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An Illuminated Interview
with Lance Olsen
by John Madera
In the first section of Lance Olsen’s 2010 book Calendar of Regrets (FC2), which is told from a close-third narration in Hieronymus Bosch’s perspective, we’re offered this admonition: “Look closely: everything is webbed with everything, existence an illuminated manuscript you walk through” This passage could serve as a key to the entire book—key not only as a way or means of interpreting the text, but also as an instrument to unlock the text-as-lock or series of interlocking locks. It’s a heuristic move: the text is teaching the reader how to read it, especially regarding the following: first, the importance of perception and its innumerable complications; second, the interconnectivity between characters and events, but also in the text as a whole, both structurally and thematically; and third, being, whether realia or fantasia, ontic or hauntic, how it, too, is a text, lavishly illustrated, which not only creates openings that you can move through but is movement itself. It also brings to mind a passage from Georges Perec’s Species of Spaces and Other Pieces:
This is how space begins, with words only, signs traced on the blank page. To describe space: to name it, to trace it, like those portolano-makers who saturated the coastlines with the names of harbours, the names of capes, the names of inlets, until in the end the land was only separated from the sea by a continuous ribbon of text. Is the aleph, that place in Borges from which the entire world is visible simultaneously, anything other than an alphabet?
I recently sat down with Lance Olsen to discuss the author’s philosophy of the “illuminated manuscript,” and in particular, his call for considered scrutiny.
John Madera: Would you talk more about this “webbing” that connects everything with everything, about reality as a text?
Lance Olsen: Maybe our real job as writers, I sometimes want to say, perhaps even as human beings (with the accent on the plural noun), is to continuously learn to pay attention to the world we move through. Yet the world—which is to say how we’re wired—plots against us. Our default mode of being often wants to be the habitual, which is to say the unexamined, which is to say our default mode of being-there wants to be not-being-there.
What’s astonishing and invigorating for me about what I consider difficult art—a sentence, say, in Ben Marcus’s Age of Wire and String or Gary Lutz’s Stories in the Worst Way; the architectonics of David Lynch’s Lost Highway; the complexity of any two seconds of a text-film by Young-Hai Chang or corner of Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights—is that it seeks to return us through challenge to attention, which is to say contemplation.
Another way of putting this is to move from the aesthetic to the existential and think about what your answer might be to Annie Dillard’s rattling riddle: “Assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?”
In other words—and this eases us toward a tentative answer to your second question about reality’s textuality—paying attention is a continuous condition of learning (and unlearning) how to read. The world is nothing if not a text composed of a multitude of texts (just as each of us is nothing if not a text composed of a multitude of texts) we try to make sense of, narrate, and, as Derrida reminds us, there is nothing outside the text.
But here’s the deep-structure dilemma: humans are by nature story generators, pattern recognition machines, designed to tell what the world has done to them. Give us an incident, no matter how enigmatic, indeterminate, or tenuous its causes, and we will narrate in order to generate the hopeful, desperate impression of coherence. We are built to strong-arm links, invent causal chains that don’t exist. Give us a bedlam of stars and we’ll birth Sagittarius. This instinct is what Nassim Nicholas Taleb refers to as the narrative fallacy—that common intellectual blunder of forcing chaos into cosmos in an attempt to account for what eventuates around us and to us and through us.
JM: Why did you choose to engage with the life and work of Hieronymus Bosch in this way?
LO: I’ve always been fascinated by artists and thinkers out of step with their times. I suspect that may be a good definition of what it means to be an artist or thinker: someone who reads the world in ways most people don’t, thereby allowing us to see it in ways we haven’t, coaching us to pay attention to details the habitual has made invisible.
So one of the first short stories I ever wrote was about Nietzsche. Thirty years later it grew into my novel Nietzsche’s Kisses. Another was about Kafka, which grew into my novel Anxious Pleasures. Bosch is beautiful for me for the same reason: his work is visionary, discordant with its sixteenth-century present, asks the viewer again and again to rethink the script he or she has written about the way things work. Unlike, say, Nietzsche or Kafka, though, virtually nothing is known about Bosch’s biography—not his birth date, not his childhood, not his training, not his personality. He left behind no diaries, no letters, a couple traces in municipal records and the account books of the confraternity Brotherhood of Our Lady. From an authorial point of view, it’s an invigorating pleasure to write through those absences, plump them with imagination.
Such fictional biography (think Coover’s Public Burning; think Anne Carson’s Nox) is aware of itself as what Linda Hutcheon dubbed historiographic metafiction—i.e., past-tense writing practices that are aware of themselves as writing practices, aware that pastness occurs only in an incessant mode of being un- and re-written. That is, historiographic metafiction is the sort that by its nature problematizes historical knowledge.
JM: Let’s talk about form. Slightly tweaking the descriptive copy on the book’s back cover, I’d call Calendar of Regrets an assemblage of twelve interconnected narratives, one for each month in the year, each narrative divided into two sections, except for August, which is in the middle of the book, which acts as a hinge as the text double-backs on itself, returning you to where you began.
LO: One of the challenges I set for myself was to invent the narrative equivalent of a Boschian polyptych. Actually, and oddly, with this novel the form arrived first—as opposed, say, to character or situation or image arriving first. I was interested, as well, in creating—also à la Bosch—intricate sub-narratives (think back to Garden of Earthly Delights) that echoed and at times even contradicted each other. Finally, I was interested in exploring various styles and genres, since each invites us to pay attention in a different way to different things. Each carries within itself certain codes for reading the text of the text, the text of ourselves, and the text of the world. Because narrativity must be temporal, implies by its syntactic structure that one event happens after another and may be linked to it, I introduced the powerful temporal metaphor of the calendar as another shaping principle.
Then I set about introducing various dissonances into Western assumptions about temporality—assumptions which are intricately linked to the ideas of reason and capitalism. You know: time is linear, time is money, time is control, time is progress, time partakes in the logic of accumulation, and so on.
JM: Calendar of Regrets is dialogical: in conversation, generally, with, among other things, circular texts, but specifically three texts, namely, James Joyce’s Ulysses, Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, and David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten. The nine intercontinental narratives in Mitchell’s book intersect and interlock in ways that are, largely, immediately legible, and whatever isn’t becomes so after a single reading. Calendar of Regrets deliberately betrays such immediate legibility. Would you talk about this conversation you’re having with these texts?
LO: The central question I ask and re-ask my creative-writing students is this: How does one write the contemporary? Naturally, the answer will be different for every author, but the questions behind the question remains: What structures capture our sense of lived experience here, now?
Thematics is meaning, then, but structuration is meaning as well. And one could arguably argue that Ghostwritten is at the end of the day concerned, as you say, with a certain ontological and epistemological lucidity suggesting a certain existential readability. It is written in the key of comfort. And that simply isn’t how I experience experience. Or another way of saying this: our lives are so legible it hurts, but only to the extent they have been made legible by the narratives we swim in daily that are manufactured by the entertainment industry, the political system, academia, et cetera—narratives designed to be repeated so often they become chronic.
