Book Review

Death Prefers the Minor Keys

Sean Thomas Dougherty
BOA Editions ($17)

by Nick Hilbourn

The poems in Sean Thomas Dougherty’s Death Prefers the Minor Keys offer a meditation on life, death, and grieving. Languages undulate through the book, whether braille, Hebrew, or the asemic scribblings of his daughter: “I try to read the secret hieroglyphics. What does this say, I ask our daughter. She says, ‘It is a new language I have invented but it is still teaching me how to read it.’” These languages create a kind of divination to communicate with the world of the dead, as revealed in the collection’s final work, where Dougherty writes: “You are my nation. I only wanted to write poems to save you.”

Each poem seeks a language equipped to transgress the boundaries of the mortal world—especially the strange space that we inhabit with loved ones who have passed. To address that boundary, Dougherty redraws the meanings of intimacy and presence. Absence becomes the highest form of intimacy, or what one poem calls the “true shape of love,” and is able to rupture barriers of time and mortality and redefine human relationships in the process.

Dougherty also reimagines language as a veil through which our dead pass and are subsequently reimagined. In “Fugue Written on Unpaid Medical Bill and the Backs of Old Menus,” the poet transforms into a heron and follows a fish swimming below the water’s surface, trying to “find a language to translate . . . the ripples of the veil. Ginsberg said he wanted to do with language what Cezanne did with paint: to capture light on objects.” Between the transformation into the heron and the identification with its prey, Dougherty moves beyond a discourse on grieving and into a mythos of it, postulating that communication between the two worlds is not only possible but necessary.

Death Prefers the Minor Keys eventually translates this life-death relationship into musical terms: If the living are the major keys in a musical scale, the dead are the minor keys, the notes that construct blues and jazz. Music saturated with the dichotomy of loss and gain, as Dougherty might say, keeps us in touch with the dead. In “The Dead Who Return as Animals,” pets owned by the grieving are incarnated—“what we didn’t spend in this life goes inside them, and then they find their people again, that light guides them”—and absence is a “leash of longing we use to pull them back to us, to fully receive all their unremittent tongue lapping love.” The image of light reoccurs in this poetry’s discourse of divinity as a mucilaginous substance that leaks from objects and people; the grieving self experiences life in an altered and almost ecstatic state of being.

One of the more curious elements of Death Prefers the Minor Keys is the speaker’s place in the lives of others; whether transported into a portrait in the room of a clinically ill patient or absorbed by the “miasma” of a crowd of people around him, joy becomes present when the dead and the living are most comfortable with each other. For example, in “People Ask Me if I Get Tired of Writing About Your Illness,” the poet describes the presence of his dead wife while sitting at a restaurant:

I can feel your eyes as if you are touching me. You are able to eat the asparagus with butter, the sauteed saffron chicken. We speak in the old tongue. As you talk, the couple next to us falls into a daydream of their childhoods. The waiter hears the lullaby of his dead mother. The cooks begin to sing. All my ancestors spoke impossibly difficult languages. Always your hand in the absence of your hand.

In this poem, there is not a linear passage of life to death, but a gradual realization of death’s presence in life. The scene succeeds not because it is surreal, but because it is mundane. One of the charms of Dougherty’s writing is how surreptitiously he ushers readers into such a radical perspective. A repeated phrase in this collection, “there can never be one hundred percent lack of joy,” reiterates his ultimately reconciling message: if the dead are always with us, their joy remains also.

Click below to purchase this book through Bookshop and support your local independent bookstore:

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

All Tomorrow's Train Rides

Matthew M. Monte
Sixteen Rivers Press ($18)

by Lee Rossi

Yes, you hear an echo—the Velvet Underground playing “All Tomorrow’s Parties,” their great anthem to indulgence and dissolution. But though it offers less indulgence and more longing, less dissolution and more selflessness, All Tomorrow’s Train Rides—the second book by San Francisco writer Matthew M. Monte—is also great in its own unpredictable way.

A thoughtful, educated writer with associate’s degrees in insomnia, shoplifting, and alcoholism, Monte evidences a fascination with the work of other writers, figures as varied as Gary Snyder, Pierre Reverdy, and Miguel de Cervantes. In “Then I Read Wisława Szymborska” he reports on purchasing one of her books in Paris—at Shakespeare and Co. of course—and retreating to “the silent piano room”:

Where with you, I
Must say I
Feel only
Free

A love poem, isn’t it? Conversely, we find him hating on Jacques Derrida: “Form and Function Letter” mimics William Carlos Williams’s famous “This Is Just To Say,” except that Monte’s apology, which is more j’accuse than je t’aime, is directed at the fabulously indecipherable French philosopher. “This is just to say,” the poet begins, that he doesn’t “mind these synonyms / and metaphors and analogies,” but that he “very much mind[s] the meanings of these tightropes / between conventions, this / high-wire act we call language.” Language is perilous, the poet seems to admit, but “these lines save us / from drowning in your / soup of same.”

