Greil Marcus
Farrar, Straus & Giroux ($25)

by Michael Lindgren

This diffuse, frustrating, and occasionally brilliant book continues in the vein of cultural criticism that Greil Marcus has made his own over the last thirty years. Starting in 1975 with the now-classic Mystery Train, Marcus has spent his entire career working variations on one fairly simple idea: that the story of American culture, its central truths, are communicated in diverse, sometimes public, sometimes private ways. By finding common ground in the voices that speak from the margins of art and society, he hopes to uncover truths that are inaccessible to the mainstream.

The Shape of Things to Come brings the same strategy to a different set of voices. Marcus's themes tend to resist compression, but the organizing principle here is the delineation of a peculiarly and identifiably American voice that speaks in the Puritan tradition of prophecy—not as a prediction of future events, but as an apocalyptic expression of the sometimes contradictory promises the nation has made to itself. With the freedom that comes with these promises ("life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness") also comes a sense of terror and dislocation as they are broken; these promises and their betrayals comprise a chain, a narrative that Marcus traces through an idiosyncratic mix of high and low cultures and media. Late in the book, near the end of the chapter on David Thomas of Cleveland avant-punk band Pere Ubu, Marcus gives a succinct description of his credo:

Movies, records, concerts, novels, poems, paintings, can seem to vibrate with an energy repressed but not stolen by time . . . you begin to create a personal culture of maps and talismans, locks and keys, within the greater culture of which you are a part...when you approach the greater culture with a personal culture, you do so with the knowledge that the greater culture can never satisfy you.

The texts in which Marcus chooses to locate the "personal culture" germane to this particular narrative are the Puritan pastor John Winthrop's sermons, Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr.'s speeches, Philip Roth's mid-1990s novels, David Lynch's films, Thomas's music, and Allen Ginsberg's long poem "Wichita Vortex Sutra." It is quite a list, defiant in its heterogeneity; such sources seemingly have little in common, and indeed Marcus has mixed success in tying them together.

The book starts out promisingly, with the comparison between Winthrop, Lincoln, and King, who share the Puritan idea of America as a "city on a hill." Through close reading of Winthrop's sermons, Marcus shows that the city on a hill was a utopian ideal, a challenge and test from God, not a blanket endorsement. The same idea manifests itself in Lincoln's speeches, which viewed the horror of the Civil War in radically eschatological terms, with failure or success equally in the balance. King picks up on the theme, not least by force of the rolling Biblical cadences of his peroration, emphasizing how deeply short of the covenant American society has fallen. The chapter is a brilliant piece of synthesis and a radical reclaiming of the image of a "city on the hill," hijacked by Ronald Reagan and his conservative successors as a symbol of untrammeled American exceptionalism—a fundamental misreading of a covenant that could be, and has been, repeatedly broken, with grim consequences. This section of the book is nearly as fine as anything Marcus has written, and is worth the book's price and the reader's time alone. Unfortunately, he drops this particular thread when he moves on, and never really picks it up again.

The examination of the stubborn, haunted characters of Roth's novels I Married a Communist and American Pastoral and the surreal, violent landscape of Lynch's Twin Peaks and Fire Walk with Me is the heart of the book, yet it is here that the reasoning becomes chaotic, somehow both repetitive and difficult to follow. Marcus faces here a very basic and probably unconquerable problem. Since he can't assume that every reader of this book has read all of Philip Roth and seen all of Twin Peaks and loves Pere Ubu, he is forced to expend a lot of his energy—and the reader's patience—in exposition and recapitulation. Reading a blow-by-blow encapsulation of a book or film that one has not read or seen, even from a critic as articulate and expressive as Marcus, is rarely engaging. At bottom, it is a conundrum of intention and of audience: if this were an academic work—Marcus is a professor of American Studies at Berkeley—then his audience would be familiar with his sources, but in a commercial publication intended for broad readership the sources are too obscure to be common pop-culture property. Thus does he try to split the difference, ending up with the worst of both worlds.

The long rehashes are not the only drawbacks, either. Marcus tends to repeat himself, suggesting that parts of the book were stitched into place after the fact; much of the Philip Roth material, for example, had originally appeared in nascent form earlier this year in The New York Review of Books. In addition, Marcus is fond of overreaching hyperbole: is a shot he remembers of Chris Isaak as an FBI man in Lynch's Fire Walk with Me really "one of the most complete and uncanny images of America ever produced"? Is it accurate to say of an early Pere Ubu single that "there were holes in the music and there was room in the sound: it made its own gravity, and it pulled you in"? Such grandiosity has the effect of dulling the passages where he reaches more legitimately for profundity.

Reading The Shape of Things to Come, one comes to understand that Marcus's intellectual existence--his whole life, one imagines—consists of mentally absorbing and cataloguing an ongoing set of impressions from a wide variety of sources, from Melville and Lincoln to forgotten rock 'n roll songs and bad B movies, and then searching out the themes that unite them. His method, then, is essentially inductive—trusting that the diverse cultural artifacts that compel his interest will yield a telling pattern—rather than deductive—applying a set of presumably objective standards to a finite work at hand. Marcus's writing is thus a poetic act of self-expression, not an evaluative or analytical one, and its effectiveness rests on whether one finds his intuitive selections fruitful, and whether one perceives that he has successfully united these extremely disparate elements into a coherent narrative. If your sensibility is not in tune with his, if your personal barometer registers a different stratus of cultural atmospherics, then you're probably not going to be willing to follow him very far along the path of The Shape of Things to Come.

