Positively 4^th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña, and Richard Fariña
David Hajdu
Farrar, Straus & Giroux ($25)

Song and Dance Man III: The Art of Bob Dylan
Michael Gray
Continuum ($35)

by Chris Fischbach

Earlier this month, Bob Dylan released Love and Theft, an album saturated with old blues, folk, and rockabilly. In some sense, it is a continuation of his previous album, Time Out of Mind, but juicier, quicker, and more electric. It has been many years since the American public has eagerly awaited the newest Dylan album to listen to "what's next," or to how he will continue or recover from his past mistakes or successes. In the great albums of the sixties and seventies, Dylan's lyrics and music reflect his struggle to make room for himself in the canon of American Folk music; these days, he has arrived, finally, and his lyrics and music display a solid and wise confidence as Dylan and his music slowly fade into the background of a tradition. Fade, that is, in the best sense of becoming entrenched in the folk consciousness. There is very little Bob Dylan in these latest albums, as there was, say, in Blood on the Tracks or Another Side of Bob Dylan. These days, Dylan the artist matters much less than the work. As they say: don't trust the singer; trust the song.

In the flurry surrounding his sixtieth birthday, it was difficult to open a newspaper or variety magazine and not find an in-depth article or retrospective on Bob Dylan. Subsequently, two books of note were published (one of them re-published) to add to the fray and to provide a launching pad for discussion. David Hajdu's Positively 4^th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña, and Richard Fariña is perhaps the more glamorous, the more readable and gossipy of the two. It is, in fact, not a Bob Dylan book, as the author has so fervently indicated in interviews. I will only concede Hajdu this point because it happens to be true; however, the book is entitled Positively 4^th Street, and it was released to coincide roughly with Dylan's sixtieth birthday. Granted, Hajdu may have had nothing to do with that decision, but writers shouldn't be blind to the fact that their publisher's actions will cast meaning onto their books and do point critics and reviewers in certain directions. As they say: trust the book, not the publisher.

In any event, it's not a Bob Dylan book, or so says this reviewer. Rather, as its subtitle clearly states, it's a book about the lives and times of four intriguing people—and possibly it's not even a book about them. Positively 4^th Street is a seamlessly written multibiography of the rise of these four musicians into stardom (or in case of Mimi and Richard, semistardom; or in the case of Richard specifically, semistardom and then cult icon). It's more or less written chronologically, but their individual biographies are woven in and out of each other with graceful juxtaposition. You can see Dylan and Baez closing in on each other's lives before they even meet, written as though it weren't history, but destiny. Then they do meet, sing together, live together, and split up. In the meantime, a wide array of "minor characters" serves to introduce and connect them to Richard Fariña and Mimi Baez, also seemingly destined to be together. Hajdu's triumph is to create a sort of rhizomatic scheme out of history that plays out in a disruptive, jump-cutting narrative, not unlike a slightly more cohesive version of Robert Altman's Short Cuts or even a Joseph Cornell assemblage.

More important than any of these four individuals, however, is the biography that does emerge: that of a single, symbolic unit, a sort of chimera of artists who feed off each other, love and use each other, learn from each other, and break each other's hearts. All, it seems, at least between the covers of this book, destined; all, it seems, because of Hajdu's terrific display of historical narrative (or historical narrative manipulation), destined to define an era. Thus, Positively 4^th Street is also a biography of that era. The characters are less important than the details of how they interact with each other, and how that interaction is an accurate and concise depiction of how folk music disseminates, is passed down, and how it remains vital to a contemporary culture. The most valuable scenes in the book may be the details of certain sets played with certain musicians; which songs they taught each other and then how those songs were bent and twisted to create something new. Hajdu's book is a sure classic of American popular history in part because it never takes on its topics directly, but dances beautifully around them.

If David Hajdu's triumph is of precise and accurate evasion, Michael Gray is victorious for the opposite reason: He takes Bob Dylan (or, more precisely, his art) head on, and has thoroughly saturated his subject. Song and Dance Man III: The Art of Bob Dylan is a monster of a book. On my desk it sits right next to the Merriam Webster's dictionary, and I see that they are almost identical in size and shape. I lift them up: Song and Dance Man is heavier.

This is not a book for the casual reader or the dilettante Dylanist. It is more properly a reference book, and the office of its ideal reader would include the following: every Bob Dylan album, a list of every live set Bob Dylan has ever played (yes, this is supposedly available), fifty or so "essential" bootlegs, an immense collection of pre-war blues and folk records, Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music, the entire Smithsonian folk and blues collection, and access to the internet with a high-speed connection and bookmarks set to roughly twenty-five vital websites. In other words, this is a book that should be plugged into the wall. If you own anything less than these items, you will sometimes feel woefully inadequate while reading this book. On the other hand, if you would love to have all of the above, this is the book for you.

Originally published in 1972, the second edition of Song and Dance Man appeared in 1981, and this is its third incarnation. Each edition has added a significant amount of pages leading up to this manifestation, which the author says he hopes "is a benign kind of labyrinth or city-state."

The book does not aim to investigate the music of Bob Dylan; instead it focuses almost exclusively on the lyrics, except when a discussion of the music is applicable or can be used to elaborate the lyrics. Gray's investigation takes aim at the lyrics from many different directions and points of view. A brief and selected list of the chapters will give you an idea: "Dylan and the Folk Tradition"; "Dylan and the Literary Tradition"; "Dylan and Rock Music"; "Dylan's Use of Language: Towards Complexity"; "Dylan's Use of Language: Towards a New Simplicity"; "Lay Down Your Weary Tune: Drugs and Mysticism"; "The Coming of Slow Train"; "Even Post-Structuralists Oughta Have the Pre-War Blues"; "Nursery Rhyme", "Fairy Tale", and "Under The Red Sky." Each chapter, then, approaches the lyrics from a different perspective, incessantly illustrating just how deeply Bob Dylan's lyrics are entrenched in folk music, blues, poetry, the Bible, nursery rhymes, and fairy tales. No New Critic, Gray painstakingly compares Dylan's lyrics with the words from those other traditions. (Some of these comparisons lead to another invaluable asset of this book, the citation of old records: name of artist, title of recording, place, date, catalogue number, year of issue, re-issue, and so on. I would venture to guess that there are at least a thousand of these listings.)

The result of Gray's thorough tracking down of the sources for Dylan's lyrics is, to this Dylan fan at least, astounding. The point that begins to emerge is that many of the lines you thought Dylan wrote have probably existed in some form or another for at least a hundred years, and have appeared variously in scores of other songs. This is, after all, how traditions work. But Gray is quick to point out once again why Dylan is a genius, in case you thought for a minute otherwise. One of his main theses is that Dylan uses blues lyrics from the past almost never verbatim in his blues songs, but instead employs the exact lyrics in his non-blues songs (though on the recent Love and Theft, it's as if Dylan is deliberately defying Gray's claim, often employing well-known blues lyrics clearly and loudly). This, by itself, would be more of a remarkable observation than a valuable breakthrough if Gray did not then convincingly argue and show how Dylan does this with tradition after tradition, making his electrifying of folk music seem emblematic of what Dylan is doing to the whole of folk language and culture. Which makes Dylan, to Gray's mind, something like a master fusionist and storehouse of folk knowledge. It's unlikely a reader of this book will not walk away from it convinced that Bob Dylan has a mind and a memory that contains all of the biblical scriptures, and all of folk and blues music, word for word—and not just that he has it all memorized, but that he understands it.