I feel a much greater affinity for Joyce’s Ulysses or Danielewski’s House of Leaves than for Ghostwritten because I find myself continuously drawn to texts that, as Bachelard said all art should do, function as “an increase of life, a sort of competition of surprises that stimulates our consciousness and keeps it from becoming somnolent,” and texts that, as David Markson once wrote, quoting Thomas Crowe, function as “a kind of research and development arm of the culture industry.”
JM: The book’s full of many surprises, one of which is the moment of authorial insertion: a photograph of “Lance Olsen.” Would you talk about this “versioning,” how it’s operating in Calendar of Regrets, and its relationship to works by writers like Borges and Sebald?
LO: For a sense of stable selfhood to persist, we need to convince ourselves that historical knowledge is an unproblematic realm. We need to develop a narrative (the kind at which Western culture has excelled) that affirms continuity—beginning, middle, and end—the notion of causality and solution. We tell ourselves into permanence and consistency. What I find remarkable about Borges and Sebald, two important writers for me, is that they trouble the relationship between pronoun and referent.
Is it conceivable, they ask, to imagine beyond Freudian theorizations of character? Beyond those we encounter in fictions by, say, Dickens or Fitzgerald, Chekhov or Morrison, that accept selves as dense products of past traumas, current conflictions and neuroses, unconscious fires and conscious tumblings? Character formations which are, in a phrase, emblematic of identities that are relatively solid through time and space, assume there are great swathes of us-ness that remain constant and complete, autonomous and fixed, aren’t invented minute by minute, second by second, from outside as well as inside, continuously changing constructions flickery as those vibrating strings we are told make up the metalogical essence of “reality”?
Which puts me in mind of Beckett’s astonishing Unnamable—that indeterminate, disembodied subject position (“character” is far too strong a word for he/she/it), uncertainly human, pulsing in and out of existence between gender and genderlessness, thereness and nowhere/nowhenness. Its modes of expression are hesitation, skepticism, and comma-spliced syntactic entropy. “But enough of this cursed first person,” it announces at one point in its self-canceling word cascades, “it is really too red a herring . . . Bah, any old pronoun will do, provided one sees through it. Matter of habit.”
Exactly. Matter of habit. Matter of the habitual. Beckett’s denarration serves as a memento that the pronoun (the heart of the heart of character) is, at the end of the day, a sort of hoax foisted upon us by the culture’s language. That character, self, and identity are quantum fields rather than Newtonian nuggets. The rules of grammar, Beckett’s novel undertakes to perform, have been repeatedly misunderstood by philosophy and fiction as a metaphysics.
JM: Calendar of Regrets offers many different stylistic approaches. There’s Joycean lyricism, Dada-esque textual fields, various minimalisms, interview and podcast transcriptions, bedtime storytelling, various mythologizings, notebook jottings, which include strikethroughs, and more besides. Would you describe the stylistic choices you made for each narrative, and how these choices directed the narrative and vice-versa? And how does all of this connect with the overall projects of the book?
LO: I guess the simple answer is that once I finish a novel I don’t want to write the same one again. Stephen King and Dan Brown have built dynasties on disagreeing with me. But what excites me is when novel-writing puts me back on my heels, tips me into a liquid geography of unknowing; presents me with a topography in which I need to navigate through unexpected and illuminating regions. For me writing is a precarious act of exploration. That’s what I set about gifting myself with in Calendar of Regrets: a complex and unfamiliar framework to live in for several years that would allow me to emerge understanding more both about my experience of experience and my experience of narrativity.
To accomplish that, I tried to match twelve incommensurate genres with twelve incommensurate styles—as well as with various points of view. Genres, styles, and points of view make certain presuppositions about the world, about how we should interpret our lives, about how the arc of narratives should go.
I wrote a science fiction story, for example, involving William Tager, the guy who assaulted Dan Rather near his home on the Upper West Side on October 4, 1986. It takes the form of transcripts of several psychiatric evaluations. Besides creating character, conflict, and a weave that would blend that narrative with the book’s other narratives, my challenge was to discover the rhythms and syntax of what I imagined Tager might have sounded like. I also needed to read a number of transcripts of psychiatric evaluations to learn what they looked like, how the language in them pitched itself. But I also wanted my narrative to be, not full-on SF, but one that from a certain perspective could be read as SF. Tager believes he time-traveled from the future only to become stuck in 1986. The psychiatrist evaluating him sees things quite differently.
I consider Calendar of Regrets a constraint-driven novel, some distant cousin of Oulipo methodology, and those constraints produced the text even as the text invariably had a mind of its own and reconditioned the constraints.
JM: Aging is another subtext in the book. Bosch again: “Growing old turned each day into a small catastrophe shaded with just enough wisdom to allow one to understand wisdom changed nothing.” Perhaps we can’t overcome such daily catastrophes, but what are some ways to navigate through them, minimize the damage?
LO: This question strikes me as almost too present to imagine. Last month I completed another trip around the sun. And I’m here to report that the cliché is exactly right: those rotations just happen at you faster and faster. You blink and you’re twenty-three. You blink and you’re fifty-seven. I’m coming to believe the collective noun for them should be a murder of journeys. Which is to say I wish there were ways to minimize the damage of those daily catastrophes, but in the end every one of us will discover breathing simply doesn’t work—even, as Don DeLillo once wrote somewhere, we seem to believe it possible to ward off death by following rules of good grooming. That, I think, is one of the Big Things Calendar of Regrets is about: how we all tell ourselves and our worlds again and again in an attempt to make sense of them, and fail every time.
Or to put it another way: the end of every narrative is a kind of formal death that reminds us precisely how the script each one of us is writing will invariably end. I’d like to suggest that in the meantime we can and should live as joyfully as possible while paying attention, while learning, while loving, and while knowing we’re only bluffing—but such sentences strike me as too fraught, too shot through with unexamined optimism, to take completely seriously.
JM: You employ various repetitions in the book—word clusters like “And what” in the Bosch sections, or names like Aleyt, or places like Aulis, or more broady repeated themes and subject matter. Would you talk about repetition as a rhetorical strategy?
LO: Calendar of Regrets is, I think, less invested in repetition as rhetorical strategy than it is in modulation and leitmotif as musical ones. At an aesthetic stratum I was thinking about how to unify those dozen diverse stories and decided one way was to create various harmonies throughout the book via names, places, and phrases. But each time those names, places, and phrases appear, they do so in a sometimes faintly and sometimes radically different context charged with a different set of associations—while carrying along with them their previous contexts and associations. The effect, I hope, is similar to the one you get when you surf from one website to another on your computer: a moment of disorientation followed by a moment of reorientation.
JM: Travel is another of the book’s major themes. One of the notebook entries describes it as “the Aesthetics of Misreading, a continuous reminder of the disorder of things.” Later, the traveler notes:
What I guess I’m trying to say is that movement is a mode of writing, writing is a mode of movement. So it suddenly feels like I’m cheating when I try to picture the travel article I’m supposed to be putting together. You know what I mean? Its heart seems diminishment, its prose the kind unaware that travel was originally the same word as travail, that travail originally referred to an instrument of torture with three stakes forming a conical frame to which the sorry victim of the Middle Ages was tied and burned alive.