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Kimberly Warner-Cohen
Ig Publishing, $13.95

by Tim W. Brown

The (anti-)heroine of Sex, Blood and Rock 'n' Roll, Cassie Chambers, is a normal young woman, at least by New York's East Village standards. She works at a clothing store on St. Mark's Place and lives with a boyfriend whose band plays regularly at clubs like CBGB and Continental. Although bothered that she isn't living up to her potential, she tolerates her menial job and enjoys a reasonably carefree life.

Cassie, however, is increasingly haunted by dreams of seducing and murdering men in imaginatively gory ways. Brief flashbacks suggest that her being molested as a young girl is responsible. Interestingly, Cassie isn't particularly disturbed by these dreams; in fact, they turn her on, and in one scene she lambastes her boyfriend for waking her up in the middle of a good one.

Seeking better pay but having misgivings, Cassie takes a job as a dominatrix for an elite agency. She quickly learns the—excuse the pun—ropes, perfecting her technique on a steady stream of clients. A former professional dominatrix herself, the author reveals a world that is clinical, seedy, and desperate all at once. This section of the novel proves fascinating to someone uninitiated in the for-pay S&M scene, and accounts for the finest writing in the book.

Trouble begins when Cassie's dream life and work life converge. She is attacked by a client, suffers a miscarriage, undergoes a lengthy rehabilitation, and goes back to work swearing revenge on the male sex. She feels nothing but contempt—scarily real, not playacted—for her clients, her boyfriend, and men in general:

All these men, these scumfucks . . . they want nothing more than to hurt the women who love them. Not that women are any better—suckers for not seeing what's in front of them, for being so fucking weak that they let these assholes in. I, on the other hand, was put on this earth for a higher purpose. S&M's just a stepping-stone.

The titillating subject matter of Sex, Blood and Rock 'n' Roll drives this novel more than its literary accomplishment. Interesting things are written about in affectless prose that conveys a too-cool-for-words sensibility. The author needs to slow down, take a breath, and fill in the emotional details available in the material. Greater attention paid to Cassie's earlier life would go far to explain satisfactorily her metamorphosis from Mistress to Monster.

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Brane Mozetič
Translated by Tamara Soban
Talisman House ($14.95)

by Robert Murray Davis

The cover photo of Passion, featuring boots, chains, and belt buckles, indicates clearly that Brane Mozetic is not writing about the kind of sanitized homosexuals like those on TV's "Will and Grace," virginal as housewives in a 1950s sitcom. Perhaps that is why an anonymous caller to one of Mozetic's characters says "We hate it how you keep writing and shooting your mouth off about gays. . . . We just want to be left alone."

In fact, the traditional sense of "gay" hardly applies to any of the characters in the collection's 35 short pieces. The title is more accurate, although the recurring narrator's major passions are rage at his lack of options; fear of and desire for death (AIDS, violence), often simultaneously; savage indignation at the pretense or whining of those he encounters; and sadistic or masochistic glee at pain inflicted or endured.

The longest of the sketches covers only six pages, most only four. The narrator begins with a sense of his own desiccation, unable to feel or remember or to join in a parody of Communion since it's "as if I did not belong there." He rages at straights who "don't have to mind the looks, they don't live in constant terror of where the sperm will squirt, the drop of blood fall, or how deep they can sink their teeth into skin."

He is no kinder to the "flashy nonentity" in "Disco" who seems "the right victim" in whom he can find "a showdown" in order "to cleanse myself, to gather new strength." As his victim climaxes, he wonders "Is that what death is like? When you hurt bad enough to go crazy. . . . Was I giving him this kind of death, was it already inside him?" And in "The Reader" he meets a young man excited by his sadistic story who wants to be in a book; he has sex with him, strangles him, and returns home "to write, in order to fulfill the boy's expectations completely." But most encounters infuriate him because of "this absolute impossibility of finding in a guy a person capable of feeling for another."

As the collection progresses, however, the narrator's obsession with the "you" to whom most of the stories are addressed becomes more central to the stories and to his consciousness. After another violent encounter, he realizes of his lovers "that the sum total amounted to zero, to some sort of void, a state of no value at all." Here the narrator begins to reveal his longing, even tenderness, and in the lower depths of an orgiastic disco scene, says "I wished I could be with you, and that they would leave me alone. That you'd be with me, forever." In "You," the final story, blood and sperm mingle as the narrator imagines pulling the lover's knife to his own throat.

Mozetic's fictional world is harsh and disquieting, but his simultaneous refusal to sentimentalize and his willingness to reveal genuine, if seemingly unattainable, desire are more valuable than sunnier depictions of gay life.

