Leslie Adrienne Miller was born in Zanesville, Ohio, in 1956, the middle Eisenhower years, and was raised there during the tumultuous aftermath of John F. Kennedy’s death and the escalation of the war in Vietnam. Her father was a judge, her mother a grade school teacher and active volunteer. Many of the poems in Miller’s first full collection, Staying Up For Love (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1990), hearken back to Ohio, her parents, and her sister, as well as countless friends, lovers, and acquaintances along the way. She graduated in 1978 from Stephens College in Missouri, studying under teachers such as Heather McHugh and Jonathan Holden, and then went on to graduate school in Creative Writing at the University of Missouri, Columbia, where she studied with Larry Levis. After receiving her M.A. in 1980, she got married for the first time and worked low-pay jobs, earning money on her own rather than retreating to Ohio and her parents, or for that matter to her husband. Her first marriage produced one riotous poem. Here are the opening and closing lines of “The Monkey”:

My first husband had a monkey,
a little spidery job with a winning
smile and quick hand. Oh, it was
dirty to be sure. Those things carry
all kinds of diseases. This from
my mother who was the gladdest
when her children grew out of pets.
Maybe I even married that husband
because of the monkey. After all,
it could carry an egg under each
armpit indefinitely, or until our
amusement waned . . .

*

I took it when I left because
it was all I wanted—the image
of the eggs dropping from the armpits,
the head cocked, waiting to see
if I’d laugh or give chase.

Of this poem, Miller told an interviewer that she liked to use it at her readings because “it’s fun to read out loud, it’s got rhythm and humor, people laugh aloud at it. But it’s ultimately a very sad piece. I was proud to have achieved both emotions in the piece.”¹ Her childhood in Ohio and her relationships with her parents and her sister were formative experiences for her. However, she had begun writing poems very early. “I’ve been writing poetry from the time I was able to read,” she remarked some years later. “For a long time, I didn’t even realize you could make a career out of it. When I went to college, I soon figured that out.”²

Her first marriage foundered over the disparate interests she and her husband had. He wanted her to have a baby and settle permanently in their suburban house in Missouri. She wanted to write and go the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for her M.F.A. degree. So she filed for divorce and headed north. The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke was particularly influential for her at this time. His advice about the solitude a poet needs was something Miller recognized she needed in order to write, to think, to reflect on her craft. She enrolled at Iowa in the fall of 1980. “I cannot blame Rilke for everything,” she reflected later, “and I have never been sorry that I took him so seriously then. The premium my culture put on solitude for the artist is hardly Rilke’s invention. It simply spoke in Letters [to a Young Poet] to the would-be poet in me, but it appeared everywhere in the literature I was reading by men and by women.”³ At Iowa, she studied with poets Marvin Bell, Jane Cooper, Donald Justice, Henri Coulette, and again Larry Levis. The work of other poets—such as Emily Dickinson, Adrienne Rich, Anne Sexton, and Carolyn Kizer—also spoke to Miller’s conscious ear and eye as she continued to work at her own poetry.

By the late 1980s, Miller was in the Ph.D. program in literature at the University of Houston. She was writing poems as feverishly as ever while she studied with writers who would challenge her. “I worked very closely with Cynthia MacDonald,” she said. “I chose Houston, in fact, because of her. I wanted to work with a strong, feminist senior female poet, and Cynthia filled that bill. She was very commanding and challenging, and she made me measure up.”⁴ While at Houston, Miller also worked closely with Ed Hirsch, Richard Howard, and Adam Zagajewski.

Never was there uncertainty about what she should do with her life, as in these opening lines from “Definition”:

I love the efficiency of my body at thirty,
the way my shoulders and calves finally have
that sharp stroke on the curve, the way
those dimples over my knees have unwrinkled.
It was impossible to love any of this
any sooner. All those years under shame
when any part of the body that emerged
seemed pale, veined, waterlogged, and not
always quite my own. Sometimes
just a glance in the mirror: that white
backside exposed, otherly . . .

Perhaps taking a cue from Rilke, Miller avoided the temptation to write love poems. None of her poems is what one might think of as sentimental, yet there is a sensitivity to living creatures that abides throughout her oeuvre. Her poems tend to be self-excavations and descriptions. Being restless and highly peregrinative, Miller has developed a focus and authority in her poems since the beginning. “I’ve been working on creating a type of rhetoric that’s authoritative, a strong voice that commands,” she said in 1990. “But I want the subject matter to remain very female. That will create the tension that I’m looking for in the work. We tend to identify authoritative rhetoric with maleness; yet if you marry that with feminine subjects, the result is very interesting.”⁵ It’s a matter of voice, of control, ultimately. Miller is acutely conscious of what other women poets have done before her and are doing in her own generational sphere. “Miller’s craftsmanship shines in measured form and lyrical rhythms,” wrote Molly Glentzer in a brief notice of Staying Up For Love, “whether she’s brooding about the mood of a lover, contemplating childlessness or lamenting the cruelty of a story on the six o’clock news. Her voice is delicate, but rooted in the earthiness of her middle-western upbringing. These are fine—and accessible—poems.”⁶

In the title poem from that book, Miller recounts a slumber party she attended as a girl in Ohio. Here are the final lines:

Because Susan and I are the last
to drowse off our elbows and sink together
we whisper we adore each other, wiggle closer.
Tomorrow Sally’s mother will suck in her breath
a little when she comes upon Susan and me
raveled and damp as adulterous lovers;
Trudy’s mother will purse her lips and scrub
at the blue imaginings on Trudy’s behind,
and the frog will be put back among his stones.

There is a tension here between “vaguely sexual imagery,” wrote Marianna Hofer, which “balances beautifully the innocence and the imagined evil.”⁷ In the next poem, “An Early Meeting With Men,” Miller follows the memory of adolescence’s boundary testing with her view of the opposite gender. The poet’s control of her form is exquisite in two shimmering lines early in the poem:

I hear my voice tinkle like a spoon
into the stentor of men.

As much as one can harness language and content within a single poem, Miller has done it here. Indeed, her view of men seems cautious but inevitably accepting, as in the poem’s closure:

I look down at my bare female arms
brushing the institutional table,
the close room sending my skin damp,
sending the perfume of aloe around
to the men, their expansive noses
sweeping in only as much air
as they need for speech.

The poet as observer as well as participant is a role Miller embraces. Her poems celebrate the observed moment, even, as in “Influenza,” a poem about a lioness put down for injuring a child that deftly melds vicariously absorbed information and first-hand observation during acute physical discomfort. Other poems, illustrative and poignant of a given situation in the poet’s milieu, are “The Man in the Courtyard,” “Celibacy,” “Tracks Were On The Frosty Lawn,” and “Deer Harvest.” Citing Miller’s poems using the method of a “narrated lyric,” an anonymous critic opined that Miller’s “facility with language distinguishes her from most other purveyors of this genre,” while adding that “Miller knows what’s she doing, and the poems evidence her formidable control over her medium.”⁸

Throughout Staying Up For Love, memory plays a crucial role. There is also the matter of perception, of how accurately one perceives how the past—whether immediate or distant—haunts the present. Take, for example, these lines from “Primary Colors”:

She puts the white away and takes out the black. She
remembers how her mother told her black was not
for young women, and indeed her culture wants of
black hats, black cats, etc.

