by Louis Bourgeois

This interview came about by way of an error: I was in the throes of researching rants, poems, and manifestos for a show I was organizing, and I ordered Martin Puchner's Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes (Princeton University Press, 2005, $31.95) thinking it was an anthology of manifestos from the 19th and 20th centuries. It was not that, but rather an intensive analysis of the political and art manifestos from that era (The Communist Manifesto being the Mother of them all). The book entranced me, especially for its discussion of the sheer proliferation of manifesto writing from this time. There were so many manifestos being written, published, and distributed across Europe (and even America eventually), and the form was taken quite seriously by governments and individuals alike, that one gets the sense, at least briefly, that this indulgence of manifestos facilitated the wars and revolutions of the time. Perhaps more to the point, the manifesto proved to be the ideal conduit for projecting violent aphorisms for a culture that was headed down a linear path of destruction.

Martin Puchner is the Byron and Anita Wien Professor of Drama and of English and Comparative Literature at Harvard University. Besides Poetry of the Revolution, his other books include The Drama of Ideas: Platonic Provocations in Theater and Philosophy (Oxford, 2010) and Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). He is the general editor of the Norton Anthology of World Literature, third edition (2012) as well as of numerous scholarly volumes and sourcebooks. He also writes on literature, drama, and politics for the London Review of Books, Raritan, Bookforum, and other publications.

Louis Bourgeois is the Executive Director of VOX PRESS, a 501 (c)(3) arts organization based in Oxford, Mississippi. His memoir, The Gar Diaries, was recently re-published by the U.K. publisher, The Other Publishing Company. His Collected Works is due out by Xenos Press in 2016. Bourgeois is also the founder and director of the Prison Writes Initiative, a writing program set-up for Mississippi inmates.

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Louis Bourgeois: I want to start with two blatant questions so the reader will know where we are from the very beginning. First, what exactly is meant by the term “avant-garde” and secondly, what compelled you to write a whole book on manifestoes?

Martin Puchner: Originally, “avant-garde” is a military term. It means the most advanced corps of an army, the part that is ahead of the main corps, the opposite of the rear guard, which guards the back. Over the course of the 19th century, this term wanders into the art world, where it acquires a second meaning: a group of artists that is ahead of everyone else. The military provenance lingers on in the often aggressive demeanor of these advanced artists. Like their military counterparts, they see themselves as the most daring members of their group, the ones who are paving the way for everyone else. This etymology raises an obvious question: why would the art world in the later 19th century think that way? To be sure, there had always been artists who violated accepted artistic conventions and who wanted to establish new ones. But to think of the entire art world this way, that there was a rear guard, a main corps, and an avant-garde, that was new.

I’ve always been both fascinated and bothered by manifestos. Fascinated, because there was this sudden explosion of manifestos in the early 20th century, and bothered (but also thrilled) by their aggressive demeanor, their often facile claims, and their shrill tone. I decided to write a book about them when I realized that this new genre was a perfect way of capturing the art world of the late-19th and 20th century, the art world of the avant-garde. That was the main reason. The second, related reason was that the great theme of 20th century art was its relation to politics. A lot of ink had been spilled on that topic. The manifesto seemed like a tangible way of addressing this question because manifestos bridged the divide between art and politics. It allowed me to observe how politics influenced art and vice versa without having to make very general claims about all art being either entirely political or not political at all.

LB: Modernist writers such as Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound seem to adopt the form of the manifesto quite reluctantly—they seem to approach it with disgust. What is it about the manifesto that revolted these angelic modernists?

MP: Ah, nicely put. Yes, Anglo-American artists were more reluctant with respect to manifestos for various reasons. First, they had always had a complicated relation to the Continent, and manifestos were very much a product of the Continent, especially France, Italy, and Germany. So there was always the question: to what extent do we want to adopt this Continental fashion? The second reason was the immense success of manifestos. Suddenly, they were everywhere and it became more difficult to compete in that environment—to have your manifesto stand out and be heard. One reaction was to reject manifestos entirely and try to do something new. The other reaction was to adapt manifestos, to come up with new ways of writing manifestos. Many Anglo-American writers opted for the former. Lewis and Pound opted for the latter, not exactly rejecting manifestos, but coming up with their own ways of writing them and incorporating them into their work.

LB: Yet in your book you refer to Pound and his cohort as the “rear guard,” rather than “the avant-garde.”

MP: The main reason I do so was Pound’s ambivalence with respect to Continental avant-gardes, which I think you hint at in your previous question. Pound was confronted with all these radical experiments on the Continent that were making their way across the channel, for example in the form of an attempt to create a London branch of Italian Futurism. Pound and his associates felt threatened by this invasion and found themselves fending off these attempts. The way they did this was by adopting some of the avant-garde strategies and techniques, including manifestos, but also by redirecting these radical energies back into more traditional, if experimental, art making. I should clarify that by rear-guard I do not mean they were artistically conservative or traditionalist; they were seen in England as quite radical in comparison with Edwardian art. But with respect to the Continent, they found themselves in a position of slowing things down and redirecting radical energies. Since the artistic “avant-garde,” in keeping with the military metaphor, thinks of itself as being ahead, the most radical, this term didn’t seem to fit. So I chose, by analogy, the term “rear-guard.”

LB: In Poetry of the Revolution, you write at length about the dual history of the manifesto. I was intrigued by this brief passage: “It is, however, on this double history of the political manifesto and the art manifesto, on the assumption that the history of the art manifesto in the twentieth century must be written as part and parcel of a history of socialism, that my methodology is based.” How do these two histories play off of each other and how do they both tie into the greater abstraction of the word Socialism?

MP: I had identified this interesting object, the genre of the manifesto, with its political history and its sudden move into the art world. So I spent a lot of time thinking about the political orientation of the manifesto. Was it a politically neutral genre, equally used by the right and the left? At first blush this seemed to be the case, since there always existed right-wing manifestos, both in the political world and in the art world. But the more I thought about it, the more it became clear that the manifesto was not politically neutral. It was part of a history of leftist revolt, in part because of the overwhelming influence of The Communist Manifesto on the whole genre. There were manifestos before The Communist Manifesto, but The Communist Manifesto really changed everything. So I found that the history of leftist revolt was in a sense embedded in the genre of the manifesto. It would have been wrong to treat the manifesto as a neutral genre and to study it in a purely literary, formal fashion. What was interesting was precisely the way it was bound up with political, and especially the history of socialism. For socialism, The Communist Manifesto was a foundational text, but one that had to be carefully updated from time to time. So socialism in this sense means the different official socialist organizations, from the Second International to the Third International to the Fourth International. Official Socialism, so to speak. At the same time, the history of socialism is a history of splinter groups, all with their own manifestos, so a study of manifestos needed to be part of that history as well.

LB: In the chapter “Fascism and Revolution,” you write: “There existed a conduit for the manifesto to move from politics to art: the notion of the avant-garde.” But I wanted to know if you could talk about the opposite direction, art moving toward the political. After all, is that not the very transmogrification we see in the post-war works of Ezra Pound?

MP: Yes, good point. Since manifestos existed in both art and politics, they lend themselves to studying the move from the one to the other, and vice versa. In other words, if you want to observe how an artist seeks to break into politics, look at how he or she uses manifestos. Marinetti is a perfect example. First, he uses a political genre, the manifesto, and introduces it into art: Futurism is born. This is the move from politics to art. But you are absolutely right that there is a move in the opposite direction as well, and interestingly, Marinetti is a good example of that as well. So he has used the manifesto to politicize art. But in a second step, he wants to move this newly politicized art (Futurism) back into politics. How so? He starts to form a political wing of Futurism and does so by writing political manifestos. Now he aestheticizes politics. (Mussolini didn’t let him get away with it, however, and basically told him to stick to art and leave politics alone).

Marinetti is a more clear-cut case of both moves, but Pound can be seen from this perspective as well. In an often confusing way, his political opinions, including his strange theories of economics, debt, and usury, spill into his art, and vice versa.

LB: Did Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto give rise to Italian Fascism, or did it serve as a cultural mirror reflecting what was historically inevitable?

