is “you ”: “you ” as reader, “you ” as lost love object, “you ” as the world itself, the ﬁgure of relation. As Paul Celan wrote in 1958: “Poems are en route: they are headed toward. Toward what? Toward something open, inhabitable, an approachable you, perhaps, an approachable reality. ” Even in absence, the poet is always looking. Here is the ﬁrst stanza of the book’ s ﬁnal poem, “Bewitched ”:

When I look
to the east
I could not
ﬁnd you
in the west
where the light
was dying you
were not there
northerly the sky
grew pitch
silence to the south
there was
only billowing

These lines, lightly lit by reference to Job 23, are exemplary of Archeophonics’s great openness, its generous density, its numinous clarity. The “billowing ” to the south is the air the poet eats, breathes in and breathes out, song of living and dead, and we as readers can breathe it and hear it and maybe even sing it ourselves. “Lyres ” may sometimes be liars, and the poet “full of bluster ” (another kind of air), but they are also “full of vision. ” Or, to take Gizzi’ s own words: “Someone saw it, I love them for seeing it. / I love seeing it with them. ”

May 2019. This review is in Chicago Review 62.1/2/3.

Laura Dassow Walls, Henry David Thoreau: A Life

University of Chicago Press, , 2017. 640pp. $20.

Reviewed by Christopher Birkett

The young Henry Thoreau proved skillful at navigating the arcane, point-based merit system at Harvard College—in addition to academic prowess, students were evaluated in terms of chapel attendance, classroom deportment, and the color of their coats—and graduated, in 1837, an exemplary member of his class. Students had opposed the retrograde nature of the college for years, most notably in the eruption of 1834 known as the Dunkin Rebellion, resulting in the expulsion of almost the entire sophomore class. But the man whose name would come to be linked with disobedience was also an impecunious student who couldn’ t afford not to toe the line. Of the sixty-seven members of his class, Thoreau numbered one of just nineteen never to have been formally disciplined.

His standing earned him a chance to speak at commencement exercises, and on the last Wednesday in August, before an assembly that included faculty, students, and the governor of Massachusetts, the twenty-year-old Thoreau took the podium to denounce the “blind and unmanly love of wealth ” that characterized America’ s commercial spirit, urging in its place a cultivation of the “moral affections ” requisite for independence. “The order of things should be somewhat reversed, ” he insisted. “The seventh should be man’ s day of toil, wherein to earn his living by the sweat of his brow; and the other six his Sabbath of the affections and the soul,—in which to range this widespread garden, and drink in the soft inﬂuences and sublime revelations of nature. ”

Thoreau may have had the year’ s economic downturn in mind. Unchecked speculation over westward expansion had combined with widespread crop failures to produce what was then the worst ﬁnancial panic in the nation’ s history. In later years, several Boston Transcendentalists—the labor-class champion and Thoreau’ s early mentor Orestes Brownson among them—would condemn the vagaries of the market and advocate the reorganization of society on a more equitable basis. But what is notable about Thoreau’ s speech is his focus on individual reformation and communion with nature. Eight years later, at Walden Pond, he would conduct an experiment in deliberate living—what his most recent biographer, Laura Dassow Walls, calls “a sacred commitment to confront…the conditions of possibility for life itself. ” But as early as the summer of 1837, Thoreau had retreated for six weeks with his friend Charles Wheeler to a makeshift hut by Flint’ s Pond, in nearby Lincoln, where they loafed at their ease, reading and conversing, or simply letting their thoughts drift amid the splendors of the season’ s foliage. Far from an evolving worldview, Thoreau’ s independence and love for the natural world were evident prior to his graduation from Harvard.

The ever-present risk when writing about Thoreau is that of reducing him to the two experiences for which he is best remembered: his twenty-six months living at Walden Pond, during which time he produced his ﬁrst book and much of the manuscript that would become Walden, and the night he spent in Concord jail for refusing to pay his poll tax in protest against the American war with Mexico. Walls laments how successive generations “have invented two Thoreaus, both of them hermits… .One speaks for nature; the other for social justice, ” and sets about dispelling the myth that Thoreau lived the life of an antisocial outsider.

Walls is additionally concerned with situating that life in geological time, emphasizing Thoreau’s exposure to the beginning of the Anthropocene epoch, the period referred to by scientists as the moment humans began to physically alter the planet through industrial activity. “For 11,000 years, ” she notes, “indigenous people adapted to [the] evolving landscape, ” but by Thoreau’ s time Americans had begun adapting the landscape to suit their needs as consumers and producers in an expanding market economy. The Concord railroad arrived in 1844, cutting past a corner of Walden Woods the year before Thoreau moved to the pond. Everywhere trees were being cleared for lumber, causing drainage and irrigation problems. When traveling up Maine’ s Penobscot River in a birchbark canoe, Thoreau observed ﬁrsthand the profusion of sawmills and lumber camps that comprised part of the “great machine ” of modern industry steadily permeating the region’ s uninhabited wilderness. No matter how far he penetrated the wild, the “trail of the white man ” often remained frustratingly evident. By contrast, and in closer keeping with his ideal, Thoreau cherished the quiet hours at Walden where “each night he fell asleep to the sounds of wind and wild animals, and each dawn he awoke to a world humans did not dominate. ”

Walls writes with a clear passion for her subject, but her prose is often marred by the unfortunate tendency to round off paragraphs with a ﬂowery lyricism, such as her description of Thoreau’ s time at Walden as a move “to his house of one, out on the shore among the pines that made the drapery of his dreams. ” She tends to employ frequent hyperbole, as in her description of Thoreau as “the one person in America who could make poetry and science not two things but one, ” or her claim that “no American writer is more place centered than Thoreau, ” and that to take him away from Concord would make him “a different person. ” This latter point would be true of any American writer: it is difﬁcult to imagine the same Emily Dickinson on one of Herman Melville’ s whaling vessels, just as it is to think of Melville living as a recluse in Amherst. At times the hyperbolic slips into the nonsensical, as when Thoreau’ s original draft of Walden is described as “a book about nature, ” but its later revision becomes “a book that would be nature. ” This attempt to gild every lily results in an unevenness of tone that tends to diminish, rather than enhance, the natural grandeur of an already grand subject.

More problematic is Walls’ s attempt to “bring Thoreau alive for our time, ” a narrative strategy that runs the risk of personalizing Thoreau beyond historic proportion, seeing in him a part of ourselves, or ourselves as the future embodiment of ideas he helped popularize. It is dubious, for instance, that Thoreau’ s time at Walden Pond “became and would forever remain an iconic work of performance art ”; that “from then on, there would [be] no casual meetings with Henry T ” because he had become a “product of modern commerce and communications: a celebrity. ” Nothing in the historical record suggests Thoreau saw himself as undertaking a performance in this sense, nor that others saw him that way. Rather, Walls imposes a contemporary understanding of art and celebrity on the cultural milieu of the 1840s. It is true that many of Concord’ s citizens thought Thoreau an oddity, and his time at Walden may have encouraged that impression. But this is a far cry from claiming Thoreau’ s status as a proto-celebrity in the twenty-ﬁrst-century sense. If anyone was a celebrity in Concord at the time, it was a more established ﬁgure like Emerson, who, precisely because of his public lecturing and publications, was popular across America and well known in Europe. Thoreau’ s life was lived in relative obscurity, his reputation only enhanced after his death.

More in keeping with the subtlety of the man, Walls takes note of Thoreau’ s “many-sided, paradoxical ” nature. Emerson also identiﬁed his friend’ s tendency to become most conversationally alive when challenging the convictions of others, and the impression was seconded by Margaret Fuller’ s younger brother Richard, who traveled with Thoreau on his walk to Wachusett: “Thoreau abounded in paradox. This led me to review the grounds of opinion rather than change them. I saw it was his humor, and his vane would whip around and set in the opposite quarter if the world should conform to his statements. ” Thoreau adopted this oppositional stance not only with others but also toward himself; in a way, he was never at rest. Known for walking at least four hours a day, Thoreau’ s mind was also in daily motion. He lived by the searching stride of the philosopher, most alive when not at peace, always questioning his own presumptions to opinion, having taken permanent residence in a dueling, inner space resonant with the capacity for entertaining contradiction, what Keats immortalized as an expression of “Negative Capability. ”

This sensibility led Thoreau to draw conclusions scarcely approached by most others. Walls relates how his 1846 hike up Maine’ s Mount Katahdin “deepened his sense of kinship with the physical world around him. ” She deﬁnes this moment as “a revolution in his consciousness, ” but it may be better understood as a solidifying of his previous thinking. In 1837, Thoreau’s observation of recurrent patterns in nature led him to postulate that both leaves and ice crystals “were the creatures of but one law. ” He expanded this idea in his 1842 “Natural History of Massachusetts ” to ponder: “Would it not be as philosophical as convenient to consider all growth, all ﬁlling up within the limits of nature, but a crystallization more or less rapid? ” Before Darwin, Thoreau was attempting to understand the relations between disparate forms of matter—and, before modern-day cognitive science, the relation between the workings of his own mind and the material world. This urge to uncover a primary substance, or force, is as old as Thales and the pre-Socratics, and it was no more original to human thought than it was revolutionary to Thoreau in 1846 when he hiked Mount Katahdin.

Of greater interest is just how radically Thoreau’ s thinking contrasted with that of his contemporaries. Congregationalists and Transcendentalists of all stripes feared what a mechanized universe implied for the signiﬁcance of human life and the possibility for morality. The Unitarian James Freeman Clarke had discouraged all efforts “to explain soul out of sense ” by “deducing mind from matter. ” Similarly, Orestes Brownson explained his purpose in launching the new Boston Quarterly Review as “seeking something profounder and more inspiring than the heartless sensualism of the last century ”—that is, the eighteenth century of Enlightenment. The Trinitarian James Marsh provides an effective summary of the period’ s general anxiety: “So long as we hold the [empirical] doctrines of Locke and the Scottish metaphysicians, ” we can “make and defend no essential distinctions between that which is natural and that which is spiritual, ” nor “even ﬁnd rational grounds for the feeling of moral obligation. ”

Thoreau rejected the claustrophobic methods of these theologically inspired thinkers. What is more, through daily, intimate communication with nature, he personalized and made emotionally vital what to other Transcendentalists remained a mere abstraction: nature as a “symbol ” of the divine. In his ﬁrst book, Emerson had written that “nature is the symbol of spirit. ” Thoreau countered, in his own ﬁrst book, “Is not Nature, rightly read, that of which she is commonly taken to be the symbol merely? ” He possessed an Aristotelian devotion to the concrete study of nature, at variance with Emerson’ s Platonic ﬂights of symbolic fancy.

Yet all the while, Thoreau never lost his sense of awe toward himself as a participant in the natural world. “How much virtue there is in simply seeing, ” he marveled. “What a piece of wonder a river is. ” And he never pitted the sublimity of conscious experience against his empiricism. Following his trip to Katahdin he wrote, “I stand in awe of my body, this matter to which I am bound has become so strange to me. ” And again, “What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries! ” Thoreau ultimately concludes that “all material things are in some sense man’ s kindred, and subject to the same laws with him. ” By collapsing the Cartesian categories separating “spirit ” and “matter, ” Thoreau anticipates Whitman’ s all-encompassing humanism in “Song of Myself”: “For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. ”

It is an American misfortune that Thoreau continues to be academically neglected in favor of his more famous European contemporaries. Aside from the occasional course in nineteenth-century history or early American philosophy, he is barely read beyond “Civil Disobedience ” and excerpts from Walden. As a celebration of Thoreau’ s life and ideas, Walls’ s book is a welcome counterweight to many years of scholastic neglect. In his eulogy for Thoreau, Emerson anticipated how his friend’ s death would be little noted but long remembered: “the country knows not yet, or in the least part, how great a son it has lost. ” Emerson implied that the nation would eventually come to value Thoreau’ s considerable gifts, not least among them his contribution to American literature.

April 2019. This review is forthcoming in Chicago Review 62.1/2/3.

Jeff Hilson, Latanoprost Variations

Boiler House Press, 2017. 80 pp. £10.

Reviewed by Colin Lee Marshall

Jeff Hilson has always been funny. From the anacoluthic mash-up of Stretchers to the ribald sonneteering of In the Assarts, his work tends to elicit laughter more frequently than is typical for poetry. Hilson’ s most recent outing, Latanoprost Variations, continues this trend in striking fashion. Perhaps the least funny thing about the book is its title. For the uninitiated, “Latanoprost ” likely sounds both occlusive and harsh, lacking the kind of euphony that might ingratiate it to us in lieu of sense. Hilson seems aware of this, mindfully elucidating the word in a note at the end of the book:

The title is not supposed to be obscure or misleading but it could be construed as both of these. “Latanoprost ” is the name of a topical eye drop used to treat various forms of glaucoma and I found it printed on a cheap plastic pen in the ﬂat of a friend I had recently moved in with, under the bed in fact.

As we learn what the word means, it oscillates for a moment as a kind of lexical pharmakon—as both the cause of a scotoma in the visual/semantic ﬁeld and as the very remedy for this scotoma. This dichotomy is in some ways relevant to the book as a whole.

The ﬁrst thing that the reader notices about the poetry is its formal boldness, with most of the poems being longish, justiﬁed prose blocks that dispense entirely with punctuation. Thereafter, it quickly becomes clear that Latanoprost Variations is an intensely monomaniacal text. Gone are the farragoes of material that characterize much of Hilson’ s earlier work, and instead the poetry is marked at every turn by obsessive repetition and elaboration. Despite this newfound insularity, though, the poems are less about their given subjects than they are roundabout them, tantalized by propositions that are constantly knocked widdershins by the absence of punctuation. Below is an excerpt from the book’ s opener, “The Incredible Canterbury Poem ”:

if you listened to the kinks heres an album you might not liken if you liken the kinks try the cure if you liken marvin gaye we recommend dean martin you listened to the talking heads check out caravan you listened to boards of canada and aphex twins heres an album you might not liken since you listened to the talking heads you might liken this new release by comus

The suggestions and imperatives spool out beyond the moment of their expected terminus, becoming hilariously lost in the unchecked generativity of algorithmic recommendation. The poem is thus resistant to convincing intonation or scanning, instead approximating a kind of text-to-voice unheimlich, one utterly germane to the subject matter of robotically corralled data anthropomorphized in the service of add-to-cart consumerism. The “Canterbury ” of the title refers to the Canterbury scene—a progressive rock subgenre, some of whose associated artists are mentioned throughout. However, the poem is also relentlessly glitch-rich, recommending S Club 7 to fans of Gang of Four, repeatedly mis-pluralizing Aphex Twin, and otiosely suggesting bands that we might not “liken. ” By thus foregrounding the system’ s errancy, Hilson sets the poem up as a rebuke to the kind of accelerationism that—at its most extreme—would cede the human to the technological singularity.

So blatant a mechanization under the veneer of the human is uncanny—a weirdly inverted example of Bergson’ s description of the comic as “something mechanical encrusted upon the living. ” The danger is that such machinic churning might become too funny, automated to such a degree that the living component that makes the laughter possible disappears, leaving us with nothing but a cachinnating clockwork jester. And yet, such excess is precisely what makes the humor of Latanoprost Variations so vital. At no point are we afforded a cathartic discharge of pent-up psychic energy à la Freud, but are instead left to tarry with the surplus.

Under the weight of such surplus, poetry cannot but appear strange. The book’ s third poem, “A False Botanic—Forensic Poem for February, ” reads like a cross between a creation myth and a botanical detective story, one whose shifting quest object is never found:

As I walked out in the morning on the ﬁrst day looking for the early gentian I didnt ﬁnd it in the morning instead I found an allis shad

Even if we don’ t quite get the joke, we quickly work out its mechanics: on each day, a new trouvaille stands in for the sought-for botanical object. Despite variations in the supposititious objects and in the syntax, each reiteration of the failed quest narrative essentially follows the same logical structure, meaning that any given proposition reads almost like a synecdoche of the entire narrative. This conceit of torturous repetition—which runs throughout the book—manages to remain funny throughout, while simultaneously feeling excessive, uncontainable. Indeed, in the case of the duo “Poem About Grounds ” and “Another Poem About Grounds, ” such uncontainability becomes blatantly indexical, mocking the very idea of titular circumscription. The ﬁrst of these poems is ostensibly about British football grounds, while the second is ostensibly about pleasure grounds. However, these relationships become upended in a rich antanaclasis of grounds and groundedness. On what grounds are we entitled or urged to interpret the poems? How grounded are they in their subject matter?

Perhaps the best interrogation of grounds, however, is the magniﬁcently titled “Optotypical Poem Including Art Garfunkel. ” On top of evoking optometric testing, “Optotypical ” reads as an ingenious political neologism, one that rings simultaneously progressive and reactionary by interrogating the conventional gaze and collapsing back into it. The poem’ s sign off, “after all the eyes are ﬁne, ” preserves this tension, both depathologizing all aberrant gazes and giving the particular gaze the all clear. In between, we get a febrile meditation on the excessive difﬁculty of looking at Art Garfunkel, who has only “approximate values in the observed spectrum. ” This visual amorphousness ungrounds the epistemology of the biographical gaze, rendering conﬁdent declarations such as “[he] is not a songwriter & really only an eccentric anomaly ” tenuous. The fraught “optotypical ” gaze runs through the poem in a mise en abyme that frames Keats, Garfunkel, and the narrator. Doubtless, the reader is also part of this “optotypical ” arrangement, a fumbling art sleuth in pursuit of an ever-diffuse protagonist (one who is named “Art, ” no less).

The ﬁnal poem of part one, the not-quite-aptly titled “A Final Poem With Full Stops, ” takes a major and shudder-inducing turn. Below is the opening of the poem, including its epigraph:

These deaths are not inevitable.
—The Human Cost of Fortress Europe, Amnesty International

suicide. suicide by drowning or suicide by hanging. suicide by jumping off a bridge. & died. roma. died or killed. died in a ﬁre. died jumping from a train. & drowned. reportedly. run over by a car reaching the italian beach. & drowned.

The sequential ambience of the poem’ s placement in so funny a book is immediately unsettling. A total volte-face into full stops starkly arrests the freedom of movement that characterized the previous poems, setting up textual borders as sites of unceremonious detention in a way that formally alludes to the wider concerns of the poem’ s harrowing subject matter. As with the rest of the book, the poem bulges with excess, even if in an affectively far different manner than previously. We can read the litany of deaths as an unﬂinching rebuttal of the epigraph: in a climate of unconcern or political dereliction, these deaths are inevitable. As though hammering the point home, the deaths seem to exceed themselves, either involving a conjunctive superﬂuity (“suicide by jumping off a bridge. & died ”) or unfolding in an impossibly composite fashion (“died jumping from a train. & drowned ”). But amidst the thanatological excess is also something like the opposite: a rhetorical erasure of individual death. Because not a single victim’ s name is given in the poem, the reader is forced to recognize a pernicious surplus, a relentless cataloguing that, rather than being ethically additive, progressively attenuates the migrant subject. Our duty, one would imagine, is to somehow retrieve the human from the mere cumulative facticity of clinical reportage.

One might have expected the book to end on this powerfully solemn note. However, the excess only continues. Part two’ s sole poem, “The Incredible DIY Poem, ” reprises “The Incredible Canterbury Poem ” almost verbatim, excising the artist names to leave a series of Shandean lacunae for the reader to ﬁll in. We are then treated to the paralipomena “Latanoprost Variations (Abandoned) ” in the tripartite third to ﬁfth section. Appended to the end of the book is a separate section called “Slates 1 & 2, ” a series of childishly scrawled micro-poems written in response to the Iraq War, their twee redactions and doodles evoking a discomfort not dissimilar to that of “A Final Poem With Full Stops. ” Latanoprost Variations is a great book. However, it is far too much to hold. Laughter is always to some degree too much. Hilson knows and shows this as well as anyone.

January 2019. This review is forthcoming in Chicago Review 62.1/2/3.

Helen DeWitt, Some Trick: Thirteen Stories

New Directions, 2018. 224pp. $22.95.

Reviewed by Ben Merriman

Critics were quick to identify the most obvious virtues of Some Trick. Helen DeWitt is funny. She is perhaps the most broadly learned fiction writer working in English today, and folds this knowledge into her work in a way that warmly reminds the reader of the pleasures of learning. In distinction to conventional short stories whose primary achievement is to establish a mood, her stories are actually about something. Rather, they are about a few things, all likely to be resonant with her readers: selfish men and the women they underestimate; trying to get money, and feeling the lack of it; and the difficulty of doing honest, intellectually meaningful work in a world ruled by money and men. That the collection is full of stories that are at once funny, smart, and serious is more than enough reason for a critic to praise it—and for a potential reader to buy it, right now.

The stories so reliably deliver up enjoyment that the first wave of effusive reviews often overlooked a deeper literary game in Some Trick: the collection extends DeWitt’s development (or revival) of forms through which literature can explore ideas—not, in fact, an easy thing to bring off. The common means for working overtly intellectual content into prose fiction are somewhat limited and limiting. Contemporary authors regularly give themselves space to explore ideas by suspending core narrative conventions of realism. But the high modernist and postmodernist canon is filled with works that leave the reader (at least, this reader) with the sour feeling that their main achievement is to flaunt the author’s knowledge, though this may say more about the egos of the authors than the possibilities of postmodernism. For those who abide by the basic expectations of psychological realism, there cannot be much gap between ideas and characters having ideas. This pairing is often clumsy: each season brings a new harvest of favorably noticed but inert novels in which a smart protagonist walks around a big city thinking smart thoughts, or sits at a desk struggling to write while thinking smart thoughts.

DeWitt is regularly characterized as an unconventional author, but she defies conventions with remarkable economy. Critics, for instance, often note the unusual sorts of knowledge that DeWitt introduces into her fiction: quotations in foreign languages, mathematical formulae, or, in “My Heart Belongs to Bertie,” some basic ideas about statistical probability with supporting visualizations and R code. But these matters are not digressions introduced by DeWitt—their presence in her work is a natural outgrowth of her creation of intelligent, curious characters. Further, DeWitt’s stories unfold in relatively orderly worlds recognizably like our own, in approximately chronological order, as conveyed to the reader by trustworthy and unobtrusive narrators. Her work’s formal originality grows almost wholly from a break with two conventions. It does not embrace the tenets, central to post-Flaubertian realism (including much of contemporary American fiction), that fiction should have a carefully established, stable tone, or tell something just the right way once and only once. Her rejection of these norms is emphatic. As Edmond Caldwell noted in Chicago Review, DeWitt’s Lightning Rods, superficially a satire of American business culture, is at a deeper level a biting parody of the editorial and critical expectation that a novel should be neatly structured and uniform in tone, and that an author, having once succeeded with a style or form, ought not to develop any other.

DeWitt has not been satisfied to do something once. She repeats and permutes freely, and it is permutation that affords such a wide scope for developing ideas without reducing fiction to a vehicle for advancing any definite claim. This is apparent, first, across the whole body of work she has published to date. Some Trick explores the same handful of themes as her other works—the novels The Last Samurai, Lightning Rods, and the hard-to-find Your Name Here, as well as other published stories not included in this collection. Her individual books, too, repeat and vary episodes and forms.

In The Last Samurai, DeWitt’s first and best-known work, many things happen over and over. In the first half of the book, its two brilliant principal characters, single mother Sibylla and her son Ludo, ride London’s Circle Line around and around. Sibylla watches Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai again and again on the VCR. Her job—endless in-home transcription of back issues of hobby magazines—is a nightmare of fruitless repetition. In the second half of the book, Ludo, disappointed by the mediocrity of his biological father, sets out to convince more interesting men that he is their long-lost son. He collects a few, with varying, always fascinating outcomes. (I would willingly have read two dozen versions of the story “Ludo Acquires a New Father.”) In its free, graceful engagement with the ideas of the human and natural sciences, The Last Samurai calls to mind the fiction of Enlightenment figures such as Diderot. In form, it recalls a different pre-realist novelistic tradition: it is remarkably like the picaresque, which accumulated narrative episodes ad libitum, and particularly recalls works such as Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, a deceptively well-plotted work revolving around the title character’s uncertain parentage.

At the conclusion of the novel, Ludo commissions a pianist to make a recording of nothing but variations of a short composition. Some Trick is, like that recording, a catalogue of variations on several themes, most obviously artistic integrity. The unnamed painter in “Brutto” labors over dozens of ugly East German–style dresses after attracting the interest of smooth art world operator Adalberto; before the end of the story she is no longer painting, but collecting jars of her various bodily fluids for a series of prestigious exhibitions. The story warns: “if you have never been there you think it is easy to walk away.” The author Peter (no last name given), cannot persuade the dim-witted agent Jim of the promise of working mathematics into fiction, and strikes out on his own; his guiding light will be Andrew Gelman, a famous (and famously scrupulous) Bayesian statistician. The author Eloise, forever reworking her first novel according to the ever-shifting preferences of agents and editors, disappears from the narrative. The Dutch author Peter Dijkstra, a man with fragile mental health and limited social graces, tries to capitalize on American enthusiasm for his work without being destroyed by the crassly economic form this enthusiasm assumes. The author Jaap Bergsma, a master of self-sabotage, nonetheless gets the “crap-free deal” he so desired for his work. The world-famous pianist Morhange, after nearly a decade in the artistic wilderness, saves himself by taming his ego; Pete the rocker walks away from stardom with no regrets; the drummer Keith O’Connor kills himself. The photographer Plantinga, by her studied avoidance of formal training, winds up with both worldly success and a true education.

Any of these stories, read singly, could be taken as a sort of parable about intellectual virtue, or an allegory of DeWitt’s own experience as a writer. But taken together, they offer no very firm moral about honest work, and vary widely in tone, pace, and outcome. “Brutto” is an incremental descent into a personal inferno, while “On the Town” is a Panglossian whirlwind. Sometimes the artists are right to stick to their principles, sometimes they are not. Very often, chance simply offers something good or ill. The formal approach of theme and variations, above all, allows DeWitt to explore the role of accidents, chance, and probability in life, with the firm implication that thinking seriously about chance will unsettle common modes of moral reasoning, as well as fictional conventions. If things can turn out many ways, there is not one correct way to tell a story, but a plurality of forms, styles, and outcomes, all interesting and mutually enriching.

The formal approach of theme and variations has another happy result: it is one that appears to admit of further development, perhaps indefinitely. DeWitt has long professed her interest in finding ways to integrate probability and statistics, data visualization, and social science into fiction. Some Trick makes modest, engaging moves in this direction, and readers should take care not to be impressed too early: DeWitt certainly has some more tricks up her sleeve.

January 2019. This review is forthcoming in Chicago Review 62.1/2/3.

Lisa Jeschke, The Anthology of Poems by Drunk Women

Materials, 2018. 41pp. £5.

Lisa Jeschke and Lucy Benyon, The Tragedy of Theresa May

Tipped Press, 2018. 44pp. £5.50.

Lisa Jeschke and Lucy Benyon, David Cameron: A Theatre of Knife-Songs

Shit Valley, 2015. 23pp. $6.

Reviewed by Sam Rowe

The first poem in Lisa Jeschke’s The Anthology of Poems by Drunk Women begins as a romantic ode to masculine creativity: the mother of an “infant sun,” a solar bundle of joy and phallic potential, sings the praises of her offspring. The poem then takes an abrupt turn: “She cut off the boy’s tongue.” The voice of masculine individualism, neutered, makes way for the collective, erratic voice indicated by the chapbook’s title. This reverse Philomela narrative captures much about Jeschke’s work, which is feminist, anti-fascist, often violent or obscene, and wincingly funny. Her verse, sometimes messy and troubling but never boring, aims not at transcendence but at the cringe and nervous chuckle. It finds the tender spots in gender, ethnic, and class politics and tweaks them raw. Jeschke’s pedigree in both the Cambridge school and experimental theater lends her verse an unusual balance of tendencies, the recondite opacity of Prynne and company blended with an explosive, scrappy exuberance. With her theatrical collaborator Lucy Beynon, she has produced a scathing attack on each of the two recent Tory prime ministers, while Anthology, a solo chapbook out this year from Materials, demonstrates her lyric talents.

Many of the poems in Anthology fall under the shadow of the nationalist turn in European politics, particularly the June 2016 Brexit referendum and the surge of the fascist Alternative für Deutschland party in the October 2017 German elections. (Jeschke is British-educated and lives in Munich.) Jeschke has a gift for political slogan, as in an untitled poem addressed to the AfD:

Rather groped in Cologne
Than marry a man
That’s my New Year’s
Resolution.

(The reference is to the 2015 incident, seized on by the transatlantic right, in which groups of migrant men sexually assaulted women at New Year’s Eve festivities.) This fierce poem takes aim at both spaces indicated by the word “domestic”: that of conjugal coupledom and that of the ethnically exclusionary nation. Against the false choices proposed by the Islamophobic right, it raises a middle finger to both patriarchy and ethnic nationalism.

A poem called “Eurotrash” addresses the Brexit referendum in the Wordsworthian form of the poem of encounter. Walking in London on June 25, 2016 (two days after the referendum), Jeschke reports encountering “a monstrous maiden bumhole…clearly drunk, definitely from the EU.” This foreign national (who, it emerges, is the German-dwelling Jeschke herself) offers a commentary on the recent political upheaval in the form of a proper British drinking song:

I want to drink with Bóris, I want to drink with Nígel,
I want to drown in the sea!

Me!

They would get some beers We would get the sea!

See!

A longing for bar-side companionship with the good old boys of British nationalism transmutes here into the fate of all too many migrants vanished into the drink. During the European migrant crisis, the sea has reemerged as a terrible barrier between the Global North and South, whether in the form of the Mediterranean charnel house or the heavily guarded tunnel under the English Channel. Britain, blessed plot and island fortress, will keep its warm, flat beer to itself. The rest can drink brine.

Jeschke is at her most lyrical when attacking such nationalist chauvinism. “Neither to Swallow to Life nor to Death” is a debate with a “quite cool young / ID-Burger,” someone “whose ID is acceptable / At border control” and “public bathroom,” but also, evidently, an “identitarian.” Against Herr ID-Burger’s proposal to “make sure the future will be the pseudo-pseudo- pseudo past / At last,” Jeschke counters:

yes, I do, actively,
Want my arm to lie in the puddle over there,
To be with others, including all brothers,
And my throat elsewhere across this winter’s desert
In the place where I work
To speak with other others
And my torso to be stretched apart, yes I want that,
To fall apart into parts, TO HOLD LIMBS RELAXED,
HARD.

An other among other others, this gargantuan body sprawls across the landscape, including the “puddle” of, perhaps, the Channel, Mediterranean, or Atlantic. This strange image of vitality in decomposition, of hardness in relaxation, evinces just the kind of xenophilia we need now.

Not all of Jeschke’s writing, however, is so inviting. Much of her poetry and drama engage in a tortured meditation on the idea of retributive political violence. In David Cameron: A Theater of Knife-Songs, Jeschke and Beynon offer a kind of cabaret of edgy political monologues, many of them exploring the poetics of revanchism. In a particularly difficult passage, Beynon muses about the possibility of responding to David Cameron’s Tory ministry with a sexual assault, only to pull back: “So, to conclude, I don’t think raping David Cameron would work. / Besides, I sort of love him. He’s so clear. He’s like, the Zeitgeist.” In response to Cameron’s politics of austerity, Jeschke and Beynon veer into exceedingly dark territory, trying to maintain a delicate balance between the fantasy of violence and its disavowal.

In a co-written poem in Anthology, Jeschke and Beynon take a similar line on Cameron’s successor on Downing Street, Theresa May:

Theresa May is not a cunt
Theresa May is not a cunt
Theresa May is not a cunt
Theresa May is a well-manned process which administrates
to maintain all aspects of the total motion-
sensored death pledge. I can’t describe how hard
I want her dead. Not biology-dead (being JUST
hardcoreficktion) but the death of the office her
body is

In response to May’s pandering to the xenophobic hard right, Jeschke and Beynon call for violence directed not at May’s person but at the form of power invested in her person. In thus differentiating the prime minister’s two bodies, they attempt to differentiate the threat of physical violence (present in their writing as “hardcoreficktion”) from the threat of radical nonviolent change. The line they walk here is very thin. One does not necessarily leave a reading of Jeschke and Beynon’s work thinking that bloody revanchism, however hedged, is the rhetorical mode the left needs now.

Jeschke and Beynon’s most recent collaboration is The Tragedy of Theresa May, a Beckettian dialogue between Ute, a professional Theresa May impersonator, and Volker, her poorly paid employee and lover.[1] (The gender of neither character is entirely clear, but I’ll refer to both as “she.”) Theresa May is a more focused piece than David Cameron, and potentially minable for good political slogans (notably: “I am a woman and I need to eat”). The piece begins with Ute, played by Beynon, belting out Tammy Wynette’s “Stand by Your Man,” and proceeds to dwell on the associated themes of intimacy, gender, power, and submission. The lovers’ dialogue that follows is played with Ute upright and wearing a dour Theresa May mask, while Jeschke’s Volker performs on all fours and occasionally whinnies like a horse. As Ute demands a series of theatrical performances from her employee, work, sex, coercion, and animalization blend into one another. (Theresa May, fortuitously, was published within months of the release of Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You, another class-struggle-oriented farce in which—spoiler alert—working people are imagined as equine creatures.)

The play’s climax reverses this situation with an act of rhetorical class warfare. Ute’s questionable professional achievements (“I am a successful person, like, I am close to the top tier of impersonators, like, I am all but the real thing”) come under savage attack from Volker: “you are…you are… you are…a cheap imitation of Theresa May!…For what?…10p more each hour and a little more power?” Ute defends herself with a cringeworthy professional self-importance that may hit uncomfortably close to home for many middle-class strivers: “I’M THERESA MAY AND I HAVE A GOOD JOB!” Volker carries the day, but there may be some question as to whether she has chosen the right target: “I’ve killed my slightly richer tired sister!” Having attacked the petit-bourgeois “mini boss” rather than the real boss of whom she is a “cheap imitation,” Volker expires, unsure if she has truly liberated herself. Meanwhile Ute, in an epilogue, laments that she ever took the part of the ruling classes: “I should never have played May!” If Theresa May is a call to rhetorical arms, then, it is also a meditation on the ambiguity of class struggle in an age of white-collar downward mobility.

Jeschke and Beynon’s work flags a potential path forward for political poetry. It is neither fully in nor fully out of the vernacular, and is somehow both crass and difficult. Against the ever-present Adornian temptation to think that poetry is implicitly political, Jeschke and Beynon seem to think that it must be made so. The genres that flourish in their writing are therefore the genres of political discourse: the slogan, the smear, the demand, the declaration of solidarity. Unlike some pundits, however, they know both how to throw a hard punch and how to envision a better world. As Jeschke puts it: “Toilets for all!! / NO BORDERS!!!”

Note:
[1] Volker’ s name carries an inscrutable collection of associations: the derivation from das Volk immediately invokes National Socialism, and perhaps the contemporary German far right, but also identifies Volker as a stand in for working people. For American readers, at least, the name may also evoke the politically ambiguous figure of Paul Volcker, an early pioneer of monetary austerity in the Carter and Reagan administrations and a sharp critic of investment banks in the Obama administration.

January 2019. This review is forthcoming in Chicago Review 62.1/2/3.

Keston Sutherland, Poetical Works 1999–2015

Enitharmon Press, 2015. 382 pp.

Reviewed by Julian Murphet

Keston Sutherland’ s Poetical Works—along with M. NourbeSe Philip’ s Zong! and Sean Bonney’ s Letters Against the Firmament—immediately takes its place among the most essential works of literature in English in this new millennium. A collection of this size and stature does more than mark a moment of consolidation, more than announce an oeuvre. It provides a framework within which to consider and appraise a series of determinate movements within the work—from “early ” to “late, ” from minor to major, from Cambridge to Brighton—that may hitherto have escaped detection. Bound within the pages of a single volume, the poems form new constellations and unguessed-at afﬁnities, both among themselves and with other works. Deﬁnite shifts in aesthetic temperament and vocal suppleness, clear breaks in the development of Sutherland’ s poetics, become clear alongside his more abiding commitments and passions.

In broad outline, three periods emerge: the Cambridge years, deﬁned by the young poet’ s precocious lyricism and awry grammar; the period of transition, marked by the publication of his major long poems Hot White Andy and Stress Position (and including the brilliant satire of Neocosis), their growing interest in metrical-syllabic prose; and the fully mature rhapsodic phase of The Odes to TL61P, with its fascinating prelude The Stats on Inﬁnity, which mark an epochal shift into block writing. Each period has its distinct pleasures and demands, and yet there are enough consistencies—of diction, syntactic torsion, tone, and voice—to navigate a movement through them that attends to their broader evolutionary arc. Neither is that arc merely autobiographical; for this is a collection that, alongside its authorial interests, tells a powerful story about the fate, and the conditions, of lyric poetry in the age of universal commodiﬁcation—and amid its rising waves of dissent and revolutionary rage.

Sutherland’ s inveterate lyricism is glimpsed in a strophe like this (from “Dildo Ode ”):

The standpoint
of limbs in a ﬂood of hate for their
own your life
tag in
raptorial total orgasm and living riotous joy
at kicking the faked edge of a life in
commodity-sepia to hell and knowing it
is a dream only in the crassest last fantasies.

This is the body convulsing, writhing in extorted Rimbaldian jouissance, under the asphyxiating pressures of a world devoid of real satisfactions. Moments such as this punctuate the often bafﬂing semio-tectonics of Sutherland’ s lyric forms, and reset the nature of our attention to them under familiar romantic auspices. Yet just as often, the lyric affect has been so scrambled, subject to such a terrible vivisection, that it seems to have succumbed to scabrous negation. In the early long poem “Mincemeat Seesaw ” (1999), nuggets of William Wordsworth are intercut with the language of market reports:

a secular upward trend in vapid glee
  as ﬂowers their idle sweets exhale, relays
love to the fathomed packhorse so-and-so,
  the bees drowse out, investment peaks and suds
of gamer prattle spray from washed-out mouths,
  the grace of trended variables to be borne
not of yourselves

This satiric tendency grows stronger across Sutherland’ s career, preserving fossils of lyric grace within the ﬂaccid ambient textures of a prosaic lowest common denominator. But in the early work in particular there is a countervailing (and extremely productive) interest in the ability to forge a new kind of lyric music out of paragrammaticality or the appearance of glossolalia. Here is a passage from “A Hyena Asleep in a Willow, ” from 2003’s The Rictus Flag :

But,
with the electrons unionized,
fate bent on tongue-ionamines, a fountain
of smoke rakes through, bit-necked
altruism under the stars weigh up chitin on
event speech blackout. You are as
such precise in having gone to die event peed.

The periods shimmer with a rhythmic energy triggered by the loosening of grammatical strings. The pulse from part of speech to part of speech is rendered ecstatic. In a typical clause there is a single pivot, the verb, around which everything turns; and metrical stresses typically gravitate to those pivots. But in Sutherland’ s sentences, meter is almost fatally compromised, and there are multiple, undecidable joints; the syntax is more like a serpentine vertebral column, sprung and rangy, than a purposeful pair of pliers applied to meaning. The sense is of omnipresent invisible and inaudible ellipses, an inscrutable tectonics of voices, tones, moods, and styles, working its way out underneath the familiar spill of stanzas and lines. It’ s grammar “ratcheted up to wring the cortex dry ” (Stress Position). Sometimes the cadences resolve these torsions of syntax into moments of exquisite aesthetic composure, as in “The Food at Alcove One ”:

where love alone shines in beauty, and the liver
waits agape on brass for its ﬂame, and is licked
forever by that ﬂame like a mirror by your eyelids.

More often the cadence too is implicated in the manias of the difference engine, wrenched out of true by a bit of ﬂying verbal debris or the vulgar recrudescence of a sniggering schoolboy plumpes Denken.

Take that triple-barreled noun phrase, “event speech blackout. ” A world that obliges us to credit such monstrous locutions as “Individual Asset Identiﬁer ” and “enterprise application architects ” (both from the Odes to TL61P) has already eroded the distinction between modiﬁer and noun, quality and thing, to the point of an irremediable dilution of language’ s referentiality, leaving epistemology and ontology awry. It is not unwarranted to seize hold of the logic of such nominal phrases, and apply it to other orders of experience. Sutherland’ s poetry is rife with grotesque noun-adjunct ganglions, where modiﬁcation is rendered hypertrophic: “lips-gear scalpel batter, ” for instance, or “love droid voice ”; “global badger-tetanus, ” “lie ﬂan debit mash liability, ” “beauty vanilla bonds, ” “Yakult / spine cooler, ” “carnauba wax rissole, ” and “elf neon crossbar. ” The ploy is at once hysterically funny and deadly serious; it shakes an apotropaic totem of verbal absurdity at capital’ s pitiless extinction of true names, even as it bundles nouns into new, untold composites that the poem’ s light must bend around.

Names, especially those proper nouns with which we populate the celestial sphere of our twenty-four-hour news cycle, stage a comeback in Sutherland’ s work as its satirical energies intensify. Hot White Andy is the transitional work in this and various other respects, and its dramatis personae include one Sergey Lavrov (Russian Foreign Minister), Andrey Vyshinsky (Stalinist state prosecutor), Akinsola Akinfemiwa (Chief Executive Ofﬁcer of Skye Bank PLC), comedian Lenny Henry, and the eponymous hero, Andy Cheng. The poem “Roger Ailes ” announces this new intensity of invective and vitriol—tempered by moments of ironic tenderness and intimacy—aimed at the directors and bit players of our world disorder, which is amply developed across the second half of the Poetical Works : Rupert Murdoch, Jeremy Hunt, Anders Hoegstroem (neo-Nazi thief of the Auschwitz Arbeit Macht Frei sign), “and other names besides, names to know and do. ” Against these satirized icons of neoliberal infamy, a Pynchonian counterforce assembles: Ali (Stress Position) is a vital persona, along with Gulnaz, Deborah, Stan, David, and other late survivors of the general wreckage. The growing tendency to name and shame the enemy is tempered by a will to characterize the resistance, to supply it with a “local habitation and a name, ” making the poems into contested force ﬁelds where antagonistic armies swirl and clash.

What some people like to call its “difﬁculty ” is this poetry’ s refusal—pace a growing number of clearer passages in the later work—to surrender to “the long arabesque of equivalence ” or the “rapture of transitivity. ” A poem is neither an anecdote, nor an argument, nor a description; or it is these things only in passing, in order to become something else. That something else—“a machine made of words, ” William Carlos Williams called it—obliges our language to become material in relation to itself, and critical in relation to social doxa. It cannot do this ex nihilo, but must work with the debased jargons of the public sphere—of advertising, politics, and the news, among others (Sutherland also likes instruction manuals). These materials cannot be circumvented or transcended; only by putting them under the most severe formal pressure can they begin to give up their truth content, which is ﬁnally us (dedicatee of Hot White Andy), in all our mediated, contradictory, and dissociated social relatedness. It is the purpose of radical poetry, not to compensate for or justify the wretched excuse for a world that capital has wrought, but to yield an image of its suffering social essence—of ourselves and our thwarted potentials, and all the horrors of our exploited ﬂesh—that we might reimagine and reenact this sociality in our own terms. Worrying that you aren’ t “getting it ” is part of the point.

A brief passage from Neutrality’ s (2004) “Ap Ob Nuat ” (a reference to the Thai “body to body ” massage industry) should indicate some of the demented energies at play throughout:

Evidence suggests that in the male guinea pig
you’ ve got plastic tits. Merely to harden th
blow not otherwise roughly squatted to, but in
they do peel off, any case of Muslim litter
heads cum vaginas trees etc. Corticosteroidal
punctuation id rips thus into buzz syntax, all for
you taking off
O common periplaneta
americana lipid, capital winged with awe
and shock to its hard bargain basement into
the foxholes dug in my face.

The ﬁrst line break here ramiﬁes a break in the syntactic order, as two sentence parts (one pedantically expert, the other colloquially rude) are yoked by violence together, establishing a hybrid discourse of scientiﬁc experimentation on animals and body modiﬁcation, which is taken up later in the “foxholes dug in my face ”—the additional military register of which also resonates with the “Muslim litter ” being strewn pornographically over the Middle East by “capital ” (ﬁgured as a common cockroach) “winged with awe / and shock ” (that linguistic detritus of the Bush regime). The sound texture is richly patterned throughout: the light i sounds of “pig, ” “tits, ” “id rips, ” “lipid, ” “syntax, ” and “winged ” chiming with the repeated preposition “in, ” and the unaccented syllable of “Muslim. ” This is threaded against a pervasive interest in the o sound, long and short, which gathers full steam in “corticosteroidal ” and “O common, ” and reaches a climax in “foxholes. ” The rhythm, beginning with those virtual back-to-back primus paeons, is tersely beaten against an underlying shift from trochaic to iambic feet, but constantly wrong-footing itself and jarring against all expectation.

Sutherland’ s lyrical gifts are immense. Giving them free reign would amount, however, to a travesty of the poetic vocation in a world that has butchered language in order to justify butchery. Staying true to the poetic task perversely entails its barbaric refutation, its exposure to immanent tortures by the jargons and cant of a torture-driven social order.

“A patriot is not a missile. ” Nihil Obstetrics Inc.
ACA NEWS: POMO DEBT FLOOR RISK (TW).

Rojarus.

Rojario climbs to his knees,
divine afﬂatus of EN 1783,
inwardly he kens himself the deputy April soot shower

Reading like a malfunctioning computer readout, such lines (from Hot White Andy) take to new lengths the Poundian tactic of extrinsic incorporation. But such ungainly verbal mannerisms are issued with the most painstaking attention to their sonic and rhythmic properties, nor has aesthetic pleasure been altogether obliterated from this verse’ s critical force ﬁelds.

The revisions Sutherland has made to Stress Position and The Stats on Inﬁnity for their inclusion in the Poetical Works are telling in this respect. One senses that each of these revisions has been determined by a scrupulous regard for aesthetic efﬁciency: eliminating redundancy, trimming proper nouns back to pronouns, improving the play of wit, and increasing the rhythmic intensity of the prosody. There is a powerful moment when, in the midst of articulating its speciﬁc vision of hell, Stress Position modulates into an unexpected love lyric. Here it’ s revealing to watch closely the changes. A stanza in the original ends:

was you until your head turned and your breathlessness lit me

But in the present collection, the line reads:

was you until your head turned and are you in breathless air

The unsatisfactory, halting music of the original is rendered into an epideictic hypallage; a poor cadence is remade into a vibrant sonic image of the thing being described—a mode of the beautiful itself, whose precious rarity in this long satanic ode requires careful cultivation.

Sutherland’ s cogent romantic strain is something he may have become less willing to permit himself, yet its intermittent upsurge, so much molten lava from the core of a mutilated subject, remains a powerful base element of his eclectic poetics, as in “Zeroes Galore ”:

what could this consciousness rise up
to annihilate in fatal and glorious sunlight,
by love bound together, the expugnation of all ﬁre.

Almost Blakean, this incandescent nihilism from love once found its outraged political expression in the closing pages of “Ejector Vacua Axle, ” where the poet issued his ﬁrst fully paraphraseable slab of polemical vers libre against the architects (and liberal apologists) of the War on Terror. But that more or less implicit defence of anti-imperialist violence from 2001 has been surgically removed from the version of the poem offered in the Poetical Works, for reasons that have everything to do with the evolution, not only of Sutherland’ s political ethics since that time, but of his poetics as well.

For Hot White Andy marks an epoch. That rather miraculous poem, now inextricable from its catalysing public readings, is (for want of a better analogy) Sutherland’ s “The Waste Land, ” marking a genuinely dialectical transformation of his increasingly satirical lyric art into something more capacious and arresting. Hot White Andy’ s many innovations—the deftly truncated lexemes, the computational glyphs, the name-dropping avuncularity of tone, and so on—merge in a self-pleasuring display of giddy release. The poem is itself formally heteroclite and polyphonic, moving through stage dialogue and short story modes, and lurching crazily from vicious satire to tender lyric in an arrhythmic heartbeat. All of which foments a new dispensation for the voice itself: as if the multiplication of modes and the unmooring of vocal discretion have allowed for an exponential expansion of horizons. The world feels larger after Hot White Andy, both in the extrinsic sense of the planetary political economy assailed by the poem, and in the immanent sense of an extensiﬁcation of poetic worldliness itself.