Clarity, precision—these are language’s gifts, and we abandon them at our peril. Consider Section V of the title poem, a sequence whose sections are spread throughout the book, in which Monte engages in dialogue with that consummate realist from the pages of Cervantes, Sancho Panza—transformed for the occasion into a Caltrain conductor. Who are these people on the train, Sancho wants to know, who “earn their keep from neither arms nor letters”? And the poet tells him: “the ore is silicon, a fool’s gold for sure. They create other minds from it. So that we don’t need to remember.” “No memory?” exclaims Sancho incredulously, issuing the poet “a private smile” for all the 400-thread-count cotton dress shirts: “Sancho knows / Clothes don’t make the man / Sees the suits for what they are / Variations on the fig leaf.”  

Culture, he insists, is a charade, a theatre of the absurd.

Reality is what Monte wants, in all its clarity and precision—even when what it reveals is harsh or cruel:

Where the utility men
Cut back pine and manzanita
          near the old quarry
They left behind a ragged cross-section of knotted wood
          in the boot-print trail dust
That resisted the motoring blade and its bite

Monte’s passion for the real takes him into unexpected places. Many of these poems come with notes and annotations, some which are straightforward, and others which read like prose poems. Commenting on Don Quixote’s famous discourse on arms and letters, the poet references the GPS coordinates where Quixote spoke, and adds that “the windmills . . . / are spread along a / hill overlooking the Manchegan / plains, offering an excellent view of / things as they are, which are even / easier to see through the pages of / Don Quixote than the bullet train’s / blurring windowscape.” Once again, language and literature lead us closer to reality than our technological culture.

Latitude-longitude designations appear throughout the book, adding a dash of typographic esprít, but there are also other typographical flourishes—long strings of periods enclosed in brackets, for example. As a reader, I’m not sure how to receive these extra-literary excrescences; are they a sendup of erasure, a musical interpolation signaling rests, or a just a new-fangled jokiness? I suspect one can read them all three ways. But without a doubt, All Tomorrow’s Train Rides is a variorum of image and epithet where time and again we encounter this poet’s extraordinary verbal facility. Another poem in sequence, “[Latitude],” “[Longitude],” “[Degrees],” etc., is a list poem offering scores of subjects which contemporary poems do (and in some cases shouldn’t) embrace. Or consider these lines from “Three Sketches from Insomnia”:

              That used-car salesman, memory,
never tells the true mileage or how
pumping the brakes never stops the night
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

            With histories like these, who needs enemies

For a writer who seems consumed with knowing exactly where he is, these lines signal a refreshing skepsis vis-à-vis the possibility of knowledge. It’s there, Monte suggests, but only if your search is dedicated and uncontaminated by self-will. I hear that sort of injunction in these lines from “Reconsider a Meadow”:

But it is states of not-mind
that reconsider a meadow
day after subtle day

above the snowy track and
shallow thaws in sheltered valleys.

Similarly, in “Write Livelihood,” he issues a slight re-formulation of the Buddhist imperative:

You read and say
how many things crystallized in your mind
and we know life found in found words is without parallel.
And though the world is not without its darkness
there is not
so much regret.

What do we find “in found words”? In All Tomorrow’s Train Rides, we find compassion, forgiveness, attention, and insight. We should be so fortunate in everything we read.

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

Wonder About The

Matthew Cooperman
Middle Creek Publishing ($18)

by Joe Safdie

A reader of Matthew Cooperman’s latest collection, Wonder About The, might “wonder about” its seemingly fragmented title. Ostensibly a portrait of the expansive biodiversity that can be found on the banks of the Cache la Poudre River in Colorado, Matthew Cooperman’s Wonder About The also explores fracking, the distance between culture and nature, and the peculiar problems of poems devoted to ecology and the environment. On that last subject, Forrest Gander poses some useful questions in his 2008 essay titled “What Is Eco Poetry”:

Aside from issues of theme and reference, how might syntax, line break, or the shape of the poem on the page express an ecological ethics? If our perceptual experience is mostly palimpsestic or endlessly juxtaposed and fragmented; if events rarely have discreet beginnings or endings but only layers, duration, and transitions; if natural processes are already altered by and responsive to human observation, how does poetry register the complex interdependency that draws us into a dialogue with the world?