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Elizabeth McClung
Arsenal Pulp Press ($17.95)

by Rod Smith

Twenty bucks says that Elizabeth's McClung's hellishly engaging first novel never makes it to film—at least not intact—which is sad. Zed not only merits cinematic interpretation, it demands it. Set in "the Tower," a rickety, 22-story apartment building more or less abandoned by the city it once occupied, the book opens with a typical day in the life of its titular protagonist: a fully emancipated (read: "urban feral") 12-year-old girl who makes a living trading everything from candle stubs and broken toaster ovens to information, drugs, and cash among the building's residents: a fascinating assortment of eccentrics, deviants, criminals, wounded souls, vulnerable crackpots, and various combinations thereof, most of whom stay simply because they lack the means to go elsewhere.

For Zed, the Tower is the world, the deal everything, and she always keeps her part of the bargain—not that she's an angel, by any means. When Charles, the toddler son of one of the building's most successful welfare moms, begs silently for a piece of the cake Zed's eating, she ignores him. Afterward, the narrator observes: "Children at best confused her, but, more often, like this, sickened her. How could they stand to be so dependent? For Charles to hold out his hand with nothing to trade, it was beyond understanding." Worse still, she's in all kinds of cahoots with Luc, the preternaturally charming drug dealer and leader of thugs who rules the building with an iron fist and the kind of casual amorality that leads him not only to take bets on future suicides, but to make them more likely.

Still, Zed joins the Father—the Tower's would-be spiritual advisor—when he tries to prevent an angry mob whipped into a frenzy by Luc from lynching an innocent man for Charles's murder. After a couple more little kids are found dead, Zed's curiosity moves her to start looking for answers, leading her into a direct confrontation with her one-time mentor and his minions and eventual building-wide catastrophe. McClung milks the novel's extended climax for all it's worth, slipping into a real-time mode that allows for maximum evocation of ancient, all-consuming evil, rotting corpses, charred flesh, and smoke so acridly real, we can feel it filling Zed's lungs—and ours.

So what's to stop some intrepid director from giving the novel the cinematic treatment it so richly deserves? Well, remember what David Cronenberg said about Naked Lunch: a literal film version would cost a billion dollars and be banned in every country in the world. Zed wouldn't cost half as much, but would easily be twice as banned—if only for the nail gun scene and its aftermath. Plus, while it offers horrors galore and a futuristic flair, it is essentially literary fiction—rich, multi-layered, and bursting at the seams with metaphor. In the end, Zed seems no less than a modern-day incarnation of Maat—the ancient Egyptian goddess of justice (or balance, depending). Luc's avatar is a little more obvious from the get-go (consider the name). Mythic status notwithstanding, both characters—and a few others who survive—are far too compelling to release after a single novel, especially one that resists closure so ferociously, practically demanding a sequel—or two.

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Alex Kuo
University of Indianapolis Press ($16.95)

by Lucas Klein

Avant-garde poetry in English, since Ezra Pound, has been infatuated with China, incorporating its exoticisms, its ideograms, its philosophies, and its aesthetics into its explorations of new verse. And yet, much of this poetry relies on a knowledge of China somewhat less than expert; Pound never let ignorance stand in the way of poetic effect, and many avant-garde poets have been happy to follow his example.

Yet while the Anglophone avant-garde and China have made friends in poetry, few experimental novelists have been as willing to incorporate China into their writing. Perhaps fiction writers are afraid that dilettantism is more blatant when hundreds of pages worth of characters and plot are involved, so the list of English-language novels that focus on things Chinese doesn't extend much beyond Pearl Buck (hardly the vanguard) and Alvin Lu's The Hell Screens. In some ways this reticence toward China on the part of novelists in English has allowed experimental Chinese fiction—such as that written by Shi Zhicun, Wang Wen-hsing, Yu Hua, and Gao Xingjian—to find a few more worthy readers. Still, when a postmodernist novel in English appears born from a deep engagement with China, we take notice.

Alex Kuo is a Chinese-American who put in his time—in the late '80s and early '90s—living in China, and his Panda Diaries includes patches of brilliance. Kuo's eye for Chinese detail is keen, and he employs his observations toward quick, active writing: "In a country in which laundry detergents are sold by names from the animal kingdom—Panda, White Cat, Goldfish—and washing machines by flower names—Narcissus, Lotus, Daffodil—anything can and does happen." His magic-absurdist take on contemporary China is also buffered by his observations, such as when he describes a village plagued by yearly floods:

At one point in the village's history, there was talk of trapping the Floodwater Deity with a net made of every thread in the village and casting it across the river at the height of the flood . . . If they could only trap the Floodwater Deity, haul it out of the muddy water and let it dry in the air and sunlight for three consecutive days, then the floods would cease forever and never again devastate the village. But . . . not everyone was willing to sacrifice every piece of thread, rope, string, yarn, twine, animal hair, and lint for something that they were not so sure about. They knew they would at least eventually use that last piece of saved string, if only to tie some duck's legs together for the market.