MP: No, Marinetti’s manifestos did not give rise to Italian Fascism. I would rather say that they accompany it. Most Italian Fascists emerged from a particular strand of socialism, from which they split at the outbreak of WWI, becoming hyper-nationalist, pro-war, etc. This is true of both Mussolini and Marinetti. So I would say the same conditions gave rise to Fascism and Futurism. Marinetti wanted to turn Futurism into the artistic wing of Fascism, but Mussolini kept him at arm’s length. In other words, both emerged from the same milieu, but moved in different directions, with some limited overlap.

LB: You write at length about the similar overlap of, and differences between, war and revolution. Can you summarize your notion here?

MP: Wow, a big topic to summarize, but I’ll try. The main distinction between war and revolution is that war is an event that takes place between nations or empires or other political units, while revolution is an event within a political unit. In this sense, revolution is more akin to a civil war, which also is a violent event within a political entity. This is why I said a revolution could be described as a particular kind of war. But not all civil wars are revolutions. The U.S. civil war, for example, was not. So a revolution is a civil war that aims at the violent overthrow of a ruling class, and not just a ruling class, but an entire political system. This, in any case, is our modern notion of revolution.

The term “revolution” has undergone a complete shift. It used to mean a continuous cyclical movement, for example the revolution of the stars around the sun. But in the 18th century, it acquired our current meaning, the sudden overthrow of an existing order. On the face of it, this is almost the opposite meaning, not a cyclical, continuous movement, but a sudden change. Why this shift in meaning? One reason was that the makers of the French Revolution, the most paradigmatic revolution, didn’t think they were introducing sudden change. Rather, they thought they were restoring an old order, that they were going back to a time when things had been better. Marx talks about this in his work The 18th Brumaire. They thought they were returning to the past, revolving back. But as we know, what they actually did was something completely new.

LB: What are some of the connections between Fascism and Socialism—I’m referring specifically to your section “ Revolution to War.” Perhaps quite a few readers do not realize that Mussolini started off as a “socialist.” What type of socialist was he? What did socialism mean in Italy at that time?

MP: Yes, most Italian Fascists were socialists, including Mussolini. The big turning point was World War I. The official party line of the Second International was an anti-war stance. Quite a number of Italian Socialists could not stomach this stance in the war-enthusiastic summer of 1914, and therefore broke with the Second International. This happened in many European countries, not just in Italy. But especially in Italy, Fascism has deep roots in Socialism. This also explains why Fascism to some extent continued to speak of itself as “revolutionary” even though it comes to oppose the left violently. Even the “socialism” in “German National Socialism” was not merely rhetoric at the beginning.

LB: What strikes me the most from reading Poetry of the Revolution is the sheer proliferation of the manifesto throughout Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I was of course aware of the manifesto as an important genre, but was not aware of its mass appeal. At times, you even seem to suggest the manifesto itself enacted the World Wars!

MP: Yes, this is what struck me, also: the proliferation of manifestos. I think it is rare that a new genre takes over so quickly. It’s important to remember, however, that many manifestos remained quite obscure. Even The Communist Manifesto didn’t develop mass appeal until the 1880s and ’90s, fifty years after it was written. This is the case even more so with most artistic manifestos. Some of these manifestos were widely known, especially the futurist ones since Marinetti was a great PR man. But many, many remained niche products. This posed an interesting challenge for me. Manifestos, their sheer proliferation, clearly captured something crucial about this time. At the same time, I needed to be careful not to fall for their own exalted rhetoric. Manifestos exaggerate above all their own influence and importance. In other words, many manifestos, perhaps all manifestos, failed—at least by their own extreme standards. After all, they all wanted to change the world, and it is difficult to change the world. Marx knew this better than anyone, when he wrote in the opening lines of The 18th Brumaire: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances.” Many manifestos ran up against this truth and wanted to make history as they pleased. So I needed to find a way of talking about the failure of individual manifestos. I did so by making a distinction between performative manifestos and theatrical ones. Many manifestos ended up being merely “theatrical,” without the force needed to actually change the world. At the same time, I found that while many—most—individual manifestos failed, as a genre they did change the world. Not by directly causing wars or revolutions, but by articulating ideas, capturing a mood, in a particular way. Having said this, The Communist Manifesto is certainly one of those texts that actually had an effect.

LB: What would you say is the “New Poetry of the Revolution,” as it attempts to hide itself in the 21st century? I’ve looked everywhere and don’t even see a glimpse of it, anywhere.

MP: The closer my history of manifestos came to the present, the fuzzier the picture became, unsurprisingly so, I suppose. The present is always confusing and we lack the historical distance to view it clearly. One thing seemed quite clear, however: our present moment is very different from the revolutionary frenzy of the first half of the 20th century. And this is mirrored in the decline of manifestos, as one would expect.

At the same time, I have been struck by the fact that manifestos continue to be written even today, albeit more hesitantly so. Especially in the art world. There is a yearning for manifestos, and different cultural institutions—galleries, journals—commission manifestos or encourage artists to write them. Something similar is happening in politics. There was a debate among the people involved in Occupy! whether to write a manifesto. No manifesto of this movement was written, but attempts were made in this direction, for example by N+1. So, again, a sense that manifestos can’t quite be written as they used to, that our time is different, but at the same time a grappling with this difference, and at times a yearning for manifestos, or something like manifestos. This defines the present moment from the point of view of manifestos for me.

LB: I was hoping you could clarify the positions of the later avant-garde groups, the Situationists, the Lettrists, and the Imagists Bauhaus. I once did a full-blown interview with a friend, in French, with die-in-the-wool Lettrist Roland Sabatier, and still have no idea what Lettrism was attempting to achieve.

MP: That must have been quite an experience. Today, Lettrism is mostly seen as a precursor to Situationism, although it was less explicitly political. One of the striking features of Situationism was the suspicion of art, and a critique of the avant-gardes of the early 20th century, including Surrealism, as somehow not radical enough. Lettrism is a link, I would say, between this earlier avant-garde and Situationism. I think you have no idea what Lettrism was attempting to achieve because they themselves had no idea what they were attempting to achieve. With a movement like this, it’s much less about a clear program or goals, than about a certain provocative attitude, a sensibility that tried to reconnect to the pre-World War II world of avant-garde art, the Dada-ist provocations of the Cabaret Voltaire, for example. The problem was that the world after World War II was a very different one, which is why Lettrism never really found a place for itself. It took another fifteen years until these wannabe avant-gardists found a way of articulating an avant-garde for post-war Europe.

LB: How does the notion of “counter cinema” play into your dissertation on the manifesto?

MP: The place where my project intersected with radical cinema was in the person of Guy Debord. I had known Debord for Society of the Spectacle, a critique of the image, an attempt to update a Marxist critique to the age of new media, especially advertisement, cinema, and television. But interestingly, Debord did not reject all image-making. Rather, he developed a way of using the image against the image, a kind of self-critical image. This led him actually to create a film version of Society of the Spectacle, a collage of media images overlaid with extracts from his manifesto. It is a kind of confrontation of manifesto and cinema. Of course, Debord was not the only one to create this kind of kind of counter cinema. The much better known figure was Godard, which is why Debord hated Godard. But the basic move, as I would describe it, is this: in a world saturated by images, what can a critical use of cinema be?

LB: And to come full circle: what is the avant-garde now in the 21st century?

MP: We are going through a media revolution even more extreme than that of the 20th century. I would say that an avant-garde for the 21st century would have to develop ways of using our own new media in critical, innovative, provocative ways. It would also have to be part of a political analysis of our moment, and translate that analysis into a new set of attitudes and ambitions. If that sounds vague, I suppose it has to be. Predicting the future is a fool’s errand. The history of manifestos is proof of that.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2014 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2014

Kelly Luce
A Strange Object (14.95)

by Ashley Wiley

In her first collection of short stories, Kelly Luce explores, relationships, love, and death within the unique world of Japan. Her characters, Japanese and gaijin (Japanese slang for foreigner), all struggle to deal with life where tradition is slowly being pushed aside. These various viewpoints of the native and foreigner, the familiar and unfamiliar, offer well rounded stories on topics about the world’s mysteries.