As huge in size and scope as the book is, I feel the need to mention that it is also fun to read. Many of Gray's footnotes, for example, contain out-of-critical-character passages—such as this one, responding to his own negative assessment of "Sad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands":

When I read this assessment now, I simply feel embarrassed at what a little snob I was when I wrote it. In contrast (and paradoxically), when I go back and listen, after a long gap, to Dylan's recording, every ardent, true feeling I ever had comes back to me. Decades of detritus drop away and I feel back in communion with my best self and my soul. Whatever the shortcomings of the lyric, the recording itself, capturing at its absolute peak Dylan's incomparable capacity for intensity of communication, is a masterpiece if ever there was one. It isn't like listening to a record: it enfolds you, to use a word from the song itself, in a whole universe.

There are many such retractions, confessions, and corrections, which lend to the book a sense of its own history and place in Dylan literature. This is accentuated by a brief, eerily self-reflexive chapter describing the state and history of Dylan criticism itself, often detailing other authors' reactions to the very book you are reading. It's that way. But one of the most astounding assertions Gray makes is one that he only briefly brings up, then drops. While discussing Dylan's lyrics in the context of Paul Auster's novel City of Glass, he writes, "The following passage too rubs shoulders with Dylan's own remarks on the relation between Bob Dylan and his creator, Robert Zimmerman." This assertion, if you can call it that, begs for an explication we never get, and we can only hope that it points to a major new section for a fourth edition of Song and Dance Man.

Readers of these books can, however, always set them down and just listen to the music, ignoring history, biography, and interpretation. As they say: Don't follow leaders, watch your parking meters.

Click here to purchase Positively 4th Street at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase Song and Dance Man III at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2001 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2001

Lisa Robertson
New Star Books ($12)

by Jen Hofer

It felt like dense fog. What is fact is not necessarily human. Memory
anticipates. Authority flows into us like a gel. We cross the border to confront
the ideal. Streaky cloudy at the top of the sky.

The weather is a condition, an atmosphere, a reflector, a manner of addressing the space. Language chasing language chasing thought. Through variegated fields in smooth trips, tripping agile acrobatics as trapeze, lovely ease with some catch. As readers of the weather we are caught in the syntax of broken cloud movement, in the desire for accuracy of description, emotion, perception, belief, in the space outside our bodies, within which our bodies occupy an inquisitive niche. Figures, objects, forms, bodies: the space between or formed by, the space along the edge of, occupied by, held open for: shifting elements in an expanse. The weather is an evaporating theory, tide-like frontal recession advancing in subtle maneuvers, negotiated minute reportage tinged with largesse....

we excavate a non-existent era of the human. Everything is being lifted into
place. Everything is illuminated; we prove inexhaustibility. Far into the night
an infinite sweetness; beyond can be our model.

As a model, diffuse: as a sky. As a model, an antecedent diffuses roughly or refuses. In words the weather corrects itself cumulatively, meanings more placed than replaced in a text ribboning out—jutting forth, doubling back—beyond itself. "Pattern undercuts the slamming heat; we speak into the dark and make corrections: Shadow for Hour. Tantrum for Lyre. Lure for Lights Curious for Lucid. Door for Bridges When accuracy comes it is not annihilated; we're economical with our sensation." The accuracy of the weather: not static. As a model, as a mode, as a mutant spiral doubling back into rigorously formless patterning: "Every system's torn or roughened. Every surface discontinuous. Everywhere we are tipping our throats back, streaming and sifting." The weather a form of praise, a form of forming, a form of sincerity, a forum for noticing within the confines of time and place: the days of the week, a residency, inhabiting time and tone, logic's lodging and longitude under cover or consideration, a porch, some verse, perseverance.

Sometimes, just what I praise, I believe. Words
take a verity to paradise.

The paradise of veracity tilts, flickers, stutters like snapshots in sequence. Description feeds: voracious nourishment in repeated attempts, belief the casualty, belief the cause, belief the hinge, no ease in paradise. "Not for whom do we speak but in whom. Umpteenth agony. We rest on the uncertain depth. Speak to us non-responders. Where can a lady embrace something free blithe and social. By our own elasticity." The weather is on and in and through the world: the social adorns, the social pokes through, the social a discussion before belief. Experience filtered through the weather or the weather a window through which to read experience: the weather a log, the weather an incident, the weather an insistence, the weather the attempt the description the nourishment the beyond.

Sometimes I want a corset like
to harden me or garnish. I
think of this stricture—rain
language, building—as a corset: an
outer ideal mould, I feel
the ideal moulding me the ideal
is now my surface just so very
perfect I know where to buy it and I
take it off. I take it off.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2001 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2001

Edwin Honig
Xlibris ($16)

by Henry Gould

Edwin Honig has a flair for drama. His multidimensional poetry manages a speaking voice with a large, fluent vocabulary, both slangy and erudite. His poems are often staged: a dramatic situation leaps to the fore. Here are the concluding lines of "The Gift":

Free! Free! The round voice sings,
mad as a bell swinging with joy,
then stops. Quick! Quick! before eyes

fail against the final wall, let him
know what joy is, in his heart—
the stranger's heart that eagerly
sang out of him, and stopped.

"The Gift," within the confines of 18 lines, sets up a dream-like encounter between the speaker and "a stranger with a baby face" sitting naked and smiling in a locked room, in a pool of his own blood. The drama serves a symbolic function: an embodiment of the otherness of inspiration, akin to possession or speaking in tongues. The process of dramatizing brings together many of Honig's perennial concerns: his fascination with allegory, parable, storytelling; his obsession with the self and its self-delusions (evident in his poetry, and in his translations of Fernando Pessoa); and his immersion in theater proper (his translations of Calderon, his essays on Ben Jonson and the Elizabethans, and his own short plays in prose and verse). Honig's technique involves setting a scene, suddenly, decisively. Within that scene a voice bubbles forth: the voice of a 20^th-century Brooklyn Jewish-American, who unites the studied stateliness of Prince Hal with the rambunctiousness of Falstaff. In the short poem "Late, Late," these opposing aspects are muted but subtly present: a restricted, iconic movement combined with an expansive vocabulary.

In the palehaired fields of August
sunlight gravely brushes
poppies, blackeyed daisies,

rusted roses gallivanting
up an old abandoned cellarway
into the open sky.

A peach tree, hunched and mossy,
hard fruit speckled, stiff,
grows near the absent barn.

Red chevrons flashing,
blackbird gangs swell by.
The titmouse follows idly.

Is it their passing darkens
wild mustard, carrot, parsley?
Is it daylight shadows falling?

A first nightstar trembles.
The sickle moon advances
with a special cunning.