It’s very Sebaldian: drawing connections between words, finding correspondences across time, and being horrified by them; that horror tentatively ameliorated, temporarily held at bay, by writing about it. Would you talk more about travel writing, travel and writing, writing as travel and movement, travel and movement and writing?
LO: We’re back to being in the alphabet of the world. The topic of travel—whether through a novel or a new country—obsesses and gladdens me. So much so that I spent my time as a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin last spring writing a nonfiction rumination about it titled [[ there. ]]. It will appear in the spring and is part critifictional meditation and part trash diary exploring what happens at the confluence of curiosity, paying attention, travel, and innovative writing practices. It takes the form of collage of observations, facts, quotations, recollections, and theoretical reflections, and it touches on lots of authors, genres, and locations, from Beckett and Ben Marcus to David Bowie and Wayne Koestenbaum, film and architecture to avant-garde music and hypermedia, the Venezuelan jungle and Bhutanese mountains to New Jersey mall culture and the restlessness known as Berlin. [[ there. ]], then, is an always-already bracketed performance about how, by inhabiting unstable spaces, we continually unlearn and therefore relearn what thought, experience, and imagination feel like.
JM: Would you talk about the Iphigenia sections, and their underlying feminist critique of Greek mythology?
LO: Those sections are emblematic of the essential gesture of the entire novel: appropriating received narratives and structures that have been repeated so often we begin to take them as truths and troubling them, deforming them, trying to make what our culture believes should be invisible visible again, if only for the brief moments one is invested in the reading experience, in order to ask ourselves what a culture must repress, forget, hide to remain whole and functioning. So while in the Iphigenia sections I’m interested in part in patriarchal narrativity, as you say, both in terms of form and content, in the Tager section I’m interested in part in our culture’s stories about what constitute sanity and insanity; in Bosch’s in the role of the artist; in the Christian fundamentalist suicide bombers in the dangerous role organized religion plays in our lives; and so forth.
JM: The “Man with Borrowed Organs” sections are full of paginal “transgressions”: Justified text is eliminated, as are conventional horizontalities. It’s replete with typographical play. Images interact with text in various ways, blur distinctions between them, reminding me of a notion articulated earlier in the book: existence being “an illuminated manuscript you walk through.” I also thought these sections might be engagements with Deleuze’s idea of the “body without organs.” How did these sections come about?
LO: In his study of formally radical contemporary poetry, Craig Dworkin tracks the idea of illegibility back to the Situationists’ focus on the politics (to use Jed Rasula’s distinction) not in the poem (think of the politics of Adrienne Rich’s feminist thematics), but of the poem (think, instead, of Susan Howe’s or Charles Bernstein’s typographical disruptions). Dworkin dwells on the Situationists’ investigation of “what is signified by [the poem’s] form, enacted by its structures, implicit in its philosophy of language, how it positions the reader, and a range of questions relating to the poem as a material object—how it was produced, distributed, exchanged.”
If some form of Debord’s argument obtains (that “the spectacle corresponds to an authoritarian univocality that encourages a passive reception and obedient consumption of its message”), then the formally radical poem calls instead for “productive dialogue” between reader/writer and text, a “two-way communication’ in which consumers . . . become (unalienated) producers of meaning in their interactions with commodities.”
The same is the case for fiction. Bill Gates teaches us every time we open our computer what a page ought to be, what it ought to look like, what fonts we ought to employ to fill it, what margins. I’m increasingly drawn to the body of the text as a non-body, a body of opportunity, and in that sense, I guess, my project correlates with Deleuze and Guattari’s’s concept of body without organs—those forms mobilized in opposition to the organism’s organization, those that stand in opposition to the functional specificity and definability of organs.
JM: The book is filled with various blots and stains, even insect “infestations.” In the middle of the book there’s a black square surrounded by text that reads:
Here the memories the teeth have chewed mix with the broth of nostalgia. Some of the recollections there are real. Some are imaginary. With some, it is simply impossible to tell.
Would you talk about these graphic “disturbances”?
LO: While Craig Dworkin focuses on poems that deliberately erase, deface, ingest, and otherwise vandalize the surface of their texts—“poetic works that appropriate and then physically manipulate a source text, employing erasures, overprintings, excisions, cancellations, rearrangements, and so on”—I want to say in this post-genre Age of Uncertainty there no longer remains any productive, articulable difference between innovative poetry and prose. There exist only innovative writing practices. And I’m interested in those that introduce manifold static at various strata—thematic, formalistic, surface, depth, in, of, wherever.
What emerges in such writings is a lively transactional condition of textual engagement, a condition of continual exploration and negotiation, that through its illegibilities disorients, deterritorializes, détourns our daily interactions with the dominant cultural mechanisms that read/write/think/feel us, thereby returning us, however momentarily, to a politicized version of Russian Formalism’s ambition for art and phenomenology’s for philosophy: a kind of defamiliarized meta-cognition, a suddenly being-present in the text of the text and the text of the world.
Dworkin’s interests fall both on the sorts of illegibilities the reader encounters at the paragrammatic level of word or phrase in an innovative poem, thereby challenging “normative referential grammar,” and on the sorts of formal disturbances the reader encounters at the level of the page—cutting up appropriated texts, for example, and scattering them, layering them, blacking out parts of them in something like a paratactic collage. My interests sometimes fall on those as well, but also on the sorts of illegibilities that find expression at diverse levels in diverse kinds of innovative writing practices—those of temporality, say, or genre, or character formation.
In Calendar of Regrets—all over, but especially in the areas you cite—I want both emotional charge and a continuous awareness on the part of the reader that s/he is reading. To become aware of what it feels like to read (something most of us have forgotten) is to become aware of how we make meaning, is to become aware of how we write and unwrite and rewrite our worlds. So in spaces like these reading is always a kind of writing, writing always a kind of reading.
JM: Calendar of Regrets features many collaborations with Andi Olsen. In your dedication to her, you describe her as “co-author of it all.” Would you describe your collaborative process?
LO: One of the wonders of collaboration is that it generates something none of the collaborators could have imagined alone. That’s the thrill for Andi and me. Yet the act of inhabiting the same creative space works slightly differently for us each time. Sometimes when we’re working on text-collages—in, for instance, our fake disease series—Andi will provide me with computer-manipulated images and I’ll let them work on me for a few days, then I’ll sit down at the processor and see what comes out. Sometimes those images will lead to a complete story, sometimes a character or situation, and sometimes something about their form will suggest a narrative or syntactic shape for me.
With Calendar of Regrets the process worked in something like the reverse. I produced the text, and had a vague idea of how I imagined it taking form on the page. Andi started working on her side and every once in a while I’d take a look and offer suggestions, to which she would offer suggestions, to which I would offer suggestions, to which she would et cetera. To say trust—even a will toward rethinking boundaries of identity—is essential to productive collaboration is perhaps too obvious a point to make.
(I’m always reminded of Seneca’s mischievous observation on the subject: “Every sin is the result of collaboration.”)