Luce uses a mix of characters—a man who can hear voices, a wife who only knows how to cook gyoza, a little girl who grows a tail—and she can set a scene in just a few words, giving even the unfamiliar reader a picture of Japan that they can relate to. A Japanese festival in the story “Wisher” comes alive with just a few beautifully written sentences:

Friday, the festival’s final night, Nao joined the crowd, wearing a yukata of orange and green. The light of colored lanterns was reflected in the river in the castle moat. A late-rising persimmon moon dragged across the sky as if it, too, sought to slow down the night.

Women play a significant role in Luce’s stories; although her female characters are often at the whim of men, nature, and their emotions, the author doesn’t portray them as weak. Rather, they take control of their lives in simple ways that speak volumes. In “Pioneers,” for example, Yumi-ko prepares the dough for gyoza in the late hours of the night, but the process becomes the shap-ing of something more:

Getting the dough right took time, and she added the water drop by drop—make it too wet and the insides fell out. Her mother had told her once that the dough should feel like an earlobe. She poked and rolled and kneaded with her fingertips, palms, the backs of her hands. Sometimes she imagined it was an ear she was creating, part of an incomplete sculpture.

The title story, “Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail,” is situated in the mid-dle of the book, a nice break from the death that marks many of the preceding tales. This story takes a different form than the rest, with each scenario marked off by a roman numeral. In the second of these vignettes, Hana has just recovered from the chicken pox; she “clings to her mother, whimpering, worried that getting too close to a hideous, wrinkly grandma will make her ugly and old, too.” Luce creates the sincere and funny story of a child coming to under-stand, if only incorrectly, the idea of contagion.

Luce doesn’t always give the reader answers, keeping with the mysterious essence of the book, but this is a strength. This collection of stories is definitely worth reading.

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2014 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2014

Ginny MacKenzie
Sunstone Press ($18.95)

by Benjamin Woodard

In fiction, queries that plague memoirists—What makes a life significant enough to share with the public? Are certain achievements worthy of permanent recording?—rarely arise, for the imagination of the author typically eschews any chance of narrative dryness. But sometimes, an author packs too much of a good thing into a tale, resulting in a sort of overstuffed hollowness: here, a character vaults from adventure to adventure with such speed that the reverberations of each event fail to have an impact on the reader. The effect, like that of a dull memoir, is similar: something happens, but the impression left behind—the literary blast shadow—is soft and easily dismissed.

Ginny MacKenzie’s Sleeping with Gypsies hews very close to creative overkill, yet has aspects to recommend it. A wisp of a novel at 164 pages, the narrative is framed as a quasi-memoir penned by Amanda—noctambulist, daughter, sister, niece, civil rights activist, artist, muse, mother, roommate, landlord—as she twinkles through memories. Opening with her unusual childhood in Pennsylvania, where bouts with sleepwalking escort young Amanda to nighttime encounters with local gypsies and a neighborhood prowler known as “the stalker,” the narrative quickly shifts to Amanda’s adult life, her first husband, frustrated painter Munk, and a stint in Florida. Working in hospital administration, Amanda—still only about eighteen years old—tirelessly fights to integrate African-American personnel to the staff before jumping ship to relocate to New York, where she and Munk purchase a loft, have a son, and Amanda checks into Mountaindale, a psychiatric treatment center, for post-partum depression. From here, the novel barrels with breakneck pace through twenty years of marriage, divorce, soul-searching, road trips, and battles, regularly breaching a linear timeline with sparks recalling earlier events, moments that try to tie past and present together.

While the Forrest Gump-ian nature of Amanda’s life is admirable—she does seem to be in the right place at the right time for memorable happenstance—the events constructing her existence rarely require the momentum in which they’re committed to paper. Late in the novel, when speaking to Dove, a young lodger considering body transformation, Amanda pleads, “But why do you want the fat suctioned out of your face? You’ll be sorry when you age and your cheeks sink in.” This sliver of concern falls on deaf ears, yet it oddly rings true for Sleeping with Gypsies, which feels like an epic novel whittled down to the barest of bones. Trials that demand breathing space are instead suffocated and snuffed out within a handful of pages, and though Amanda’s voice remains interesting throughout, it’s difficult to find attachment to her plights due to MacKenzie’s knack for marooning certain facets of her personality for long stretches—or, in the case of sleepwalking, abandoning them completely—leaving the reader with a protagonist that never quite appears genuine.

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A Guide To Contemporary Ideas, Movements, and Buzzwords, 1945 To The Present
Robert Atkins
Abbeville Press ($24.95)

by Mason Riddle

Many of us prefer trains to planes. And, maybe for the same reasons, many of us prefer flesh and blood reference books to cyber Wikipedia and Google. Arriving at one’s destination may take a bit longer, but the journey is more satisfying, the experience more human, and the results, frequently, more reliable. Consequently, ArtSpeak: A Guide To Contemporary Ideas, Movements, And Buzzwords, 1945 To The Present should find a berth on every home reference shelf, even if the art world is not one’s purview.

Robert Atkins’s third edition, the first of which appeared in 1987, is organized with a fact-based but cursive introduction that pinpoints “now” vs. “then” issues in the art world; a multi-layered cultural and political timeline that begins in 1945 and ends in 2012; and 146 alphabetized entries defining the “ideas, movements and buzzwords” of the period.

Atkins immediately points out that when ArtSpeak was first written “twenty-five years ago, the world was a different place.” He notes the Berlin Wall was still standing, China was advancing economically but not democratically and Tiananmen Square had not yet happened. Email was in limited use, and mobile phones were scarce. He notes differences in the art world as well, in particular its globalization. New York City had “only recently relinquished its mantle of the center of postwar art production, exhibition and sales. . . . This multi-centered—but indisputably Western—art world was the foundation of today’s international art system.”

Atkins also emphasizes that the new edition of ArtSpeak reflects this globalization by covering art production in China, Japan, and Brazil, and recognizes that art is now distributed via art fairs, biennials, and museums. He also posits that the language of art has changed with a “shift away from the division of art into short-lived styles or movements” such as Pop Art, Minimalism and Conceptualism. “The twenty-first century has seen the disappearance of art movements as the basis of a descriptive language of art." He also makes the critical point that 21st-century artists work in a variety of media and styles that “makes them primarily artists, rather than photographers or painters or video artists. . . . the artist’s signature style has in many cases been replaced by a signature thinking, invisible to the eye but apparent to the mind.”

According to Atkins, ArtSpeak’s goal is to decipher the complex meanings embedded in contemporary art and stimulate a knowledgeable appreciation of its production. He touches on how artmaking is a rigorous and demanding process involving “decision making and self-criticism.” And he wisely points out that artists do not make art only to make money but more importantly to “express them selves and to catalyze communication.” He also writes about how we now intersect with art. Moving beyond “modern industrial production to postmodern digital production,” the distribution of art is dominated by the international art fair circuit.

Following Atkins’s introduction and the timeline of significant world and art-world events from 1945 to 2012, the main body of the book “identifies and defines the terminology essential for understanding art made since World War II.” These entries are listed in alphabetical order and include art movements, art forms, critical terms and cultural phenomena. Most are divided into the hallmark journalistic categories of Who, When, Where, and What. In Who names in boldface type connote the leaders or “virtuosos” of that particular process, style, or event. When signifies the period of greatest activity; Where the cities, countries and continents of impact; and What explores the nature and implications of that style, movement or event. Abstract Expressionism and AIDS Art, Biennial and Black Arts Movement, Gutai and Mülheimer Freiheit, Neo-Concretism and Primitivism, and Semiotics and Transavantgarde are all there.

In the end, ArtSpeak is informative and readable, a friendly invitation to better understand the language of contemporary art. Over its history, the book has transmuted from more or less a dictionary of terms into a relatively comprehensive survey of twenty-five years of art. Now, don’t you want clearer understanding of the movement Mono-ha?

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2014 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2014

Edited by Leigh Anne Hornfeldt and Teneice Durrant
Two of Cups Press ($12)

by Lauren Gordon

The poems in the anthology Small Batch approach an interesting motif: bourbon. The concept sounds simple, but the variety of poetry contained within gleans quality through craftsmanship. In the introduction, Carla Carlton explains how making bourbon in small batches is not unlike the creation of poetry: “The success or failure . . . depends on the artistry of the maker.” The makers, in this case, are varied; ranging from Affrilachian Poets, to Cave Canem Fellows, Laureates and even freelance food writers. Under the careful editing of Leigh Anne Hornfeldt and Teneice Durrant, Small Batch goes down smoothly.