There is a minor movement in the later parts of the book toward a kind of meta-poetry, where individual poems begin to comment on their own forms and rhetorical operations. “The Food at Alcove One ” incorporates three moments of a “duck section ” that “comes later, ” then appears in the epode— ”strapped to the waist of a splitting duck / whose lids bat atavistically ”—then is subject to a set of ironic instructions on how one might parse it in a “meaning you / can own. ” This kind of thing happens again in the opening of Hot White Andy and elsewhere, an emphasis on the sheer liberty of the poem’ s ability to take x for y, which (under the mounting pressures of irony) turns darkly into its opposite: the more these poems authorize us to perform semantic reductions or metaphoric ﬂights, the less they seem willing to do anything but say exactly what they are. The growing tendency toward literalism and public address in the later work is a political countermeasure against the Munchausen bootstraps by which poetry is generally allowed to lift itself into signiﬁcance out of the mire of its own complicity: what Sutherland calls the “ethic fallacy. ”

But the most important formal development visible on the later pages of this volume concerns the relative, and perhaps permanent, eclipse of lineation in the poems. Beginning in Stress Position, continuing in “The Proxy Inhumanity of Forklifts ” and across the vast bulk of The Odes to TL61P, and culminating in the whole of the previously unpublished ﬁnal work, Jenkins, Moore and Bird, Sutherland has progressively extinguished the line break from his work. This is not to say that he has abandoned prosody as such, as there are extremely complex rhythmic and sonic textures fretted into the resulting prose-like monoliths of text, sometimes even rhyming tetrameters—but without lineation, it is as if a certain visual logic (of constipated blockage) has been suffered to usurp the exquisite sound patterns. So too the playful wit and ambiguity that gravitates to line endings, and the sensibility that goes with that, has been sacriﬁced to a much more explicit formal insistence on the literal sense of poetic language as a stream of lexical units. In a series of arresting theoretical speculations about this turn in his own (and many other British poets’ ) work, Sutherland has suggested that the speciﬁcally tubular form of what he calls “block poetry ”—its crammed compression into double-justiﬁed slabs of unbroken turgid ﬂow—entertains strong homologies with a number of interrelated phenomena: the experience of being “kettled ” by police during post-GFC protest marches; the latent opportunities for a more collective mode of subjective expression; and the omnipresent pressure of capitalism’ s value form on the human body’ s native elasticity. The consequent movement away from form as such arises from the relentless pressure placed upon the brittle foundations of “the tradition ” by the value-relation and its tendency to reduce all salience to a slurry of equivalence.

Yet the ﬁnal irony is that, over the length of this volume, one inescapable conclusion emerges: that Sutherland is the greatest living exponent of one form among the many that he has employed, and the greatest since W. H. Auden—namely, the ode. The ode, a mode of lyric to which he has returned with a symptomatic regularity that culminates in his stunning chef d’ oeuvre, The Odes to TL61P, suits Sutherland’ s talents better than any other form. It is the mode in which he has actuated the remarkable (and as yet unheralded) shift from coterie poet to public poet, honing a voice through which increasingly to inveigh, accuse, and anathematize the enemy, but also to celebrate, inspire, and commemorate the resistance. The ode is the most august of all forms of occasional verse; but what we mark most here is the shifting historical logic that has taken hold of the “occasion ” itself, from a punctual event massively resisted (the Iraq War) to a disseminated one (the daily extraction of surplus value in a context of crisis and the declining rate of proﬁt), and the consequent shift away from a robust subjective resilience in the face of imperial aggression, to a knowing acknowledgement of the “bloodless anathema ” that poetry must resemble under a recalibrated capitalism. What is to be done with the rise of any number of intervening mediations—institutional, structural, logical, and ideological—between the existential and the economic, in which welter the shape of the event, the occasion of exploitation, gets lost? The ode is the lyric mode in which these wracking contradictions between private agony and public disorder can best be squared. Sutherland, whose investment in the form crystallizes around Wordsworth’ s great Intimations Ode, is either going to have to adapt his block poetry to the imperatives of that mode, or use it to blast a way out of his kettled verbal masses. Or, like John Milton and Wordsworth before him, gravitate toward epic. The dramatic ﬁfteen-year evolution on display in this volume is enough to persuade us that he will succeed either way.

January 2019. This review is forthcoming in Chicago Review 62.1/2/3.

Mohammed Hanif, Red Birds

Bloomsbury, 2018. 304pp.

Reviewed by Kamil Ahsan

Momo, one of the three protagonists of the British-Pakistani writer Mohammed Hanif’s new novel Red Birds, is the sort of kid who delivers verdicts quickly and ruthlessly. “The international-aid types, nice-smelling do-gooders obviously were the biggest thieves of them all,” he opines, two paragraphs in. “But they did their paperwork. You see that crater there? That was gonna be a dam for a water reservoir. You see that pile of shining steel poles tied down with chains and locks? That was gonna be electricity. You see that shack with two buffaloes in it? That’s my alma mater.” So strongly does Momo fit the cynic we expect—a teenage boy in a heavily-bombed refugee camp in the middle of a desert, location unknown—that when he suddenly boasts of being an “entrepreneur,” you know he’ll have some convincing to do. Lo and behold: “You can’t be a child in this place for long,” and then, “Show me another fifteen-year-old businessman in this Camp…who owns his own Jeep Cherokee 3600 CC. It’s vintage.” The boy struts, and speaks, with cocky certainty, though the reader may find it all a bit too obscure. Plenty of red herrings abound about the nature of the capitalized Camp’s location—is this the Middle East? Are they Arabs? Nobody seems to know, but everyone says the word “Arab” a whole lot.

Momo’s older brother, Bro Ali, has been seduced away from his grieving family into a nearby US Hangar (also capitalized, for maximum ominous effect) with no prospect of ever returning. An American man named Ellie who was supposed to bomb this very Camp has crash-landed nearby. And Momo’s dog, Mutt, has somehow gotten his brain “fried.” Ellie, and yes, Mutt, are the two other protagonists. As an anthropomorphized dog, Mutt can be pretty funny (“When goats or cows were licking salt they were so absorbed…I could sneak in between their legs and take a lick.”) but other than the occasional comic affect, his sole purpose seems to be olfaction (he discovers a starving Ellie in the desert) and world-weary wisdom (“God left this place a long time ago…He had had enough.”) Ellie, the crashed airplane pilot, lets us know right away that this whole business will be a sort of morality tale about American drones, bombs, and wars. Once Ellie reaches the refugee camp, it’s a dismal journey to what we have already figured out. The enterprising Momo wants Bro Ali back—and Ellie is something of a bargaining chip. The culmination of the drama will arrive when we get to the Hangar. There’s simply no other way through.

But before we get there, there’ll be plenty of information frustratingly withheld. For one, it is never resolved what “red birds” are. First they seem to be something Mutt sees when a person dies, but soon we find that humans can see them too if they want to, and then it seems that they’re somehow connected to the “ghosts” in the empty Hangar. Then there are the “ghosts,” about whom an NGO-lady named Lady Flowerbody observes near the end of the book: “I don’t believe in ghosts but here they are jumping from wall to wall, completely oblivious to local culture and traditions.” Occasionally, one finds the all-too-familiar observations turned into the gallows humor with which Hanif has made a name for himself. Momo, for instance, makes short work of Lady Flowerbody: “I have been the subject of many studies since I was eleven. ‘Growing Pains in Conflict Zones’. ‘Tribal Cultures Get IT’. Even ‘Reiki For War Survivors’…I get PTSD, she gets a per diem in US dollars.” Ellie does the same with Momo: “What’s with the fake American accent if he hates us so much?” Red Birds isn’t entirely without its charms. A keen reader may find reprieve in sussing out the things Hanif has left out. When a phrase in Urdu is spoken later in the book, there’s a thrill in finally knowing for sure. But mostly it’s all a bit hokey and banal: Ellie is racist but pretends to help around the Camp while hatching a plot; Momo is hatching a plot, too, but when all is said and done, he’s just an angry teenager. And Mutt? Well, Mutt is just loyal—but also omniscient.

Refugee camps have become fertile literary ground nowadays—even for writers from the Indian subcontinent. This is perhaps a bit predictable. If one wanted to assess the enduring impact of British colonialism or the guiding salience of imperialism in literary narratives, one could scarcely do better than take a look at the subcontinent’s most critically-acclaimed English-language writers, all those who end up on Booker Prize longlists: Arundhati Roy, Mohsin Hamid, Kamila Shamsie, and Hanif too. Each seems to write out of the impulse of Post-Colonialism 101 to allow for an over-abundance of moral outrage—and yet, mostly they’re talking to the West, because the English-speaking intelligentsia of the subcontinent gave up on expecting something other than banality from them quite some time ago.

For writers so compulsively aware of the difficulties of writing in a language that the vast majority of their countrymen and women cannot read, each uses a strange technique of over-compensation. Writing predominantly from what Zadie Smith calls the “lyrical realism” tradition of Balzac and Flaubert, they rarely write sentences that, like James Baldwin’s, are “clean as bone” (Hanif does). No subject is too grand or too big to broach with the utmost confidence. I have yet to meet a South Asian who doesn’t talk of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness with annoyance. No matter the thrill of a hijra (intersex) character, the treatment is too familiar and saccharine, and the fever pitch of moral indignation too high. Obviously the story will collide with India’s occupation of Kashmir, and obviously there’ll be set pieces made out of Hindu fundamentalist mobs. Meanwhile, in Exit West, Mohsin Hamid departs from the subcontinent entirely—landing in a refugee camp in Mykonos. And then there’s Kamila Shamsie, whose book titles were a long-running insider gag: Broken Verses, Fading Skies, Lost Lands, and Burnt Shadows. Two of those are not like the others. To be fair to Shamsie, her latest, Home Fire, has been received more warmly than the other two—although even as a riff on Sophocles’s Antigone it, too, touches far too many hot-button “Muslim” issues to be believable.

The point is not the predictability of the stories, though that too is true (it seems that some covert rules for the Very-Important-Circle-of-Subcontinental-Writers dictate that every book must contain at least four of the following: Islamophobia, British rule, Partition, allegories for class or caste struggle, endless sections waxing poetic about minorities, the War on Terror, bombs, drones, terrorism, and immigration. Preferably all of the above.) The point is the staleness of it all. These writers—our esteemed people of letters—are intelligent to a fault; rarely does anyone argue otherwise. We expect their characters to amount to more than their stereotypes, but they’ve been trying for so long to subvert the tropes by blithely recreating them, it seems no one has mustered the courage to tell them that people aren’t buying it. Even when the political commentary shows signs of being deeply trenchant, the aesthetic remains the same. It’s a true Barthesian conundrum: Would these authors just die already so we can actually read something less readerly? Can they please come out from the umbrella of instinctive anti-Orientalism long enough to accept their own Orientalist dismissal of the largely quotidian—and not all that culturally specific—nature of our lives?

Hanif was supposed to be our reprieve from all this. It’s hard to properly articulate precisely why Hanif’s debut A Case of Exploding Mangoes (longlisted for the Man Booker) was such a thrilling moment for Pakistani literature. A revisionist, naughty, and often downright blasphemous (accounting for the otherwise-vague comparisons with Salman Rushdie) novel about the (made-up) events leading to the (real) plane crash that killed the Pakistani military dictator and then-President Zia-ul-Haq, Hanif’s prose glittered with a devil-may-care attitude. He inverted the model: nothing was too serious or too grand to make fun of. The aesthetic of Exploding Mangoes was firmly black comedy. Hanif also didn’t feel the need to hit all the buttons of topicality: the protagonist Ali Shigri, an officer in the Pakistan Air Force out on a revenge mission against Zia for the death of his father, still finds room in his life for a laundry man named “Uncle Starchy” whose most prized possessions are jars filled with venom, as well as a very risqué and titillating homosexual relationship with his roommate, “Baby O.” As the satire found its stride in bleak familiarity, the plot expanded gleefully into taboo territory. Where English might have impeded his delivery, Hanif fashioned sentences with the jumpy, inverted rhythms of South Asian English vernacular. In 2008, when Exploding Mangoes hit the shelves, Hanif was like the Veep to Kamila Shamsie’s The West Wing. Nothing was too depraved, no character too unafraid of amorality. Ten years later, and three (largely) peaceful democratic elections later, the book more than holds up for its grim view on the Pakistani military.

Since then, it is Hanif’s stellar nonfiction that, like Roy’s, has garnered him a reputation as one of the most daring and eloquent writers from the subcontinent. As a journalist with the BBC and more recently an op-ed writer for the New York Times, Hanif may well be Pakistan’s most trenchant and important writer. But he hasn’t met his own high bar in fiction. His sophomore novel, Our Lady of Alice Bhatti, was a tad more muted and daring; but using the perspective of a poor Christian woman (Christians are a beleaguered low-caste minority in Pakistan) gave Hanif’s brand of tragicomedy a whiff of presumptuousness. Even still, Hanif’s reputation for cheek continues to sustain the fevered anticipation of this new novel.

Which makes it all the more disappointing to admit that Red Birds is probably not the book Hanif’s readers want, for it squanders his gifts with wild abandon. In Hanif’s hands, the desert is tantalizingly exotic, the refugee camp a bottomless pit of bitterness, and the US hangar a place of sinful magic and mystery. For the first time, Hanif’s settings feel too broad and unrealistic. And for the first time, he moves squarely from satirizing to proselytizing. It’s clear that he’s trying his hand out at something new: something farther than Exploding Mangoes or Alice Bhatti, but it takes a while to recognize that what’s new is an earnestness about his subjects. Unlike in his previous novels, Hanif seems desperately to want to imbue his characters with more intelligence than the reader initially believed. And sometimes he very nearly succeeds. Ellie, who develops a tenuous friendship with Lady Flowerbody, decides that if there weren’t people like him to drop bombs, there would be no places for people like her to save. Mutt tries to communicate to his master Momo about a gun with the safety catch off, and states plainly that “guns smell of idle lust.” These are glimmers of beautiful insight; but they’re rare, and even the determined reader may stop reading before they get there.

It is also undoubtedly Hanif at his most serious and tragic. When the characters all arrive together at the Hangar toward the end, the book opens up to a plethora of perspectives: Momo’s mother, called simply “Mother Dear,” the camp’s resident doctor called simply “Doctor,” and of course Lady Flowerbody. It is here—three-fourths of the way through—that the plot gains momentum, and when it does, it is primarily because “Mother Dear,” who we have heard so little of, turns out to be capable of leading a blazing revolutionary charge to get her son back. Hell hath no fury like a grieving mother, Hanif is telling us. But who wouldn’t know that already? When the action begins to speed up, one realizes that almost every character—with the possible exception of Ellie, who never redeems himself—sounds exactly like Hanif himself. Particularly Mutt. There doesn’t seem to be anywhere to go from there. This is a polemic, Hanif seems to be warning us near the end, not a playground. We get it. Drones, bad. America, bad. War, bad. Refugees, sad. Anything else?

Hanif does have something of an answer to that, at the very end—specifically, in the last five pages—and it is, quite simply, glorious. Hanif finds a new rhythm—an operatic rhythm (interestingly, Hanif has in fact written the libretto for a new opera, Bhutto). Gone are the serrated edges of his prose; what you get instead, in three clean slices, are alternate endings. One character hangs from chains “like a human chandelier,” another bemoans knowing “everything about safe sex…[but] nothing about how to tell a ghost from a non-ghost,” a third sees a battle as the US soldiers’ “way of keeping the war going,” and a fourth tells us a story of a child who hands in a blank piece of paper as a drawing, arguing that it is a “white country…made of snow.” If one tries, one can make the layered perspectives cohere. It is, after all, just a matter of reading five pages over and over, though it is unlikely any strict determinations will be found.

So: anything else? Yes, Hanif answers in those clean five pages at the end of the novel: everything else. But what about the reader who, like Momo, has delivered a verdict well before then?

This review is forthcoming in Chicago Review 62.1/2/3.

Poetry as Biopic: On Pablo Larraín’s Neruda and Terence Davies’s A Quiet Passion

By Jose-Luis Moctezuma

Gustave Courbet, “Portrait of Charles Baudelaire” (1848-9). Wikimedia Commons.

Still from Neruda, dir. Pablo Larrain (2016).

How does one picture or dramatize the writing of poetry? Is the labor of poetry—the abstract, nebulous, and invisible activity that occurs somewhere between the body and the page—an action or emotion which can be captured in pictorial or cinematic form? Two recent films, one on the life of Emily Dickinson, and the second concerning an historical moment in the life of Pablo Neruda, seem to propose different solutions to the enigma of how to represent such seemingly unrepresentable states. While the first film, Terence Davies’s A Quiet Passion (2016), ambitiously attempts to condense the entirety of Dickinson’s writing life into just over two hours, the second, Pablo Larraín’s Neruda (2016), more modestly reimagines the incidents leading up to its titular subject’s political exile from Chile in 1948. Are there two more different, yet universally famous, poets than Dickinson and Neruda? Dickinson, the poet of ellipsis, subtext, sparsity, and concision, enframes vast metaphysical and existential questions in the minor moment, while Neruda, the poet of accretion, velocity, gluttony, and the epic gesture, explodes all the world’s vegetable histories into a monumentalized, lascivious verse form.

In Larraín’s film, Neruda’s reputation as the author of the celebrated Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada (Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair) (1924) precedes him, and the film establishes early on Neruda’s role as public figure: he is a senator, diplomat, and “the world’s most famous Communist.” Neruda nurtures international attention and attracts crowds wherever he goes—we frequently see admirers ask him to repeat famous lines from his poems, as people do of actors who starred in their favorite films. Neruda’s celebrity outweighs him. Dickinson, by contrast, lived in relative obscurity, published almost nothing in her lifetime, remained aloof from political engagement, and would have bristled at the idea of a crowd. Her audience was with “Eternity,” and her readers awaited her somewhere in a vast futurity that seemed destined for a wide range of interpretations and the inevitable biopic. If Neruda’s legacy and international globe-trotting guaranteed him an overexposure during his lifetime, Dickinson’s biography endured multiple omissions and recessions due to her formal radicality as a poet and the injustice of not being taken seriously in the same patriarchal culture that would allow Neruda to travel so liberally.

As directed by Davies, A Quiet Passion exemplifies this contrast between the public celebrity and the solitary figure from the very opening of the film. We see a group of young women facing, in a counter-shot, a stern-looking instructor who glares at them, a Christian cross authoritatively placed on the wall behind her. The scene is clearly meant to be Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, where Dickinson matriculated. The instructor divides the students into those who “wish to come to God and be saved,” and those who only “hope to be saved,” and after two sets of students take sides, we are left with only one student, the solitary Emily Dickinson (played by Emma Bell), who defiantly chooses neither side and answers back to the instructor’s remonstrations: “I wish I could feel as others do, but it is not possible.” The instructor answers, “You are alone in your rebellion,” and it is this statement which the film seems intent on establishing as the general theme of Dickinson’s life, a “quiet passion” that luxuriates in solitude and rejects the kind of fame that poets such as Neruda courted. It is no surprise, then, that among the poems featured in the film, Dickinson’s “I’m nobody!” is heard in voice-over in another scene:

How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell your name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!

Choosing neither side, and contradicting the strictures of the evangelical authority, Dickinson chooses to follow her own lights. In one of Davies’s most striking shots in the film, we find Dickinson, left alone now, gazing out a window as sunlight streams around her. I read this shot as an allegorization of the invisible labor of poetry, the necessary and silent rituals of contemplation that feed into the fabric of lyric thought. She gazes out, motionless and almost distractedly, but she is also, we imagine, “working” inside her head, within the careful abacus of her mind. We hear in voice-over the lines of “For each extatic instant”:

For each extatic instant
We must an anguish pay
In keen and quivering ratio
To the extasy –

For each beloved hour
Sharp pittances of Years –
Bitter contested farthings –
And Coffers heaped with tears!

As we gaze at her in the act of gazing out, the “work” of poetry erupts in a voice-over by Cynthia Nixon, who plays the older Dickinson for most of the film. The shot seems to punctuate the two ends of Dickinson’s maturity. As a young woman, Dickinson is presented as favoring a primarily indoor life in which she routinely gazes outward and ponders complex, enigmatic thoughts that only become visible to everyone else in the hundreds of poems and poetic fragments that she would write down on multiple surfaces: stationery paper, parcel paper, letterheads, fascicles, the pieces, bits, and scraps of paper that Dickinson wrote on, collected, and extended into her correspondence. Much later in the film, we again find Dickinson, now significantly older and on what will be her death-bed, gazing out a window in a kind of “anguish” that, following through on the poem’s own tenets, she now pays “In keen and quivering ratio / To the extasy” she had felt as a young woman many years before.

Whereas Davies opens up with scenes from Dickinson’s cherished solitude and her rejection of conventional society and its doxa, Pablo Larraín opens Neruda by emphasizing the Chilean poet’s courtship of the crowd and his evident pleasure in his own celebrity. Neruda (played with mischievous aplomb by Luis Gnecco) is berated by opposition party senators who whistle at his Communist Party allegiance and call into question Neruda’s double life as the politician “Ricardo Reyes” (Neruda’s birth name) and as the published poet “Pablo Neruda” (the pen name Neruda would legalize later in his life): Which name is he? Is he a Communist spy, a mole in the house of government?

Interestingly, Larraín and screenwriter Guillermo Calderόn focus much of the film’s narrative on the problem of identity and the impossibility of solitude in the throes of public celebrity. If Dickinson chooses a solitude that rewards her with mystic and resonant silences, Neruda attempts to fabricate some sense of personal integrity in the eye of a political vortex that threatens to consume him. Neruda constructs personae with various costumes, fake beards, and aliases, and Larraín suggests that it was as much for Neruda’s safety (as he avoids detection for political reasons) as it was for his own pleasure. The film plays on this theme of multiple Nerudas: the actor, the Communist agitator, the witty diplomat, the philandering husband, and the poet who is still asked, many years later, to recite his greatest hits (“Tonight I may write the saddest lines…”), even as he was engaged in writing the magnum opus that would mark the high point of his career, Canto General (1950). In another scene, we find Neruda performing for a crowd of friends and admirers during a bohemian house party, and he recites his most famous poem while cosplaying in the garb of Lawrence of Arabia. The allusion is appropriate: soon to be forced into exile, Neruda is as much a foreigner in his own country as he is a poet dressed up in the costume of diplomat-cum-adventurer.

The plot of Neruda involves the poet’s “grand escape” from the clutches of a vainglorious and fashionably dressed pursuer, Oscar Peluchonneau (Gael Garcia Bernal), a police detective tasked by the Chilean President, Gabriel Gonzalez Videla (Alfredo Castro, in a rare minor role), to capture and imprison Neruda, whose popularity and recent allegiance to the Communist Party threatens to upset the conservative government’s political influence. While Neruda, with the help of Communist party members, plots his clandestine escape from Chile to Argentina, Peluchonneau traces his every step, only to fall one step behind the poet who leaves clues and calling cards for the bumbling detective. But, as we find out eventually, Peluchonneau is fated to live out Zeno’s paradox and never reach his quarry: the detective is a figment of Neruda’s imagination, an invention straight out of an Unamuno novel or a Pirandello play. In the film’s meta-fictional third-act, Peluchonneau learns from Neruda’s wife, Delia del Carril (Mercedes Morán), that Neruda has dreamt up and scripted Peluchonneau’s character. Everything from his frequent voice-overs to his ostentatious behavior and dress code is an invention of Neruda’s own making—a private diversion that results from Neruda’s rabid reading of romans policiers, as a way of intensifying and spicing up the stakes of the poet’s impending exile.

The reveal is not so clever as it seems, but part of Larraín and Calderόn’s point is that Neruda may have been partly insensitive or class-blind to the realities of the danger that circumvented him, possibly even to the realities of actual poverty and the suffering of those who were captured, tortured, and imprisoned. In a conversation with a politician, Neruda unfeelingly suggests, “You think the way to defeat communism is to push us into exile, to throw us into jail. Let me give you some advice. The solution is to kill us all. Kill us. And your problem will be solved”—a statement that would become all too true during the purges that followed the Chilean military coup on September 11, 1973. (Larraín’s trilogy of films beginning with Tony Manero [2008] and ending with No [2012] deals explicitly with the painful and bloody legacy of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile.) Later, when Neruda asks in total disbelief, “Who will kill me?” Larraín and Calderόn seem to ironize the statement, perhaps in some dim recognition of rumors that Neruda’s death had been an assassination staged only two weeks after the coup.

In this regard, the dreaming up of a police detective who Neruda outwits at every turn seems particularly uncomprehending of the realities of other communists in Chile less fortunate than the grandstanding poet. We glimpse some aspects of Neruda’s self-importance during small moments in the film. He rages impetuously when a Communist Party attaché tasked to keep him safe and undetected questions where the poet has wandered off to. In another scene, a drunk reveler at an underground party approaches Neruda, at first in admiration, only later to question Neruda’s comprehension of what the working class actually experience in their everyday situation. Here the poet is briefly presented as the feckless and self-involved poseur, who writes of the working class and yet doesn’t seem to participate in its struggles other than through the labor of poetry. In a sense, poetry itself is being interrogated: What is Neruda’s value to the Communist Party, or to the people of Chile? As a poet of the working class, what labor does Neruda’s lyrical language actually enact or put forth, if it isn’t policy or legislation or the language of collective bargaining? The film’s conclusion puts forth the thesis we already know and expect: The poet speaks for the people in that the people—their lives, their fears, their struggles, their loves—are already the material of his poetry. In Neruda’s case, the poet as public figure fulfills his end of the bargain by speaking in and for the people.

Which brings us back to the question: How do Larraín and Davies, respectively, portray the work of poetry? In Larraín’s film, we see Neruda actually write and compose poetry in two small cut-scenes, but often we find Neruda wandering around, disguised, clandestine, a flaneur aimlessly searching around for his thoughts to roam free. Larraín often depicts Neruda writing with Peluchonneau’s voice-over carefully describing the inner thoughts that disclose the labor of poetry-writing. All of the lyrical bits are given to Peluchonneau, who praises the object of his pursuit, but here and there are snippets of Neruda testing out a few phrases or lines in his mellifluous “poetic” voice. (There’s even a scene in which Neruda is rehearsing the lines of a speech he’s about to give, and del Carril encourages him to adopt the affected poetic voice in place of his more formal diplomat’s voice.) Peluchonneau’s voice-over informs us Neruda must have specific conditions for him to produce his lines. Here, the labor of poetry is presented as a theatrical event, “four walls and roof,” and the camera frame in which we can trace his thought process becomes a function of the poetry itself. In seeing Neruda type or write out his thoughts, sometimes reading aloud a line or two, the ordinariness of poetry’s labor is what comes across. As public or as private figure, the poet writes lines in the way one washes dishes, smokes a cigarette, or breathes in the air at Machu Picchu. Neruda’s ordinariness prompts him to take up fake identities and disguises, but it also prompts him to write poems, long ones, short ones, odes to socks, tuna fish, or to Juan, the carpenter, miner, and fisherman “whose bones litter all places.”

In A Quiet Passion, on the other hand, Davies offers about four different scenes of Dickinson writing—or sewing a fascicle together—and he frames his medium shots with a view toward opening up Dickinson’s writing process to both the spectator and an off-screen interrupter who is revealed in a counter-shot, usually Dickinson’s father, her sister Vinnie, or her brother Austin poking into her study room. The framing is intended to invite us into the labor of her writing, and yet, similar to the shot of a young Dickinson gazing outside, her thought process remains occluded to us.

Nonetheless, we hear Dickinson’s poems—the stuff of the writing we glimpse in parts—in multiple voice-overs by Cynthia Nixon, and her readings capably bring us to consider the bits and pieces of Dickinson’s accumulated material as a seamless play of poetic thought that links the events of the film together. In one notable sequence, we witness Dickinson write the lines to “If you were coming in the Fall,” then gaze at the words on the page with a loving enthusiasm, and then stand up to gaze out the window again. This chain of actions seems to link the scripting of the poems to the primary moment the film opened with, in which Dickinson refutes the Christian rigidity of her schooling and its false certainty for the communal solitude of sunlight, the vista of an open window, and a steady and cautious agnosticism. Dickinson answers to no one but to her own labor.

Still from A Quiet Passion, dir. Terrence Davies (2016)

It may be this fairly rote portrayal of Dickinson’s labor as an epiphany-dependent activity which too readily lyricizes poetry-writing into romantic scribbling and window-gazing, that Johanna Drucker mocks as constituting a portrayal of how “poetry is fatal, especially to unmarried women.” Drucker reads the film’s argument as one in which “interiority is clearly a form of pathology,” and this critical point holds when considering how reduced the particulars of Dickinson’s life are, oriented around a few deaths in the family that seem to accelerate her own death: the death of her father, after which she begins to wear white in mourning, and the death of her mother, after which she is diagnosed with Bright’s disease and eventually succumbs to the histrionics of a movie death. The before and after of Dickinson’s life—the blithe and happy party-going of a young brilliant woman in Amherst society, and the grim and convulsion-racked “interiority” of an unmarried woman who loses her friends, her taste for society, and her parents—seem to position her life as a series of cruel exchanges for the “quiet passion” of poetry-writing. Of all the poems heard and cited in the film, the first one we hear in the film (“For each beloved hour / Sharp pittances of Years”) calculates the film’s controlling thesis for the remnant of Dickinson’s life, and it is one that no doubt leaves much of Dickinson’s joys and miseries open to endless interpretation (or biopics). But as Virginia Jackson has argued, the “hermeneutic legacy of Dickinson’s posthumous publication is also first of all a ‘sorting out’” of the spaces, silences, marginalia, and extensions that tend to make of Dickinson’s figure either a palimpsest for specific types of “lyric reading” or a blank slate for completely experimental interpretations.

Poetry remains figurally unrepresentable in pictures or on film, but these films seem to arrive at the same conclusion for poets who are strikingly, even vastly, different: The relative “publicness” or obscurity of a poet offers no solution to the enframing of poetic labor, since the invisible labor of poetry, especially in the genre of the biopic, too often relies on voice-overs and scenes of actual writing to register transparently what it is a poet does when they are “poetizing.” It’s true: biopics aren’t usually greenlit if they don’t already have a built-in audience in mind, and thus they depend on the figure of the poet as a person of interest who is meant to be pictured as a person apart from the words, that is, as a compelling biographic cipher deserving visualization. Neruda is cast as a socially-conscious but self-involved flaneur who responds to and acts in accordance with public desire, and Dickinson (to use Drucker’s words) is reduced to an “embittered spinster” who rejects publicity in favor of hermetic solitude; and yet these thematic conclusions don’t seem to transmit the quality of the poems themselves nor the quality of the aesthetic impact the directors bring to the table.

For one thing, neither film seems to represent the signature qualities of the best work of its respective director (both Larraín and Davies are celebrated international auteurs with a long body of critically-acclaimed work), and this may be due in part to a fundamental misunderstanding regarding how to “cinematize” poetry. The brilliance of Larraín’s other films (especially Tony Manero [2008]), or of Davies’ masterworks (especially The Long Day Closes [1993]) are lost somehow in the translation of poetry to the screen. There is a notable lack of conviction in the transmission. Is it the medium-specific anxiety over how to represent poetry? Put more harshly, Neruda and A Quiet Passion pale in comparison to the directors’ other works: the former comes across as surprisingly middling and minor considering Larraín’s Chilean roots and deep awareness of Neruda’s significance, while the latter film feels profoundly stilted and artificial, a glitzier version of a Masterpiece Theatre episode in which the acting, excepting Nixon’s, is dull to the point of suggesting an affect bordering the animatronic. (Or maybe New Englanders in the 1870s just talked that way?) What’s missing, I’d argue, is a formal awareness of the particularities of the medium of poetry, and it is one that transcends, or can’t be restricted to, what can be gathered from the historical data concerning the presumed personality of the poet. Visualization of acts of writing may not be enough, and this is because the invisible labor of poetry isn’t of the kind that can be easily communicated in histrionic death-scenes or in the sight of a poet furiously clacking away at a typewriter or dipping a plume to ink and paper. In other words, the film itself must be the poem, and neither A Quiet Passion nor Neruda manage to convey the intensity of the poetry of their subjects because there is, as is customary with most biopics, far too much attention lavished on the mythos and figurality of the authors themselves.

I want to conclude with a brief look at a few scenes from a different kind of biopic—one which doesn’t concern the life of a poet but that of Johann Sebastian Bach—Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet’s The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (1968). As the title suggests, the film centers on Bach’s wife, Anna Magdalena, and her journals (a narrative device fabricated by Straub-Huillet) track and describe the composition and performance of Bach’s works. The minimalist film was radical for its time, and continues to be: instead of focusing on biographical details or dramatic episodes in Bach’s life, the film is comprised of long takes of on-set performances of Bach’s works. The only narrative guidance we are afforded are a series of voice-overs by Anna Magdalena (played by classical pianist Christiane Lang), who describes the composition we hear, the setting for its first performances, and the circumstances surrounding the composition. What comes forward isn’t the persona, but the work—Bach hardly matters because the work, which we hear in performance after performance, sums up the totality of what Bach represents, of who he was and what he accomplished. The film is less bio and more pic—the labor of making is introduced here as a spectacle of bodies and instruments harmonizing in a carefully unfolding instant. We see the notes on the page, we see the hands play in real time, and somehow this tells us more about Bach and his milieu than a conventional biopic would.

One scene comes to mind. Thirty minutes into the film, we enter a compressed master shot of a double chorus and orchestra playing the first movement of Bach’s oratorio St. Matthew Passion. The tightness of the composition suggests historical accuracy: the players are compressed to the left of the shot, in what looks like the narrow raised section of the choir, the orchestra cascading across the chancel like a garland of voices and instruments strung along the ridge of a massive yet concealed organ. The setting is presumably at the original site of the work’s first performance in 1727, Thomaskirche in Leipzig, and the “actors” are all trained Baroque musicians donning wigs and period costume, in what is staged as a cinematic reenactment of the historical settings for the composition. Bach himself is hardly the center of attention, and Anna Magdalena, like many of the characters in the film, is only a conduit for the music. In the compressed shot described here, Bach lies in the background to the right of the shot, hardly visible in the eye of an unmoving yet resonant vortex. What we do see of him are his arms rhythmically waving up and down as he conducts an assemblage of faintly swaying bodies that communicate their passion into voices and instruments that are themselves focused and stationary bodies that communicate remoter abstract frequencies.

Still from The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach, dir. Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet (1968).

The scene is remarkable because it makes the critical point regarding the cinematic treatment of the lives of artists: Bach’s life was almost entirely a succession of works, and the film restricts itself, with nearly monomaniacal yet phlegmatic devotion, to long takes of master shots of performances (recorded in mono, on set) by actual musicians dressed up according to the standards of Bach’s time, playing Bach’s music. The distantiation from the subject of choice, Johann Sebastian Bach, is increased through this double distance. Played by the eminent Dutch pianist, Gustav Leonhardt, Bach is never given a voice other than through his wife and his works: he himself, as narratological object and cultural icon, hardly ever speaks or becomes a figure of dialogic exchange. Bach is merely a point of contact, a focal point around which musical situations, genres of performance, congregate, rehearse, and perform. The music precedes and buttresses him—he is hardly there, except in the costumes, instruments, and sounds that Straub-Huillet carefully craft, assemble, and direct.

Depicting the life of a musician has a singular advantage: play the music, only play the music, and you get the gist of the work. Instantaneous reproduction, instantaneous understanding. Bach’s soul is the music itself, it only has to be played to arrive at the centrality of a life dedicated to its medium. Straub-Huillet’s film, remarkable on its own, forgoes the usual trappings of biopics and invests itself in the pure phenomenon of a medium speaking in and for itself. That is, the labor that went into Bach’s compositions is almost totally retained in the mere recording and replaying, the performance of the works. Seen from this angle, one can understand why, in the words of Walter Pater, “all art aspires to the condition of music”—the instantaneity is a step closer to thought, as Hegel once noted. Translated to the cinema screen, the medium of sound allows for an immediate and encompassing kinship with the complex contingencies of Bach’s time, with little difficulty or obstacle. And it is perhaps this secret in the life of music that posits a solution to the enigma of poetry’s unrepresentability in pictures or on the screen.

October, 2018

Sandra Simonds, Orlando

Wave Books, 2018. 79pp. $18.

Reviewed by Kirsten (Kai) Ihns

Sandra Simonds’ s Orlando thinks through problems of living in relation to fantasy. With “the frenzied lushness of plants and water, ” a language wracked and snapping, the two long poems that compose the book represent and enact an electriﬁed sensory intensity peculiarly anchored in the unreality aesthetics of late-night Berlin clubtronica, the fringes of the American theme park, teenage sensibility, metal hotel walls, the high false sweetness of an artiﬁcial sugar, and, simultaneously, the everyday details of life as a mother, and the stormy ecology of Florida itself. The book is as “pink and furious ” as Orlando, Florida—“City Beautiful, ” “Theme Park Capital of the World ”— where a storefront tourist order of “chlorinated / water pouring and pouring from the corpselike molten spaces, the crystalline and mechanical turns / of what is no longer human ” abuts a dominant logic of fury and turbulence (weather, relationships, interpenetrating fantasy and reality). At other times, the book’ s Orlando seems to be an ex-lover—one who has chased the poems’ central persona’ s children good-humoredly around an apartment, who sits on the sofa, who is married to another woman, whose wife buys a house. And then suddenly Orlando has a diner in it, has cloud cover, cannot be snowed in.

A quiet and irregular musical line of literary reference and convention also emerges around “Orlando ”: Orlando Furioso, Woolf’ s Orlando, Orlando of As You Like It. “Orlando ” in Western literature tends to colocalize with love: unhappy love, strange and ﬂuid kinds of love, love thwarted, rearranged, persistent. Other unhappy literary lovers appear for brief cameos as well: Desdemona drifts across a line, “Ophelia season ” comes again. The grand “O ” of the love lyric, apostrophe, and theatrical address makes itself felt—we “O greenest / branch hail! ” We “O ” a lot, actually: we also call the city/lover “O. ” Names, forms of language convention, personae, and places are in a network of free-ﬂoating, emergent relation, without ever settling into an enduring pattern. It is not really clear what any of these devices and references do, other than to help establish Romantic Love as a constitutive part of the book’ s ecosystem. The ontological orders of Simonds’ s ﬁgures are inconstant, shifting, as unstable as the text’ s relationship to lived experience, to material conditions, to temporality, and to adolescence, which seems to work as a “narrative doubling back on itself ” in the book—a way of experiencing whose return, in modiﬁed form, guides both the affective and formal intuitions of the poems.

Ordered around a thematics of fantasy, Orlando explores a personal archive as its opening gambit—the “I ” returns to their teenage diaries, excerpts of which often appear as italicized and dated quotes within the text. Signiﬁcantly, a poem called “Fantasy ” is offered piecemeal—the “I ” ﬁrst hesitates because the poem seems juvenile. And, indeed, the language of the excerpts is juvenile, hyperbolic, grandiose; the teenage self exclaims, “Oh my god, poetic inspiration!!! ” declares that it does not want to be meat, gushingly admires Sylvia Plath, whose inﬂuence on both the adolescent and adult poet is palpable. The amped-up snarl-and-ﬂail of teenage emotional extremes pervades the logic of the poems at all levels, and rules as an unrelenting steamy climate over the space that the text generates. Orlando, the city, as Simonds’ s book portrays it, induces such extremes of feeling. Simonds’ s wild and gorgeous, striding, comma-riddled, multiclausal lines—are they lines?—in the title poem often also represent, via teenage formulations, such extremes of feeling in the adult “I ” ’ s life, as do the shorter lines of “Demon Spring, ” the second long poem in the book (“Police brutality makes me want to starve / myself to death and loneliness / sucks ”). The adolescent voice is often cut with tonally drier references to “conceptual poetry ” or “theory and long / hours of study, ” or “eruption[s] of data, ” but these countervailing registers feel mostly gestural, and never quite resignify the tonalities they modulate. The formal intelligence in Simonds’ s lineation, however, does sometimes allow these conﬂicting elements to cohere, and there are also a few choice moments where a juxtaposition of disparate registers does produce real sparks. For example:

you decided you didn’ t want what you wanted, but then the effusive apology, the guilt
streaming down your mouth like grease, having eaten many chickens, having stuffed one’s
core with bold meats, black wines, and lust, what crime did you read, did I kill a rat

Here the overdetermined, familiar excess of “the effusive apology the guilt / streaming down your mouth ” is cut and, somehow, magically balanced by the sheer awkward strangeness of “having eaten many chickens, ” then by the odd, goth, High-Literary quality of “bold meats, black wines, and lust. ” The book’ s poise, when it achieves poise—always momentary, just a wavering between kinds of frenetic overdoing-it—arrives when either a formal attention to the line or a carefully calibrated balancing of gestures harnesses the sometimes too-cheap pyrotechnics of the book’ s generic and modal collisions. Simonds’ s ear and intuition for multiple energetic ways of folding a sense unit are the true strength of the collection.
Another example of the book’ s energetic loveliness, this time from the very beginning of the ﬁrst poem, also usefully condenses some of the most important ways the poem thinks about fantasy:

Don’ t make the morning come, Orlando, place of “how did thishappen? ” and to what extent, your body, heaved inside the abacus moon, I begged the gods, the upward whatever, “don’ t make it happen this way, ” already
too late, a dented taxi rushes off

into the palm tree afternoon, dented sun, dented hotels, shiny and sad, remote as money, the future you told was incredible and made me feel like a real poet, more than my favorites even: Frank O’ Hara, John
Wieners, Alice Notley, pulled at my throat,

until I was above my own circumstance, until I could ﬂoat above my life
like a moth
whose lifespan is so short but still she tries to extract some horrible
beauty from this world as she
hovers over the tender waters of sleep and I hovered there too with the
ﬂourishing language

you offered: Oh, I was the great moth, great Suwannee River, and when
you said of yourself,
“I’ m a really bad person, ” I didn’ t believe you, couldn’ t believe this
would devolve
into failure, ink of the adolescent’ s diary that comes off so easily, powder
off wings

The “ﬂourishing ” language—both in the green sense of Florida’ s enthusiastic overgrowth, and in the “purple gel / pen ” sense of the extra, the supplementary, the excess, the swirl—is simultaneously an issue of semantic content, but also of drawing, of living, and of ways of being in space. Here, as elsewhere, Simonds works to multiply charge her recurrent forms. These lines also make apparent how much Simonds is able to generate a propulsive movement within the long line, even with nested clauses and repeated simple conjunctions, without resorting to a fully realized anaphoric rhythm. One of the most important contributions of the book is the way that “Orlando ” marries structurally complex sense units spread over long lines to the Laura Warman–style internet affect vortex, managing to preserve the speed of the latter and some of the elegance of the former.

One other feature this moment preﬁgures nicely is the way a concern with “beauty ” and with ﬂoating above life or circumstances (i.e., fantasy) relate to one another. It is helpful to read Orlando as an exploration of this relationship: Can one extract “beauty ” by a practice of hovering with “ﬂourishing language ”? What are the limits of fantasy? To what extent is a kind of emotional reality or intensity possible without true purchase on material circumstances? The “I, ” sometimes ﬁgured as a singer, is “in the dream city, the energy radiating, / and I stand here, alone, / Orlando, singing inside the song of it. ” They sing in the fantastical key of the theme parks’ city, of the teenage diary archive, of the poem and vaporwave and humid salmon clouds of a Florida sunset. And this is perhaps the difﬁculty of the book, or the point at which the exploration of its questions discovers and develops an emergent problem. Despite the brief and familiar head nods to the evils of capitalism, calls for solidarity among women, received thoughts about the difﬁculties of care in a consumer society, and so on, the lyric “I ” ’ s persistent interest in fantasy, beauty, the unreal, the simulated, and the personal archive can often have the effect of making the poems seem narcissistic, adolescent, and unexamined. The emotions expressed often register as both inﬂated and ﬂat, offering little in the way of insight or relatable reformulation, even (and perhaps especially when) the poems seem to want to redeem these gestures by ironizing them. While the overt framing of these teenage and fantasy-oriented formations as the text’ s central concern does work to stabilize the disagreeable tonal effects, they nonetheless become a persistent and unpleasant note running through the book. Aesthetically, they mar the work, and yet in many ways they feel like the most real and true thing in the text, aside from the frequent pleasure that the “ﬂourishing ” language offers. But maybe that’ s the point: yes, one can live inside a fantasy, but only if one accepts the emotional logic, the relational capacities, and the relentless sensory intensity of adolescence.

Ultimately, despite the sometimes jarring way Orlando thinks through its questions, the book is a pleasure to read—its language is wild, innovative, lush, joyous. These are fast, exciting poems—they inject complex sinuous sentences with something approximating the hectic teenage aesthetic of the internet, where everything is immediate, brightly colored, unbearably intense, referentially-inclined (but with an ever-diminishing attachment to a referent), maybe a joke, deadly serious. The book’ s tonal extremity and tilt towards a kind of solipsism is—almost!—saved by the fact that it makes these aspects elements of a problematics, enacts and asks them as a question, offers them as a trouble and an answer in a wet crystal forest of Florida greenery, “body sack[s], ” storms, formal intelligence, simulacra.

August 2018

This review appears in Chicago Review 61.3/4.

A. James McAdams, Vanguard of the Revolution: The Global Idea of the Communist Party

Princeton University Press, 2017. 584pp. $35.

Reviewed by Abhishek Bhattacharyya

A. James McAdams’ s Vanguard of the Revolution marks an ambitious stab at narrating the global history of communist leadership. Beginning with the League of Communists and Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ s Manifesto of the Communist Party, the 584-page monograph journeys primarily through the history of different Soviet republics, some other European countries, the US, Cuba, China, and North Korea. In working against the ghettoization of this story by regional interests or specializations, what is particularly remarkable is McAdams’ s ability to shift across contexts within thematically divided chapters, which allows the reader to gain a sense of the developments of a speciﬁc period in a global context. For example, chapter four, titled “Internationalizing the Party Idea, ” starts with the Second Congress of the Communist International (Comintern) in 1920, and its decision to change the names of all parties to explicitly ﬂag themselves as communists to distinguish themselves from social democratic forces. McAdams shows the great diversity of positions held within the Comintern prior to arriving at this decision. He then turns to speciﬁc national contexts to locate those varying positions, and further narrates how this decision kept shifting with developments in distant parts of the world. Yet there are signiﬁcant limits to McAdams’ s vision of this history. While any project of narrating such a vast story is bound to have omissions, McAdams’ s story is tailored to a liberal teleology emerging from the Global North that prevents an examination of how the party form has proliferated in its variations beyond what his study suggests.

In the monograph’ s ﬁrst extended venture outside Europe, McAdams begins by noting that, as opposed to the “sinuous paths ” of the European debates he has been tracing (over the previous 135 pages), the Comintern found its “greatest source of unadulterated support ” in “the less developed, nonindustrialized world. ” The implication is that Europeans debated with theoretical sophistication and nuance (“sinous ”), and the rest of the world primarily expressed credulous (“unadulterated ”) support, so their voices can be appended as numbers to a theoretical scaffolding established elsewhere. Representatives from these countries, who formed “one-quarter of the voting and nonvoting delegates at the Comintern’ s Founding Congress in 1919, ” were “simply happy to have found a common home. ” They merely appear to have translated Bolshevik terms—or whatever they understood by them—into their own struggles against colonialism, and did not contribute much to the formation of Comintern policies. Similarly, in the discussion of early Cuban communists, he writes: “Only a few of these founding fathers could claim to know much about Marxism… . Few had read the seminal works of their political forefathers. What these early communists lacked in ideological formation and organization, they made up for in the appearance of authenticity. ” At a crucial point in the history of communism, when non-European communists were taking up the cause and radically changing what communism stood for, McAdams can’ t help but read them along a European standard of literacy in the Marxist canon, and a performance of authenticity with respect to it.