The “interdependency” Gander mentions is very much a concern of Wonder About The; from the beginning, it’s clear that this book doesn’t offer any sort of lazy propaganda. In the first poem, “Thesis,” lines such as “It rolls on as sugar beet, sweet in its labor and sweat in its weight” show Cooperman paying attention to the sounds of his words as well as to the indomitable river. In this expansive vision, humans aren’t separate from their environment, but are charged with the task of striking a balance between how things appear and how we, in turn, are located within the appearance—or as Cooperman puts it in “Another River in Spring” in lines that well represent the exchanges between inner and outer life throughout the book: “what marks the site of your sight // who walks through the door of a river.”

One major concern of ecopoetry is, as critic Nassrullah Mambrol writes, “how the human is situated within its habitat, specifically where (or whether) borders exist between body and world, human and other, space and place.” The peculiar art of perceiving the environment is often a subject of Wonder About The, whether it’s acknowledging that a farmer’s “bright Deere” is “a part of / the field’s design” or the urgent command, presented in progressively larger type, to “look up / look up / look up.” Eyes, in fact, are mentioned often, from “the sense record” being visited “upon our eyes / our ears” to a hard-earned vision of a waterfowl:

my winter eye
unlayers all frost
anneals what distance
     takes

rank glorious muck
rot palimpsesting rye
the duck
the living eye

Cooperman’s eye is sensitive enough also to register the fact that “the number of active oil and gas wells in Colorado almost doubled from 22,228 in 2000 to 43,354 in 2010” while explaining what’s really at stake:

frack is a word to obtain a thing
gas body or oil body
by liquefaction     say water     various solvents
an exchange body     replacement earth
toxic metonomy the force of
forces     engineers     making a new earth writing

In these contexts, the collection’s fragmented title might signal that such unnatural phenomena—“benzene earth man / now embowered with / salt and sand”—challenge traditional grammar’s ability to comprehend or explain them, though it also heeds the dreamier nature of observation, given its provenance from a poem by Theodore Enslin (which Cooperman uses as a section epigraph): “wonder about the / dream a dream’s about wonder will be.”

In his magisterial 2004 study A New Theory for American Poetry, Angus Fletcher posited that “environmental sensitivity demands its own new genre of poetry” and argued that environment poems “are not about the environment, whether natural or social, they are environments.” The inclusion of stunning color photographs of various places the book chronicles, most taken by Cooperman himself, makes it clear that Wonder About The not only adds to those environments, but breaks new ground.

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

The Never End

The Other Orwell, the Cold War, the CIA, MI6, and the Origin of Animal Farm

John Reed
Palgrave Macmillan ($119.99)

by Zoe Berkovitz

“Orwell has come to an end,” John Reed tells us. He’s earned a say in the matter: His newest book, The Never End, collects twenty years of essays, long form pieces, and interviews that parse the complicated history and legacy of George Orwell’s 1945 novella Animal Farm.

Orwell’s classic allegory has been a syllabus staple for decades, but its popularity in schools, Reed points out, “is not by chance.” Having made a literary case that “revolution is doomed to fail,” Animal Farm became the “greatest success” of the Information Research Department of the British Foreign Office (eventually to become MI6) and soon became a player in the CIA’s “cultural ‘Cold War’” with Russia, “the terminology of which was Orwell’s own coinage.”

Reed maintains that Orwell would have pushed back against readings of Animal Farm as broadly anti-revolutionary; in his refutations to similar interpretations of 1984, Orwell implied that his message was more anti-Stalinist than anything else. “Regardless,” Reed writes, “Orwell died, and the CIA and British Secret Service proceeded unimpeded, and the bargain sealed, alas, was a Faustian one … The Animal Farm of the CIA doesn’t apply to just the Russian revolution; it’s a parable, a ‘timeless’ parable, a ‘universal’ parable, about the dangers of systemic change.” Translations, global distribution, and film and television adaptations, funded by the IRD and CIA (and its Congress for Cultural Freedom, which deeply influenced “the course of US art and literature in the twentieth century”), spread the story of Napoleon, Old Major, and Snowball across much of the world. Talk about culture war: Reed calls Animal Farm “an educational missile aimed at any healthy impulse toward reform.”

Orwell died in 1950, just two years after Animal Farm was published, and his death at forty-six left a mine of questions for critics like Reed to consider—in part because propagandistic uses of Orwell’s writing began while Orwell was still alive and to some extent with his cooperation. Orwell produced enemies lists with the names of 135 “fellow travelers” for the IRD; “replete with vindictive inclusions,” the lists were part of ”a long and active exchange” with Orwell’s friend Celia Kirwan, an employee at the IRD (and a woman to whom he once proposed). Some of these names are still classified today—“one can surmise sensitive or embarrassing contents.”