Many of the poems in this collection use bourbon as the subject, while other poems offer only a brief nod. Dan Nowak’s poem “A Slight Retelling of Greek Mythology With Bourbon” pays homage to the myth of Echo and Narcissus in prosody: “but still whenever you show me the picture of your lips / on the mirror I think of drowning myself in quicksilver.” The poem has a liquidity that is unironic. Nowak’s pacing becomes frenetic near the end of the poem as the speaker’s desperation mounts:

I’ve one more night
in this city or at least that’s what I’ll say because it
makes you hold my hand tighter and we’ll drink bourbons
with our free hands and throw compliments across
the table that sticks to our skins and I’ll wish your
lips stuck on my body and I would echo every move

The very nature of a small batch of bourbon is that it is hand-crafted, hard to emulate and repeat. It is, in essence, ephemeral, much like the relationship Nowak captures.

Hornfeldt and Durrant have also selected a number of poems that are more formal in structure, and one of the stronger poems is the darkly humorous “The Housesitter’s Note” by Juliana Gray. Gray imagines a note that begins benignly with details of a wilting basil plant and ends with the house sitter’s hijacking of the home owner’s life, even up to their death: “I softly passed away in your bed. / It’s all right. It was my time to go. / And now, you’d never know that I was there / in your tidy house, your green and purring space, / except for a ghost of bourbon in the air / and, on your pillow, a single foreign strand.” Bourbon is not the engine that propels the poem forward, but it is a “ghost” that resonates.

The poems in Small Batch vary in form and function, but together they are a complex brew. There are dizzying poems, devotional poems, narrative poems—and they all seem to linger with a satisfying finish.

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2014 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2014

Greg Pape
Lynx House Press ($15.95)

by Warren Woessner

Four Swans, Pape’s tenth collection of poetry, should come with a map. Apart from an excursion east to bury his mother’s ashes, his poems are firmly rooted in the landscape of western Montana. While the poems in Four Swans are arranged in four sections, and the thread of his mother’s life and last illness is a theme, it is the imagery of rivers and streams—moving, unstoppable water—that connects these poems. In “The Spell Of The Bitteroot,” despite being “ditched and diked, / riprapped and rerouted, / dredged and diverted,” the river remains:

a mouth that won’t stay closed,
a network of living vessels, veins
in a watery leaf of earth,
channels, braids, a continuous flow
of wild water.

While parts of Four Swans recall Jared Diamond’s ecological accounting of the same beautiful, fragile and threatened landscape in Guns, Germs and Steel, Pape seldom slips into political polemic—there is just too much going on. In “What You Should Know To Be A Poet,” Gary Snyder suggests: “All you can about animals as persons. / the names of trees and flowers and weeds. / names of stars, and the movements of planets / and the moon.” In these poems, Pape proves that he has all these bases covered, and his knowledge often spills out in over-exuberant lists, as in “Tracks & Traces:”

I go on walking, glancing down to see the path,
then up into the trees to see the trees, owls
maybe, great-horned, long-eared, sawhet,
woodpeckers, hairy, downy, pileated,
the brown creeper, the snipe, or porcupines, . . .

But Pape is not just a “lister;” he knows how to observe nature; how to look closely. In “Bitteroot Suite,” he sees:

. . . three duck feathers
light and downy, curved upward and held
against stones like boats run aground
in green algae shallows.

No one will ever have to ask Pape about the forebears that influence his poetry; he wears them on this sleeve and inserts stanzas and entire poems from the great Japanese and Chinese masters into his poems. While poets like Shinkichi Takahashi, Tu Fu and Bashō are famed for their evocative simplicity; Pape uses their poems as starting points for both explication and to inspire internal exploration. The longest poem in Four Swans is an homage to the T’ang master, Su Tung-P’o. Pape feels that he is “a friend across time:”

His dream of the Taoist immortal disguised as a black-and-white crane flying
above the river is my dream. His pleasure in words—finding them, arranging
them in clear sentences, satisfying lines—is my pleasure.

Pape knows that he is fortunate to live in a country of “Mountains and Rivers Without End,” a country “shot through with clear light, / a clear light that makes men joyful” as Hsieh Ling-Yun wrote. “Ice Fishing in a Snowstorm” begins with a poem by Liu Tsung-yuan about an “old man . . . fishing alone in the cold river snow” which leads Pape to consider the poetic process:

Ice in an old hole
will dull or break the blades of the auger.
You have to cut a new hole.
You have to sit in the snow and wait.

In the same poem, Pape acknowledges Richard Hugo as one of his influences, and when the poet goes into town, Hugo’s rough affection for the bars, truck stops, and cafés of the West is well preserved, as in “Lunch in Lima:”

All along the bar
the citizens bow before their beers or coffees
and give thanks to Social Security, while the poker
machine in the corner goes ping and pays out
another hand with a one-eyed Jack and a pair
of fives.

In the long prose poem, “Driving Through,” Pape passes a weather-worn hitchhiker while musing on a Basho haiku, stops at “the only light in thirty miles” and realizes that he is in his own Zen riddle:

I started to feel like a sewer rat on my way to another meeting with my colleagues to vote on someone’s fate. I turned around right there and went back for Basho, for Chief Looking Glass, for the one walking through Lolo.

In the title poem, Pape names the four wild swans “Grace. Peace. Dignity. X.” He leaves it up to the reader to decide what X equals.

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by Andrew Farkas

The traditional interview begins with a description of the surroundings where the interview took place, though in the present tense as if it were taking place right now and somehow being beamed onto the page. For instance, “I meet Cris Mazza at Insomnia, a coffee shop in Columbus, Ohio, that is situated mostly below street level. It is jam packed, as always, full of twenty- and thirty-somethings chugging French Roast and Guatemalan, everyone trying to be more authentic than everyone else, while playing chess and checkers, arguing about the greatness of various bands, informing each other how wrong all of their ideas are . . . but luckily we’re able to find a table. Though Cris doesn’t look like she quite fits in with the tattooed and rather punk rock clientele, some are even holding on with both emaciated and bleached fists to the Goth style, the very purpose of Insomnia seems to be that no one fits in here, the only club suitable for this mob being Groucho Marx’s. I felt this would be the perfect location to discuss Mazza’s memoir, Something Wrong With Her (Jaded Ibis Press, 2013, $18), a book about ‘sexual dysfunction’ and the social difficulties (especially the difficulty of fitting in) that have ensued in her life from this ‘problem.’”

---

Andrew Farkas: It is customary to comment on the physical surroundings of the location of the interview. How do you feel about this tradition?

Cris Mazza: It’s something I’ve always hated: It’s always done in present tense, as though there’s a tape recorder running and the interviewer is giving a voice-over as he or she conducts the interview. It’s so fake. I’m not likely to read any interview that starts with that pretentious present-tense “We meet at a chic vegan Thai ice cream bistro in the Amazon rainforest . . .”

[The interviewer has decided that, through whatever diabolical means necessary, he will trick Cris Mazza into one day meeting him for an interview at a chic vegan Thai ice cream bistro in the Amazon rainforest.]

Next, the introduction lists the accomplishments of the person being interviewed. For instance, Cris Mazza has published seventeen books (eleven novels, five story collections, and a collection of essays), won the PEN/Nelson Algren Award for her novel How to Leave a Country (Coffee House Press, 1992), and directs the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In this way, interviewing has always been a form that needs an excuse. “This is not just me talking to some friend of mine for no good reason and publishing it,” the beginning of every interview ever says.

AF: It is also customary to list the accomplishments of the person being interviewed. But how likely are you, no matter how many accomplishments the person may have, to read an interview with someone you’ve never heard of?