More importantly, the conceit of Panda Diaries is Kuo's greatest flash of brilliance: a mail-delivering panda becomes the only friend to an honest and alienated government bureaucrat wrestling with his political past and his desire to reconnect with his family. Taken alone, a panda in fiction could be reminiscent of either Ron Carlson or Seth MacFarlane, but here Kuo sets the panda to indicate the necessity of environmentalism for China's political self-examination. The protagonist, Colonel Ge, opens up to Panda in chapters that alternate with flashbacks to Ge's Cultural Revolution or Tiananmen Square past, suggesting that Panda learns of Ge's history along with us. While Ge is no mere symbol for China (for that matter, neither is Panda), the suggestion is that for the country to move forward, it must open up both to its history and its animals.

And yet, for all this, Panda and Ge raise more questions than they can answer. What, really, is this Panda, anyway? How did he get to be a mail carrier? While the book opens and closes with documentary-style clippings of panda-trafficking around the world, this Panda is, despite his presumed girth, quite flat. Flatness is not necessarily a criticism—after all, in fiction where pandas talk and eat noodles, why adhere to writing-workshop codes of character development?—but the question is raised. If flatness is purposeful, then what is its purpose?

Questions crop up around the portrayal of Colonel Ge, too. In a recalled discussion with his wife, she intones:

"Papa and Mama have always busied themselves with their children's education, employment, residency, and only until recently, even their choice of marriage partner. Except that now with communism, the state has become the parents, the work unit has become the parents. The administrative organization of feudalism with its elaborate but clear assignment of authority and obedience has morphed into this modernized age, even co-opting the one-child-per-family policy that perhaps it had invented in the first place to take over that final stronghold of choice."

If the world of Kuo's fiction allows couples to speak to each other like this, then—talking pandas aside—what is the relationship of Kuo's fictive world to our real one? Are we supposed to accept their language as Chinese or as English, or as some kind of nether-world translationese? In what language was "morph" a word in the early '80s, when this dialogue takes place? When this debate yields their decision to separate, we find that while questions are not necessarily criticisms, this narrative has neither the breadth nor the depth to sustain suitable answers.

True honesty and sincerity is to be found within Panda Diaries, however. The rhetorical questions that parents must ask when separating are laid out with touching eloquence:

How do you tell a six-year-old that his parents who seem to love each other have decided to get a divorce? How do you tell a six-year-old that his parents who seem to love him have more important things to do in life than be with him? How do you tell your six-year-old that you're leaving him in order to shape your own political destiny?

Because of the energy and genius that motivates so much of this novel, as well as the glimpses of earned sympathy, the quickness with which the novel glides over the moments of dramatic tension is its greatest shortcoming. In under a hundred pages—plus an oddball alphabetic list called "The Animal Grammar," an exhaustive compendium of English phrases that refer to animals, as in "to LEECH / Change a LEOPARD's spots / LION's share"—this book tries to accommodate politics, history, family, and cross-species friendship. But for Panda Diaries to be a true novel of ideas, it would have to be larger, more expansive, both developing the characters and their interactions, and answering the questions—about character, language, and China—that it still leaves incomplete.

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Eileen Tabios
Moria Books ($10)

by Garin Cycholl

We all live in a company town. That much seems clear. The question of how we inhabit that town is the question addressed by Eileen Tabios's Post Bling Bling, a pair of cross-genre works. Here, Tabios investigates marketing culture through found and shared language in tightly defined moments, a collection of e-mails by Filipino ŽmigrŽs over four days in May 2005 and a summer issue of Vanity Fair.

The magazine's advertisements comprise the found texts of the first work, "Post Bling Bling." Peeled from slick pages, the marketed identities proclaim themselves. In serious stride, Robert DeNiro embraces: "My Life: / My Card: / AMERICAN EXPRESS." At Vegas' Mandalay Bay, you're invited to "Be Yourself At Home / Topless / Wet / White." The metal and verbal technologies craft "the new" in the Lexus hybrid, "not just the debut of a new car, but of a new category." The travel professionals with Ritz Carlton remind us, "THE BEACH IS SERVED / on a silver platter." In the end, it is "Your Choice. Your Chase . . . Subject to Credit Approval." Of course, this play can be extended to the book's front cover, a photograph of a south Pacific beach shadowed by familiar trademarks. We can read this beach in every dimension of authorship as well; the beach itself is trademarked. But is this marking done by the marketers or the author (her name and the book's title as prominent as the well-known circles, ambiguous squares, and swoosh of corporate logo)? The beach seems deserted by all but the photographer. How "dead" is the author? Capitalism itself?

The play here is wonderful, though not surprising. The found texts of marketing culture are poetry's bubble gum (and sometime sustenance). In The Maximus Poems, Charles Olson underlined that the "best is soap":

And for the water-shed, the economics & poetics thereafter? . . .
The true troubadours
are CBS. Melopoeia
is for Cokes by Cokes out of
Pause

Olson and Tabios recognize the mythic substratum that exists beneath our imagination of this "stuff," whether it is constructed of fructose, image, phosphate, plastic, or language. The imaginative spaces of this melopoeic underworld define the terrain of the work's investigation for Tabios. What lends the familiarity of these visual and verbal images? Does the actor own the plastic or does the plastic own the actor? What self am I supposed to be now? Whose choice is it, again?