Still, the kind of collaboration I just described—the overt variety—disguises another invisible sort in our culture. At the end of the day, all acts of writing are collaborative in nature. When you sit down to compose, you’re collaborating with every other author across space and time who has ever written in your genre, against your genre, near your language, in your sociohistorical position, in your gender, out of your gender. And of course you collaborate with the writing application on your computer, with your editor, cover designer, publisher, reviewer, distributor, reading-program coordinator, and so forth.
It’s dizzying to think about how little of the writing process is ever a solo flight.
JM: Lastly, tell us about your forthcoming publications, and what you’re working on now.
LO: In addition to that critifictional meditation, [[ there. ]], I have two projects appearing in the spring. First is a new and selected short-story collection, How to Unfeel the Dead, which has been great fun building, since it’s given me a chance to look back at something like thirty years’ published work. The process feels akin to going back over old photographs you don’t remember ever having taken or found yourself in.
The other is a novel called Theories of Forgetting, a narrative composed of three parts. The first involves the story of a middle-aged filmmaker, Alana, struggling to complete a short experimental documentary about Robert Smithson’s famous earthwork, The Spiral Jetty, located where the Great Salt Lake meets remote desert about a 100-mile drive northwest of Salt Lake City, where I live and work. The second narrative involves the story of Alana’s husband, Hugh, owner of a rare-and-used bookstore in Salt Lake City, and his slow disappearance across Jordan while on a trip there both to remember and to forget in the aftermath of Alana’s death. His vanishing may well be linked to the Sleeping Beauties, a religious cult that worships barbiturates. The third involves marginalia added to Hugh’s section by his daughter, Aila, an art critic living in Berlin. Aila discovers a manuscript by her father after his disappearance and tries to make sense of it by means of a one-sided “dialogue” with—speaking of versioning—her estranged brother, Lance.
Each page of the novel is divided in half. Alana’s narrative runs across the “top” from “back” to “front,” while Hugh’s and his daughter’s run “upside down” across the “bottom” from “front” to “back.” Neither narrative finds privileged material footing. The “front” cover will look exactly as the “back” (ditto with the “front” matter) upon publication, except each will be upside down with respect to the other. Consequently, how a reader initially happens to pick up Theories of Forgetting will determine which narrative he or she is likely to read first, thus serving to pressure his/her meaning-making. The novel’s physical structure could therefore be said to suggest a spiral—the guiding metaphor at various strata for the whole, and a shape of critical importance to Smithson’s own work and thought.
I’m also about thirty-five pages into a new novel. I’m still feeling my way along, so I shouldn’t say much except that I think it’s a retelling of Theseus and the Minotaur. Here the latter isn’t a beast with bull’s head and human’s body, however, but rather the deformed girl of King Minos and Pasiphae hidden away from the public at birth in the Labyrinth.
Click here to purchase Calendar of Regrets at your local independent bookstore
Click here to purchase [[ there. ]] at your local independent bookstore
Click here to purchase Theories of Forgetting at your local independent bookstore
Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2014 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2014
FREE VERSE: MICHAEL MCCLURE
Thursday May 1, 7 pm
Walker Art Center, Cinema
1750 Hennepin Ave, Minneapolis
Join us for a May Day extravaganza as Michael McClure unleashes a mighty roar! A central figure of the Beat Generation, McClure has enchanted audiences through his poetry, plays, and performances for nearly six decades. His poetry is heavily infused with an awareness of nature, especially the animal consciousness that lies dormant in mankind, and he has collaborated with artists such as Wallace Berman, Bruce Connor, and Ray Manzarek. Don't miss this special event with a living legend, co-presented by Rain Taxi Review of Books and the Walker Art Center. This event is FREE and open to the public!
"Michael McClure shares a place with the great William Blake, with the visionary Shelley, with the passionate D.H. Lawrence . . ." —Robert Creeley
"McClure's poetry is a blob of protoplasmic energy." —Allen Ginsberg
"Without McClure's roar there would have been no Sixties." —Dennis Hopper
After moving from Kansas to San Francisco as a young man, Michael McClure was one of the poets who participated in the legendary 1955 Six Gallery reading that featured the public debut of Allen Ginsberg's landmark poem Howl. A central figure in the Beat Movement and the San Francisco Renaissance, McClure is immortalized as Pat McLear in Jack Kerouac’s novel Big Sur. He has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Obie Award for Best Play, an NEA grant, the Alfred Jarry Award, and a Rockefeller grant for playwriting. McClure continues to reach new audiences through his poetry, plays, and performance, and resides in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife Amy.
McClure's many books include Hymns to St. Geryon (1959), The Beard (1967), Rare Angel (1973), Antechamber (1978), Rebel Lions (1991), and Plum Stones (2002). His latest release is Ghost Tantras (City Lights), originally self-published in 1964 and long out of print. Ghost Tantras is one of McClure's signature works, a mix of lyrical, guttural, and laryngeal sounds, lion roars, and a touch of detonated dada. See more at http://www.michael-mcclure.com/.
author photo by Garrett Caples
LITERARY WITNESSES: PATTIANN ROGERS
Monday, April 28, 7 pm
Plymouth Church
1900 Nicollet Ave, Minneapolis
Award-winning Colorado poet Pattiann Rogers brings a field biologist’s eye to nature’s particulars, the rare poet combining hard science and gobsmacked reverence, a "boundless love of the world, and remarkable dexterity as a poet," according to Orion Magazine. Her books will be for sale, and a reception will follow. The event is free with plenty of free parking. It is sponsored by Literary Witnesses and co-sponsored by The Loft Literary Center and Rain Taxi Review of Books.
Pattiann Roger is the author of fifteen books, including Firekeeper: New and Selected Poems (Milkweed Editions), a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Award from the Academy of American Poets and a Publisher’s Weekly Best Book of the Year. Her poems and essays appear often in the annual collection Best Spiritual Writing. Her collected essays, The Grand Array: Writings on Nature, Science and Spirit, was published in 2010 by Trinity University Press. Penguin Poets released her latest poetry collection, Holy Heathen Rhapsody. She lives near the Rocky Mountains with her husband, John Rogers, a geophysicist.
Among her many prizes are the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, the Bock Prize from Poetry, the Roethke Prize from Poetry Northwest, and the Strousse Award from Prairie Schooner. She worked with Poet’s House, New York, The Milwaukee County Zoo, and the Milwaukee Public Library on a three-year project, The Language of Conservation.
Sex Workers Unite
A History of the Movement from Stonewall to Slutwalk
Melinda Chateauvert
Beacon Press ($26.95)
by Kelsey Irving Beson
Although Sex Workers Unite’s language is dispassionate and academic, the story that it tells can be heartbreaking. It is well known that sex workers are the frequent targets of violent individuals; far less notorious is the fact that they also suffer at the hands of lawmakers and police, who can be as hateful as vindictive johns, but are doubly dangerous because they are in a position of systemic power. The scope of this brutality would be difficult to explain with mere statistics, but Melinda Chateauvert gives it a human face when she relates individual stories. For example, in 1989 District of Columbia police spontaneously rounded up about twenty-five street-based sex workers and forced them to march to Virginia. A Virginia congressman’s response was to decry the action as part of a legacy of DC sending its “sewer sludge, garbage, and convicted felons” outstate. Chateauvert effectively exposes this combination of systematic bigotry and personal brutality that enables people such as Gary Ridgway, a Seattle man that murdered at least forty-eight women. When he was finally brought to justice, he stated that “I picked prostitutes because I thought I could kill as many of them as I wanted without getting caught.”
