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THE NOTEBOOKS OF MALTE LAURIDS BRIGGE

Rainer Maria Rilke
translated by Burton Pike
Dalkey Archive Press ($13.95)

by Tim Keane

Which is the more accurate word for Rilke’s abiding subject, being or becoming? The word “being” recurs the most in English translations of his poetry. One such compendium is even called Possibility of Being(New Directions, 1977). Even his most astute English translator, J. B. Leishman, argues in his 1957 Hogarth Press edition of Rilke’s poems that the achievement of pure “being” was Rilke’s goal, formulated in a 1922 note from Muzot by the poet himself as “the experiencing of the completest possible intensity.”

Yet “being,” in English, seems a too static designation, leaving out his poetry’s constant openings, transformations, and gradations. Indeed, Leishman points out that Rilke was the first German poet to consistently deploy words which indicate ineffable measures of becoming: “fast (“almost”), allmählich(“gradually”), ein wenig (“a little”).” ¹

In Burton Pike’s refreshing new translation of The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, the reader encounters precisely such an emergent Rilkean persona in full flowering, a figure so uneasy about being that he must write his way toward an ecstatic becoming, rejecting along the way each received formulation that fixes existence too simply: “One comes along,” his Malte warns us, “one finds a life all prepared, one only has to put it on.”

For some reason this otherwise excellent new edition neglects biographical context, providing scant detail about Rilke’s life before, during, or immediately after his only novel’s publication. Such background might have addressed the inevitable questions that longtime readers of the poetry might ask: What aesthetic problems in his poetry might have led Rilke to fiction? What relevance does this novel have to his earlier fables in Stories of God (1900) or his subsequent The Life of The Virgin Mary (1913)? Did the novel alter his poetics?

We know from other biographies that Rilke carefully avoided the “prepared” existence that his character Malte dreaded. In the company of Lou Andreas-Salomé, he traveled to Russia and met Tolstoy. Through his brief marriage to Clara Westoff, who was a student of Rodin’s, the young Rilke arrived in Paris in 1902 to write a monograph on the sculptor. They had one child named Ruth. He made a decent yet exhausting living for several years as Rodin’s secretary; he roamed widely around Europe; he read Nietzsche; he visited the Grand Palais in Paris and wrote copious letters about Cezanne’s paintings. In the winter of 1902-03, already a prolific poet, Rilke began the Notebooks during a stay in Rome and finished it in France seven years later.

Translator Burton Pike’s introduction does locate Rilke’s novel within the experimental ethos and cultural pressure of modernism, and his descriptive appendix goes much further than previous translators in tracking down the novel’s dizzying array of source materials. He also explains the idiosyncratic qualities of Rilke’s difficult German syntax. His translation favors loyalty to that often abrupt and clipped style of Rilke’s German, a welcome if sometimes disorienting choice for English readers, but a needed break from the sinuous opacity of M. D. Herter Norton’s version (Norton, 1949), and the often overly Anglo-friendly choices of Stephen Mitchell’s rendition (Vintage, 1985).

“The Sketchbooks,” Pike informs us, would be the literal translation of the Die Aufzeichnungen of the novel’s title. But Malte’s sketches are neither loosely arranged diaries nor a thinly veiled autobiographical performance by its author. Psychologically subtle and cohesive even in its associative, fragmenting technique, the novel’s dense prose is exhausting and exhilarating.

On the surface, Rilke’s Malte is uninteresting. The lonely scion of a diminished Danish aristocratic family, he is by turns passive, hyper-sensitive, and self-pitying. Compared to the neurotic heroes of early 20th-century Künstlerromans, Rilke’s anti-hero is rather boring, lacking the hedonistic proclivities of Proust’s Marcel, the amorous ambitions of Mann’s Hans Castorp, or the megalomania of Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus. Haunted by lost hierarchies and traditions, Malte resorts to wandering the dirty, congested French capital. Struggling with frail health, living in an apartment on “rue Toullier” near “Val-de-Grâce, Hôpital militaire,” Malte begins to write: the entirety of Notebooks unfolds as an intimate epic in two movements derived from a single entry dated “September 11.”

Through kaleidoscope-like passages—some recursive, others entirely discreet—Malte chronicles his interior states with as much scrupulous detail as he applies to his exposition of the physical world, attempting “to transform this capillary activity in a single stroke into the most convincing gestures, the most intensely present things.”

The novel’s most captivating passages are those that circumvent the reader’s tendency to distinguish prose poetry from novelistic exposition. Twenty-eight years old, Malte has strong lyrical gifts and prodigious novelistic élan. Recalling a beloved girlfriend from childhood, Malte describes her “smooth features in which comprehension renewed itself from time to time, as if she were constantly understanding something.” An emotionally frozen patriarch listens “attentively” to other people speak about his own daughters, “as if they lived in some other city.” As in Rilke’s poetry, the non-human world of objects like lace, toys, and walking canes are oracles. “Trees stood as if they didn’t know what to do in the fog,” and “the wind of the day had died down, the alleys were long and satisfied; where they ended houses shimmered, new as fresh fractures in some white metal.”

The novel dilates and detours in and through seemingly disconnected scenes. As if composing cycles for a fugue, Malte writes of memories and fictions, exteriors and interiors, luminous strangers and lost guardians, mirrored reflections and ghostly visitations, sudden music and sustained silences. He communes with Baudelaire’s poetry in the Bibliothèque Nationale. He reads the faces of pregnant women and the ill in the Hôtel Dieu as if they are harbingers of change within himself—which they are. He confesses cryptically that he yields to “the temptations” of Paris but offers no hints about his transgressions. As coming-of-age stories go, Rilke’s novel is often disappointingly chaste and ascetic. Malte, like his mother’s attending physician Dr. Jespersen, is employed mainly in “the soul department.”

Following along as painstakingly as Malte writes, the reader finds literary texts soon indistinguishable from lived lives, and religious visions from Malte’s Scandinavian childhood are rendered as lucidly as the anonymous comings and goings of his noisy neighbors in Paris. Yet the novel is less about the depiction of a self in society than the construction of a newer existence within the gesture of writing itself. The drama is inextricably textual. Momentum builds as Malte’s various conclusions accumulate force through his acceptance of the terrible paradox that we were born in order to die.

This surrender is most poignantly on display when Malte recalls and re-creates scenes from his troubled childhood and from his tireless readings. Describing how he witnessed the death of Count Brahe, he recalls how the nobleman “knew that he was now leaving everything, not just people. Another instant and everything will have lost its meaning, and this table, and the cup, and the chair he is gripping tightly, all the everyday and closest things, will have become incomprehensible, alien and heavy.” The recent execution of the Russian Czar is recast as a poeticized tale of lost omnipotence, poignant right up to its last gasp: “between voice and pistol shot, infinitely compressed, there was once more will and power in him to be everything.” Sentence after sentence, through minute observations of absence-as-presence and presence-as-absence, Malte actualizes a revitalized relation to those “closest things” of daily life, restoring them to an original perfecting strangeness, an aura which words and names, by their implicit denial of mystery, have stripped away.