What Tabios inserts into these familiar questions is the element of time. In "Post Bling Bling," time is defined by the moment of the magazine's issue itself, Vanity Fair (July 2005). Beyond this though, the poet explores our imaginations of the timeliness of all this "manufactured stuff" in the book's second work, "A Long Distance Love." Here, she initiates an e-mail discussion among "Filipinos in cyberspace" on the subject of "balikbayan boxes," the containers of American products that they have hauled back to the Philippines on subsequent trips to see family and friends. Respondents provide lists of these items (over-the-counter medicines, used clothes and shoes, unpopped popcorn, toys, etc.), including specific brands in certain cases (Costco vitamins, Clairol hair dye, Ziploc bags, Sketchers, California wine, Spam, etc.). Tabios's intended project is a section of a "poetic autobiography based on shopping lists." What emerges, as a respondent prompts, is a reconsideration of "colonialism [as] a very easy label." Poetic devices in themselves, the lists complicate things. The boxes force language here to re-measure our sense of (de-? re-?) constructed borders, how these spaces dissolve or precipitate in the larger spaces of marketing culture. As one respondent, Leny Strobel, asks, "When does colonial discourse become a luxury? For whom?"

The form of the work here is interesting. The e-mails (collected within a given timeframe and ended "abruptly" with a series of pointed but unanswered questions) engage late capitalism with focus (their tightly defined spaces on the screen/page) and particularity (Ivory, Loreal, Nesquik, and Armour). What items are needed, appreciated, or quickly discarded? Which are regarded (particularly by the buyers) as essential or "magical?" Paper towels produced in the United States are preferred by one family member to those produced in the Philippines; used books or magazines seem to some to be a waste of the airlines' baggage weight limitations. By their sheer volume, the lists of things themselves maintain some mythical quality. In the imagination of one respondent:

there was one and only one thing i looked forward to when i opened those boxes: inhaling the escaping smell of america. it was what i looked forward to as a child. i even wanted to live in that box so i could smell it all day.

Tabios, in response, notes the remembrance of a woman who welcomed these gifts with the observation, "Oooooh. Soap even smells different from America."

These lists explore the realities of commodities as well as the magical qualities endowed by and within the common imagination. Understanding herself as a transcolonial poet, Tabios's work rethinks these qualities through the products' life in the time of late capitalism, their real and nostalgic values. For buyers, these nostalgic values are lent by temporal geographies (the past or home as a "simple place," the "exotic dimensions" of the faraway time or place). The imagination of needed or desired items invokes a sense in one respondent where "packing the boxes and seeing all the chocolate and makeup and bottles and bars of soap were so magical!" Another recalls, "i remember when we 'saved' many of these things in manila because of their value (monetary, colonial-stateside, etc.). we put some of them away like exhibits." How do we imagine others as we cross the very real borders defined by need and geography? Is it possible to escape marketing's influence on any such real or imagined journey? In the end, these speculations dissolve as the responses conclude, leaving the reader nostalgic for some sense of a completed (or consumed) narrative. What makes these things (this piece of art) magical? We are left with the blank page, a "P.S." reminder of the dislocations that ultimately define the world.

In Post Bling Bling, Tabios's work interrogates our imagination of the things made in this company town of a world by rethinking whatever it is we are pulling out of the box. Out of the page. Out of the numbers. Out of the ground.

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Edited by Robert Kimball
The Library of America ($20)

by Spencer Dew

Even educated fleas recognize Cole Porter as a ubiquitous presence in American culture, and now the Library of America's American Poetry Project—having already published the likes of Whitman, Poe, Lazarus, and Brooks—assembled a selection of his lyrics. Editor Robert Kimball—who has co-written a book on reading lyrics—only addresses this decision by saying that the book can only "provide a partial impression of these songs." He also fails to speak of the purpose, justification, or imagined audience of this volume, which clearly shouldn't be anyone's introduction to Porter but also shouldn't be of interest only to Porter aficionados. Ideally, it should be an appendix to something else (perhaps the DVD of the American Masters documentary on Porter which mixes biography and context with plenty of audio and performance footage). But the songs do not suffer equally for being on the page; there are plenty whose tunes are part of our collective humming consciousness, plus those (like "Night and Day," for instance) that are so masterfully constructed as to sing themselves.

And there is an undeniable pleasure in seeing Porter's words, marked not only by an ear for sound and a wandering eye for innuendo but also by that American aesthetic of slathering trademarked names over every available surface. Ironic recognition of consumerism dovetails with the intoxication of advertisement, so that questions like "Would the glowworm trade her spark / For the latest Dunhill lighter?" are only partly tongue-in-cheek. He finds his lover as spanking as "the pants on a Roxy usher." While love is rumored to be both abstract and inexpressible, Porter gets an awful lot of play from the sheer accumulation of nouns. He doesn't just draw comparisons, he constructs museums: "prints by Hiroshigi, / Edelweiss from off the Rigi, / Jacobean soup tureens, Early types of limousines."