In spite of these emotional stories, the tone of Sex Workers Unite is not overwrought or maudlin. The reader never gets the impression of being invited to pity the book’s subjects. Chateauvert is also realistic about the everyday tedium of sex work, which entails quotidian drudgery remarkably similar to that of more conventional service industry jobs. Alienation is a frequent complaint, as are physical problems associated with repetitious motion (one study of professional strippers, for example, cited high heels as a more pressing health hazard than STDs). This clear-eyed analysis is refreshing compared to the common hipster narrative of sex work as an empowering, sexy performance rather than a job done by ordinary people. The author’s focus on the work rather than the sex aspect also enables her to build a connection with the overarching fight for unionization and labor rights, especially in the wake of NAFTA. The struggle for humane working conditions and a living wage in the face of greedy bosses and indifferent authorities can and should be included in the larger narrative of U. S. worker’s rights.
The book also connects sex work activism with many other midcentury countercultural movements and concepts. These include the shift toward increased sexual honesty and freedom, the debate over privacy and civil liberties, and AIDS activism. Chateauvert pays close attention to the concept of intersectionality, and race and gender normativity (or lack thereof) figure heavily into her analysis. Big personalities abound, with sex work activists such as Margo St. James and Flo Kennedy instigating riotous (but relevant) pranks such as “awarding” a giant keyhole to nosy San Francisco police or judging an Anita Bryant drag contest. The focus on grassroots activism really emphasizes that sex workers are free agents that can improve things for themselves.
The author’s thesis that her subjects are capable individuals, not a crowd of victims, is well-supported, and it works best when she justifies it with specific events and quotations. Unfortunately, the book is liberally peppered with snarky asides about pretty much everyone that isn’t a sex worker. Combined with a rhetorical strategy that often consists of describing (purportedly) opposing groups and their endless clashes with each other, this makes parts of the book seem unnecessarily combative and almost whiny. For example, when discussing AIDS activism during the 1980s, the author decries the marginalization of sex workers by “gay male” movement leaders. When these men (none of whom, apparently, were or cared about sex workers), finally extended a hand of welcome, sadly, it did little good:
The result [of inclusion] often looks more like a poor woman’s fixed-up ranch facing foreclosure than the professionally rehabbed and decorated city brownstone of a married professional gay couple.
This reference to the stereotype of the wealthy, materialistic gay urbanite feels especially pernicious when one considers that this refers to a time before any kind of legal recognition of gay couples actually existed. The emphasis on antagonistic differences is so ubiquitous that it ventures into the absurd—breast cancer and AIDS framed as competing diseases whose activists have no appreciable overlap, for example.
The bulk of the author’s ire is overwhelmingly directed toward feminists of all stripes; including radical, liberal, separatist, and mainstream; even modern-day sex-positive allies can’t get a break. It is here that the binary framework is most obvious, and possibly least appropriate. Admittedly, the 1970s and 1980s were an era of rampant and vicious infighting among feminists, and by no means should this be whitewashed or sanitized. However, “sex worker” and “feminist” (even radical feminist) were not discrete categories—some of the most vocal leaders in the movement to abolish sex-for-pay (seen by some feminists as an intrinsic part of patriarchy) had been sex workers themselves. This fact is glossed over in favor of literally designating sex workers as “bad girls” and everyone else as “good girls,” terms that make numerous appearances throughout the book (lesbian separatists especially might have been surprised at the “good girl” designation). The recriminations against feminists (which frequently lack citations or attributions to actual people) include everything from vague implications of joylessness to the very serious allegation of “successfully suppress[ing] safer-sex literature,” essentially accusing feminists of endangering people’s lives. Indeed, there are parts of the book that make it seem as if other women were the authors of societal misogyny, instead of fellow casualties.
Sex workers are a largely subaltern group, and hopefully this useful book is a catalyst for the beginning of a scholarly, serious documentation of their history and activism. Chateauvert’s effort is well-executed, her quest laudable, and her passion palpable; these qualities save Sex Workers Unite from drowning in its own vitriol—but only just.
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Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2013 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2013/2014
The Sanctuary of Illness
A Memoir of Heart Disease
Thomas Larson
Hudson Whitman/Excelsior College Press ($15)
by Renée E. D’Aoust
Illness as a sanctuary—a necessary retreat from unconscious living—is something the eminent Canadian physician Gabor Maté focuses on. When the body has had enough, it says “no.” Dr. Maté tracks reasons for illness, long before dramatic episodes present. Indeed, the signs were there for Thomas Larson, author of the graceful and engaging memoir The Sanctuary of Illness.
The signs are strongest, of course, when Larson’s first heart attack strikes. But the word “strike” is suspect; coronary disease creeps up and reveals its message. “Every year 1.1 million Americans have a heart attack. Four in five infarcts come out of nowhere; they’re asymptomatic . . . in all, one in three Americans die of cardiovascular illness, one of two adults.” Larson continues, “I’ve had no omniscient caller brand me with a condition as this disfigurement has. Such certainty of self has always eluded me—and now, bidden and not, it’s here.”
In language befitting the heart, Larson takes us into the “here,” including both the lead up and the aftermath of three heart attacks in five years. Those attacks don’t happen in a vacuum. Life continues, family members are ill, he teaches, and his buddies look at him as if they dodged the heart hardware, for now. Larson reports from the frontlines of newfound insight; he sees his friends differently, and they regard him suspiciously: “There’s something new: their collective mask—the saggy eyes, the cloister-y smiles. This has entangled you and spared us—for now.”
Coronary disease is not infectious, but in metaphoric terms it is one way to explain the high numbers of people with the disease. Like William O’Rourke’s equally compelling On Having a Heart Attack: A Medical Memoir (University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), Larson’s prose makes us pay attention. Accounts of disease (especially of heart disease) are one urgent way that memoir educates about personal experience while helping readers identify changes needed in their own lives. Larson writes:
It’s then that I finally hear the all-caps phrase at the report’s end shouting at me, an emergency siren pushing through this diagnostic snowstorm: CHRONIC ISCHEMIC HEART DISEASE.
My disease is chronic. It’s here to stay—and it’s going to kill me. It’s here to kill me. Perhaps not tomorrow. But sooner not later. That’s what the no-comment techie and the nothing-to-worry-about doc were saying. By not saying it.
By “saying it,” Larson reveals the inner places he terms the “dodgy now”—a place that necessarily involves dramatic action. Larson doesn’t scream about the need for change; he’s methodical, not righteous, showing us the way while he makes his way. His partner Suzanne is there, making her way, too. They grow together, especially after she suffers her own medical emergency.