Death, he learns, is only one facet of the ubiquitous unknown in which we confront our daily being. The immutability of things need not induce morbidity. Fearful and sometimes trembling, Malte recaptures the creative energy he thought he had lost: “For it [fear] is so totally incomprehensible, so completely against us, that our brain dissolves at the spot where we strain to think it. And yet I have for some time believed that it is our energy, all our energy, which is still too strong for us.” The incomprehensibility of death gradually and passionately carries over into his perceptions of all phenomena. By writing, he sees (and indeed, “learning to see” is the book’s dominant motif). Like the saint in the Bayeux Tapestry in front of which Malte practically comes to reside, the narrator sees beyond “the random fornication of distraction.” The novel casts a spell like “a peculiar, sentient, tingling quiet, as if a wound were healing.” This glacial transformation—from Malte as a narrator who resists the unknown to Malte as an evangelist for the centrality of the unknown—is the key point of the book.

Shaking off residual solipsistic tendencies, he learns how to distance himself from his own being and from God. Through a re-examination of the lives and stories of distinctive women—his mother, Gaspara Stampa, the Portuguese nun—he re-conceptualizes love as a form of harrowing grace. Not surprisingly, he lyrically charts these inner changes through recitations of medieval and courtly romances.

The second half of the novel develops this existential-mystical vision of love, distilled by a brilliant re-telling of the Parable of the Prodigal Son. In Malte’s version, the Biblical tale shows the return of a poetic wayfarer who recognizes in his homecoming that his resistance to love involved neither a claim to a fixed identity nor a firmer grasp at being. Rather, “his love scattered itself about him . . . he was like one who hears a glorious language and feverishly undertakes to write poetry in it. Still ahead was the consternation of discovering how difficult this language was.”

The “language” of such becoming marks The Notebooks as a rare form of secular scripture. It was Malte’s language, discovered at the end, that Rilke set about perfecting years later, voiced by that implied credo to endlessness in the Duino Elegies:

begin again and again
the praise you can never
fully express.²

¹ For this and all biographical material and publication dates, I have relied on J.B. Leishman’s Rainer Maria Rilke: Poems 1906 to 1926 (London: Hogarth Press, 1957): 1-54.

² Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, translated by David Young (New York: WW Norton, 1978): 22.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2009 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2009

BELLADONNA ELDERS SERIES #4: Tribute to Emma Bee Bernstein

Emma Bee Bernstein, Susan Bee, Marjorie Perloff, and Nona Willis Aronowitz
Belladonna Books ($15)

by Ellen Kennedy Michel

Rarely has a book been published with as immediate and tragic a backstory as the fourth in the Elder Series published by Belladonna Books, now titled a “Tribute to Emma Bee Bernstein.” Daughter of poet Charles Bernstein and artist Susan Bee, Emma Bee Bernstein took her own life, at the age of 23, on December 20, 2008, inside the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, the day after sending her mother her contribution to the book.

Conceived nine months earlier, the concept for this Belladonna selection grew out of a panel presentation at the Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, “Beyond the Waves: Feminist Artists Talk Across the Generations.” There, Emma held her own among artists and critics Carolee Schneemann, Mira Schor, Brynna Tucker, and Susan Bee. Having grown up at the epicenter of the contemporary American avant-garde, with parents who disrupted fixed boundaries between visual arts and language, it’s no wonder that Emma became a collaborator with elders. She also became a defender of her own generation, wondering what is left for it to do and what forms its feminism will take.

Emma’s closest collaborator was journalist Nona Willis Aronowitz, who is also the daughter of intellectual, critical-minded parents, the late Ellen Willis and Stanley Aronowitz. After the death of Ellen Willis from cancer in November 2006, Emma and Nona began to imagine a project that would let them take “responsibility for the legacy we inherited: to keep the memory of our mothers, and feminism, alive.” Motivated, too, by the desire for “change, discovery, travel, and adventure,” they set out from Chicago in a ’98 Chevy Cavalier shortly after graduating from college, with laptops, lists of names, and money saved from waitress and hostess jobs. (“We worked all summer at crappy jobs to do this,” Nona explains in the book. At the GIRLdrive FAQ she puts it more bluntly: “we worked our butts off at shitty jobs for almost a year in order to hit the road. No book deal, trust fund, or doting parent picked up the tab. Just sayin'.”)

For two intense months Emma and Nona interviewed and photographed over 200 women—most of them young and urban, some of them mentors—and recorded their journey at girldrive.blogspot.com. Their aim was to write a book containing answers to four (“appropriately Jewish”) questions: “Do you consider yourself a feminist? Do you see your life through the eyes of being a woman, or does gender figure into your daily experience? What issues are the most burning or pressing for you, whether in your life or in the world at large? What would you like to see for the future of women?”

Belladonna Elders Series #4 has a swiftness and immediacy, and not only because it was hastened into print in Emma’s memory. It stands out boldly from others in the Belladonna Elders Series, white text artifacts also designed by HR Hegnauer, marked with cover photos of the “deadly nightshade, a cardiac and respiratory stimulant.” As an object, it demands attention—its cover, a brightly colored painting by Susan Bee titled “Lost in Space,” depicts a black leather-clad superwoman resisting the grip of a one-eyed octopus. The back cover, Susan Bee’s “Future,” features an altered vintage image of three girls in short black skirts, sweaters, ties, and butterfly wings. They stand under a banner proclaiming Emma’s dictum: “Let feminism be an amorphous cloud that floats over women’s ideation and visual experience—and that brings us together instead of partitions us off from one another.”

This tribute volume also invariably serves as an interim introduction to the GIRLdrive book, due in the fall of 2009 from Seal Press. In her own contribution to Belladonna #4, “Emma’s Poetry,” Nona Willis Aronowitz writes: “Emma was always disappointed that ‘GIRLdrive the book’ could not possibly embody the headiness of ‘GIRLdrive the experience’. . . She wanted us to be more conspicuous characters in the story of GIRLdrive, more than just the talking heads of the odyssey that forged connections between hundreds of women across thirty-five cities.” Nona’s prose, both here and elsewhere, conveys the energy and intelligence of GIRLdrive. The two women knew how to seize the moment, identifying the gaps and the overlaps between their forebears and feminists (or “not”) of their own generation.

Especially in its aftermath, it’s possible to wish GIRLdrive had also been a film project or even a reality show, capturing its on-the-road headiness. Its ambition was vast, leaving Emma wanting more. In an essay on her loss, Susan Bee reveals that a serious car crash after the GIRLdrive trip left Emma with injuries that may have contributed to a sense of desperation in her final moments. She was also in an artistic space charged with notoriety and intergenerational drama: the Guggenheim houses some of the works of artist Pegeen Vail, daughter of Peggy Guggenheim and painter Laurence Vail, who killed herself in 1967 after more than a dozen attempts—a fact that couldn’t have escaped Emma’s attention.