CM: Sometimes I wonder why novelists are being interviewed, and am not inclined to read an interview with a novelist that’s about a novel because the novel should be self-contained. I suppose the same could be true of a memoir, although with a meta-memoir like Something Wrong With Her, I think having interviews going on after publication are part of the whole project—a story largely about writing the book—because the writer didn’t stop learning what she was writing about, having insights and revelations, after the manuscript went into production. It had to be forced off my computer and I had to will myself to stop going into it and adding updates. So for this kind of project, interviews are a way for the story to be continued toward . . . well, there’ll never be a resolution, but continued bumps and layers. But I’m circling your question instead of answering it. I would have to put myself in a study and have them hand me thirty interviews and see which ones I read over the course of a month. Since, in interviews, I would want to read to see how a writer personally handled issues like isolation, envy, disappointment, not being understood by critics/editors/agents . . . so maybe the answer is that I wouldn’t be as inclined to read an interview with a first-book writer, unless it was a first book published later in life. Just saying that challenges me to find one and read it. I could get back to you after I do.

AF: You mentioned meta-memoir. When you first told me about Something Wrong With Her, you called it “meta-creative nonfiction.” Could you explain what that is?

CM: In the first place, I think all memoir has to be “meta” based on the simplest definition of metafiction, that it “does not let the reader forget he or she is reading a fictional work.” I don’t believe any memoir allows the reader to forget he or she is reading a work of memoir. The first giveaway is the first-person narrative: that narrative didn’t spontaneously appear in a thought-bubble above the reader’s head, it’s a consciously created manipulation of language to tell the writer’s personal story. So just the words “a memoir” on the cover of a book make it, in my mind, “meta” in the sense that no one is pretending the author didn’t write it, that the author isn’t that first-person narrator, that writing didn’t take place on a keyboard (for contemporary memoirs), that the author wasn’t fully aware that a memoir was being produced when he or she sat tapping on that keyboard.

But even knowing that a traditional memoir is consciously aware of itself as a memoir doesn’t make critics call it a meta-memoir. I used that term from a very early point in constructing this book because I knew it was a book that needed to be read while it was being written. That what was happening and what I was learning / feeling / deciding while I wrote—and how I realized & decided—were part of the story being told. It was circular: how the writing influenced my mood, preoccupations, decisions, etc., and then how those things in turn influenced the form and direction of the manuscript. I wanted both sides of that process to show as much as possible in the “finished” book (if it can be said to be finished . . . I simply had to stop).

I’m not sure I can effectively give a succinct statement of what metafiction did to or for fiction—it has to do with the nature of reality and reality’s “place” in art, and art’s relationship and place in reality—but I believe the parallel in meta-nonfiction is more user-friendly. If the work—and everything involved in the work—of writing the story is part of the story, it may lay bare the reason for producing a memoir at all. Why do people watch or read “true” crime dramas: not because the crime happened to them or to someone they know, not because it was committed by anyone they know, but because the intuitive, investigative, psychological, and forensic work of “putting things together” is inherently interesting, maybe because it’s how most people live their own lives, whether they know it or not. So even if every memoirist doesn’t want to see a memoir that way, wants it to be a story told with the retrospect of time, with wisdom gained from distance, and wants the events of the story to be what’s important to the reader, a different kind of memoir like this one can also be significant to a reader: just seeing how someone put pieces of life-evidence together and was somehow altered (I do not want to say “healed”) by the process.

After the introduction has been laid down, it is then the job of the interviewer to slowly fade away into the questions being asked. This makes perfect sense because it is the interviewee who is important, interesting, the reason people are reading. But because the surroundings have been described, and because the interview is set up to seem like two people hanging out, drinking coffee or beer in a public setting, this interviewer, anyway, has always imagined other interviewers slowly turning invisible, while the interviewee turns to the crowd gathered and speaks.

. . .: Along with being a different take on creative nonfiction, this is also a book about so-called sexual dysfunction. You even use the chauvinist word “frigid” to describe yourself. How do you see Something Wrong With Her in comparison to other books about sexual dysfunction?

CM: This is something I’m not going to be able to answer (as asked) because I am unfamiliar with any other books about sexual dysfunction, unless by “dysfunction” one means “addict” or “fetishist” or if it’s a book about sexual withdrawal after some sort of sex crime. (Not that I’ve read books about those conditions either, but I’m aware they exist.) I didn’t seek to read anything in “the tradition” of books about sexual dysfunction because I wasn’t going to model or form this book based on emulation of or rivalry with or transgression of what already existed. But I did look (I don’t think I can call it intense searching) for information or accounts of similar sexual experience, and only found it either in (a) anecdotal material about menopausal consequences (usually insinuating it was sexual deterioration from a better, more “normal” sex-life), and (b) in Nancy Friday’s research from the 1970s and ’80s when hundreds of women answered her research questionnaires for books on women’s sexual fantasies (incidentally, soliciting contributions rendered her books “unscientific”), and books by Shere Hite (a sexologist whose books were considered scientific). This showed me that there are many anorgasmic women (the percentages vary, with the alternate percentage being “normal” women). My cursory extension of research into contemporary times included mostly my own observations and mental data-keeping on how women speak (and write: blogs, Facebook postings, as well as memoirs, interview answers, etc.) with rhetoric—infrequently direct, usually implied—that says they do respond wildly to sex provided the partner is good enough. Sex talk is open, free, common, routine. But no one is openly, freely insinuating they never respond much. No one tacitly bragging about that. An update to the old Masters-and-Johnson sex studies was recently made into a TV documentary, using videos of some of the “typical” (we were supposed to assume) respondents who had been interviewed in the study. But for the statistics/percentages of “those who never orgasmed,” there were no representatives among the live example interviewees shown sitting on a bed, either alone or with a partner, seemingly answering the study interview questions. None of them had been offered (or else declined their invitation) the chance to sit perkily on a bed in front of a camera and voice the answers they’d given on the survey. I thought: they should’ve asked me. I guess I see Something Wrong With Her as one of that other percentage, sitting on a bed in a TV studio looking into the camera, the one who volunteered. Whether they wanted me to or not.

[The interviewer sees this scene as taking place on a sound stage reminiscent of The Dating Game, pastel asterisks everywhere, even Chuck Barris surprised by the response.]

. . .: Throughout you use jazz terms to describe situations and actions in your life. But jazz, as I’ve come to understand it, is all about improvisation (you even discuss this when you point out that jazz musicians don’t really use sheet music, instead they use the rough notes found in a fake book). And yet, since you show us that you have dramatized parts of your life in your novels, and then re-dramatized them, and now you’ve written a memoir about those same moments, Something Wrong With Her has a classical music connection: the idea of getting it right (or, if you will, of penning the definitive sheet music), instead of improvising. How do you see this friction between jazz and classical music playing in your memoir?

CM: Stan Getz said, “It’s like a language. You learn the alphabet, which are the scales. You learn sentences, which are the chords. And then you talk extemporaneously with the horn. It’s a wonderful thing to speak extemporaneously, which is something I’ve never gotten the hang of. But musically I love to talk just off the top of my head. And that’s what jazz music is all about.”

I guess I would say that those events or moments that I transcribed into a journal, then dramatized, sometimes re-dramatized, finally cut-and-pasted into a memoir . . . those would be the chords, the key signature. Chords, even in the fake book, are the same whether they come under the title “Make Someone Happy” or “Bessie’s Blues.” (Not that all tunes have the same chords, just that when a particular chord appears under two different titles, the same notes build that chord in each. Then the soloists improvise with the notes in whatever chord is given.) Something Wrong With Her was, I think, a sort of improvisation with the chords of my life. The way a book has to differ from a jazz solo is that it had to be made “final” at some point. But so did the recorded solos of Getz, Miles or Coltrane. (And someone came along and wrote out the sheet music for those solos for less inspired players to play, note-for-note). Still, it’s obvious there was a weak link in my attempt to make this book more like jazz while a novel is more like classical music.

There was a freedom while I wrote, though. But when I say freedom, agents say “this isn’t a memoir that will sell.” Because I didn’t follow a familiar shape. I don’t think there was a familiar shape in what I felt I needed to say and why. That’s why it’s more like jazz. I was exploring the chords for the tune while I was playing it. Still, there’s long been a rift within jazz as to how free improvisation is. Thelonious Monk said, “They speak of freedom. But one has no right, under pretext of freeing yourself, to be illogical and incoherent by getting rid of structure and simply piling a lot of notes one on top of the other. There’s no beat anymore. You can’t keep time with your foot . . . There’s a new idea that consists in destroying everything and find what’s shocking and unexpected; whereas jazz must first of all tell a story that anyone can understand.” That’s the “literary” jazz I hoped this book was emulating. Monk also said, “play your own way. Don’t play what the public wants. You play what you want and let the public pick up on what you’re doing, even if it does take them fifteen, twenty years.” Put that together with his plea for a beat, for a “story anyone can understand,” and you have the quandary of non-traditional writers. “All you can do is play melody,” Getz said, “No matter how complicated it gets, it’s still a melody.”