“For Miller, there seems no boundary between the need for beauty in one’s poetry and in one’s life,” wrote Susan M. Schultz. “That her central theme is erotic love only bears this out. She would agree with Elizabeth Bishop, who considered life and art to be the same. And, like Bishop, Miller refuses to simplify the equation between life and art, and she also knows the dangers of falling in love, not with The Future, but with the past . . .”⁹ Schultz quotes two significant lines in one of Miller’s poems: “Memory is fond of itself, / inventive, selective, even false.” It is true that memory may play tricks and be emblazoned as more important than it really was at the time, in one’s present life from day to day, week to week, as the years unfold. Miller’s work is partially ruminative of her past, but not obsessed by it. For her, the past is a source of poetry, but not directive of the present, whatever today’s problems may be. At the end of her review, Schultz amplifies her view of Miller’s achievement in Staying Up For Love: “Miller’s poetry does something that the poetry of statement . . . cannot do, which is to show how language—attenuated, sometimes broken—can help us to communicate, almost despite ourselves. It shows us that art need not approximate artlessness in order to heal the severed connections between men and women, black and white, poet and reader.”

After receiving her Ph.D. from the University of Houston in 1991, Miller moved north to Saint Paul, Minnesota, where she took a teaching job at the University of St. Thomas. By now she could add south Texas to her list of memory sources from which to write poems. In 1994, her second collection, Ungodliness (Carnegie Mellon University Press), appeared. The first poem has some striking images. Reflective of her dissolved first marriage and the uncertain present, Miller is still ruminative, but not morbidly so. If anything, her candor, even when exorcizing painful elements in her past, is a refreshing staple of her discursive style, as in the opening lines of “Walking Around My House In The Dark”:

The armchairs are silent uncles who came
to my wedding and never danced.
In the shadows thrown by the outdoor light
they stand, arms crossed, the only family
I have who refuse comment on my behavior.
They neither love nor judge me,
the niece who later up and left
the slim, red-headed husband they glimpsed
across the plastic sparkle of a small town
country club dance floor. They hold
down the edges of the room with shoulders
squared like waiting genies and watch.

Miller’s directness, as intimated above, is a high mark of her style. Listen to the final lines of the poem as she attempts to bridge the silence rather than embrace the isolation of estrangement:

Oh uncles
driving tractors through pungent alfalfa,
loading trucks with someone else’s worn
furniture, closing deals on insurance, seeds,
houses and sheep, please sit awhile longer
in my dark, deep with regret,
unintended silence, ruined weddings,
and let me tell you why.

Fred Eckman noted the candor with which Miller uses her personal circumstances in her work. About her poems, he observed, there is no shrinking from difficulty: “Absolutely without self-pity, they are as ruthless in their depiction of the cruel, snobbish, self-centered girl as of her family, friends and teachers.”¹⁰ Yet again, how does biography influence the work? It would be inaccurate to say that Miller remains at home and stays in one disinterested poetic mood. The poet is rueful, even amused, and ultimately ironic and unremitting, as in these closing lines of “The Police Tent At The County Fair”:

Even now I sometimes smile at cruel
news, and I still don’t know
where it comes from—that flinching
at the corners of the mouth when one body
suddenly and fully comprehends the end of another.

It is in poetic closure, as Eckman suggested, that Miller is strongest. Another critic concurred: “Leslie Adrienne Miller presents a series of ordinary images which seem to roll along smoothly until, almost casually, they zap the reader with more intensity than one at first thought. She makes us see anew.”¹¹

Miller’s second book received favorable notices, with critics remarking that her almost brutal honesty about herself, her past, and her family members, does not obtrude. She is not settling scores, but rather explaining her past through the cynosure of the poem, using this vehicle to shed light on herself. “Ungodliness . . . is a nearly perfect collection,” wrote Richard Broderick. “Not only do the individual poems achieve a balance of form and content, but they work together superbly as a book . . . Her territory is the ‘ungodliness’ of everyday life—the shadow side of human consciousness: the jealousies, resentments, hurts, angers, and wild, often self-destructive urges that we normally try to keep hidden. A postmodern romantic, she is fascinated by chaos.”¹² Broderick was also insightful when he observed that Miller is not “confessional” but “supple” and “energetic,” even “lyrical” in her verse. One excellent example of this is “Substitute,” in which Miller remembers a substitute teacher in her 8th-grade English class who had had a baby without a husband. For this, the substitute teacher was judged unworthy by some members of the class, including the future poet; they decided to punish her by not answering her questions. Here are the concluding lines of this forceful, though amusing, poem:

. . . Scum, I thought, as I snuck
peeks at her creamy skin, the svelte navy skirt
she couldn’t have worn when it happened.
I drew horses on all my notebooks,
swelling their withers and flanks,
topping them with girls who filled
their hands with streaks of mane,
blissful, reckless, while the substitute
went on invoking correct pronouns,
agreeing verbs, and we / us, I / me
dismantled her, her breasts, her lover,
her speckled scarves and dainty feet,
whatever we could conceive of her sex,
and carried it away in doodles, reveries,
silence, to the great cache of our rich
and dangerous unknowing.

It is natural to appreciate such a motley but cohesive collection as Ungodliness. Miller uses the grit and the small triumphs in her life, and the faces and personalities of those she meets along the way, as objets d’art in her poems.

Her third book, Yesterday Had A Man In It (Carnegie Mellon University Press), appeared four years later, in 1998. By this time, the poet had done some extensive traveling abroad, to various places in Europe as well as Asia. A number of her poems reflect this travel. As she told an interviewer, travel for her is a sense of renewal:

The enemy of poetry is familiarity. I travel to evade it, and although it is impossible to evade it permanently, one can evade it over and over again with many goings and comings. Travel keeps the world fresh for me. I know that I will return home to discover much I love there, whereas when I left, it was all so familiar I thought I could not abide continuing to live there. It’s the old idea of defamiliarization—a term from the Russian writer Victor Shklovsky. The idea that the artist, the Western artist, must find ways to look at the ordinary that make it seem strange. Travel to foreign countries is one of the easier ways to effect this defamiliarization. It freshens one’s perceptions, disturbs and disrupts habits. I can only hope that the poems I have written here will look very different when I get home, that I will even wonder who it was who wrote them and that many of them will require adjustments for American readers whom I needed to forget for a while.¹³

An early poem in the third book, however, is set in Minneapolis at a rock concert in Loring Park. Miller is acutely conscious of the burgeoning youth around her at this festive event, and not a little incredulous at the culture not of her own generation. Here are the opening lines of “Babes in Toyland”:

I understand why the lead singer
wears cheap yellowed lace, the A-line dress
chopped just below the hip, unhemmed,
why her hair, greeny with bleach,
glows glossy, hideous in the August twilight.
She is a studied mockery of all it has meant
to be female in the Western world,
the unreserved embrace of death itself,
agent of its own destruction, spoiled,
droll and gaudy as a plastic bead.
She can do this because she is still
baby doll pretty, petite, her bare white
legs folding like bent saplings as she spits
and fumes, mocking her own anger.

It is not surprising or at all uncommon for a poet of Miller’s caliber to want a different experience, to go where others of her generation might not go or might not want to endure the cacophony. At any rate, these middle lines amplify the poet’s amazement at what she sees and hears:

I do not understand the studied ugliness,
the small gray girls bobbing and gaping like wounded
birds in front of the stage, a grimness that is sleek
only one or two. The rest deliberately
disheveled as rape victims, pretending the worst
has already happened to them.

In another vein, Leslie Miller experiences the culture as many of her generation of women do. In this context, physical exercise under the guidance of an expert instructor, the poet takes her place with others. She records the experience in precise, unrhymed couplets in “Rite of Winter,” evoking kinetic energy:

Some evenings we scream in aerobics class—
if we feel the bass in our bones,

if the teacher goads us, if it’s Friday
and January and the class is full,

suddenly, of hefty women with resolutions,
I among them, to pound away at the last

five years, the harangue of old hips.
Some of us yowl, some screech or bellow,

some even whinny—which we wouldn’t do
if we thought men were looking,

but they aren’t. It doesn’t hurt
that there’s a full moon tonight, that outside

it’s 10 below, that the air is so dry
it whispers in the lungs, that it’s 1994 . . .