As far as we know, the lists didn’t have serious consequences, but to Reed, that isn’t enough to let Orwell off the hook: “you took aim, but you might have missed.” In his diaries, Orwell wrote, “All propaganda is lies, even when one is telling the truth. I don’t think this matters, so long as one knows what one is doing, and why.” Reed’s response: “A discerning understanding of propaganda begets accountability.” He has retorts for each kind of Orwell protector, including those who argue times were different: “Isn’t surviving historical context the challenge of literature? None of the 11-year-olds reading Animal Farm are reading it in historical context.”

Certain sections of The Never End focus on Reed’s research about the origins of Animal Farm. Orwell lifted the premise (and quite a bit more) from a Russian short story called “Animal Riot,” written around 1880 by the Russian historian Nikolai Kostomarov—however, his story of farm rebellion, as opposed to Orwell’s, ended in successful overthrow of the humans. Same beats, same referent, different agenda. Reed’s 2015 essay for Harper’s Magazine about the Animal Farm-“Animal Riot” connections comprises this book’s third chapter; in it, Reed makes an impeccable case. Reed also had “Animal Riot” translated into English, and that text is included in this volume. Yet for all the research that went into the Harper’s piece, the response defied his predictions: “It was news, but not heartbreak.” (An interesting aside to the Kostomarov plagiarism thread is that in his original preface to Animal Farm, Orwell does explain how he got the idea for the book—but the story he tells there is “a rehash of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s instigating event in Crime and Punishment.”)

The “Animal Riot” analysis is where Reed’s own fiction enters the conversation. During the weeks following 9/11, Reed wrote his novel Snowball’s Chance (Roof Books, 2002), an unofficial sequel in which Snowball, Animal Farm’s Trotskyish pig, returns to the farm and introduces capitalism to the animals in post-Soviet fashion; the fallout satirically mirrors the U.S. War on Terror. Reed’s novel came under legal threat from Orwell’s estate for copyright infringement, but U.S. parody law protected it. (It was also criticized publicly by Christopher Hitchens, who called Reed a ”Bin Ladenist.”) Revisiting Snowball’s Chance allows Reed to include a few critical essays about contemporary culture and politics that offer a break from Orwell studies without deviating too much off topic.

As The Never End covers twenty years of work, we get a variety of tones. In a 2011 essay originally published in The Rumpus, the invective hits a peak:          

Popular entertainment is a helpless, writhing, mega-maggot of selfish desire … Culture-at-large presumes that writing is torture, art is suffering, and artists are monstrous … in the service of denigrating creative living and creative thinking, which is the single alternative to a life of stultifying obedience.

By the time of the writing of The Never End, at least as regards Orwell, Reed’s mood is a little different. The Cold War is long over, and with it, the “paradigm” that helped Animal Farm proliferate. Reed points out that the nature of our warfare, both material and cultural, has changed, as has the nature of national borders; when Orwell’s fiction is applied to U.S.-China tensions, for example, “the corollaries are curiously hollow.” Reed argues that our newly assigned foe is not a Cold War-esque antagonist but a protracted symbol of “the America of the erstwhile confrontation … that is as absent as its imagined nemesis.”

Of course, Orwell’s work is a trove of such imperfect comparisons, and there is plenty more to be discovered that can shake up the picture, although “the tasks are infinite, and decrease in impact and importance into infinite pointlessness.” And if someone is to continue the project? Reed knows better than to be expectant: “People no longer doubt, and quite possibly don’t care, that George was the author of such toxic hypocrisy. Does that say as much about ourselves as it does about Orwell? It’s so easy to sympathize: he sold his soul.” At this point, Orwell’s reputation is unlikely to change, because the reasons he is admired sustain themselves:

Why are we still fond of Orwell? Maybe it’s that he was such a genuinely sincere propagandist. Maybe, where we once loved him despite the compact he made with the devil, we are now denizens of so broken an epoch that we love him because of it.

Conducted out of love or not, further research into Orwell the man will probably only go so far toward altering attitudes toward Orwell the symbol. For those interested in both, though, The Never End is essential, even as it asserts its own expiration. Reed writes in the final pages: “He is everywhere and nowhere to the degree that there is no Orwell—only a cascading attrition of citations, half-lies, and history receded, gone on the horizon.” A dim prognosis, but, in the spirit of George, a truthful one.

Click below to purchase this book through Bookshop and support your local independent bookstore:

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2024| © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

Over the Edge

Norbert Hirschhorn
Holland Park Press (£10)

by Warren Woessner

Poet Norbert Hirschhorn’s parents fled from Austria just before the Holocaust and resettled in New York when Hirschhorn was ten. He went on to become a social services physician who was honored for developing a treatment for cholera; later in life, he started writing poetry and has published several books. His latest collection, Over the Edge, is not an easy read, but it is compelling. The edge that the poet and his parents go over is from normal life as survivors (albeit temporary ones), toward Hirschhorn’s visionary descriptions of what may be waiting on the other side. (Hint: It is not heavenly peace.)