There is something undeniably heartbreaking about this book. Poets, artists, feminists, friends and relatives of Emma, her brother Felix, and of course her parents, have been sharing memories and collective grief, trying to come to terms with the implications of her death. Charles Bernstein’s blog has a prominent “In Memorium” link that includes words from her funeral service. Mourners note that Emma held a place of unusual privilege and promise in the art world, having been recognized as precocious while still young. Her remarkable elders encouraged her, finding value in her observations and images. And yet she sensed acutely the double bind of her own generation, arguing that they have been robbed of the time to reflect: “These are not the good ol’ days and we know it . . . That reality check followed our whole road trip . . . ‘They had it so easy’ is a popular refrain of Gen. Y. We are bitter and jaded. The idea of carving out time in your youth for self-discovery and exploration is as outdated as rainbow ponchos and love-ins.” Later, she writes: “ Many of us no longer are given a chance to make moves in life that aren’t documented, that don’t only function as a stepping stone to something else. We couldn’t even think of taking this road trip unless it took the form of an ambitious project!”

Like Mary Shelley before her (crossing the Alps on a donkey with Percy Bysshe Shelley and half-sister Claire, the three of them reading aloud from the works of Mary’s parents, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin), Emma’s work spins from a fascination with the social pioneers of her parents’ generation, as well as her sense of aesthetic entitlement, urgency, and legacy. She wanted to be meaningful too, and knew she had it in her. In a piece Emma contributed to Feminist Art: A Reassessment (edited by Susan Bee and Mira Schor) she argued for

Griselda Pollock’s plea for sustained creativity rather than novelty for novelty’s sake, non-Oedipal models that cause respect rather than rebellion in genealogies, for a feminist future that we live beside not below, ‘the right to say WHO I am, not WHAT I am,’ to have feminism conflated with the feminine, for the feminine and masculine to be understood as metaphors, symbols, tools, that create positive dimensional action in all sexes, that the symbolic gesture of maternity be an art world ethos where artists can rear the next generation without having to claim anything in return.

That breathless, theoretically compressed sentence actually goes on: the plea above begins and ends with semi-colons. It demonstrates how cognizant Emma was at an early age of the issues and specifics of American feminism, within broader social, philosophical, and artistic efforts. In Belladonna #4 you can imagine her frustration during a conversation with poetry critic Marjorie Perloff, whom she and Nona interviewed on October 27, 2007, in her Palisades, California, home. “Chatting with Marjorie in her huge living room, surrounded by books, there was a voluminous weight to her contribution before she even began,” Emma explains. The young women bristle when Perloff claims that middle-class women are plagued by “endless side issues, boutique issues.” “Are body image and self-image issues boutique?” they ask, fresh from conversations that unsettled that perspective.

The Perloff interview—which has the immediacy and familiarity of an argument among affectionate, exasperated relatives—dramatizes the paralysis and discomfort a young person might feel while trying to chart her future on the basis of advice from elders. At one point Perloff, who is now in her seventies, says:

When I got my PhD you could get jobs just like that because there weren’t all these people competing . . . it’s probably not a good idea to encourage young people to become artists. Why does everybody need to be an artist, and what shall we do with all these artists? There are too many artists, too many poets. Sometimes I think that if I hear about yet another new poet, I’ll shoot myself, even though I’m the one who writes on poetry. What does this glut of so-called poets and artists do for society?

This is from someone who, in theory, is rooting for these girls. (Perloff offers a written-in-hindsight postscript in the book.)

“Nothing tires a vision more than sundry attacks,” it says on one of Susan Bee’s collages illustrating the text, where recontextualized phrases mark the ambivalence roused by its subjects. Nona and Emma also interviewed Susan Bee, who speaks openly about her own struggles with artistic identity; as the daughter of artists Miriam Laufer and Sigmund Laufer, Bee also inherited the challenge of artistic differentiation and succession. She reflects on her new role as bereft mother: “Rather than having Emma to carry on my legacy and to help me care for my parent’s artworks—as I expected—I am now responsible for her artistic legacy.”

In her own prose contribution, Emma notes how difficult it is to settle comfortably into “one ideological zone.” When recounting her interview with Perloff, she writes: “Her answers threw us for a loop, and my eyes widened with delight at her frankness and willingness to go against the grain. ‘I am a feminist practically speaking, but I have no interest in feminist art or literature,’ she told us.” This is one of many moments I wish I could see on film, the better to decode the irony, ambiguity, and inflection of the younger women’s discomfort and “delight.” It’s the delight—and now the despair—in Emma that may have thrown her elders for a loop.

Untitled, color photograph, 2004. Photo by Emma Bee Bernstein.

It is clear from Belladonna #4 that feminism, photography, and artistic expression have lost a fierce, articulate, forthright, inquiring practitioner, the voice and vision of a young adult who was romantic, idealistic, impetuous, talented, and knowledgeable beyond her years. Her pace was fast, eager, and self-reflective. Emma’s photography (for which she earned a degree with Honors, with images such as the one here, of a friend) played with the notion of masquerade: “In all of the photographs, a set of elusive and unknowable eyes peers out from the layers of artifice, trying to see and be seen. There is a tragic element, as despite all the attempts at engendering an image that matches a mental picture, the woman underneath the clothes and behind the skin remains a mystery to us and to herself.” That Emma suffered so much at the end of her life confers a harder look at the issues that consumed her.

The final essay is by editors Emily Beall, HR Hegnauer, Erica Kaufman, and Rachel Levitsky. They note that Emma raised “critical and urgent questions through her vivid, pointed expression of the dire effects the speeding up of time and the narrowing of space (despite the expanding virtual field) have had on her own generation.” Their hope is that the work will “provide a way to pick up the challenging matters Emma testifies to—of continuity and disruption, speed and anxiety, and the communal limits of virtual life.”

Meanwhile, Nona Willis Aronowitz continues to push GIRLdrive forward, inhabiting the virtual world, twittering, visiting cities, giving talks, and calling for more time to expand and diversify the project: “As soon as I finish the manuscript, I plan to start plotting a GIRLdrive.org,” she writes. “I would love for GIRLdrive to have mentoring programs, funding for women doing similar projects, or anything else that seems right.”

And then there are these words—Emma’s—belying her now posthumous fame: “Retrace your route in reflection, but look only as far as the blur of the passing yellow lines to see the present. Race your future to the finish line.”

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2009 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2009

Noteworthy Reprint – WAIT FOR ME AT THE BOTTOM OF THE POOL

The Writings of Jack Smith
edited by J. Hoberman and Edward Leffingwell
High Risk Books ($16.99)

by Spencer Dew

“Corniness is the other side of marvelousness,” argues Jack Smith in his breakthrough essay “The Perfect Filmic Appositeness of Maria Montez.” Published in Film Culture months before the release of his film Flaming Creatures, the piece champions a trash aesthetic of “personal masterpieces,” rhapsodizing over a “whole gaudy array of secret-flix” remembered from Smith’s childhood. “Dorothy Lamour sarong flix,” “all Spanish Galleon flix,” “all Busby Berkeley flix,” and “all musicals that had production numbers,” are included, but as the title indicates, a special reverence is reserved for the Marvelous One, B-movie queen Maria Montez—Smith’s lifelong muse and star of such “secret-flix” as Arabian Nights, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, and Cobra Woman, from which he lifted his taste for over-the-top Orientalist exotica, convulsive sensualism, and pulpy plot elements. Invoking and attempting to channel the spirit of Montez in his own work, Smith paid homage to “whatever in her that turned plaster cornball sets to beauty.” The wonder and gorgeousness of art, as Smith saw it, was in making glory out of junk—exotic pyramids of Baghdad built from mounds of plaster in a ruined loft apartment, for instance, or fearsome creatures like the White Bat and Green Mummy costumed entirely in secondhand clothes and rags. Movies, as a medium, were magical, related to dreams, offering escapist hallucinations and, via the flickering of visual images, ecstasy.