In Indonesia, Miller comes down with a fever, just as she is about to leave the country. Toward the end of “At The Bandung Emergency Room,” she sees differences:

I come from a country
of drinkable water and curable mysteries.
But here, affliction is the easiest way
around difference. Because I am permanently
pale, your blonde doll, your beleaguered
traveler, because there is no way for me
to turn my hot gaze on your world
without changing it, I must give up
my fever, and you your ministry . . .

And Miller evokes irony in her work, perambulatory as the otherness in another person, in the title poem’s closure:

This happened to someone at least once,
a luckier woman many times—or unlucky
if you believe this is a kind of hope
that rarely finds its mark. Empty
fairgrounds, abandoned airstrips, a field
bruised with some remarkable event,
the usual parks. One luminous glance
and the hope returns like a trained bird,
the light diffused around its homing
The air around the kiss she gets
brief and sweet and almost real,
so later she can sleep in the thought
of it—yes, that bud may open tomorrow—
though tonight she’ll wake confused
by the momentary odor of otherness,
her own hair buried in the pillow.

Critical reaction to this book was mixed. One reviewer was skeptical. “These obsessively dense poems are products of a formidable will,” wrote Thomas R. Smith. “The problem is that poems of will, which twist each effort toward a thesis—that men are untrustworthy, say, or that one is unloved—preclude the possibility of true discovery, which may be the chief grace poetry offers. Yesterday Had A Man In Itcomes up short for reader and poet.”¹⁴ But the patina of feminist rhetoric, perceived or not, should not dissuade a perspicacious reader about the merits of the poet’s achievement. Andrea Hollander Budy observed: “Many of Miller’s poems explore this familiar, human terrain that only poetry seems to be able to expose satisfactorily.”¹⁵ Yesterday Had A Man In It offers a rich assemblage of Leslie Miller’s talent, recognizing her own identity as a woman while at the same time not being obsequious to the male desire to control the conversation, the discourse, so inherent in poetry. Like Elizabeth Bishop and Adrienne Rich before her, Miller is particular and undiminished in her voice, registered in deftly composed metaphors and allusions. And while certainly intense at times, this does not by any means prevent a pluralistic appreciation.

Eat Quite Everything You See (Graywolf Press, 2002) is the allusive title of Miller’s fourth collection. The title poem and many others in the book are reflective of a brief time she spent living in a house once owned by Jacques Prévert in the south of France. The poet and the landlady got along very well, as in these closing lines from “Prévert’s Peaches”:

Three times she married, and never once for love. We laugh,
wet mouths stuffed with Prévert’s colossal sweets,

and their honey jotted on our wrists. We swallow fruit
and azure air as if we’ve always known what we know now,

What drives our lush capacity for greed. The more
we give ourselves, the more we can afford the heart’s caprice.

Eat, she says, inviting me to take the painter’s chair,
another Prévert peach, eat quite everything you see.

Miller’s love for travel continues to inform her work, broadens her world-view, and augments our own grasp of what a poet can achieve in images and well-wrought metaphors. The poet herself is quite sanguine about the ingredients of her poems and her methods of working. “I wanted to explore the relations of poetry and painting,” she explained to an interviewer at the University of St. Thomas, “and so I devoted a lot of poems and reading time to exploring seeing versus saying, the relations between text and image . . . I wanted to see if I could make a kind of poetry that behaved like a painting, a poem that could actually look at the way one looked at a painting for color, line, shape in the language, spatial relationships.”¹⁶ Indeed, as one reads this volume, one sees the broad palette the poet uses to make her finely etched poems. In “The Anarchist,” Miller captures the essence of this stunning light:

The houses could be rocks, the rocks could be roads,
The boats could be doubts or birds. That’s what

art is for: to remind us that we have not seen
what we remember having seen. If I say

Mediterranean to you now, all this will freeze
into azure, and you will lose the richly actual

to mere knowledge, the terrible stillness
that keeps the eye from going too far.

The critical reception to this volume was generally positive. Miller’s travels and her veritable romances leave anything but the proverbial trail of tears. She “takes us to many lands, both interior and on the map,” wrote Pamela Miller. “The book’s mannered but wry title reflects its many tones. Appetites of all kinds parade across the pages. Raw sensuality mingles with strong awareness of mortality. Humor and sadness collide in many of these poems.”¹⁷

Color and shifts of tone broaden the poet’s ability to depict situations, milieu, atmosphere, and physical surroundings—as in these opening lines from “Mise en Abîme”:

We enter, all eyes cast about at once
to identify maker, made, the precious few
who might consume, review the evening’s

order, light, and wine, signature black
stockings, tailored jackets. We know the frame
repeats itself as a trick, the icon of the invitation,

beckoning for weeks from local shops, café,
patisserie, tabac. . . .

Since this book’s publication, Miller has achieved an ambition on her own terms: to give birth in harmonious circumstances. She married for a second time in 2000, and in 2002 had a son. By now she was in her mid-forties. However, before her second marriage, she wondered what it would be like to have a child. Shopping in a women’s boutique, Miller conjures what might be possible in these opening lines of “Imagining Myself with Child at Forty”:

I paw through row on row of black strapless
dresses hung on loops from the armpit seams,
bouclé, swarms of beads, sequins and pearls.

We’re looking for holiday clothes for me,
my friend and I, something to cover
the rough beast of my hope concerning

a man, while she pushes her new daughter
along before her and hugs the next in her womb.

In the company of a woman friend on this occasion, the poet keeps her private perambulations to herself, but they are as real as flesh, blood, fire and the rich scent of food:

. . . I feign helplessness, hand to temple
shrinking, suffering, or just plain sultry.
A pack of hounds, golden-haired and sleek, wait

at my feet for the curls of cold on the sleeves
of the next visitor to bring a whiff of that world
they were born to. They do remember it distinctly,

the extravagant stink of what so recently
was fierce and floating, glistening gristle
and scales, festive blood and flecks of bone,

the crystal air, birds flushed from dry grass,
rodents stirring in moss banks, and oh the preen
and pucker of marvelous fish zipping beneath thin ice.

The critics could not miss the direction of Miller’s allusions. “In Leslie Adrienne Miller’s new collection of poems, we peer into the most intimate places in her life,” wrote Diane Wilson, “following her across Europe, through relationships, into the dressing room where she imagines herself with a child at forty. Driven by a hunger for experience, Miller’s elegant poems emerge from her desire to understand what she consumes, whether it be the torment of love or the comfort of a pair of bedroom slippers.”¹⁸ There were naturally observations on her “palette” of colors, gradations, flavors of food, and local atmosphere: “Miller’s poetic voice is honest and insightful,” wrote Marjorie Buettner. “Her poems inspire and instruct showing us how the sweetness in life of ‘cadmiums and light’ may fall to us unexpectedly. Her poetry tells us again that what we thought was lost is really regained in a different form; what we expected never to see or feel again comes back to us—this expectation of love—with grace; Miller’s poems remind us in a heartfelt way how to be sustained by life: eat quite everything you see.”¹⁹ There are a number of other delicious poems in this collection, such as “Panorama Place,” “Lingua Franca,” “One Moon View of Puget Sound,” and “The Many Faucets of Love.”

Miller’s fifth collection, The Resurrection Trade (Graywolf Press), appeared in 2007. The history of this book’s conception, pun not intended, is important. The birth of her son in 2002 provided the now middle-aged poet and new mother a change of focus—forgetting, or at least ignoring, her past. It’s worth remarking that few poets go for more than one advanced degree in Creative Writing, but Miller acquired three beyond the baccalaureate, the second of which necessitated the breakup of her first marriage. She never looked back. Now for her fifth book, the principal theme inspired by her pregnancy (which she knew would be her first and last), the poet surveyed her own circumstances. She now focused instead on women in the past—the late Renaissance through the 19th century—who were, after their deaths, used as vehicles for medical research. From this came the English term, “resurrection trade,” the physical dissection of female corpses, some pregnant, and then artistic depictions of them in realistic, frequently unpleasant, drawings, such as one on the front cover of The Resurrection Trade.