The section of poems entitled “853 Riverside Drive (New York City)” offers an unflinching memoir of death and its precursors, depicting the anything but hopeful strivings of a young emigrant. Hirschhorn helps his mother with the laundry, where he would “edge over to the waist-high / parapet, and imagine myself flying to the next building / over. It was my first sense of suicide.” He is not alone:

Sitting at my 8th grade homework in the alcove by
The kitchen I smelled something strange. I turned.

To see my mother sitting calmly, wearing her new
housecoat, her chair facing the gas-oven door.

Hirchhorn’s father leaves the family but eventually returns to die at 853 Riverside Drive. The poet reviews his father’s body for the last time before it is “lowered into the ground, followed by / dirt, rocks, prayers and perpetual darkness”; in the next stanza, Hirschhorn the medical student compares dissecting a corpse to carving a Thanksgiving turkey. Perhaps as a sort of atonement for his disrespect for his father, Hirschhorn includes a poem titled “Tahara,” a formal death Jewish ritual:

the body laid in a plain pine box.
The family kissed his head in reverence.
Tahara, a gift to the bereaved, done.
The body now ready for burial at sundown.

Some of the most arresting poems in Over the Edge describe conversations with death as vivid dreams, as in the last lines of “The Call,” where we get both sides of the story:

Please, give me some ease.
None to be had.

Then let me ask you something.
Go ahead.

Why does it take me so long to leave the house?
You know, forget this, forget that, recheck the stove,
Go back for the umbrella . . .

You’re afraid you’ll die.
I am afraid.
Good then. Let’s go.

In “I Dream Of Him In Lightness and Dust,” Hirschhorn calls up death as a rather suave fellow, but one the poet would rather not meet:

Before me now, arms outstretched.
I want to fall on his breast, panting, crying,
bury my face in his sweet-smelling neck.

Instead, we press our hands together,
my right hand between his, his between mine.
For this is the manner, this is the custom

how the dead greet the dead.

Dramatic in the best sense of the word, Over the Edge is written to be spoken and meant to be heard. With a physician’s candor and the complex perspectives of a child of survivors, Hirshhorn offers a roadmap to a vacation that few of us want to take.

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

Polymath

The Life and Professions of Dr. Alex Comfort, Author of The Joy of Sex

Eric Laursen
AK Press ($34)

by Richard Kostelanetz

As an independent scholar, Eric Laursen spent many years working on Polymath, a thick biography of the protean Alex Comfort (1920–2000), who became famous for his 1972 smash hit The Joy of Sex, an illustrated manual that sold millions of copies worldwide. But before this unexpected bout with celebrity, Comfort was a widely published poet, a novelist, a certified physician, a contributor to anarchist publications in both England and America, a research biologist, a pioneering influence on gerontology (the study of aging), a literary critic, a prolific book reviewer, and a popular BBC broadcaster, even though he spoke much faster than the typical on-air personality. (Bits of his fast-speaking for the Beeb can be heard on YouTube.)

Comfort was also a pacifist whom George Orwell famously dismissed as a Nazi dupe during World War II; their disagreement on the necessity of war was the subject of a 2018 book by Laursen, The Duty to Stand Aside. Courageously inventive as an activist, however, Comfort developed a precursor to pirate radio during the Suez Crisis of 1956. As Laursen tells it, “Working almost entirely in secret, with no collaborators, he broadcast a nightly radio message calling on listeners to protest the invasion and demand that Britain unilaterally scarp its nuclear arsenal.”

Essentially, Comfort was a respected public intellectual, moderately influential in a variety of fields, until he and a sympathetic publisher produced The Joy of Sex—“produced” because so slight was his input that the cover of the initial 1972 edition has it “edited by” him with his degrees of “M.B. and Ph. D.,” as though it were a medical book. Only later did Comfort claim authorial credit, which was given, though the reader can be grateful that the subtitle “A Gourmet Guide to Lovemaking” replaced the one in Comfort’s original draft: “Cordon Bleu Lovemaking.”

Joy has three themes, two classic and the other fashionable. The first, reflecting Comfort’s libertarian anarchism, holds that no one has more authority than anyone else to tell you how to do sexual relations. The second, denying religious and other proscriptions, expands this legendary sentence: “Chastity is no more of a virtue than malnutrition.” The third, reflecting its era, opines that sex should be fun, even if “love” doesn’t accompany it. No previous book on the subject so successfully disseminated these themes.

To support his title of Polymath, Laursen intelligently surveys Comfort’s literary and scientific work that appeared in a few dozen books. As a critic, Laursen regards I and That: Notes on the Biology of Religion (Crown, 1979) as Comfort’s very best book. (Out of print, it can be hard to find in used bookstores and libraries, though scans of the complete text can be found on the internet.) Laursen also takes seriously Comfort’s poetry, though it had more presence in 1940s England than anywhere else or since.