Those lines are from an early hit, though you have to flip to the copyright pages to get the date (1916). The book offers no chronology, no discography, and no notes; the ten-page introduction offers only a handful of anecdotes. Floating down the Rhine with a boatful of friends, Porter asks for help brainstorming what would become "You're the Top," where, yes, the beloved ends up being compared to everything from "Mahatma Gandhi" to "cellophane." We also learn that "Begin the Beguine" "was inspired by a native dance in the village of Kalabahai on the island of Alor in the Dutch East Indies," a phrase which sounds like a Porter lyric but which, in the end, tells us nothing. Granted, we might not need to know if Porter was ever in Alor, but there is so much else we do need to know.

Porter's lyrics are a pastiche of pop culture, and while readers can be expected to know of Dorothy Parker and FDR, many of the references are obscure and so, many of the tasty jokes occluded. In the simulations of contemporary nightclub banter there's much more than humor happening. "Let's heap some hot profanities on Hitler's inhumanities, / Let's argue if insanity's the cause of his inanities." The rhythm of that line echoes into our time, raising questions about Porter's musical legacy that also go unaddressed.

Kimball includes Irving Berlin's riotous parody of "You're the Top" as if it were merely an extra verse, which cheats readers of understanding while giving them the funniest lines in the book: "You're a high colonic . . . You're the burning heat of a bridal suite in use . . . You're King Kong's penis, / You're self-abuse." More frustrating are those instances where alternative verses are offered sans explanation. All we have for the ending of "You've Got That Thing" is an asterisk and the word "Or" to indicate that the saccharine and seemingly misplaced

You've got that love, and such a lot
It makes me think you're prepared for what
Any stork might bring

could be, alternatively,

You've got ideas inside your head
That make me order an extra bed
With an extra spring.

All lyrics are not created equal, and these read as different as a "kick from cocaine" versus (in a scrubbed-up and drugged-down version) "a bop-type refrain.

The mission of this series is to provide small, attractive, inexpensive books of selected poetry, though $20 surely pushes the limits of "inexpensive." Ultimately, of course, if a selection does nothing but whet a hunger, that act must be applauded. In that regard, this book has value as an infuriatingly brief glimpse, a teaser that will prompt those who read it to dig up and dig into more Porter, and that's the top.

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John Kinsella
Arc Publications

by Julia Istomina

When I came to the United States from the then near-crumbling Soviet Union, America was a vast, vociferous, and unapologetically boisterous "land of opportunity." However, the kind and devoted Russian community quickly informed my parents which neighborhoods and ethnicities to steer clear of; America's proverbial melting pot seemed more like an impenetrable stew. The United States, a land of multiple, variant possibilities, can also be seen as a land of contrived similarities, without a national identity that goes beyond the arid and ambiguous construction of "the American." Therefore, the cultural connection of this nation is a debased communication, one that must fight through millions of individual backstories, coughing up new episodes of "American Idol" as a symbol of national unity.

"Rebellious, migratory / flights don't end up where / they're supposed to." Such is John Kinsella's depiction of "Cultures" in an earlier work, Peripheral Light. Beyond the fact that, as Peter Porter states in his introduction, Kinsella "knows the whole world still covets a Green Card," America, (A Poem)dissects the notion of culture when it becomes a destabilized force, dependent on mass production of popular icons to ground its territory and its various peoples. Inadvertently, Kinsella, a native Australian who has taught at American institutions like Kenyon College in Ohio, takes us on a migration, a voyage that allows for the consideration of how one acquires a sense of self and a sense of country in a land seemingly overridden with cliché.

Although America is a long poem, the various stages and passages summon a sense of progression depicting the trying-on, or acquiring, of a different culture and identity different from what the immigrant has previously known. Beginning with the excited phrasing of "great white liners / sailing into New York harbour," Kinsella floats dangerously close to the overly optimistic and rarely successful construction of "great one-liners." He continues with an almost obsessive listing of various American cultural icons and ideologies that practically run off the page. This technique of listing serves the narrative well because as every language learner knows, one must start with an overly simplified, yet active, language base in order to communicate with the "natives."

This process of language acquisition is further explored in the lines, "Baudrillard says: 'Decidedly, / decision decide decimate deciduous,'" where one gets the sense that the narrator is poking around in a dictionary to acquaint himself with close-sounding words and their connotations, as well as their potential arrangement for the construction of a meaningful thought. He takes us "through border controls as if land not occupied . . . / sometime art, poetry, spicy food," depicting trite images and icons everyone knows—the overly general "spicy food." His individualized perceptions deviate from the "norm" only later, like a language learner who has achieved enough aptitude in the language that he may subvert it, now that he is more comfortable within the environment.

Kinsella's activist political language never dissipates, but only displaces itself like a pinball pinging against cultural idiosyncrasies and long-held tenets. This creates a palpable static between the conscious wanderer and his new environment. In fact, it is this static that may have drawn our immigrant narrator to America in the first place:

In heightened weather I scrape
carpet fibers from my cuffs,
drawn there by static,
stuck on foreign policy
ruling nothings out, balls in play

Only with the mindset of ruling out nothing can the narrator grope his way through the overly simplistic national tropes and reach the deeper roots of thought beneath America's current identity. The process of actively taking in information gives the narrator a sense of "individual freedom" to make up his own mind.