That the conscious acknowledgment of love, in addition to diet and exercise, heals the heart should come as no surprise, but Larson writes of his emotional growth without sentimentality. Larson makes clear that emotional awareness helps a damaged heart to keep beating.
I used to think our separateness defined us. The road bricking up before us is the path of partnership, as wary as I am to admit the fact: one loads and carries the other’s worry. My feelings embody hers. And she already has my worry pouring through her.
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Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2013 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2013/2014
The Rain Wilds Chronicles
Volume 1: Dragon Keeper ($7.99)
Volume 2: Dragon Haven ($7.99)
Volume 3: City of Dragons ($7.99)
Volume 4: Blood of Dragons ($27.99)
Robin Hobb
Harper Voyager
by Kris Lawson
Hobb, who also writes under the name of Megan Lindholm, is a prolific author known for her rich world-building, evident here in the evocative, detailed descriptions of the plants and animals that her characters encounter.
The Rain Wilds Chronicles document a quest with world-changing consequences, but Hobb keeps the narrative focus on her characters. There are no pre-ordained outcomes or messianic Luke Skywalkers here, only people with their own problems to solve and their own journeys to adulthood and/or freedom to complete. Her series does include dragons who use telepathy to communicate with certain special people, but if the reader is expecting the beneficent, empathy-driven dragons of Anne McCaffrey's Pern books or the childlike, humorous dragons of Naomi Novik's Temeraire series, then Hobb's dragons, who are alien in every sense of the word, will be a welcome surprise.
Hobb has already set two other trilogies in the world where the Rain Wilds Chronicles takes place. However, she provides enough detail and backstory so that reading the earlier books is not necessary. Rain Wilds refers to the vast swampy basin surrounding a slow-moving river full of acidic water, on which only Traders travel between cities located far apart from each other (most communication between cities is through carrier pigeons). There is little arable land; most of the Rain Wilders live in trees. Vague legends of an earlier, better time are articles of faith to the Rain Wilders, and are physically manifest in the magical relics that occasionally surface in trade. The relics are said to originate in Kelsingra, the legendary, lost city of dragons and their Keepers, known as Elderlings, immortal humans who tend to and partner the dragons.
As the books open, only one dragon, Tintaglia, is left alive. In a desperate attempt to bring more dragons into the world, she has herded their proto-forms, serpents, from the sea into the Rain Wilds River, and then has arranged for a guard for them as they hibernate in cocoons. But the acid river water and exhaustion from the journey take their toll on the hibernating serpents; they hatch too early, before they are fully formed. Dragons are supposed to be born with the memories of their bloodline, which serves to make them fully developed personalities and self-sufficient from birth. These hatchlings have only vaguely formed memories to aid them. Tintaglia disappears before they hatch; her Elderlings, Malta and Reyn Khuprus and Malta's brother Seldin Vestrit, are left behind to watch over the cocoons.
The official guardians of the cocoons are the council of the city of Cassarick, who struck a deal with Tintaglia. In exchange for fostering the young dragons, they would in turn receive protection from the warlike inhabitants of Chalced, a city far south that nevertheless presents real danger to the Rain Wilds inhabitants. Faced instead with Tintaglia's mysterious absence and malformed dragons who cannot fly or even hunt for themselves, Malta and Reyn Khuprus and the council make a drastic decision: hire Keepers for the dragons and send them all north to re-found Kelsingra.
The first volume, Dragon Keeper, sets up the world and the characters whose adventures Hobb will be chronicling. One of the main characters is Thymara, an 11-year-old girl who has been marked physically by the Rain Wilds “magic”—an invisible power that alters some humans, leaving them with claws, scales, or other mutations. Thymara's mother is ashamed of her daughter's appearance and keeps her isolated and fully aware of her “inferiority.” Thymara becomes a hunter, preferring the chase to the company of most other people. When she is offered the chance to become a Dragon Keeper, she seizes it, backed by her father and her friend Tats, a young boy who is a former slave.
Another member of the trek north is Alise Kincarrion Finbok, a scholar forced into a conventional marriage by her Trader family. Eager to escape from her cruel husband Hest and explore the realities behind the faded histories she labors over, Alise uses what little power she possesses to leave her unfulfilling married life behind. Accompanying her is Sedric, Alise's childhood friend and, unknown to her, also her husband's lover, sent along to keep an eye on her. Together with the young Keepers, they travel on the liveship Tarman, captained by Leftrin and his crew.
A liveship is just that: a living ship, with a figurehead that can see and communicate with its crew. The aliveness originates in the materials from which the ship is constructed: wizardwood (the cocoon of a dragon). By adding more wizardwood to Tarman, Leftrin gives his ship even more independence and personality, but at the same time, he opens himself to blackmail: using a dragon's cocoon, even with a dead dragon inside, is taboo. Since liveships are the only ships that can withstand the acid water of the Rain Wilds River, Leftrin, eager to make a better life for himself and his crew, is willing to take the risk.
Hobb's description of the journey to Kelsingra (volumes two and three) mainly documents the struggles between the dragons and their Keepers to adapt to the changes that adolescence and magic bring to their bodies and minds. The Keepers and Alise discover that constant contact with the dragons, the act of being “chosen,” is what creates Elderlings: immortals with some of the physical characteristics of dragons. As they continue the slow trip to Kelsingra, Chalced and its ailing, insane Duke are a constant threat; he is obsessed with consuming dragon blood and flesh in order to stay alive, and his agents have infiltrated the travelers on board the Tarman.
As the final book, Blood of Dragons, opens, Kelsingra has been achieved. However, the dragons are too weak or malformed to fly and the city lies across a vast body of water too far for the dragons to swim. Leftrin returns to Cassarick for supplies and to pick up the payment owed the expedition's members. There he meets with Reyn and Malta Khuprus, who persuade him to let them travel with him to Kelsingra; Malta's baby is dying and needs to be healed by a dragon.
Now that the news of Kelsingra’s discovery is out, greedy Traders, including Alise's husband Hest, are ready to travel there themselves and plunder the city; some have allied themselves with agents from Chalced. In Chalced, Seldrin Vestrit the Elderling sits in prison, waiting for the Duke to feed on him if he can't get the dragon's blood he really wants. Tintaglia reappears, bringing with her an ancient, half-mad dragon named Icefyre who is obsessed with establishing dragons' rule over the world. The Keepers and the young dragons need to adapt quickly to face the growing danger that surrounds them. Alise and the Keepers work frantically together to find what they desperately need: the knowledge the ancient Elderlings have left behind.
Hobb's Rain Wilds Chronicles are a welcome change from epic or high fantasy. Her stories are informed by self-discovery, especially that of the young women characters. Unlike epic fantasy, her characters are refreshingly human and imperfect. Especially refreshing are the dragons themselves: alien and animal, replete with personality but not human. Magic is not the solution, the deus ex machina that all too often appears in this genre. Instead, it creates more problems, worse problems: deformity, illness, addiction. And instead of the quest for power, achieved by brute strength or armies and battles, Hobb depicts the quest for knowledge—a far more intricate and interesting journey.