For students of publishing, Polymath is useful for chronicling the calculation and career of a bestseller. Conversely, it documents the obstacles that Comfort encountered in publishing his other books, which, before and even after the success of Joy, appeared primarily from small literary presses, mostly now forgotten, and from specialized scientific outlets.

Comfort moved to Southern California in the wake of Joy, becoming a nouveau American millionaire celebrity. Whereas English media sought his advice on several subjects, here he was asked only about sex, to his annoyance. In Gay Talese’s 1981 book on sexuality in America, Thy Neighbor’s Wife, Comfort is memorably portrayed as an overage visitor to swingers’ clubs; other commentators have described his schemes to minimize his personal income taxes. Uncomfortable in the U.S., Comfort moved with his second wife back to England, where he suffered the first of several debilitating strokes at seventy-one and died just after his eightieth birthday (it remains unfortunate that he didn’t get to test his gerontology ideas against his own eighties and nineties). Though he influenced many people in many ways, he did not have protégés; his sole heir and executor was his only son, the journalist Nicholas Comfort. But undoubtedly Alex Comfort led a unique and protean life that Laursen tells well in this nearly 800-page book—it is doubtful that anyone else will ever tell it better.

What some may find odd about Polymath is the absence of any acknowledgment of Comfort’s American analogue, the writer Paul Goodman (1911–1972), who resembled Comfort in many ways. Both were anarchists for life; both were published by Dwight Macdonald in his magazine Politics in the 1940s. Whereas Comfort worked in medicine, Goodman was an unlicensed psychotherapist who co-authored the substantial 1951 text Gestalt Therapy. Just as both published poetry and fiction as well as nonfiction, so both had many publishers, because their work was essentially noncommercial and their interests nonpredictable. Until Goodman published his popular Growing Up Absurd (Random House, 1960), likewise around the age of fifty, his books were little known, but after Absurd went into a second printing, Random House released books of Goodman’s poems, lectures, and much else (until he was dumped). They probably never met as Goodman was too indigent to travel to Europe, while Comfort didn’t often come to the U.S. until the mid-1970s. One radical move for a future writer would be a double consideration of Comfort and Goodman, literally parallel lives; the experience of one libertarian life would surely illuminate the other, even though they never collaborated.

Click below to purchase this book through Bookshop and support your local independent bookstore:

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

Night of Loveless Nights

Robert Desnos
Translated by Lewis Warsh
Winter Editions ($20)

by Geoffrey Hagenbuckle

In 1922, the Surrealist prodigy Robert Desnos (1900-1945) threatened his friend and fellow poet Paul Eluard with a knife while speak-walking and sleepwalking, singing under hypnosis or in dreams. Though Surrealism’s dream kingdom has been watered down here in the U.S. to advertising, in his 1929 poem Night of Loveless Nights, Desnos imbued love, death, and jouissance, the “little death,” with that tragic magic of his signature themes. A new edition of this truant poem marks the 50th anniversary of its translation into English by New York School poet Lewis Warsh (1944-2022).

Through an epic drift of shifting moods, motifs, and styles, Desnos constrains or expands Surrealist automatism to include the alexandrine, one of the strictest self-conscious classical meters in rhyme. It’s a form close to prose, at which Desnos excelled; he notoriously composed lengthy automatic prose poems such as Liberty or Love! as well as the deftly opiated novel The Die Is Cast. In Night of Loveless Nights, Desnos splits the difference, displaying endearingly enduring twelve-beat rhyme amidst idyllic lyric while breezily tossing off kiss n’ tell bagatelles in a single languorous love song or run-on billet doux.

Unlike its appearance in the ’70s, the original French text of Night of Loveless Nights is included in this new edition, but if it reveals that some of Warsh’s version seems forced, it’s not from oversight or ineptitude, but rather from compelling the strictest of regimes to meet its own demands. Following Desnos, Warsh teaches rigorous classical verse to lilt, laugh, and utter nonsense (“utter” here being both superlative and verb). Reachy malapropisms arc from the recondite and recherché to the heteroclite and Byzantine:

Like the clouds evening parties are born without reason and
die with this tattoo on top of the left breast: Tomorrow

In its first manifesto, Surrealism stuck to avant-garde schemes without glimpsing lateral or equal dispersion strategies to come. Desnos’s reply to the position he inherited as Surrealist seer was to outdo even his fellow enragées:

One day I met the vulture and the sea hawk.
Their shadows on the sun did not surprise me.
Much later I made out the chalk on the ramparts
The carbon initial of a name I knew.