It is therefore no surprise that there are signiﬁcant omissions from this history. For example, while one reads about how revolutionaries from colonized countries participated in the Comintern, there is no discussion of how they informed its colonial policy. Among those missing is a ﬁgure of such importance as Indian revolutionary M. N. Roy, who was a founding member of the communist parties of India (1920), as well as of Mexico (founded in 1917 as the Socialist Workers’ Party, and renamed as Communist in 1919), and whose criticisms of Lenin’ s proposal on the colonial question within the Land and Colonial Commission resulted in modiﬁed versions of the two theses (Lenin’ s and Roy’ s) being simultaneously adopted at the Second Congress in 1920. Roy was elected a candidate member of the Executive Committee of the Comintern in 1922, and a full voting member in 1924. He became a member of the Presidium in 1924, and in 1926 he was appointed to the editorial staff of the Comintern.[1]

Then there is the account of how communist parties struggled with multi-party democracies as the Soviet model of one-party rule was falling apart during the 1980s. Commenting on Gorbachev’ s remarks in 1990 regarding opening up to competition with other political parties, McAdams writes: “The party was either a vanguard or it was not. There could not be multiple vanguards. ” The implication here—made more explicit by other comments, as well as the organization of the book itself—is an identiﬁcation of the history of communism with one-party rule. It is unclear why this should be the case, however, since even his study of the early history of the party shows a wide variety of views of communist power, not all implying single-party rule. (China Miéville’ s October also has a fascinating discussion of the failed attempts in 1917 Russia of Socialist Revolutionaries, Mensheviks, and Bolsheviks to work together in seizing power and governing as a multiparty soviet, a possibility that may well be worth revisiting.) For McAdams, the story of the Communist Party effectively ends with the fall of one-party rule in a large number of nations across the globe. The other varieties of communist organizations that he discusses in the buildup to this speciﬁc form of one-party rule drop out from his account and are thereby framed mostly as a prehistory to the party. McAdams’ s position also implies an equation of a multiparty polity with liberal multiparty systems.

All that said, McAdams could very well present a valid critique of a form of communist leadership (and one that became a particularly strong historical force), which simply could not exist within a liberal multiparty polity or actualize an alternative model of multiparty competition. However, to make such an argument more generally for the world (viz. communists cannot survive elections), one may be expected to offer a reading of the long history of successful communist participation in elections—which he does in some contexts, but again with the kinds of geopolitical biases highlighted here. For instance, there is no discussion of the Communist Party of India, which reportedly formed the ﬁrst elected communist government—within a bourgeois democratic framework—anywhere in the world in 1957 in the Indian state of Kerala, currently home to almost as many people as Canada, and with a coalition government led by the Communist Party of India – Marxist (CPI–M).[2] Nor is there any reference to the CPI–M, which in the Indian state of West Bengal (with a population approaching two thirds of Russia’ s) formed what is probably the longest-serving, continuously elected communist government in the world (winning seven terms by leading the Left Front coalition, 1977–2011). The Communist-supported government of the Marxist Salvador Allende in Chile merits only a passing mention.

While one can conceivably make a case for why these communist experiences of power through the ballot box are of less global consequence than, say, those of less successful communist activity in electoral regimes in Europe, which McAdams does discuss, it is far from obvious that this is the case. McAdams’ s omissions mark a pattern that marginalizes the role of countries of the global South in beneﬁting from and transforming communist legacies. This pattern of omission can be located in a variety of contexts, beyond the question of communist participation in elections discussed above. The long history of organizations such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) (who just last year decided to abandon arms and contest elections), or various groups that are a part of the ongoing Naxalite movement in India, receive no mention. The role of communists in anticolonial struggles around the world, including ﬁgures such as Nelson Mandela (who was a member of the South African Communist Party in the 1950s), are not an important part of McAdams’ s story either.[3] This is not simply a question of the amount of text dedicated to a particular country, but of how the broader story is structured. For example, McAdams dedicates the bulk of two chapters (about eighty pages) to continuous and detailed discussion of the Chinese context. However there is hardly any discussion of the signiﬁcant inﬂuence of Mao Thought or Maoism on communist (or communist-friendly) organizations across the world, even in the putative West. In other words, despite the ﬁrst chapter on China being titled “A Different Kind of Party, ” China becomes another important point in the communist spectrum that was born from Europe, but is not presented as a new and powerful radial node.

McAdams’ s politics can to an extent be teased out from his short three-page preface. In the ﬁrst paragraph he writes that over the course of the twentieth century the communists were “the primary challenger to the liberal-democratic party, ” and then concludes by writing of “these politically tumultuous times, when liberal democracy is once again threatened by extremism and intolerance. ” He offers his readers the tale of a threat that was contained and defeated, from the point of view of the liberal US. That McAdams’ s liberalism constantly frames the narrative comes to the fore in his choice of adjectives and in various arguments made in passing. Deng Xiaoping, for example, who introduced market reforms in China, is usually referred to with neutral or positive adjectives, whereas Mao Zedong usually merits negative ones. Similarly, in discussion of Soviet Russia, Gorbachev is usually described with positive adjectives for his reforms. That the capitalist liberal democratic order is the more desirable norm is never open to question. The collapse of the Soviet project is located primarily in internal causes, and not the US’ s imperialist aggressions. While noting that “clearly, the West’ s military and economic superiority over the USSR played an important role, ” he contends that “the [communist] party was not defeated; it lost the will to stay alive. ”

While discussing the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic, among the “measures [that] verged on the bizarre, ” which are listed without needing argument, appears the prominent philosopher and Deputy Commissar for Education György Lukács’ s decision to open “proletarian theaters to raise the consciousness of the working class. ” Words with negative connotations frame a speciﬁc party in a particular way even before the party’ s work has been introduced—immediately before discussing the Hungarian Communists’ initial steps, he writes of the horrible circumstances in the country, which “created fertile ground for demagoguery and the advocacy of simplistic solutions. ” His condescension toward those who have historically been kept away from power is expressed in dismissive comments about those who “gave voice to the triumphant bravado that is commonly found among people with little experience in real-world politics. ” Criticizing the current liberal status quo, or its twentieth-century past, is not something his study of communism’ s history leads him to. The otherness of communism as a political project is never under question. For instance, contemporary mobilizations against police brutality could have made this a ﬁtting time to at least reference the Black Panthers’ place in the communist world of that time, or more generally to remark on the role of people of color and their relationship to communist organizing in the US. Research aside (of which there is a lot in this regard, even just by academics based in Chicago), if one simply runs a Google search for the title of McAdams’ s book, one gets a page full of references to the 2015 documentary titled The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution. The subject of McAdams’ s work is not as alien as the monograph makes it out to be.

McAdams’ s book, then, is a far cry from another tradition of international communist history. Caribbean intellectual C. L. R. James’ s World Revolution, 1917–1936 (1937), for example, was written in conversation with and critique of Leon Trotsky, and—although written in England as a part of a debate with the Communist Party of Great Britain (most speciﬁcally Rajani Palme Dutt’ s World Politics, 1918–1936 ), and discussing primarily a European stage—spoke from a very different geopolitical vantage point. There have also been numerous critical negotiations with the history of communism from the 1980s onwards by scholars from Marxist, feminist, and Dalit perspectives, among others. McAdams’ s book does not speciﬁcally build on this work. Nor does it contain any reference to the reimagining of Marxist theory by groups such as the Zapatistas in Mexico—among the most exciting critics of vanguardist politics within the last two decades, and whose work (even beyond famous letters, such as the one titled “I shit on all the revolutionary vanguards of this planet ”) has received some circulation in the US academy. Such work could have provided fresh frames for a critical appraisal of the history of communism, but McAdams’ s liberal perspective does not seem to have been enriched or challenged by it.

A wary reader of McAdams’ s book may ﬁnd the disenchanted narrative of communist history helpfully provocative and informative. In particular, his study of party structures across a variety of contexts, and their relationship to individual personality cults that often reached dominant positions, offers a very helpful comparative study of an oft-noted problem, diagnoses of which frequently get mired in regional speciﬁcities. However, in attempting to write (as the book blurb and his university proﬁle puts it) “the ﬁrst comprehensive political history of the communist party, ” (in any language, anywhere, one assumes!) McAdams offers a pickled vision of parties that for the most part have ceased to exist or be of much political relevance. In doing so, he ignores a broad swathe of communist organizations and inﬂuences that continue to inform struggles around the world today, as well as a wide variety of engagements with this heritage by noncommunists who seek to draw from particular aspects of it. While, in his conclusion, he notes in passing projects such as that led by Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, he tries to categorically separate these from their predecessors, for without such a separation he could not conclude with a last chapter titled “The Party Vanishes. ”

McAdams’ s achievement lies in his learned demonstration of how communism is hardly a monolithic form and has varied greatly according to context. Locating this strength of the book alongside the limitations imposed by his liberal political frame, one can follow the logic of proliferating forms that he outlines beyond the historical contexts that constrain his narrative. A perspective arising from within the wide variety of struggles around the world today would produce a very different history of communism and its legacies.

Notes:
[1] See Abhishek Bhattacharyya, “A Hundred Years of the Russian Revolution in India, ” New Socialist (December 30, 2017). “Sobhanlal Datta Gupta’ s ‘The Russian Revolution, the Third International and the Colonial Question’ discusses some of these contexts, and also in passing references other (non-Indian) contributions to the debate. “ ‘Mustafa Subhi (Turkey), for example, pointed out that the destiny of the European revolution was also dependent on the fate of the revolutionary movements in the East (Riddell 1987: 208–09).’ Given the more familiar arguments about how the Russian Revolution’ s success depended on successful revolutions in Western Europe, such counterpoints may prove very helpful to think with. ” The story of Roy’ s rise in the Comintern is discussed in John P Haithcox’ s “The Roy-Lenin Debate on Colonial Policy: a New Interpretation, ” The Journal of Asian Studies 23.1 (November 1963): pp. 93–101.
[2] From what I can ﬁnd, there are precedents of communist involvement within elected governments (such as in San Marino (1945), once the smallest country in the world, where the communists were the junior partner in a coalition with socialists), but not of communist-led governments, particularly over a region of comparable size.
[3] In an earlier review, Patrick Iber, making a slightly different critique from mine with this point, has noted McAdams’ focus on communist leadership, lack of engagement with struggles against colonialism, and argued with reference to Mandela’s omission.

August 2018

This review appears in Chicago Review 61.3/4.

Ben Hickman, Crisis and the US Avant-Garde: Poetry and Real Politics

Edinburgh University Press, 2015. 240pp. $120.

Reviewed by Zane Koss

A shift in contemporary poetics has begun, most evident in emerging leftist political critiques of the Language poets. These critiques tend to rely on the close attention to the political dimensions of poetry that the Language poets themselves helped to reintroduce into discussions of poetry in the late 1970s.

As the Language poets come under renewed scrutiny, new accounts of the relationship between poetry and politics will need to contend with their work while seeking ways to revivify the radical territory they previously occupied. In Crisis and the US Avant-Garde, Ben Hickman argues that the literary criticism of the Language poets, or under their immediate inﬂuence, places too much faith in an Adornian insistence on the inherent politicization of artistic forms. Hickman calls into question this emphasis on linguistic form as a site of useful political intervention, claiming that such theories seldom produce concrete effects, while they nonetheless occupy space on poetry’ s radical front. Hickman hopes to reground twentieth-century poetry in the history of political crises as they unfolded in the US between the Great Depression and the late-1970s ﬁnancial crisis. Thematizing the poets under consideration through “crisis, ” Hickman aims to reread the relationship between the political and the poetic not as an inherent property of language, but rather as an index of poets’ responses to and interventions in actual historical events: “how moments of political crisis can sharpen our sense of the historical force of poetry, and how American poems have sought to intervene in speciﬁc political upheavals. ” In other words, Hickman hopes to escape abstract accounts of the politics of poetry by focusing on the politics of poets. Though Hickman attempts to pressure “both the speculative preoccupation with poetry’ s relation to the commodity and historicism’ s immovable ‘context,’ ” his metacritical and pedagogical focus is mostly concentrated on the former, which he associates with the Language poets and their followers. Hickman’ s call for a post-Language renovation of political discourse in poetry feels both necessary and urgent, but his quarrel with Language poetry’ s critical theory risks a misstep in his attempt to move past it.

Hickman sets about achieving this renewal through two primary strategies. In the ﬁrst three chapters, he deploys biographical resources to complicate the reception histories of Louis Zukofsky, Muriel Rukeyser, and Charles Olson. In the ﬁnal three chapters on Denise Levertov and Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, and the Language poets, Hickman focuses more on social and historical contexts and the ways in which these poets became actors within them. Hickman’ s project is primarily an effort at recontextualization; he offers compelling readings of individual poems, but the primary focus is on bringing new or neglected extratextual material to the conversation. Given this orientation, the success or failure of Hickman’ s intervention tends to rely on the cogency of the biographical or historical context he brings into play.

In his ﬁrst chapter, for example, where he offers an excellent reappraisal of Zukofsky’ s “A-1, ” steeped in its social context, Hickman counters narratives of Zukofsky’ s career that trace a teleological trajectory from the failed poetry of commitment toward a more liberated aestheticism—one that pursues politics by means seemingly more congruent with the Language poets. Instead he offers a more nuanced depiction of the diverse and divisive inclusiveness of the literary left during the Great Depression, drawing attention to Zukofsky’ s active participation in Marxist organizations. Hickman argues that critics as politically wide-ranging as Hugh Kenner, Eric Mottram, Barrett Watten, and Charles Bernstein have ignored “the awkward facts of [Zukofsky]’ s activism within the Communist Party, the Soviet-sponsored League of American Writers, and New Masses…[including] his defence of Stalinism in the [1930s] ” in order to posit structurally congruent accounts of Zukofsky’ s development.[1] According to Hickman, closer attention to this history can help with “rediscovering the radicalism of Zukofsky’ s early work, ” while potentially exposing Zukofsky’ s postwar output as allied with more reactionary modernist practices than many care to admit. Rather than recuperating Zukofsky’ s A Test of Poetry (1948) as the extension of his earlier aborted Workers Anthology (1935) of radical verse, as Rachel Blau DuPlessis does, Hickman points to the ways in which Test “effectively co-opts class struggle into a bourgeois standard of aesthetic pleasure ” nearly indistinguishable from the universalizing valuations of Ezra Pound’ s aesthetic program in ABC of Reading (1934). For Hickman, the point is to recognize these contradictions in Zukofsky’ s thought, and to use the critique of Zukofsky’ s predilection for an “ahistorical sense of aesthetic order ” as a caution against smoothing over the contradictions between his prewar political commitments and his postwar aesthetics—a warning Hickman quite clearly intends for poets such as DuPlessis and Bernstein.

Hickman’ s political project is compelling, yet the project often fails to live up to its promise. Though in the introduction he professes a desire to not fall into the trap of an overdetermined historicism, his use of “crisis ” as a conceptual category and his focus on poets’ responses to the historical crises in which they wrote implies a level of historical detail that never fully materializes. In the chapters on Zukofsky and Baraka, for example, the particular crisis each poet negotiates turns out to be more literary and personal than political or historical—at least in terms of the evidence Hickman presents. The Great Depression lingers in the unconscious of the opening chapter, only to surface as an element of aesthetic debates between Zukofsky and such ﬁgures as Pound and New Masses editor Mike Gold. Certainly these debates were invested in competing political responses to the Great Depression, but the larger economic crisis remains a background to the personal and literary narrative. Baraka faces a similar impasse between avant-garde abstraction and proletarian realism prompted by his adoption of third world Marxist philosophy in the 1970s. While Hickman details Baraka’ s use of the music of John Coltrane to mediate this aesthetic conﬂict, the crucial historical and philosophical contexts that informed Baraka’ s political shift are left unexplored, attributed vaguely to the conditions of African-American life in the US. To propose an account of poetry’ s relation to politics through concrete historical crises and then to focus primarily on aesthetic crises does little to undermine Language-centric accounts of the a priori politicization of poetics.

The level of historical detail promised by the introduction and by Hickman’s commitment to “crisis ” as a conceptual category surfaces only in the chapters on the Vietnam War and Language writing. In these two chapters, his focus on multiple literary actors helps to break his reliance on biographical detail, allowing the historical moment itself to act as the subject. Before getting down to his analysis of Levertov’ s “Staying Alive ” (1970) and Ginsberg’ s Wichita Vortex Sutra (1966), Hickman adds historical texture through his citation of the expanding readership of poetry in the Vietnam War era, the New Left organizations that formed the backbone of the anti-war movement, the continental philosophers undergirding the intellectual motivation of these organizations, and how this conﬂuence placed poetry in a unique position (both synchronically as a medium, and diachronically in the history of poetics) to comment on contemporary politics. Hickman manages to incorporate all these contexts while quoting poets as dissimilar as Robert Bly, Robert Duncan, Daryl Hine, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Basil Bunting. Such historical texture is what makes his account of poetry’ s intervention in the Vietnam War palpable. The chapters that rely heavily on biographical detail, alternatively, do so at the cost of losing the historical graininess that Hickman deploys here with such force.

Nonetheless, Hickman’s careful attention to biographical particulars in discussions of poetry’s politics can help to mediate volatile debates that might lose sight of the historical contexts in which poetry is written. In the chapter on Olson, Hickman hopes to stake out new space for Olson’s politics in the gap between the “clean break ” from politics proposed by Tom Clark’s hagiographic biography and accounts by critics such Robert von Hallberg and Heriberto Yépez that depict Olson as little more than a stooge of US imperialism. By returning to the archival material that concerns Olson’s break with his wartime employment in the Ofﬁce of War Information, Hickman argues that Olson repudiated the imperialist policies of Roosevelt’s successors yet never fully abandoned the political as a mode of rhetoric or organization. The insertion into the collective record of Olson’s statements on US interventionism constitutes the primary value of Hickman’s reading.

Yet this focus on writers’ direct statements about their politics reveals another weakness of the project: in every chapter except the closing chapter on the Language poets, Hickman too often takes the writers at their word. Hickman’ s trust emerges from his critique of deconstructive accounts of the politicization of language and his resulting treatment of the poems’ content as distinct from their form. While eschewing formal readings marks an integral part of Hickman’ s rebuttal of the Language poets, his methodology leaves him open to accusations of naivety. Though Hickman is aware that “no reader wants to associate a poet they admire with dogmatic anti-intellectualism, ” he fails to extend this critical suspicion to statements made by the writers in his study, except in his hypercritical account of Language poetry. This double standard marks his censure of Language poetics as an exercise in bad faith. A greater attention to poetic form may have allowed Hickman to complicate the claims of poets about their own political positions. Indeed, Hickman’ s account of Zukofsky’ s historicist formalism, posed in contrast to Pound’ s ahistorical, universal formalism, suggests that Hickman could have incorporated formalist readings. Instead, Hickman trusts that poets’ statements about their political commitments are able to sufﬁciently account for the politics of their writing, as when Hickman dismisses Yépez’ s accusations of imperialist tendencies in Olson’ s writing because Olson resigned from the Ofﬁce of War Information as a rejection of US interventionism.

Hickman pursues a number of valuable threads in his book, each of which potentially opens new avenues of research. Yet rarely do these threads—biographical evidence, literary history, political and economic context—cohere in the same argument. This may be as much a fault of the material as of the method. The one chapter where these multiple threads coalesce is in Hickman’ s reappraisal of Rukeyser. In his reading, Hickman argues that Rukeyser’ s shift from a poetry of witness in The Book of the Dead (1938) toward the more mythopoetically-engaged verse of Beast in View (1944) begins with her exile from the scene of combat during the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War—and the subsequent impossibility of witness this distance enforced—which Rukeyser captures in the poem “Mediterranean. ” Yet, rather than reading this shift as the movement from a poetics of commitment to a poetry of detachment, Hickman sees Rukeyser shifting her engagement toward a critique of the processes of mythmaking itself as they played out in the politics of the Second World War. While peers like Eliot, Pound, and Yeats used myth to privilege a universalized lost past not incompatible with the use of myth and mysticism in fascist propaganda, Rukeyser developed a “projective sense of memory ” that “reminds us that the past has always had a future, and that we, concerned with our own, may use that past to overcome the currently impoverished imagination that prevents us conceiving it. ” Hickman deftly ties together the gender and international politics of the Spanish Civil War, Rukeyser’ s frustration with her distance from the conﬂicts of the late 1930s and early 1940s, mythopoetic trends in late-Modernist poetry, and her ﬁrm commitment to Leftist politics. As Hickman summarizes, “Rukeyser’ s great achievement in the war years is to make a virtue of this distance, to create from it a space able to look beyond crisis, in which poetry can project different futures and possibilities from the same sources constituting our current reality. ”

The trouble with Hickman’ s methodology is that it requires such an exemplary ﬁgure as Rukeyser to cohere effectively. When he strikes a virtuosic balance between the personal, the political, and the poetic, Hickman’ s readings convincingly reorient literary history. But this methodology never quite amounts to a compelling alternative to either the familiar formalist or historicist models he critiques. While Hickman’ s focus on ways in which the poet’ s politics can usefully critique accounts of the poem’ s politics, his reliance on biography doesn’ t seem to offer anything profoundly new. What’ s missing from Hickman’ s study is precisely the “projective sense ” that Rukeyser’ s poetry appears to hold for him—the ability to build a viable future from a “radically open and contingent ” past. Crisis and the US Avant-Garde acts as a sign of the changing times—and it will undoubtedly call forth further studies in its wake that will attempt to concretely account for poetry’ s politics—but it remains, like the models it critiques, too much tethered to the present.

Notes
[1] Likewise, in Hickman’ s view, critics who offer more nuanced accounts of Zukofsky’ s politics too often assume the presence of “two constitutionally opposed [literary] camps ” in the 1930s. Critics like Eric Homberger and Mark Scroggins obscure “the period’ s pluralism and spirit of debate, which Zukofsky, far from being the passive victim of editorial policy…participated in as a writer and editor. ”

August 2018

This review appears in Chicago Review 61.3/4.

Philip Levine, The Last Shift

New York: Knopf, 2016. 96 pp. $27.

Reviewed by Christopher Kempf

The last time I saw Philip Levine he was—characteristically, it seems to me—laughing as he walked off the stage of Cubberley Auditorium at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. This was April 2013, two years before his death from pancreatic cancer; he had come that night as part of a roundtable discussion on the history of creative writing at Stanford, where, in 1957, after receiving his MFA from the University of Iowa, Levine had been a Jones Fellow under Yvor Winters. Levine would go on, over the course of his career, to win virtually every major award available to American poets, including two Guggenheims, three NEAs, two National Book Awards, and a Pulitzer Prize for his 1995 collection The Simple Truth. He is more often remembered, however, for a period of his life a good deal prior to all this, a period—the late 1940s and early 1950s, when he was in his teens and twenties—during which he attended Wayne State University as an undergraduate while also working as a laborer in Detroit’ s then booming automotive industry. It is this experience, forged in places like Chevrolet Gear and Axle and Detroit Transmission, that informs nearly all—and, I think, the best—of Levine’ s signiﬁcant body of work, and it is this experience to which he ﬁttingly returns in his latest and ﬁnal collection, The Last Shift. “I believed even then, ” Levine has said of these formative years, “that if I could transform my experience into poetry I would give it the value and dignity it did not begin to possess on its own. ” A powerful culmination of a singular career, The Last Shift is just such a transformation: a digniﬁed, human testament from a writer whose equal we are not likely to see anytime soon.

Organized and edited by Edward Hirsch, Levine’ s longtime friend, The Last Shift takes up many of the ideas that have come to deﬁne Levine’ s career, including the exploration of writing itself as a form of work; the work of making, out of local materials, a self and culture; the effects of work on those who do it; and the ways in which nearly every aspect of our shared existence is determined, ultimately, by the work that we do. The strongest poems in The Last Shift, however, concern themselves with the relationship between working-class life and its romanticization in poetry—the question, that is, of how one properly poeticizes or mythologizes or waxes nostalgic about such traditionally “unpoetic ” material as tool and die factories or, as Levine puts it, “Chevy Gear & Axle / grinding the night-shift workers / into antiquity. ” In the poem “Urban Myths, ” for instance, Levine writes that “In Detroit no one walks under the moon / much less talks to it or to the unseen stars / that years ago we stopped believing were there. ” Yet such resistance to lyricism—the implication that there will be, in Detroit, no moons or stars or gods or love or light—is counterbalanced by the poem’ s redemptive close:

Everything I’ ve written here is true,
and the cities—Brooklyn and Detroit—
are actual, and people still live in them,
people you might love were you to venture
east, like the Magi on their mad quest
to touch a star and pass into history.
I still go back each year to Detroit
to relive my long childhood in the houses
that burned down ages ago, to walk alone
the streets paved with gold and to get wet.

That wetness is the wetness of Robert Creeley’ s “decent happiness, ” and the Christ-like “people you might love ” are, in large part, the working-class immigrant families that have populated Levine’ s work from the beginning. Time and again throughout this work Levine ﬁgures working-class life as pinned, restlessly, between divine radiance and brute reality: “in this world the actual / occurs, ” he writes in “The Angel Bernard. ” “In November the rain / streams skyward in cold sheets, / the ﬁres burn unseen, the houses / bear down, separate and scared. ”

As even so cursory a sample as the above suggests, Levine possesses a powerful sense of line and rhythm, as well as a keen understanding of how a poem moves through its various scenes and registers and emotions; his poems begin, often, with a tight narrative focus, widening out to larger ideas—or to more lyrical and rhetorically complex language—before returning, hero-like, to their original home. Because of this strong rootedness in narrative and in autobiography, Levine has often been unfashionable among critics and writers with more “experimental ” sensibilities. Yet his writing, as Hirsch describes it, is “a fundamentally human-centered poetry, ” and, much more than an easily epiphanic narrative poet, Levine is a careful witness to a wide range of human experience, as evidenced, among other places, in this collection’ s many poems about travel in Europe and South America. In an age like the present, moreover, when poetic language is often valued less for its referentiality than for its opaque texture or playful lyricism, Levine’ s language is transparent without being simple—clean, crisp, elegant, all without calling attention to itself as language. I can’ t think of a more unfashionable poet by contemporary standards, but I can think of very few poets better. To be sure, the endings in The Last Shift sometimes feel ﬂat and unsurprising—three poems end on the word “nothing ”—and Levine’ s tone is often too light or jocular for my taste, relying heavily on the dark irony that characterized many other poets of his generation. But there is, behind this, a profound wisdom and quiet reverence for life, a sense of unpretentious care for people and for places easily overlooked in the bulk of contemporary poetry.

Indeed, there exists throughout The Last Shift a sense that Levine is engaged in the crucial and life-sustaining work of salvage, dredging up and restoring moments and memories that might otherwise pass into oblivion. This idea is literalized in the poem “1934, ” one of many in which Levine recalls his immigrant ancestors with, simultaneously, mythic grandeur and frank realism. “My mother’ s family was in junk, ” Levine writes. “The men / were huge, thick-chested, with long arms / and great scarred hands. My uncle Leo / could embrace a barrel of scrap metal, / laugh out his huge laugh, and lift it up / just for the joy. ” The image—an ecstatic redemption of the past—is also a description of Levine’ s poetics, one in which people, objects, and sometimes whole cultures are saved from vanishing, held in the amber of memory by the simple, joyful act of poetic perception. The collection’ s ﬁnal and titular poem, however, complicates this idea of salvage. Stalled in trafﬁc as a train passes, Levine’ s speaker imagines the world carrying on without him. “Soon the kids / would descend from these lightless houses, ” he writes, “gloved and scarved, on their way to school / with tin boxes of sandwiches and cookies. ” As the train in front of him slows and then stops, Levine’ s collection turns, for the last time, to its powerful culmination: “Around me / the engines began to die, and then / my own went. ” Then, the poem’ s conclusion:

I knew
these tiny glazed pictures—a car hood,
my own speedometer, the steering wheel,
the windshield fogging over—were the last
I’ d ever see. These places where I had lived
all the days of my life were giving up
their hold on me and not a moment too soon.

One of the ﬁnest “last poems ” I have ever read, “The Last Shift ” employs Levine’ s dark irony to tremendous effect, suggesting that it is he, now, who is salvaged from this world “not a moment too soon. ” It is a deﬁant acceptance of death, heartbreaking in its simplicity, yet those “tiny glazed pictures ” are nothing less, it seems to me, than Levine’ s sharp, unforgettable poems—poems which glisten, still, like the chrome of a speedometer, and with which we will, I think, long live.

July 2018

This review will appear in issue 61.3/4

Karin Roffman, The Songs We Know Best : John Ashbery’s Early Life

New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017. 316pp.

Reviewed by Christopher Spaide

When The Songs We Know Best—Karin Roffman’ s careful, caring account of John Ashbery’ s ﬁrst twenty-eight years—found its ﬁrst readers, its subject was not only alive but immortal, fresh off his twenty-seventh collection, a monument in American poetry who outlasted all the moments and movements he supposedly deﬁned. A month and change after its publication, Ashbery turned ninety; another month and change later, he passed away.^†Roffman did not set out to write an obituary, nor to condense an entire life or career, but her book may be the most instructive guide yet on reading Ashbery autobiographically, a rarely-chosen approach to this poet who invites and deﬂects all approaches. It’ s no secret that Ashbery had a life—it’ s there in “The Skaters ” (1966), with spots of time bubbling up to its surface; Flow Chart (1991), the hundred-page poem written into the vacancy left by his mother’ s death; “The History of My Life ” (1999), an elegy for his younger brother and a fairytale-neat childhood: “Once upon a time there were two brothers. / Then there was only one: myself. ” But for every dispatch from his life, Ashbery’ s poetry provides hundreds of red herrings, set changes, inattentive wanderings away from self-absorption. “And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name, ” from Houseboat Days (1977), ﬂings confessionalism down with a splat—self-indulging for a few whiny lines, Ashbery moves on:

So much for self-analysis. Now,
About what to put in your poem-painting:
Flowers are always nice, particularly delphinium.
Names of boys you once knew and their sleds,
Skyrockets are good—do they still exist?

One Ashberian virtue of Roffman’ s biography is its doting preservation of those boys’ names, sleds, skyrockets, of apparently everything minor, dated, otherwise discarded. That virtue enriches the ﬁrst chapters of The Songs We Know Best, on Ashbery’ s roots and childhood in upstate New York, divided between the family farm in Sodus and his grandparents’ house in Pultneyville. For all the golden-hour nostalgia and endearing antiques within Ashbery’ s poetry, his childhood played out over a room tone of sadness:a father’ s disregard, a younger brother’ s unmentionable death, a small town and small minds inhospitable to this gay, ambitious, spacey, irrepressibly odd boy. As self-defense and self-distraction, the young Ashbery turned to playwriting, art history, technicolor spectacle, and overblown crushes; he fostered a competitive sense of bookishness that just about made him a quizbowl child star. (His record was imperfect, tragicomically: at the New York state spelling bee, the thirteen-year-old Ashbery spelled as far as D-E-S-P-A, realized his error, and was knocked out on “desperately. ”)

As Ashbery enters adolescence, Roffman’ s other virtues emerge. Compassionately, dependably, Roffman reconstructs the withheld interiority of the young Ashbery, whom she treats not as an Old-Master-in-the-making but as who he was: a young gay man, sad, solitary, distraught with his circumstances, itching for some transcendent escape. Collaborating with both Ashbery the septa-then-octogenarian and Ashbery the teenager, Roffman stitches together interviews with the former and the latter’ s diaries, totaling over a thousand pages, offering a meticulous (though often enciphered) accounting of ages thirteen through sixteen. (These, presumably, are the very diaries Ashbery remembered in a 2009 interview as “so boring!… I obviously wasn’ t doing anything of much interest. You know, I’ d say ‘had a tuna sandwich for lunch.’ ” So much for self-analysis.)

“The diaries were a revelation, ” Roffman writes, “because the voice of the poet was so present already, ” years before his mature (or immature) poetry took shape: there, unmistakably, were “his wry sense of humor, patience, impatience, and attention to the experience of his experience. ” A precocious teenager, no doubt, though it’ s just as fair to say that Ashbery the twenty-something (even the eighty-something) was constitutionally adolescent: Ashbery grows into a voice that can turn gushily romantic or moodily evasive, self-amusing or parodic of any adult pretensions within earshot. (“None of us ever graduates from college, ” Ashbery would write in “Soonest Mended, ” which he deemed his “one-size-ﬁts-all ” confessional poem. “For time is an emulsion, and probably thinking not to grow up / Is the brightest kind of maturity for us, right now at any rate. ”) Roffman’ s biography, for all its scrupulous research and strict chronology, is constantly made trippy by its subject, a young poet who never acts his age. As a senior at Deerﬁeld, Ashbery was already placing poetry in Poetry (though not under his name, or any real name—the poems were plagiarized by a roommate and printed under a pseudonym). Later, as the most overambitious undergraduate among many at Harvard, he made plans to “rip modern poetry wide open! ”; ever the ambitious reader, he cruised through Proust in one summer, then read it all again that fall. Going by the juiciness of the gossip, the Harvard years might beat out post-college Manhattan, years weighed down by grating jobs and undiagnosable writer’ s block, despite the levity and solace offered by his new friends. Maybe you’ ve heard of them: the artists Jane Freilicher and Larry Rivers, a trio of barely-known poets named James Schuyler, Kenneth Koch, and Frank O’ Hara. (All of the above convened in East Hampton to gripe, collaborate on sestinas, and ﬁlm a version of Schuyler’ s short play Presenting Jane (1953)—less New York School than New York Summer Camp.) The deus ex machina of Ashbery’ s early life, and Roffman’ s biography, is W. H. Auden, who intersected with Ashbery’ s twenties with a preposterous frequency. The titanic poet of the post-modernist (and pre-Ashbery) generation, Auden at ﬁrst seems untouchably distant: a chapter later he’ s a near-miss hookup after a Harvard Advocate event, then the subject of Ashbery’ s scraped-together BA thesis; a few years later, he’ s the contest judge awarding the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize to Ashbery’ s debut Some Trees (1956), choosing its title and cutting poems with words deemed unpoetically obscene (“masturbation, ” “farting ”).

In large part, The Songs We Know Best narrates the development of John Ashbery the poet—as odd, as temporality-shufﬂing a story as any in this book. The someday author of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975) started writing poetry at age eight, inspired by a 1935 ﬁlm of A Midsummer Night’ s Dream: part fan ﬁction, part slapstick showpiece, “The Battle ” pitted fairies against bushes, ﬂaunting an ear already attuned to storytelling cliché and unpredictable comic timing:

The battle’ s beginning! It’ s a ﬁght to the end.
The rabbits pitch in! Some help they must lend.
The bushes are conquered! Well that was short.

Ashbery’ s Citizen Kane–sized debut, “The Battle ” proved hard to follow, and set off a seven-year hiatus from writing poetry.
But even before the adolescent Ashbery styled himself a writer and read through the Rochester Public Library by the shelfful, his voice opened up into a different range in privacy—was, in a way, privacy itself. Following his ﬁrst, seminal gay experience, Ashbery opened his diary and strewed unpunctuated, clipped-short phrases across a page: as Roffman realizes, they were encoded notations “in a form that would render its importance legible and memorable for him ” but closed off to others, as well as “John’ s ﬁrst original modernist poem, ” years before modernism found its way to Sodus:

tulip garden
old dutch
home all our own until
recall once more

At Harvard, Ashbery trained himself to stage that privacy in the open, in poetry that (for now, at least) strung that diaristic shorthand into bewitching verse. The title poem of Some Trees (dashed off in an hour, in pencil, at his dorm-room desk) ﬁnds congenial ﬁgures for intimacy in trees’ silent, digniﬁed proximity—“These are amazing: each / Joining a neighbor, as if speech / Were a still performance ”—and ends in “defense ” of a love that evolves, never entirely articulated, less into PDA than affection’ s telling “accents ”: “Placed in a puzzling light, and moving, / Our days put on such reticence / These accents seem their own defense. ”

As The Songs We Know Best becomes a story about the haphazard cobbling-together of Ashbery’ s now-legendary debut Some Trees, Roffman appears at her most eloquent and effortless (and least tethered to references: with forty-three pages of endnotes for 244 pages of text, The Songs We Know Best sometimes seems too resourceful). Seemingly impregnable poems, in Roffman’ s hands, open up in every direction. With “Some Trees, ” for instance, Roffman triangulates contexts: a frustrated ﬂirtation with a fellow Advocate staffer; a newfound fondness for Marianne Moore’ s poetry, which kept passions in syllabic check; and the many resonances trees held for Ashbery: for starters, “summers in Pultneyville, castles, climbing willow branches, Robin Hood, his boyish and fragile brother. ” Roffman’ s readings never mean to “solve ” Ashbery, to ﬁll in art’ s variables with life’ s constants: they alert us, rather, to how much of life Ashbery cleared away, abstracted, or eluded. The dorm-room epiphany of “Some Trees, ” she explains, “ﬁnally expressed the combination of experience and transcendence he had been attempting to communicate for many years, ” managing the feat “without including any speciﬁc details about his life. ”

Born in 1927, Ashbery arrived amid an absurdly prodigious and proliﬁc generation of American poets. Already lodged into literary history, they’ re recently getting the full canonical-poet parade of publications: the last few years have brought us the collected poems of Denise Levertov, A. R. Ammons, Galway Kinnell, Adrienne Rich, Amiri Baraka, and Lucille Clifton; revised selections or last poems by Allen Ginsberg, W. S. Merwin, Philip Levine, and June Jordan; and authoritative biographies on two Jameses, Merrill and Wright. (Line them all up and you’ ll hear Ashbery’ s title anew: some trees went into printing these.) Among such phonebook-thick volumes, The Songs We Know Best is the odd one out—felicitously so. Roffman hops about Ashbery’ s nine decades (including in her title, lifted from a 1980 poem) but her brisk, selective, blithely inconclusive biography cherishes the trivial and provisional and can’ t be bothered with grand, full-career-sweep pronouncements. All of which is to say that Roffman stays true to her subject, who is photographed on her last page during the ﬁrst days of his Fulbright in France—caught midstride, he looks directionless but hopeful, oblivious of the work of the next day, let alone the next uncharted decades. Preserving that young poet’ s hope in her time capsule of a biography, Roffman has written something invaluable for today’ s many mournful readers, for all of us struggling to imagine American poetry without Ashbery’ s meandering step leading the way.

July 2018

This review will appear in issue 61.3/4

Renee Gladman. Houses of Ravicka

St. Louis: Dorothy Project, 2017. 152pp. $16.

Renee Gladman. Prose Architectures

Seattle: Wave Books, 2017. 144pp. $50.

Reviewed by Jean-Thomas Tremblay

“You are used to contradictions in Ravicka; you just hope to get the ones that allow you to go on making a life doing whatever it is you do, ” observes the occupant of a perplexing home in Houses of Ravicka, the fourth volume of Renee Gladman’ s Ravicka series. The remark doubles as a commentary on the series, which as of 2018 also includes, in order, Event Factory, The Ravickians, and Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge. With the Ravicka series, the mainstay of Dorothy Project’ s catalog, Gladman produces an account of contemporary life that gains not only in relevance but also somehow in coherence as it accumulates contradictions.

Ravicka, the mysterious city-state, ampliﬁes present-day dynamics of urban living. Ravicka is a city deﬁned by crisis. Yet the crisis is mute about its nature. It’ s all effects, few discernible causes. Here’ s what we know: some event, referred to in The Ravickians as an “attack from above ” (from the sky, or by some elite—we don’ t know), led to a collapse in public infrastructure. “Structures [became] ash. ” The crisis going on in the wake of this event is environmental, perhaps ecological. Inhabitants and visitors debate how to refer to what ﬁlls the air. Some name it smoke, others silence. Characters register the crisis, notably, by breathing it. Accustomed to the Ravickian air, locals react to its transformation in a manner illegible to foreigners. So, too, the ethnic factions that compose the local population present clashing symptomatologies.

Gladman, who’ s African American, creates a world that demands to be apprehended in light of questions inextricable from issues of racial subordination and segregation. Questions like: To whom does a city belong? Who absorbs the cost of crisis, be it political, economic, or environmental? At the same time, Gladman deforms the reader’ s expectation of what the representation of race or blackness might encompass. Identity doesn’ t stick to characters in the series. Different ways of blending in with or standing out from the city’ s characteristic yellow, different ways of taking in the city, hint at constantly reworked group afﬁliations.

In the ﬁrst three books of the series, characters who seek to make sense of Ravicka’ s crisis—an unnamed, non-Ravickian ethnographer and linguist; the great Ravickian novelist Luswage Amini; her friend, the “not exactly Ravickian ” Ana Patova—take turns as narrators. The fourth volume concretizes the project to ﬁgure out Ravicka’ s crisis as a visual endeavor. Our new narrator Jakobi, whose gender identity wavers, is head of Ravicka’ s Ofﬁce of the Comptroller and author of the amusingly titled Regulating the Book of Regulations. Jakobi travels across Bellona to take “geoscogs ”—“measurements that keep track of a building’ s subtle changes and movements over time ”—of two elusive houses, no. 32 and no. 96, located respectively in the neighborhoods of cit Mohaly and the Skülburg. The novel’ s second act presents ﬁrst-person accounts of life within a house such as these.

The publication of Houses of Ravicka followed by just a few months that of another book by Gladman, Prose Architectures. In a sumptuous edition, Wave Books amassed Gladman’ s drawings, most of which are in black ink against white, gray, or oatmeal backgrounds, with the occasional, glorious splash of color. Prose architectures are more or less abstract urban plans— geoscogs?—drawn without perspectival techniques. Made in the negative space between two books of the Ravicka series, the drawings themselves magnify the liminal or the in-between: circulation lanes, parks, air, and water systems. Gladman’ s scribble-like plans, which resemble thinner, more delicate counterparts to Rorschach’ s inkblots, evoke alternately an alveolar arrangement, a power grid, and a public performance space or perhaps a site of political assembly. The drawings afford, in Gladman’ s own words, “some interiors, some energies of [her] prose. ”

Refracted through Prose Architectures, technically not part of the Ravicka canon but indissociable from the series, Houses of Ravicka suggests that Gladman is now interested in the novel less as a storytelling technology than as a site for tackling problems of description and representation. Her own account of the bumpy genesis of Houses of Ravicka, offered in the afterword, is just as enigmatic, just as fascinating as the work that precedes it. As Gladman invented the science of geoscogs and began to tell of Jakobi’ s journey, the words ﬂowed. “And then, ” she recounts, “I hit that wall. There was a mystery. No. 96 was not where it was supposed to be, thus we couldn’ t be sure that no. 32 was where it wasn’ t appropriately. ” It’ s tempting to interpret Gladman’ s report straightforwardly: unable to visualize Ravicka in its entirety, and thus where houses no. 32 and 96 could plausibly be situated, she had to draw and write—Prose Architectures but also Calamities, a collection of essays; Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge (at ﬁrst intended as number four in the series); and a still-untitled Ravicka novel on the grass—in order to return to Houses of Ravicka with a more developed sense of the world she had created. But this interpretation would be an oversimpliﬁcation. For one, what are we to make of Gladman’ s double negative: “we couldn’ t be sure that no. 32 was where it wasn’ t appropriately ”? What Gladman likely means here is not that she lacked a clear-enough map of Ravicka, but that she hadn’ t worked out a way to express Ravicka’ s contradictions that felt real. Gladman zigzags across negative or contrastive locutions to lay out the paradoxes of a crisis that resists resolution or mending. The conclusion to her afterword corroborates this: “It was only a couple of weeks ago in January 2017, as I was ﬁnishing Houses…that I understood where house no. 96 was. It is where I am, where many of us probably feel that we are: somewhere where the boundary between places has broken. ”

Houses like no. 32 and 96 convey Gladman’ s vision for spaces that allow dwellers to live through a crisis: such spaces should offer protection, a shield, and still there must be a ﬂuidity to their interior, one that favors experimentation, emancipation. Buildings in Ravicka are on the move, but not only because of external forces like wind or erosion. Houses have a subjectivity, a psychology. They have instincts. A dweller describes the interior of a house as one where living, walking, breathing, thinking, and writing all extend into one another, are one another:

Living was like writing a long, immersive essay: inside something ﬂuid and labyrinthine, where light shined in at odd angles, even during the new moon. Sleeping was a terrifying pause in writing. Walking was writing. Each room held an essay you wrote as you breathed and the subject of the essay usually had nothing to do with the function of the room, but maybe the room’ s architecture, for that day, was shaped by the quality of your thinking. First, I breathed the steps to my house, and then I descended them.

This utopia of integrated living (which nonetheless ﬂirts with dystopia, if we consider the demand in a creative economy that workers be productive just by virtue of being) contrasts with the impenetrable solidity of exteriors. Indeed, not only does the house “fail to present a door, ” notes Jakobi, “there also appeared to be no windows. It was one solid, unbroken, cascade of wall. ” “The material, ” he adds, “was stone or stucco, I couldn’ t tell. ” Elsewhere, Jakobi describes what he initially ﬁnds in lieu of house no. 96 as “whatever you call ‘turning the corner’ as a place. ” Gladman’ s interiors are soft, her exteriors jarring.

Granted, from the outside, Gladman’ s books, Houses of Ravicka in particular, might appear just as impenetrable. They demand on the part of the reader a commitment to getting lost. But the payoff—the chance to inhabit some of her prose’ s interiors—is worth the commitment. Reading the series isn’ t a masochistic practice. It doesn’ t hinge on the reader’ s subservience to a controlling formal master. Early in Houses of Ravicka, Jakobi says, “I had gone to see Duder Munhandyi to silence the conversation I’ d been having with him in my head. ” We return to Ravicka to reignite the conversation with Gladman that we were having in our heads between the two installments of the series: a conversation about living and walking and breathing and thinking and writing amidst brokenness.

June 2018
This review will be published in issue 61.3/4.

Daniel Swift, The Bughouse: The Poetry, Politics, and Madness of Ezra Pound

New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017. 320pp. $27.

Reviewed by Robert Archambeau

There’s an old black-and-white photo from the 1965 poetry festival in Spoleto, Italy, in which we can see Ezra Pound surrounded by younger poets: Bill Berkson is there, along with John Wieners, Desmond O’Grady, Charles Olson—so large he looks like he’s been sloppily photoshopped into the scene—and a partially obscured John Ashbery. The scene is significant, I think, for how it projects two moments yet to come for Pound’s posterity: the Olson-led renaissance of his reputation in the late 1960s, and his eclipse as a model for younger poets after the rise, a decade later, of Ashbery’s star. Pound had already been in and out of vogue many times: in the 1910s, he was at the center of a creative vortex, and an influence on the shape of poetry on both sides of the Atlantic. By the late 1930s, he was largely an outsider, and at the end of the Second World War he hit his nadir, politically disgraced and caged like an animal by the American Army occupying Italy.

Our own moment should be a propitious one for another look at Pound. He isn’t currently a model for many poets (Nathaniel Tarn and John Peck are the most significant talents carrying a torch for “Ole Ez”), but we do live in times that seem uncannily Poundian: times of public madness, resurgent fascism, and crackpot economic theories. Perhaps it’s not a great time for a young poet to take her cues from the author of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, but it’s certainly a good moment to examine Pound as a phenomenon, if not a model. The 1959 anthology A Casebook on Ezra Pound provided excellent fuel for the reevaluation of the poet after his release from St. Elizabeths Hospital, when, as Donald Davie put it, Pound’s politics had “made it impossible for any one any longer to exalt the poet into a seer.” We would welcome another book capable of opening up a new discussion of Pound’s meaning and significance. Daniel Swift’s study of Pound’s dozen years in St. Elizabeths Hospital, The Bughouse: The Poetry, Politics, and Madness of Ezra Pound, promises to be just such a book. The topic—and, especially, the subtitle—lead one to hope for a study packed with insight into the moral and aesthetic conundrum that is Pound. Is he to be held responsible for his fascism? Does his mental health exculpate him? How do madness and politics bear on the poetry itself? One opens the pages of Swift’s book eager to find out.

The Bughouse, alas, does not live up to its topic, or its moment, when the issues of Pound’s politics have an alarming currency. Not that there aren’t moments that come tantalizingly close. Swift’s sojourn among Italian neofascists who revere Pound is revealing: he catches the particular nature of their attachment to the poetry, as well as the appeal of their movement—with its ethos of brotherhood and its cool tattoos—to a certain kind of alienated young man. He’s even brave enough to admit that while spending time among them he came to want to be liked by the dubious fraternity. Swift can also be quite good on how Pound’s publishers colluded in hiding the worst of his political offenses, keeping, for example, the most overtly pro-fascist parts of Pound’s writing obscure. Canto 73, Swift tells us, is among the most disconcerting parts of Pound’s epic. The canto, he says,

celebrates the death of a company of Canadian soldiers tricked onto an Italian mineﬁeld. Cantos 72 and 73 were written in Italian during the summer and autumn of 1944. Pound’s publishers, New Directions and Faber, excluded these two cantos from the printed versions of the poems until 1987. Since then, editions include them in the original Italian along with an English translation of 72, but not of 73, meaning that the most extreme statement of Pound’s political sympathy remains unknown to those who cannot read Italian.