Yet for Smith, art was not merely “entertaining, escapist, stunning, glamorous,” etc. It was also conceived as a “dream weapon” against the oppressions of capitalism, landlordism, and the rental society. In Smith’s personal argot, the scum of Baghdad was the term for the most receptive of audiences, and the Lobster was synonymous with individual landlords and the crushing regime of property ownership more broadly. Pasty normal straights and sugar zombies alike were held under the grip of these red claws, but worse, for the underground artists, was the fact that “critics are the hand maidens (sic) of the Lobster.”Flaming Creatures met first with infamy (raids, arrests, legal battles) and then with entombment in the crypts of critics. Jonas Mekas, who purchased, toured with, and was arrested for screening the film, became a villain in Smith’s mythology: Uncle Roachcrust, Uncle Fishhook, Uncle Oldie, Uncle Artie, etc. “Still, it’s nice to be let out of the safe every ten years whenever there’s some retrospective program,” Smith would snarl in his performance piece “What’s Underground About Marshmallows?” This collection voices such rage while also offering a broader context for understanding the pageantry and passion of Smith’s films and his understanding of his own political agenda.

Along with his revelries devoted to Maria Montez (both nonfiction and fiction), his rants against landlordism and narcotics laws (“Marijuana,” he argues, is “not more a drug than consumerism and much less hypnotic than landlordism”), and his theories on the use value of sexual fantasizing in general (“the pitiful means whereby the truly unpleasant difficult sex function is swathed in glamour, perversity, and ultimately, simply, interest”) and pornography in specific (“of course when the quester after ecstasy finds realistic love the sex fantasies are put aside and forgotten”), there is also included here a probing interview with Sylvére Lotringer, who examines Smith’s anarchism and his idealistic notion of a socialist society based entirely on “social ways of sharing.” Journal notes on the filming of Normal Love (featuring poet Diane di Prima, who, after a scene revolving around a giant Claes Oldenburg birthday cake, promptly gave birth to a son) and hilarious scatological routines like “The White Pig of the Medina” (which reads as imitative of William S. Burroughs) round out the volume, but it is impossible not to feel the glaring lack of photographic images.

Smith—who in the wake of the brouhaha over Flaming Creatures turned against the notion of autonomous artwork and kept all of his subsequent films unfinished, performance pieces that required his presence at the projection—produced a vast oeuvre of posed still images, some used as slides, that represent his strongest and most formally influential work. Both editors of Wait for Me at the Bottom of the Pool have produced their own books on Smith’s work, books that include pictures. One can only hope that the reissue of this volume (originally published in 1997) heralds, along with Mary Jordan’s excellent 2006 documentary Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis, a resurgence of interest in Smith and his work, which will, in turn, lead to restoration and redistribution of his films and further collections of his photographs.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2009 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2009

Burning Behind the Unnamable: an interview with David F. Hoenigman

by David Moscovich

David F. Hoenigman is the author of Burn Your Belongings, dubbed by reviewer Gary J. Shipley “an ultra-minimalist work: each page is a paragraph and each paragraph is devoid of proper names, commas, colons, semi-colons, question marks, dialogue and standard capitalization—apart of course from the all important first-person pronoun.” Indeed, the book eschews a standard format, but the form which remains begs the reader to blur the eyes, step back, and view the work visually, skipping lines as the eye would cast over an atomic mosaic. Everyone has the chance to create their own reading of this anti-novel, as each sentence seems to collapse one over the other, smearing time in favor of fluidity. When I told the author of my tendency to read his book the way one might appreciate a cottonwood grove, allowing the vision to secede naturally from one leaf to another, he said, “Burn Your Belongings is nonprescriptive and meant to be used/read however you see fit, like a roll of duct tape, or anything else you’d buy.”

Hoenigman was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, but has lived in Tokyo, Japan since 1998. He is the organizer of the bimonthly PAINT YOUR TEETH event held in Tokyo, a celebration of experimental music, literature and dance, and is currently working on his second novel, Squeal For Joy.

David Moscovich: Sections of Burn Your Belongings could be viewed as a comment on the roboticism or conformity of Japanese, or life in Japan as a second-class citizen or foreigner. For example “ I’m walking through the train station wondering if I’m the only one that’s real. if the rest aren’t made of clay. or merely visions.” Or is this interpretation just superimposing a cultural template on this work?

David F. Hoenigman: I knew that by its nature, Burn Your Belongings could be interpreted in many ways—that’s what I wanted—but the idea of it being critical of the Japanese is something that makes me very uncomfortable. I think most Americans are conformist, so I don’t really feel I’m in a position to get on my high horse about it. What you picked up on is a feeling of distance from the rest of society: I’m trying to show self-discovery. The comments are always from an individual’s point of view.

Although it’s never directly mentioned, Tokyo plays a role in the atmosphere of the book: the hectic lifestyle, on and off trains, always surrounded by people, hearing your neighbor blow his nose through the wall—but I wasn’t trying to criticize Japanese society. I love Tokyo and the surrounding area. The dirty river I mention in the book is a place I still often go to sit and talk with friends. I was happy to see a scene in Shozin Fukui’s 964 Pinocchio that has two of the characters sitting in front of the owl statue in Ikebukuro station—that statue is in my book. Japan’s been my home for ten years. I’m just a negative person at times. I think some of the negativity and distance still would have been there if I’d written the book in Cleveland. When I’m in a certain mood, humanity looks ugly to me, wherever I happen to be living.

DM: How has living as a foreigner in this country affected the language in Burn Your Belongings?

DH: I had made up my mind beforehand that the language would be stripped down. I wanted sparseness, space. In my daily life, people spoke to me in simple English and I spoke to them in simple Japanese—so I suppose my appreciation of a few well-placed basic words would have been at an all-time high. Yes, I think being emerged in choppy, broken speech affected the language I used. I think it added to the sparseness.

DM: Considering the Japanese lexicon, in which the subject is often emitted as superfluous, are you playing off this—highlighting the subject by downplaying it?

DH: Yes, perhaps studying Japanese had an effect. I was thinking about sentence structure a lot, and trying to maintain a certain rhythm throughout the book. Studying a foreign language makes words jump around in your head in new ways. Hopefully I capitalized on that a bit. I wanted to highlight things by leaving them absent. I also had a few Jandek albums I was listening to; I loved how the space in his songs lyrically and musically gave everything a special glow. Not knowing his identity and the album photos added to the creepiness. . . I wanted some of that.

DM: Do you see Beckett’s How It Is as a predecessor and/or Cormac McCarthy’s The Road as a kindred work?