As noted, Miller’s penchant for ridicule of the male gender has led to, if anything, her objectifying men. Thomas R. Smith noted that in her previous volume, Eat Quite Everything You See, “men are untrustworthy.” One has to say that his observation has been borne out in this fifth collection as well. Miller’s high intellectual discernment has led to a questionable direction. Denigrating the sex act, as Miller does in poems such as “Anatomy of the Unsought Finding,” is too easy and predictable.

In this vein, if one emphasizes the positive, there are several poems displaying Miller’s command of irony and use of mnemonic devices. When years earlier she and her sister had to endure listening to their parents host a party, the ludicrousness of adult behavior is vividly portrayed, as in the first quatrains of “Bridge Club”:

It comes back to me as a tangled after-dark cackle,
female, roughed up by cigarettes and scotch,
wakes me into the possibility that something
is being missed. A fleet of card tables set up

across three rooms, an armada of liquor bottles
lining the kitchen, mother cooking the “company”
dish out of a book. My sister and I, bathed,
pajamaed, are handled, smeared with scent

and coo by the ladies, teased and pinched by the men.
Father presides over vodka, gin, rusty Manhattan mix,
a shaker with cartoons of busty ladies toasting mirth.
after I Dream of Jeannie and Gunsmoke I’m put down

in my bunk which shares a wall with the party,
so I wake each hour hearing the laughter turn,
fill with silliness and edge: tatters of gossip
doused in the toilet’s incessant flush.

Allusions to the television roles played by Amanda Blake and Barbara Eden, mixed with resentments against perceived parental shortcomings, make for a measured irony: “I hold on to her single / wrong note and know it’s a gift . . . ”

Other poems are more readable than the title poem, written in both English and French with Latin phrases thrown in to establish the poet’s scholarly credentials. Genevieve Kaplan found the book a mixture of accomplishment and pretentiousness. For Kaplan, the book “straddles the fine line between poems that at times can be overtly academic and off-putting and poems which are universally inviting and lyrical. While some elements may prove difficult for an ‘average,’ non-academic reader, many of the individual poems are intrinsically enjoyable, as well as socially and emotionally resonant.”²⁰ This ambivalent reaction attends particularly to the title poem, meticulously rendered, but tendentious—as if the poet’s indictment of men in general extends justifiably because of the dehumanizing “resurrection trade” abandoned long ago. Still, lines such as these are not easily forgotten:

Coifed, composed in a manner suitable
for rendering in oils, she rests her elbows
on the swell of gray and surely dead (d)
infant intent on reading his own fat knees.

Below which: les parties du Sexe feminine détacheés
Read: detachable female sex parts

“The author’s tendency to obscure inherently interesting facts and details instead of presenting them plainly is ultimately disappointing,” Kaplan opined further. Stan Rubin underscored the positive. In a long review, he gave evidence of a careful reading: “Read as a whole, the book becomes a delirious trip through the history of this project of exploring, rationalizing, and thereby controlling, the mysterious geography of the female Other. Inevitably, it’s an accumulation of good intentions gone awry.”²¹ In the next paragraph, he writes: “Miller provides the missing female voice. To her credit, she is not interested in material for its ‘shock value.’ She is neither a polemicist, re-contextualizing what she discovers in terms of contemporary ideology, nor a prosecutor fixing blame.”

Miller’s usual killer endings for poems are not always as forceful in this book as in previous collections, but still the overall breadth of her work has a vivid impact. As others have noted, Miller’s academicism sometimes gets in her way as a poet, with five pages of notes and a bibliography at the back of this volume, although the consensus is again mixed. “With the subtlety of a sledgehammer, Miller chisels away at the image of woman as sexual object, showing how women can find meaning and truth and ultimately their humanity through reclaiming their bodies,” wrote Michelle Crosnoe. “Miller’s writing is imagistic and powerful, scientific and visceral . . . . The Resurrection Trade is well-written and hard-hitting, fearlessly confronting the same old problems through a marriage of themes, a union sure to stand reading after reading.”²² One can understand Crosnoe’s defense of Miller’s intentions without being convinced the poet hasn’t overdone it. To pick up on Crosnoe’s analogy in another sense, is a sledgehammer what one looks for in poetry? Is this what a poem needs? Of course, subject matter can make a great difference. Irony is most often an essential ingredient in poems of social statement, as in this case. Miller has brought this tonal element to her work frequently from poem to poem, book to book.

Then again, an artist such as Miller is bound “to find some unusual interests” during pregnancy, as Judy Woodward observed.²³ Still, Miller’s son is never mentioned by name in the book, other than in the dedication. She refers almost mechanically to “my child” or “this child” or “my son.” But never does “our son” come across in the narratives from poem to poem. Nor does the reader learn her husband’s given name, although by inference we gather his surname. There are no poems alluding to domestic hearth or affection. Rilke’s advice notwithstanding, this is notable and disappointing from one perspective.

Sea Stachura, the public radio reporter, delivered an illuminating commentary on Miller’s approach to poetry and this book in particular. Woven around interview clips with the poet, Stachura emphasized the ameliorative aspects of Miller’s achievement, something males never have to think about—the objectification of women’s bodies.²⁴ What Stachura did not mention, however, is that one might well argue that Miller in turn has objectified men’s bodies and maleness—for example, both her son and his father, whom we never get to know through her poems, other than the constantly arch reminders to her second husband that before he came along she had many lovers. This theme undergoes a reversal in The Resurrection Trade: while the poet is in Paris researching material for this book of poems, she learns though an email that back in Saint Paul her husband has been unfaithful:

I fight down
the unthinkable news delivered
at dawn e-mail: someone else
is in my marriage bed, her broad thighs
loading up on genes, the very same

that give my son his dazzle and dash,
his own sweet power to sunder.
(from “Parlous In Paris”)

There are a number of superlative poems here, aside from the arguable nature of the title effort— “Shopping For The Queen of England”; “Hydrologic Sonnet”; “Mantra of the Bath”; “The Death of Irony”; and particularly “Mother and Son,” in which the poet’s sister, recovering from a mastectomy, is told by her small son to pretend she is one of the Twin Towers, as in these opening and final lines:

The night after the twin towers evaporated in jet fuel
and dust, my nephew asked my sister to stand up

beside his bed, her arms drawn tight along her hips.
He was clear about how he wanted her, straight, tall,

as rigid as possible. He’d said his prayers, read
his bedtime story of a girl with golden hair locked

in a stairless tower by a witch whose motives weren’t
entirely clear. He’d seen the footage at school that day . . .

This is how he’d wished
to learn: whether to be sad or mad, but his mother

doesn’t know herself. In tears, she takes the downed bear
and bewildered boy in her arms, and hugs them and hugs them

against the changed landscape of her womanhood.

One is reminded of Jim Moore’s poem about this event, “9/11/01,” written in eight quatrains with a final line, as Miller’s poem has, separated at the end.²⁵ Miller’s poem is in unrhymed couplets, Moore’s in closely rhythmic quatrains. The final lines of both poems suggest that one’s sense of isolation can be bridged in being with others at such a time. It has been said that Moore’s poem is a unique response. I suggest Miller’s poem, originally published in Great River Review, is a worthy complement.

Throughout her five collections, Leslie Adrienne Miller displays a fountain of senses, images, and colors, inviting her readers in as she explores her own rich history. She uses her wide reading, travels, and interactions with people she has known along the way to create a lustrous array of poems and thereby enriches American literature.