"Late, Late" is a concise example of the strain of elegiac mourning which is pervasive in Honig's writing, and is found in combination with two important counter-tones: a streak of bitter, black humor, and a quieter voice of metaphysical hope. This collection of over 50 years' work shows particularly clearly how the poet's muse is framed by death: from the death of his young brother, hit by a truck while the two boys were crossing a street (in the 1920s), to the death of his first wife (in the 1960s), to the sense of political and cultural death (during the Vietnam War era and after), to the lonely confrontation with aging and dying faced by all (in the 1990s). His young wife's passing triggered a whole range of writing, from brief poems to verse plays, stemming from the myth of Orpheus. This section, from a sequence called "Another Orpheus", seems especially moving:

Her Remoteness

We sat in the lamplight's quiet estimation
of our wavering unanswered fire, one moment
in our living brimful glass
containing each of us, each as yet untouched,
unbroken, asking, Who
will drink us if we do not drink each other?
And neither of us stirred.

*

It is a light lingering on a sill
as I lie half-awakened on a summer morning
sunk in the weighted gladness
of my beached body still awash and unreleased
by the dark tide of sleep
till I advance a hand to touch the light and it
withdraws however far I reach and disappears.

Honig sometimes frames his mournful, rueful, bittersweet intonation in large, ambitious long poems. Most powerfully in Four Springs (a book-length poem modelled in part on Louis MacNeice's Autumn Journal) and Gifts of Light, he expands toward impersonality and objectivity—satirical and social (Four Springs) or a Beethoven-like, metaphysical sublimity (Gifts of Light). The latter poem swells finally into hymn:

Pulsing in the eye and ear
rhythms calling
inner to outer being
are gifts bestowed by light

In the intricate tasks of day
the fishing in
and hauling up
of joys and pains
are gifts bestowed by light

In the endless castings
of the fisher's lines
the slicing of the scalpel
into flesh
are gifts bestowed by light

All
all of these and more
are of the gifts
bestowed by light

This massive collection is the testament of a survivor, and a record of 20^th-century American poetry. Reading Honig through 50 years, one can trace his early apprenticeships, not only to Stevens, Lowell, MacNeice, and Dylan Thomas, but also to the Spanish modernists and European surrealists. One can follow the deepening of his own idiosyncratic vision and manner, while, at the same time, his precise, consistent mastery of diction flows into looser and more flexible forms. In this process he shares the developments of his generation: yet there are ranges of shaped experience which are complementary to, but different from, those of his peers (for example, Berryman or Lowell). Honig was both more cosmopolitan and more isolated: his translations of Spanish and Portuguese literature are known and performed widely around the world; his deep kinship with a Mediterranean—Moorish—Hebraic past filters into his work in distinctive ways; and his quiet life in provincial Rhode Island tempered his poetry with a plangent, meditative quality. For example, here is the beautiful short poem which concludes the volume:

Hymn to Her

The load you take
is dense, backbreaking
and mistaken.

It can be otherwise:
and in full light
wholly undertaken,

the load is slim,
and to the one that
takes it, bracing—

owed to none but
for the life
that lifts awakened.

Note the meticulous, elegant shape of the sentence working against the stanzas, and how right the rhymes are. This lyric by an aging, ailing man sums up a lifetime's commitment in a hopeful key, and declares it good. Hopefully Edwin Honig's dramatic presence and inimitable voice will find many new readers (and listeners) as the new century unfolds.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2001 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2001

Carl Thayler
Pavement Saw Press ($10)

by Reno Lauro

The poetry of Carl Thayler has been largely ignored for the past 30 years, but what a mistake that has been. A man of diverse talents and concerns, Thayler grew up in Southern California. During the '50s he acted in several B-movies—the Hollywood press even touted him once as the next James Dean, much to Thayler's chagrin. Deciding to leave the mills of visual opportunism, he eventually moved to the Midwest to study philosophy and pursue poetry. Over the years, his creative life would be extended by friendships with Dexter Gordon, George Oppen, Paul Blackburn, and Howard McCord, among many others. After his first book, The Providings, was published in 1971, he continued writing, testing himself and his art. But without formal publication his work receded behind an onslaught of writing in the 1970s and '80s that would change the concerns of poetry. The brazenly theoretical and social concerns that became the motivating forces of experimental poetry in those years extended a stark contrast to Thayler's perceptive and personal investigations. Both by temperament and the process of his art, he worked in growing isolation.

On the heels of last year's Poems from Naltsus Bichidin (Skanky Possum Press), Shake Hands presents a more personal and painful acknowledgement of the lonely American West. It's sustained by a focus on friendships and their dissolution with the passing of time. The deeply introspective arc of this work examines close bonds between friends, and the inevitable conflict of those relations as they are played out according to their geographic and historic conditions. "Friends…defined a world," Thayler says in the foreword, "I mean literally defined a world as surely as any instrument of thought might map various placements among which one's attentions might trace, or rationalize, lines of perception and activity." Thayler takes us on a journey—gritty, bawdy and, at times painful—of a life and world lost.

Like the line-drawn specter that graces the cover we are left with questions, unsure how to read what we see. Is Shake Hands meant to paint a picture or is the intent to tear one down? Thayler is a tactician versed in literature, landscape, and music. Like a Merle Haggard song, he artfully pieces together verse using skillful rifts and edges that leave one in a morose middle ground where the joy of remembrance is haunted by longing and regret.

Mercy—umbrage taken at your minimalist love? Well here's your drowned world in a seashell—bandy it about as you have my heart, my dreams, & that's only a slurred summary.

Since love encourages defiance of shabby astral secrets: here's to my ruined liver, the glass raised in apology to the quips of excitable song birds.

There are also moments of lucidity and clarity when raw nerves are exposed and undercut by an ethereal level of reflection. In Poems from Naltsus Bichidin, Thayler tied loss and pain to the historic mythology of an American West. Here, there is a groundedness that comes with reflection and the attempted articulation of that experience.

I pray in bird-time, leap in toad-time, turn the corners of heaven in spider-time, perch on the left hand

of Him, thy most reclusive sky-crusader, the northern lights keen among my feathers. I am a saga in my own right, filling the breadth of thy Lord's palm,

I savor the wonderment of myself, token anthropologist, Ghost Dancer, slayer of the mathematical canon, lineage of One. Pure white crow.

Thayler's work reminds us what it is to be human. He knows the metaphysical wilderness and returns from it with new life. "Imago Mundi as malleable / as the world / by which I breathe / a glaze," he writes, sensitive to the craft of his art. His work retrieves the song of the earth. Thayler's acute sense of the lyric, his ear for music, and his truthfulness extend to us a necessary and compelling vision, one ready to be discovered by a new generation.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2001 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2001

Standard Schaefer
Sun & Moon Press ($10.95)

by Jeffrey Julich

A stem cell from the fertilized embryo of a clone has replicated and spawned and given birth to a book of poetry: Nova, by Standard Schaefer.