It is to be hoped that the current editorial staff at New Directions and Faber will remedy the situation, though one has doubts about them making the financial commitment to a project that might well undermine the appeal of one of their poets.

Swift has done his homework in digging up the various diagnoses of Pound’s mental health made during, and just prior to, his St. Elizabeths period—and he’s right about the conundrum Pound’s possible insanity poses: unless one is a fascist, “to sympathize with Pound one has to accept that he is insane, and yet to take his advice one must assume that he has real and sane things to say.” So how mad was he? One psychologist finds the grandiosity and vagueness of Pound’s poetry to be, in itself, a sign of mental distress. Another worries over how “a distinct remark is meaningful” to Pound, “but the complete meaning is lost to others.” Is the patient lost in solipsism, talking to himself alone? Later, attorneys will question whether Pound was being sheltered by his doctors, and wonder whether his ongoing publication of poetry and translations isn’t a sign of sufficient mental health to warrant a long-deferred trial for treason. Some psychiatrists were convinced Pound suffered paranoia, or manic depression, though a Rorschach test revealed no evidence of psychosis, and one analyst concluded that Pound’s evident hatred of women and other races needn’t be regarded as paranoid, as it was entirely “in line with Fascistic ideology.”

It is difficult to choose between these opinions, as Swift doesn’t give us enough by way of context to make a judgment—with the sole exception of an early psychological assessment that argued Pound’s mental health had been badly eroded during his captivity in an American military facility’s open-air cage at the end of the war. We see enough of that grim period in Swift’s account to find the analyst’s claims entirely plausible. Swift, though, equivocates regarding Pound’s mental health. He sees traces of paranoia in the Chinese cantos, but Pound, he concludes (if that is the word), was “neither quite mad nor sane.” We certainly do need more evenhandedness and disinterest in the world, but inconclusiveness is a poor substitute for objective insight.

Insight, in fact, is what The Bughouse is most lacking. So meandering, so digressive, so diffuse is Swift’s book that it’s not just a matter of wondering what thesis it might hold, but of wondering just what the book is about. “The Poetry, Politics, and Madness of Ezra Pound”? No, it’s not really about any of these. Pound’s poetry never really takes center stage. As often as not, the poetry under discussion isn’t Pound’s, but that of his visitors at St. Elizabeths. This could, of course, have been interesting enough, had the analysis of poems given us some significant understanding of Pound—but instead we find ourselves being told that The Waste Land is T. S. Eliot’s masterpiece, and that Life Studies was Robert Lowell’s breakthrough book. One wonders, at moments like these, just whom Swift imagines his likely reader really is, and what that reader needs to be told. Discussions of Pound’s poetry tend to be cursory: a quotation followed by a simple paraphrase, say, or an observation about Pound not really understanding how the Chinese written character worked. There are some good observations about the general nature of The Cantos. “The Cantos are an artwork which demands forty years of attention,” writes Swift, “and once a reader has expended such care, he or she is bound to assume that its object has been worthwhile…and this is how Pound converts literary critics into disciples. It is not possible to be a casual reader of the Cantos.” But such moments are few, and scattered sparsely in a narrative that takes us far from the poetry for long, sometimes barren stretches.

The Bughouse offers as little insight into Pound’s politics as it does into his poetry. We hear the familiar anecdotes about Pound’s radio broadcasts and his brief meeting with Mussolini, and we see him willingly appropriated by various American racists and European fascists. There is some intrinsic interest in these scenes, especially in our troubled times. Swift quotes, for instance, from a journalist’s account of the 1956 trial of John Kasper, an American white supremacist and disciple of Pound:

“We didn’t have no education, no way to let those city folks know how we felt,” one lean weather-bitten woman said outside the courtroom at Kasper’s trial in Knoxville last year, “but now John can speak up for us and tell them about the colored and all that. He’s been to college, but he’s for us. ”

The remarks could almost have been made this year, from the same sort of woman, about a different and more successful American populist demagogue. But if what we seek is any penetration into why Pound became and, by all appearances, remained a fascist, we seek in vain. Swift has some anecdotes, to be sure, but neither theories nor opinions are on offer. You will understand Pound’s politics no better for having read this book. Nor will you be any closer than you already were to an understanding of whether his broadcasts in Italy would have constituted treason had he come to trial.

Despite recording the observations of various psychiatrists, The Bughouse isn’ t really much concerned with madness. There are interesting anecdotes about the history of St. Elizabeths, how it evolved from what was hoped to be a pastoral retreat whose peacefulness would heal damaged minds into something more like a holding tank for patients gooned on tranquilizers. These anecdotes might have formed the core of a very different book, a kind of biography of an institution. But this, like so much else, never really emerges from Swift’s meanderings.

The digressive, episodic structure of The Bughouse is, in large measure, a result of Swift’s decision to tell his tale in the style of New Journalism—as a kind of “in search of” story, featuring Swift in propria persona as he delves into his subject matter. But it is precisely as New Journalism that The Bughouse fails most spectacularly. What works for Tom Wolfe as he treks cross-country with Ken Kesey and his drug-tripping Merry Pranksters in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is—unsurprisingly—far less effective for a story whose most key moments include the opening of institutional file boxes and interviews with mid-level civil servants.

In the end, The Bughouse must be classed as a missed opportunity: the topic offered a chance to reflect on how forces now (alas!) reemerging in society worked on, and through, one of the leading poets of an earlier generation. Despite some good vignettes and fragments, Swift’s book, like The Cantos, simply does not cohere. Unlike Pound’s troubled, troubling, and misguided epic, though, it does not have the redeeming quality of genius.

May 2018

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet: The Complete Edition

Translated by Margaret Jill Costa and edited by Jerónimo Pizarro.

New York: New Directions, 2017. 488pp. $24.95

Reviewed by Michael Autrey

Can too much be made of the fact that in Portuguese pessoa means “person ”? What Artaud wrote in 1936, the year after Pessoa’ s death, speaks directly to the question: “For me, the essence of Surrealism was an afﬁrmation of life against all caricatures.” Pessoa’s work, a fraction of it written by “himself,” the rest attributed to, at last count, 136 heteronyms, was in ﬂight from the ultimate caricature, axiomatic now, that the purpose of life is to “be somebody. ” If this tome, not quite a doorstop—which claims to be the ﬁrst translation of the “complete ” Book of Disquiet—could be said to have a subject, it is this paradox: How to be a “nobody ” and leave any trace?

In an earlier selection of Pessoa’s poems in English, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe (Penguin, 2006), the Pessoa scholar and translator Richard Zenith provides a useful chronology. Pessoa was born in Lisbon in 1888 and educated in South Africa. Back in Lisbon, Pessoa missed his exams after his ﬁrst year because of illness and, after reenrolling a second time for the ﬁrst year, missed them again because a strike by students had shut down the university. He went to work in an ofﬁce, writing business letters in French and English. He wasted a small inheritance on purchasing a printing press and opening a printing ofﬁce that closed almost immediately. Then, in 1915, he cofounded the magazine Orpheu, which, Zenith claims, introduced modernism to Portugal. In 1921, he opened another, modestly more successful printing company, and in 1924, started another magazine, Athena. In 1927, the year after Pessoa’ s translation of Hawthorne’ s The Scarlet Letter was serialized in the magazine Illustração, the young editors of the newly founded magazine Presença, notes Zenith, “consider Pessoa, who is not especially well known, to be Portugal’ s most signiﬁcant living writer, and they regularly publish his work throughout the rest of his life. ”

Zenith’s own edition of The Book of Disquiet is excellent; in his introduction he claims that “Pessoa invented The Book of Disquiet, which never existed, strictly speaking, and never can exist. ” According to Zenith, the ﬁrst “passage from The Book of Disquiet, signed by his own name, ” was published in 1913. He did not publish more until 1929, and then the writing was “attributed to the ‘semiheteronym’ Bernando Soares. ” Zenith’ s historical observations outline the bibliographic problems confronting the present “complete ” edition of The Book of Disquiet, problems the preface by the translator and the editor’s note of this edition do not answer—because they are unanswerable. The sad clown cover art—grafﬁti of Pessoa’ s portrait—the hyperbolic subtitle, the chronological sequencing of the texts which can only be hypothetical: everything about this “complete ” edition conspires to create a uniﬁed impression that the work itself defeats. Not only does the book not have a single “author, ” it was not published as a “book ” until 1982. It has been, as Zenith puts it, “compiled by scholars. ” To make matters more complicated for readers without Portuguese, there have been four previous selections rendered by three different translators since 1991, including a prior selection translated by Margaret Jull Costa. Jerónimo Pizarro, the editor of this edition, notes that even Pessoa’ s title functions as ironic commentary on the minutiae of feeling and sensation that the “book ” records. In one of the few places where Pessoa/Soares comments on his project, he writes, “Through these deliberately unconnected impressions I am the indifferent narrator of my autobiography without events, of my history without a life. These are my Confessions and if I say nothing in them it’ s because I have nothing to say. ” The Book of Disquiet is a whole lot of “nothing, ” 488 pages in this new edition. Pessoa wishes, I think, to say nothing deﬁnitive or ﬁnal. He refuses the authority that belongs to the sort of ﬁgure he has become, which complicates our reading just as it complicated his writing life.

Pessoa described Bernardo Soares as “a semi-heteronym because his personality, although not my own, doesn’ t differ from my own but is a mere mutilation of it. ” Throughout The Book of Disquiet, Soares claims marginality and insigniﬁcance as a mantle. Like a cloak of invisibility, his low position allows him to live the fullest possible dream life, and to inhabit the largest number of other persons because he is barely one himself. A mutilation, Soares is cut off from others, a phantom limb in search of an imaginary amputee.

Even our dream selves mature—or so the book proves, assuming it could be said to prove anything. Naturalism has always been achieved by artiﬁcial means, and from inside the person who he isn’ t, Pessoa/Soares observes and records more naturally what is outside his self. Much of the material in the much shorter ﬁrst part—the work of “Vicente Guedes, ” another heteronym—reads like juvenilia—portentous, symbolist, and misty: “What does not ﬂow freely from us is the result of the uneven ground of our own imperfect self. ” Pessoa’ s decision to “become ” someone else allows him to write clearly about “real ” and imagined others. The approach, though, remains remarkably uniform. The book is a series of speculations: almost every passage arises from what is seen or dreamt, dreaming understood as a visual medium. “When I want to think, I see, ” he writes in a passage dated June 4, 1930, and even when he raises philosophical problems, or attempts metaphysics, this still sounds like a creed. There are few references to smell, touch, or taste. Soares keeps his distance from others in order to experience his own feelings more fully, more completely. His procedure, often repeated, is to ﬁll himself with others, dreamt or “real, ” and to record careful measurements of his volume, his limits.

Soares expresses common feelings uncommonly well. He writes beautifully about dreams and daydreams; tedium as distinguished from boredom; views from the ofﬁce window on Rua de Douradores; views from the window of his fourth-ﬂoor walk-up and of Lisbon generally; ofﬁce politics, as seen from near the bottom of the ladder; the pleasures of sleep, and how keenly he feels the lack of it; sunsets; and the weather, notably thunderstorms. I will never experience the buildup of a storm the same way now that I’ ve read this description of the tense moments before ﬁrst lightning: “the darkness grew black with silence. ” What he leaves out is more surprising than what he puts in. On the subject of desire he has very little to say; about women or men, or love, or money, almost nothing. And the author’ s name that Pessoa/Soares drops most often? Chateaubriand—not for his connection to Romanticism or his politics but for his style: “I tremble if I hear someone speak well. Certain pages in Fialho or in Chateaubriand make life tingle in my veins, make me quietly, tremulously mad with an unattainable pleasure already mine. ”

It is seductive to think of The Book of Disquiet as the record of a “real ” nobody, since he argues that it is his lack of “personality ” that allows him the freedom to “be ” others. A passage that Pizarro dates to 1931 makes a large claim of what Soares says often, in slightly different form:

I look again, with real terror, at the panorama of those [monotonous, ordinary] lives, and just as I’ m about to feel horror, sorrow and revulsion for them, I discover that the people who feel no horror or sorrow or revulsion are the very people who have the most right to, the people living those lives. That is the central error of the literary imagination: the idea that other people are like us and must therefore feel like us. Fortunately for humanity, each man is only himself and only the genius is given the ability to be others as well.

Resigned to his “genius, ” he concludes his attack on ordinary people by dismissing royalty: the King of England “has lost the ability in his dreams to be any other king than the one he is. His reality does not allow him to exist. ”

Somewhat earlier, in an entry dated 1930, the year from which the most entries come, he records the experience of looking at the group photo of his ofﬁce colleagues, “real ” nobodies, who exist only because he invented them. (Or did Pessoa “mutilate ” his colleagues too?) His boss Senhor Vasquez appears “exactly as he is in real life… . The energy and intelligence of the man—qualities which are after all utterly banal and to be found in thousands of men all over the world—are stamped on that photograph as if it were a psychological passport. The two traveling salesmen look superb… . And Moreira! My immediate superior Moreira, the embodiment of monotony and routine, looks much more human than I do! ” Even if they are modeled on “real ” people (i.e., Pessoa’ s “actual ” ofﬁce colleagues), Soares occupies a position so much lower in the ofﬁce than the actual Pessoa occupied in his. The “real ” Senhor Vasquez, ofﬁce boy, traveling salesmen, left no records. They are among the deadest dead; “real ” people re-membered in the memoirs of a mutilation.

The Book of Disquiet is an unforgettable reminder that representations of the real are as real as the real—assuming the representations, being more durable, are not more so. It is a book to be read slowly. Long entries are four pages, which make it easy to pick up and put down. So effectively does Pessoa become Soares that this reader at least was prompted to take new soundings of his own depths. One wonders how we will regard Pessoa once all his work is translated into English, a project New Directions is undertaking. What will it mean to have all of the work of a person who never wanted to live up to his name?

April 2018

The Poems of Basil Bunting, Edited by Don Share

London: Faber & Faber, 2016. 624pp. £30

Reviewed by Annabel Haynes

A few years ago I was shown around the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh by a friend, an object conservator there, who pointed to an elaborately carved Maori waka taua, a war canoe, hanging from the ceiling. The waka was made before 1827 in Bay of Plenty, New Zealand. When it first arrived at the museum, it was badly damaged and was kept behind the scenes, for years deemed too difficult for the public to interpret in its fragmented state. But recently the museum enlisted the help of Maori artist George Nuku, as well as a team of conservators, who rebuilt parts of the boat, most strikingly refashioning the missing stern using clear and colorless acrylic, carved to match the rest of the highly ornate patterning, to complete the object—make it interpretable, visible, as a canoe. The point of the project, as of much modern-day conservation, was to preserve the object and enable people to see it in its full glory. Rather than attempting to hide the marks of repair, and restore the object to an approximation of its former guise, these additions announce themselves as additions and present the history of the making, the breaking, and the remaking of the object. The repairs are also reversible, bearing in mind that future generations of conservators might adopt a different view on restoration and intervention. The resulting object was magnificent, beautiful, a little ghostly, and perhaps even greater than the sum of its parts.

It is this kind of attentive crafting, this meticulous and respectful work, that Don Share has carried out, too, in putting together his critical edition of Basil Bunting’s poems. While we might not say that Bunting’s oeuvre is in disrepair in the same sense that the waka taua was, Bunting is a poet whose modernist complexities have surely baffled his readers; his work can be difficult, fragmentary (“polyphonic” is a more positive term), paratactic, replete with obscure references to ancient and contemporary world literatures and historical events, peppered with arcane terms and various dialects and languages. Bunting spoke about his work infrequently, wrote slight, often mischievous or deliberately abstruse notes, and famously requested that his correspondents burn his letters, especially those that might reveal something more about his poems, or himself, than was there on the published page. Share’s book is a work of conservation because it gathers, for the first time, material to supplement and elucidate Bunting’s poetic oeuvre. It uncovers abandoned works, drafts, variant editions, as well as commentary from Bunting’s published prose, private correspondence, and critical work on the poet. Furthermore, it offers, for the first time, comprehensive footnotes to all of Bunting’s work, including Bunting’ s own notes. Like T. S. Eliot’s modernist project for The Waste Land, Share shores these fragments, both preserving and bolstering them by pairing them with the poems, simultaneously aiding the reader in the difficult task of interpretation.

Scholars of Bunting’s work have been troubled by his warnings and admonitions against certain kinds of scholarship that involve just such shoring of fragments. Warding off “industrious compilers,” in 1977 he declined an invitation from R. B. Woodings at Faber & Faber to introduce a new volume of his friend Ezra Pound’s work: “I’d rather leave the lid on my dustbin and the earth on my friend’s graves.” Pound himself appears to doubt Eliot’s aim for The Waste Land, altering the lines in his own Canto VIII: “These fragments you have shelved (shored).” Pound implies that Eliot’s project has been “shelved” or “shored”—the latter verb also means “to run aground.” The shelving, I think, also and alternatively implies a mistrust of putting the vivacious, great works of former ages into books, to be ﬁled away in dusty libraries. Similarly, Bunting spoke out against particular kinds of exegesis and had a strong antipathy toward academic scholarship and its shelf-heavy institutions (though he taught in several universities). He insisted in “A Note on Briggflatts,” that this long magnum opus “is a poem: it needs no explanation.” In “The Poet’s Point of View,” he advocated listening to poetry aloud as the best way of understanding it, and warned:

Do not let the people who set examinations kid you that you are any nearer understanding a poem when you have parsed and analysed every sentence, scanned every line, looked up the words in the Oxford Dictionary and the allusions in a library of reference books. That sort of knowledge will make it harder for you to understand the poem because, when you listen to it, you will be distracted by a multitude of irrelevant scraps of knowledge. You will not hear the meaning, which is in the sound.

So what is a scholar and editor of his work supposed to do? Share navigates these difficulties sensitively, but assertively: he takes Bunting’s views into account, but appreciates that a growing readership might need more assistance than Bunting was happy to provide. While preserving and presenting aspects of his work that Bunting might have grumbled about, Share adopts a methodology that ultimately fits with Bunting’s ethos and, more importantly, preserves the poetry and opens it up to new readers and future generations. The method Share uses means that the sourcing and publication of Bunting’s drafts and fragments and the excerpts from correspondence don’t necessarily jeopardize the poet’s privacy or the integrity of his verse; and, crucially, the book does not prioritize Bunting’s biography over his poetry. The extensive annotations provided for each poem—sourcing clues to the poems in letters, manuscripts, biographical details, and ephemera—don’t presume to offer definitive or final readings of the poems, but instead allow a curious or baffled reader a range of insights to help them form their own interpretations. After a useful and engaging introduction, Share’s own critical voice is guiding but unobtrusive in the annotations: true to the high modernist tradition, information is presented rather than explained, and while these notes are extensive—even comprehensive—they are succinct. “Never explain—your reader is as smart as you,” Bunting advised young poets. Heeding him, Share anticipates difficulties any reader—whether seasoned or new—might encounter reading the poems, but he also anticipates an independent, inquiring, and intelligent reader: the book is a compliment to them. Furthermore, the poems appear on the pages unblemished by footnotes, endnotes, or asterisks. Share has thoughtfully added line numbers (and students of Bunting thank him for it), as annotations and appendices are placed at the back of the volume for the inquisitive to explore as an adjunct to the primary material of the book: the poems.

Prior to this new volume, Bunting fans could turn to Richard Caddel’s excellent, slimmer edition of the Complete Poems (2000), published in the UK by Bloodaxe Books—based in Bunting’s native North East and named after the Viking whom Bunting takes as one of Briggflatts’s heroes—and in the US by New Directions (2003). Given that Share’s edition of the poems is sublicensed by Bloodaxe, one might wonder what the advantage of the new edition is. Share explains his rationale for altering the extant Complete Poems, writing that Bunting’s verse was “modiﬁed” according to Caddel’s preferences, which he does “not share.” He highlights the differences between his and Caddel’s editions in a dedicated section of the book. The Faber collection adds two poems, as well as providing several “variants, anomalies, fragments,” and drafts—“false starts” in Bunting’s terminology. Throughout, Bunting’s own notes from previous editions of collected poems are retained, the juxtaposition with Share’s scholarly annotations highlighting not only how valuable the new edition is, but also how terse and tongue-in-cheek Bunting’s attitude to exegesis was. For example, “Villon” gets just one note from Bunting explaining the reference at the end of the poem to drops of quicksilver “from the late E. Nesbit’s Story of the Amulet,” whereas Share provides nine pages. Share also includes tables of all of Bunting’s previous collections of poems and the prefaces he wrote to each of these. In addition to these extras, many of which are extremely difficult to get hold of elsewhere, Share’s notes make this a timely, necessary, and unique collection. A reader might not realize what a feat it is that, at last, an authoritative, scholarly edition of the poems has been put into print.

Each of Bunting’s long poems—modernist in their range and numerous references to obscure literary and folk history—is treated in Share’s endnotes to a section containing Bunting’s comments on the poem (taken from letters, prose, and interviews), a publication history, and a guide to the most obscure of the poem’s allusions and references. Share presents this material at the back of the book rather than alongside the poems, offering it to but not forcing it upon the reader. The information he provides does not force his own understanding of the poems, but nurtures the reader’s own, allowing them to make their own links: surely the best way to deal with modernist poems whose references, complications, collations, and juxtapositions set up multifarious avenues for thought and generate numerous permutations for reading.

Share’s annotations illuminate previously obscure references, and will help to foster new readings of the poems. In the case of a poem like Briggflatts, which has received a reasonable amount of critical attention since its publication in 1966, extant readings are consolidated with Share’s research and Bunting’s own comments on the poem. Many long-term readers of Bunting will turn to Share’s notes to Briggflatts with great interest. Publishing such a comprehensive glossary and reference guide to the poem runs the risk that some of the fun of misunderstanding, or digging around, or guessing, will be lost. But what these notes bring to the reading community far outweighs these small gripes, and produces a modernist masterpiece in technicolor, opening it up to new readers and readings.

The draft material for “The Spoils,” as Share says, offers a rare example of Bunting’s compositional methods, an example of particular interest to apprentice poets. He includes material on Bunting’s interest in Persian literature, documented in further detail in his previous Bunting collection, Bunting’s Persia. The notes to “The Spoils” are enlightening, helping to highlight the politics and spirituality behind this complicated poem. It’s a poem that doesn’t give itself up easily, but Share’s annotations emphasize the poem’s focal points: it’s not as much about religion as it is about money, luxury, material wealth, beauty, sex, sensuality, and war.

The richness of Bunting’s tapestries are revealed by Share’s annotations: references the casual reader might overlook are explored in detail, and with reference to multiple and sometimes conflicting readings, such as the intriguing line about “the Emperor with the Golden Hands” that Bunting adapts from François Villon’s Le Testament. Share explains current Villon scholarship, and includes Peter Makin’s and Richard Burton’s different interpretations of the reference, without drawing his own conclusion, leaving the reader to decide for themselves. Share’s notes also reveal the structure of Bunting’ s work as never before. We can see, for example, how much of “Villon” is a reworking of Villon’s own verse, and how much is Bunting’s. The fact that the fifteenth-century French poet’s images and stories are sometimes indistinguishable from Bunting’s shows where time and contexts overlap, how time repeats itself, and what a contemporary reader might have in common with a medieval one. This is the kind of modernist magic that Bunting, Pound, and Eliot were seeking to make. Villon’s verse is, in this sense, made new—made ﬁt, at least, for a twentieth-century readership.

Despite Share’s efforts, some poems remain obscure: the first part of “Attis,” for example, whose quotations and innuendos are too much of an in-joke to reach a broader audience. Readers won’t suddenly be able to decipher every line building up into an overall “meaning,” but this is just right: Bunting’s poems are not puzzles waiting to be solved. Share quotes Bunting’s letter to Harriet Monroe in 1931: “Ezra says Attis is obscure, from which he deduces that he is getting old. It certainly wouldnt be easy to write a synopsis, but I think it’s really fairly plain for all that, if the reader doesnt spend time and energy looking for a nice logical syllogistic development which isnt there. I dont like formal logic. There are better ways of connecting things up…” The annotations to “The Well of Lycopolis” break new ground, and will provide much relief to a perplexed reader. But there are still obscurities. For example, knowing that Canopus is a star doesn’t help to entirely unpick the line “Windy water slurred the glint of Canopus.” Share writes for a “smart” audience; and though the poems might still leave the reader in the dark in places, it is their job to make connections—to decide, for example, what Daphnis and Chloe have to do with boys with ambiguous faces, treading “between the bedpots.”

A history of Bunting’s reading is also built up over the course of the notes, with Share including possible sources for Bunting’s word choices. Share provides definitions from the Oxford English Dictionary and English Dialect Dictionary when necessary, linking Bunting’s usage of these terms to previous instances of such words and phrases, the sources ranging from poetry to classical philosophy, religious texts, and folk song. For example, on just one page in “The Well of Lycopolis” Share notes: “mansuetude,” “Canopus,” and—my personal favorite—“kecking,” which appeared in Milton before Bunting used it. The “may,” the flower of the hawthorn tree, which falls on the bull’s hide in Briggflatts, appears, Share notes, in Spenser, Jonson, Shelley, Arnold, Longfellow, Pound, Tennyson, and Hopkins. Share reveals just how literary Bunting’s obscure-seeming language is. Share’s tracing of Bunting’s lexis, terminology, and allusions shows that he is not the outlier, eccentric, or regionalist he has sometimes been portrayed as, but a proponent of a far-reaching poetic canon. Lines in Briggflatts’s first part describe a Northumbrian soundscape, as two children hitch a lift on a stonemason’s cart:

Under sacks on the stone
two children lie,
hear the horse stale,
the mason whistle,
harness mutter to shaft,
felloe to axle squeak,
rut thud the rim,
crushed grit.

Share finds examples of “felloe” in the Old English Boethius, Hamlet, George Sandys’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, George Chapman’s The Iliad, and Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution. “Stale” which means “urinate ” (and not “whinny” as I had previously assumed) is also used by Shakespeare in Antony and Cleopatra, Thomas Hardy in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and Kipling in “South Africa.” Such notes bear evidence of a long history of poetry and a literary tradition that Bunting is both rooted in and carries forward: the edition thus places him, poetically, among the greats—thoroughly deserved and long overdue.

It is significant in this regard that The Poems of Basil Bunting was published by Faber, ending almost a century of struggle to get a collection of Bunting’s poetry published by the esteemed press. Rumors surround Bunting’s apparent hostility toward Eliot, a poet who, as Share’s volume highlights, is actually more of an influence on Bunting’s work than a hindrance to it. Nevertheless, the story goes that a lifelong antipathy developed between the poets, because, as the poetry editor at Faber, Eliot repeatedly refused to publish Bunting’s work, despite Pound’s support for the younger modernist. Bunting’s letter quoted above to poor Mr. Woodings suggests that he and the press had something of a checkered history. Without disregarding the smaller presses who continue to preserve and proliferate Bunting’s work, it is exciting to see him inhabit the territory of major poets.

Share provides quotations from scholarship on Bunting, too, which is part of what makes the volume so generous. For example, he quotes extensively from Barbara Lesch’s 1979 PhD dissertation, which is difficult to obtain, but contains numerous readings and sources, making some of these quotations from Bunting’s correspondence—often letters to Louis Zukofsky—readily available for the first time. He also reprises Bunting quotations from Victoria Forde’s The Poetry of Basil Bunting (1991); it is timely and useful to look at these again, and Forde’s book is now out of print. It is notable that these two woman scholars of Bunting are quoted regularly throughout Share’s book, helping to show that Bunting studies is not a male-dominated ﬁeld, despite the masculinism of his work.

I started working on Bunting ten years ago; as I read Share’s book it was clear how much labor this volume will save the scholars starting out on their Bunting journeys. Share preempts our questions, usefully deterring researchers from walking up tempting but blind alleys. For example, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 86 is reworked into “The Well of Lycopolis,” but Share warns us that Sonnet 86 wasn’t one of a number edited down by Bunting as an irreverent demonstration—to Dorothy Pound—of his superior concision. (These appeared posthumously in Sharp Study and Long Toil.) Share has done the groundwork, filled gaps, and anticipated the sorts of scholarship that might be required or desired in the future.

Good conservation is an art, entails craft, and has a philosophy and ethics behind its practice. Editing a volume is an act of conservation, in which the editor must think not only about the value of the poems to future generations, but the meaning, resonances, and implications of the method which they adopt. How will the collection influence readers’ understanding and opinion of the poet now and in the future? What is included and what is left out? How much help should the reader be given? What sort of interventions, even in the form of repairs or corrections, ought to be made, and how do you signal that they are interventions? What effect do interventions have on the story of how the poem came to be the way it is? If a full stop was originally misplaced when the poet was alive and the poem was first published, and that is how the poem is now known, what effect does “correcting” this original mistake have? At what point is a poem complete? What is an original, and does the original matter? Share has evidently carefully considered these concerns. The result is a volume that bolsters Bunting’s position in the canon, introduces readers of his poetry to new aspects of the work, provides a welcome crib to newcomers and a valuable resource to long-term fans, and makes his poetry visible to, and enjoyable for, a wider audience for many generations to come. Share’s work is no mere root around in Bunting’s dustbin: this is an attentive, respectful, and crucial work of conservation.

April 2018

Marie NDiaye, My Heart Hemmed In. Translated by Jordan Stump

San Francisco: Two Lines Press, 2017. 296pp. $14.95

Reviewed by Kamil Ahsan

“We don’t feel safe in our homes. We don’t feel safe anywhere,” ran the recent log line of a well-reputed news source. The speaker of such a sentence, it can be easily assumed, could safely plug such an evocation of banishment and assault, without any extraneous clues, into countless injustices. Into the isolation of a refugee camp, for instance. Or into the stratiﬁcations of caste-, class-, or race-based political system. Into apartheid. The problem the Prix Goncourt–winning French writer Marie NDiaye poses in her book My Heart Hemmed In is: What if you know what the context is, but have no notion of placing it? What if you know about the nature of xenophobia and racism, but you don’t have the words? What if you just can’t—or don’t want to—name the problem?

That singular quandary could in and of itself make a character tick, and it is a major motivation for the reader of NDiaye’s narrative to proceed at a breakneck pace, grasping the pages tightly. It’s a book that can be read in one terrifying sitting: so compelling is the “What is happening?” problem posed for NDiaye’s protagonist, Nadia, and her husband, Ange, at the beginning that one cannot help but fall down the rabbit hole of surrealist, nightmarish scenarios that complicate the characters, tease out details and backstories, and even, early on, make the reader question the veracity of the narrator, Nadia, herself.

This is not, however, the singular, or even central, question posed by NDiaye, although it certainly seems like that’s what many reviewers have taken it to be. Caite Dolan-Leach writes in a blurb at the back of the book: “My Heart Hemmed In thoroughly consumes the reader with its lovely, spooky language… . Like Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream, it generates both a sense of mounting unease and a pleasurable desire to learn just what, exactly, has gone so wrong.” Dolan-Leach is correct, of course, about the wonderfully “spooky language,” but she’s also wrong: “what has gone so wrong” is hardly difﬁcult to discern. We meet Nadia and Ange, both respectable schoolteachers, at a moment in their lives when everyone around them has seemed to turn on them. The book begins with a chapter entitled “When did it start?” The very ﬁrst sentence has Nadia wondering, “Now and then, at ﬁrst, I think I catch people scowling in my direction. They can’t really mean me, can they?”

But of course they do. A passerby spits in Nadia’s face for having the audacity to smile at him. Ange is found brutally wounded, with a “gaping crater dug by some tool…something both broad and sharp…like a stout wood chisel or a gouge, which someone took the time to wiggle back and forth in Ange’s ﬂesh after thrusting it deep inside.” A rotating cast of people who seem to know far more than Nadia or Ange—a pharmacist, an interloping and possibly devious neighbor, Ange’s daughters attending to his wound—each in turn express pity, disgust, and revulsion. Nadia and Ange have done this to themselves, their world seems to argue. It is as if Nadia and Ange have gone to bed in a perfectly normal world and woken up the next day in a fascist, dystopic Bordeaux that has stripped them of their dignity and made them outcasts where once they were welcomed. Their neighbors, save one, have disappeared. They are no longer wanted at their school, even urged to never come again. What story could this be other than a nightmare borne of the recent reemergence of the far right—one that brings to mind internment camps, deportations, ethnic cleansing—a nightmare about a racial animus that has again reared its ugly head unbeknownst to this middle-aged couple, convincing everyone they ever knew that they are different, that they are “other”?

That is unquestionably what is happening to Nadia—and by association, we learn, to Ange—but it is not the only thing. Nadia cannot bring herself to speak her predicament, but it is precisely the nature of a game she is relearning that drives the plot forward. “Haven’t you been following the news?” people keep asking Nadia. She replies that they “don’t have a TV.” It slowly dawns on Nadia how truly ignorant she has been, but what we learn of her is far more telling.

NDiaye’s melting pot of genres could only be contained within this hyperfamiliar contemporary nightmare. Like Schweblin or Murakami or Nabokov, but also not like Schweblin or Murakami or Nabokov or any other contemporary writer who deals in dreamscapes and alternate realities, NDiaye, herself of French and Senegalese ancestry, turns Nadia’s descent into paranoia into a story that is surreal, demonic, perhaps even supernatural—but perfectly plausibly so. Reviews I have read of My Heart Hemmed In speak of the mystery-that-must-not-be-named as something that the reviewers gradually learned—something that was perhaps even revealed at the very end. In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Tara Cheesman speaks of it as if it were something hidden: “Whereas the physical appearances of the other characters are described in detail, NDiaye teases out Nadia’s ethnicity. She doesn’t mention her skin color, her features, or her build. And yet we eventually come to understand that Nadia is probably North African.”

This seems, perhaps, a little obvious and also beside the point. Through the narrative, Nadia gradually descends into a sort of purgatorial state of paranoia, but the devil is not in the details of her ethnicity, for those are never in question. What is instead in question is why it has taken Nadia so long to understand what it means to be a “person like her.”

•

Nadia visits a police station to meet her son’s ex-lover Lanton—a man of whom she wonders, “Didn’t I discreetly prefer Lanton’s company to my son’s, and of those two, wasn’t it Lanton I couldn’t imagine never seeing again?”—and she has to summon a deep courage to see the crowd (gathered, one guesses, for reasons having to do with their ethnicity) at the station “straight on…[and] realize we’re alike, they and I.” What does this tell us about Nadia? What does all this tell us about a woman who has left an ex-husband whose tastes and manners she disliked; who escaped a family living in the Les Aubiers projects and never returned to her parents; who wished to never be recognized by anyone she used to know ever again; a woman who had unquestionably bourgeois desires and didn’t rest until they were fulﬁlled in respectable Bordeaux with respectable Ange, whose estranged son’s daughter has a name she cannot bring herself to pronounce? “What sort of lesson is being forced on me by that intolerable name ‘Souhar’?” Nadia asks about the daughter of a son she can never forgive for having “perpetuated the indignity of our bloodline.”

It tells us, perhaps, too much for comfort. Nadia is an unreliable narrator, if that isn’t already clear, her self-awareness coming in trickles and then bursts. When a man from the police station whispers to her “Betrayer!” she refuses to believe it. Nadia is, perhaps, as a blog review has written about her, “so self-centred that she truly can’t see beyond the narrow reality she has constructed around herself.”

And yet, unlike most unreliable narrators, there is a kernel of Nadia’s soul so painfully familiar to the immigrant reader that any reading of her comes with an instinctive desire to protect her—to protect ourselves. For Nadia, who committed the crime of aspiring to the cultured, to the elite, there must come a reckoning. And the reckoning comes with ordeals often too brutal to read. Her paranoia is accompanied by a progressive weight gain that repulses everyone, for which she is constantly chided. The punishment for her ignorance is swift and unrelenting. As she searches for her way back home or her way out, she ﬁnds herself lost, turned away by the city:

And my heart is cornered, surrounded by the baying pack, and it’s hammering on the wall of my chest, wishing it could break out of its cramped cage, my poor aging heart, my poor trembling heart. I was born right here in Bordeaux, in Les Aubiers neighborhood; I’ve spent my whole life in this city, and I love it with a fraternal tenderness, like a human soul mate. But now I ﬁnd Bordeaux slipping away from me, enigmatically shunning my friendship, its streets seeming to change their look and direction (is it only the fog? I ask myself), its citizens grown hostile over the past few months (and I’d gotten used to that, and it had, over time, become bearable), seeming no longer to hate me, exactly, but to be stalking me.

There has been much talk of NDiaye’s remarkable gifts, but if there is one that must be highlighted above all it is her ability to shovel in to the deepest fears of immigrants in the West—particularly women—to examine them as objectively as possible and then ﬁnd a space to exonerate them. Indeed, My Heart Hemmed In, through its unpretentious translation, comes off as a triumph of introspection so profound and yet so brutal that the reading of the protagonist as an unlikable female character with whom one cannot empathize rankles. Nadia is a deeply ﬂawed character, of that there can be no doubt, but what human being deserves this?

That, ﬁnally, is the question NDiaye ﬁnds worth asking. Her inquiry into a woman ﬁlled with self-loathing rooted in her identity is so familiar that it ultimately forces us to ask ourselves: Can we ﬁnd it in our hearts to forgive others, even ourselves, for attempting to assimilate into elite, Western society?

There comes a point in My Heart Hemmed In where an aloof woman—a gynecologist—with whom Nadia ﬁnds her son living, suspects Nadia is pregnant, inspects her, and asks furiously: “Who did you make this with, mama? What have you done with your life?” The book’s ﬁnal turn is Nadia returning to the Les Aubiers projects of her childhood; possibly the happiest of endings for the unhappiest of stories.

Could NDiaye be telling us that, after all that we do, we must ultimately return home? Unlikely. Thankfully, there are too many unanswered counterfactuals in Nadia’s life for there to be a lesson in her horror. That sanctimony, NDiaye spares us.

March 2018

This review will be published in issue 61:2.

Lynn Melnick, Landscape with Sex and Violence

Portland, OR: YesYes, 2017. 112pp. $18

Reviewed by Cassandra Cleghorn

In every poem of Landscape with Sex and Violence, Lynn Melnick just about eats the mic, pressing it against her lips as she sings so as to boost the bass and rasp of each lyric. The book’s scene is LA punk and grunge, beginning with the epigraph drawn from Hole’s “Asking for It,” and spilling into alleyways in which “it’s the ’80s / and we’re all wearing a whole lot of electric pink,” the poet “lit by Hollywood in a decalescent dress.” As advertised, sex and violence are the order of the day. The book spins out its “choke of triggers,” laying down riff upon riff of blood, bruise, splatter and harm, as the poet takes us through the boulevards and backstreets of her California past. “Consider this canvas of central valley splendor / dull as the usual set of sucker punches—his distinctive // suggestion for a rainy day,” begins the title poem; “I couldn’t splay my sentences // damp into dark. I tried to detonate my body / differently than he did.” In diction and delivery, Melnick stakes a claim to a lineage of powerhouse women rockers: as much Patti Smith and Exene Cervenka as Courtney Love.

In the book’s first pages Melnick heads off the charge of confessionalism: “I am going to confess this once // and then I am going to confess it again // in different ways I won’t admit to but never mind”; and, later, “I’ve gotten to this point where I am just going to tell everyone // everything / that’s ever been done to my face.” Even the upgraded critical discourse of “postconfessionalism” is insufficient to Melnick’s Landscape. Yes, Melnick tells all with a frankness that recalls the tradition: “I left for a spell, I left for // a spell and was cuffed and gagged / and let go. I’ve never told anyone that.” A few lines later she adds: “So I’ll share // with you my most recent fat lip, how / the new red I bought covers it // pretty good.” But, having made her reader squirm under the pressure of being named her sole confessor (a twisted version of the intimacy effect of a platinum hit that seems to speak to each of us alone), Melnick pins us in a tighter place: “How it hurts when you / kiss me and I don’t dare look // up—there’s no end to this—chemtrails / the world destroying itself.” The poem ends with this abrupt pan upward, to the ominous skywriting that the poet cannot let herself look at and yet is able to describe, leaving the reader holding the smoking gun of unwanted complicity.

Having read generations of forthright, personal poetry, we are used to seeing poets in positions and scenarios we cannot easily unsee (e.g. the widely circulated photo of Love’s stripped-naked body forcibly groped and assaulted by a mob of fans, the image that moved the singer to write “Asking for It”). We are used to deflecting a poem’s second-person address, certain that Plath’s line, “the brute / Brute heart of a brute like you,” refers not to us personally, but to that “Daddy” over there. Faced with brutal revelation, we as readers seek the familiar, if awkward, third point from which we may overhear, without entering into, the poem’s proper dyad. However keenly I feel for Sexton’s young daughter, having been made privy to her mother’s regrets, I am not that child. This distinction is what allows us to be moved by the poet’s candor, and by the imagined effects of that confession upon the one who should be hearing it.

What’s shocking about Melnick’s book, and what takes it out of the space of the conventionally confessional, is its positioning of the reader as the poet’s male assailant. She taunts us: “I think you should grip your dick through your jeans and ask me // if I can handle it because you know I can, right?” And again: “screw me sideways right here on the sidewalk / like you said you might like to screw me,” and “whistle so loud at my fat ass / that I jump like a stray rodent.” Asking, “Why am I walking away from you? Why am I here on the sidewalk?” she answers, simply, devastatingly, “I’m yours.” Strains of Whitman’s great poem “Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand” are almost audible: “Here to put your lips upon mine I permit you, /…Or if you will, thrusting me beneath your clothing, / Where I may feel the throbs of your heart or rest upon your hip.” Take me, says Whitman to his reader, I’m yours. But the poisonous gas of rape culture, catalyzed by the accumulating fragments of Melnick’s history as victim of assault and rape (“holding all my blood in vials on my lap”), makes violence, not seduction, the key term and transforms the compact between writer and reader accordingly. When the reader is made bystander to scenes such as the one wherein a man ties the poet to a fencepost, or another in which a man “shoves [her] face / into the flatbed then punts [her] / when he’s filled [her],” the reader’s choices are severely narrowed. Organizations such as RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network) tell us that bystanders may intervene to change outcomes, but there is no “stepping in” for the reader; the violence to which we are made witness in this book is always already after the fact. In such a context, reading becomes an act of muted listening, building in the reader a rising sense of powerlessness to do anything other than stand by. We may not have asked for it, and yet we must take it.

At the end of the book, the poet returns to the idea of confession, simultaneously fulfilling and refusing the promise she herself had broached:

and, while you are probably waiting for confession
because you think that’s what I’ve been doing here all along

this is not a story of how my body was first held down
before I’d even hit double digits

on a dingy carpet whose fibers are still
on my tongue, whose burn to my cheek I didn’t even notice

amid the more traumatic injuries

The cumulative experience harrows and dizzies. I received the book during the first days of the #MeToo Movement, in the wake of Harvey Weinstein’s exposure as Hollywood’s most aggressive sexual predator (as of October 30th, sixty women had stepped forward to share their stories of assault and rape). Numbed by thousands of tweets and testimonials, I approached the book warily. Melnick’s poems subsumed the media stream and swept me to higher ground. In their temporal reach—back to the poet’s youth (“I was smut. / The rest was burnished”), and forward to “the story of how I got to live”—the poems accumulated to let me see behind the gropers and rapists, into the very system that grooms and protects them at all levels of our society. Melnick’s achievement is the crafting of a clarion voice that keeps me reading what I both want and desperately do not want to read, cutting through every scene with language that works by turns as razor wire and lifeline.

Another, unlikely epigraph from Jared Farmer’s Trees in Paradise: A California History shares the page with Courtney Love’s lyric: “…there is no such thing as an innocent landscape.” Farmer tells the decidedly nonparadisial history of the Golden State through an account of the importation, exploitation, and mismanagement of its four most identifiable trees: redwoods, eucalyptus, citruses, and palms. In an interview, Melnick has said that Farmer’s book inspired her own project: to represent her own body and personal history as intertwined with “this dangerous, messed-up, haphazard landscape,” which encompasses both her home state of the 80s and 90s, and the US of Trump et alia. The landscapes that emerge from Melnick’s poems are not mere metaphors. Concrete, pavement, “(tarmac, blacktop, lonesome),” “the neon of a floozy motel,” and the “post-industrial particulate” of “the spiky city” come to feel every bit as natural—that is, as necessary—as the floral species of those southwestern biomes that ground these poems: greasewood, cranesbill, “Doomful orange garden!” Palms appear in the book’s final, fragile oasis: “(I almost forgot to tell you) // I lived // in a desert / where palms are signposts of water, not the want of it.” In counterpoint to the book’s primary story of violence and survival threads the motif of California’s tenuous resilience.

The most important implications of Melnick’s book follow from the poet’s ability to sensitize us to the longue durée of our toxic moment. As victims, allies, assailants, and bystanders, we are with this landscape—not simply in it or on it—and each of us has a hand in its destruction and its rebuilding. “I’ve been trying to plant a palm in every garden / I slink through,” Melnick writes. In her singular, sly way, Melnick names and tends to her own pain and anger so as to bring us as readers into the slow poem-by-poem regeneration of our common culture. Holding us to the act of witnessing her subversive repair—as we hold her book now in hand—Melnick makes us party to her radical intervention.

February 2018

This review will be published in issue 61:2.

FLARF: An Anthology of Flarf

Edited by Drew Gardner, Nada Gordon, Sharon Mesmer, K. Silem Mohammad and Gary Sullivan.

Washington, DC: Edge Books, 2017. 288pp. $36

Reviewed by Jasper Bernes

Flarf was and is many things—a movement, a method, a friend group, an in-joke, an email list. But mostly Flarf was a product of a keenly-felt transitional moment, when the various institutions that glued American poetry together were soaked in the solvent fluids of emergent social media. Poetry, and discourse about it, was no longer beholden to the moderating temporality of the print journal, the gatekeeping of the university MFA program, or the fierce tribalism of the city-based avant-garde scene. I remember finding it remarkable that my new online friend of the time, Anne Boyer, could win so many readers, admirers, and friends merely by the strength of her blog. For someone like me, stuck in a remote town and fresh out of an MFA program determined to insulate me from everything interesting in the world of poetry, these blogs and email lists were an essential part of my education.

This was, in other words, a Golden Age of amateurism, before blogs and bloggers were gobbled up by Facebook and Twitter or domesticated by professional websites and institutions. Frequently composed from content found on the user-driven sites of the early internet, Flarf channels these amateur energies, but not in a simply celebratory way. The Flarf creation story that Gary Sullivan tells involves his bad feelings upon discovering that his grandfather had been hustled by the scam site Poetry.com, which awards prizes to everyone and anyone in order to sell them bound anthologies of prizewinners. In response Sullivan writes the worst and most offensive poem possible and submits it to the site, in order to test if there is any lower bound to their aesthetic judgment. (There isn’t; he’s also given a prize.) Flarf is born when Sullivan convinces others on the subpoetics email list to submit their terrible and offensive poems to the site. Far from a celebration of this new age of amateurism, Sullivan’s initial move seems to be an attempt to preserve aesthetic judgment, to ridicule and parody the sheer awfulness of the poems recognized by Poetry.com.

Sullivan’s oft-circulated account of how Flarf was born shouldn’t be the last word, since other Flarfists would display a different attitude to the masses whose language they reworked. But one of the few disappointing aspects of the anthology that Edge has released is that it provides no context for understanding the work of the twenty-four poets included therein. I do not think Flarf is so self-evident and so well-understood a phenomenon that an anthology can dispense with a contextualizing introduction or some sort of prose supplement. Flarf was born out of that heady “blogosphere” and dozens if not hundreds of posts and mini-essays, both affirmative and critical, were written about it. While it will surprise no one if the editors dread a return to such debates, few contemporary readers are battle-scarred in this way, and they would benefit from some historical and political contextualization.