 

¹ Jeff Troiano, “Leslie Adrienne Miller,” Siren (Houston, TX), November 1990.
² Stacy Atchison, “Five Questions With . . . ,” The Daily Iowan (University of Iowa newspaper, Iowa City, IA), 4.
³ Leslie Adrienne Miller, “Alone in the Temple: A Personal Essay on Solitude and the Woman Poet,”Kansas Quarterly, 24:4, Spring 1993, 13 (manuscript).
⁴ Letter to the author. 1 November 2002.
⁵ Jeff Troiano, op. cit.
⁶ Molly Glentzer, “City Insight,” Houston Metropolitan Magazine (Houston, TX), January 1990.
⁷ Marianna Hofer, review of Staying Up For Love, in Ohioana Quarterly, Volume XXXIII, Number 3, Fall 1990.
⁸ Unsigned review of Staying Up For Love, in The Virginia Quarterly Review, Volume 66, Number 3, Summer 1990.
⁹ Susan M. Schultz, American Book Review, June-July 1990.
¹⁰ Fred Eckman, review of Ungodliness, in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, 19 June 1994.
¹¹ Unsigned review of Ungodliness, in Ohioana Quarterly, Volume XXXVIII, Number 3, Fall 1995.
¹² Richard Broderick, in Minnesota Monthly, Saint Paul, Minnesota, 1994.
¹³ Heid Erdrich, “An Interview with Leslie Adrienne Miller,” A View from the Loft (Minneapolis, MN), September 1998, Volume 21, Number 2, 14.
¹⁴ Thomas R. Smith, “Two collections mine autobiographical vein,” (a dual review with a book by Chitra Bannerjee Divakaruni also discussed), Minneapolis Star Tribune, 8 March 1998.
¹⁵ Andrea Hollander Budy, “Poems for Poetry Month,” Arkansas Democrat Gazette, 26 April 1998.
¹⁶ Pat Nemo, “Speaking of Books,” University of St. Thomas publication, summer 2002, 15.
¹⁷ Pamela Miller, “Five poets expose their regional affinities in new collections,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, 14 July 2002.
¹⁸ Diane Wilson, notice of Eat Quite Everything You See, in Minnesota Literature (Saint Paul, MN), Volume 28, Number 1, September 2002.
¹⁹ Marjorie Buettner, “This Expectation of Love,” The North Stone Review (Minneapolis, MN), 2002, Number 14, 321.
²⁰ Genevieve Kaplan, “From The Academic To The Lyrical,” American Book Review, November/December 2007.
²¹ Stan Samuel Rubin, in Water-Stone Review, Volume 10, Fall 2007.
²² Michelle Crosnoe, Big Muddy: A Journal of the Mississippi River Valley, 2007.
²³ Judy Woodward, Twin Cities Planet, 29 March 2007.
²⁴ Minnesota Public Radio broadcast, 1 April 2007, Sea Stachura, reporter.
²⁵ Jim Moore, “9/11/01” in The North Stone Review, Number 14, 2002, 286-287. Thus, his final line: “This is the day we must begin. This is the day. We must begin.”

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THE POETRY OF SUSAN HOWE:
History, Theology, Authority
 Will Montgomery
Palgrave MacMillan ($80)

THE SMALL SPACE OF A PAUSE:
Susan Howe's Poetry and the Space Between
 Elizabeth W. Joyce
Bucknell University Press ($65)

THAT THIS
Susan Howe
New Directions ($15.95)

by John Herbert Cunningham

Prior to creating the lexicon of Cubism, Picasso and Braque began an exploration of collage. One of the things that distinguished Picasso from Braque in that art form was Picasso’s use of the print medium, generally in the form of newspaper headlines that were made clearly distinguishable from the other objects that littered his canvas. Half a century later, along comes a poet whose visual art training makes her aware of both this period of art history as well as the developments of the de Campos brothers, Eugen Gomringer, bp Nichol, and Steve McCaffrey in the sphere of concrete poetry. Combining collage and visual poetics with the concept of marginalia, she creates a new form of poetry.

Why is there so much interest in a writer whose works are so difficult to fathom? Perhaps it’s just that. They present a challenge to the reader who has grown tired of the usual fluff that passes itself off as literature these days. In the process, the works of Susan Howe extend our concept of what poetry (and writing in general) is, creating new dimensions, new problematics and techniques to be understood and mastered by the adventurous writer. And thanks to Will Montgomery’s new book The Poetry of Susan Howe, the reader can gain new insights into Howe’s work.

Howe’s mother was an “Anglo-Irish actress, playwright, and director,” her father a New England lawyer. Montgomery uses these two facts as the opening into Howe’s world. In the first chapter, “The Maternal Disinheritance,” he examines certain of Howe’s poetry from her estranged Irish inheritance. For example, he says of The Liberties:

Howe situates herself at the crux of a horizontal, geographical disjunction and a vertical, historical one. Surrounded by the desirable and undesirable burdens of cultural and familiar inheritance, the "homeward rush of exile" in The Liberties works as a paradoxical twinning of refuge and displacement at the level of the personal (the relation of Howe’s poetic vocation to her father and her mother), of populations (the Irish diaspora), and of lyric (the formal consequences of seeking to address a notion of absence in poetic language.)

We can see this maternal influence appear in other ways, as well; for example, Montgomery says of The Midnight that it is

a book about books—books cited, inscribed, inherited, and loved. It is stylistically diverse, combining literary speculations, memoir, lyric poetry, and photography. . . .
The Scare Quotes sections are built around the editions of Yeats, Stevenson, and others that Howe inherited from her mother and her mother’s brother.

Montgomery then moves on, in the chapter “The Ghost of the Father,” to an examination of how paternalism enters into Howe’s poetry: “Alongside the maternal associations of identity, speech, and inheritance discussed in the previous chapter, there runs in Howe’s work an appraisal of ideas of law, authority, and patriarchy.” Before even beginning to close the circle on Howe’s inheritance, Montgomery takes a tangent into Language Writing and Howe’s relationship to it as examined from the perspective of the lyric “I”:

Although the lyric "I" was anathema to many of Howe’s contemporaries among language writers—the "guard", if anything, of the specious claim to coherence of the poem’s speaking subject—for Howe, despite the polyphony of her writing, the I appears to guarantee an ethics of poetic "vision". The I is, in this view, not identical with the speaking subject. It is a notional, quasi-divine absence that serves to underwrite the poem by preserving the strangeness of poetic speech.

Montgomery initially uses Howe’s The History of the Dividing Line (1978) to explore issues of paternity, assessing Howe’s long love affair with library stacks and archives:

There is, then, a more profound ambivalence toward an institutional acquisition of knowledge that is thought to be aligned with patriarchy . . . On one hand, archives are considered to prolong the hegemony of those who guard America’s cultural heritage; on the other, they are places in which to get ecstatically lost, the sources of wild, "out-of-the-way" knowledge that might undermine that patrimony.

Leaving behind that type of inheritance, Montgomery goes on to explore, through analysis ofPythagorean Silence (1982) and Defenestration of Prague (1983), Howe’s indebtedness to the literature of the Renaissance: “Pythagorean Silence and Defenestration of Prague both draw substantially on motifs from the literature of the Renaissance. I will be concerned with Howe’s adaptation, via Ovid, of the notion of metamorphosis and of her use, when I come to discuss Defenestration, of the aesthetics of the masque and of Renaissance pastoral.”