Aristotle and the pre-scientific world used to believe in "spontaneous generation," that mosquitoes literally sprang up out of swamps, etc. Schaefer has tilled a Petri dish where meanings and images and story lines spring up ex nihilo out of the swirling concatenations of words he rubs together for flint sparks.

The book intertwines several epic-scale themes; one of them is the science of sub-atomic particles. Quarks and mesons, infamous for their paradoxical, seemingly impossible movement (they pass through each other, can be in two places at once), are the active metaphor for what avant-garde, experimental language does. And there are eggs, and ovals, and circles, and—

The science has a Popular Science feel to it sometimes, but that at least is not a remedial "Physics for Poets" credulity, and it is far from cold or dispassionate. Where another remarkable first book like Eleni Sikelianos's First Worlds, which also uses science as a main theme, can wax mythic in imagining a magnificent, primal Big Bang, or romanticized tectonic plate shifts—consequently a sort of naïve acquiescence to the P.R. the science industry is sending off about its heroic discoveries—Schaefer's scrambling of scientific vocabulary flattens its aggressive proselytizations in a way that leaves its packaging vulnerable to a healthy skepticism.

I read one main Nova storyline, carried across poems of different stylistic methods. The poetry is butch, chock-a-block with boys' stuff, guy talk ("the fist extending to darken the page," "the sting of silver nitrate then swallowed up in cowboy boots," "I sleep in my boots," "Nothing covers the scent of jism on your fingers like armed conflict or sympathy for the working man"). There is a father figure who is dimly glimpsed in the book's more ostensibly autobiographical opening series, "Fort" ("a shadow in a doorway like his father's back / but it was only a guess in his pajamas," "he reached for the roll of fifties and hundreds / kept in the glove box with the golf balls and pajamas," "sirens on the CB—and the old man's habit of high beams"), and as the realism recedes, that father becomes gradually "sublimated" or transformed into further and further distillations of male power figures: el conquistador, bosses ("My former employer") . . . What's left behind is the vacuum of a shadowy paternal silhouette other things try to fill ("laments he's merely an outline of a blunt mass," "In the male of the species, the memories of the man who was alive chiefly in his memory"). There is something elegiac at first about "Daddy go bye-bye."

In the book's second series, "Ovalness," a God father figure gets mixed up with tough male booziness ("God was not built in a bottle") and is put through Finegans Wake-like punning transformations ("Render under Asunder what is Asudder's. Unto Grog what is Grog's"). These are often aimed at The Lord's Prayer ("Our lather who is in curved and thick space, hollow is the sequential advance echoing through your name"), an easy target that might seem puerile or pointlessly blasphemous as anti-religion polemic, but which assumes poignancy when read as struggle with Papa.

The fathers become more and more cartoon-like and comical ("another hilly-billy king whose / context has gone madly insufficient"). He can be as big as Daddy once appeared, a Gulliver from a Lilliputian's eye view ("The tub in the sky where the giants wash their testicles," "the giant has never been extensive, only promiscuous," "bees beat juicy shadows around the nose of the giant") or gnomish. Eventually, the father-figure-comic-strips split and take on funny names, a Shem and Shaum-like, Vladimir and Estragon "general" and "groundskeeper" ("The groundskeeper was imposing, all shoulders and immaculate like a ceiling." "The general claimed to reach it . . . the Grounds Keeper to whom the pear merely occurred"; they're caught playing their boys' games with balls: "says the General over the pings of the pinball machine," sometimes sparring in debate: "According to the crows, one crow could destroy all of heaven, and according to the General, heaven is immune . . . . The Grounds Keeper maintains both are correct") where winner/loser would only be the end of a game enjoyable mainly while it lasts.

In time, these G-men (groundskeeper/general/giant) emerge to be yang-and-yang like facets of male identity ("the impossibility of giants and generals in the same room, much less the same man"). And then they start saying things, things that interweave the book's other major themes of science or grammatology: "'these black holes I call pronouns are but a blue thread . . .' —the Grounds Keeper"). The bigger they are, the harder they fall, and they must come to be undone by their man's work: "The grass eventually devastates the greenskeeper", as if the lawnmower and the thought of all that crabgrass finally did ‘im in.

After their defeat, episodic reappearances that developed sequentially, they are replaced: "the Faculty of Theology contradicts the greenskeeper . . . In place of the greenskeeper, a philosopher was sent". The speculative thinker male emerges out of the chromosomal male. But they were never really flesh-and-blood; they were parahuman ("A point made by the giant: stress on those days was placed on the parahuman aspect of the orgies").

This search for the disappearing/disappeared father, one of the Great Themes of literature—the Odyssey, after all, is the boy Telemachus's search for his father Ulysses—gets Hamlet-like in its spooky apparitions: "fleas so whereas He was once fire-clad now seems surrounded if gradually by ghosts." Indeed, the book opens with a palpable, lugubrious "There's something rotten in Denmark" sickliness: "malaria: bad air / brown wave after brown wave," a sort of Death in Venice sirocco. This is poetry written for a sick country.

There is much of the feel of Language Poetry here; indeed, it is Language Poetry, good Language Poetry. Except maybe not quite Language Poetry. Maybe Lingo Poetry. Or Jargon Poetry. Or Speech Therapy Poetry.

Whereas, for example, many Language Poets announced their intention to make a poetry of text and its printedness, a "grammatology" of language as opposed to the spoken, by casting up right to the surface of the poem a flotsam of linguistic terms that normally only refer to a text (the word "word", "letter," so on), Nova's occasional use of the same material ("Others fear the boards are as thick as a comma," "was it dash marks and vibrating diamonds / caught in the clock," "a dash mark carved through the skull," "the hyphen dividing the autotopsy [sic]," "a void between the letters and details of the window") treats these parts of speech and punctuation marks as surrealistically solid, and emotional. Jots and tittles turn into similar-shaped things: six-pointed asterisks into six-pointed snowflakes, "snow fell with no style / asterisks grew robust"; a typographic crescent shape into a quarter moon, "an aspirin in parenthesis / the aftermath of ellipsis / moon looming"; an etymology, "a tenth of an asteroid used for an asterisk"). The textual is on a plane side-by-side with things of the world.

The newness here is that this masculinity is not a phallic but perhaps rather a testicular maleness; not phallic, but "phatic" (another linguistic term, for the "uh-uh" and "yeah, yeah" fillers that keep a conversation going, here coupled with telling markers of maleness, such as measurements of size or shaft: "a million miles excrete a phatic inch," "shafts of a phatic if transitional species"). Almost lovingly, tenderly: "indentations in the grass / left by poised testicles."

The performance artist and sometimes film-maker Mathew Barney closes one of his Cremaster films with a strange shot: some weird, bumpy, infinity sign flesh protuberance fills the entire screen, squeezed through an opening. One realizes: balls. "The End" and closing credits will come down over or after a panoramic close-up of anonymous testicles. In his Cremaster opera film, a naked satyr has a Barbi's boyfriend Ken-smooth crotch but unmistakable, makeup-powdered scrotum, that tied to long ribbons at the ends of which are tied doves roosting on his shoulders. At his pantomime signal, the doves break into flight, pulling the ribbons in their wake.