The age of amateurism was also a period when the US government was in the process of killing hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq and Afghanistan. Sullivan’s submission to Poetry.com occurred in 2001, right after the dot-com bust and right before the launch of the war on terror and the modern surveillance state. Fifteen years on, the power of these poems resides in their ability to capture the goofy enthusiasm of early Web 2.0 in such a way that you can hear the bombs in the background. This was also an age of relative political powerlessness, at least by comparison with what comes after the economic crisis of 2008. The anti-war movement was massive but also massively weak, and more or less evaporated after the invasion of Iraq. Liberalism dominated the terms of resistance and what liberalism meant, more or less, was a politics of irony, despite a brief epidemic of post-9/11 think pieces declaring a new age of sincerity. Encasing the blood and viscera of the bad news in a sausage skin of satire, Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show and Stephen Colbert’s The Colbert Report captured the spirit of the times. The ironic politics of Flarf shares something with these contemporary expressions. Seminal Flarf poems like K. Silem Mohammad’s “Mars Need Terrorists” and Drew Gardner’s “Chicks Dig War,” for example, scour the internet for repulsive views that they might ridicule, intermixing them with the porny, spammy, chatty wordspew of the general online environment. The latter poem is composed in large part of language taken from Matthew Fitzgerald’s Sex-Ploytation: How Women Use Their Bodies to Exploit Money from Men, a predecessor to the pickup artist and men’s rights groups that led the charge of Gamergate and, later, formed the misogynist core of the alt-right. Gardner splices the language together expertly, exposing the bizarre dream logic at the core of the new misogyny, and does so in such a way that you’re never unclear what the point is.

Flarf satire can be used to powerful effect, but in other instances it goes astray. One of the problems is that Flarf often displays a simplistic red state vs. blue state conception of political division, animated by a fear that, in the language of another Gardner poem, “soon we’ll all be praying to John Denver / if we don’t allow right-wing poor people to feel happy ALL the time.” Sullivan is explicit about this connection in his Flarf origin story. As he notes, “the flarf ‘voice’ in my head was that of my father, a transplanted Southerner who likes to pontificate, and who has a lot of opinions that kind of horrify me.” This sort of “flarf voice” is fairly prevalent among the poems collected here. Without putting too fine of a point on it, many of the dramatic monologues from language found on the internet express, through ventriloquized irony, middle-class contempt for poor (or rural or uneducated) whites. Mixed in with that contempt is an unmistakable enjoyment in saying the unsayable, experimenting with language and viewpoints deemed off-limits by middle-class liberal standards. Sullivan is explicit about this as well. He found the norms of the listserv where he first experimented with Flarf too “P.C.” and “began using ‘flarf’…as a way of keeping [his] own tendencies toward repression” at bay. Eventually, Sullivan and others created the derepressive space of the Flarflist, where they could share their own experiments with socially toxic materials without fear of censure.

We have here, in miniature, an allegory of internet discourse. On the one hand, the politically correct discursive norms of a certain social media space; on the other hand, the troll who would violate them. This scene has played out in countless ways in the decade and a half since Flarf emerged. The troll will tell you that they have no avowed commitment to the content of their challenges. Their interventions are purely a question of form—the offensive content is therapeutic, or it’s there to prove a point about free speech, to attack the sanctimony and self-righteousness of the politically correct. In the Trump era, however, when the trolls show up with knives and guns, such claims have little ground to stand on.

Flarf is not merely a troll poetics. There are other tendencies, as a reading of the anthology will make clear. In some hands, Flarf seems a variant of documentary poetics, an attempt to sound the depths of nascent digital cultures, providing a cross-sectional study of worlds heretofore understood as separate. In the best Flarf, there is an infectious, lexicographic joy at the weird wondrousness of contemporary English. Jordan Davis captures it nicely: “‘What I love about chat rooms / Is that they’re already halfway to poetry.’” This is a sincere rather than condescending celebration of amateur culture. One cannot read K. Silem Mohammad’s poems without catching some of that joy. A poem like “‘The swans come hither in great numbers’” moves from Lucretius to chat room to spam to porn to literary criticism in the space of a few couplets. The poem seems likely to have been written via “Google Sculpting”—that is, collaged from search results generated by an improbable combination of terms. One of these terms is certainly “swan” and the poem serves as a rather remarkable survey of the fate of that bird as symbol, marking our distance from Mallarmé’s swan frozen in lake ice.

in our culture many people choose to use pairs of swans
to create an undetectable total mind-controlled slave

filled with a sinister creative brutality unleashed to sleep till bedtime
they began to vomit blood and rolled up their eyes

swan districts are an abomination! go the tigers
reflux superstructures whimper outserved intrepid gynarchy

unattended braintrust-plugging minuses won a Nutrisystem contract
stupid-brain rollercoaster mouths asserted “Africa podium hut”

dissonant biharmonic cream-puff underwear-freak bangers
mentally uncovered integral zebra-cellist-messiah dining halls

amazing feats of animal husbandry wherein I poked Mom in the ribs

For Mallarmé, the swan (le cygne) was a sign (le signe) that had become ossified by convention. But for Mohammad it’s less sign than signal, a vehicle for a deluge of associational content. The other search term is probably “vomit” and we might think of this poem as turning the swan inside out, emptying its insides, rather than freezing it in the clear lake of lyric.

Stronger, perhaps, than the documentary impulse though often intermixed with it is a tendency for the Flarf poem to become dramatic monologue. This is clear in Sullivan’s account of the Flarf voice, where he both desires to speak in and yet is horrified by the voice of the other. Not all Flarfologues are animated by the same urges, however, and in the hands of a writer such as Katie Degentesh, the dramatic monologue becomes a powerful tool for documentary exploration. Many of the poems included in the anthology derive from her excellent book The Anger Scale, which used the questions from a personality test (the MMPI) as search strings, and then created monologues from the results. The effect is compelling, and strikingly different from other Flarf poems, in part because Degentesh works hard to make these poems and their speakers internally coherent. The seams and fissures in the poems therefore stand out all the more clearly. We are able to see how the poems originate in contradictory social materials and processes. Degentesh’s poems say something significant about character and personality in the age of social media. Just as the questions of the MMPI call into being certain speakers and dramatic monologues, so too do the algorithms that drive the content we see online, personalized for us through crude though effective forms of typecasting not so different from the MMPI. Degentesh’s poems reveal the people formed by these processes, but also their attempt to speak through the cracks in them. One of the most welcome aspects of this anthology is that it includes newer work by Degentesh from two separate sequences—one concerned with the sex lives of adolescents, and another with the viral properties of the hashtag—that continue the method begun with The Anger Scale. The poem, “My Friends Were Having Sex and I Wanted to Fit In,” for example, is a brilliant exploration of the awkward and uncomfortable nature of adolescent sexuality:

I started wearing bras when my mom told me that I could have sex.
Recently she has asked me repeatedly not to wear a bra, telling me
I am going to watch my loved ones suffer when I die

Everything gets twisted, but in a way that makes a strange sort of sense:

Sometimes I get jealous when this young girl calls and asks Bobby
to be the guy that everyone barely remembered
when the mostly white community met at the mall for caroling.

Flarf is adolescent, then, in the worst and best ways. It can be annoyingly puerile and sarcastic, or touchingly pimply and embarrassed. But adolescents grow up and there are, today, a number of writers who owe a great deal to Flarf. Some of the best poets of the younger generation associated with so-called conceptual poetry—I’m thinking of Trisha Low, Steven Zultanski, and Diana Hamilton—write poems that resemble Degentesh’s to no small degree. These are all writers who use what I would call “post-internet collage” to explore questions of character and characterization, if not dramatic monologue, in the contemporary moment.

Flarf and its spirit lives on everywhere, and perhaps nowhere more clearly than in meme culture. In its moment Flarf captured perfectly the goofy charm of the meme, those in-jokes so inward one doesn’t need to understand them. Take, for example, a poem like Rodney Koeneke’s “Pizza Kitty”:

Kitty Goes Postal—
wants pizza.
Kitty has hat & cape and looks
like a magician…

Observe kitty eating a slice of pizza.
“Eat some free pizza, Kitty!” YUM
(pizza man impatient at the door)

BAD KITTY LIST, FOOD RELATED
______will not use my ninja kitty paw strike
______naked on sofa with rapidly-cooling pizza
______monster clowns with KITTY FACES!

Meme culture is a politically polarized space, and as much as memes can be innocuous diversions emptied of all content, they are also vehicles for the politics of irony that Flarf and kindred forms explore. Memes emerge from same digital spaces as the troll, from message boards like 4chan that offer up a smorgasbord of ironized racism and sexism. The left has its memes, just as the left has its trolls, but it’s arguable that the meme depends on a structure of feeling that, in this day and age, complements the manners and methods of the far right. With the rise of Trump, troll culture found a raison d’être and a new discipline and organization, taking the streets adorned with the visual and verbal jargon of right-wing imageboards. Flarf emerged in a moment when a person might reasonably believe that satire could expose the absurdity of the powerful and organize outrage. Poems such as “Chicks Dig War” and TV shows such as The Colbert Report could deliver the news and mobilize feeling about it, and though resistance never amounted to much, such things might reasonably have been expected to lead to action rather than paralysis. Trump effectively puts an end to that. His actions and language outstrip even the most imaginative parody. He neutralizes all outrage and scandal by purposely courting it in advance. He is his own satire, the king of the trolls, and effectively puts an end to a left troll politics, not to mention a troll poetics. Flarf’s future lies elsewhere.

February 2018

This review will be published in issue 61:2.

The Poetry of Jim Jarmusch: A Review of Paterson

Reviewed by Eric Powell

Poetry has been a consistent, and often humorous, element in the films of Jim Jarmusch. Think of Down by Law (1986), in which Roberto Benigni is infatuated with the poetry of Robert Frost and asks, with his thick Italian accent, “You like-a Bob Frost?” Or Dead Man (1995), in which Johnny Depp’s character is inexplicably named William Blake. Or Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), in which John Hurt somehow convincingly plays Christopher Marlowe as a vampire who has been alive for hundreds of years. But Jarmusch’s love of poetry comes to the fore in his latest film Paterson (2016), set in the New Jersey city of literary fame—the city of Allen Ginsberg and William Carlos Williams (who of course features prominently in the film).

Paterson is pro forma Jarmusch in that almost nothing happens in the film. In place of a plot there is a diurnal filmic sequence that is repeated with minor variations: Paterson (Adam Driver, we’re never given a first name), a bus driver who writes poems, wakes up around 6:00 a.m., looks at his watch, kisses his wife Laura (Golshifteh Farahani), has Cheerios for breakfast, walks to work, writes poems for a while before his shift begins, talks briefly with Donny (Rizwan Manji) who is his shift leader (or something like that), drives his public transport bus, takes a lunch break during which he writes more poetry, walks home, greets Laura—who is always engaged in some new artistic project—has dinner with her, walks their English bulldog Marvin (the winsome Nellie), stops in the local bar for a beer, goes home and goes to bed. This sequence is repeated for a full week, Monday through Sunday, with little development. It is emphatically quotidian, which is where Jarmusch started with his great early films Permanent Vacation (1980) and Stranger Than Paradise (1984).

As an artist of the quotidian, Jarmusch’s technique is minimalist; it reminds me of the music of Philip Glass or Steve Reich, the smallest of alterations in pattern resonating louder and louder over time and through repetition. His films are, in this sense, anti-filmic—or at least anti-Hollywood—eschewing narrative and the eye candy of constant action and special effects.

Another less commented upon aspect of Jarmusch’s postmodernism is his self-conscious play with genre. He’s been quietly ticking off the boxes of the major American film genres, but always twisting or subverting them: Down by Law is a jailbreak film, Dead Man a western, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999) a gangster/samurai movie, Broken Flowers (2005) a mystery/road trip film, The Limits of Control (2009) a spy thriller/action film (with absolutely no action), Only Lovers Left Alive (2013) a vampire/stoner film. Paterson is no exception; it’s Jarmusch’s romantic comedy. It’s a story of the love of Paterson and Laura (the Petrarchan reference too obviously spelled out in the film itself); but it’s also about Jarmusch’s own love of poetry.

I was surprised on learning at the end of the film that the poems—uninspired plums-in-the-icebox-style Williams stuff—were written by a professional poet, Ron Padgett. I was grimacing throughout the film each time a poem was read, both because of the poetry itself, which I assumed must have been written by Jarmusch—or perhaps even Adam Driver—and also at the Hallmark-card-kitschy way in which the poems were presented on the screen. This, I thought with a pang, is exactly the kind of innocuous bullshit that people think that poetry is.

A friend justly pointed out the problematic class assumptions lurking beneath the poems, which are either sappy love poems or poems about objects directly in front of Paterson. No doubt Jarmusch and Padgett were going for Williams, but this is denatured Williams: “The Red Wheelbarrow,” for example, now mostly encountered in isolation in anthologies or the classroom, was incorporated into Spring and All, a work at least as formally innovative as The Waste Land. And “This Is Just to Say” was radical in a Duchampian ready-made fashion. Not so, the boring object poems in Paterson. No doubt unintended, the effect of the poems in the film is to suggest that this lowly bus driver is completely incapable of ideas or extended thought or reflection, despite shots meant to convey thought and reflection. Williams’s dictum “no ideas but in things,” is transformed here into: “No ideas. Things.”

The love story has its own troublesome aspects, with Paterson lovingly indulging in his stay-at-home wife’s dilettantish arts and crafts activities and dreams of fame and success, while he labors away at work and his poems. When Laura’s dog Marvin (spoiler alert—kind of) eats Paterson’s notebook that contains all of his poems, handwritten naturally, it feels too much like the old tale of the wife thwarting the great work of male genius.

The best parts of Paterson are the scenes in which Paterson is driving his bus route through the city, the conversations between passengers that he overhears, the unadorned poetry of daily life that emerges through the liminal space of transit. This is what Jarmusch shares with Williams: the rootedness of his films in a particular place. Each of his films is a kind of paean to a place and its unique life, colors, textures, and rhythms. It’s usually a city—New York (Permanent Vacation), New Orleans (Down by Law), Memphis (Mystery Train), Madrid (The Limits of Control), Detroit (Only Lovers Left Alive)—but sometimes a particular landscape—the wild west of Arizona (Dead Man) or upstate New York (Broken Flowers).

Paterson is not one of Jarmusch’s best films. His poetry lies elsewhere, in the painterly eye he brings to composing single frames; in the development of short sequences and their repetitions; in his ability to work within while ultimately transgressing the boundaries of genre; and in his ability to capture the soul of the place where he shoots.

February 2018

Natalie Shapero, Hard Child

Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2017. 96pp. $16

Reviewed by Christopher Spaide

If you named Natalie Shapero the funniest newish poet in America, you might not be wrong, but you would be doing her a disservice. Humor is only one of her tools, but it happens to be her most versatile—a fifty-function Swiss Army knife supplying her with tweezers, toothpicks, corkscrews, necessities for survival. The funny poets before her would recognize her non sequiturs, mishearings, toppling-over lists, the sort of brusque Plath-grade oversharing that elicits nervous, what-was-that laughter. They might appreciate the peanut gallery of interlocutors that pipe up throughout her poetry, descendants of George Herbert’s God and James Merrill’s Ouija board pen pals, their speech-balloon interjections rendered in SMALL CAPS: God, who built Shapero “for endings,” “never says anything but YOU HAD ONE JOB”; wondering what kind of dog she’d be, Shapero, or her id, blurts: “I WOULD BE A DEAD DOG, THAT’S WHAT KIND.”

Elsewhere, Shapero sounds like the closest American poetry has come in decades to stand-up, though what kind of comedian is she—a whittler of one-liners?

I’m in my thirties
and so already know every form of human
repugnance—only a child has anything there
to learn.

An observational comic, handing over anthropological jottings on our own bafﬂing behavior?

After a bath or escape, the dog
stands newly without his collar
and everyone coos ohh aww he’s
naked, as though he weren’t
on full display before.

An absurdist who treats whimsy with a logician’s rigor?

Charged with attention always, who could not drift

to, say, how untried cowboys may find kissing
unduly burdensome, due to the hats?

Keeping all this together depends on a honed sense of comic timing and a sustained performance, sentence by sentence, of raising one expectation while unsettling two more. A typical Shapero poem, a ten-to-thirty-line routine, starts with a title that dices standard English into a riddling snippet (“Absence, That Which Never”; “Not Horses”; “Teacup This”), sets up one tone or tactic in her first sentence, and lands punch lines in every sentence that follows. “Outside Less”—another huh? of a title—is half conversational coasting, half hairpin turns:

I have been outside less, I have taken to saying,
in the days since my daughter was born—
passive, as though it were somebody

else who bore her. And bore her, I also have
taken to saying, as though she were a hole.

Taken a sentence at a time, a Shapero poem seems just arrived at, an on-the-ﬂy sequence linked by free association, false equivalency, and mock clariﬁcation: the unquenchable “hole” of her infant reminds Shapero of “a woodpecker” forcing “a gape in my neighbor’s / barn side,” which in turn elucidates Shapero’s infant daughter, that something made from nothing, as she “knocks, woodpecker-like, her searching mouth / into my breast.” Taken as a whole, however, the same poem seems precisely plotted, its parallels and reversals coming into focus—the “passive” birth matching the forcible boring-inward, the mother going “outside less” while feeling peculiarly inside-less, bored-into and boring, before and after her daughter’s birth. The poem never drops its chatty, swaggering composure, even when Shapero talks her way into dead ends: “But I don’t mean to say she / instills in my body an absence,” Shapero reassures us: “What nothing // assembles within me was already there.”

Shapero’s comedic chops were already sharpened in her 2013 debut No Object, a collection anxious with the influence of equally anxious comedians: one poem doubles down on Henny Youngman’s number-one one-liner (“just take / my wife seriously / take her”); another quotes verbatim all the smuggest dirty lines from Woody Allen’s Manhattan. In her new collection, Hard Child (which alludes to Annie Hall’s opening), the humor is less for our entertainment than for Shapero’s cold comfort, understanding everything too late: “All I have coming in this / world is a joke that hits me later.” Shapero’s topics are the same that agonize Allen, oldie-but-goodies for comedy and poetry alike: death, sex, war, Hitler, JFK’s assassination, the apocalypse, pretty much anything insurmountable and verboten from polite conversation. Like Allen, Shapero reserves her best smack talk for the God she half-believes in, spreading bad rumors in the hopes he’ll show up, fuming. Maybe he, she muses, is “like Houdini: / rumored withstanding of any assault, but / in fact it takes only a few well-delivered // blows and a week and He’s gone.” Rarely, reticently, Shapero subjects herself to the same scrutiny—her title poem admits, halfway through, “I was a hard child, by which / I mean I was callous from the start”—but she would rather tilt the surgical lighthead onto others. “I typically hate discussing the past,” that poem concludes, “and treasure the option, rarer and rarer, / to turn from it, as when K.’s twins / were born and one of them / nearly died—I don’t even remember which, / that’s how much they got better.”

The collection’s titular child could be Shapero herself, reluctantly compelled to look hard at a past that’s like one long, difficult childhood: suffering passively, inflicted-upon, irredeemably past but continuous with the present’s troubles. It’s also Shapero’s own child, whose birth gives Hard Child a structure (its two parts, unnamed, document two eras, Before Child and After Delivery) and a new theme that fits her style as snugly as a BabyBjörn. Parenting and its cultish entourage give Shapero—a poet nauseated by dogma, officialese, conventional wisdom—a gallery full of targets. Shapero does not wait longer than the opening poem to report: “I bought the bound ONE THOUSAND NAMES / FOR BABY, made two lists: one if she’s born breathing, // one if not. The second list was longer.” In Hard Child’s first part, the yet-to-be newborn strikes Shapero as yet another worthless fiction to riff on—she imagines dressing the baby, “due to be / born near Halloween,” as the Lindbergh Baby: “This costume / works the best if the baby / is nowhere to be found.” Hilariously, in the second half of the book, the baby stays just as unreal in life as she was before birth, becoming a novel prop in Shapero’s one-woman show. The hospital is complicit, “packing the baby into your arms, / saying avoid the dismal,” only to prescribe Shapero’s specialty, self-subtraction:

remember it’s normal
for the baby to lose weight

in the first days, then regain it, you can check by stepping

onto a home scale holding
the baby, then you just subtract
your body from the scene.

Mother, it turns out, is as much of a prop as her child, dependent on propping up and changing, treacherously ticking with life: “each of us // is a clock, all hammers and counting down.”

Intolerance for even trace amounts of sanctimony distinguishes Hard Child from the past decade’s outstanding collections of poetry on motherhood. Shapero is closer to the loopy Plath of “Metaphors,” one-upping her own caricatures of the pregnant or maternal body: Shapero, learning about an agglomeration of “a thousand small // ﬁsh, stuck together and sucking,” confesses that she too is “composed in haste and subject to uncoupling.” A list of Shapero’s ancestors would also include Emily Dickinson, going toe-to-toe with the universe, and John Berryman, with his volatile, meiotic Henry. The living poet whom Shapero recalls most often is Louise Glück, another poet of self-cancellation, formal constriction, and a deadpan that’s practically flatlining. Both poets write from within passivity and powerlessness, prey to everyone, even themselves. (“The great thing / is not having / a mind,” Glück once wrote, “Feelings: / oh, I have those; they / govern me.”) And in Glück, Shapero may have found a model for her disjointed free-verse line, with its unapologetic asymmetries and snapped-off enjambments. “Even a baby stares / longer at symmetrical / faces,” she acknowledges, “suggesting a preference / for pattern, a want // inborn.” But Shapero recognizes how formal perfection can gloss over: “what / if the baby is staring / instead in horror?”

The chief danger of Glück’s scraped-out style is portentousness, clanging hollowly; Shapero, so similar in technique and so opposed in temperament, risks swerving entirely into gooﬁness with no grit, punch lines that deliver quick laughs with easy ironies. A dozen poems in Hard Child end on a sentence with some form of the words “die,” “kill,” “pain,” or “take my life” (I counted); her least satisfying poem about death finishes with proverbs only a few cheesy degrees from slasher-film taglines: “Death is the worst // sort of lurker, the best sort of soldier of fortune. / It hardly ever refuses anyone’s offer.” In Shapero’s most memorable endings, her music gets impeccable—syntax winding up, meter evening out, perfect rhymes clicking into place—exactly when life starts to seem unfathomable. “Form, Save for My Own,” the poem with the horror-stricken babies, starts to funnel all that horror inward: “I revere all variants / of the human / form, save for my own.” It’s a quintessential Shapero predicament, one woman’s standstill against herself, and no one cuts anyone a break:

My mind has made
an enemy of my body;
it’s all I can do

not to quote Kissinger
on the Iran-Iraq
War: A PITY THEY

BOTH CAN’T LOSE.

A poet who ends by rhyming “all I can do” with “LOSE ” knows there’s no way to win. Up on the scaffolding of her crystallized forms, keeping a wary comic distance, there may be a way out.

January 2018

This review was published in issue 61:1.

China Miéville, October: The Story of the Russian Revolution

London: Verso, 2017. 369 pp. $17.95

Reviewed by Alexander Billet

For anyone familiar with the work of China Miéville or the Russian Revolution, there is a question immediately posed by his new book October: The Story of the Russian Revolution: Why should Miéville, author of some of the most complex and vivid contemporary “weird fiction,” be a good candidate to write about the first successful communist revolution in history? The centenary of the Bolshevik seizure of power has of course brought out countless commentaries and dissections of the still-controversial event. Some are useful. Others are disgraceful hatchet jobs. Does there need to be another volume written on what took place in Russia one hundred years ago? What does this curator of the strange and uncanny have to tell us about it?

As it turns out, a great deal. And this is connected to the necessity of revisiting and retelling the story of the seizure of power that took place during the October Revolution. Miéville knows how to use off-kilter lights to illuminate those parts of existence elided by polite conversation. His best work reminds us of the power that exists in alterity: systems cast people into the past, yet these same people often contain an image of our future. Whereas a more traditional historian might describe a sequence of events, Miéville tarries with the moment and the event, mining its different dimensions and its possible outcomes as manifested in a place or a crowd.

The potential of the crowd is a prescient discussion, as ever-present as it is contentious. The refrain that America’s most disaffected and disgruntled are the ones who gave us President Donald Trump is a constant one. Miéville presents us with a markedly different kind of deplorable, however, and a sharply opposed vision of the future. He is a Marxist, and an unabashed one. As such, October is resolutely partisan in its sympathy for the Bolsheviks, Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, the ragged soldiers, sailors, and workers who stormed the Winter Palace on October 26, 1917.

Miéville’s method is in both his wheelhouse and the title. As he writes in the introduction:

It is…a short introduction for those curious about an astonishing story, eager to be caught up in the revolution’s rhythms. Because here it is precisely as a story that I have tried to tell it. The year 1917 was an epic, a concatenation of adventures, hopes, betrayals, unlikely coincidences, war and intrigue; of bravery and cowardice and foolishness, farce, derring-do, tragedy; of epochal ambitions and change, of glaring lights, steel, shadows; of tracks and trains.

In other words, it is the creative intellect rather than the analytical that leads us here. This is not to say that Miéville plays fast and loose with the facts, or that there isn’t a rigorously researched reality being sketched for us. The book’s partisanship and willingness to take a side necessitate that the author regard the facts for what they are. Russian workers and peasants lived through both abject deprivation and violent flux. World War I was a depraved bloodbath that threw millions into a meat grinder. The Romanovs were pampered inepts completely detached from the real world and the liberal politicians who attempted to build a society after the tsar’s abdication. They were trying to stop a process they didn’t fully understand. No matter how they feel about the Revolution, all but the most dishonest historian would accept these as hard truths. But how does the truth evolve? How does one reality become another? Explaining this is where Miéville’s gifts as a storyteller are so important. Not in the sense of creating fiction, but rather in knowing that the dramatic also holds within it the stuff of social conflict and change.

Miéville starts his narrative in a unique way: by retelling the myth of how St. Petersburg (later Petrograd), the primary setting for October, was founded. In 1703, Peter the Great himself supposedly thrust his bayonet into the earth and yawped for there to be a city built on Zayachy Island. “This never happened,” the author writes. “Peter was not there.” There are distinct echoes here of Marshall Berman’s literary treatment of cities (St. Petersburg included) in his seminal All That Is Solid Melts Into Air. In such narratives, the city is a contradictory place: at once built from singular triumphalist myth and a multifaceted combination of different landscapes and timelines jockeying with each other. In October, however, St. Petersburg is more than setting; it is its own character, with different versions of itself emerging and taking over depending on which historic force seizes its streets and the form in which it does so.

The breadth and diversity of these forces—some of which emerged during or after the toppling of the tsar in February, others radically transformed and rearranged—are often dizzying. And Miéville, it appears, wants us to feel this dizziness, even if we are never overwhelmed by it. This is no Manichean tale of two sides grappling for a clean victory. Russia’s ruling cliques change face a handful of times throughout the book: the tsar abdicates and leaves a vacuum to be filled by parliamentary bodies pulled between reaction, liberalism, and social democracy of one kind or another. Hard-line military men step in and attempt to wrench control of the nation back into authoritarian hands, impatient with the dithering of compromisers.

On the other side is a restless subaltern that also straddles the divide between futurity and anachronism: a vast peasant majority often forced into squalid circumstances, and a proletarian minority working in some of the largest and most technologically advanced factories in the world. These were further composed of several variants of radical and socialist parties—Bolshevik, Menshevik (Left and Right as time progresses), Mezhraiontsy, Socialist Revolutionary (again parsed into Left and Right wings), and so on—whose ways forward conflicted as often as they dovetailed. When these classes instituted their own method of democratic decision making in the form of soviets, the parties became stages for competing visions and philosophies as conditions grow more and more dire.

What Miéville necessarily must experiment with here is a concept that has fascinated and stumped a great many writers and artists: that of the collective protagonist. It was, in fact, a method of storytelling whose contradictions were drawn into further relief by the Russian Revolution itself, spurring filmmakers like Sergei Eisenstein to innovate the method of montage to conceive of “the people” as the narrative’s driving force. Like Eisenstein, Miéville is uninterested in telling the revolution as a tale of “great men” who magically amass throngs of people behind them in the shape of their historic vision. To him, this is not fundamentally where the story exists.

If this is evident anywhere, then it is in the sequences that feature the in/famous personification of Bolshevism: Lenin. It is impossible to talk about the Russian Revolution without him, and both proponents and detractors have granted him a central place in its events. While October does not deny for a second that he was crucial to shaping the path to working-class power, it also has no truck with images of either genius or master manipulator. Miéville is frank, several times throughout the book, about when Lenin was wrong, when he miscalculated, misjudged, or failed to win an argument with the membership of the Bolsheviks. He is also, along with the Bolsheviks, outpaced by events through dint of misjudgment or outright absence several times.

Such debates and arguments are a constant feature throughout the book, particularly within the Soviets (councils) of workers, soldiers, sailors, and peasants. Miéville’s care in connecting the arguments with the consequence of what was happening in the real world, however, saves them from becoming merely interminable chatter. Here is the scene that played out in April when Lenin arrived in Petrograd after months in exile, greeting a Soviet whose elected representatives were urging caution, arguing against the seizure of power and for the continuation of war:

When Lenin at last replied, it was not to the Soviet chair, nor to anyone from its delegation. He spoke instead to everyone else present, to the crowd – his ‘dear comrades, soldiers, sailors and workers’. The imperialist war, he roared, was the start of European civil war. The longed-for international revolution was imminent…. Ever the internationalist, he concluded with a stirring call to build from this first step: ‘Long live the worldwide socialist revolution!’ His Soviet hosts were stunned. They could only watch numbly as the crowds demanded a further speech.

It is the crowds that drive this scene, not Lenin. In this way Miéville reveals how, even within the historico-literary aegis of the collective, certain individuals and their ideas can become conduits for future events, both acted upon by them and in turn acting upon them. This is, after all, the story of a revolution struggling to make itself permanent. Illustrating such a dynamic requires mining the chaos for strands of order, of the common threads that tangle and cut from each other as factories strike, landlords’ homes are ransacked, and battalions revolt against their commanding officers.
Boosters of the revolution might shy from mentioning the violent and senseless crime that streamed into Petrograd life in the weeks leading up to the October Revolution. Miéville doesn’t. This is not, as one would expect were the author a detractor, a play at painting the revolution wholly as an act of depravity. Rather it is to drive home the fact that there was no going back to the old order. It could not hold, and the morbid symptoms (as Gramsci famously called them) were bound to appear. Much like the revolutionaries themselves, the author must find the hints of utopia in an increasingly dystopian sequence.
Seeing these differing realities, these different visions for the future balancing and pulling on each other, hits home the depth of the rupture taking place within Russian society and the possibility for that shift to go in any direction. “The standard of October declares that things changed once,” writes Miéville, “and they might do so again.” This image of history is necessarily one in which crowds become chimeras, transforming the trajectory of time between each singular moment’s pain and promise. It is a markedly different kind of historical event, a different kind of crowd, than the one that lifts the demagogy of right-wing populism on its shoulders. In the midst of overwhelming chaos, there is also the potential for something new to be conceived and invented.

January 2018

Denise Duhamel, Scald

Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017. 102pp. $15.95

Reviewed by Angela Sorby

Denise Duhamel’s Scald
deploys that casual-Friday
Duhamel diction so effortlessly

a reader might think heck,
I could write like that,
but then the dazzling leaps

and forms begin—
“Snake Pantoum,” “Conceptual Villanelle”—
and Duhamel’s sentences

don’t even break a sweat,
sailing on with her trademark mix
of irony, grrrl power, and low-key technical virtuosity,

like if Frank O’Hara, Carrie Brownstein,
and Elizabeth Bishop had a baby.
Scald recklessly excavates

the late twentieth century,
dedicating its three sections
to Shulamith Firestone, Andrea Dworkin,

and Mary Daly, a combo
that could be deadly (preachy, passé)
but is, in fact, great;

a poem like “Fornicating”
starts the Dworkin section
imagining “unmet desires”

and absurd anonymous hookups,
ultimately complicating Dworkin’s
infamous anti-het-sex stance

without scorning it. That’s key:
Duhamel asks her readers to picture
these now-dead women

as part of an evolving conversation.
Still, Duhamel’s hardcore
fans, who recall the witty immediacy

of the Barbie poems in Kinky (1997),
might prefer Scald when it tackles
the near–present tense,

as in “Extreme Villanelle,” which starts:
“Our drones, called Predator and Reaper, /
have killed at least four hundred civilians /

as they wiped out extremists,
life cheaper // in the Middle East.”
What, she asks, counts as extremist?

Us? Them? Labels are too easy.
In “How Deep It Goes”
Duhamel claims to hate the phrase

“having it both ways,” because “men
always have it both ways,”
but her poems are too concrete,

too embodied to resolve
into the political binaries of the 1970s
or 90s or now. Even when Duhamel

samples nonfictional texts
her words are not mirrors or lamps
but doors, opening both ways,

between actual and possible worlds.
In “On the Occasion of Typing My First
Email on a Brand-New Phone,”

Duhamel writes, “When I sign ‘Denise’ /
autocorrect suggests Denise Richards /
which makes my ex-husband Charlie Sheen…”

as if the wrong word could disrupt
a person’s whole self, as indeed it can.
When I type my name,

“Angela” autocorrects to “Angela Merkel,”
Chancellor of Germany,
but the error is fixable,

fortunately, since I’d prefer
to skip the Group of Seven summit,
and instead applaud Scald,

a book that displays Duhamel’s
signature verve while adding a layer
of retrospective melancholy,

as befits a poet at midlife,
especially one still reeling from Charlie Sheen’s
drug-fueled and insensitive behavior.

November 2017

This review was published in issue 61:1.

Bill Knott, I Am Flying into Myself: Selected Poems, 1960–2014, Edited by Thomas Lux

New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017. 214pp. $28

Reviewed by Andrew Osborn

Bill Knott made himself out to be a sad sack who compensated for his burlap psyche by donning intriguingly tailored hairshirts. He was also a hilarious, renegade kook, whose copious poems often catch ﬁre from their frictions. As if taking cues from both Berryman’s Sonnets and The Dream Songs’ Henry after cutting his teeth on Surrealism in the late 1960s, Knott expressed his sense-of-self-as-schlimazel with increasing dexterity and wit to achieve an aesthetics of exquisite haplessness. I Am Flying into Myself, edited and introduced by Thomas Lux, offers a sanitized sampler of Knott’s life’s work. It returns to deserving circulation mostly the most reﬁned poetry of a half-century corpus distinguished by crude ﬂourishes. I Am Flying into Myself is especially valuable for its inclusion of brilliant poems composed during Knott’s ﬁnal decade—that is, since 2004 when, allegedly with regret, he allowed Farrar, Straus and Giroux to publish The Unsubscriber.

That collection, his eleventh and best, displays Knott’s quirky combo of erudition, self-deprecation, and excess in its concluding section, “Poems After, ” which responds to works by an international array of artists and writers. His gloss on the title of “Transhendeculous, ” for example, is clever but also patently obsessive: “Trans(from poetry to music/from Pater to Mater)hendec(-asyllabics)ulous(ridic- of no-brow me to adumbrate the Great Pate). ” Among homages to Borges, Bashō, and Braque, “transversions ” of Trakl, as well as allusive addresses to Alfonsina Storni, José Lezama Lima, and Magritte, Knott reverses the vectors of surveillance in “Archaic Torso of Apollo ” to devise his own sonnet, “Sureties. ” According to Rilke’s sublime logic, the lack of ocular points of origin distributes and magniﬁes the moral insistence of the god’s gaze: “You must change your life. ” Knott irreverently ﬁgures the truncated sculpture’s self-containment after “A tortoise that has retracted everything / Into its obdurate lair. ” Then, imagining “you ” as an assailant who seeks to further vandalize the artwork, he declares that only by assuming the artwork’s divine indifference to human mutability may one attract its notice:

You dance like wallpaper thawing its father
And still you lack that proof-in-all, that aloof
Olympian ennui, the sniper’s prize.

As long as change is your life it will shun you.
No shot will shut your target torso.

The poem’s coup de grâce depends upon the reader’s recognition of that last line as not a reassurance but a threat. To Knott’ s way of thinking—held over from what prompted him to title his second small-press collection Auto-Necrophilia—we are willing Semeles, eager to be offed in trade for proof of an eternal being’ s attention.

I can’t account for this excerpt’s opening simile, but I can say that it’s typical of the zany risks—sudden swan dives, or cannonballs, into the deep end of Dada—that distinguish even Knott’s later poetry from that of pretty much every other postwar American. Knott debuted in the Nixon era as an angry, lovelorn surrealist whose most compelling poems’ brevity preempted others’ enervating lack of follow-through. What distinguishes the gems among his mature poems of the 1980s onward is their fusing of keen, metaphysically extended conceits with demotic language, lowbrow concerns, deliberate ﬁgural imprecisions, and ﬂights of inexplicable fancy. The subtitle of Knott’s ﬁrst volume, The Naomi Poems: Corpse and Beans (1968), pays impish homage to the French surrealist poet Robert Desnos’s Corps et biens (Body and Goods) (1930). With its reﬁnement, however, Knott’s lyric craft increasingly resembled that of Salvador Dalí’s painting Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (1936). Whereas photo-realists depicting layered architectural angles or art brut painters of slovenly scenes create little tension between form and content and thereby risk having their artistry ignored, Dalí’s exacting presentations of ﬁctive grotesques bring new images into the world even as they heighten appreciation for his technical mastery. Knott’s structured abjectness arrests our notice similarly.

Knott’s revision of Rilke also evades the allegory in the original of the poet’s fraught inwardness. Among Boston’s literary circles especially, Knott was famous—or infamous—for a difﬁdence that could burst from all the borders of itself like a supernova of paranoid belligerence. Almost everyone who supported him emotionally or artistically—say, by publishing his poems—got burned. I’m thankful that the anecdotes of annoyed but friendly and admiring fellow poets, a lover, and preternaturally forgiving editors which Steven Huff assembled in Knowing Knott: Essays on an American Poet (Tiger Bark Press, 2017), relieve me of any incentive to let critical focus founder among such stories here. Even so, citing some biographical details and autobiographical poems may help account for the morbid, misanthropic lyric persona we ﬁnd elsewhere. In I Am Flying into Myself the go-to poems on this score are “The Day After My Father’s Death, ” “Christmas at the Orphanage, ” and “The Closet, ” an elegy for his mother. She died in childbirth when Bill, according to Lux, was seven; three years later Mr. Knott, a butcher, drank poison. By then young Bill was already being bullied in an Illinois orphanage; from there, he was sent to a state mental hospital for some months, lived on an uncle’s farm for a couple of years, then joined the Army and stood guard at Fort Knox until he was honorably discharged at twenty. Around that time he lost track, forever, of his younger sister.

Originally published in Becos (1983) but omitted from collections since, “The Closet ” is raw and disconcerting, aptly claustrophobic. (Editor Jonathan Galassi singles out the elegy as a motivating factor in his signing the small-press poet with Random House two decades before he again reached out to Knott, this time from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.) Recalling his mother’s closet, a personal space nearly emptied “after the hospital happened, ” Knott adopts the present tense to submerge readers in a toxic gumbo of his bereft childhood self’s saccharine pathos and the adult poet’s embittering knowledge. “Three blackwire hangers ” remain, like

Amiable scalpels though they just as well would be

Themselves, in basements, glovelessly scraping uteri
But, here, pure, transﬁgured heavenward, they’re
Birds, whose wingspans expand by excluding me. Their
Range is enlarged by loss….

The poem concludes with haunting predictions vowed with the beneﬁt of hindsight: he will dream of “obstetrical / Personnel [who] kneel proud, congratulatory, cooing / And oohing and hold the dead infant up to the dead / Woman’s face as if for approval. ” Having pulled the avian hangers from their imagined perches, the poet-to-be “shall ﬁnd room enough here // By excluding myself; by excluding myself, I’ll grow. ”

Such abnegation is Knott’s master trope, an unshakable pun on his name. Whether range-enlargement or growth reliably follow from it is doubtful. Knott’s capacity to undermine himself was great. But some of the reagents that mixed so caustically in life made gold in the poet’s crucible. The title poem of The Unsubscriber, reprinted in I Am Flying into Myself, suggests that Knott eventually outgrew the logic of growth by self-exclusion; the so-called outsider poet calls himself out as reluctant to exclude himself by revoking a “de facto ” membership. He has remained in that “vain solipsistic sect, ” that “lyric league ” of youthful naïfs well past his naïve youth. That’s what the lyric endeavor is about, after all: keeping faith in the world as one knows it through a child’s original, sensuous experience, holding out against its translation into fungible concepts. While most grown-ups lack patience with self-discovery’s inefﬁciencies, Knott stoically acknowledges, with the critical neutrality of second-person self-address, his paying of dues without apparent reward. He is not an unsubscriber because he has let his subscriptions lapse or refused to belong to any club that would admit him; he is unwilling to under-write, to make too little of anything.

That said, Knott’s evocative density—his afﬁnity for knots as well as nots—amounts to his making a lot of few words. At 45 lines, “The Closet ” is among this posthumous volume’s longest poems. Having initially made a name for himself—or for his pseudonym, Saint Geraud—on the strength of aphoristic poems as brief as a single line, Knott never really mastered long-form momentum. Some readers may crank more than once through the adolescent, “pornocoiled ” fantasies indulgently recalled in the 77-line sentence that is “Mrs. Frye and the Pencilsharpener. ” Fewer will want to trudge twice through the 106 fricative-fretted couplets to which “Overnight Freeze, ” formerly published as one succinct quatrain, has overgrown. The tensions that animate Knott’s “great mismatchings ” are more readily felt when set forth in shorter forms like the single ottava rima stanza of “Night Thought, ” wherein pajamas (“ﬂoppy statues of ourselves ”) are said to caricature our bodies as the dreams we have while wearing pajamas caricature rational day-thoughts. Less comically exacting—indeed, ﬂoppier—than those of Byron’s Don Juan, the octave’s polysyllabic rhymes (pajamas–unserious–posthumousness) diminish its would-be monumentality, burlesquing the form; the concluding couplet commends such slackness, as it “mimics the decay / that will ﬁt us so comfortably someday. ” Knott’s craftiness rewards this kind of reading, attuned to prosodic minutiae, but it’s nearly impossible to sustain across discursive sweeps.

Fortunately, over a third of the 152 poems in I Am Flying into Myself are what Knott called quatorzains, taut fourteen-line poems that range from the one-word-per-line “Quickie ” (which likens poetry to “sex / on / quicksand ”) to the only slightly less skinny “To Myself ” (which likens poetry to a magic carpet so long as you are “willing / to pull that rug out // from under / your own / feet, daily ”) to more conventional sonnets of strictly rhymed decasyllabic lines. When the American Poetry Project’s American Sonnets: An Anthology appeared a decade ago, it was disappointing to ﬁnd that the chronological cutoff narrowly excluded Knott because, with Frederick Tuckerman, Frost, Cummings, Millay, and Berryman, he is truly among the nation’s most inventive and nuanced masters of that not-so-ﬁxed form. Like “Night Thought, ” “The Sculpture (To —— ) ” exempliﬁes Knott’s brand of the burlesque; apparently composed after Becos but in time to be included in both of Knott’s 1989 books, the sonnet endangers the bounded shapeliness of sculpture and sonnetry by suspending formality at the local scale of diction and syntax. One might have thought that sequences like “Molding fast all the voids the gaps that lay ” and “we were told to kiss hug hug harder ” would be improved by the addition of commas, or that phrases like “some sort of glop ” and “state-of-the-art polymer ” were anathema to lyric. With Gertrude Stein he wants the lack of such punctuation to innervate our engagement, so that we feel those voids and gaps, that hardening hug. Insofar as the thwarting of grammar registers initially as negative, it ends up only securing the idea that salient negativity—including the space that remains between embracing lovers—represents what their love overcomes:

We stood there fused more ways than lovers know
Before the sculptor tore us away
Forced us to look at what had made us so whole.

This pajama-and-polymer-glop poetics may be appreciated fully only by engaging a full poem. “The Consolations of Sociobiology, ” a timely response to E. O. Wilson’s controversial tome on the “New Synthesis ” of behavioral psychology and evolutionary science, exempliﬁes Knott’s mid-career shenanigans as well as the star-crossed fortunes of his then default persona. One of the sonnet’s pleasures is the puzzle regarding its antecedent scenario.

Those scars rooted me. Stigmata stalagmite
I sat at a drive-in and watched the stars
Through a narrow straw while the Coke in my lap went
Waterier and waterier. For days on end or

Nights no end I crawled on all fours or in
My case no fours to worship you: Amoeba Behemoth!

Although we can’t trace the provenance of the second, phatic epithet as we can the alliterative ﬁrst, mapping “Stigmata ” to “scars ” and “stalagmite ” to “rooted, ” we can appreciate the latter as a grotesque expression of idolatry and a bit of phonetic fun: uh-mee-buh-buh-hee-muhth. Both epithets pair the small with the great. And certainly some low-budget, compensatory form of telescopy is underway with that straw, but to what end? Boethius’s early medieval De Consolatione Philosophiae begins with Lady Philosophy’s banishment of the poetic Muses, among whom the imprisoned author had “taken up melancholy measures. ” Knott not only updates Neoplatonism with sociobiology but also makes the latter’s spokesperson the would-be mate who rejects him, resulting in the stultifying scars.

—Then you explained your DNA calls for
Meaner genes than mine and since you are merely

So to speak its external expression etcet
Ergo among your lovers I’ll never be…
Ah that movie was so far away the stars melting

Made my thighs icy. I see: it’s not you
Who is not requiting me, it’s something in you
Over which you have no say says no to me.

Note Knott’s proﬂigate dispersal of poetic Easter eggs: among them, a faux epiphanic “I see ” occasioned by its homophone icy even as this adjective qualiﬁes the speaker’s spurned loins; also, the concluding chiasmus of “no say says no, ” which corroborates as signiﬁcant the speaker’s self-correcting tic, heard earlier in the poem’s third sentence, whereby he twice ﬂips the positive on to utter a negative no, rendering his hyperbole more pathetic without dampening it. He’s failing to thrive on the ﬁtness landscape, and he knows it. Sad. Donne rareﬁed the crude elements of eros with his prosodic ingenuity and ductile ﬁgures; Knott’s conceits are no less clever or complex, but he reverses the alchemy, undoing Donne with bathos.

Nothing about this poem’s core concern requires that it take place at the movies, however. Like that line about “wallpaper thawing its father ” in the Rilke revision, like Cy Twombly’s scrawlings, the signature on this sonnet is distinctively illegible. Knott seems to have recognized the potential for an apt analogy: eschatological justiﬁcations for perpetually deferring gratiﬁcation are to the equivalent selﬁsh-gene argument as the heavenly vault (overhead, with its stars) is to the silver screen (across the lot, with its stars) and as inﬁnite night is to caramel syrup. Moreover, the discontent one feels despite efforts to adopt a new perspective—jailed in Ravenna, unrequited at the drive-in—is like the chill, in the one case, of astronomical voids and, in the other, of a soda equilibrating in one’s lap. The poet-speaker intuits that he need not foreground the prosaic play-by-play. By distorting proportions and relaxing syntax he implicates the complex analogy within the sonnet’s texture, where it abides like a watermark. There’s even something about the repeated adjective waterier—its admixture of ordinariness and rarity, its nod to a lapsing, its insipid double-/Ər/—that lets Knott use it to mark this mode of making suggestive mistakes about scale as his own.

Louis Zukofsky drew from the calculus to deﬁne his poetics: “An integral / Lower limit speech / Upper limit music. ” Knott’s version would be this:

kiss
∫
cough

And that’s not because, with Auden, he projects some prudish Time that spies from the shadows, interrupting lovers’ fun. Knott’s antipathy to established norms was such that, although he’d readily allude to Pater’s famed claim about art’s aspirations, he’d also then spurn music as a satisfactory goal. His yearnings are erotic, not melodic. Similarly, “speech ” is too plainspoken and hygienic to be his lower limit. Imagining lip-readers who move their lips as effectively captivated in a process “less translation than transference ”—he has in mind, I think, the physicality of reading lyric poetry—Knott writes of “even a cough, a kiss ” as “enunciations / which paraphrase the space which runs // through all speech though all tongues try / to gun that gap by perusing, musing / mere coherence. ” Given the syntactical complexity of this fragment, it’s evident that he wants us to read and reread, working out the sense in our mouths. He’s acutely aware that articulation—“mere coherence ”—often misses its mark. But even as language fails to convey certain nuances of intent, its sounds avail a sensuous surplus. As he implicitly argues in another of his stand-by sonnets “Depressionism, ” bombs sometimes fall shy of their targets, but by eschewing speciﬁc aims, the poet may fruitfully repurpose inconvenient craters. He may make gardens of depressions.