Having explored the European legacy in her work, Montgomery now turns to Howe’s Chanting at the Crystal Sea (1975), where “Howe begins her long poetic engagement with American history.” Her discovery of Hope Atherton inspired many a poem, right up to her recent book Souls of the Labadie Tract (2007). Regarding this source of inspiration, Montgomery states:

The two major serial poems of Singularities—Articulation of Sound Forms in Time and Thorow—show Howe wrestling into being a form of poetic speech that is adequate to a constellation of issues involving the archive, the transplantation of the Western tradition to another territory, femininity, and power. . . .
. . . For many observers, their representation, through a language of rupture, of the underside of American colonial history has rendered them exemplary among Howe’s poems.

Throughout a long and distinguished career, numerous themes have interested Howe, the strands of which she has woven into a tapestry. In The Poetry of Susan Howe, it is evident that Montgomery has done an amazing amount of research regarding Howe’s career and writings; the pages are peppered with numerous quotations from her writing and from interviews with her. His analysis is also exceptional, making this a book full of insight into a “difficult” poet.

Elizabeth W. Joyce takes a different approach to this difficult poet inThe Small Space of a Pause, examining Howe’s interaction with what Deleuze and Guattari have termed the “third space,” i.e. “the silences of history, the margins of the page, the placeless migrants, and the uncharted lands.” But there is something else—much more, in fact. Anything that can aid in understanding the work of a major contemporary poet is highly valuable, and this book does just that.

Joyce, in her introduction, begins by examining the concept of space from the perspective of numerous other writers, such as Charles Olson and Steve McCaffery. She also references Howe’s 1987 textArticulation of Sound Forms in Time, combining this with a discussion of W. J. T. Mitchell’s “Spatial Form in Literature” in setting out the relation between space and time. These discussions lead to what Joyce refers to as “the manifesto . . . for Howe’s poetry” which she finds in an interview Omar Barrada conducted with Howe, in which Howe states: “What has always fascinated me is the space in the fold between two pages in a book, or the space between one poem and the next in a series. I see an area between poems; even if I cannot control what the reader sees, there is an area.”

While referring to Howe’s reluctance to be labeled a feminist, fearing that everything henceforth will be analyzed from that perspective and thereby create a reductive analysis of someone who’s work is polyvalent, Joyce does mention the importance of the “third space” as being “a potential solution to the binary system of human existence which sets up a hierarchical power system that reinforces the lesser social position of women, among other things.” Through significant reference to Brian McHale’s “How (Not) to Read Postmodernist Long Poems: The Case of Ashbery’s ‘The Skaters,’” in which McHale argues the ineffectiveness of attempting to come to an understanding of long poems through an analysis of discrete points, Joyce delimits the scope of her work in this text stating that “not only does this book not analyze each of Howe’s poems; it also does not attempt to analyze any of them fully.”

The first chapter, “Contextures: Susan Howe’s ‘voices stuttering out of the wilderness,’” examines Howe’s A Bibliography of the King’s Book, or, Eikon Basilike from the perspective of intertextuality. As Joyce says of Howe: “In most of her work she, like other postmodernist writers . . . takes a particular text or group of related texts on which to focus each poem.” Howe, in this poem, takes an alleged text by King Charles I—supposedly written just before his execution by the Cromwellians— and attempts to extract truth from fiction and outright lie. This permits Joyce in the opening paragraph to categorize Howe as a plagiarist, as she does not “differentiate between her words and those of others by using quotation marks or citations.” Joyce then goes on to state: “plagiarism is a ‘necessary’ component of writing in the later twentieth century (I take the word in quotation marks from Kristeva, who quotes Lautréamont, saying ‘The plagiarist in necessary’).” The phrase “stuttering out of the wilderness,” a phrase invented by Howe herself, she uses to indicate those times when “Howe does not integrate multiple sources smoothly into her work . . . retain[ing] closer ties to their original context than to the created context of the poem.”

The next chapter, “’Thorowly’ American: Susan Howe’s Guide to Orienteering in the Adirondacks,” examines her poem “Thorow” from the perspective of naming and, by extension, the concept of mapping as an appropriation. This thought-provoking chapter renders the entirety of the book worth reading. As an additional bonus, we encounter for the first time Howe’s use of language fragments sprinkled helter-skelter upon a page and sometimes piling up as if in a multi-vehicle collision. Joyce relates this to the mapping concept: “The space of the land given perspective and division by the act of mapping has no structure in the absence of orientation. Howe vitiates the power of the map, of the surveyor, of the purveyor of culture, by dissolving the tool that represents cultural imprinting. . . . Howe, too, looks for the sublime in the absence of direction, either spatial or temporal.”

Several of the chapters build on Howe’s use of language fragments as a visual poetics. This concept of the visual is legitimated by Howe’s statement that “You see I started as a painter—and am married to a sculptor and I came to poetry out of the art being done in and around New York during the 60’s and early 70’s.” We can think of Jackson Pollock with his splatter painting or Mark Rothko’s paint swatches and see parallels between how these artists approached their work and how Howe employs a similar approach. Joyce, in the chapter “When Text Becomes Images,” in describing the multi-angular splay of words on a page of Eikon Basilike, states that “it is no longer possible to pretend that these words will group together to form sentences. . . . The impact of this page style is the same as that of collage, or a kind of word cubism.”

But then there is Howe’s attraction to non-Euclidean geometry and fractal images to contend with. “The core of this interest develops through the ideas laid out by Pythagoras.” Her interest in chaos and fractal theory gives rise to her interest in the singularity: “The term most indicative of Howe’s poetry issingularity, and as with most words that she takes up, this one develops out of multiple meanings but also through her persistent avoidance of binaries. Singularity is a moment of violence, which is partly why her poetry focuses so much on war, but it is also the moments of movement and of formal innovation.”

As Joyce does an exceptional job of explaining, this difficult but extremely rewarding writer has been one of the most innovative poets of any period. She treats the edges of a page as a frame into which she unloads word and sentence fragments, unleashing the primeval forces of language creation. Her latest volume of poetry, That This, opens with prose—recollection of the day Howe discovered her husband, Peter, dead in bed. She concludes her first paragraph with an aphorism: “Starting from nothing with nothing when everything else has been said.” And she cites an historical event, probably encountered in one of her journeys through the library stacks, regarding the death of Sarah Edwards’s husband in 1758 and how Sarah was consoled by thoughts of God—a refuge which, as Howe relates, was not available to her:

For Jonathan and Sarah all rivers run into the sea yet the sea is not full, so in general there is always progress as in the revolution of a wheel and each soul comes upon the call of God in his word. I read words but don’t hear God in them.

Howe’s refuge is in writing, and she creates stunning lines such as “Your head was heavy as marble against the liberty of life.” For Howe, prose is a generic term and she does not shy away from the inclusion of a dictionary entry, an autopsy report, a letter. Here as elsewhere she reveals herself as an expert at collage, deftly assembling disparate materials. Later, Howe incorporates a technological description of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library “one of the largest buildings in the world devoted entirely to rare books and manuscripts” which was “constructed from Vermont marble and granite, bronze and glass.” Reminiscent of Marianne Moore, this reads like a brochure extolling the virtues of this building, with its “state-of-the-art North Light HID Copy Light system.” This is followed by a description of “Hannah Edwards remembering her delirium during an illness in 1736,” giving us a panoramic view of time, a view which stretches as far back as Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Pyramus and Thisbe.

The next section is called “Frolic Architecture,” and we are greeted by a transcendental Emerson epigraph. Howe provides fair warning of what we are about to encounter: “this book is a history of / a shadow that is a shadow . . .” Here we enter the realm of “writing through” which experimenters such as Jackson Mac Low did before Howe, although she has become justly famed for having explored this method’s reach. Essentially, she takes a piece of writing—hers or somebody else’s—and places across it something opaque so that part of that writing is obscured, copying only the writing showing through. On occasion she intersperses what appear to be photographs that mimic the remainder (or vice versa). Is it accidental that “tho melancholy was yet in a quiet frame” appears within a square block? On that the words “I was in, it was not without a deep” appear as a visible phrase on the next line? Howe originally being a visual artist prior to turning to poetry, is this process, for her, a development of concrete poetry?