DH: I’ll have to read How It Is and The Road. It’s been interesting for me. People always bring up stuff I haven’t read yet: Robert Grenier’s “I HATE SPEECH,” Ron Silliman’s Sunset Debris, Pierre Guyotat’sEden, Eden, Eden. I’m happy to be turned on to things. I plan to read them all.

Samuel Beckett was a definite influence, but I had only read Waiting for Godot, Watt and some essays on him before I began to work on Burn Your Belongings. Something about Godot seemed to stay intact in my head. I studied it at school, and watched a TV version with Burgess Meredith. Even though a lot of time had elapsed since then; it was something I thought about a lot. I was intrigued that I didn’t know anything about these characters or the place where this dialogue was unfolding, yet I was spellbound by their interactions. There’s something about the unknown that gives the characters an almost holiness. Recently I’ve been reading the Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable trilogy and I read the biography by Deirdre Bair, but it was Godot that really set me off. I love that something you can read in a single afternoon can change your whole conception of art.

Another influence was Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers. I like how the characters would swirl together and you’d have a hard time figuring out who was who, or suddenly a character’s sex would change, or you don’t know if something is actually happening or if it’s in someone’s head. . . Again, it’s the whole idea of not understanding that I find invigorating. It’s almost like Genet is saying you must stop worrying about all the identifiable surface stuff if you hope to grasp what he’s getting at. It’s a question of renouncing the material to understand the spiritual. Burn your belongings.

Another book that I found really inspirational was Randie Lipkin’s Untitled (A Skier). I don’t often see this book mentioned elsewhere and I think it’s a crime. I had reached a point where I had the Burn Your Belongings material ready to go more or less, and I had an idea of how I wanted to put it all together, but I was really beginning to lose faith in the concept of the book. I don’t know. . . something about going through it all with a magnifying glass had my confidence really rattled. I knew that rhythm had to be, must be, a key element to this writing or else the whole thing would fall apart. So I became worried that I was relying too heavily on rhythm to pull me through and may have wasted years on material that was unsalvageable. It was a horrible feeling. Then I read Lipkin’s book. I’d never seen a novel use rhythm and repetition so beautifully—it’s just a soft snow flurry of phrases being repeated in a different order. Maybe a bit more information each time, but turning over the same things again and again, and throwing in something new and then repeating that again a bit later as if it had passed an initiation and been accepted so now could be repeated, and things that are said almost every page, and things that only seem to be repeated two or three times in all. . . Once I finished reading this book, I knew I could finish writing mine.

A bit different from that, but still along those lines for me would be the music of Daniel Johnston. For over 25 years, he’s written dozens and dozens of songs about the same girl who sat next to him in art school. Again and again the same story, the same girl. It’s not even a good story from our perspective—he didn’t get the girl in real life and he never gets her in the songs. Granted, he’s a genius at melody and has tools at his disposal that I don’t, but I think it was an important lesson for me that art can transcend the subject matter. I struggled with writing for a while because I felt I was always writing about the same things; I wanted to write about everyday life but it didn’t seem to change much from day to day. Daniel Johnston taught me not to be afraid to turn the same seashell over and over again in my hand. If the inspiration keeps coming, let it take its course.

DM: You mentioned Beckett as a major influence. With The Unnamable trilogy, the “ I” disappears in a way that Beckett sets up starting with the first two novels. In Burn Your Belongings, it’s more of a consistent play on syntax that lets the eye jump around the book. My reading impulse was not to approach the book from front to back. Was that intentional?

DH: Yes. I’ve always thought it was a cool idea that a book doesn’t need to be read from front to back. I think Henry Miller mentioned that in one of his books, but I’m sure he wasn’t the first or the last. Kenji Siratori told me the same thing about Blood Electric. Burn Your Belongings is nonprescriptive and meant to be used/read however you see fit, like a roll of duct tape, or anything else you’d buy. One guy told me he keeps it on his nightstand and when he’s in a very specific mood he reads exactly one page and puts it down. Another guy told me he only reads it aloud. I got an email from a woman saying

. . . the first 8 pages I read about 4 times to see if my eyes were having games with me. I concluded one night that every third sentence was the main character, and that was the code. And so I read 8 pages only reading every third sentence. . . . so you may be angry as I don’t read in the order I am supposed to.

All this makes me very happy. Start at the front, start at the back, from the middle, hang from your feet like a bat—but I say THANK YOU to whoever takes the time to read it.

Speaking of The Unnamable—I always read that book aloud.

DM: You also mentioned Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers, how the characters swirl together and you have a hard time discerning who is who. Genet’s story is being told from a prison cell, and the characters are arguably just a fabrication for the narrator’s entertainment; amongst the characters is a transvestite who changes from He to She. Similarly, the He and the I seem to be not strictly delineated in your novel.

DH: No, they swirl all over the place. Whoever happens to be on my mind. Sometimes it’s memories from childhood. Sometimes it’s a conversation or incident from that day. Though I think you’ll notice She is typically feminine and He is typically masculine in the way they interact with each other—not that I feel people need to adhere to expected roles, I was just writing about my life and it came out that way. Perhaps elements of the relationships I was writing about were somewhat gender typical. Given the challenging layout, I didn’t want the subject matter to be something people wouldn’t recognize. It’s about love, frustration, loneliness, happiness, alienation, redemption. . . Everything that makes us tick.

About Genet, I realize I just glossed over what Our Lady of the Flowers is actually about when I brought it up earlier. I guess I’m just way more into the atmosphere of something than I am its content; the atmosphere is what stays with me.

Burn Your Belongings is an experimental work in the sense that I had no idea what the outcome would be. I had some theories and some things I wanted to try, and I just let it fly from there. I had this idea that if I wrote uninhibitedly about whatever crossed my mind, and if I kept it up for months and years, that some theme or some great truth about myself or about the universe would just emerge out of the writing. Maybe I was trying to psychoanalyze myself; I remember thinking it’d be nice to have some insight into why I’d made the decisions I did, why exactly I was on the other side of the world for one thing. I had a lot of faith in the subconscious and I still do, but as an experiment that might have given me a glimpse into myself I’d have to call the book a failure. No great truth or meaning emerged—what I got was pages and pages of chaos—but I felt it was human, I felt it was something people could relate to. So what failed psychologically had succeeded artistically—the stringent layout was my attempt to present this chaos in a manageable form, like a piece of music.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2009 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2009

BALONEY: A Tale in 3 Symphonic Acts

Pascal Blanchet
translated by Helge Dascher and John Kadlecek
Drawn & Quarterly ($16.95)

by Donald Lemke

In his encore to the critically acclaimed White Rapids (Drawn & Quarterly, 2007), award-winning Quebecois cartoonist Pascal Blanchet delivers another refreshing piece of graphic literature with Baloney: A Tale in 3 Symphonic Acts. Originally published in French by Editions la Pastèque, this slender volume reinforces Blanchet’s definitive retro style and reimagines the limitations of sequential art by introducing a musical backdrop and creating a distinctive, media-bending experience.