. . .: The experience of reading this memoir is a combination of looking through a scrapbook (a writer’s scrapbook, or even a jazz musician’s fake book), but also looking through a detective’s notes (a detective who has been on the case for a long time, like Leonard Shelby in the movie Memento). How did you come up with this form, or why did you decide to use this form?

CM: In some ways, the form grew out of necessity. I knew I had a box full of journals kept in college. I knew there had been a “black hole” in the first collection of personal essays I had published—the period 1974 through 1980. I knew I had experienced events and situations during that time that had “marked” me. I felt there must have been a reason I skipped that time in the first nonfiction book. Right there was one of the first questions that got me started: Why did I skip the most difficult material? The initial answer to that question, which helped me start the book, was a hypothesis that could not be sustained . . . or at least that was overwhelmed by other material. I thought it would be a book about how incidents of sexual harassment, before there were sexual harassment laws, had been influential or affecting in an interesting and/or significant way. Perhaps were part of the bedrock for a lasting dysfunctional sex-life. (I cannot say for certain when I realized the book would be a search for that answer, about my sexual dysfunction, and not just some answer pertaining to my over-influential male mentors and incidents of sexual harassment.) At any rate, this made it necessary to read all of those journals. It was the proverbial can of worms. Recalling for me easily a dozen specific incidents—how hotly important they were at the time, then somehow nearly completely faded from memory.

At the same time, coincidentally (not part of the book’s research), I was getting back in email contact with someone I had known all during that period of time. It was natural to tell him some of what I was working on, because he knew the other significant “characters,” but his responses and memory-contributions and—mostly—his questions, one particular question, brought to the fore just how significant he had been in all of my braided (and unraveling) situations all along. This was one of the first major things that happened during the writing that became part of the writing, ultimately the major portion of the story that writing-the-book would tell. Re-connection with Mark brought out the letters I’d written to him, our yearbook inscriptions, the cartoons he’d drawn, eventually the songs he’d written. Each item—examining it, thinking about it, sharing responses with him over email—shaped how I would be using it, what it would say to me, what it said about me (or him), etc. Then using selections from my published fiction became another memory-exercise. I had to remind myself how I’d fictionalized certain events in order to better remember them, and also so that if I dramatized the scene again it wouldn’t be a deadened copy compared to the fictional use (I eventually elected to only use the fictional scene whenever possible, instead of the pretense of re-dramatizing the same scene again for the sake of this book). I was curious why I’d changed certain things, why I’d used certain images or metaphors. It became not an author providing critical insight to her own work but forensic self-analysis.

. . .: You point out that it’s perfectly fine for a woman to write about sexual transgression (rampant sex, illicit sex, etc.), but that it’s actually taboo for a woman to write about having trouble with sex. Why do you think that is? At this stage, shouldn’t all people be “allowed” to talk about any sort of sexual viewpoint?

CM: Oh, certainly allowed! It seems, from my observation, to be a personal taboo. In the face of an openly sexualized culture, who wouldn’t keep their failing in society’s biggest contest a secret? And no one’s saying culture shouldn’t be openly sexualized. I guess. I’m not sure a male pop singer dry ass-humping a virtually naked female pop star with her tongue hanging out is the epitome of high art. But look at that recent controversy. (Add in Beyonce at last year’s Super Bowl, and a few other recent public debates along this line.) Sex is depicted or acted out or represented in such a way that shows the female in the throes of fervor. No staged portrayal of sexual activity shows the female hesitant, lacking hunger, less than fully responsive . . . or in pain. (The latter would be a depiction of rape and wouldn’t make the song or whatever is being sold very appealing. I hope.) A fully sexualized woman is, frankly, considered more complete. (And maybe she is.) So while women writers are willing to display their incompleteness in so many other ways, from eating disorders to their bodies being mutilated by cancer treatments, from mental illnesses to obesity, whether or not they write with the inclusion of any complicity in their kinks, flaws or deficits, if sexuality is involved as well, it’s usually to ensure the world that despite these things, they are still complete that way. Unless their story is that they experienced abusive sex and/or incest . . . or were sex addicts (revealing damage done to their egos when sex becomes identity), none of which indicates anorgasmia. Memoirs from sex workers—surrogates to call girls, dominatrix to fetish satisfiers—are usually not exposing character flaws or deficits, but illustrating other layers of our sexualized culture, and by the way, it’s not all that new: look back to Xaviera Hollander’s The Happy Hooker, 1971, and Anias Nin’s unexpurgated diary in 1986.

. . .: What surprises me about your view of your condition is that, throughout your life, you’ve thought that you did something wrong, or that if something would’ve happened (for instance, if “Harlan” would’ve allowed your relationship with your “master teacher” to take its course), then your sexual development would’ve followed a more “normal” path. And yet, from the very beginning, I wondered if there might be a concrete physical problem outside of your control (and anyone’s control outside of a medical doctor) that caused you to have difficulty engaging in sex. Why do you
think it took so long for you to decide that it wasn’t any fault of yours, but that it might be an actual, physical problem?

CM: I’m not sure I have decided it wasn’t any fault of mine. Note my subtitle. “I shaped it: the snowball that swelled into sexual dysfunction frigidity.” Despite my discovery of certain physical links between certain types of sexual dysfunction (i.e. the link between weak or damaged pelvic floor muscles and vaginismus), it simply seems too big a coincidence for there to have been a physical reason for vaginismus (and maybe anorgasmia) in the same person who, for whatever unknown reason, was petrified of sexual contact as a pre-adolescent through her early twenties. (If I’d had more therapy with more therapists, I suspect many of them would have been digging for those mythical un-accessed memories of early childhood sexual abuse.) It seems obvious the fear helped feed the pelvic floor dysfunction, so why couldn’t it have helped beat down other expected “normal” developments? There have been sexual studies of anorgasmic women, and their experiences usually include most of these: (a) strict and/or religious backgrounds where sex was depicted as sinful or immoral, (b) other forms of sexual repression often relating to negative body image, (c) lack of childhood and adolescent masturbation (often related to the first two items), (d) ill-informed (or otherwise repressed) male partners. (Interestingly, many of the individuals in these case studies had children, and none that I found reported pain, although I also don’t remember any sex researchers asking about pain. In my mind, pain has to be related, a snowball effect that would gather up and crush sexual-response as it rolls.) From the list above, I can claim a full one and two other partials (as can most women my age, although we might all have different ones and partials). Was my childhood steeped in religion? No. Was I ever told not to touch myself? No. Were my parents overly sexually repressive? Maybe, but no more so than most, and only by saying very little. So far I seem just part of that huge segment of my generation (or of adult women) called “most.” So one of my motivating questions in writing was why? And I don’t think I was able to answer it. Only circle and poke at it. Luckily there were other motivating questions, always developing as I wrote further.

. . .: There are authors who, over time, show us that all their novels take place in the same universe, and that their characters all exist in that universe (Thomas Pynchon and Bret Easton Ellis come to mind). But with your work it seems the events are the ones that exist all together, that up to this point you have been wandering through alternate realities, and now you’ve reached the real reality. In other words, you’ve made a palimpsest of your life which you display by including your memories of a particular moment, then the journal entry about a particular moment, and then the fictionalizations you’ve created from that very same moment. What effect do you think this process has had on you (as you say in Something Wrong With Her, you see yourself as an anthropologist here), and what effect do you believe it will create in the reader?