Standard Schaefer is pioneering that same, disturbing, scrotal masculinity. In Nova, the ribbons the doves pull are the trails of meaning we're compelled to draw across the text. Nova's politicized manhood is to the male what feminism aimed to be to the female, a sort of liberatory explosion of imprisoning gender stereotypes.

There are some marvelous new slogans to put on our protest posters: "Taking off your clothes is not a revolution."

No wonder Nick Piombino was the judge who picked this book as the National Poetry Series winner: Piombino is a psychoanalyst by trade. It isn't often that Id writes a book. The book is strung together with a sort of fuzzy logic that's so fuzzy it's peach-fuzzy or stubbly like an unshaven chin.

I'm the boss here and this is an order. Buy Nova and read it . . . before it buys you.

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Harry Mulisch
translated by Paul Vincent
Viking ($24.95)

by Jason Picone

Many contemporary novelists attempt to inform their fiction with science and philosophy, but few succeed as completely as the Dutch novelist Harry Mulisch. Without ever being heavy-handed or smart-alecky, his new novel manages to integrate chemistry, Jewish mysticism, and the Pygmalion myth in a beguiling and enrapturing tale of modern man.

Mulisch's fourth novel to appear in English, The Procedure begins with a close reading of the book of Genesis, an investigation that leads the narrator to observe that God formed "man of the dust and of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life." This account of the creation of man fuels the idea of the golem, a Jewish myth that Mulisch updates through his retelling of a late, 16th-century event.

Charged by the Holy Roman Emperor to animate a creature composed of earth, Rabbi Jehudah Low reluctantly applies himself to the Jewish Book of Creation, which details the procedure for creating a golem. The Rabbi's initial resistance slowly gives way to excitement, as he wonders if his experiment might truly succeed. Ultimately, the unexpected outcome of Low's labor serves not only as a warning to those who would attempt to play God, but also as a testament to life's essentially unpredictable nature.

The novel's protagonist, Victor Werker, is a present-day Dutch chemist who has managed to create a simple organism (called the eobiont) from inorganic origins, a process that mimics both God's birthing of man and Low's animation of the golem. While Werker is an unqualified professional success, it's ironic that he can create life in the laboratory, but not in the conventional manner with Clara, the woman he loves; their daughter emerged from the womb stillborn, a traumatic event that separated the lovers. In addition to these personal disappointments, Werker must also weather threats from religious sources, which allege that his experiments are trying to displace God.

Though The Procedure is a cautionary tale about the dangers of overwhelming pride, under close consideration (the novel's epigraph is "So cleverly did his art conceal its art"), another possible reading emerges. As well as resembling Low, Werker also bears an uncomfortable similarity to a golem, a metaphor suggested by Mulisch's earlier observation that if Adam was a golem, all of humanity might be as well.

A man who knows the dead better than the living, Werker addresses his letters to his daughter instead of Clara, because he is more comfortable communicating through a stillborn medium than directly to a loved one. Even the partner with whom he made the eobiont has deserted him, a mutual accusation of treachery filling the void between them. Werker is occasionally moved to action by a buzzing in his chest, but it's not his heart that animates him, it's the vibration of a cell phone that he keeps in the front pocket of his shirt. The chemist's overly logical investigation of the novel's final puzzle limits his ability to find a solution; he has information that a crime will occur, but his innate inflexibility compromises his ability to prevent it.

After Mulisch's previous novel, the lap-breaking and mind-boggling The Discovery of Heaven, fans of the Dutch writer might be disappointed that The Procedure is only 230 pages, but rest assured that all the genius, wit, and humanity of his opus is amply on display in the slender new work. The Procedure reminds us that no matter how man chooses to order his existence, there is no simple set of instructions to follow; in order to feel truly alive, man must carve his life from life

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Jenny McPhee
Doubleday ($22.95)

by Rumaan Alam

Who's more suited to a life of movie stardom than the children of movie stars? Reared in the glow of public affection and flash bulbs, they're poised from birth to parlay their unique luster, whether culturally endowed or genetically inherited, into a career on screen. Thus Anjelica Huston and Carrie Fisher, Sofia Coppola and Angelina Jolie, Scott Caan and Gwyneth Paltrow, the Redgraves and Barrymores. The scions of artists sometimes become artists, as in the case of Kiki Smith; the progeny of poets sometimes become poets, as in the case of Frieda Hughes (daughter of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath); the offspring of musicians sometimes turn to music, as did Jakob Dylan and Sean Lennon. But who among us doesn't doubt the mettle of these second generation artists? Who isn't convinced that were it not for that famous surname and the whole coterie of agents, producers and curators indebted to those parents, their poems, paintings, films and the songs would never see the light of day?

That said, it may come as a surprise to some that The Center of Things, a first novel by Jenny McPhee—daughter of the legendary essayist John McPhee and sister to the equally literary Martha and Laura—is an intelligent and rewarding read. It's neither a transparent, garishly autobiographical novel about the daughter of a writer nor an insipid quasi-literary tale of sex and the single girl. Rather, it's a witty book that uses physics as a metaphor for the chaos of life and love. Critics generally go easy on first time novelists, but most writers would crumble under the scrutiny that being born of such a well-known parent inevitably invites. McPhee weathers it quite nicely, even surviving comparisons to her father's oeuvre.

 Marie Brown, the endearingly eccentric protagonist of The Center of Things, is too tall and too intelligent. She's a hard working researcher and reporter at the Gotham City Star, a lurid evening tabloid. She's deaf in one ear. She's 39. She's chronically early for appointments, and chalks this trait up to a fear of abandonment. McPhee wastes no time filling in Marie's outline, feeding us this information early in the book to diffuse the sense that this is another single-girl-in-the-big-city book.

What really sets Marie apart from her contemporaries is her academic background, an unusual trait in a female character, and almost without precedent in as breezy and fun a book as this one. Fifteen years earlier, while a graduate student, she took a seminar on the relationship between quantum mechanics and reality. Working toward her degree in the philosophy of science, Marie became captivated by quantum theory, the idea that the act of observing elementary particles influences their behavior. Her work on this paper, her struggle to grasp this unknowable subject, is her priority in life.

Of course, the novel itself is, ultimately, a text on this abstract, complex idea. It probably wouldn't bother most readers if McPhee got her facts straight, but she handles the terms and concepts of physics with all the confidence of an expert. She writes as lucidly on this subject as her father writes on geology or any of the arcane subjects generally uninteresting to the uninitiated that he makes come alive on paper, his great gift. Truly, his daughter has inherited that ability, or her father has instilled it in her.

The catalyst for the whirlwind plot of The Center of Things is the glamorous film siren Nora Mars, as enigmatic a presence as Pynchon's V., known only to us readers through the epigrams from her films with which McPhee has liberally (perhaps too liberally) peppered the narrative. As the novel opens, Mars is lying in a coma. It's an auspicious moment for Marie's career. Mars was one of her great childhood heroines; the aforementioned epigrams are a central part of Marie's youth, comprising a game she played with her brother Michael, from whom she is estranged as an adult, in which they swapped dialogue from Mars' filmography.