Translated into English by Helge Dascher and John Kadlecek, Baloney, like the fables of Brothers Grimm or the twisted tales of Franz Kafka, maintains its surrealism across language and culture. Set in an isolated village, high atop a snowy peak, the story begins with Sergei, a once handsome and prosperous butcher whose life—in a single moment of tragic destiny—suddenly changes for the worse. Forced to choose between his wife and daughter, Sergei instinctively saves his only offspring, letting his one true love fall from a rocky cliff to her death. But tragedy for the widowed meatcutter does not end there. As the years pass, his daughter loses an arm and leg to polio, and then loses her eyesight to cataracts. These curses are only exacerbated by the Duke of Shostakov, the town’s ruthless dictator, whose monopoly of the local heating company strangles businesses and keeps citizens in perpetual misery. Sergei’s misfortune, like many others’, leaves him withered and resigned to heartbreak. “Everyone called him Baloney,” Blanchet writes about Sergei, “after the saddest of all meats.” However, luck for Baloney soon takes a turn for the better when an idealistic tutor arrives to school his daughter. Their late-night lessons turn to love—sparking jovial conversations and inspiring a plan to take down the Duke of Shostakov and bring back light to the gloomy village.

Although brief, Blanchet’s narrative is delightfully lyrical, even poetic, at times, and his tale is deliciously dark and gothic; the author offers his characters hope just long enough to hurt them when it’s taken away. The real story, however, is Blanchet’s illustrations—angular geometrics and curvy lines decorate each full-page panel with the modernist flair of a Jim Flora album cover and the deconstruction of a Picasso painting. His characters bodies are perfectly spare of any details, intentionally featureless to avoid any disconnect from the reader. This abstraction of character does not lack complexity, however; instead, simplifying the characters induces greater understanding of moral concepts and creates concrete representations of the underlying themes: love, despair, and heroism. The vibrant shades of red, like the colors of raw or cured meats, enhance these emotions even further.

The most innovative aspect of Baloney is Blanchet’s inclusion of a playlist, which offers a musical pairing for each section of the book. From Prokofiev to Shostakovich, these musical suggestions are anything but ancillary. Read without minding the score, Baloney is a visual escape, but paired with these ballads the book becomes an immersive experience, evocative of the greatest silent films. With any luck, other creators will note this innovation and follow Blanchet’s lead as the sole composer of operatic graphica.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2009 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2009

TIGER! TIGER! TIGER!: Volume 1

Scott Morse
Red Window / AdHouse Books ($14.95)

by Adam Hall

Replacing himself with an adorable cartoon tiger in his autobiographical graphic novel Tiger! Tiger! Tiger!, author/artist Scott Morse attempts to reconcile the responsibilities of adulthood with his own vivid and often distracting imagination. In a series of loosely connected anecdotes, Morse recounts, among other things, his anticlimactic stint in jury duty, being accosted by a homeless woman on the street, and his encounter with a child who casts his son (represented by a smaller tiger) a hateful glance on the playground. In constant search of the everyday wonder of modern life, Morse’s evocative and stylistically fluid blend of watercolor and ink morphs with the tonal shifts of each story, by turns recalling Chuck Jones, Will Eisner, Calvin and Hobbes, and even a color palette similar to Ezra Jack Keats’s.

Morse subtitles Tiger! Tiger! Tiger! “A Collection of Scattered Thoughts and Moments That Somehow Equal a Whole,” and while the scattered thoughts do offer a certain amount of poignancy when taken alone, the whole feels somewhat slight. It might seem unfair to chastise a book so playful and endearing for lacking focus when the author himself admits within its pages that “mentally, he tends to drift off,” but the absence of a central unifying idea and the casual flitting from anecdote to anecdote makes this volume read like a series of journal entries in a particularly vivid sketchbook rather than a complete work. Moreover, Morse’s verbosity tends to clutter the book, especially when large blocks of text invade the artwork and undermine the images. In the encounter with the child who scorns his son, for example, Morse’s tiger avatar mottles and distorts with rage, only to disintegrate into an ashen outline as the anger loses its hold. Yet the clunky pontification Morse inserts (“How do you qualify your good intentions when your most prominent instinct is rage? When the best answer seems to be, ironically, the most parallel?”) is directly at odds with the stark portrayal of this transformation—one of many missed opportunities to let the beauty of his artwork do the heavy lifting.

Still, the stories Morse presents here are treated with an earnestness and open-eyed wonder that prove infectious. Regarding autobiographical comics, critic Steven Grant once wrote: “They work best in short form highlighting some specific anecdote, because most people's lives are just nowhere near as interesting as they think they are.” While harsh, the statement rings quite true in a time when many comics are praised simply because they offer alternatives to the glut of superhero fare. Tiger! Tiger! Tiger! proves Grant’s assertion insofar as the specific anecdotes it recounts elevate the mundane with dreamlike renderings. What will truly set the series apart in future volumes is if Morse can let his pictures do more of the talking.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2009 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2009

AN ORESTEIA

Agamemnon by Aiskhylos
Elektra by Sophokles
Orestes by Euripides
translated by Anne Carson
Faber and Faber ($27)

by W. C. Bamberger

The first sentence of Anne Carson’s introduction to these translations is, “Not my idea to do this.” An Oresteia includes Carson’s translations of three tragedies, Agamemnon by Aiskhylos, Elektra by Sophokles, and Orestes by Euripides. Each presents one episode from the tragedy of the house of Atreus: in the first, Agamemnon returns from the Trojan war and is murdered by his wife Klytaimestra; in the second she is murdered by her son Orestes with the collusion of her daughter Elektra; and in the third, Orestes fights madness, the two children are nearly stoned to death, and Apollo issues orders that more or less tie up all the frayed ends. Carson had translated Elektra in 1987 and Orestes in 2006. She thought herself done with the house of Atreus. But Brian Kulick, artist director of the Classics Stage Company, approached her to translate Aiskhylos’s version of the first episode and create a trilogy. Reluctant at first, Carson eventually agreed.

Kulick’s idea was that the three playwrights wrote from three different attitudes toward Athenian civilization, roughly corresponding to seeing it in sunrise, at midday, and at sunset, as Athens began to decline. This conceit is not a perfect fit for the plays, with the first two staying faithful to the tragic form and the third subverting and twisting it. But Carson uses different kinds of language to convey the divergent styles of the three playwrights. In Agamemnon, the language is at once recognizably modern and supple even as it retains the tone of Greek tragedy as we know it, as when the chorus says,

O Zeus king, O night of glory
You have thrown over the towers of Troy
A net so vast no man could overleap it,
A dragnet of alleneveloping doom.

But by the third play—that which Kulick identifies with the decline of a civilization—Carson’s willingness to employ the vernacular pushes the language in another direction, as when an effeminate slave tells how Orestes abducted Helen, meaning to murder her:

He leads her, he leads her, she follows away
and then it gets worse, Helen’s bad day.
The snaky guy jumps on the bodyguards
snarling out his lips,
“You Trojan trash, I’ll clip your tips!”