The final section, “That This,” contains a series of five poems written in the same form—two couplets—that began the previous section before it moved into the “writing through.” The first of such poems, all untitled, reads as follows:

Day is a type when visible
objects change then put

on form but the anti-type
That thing not shadowed

Meaning appears on the edge of consciousness, unable to break through. This is Howe’s magic—to make you, the reader, reach for something you feel is there, and to keep you returning to the page in hopes that, at some point, the boundary will be breached.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2011 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011

Two remarkable artists join hands across time—and across the chasm of some of the most idiosyncratic French ever written—in a new translation by John Ashbery of Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations (W. W. Norton, $24.95). The project makes so much sense that one wonders why someone didn’t think of it sooner.

Ashbery, for one thing, long has been interested in French language and literature. He moved to Paris in the mid-1950s on a Fulbright, and ended up staying there for most of the next ten years. He began and later abandoned a doctoral dissertation on the avant-garde writer Raymond Roussel. He has written about and translated Roussel as well as other French writers, including his former partner and longtime friend, Pierre Martory.

Rimbaud and Ashbery are radical practitioners who have divided critics and readers. Ashbery says of Rimbaud that he “resembles no one else”; the same could be said of Ashbery. And when, in his Preface to this translation, Ashbery notes that “absolute modernity was for Rimbaud the acknowledging of the simultaneity of all of life, the condition that nourishes poetry at every second,” he seems also to provide a précis of his own unique aesthetic.

The similarities, however, end there. Rimbaud, that most audacious and revolutionary poet of the 19th century, did all of his writing between the ages of fifteen and twenty, then quit. Ashbery began writing poetry seriously in high school before attending Harvard in the 1940s, and he continues to write and publish in his mid-eighties. He has issued twenty-nine volumes of poetry as well as books of journalism, criticism, and even a novel. His newest book of poems,Planisphere, came out in 2009.

In a phone interview from his home in Hudson, New York, Ashbery talked about “Les Illuminations,” translation, and his own regard for the man of whom he writes: “If we are absolutely modern—and we are—it’s because Rimbaud commanded us to be.”

Claude Peck: How old were you when you first read Rimbaud?

John Ashbery: I think I was sixteen. At that time a slightly older friend of mine told me about him and read “O Saisons, O Chateaux” to me, in English. I had high-school French then, but couldn’t read Rimbaud. It seemed just wonderful. The second line is, “what soul is without its flaw?” I don’t know, it seemed to be poetry for me as I hadn't seen it before. A few years later, when I was in college, I bought the Louise Varèse translation of Illuminations, which I still have, dated 1946, with a little sticker in it from The Personal Bookshop in Boston. (It seems funny today that there could be such a thing as The Personal Bookshop.) I read that then, along with the Wallace Fowlie translations. About ten years later, I went to France and actually started to learn the language, and read him in French around 1955.

CP: Did Rimbaud’s writing influence your own poetry?

JA: Yes, certainly, though it’s hard to say how, exactly. When I was in high school the 20th-century poetry they taught was mostly limited to Frost, Millay, and Robinson, and though I was interested in them, it wasn’t until I discovered on my own poets like Dylan Thomas and Hart Crane and Auden, and of course, Rimbaud, that I really got involved in modern poetry.

CP: Among French poets of the 19th century, do you like Rimbaud best? Who else?

JA: Lautréamont's Maldoror was published by New Directions in the early ’40s—I read that when I was in high school, and that was another big influence. More so than any of the other 19th-century French poets, I would say, including Baudelaire, whom I didn’t read until later.

CP: When did you begin working on Illuminations?

JA: I translated the first one ten or fifteen years ago, thinking it would be fun to do the whole thing, someday, maybe. Since I now do know French, it has become a sort of exercise, to translate things I like and that might perhaps influence my own poetry in a good way. Then I never went any further with this project, like so many other projects of mine, and it wasn’t until a couple of years ago that an editor at Norton, Bob Weil, whom I know quite well, started saying, “I wish we could publish a book of yours at Norton.” I said, “What I write is poetry and I’m very satisfied with my publisher, Ecco." He said, "What about a translation?” They had a big success with Simon Armitage’s translation of Gawain and the Green Knight, and also published Seamus Heaney's best-selling Beowulf. Weil had the idea that if they could match the right poet and translator, they might get something rather successful. I said, “Well, there is Rimbaud,” and he said, “That sounds great.” I told him I always liked Illuminations, maybe I could have a go at that. So that’s how I started doing it, I guess about two years ago.

CP: What was your method? Did you start working directly from the French? Or make a study of other translations?

JA: I just started working on my own, although I won’t deny that I looked at other translations—sometimes as much from being stumped about how to translate something as for not wanting to repeat somebody else’s successful version. A number of them were really excellent, so I didn’t feel I was going to be coming up with a definitive translation. I was doing it really for the enjoyment of it, and for the possible after-effects it might have on my writing, which I can’t really judge and I’m not sure whether they’ve happened. I like Wyatt Mason's version. The Varèse is still pretty good. (I always thought that Louise Varèse was French until I started on this project—she was married to the French émigré composer Edgard Varèse, but was actually born Louise McCutcheon, in Pittsburgh.) The poet Donald Revell, a friend of mine, has published excellent translations of both A Season in Hell and Illuminations.

CP: Wallace Fowlie is said to be a more literal translator of Rimbaud.

JA: I myself try to be very literal, and I frequently use cognates even when they might sound a little strange in English, just to stay as close as possible to the original.

CP: Are there times when that doesn’t work, when you have to abandon the literal and float above it, for the sense and the sound?

JA: Oh sure, on every page, many times.

CP: When it’s a Thursday morning and you are working on Rimbaud, do you have stacks of books and other translations, or is it just you and the French version?

JA: I work directly from the French, with three gigantic dictionaries!

CP: Can you work on translation at the same time as you write your own poetry?

JA: Sure. No problem about that. I don’t write poetry every day, by any means. Or even every week, so I have lots of free time. I was doing both simultaneously.

CP: Was it a joyous process, or hard work? Or some of both?

JA: I would say joyous. I think I probably have blocked out the hard-work part, but even that was always fun. How am I going to translate this sonuvabitch? [laughs] How dare he make it so difficult? It was always stimulating.

CP: Why has Rimbaud appealed, over the years, to various music icons, from Jim Morrison to Patti Smith?

JA: Bob Dylan, I think, also. Rimbaud has always appealed to misfits and delinquents, who are very often poets. Poets are very often of those persuasions. And he was so utterly an outlaw, in such a profound sense of the term. His bisexuality, for instance, if that’s what it was—he wasn’t even homosexual, as far as I know. Verlaine seems to have been his only male lover, and he lived with a mistress in Africa. He doesn’t seem to have ever thought about, “am I straight, am I gay?” or whatever, but just went about living each day as it came along, with its own set of questions and phenomena. He could be a real shit, too. These are all things that, how shall I say, delinquent poets glom on to and start running with. Also the fact that his poetry is totally un-paraphraseable is something that I and many other poets are trying to achieve—something that can be said in no other way, at which point it becomes poetry.

CP: In his biography of Rimbaud, Edmund White uses the word “inedible” to describe Rimbaud and to explain the enduring fascination with his writing and life. In another food metaphor, you wrote something similar in discussing Roussel, saying that commentators and critics of different stripes are drawn to his work because it can be “served with any sauce.” Is this true also of Rimbaud?

JA: Yes. The French idiom is accommoder à toutes les sauces—serve up the same topic with every kind of commentary. That’s definitely true for Rimbaud, as for Roussel. Both are totally sui generis.