In its second manifesto, André Breton excommunicated Desnos for essaying rhyme and fairy tales; acting after that as a sleeper agent, Desnos is perhaps the more adored of the two today. His death at a Nazi concentration camp in 1945 makes it all the more important that readers revisit him today, with fascism alive and smelling rank in the age of its technical reproduction.

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

Fugue and Strike

Joe Hall
Black Ocean ($17)

by Greg Bem

The grotesque yet inquisitive poetry of Joe Hall returns to the limelight in Fugue and Strike. The book has six sections and opens with a short sequence, “From People Finder Buffalo”; its vital poems on the economy and police violence instill in the reader a sense of the core protections of the structures that impose upon our communities and threaten our collective livelihood.

Fugue and Strike bursts from the seams through its two largest sections, where Hall brings together distinct series of poems that tackle one large theme: labor. The first, “From Fugue & Fugue,” falls in the lucid tracks of other serial works like John Berryman’s The Dream Songs and Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, where Hall’s distinctive, deranged, and blunt imagery centers the whirlwind lives of the American working class. The poems in this sequence are some of Hall’s most experimental, their language derivative of both machine-like repetition and the manic bracing of daily stress:

I consider debt, each word, each poem
an easter egg, w/absence inside and inside absence
you are hunger, breathing this time and value
particularized into mist, you are there, at the end
of another shift

Following the fugues, the hypnotic and didactic series “Garbage Strike” sheds light on the history of sanitation worker strikes from the 1600s to the present. Across international cities including New York City, Oaxaca, Buffalo, Tokyo, and Memphis, Hall’s poems dig deep into the folds of garbage, trash, refuse, and output on a massive scale. These are stories of people deserving of the spotlight, of ecosystems of everyday life. Hall highlights the work of society’s perceived lowest working classes, those the systems want invisible or forgotten:

I want the history of lurching waste flows and accumulation, the labor of carriage and decomposition, the production of intensified difference and hierarchy among workers, and the rebellions of those laborers: Mudlarks; dirt-carters; loaders of horse-corpse barges, dung ships, and containerships; workers in ship-breaking yards; emotional garbage sorters and haulers. What if it was a celebrated labor? To disassemble the titans.

The book closes with a cluster of three standalone poems, “I Hate That You Died,” “The Wound,” and “Polymer Meteor”; each confronts loss separately while getting to catharsis collectively. In the final poem, Hall closes the book with statements on rigorous criticism, outreach towards sustainability, and our persistence through cycles of production:

Given that we, flesh, are affiliated with so many polymer immortals, I would like to suggest we imagine future time as present weight in order to see the world. If long after our bodies die, the case of a cell phone lives on into the thousands of years, its mass multiplied by (all that) time, would be unliftable. It would break your floors.

Like the contemporary American working-class poetry of Ryan Eckes, Robert Mittenthal, and Tim Greenup, the poems in Fugue and Strike foster a sense of irony combining labor and solidarity. Hall may not be overtly Marxist in his words, but he consistently throws punches against capitalism. His tones are derived from a spectrum of monotony and crisis with speakers engaging in moments of reflection amidst toil, explosions, brutal reckonings, and epiphanies.

As his fourth full-length collection, Fugue and Strike feels more mature than Hall’s previous releases; form across the collection feels neatly fitted despite the sprawling subject matter. Balancing personal stories with historic retellings, the book bears an academic level of research and contains an extensive bibliography. Coming out of a world of education and pedagogy, this poetry may serve for many as a kaleidoscopic keystone into the relentlessness of work, the void of commodification, the hope of solidarity, and the necessity of revolt.

Click below to purchase this book through Bookshop and support your local independent bookstore:

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

Childcare

Rob Schlegel
Four Way Books ($17.95)

by Stephanie Burt

I woke up today intending to review Rob Schlegel’s new collection—his fourth, shortest (by line count), and maybe his best. Then I couldn’t find the book for hours, because one kid’s D&D backpack, a bag of dog food, my own undone dishes, and a scheduled Zoom call got in the way. When I finally found Schlegel’s volume, I realized that my distracted, distressed, and familially challenged mood fit the book I wanted to recommend. Childcare is a book about parenthood, household maintenance, and daily life; about maximum distractibility and post-quarantine forced togetherness; about our manifestly required (but secretly fragile) emotional resilience in an age when capital and mass media tell us to find individual solutions for collective problems. Are we too busy making grilled cheese sandwiches to address the tragedy of the commons? Or vice versa? What will my words do for my kids, if anything?