This change of register, this willingness to insert more jarring anachronisms—from “okay” to “bad shit happening” to Helen being described as “that weapon of mass destruction” and more—can be disconcerting at first. But what Carson is trying to present in these plays is not just a translation of the words. She does not approach the plays as a linguist, but as the original playwrights did: as a storyteller. And as with any good storyteller, she is trying to convey the feeling of the experience of the story rather than the simple facts. So where she feels a modern expression will make us be more attentive to the playwright’s intended complex of emotions she feels free to use it. Elsewhere, Carson has written of the painter Francis Bacon’s wish to “grant sensation without the boredom of its conveyance”; at times in her translations here, Carson disregards the boredom of temporal fidelity in favor of evoking the sensations the plays are meant to convey.

Indeed, it’s the language, the rhetorical arias of the characters, that carries these plays. In Agamemnon, Klytaimestra boils over with the will for revenge, and Kassandra’s near-surrealistic but precise description of how Agamemnon is to die make audible the adrenaline terrors of anger and violence. InElektra, the title character mourns and laments to an extent that even she agrees is excessive, but it is also how she stays true to herself. In Orestes, the title character’s chaotic speeches convey his struggle to avoid madness, which threatens him as imminently as does death by stoning. But while excess is definition for all these characters through most of the trilogy, the third play finally offers a way out of the tragic maze: balance. As Orestes raves from pole to extreme pole, Menelaos offers to speak to the crowd that wants to stone Orestes and Elektra:

A mob lives on passion, but also compassion.

............................................

You know, when the sail is too tight the
ship goes under:
slack off a bit and it justifies itself.
God hates a fanatic. So do good citizens.

Orestes’s sail is indeed too tight, so much so that he considers Menelaos a coward and disloyal, and pushes for more confrontation. In the end Apollo appears ex machina, to save the unbalanced cast from themselves: he transports Helen to divine safety, stops the murdering, and marries off the cast in ways that diffuse old blood revenge by balancing it with new blood loyalties. He also says, evoking another, more terrible kind of balance, that Helen was only a “mechanism of the gods,” used to kill off a number of both Greeks and Trojans, to preserve their balance even while reducing their troublesome numbers. Because murder and coercion are used even by Apollo to attain his ends, it certainly isn’t about moderation, but it is about the power of balance.

Curiously, Carson claims not to see it this way. She writes of Euripides as seeming “to prefer maximum exasperation in the final scene, where all the lines of the plot have been pushed to impasse and categories like good/evil, happy/unhappy, mortal/immortal are sliding around so crazily that only a god can make things clear. . . . [But] the god in question (it is Apollo) dictates a series of solutions that make nonsense of all the actions and anguish of the characters up to that point.” She also says that the play is a “wild, heartless, unconstruable statement,” and suggests Euripides was simply throwing the pieces of his drama in the air to see how they might randomly fall. This is strange, as the point of the play’s resolution seems clear from the text—still, such a view is defensible. But other of Carson’s comments are even more curious, because they seem to contradict the texts as she herself translates them. In the introduction toOrestes, for example, she writes that the scene where Orestes lies to Elektra, telling her the ashes in an urn are his own, is “a hard nut to crack. Why does Orestes decide to trick his sister into thinking he’s dead? Why does he give it up in the middle?” Carson’s own translation makes it clear that Orestes does not recognize Elektra (they have not seen one another in many years), and so doesn’t know whether she is friend or enemy, but that as soon as he understands who she is he “gives up the ruse and takes her into his confidence.

Perhaps this is why Carson makes some of the puzzling comments she does in her notes: because she wants her readers to read the text deeply, to understand and feel it. The mildly jarring, too-modern idioms in the spoken lines would do much the same for an audience, but readers are more inclined to see words as settled on the page, and perhaps even to believe they already know these old stories. But the (feigned, I believe) puzzlement in Carson’s comments refuses to let us read what we think we know. In both language and in commentary, then, Carson’s intent is to force readers to experience these plays as if for the first time.

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INS AND OUTS OF THE FOREST RIVERS

Nathaniel Tarn
New Directions ($16.95)

by John Herbert Cunningham

Born in 1928 in Paris, France, Nathaniel Tarn became both a poet and an anthropologist. He brings both of these disciplines to the fore in his new book Ins and Outs of the Forest Rivers, which he says “arose out of, and was written during, two months’ travel in the wild regions of Sarawak, Borneo, East Malaysia, in 2005. Anthropological and archaeological interests were fed by visits to contemporary indigenous settlements and historic sites.”

The book is written in five parts: “Of the Perfected Angels,” “Dying Trees,” “War Stills,” “Movement / North of the Java Sea,” and “Sarawak.” But before this multi-stage expedition can begin, there is a prefatory poem, a moment of reflection, a meditation on the thing that makes up and encompasses life. Titled “Pursuit of the Whole & Parts,” this meditation ends:

when whoever owns the machine stands again at the doorsill
and the astonishing beauty of the understanding is detected
and the knowledge that it is always there—however many times
you are at a loss in the world, [at a complete loss in the world],
to be returned to, in that new moment, which is also all the old,
as if this moment were ageless and could always return
with the astounding recurrence of air by the unbounded ocean.

Here we feel the rhythm of the waves lapping at the shore and envision the sunrise and the sunset at the same instant, as well as all that came between.

“Of the Perfected Angels” initially seems to have nothing to do with Tarn’s trek, although it may signify the leaving behind of Western civilization. The last poem in this section, “Mathis at Issenheim,” concerns Tarn’s response to an altarpiece created by Matthias Grünewald in the 16th century, titled “Green Forest,” which was

saved over the years
from many wars and revolutions,
hidden, carried away and changing domiciles
time after time for seven centuries,
saved from perdition but not so much discussed,
catalogued only among earth’s treasures . . .

Tarn condemns war and contrasts it with the enduring nature of art, claiming that the altarpiece

has lifted him little by little,
men’s eyes sharpened for vision,
to the highest tree,
in the top branches of the highest tree,
(as lords of patience triumph over loss),
there where the stars are singing, uneclipsable.

This, to Tarn, is the essential nature of Western civilization—the ebb and flow which he recreates through his halting, returning lines between good and evil, between creation and destruction.

We move from “Green Forest” to “Dying Trees”—a poem in nine parts, each individually labelled. In the second poem, “A Hand,” we read:

Skyscrapers had not done it,
not raised it truly over all the land
around, the huge, thirsty expanses dry as
the dustbowl of our present time, choking
the trees. Now there’s to be some talk of hands—
one hand especially that has grown old, spotted
and veined in honest work and honest “husbandry.”

Is this a subtle condemnation of monoculture? And does that condemnation extend to the “skyscraper,” that symbol of man’s “progress” that has spread like a cancer across the land, literally and figuratively creating a “dustbowl”?

The final section, “Sarawak,” consists solely of the long poem “Ins and Outs of the Forest Rivers.” The tenor of this section is well summarized in the following excerpt:

Trapped in pervading stench of old ideas,
trapped in repetitive paralyzed projects,
trapped by the magistrates who never move
on cases dusty for decades, and by police
who police nothing but the new owners’ acres
they took from those who grew the land
and are now homeless.