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Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2013 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2013/2014
A Child Is Being Killed
Carolyn Zaikowski
Aqueous Books ($14)
by Gavin Pate
Carolyn Zaikowski’s novel, A Child Is Being Killed, tells the story of Shrap, a young girl sold by her father into sexual slavery. It is a story with little exposition, one that hurls the reader immediately into the sickening conditions Shrap must endure. However, while the violence of the book, both physical and psychic, feels unrelenting, Zaikowski manages to transform Shrap’s torture chamber of a text into a defiant struggle for survival. By doing so, A Child Is Being Killed both inhabits the terrifying space of its title while giving a singular, lyrical voice to its victim.
The novel opens with the line, “A beautiful woman asks me, what do the dead dream?” Within this line, the narrator lays out the dream logic that propels the book forward, the surreal twists and turns of Shrap’s journey, and the formal constructions Zaikowski uses to tell her tale. For if a child is being killed, and Shrap’s narration is a record of that moment, and that moment turns out not to be an instant but an eternity, then the line between life and death is forever soiled. This may be the dilemma for such a book: if hope is but a dream, and life a living nightmare, then what might it take for such a story, and its narrator, to survive?
A Child Is Being Killed is an experimental book, one that uses prose blocks and competing voices, fragmented consciousness and paratactic juxtapositions. In doing so, it refuses to allow the reader to capture Shrap’s story in a simplistic way—a move seemingly meant to mirror Shrap’s own refusal to succumb to her captivity, to give over her body and soul to those that corrupt it. While the novel might not be as successful in its innovations as it wants to be, it still undeniably impresses itself on the reader. You suffer alongside Shrap and you end up cheering the violence she summons against her captor in its climax.
Too often, violent novels ask us to relate to their monsters, be they Humbert Humbert, Patrick Bateman, or more recently, from Alissa Nutting’s Tampa, Celeste Price. In these books the transgressive is celebrated under the cover of satire, and the victims are often an afterthought, a construction of the monstrous voices that present them. In contrast, A Child Is Being Killed forces us to bear witness from the point of view of its victim. The healing at the end feels faint, and lines like “Even if someone loves you the world is still a dirty liver” seem to suggest how hard it is to be clean of such atrocities. But the book’s best success is the unflinching way it steers us away from melodrama and refuses the assurances of false hope.
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Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2013 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2013/2014
The Dark
Sergio Chejfec
translated by Heather Cleary
Open Letter ($14.95)
by Kristine Rabberman
Early in Sergio Chejfec’s The Dark, the nameless narrator describes his disorientation when looking over a landscape as “the vertigo of simple things.” This phrase describes the experience of reading Chejfec’s novel, an interior monologue by the reclusive narrator. He remembers his affair with Delia, a young factory worker whom he abandons after she becomes pregnant. His search for meaning leads him to interrogate his memories: “I always felt as though I occupied a place on the outside, that my role was to register things and to draw conclusions from what I saw, whatever the circumstance.” He analyzes fragments of the past as an archaeologist. However, he is the most unreliable of narrators, specializing in indirection, circling around difficult memories only to be deflected into abstraction.
Throughout The Dark, the narrator sparingly discloses details about himself: he is much older than Delia, and from a higher social class. He obsessively tries to understand Delia and himself, but has no understanding of intimacy. He cites lessons learned from reading novels, though he notes the differences between fiction and reality. Novels are created to last, while actions and events are fleeting. At the same time, “One doesn’t write to uncover what is hidden, but rather to obscure it further.”
In light of this belief, the narrator turns from words to other manifestations of the past. He dredges up memories of objects, from a flattering skirt that Delia borrowed to her uniform, and later, even garbage. He states, “in order to salvage the past, to salvage that which is hidden behind things, we also need the concrete and mechanical objects and situations that give us life to this day; it is this past that sustains us, but it abandons us if we recover it exactly as it was.” He reads Delia herself as a sign, noting, “there is more to Delia than just the woman, the worker, the person without whom I was unable to wake or to function; there are also the symbols and the forces hidden within her name.” In this mechanistic view, even Delia’s passion is impersonal: “What I mean is that Delia did not understand her desire—she was aware of it only as an assortment of vague ideas that she, nonetheless, was forced to obey as it pursued its own fulfillment.” In the narrator’s world, “people do not express themselves outward; it is instead the outside world that manifests itself through individuals.”
The narrator devotes special attention to Delia’s job in the factory and her social status in the working class. He remembers watching Delia and her fellow workers from afar, marveling at their appearance as a collective entity, describing them as a “herd.” He applauds Delia’s ability to subordinate herself to machines, the commodities she produces, and the collective she creates with her fellow workers. In the end, he is attracted to Delia in part because of her identity as a factory worker; her later combined identity as a mother and a factory worker threatens his sense of her and of himself.
Why, in spite of these difficulties, does the narrator interrogate his past? One clue may be held in the novel’s title. Remembering the early stages of their relationships, the narrator recollects, “If there is beauty in the world, Delia and I thought, if something moves us to the point we are unable to breathe; if something presses our recollections to the very limits of memory, so they can never be as they were, that something lives in darkness and only rarely makes itself known.” These moments, when Chejfec combines exquisite prose with the human yearning for truth and beauty, keep us reading, weighing the novel’s contradictions, sifting through the narrator’s abstract reflections in search of his life’s meaning.
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Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2013 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2013/2014
Psychedelic Norway and Dance
Psychedelic Norway
John Colburn
Coffee House Press ($16.95)
Dance
Lightsey Darst
Coffee House Press ($17.95)
by Benjamin Paloff
In The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Rilke has a bit about how, if you gather experiences throughout a long, rich life, you might be able to eke out maybe ten decent lines of poetry at the end of it. He’s talking about how meaningful utterance announces itself spontaneously from what we live through, though there is also something here of the Modernist word fetish, the same kind of bravado that Oscar Wilde expressed when he claimed to have spent all morning removing a comma and all afternoon putting it back. What it also suggests, and what is easily overlooked in our eagerness to be as badass as our masters imagined themselves to be, is that the line, the phrase, or even the lowly comma might serve just as well as the poem as the basic parcel of lyric expression, its most readily identifiable real estate. When teaching poetry so often means spending an hour discussing a line, why not treat that line as self-sufficient? Why not make it the subject of an article or give it its own page in an anthology? What if the references in a book’s table of contents are merely suggestions, or a rough map of the whole, rather than an itemized list of individual works?
Lightsey Darst’s Dance and John Colburn’s Psychedelic Norway both reflect this rethinking of what constitutes the lyric, and they do so in bold, often exhilarating ways. In trying to grasp these poems’ movement from start to finish, we cannot lean on prosody, as we could with traditional English forms, nor on narrative, as we might with postwar Confessionalism. Neither form nor story makes a convincing case for where these poems should begin or end, though they remain insistently invested in both. Instead, these books, for all their clear attention to design, consist of parts coalescing into wholes, like the exquisite notes of Nicolas Chamfort or Joseph Joubert, or the micro-journalism of Félix Fénéon, published as Novels in Three Lines. (An aspirational title, since many of them are only two lines long in the American printing.) Given that literary journals are by their very nature organized around the principle that individual pieces are self-contained, one has to admire the perspicacity of those editors who accommodated this work as it was being developed, or who might otherwise have tricked themselves into reading these pages as autonomous.