CM: At first, I was looking at my fiction just to try to help my memory dredge up details from a lived experience. But I found that turning experience into fiction—the act of doing so—was part of my relationship with an experience, so turning my attention to the techniques offered as much insight as the content. In addition I was also experiencing—and narrating it while it happened, because I hadn’t known it was going to happen—how a writer’s relationship with her work alters, even develops further, when the two (writer and work) are brought back together with the added complication of distance and maturation. Simply, when I looked back at the fictional accounts of events in this new context, I discovered that what I’d thought I known (or was in control of) about using experience to develop fiction was incomplete. Seen another way (using the anthropologist metaphor), I was examining any artifact I could turn to—anything more tangible than memory—for answers to various (and some not articulated) questions. A writer’s work is obvious artifact (in that it is still there to be poured over), but also, if a writer’s relationship to his/her work can be gleaned from that artifact, it can provide more implications—not about the work, which has to stand on its own without the writer’s relationship to it or any personal issues to supply “meaning”—but about the life being examined. It’s the “writer’s relationship to the work” part of this formula that isn’t usually available to anyone except the writer (and maybe his/her therapist). Memory is also not a good way to access my relationship to a past work; but I had those journals and letters where the raw in-the-moment me transcribed experience into language. So the raw material started as reaction to an experience . . . and in how that reaction was then utilized in fiction I was able to discern subtle aspects about myself I hadn’t been aware of. I didn’t have any expectations for an effect this would create in the reader. I didn’t see it as satisfying any “need” any reader has to see my particular relationship with my own work, but that readers (and people) in general seem to be interested in forensic exploration: How an archeologist or historian or detective can put together pieces of a “story” from physical artifact or evidence. And that any of us can do it, if willing to find (or keep for decades) and gather together the pieces.

. . .: You point out at one point in Something Wrong With Her that novels aren’t realistic because people’s lives don’t braid together in neat ways, which in turn lead to plot arcs and, ultimately, resolution. And yet, people often find novels that follow those conventions to be the most realistic, the most like life. How does your memoir attempt to expose these novelistic conventions, then, as being unrealistic?

CM: I don’t know how people find those novels to be “realistic.” I do find many of them satisfying and pleasurable, but I think that’s one of the kinds of satisfaction one gets from art, having nothing to do with “reality.” I think the “like life” people see in traditional novels has to do with psychology more than how life works. The pathos of human response is recognizable, therefore seems real. It’s so simplistic to say this, but the literary tradition of “realism” is not the same thing as “realistic.” Any “ism” denotes a doctrine, theory, system or practice (could add the word formula), so realism is a way of writing novels. I’m not sure the most realistic writing possible—durational time describing every minute of time in a slice-of-life story—would satisfy literary realism.

OK, sorry for the rudimentary definitions, but sometimes I need them to straighten myself out before starting to circle again. I think this memoir can expose those kinds of conventions of realism (or novelistic conventions) to be un-lifelike because, (a) even where there is “braiding” (several different older male mentors, some thinly related in the professional world; or one event bouncing me to another involving seemingly unrelated people, etc.) . . . the braids unravel and/or some of them “go nowhere” (the Jehovah’s Witness who would touch me when he’d had a drink then tell me I was “too worldly,” the master-teacher whose sexual advances suddenly ended); and (b) there is so little resolution, especially to the whole sexual issue, and regarding Mark (at least there’s little actual resolution in the book). Certainly no resolving outcome in the form of triumph or overcoming. And cathartic crises? Well, as my mentor said of me in the 1970s: she goes from crisis to crisis without learning anything.

. . . : In addition to novels in the realist mode being unrealistic, you also point out the expectations readers often bring with them to creative nonfiction: it must be “the hyperbole of experience” (as you say). How do you work against this expectation and what effect do you hope to convey by working against this expectation?

CM: Let me give the beginning of that quote of mine. (Now I know what it feels like to be taken out of context!) I was talking about how an excerpt from Something Wrong With Her had been rejected by a graduate-student run literary magazine, and their comment was that “it wasn’t special enough.” My next comment was: “I can read their disappointment this way: nonfiction simply must be beyond the grind of life, it has to be the hyperbole of experience.” Perhaps unfairly translating their comment, I was typecasting a mainstream notion of what nonfiction “has to be.” Trauma and recovery. That’s a pretty good pigeonhole for how many agents/editors view commercial memoir. And the trauma: incest, war, body-devastating drug addiction, violent sex crime, violent cancer and violent cancer treatment, gender reassignment, bad parents, good parents lost, inexhaustible sexual dark side. And any number of other startling, downright ghastly situations that do merit publication (if written well) if only for the sake of expanding the awareness of those things in comfortable, safe lives. Are there too many trauma memoirs or have they become the definition of memoir, thereby pushing out others whose experience doesn’t “measure up”? When I showed my first nonfiction manuscript to my then-agent (Indigenous: Growing Up Californian, eventually published by City Lights Books), she said, “Cris, this isn’t a memoir, it’s a John McPhee book.” OK, I can see now that John McPhee doesn’t really write memoirs, so the comment wasn’t a complete slam at either me or McPhee. (Maybe more at him than at me.) Remember, I thought Something would be a book about experiencing sexual harassment before there were sexual harassment laws, and whether or not it might have something to do with how my sex-life developed (or didn’t). Most of my experiences would not meet the “hyperbolic life” criterion. Instinctively aware of that (since the “this isn’t a memoir” comment was vivid), my earliest conscious plan was that I was going to contextualize my experiences against the almost-simultaneous development of the law, and I even had a dim idea that I might gather some other stories from friends or acquaintances. But I could see, almost immediately, that this would be a task for a true literary journalist (like Laura Hillenbrand), and maybe one who was also a psychologist and/or law expert who already knew a lot of stuff about the law itself (with corresponding examples) as well as how women’s sexuality has been affected by these kinds of experiences.

Luckily, some of the other incidents that changed the path this book took were starting to occur, and this ostentatious plan was abandoned almost immediately. But, I do think any plan like that—based on an instinct that my experiences didn’t measure up to the standard for memoir—is related to how the hyperbolic-life characteristic, and the quantity of acclaim and attention heaped upon authors of trauma-memoirs, is teaching too many of us that we’re not as worthy—as writers—because we didn’t have a life savaged by abuse, victimization, disease, poverty, etc. (This is also the commercial book industry looking at writers as salable commodities—are they exotic, beautiful, and damaged enough?) I kept working against that expectation because there was nothing else I could do. The situation of my life at the time, and what writing the book was contributing to it, made writing it one of the necessities of life, along with eating, sleeping and breathing. But still, while working on the book, there were a few people I did talk to about it, and I probably became a tape-loop of insecurity, “Who will want to read this,” “who will care?” I received encouragement in return: that the countless numbers of others living with quiet chronic angst will relate. And then it happened when the book went into production: A publicity intern I’d never met, who lived 1000 miles away and was 30 years younger than me, read the manuscript and emailed me to say, “I keep asking myself, ‘Did I write this book?’”

It is true that in many interviews the dialogue itself takes us to the conclusion. Yet this convention persists, much like the description of the surroundings, the list of accomplishments, the disappearing (and sometimes reappearing) interviewer, to make it seem like the interview itself has occurred in a particular place over a relatively brief span, a brilliant conversation we all wish we had, we all wish we were having all of the time, though our own conversations may never measure up, and since that is the case we desperately wish we could’ve been present at this discussion, but luckily someone was present to write it all down . . .

AF: These days, interviews are often conducted over email, or even if they do take place at, say, a coffee shop or bar, they are heavily edited afterwards. Tell us about your experiences being interviewed in the past.

CM: Not always over email. Of course, I was publishing before we all had email. I remember being very nervous when interviewed by traditional newspaper journalists who asked questions then only jotted notes while I was speaking. I spoke slowly, tried to pause often, to give them time to write everything. It helped me think, but still, saying what you want to say, getting it to be what you really mean, and making it complete in that context was . . . well, impossible. I was, however, frequently surprised in a good way at some of the one-liners they attributed to me. A professional feature journalist knows how to synthesize what you’ve said into a pithy quote.

[Oh, well there is that. It seems, then, that the Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass scandals were more of scope, rather than tradition. They made up too much, while actual journalists take quotes from actual people and make them sound better.]