•By remaining true to Knott’s habit of arranging the new and recirculated poems in any given collection randomly, Lux similarly obscures the chronology of the poems included in I Am Flying into Myself. Even so, by comparing out-of-print books, vanity editions, and the hundreds of PDF collections freely available at billknottarchive.com, one may estimate many poems’ dates of composition. One who goes to that trouble ﬁnds that Knott did grow, poetically, by excluding much of his former free-radical malaise from the poems that ﬁrst appeared in either The Unsubscriber or this new selection. Few would remain unmoved by the panicked staccato that modulates to febrile pining in “The Closet ”—“I’ve ﬂed / At ambush, tag, age: six, must I face this, can // I have my hide-and-seek hole back now please, the / Clothes, the thicket of shoes, where is it? ”—but it’s good, after hacking head-down through decades of thicket, to ﬁnd a glade. “First Sight, ” for example, wends among a short series of speculations with unusual calm. It initially appears to be about summer but more truly concerns the misattribution of vagueness and the desire to sustain an aesthetic condition that Borges called, in a phrase later recommended by Ashbery as a key to his own early aims, the “imminence of a revelation. ” Knott’s analogous phrase is the sonnet’s ninth line: “a hesitation at the threshold of itself. ” Summer’s apparent haze is occasioned by the screen-mesh on the doors through which we open our prospects to it. To open the winged pages of I Am Flying into Myself upon new poems that either avoid the ﬁrst-person singular altogether or divest it of its former rancor and passive aggressions is a revelation.

“Windowbeam, ” a quatorzain of seven couplets, provides an opportunity to appreciate what crucially has altered because it retains Knott’s misanthropy. An opening series of epithets reminiscent of George Herbert’s “Prayer (I) ” expands into Manichaean moralizing. Intrigued by a ray of daylight’s vulnerability to pervasion even as it invades a room, Knott asks the “sunstripe penetrant, ” “what made your phalanx fail: why can’t // its gallant-greaved angels’-armor / avert our dirt…? ” He answers that humanity, and thus the domestic space this side of the pane, is not only corrupt but incorrigibly corrupting: “each mote of us / holds abject thought that blots with dust // your gold-shed greatness. ” The former impulse toward self-censure persists but the inclusive pronoun shares any shame across a universal community, and the Hopkinsian exuberance of medial sound-play buoys the mood.

“Wishing Well, ” which attained its ﬁnal ﬁve-quatrain form in the second half of 2010, is another of the most deftly realized new poems in I Am Flying into Myself. Here, again, Knott holds in check the emotional miasmas that formerly accrued to his use of ﬁrst person. Tossing a coin in a well, one pays not for a wish, he suggests, but for the privilege “to smash apart that calm // gleaming ” surface and thus introduce to a static situation that other kind of change. One trades the coin for a “claim / on the future ” in which something new will happen. One buys time. Halfway through, Knott pivots from wish to the slant-rhymed guess, effectively reorienting the poem’s unknowable dimension from the temporal (“the future ”) to the vertical (“a depth I can only guess ”). If wishing is already a secular dilution of prayer, then a guess is that much more so, and yet the mathematical sublime resurrects transcendental considerations. The poem concludes in interrogative paradox even as it introduces the promise of a new exchange: of worldly lucre for solar luxury.

And even if it reaches that far,
plummeting through the rich
rings of its sinking to reach
a bottomlessness whose core

is death’s perhaps deepest ore,
there where the end gathers
will my silver ever bring me
any of the gold it shatters?

As it plumbs the narrow well of itself, the poem amasses sonic riches—the /Iŋ/s of plummeting–rings–sinking, the slippery sibilance of bottomlessness’s double sufﬁx, the reverb of there–where and silver–ever—and accrues other interest. Even if little of the sun’s gold emerges as a return on Knott’s down-paid coin, however, I see such poems as gleaming yields on his lifetime investment; he made malleability valuable under the grotesque’s imprint and now remints it with a fairer face.

But my favorite poem in the volume may be “Merry-No-Round, ” a quatorzain of couplets that was also in The Unsubscriber. In I Am Flying into Myself, however, Lux has placed it immediately following a newer sonnet circa 2009, “There’s the Rub. ” In this Shakespearean context, “Merry-No-Round ” may be read as a telegraphic variation on Ariel’s progressive releases from incorporation in a blasted pine and from indenture as a minion entertainer to true freedom among the lighter elements. But it’s unencumbered by The Tempest; it isn’t an importantly allusive poem at all. Curiously, with Knott’s earlier raging and lusting, with the plaints of self-pity and slapstick profanity, much of his former allusiveness has ﬂown as well. As the title suggests, the central image is a carousel’s:

The wooden horses
are tired of their courses

and plead from head to hoof
to be fed to a stove—

In leaping lunging ﬂames
they’d rise again, ﬂared manes

snapping like chains behind them.
The smoke would not blind them

As do these children’s hands:
Beyond our cruel commands

The ﬁre will free them then
as once the artisan when

out of the tree they
were nagged to this neigh.

If writing poetry is like sculpting, then writing poetry as Knott does is like nagging neighs from knotty wood. To ﬁgure artistry as nagging is typical Knotty bathos: it is recuperated by the wit involved in deriving the pejorative verb for verbal action (nagged) from a pejorative synonym of the noun horse, nag, which probably derives from the onomatopoetic neigh. In “Wishing Well, ” certain rhythmic and syntactic ﬂourishes—the ﬂuctuations between seven and eight syllables, between three and four accents per line, and the anastrophe of “whether such a small as this / sacriﬁce is worth one wish ”— endowed with ﬂuency a structure that had no correlative in its essentially static scene. Here, the mostly perfect rhymes secure couplets that close a bit earlier or later than one expects because the erratic rhythm conveys the muscular leaping and lunging and snapping of chains.

•Literary history won’t care—or shouldn’t care—that Knott was often ornery. In the short poem “Worse, ” he presents himself as impoverished and ungenerous: “All my life I had nothing, / but worse than that, / I wouldn’t share it. ” But his thousand-some freely available poems give the lie to both claims and, at any rate, are no longer his to dispose. I Am Flying into Myself arrives as a huge gift, in large part because Lux and Galassi have pulled Knott’s magic rugs out from under him, seized their invisible reins, and steered the process of canonizing a selection of them away from Saint Geraud’s sometimes stupid and raunchy apostasies. I am grateful to have ﬁrst encountered Knott in his no-holds-barred Outremer (1989), whose bill of lading alone—with titles like “(Castration Envy #21) Does the Swordswallower Shit Plowshares? ” and “No Androgyne Is an Archipelago ”—repaid the embarkation fare and ensuing seasickness. But I’m far more grateful to have found further evidence in I Am Flying into Myself that, later in life, Knott snapped some of the chains that had bound him to carousels that weren’t going anywhere. The artisan that Knott became nagged his nays into freely unpredictable holding patterns, living forms that answer to his suggestive title “Rigor Vitus. ” May they endure. May they never go up in smoke.

November 2017

This review was published in issue 61:1.

Solmaz Sharif, Look

Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2016. 112pp. $16.

Blunt Research Group, The Work-Shy

Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2016. 160pp. $24.95

Reviewed by Ingrid Becker

Browsing through a photo-album, making a long distance call, receiving a letter or a visitor, heading home, complaining about work, picking someone up at the airport, using a paper and a pencil, having sex, having a family, having a state, having a language, having a name; these “daily, daily things,” as Solmaz Sharif puts it at one point in Look, are privileges tightly controlled and distributed by political, legal, and cultural institutions whose power is maintained by specific grammars, protocols, processes. And by textual sites like the US Defense Department’s Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, a source that Sharif, an immigrant of Iranian descent, draws on, disrupts, repurposes, and tangles up with the experience of the minoritized bodies it encodes, targets, and kills. The re-appropriation of found language is at once a method and a subject for the poems, which explore the circulation of meaning through military chains of command, mass cultural channels, family histories, and who-knows-where as it comes to us, the readers.

Sharif begins by defining a zone of combat whose borders she goes on to ﬂaunt, to redraw: “Look—(*) In mine warfare, a period during which a mine circuit is receptive of an influence.” The poems are mined from an admixture of official and personal accounts of human experience in such a way that this “mine circuit” calls up questions of self-ownership and the relation of a self to the influences that may shape it. Read in the context of formal play, of poetry’s capacity to relieve words from the burden of everyday usage, the “sanctioned twoness” of reference illustrated by mine/mine is something to take pleasure in. But it creeps eerily, urgently, through the realities that matter to Look, highlighting the double standards that undergird forms of disenfranchisement and aggression against people from the Middle East, of Muslim faith, and of color in today’s political climate.

The longer history of biopolitical control and its ties to white supremacy is taken up in The Work-Shy, Blunt Research Group’s investigation into early twentieth-century eugenics initiatives in and outside the US. Like Look, the book falls in with contemporary trends in poetries of citation, documentation, and witness, in which the political and ethical stakes of using found language are often heightened by a focus on representing those deprived of the right to—or the instruments necessary for—their own self-representation. Attempting at once to acknowledge the historical violence embedded in its archive and to avoid its reproduction, the members of Blunt Research Group enforce a constraint: they will only use language from the records they uncover. Their choice to remain anonymous as they rearrange what they call “loan words” raises important questions for the entire ﬁeld of citational and conceptual poetics—which includes word-borrowers of many stripes—about sources, sourcelessness, and what sorts of realities inhere in projects of linguistic remediation.

“The names are real.” So says the Blunt Research Group in the preface to “Lost Privilege Company,” the first of three sections in The Work-Shy. Frances, Cornelius, Josephine, Dorito, Edward, Pedro—they emerge, ghostly yet bearing intense gravity, from the cabinets of the Eugenics Records Office, in which their case notes are ﬁled with those of twenty-thousand other American youths who were detained in reformatories, workhouses, and asylums, deemed unﬁt to procreate and surgically sterilized over the first half of the twentieth century. We meet them suspended in atmospheric, grayed-out print as the poems transcribe, translate, and assemble textual fragments and images in a “gesture seeking permission to listen.” The structure is straightforward, progressive, a careful and serious loosening of stories—Carl’s, Wilhelm’s, Jacqueline’s, Hyacinth’s—from the reductive strictures of institutional frameworks. “Lost Privilege Company” is primarily composed from the notes of “fieldworkers” at California’s Whittier State School; set in italics, the voices of “wards” bubble up, pleading for recognition—“i’m here”—only to be dismissed and pathologized, derided as “depraved,” “profane,” “obscene,” or “immoral,” attributed to a “cold-blooded schemer,” a “High Grade Moron,” or a “great big over-sexed boy,” as symptoms of “mania,” “lachrymose excitability” (crying), or the “onset of incorrigibility.” The gazes of Victor R, Edward Leiva, or Leonard H, which reach out from intermittent photographic portraits, convey none of these proclivities to antisocial behavior. Instead, these images are marked by the racialized, criminalizing conventions of the mug shot—brown and black skin, numbered plates bridging the lapels of jackets, profile shots peeking from strategically placed mirrors.

The photographs, even more so than the case notes, highlight the historical fact of the silence imposed on their subjects. Keeping in mind the fine line between inviting and coercing them to speak, The Work Shy’s middle section pauses to reflect on methodology. The series of meditations that comprise “The Book of Listening” (the absence of the visual ﬁeld is striking here) bear out important “distinctions between listening, overhearing, and eavesdropping” in a search for kinds of writerly and readerly attention that, as the poems move forward, can “satisfy an aversion to theatricality.” “CREEDMOORBLANCA” gathers the “inﬁdel language” of inmates from additional archives: Nazi institutes in Heidelberg and Breitenau, the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in New York, and the Paciﬁc Colony for the Feebleminded. As if the fieldworkers were away from the premises, an in-group’s private idiom develops, registered in the proliferation of such words and phrases as “trikadero,” “exactology,” “jiggered up,” “crooked it off’n him,” “societologically,” and “Ish gebibble!” The free-floating lines and tentative spacing of the early poems give way to more internally regular, stanza-like forms that vary page by page and name by name, so that individual voices seem to be solidifying, accruing particular rhythms and vocabularies. Similarly, the portraits yield to a wider range of images, some of which capture the creative output of inmates themselves; once displayed as examples of “degenerate art,” they are recontextualized here not as symptoms of illness but as traces of subjectivity. Sewn dresses and doodled curves are scrawled over with what might be handwriting exercises, or diary entries. Often barely legible, graphite impressions softened by time, the words are hard to make out.

The most attentive and tender gestures of recognition manifest in such moments of strained or distanced receiving. Take the words that seem to give voice to an inmate called Jules, over which we may stumble, and dwell, in the realized incongruity between the seen and the heard:

Ive lost tutch with mye selph
Ide bee blyged iff yoo
cood spair a pockit hanker cheer for Jools

[…]

mye syst her througher alms
surround mye nekk Yore syst
hearse herb itch Getcher sell foam

The personal testimony begins to wiggle out of the straightjackets of spelling rules, articulating experience in its own terms—Jules has not a self but a “selph,” not a sister but a “syst her,” whose arms become the “alms” of embrace. The poem deftly refuses to ﬁgure this fragile, unconventional correspondence between sound and sign as a result of illness, as a cyst, instead lavishing in the phenomenological aspects of phonetics that make it possible to imagine the “lost tutch,” the stolen intimacies, of a displaced and conﬁned child.

Yet it is difficult not to sense the skilled hand of the assemblers in this moment of brief catharsis. Is this reconstructed scene as real as the names of inmates? How much room for invention does an anonymous listening gesture permit? Despite the Blunt Research Group’s sensitivities, the suggestion of homecoming in “Getcher sell foam” feels too easy, even false, especially when read alongside the ways Sharif manages such gestures in Look, which circles around and reaches toward reunions with loved ones but never touches, never arrives. Perhaps my feeling has something to do with the contemporaneity of Look’s subject matter, or the fact that it can lean on a pseudo-autobiographical foundation lacking in The Work-Shy’s anonymous authorship. Then again, Sharif’s “I” is profoundly un- or up-rooted, epistolary but redacted, circulating in anti-Muslim stereotypes and speaking “like the world listens”—because, for those under NSA surveillance, it does. This of course raises the issue of anonymity as a privilege. It also brings me to a subtle but crucial insight offered in Look: the institutional “mine warfare” that seeks to control the expressions, movements, and representations of particular individuals is enabled all the time by abstract, anonymous mediations and remediations of found language and images.

That’s because, as Look makes visible, the military’s organizing logics saturate and animate the “daily, daily” verbal-visual mass media discourses that at turns erase and spectacularize the suffering of marginalized bodies. Take one of the book’s first poems, which redefines a military term by way of an image:

BATTLEFIELD ILLUMINATION on ﬁre
a body running

Glaring out from an otherwise blank page, “BATTLEFIELD ILLUMINATION” does a kind of captioning, naming a scene that is at once shocking and familiar, recognizable, out of a movie; and in movies the people on ﬁre are rarely the good guys. Heroes make appearances, too: for instance, when, “At the WWII memorial, FDR thanks women / for sacrificing their sons / and their nylons. ” The zeugma’s equation of human beings with stockings draws attention to the incongruities between defense discourse, heartwarming media moments and precarious realities that, as Sharif emphasizes, are in practice easy to gloss over. She makes a similar move in “DESIRED APPRECIATION,” as a White House PR photo-shoot morphs into its obverse, a scene of interrogation and torture that supposedly also informs the public sense of security: “the nation must administer / A bit of hope…. Must muss up / some kid’s hair and let him loose / Around the Oval Office. click click could be cameras / Or the teeth of handcuffs closing to ﬁx / The arms overhead.” Elsewhere, poems consisting entirely of captions—“Soldier, Home Early, Surprises His Wife in Chick-ﬁl-A,” or “A young soldier (pictured above) the son of an imam, brother to six, is among the latest casualties in the military campaign of Susangerd”—intensify our sense of the precarious relation between a given reality and its unanchored, unattributed signage.

There are no photographs in Look, no possibility for ogling; figuring the un-pictured, the poems enact a kind of ekphrasis. This is another strategy, an unrelenting one, to “satisfy” The Work-Shy’s “aversion to theatricality,” as an epigraph from Susan Sontag near the center of book suggests: “Like guns and cars, cameras are fantasy-machines whose use is addictive.” The apparatus of visual culture referenced in Look—cameras, shutters, lenses, albums, stages, and film reels abound—is charged with producing a sort of pornographic “CONTINUOUS STRIP IMAGERY” that frames people as objects rather than subjects. As the sequence moves toward an imagined meeting with a deceased uncle, and as institutionalized forms of representation penetrate even the most private spaces—“The enlarged ID photo above her mantel,” Sharif writes, “means I can know Amoo, / my dear COLLATERAL DAMAGE, // as only a state or a school might do”—we sense how thoroughly imprisoned we are by the many-layered conventions by which we might encounter ourselves and each other. Meanwhile we can catch glimpses, as in a description of a camera rolling on Sharif’s father, “his hair

black as mine is now, I’m four and in Alabama, I see him
between odd jobs in different states,
and on the video our friend shows baba a picture
of me and asks how do you feel when you see Solmaz?
and baba saying turn the camera off then
turn off the camera and then
can you please look away I don’t want you to see my baba cry

Struggling to escape the confines of “PERCEPTION MANAGEMENT” is a laborious, confusing, and painful process. We can’t dress in camouflage, steal the keys, and release wards/words, as, for this reviewer, Blunt Research Group seems to. Circulation, anonymous or not, has its own strictures; within them, Sharif’s look lingers like “a ﬁlm projection caught / in theater dust.”

November 2017

This review was published in issue 61:1.

Nathaniel Mackey, Late Arcade

New York: New Directions, 2017. 191pp. $16.95

Reviewed by Paul Jaussen

For over three decades, Nathaniel Mackey has been composing a serial fiction that measures the resonance between music and language. In these works music sounds language, while language expands upon music’s capacity to signify, each serving the other in what Mackey calls a “syncretistic salt,” a “mix in which adverse traditions relativize one another, relate while applying a grain of salt to one another.” Each of the novels in the series—Bedouin Hornbook (1986), Djbot Baghostus’s Run (1993), Atet A. D. (2001), Bass Cathedral (2008), and now Late Arcade (2017)—constitutes a movement in an ongoing work titled From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate. The novels follow the life of the fictional jazz sextet Molimo m’Atet through the epistles of the horn player N., who writes regularly to an interlocutor he calls only “Angel of Dust.” The letters relate the story of the band as both an artistic and personal collective, narrating practice sessions, gigs, compositions, conversations, and various romantic encounters.

Simultaneously quotidian and meditative, N.’s letters are an ideal platform for the concerns that animate Mackey’s expansive oeuvre. In addition to the novels Mackey has published sixteen books or chapbooks of poetry, including Splay Anthem (2006), a work that united his ongoing twinned serial poems, “mu” and Song of the Andoumboulou. He has authored two books of criticism, edited the journal Hambone, and hosted the long-running jazz and global music radio program Tanganyika Strut. In much of this work Mackey engages what he calls “black music,” here primarily jazz but applied broadly to incorporate a whole range of African, diasporic, and hybrid traditions, from flamenco to reggae. Black music articulates black life as history itself, conceived of as a series of ruptures, displacements, uncertainties, and accidents, to which one can respond only by way of improvisatory composition. Accident is not form here so much as it requires or provokes form in the many avatars that appear throughout Mackey’s works, whether musical, literary, or visual. By continually rearticulating these elements into an accumulative whole, From A Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate has become a major work of experimental and philosophical fiction, propelled not by plot but by the movement of sound-concepts. Composed in a language that is attuned to its own materiality as both aural and semantic resonance, Mackey’s novels comprise an ongoing meditation on black cultural production writ large.

For Mackey, black music as cry or wail articulates lost sociality, while black music as repetition or improvisation presses toward alternative futures. Repetition is always a revision, a restatement of earlier work that acknowledges the past yet casts it in a different key. Late Arcade revises the concerns of the previous novels—sound, performativity, the political ontology of music—to bring out an expanded sense of time as loss, whether personal, cultural, or ecological. Time as both loss and repetition is signaled from the outset: the novel opens with a letter dated September 14, 1983, when N.’s bandmate Djamilaa comes to practice with a new piece entitled “Sekhet Aaru Struff.” This creation is, in fact, a repetition, an allusion to N.’s own earlier composition “Sekhet Aaru Strut.” In the musical world of Molimo m’Atet, each work is already a remake, restlessly continuing toward another articulation, strut becoming struff on the way to Sekhet-Aaru, a heavenly reed ﬁeld in Egyptian mythology. The novel thus plants us firmly in the early 1980s, but also in ancient Egypt or some other heaven, as well as the evolving oeuvre of Molimo m’Atet and, indeed, of Mackey’s own writing. Messianic promises, such as they are, emerge fitfully through musical and epistolary repetition, in those folds of time that the novel enacts.

The folding of time often produces ontological uncertainty in Mackey’s writing, as characters and speakers move between worlds, at times accompanied by mythical or syncretistic companions. Early in Late Arcade, the band is haunted by the return of their most persistent companions, the floating text “balloons” that first appeared in Atet A. D. as a textual, performative accompaniment to Molimo m’Atet. At once comic book dialogue balloon, bubble, and captured breath, the balloons are a productive wedge, what the band refers to elsewhere in the series as “an opportune prodigal opening” between sound and sense. A similar ontological crossing occurs in a series of dateless letters by Dredj, an alter ego who appears when N. suffers a trance-inducing “attack” from the cowrie shells embedded in his skull. One attack leaves Dredj playing his horn at the bottom of the ocean, staring up at the flamenco singer Lole Montoya’s “metathetic morning boat” that “bulged with voices, some stowaway, some aboveboard.” Are those voices enslaved persons on the Middle Passage or perhaps adrift refugees? We can’t know. The passage speaks to multiple possibilities, including those still to come; Dredj’s musical accompaniment testifies to the unfinished business of the displaced.

We might consider the ocean itself to be one of those refugees, a castaway fractured by the pollution of modernity, a global reality that will undoubtedly lead to even more human suffering on the part of the poor and vulnerable. While the ocean as the ambivalent geography of diaspora has been a recurring theme for Mackey, Late Arcade extends these concerns in new ecological directions. Shortly after his cowrie shell attack, N. composes “Fossil Flow,” a musical piece inspired by the “massive” oil spills of 1983, another day in the life of the Anthropocene. The spill is an ambivalent return of the repressed, proof that, ecologically and socially speaking, the past is not entirely past. N. glosses the spill as “the distant past (prehistoric apocalypse, collapse or catastrophe) achieving fluidity, the oxymoronic play between fossil and ﬂow of such dimension as to put the present at risk.” The spill is a disaster, yes, but also a sign of transhistorical entanglement, a story still being told: “It’s as though it were the dinosaurs and the mastodons’ revenge, prehistory’s grudge against…preservation or containment, fossil solidity, an entropic brief against past and present keeping their places.”

This muddling of past and present usefully illustrates the productive lag between compositional and narrative time that Mackey often exploits. For such fossil flows may strike our ears more paradoxically and apocalyptically now, in 2017, than they did in 1983. We are overhearing N., years in the past, inevitably speaking of our present, articulating a future both yet to come and already here. In another passage, N. compares time passing to the experience of re-listening to Miles Davis’s “Autumn Leaves,” where the trumpeter generates an “off-to-the-side reticence or recoil I can’t help hearing as recondite presence and manifest absence’s mix or mating dance.” Similarly, the present moment of any re-listening always evokes the accumulative absences of one’s past: “I can imagine listening to this track thirty or forty years from now and still finding it fresh, the advent of my own autumnal prospect lending it all the more relevance and resonance, a time-capsule bubble or balloon loaded with decades of what won’t tell itself but does, caption after caption donned and auditioned only to be cast off.” We cannot help but hear Mackey speaking through N. in this passage, the author in his seventieth year writing as a younger man thirty-four years in the past. The text is not quite an oil spill, but certainly a geology, as time becomes a palimpsest, uniting musician and audience, author and reader.

While palimpsestic time can be an occasion for mourning, it can also afford hope. In both his poetry and prose, Mackey insistently opens resonant spaces between tragedy and transcendence, forcing us to think them simultaneously. In the face of time’s multiplying ﬁeld, improvisatory repetition can approach an aspirational heaven, what N. elsewhere dubs “No-Show Sunday.” In Late Arcade that heaven appears in many guises, but particularly as erotic love. As Jeanne Heuving has argued in The Transmutation of Love and Avant-Garde Poetics, Mackey is a contemporary poet for whom love offers an experiential extension of the self, an ekstasis into the world. Lovers are metamorphic in his work; they change names, couple with dream selves, and, muse-like, occasion new compositions. Love’s promised heaven, however, never avoids risk. In the longest letter of the book, N. describes Molimo m’Atet’s performance at a birthday party, an invited gig the band approaches with trepidation, uncertain that their music is appropriate for the occasion. Aunt Nancy, another member of the band, encourages them to stay true to their fractured vision, calling them to “darken festivity or strike a note of dark festivity.” N. reads Aunt Nancy’s provocation as a “dread, gnostic note,” one that insists on “birth as an issue of misconception, conception itself as an issue of misconception, dubious arrival into a miscreant world.” The band’s performance of errant conception provokes the return of the balloons, this time bearing a confession of pain as the road to love and self-discovery. “I tore myself to be whole,” one balloon reads, “tore myself to possess myself.” Mackey’s is an erotics of accident, where the fragmented, suffering body is reclaimed as historically constitutive of the subject, particularly the racialized and disinherited subject of black history. That subject is always belated, if not actually late, an embodied testimony against modernity and its misplaced promises.

As it turns out, the risk of No-Show Sunday—it may appear, or it may not, it may be nothing more than a fanciful promise—echoes the dilemmas of love, particularly “the millenarian, great-gettin’-up-Sunday collective love we all so badly want.” As the affair between band members Penguin and Drennette heats up in the final letters of Late Arcade, their relationship produces not transcendence but loss, as love is constantly provoked by what it can never actually achieve. Love’s tragedy also characterizes beauty as its aesthetic proxy. Lambert, another band member, suggests that beauty, continually withdrawing from us and beyond our grasp, “hawks the intangible,” a street-side huckster of transcendent promise. Beauty testifies to and affirms the inadequacy of the material world, emerging from the world in its appearing but always eluding final grasp. Through beauty, we thus learn a surprising lesson about history as struggle, as dislocated, enslaved, or segregated being: it is always not-here.

Which is not to say, exactly, that it is nowhere or never. Love’s “late ark, love’s late arcade, love’s last arcade perhaps” leaves N. imagining a similarly displaced heaven, precipitated by no less than the balloons as captured breath or airy substance. In the novel’s final pages the band stops Los Angeles traffic by initiating an impromptu parade with B’Loon (another avatar of the balloons), a march that recalls the second line in the New Orleans funeral tradition. As the parade swells, a social being created simply by the willingness of its participants, so does B’Loon, growing into a giant unfinished figure that towers above the crowd. Sustained by this breath, B’Loon takes flight, floating up into the clouds and gradually becoming invisible, leaving the arrested crowd to watch a now-empty sky. The band and audience together strain for the unseen, looking hard after a leave-taking that could just as easily be an advent.

As a balloon floating into absence, No-Show Sunday is a fragile thing, a thread of hope that makes a tiny opening into time. Mackey’s achievement in From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate has been to articulate that opening, again and again, through ongoing literary innovation and an attunement to human contingency. We could, following N., call this opening the “sound of the future perfect,” a tense and tone that can only be imagined and pursued yet never grasped. In the future perfect, departure is also an initiation, no matter how belated. B’Loon’s disappearance, leaving a small collective beyond itself, signals that such departures and arrivals are not simply aesthetic, but also social, political, and cosmological. Sound and sense are inescapably in time, no matter how little of that time may seem to remain. Mackey’s novels have been teaching us this truth all along. But, as Late Arcade demonstrates, the lesson bears repeating.

October 2017

This review was published in issue 61:1.

Yates McKee, Strike Art: Contemporary Art and the Post-Occupy Condition

Brooklyn: Verso, 2016. 296pp. $26.95

Reviewed by Kristin Gecan

The civil war died down but there were still his patients with pains from their phantom limbs. There was still the occasional unrest.

—Cathy Park Hong

“The American Revolution of 1776,” Walt Whitman wrote forty years after that war, “was simply a great strike, successful for its immediate object—but whether a real success judged by…the long-striking balance of Time, yet remains to be settled.” We’ll need more than five years to evaluate Occupy’s lasting effects, but Yates McKee’s Strike Art: Contemporary Art and the Post-Occupy Condition helpfully starts the record on Occupy and its influence. With Strike Art, McKee has begun to make the case, if nothing else, that Occupy was, indeed, a great strike—one much larger than the original events surrounding #OccupyWallStreet.

Strike Art will serve as a valuable primary text for future historians. Because McKee himself participated in Occupy, current readers and future writers benefit from his own involvement in, and his own perspectives on, the movement. “I myself have been a participant in many of the projects detailed here,” McKee notifies readers in his introduction, “which colors my perspective.” An inherent quality in participant-observation, this “colored perspective” is something to keep in mind as Strike Art is both history and analysis. As Barry Schwabsky has written in his recent book A Perpetual Guest, “a subjective response from a participant”—like that of McKee’s—“would lack the sense of spectatorial distance essential to criticism; and an objective account would not be criticism but reportage.” McKee’s insider status cannot help but color both his criticism and his reportage.

Having been removed from Occupy central—as I was, and as future historians will be—has its benefits. Though much of Occupy (particularly McKee’s Occupy), happened physically in New York and other cities, it was clear to me, from Chicago, that the most active of the Occupy activists were part of the creative class—that is, “students, organizers, artists, writers, designers, programmers, and other ‘creative workers’”—people who believed art, whether manifested through images, words, performance, or some combination, can make something happen. Because I saw that the role of artists in Occupy was pivotal, it’s hard for me to believe, as McKee writes, that it was “a little known fact.” McKee’s mistake here, I think, is a result of his insider role in Occupy, and it comes with the territory of writing such a recent history from the front lines. Doing so is a bold undertaking, since most of us have our own memories of Occupy with which we can’t help but compare McKee’s account.

Where McKee must know better, regardless of his insider status, is when he states that “Occupy involved the emergence of ‘the artist as organizer.’” Artists and poets have organized numerous and notable movements in the past—examples include but are not limited to F. T. Marinetti in Fascist Italy, Amiri Baraka and the Black Arts Movement in the U.S., even the “radical art workers of the Paris Commune” that McKee refers to on the next page.

For Occupy, there is no equivalent F. T. Marinetti or Amiri Baraka, no one founder, no charismatic poet-artist-leader, no genius movement architect, no communications mastermind—at least not as identified in the pages of Strike Art. But then who called everyone to Zuccotti Park? And who wrote those memorable words: “We are the 99%”?

Could Occupy truly have been led by the 99%? McKee’s answer, I think, would be yes. But he shows instead of tells.

•

Chronicling the makings of the Occupy movement, McKee shows how nonprofits like Creative Time, artist networks like Art and Revolution, magazines like Tidal, and exhibitions like Democracy in America made Occupy possible. In McKee’s account, Occupy grew out of a particular moment in the established art world, one in which the passive viewer of art was making way for the active participant. This was, to be fair, “an outcome of a cultural shift that’s been a long time in the making,” as Schwabsky has put it. (At least as long ago as the nineteenth century—the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé acknowledged that “modern audiences seek to participate in the creative process.”) According to McKee, audience involvement heightened in summer 2011, to the extent that it could be “diagnosed” by art critic Claire Bishop. As McKee notes, Bishop showed that recent “discourses took artistic participation as a prefiguration of direct democratic participation.” Thus, involved Occupy audiences were participating in the American democratic process as a result of engaging in the specific creative process of Occupy.

Participation in the creative process changes traditional artist-viewer roles. Experiencing art is no longer top-down—an artist makes art, another regards it. Instead, increasingly, viewers become part of the art or the art experience, bringing their own backgrounds and interpretations. Works are incomplete without audience participation. In the case of Occupy, no one at the top instilled rules and regulations for how the Occupy brand was used. Instead, according to Strike Art, a “common set of languages, principles, and practices were developed” (italics mine).

McKee uses passive construction to either avoid naming the source of the Occupy identity (negating hierarchies, and avoiding naming that charismatic leader I seek), or to suggest that common practices were developed on a group level. With Occupy, another mode of collective life was not only imagined, it was practiced. Structures that were being redeveloped during and leading up to this time made it possible for the entire movement to happen in such a way—for people who otherwise would have been passive bystanders to become participants in the movement, for the existing structures, particularly of the art world, to be subverted, and to bring that subversion to bear within the structure of the movement so that it might influence the structures of society at large.

McKee maintains that Occupy was not “an unstructured free-for-all,” but he doesn’t select any individuals as responsible for Occupy’s communications and brand. (Some movement organizers, however, such as Judith Butler, are named.) He never refers to Occupy’s identity, or uses any communications lingo—brand, slogan, or the like. They are part of marketing-speak—taboo in academia, they might seem out of place in McKee’s art historical analysis, or even in the pages of a journal such as this. But it’s worth considering Occupy conceptually as a brand. Because if the Occupy movement was successful, insofar as we all now remember it, understanding how it was made memorable would teach us a lesson in the art of movement-making.

Occupy’s brand was true to participants’ beliefs, values, and concerns: that a fraction of the population was living at the expense of the much greater majority, that American citizens must defend the health of our democracy, and that doing so would require rectifying systemic issues. Because the Occupy brand was created by the participants themselves (though McKee doesn’t state so outright), it was authentic. This, at least in part, is why the Occupy campaign was so memorable. It was a brand not created by marketers for a target audience, but an identity that all Occupy participants helped to shape and extend via the “populist figure of the 99%, the form of the general assembly, the embodied technology of the People’s Microphone, the aesthetics of cardboard signage, and the tent encampment with its infrastructures of mutual aid,” all of which were manifestations of the Occupy brand.

When we see Occupy as a brand, rather than as a collectivist utopia, we can see it as a movement whose success was due to its inclusiveness. As a brand, as a movement, Occupy found a way to unite people by focusing on dissatisfaction with the 1%, and by speaking clearly to the other 99%.

•

“We are the 99%” was plastered across New York City, at least the one we saw in the media. Yes, “we” was overrepresented by the creative class, but by setting “everyone off against the common enemy of Wall Street” with a memorable slogan, Occupy assured audiences and onlookers, passersby and passive viewers of the movement that yes, you are one of us, part of our community. This too was key to Occupy’s success. This rhetoric is why we remember Occupy: clear, resonant messages and images, culminating in a powerful brand, one whose strength derived from empowering its community, from transforming an “audience” into participants and collaborators. This message is why I would suggest that the movement was successful in its “immediate object,” as Whitman put it—that is, successful in getting our attention, not necessarily in making identifiable, measurable change.

The fact that Occupy is a moment in our collective American memory accounts for something of the movement’s success. I’d like to learn more about how and why Occupy succeeded in getting our attention, trace the root of its memorable communications strategy and brand, and identify the people or person responsible for it; but such information is not included in Strike Art, because, it would appear, such a hero does not exist. This is part of the genius of the movement: it was generated communally. It thus defies easy summary, a clear sequence of events. It also defies, in McKee’s terms, being measured by “success”:

My own approach to Occupy in this book, however, finds a closer affinity with those thinkers who have approached it not in terms of a predetermined metric of success relative to which Occupy would be found lacking, but rather in terms of the unknown possibilities and impassioned energies it unleashed for the present.

The sentiment is akin to another I’d read on the outcomes of Occupy, outside of the confines of McKee’s book. It’s attributed to the author of the line that I’d been trying to trace, the reason, perhaps, I picked up McKee’s book in the first place. I wanted to know who the author of the line “We are the 99%” was—it’s a line that became central to the Occupy movement, one that has since codified the mood of multitudes, and originally came from a Tumblr which first started publishing submissions on September 8, 2011. It’s a unifying statement, one that evokes the Occupy moment but also outlives it, a statement I think Americans alive in 2011 will forever remember, one that was invoked over and over in the 2016 election cycle. And it’s a line attributed to a man named only as Chris, someone we might make the hero of the movement, if only he had a last name. He’s quoted in an October 7, 2011 post on Mother Jones:

The important thing is to go as far as we can for as long as we can, and to try as hard as we can. Because that means the next time someone else is going to try harder. And then, someone else will try harder than that. Until, eventually, we win.

Winning, of course—that would mean success. But then that same sentiment—the one that shrugs off success in any measurable terms—was struck, yet again, when I traced the father of the Occupy brand (according to the New York Times). Though he went unnamed in Strike Art, in the press Kalle Lasn was often referred to as the founder of the movement, the source of its brand. Lasn defined Occupy’s success for the New Republic: “They have been successful in launching a heavy duty conversation in America about the state of America…. It doesn’t get any better than that.” Meaning, by starting the conversation, Occupy (or they, nota bene) had in a sense already won.

Lasn is the editor of Adbusters, a magazine published in Canada and widely distributed in the U.S. Lasn is notably absent from Strike Art, though McKee does mention Adbusters. The magazine’s contribution, according to McKee, was in providing “the foundational meme of Occupy,” an image released on July 2, 2011 which McKee describes this way:

A ballerina stands atop the sculpture [Charging Bull, a mascot for the finance industry] in an arabesque pose, her lithe, linear figure playing off against the lumbering bronze corpus of the bull. In the background, hordes of gas-masked militants surge forward toward the viewer through clouds of teargas. At the top of the image, at the apex of the ballerina’s pose, we read “What is Our One Demand?” At the bottom, against the cobblestones of Bowling Green: #OCCUPYWALLSTREET SEPTEMBER 17TH. BRING TENT.

It’s as though they were all working together. Lasn sent the invitation, “Chris” set the anthem, McKee wrote this book. For Schwabsky’s part, we might say, it’s part of a larger, longer-running picture. One where creatively, together, we get the Union back into shape—one where democracy wins? Let Whitman have both the first and last word: “I can conceive of no better service in the United States, henceforth, by democrats of through and heart-felt faith, than boldly exposing the weakness, liabilities and infinite corruptions of democracy.”

September 2017

This review was published in issue 61:1.

Anthony Madrid, Try Never

Texas: Canarium Books, 2017. 53pp. $14.00

Reviewed by Joshua Weiner

There’s a clever-cleverness in contemporary American poetry that keeps alive older verse traditions, straddles generations, and seems very much a boy thing—Frederick Seidel, Paul Muldoon, Michael Robbins, and Adam Fitzgerald come quickly to mind. But my money’s on Anthony Madrid. He’s no one-trick pony; his talent is a dark horse he trains bareback in moonlight. He keeps close company with the Ancients.

In 2012 Madrid’s first book, I Am Your Slave Now Do As I Say (Canarium Books), joined an impressive company of debuts, one that included Robbins, Eduardo Corral, and Patricia Lockwood. His was a stunner, a book comprised of sixty-five ghazals that, by turns, adhere to some basics of the classical Persian form and utterly thwart any expectation of pedantically fulfilling it. The poems dazzle and boggle with their allusive range, crazy metaphors, bold outrageous associative leaps, and rhetorical flair—they’re wired, fired, decked out, gone, and not waiting for you to catch up. More than anything, I was stunned by the energy, effortlessly on tap, of a poet breaking out behind the persona of “Madrud,” his invented Persian alter ego, who made us think again about the meaning of the phrase “command performance”—only he was both player and prince. The ghazal had presented Madrid with the formal opportunities to say anything and everything; the inherent internal autonomy of the ghazal’s couplets, together with the elements (for Madrid) of occasional refrain and occasional rhyme, created the perfect tension between free agency and patterned expectation, disjunction and conjunction, mad clowning around and lightly-worn erudition.

The ghazal is a leaping kind of poem just as the sonnet likes to make arguments: each has generic elements and conventions—specific formal technologies—that poets use in order to do certain kinds of things. A poet can take great delight in repurposing them, but they also provide a tradition of voicings to adapt, bend, distort, and play around with. While the ghazal’s couplets were, for Madrid, a perfect form of implied logic with loose parameters, I heard him exhausting its potentials as he practiced it. What would he do next?

What he hit on is the Welsh englyn, a formally complicated stanza that requires a much tighter coil than the ghazal, but which also intensifies Madrid’s love of propulsion. Madrid only ever takes what he needs from a tradition. In the case of the Welsh englyn, which is also a tradition of variations, Madrid’s own take on it, or his take from it, perfectly suits: a formal elastic tension, like a rubber band stretched back from your thumb and aimed at your best friend’s face. Here are the opening verses to “Stepping Crow,” an example of Madrid’s variation on the tercet form of the englyn stanza:

Stepping crow. Moon at half mast.
Dawn horse, horse, blanket and mule.
The fool knows something you don’t.

Stepping crow. Both feet in the boat.
Books stacked up, and nowhere to store ‘em.
Decorum is spontaneous order.

Stepping crow. Gone north of the Border.
Magic in motion and magic at rest.
Only divest, no need to announce it.

Stepping crow. Locked in from the outset.
Feet in the boat and we’re already rowing.
I don’t like thinking, I like already knowing.

With so much happening at the level of pure form, the technical aspects would be tedious to parse. But if you think of the way Celtic designs carry curving lines from one quadrant of the visual field to another while maintaining qualities of symmetry and balanced value, tracing exquisitely detailed involutions and mandala-like circularities, then you’ll have some sense of Madrid’s analogous acoustic embroideries. Consider, for example, that the final sound in a tercet’s second line rhymes with one of the opening sounds in the third line, and the final sound in the third line of a tercet end-rhymes with the first line of the next one. Except where it doesn’t; except where the poet feints in one direction and then delivers in another. If he drops the ball over there, he retrieves it over here—but it never stops bouncing, it’s in continual play, so you hardly notice what’s happening. Additionally, with the set repetition of the opening phrase in each tercet, and the division of the first and second line into two grammatical parts by way of caesura, Madrid maxes out his opportunities for different kinds of conjunction and disjunction: the second phrase of each tercet’s first line sounds like it’s elaborating on the repeated first phrase, but it’s not always clear how; the second line seems like it’s adding objects and ideas to the picture; and the third seems to extend to a kind of meta-comment on everything that’s preceded, sometimes on the act of poetry itself. But, again, there’s a leap; the logical connection is implied, not stated.

What holds it together? Two essential elements of poetry that, when in balanced interplay, generate much of the pleasure that we take in the art: energy and rule. Energy, in Madrid’s poems, comes from disjunction, the leap in logic; but it also comes from rhythm, which, in these poems, is predominantly anapestic (da-da-DAH)—that galloping sound. Rule, in his poems, comes from rhyme and measure, but rhyme is not only a quality of rule; it also generates something like cognitive energy by holding ideationally unrelated things in suspended acoustic relation. Madrid understands that energy and rule are qualities best exercised in tension, and he’s become a master at it. The poems move like tight syllogisms, but they speak in rapid tongues. The rhymes of these poems, and their rhythms—common to light verse, satire, and some balladry—would be cloying were they running under sentimentalities, received notions, automatic feelings, or other notional comforts. But Madrid uses such elements to formally stage something fresh, a poetic intelligence making new moves and new shapes while keeping audible the verbal history of these deeper sounds.

It may seem as if I’m explaining how a joke works. Such explanations, however entertaining to poetry nerds, are never very funny to the crowd—and Madrid’s new poems have a lot in common with the way jokes work. But the key to Madrid is his obsession with rhyme, its sounds and its logic. Much more than a technical matter, much more than the correspondence between like and unlike sounds, rhyme is its own circuit in the pleasure center of the brain, and Madrid feels how the poetry mind is wired to it. He’s composing out of his own pleasure center, and his aim is to light up yours. It’s not an expression of a formalism; his poems don’t establish positions we associate with poetics these days. And they want to do more than just swing. “Only divest, no need to announce it.” “Decorum is spontaneous order.” “You close the circuit, find out what it’s worth.” “I know it, but I don’t know it.” “Functioning bronze is expected to sparkle.” “If you say it’s obvious, it’s never.” “I wish it were true that the best is best cheap / But the best is better expensive.” These are all final moves in stanzas from different poems, and indicate an important aspect of Madrid’s ambition: he’s not just joking around, he’s interpreting his experience, coming to conclusions, and finding surprising forms of expression for his ideas.

Here are the opening verses to “Mixed-Up Moon,” an example of Madrid’s variation on the englyn quatrain:

Mixed-up moon. Prop open the book.
Now and forever, you nip it in the bud.
I allow the heart does not make the blood,
Nor the human being the book.

Mixed-up moon. I don’t have to look.
Que no quiero ver that talked-up perfection.
It’s no use trying to rub out your reflection
From a piece of polished brass.

Mixed-up moon. I’ll take that as a yes.
I’ll take it ouside, out of ‘shot of the mourners.
I think you’ll agree it’s time we cut corners. We’ll cut
So many corners, the thing becomes a sphere.

Mixed-up moon. Insincere, insincere.
Thomas à Kempis and Francis Xavier.
The Better Book says that good behavior
Is the privilege, not the duty, of the good.

As with the tercet, there’s plotted internal rhyming and rhyming across the stanza boundary, but the quatrains also contain a rhyming couplet in the middle. This correspondence, this central drawing together, throws into greater relief the contrast with the stanza’s last line, which is consistently a kind of wild veering into prose. The effect is brightly comical, as the third line, in verse, runs into the prose of line four; the cross-stanza end rhyme steadies it with a kind of acoustic ballast. It’s like watching a great clown balletically perform a fall that, rather than ending a physical movement, tumbles upward into a new part of the dance.

Madrid appears to have brought together two kinds of poetry that could never have been combined without him (no one before him has been insane enough to try): limericks and wisdom literature. It’s as if the poet of the Ramayana wrote like Edward Lear (another of Madrid’s passions). I cannot think of anything weirder. But it’s fetching as all get out. It puts him squarely in the cultural moment of recombinant originality.

I hear disguised personal material in the poems, such as Madrid’s recent move to Texas; and inside jokes, such as his editor, Nick Twemlow, showing up in a line as Count Dracula; or the buried allusion to Stevens (“Nor the human being the book”). Key final lines of stanzas in one poem float over to perform the same role in another poem. This works in the same way as what stand-up comics call a tagline: when they bring back a joke from an earlier bit, but in a new narrative context. Audiences love it because it disrupts the assumption that each joke is its own isolated discrete form, and helps create a highly artificial world that also feels natural—after all, aspects of our lives bleed into each other.

This wide-ranging allusiveness and self-referentiality builds in the penultimate poem (“Poor little poem, nobody likes you,” says the poet), and culminates in the title poem, saved for last, which opens so winningly:

Last thing in the book. I trembled and shook.
A half hour down and a half hour do.
Sapphire, sapphire, I don’t know who,—
And when will I ever do that again?

Try never. Try this is the end. This is
The thing they don’t know about magic. It’s
Just not in its nature to work every time;
If it worked every time, it’d be physics.

And he’s right, it doesn’t work every time. If there’s a dud here, it’s the long prose lines of “Maxim 2,” which can’t counteract how the earworms of his englyns, in thirty-eight pages of anapestic rhyming, have naturalized our hearing—I find it impossible to make the shift. But little matter. And whether or not we want to hold him to it—never again!—or beg him to stop, Madrid is a few steps ahead of us, saying goodbye to all that: his first book of poetry, his doctoral dissertation, and even, we think, the book we’re reading:

Yeah, try never. The charm’s wound up.
The top of the tree is the end of the climb.
Now Do What I Say and The Warrant for Rhyme
Have done what they could and, one last time,
I say to you all, in a whisper: Try never.

This last poem, self-reflective and self-reflexive, is like a grand finale, where all the prosodic pyrotechnics on display in the book come to a heady climax; your brain feels a little bit like what happens to it when you watch the final scene of Spamalot or Blazing Saddles. But just as it makes its ultimate moves, which are very big, the poem brings the voice down to a whisper. That’s consummate showmanship of a kind we rarely encounter anymore in today’s poetry. It’s serious business, and all play.

September 2017

This review was published in issue 61:1.