Such questions have shown up, for decades, in poems by moms (Rachel Zucker and Bernadette Mayer are two shining examples) but they’re pretty new for poems about, and by, dads, whom adults expect to work independently and outside the home, and who don’t normally, if they are cisgender, come with the same umbilical connections to young children. Schlegel knows time spent writing is time not spent preparing that grilled cheese, and Schlegel’s kids know it too: “Daddy, my daughter says, / When are you going to stop?” “Poetry / Is pointless, my son says. If you write that down / I’ll kill you. I fear he fears / The attention I give it.” What poet parent has not felt that fear? Who has not asked, as Schlegel does, “When will I reach the people I love?”

If such lines—however quotable—sound bald, or abstract, or all too accessible, it’s worth mentioning the elegance and the sophistication in this volume too. Schlegel has learned spareness, abstraction, and accessibility from Oppen (who provides an epigraph), Niedecker, and Dickinson. He’s also learned how to bring readers deep into his own fact-studded idiosyncrasies, quick images (a baby is a “little herring”), and the sounds he makes when he’s alone: “The rolling hills of Pomeroy / Bring the locals local joy.” The diary, the flatness, and the divided attention between what the kids need and what the poet desires place Schlegel in a delightful—and young—tradition, among recent books about domesticity by poets such as Chris Martin, Nick Twemlow, Dobby Gibson, perhaps Dana Ward.

To their disarming ongoingness, to the “competing / Sorrows of parenthood,” to fears about being a man and raising men (“my son pinning the future against the wall”), Schlegel adds white space, concision, and the uncomfortable, imperfect elegance of a careful craftsman sharing a rough draft in the knowledge that making it smoother will ruin it. Those spaces are his self-divisions, his irresolvable quarrels with himself: “I’m two people— / One not speaking to the other.” Like the Bon Iver album he namechecks, Schlegel adds an explicit sense of multiple generations, but where Justin Vernon imagines “I am my mother on the wall,” Schlegel frames his own worries in response: “I’m angry at my father for aging.” His clipped lines suggest he feels the rebuke that sensitive adults get when we remember how privileged we remain: privileged just to have enough to eat, let alone to take care of our kids, to find time to read, to be alive: “I tuck my son into bed. / I wish I had better parents, he says.” Schlegel, and I, hold such wishes for our children too, wishes the poems work hard—and sparely—to name. All of our kids deserve better than we can give them, but they get, at best, you and me.

Click below to purchase this book through Bookshop and support your local independent bookstore:

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

Move Like Water

My Story of the Sea

Hannah Stowe
Tin House ($24.95)

by Elissa Greenwald

In her debut memoir Move Like Water, Hannah Stowe immerses readers in the world of the ocean. Early on, the Welsh author connects the constantly changing outer world of the ocean with her troubled inner one: “There was a current inside me. At times, it swept along straight and true, serene on the surface, but determinedly fast flowing. At others, the winds of life would turn against the tide . . . and I would rage, tempestuous.”

In the book’s opening chapter, Stowe tends to pile up phrases, with many sentences using five or more commas. While the lyrical style may lull the reader like waves, we start to long for events and characters that comprise a life, though we are given brief glimpses of the author’s mother (her parents are divorced) and companionable brother. Her mother, however, becomes more important as the book progresses; we learn it was she who both inspired Stowe’s artistic impulses and taught her how to swim, “moving with—moving like—the water.”

The book finds momentum in the second chapter when the author goes to sea, on a ship where “it was hard to tell the sea from the sky—the water was everywhere.” At sea, Stowe is continually off-balance, literally and metaphorically. In order to cook on shipboard, “You have to lash yourself to the stove, which swayed wildly on its gimbal, the pivoted support that allows it to swing with the motion of the boat.”

The dramatic action at sea brings the narrative to life. “In my roamings around the coast back home, I had moved through the landscape,” Stowe writes; “Now, the seascape built, fell, hurled, roared, and hurtled around me, dictating my movement with a Mephistophelian chaos.” There is no doubt that the ocean is Stowe’s true home: “I had found my north, the area of life into which I wanted to pour my passion.”

Stowe’s adventures at sea, where she crewed for scientific expeditions as far as Newfoundland, recede into memory after she suffers a surfing injury. Move Like Water here becomes a memoir of healing, both of body and mind. Comparing herself to Icarus for being dissatisfied with her life and always seeking new adventures, Stowe experiences recurring dreams in which she alternately becomes an albatross and a sea captain. Both dreams help her grow—the first through study of how the wanderings of the albatross resemble her own, and the second by inspiring her to buy her own boat.

The author’s rapturous descriptions of the sea and its inhabitants, from the lowly plankton to the lordly sperm whale, fulfill her goal to give the reader “an ocean to hold in your hands.” With a scientist’s perspective, a sea captain’s knowledge, and a poet’s soul, Stowe takes readers on a journey that enlists us in her project to preserve the ocean and its creatures.

Click below to purchase this book through Bookshop and support your local independent bookstore:

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2023-2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024