CM: There used to be a journalistic practice for these kinds of interviews where after the interview article was written up, the journalist would call and read just the quotes over the phone for the interviewee to verify that’s what he or she said. But they would not tell you how that quote appeared in the interview, and none of these pre-email interviews were in the Q&A format, so the journalist or interviewer was using narrative scene, dramatizing a dialogue we supposedly had, using both direct and indirect quotes. Since I couldn’t really remember the dialogue either, I don’t know if they rearranged the order of topics when turning it into a narrative article. I was interviewed for Poets & Writers in 1996. I think it was partially done over the phone, and then I may have been able to go over how my answers transcribed in writing. I think it was not the former journalistic tradition where I was only allowed to verify what I’d said, but also not formatted in Q&A. I think the interviewer read me large portions of the galley they provided to him. We do have it much easier now with email interviews. I’m less at the mercy of someone else’s memory, someone else’s ability to take notes and to understand his/her own notes, and how I looked or sounded while answering.

AF: What do you see as being the purpose of an interview?

CM: I’ll answer for this book: the purpose of interviews is that it’s a continuation of the process of “writing the book.” The process of writing the book is partially what the book is about. Having an interview afterwards isn’t necessarily part of the process of writing every book, but in Something Wrong With Her, I was so frequently shifting course (or being sidetracked) based on what writing the manuscript (or Mark) was showing me. So having me look at it again afterwards and talk about it in an interview is another of those shifts. While writing, I was talking to Mark (and myself) and responding to new perceptions (sometimes his). In an interview, an interviewer has the new perceptions, so I have to look again with that context. I see things that are still incomplete, I react to certain parts differently, thus “the book” is still developing, and I’m still both extending and experiencing it.

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2014 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2014

Patrick James Dunagan
Ugly Duckling Presse ($10)

by James Yeary

Nothing appears further from fashionable at this moment in poetry, and perhaps in the larger art world as well, than alignment with the Modernist project. Somewhere between Pisa and 1968, signal and summit of the Fall, the idea of a singular vision is switched out for plurality. Mutations or evolutions of old ideas crop up in new generations. Color-fields broken free of painterly affects make textures, impasto, out of their own concrete situation. Surrealism forgoes revolutionary politics as it enters into Young Adult territory.

And what happened to that old chestnut the Long Poem, the one that tells the tale of the tribe, putting history, and the history of ideas, to music? Zukofsky’s “A” is perhaps the last major work in this line. “A” starts off as a historical poem, but, to our benefit, becomes something else, doing for the Long Poem what Stein did for prose and Dickinson did for the short poem a half a century and more earlier. After “A” comes Ronald Johnson’s Ark and Ron Silliman’s Ketjak, Long Poems casting language against itself, wherein appear event and idea treated as musical note or node, shining, however distantly, in the constellations made by these later works. This is a mutation (a term I use with a neutral if not positive tone) of Pound or the younger Zukofsky.

It is a relief to come across something so apparently out of fashion as Patrick Dunagan’s new chapbook, preposterously titled Das Gedichtete or un thème et variations poétique. The bathic nature of the title, in three languages, is a pivot that might catch a potential reader scanning the shelves with the apparent faux-Romanticism one would expect to laugh at ironically before plunging into a contemporary work more hip, twee, and introspective.

What we have instead is decidedly old school; much of the book is culled from the poet’s readings of Theodor Adorno’s music writings. It is hard to make concrete images with Das Gedichtete. The language seems to blend the poet’s thought of and with Adorno, great underminer of Enlightenment ideas. So a forest quickly turns toward the stars, measuring atoms, in the second stanza:

Not the Bohemian Forest
full of marching cradles
ordered symbol
of cosmic mass
gathered in parable
eternally static
realm of enchantment

Dunagan’s primary musical vehicle can probably be most closely compared with Creeley, in that he uses loosely defined, variegated patterns to shape and pace his thoughts, in series of lines and stanzas of comparable lengths. This is where one strain of the Modernist canon has brought us, extant today in the funny Brooklynese punk and blues renga of Ted Greenwald, or the meditative rosaries of Kyle Schlesinger.

It is nuance where the magic happens in this poetry, and probably in all poetry. In an epigraph that precedes and dwarfs one of the shortest sections of Das Gedichtete, Dunagan appropriates a statement by free jazz anomalist Sun Ra. Beginning “honesty is not what I’m talking about,” Ra, self-described Martian bandleader, expounds on the credibility of deception, the necessity of being “evil and wicked like me” when taking on the white race. This openness to duplicity in tactic and also the necessity of belligerence calls to mind the late Amiri Baraka, but what in God’s name does it mean in the context of this poem? The epigraph treads directly into

Hours stretching
days to weeks
no surprise

in every step
learning again
to watch
matched colors
change to mist

born into this
eternal delight
how suddenly
it lasts

It only takes a turn of the page from the epigraph to move from Ra's militant jazz to the existential and ironic ontology of "born into this /eternal delight / how suddenly it lasts" —not exactly a refutation, but perhaps an existential crisis rendered sublime. The poem continues:

Breaking clods of earth
lingering over flowers
hillside aglow
evening and morning
to walk out
among the city’s habits
another regular
with nothing special
going on

In “Breaking clods of earth,” we have the first and only possible echo of the violence suggested in the epigraph, unless the dissolution of the “matched colors” changing “to mist” is some kind of eschatology. Which it might be. This poem doesn’t have the implied political programs that led to discontinuity in the Cantos or in “A,” unless it is one of postmodernity. It is an apt time in history, musical and political, to invoke Adorno while scrutinizing his ideas, and the musical form is an appropriate setting for them. The anomalies of voice that appear in Sun Ra (and a couple pages later in sexual proclamation) add an indeterminacy more worldly and human than the meditations from an ivory tower. Once removed from its midst, the appearance of Sun Ra can be seen as a perfect ideological counter to Adorno, who—as a Marxist at a time when it appeared to everyone else to be Communism’s most valiant hour—found that theory needed its own internal revolution before a praxis could be developed to support any revolutionary goal.

So Sun Ra appears as everything Adorno isn’t, an improvisational musician and thinker who expounds that theory must bend to meet necessary action. In the collage of fragmented voices that is the Cantos, Pound never offers a dialogue so equally weighted as this, only parody and mockery of his opponents. Dunagan’s poem, then, has an ironic coherence in the disparity of its thoughts set to music. Its philosophical paradises, if they exist, are not clearly defined, but the images contained in its rhythms invite repeated investigations, as the best modern poetry always has.

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2014 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2014

New Poems
James Reidel
Black Lawrence Press ($8.95)

by James Naiden

This chapbook, briefer than a will o’ the wisp at only twenty pages, contains poems not at all what one might expect from a more conventional practitioner. James Reidel obtained his MFA at Columbia University over three decades ago, wrote a highly respected biography of poet Weldon Kees (Vanished Act, Bison Books, 2007) and has gone his own way ever since. In this sense, the tradition of John Ashbery and to some extent Peter Klappert finds renewal in Jim’s Book. The value here is in letting the poem work its way into one’s consciousness via extended, sometimes jarring metaphors. While all may not be revealed, the suggestions are there—and that’s enough.

What may seem droll and ordinary to some is a matter of speculation to Reidel, as he plumbs the motivations and aspirations of those he sees but does not know well. Here are the opening and closing lines of “Amish Children at Baseball:”

To find such a sideshow antiquing that day, between Game
5 and 6–
The taller girls and a boy in the outfield turned to stare with that
guarded look
For English, strangers, the cold,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Everyone a blackleg, broadcloth, the only colors
Skirts of cornflower blue, a mauve of no allegiance.
Pick me.

In such a poetry, the nuances are many times the inverse (or at least the opposite) of what you might normally think. For example, to leave out mention of the unpleasant or the aggravating is—in Reidel’s lexicon—missing the point. Bring it all in! The beginning lines of “Corn Pie, Ephrata, Penna” attest to the poet’s inclusiveness as a style:

A bed-and-breakfast serving no breakfast,
Just the bed, the shower, its jigger glass head
Forcing me to take a sip of the oil and salt face
Projected all night atop the others in my dirty pillowcase.
The plastic curtain billows before my hand.

What is worthwhile here is the sum of the world’s disconcertions; omit them and you’re living in a dream world that doesn’t exist. James Reidel’s verse is an honest, refreshing refutation of the notion that certain parts of reality don’t matter. This poet might surprise as you dip into his world.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2014 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2014