Abigail Lang and David Nowell Smith (eds.), Modernist Legacies: Trends and Faultlines in British Poetry Today

New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 263pp. $99.00

Reviewed by Daniel Eltringham

Modernism is back, sort of. Modernist Legacies is part of a broader tendency towards the reevaluation of modernism’s continuing presence among the current generation of British poets who, looking back to an underground tradition in British experimental writing that has been largely ignored by the publishing industry and prize circuit since the 1950s, are making it new, again. What, then, does it mean for that double movement—going back to go forward—to be also a legacy? The editors of this helpfully wide-ranging collection of critical essays address the exclusionary cultural baggage of the modernist tag, aware of the “risk of egregious tradition-making” that closes down as well as opens up. The “trends and faultlines” this volume sets out to trace are the “traditions, genealogies, burdens, unresolved questions—in short, the legacies that modernism has cast, in order to take these legacies upon themselves as a spur to future practice.”

The book sets out, therefore, to address some of the power imbalances at work within experimental circles, which remain overwhelmingly well-educated and white, if arguably less male-dominated than in previous generations. In this sense it is in line with current critical tendencies: Andrea Brady’s essay for The Conversation, “The White Privilege of British Poetry Is Getting Worse” (October 2015); Sandeep Parmar’s essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books, “Not a British Subject: Race and Poetry in the UK” (December 2015); and the Race and Poetry and Poetics in the UK (RAPAPUK) symposium in London (February 2016) all attest to a desire to assess and begin to reverse this long-prevailing wind. The argument that an anticolonial politics of dialect and accent is especially pertinent and localized within the British Isles, where class and the politics of voice are hopelessly striated and inextricable, is an important one, made obliquely or explicitly by several essays in this collection.

Part of the justiﬁcation for using the genetic language of inheritance is that such a tradition is not self-evident or—at least not yet—self-reinforcing. In comparison with the North American experience, Lang and Nowell Smith write, assembling such a legacy is not straightforward; the dots cannot be easily joined between “dozens of strong poets and movements” as in the US. Instead, the connections are those forged between fugitive “outriders” such as Basil Bunting, W. S. Graham, and David Jones and the poets of the 1960s and 70s whose brief stints in charge of the mainstream organs that govern taste—the Poetry Society and Poetry Review—ended in a messy coup and decades of subsequent obsolescence. The ﬁrst section of Modernist Legacies goes over this contested historical ground. Allen Fisher and Robert Hampson return to the transatlantic connection that catalyzed much experimental poetic practice in Britain from the early 1960s. Romana Huk, meanwhile, sees lying behind British poetry’s continual worrying at lyric’s political complicities and efﬁcacies a need to let messy materiality into the form. That impulse, she suggests, comes at an often uncontrollable cost to subjective coherence, so that the lyric “I” is revealed as a ﬁction constituted all along by those material forces.

Of course, part of the vibrant, samizdat feel of British “innovative” or “Revival” work since the 1960s is owed to its pelagic presence, gliding below mainstream currents that, by and large, regarded modernism as an “historical aberration, thankfully now defunct.” In recent years, however, it has been breaking the surface: key ﬁgures from the British Poetry Revival, such as J. H. Prynne, Andrew Crozier, Tom Raworth, and Barry MacSweeney, have been published in collected formats by larger presses, and the academy—as this book and the conference that generated it attest—has been catching up. One of the main virtues of Modernist Legacies is that it widens the circle considerably beyond those more familiar names, with work (among others) on Jeff Hilson, Caroline Bergvall, Wendy Mulford, Geraldine Monk, Anthony Barnett, Sean Bonney, Peter Manson, Maggie O’Sullivan, and Tom Leonard. It also shines light on such projects as the cassette series Balsam Flex, which Will Montgomery retrieves from the obscurity of archiving procedures that “have never been on a par with those for small press books and little magazines.”

In his own contribution Nowell Smith groups Monk, from Lancashire and now based in Shefﬁeld, and the Glaswegian poet Leonard along with Anglophone Caribbean and black vernacular poetry from the UK. This is a powerful intersectional move that brings together the exclusions of class, geography, and race where they meet, in accent and the voice. Nowell Smith asks how “modernism” can be a useful term for thinking about traditions excluded from or peripheral to its central practices. Even those of the North American poets (Williams, Cummings, Moore) whose “distance from the rigidities of the British class system” allowed them to try out prosodic and rhythmic approaches “that might serve to articulate forms of experience incompatible with an iambic rise and fall” were still not really attuned to other marginalities beyond their own status as postcolonial writers. Nowell Smith quotes Caribbean poet Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s History of the Voice, which sees the pentameter’s persistence as a continued instantiation of ruling-class privilege that “carries with it a certain kind of experience” but falls short when called to account for the distinct environmental conditions of Caribbean life: if the pentameter is not attuned to the prosody of North American experience, neither is it “the experience of a hurricane.”

In UK black and vernacular poetries, too, Modernist Legacies comes up against the problem that, as Sarah R. Greaves puts it in her contribution on “Transcultural Hybridity,” the formal and aesthetic inheritance and impulse of modernism—to open the ﬁeld and inhabit border zones—has mostly been transmitted in an institutional form “relayed by generations of academics” that is “narrow, exclusive, aesthetic.” The other side of that coin, as Sandeep Parmar recognized in her LA Review of Books essay, is that while poets such as Grace Nichols, Jean Binta Breeze, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Benjamin Zephaniah, and Patience Agbabi offer a politically necessary and compelling response to a largely white tradition, “their poetry does not usually incorporate language that is complex, difﬁcult, or engaged in deconstructing meaning while communicating it via formal structures that extend beyond the binaries of social and racial identity too easily crystalized by the conventional lyric ‘I.’” Parmar’s criticism is bivalent: if the lyric “I” seems too bound to identity politics, then the modernist fragmentation of identity itself serves a speciﬁc institutional legacy that is usually constituted along lineaments of race and class. Her criticism is complicated, however, by explicitly political poetry that does make use of some elements of lyric voice, in service of Marxist and/or feminist commitments. Why should this recourse be open to some forms of commitment as redress for some exclusions and not others?

Modernist Legacies does not confront this vexed question head-on in terms of contemporary debates. (Indeed, the interventions cited earlier in this review either post-date the book’s publication or precede it by only a few months.) But it does offer compelling historical accounts of the development of politicized lyric in British poetry. Samuel Solomon and Luke Roberts both examine the strained political commitments of the 1970s and 80s in the poetry of Wendy Mulford and Barry MacSweeney, respectively. Mulford’s commitments to “Marxist-feminist organizing” and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament provided, Solomon writes, a “setting for her to think through the political relevance of personal experience, and to understand personal politics as part of an effort to transform society collectively,” but her writing pulls against and “outpaces” its Leftist afﬁliations. Mulford’s ﬁrst full-length collection, Bravo to Girls and Heroes (1977), is for Solomon “an experiment with holding such commitments through and across the trials of lyric.” It reﬂects the inﬂuence of the contemporary Wages for Housework movement that took Marxism into the home, seeing both production and consumption as “implicated in reproductive politics,” while registering the ways “reproductive pleasure always bears the ambivalence of reproductive work”: “we like to live simply & we like to / eat well. that does not include children. / deﬁnitely. they exclude it.”

MacSweeney’s own relation to the Left was almost the obverse of the kind of careful feminist reworking of the lyric achieved by Mulford and Denise Riley. Roberts’s reading of his at times overtly masculine, picket-line work does glancingly address the “unexamined misogyny that would peak in his writings following the election of Thatcher,” a tendency partially redeemed by his late poetry, especially Pearl, which “shows his capacity for portraying and imagining a female voice and life.” Roberts’s focus, though, is on MacSweeney’s ﬁrst book, The Boy from the Green Cabaret Tells of His Mother, published by Hutchinson in 1968. Roberts traces MacSweeney’s romanticizing affection for the Soviet Union and its ﬁrst generation of Bolshevik revolutionary poets. Russian poetry and politics were useful to MacSweeney, Roberts notes insightfully, as a counterweight to the Olsonian, transatlantic lode of The English Intelligencer (1966–1968), a poetry worksheet in which much of the groundwork of the British late modernist poetics covered by this volume was done. MacSweeney revises Olson’s emphasis on “SPACE,” Roberts writes, substituting instead “Russia, the large LAND,” in an easterly gesture of political afﬁliation. This was a deliberate tack in the other direction and consciously against the westward movement prevalent among his Revival contemporaries, in a “schismatic attempt by the young poet to claim the exotic Soviets as accessories in a strategy of differentiation.”

Perhaps Roberts is not entirely fair to see MacSweeney’s eastward stance as only strategic, though. His poem “Brother Wolf” suggests that the felt connection with an idea of “LAND” was as much topographical as political:

There is so much land in Northumberland. The sea
Taught me to sing
the river to hold my nose. When
it rains it rains glue.

In The Prelude the river Derwent gave Wordsworth a gentler schooling, having “blend[ed] his murmurs with my nurse’s song ” and “ﬂowed along my dreams.” MacSweeney’s rougher treatment, on the other side of the Pennines, is part of the nonacademic, nonstandard English trajectory of North-East modernism, its languages and landscapes. In this light it would have been a boon for Modernist Legacies to have included a full-length essay on Bill Grifﬁths, whose “ﬁrst encounters with North Eastern vernacular,” Nowell Smith comments, “were ﬁltered through the poetry of Basil Bunting and studies in Anglo-Saxon,” but shifted from an “ethnographical and philological” interest in the region to a political solidarity with the marginalized industrial North East.

And if the pentameter is not the experience of a hurricane, neither is it even the experience of the Pennine Hills, the spinal column running from North Derbyshire to Scotland that links together Northern poets such as MacSweeney and Grifﬁths in a continuity of harsh fells and moorland. Also among these Northern poets is the Yorkshire-based Maggie O’Sullivan, whose poem “Another Weather System,” Peter Middleton observes, contains “wild soundscapes” that occur in an “unnatural world of wild birds and animals, a world made strange and phantasmagoric, where words fail and bodies break only to re-form themselves,” very far from the acculturated worlds of meter and measure, whether the pentameter is broken or intact. O’Sullivan’s singular deployments of “verbal energy” insist that “however much an object language might be, its state is changeable from solid to ﬂuid to gas.” In this ambience of mutability, the modernist preoccupation with the ideology of “form” seems like such an indoor thing to worry about. For O’Sullivan “language is an ecology, a habitat of lake, the air, or earth. The outside, living as well as inanimate, gentle and violent, enters language.”

Indeed, the nonhuman is the last of the exclusions Modernist Legacies redresses, and the one that receives the least critical attention. Another version of this book might read many of the poets discussed in these terms, with less focus on the social geography of urban centers and more on the signifying practices of world-making. Critical attention would then land on the linguistic porosity of reference and world, avoiding what Drew Milne calls so much concentration on “the fallacy of constitutive subjectivity” in “pre-theoretical and post-theoretical modalities of innocence and complicity.” In other words, worrying less about who you are and your complicity in how you came to be, and more about your language’s relation-making with the ineluctable signifying practices of nonhuman animals and the material world. Would that still be modernist? Not as a legacy, perhaps, but rather, as the epigraph of the 2015 edition of Prynne’s Poems directs us, “for the future,” and towards a sustainable relation with the nonhuman world. For such a poetics neither “modernist” nor “legacy” quite sufﬁces.

July 2017

This review was published in issue 60:3.

Joseph Gordon Macleod, The Ecliptic

Chicago: Flood Editions, 2016. 112pp. $15.95

Reviewed by Jose-Luis Moctezuma

In astrology the concept of personhood is a curious thing. Attached to the shifting valences of the stars, a person’s life suddenly has a terminal value: responsibility for the self lies determinedly in the weathers of social situation and personal circumstance, and free will is seemingly evacuated from the picture.

In the poetry of Joseph Gordon Macleod, personhood and astrology align at just the right degree of compositional value, producing a system of the self that is equally nebulous, equally predetermined. Macleod’s The Ecliptic, a “lost modernist classic” published in 1930, narrates what its editor Richard Owens describes as the development of “a single consciousness in twelve parts, each of which corresponds to one of twelve constellations in the Western zodiac.” A long poem written on the astrolabed fissures of a piecemealed mind, Macleod’s work reflects the modernist concern for fragmented consciousness and the dissolvable, irresolute aspects of personality. Indeed, Basil Bunting had approvingly sent it to Ezra Pound, and Pound encouraged T. S. Eliot to publish it at Faber & Faber; Virginia Woolf had been close to publishing it for Hogarth Press; and Louis Zukofsky, another player on the stage of refraction, demonstrated some admiration for Macleod’s brand.

Despite these associations, the poem is oddly anachronistic. Its hermeticism mixes high modernism’s elliptical difficulty and cultish formalism with late nineteenth-century Symbolism (think Arthur Symons translating the evocative knots of Stéphane Mallarmé). In his preface Macleod rationalizes the poem’s length by citing poetry’s need to rival the vogue for novels with a version of Pound’s “prose kinema”: prolonged narrative arcs undergirded by archetypal symbols. “All literature is born symbolic,” says Macleod, and the “symbol, being an idea, should be allowed to develop as ideas do,” across long stretches of “autobiographical indulgence.” Macleod approaches astrology with the Symbolists’ fervor for occult prognostication as a readymade for poetical association. He takes the astrological signs as dramatis personae, constructing a range of personhoods beginning in Aries and ending in Pisces. A powerful hermeneutic for personhood in The Ecliptic, astrology also leads Macleod into the obscurantism of horoscope riddles.
“Aries, or, The Ram,” the first part of the poem, exemplifies some of the sonic pyrotechnics Macleod excels in. We enter a vision of spring (Aries’s month is April):

Spring is anticipated honourable and fresh.
It comes. The frosts are gone. But impulsive purple and yellow
Yet are slaves to the ground. When time folds over again,
Dire in the midst of lilies adored the disciplinary lily
Hangs its head fulfilling the legal balances,
Not balances that embrace all, being all-comprehending;
But balances that exclude, being but compromise.
Sap rises. The hedgehog wakes.

Macleod tends to be highly alliterative in his verse, using sound patterns to evoke significant connections. In the fourth line above, “Dire” calls attention to the d sounds in “midst,” “adored,” and “disciplinary.” But in the midst of “disciplinary” there is also the counterpoint of the softer consonants in “lily” and “lilies.” The discipline in question here is that of the lily taming the harsher notes of d by spreading a silkier music of l sounds: “fulfilling,” “legal, ” and “balances.” Meanwhile, the participle of “adored” works in favor of either the undifferentiated lilies or the differentiated, and highly disciplinarian, lily. Macleod is ratcheting up his evocative powers: “adored” evokes two simultaneous figures or actions without specific corralling. Many of Macleod’s lines perform this equivocation, just as often in the diction as in the syntax. His ingenuity places much pressure on the prismatic effect of such words as “strabismus,” “tragomaschality,” “triforium,” “erythroglot,” and “metanairesis,” whose preciosity and difficulty add to the poem’s lyric drive. In his stellar moments Macleod exploits the aural capacity of these select words in companionship to generate novel forms of expression that evoke rather than affix poetic meaning.

In spite of its evocative ingenuity on the level of sound, The Ecliptic’s pretensions at narrative integrity are bogged down, sometimes unnecessarily, by the modernist prerogative for remixed Hellenisms. “Taurus, or, The Bull,” the second poem in the series, takes the “ceremony of the Bull murder at the Athenian Dipolia,” as Macleod notes, citing James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, and gives it a neoclassical rendition:

‘Goodly Bull, come, Hero Dionysus,
To Elaeans’ shrine, a pure shrine, pounding
Oxhoof graced, Goodly Bull, O Goodly
Bull,’ so to herself hummed exiled Pyrrha
Pent in sorry school in ugly Scyros…

Pyrrha, we learn, is the young Achilles hiding out on the island of Skyros, dressed in drag and feigning womanhood, and spending his (her) time with the daughters of Lycomedes. Pyrrha’s relation, and equally Taurus’s relation, to Aries emerges here only through a collation of seasonal tropes. The figure of the finch in “Aries” is reworked here in the image of the goldfinch, each one denoting the springtide wake of replenishment. But the force of these transitions is diluted unnecessarily by the minutiae of ornamental language. The self that the poem strives to build up, sign by sign, is resultantly obfuscated by a clutter of antique Greek furniture and mythological commonplaces that don’t specify so much as disperse.

The next poem, “Gemini, or, The Twins,” is comprised of couplets that mimic the dual nature of the Gemini sign, while “Cancer, or, The Crab” is composed in the sidewinding manner of the crustacean:

How can I be hardened when the whole world is fluid?
O Aphroditê Pandêmos, your badgers rolling in the moonlit corn
Corn blue-bloom-covered carpeting the wind
Wind humming like distant rooks
Distant rooks busy like factory whirring metal
Whirring metallic starlings bizarre like cogwheels missing teeth

Despite the hardened exterior of the crab, its sideways motion gets mimicked in the fluid patterning of these lines. The end-word of each line flows into the opening phrase of the next: “moonlit corn” reappears as “corn blue-bloom-covered” (presumably huitlacoche, or “corn smut”), and so on, until whirring metal, now missing teeth, metamorphoses into starlings. In the midst of the crab’s motion “the Zodiac itself…dissolves like a sandcastle into acidity.” The disintegration is significant. Personhood, in Macleod’s argument, is of value when it is multiple; the crab’s failure at direct motion results from a hardened unchanging personality, one that cannot embrace the nebulous multiplicity of being a person dictated by the multifaceted Zodiac.

In the final poem of the series, “Pisces, or, The Fishes,” the hardened personhood of the crab is offset by the fluid personhood of the fish. Pisces, the Crab’s water-sign counterpart, offers “the poem of redintegration / To some souled, parallel epipedal crustacean.” Redintegration, or the restoration of the whole from the part, is the culmination of Macleod’s long poem: all the signs of the Zodiac are but stages in the becoming-whole of personhood. It takes a madeleine sometimes to jumpstart the constitution of an entire memory, leaving a novel in its wake; in Macleod’s case, it takes a vivid inhabitation of each of the houses and symbols of the Zodiac to establish individual consciousness, and the long poem is its embodiment. Macleod’s final lines leave a testament to this belief: “I use the stars as wisely as I can / With migrant man as faith to migrant man.” Macleod’s “migrant man” offers a useful caption to the incommensurability of personality in the face of astrological movement and planetary eclipses. What migrates above, migrates below.

The Ecliptic turned out to be eclipsed by its author’s own incommensurability, because personhood came to mean a lot of things for Macleod. Following the disappointment of his subsequent book of poems, Foray of Centaurs (1931–1932), whose baroque symbolism failed to find a publisher, Macleod turned to acting and the theater. Given the actor’s ability to change personhood, it’s appropriate that this became the chief passion of his life. Astrology, with all its chance happenings and fatalistic weather patterns, however, did not leave Macleod alone. Electrocuted while performing stage work, he had an epiphany and devoted himself to socialism and a life in politics, becoming chairman of the Huntingdonshire Divisional Labour Party and later a candidate for Parliament. Personhood shifted repeatedly for Macleod: at different stages of his life, he was a newsman and filmmaker, a literary critic, and a barrister. Most tellingly, he even adopted a pseudonym, Adam Drinan, and under that name composed and published poems with a Scottish nationalist verve, strikingly different from his earlier occultish verse. Indeed, Macleod embodied multiple personae throughout his life, and The Ecliptic may hold the key to all of their diverse motivations.

July 2017

This review was published in issue 60:3.

Hiromi Itō, Wild Grass on the Riverbank

Translated by Jeffrey Angles

Notre Dame, IN: Action Books, 2015. 103pp. $16

Reviewed by Zhou Sivan

Hiromi Itō is said to have called the English-language version of her narrative poem Wild Grass on the Riverbank, translated by Jeffrey Angles, a lost original of her Japanese text. “As I read out loud the English of the English translation,” says Itō, “I feel as if that is really my true voice, and I am caught up in the illusion that this is the way that I have been telling the story since the very beginning.”

A remarkable account of the textual prosthesis as the text’s origin, this story is also about the theme of atopy (placelessness) in Itō’s work, which has always reflected the author’s unusual position in the ecology of world literature and the transnational avant-garde. Itō is indeed a “shamaness of poetry,” keen in her ability to channel different voices and registers. Inspired by traditions ranging from Native American narrative verse to the medieval religious Japanese storytelling art of sekkyō-bushi, she also counts among her influences Allen Ginsberg, Miyazawa Kenji, Swedish poet Siv Cedering, and Austrian poet Georg Trakl. This transnational circulation of voices does not have a particular name, nor does it need to. It is embraced within the mythology of past voices that animates contemporary colloquial Japanese. Poised on survival, it is a resourceful “making do” in the manner of bricolage: it makes, as Michel de Certeau said, a “mobile organicity of the environment.” Itō’s comfort with atopic circulation also makes the best of a bad social reality. Like the anthropomorphism of the South American Verbena brasiliensis, which “stutters” in Wild Grass on the Riverbank with a “strong accent,” Itō’s own strange relationship to language captures the experience of migrants whose lack of English has, in Angles’s words, “condemned them to silence.”

Wild Grass on the Riverbank can be read as a simple allegory. A mother and her children shuttle back and forth between the landscapes of the riverbank and the wasteland—southern Japan (Kumamoto) and southern California, respectively—enacting what seems like a sexual drama between two fathers and a choice of two different lifestyles. The catch is that both places are equally grotesque, and that the father and the stepfather are both desiccated corpses come back to life occasionally, or seasonally: describing one of them, the child narrator tells us “the law of the plants had extended to this man who had been our father.” These men find themselves on the receiving end of the mother’s hatred: she snips off one of their penises and says, “leave it alone and it’ll grow again.” In place of impotent fathers, we get old men masturbating by the riverbank, looked over by the narrator and her siblings, and a dog whose “penis growing longer and longer…intertwined with mother.” Itō’s treatment of sexuality and motherhood is startling and dramatic, to say the least, and there is no telling what form reprieve may take.

Sometimes reprieve comes in the form of landscape, environment, or natural settings, though the idea of place ultimately provides no stable ground for Itō’s characters to orient themselves. The hot spring is more than benign and naturalistic; it cleanses and heals sicknesses, raises corpses from the dead, and conquers death:

Mother said, that hot spring
Will ﬁx you up right away,
Soak yourself, open your pores, scrub your body, swell up,
It’ll heal your eczema, your blisters,
Your skin infections, your ringworm,
Your dermatitis, your infectious diseases,
Your atopy, your allergies,
Your corpses, your impending death, your having died, and even death in general

Jeffrey Angles’s choice of the word atopy refers here to the condition of hyperallergy, but it also indexes Itō’s fascination with the Greek concept of placelessness. Throughout Wild Grass on the Riverbank, not a single place is identified using a proper noun; “L. A.” is only sung in a Neil Young lyric. The only real place is memory, knowable exclusively through landmarks and monuments like the burial site of a “samurai-monk’s big camphor tree.” Often, sickness and being-out-of-place seem to collude, as in the figure of an old man sitting like a thicket of horseweed by the riverbank: “he had a mild case of dementia rather like Erigeron canandensis.” Physical and mental sicknesses take the form of forgetfulness of the present, not to mention the past—the result of having migrated from another place.

Whether present or not in the Japanese, the pun on the word atopy can be linked to Itō’s larger critique of common metaphors, especially in US immigration discourse, that cast immigrants as diseased people, animals, invasive plants, or even objects of war. As quickly as a human character is introduced as a weed, it transforms into something that cannot be “weeded out.” The result is a nightmarish and grievous landscape of corpses, like the two fathers, “[m]ultiplying, dying, coming back to life, and multiplying again.” Presumably, the boundaries between human, animal, and vegetable are what guarantee life, and when these boundaries break down, life becomes unsustainable. Dangerous and unpredictable is Itō’s monster-image of life: one moment the narrator finds succor and her own self-image in the weeds, and the next moment she and her friend, Alexa, are sexually assaulted by tendrils of the kudzu plant. When the narrator and her family are treated by state authorities as objects of war, in a story based on real newspaper reports, they are presented as animal-vegetable-human life forms: having returned from abroad, and found illegally squatting near a river, the father turns into a mummified corpse, the mother is detained as a suspect for murder, child negligence, and abuse, and the children are left defending their household with dogs and hunting rifles.

Sometimes being eaten alive by nature in this way is how Itō’s poem tropes the social and political process of “naturalization.” Assimilation, in other words, is cultural death. But when the word “naturalize” is broken down by the narrator, it’s shown to contain the character “return,” which could suggest nature’s resilience and resistance to the deadly forces of naturalization itself. Here the narrator tells how she learnt a plant name, Paspalum urvillei, from an old man who had moved to Japan just as the plant “came fifty years ago to the riverbanks of Japan”:

We looked it up in a plant book once, but it wasn’t there
I pointed at the grass with the white spikes of seed
He said, Paspalum urvillei
I said, why wasn’t it in the plant book?
He said, it was first discovered in 1958 in northern Kyūshū, so it’s only newly naturalized here, you know, the word “naturalize ” is written with the characters that mean “return” and “change,” that is what they call plants that have come from somewhere else and settled down
I said, I’ve seen that word in the plant book
He said, that’s right, that’s a word you’d be sure to see in plant books
He looked around with a happy expression and pointed, that’s a naturalized plant too

As if to enact a “return” in its very telling, the narrative turns even further at this point toward the history of immigration to Japan:

The other plants are older,
Some of them came a hundred and fifty years ago when Japan opened up,
Some of them came after World War II,
But this one is different,
Paspalum urvillei is from South America,
It reached here about the time I was born,
We grew up together, the whole time, here on the riverbank,
But neither of us has ever gotten used to the place

The revelation that the plant has not been documented opens up the entire oral narrative to its current material form. Paspalum urvillei ’s missing entry in the narrator’s remembered plant book is later mended by its inclusion in a miniature plant glossary at the end of Itō’s book. That book exists precisely so that the narrator can heed the lesson to document her own absent history as a migrant. The poem becomes our narrator’s way of sorting through multiple identities: “Alexa was me / The wild grass was me / I was Alexa / I was the wild grass / We were exactly alike, just like Erigeron Canadensis and Conyza sumatrensis.” The scientific brevity of taxonomies cannot capture the complicated histories of a person, let alone a community. But recourse to the facticity of plant names is one way to come to terms with the painful event of diaspora.

Perhaps there is no definite place but in plant names. The immersion in a hot spring around the riverbank may cure one’s atopy, but there may also be some palliative significance in the placelessness of cultural entities that are held together only by the knowledge of names and immaterial histories. As in the old man and Paspalum urvillei, the separate yet sometimes coterminous tracks of human and plant migration suggest the ecocritical possibility of organizing human migratory patterns around the history of plant mobility. Yet towards the end of Wild Grass on the Riverbank, Itō makes clear that the characters’ anxieties from ceaseless movement come down to political constructs that cannot be easily naturalized: their legal residency statuses, or identities mediated by the state. In the fine distinction between having “flawless passports” and a “dirty spot on your passport,” there is the enormous difference between the emancipatory text of one’s own history and the state’s interpretation of that history. By the end of Wild Grass on the Riverbank, Itō has upended in turn the carnivalesque images of transmutable human and plant life, insisting that the problems of human immigration are ultimately larger than the metaphors of natural history.

July 2017

Julie Carr and Jeffrey C. Robinson (eds.), Active Romanticism: The Radical Impulse in Nineteenth-Century and Contemporary Poetic Practice

Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2015. 276pp. $39.95

Reviewed by Eric Powell

Active Romanticism is a collection of essays with a polemical intent, as the editors announce in their introduction. Decrying the “institutional Romanticism” of textbook anthologies, which they call “a system of exclusion and distortion,” Carr and Robinson offer instead “a claim for Romanticism as an enactment of an avant-garde and innovative poetry, a claim that links vitally a poetry of the past and a poetry rediscovering itself in a present at any stage of subsequent history. Our book insists, against the grain of established cultural expectations, upon Romantic continuities, recurrences, and proliferation.” I wonder if textbook anthologies might not be fairly innocuous windmills rather than the pernicious giants that Carr and Robinson seem to think them, but the reconception of Romanticism offered here is interesting and provocative for its rejection of a liberal-progressive narrative of literary history. Carr and Robinson counter liberal historicism with a Walter Benjamin–inspired philosophy of literary history in which crises “of democracy could be said to define a form of Romanticism that can spring up at any moment.”

The introduction is a quasi-manifesto, delineating four “premises” of active Romanticism, which I don’t have space to engage with here. They are interesting, tendentious, and written in the language that is appealing to contemporary academic Leftist(ish) poets and critics. The gist of it is that active Romanticism is inherently political, experimental, and, dammit, still alive. To show just how alive and kicking Romanticism is, the editors have gathered essays written mostly by contemporary poets. These poets are supposed to “bear witness to the effects of Romantic poetry and poetics on modern and contemporary innovative poetry.”

Unfortunately, I come away from the book with the impression that contemporary poets aren’t reading the Romantics very much or very well. Part of what has been radical—a word much prostituted in this book—about criticism of and scholarship on the Romantic period in the last fifty years is the recovery of, or renewed focus on, women poets, working-class poets, poets of color, colonized poets, and queer poets. Despite the editors’ commitment to this program, Active Romanticism is, generally speaking, regrettably canonical and Anglo-American in its focus; in this it is like the “institutional Romanticism” that Carr and Robinson decry. Here is a simple list of the Romantics given at least some degree of sustained attention in the book, essay by essay: Erasmus Darwin, Whitman, Thoreau, Keats, Emerson, Wordsworth, Wordsworth, Mary Robinson, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Percy Shelley, Whitman, Coleridge, Whitman, Robert Burns, Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, Anna Barbauld, Coleridge, Percy Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, John Clare, Percy Shelley, Keats, Schlegel, Novalis. This poor state of affairs is made worse by the fact that Mary Shelley, Anna Barbauld, Mary Wollstonecraft, and John Clare are all concentrated in Judith Goldman’s excellent essay “Dysachrony: Temporalities and Their Discontents, in New and Old Romanticisms.” The worst offenders not only stick close to the canonical six British Romantics and their American equivalents, but also concern themselves almost solely with their greatest hits.

Dan Beachy-Quick’s essay “‘The Oracular Tree Acquiring’: On Romanticism as Radical Praxis,” is a case in point. After starting with some interesting and less well-known passages from Thoreau, he goes on to focus his attention on Wordsworth’s emotion recollected in tranquility and Keats’ negative capability, fluctuating between gross generalizations about Romanticism and gross generalizations about Poetry. The essay is full of claims that would amuse the average philosopher: “Romanticism claims poetry as that difficult art that shows us the condition we are in by making that amazed condition apparent. The cost of the gift is being included in the gift’s trap, and to fail is to both escape the maze and be lost in it.” When Beachy-Quick claims that “Romanticism claims” such and such, I claim that Beachy-Quick needs a large dose of Arthur Lovejoy’s classic critique of the ideological coherence of the word Romanticism itself. At his most inflated it seems as though Beachy-Quick fasted for seven days and then performed a séance to summon the spirit of Emerson to serve as his amanuensis. There is nothing radical here, and certainly no praxis.

When the essays do focus on more neglected figures, the results can be less than enlightening. Elizabeth Willis’s essay, “Bright Ellipses: The Botanic Garden, Meteoric Flowers, and Leaves of Grass,” for example, begins with Erasmus Darwin, a very interesting poet-scientist whose didactic poems written in eighteenth-century couplet style were quite popular, and exerted influence on more canonical poets such as Shelley. Willis seems to want to make Darwin sexy through a (now banal) deconstructive focus on paratextual material, but she only succeeds in affirming history’s conclusion that Darwin must be really boring if she has to resort to writing about the errata leaf and commonplace printing conventions like the leading words from one page to another. This focus leads to postmodern excesses beyond all bounds of indecency:

Typeset beneath the footnote, the word ‘Breathe’ is an interruption to the notational commentary on ‘The Swallow’ and is visually severed from what precedes and follows it within the central text. A page turn, like a line break, is literally a space to breathe. But here the turn also creates new grammatical alliances: ‘Linnaeus observes that the wood breathe.’ Indeed Darwin’s pages do breathe in the interstices between words and stanzas, and in 1791 they would have been made of previously breathing, plant-based materials.

Forgive me if I’m not buying it.

There are some sparkling exceptions to the book’s too-narrow canonical focus. As already mentioned, Judith Goldman’s essay exhibits a wide and deep knowledge of Romantic writing, admirably marshaled in a series of short but sharp reflections on time out of joint in various Romantic works. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, in her essay “Singing Schools and ‘Mental Equality’: An Essay in Three Parts,” offers a fascinating and historically valuable reading of the intersubjective poetic dialogue between Coleridge and Mary Robinson, showing that “dialogues between male and female poets were a lively mode of practice” in the Romantic period. Through a keen reading of Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” and Robinson’s “To the Poet Coleridge,” the latter a remarkable poetic response to the Coleridge poem (which Robinson read in manuscript), DuPlessis makes a lucid argument about the importance of “gendered tropes” and their power to “construct a powerful cultural legacy that must be acknowledged and faced.” Like several of the essayists in the volume, DuPlessis moves toward personal reflection at the end, but she does so in an admirable way, keyed closely to the historical fate of women writers like Mary Robinson.

Nigel Leask’s essay “‘A Spark o’ Nature’s Fire’: Robert Burns and the Vernacular Muse” is another high point. Leask reads Burns’s use of the Scots vernacular as a “challenge to the class-based imperative of ‘standard English’,” avoiding, at the same time, a reductive account by paying close attention to the “self-conscious artifice of his poetry.” Leask juxtaposes Burns with lesser-known Scottish precursors, contemporaries, and conflicted followers such as Allan Ramsay, Alexander Geddes, Hugh MacDiarmid, and Tom Leonard, weaving a rich and nuanced account of the changing valences of Scots dialect verse, especially as it intersected with class politics, from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries.

Two of the essays collected here deserve notice as one-off performances. In “A Deeper, Older O: The Oral (Sex) Tradition (in Poetry),” Jennifer Moxley turns the apostrophic O of Romanticism from a figure of embarrassment, as Jonathan Culler has it, to a figure of “radical receptivity,” using oral sex as a master trope. It’s a fun read, but I’m a bit miffed. I won’t be able to read some of my favorite poems anymore—Wordsworth’s Intimations Ode, Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind,” Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus—without thinking of blow jobs. (It could be worse, I guess.) For Moxley, fixated on double entendre, not death but (oral) sex is all metaphors. Moxley’s essay is smart, her adroitness in reading poems is obvious, and I’m sympathetic to her aims. But it gets a bit sophomoric at points, as when, in a footnote on the Intimations Ode, she intimates that “Wordsworth’s ‘Ye that pipe’ recalls the French slang term for blow job, faire la pipe.” Wink, nudge. I groaned a deep, long O, and not of pleasure.

Simon Jarvis’s essay, “Hyper-Pindaric: The Greater Irregular Lyric from Cowley to Keston Sutherland,” is a singularity here. But then, Simon Jarvis is a singularity among contemporary critics: simultaneously one of the best we have and perhaps the most idiosyncratic in his focus, his aims, and his commitments. Taking the long view on what M. H. Abrams famously denoted the Greater Romantic Lyric, Jarvis provocatively jump cuts from Abraham Cowley’s “The Resurrection” (1656) to Keston Sutherland’s Hot White Andy (2007), tying the form to the larger historical development and fate of the Pindaric ode. “The discussion of these two widely separated terminuses,” Jarvis writes, “prepares the ground for a future discussion of the great irregular ‘Romantic’ ode, not as an inexplicable outburst of native woodnotes, but as a critical instance in that series of deaths and resurrections of the Pindaric which has characterized the grand English lyric ever since Cowley’s reinvention.” Cleverly structuring his essay in the dialectical form of the ode itself—strophe (Cowley), antistrophe (Sutherland), and epode (historical synthesis)—Jarvis brings to bear the virtuosic attention to technique that has become his hallmark, arguing that the “nuts and bolts” of meter, rhyme, and rhythm “constitute an essential condition, not only of the poems’ versification, but also of their loftiest and most rareﬁed thoughts.” This commitment to technique, to counting the “small change,” coupled with his astonishing historical breadth, yields the kind of insights into the development of verse forms that is all too rare these days.

Not content to stop with this contribution to poetics and literary history, however, Jarvis also hopes to make “a small contribution to literary theory” by stepping into the contemporary debate on lyric. Jarvis doesn’t have any interest in adjudicating “the controverted question of exactly what lyric is,” arguing instead that the concept of ‘lyric’ should not be “deployed emphatically.” The argument feels tacked on in response to the notoriety that the new lyric studies has accrued lately, and I wish that Jarvis had developed the point further.

Finally, for a book that is supposed to be, as the subtitle has it, about The Radical Impulse in Nineteenth-Century and Contemporary Poetic Practice, I was surprised to find virtually nothing about nineteenth-century popular radicalism, despite the fact that the poetry and poetics of so many of the Romantic poets considered in the book were deeply imbricated with radicalism—whether in solidarity or reaction. For example, “The Mask of Anarchy”—Shelley’s outraged ballad written in response to the Peterloo massacre—was widely circulated by the Chartists, and, as Michael Demson has shown, found its way into the early labor movement in the US. As Paul Foot notes: “Gandhi quoted it when agitating among the South African Indians in the early part of this century. More recently it was translated and chanted during the students’ uprising at Tiananmen Square, Beijing.” That’s an example of the “radical impulse” in Romantic poetry, and poetry as radical praxis, active still in contemporary poetic practice. Politics in so much contemporary academic writing consists in merely fighting little semiotic skirmishes in the cul-de-sac of language. Those that are interested in carrying on the tradition of nineteenth-century radicalism and its political praxis should be diligent in calling out the entropic effects of the misappropriation of such terms. But if one disregards the subtitle and the introduction—or, better and more generously, considers them as prefatory not to the present book but to a future book that could, and probably should, exist—then what one is left with is a widely and wildly divergent grab-bag of essays by contemporary poets, mostly British and American, working through their own relation, or that of their contemporaries, to the Romantics, again mostly British and American. There’s much of value in that.

July 2017

This review was published in issue 60:3.

Kenneth Cox, The Art of Language: Selected Essays

Edited with an introduction by Jenny Penberthy. Afterword by August Kleinzahler.

Chicago: Flood Editions, 2016. 328pp. $17.95

Reviewed by Michael Autrey

Kenneth Cox’s work is of that rare type one accepts with alacrity and begins with high hopes. And yet, to redeploy the opening of Cox’s assault on Geoffrey Hill, surely it cannot be denied that Kenneth Cox is very limited? Cox writes criticism as he claims Zukofsky wrote poetry: “as if you [have] read everything and no-one had ever written before. ” While this allows him space to offer remarkable readings, it also leads him to make irresponsible claims.
The Art of Language: Selected Essays hews closely to but also differs crucially from the contents of Cox’s Collected Studies in the Use of English, his only book, published by Agenda Editions in 2001. Cox’s Collected Studies consolidated his reputation—the more apt word might be cult—among a subset of experimental poets, the postwar descendants of Modernism in the UK. A glance at the table of contents identiﬁes Cox’s milieu. Editor Jenny Penberthy’s introduction situates him. Cox, a decorated veteran of the Second World War, did not attend university, began publishing in the 1960s and then only in “little magazines,” notably William Cookson’s Agenda and later in Montemora, Maps, and Scripsi, among others. Cox wrote slowly, revised often, crucially changing his mind years, even decades, after offering his meticulous readings of poets’ use of language.

At his best Cox is careful, brilliant, and stylish. Often at his best, his painstaking attention to the works of his favorite authors must equal the pains they took making them. The most characteristic longer pieces are “Hugh MacDiarmid,” the three pieces on Bunting, and “Louis Zukofsky: Tribute to Mallarmé.” Among the shorter reviews, “Gael Turnbull,” “Roy Fisher,” and “August Kleinzahler” stand out. Discussing Bunting’s use of language Cox writes, “It seems the feel of living speech comes through only when the subtlest elements of movement and intonation come together in a meeting governed by rare and unpredictable conditions, such as those which govern the evanescent existence of the elementary particles.” This is beautifully said, and beautifully judged: the movement from “comes through” to “comes together” is as elegant as the rare concatenation it describes.

As often as there is beauty, care, and attention in Cox’s criticism, there is also ignorance, even silliness. He makes wild assertions and offers deeply suspect theories, their offensiveness not lessened by his occasional moue of lament. Here, in a piece about Wyndham Lewis, Cox observes: “Hard as it is to take, both the structure of ideas and the history of individuals show an undeniable line joining Mallarmé’s Tuesdays rue de Rome with Belsen and Auschwitz.” If only Cox had deigned to open John Carey’s The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992), a book that looks into an abyss that Cox tries to leap in a sentence. In “Louis Zukofsky,” Cox goes well past the ridiculous too often found at the far side of the sublime: “The re-emergence of Jewish wisdom and Jewish intellect in the vernaculars of Europe is one of the glories of twentieth-century literature and a phenomenon in the long run more important than the re-establishment of the state of Israel.” Can anyone go with Cox beyond the conjunction “and” after “literature” in a generalization so grand it becomes meaningless? What prompts a writer justly renowned for his scrupulousness about matters of language to risk such claims about history?

Cox makes bizarre, sweeping statements about poetry, too, as kooky and spurious as Louise Glück’s claim in her essay “Against Sincerity” that “the great advantage of formal verse” is that “metrical variation provides a subtext. It does what we now rely on tone to do.” Glück’s “we” excludes. She makes the classic mistake, conflating personal technique and idiosyncratic means for historical necessity and inevitable ends. Compare with Cox, writing about Yeats: “Another constant feature, rhyming, is important. A tawdry ornament of no intrinsic value but great persuasive power Yeats came to rely on it as a means of fortifying his habit of rhetorical expression.” Cox, like Glück, uses criticism of style as a means to make—and enforce—taste and to write history. And from an otherwise careful examination of Roy Fisher, a poet who cannot receive too much attention: “The conventional norms of English versification have collapsed and no sensible person seeks to restore them, unless for occasional antiquarian purposes.” Cox’s sense of history pollutes astute readings even of poets he admires.

The editing of this work gives a curious impression of Cox’s evolution as a critic. Readers may get a mistaken impression that Cox despised the formalist, academic Geoffrey Hill and was happy to skewer Donald Davie, one of the few critics who praised him, but was never anything but judicious and respectful of his favorites. Penberthy writes, “We know that [Cox’s] final judgment of Zukofsky’s work, and indeed person, was damning. He chose to include his late reconsideration, completed in 2000, in his Collected Studies. It is uncharacteristically sour and tendentious, of a piece with other late-in-life cantankerous disparagements of writers such as Bunting and Allen Upward.” Instead, she includes the “brilliant essay Cox wrote [about Zukofsky] in 1979.” It seems unlikely that a writer as meticulous and as committed to revision as Cox didn’t mean what he ultimately concluded about one of the authors he had lived longest with. Reviewing Mark Scroggins’s biography of Zukofsky in the London Review of Books, August Kleinzahler, Cox’s literary executor, endorses Cox’s final assessment: “This is a harsh appraisal [of Zukofsky], and not in every instance justified, but I find it hard to argue with finally. ” Penberthy’s decision risks sanitizing a writer for the sake of broadening his appeal to an audience for which he never would have compromised.

Why omit Cox’s changes of mind about the authors he had read most closely, and include his demolition of Hill, which amounts to a full-blown mid-life disparagement? In Cox’s blinkered view Hill’s project is passé, and this makes him an inviting target. Ironically, in the final paragraph of his hatchet job, Cox perceives the direction Hill’s late work ultimately takes, an intuition few of Hill’s fans would have endorsed at the time he made it. The review’s final sentence reads: “The ingredients [of Mercian Hymns (1971)] are not everywhere equally blended and the thing as a whole may well be a bit of a lark but if so it only shows what Hill can do when he is borne aloof (as he has it in Tenebrae) less by high endeavour and more by high jinks.” After Canaan (1997), savage, satiric high jinks become Hill’s most productive mode, notably in Speech! Speech! (2000), the second volume of a trilogy (some call it his Commedia) that begins with The Triumph of Love (1998) and ends with The Orchards of Syon (2002). Cox deserves credit for his prescience, not for his vitriol.

This Selected Essays lives uncomfortably between the careful introduction and the hagiographic afterword that bookend the volume. While I quibble with Penberthy’s decisions I can take her at her word. I am expected to take Kleinzahler by his reputation, however, and Kleinzahler likes nothing so much as an unapologetic, angry man. His picture of Cox the polymath, retired from the BBC and living alone in a “book-laden, musty ﬂat” is a lovely read: elderly neighbor ladies look in on him from time to time, the story culminating with the Visitation of Lady Natasha Spender. Kleinzahler’s role is that of a renegade magi in bemused attendance. But just as some portrait-painters always find their own features in their subjects, Kleinzahler’s afterword says as much about him as it does about his subject’s lifelong isolation. What Kleinzahler praises as “singularly unaccommodating” in Cox’s criticism sounds more like axe-grinding. When the introduction and the afterword are taken together, Cox comes into focus: brilliant but disappointed, unreconciled to his anonymity, his inability to play well with others counted a virtue only to others with the same lack, he fits a type too common to make an exception for, even in this case.

In her own portrait of Cox, Penberthy stresses his hostility to the academy, but it’s also possible that Cox preferred to strike from the corner that he painted himself into rather than come to terms with a wider world he believed must accept him on his own terms. Cox diagnoses his own problem in a letter quoted by Penberthy: “To a young writer hostile to a polyglot poet, Cox notes that this is ‘the kind of thing that happens when after long close study of a chosen author, you ﬁrst come face to face with the fact that you and he are fundamentally unlike. The experience is a test of humanity as well as a test of taste.’” On the final page of his afterword, Kleinzahler excerpts a letter that he received from Cox in 2003: “All the same I have good news which cannot be doubted: William Cookson is dead.” Here Cox celebrates the death of the editor who did more than any other to make his work available, and this sentiment makes explicit what the essays suggest: Cox often failed his own test. As often as Cox surpasses the ordinary task of the critic, as often as he makes a lasting contribution to our understanding, he fouls the nest with the sort of nonsense he would never let his subjects get away with. Read him—and bring salt.

July 2017

This review was published in issue 60:3.

August Kleinzahler, Before Dawn on Bluff Road: Selected New Jersey Poems / Hollyhocks in the Fog: Selected San Francisco Poems

New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017. 176pp. $25.00

Reviewed by Patrick Morrissey

August Kleinzahler is a double agent. His poems began appearing in the late 1970s and early 1980s in little avant-garde magazines such as Origin and Sulfur; today his collections are reviewed in The Guardian and The New York Times. He owns up to influences both high modernist (Basil Bunting, Ezra Pound) and countercultural (the New York School, the Beats, Thom Gunn), yet he writes in a lucid style that makes his work available to readers who live outside the institutions of poetry and higher education. He speaks one moment of Bartók, the next of gas stations and liquor stores. His poetry embraces both high culture and the culture of people living on the margins, and it does so as a matter of course. He is unabashedly erudite, yet he writes about poor people and poor places—the “other half” of American life—without condescension or romanticism. He is a rare sort of poet, one who is both aesthetically sophisticated and truly egalitarian.

Kleinzahler is also a man of divided geographic loyalties. Born in Jersey City in 1949, he has lived for much of his adult life in San Francisco while returning often to New Jersey both in person and in his imagination. His writing has long been organized according to an implicit bicoastal logic, but his new split volume of selected poems makes it explicit: on one side, we read Before Dawn on Bluff Road: Selected New Jersey Poems, and flipping to the other we read Hollyhocks in the Fog: Selected San Francisco Poems. These selections make a fine introduction to Kleinzahler’s large and various body of work, framing him definitively as what he has always been, which is a poet of place. He has written dramatic monologues, character sketches, historical panoramas, dream narratives, faux-classical epistles, elegiac songs, and verse essays on music history, to name just a few of his modes, but the locodescriptive is perhaps the one to which he returns most frequently, and the one in which he has written some of his finest poems. Yet while many poets of place are deeply rooted in one particular location—Roy Fisher in Birmingham (UK), for instance, or Lorine Niedecker on Blackhawk Island—for Kleinzahler, being a poet of place also means being a poet of transit.