Part of Marie's duties at the Star is keeping the advance obituary file, but when Nora Mars falls ill, Marie convinces her waspy, cartoonish editor Miles Brewster, the character least developed in the book's small cast, to let her write the obituary itself. It's a big step up from her usual duties, which include ghost writing for her less talented, lout of a boyfriend named Ned Brilliant, a dashing reporter at the paper. Though driven by a love for Mars and all that movie stars represent, Marie eventually uncovers the tawdry story behind her idol's life.

Marie meets with Mars' young ex-husband Rex Mars (Nora, in a delightful touch, required all of her myriad husbands to take her last name), and learns that his relationship to the actress might be far more complicated than most people know. A visit to Nora's sister turns up similarly irresistible material. Marie the tabloid reporter has struck gold, and the hitherto unknown truth about Nora Mars' life is Marie's ticket to stardom. The famous, we see, are the elementary particles in the universe of Marie and her tabloid job. And Marie, the scientist-cum-observer, alters the results of her observation as she writes, becoming involved in the whole brouhaha.

So what's the reality of Mars' life? It doesn't ruin any of the plot's surprises to say that it's a chaotic, squalid tale of embittered siblings and foiled loves. In fact, it's not unlike Marie's life. Marie's estrangement from her brother Michael is deeply felt. Though the reason for the rift between them is actually a bit predictable (I won't give it away here, don't fear), the characters are fully enough realized to lift the estrangement above the conventional and make it poignant. And in keeping with the metaphor McPhee has established—that the behavior of particles is influenced by their observation—Marie has an active role in the Mars family scandal and learns a few things about her own family troubles.

Though her love life is less operatic than Nora Mars', Marie's precarious romantic position is also part of the equation. Her affair with Brilliant has gone sour, though they are still colleagues and eventually competitors. But her true romantic partner is the delightfully bizarre Marco, a "freelance intellectual" she meets during one of her many trips to the Library of Science, Industry and Business, where she goes to tackle the Sisyphean task of finishing her dissertation. Again, McPhee employs the metaphors of physics to chart everything that is happening around Marie, skillfully exploring the theories of chaos that sound so intimidating to the uninitiated.

The Center of Things has a strange resolution. McPhee's strategy recalls the experiments of Lorrie Moore's underrated novel Anagrams: there seem to exist simultaneously several different plots, all of them at odds with one another. This novel, which starts out seeming like a dressed-up beach read, turns out to be about more than romantic intrigue, more even than theoretical physics. It's not a bad conceit, but the end of the book demands a close reading, and readers may feel they're missing something. But it's an admirable feat; the author achieves the momentum of a thriller with the material of something altogether more whimsical.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2001 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2001

Laird Hunt
Coffee House Press ($23.95)

by Kelly Everding

In an essay on Robbe-Grillet's fiction, Roland Barthes writes: "'The human condition,' Heidegger has said, ‘is to be there.' Robbe-Grillet himself has quoted this remark apropos of Waiting for Godot, and it applies no less to his own objects, of which the chief condition, too, is to be there." Stripped of some "something," the object can just exist without any meaning projected onto it by the writer. As I attempt to ascertain Laird Hunt's The Impossibly, I turn to my warehouse of evidence—books that share similar sensibilities and techniques. So upon reading the first paragraph, having to do with the purchase of a stapler, I'm reminded of Robbe-Grillet's The Erasers. Further, as I read the twisting plot (it never unfolds), I think of the avant-noir of Paul Auster's New York Trilogy. Others come to mind: Kafka's "The Trial" and, of course, the aforementioned Waiting for Godot. A definite flavor is suggested: intrigue and absurdity with a dash of existentialism. Dark humor and occasional slapstick accentuate the absurdity and make this pathetic protagonist, albeit a murderer, loveable.

Let me begin again. As Hunt's protagonist relates, "beginnings were quite extraordinary things, there being nothing and then there being something, a prelude and an aftermath . . . many beginnings were a positive morass of the unlikely, the bizarre, the insignificant but intriguingly odd, the innocently calamitous, the highly charged mundane." The novel's beginning is mundane enough: the hero helps a woman find a word for an object and later falls in love with her. However this sort of mundanity can't be trusted in the world Hunt has created in The Impossibly. Our hero is a nameless operative working for a nameless organization in a nameless city. Just about everyone seems to be working for this "organization"—everyone is involved in one intrigue or another in a part-time capacity—so the whole society is complicit in the reign of violence and uncertainty that pervades the culture. When he receives an assignment which he does not complete, he is subjected to the violence he himself had perpetrated. "In picking me for the assignment, the boss hadn't counted on what might become the ramifications of my having fallen in love."

The intensified atmosphere of this world finds expression in the language where contradictions, corrections, fragmented messages, and holes in the story reveal the deep-seated psychological break incipient in the protagonist. Unable to trust his own perceptions, or perhaps bowing to the impossibility of true certainty in any occasion, he often takes back what he just said. For instance: "it was the best time of all, though not really. Never really"; or "Perhaps there was a hint, in my mind, of something sinister about her. Perhaps it was because there was no hint of something sinister about her, ever, and yet she was." The protagonist, in relating events, chooses not to divulge the true nature of conversations or any actual information—instead we are left with a skeleton of events, just body signals and insinuations. Love especially suffers a lack of expression, maybe because it is so rare: "We had not yet developed a vocabulary that could accommodate, in this line, any kind of elaboration." The reader must fill in the holes and become the necessary detective of the story, in effect, piecing together evidence and stray references to partial descriptions of horrendous acts—blood, the smell of burning flesh, screams.

The reader receives hints of atrocities and acts of murder, but there is no objective laid out, no reason or goal of these operations. It's just the way it is. Yet although there is no objective to the violence, there are many objects that make up the world Hunt has created, mundane objects that take on sinister meanings or are used for sinister deeds. (I will personally never look at a feather duster in the same way again.) The objects seem to carry more significance because of their mundanity, as opposed to the human-designed horror witnessed everyday in the city—like the box carried around by the soldier in Robbe-Grillet's In the Labyrinth or the fixation on erasers in The Erasers. Objects are immediate things that take on symbolic meaning whether we want them to or not. We fetishize them and derive comfort from them, from their familiarity, from their nostalgic emanations, especially in times of uncertainty. Hunt not only fetishizes the objects, he fetishizes the names we give them—names which take on their own kind of beauty. However, as the hero's girlfriend explains, "it is not the fact of the objects or the fact of the words, really, it is the fact of establishing the correct establishments on which to place them, that is all. Each combined expression can mean one of these, she said, i.e., what, how large, what kind, related to what, where, when, how placed, in what state, acting or suffering." The protagonist himself is enamored of the "realia" his job requires—yet these objects, harmless in themselves, are employed in horrible acts by human beings. It is the mind that establishes relationships that result in suffering or happiness. Ultimately, the objects we love are projections of who we are. "I was told once in a big bed in the countryside by the woman I loved that what made it always so difficult, all of it, was being an interior in a world of exteriors."