Tarn trashes society’s institutions, condemning them for their destruction of the planet and the poor; he sees in them only the upholding of a status quo which bears the motto “might is right.” It is within the bailiwick of this rant that we find the message that has permeated this entire volume, a message that could be summarized as “this place stinks and I’m not going to take it anymore.” Tarn thus promotes rant to the rank of first-rate poetry, adding his voice to the others that try to bring light and hope to our dark time.

Editor’s Note: “Dying Trees” was originally published as a chapbook by Rain Taxi in 2003.

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OHIO VIOLENCE

Alison Stine
University of North Texas Press ($12.95)

by Erin M. Bertram

Occasionally, the world splits open, revealing small animals and rusted trucks, constellations, stray dogs—familiar things you never paid much attention, now charged beyond memory. You like some of what you see very much, but the rest of it scares you, leaves you facing doorways and watching parked cars at night. This is the mood of Alison Stine’s first book, Ohio Violence.

The book begins with an epigraph from James Wright, a master of the empathetic, narrative pastoral: “I began in Ohio,” it reads, “I still dream of home.” Though Stine wasn’t born in Ohio, she did grow up there, and like Wright she suffers the strong pull of nostalgia for the locale. It’s worth noting that the word nostalgia has its etymological roots in homecoming. As Stine tells us in “Catalogue,” “The more we tell a story // the more it becomes what we want it to be.” Perhaps, likewise, the more we return home, the more it becomes what we want it to be—though not without also becoming strange to us in the process.

And don’t we always return home in memory? In “Tiresias,” titled after the ancient blind soothsayer who lived life as a man and a woman, respectively, Stine blurs the distinction between the title character, a former lover, and the many snakes she’s tried to kill throughout her life. The poem finds the speaker making a claim firmly secured in memory, a claim that may as well be about home: “I am learning // nothing has a sex. I am learning // whomever we love, we are left this way, halved.” Many of the poems in the book weave down the page in serpentine sway, a stylistic decision that’s at times quite hypnotic.

The world of Ohio Violence is rife with grief, bewilderment, and longing, but there’s no lack of the immediate experience of living life in a physical body. It’s a world replete with wonder, populated by the strange, the sometimes glorious, and always by the true. There, you’ll find dead deer splayed in carnivalesque puppetry on the side of the road; a bat lifting itself from a towel until it becomes something more specific than itself in the sky; and a woman’s voice, in the title poem, that says

Underneath my skin

is a city. Underneath my skin

is a crying out. You want to find light.

You want a picture. Break me open again.

As with Stine’s 2001 chapbook, Lot of My Sister, Ohio Violence is full of lush, minute landscapes, internal and external alike, and Stine’s easy (though by no means simple) handling of brick-heavy themes like desire, sexuality, and loss. Admittedly, a few poems in the collection, such as “Bones” and “In Graceland,” are less successful in terms of the narrative—and much of Stine’s work is powerfully narrative-driven, as in this happened, then this—but the tangible quality of the speakers’ immediate reality, coupled with the emotional resonance of each moment, is never wanting.

Early on in the collection, in “Moon Lake Electric,” Stine tells us, “All the world does is give me signs.” And indeed, the speakers of her poems draw meaning—sometimes whole, sometimes tattered—from their surroundings, noting the small, though hardly insignificant, stories held in every single thing. Shot through with a keen resolve, Ohio Violence is an arresting, despairing book that alternately stuns and seduces.

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POETRY STATE FOREST

Bernadette Mayer
New Directions ($16.95)

by Todd Pederson

Like rutted footpaths, the poems coiling through Bernadette Mayer’s newest collection, Poetry State Forest, steers readers into the scrubby undergrowth. Indeed, Mayer’s poetry is so wildly overrun that the simple business of moving ahead takes discipline and effort—every root and leaf is suspect. Since Mayer often conceals intent beneath dense canopies of language, her work can seem deliberately evasive, leaving readers to guess, “What’s the point?”

With Poetry State Forest, Mayer arranges strangled, fantastic settings where no association is carelessly set aside. Anything her intellect stumbles across gets in, almost to the point of overstatement. Comprehension is rough going, but Mayer asks that readers remain alert to happenstance, because any occurrence or chance encounter has relevance. For example, consider the last stanza of “Start Almost Over,” in which Mayer cross-examines her present life against the reflection of another:

i was rolling dough for rolls—
hard to do cause it had asparagus in it—
in imitation of all the great pastries
i’d desired in a bakery window
in which i’d seen reflections in my early poems
i bought a gay pastry, words i like
to read & write, it has asparagus in it

The poem seems, initially, without clear meaning; but hidden underneath the green asparagus spears lay sentiments of longing, want, and meditative regret. Mayer speaks figuratively about the lure of imitation rather than living one’s life authentically. This theme is commonplace among contemporary poets, but in Mayer’s hands customary topics feel warm and fresh as baked bread, not derivative in any way.

Like “Start Almost Over,” Mayer’s poetry is generally uncontrolled, and its arrangements often seem arbitrary. The tangled images crowding many pieces are pleasant, but the philosophy linking each distinct idea can feel scrappy, making the poetry’s ambition appear carefully sequestered. In its worst moments, Mayer’s work is almost too loquacious, too witty for its own good. Readers who appreciate poems with a balanced narrative and unmistakable conclusions may find most of Mayer’s page-length rambles difficult to navigate. Her longer pieces are so discursive, so overweight with description and fragmentary patterns of speech, that they seem more concerned with lively chatter than a concise viewpoint.

These contentions may seem an indictment of Poetry State Forest, but if the poems disappoint as archetypes of orderly thought, they do successfully demonstrate the attraction and worth of a vigorous personality. Mayer’s preoccupation with artistry and her work’s bursts of activity imply a frenetic, intimidating intelligence which might place her audience at a distance; nonetheless, the inventive ways in which Mayer renders this turbulence encourages conscientious readers to lean in closer and take an honest look. Foremost, Mayer’s tone evokes an urgency and presence too often lacking from contemporary poetry. One long poem, “Summer Solstice 2006,” could easily menace, but Mayer sympathizes and accompanies instead:

i’ll protect you
from the guy who drives a pickup with a confederate
flag as decoration

Mayer offers a comparable solace with the concluding lines to “1980”:

Space of the waiting pastures, empty of snow,
Now for spring as in any place
We sit around and wait too

“We sit”; “I’ll protect”—given her work’s convolutions, these are crucial statements. With Mayer’s poetry, an impression of companionship, above all else, prevails. The poems are overgrown and their language is complex, yet she never abandons her readers, and even manages a surprising sense of intimacy throughout the collection. Mayer’s responsive temperament, evident in her good humor and enthusiasm for vivid illustration, engenders trust. Her readers are spoken to, never at—which makes all the difference. With sincerity established, one imagines Mayer’s poetry as an invitation to ignore disorder and enjoy, instead, her craft’s more fanciful elements.

So what’s the point? Grasping at the significant, or “getting it,” doesn’t seem Mayer’s aim with Poetry State Forest. Instead, human camaraderie is the issue at stake. Yes, the poetry is untidy, but readers who invest the time will find tame pathways among the trees, and, in this poet’s voice, damn fine company for their wooded strolls.