Taking on the ambiguous and all-encompassing identity of "American" necessarily cuts off the marker of individuality and personal ties to other nationalities. Where immigrants might have the national foods, language, clothes, and idiosyncratic traditions of their home country, we have Wal-Mart, 9/11, and Applebee's to connect us. The perceived arbitrariness of locale in America is depicted in lines such as:

I have a distant uncle by marriage who lived in Chicago.
Or was it a distant auntie and / or cousin by marriage who lived
in Chicago?
Narratively, it matters. Nationalistically, not at all.

In the absence of a strict national congruity, America serves up a profound "sea" of space. There is no familial or cultural authority when making statements or committing political actions; there are just too many different kinds of people in America to either agree or disagree with the proclaiming individual. Therefore, the progression of America (A Poem) toward its final bound, an unapologetically ranting mono-debate titled "Capo dot com," can not only be seen as an afterword, but also as a justification of individual thought. While we are situated "in the US of A, collapsed star absorbing all cultures" or "promoters of seed-stock that is patented," we are free to patent ourselves, as individuals, as necessary.

Given Kinsella's marked political perspective as "passive activist" and fighter for human, animal, and natural rights, it is not difficult to pinpoint his view on the all-encompassing capitalist venture. The sense of America as identity is problematic in its very own nature: America is marked by its organization of economy, a "land of the free" with free enterprise. At the same time, this plan of production and utilization of goods inherently affects our sense of community in respect to how we see and connect with others in this country. When I meet a Russian person, there is a strange, inherent camaraderie, regardless of age, sex, or creed; although this person is a stranger to me, we can relate to one another on a plane of identity that has certain and definitive "trigger" customs. In America, this is more difficult.

I should perhaps say that I have taken classes with Kinsella at Kenyon College, a place that presumably helped inspire this book. I have heard him talk about the inherent injustices committed in his daughter's school, the problematic structure of university systems, the nature of Australia and its violent history at the hands of the English. I have both loved Ohio and hated it for its small-town, simplistic feel; resented the peppering of Krogers and K-Marts while still purchasing goods there many times. I also know the feeling of nostalgia when something foreign becomes native, the smell of Ohioan flowers, poplar trees, the kind greetings of the bookshop ladies, the feeling that something unique is turning in the air.

Inside, the book has a slightly different title to the cover: America or Glow (A Poem). The ambiguity is striking: something may glow because of radiation or perhaps because the moonlight is hitting its peak at night. The word "glow" is multifaceted, adventurous, reliant on the contextual and therefore problematic. So is Kinsella's America.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2006 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2006

Jean Grosjean
Translated by Keith Waldrop
Burning Deck ($14)

by Mark Tursi

It's difficult not to read Jean Grosjean's first book Terre du temps (An Earth of Time), recently translated by Keith Waldrop, without considering the author's struggle with religion and his personal relationship to God. The editor's note at the end of the collection tells us Grosjean was a Roman Catholic priest who wrote this book while incarcerated in a Nazi stalag during World War II. Four years after the book's publication in 1946, Grosjean left the priesthood. So much of Grosjean's personal history and the context in which these poems were written insinuates itself on any reading of the text. This means filtering each section of the book via notions of captivity vs. freedom, human suffering versus love, transcendence versus fallibility, and religious faith versus doubt.

The book certainly does engage these issues, often beautifully, as in the poem "Labor," where the title phrase first appears: "Reading the eternal under open skies, you carve out an earth of time. Father, your son aspires no higher than your shadow." Throughout, issues regarding spirituality and love for God are pervasive. Grosjean is undaunted about showing his passion and exuberance for God's creations: "Herds of clouds coursed the sky. And we drank draughts of a wilderness milk. Our limbs lively in the heat of the day. Who is it kindles the highlands?—The mountain twists in guffaws of gold." However, even as many poems ring with similar enthusiasm and often celebrate the sacred quality of nature, there always seems to be an implicit or embedded kind of irony in this glorification; for example, the passage quoted above is, interestingly and incongruously, from a poem titled "Exile."

An Earth of Time also features interesting re-workings of biblical stories about major figures from Adam and Moses to Solomon and Job, where Grosjean seems to delve into the individual psyches of each figure in order to reveal the inner landscape of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Under most circumstances this would mean an undertaking so filled with gravitas, the weight of it would smother the reader. Via the poetry of Grosjean, however, it often seems like a light and airy romp through a summer meadow. The metaphor here is quite intentional, since many of the poems rely on natural imagery—the wondrous creations of God as Grosjean would have it—to reveal both inner emotion and the outward manifestations of humankind's response to the divine. In an epistolary poem titled "Samson," the author makes an obvious and explicit allusion to the Samson and Delilah story, but he renders the reference so deftly and subtly that the beauty of the images supplants the biblical implications: "Your lip on my eyelid like a dragon-fly on gorse . . . World, your smile is lost on me when given to everybody. Since you look at me as you look at foliage, I know how your cornea is constructed.—And I remain subject to your rolling gait!" It is not that the religious narrative is forgotten or rejected; rather, the imagery seems to create a more potent and boundless resonance.