By framing him as a poet of two places, Before Dawn on Bluff Road / Hollyhocks in the Fog also helps us locate him in the history of American poetry. When Kleinzahler writes about the places he knows and the people who inhabit them, he makes his inheritance of Walt Whitman and especially William Carlos Williams richly evident. In his combination of adventurousness and availability, the poet he most resembles is Williams, his fellow New Jerseyan. Both are poets of compact technical dexterity and of American speech—capable both of rapid, surprising swerves and of talking plainly to cats and dogs. And like Whitman and Williams, Kleinzahler is a democratic realist with a lyric gift, one who believes that ordinary people and things are suitable subjects for poetry. Yet where Whitman and Williams prized immediacy and planted their feet firmly on home terrain, Kleinzahler is a poet of both proximity and distance, writing from an airplane as often as from home. An American in the age of mobility and globalization, he writes in and of transit. His poetry is marked by a sense of doubleness—here and there, self and others, now and then—and a sense of how one place, person, or time might become or be haunted by another.

The poem “Snow in North Jersey,” which first appeared in the 1998 collection Green Sees Things in Waves, is a formal homage to Whitman, a rangy litany of ordinary people and locations—everyone and everyplace the snow falls upon—joined by anaphora and the accretion of simple conjunctions. Its homage to Williams is even more explicit: “and they’re calling for snow tonight and through tomorrow / an inch an hour over 9 Ridge Road and the old courthouse / and along the sluggish gray Passaic / as it empties itself into Newark Bay.” Kleinzahler names the doctor’s address and quickly sketches the itinerary of his Paterson, the long poem which followed the Passaic River over the Great Falls and out to sea. But while Williams’s approach to North Jersey is archaeological, excavating what he called “the elemental character of the place,” Kleinzahler’s is cinematic, panning with the weather across the region. The poem provides something like an extended aerial shot that zooms fluidly in and out:

Snow is falling along the Boulevard
and its little cemeteries hugged by transmission shops
and on the stone bear in the park
and the WWI monument, making a crust
on the soldier with his chinstrap and bayonet

Kleinzahler begins with a cartographer’s distance, yet a brief survey of the landscape quickly establishes a sense of temporal depth. The dead and the auto mechanics who survive them are intimate with one another, lovingly occupying the same turf. Then the time scale broadens to include world-historical events: in the finely rendered face of the WWI statue, a familiar representation of local boys who died abroad, North Jersey’s past is integrated into the global twentieth century. Kleinzahler continues by shifting scales again:

It’s blowing in from the west
over the low hills and meadowlands
swirling past the giant cracking stills
that flare all night along the Turnpike
It is with a terrible deliberateness
that Mr. Ruiz reaches into his back pocket
and counts out eighteen dollars and change for his lotto picks
while in the upstairs of a thousand duplexes
with the TV on, cancers tick tick tick
and the snow continues to fall and blanket
these crowded rows of frame and brick
with their heartbreaking porches and castellations
and the red ’68 Impala on blocks

In the space of a few lines, the poem sweeps back out to encompass a natural terrain overlaid by highways and oil refineries, then zooms into Mr. Ruiz’s pocket and the pathos of his careful count of bills and coins, a tiny hard-luck narrative. From there the poem expands and contracts at once, giving us the deadening endlessness of “a thousand duplexes” and the particularity of a single upstairs room lit blue by the TV. And then the most dramatic zoom yet, down to the cellular level, as Kleinzahler unsettlingly imagines cancer proliferating in thousands of bodies, the result perhaps of overexposure to petrochemicals, while they watch sitcoms or the evening news. Out on the wintry street again, Kleinzahler plays “castellations” off of “the red ’68 Impala,” achieving a sort of tragicomedy in the juxtaposition of a multisyllabic archaism with the name of a best-selling Chevy sedan, a jalopy decaying in front of run-down duplexes adorned by castle-like parapets. The shift of verbal registers and the sharp observation of socioeconomic class markers are both signature Kleinzahler.

Whitman sought a new poetry appropriate to what he believed was the infinite breadth of American democracy, and Williams wanted to find poetic form for the American idiom and the humble particulars of everyday life. Both held utopian hopes for their poems, believing that poetic innovation could bring readers into closer contact with the “reality” of their lives. Kleinzahler seeks a similarly capacious, realistic rendering of contemporary American life, but he is more doubtful about its transformative potential. “Snow in North Jersey” ends with this image:

It’s snowing on us all
and on a three-story fixer-upper off of Van Vorst Park
a young lawyer couple from Manhattan bought
where for no special reason in back of a closet
a thick, dusty volume from the ’30s sits open
with a broken spine and smelling of mildew
to a chapter called “Social Realism”

After an earnest note of Whitmanian solidarity—“It’s snowing on us all”—the poem takes an almost satirical turn. At first the joke seems to be about yuppies moving into the neighborhood, but then it turns on the poem itself. This faithful recording of an evening in North Jersey—its cemeteries, oil refineries, convenience store gamblers, junked cars, tumors, and dead poets—might end up as an example of an outdated art form in an old book. Its realism might become just another mildewed object of study or curiosity for the young college types who gentrify working-class streets. Yet the poet persists in his witnessing, and he does so without condescension, sentimentality, or pulled punches. The reality he depicts includes the possibility that bearing witness to what’s passing finally won’t matter much, but he writes it anyway, out of something like love for the world.

Kleinzahler’s lyric “Poetics,” first published in the 1985 collection Storm over Hackensack, is another poem of his native North Jersey, though here he works in the more compact, imagistic mode common to his early poems:

I have loved the air above ShopRite Liquors
on summer evenings
better than the Marin hills at dusk
lavender and gold
stretching miles to the sea.

At the junction, up from the synagogue
a weeknight, necessarily
and with my father—
a sale on German beer.

Air full of living dust:
bus exhaust, airborne grains of pizza crust
wounded crystals
appearing, disappearing
among streetlights and unsuccessful neon.

A few well-chosen words specify the landscape and let it expand in our imaginations. “ShopRite Liquors” names a package store of certain vintage, concerned not with refinement but with cost-effectiveness, its parking lot or curb lit by a familiar sort of sign. We can begin to construct a local economy. “Synagogue” offhandedly signals a certain religious and ethnic milieu, one that’s relatively comfortable here in Jersey. The temple’s proximity to the package store and the faint verbal echo of “ShopRite Liquors” in “synagogue” give us a wink: there’s as much family ritual in a beer run as there is in worship.

“Poetics” doubles this primary landscape with another more distant one—“the Marin hills at dusk”—to which, perhaps surprisingly, New Jersey compares favorably. Kleinzahler plays this surprise for humor, but the development of the first stanza’s transcontinental comparison also allows him simultaneously to expand the poem’s scale and to make its primary location seem all the more particular. The description of “lavender and gold / stretching miles to the sea” quickly transports us from neon-lit asphalt to sweeping grassy vistas bathed in late California sunlight. Yet by a slight shift in register, from the brassy particularity of “ShopRite Liquors” to the more ambrosial, generically “poetic” description of “lavender and gold,” Kleinzahler makes his beloved New Jersey pop. The second stanza narrows the scale again, cutting rapidly back to the poem’s kernel scene, a thumbnail narrative of the poet and his father. We zoom in on “living dust: / bus exhaust, airborne grains of pizza crust,” but this minute focus also enacts another kind of expansion, as the particulars of the scene—buses and pizza joints—become particulate matter suspended in the atmosphere, drifting into the evening lit by streetlights and neon. New Jersey’s polluted, pizza-dusted air is made to glimmer as preciously as a Marin breeze, but it also now evokes the “wounded” disappointment of the people who breathe it. The son has gone away and come home: he now knows the Marin hills, which are both beautiful and populated by rich people, but New Jersey remains constant and constantly unsuccessful. “I have loved the air above ShopRite Liquors” (emphasis mine): the present-perfect resonates with both praise and remembrance. The poet has lost yet still breathes the air outside ShopRite Liquors. If this poem is a statement of Kleinzahler’s poetics, he proposes that writing poetry is the composition—the putting together—of seemingly distinct times and places. It involves both love and disappointment.

The poem “San Francisco / New York,” which originally appeared in 1995’s Red Sauce, Whiskey and Snow, inverts the orientation of “Poetics.” Now Kleinzahler is in San Francisco, his adopted hometown, thinking back toward the Northeast:

A red band of light stretches across the west,
low over the sea, as we say goodbye to our friend,
Saturday night, in the room he always keeps unlit
and head off to take in the avenues,
actually take them in, letting the gables,

bay windows and facades impress themselves,
the clay of our brows accepting the forms.
Darkness falls over the district’s slow life,
miles of pastel stucco canceled
with its arched doorways and second-floor businesses:

herbalists and accountants, jars
of depilatories. Such a strange calm, the days
already lengthening and asparagus
under two dollars a pound.
Is New York fierce?

With its image of evening light stretched across the sky and an announcement of setting out, the poem’s opening stanza might be a pastiche of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Once out the door, however, Kleinzahler quickly diverges from Eliot. While Eliot’s Prufrock projects etherized patients, tedious arguments, and feline forms upon the cityscape, drenching it in his pathos, Kleinzahler seeks not to project but to receive the impressions of the city around him, which he hopes will be quite physically pressed into his body. His San Francisco appears as an actual place, whereas Eliot’s city is a more generic representation of urban alienation, its “one-night cheap hotels” and “sawdust restaurants” functioning as atmospheric touches rather than particular locations. With the wonderful detail of the asparagus’s price, Kleinzahler signals a lived intimacy with this “district’s slow life,” his attention to its ordinary rhythms. As a true poet of real places, he is more Williams than Eliot.

“San Francisco / New York” is included in Hollyhocks in the Fog, but the thought of New York haunts the poem, threatening to take it over. We quickly realize that Kleinzahler walks alone, thinking of an absent companion. “Is New York fierce?” comes upon us with abrupt intensity, as the pang of another’s absence might suddenly seize a person. Is one alone in such moments or not? The poem’s pronouns briefly go wobbly:

The wind, I mean. I dream of you in the shadows,
hurt, whimpering. But it’s not like that, really,
is it? Lots of taxis and brittle fun.
We pass the shop of secondhand mystery novels
with its ferrety customers and proprietress

behind her desk, a swollen arachnid
surrounded by murder and the dried-out glue
of old paperback bindings.
What is more touching
than a used bookstore on Saturday night,

dowdy clientele haunting the aisles:
the girl with bad skin, the man with a tic,
the chronic ass at the counter giving his art speech?
How utterly provincial and doomed we feel
tonight with the streetcar appearing over the rise

and at our backs the moon full in the east,
lighting the slopes of Mount Diablo
and the charred eucalyptus in the Oakland hills.

As if to hurry past a moment of vulnerability, Kleinzahler turns to his gifts as a storyteller or local colorist, his knack for conjuring a place and its “types” in just a few words. Yet the comic sketch of the bookstore reveals his own identification with the shoppers, sliding right into his lament—“How utterly provincial and doomed we feel”—so that “we” momentarily unites the poet and these other lonely hearts “haunting” a Saturday night at the edge of America. The poet is one more “type”: the solitary middle-aged flaneur looking into shop windows. The sense of loneliness only grows more acute as the scene broadens with beautiful efficiency, the streetcar carrying in passengers from other districts and the city giving way to the wilderness at its edges.

New York comes back into view at the end of the poem, with Kleinzahler wondering whether his absent companion sees the same moon he sees:

Did you see it in the East 60s
or bother to look up for it downtown?
And where would you have found it,
shimmering over Bensonhurst, over Jackson Heights?
It fairly booms down on us tonight
with the sky so clear,
and through us

as if these were ruins, as if we were ghosts.

The questions are about the moon, but they’re really asking something else: Are you thinking about me as I’m thinking about you? Here Kleinzahler risks becoming maudlin, and the poem seems almost to comment upon its wager. As sentiment crescendos, color and life drain away. The moonlight of the poem’s final sentence blanches these characters and their distinctive landscapes with audible force; its emotional power washes away the previously vivid particulars of place and person. Book shoppers, the poet, and his companion—the moon makes ghosts of them all. There is a sort of beauty in this ghostliness, but there is also something lost. Ghostliness, perhaps, is the risk of living between two places, and once we understand Kleinzahler as a poet of transit, we can feel a new urgency in his acute observations of place, as if his poetry’s alertness is what allows him to be present someplace real instead of lost no place at all.

Kleinzahler’s New Jersey poems tend to be more emotionally intense than his San Francisco poems—charged as they are with the presence of family, memories of youth, and the sensory data of his native habitat. But the San Francisco poems bring us into another sort of confidence, a mellower intimacy with the neighborhood: Silicon Valley kids coming home from work “solitary as widows or disgraced metaphysicians,” which days of the week one will find in the shops, which time of year the weather does what, and which composer the oboist upstairs prefers, all of it inflected by “foghorns / lowing like outsize beasts / shackled to cliffs at the mouth of the Bay.” In early poems like “Sunset in Chinatown” and recent work like the wonderful sequence “Summer Journal” or the title poem “Hollyhocks in the Fog,” Kleinzahler records the daily rhythms and sensations of his adopted hometown with wit and vividness. San Francisco seems to be the place where he finds it possible to make a life in the present. New Jersey is both more and less real to him. As he puts it in “Gray Light in May,” a homecoming poem published in Green Sees Things in Waves but not included in Before Dawn on Bluff Road, the “stereoscopic” light of New Jersey intensifies experience almost unbearably at times: “So much a part of me / So much of what is dearest / I can barely stand upright under the weight of it…How many years / For how many years / A stranger to my own heart.” This feeling of strangeness in the places we know best—of strangeness to ourselves—is likely familiar to many of us living in an age of geographic mobility and dislocation. In such an age, the poetry of August Kleinzahler helps us both to feel our strangeness and to make ourselves a bit more at home.

July 2017

Fred Moten, The Little Edges

Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2014. 80pp. $22.95

Reviewed by Gerónimo Sarmiento Cruz

Fred Moten’s sixth collection of poetry, The Little Edges, begins by immersing the reader in the space of its intricate poetics. “that’s what rodney asked about, ” declares the ﬁrst line of “fortrd.fortrn, ” the inaugural piece of the collection. “can you make what we already (do | you remember/how did the people) / have? ” Turning back the reader to revisit the past, the lines hover over historical fact, using insinuation to rarefy the ﬁxedness of the LA riots. Granting the event a deeper profundity through the interplay of enjambment and parenthesis, the poem pushes us to ponder the appositional relation between making, doing, and having—to readdress the questions that Rodney King put forward. “here go a box with a lid on it, ” the poem later offers: “if you open it you can come into our world. ” Only this world offered not as some hermeneutic reward beyond the initial complexities, but rather as the same world already shared by poet and reader and enriched by its complexity.

To match their intricate syntax, the poems in The Little Edges are visually arranged on the page in elaborate conﬁgurations that Moten calls “shaped prose ”: open-ﬁeld compositions that intercalate fragments of verse and prose with a prominent use of the page’s whiteness. Across the range of poetry collected here, which includes several occasional pieces, the through-line is a constant ludic interaction with the page’s surface. This is how The Little Edges expands Moten’s concern for poetry’s worlding capacities—by placing the reader in the liminal spaces of language and meaning, in the marginal positions suggested by the collection’s title.

At certain moments The Little Edges offers its poetic ambitions with distinct clarity. Take the poem “all, ” which begins with the straightforward statement, “this complex word is an experiment. All. ” Conferring a certain illocutionary force to the word, “all ” begins to frame a recurrent motive: the continual rehearsal of poetry’s evocative potential, materialized here precisely as the persistent exploration of the distinct and changing multiplicities that the word “all ” can summon in each poem and in each utterance. Moten’s “all, ” however, does not envision absolute totalities. Pointing to its own generic afﬁnity with experimental writing, “all ” disregards the possible metaphysical connotations of the term and instead retrieves the contingency inherent to the act of experimentation. And experimentation, in Moten’s writing, is never far from improvisation and music. Less a synthesis than a playful roll call, “all ” evades coalescing into the uniformity of its title; instead it fragments this unity into the differential multiplicity that continual experimentation yields. Within “all ” there runs an irreducible sociality that reveals the experimenter as one among others: “we gathered all our little alls, our little nothings, and at // our sailing he had brought his little all for a venture, on a stylus. ”

It would be hard to overestimate Moten’s investment in collectivity. His poetics of the social is marked by a hyper-awareness of its always being (in) a social scene. His writing departs from a skeptical understanding of the poet as an isolated individual. This skepticism, coming from a poetry premised on the capacity to enact or ﬂesh out social interactions, produces a felicitous effect on the reader. Moten’s approach starts from the premise of necessary human codependence: “as I am, I have what I already have, I’m yours. ” Such an approach brings Moten right back to the act of experimentation: it emerges from sustained scrutiny and meditation on the particular history and expressivity of jazz, where the commitment to codependence is cognate to the act of listening in general. This is the reason why the sociality of Moten’s poetry so often takes the form of a latent aurality that assumes not only listeners and interlocutors but also other contrapuntal voices and sounds beyond the purview of the text itself. The suggestive title “hand up to your ear ” captures this kind of scene, where sound is portrayed as haptic and corporeal, conducive to the very bodily contact that produces and preserves sociality itself: “Listen to the sound through one another’s skin. Preserve the sound / through membrane and water, to ﬁnd our form in corresponding. ”

Rather than the canonical bard speaking to and for his audience, Moten puts himself in afﬁnity with the jazz ensemble, with the musician among musicians. In “excerpts from european episode, ” the opening section of his series on pianist Jaki Byard (here deemed “a sociologist ”), Moten describes “the history of the soloist who is not one, of one in nothingness in cherry and / choir, ” which could very well describe Moten’s own poetic persona. As with “all, ” this poem builds up from a conceptual tension between poverty and excess, nothingness and self, dispelling any antithetical oppositions in favor of a mutual bond. The poem carries on by diffusing the ﬁgure of the soloist, letting openness predominate as the dominant ﬁgure: “the history of the soloist who is not one, of one in nothingness in cherry and // choir, of things in blossom in aperture, a stray horn through a crack in the wall, the narrows between the open // mouth of the wall, the decreasing permanence of the wall in open air. ” Moten’s lines often break out this way and display their kinship with projective verse, where the poem is allowed the liberty to meander and take precedence over the poet.

A similarly recurrent feature of The Little Edges is Moten’s propensity to namedrop. (In fact, the book’s dust jacket advertises an online reader that one supposes could help contextualize all these proper names. Unfortunately, it offers little more than what a meticulous online search could.) If at the sonorous level Moten’s poetry enacts the social scene of music, at the referential level it ramiﬁes into multiple historical and cultural nodes. Counting the pieces whose titles incorporate proper names (“the gramsci monument, ” “mudede waters like josé muñiﬁcent. ”), along with the casual allusions to musicians (Morton Feldman, George Clinton, Cecil Taylor, Nancy Wilson) and the references to ﬁlm and television (The Wire, Do The Right Thing), The Little Edges seems intent on laying down a map of its cultural and intellectual bearings.

One instance of this bricolage is “spanish tinge no. 1, ” also part of the series on Jaki Byard, which links the pianist with Ferdinand II of Aragon: “like maroon speed and iberian note blacking on the loosaphone, when ferdinand was thinking // of expansion, wondering where the surplus would come from, wondering what the surplus was, wary as all his // cups began to fade, the theory of itinerant note blacking and line worrying was celebrating a thousand years of / bursting from the writing of its practice like a star. ” As the poem’s syntax begins to trace the fast movement of the Spanish ﬂeet, only to interrupt it with the appearance of Ferdinand and his static pondering over the ﬁnances of the Spanish empire, Moten stresses the contrast between the simultaneous thought of transatlantic expansion and the overarching motion of this still indeterminate practice. Belittled in its lower-case spelling and engulfed by the movement that precedes and follows it, the proper name cedes its individual primacy (or in this case its royal sovereignty) to the force of this centrifugal expansion. The fragment orbits around the colloquial and polysemous term “blacking, ” which is Moten’s way of evoking collective black experience through the tradition of Byard’s trade. Cohabitating the same poem, these referents open up a scene of historical and cultural friction that quickly turns political. Further on the poem declares deﬁantly: “the venereal nation under our // feet won’t even have kings for a day. ” No less central to Moten’s interests is how the poem’s ﬁgure of artistic creation, the bursting star, “was already there as something else from someplace else // always. ” Pointing to a certain immanence sustaining the poetic act, where poiesis approaches metamorphosis, Moten envisions art as a transhistorical practice that remains continuous beyond the discrepancies of its forms.

The meaning of this ﬁgure resonates strikingly with the recurrent lyricism of The Little Edges, which works like apostrophic address but differs in one crucial respect. Moten does not turn to the traditionally sanctioned repositories of poetic value but rather works through the lyric presence of African American vernacular: “when he ready to get up and do his thing, when he wants to get into it, man, it’s paramilitary // theory. ” Moten’s lyrical address, in a sense still complying with being overheard, stands as one of his most noticeable traits, yoking his theoretical sophistication to his musicality: “we pound plenty, baby, softened in our program, our transubstantial fade and crossfade bodies, baby. ” This is also where Moten’s political project takes its roots, in the articulation of an ageless tradition that ﬁnds its present in African American forms of sociality. As “the gramsci monument ” puts it: “projection’s just us that’s who we are that’s who // we be. we always be projecting. that’s all we have. / we project the outside that’s inside us. ” That is, Moten’s poetry strategically envisions a project in the literal sense, projecting into the future the surviving collective experience that connects past and present.

June 2017

This review was published in issue 60:3.

Lisa Robertson, 3 Summers

Toronto: Coach House Books, 2016. 120pp. $17.95

Reviewed by Sam Rowe

“4:16 in the afternoon in the summer of my 52nd year / I’m lying on the bed in the heat wondering about geometry.” Thus begins 3 Summers, Lisa Robertson’s new collection of speculative lyrics. From an almost neo-romantic placement of the poetic speaker in a concrete present, Robertson immediately passes to meditation on the most abstract of sciences. This conjunction of lived embodiment and geometry, corporeality and form, is the project of 3 Summers. Attending to the immanence of form within the body, this book is both a statement of materialism and a statement of corporeal aestheticism. Materialist polemic in whatever guise too often takes the form of a glum and predictable reductionism. Robertson charts a different path: she avows a militant materialism, but a materialism of the superﬁcial, the dandiacal, and the proﬂigately lovely. Robertson’s growing body of work amounts, arguably, to a quietly audacious defense of aestheticism, and 3 Summers continues this enterprise by turning to the human body. It regards human biology as suffused with errant form and luminous ornament.

The complexity of Robertson’s materialism may stem in part from her eclectic learning: Lucretius haunts the pages of 3 Summers, but so do Edmund Husserl, Karl Marx, and Émile Benveniste. The last of these is likely invoked in the book’s frequent meditations on pronouns, which for Benveniste are a semantic mechanism that draws bodies into the semiotic web of language. For Robertson, the relation of pronoun to body is, at times, one of deﬂection:

I have no problem with the feminine pronoun.I’m stupid against its animate insult, mewith my scaly feet, my rubbed thoraxmy vibrating wings, my periodicradiation, my repetitive chant and cunt

This strange becoming-insect imagines femininity as an embodied ensemble of periodicities and frictional surfaces. The feminine pronoun lands with a thud against such a body, describing it without being able to penetrate it. Elsewhere, however, the body eludes semiotic capture precisely through its permeability: “What if the body does not signify? / Its wee lost cluster / starts to fade / the skin opening to the moisture of the season / its immunity is landscape.” The “wee lost cluster” of the body is minor and vulnerable, but its very openness to the world provides a path of escape from reductive meaning. We might call this radical exfoliation.

Robertson is particularly interested in the mouth, the organ which conjoins the biological and the symbolic: “Because of the fact of the structure of the human mouth / the festival of idleness is speaking in signs through my body. / I do this because it’s valueless. ” Language happens in the body but also remains in excess of biological function. It is a labor that produces the valueless and ﬁlls the oral cavity with a bacchanal of proﬂigate sense. As it produces pleasure, so it produces politics: “And the enjoyable gland also / dribbles a politics / for its friend. ” Politics is an endocrinal excretion, something that dribbles from body to body. The enjoyability of the oral gland thus allows it to open onto a commonly held world:

I made a mistake in languagethen the water maiden came

ﬁzzy things were happening at the surface of my hipsa lectern-cum-scaffold propped my arms

something buzzed behind the iliac crestand my breasts ached at the tops of them where the ribs curved out

so that the language had no content, only connectiveswe speakers were the content

The exact nature of the experience reported here, perhaps one of embarrassment, recedes behind the ripples of sensation that it causes to ﬂow through the body. A linguistic community comprised of relations rather than communications is mediated by these embodied vibrations and pressures.

Robertson’s insistence on the embodied quality of language, however, gives way to a more inscrutable assertion: “this is how the question of form opened to me / leaving behind the aristocracy of concepts. ” Form is thus a principle of embodied relating to the world in excess of intellectual apprehension. Robertson develops the point exhaustively in “On Form, ” a poem of remarkably sustained lyric power:

the liver is a crown and it is a vesselit constitutes our life form is foldingthe full part is a vase the nostril iscartilage connecting mineral saltsthe root of the belly the palate acelestial dome a vault a sky…

This formalist account of the innards places the body in an analogical network with objects in the world. The correspondences established are organic but not therefore natural, and render the body as a repository of geometry, a life-form in the most literal sense possible. The claim, for example, that there is a sky in the interior of the mouth is not exactly a metaphor or a surreal image. Its correlation of the dome of the oral cavity with that of the ﬁrmament is purely ﬁgural (and not ﬁgurative). Embodied form is not function. It is anatomical but not physiological.

As an anatomical formalist, Robertson meditates with particular gusto on the endocrine system. She sings of toxins and hormones: “What I want to say is / I’ve been the transparent instrument of / certain chemicals and it’s excellent. ” As Robertson reports, the late poet Stacy Doris theorized that “hormone ” etymologically means “star-snot. ” This etymology invests the chemical substrate of subjectivity with a halo of cosmological radiance. The slimy substance of life, in 3 Summers, is shot through with an astral and unearthly light. The most austere materialism becomes difﬁcult to distinguish from mysticism, and bodily sludge is transubstantiated into cosmic holy water: “nothing apart from the Gushing Abdicating Bilious Live Body // the pools of bile glistening on the ﬂoor of the operating theatre / beneath the heavenly blue lamps. ” According to such a materialism, there is no valid distinction between aesthetics and politics, “just the juiciness and joy of form / otherwise known as hormones… ”

Robertson becomes more explicit in her politics when she moves from bodies to what covers them: clothing. In “A Coat ” she responds to the ﬁrst chapter of Marx’s Capital, where this garment exempliﬁes the general equivalence of objects in commodity exchange. The textile commodity, however, has form in addition to value, and as with the body its form resides in that which exceeds utility. Clothes rufﬂe, drape, and ﬂow to constitute what Robertson, in an essay on the Value Village chain of thrift stores, has called the “dandiacal body. ” Drawing on a nineteenth-century tailor’s manual, Robertson enumerates the endless surface of such a body:

a waistcoat of white Marcella, single breasted with a stand-up collara blue dress coat with gilt buttons and velvet collara fancy under-vest with a blue under-vesta green dress coat with a fancy velvet vest and a blue under-vesta wide French braid down the front edges around the collar with ﬁve volutes of braid down each side of the breast

Clothiers were practicing materialists long before neo-Heideggerians made it cool. Robertson constructs a coat of many colors, an endlessly unfolding, proﬂigately rich superﬁciality. Its fabric is a deep surface. If “A Coat ” wrests the commodiﬁed object out of capital ﬂows and back into concrete materiality, then it does so via immersion in the textural and ornamental frivolity of this surface.

Robertson is all the more worth reading when both Darwinian and materialist reductionisms are on the march in aesthetic thought. The former asserts that a living body is a thoroughly and inescapably purposive object, the latter that such objects must be described as inert matter. Robertson accepts the materialist thesis, but quietly demurs from its most inﬂuential corollaries by describing bodies and the language they excrete as ﬂorid, intricate, and inefﬁcacious. She attends to that in the body which is purposeless and therefore radiant, and calls it form. Hers is a dandiacal materialism that discerns a utopian dimension of freedom in the ornamental, the surﬁcial, and the fabricated. She declares: “in the fashion-nature dialectic / I’ve positioned myself as the custodian of the inauthentic. ”

3 Summers closes with a manifesto for aesthetic inauthenticity in the form of a remarkable prose poem titled “Rose. ” The protagonist of this ﬁrst-person narrative obtains the proverbial rose-colored glasses, and reports on her experience of wearing them. The ﬁt is awkward at ﬁrst, but the new, rosy world she inhabits grows on her (“the blackberries and prune plums did glow like purple diodes ”; “Each person who passed on the boulevards seemed gently inﬂamed with a precise gorgeousness ”). She happens to be reading Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, with its millenarian promise of a new human being living in a condition known as the Great Health. That is:

Our hidden organs seem to sparkle—the kidneys lift and ﬂare a little; beneath the sternum the long vagus nerve decompresses and throbs like an intelligent tentacle; the body-wide, clear connective web called the fascia becomes a warm communicative medium. Bones feel less heavy.

This new body, suffused with vitality, thrives in the rose-tinted ether of unreality provided by the lenses. Robertson operates in outright deﬁance of the habitual slander on rose-colored glasses and other devices of aesthetic inauthenticity. The aesthetic, she claims, erects a new Health, a new embodied form of life, and does so precisely because of its artiﬁciality. This is an uncompromisingly utopian idea, which is to say one bound for disappointment. But honest poets are generally utopians.

June 2017

This review was published in issue 60:3.

Kent Johnson, I Once Met: A Partial Memoir of the Poetry Field

West Brattleboro, VT: Longhouse Books, 2015. 176 pp. $18

Reviewed by Jeremy Noel-Tod

Every poetic community knows “that guy.” He—and it is usually he—is the gadﬂy in the ointment, the satirist or critic who mocks the pretensions of the leading figures of the day. “That guy” is not so much an individual talent as a singular pain in the ass. In early eighteenth-century England, he also happened to be the era’s ﬁnest poet, Alexander Pope, who in The Dunciad and the spoof essay “Peri Bathous” laid mock-heroic waste to his contemporaries. Three centuries later, he is known to Internet sociology as a “troll,” lurking below the line as once below the bridge.

Kent Johnson, as this second expanded edition of his “partial memoir,” I Once Met, acknowledges, has long been “that guy” at the avant end of American poetry. Each short section is structured around the conceit of a remembered meeting in the “Poetry Field.” The ﬁfth reads in full:

I once met Marjorie Perloff. This was at the MLA, though I can’t remember the city; it was long ago, I think it was D.C. She is a great critic and an extraordinarily generous person. Kent, this is Bob Perelman, said Marjorie. Bob, this is Kent Johnson. Oh, so you’re that guy, said Bob. What guy? I said.

The next section, which recalls meeting Allen Ginsberg, has the same don’t-hit-me punchline. It seems likely there has always been more than one reason why Johnson might be known—in words attributed to Perloff—as a “horrible troublemaker.” Perhaps the most notorious dates from the mid-1990s, when he presented the world with the poems of Araki Yasusada: a Japanese poet who, despite surviving the bombing of Hiroshima, did not, in fact, exist.

Johnson has continued to be a rogue double agent in the poetry wars that have followed the Death of the Author. His archive-procedural masterpiece, A Question Mark above the Sun (Punch Press, 2010), proposed that Kenneth Koch was the real author of Frank O’Hara’s poem, “A True Account of Talking to the Sun on Fire Island.” The ﬁrst edition met with legal threats from unamused estates and appeared partly redacted. He also seems to have had at least a mouse-clicking hand in the Works and Days of the Fénéon Collective (Delete Press, 2010), an anonymous PDF which began as a blog devoted to scurrilous “Faits Divers de la Poésie Américaine de Brittanique,” such as the following parable of Conceptualism:

“Ouch!” cried the cunning oyster-eater, M. Goldsmith. “A pearl!” Someone at the next table bought it for 100 francs. It had cost 10 centimes at the dime store.

In 2009, Johnson produced his own edition of Kenneth Goldsmith’s Day (2003)—a book comprising the typed-out text of an issue of The New York Times—by pasting on a new jacket bearing his name. Regular readers of

Chicago Review will know that Johnson has serious revolutionary beef with the political amnesia of such appropriative poetics, and its “desire to be legitimized by dominant institutions” (see “Card File, or: Why Communism Looks out of Their Eyes (50 Graphs on Conceptual Writing)” in the Winter 2015 issue).

The frequently institutional vignettes of I Once Met continue Johnson’s favorite theme of the “Avant Garde in the Ivy League,” and play familiar games with the duck-rabbit of fact and invention (“poetic license,” he writes, has sometimes been employed in “a deepening of the genuine”). What is unexpected is how cumulatively moving the book is. The satirist, wrote Robert Graves, is a left-handed poet, and I Once Met is not so much a compilation of pasquinades as a series of “small and stillborn poem[s],” as Johnson calls the sweetly sincere note addressed to his son, Brooks Johnson.

The remembered meeting in Cambridge, England with the “tremendous poet Stephen Rodefer” is particularly touching in its truth to the dysfunctional and noble reality of people getting together to hear each other read verse. Rodefer, who died last year, was undoubtedly “that guy” on the Cambridge poetry scene for many years. Johnson’s pen-portrait brings him right back: “Stephen Rodefer came over and said something like…is Eager Kent trying to suck up to you so he can make it in the avant-garde biz? He walked away, smirking, drink in hand, and I followed him down to the wine box.” Eager Kent threatens violence, but all is changed to tenderness by the story of a small boy who sits in on Rodefer’s reading (which rails, Johnson-like, against “the complicities and hypocrisies and treacheries of the post-avant”). The sight of this boy moves the poet to tears due to his resemblance—Johnson learns—to Rodefer’s own son, who drowned at the age of ten. The next day, that guy and that other guy are reconciled in “awkward small talk” by the wine box, walking “out into the courtyard together, where it was cool, in the evening air.”

The elegaic refrain of the book is “life is strange.” Johnson’s feeling for lacrimae rerum is the secret of his power as a poet, which has often been hidden behind the slasher mask of his satire. His love-hate riffs on the New York School, for example, come down to the essentially poignant contrast between their romantic whimsy and some harder reality elsewhere. Thus the brief text here about having never met John Ashbery, which moves immediately sideways into melancholic parody (“Automobiles go by in the night”) and ﬁnally arrives at the image of “a cheap velvet painting…on half a wall, in some bombed out slum, on the outskirts of Beirut.”

There is much more of such anti-imperialist bathos in Homage to the Last Avant-Garde (Shearsman, 2008), a collection that Johnson published in the UK. Here, his affection for the quixotic nerve of the New York poets also shines through, from the dedication “to the memory of Joe Brainard”—a witty acknowledgement of the model of Brainard’s I Remember (1970), a prose poem of life-trivia—to the ﬁnal anecdote about the Zen Buddhist poet Philip Whalen, which plays a koan-like variation on Frank O’Hara’s notion that writing a poem is an alternative to picking up the telephone:

No, No, No, he growled, The last thing I’m going to do is write an essay on the relationship between Zen and poetry. I mean, what makes you think that either one even exists? I mean, give me a break. Goodbye. Click.

Johnson’s admirable work as a “militantly anti-racist” editor and translator of (real) non-American poetries is mentioned in passing here, along with his time as a volunteer literacy teacher for the Sandinistas in Nicaragua during the early 1980s. Ultimately, however, the book’s biggest target is Kent Johnson himself, whose vanities and failings are exposed in his clumsy, unremarkable memories of “just saying hello to…nice people,” retold in what he admits is “a somewhat antiquated and affected prose that appears to be, now that I look at it, a poor imitation of the writing of the dear friend of John Keats, Charles Lamb.” One repeated form of praise on the cadenced lips of his courteous manner is that so-and-so was a “true gentleman,” and this is indeed, among other things, a deeply homosocial account of contemporary American poetry—a fact that strikes Johnson about two-thirds through, and launches him into “a kind of strained apologia for great matters that oppress my mind.”

At its best I Once Met is a work of profound self-critique which challenges the hypocrite lecteur to recognize that “gossip in poetry is…the beating heart of its habitus,” and that if we were all a little more like “that guy” in telling the truth about the frailty of virtue, poetry might paradoxically become a more civilized place. In his story about Peter Davis, Johnson rehearses some convoluted regrets about having spoken too harshly against the Best American Poetry as a culture-industry takeover of “the mysteries and divagations of anarchic, rhizomatic collective life.” True to the spirit of this vision, Johnson doesn’t try to reconcile the antagonism in his sign-off, but instead restates his dialectical attitude even more starkly: “The avant-garde is a rotting corpse. I hope this ﬁnds you well, Peter.”

Johnson’s most recent project is a website called Dispatches from the Poetry Wars. During the Republican National Convention, there was a homepage post that began:

Shares in VHS Concept Industries rose slightly on news that Kenneth Goldmine and Vanessa Plot ﬁled a $100,000,000 lawsuit against Donald and Melania Trump. The suit alleges that on July 19th Melania Trump appropriated without legal authorization Goldmine and Plot’s trademarked concept of replicating material related to African-American topics, texts, autopsies, and First Ladies…

Etc. It’s a neat structural satire. But it’s not as boldly counter-avant-garde—Confessional, even—as Johnson’s apparently true account of talking with Vanessa Place on the train from Princeton to Newark airport, which concludes:

I’m no less sceptical about the current version of Conceptual Poetry, no less sceptical at all. But I have to say that I came away, really, liking Vanessa Place quite a good bit, life is strange.

May 2017

Robert Archambeau, The Kafka Sutra

Asheville: MadHat Press, 2015. 108 pp. $18.95

Reviewed by Piotr Gwiazda

Robert Archambeau’s new book of poems The Kafka Sutra differs from his previous book Home and Variations (2004) in the degree to which it explores the possibilities of appropriation as a literary device. Appropriation, moreover, becomes a hermeneutic tool in Archambeau’s hands. A poet and a critic—the author of Laureates and Heretics (2010), The Poet Resigns (2013), and the forthcoming Making Nothing Happen—he employs it to compose his poems and to perform criticism on his textual sources. Entertaining and intelligent, The Kafka Sutra shows Archambeau’s in-depth engagement with this widespread, increasingly dominant poetic practice.

The title sequence at ﬁrst quite implausibly grafts several of Kafka’s enigmatic parables onto the subject matter of the Hindu classic Kama Sutra. Describing it elsewhere as “one of the odder things [he’s] done,” Archambeau promises, at least in theory, a merging of existential anxiety, sensual fulﬁllment, and didactic intent. The result is indeed odd, but not entirely foreign to anyone who has ever had the experience of reading creatively more than one book at a time. The sequence is also disarmingly playful and funny, as are the accompanying illustrations by Sarah Conner. Here is “Couriers,” quoted in its entirety:

He is offered the choice of becoming a husband or the lover of another man’s wife. Men being as they are, he wants to be a lover, as do all the others. Therefore there are only lovers hurrying around the world, near rabid with ardor and bearing their secret letters of desire. There being no husbands, though, there are no wives, so there is no one to receive their amorous messages. Secretly they would all like to put an end to this miserable way of life, but fear commitment.

As he exploits the comedic potential of the double parody, Archambeau makes a not-so-outlandish critical point: he reminds us that Kafka’s writings are pervaded by frustrated sexuality, while Vātsyāyana’s text, primarily known as a manual on the art and techniques of lovemaking, is also one of the world’s most comprehensive guides to a happy life.

The section that follows, “Responses,” contains sixteen poems inspired or otherwise instigated by other sources, not always literary or written: the comic book character Sheena, Queen of the Jungle (later reinvented as a “punk rocker” by Joey Ramone); a photograph of David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, and Tony Defries; the design of US and Mexican ﬂags; a typo in his friend’s email message (contextualized through a misprint in a poem by Thomas Nashe); the life and work of Archambeau’s teacher and mentor John Matthias; John Berryman’s poetry (who “taught / [his] teacher”); Milton’s neologisms; Albert Goldbarth’s Budget Travel through Space and Time; and the ancient Gnostic texts discovered in Egypt in 1945. These poems can be most readily called Archambeau’s own. Though prompted by other texts, they are linked to his personal experiences and relationships; in one instance, he quotes and ruminates on some words spoken by his ﬁve-year-old daughter. Formally elaborate, they project several authorial stances—anecdotal, excursive, dramatic, meditative. My favorites in this group are “Brightness Falls” and “Nag Hammadi: A Parable,” poems that speak at once casually and profoundly about global politics.

The next two sections, “Two Procedures” and “Versions,” offer compositions made up completely of borrowed material. “Manifest Destinies, Black Rains” splices two prose passages, one from Anne C. Lynch’s nineteenth-century essay on Washington, DC, emphasizing US exceptionalism, the other from Masuji Ibuse’s 1965 novel about the aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima. As in most instances of documentary poetry, the choice of textual sources invites readers to draw their own conclusions. In a rhetorically signiﬁcant maneuver, Archambeau shapes them into nine four-line stanzas, one per page, to make them resonate together with the white space around them:

A magniﬁcent country’s principles of freedom,
completely razed to the ground.
Where they had once stood an arid waste
Scattered with broken tiles.

He follows this with “If Wronging You is Love,” a clever “conceptualist inversion” of a text by Felix Bernstein, itself containing allusions to Luther Ingram’s song and David Antin’s talk-poem “what am i doing here?” Another variation on appropriative poetics comes in the form of “free and loose” translations of French-language poems by Martinique’s Lucie Thésée and twin brothers Gabriel and Marcel Piqueray of Belgium. The product of a collaboration with Jean-Luc Garneau, these “versions” seem akin to mid-twentieth-century experiments like Jack Spicer’s renditions of Federico García Lorca and Robert Lowell’s “imitations” of various European poets. Even as he salvages these relatively obscure poets from the past, Archambeau hints at additional meanings of appropriation. Combining the strains of Surrealism and Négritude, Thésée adopts the persona of her island to express an attitude of protest, proving herself a worthy counterpart to Aimé Césaire. As for the Piqueray twins, the elusiveness of their verse can perhaps be explained by the fact that they did not believe in individual authorship and often published under pseudonyms.

Archambeau concludes The Kafka Sutra with a prose “afterword” in which he reﬂects on the partisan nature of poetry criticism in the past several decades and his own resistance to polemic. If not exactly the key to his book, the essay comes close to being an explicit statement of Archambeau’s broader agenda, which is predicated on a relatively modest claim “merely to describe” poetic texts and phenomena as he sees them. As I noted earlier, he is not only a poet but also a proliﬁc critic, editor, and blogger with a long-standing interest in the social contexts of poetry writing in the United States, as well as an English professor at Lake Forest College. The academic background comes across in the poems, with their numerous allusions and references, mostly to the Romantic, Victorian, and modernist poetry canon he presumably teaches. Like a good teacher, Archambeau shows us how literature is made: through the zany, delightfully dissonant title sequence, as well as his other “riffs on, remixes of, replies to, or deeply unfaithful translations of what others have written,” he illustrates how one text gives birth to another, how one reading generates another. The essay at the end suggests that, at least in his case, the creative faculty is never too far from the critical.

Throughout his book, Archambeau also makes an argument about the personal side of writing and reading. What especially stands out to me is the way he pays homage to two individuals who have shaped him as a writer: his mentor Matthias, the addressee of “Working the Piano” (“it is your work // my books are all about”) and his father, a ceramic artist based at the University of Manitoba whose name he shares and who is the hidden subject of “La Bandera,” a poem ostensibly about differences between the US and Mexican ﬂags. In the concluding essay, the younger Archambeau considers his father’s contempt for artistic grandstanding as a likely source of his own “neutral” temperament: “Most of our attitudes are absorbed from our environment without much conscious reﬂection on our part, and I imagine my distaste for battles about aesthetic recognition and campaigns against forms of art different from one’s own comes less from all those grad school hours reading Bourdieu and Adorno than from seeing my dad roll his eyes at the rhetoric and ambitious yearnings of his colleagues.” Even Archambeau’s biographical note at the end of the book is more than a typical list of publications and teaching appointments. Rather, it’s a graceful précis of his life at its midpoint, as it salutes both of his parents, recalls his beginnings as a poet in Canada and his formative study under Matthias at the University of Notre Dame, declares his fascination with appropriative poetics and his critical interest in the social position of poetry in the United States (he certainly knows his Bourdieu and Adorno).

The Kafka Sutra is an accomplished book—thoughtfully put together, formally and linguistically adept, comfortable with a wide range of cultural idioms, responsive to world events. It is also a very personal book, expressing gratitude and love to those individuals who have enabled Archambeau’s career.

February 2017

Share this:

Michael Ondaatje, Warlight: A Novel

Naeem Mohaiemen, Two Meetings and a Funeral

Samiya Bashir, Field Theories

Daniel Owen, Restaurant Samsara

“Something Happens Under the Bridge”: Three Recent Books by Gay Trans Men

We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan, edited by Ellis Martin and Zach Ozma

Zach Ozma, Black Dog Drinking from an Outdoor Pool

Oliver Baez Bendorf, Advantages of Being Evergreen

Nikki Wallschlaeger, Crawlspace

Dawn Lundy Martin, Good Stock Strange Blood

Harmony Holiday, Hollywood Forever

Duriel E. Harris, No Dictionary of a Living Tongue

§

§

A Surprised Queenhood in the New Black Sun: The Life and Legacy of Gwendolyn Brooks

By Law In Sound: J. H. Prynne’s Recent Poetry

Uljana Wolf, Subsisters.

Translated by Sophie Seita

Belladonna*, 2017. 186pp. $18.

Jorie Graham, Fast.

Ecco, 2017. 84pp. $26.

Malika Booker, Pepper Seed

Peepal Tree Press, 2013. 84pp. £9.

Nick Makoha, Kingdom of Gravity

Peepal Tree Press, 2017. 82pp. £9.

Paul Celan, Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry

Translated by Pierre Joris

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014. 654pp. $40.

Peter Gizzi, Archeophonics

Wesleyan, 2016. 108pp. $16.

Laura Dassow Walls, Henry David Thoreau: A Life

University of Chicago Press, , 2017. 640pp. $20.

Jeff Hilson, Latanoprost Variations

Boiler House Press, 2017. 80 pp. £10.

Helen DeWitt, Some Trick: Thirteen Stories

New Directions, 2018. 224pp. $22.95.

Lisa Jeschke, The Anthology of Poems by Drunk Women

Materials, 2018. 41pp. £5.

Lisa Jeschke and Lucy Benyon, The Tragedy of Theresa May

Tipped Press, 2018. 44pp. £5.50.

Lisa Jeschke and Lucy Benyon, David Cameron: A Theatre of Knife-Songs

Shit Valley, 2015. 23pp. $6.

Keston Sutherland, Poetical Works 1999–2015

Enitharmon Press, 2015. 382 pp.

Mohammed Hanif, Red Birds

Bloomsbury, 2018. 304pp.

Poetry as Biopic: On Pablo Larraín’s Neruda and Terence Davies’s A Quiet Passion

Sandra Simonds, Orlando

Wave Books, 2018. 79pp. $18.

A. James McAdams, Vanguard of the Revolution: The Global Idea of the Communist Party

Princeton University Press, 2017. 584pp. $35.

Ben Hickman, Crisis and the US Avant-Garde: Poetry and Real Politics

Edinburgh University Press, 2015. 240pp. $120.

Philip Levine, The Last Shift

New York: Knopf, 2016. 96 pp. $27.

Karin Roffman, The Songs We Know Best : John Ashbery’s Early Life

New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017. 316pp.

Renee Gladman. Houses of Ravicka

St. Louis: Dorothy Project, 2017. 152pp. $16.

Renee Gladman. Prose Architectures

Seattle: Wave Books, 2017. 144pp. $50.

Daniel Swift, The Bughouse: The Poetry, Politics, and Madness of Ezra Pound

New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017. 320pp. $27.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet: The Complete Edition

Translated by Margaret Jill Costa and edited by Jerónimo Pizarro.

New York: New Directions, 2017. 488pp. $24.95

The Poems of Basil Bunting, Edited by Don Share

London: Faber & Faber, 2016. 624pp. £30

Marie NDiaye, My Heart Hemmed In. Translated by Jordan Stump

San Francisco: Two Lines Press, 2017. 296pp. $14.95

Lynn Melnick, Landscape with Sex and Violence

Portland, OR: YesYes, 2017. 112pp. $18

FLARF: An Anthology of Flarf

Edited by Drew Gardner, Nada Gordon, Sharon Mesmer, K. Silem Mohammad and Gary Sullivan.

Washington, DC: Edge Books, 2017. 288pp. $36

The Poetry of Jim Jarmusch: A Review of Paterson

Natalie Shapero, Hard Child

Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2017. 96pp. $16

China Miéville, October: The Story of the Russian Revolution