That’s an easier sell in the back half of each book. But even in standalone poems like Colburn’s “what we knew and what we decided and what we built (guerilla warfare)” we encounter lines spoken with such authority and control that any one of them could lend the book its title. It just happens that the last of these did:
Someone lit the firecracker in the trendsetters’ mope warehouse.
We decided to set a travesty.
Then for a while the motorbike was everything.
Our travesty was sin and it could travesty anything.
We built a small fire-eater-in-waiting,
we built a gigolo gland.
We heard singing from the fjords of psychedelic Norway.
It’s not that the lines don’t fit together, or that they don’t accumulate value. Clearly, they do. The “set” of “set a travesty” assumes the weight of the firecracker in the preceding line—itself an echo of “firebomb” and “firecracker-in-waiting” earlier in the poem, soon to be “fire-eater-in-waiting”—just as that travesty, now set, sets up the antanaclasis of “travesty” one line later. The composition is sinewy, both in the thickness of its internal resonances and in the force it commands. But it is also modular, with the strong pauses between lines suggesting a finality to each.
While he sometimes breaks away from them, Colburn is most at ease in these direct declarative sentences, coterminous with the line, their tone sloping downward so smoothly from start to finish as to render the fact of the matter simply, matter-of-fact. Without the line breaks, the same effect features strongly in his previous book Invisible Daughter (Queen’s Ferry Press, 2013); poised in that Phantom Zone between prose poem and flash fiction, Invisible Daughter is loaded with delightful nuggets of faux-wisdom that, on further reflection, turn out to be not-so-faux: “Historians would ring the bells but in the woods history meant nothing.” “A door slows you down.” “Speech had gotten stuck in our big steak dinner.” In form, the pages of Psychedelic Norway tip decisively toward the lyric poem, but the acutely-observed, aphoristic pronouncements—“may the red birds sing for anyone trapped,” “all of this meat is how I am”—are equally prominent as the site where the poems happen.
Does this mean that the poet—and why not the reader?—might rearrange these sentences without damaging the integrity of the whole? Yes and no. Colburn’s work is deeply invested in story; “pre-occupation,” the accomplished, thirty-one-part sequence that is the heart of Psychedelic Norway, is as close generically to a minor epic as anything being done in English today. Yet here, too, we find statements that fit together beautifully without completely foreclosing the possibility that they might be refitted some other way:
Some animals are given the names of their cries.
Birds may have fatal habits.
Any leopard vibrates at a frequency a good deer can hear.
When it is time to mate, the cockroach speaks in the voice of Old Glory.
Little is known.
In fluency of embrace the alligator has advantages.
During mating season, the emperor spider withholds its vocabulary of string.
Baboons spit pulp as a form of gratitude.
As with most any narrative, plot proves more flexible than story, which maintains its contours even as the components of its telling may be re-sequenced. Such surgery typically alters our experience of the story—the art of poetry is predicated on the assumption that structure conveys meaning independently of representation—though the story remains the same. Colburn’s work garners much of its energy from the sense that it is what it is by some fortuitous, tenuous miracle. It seems constantly on the verge of taking its considerable gifts away, but then it doesn’t.
Darst’s Dance operates on much the same principle, with the notable exception that whereas Colburn tells stories, Darst performs. Written almost entirely in long-breathed, disjointedly-punctuated couplets, these pages bleed one into the next, the headers in the book’s first and third sections providing performance notes that are by turns cryptic, whimsical, and occasionally instructive: “[Listening, chanting. Let a crown / rise from your head.]” “[Leaving air open for water or fire.]” “[Lie down in the open space: let fragments / be heaped around you.].” This last one could serve as instructions to the private reader as well as to the public performer, which makes sense, insofar as a poem’s reader is, in silence or otherwise, necessarily the medium of its performance. True to the book’s title, the more urgently Darst heaps her fragments around us, the more we feel swept up in a remarkably kinetic, visceral movement.
A few years ago Katie Peterson wrote that in contemporary poetry the couplet had become the default stanza of deep thinking; it is curious how poorly this otherwise sharp observation applies here. Not that Darst writes free from intellect, or that her lines are any less intelligent, authoritative, or pithy than Colburn’s: “I’m the one who’s always right: the Author. Now I’ll burn you; you’ll feel little bites;” “if he can touch / down in seven states causing millions in damage he can sure touch you.” But a natural consequence of the poems’ dynamism is that such assertions, whether they pertain to the Self (as in the first of the above-quoted lines) or the often erotic Other (as in the second), come to us as precipitates of a lyric process that evades them until they become inevitable. In this way, the most ordinary, direct language in the book consistently arrives at just the moment when it will strike us as revelatory. It is much as John Ashbery described, now nearly four decades ago, as a poem’s performing the failure to avoid ideas: “But we / Go back to them as to a wife, leaving / The mistress we desire?” Darst makes arriving at ideas feel like a homecoming.
What she does in the meantime is to float us in the aesthetic—more or less literally, in the sensual experience of surfaces. This is especially true in the book’s first section, and there especially in the sequence “The Ash Palaces,” whose attention to the finer details of costumery blurs the distinction between theater and still-life, constructing a hypnotic tableau vivant on the page:
. . . as this lust
shakes us intoastrakhan w/ panne velvet train guipure lace w/ broadtail pearl-painted silk chemise
w/ infant nail paillettes so pay, take a broke limb, drape it, artful slashes as if you madelove in a rose thicket. Once all was clean, now “darling, I hide nothing” creeps through our
city like dye
in a vein” “don’t breathe on me” collar of emerald on a jade-eyed captive corrupts, once “I was
worth morethan an alley of museums
Here there is, as the would-be title of one of these poems suggests, “No shortage of symbols.” In their speed and length, however, Darst’s lines are so physically demanding—on the lungs, certainly, but even on the eye—that they usually forestall the kind of contemplative pause, that momentary respite, that symbolic representation typically demands. Then, with a timing whose accuracy befits a dancer and dance critic—Darst is both—she provides that respite, and the surfaces reveal their inner layers: “It parts, waters of the Red Sea close after, what after there is none. empty. Curtains / end this fine chain of impressions your mind could indeed be represented on paper or in // a nightclub fire. We dig old graves but even the best embalming only ends in corpses.”
Coffee House Press, which has given us both of these excellent books (as well as Darst’s earlier Find the Girl (2010), which shares delightful, if likely coincidental, thematic ground with Colburn’s Invisible Daughter), has in recent years demonstrated a substantial editorial commitment to poetry books composed as books—line by line, gesture by gesture, with each part echoing the unity of the whole and the whole thereby guaranteeing the self-sufficiency of the parts. As a model for the book, this is a significant departure from the miscellany of poems arranged, however artfully, from a poet’s work over a given period. While the miscellany has been the dominant model for making poetry books in the Anglo-American tradition (and is likely to remain so), the alternative represented by poets like Colburn and Darst rewards our attention. Done this well, the experience is utterly satisfying.