Even with the ubiquity of biblical allusions and the important historical and personal context in which the book was written, these aspects are not the most powerful and engaging moments in the book. Even as the editor's note and the titles of the poems (e.g. "Creation," "Sin," "Adam," "Job," "Solomon") encourage us to read for biblical and religious connections, the most enthralling and interesting aspects of Grosjean's work is his imagery and the beauty of his language. He describes love, for instance, in this way: "A bird flies past. It's his shadow you see pass across you. // The traveler has arrived when he thinks he has never been elsewhere. Rose whose scent, fading, catches my breath." Again and again, Grosjean surprises and delights the reader with juxtapositions and imagery so unique and unexpected they broach surrealism: "Your countenance, moon, is detached from the horizon, the reverse of a falling apple.—Alone, arms in branches, mouth in the uncertain foliage, expelled from my body's hometown. // . . . The fig tree, inspired, shakes down the last star."

Though strewn with often delicate and stunning imagery, the book certainly does not lack in unsettling and even grotesque moments: "My dead sisters, like dessicated [sic] frogs, rush towards me, scenting carrion." Or in a scathingly satirical piece, again an epistolary poem—this time from David to Jonathan, two controversial figures who some biblical scholars believe may have been gay lovers—he writes, "I should piss the Southern Cross into a puddle? If that's all there is, I'll do it, but without putting my heart into it. Cigarettes." By mixing ancient biblical references with the objects and events of contemporary, day-to-day life, Grosjean seems capable of bridging past and present, religious and secular, myth and reality, comic and tragic.

Not surprisingly, some of the most disturbing imagery appears in the "Job" series of poems. The name "Job"—literally "hostility" in Hebrew—is consistent with its namesake. The Book of Job is often considered the most complex book of the Old Testament and involves an attempt to explain and reconcile the presence of evil in the world. It is in these poems that Grosjean seems to struggle most with humankind's relationship to God and, in fact, his own doubts and reservations about transcendence: "I was pulling the universe's sparkling van. But too many ragged hopes in childhood shanties have dried in their tracks. . . . // The louis d'or that, kneeling, I milked from past situations and toss to the clouds are nothing now but suns of stillborn worlds."

Moments of angst are contrasted with moments of joy throughout. Although uncertainty is pervasive, Grosjean seems able to find solace in human grace and nature: "Oar broken on the bank among pippins. Bleating with my valley echoes, this Mongolian overconfident of my fluency. But you, you put heliotrope in my sash before the wind rises. . . . // All I can do now is play the clown on the bridge to light your eyes momentarily." Once again, the exuberance is tempered by doubt, even fear, and happiness seems fleeting or at least coupled with trepidation: "Heart, absolute, that must have a son, your love exists only if it is returned. Sacred horror. Abyss on high, Father of God, what is this world but the print of your face running with tears." Grosjean's relationship between human subject and the objects of reality are often tenuous but are almost always connected to a deeper spirituality. The final instance where the title phrase appears provides a hint at this connection: "The facets of creation vanish in proportion as the zenith weighs and wakes in me. But the earth of time is yours, perfumer. Your seeds fill with stars the space with which you satisfied me." Or in "Jonah 6," he writes, "All the trees flowering, far into far off skies. Unexpected. Perhaps it's snow, but warm and scented. . . . There are days when matter is nothing more than spirit moving." This connection between matter and spirit, Grosjean constantly reminds us, is made possible in and through language, which for him is often synonymous with wisdom, knowledge or sin. But, ultimately, it is love and a connection to God via nature that allows humankind to transcend even the prison house of language: "In order to hear Love breathe, I sometimes hold back my Sentence. It is snowing."

Grosjean's paradigm is clearly Christian, but that doesn't make it easy to quantify his complex cosmology. One might suggest that Grosjean's project is the same as what is often said of Milton's Paradise Lost: he wrote it presumably to justify the ways of God to man, but he ends up explaining the ways of man to God. Certainly, the impulse exists: "God gives and God takes. A mad storm has carried off the house. Adam is astonished and Job sings. I fear your gifts, now that I know your ways. But woe is me if I disdain the windflowers. // Mankind is face and is music, at once poem like a peach—topping the fines, adorned in triumph—and agonized solitary monologue in the garden. Mankind, fatherland of men, the rest is exile." But there is simply too much trepidation, uncertainty, and despair in Grosjean for vindication or explanation for these to be his modus operandi. It is human experience in all its angst and glory that grounds Grosjean's spirituality and his poetics. He is more interested in the space between phenomena—e.g. "getting and giving," absence and presence, nature and God, grace and sin, chance and order—than he is in pinning down certainties about reality or the divine. And, it is always in the beauty of language linked to nature where one finds Grosjean's ultimate resolve: "The sage studies only function, but cannot get around chance. A globe is being raffled off in the sky. It's the first thing one notices. . . . // Glissando and ritournelle—I invented music in order to be alone. With you, I mean, fury of old Chronos and soft moth against my cheek."

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2006 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2006