And that brings me to memory, the mind's lackey, which really sets the narrative of this story apart from others. Although the general arc of the novel is chronological, following the life of the hero, his falling in love, his loss of that love, his immersion in the doings of the "organization" and finally his "disaffirmation" from that organization, within the telling of the story time is jumbled and stutters and skips around. Stories will generate other stories told to or remembered by the hero. This interruptive narrative seems to be an accurate map of the human mind trying to make sense of the world, trying to create or establish relationships and meaning from the myriad events we are subjected to in our lifetimes, but the failure of memory to record these events accurately becomes a source of distress:

But perhaps I am misremembering and am subconsciously overlaying what it is I remember now onto what it was I remembered then. In fact, when I was still in the process, some years ago, of actively learning, or of actively acquiring knowledge, I once read that this overlaying process was not possible, I do not say difficult, I say not possible to avoid.

And again, later in the novel, the hero admits:

In fact, given my condition at the time and my condition now, not to mention the considerable interval, it would be irresponsible not to admit the possibility that these memories were inaccurate, i.e., that they did not substantially adhere to the real, or at least to some satisfactory approximation thereof.

We are subjected to the hero's selective memory of what he may or may not have heard, heightening the sense of uncertainty or unreality. Dreams assert their influence as well and become as significant in the uncovering of the mystery as any investigation, and often we do not know if we are witnessing reality or dream. Ultimately, the hero is a pawn in this world, manipulated by the devilish machinations of the organization who are alternately his friends and enemies—often within the same sentence—depending on his compliance with their requests One of the fragmentary covert messages from his boss lays out the threat quite nicely: "Dear Sir, Do not, under any circumstances." In this existential universe, love is a liability, but the hero holds onto his illusion of love into his old age and retirement, even after taking on a new investigation that will lead to information he would rather not know. Does love ultimately redeem him? Or is he doomed to repeat the horrible crimes he committed under the aegis of higher powers? Perhaps a little of both as he moves from one stage of his life to the next: from young love, to fat middle age, to gaunt old age and reconciliation with his own death, and beyond to the next life where love lifts him up beyond the scope of any investigation.

The Impossibly, Laird Hunt's first novel, is a challenging and inventive work, alternately chilling and humorous, that breaks new ground in the world of speculative fiction. Diffuse with noir tropes stripped of their origins, it leaves the reader with a map of the complicit mind trying to deal with perversity and adversity in a violent world.

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Barry Hannah
Atlantic Monthly Press ($24)

by Brian Beatty

What an earnest fool I used to be. During my undergraduate and graduate school days, as I presumed to be studying the art and the craft of creative writing, I somehow convinced myself there was just one way to write serious literary fiction: the crazed way Barry Hannah seemed to do it.

The conspicuous lust and violence of Hannah's fiction lured me early. As time passed I learned to appreciate the splendor of his sentences. For my money, nobody spoke the confounded tongue of the late twentieth century better than Hannah: his desperate, doomed characters lived and spoke true poetry. The novels and short story collections of all other writers I measured against my favorite of his books. I rated the short stories of my peers in workshops against them, too. And I hardly spared myself. My own fledgling fiction attempts often resulted from laborious exercises such as retyping Hannah stories from beginning to end to better imagine how he did it.

A genuine zealot, I championed even Hannah's slim, inconsequential books (the autobiographical Hey Jack! and Captain Maximus and Boomerang) to anybody with ears, including my graying literature professors (dullards and prudes who didn't read Americans or literature written after the nineteenth century). I even mailed Hannah a short story I had written–in hopes of great praise, I suppose. My hero returned my story in the SASE I'd provided with considerable edits and notes, including a suggestion that I check out Beckett and Joyce—"for variety." I don't recall if I confessed in the letter I sent along with my manuscript how I had read and reread his books until I could recite lengthy passages from memory, or if I'd mentioned how I maintained an extensive Hannah archive, though it was basically just a manila file folder stuffed with stapled photocopies: his early student publications; magazine and literary journal interviews; and reviews, good and bad, for all of his books.

More likely, my obsession revealed itself in the vaguely familiar rhythms of my mediocre prose.

Eventually, the summer after graduate school, I was rescued at a writing conference. I was there to study with fiction writer and magazine journalist Bob Shacochis, a student from Hannah's tenure as a professor at Iowa, it turned out. The afternoon my story was up for critique, Shacochis kept his opinions to himself until my peers were done with their criticisms and the table was quiet. Even then he didn't say a word. He simply pushed his copy of my story back across the table at me with a single written note: "One Barry Hannah is enough." His criticism could not have been truer or more obvious. At long last I was forced to admit that there wasn't much call for literary impersonation, regardless how flattering.

So I quit prose fiction for easier work. Hannah, on the other hand, never quit—not even after a book or three that insinuated he was possibly imitating himself. Instead, he wrote through his apparent (not so) dry period, and survived to defy his critics. In fact, his steady, respectable return to form could be a model for many more literary authors than it would be polite to list.

The first suggestion that readers had not seen the last of Hannah was 1993's Bats Out of Hell. A collection of new stories and rewritten chapters salvaged from his lesser novels, the book was surly and mean—and probably Hannah's best since the widely acclaimed Airships. High Lonesome, a small batch of stories in which a more expansive, more mature narrative voice replaced both the Hendrix-inspired prose riffs of Hannah at his best and the clipped drawl of his dim period, appeared in 1997. This new voice worked better in some of the book's stories than others, but more importantly it revealed that Hannah was not content repeating the accomplishments of his earlier work.

Yonder Stands Your Orphan, Hannah's new novel, is his first since Never Die, his elliptical and unfulfilling Wild West novel. It's also, very likely, someone's idea of a Faulkner book (though probably neither Hannah's nor Faulkner's). Set in a secluded lake resort town populated by complicated Southern folks experiencing a wide variety of emotional and psychic hurts, the book catches up with characters and relationships reprised from Bats Out of Hell's opening story, "High-Water Railers." But unlike Hannah's expansion of a short story into the slim novel The Tennis Handsome, this book doesn't bother recycling much of the original story's plot or tone. Everything about this novel is darker and sadder than Hannah's previous work.

Probably saddest of all is Man Mortimer, the smalltime pimp and car rental tycoon whose descent into madness visits treachery upon an entire town. Each of the book's remaining characters (and there are many) exists in relation to Mortimer, but suffers a terrible secret or past, too. Hannah leaves the reader to wonder how exactly these people keep from drowning themselves just to be done with their many miseries. While other novelists orchestrate action to progress their narrative, Hannah forgoes strict plotting in favor of humming, electric sentences. As always with his work, wretched, startling lives are revealed every time his characters open their mouths to speak what's troubling their hearts.

It's a redundant comparison to make, but Hannah is more like Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor in Yonder Stands Your Orphan than he has been in any book yet. But he resembles Bob Dylan a little, too. Like Dylan, whose "It's All Over Now Baby Blue" provides this novel's title, Hannah continues reinventing his song and dance, proving what age and life experience almost always have over youth, ambition and envy. This, coincidentally, is the realization that evades Man Mortimer but not the fortunate survivors found in Hannah's most vividly imagined fiction since his stunning debut. Some dumb coincidence? That would handy, but a fib. And if Orphan is tough going for long stretches at a time—Hannah's moral compass spins in wild arcs that defy even the slimmest light between the pages—the rewards include authentic literary art and a folk wisdom that is as valuable as it is simple and true.

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by Robert Baker

Growing directly out of the complex music of Gerrit Lansing's poetry is a metaphysical doctrine of considerable sophistication. But unlike many systems, Lansing's demands the full participation of the world-creating power of the imagination. Lansing's belief in the ultimate power of the imagination, however, raises some interesting questions regarding the status of reality, particularly the reality of the natural world. To what extent is the "not me" of nature a product of imaginative creation? Is it possible to separate the experiencing of the natural world from the capacity to create experience through the power of the creative imagination?

The question of the relation of the creative mind to the natural world is central to Emerson's essay Nature. For Emerson, nature is a teacher of spiritual truths whose objective existence is uncertain at best. "Whether nature enjoy a substantial existence without, or is only the apocalypse of the mind, it is alike useful and venerable to me. Be it what it may, it is ideal to me, so long as I cannot try the accuracy of my senses." In his view, the universe as we know it is "the externisation of the soul." It exists primarily to provide an opportunity for self knowledge through creative world building: "Every spirit builds itself a house; and beyond its house a world." However, Emerson also defines nature as "all that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the NOT ME." In "The Poet" imagination is a "very high sort of seeing, which does not come by study, but by the intellect being where and what it sees." This implies an imaginative identification with an object beyond the self. Through the use of the imagination it is possible to achieve a kind of correspondence to nature that can "restore" both humanity and nature to their "original and eternal beauty."

Lansing, a careful reader and interpreter of Emerson, shares his rich ambiguity as to the exact "location" of nature relative to the human mind. His writing also exhibits the tension between seeking a kind of imaginative, salutary and restorative correspondence to an independently existing natural world and seeking in the world an externalized version of our own realized creative imagination and will. Section IV of Lansing's long poem The Soluble Forest offers an imagined glimpse at the "root" of perception and this root's connection to the creative acts of writing and ritual (write and rite). "From zero jumps two, two being how something is apprehended. Only a stone's throw from writing to root. The rite of winter is the root of spring." Separation is a primary quality of apprehension, "as things emerge from the void of no-thing." But the imagination, through the act of writing and rooting, also provides a route, "a way and the map of a way." The creative imagination roots/routes our way to the world of things. For Lansing there is no fundamental unity underlying our separation from nature, but writing and rooting/routing anchor a void of no-thing to a human mapping.

A particular mapping, however, can outlive its use and become rigidified and stifling, as we see in Lansing's major work on nature "In Erasmus Darwin's Generous Light." Echoing Blake, Lansing berates the priesthood of the "social web" by viewing it through the eyes of Erasmus Darwin: "He saw how joys were trampled in the priests' black rounds / twisted by quibbles / of ministers and schools / knotted secure." The "worship of document" seals off humanity from a direct experience of nature, even as the "reductionists" mount an attack on "within." For Lansing the experience of nature and the experience of "within" are inseparable; as Lansing puts it in "Stanzas Of Hyparxis, "How far out you go / it is within." In "Erasmus Darwin's Generous Light" unmediated contact with nature is demanded in concert with a proclamation of the infinite nature of within: "within within / all & everything." Here is Emerson's rich ambiguity. Salutary contact with nature is immediate, but ultimately that contact takes place within; it is a product of the creative imagination and cannot be acquired through the filter of document and fossilized text. The imagination must generate fresh roots/routes through nature or come to see nature as "nothing but pages."

For Lansing, nature too exhibits the qualities of creative imagination. In section IV of The Soluble Forest, we find "the crown of a tree flourishes the idea of its root." The most intimate contact with nature is like that between lovers, as in "Perianth": "By far the best farmers / lovers are / whose bodies glisten in the light they make." By the end of this poem the language becomes explicitly sexual. The word "perianth" is used, the speaker informs us, "to remind me of the floral unity of love." To meet nature on its own erotic terms is orgasmic: "we double on ourselves the world / when our bodies shoot / and the heavens open." In terms of Lansing's doctrine of nature, it makes no sense to ask if this encounter is real or entirely subjective. What counts is that humans encounter nature "in the light they make," and that we "double on ourselves the world." The "two," having emerged from "the void of no-thing" find their nexus in the creative imagination. In "The Castle of Flowering Birds," we encounter a group of birds "dumb with feeling." The observation of these birds leads the speaker to an encounter with the passionate soul of nature:

The company of love,
Safe in the garden that is themselves,
More ghost than garden, more brute than bird,
Acclaim the throbbing animal,
The beastly petals green with blood.

The birds are in the "garden that is themselves" and that is more "ghost" than garden. Yet the speaker has access to their world through the power of his imagination to the extent that we cannot help but sense a strong note of affirmation in the last two lines. We are all "throbbing animals" encountering each other and the world on the plane of the imagination, but the encounter is no less intense because of this.

Lansing's view of the interrelations between nature and the imagination is also much like the views inherent in the Magick of Aleister Crowley. For Crowley the universe is ultimately subject to the powers of humanity. "Man is capable of being, and using, anything which he perceives; for everything that he perceives is in a certain sense a part of his being. He may thus subjugate the whole Universe of which he is conscious to his individual Will." In Lansing's poetry there are moments when nature seems to offer to consciousness a power that is on the very brink of the unattainable. For example, the speaker of "In Northern Earth," meditating on nature in a graveyard, states the following:

Dissolve, coagulate, the chemists say:
but the first darkness blinds the human eyes
that climb the ladder of the visionary spinal chord to issue in
the thousand-petalled sun.

It is possible for human consciousness to "climb" the "visionary spinal chord" to the "thousand-petalled sun." (The allusions here are to Kundalini yoga, a form of yoga heavily reliant on intensive use of the creative imagination.) The ascent of the "ladder" is in no way guaranteed and must be wrested from a nature that normally "dissolves" consciousness at death, and "darkness blinds the human eyes" of even the most accomplished "climber." The struggling mage must conquer nature to win the final visionary state. This is also the case in one of Lansing's best known poems, "The Heavenly Tree Grows Downward." In this poem those who bury the dead "must from the grave / establish a habit." In order to "rise again," the dead are buried "in fetal position / knees pulled up to chin." What is interesting is that the motion of rising is opposite to the movement of the "Heavenly Tree." The quest for any type of immortality must be won from nature through a kind of ritual, or rite.

The writing/riting of poetry is for Lansing a testing of the human imagination against the creative and destructive powers of nature and the universe. It is the most serious of games and should only be played by those who would risk everything, but for those, there are worlds to gain. As we hear in "The Cutting of the Lotus," in the depths of nature "water and mud are not separated." There is a god there whose utterance is the creation of his own light: "The words tumbled from all the mouths of the god at once. He rubs himself with his utterance. He shines." This god is a poet.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2001 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2001