CP: Did the intense work on Rimbaud lead you to other, new appreciations of Rimbaud, or other insights into your own work?

JA: I think, in a kind of invisible way, it encouraged me to greater freedom in my own writing, but this is something that always seems to happen anyway. At least I hope it does. But the example of this great mind in the 19th century writing such incredibly off-the-wall, provocative lines . . . Let me dip into the book a minute and give you an example. Here, from “Cities I”: “a few red velvet divans, they serve arctic beverages, whose price varies from eight hundred to eight thousand rupees.” This is in the sort of surrealist city that he’s describing. What the hell is he talking about? And yet he said it, and it couldn’t be said in any other way. This is one of the poems that's supposed to be descriptive of London. It undoubtedly is, but I really hate the tradition, particularly among French academic critics, of trying to link everything in his poetry to something that was part of his biography. There’s another poem in which he mentions Scarborough, the English sea resort, and Brooklyn in the same sentence. There’s a period of several months when he was in England, and nobody knows what he was doing. He had left London, and therefore people have tried to trace him to Scarborough, just because he mentions Scarborough, and I think there may even be some critics who are somehow hoping to trace him to Brooklyn! But no one has seriously tried to do that. [laughs] There is always the idea that if a poet writes something it must have some direct bearing on his life or experiences, which is not what happens at all. It's as though Shakespeare would have had to visit Verona in order to write Romeo and Juliet. The best parts always seem to come from something totally unlived and/or unimagined before.

CP: In yet another Rimbaud biography, Graham Robb says that Rimbaud’s “refusal to adopt contemporary prejudices” is what makes Illuminations “such an excitingly alien work.” Do you agree? What made Rimbaud adapt style and content that was so alien to most readers and critics in his era?

JA: Yes, alien. I think that’s exactly it. It says it better than I’ve been trying to.

CP: What does it mean to you, as someone still actively writing poetry in his eighties, that your subject here stopped writing at about the age of twenty?

JA: That’s puzzled everybody, of course, even young poets. One regrets the fact that he didn’t go on writing, because what he did write was so wonderful; there could presumably have been many more wonderful poems to come. On the other hand, that’s the way he did it, and maybe there was no other way. He stopped when he had to, or more likely when he wanted to. It seems to have been a question of his just sort of closing the book on poetry one day and going on to something that interested him more, which was his trading and life in Africa. For some reason this outweighed poetry as a life experience.

CP: In the 1950s in New York, was Rimbaud someone to talk about, to read, to enthuse about?

JA: Yes, I’m sure we did. O’Hara and Koch loved Rimbaud. He was one of the divinities in the poetry stratosphere.

CP: The painters, too?

JA: I guess so—I don’t remember anyone not being interested in Rimbaud.

CP: Why did you choose to translate Illuminations as opposed to some other body of work?

JA: Well, there are three major works—A Season in Hell, which I could have gone for. I love that, too. And The Drunken Boat is his breakthrough, sort of like Huck Finn’s raft adrift in 19th-century France. A Season in Hell is somehow more clamorous than the Illuminations, which have a kind of ripeness about them, as though he had to live through a season in hell to have written them.

CP: Among the Illuminations, do you have favorites?

JA: One is definitely the first one, “After the Flood,” and the two “Cities” poems. . . also “Promontory,” “Genie,” and “Parade,” which I translated as “Sideshow.” That’s a difficult word to translate, because it sort of means parade, but it also refers to the patter about a show that a barker gives at a carnival to get people to go in. There’s a Seurat painting that shows that sort of scene, and it’s also called “Parade.” That’s one case where I chose not to use the cognate because I thought it would be distorting it.

CP: What other titles and lines did you play around with?

JA: Well, there were many, I guess. For example, "Vagabonds" I translated as "Drifters." Vagabonds sounds a bit too jolly and operetta-like (as in "The Vagabond King"), whereas "Drifters" has the required slightly sinister overtone. Or so I thought. And at the end of "Cities (II)" I have "from whence issue my sleep and my slightest movements." I'm aware that "from whence" isn't quite correct—though it’s often accepted, as in the Psalms' "the hills, from whence cometh my help." But I felt that in the context it might sound prissily correct.

CP: You assert in your Preface that for Rimbaud, “the self is obsolete.” But Robb finds the prose poems to be “a chaotic identity parade” and “a search for a missing person who never existed.” Are the two notions at odds?

JA: Perhaps both of these stem from his famous line, “Je est un autre,” or “ 'I' is another.” Which is from his “Lettre du voyant,” the seer’s letter. The I who writes poetry is not the I we are accustomed to dealing with in our daily lives. I think that’s what I meant, and maybe what Robb had in mind, too.

CP: In closing, let me ask about your own affinity for Rimbaud. Do you consider him “difficult”?

JA: One of the Rimbaud poems I read early on was his famous sonnet of the vowels, where he assigns different colors to the various vowels. That seemed to make perfect sense to me, at the age of sixteen. It didn’t require any explanation. I also read Gertrude Stein at about that age and again felt there was nothing at all strange or peculiar about this writing. I recognized it as poetry right away, as with the colored vowels. There’s also an early lyric where he says, “On summer evenings I’ll walk through the fields with the grass pecking at my wrists”; since I grew up in the country, and did that myself in the summer, that was one of the first ones I liked especially, because of both the strangeness and the familiarity of it.

 

Translating Rimbaud

The writings of Arthur Rimbaud have appeared in widely divergent English versions over the years. The opening line of the prose poem “Conte” (“Tale”), for example, shows some of the options that Rimbaud’s French offers to translators:

Rimbaud:
Un prince était vexé de ne s’être employé jamais qu’à la perfection des générosités vulgaires.

Wallace Fowlie:
A Prince was tired of merely spending his time perfecting conventionally generous impulses.

Wyatt Mason:
A Prince was troubled by his tendency to act only on his most obvious impulses.

Donald Revell:
A Prince was vexed at never having busied himself with anything but the improvement of crude generosities.

John Ashbery:
A Prince was annoyed at always being occupied with perfecting vulgar generosities.

For another example, here’s the final line of "Conte" ("Tale"):

Rimbaud: La musique savante manque à notre désir

Wallace Fowlie: Our desires are deprived of cunning music.

Wyatt Mason: Our desires lack an inner music.

Donald Revell: The cleverest music falls short of our desires.

John Ashbery (in galley): We have no desire for complex music.

John Ashbery (in final book): Wise music is missing from our desire.

And, from the opening of “Parade” (a title that Ashbery translates as “Sideshow”):

Rimbaud:
Des drôles très solides.

Fowlie:
Husky fellows.

Mason:
Muscle-bound goons.

Revell:
Sturdy rogues.

Ashbery:
Very robust rascals.

 

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2011 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011

Last year, FC2 published Steve Tomasula’s “new-media novel” TOC, an assemblage of text, film, music, photography, the spoken word, animation, and painting that comes on a DVD for “reading” on a computer. A multimedia epic about time—the invention of the second, the beating of a heart, the story of humans connecting through the lens of history—TOC is an evocative, steampunk fairytale. It also represents a new literary genre: a marriage of conventional narrative and image use with the possibilities for fiction that are opened up by the computer. Now in its second “printing,” TOC was awarded The Mary Shelly Award for Excellence in Fiction, and a design award from the Association of American University Presses. For excerpts and a closer look, see www.tocthenovel.com.

Steve Tomasula’s short fiction has appeared widely in magazines such as Bomb, The Iowa Review, andMcSweeney’s. His previous novels are VAS: An Opera in Flatland; IN & OZ; and The Book of Portraiture.

Yuriy Tarnawsky: Tell us a little about TOC and the “new-media novel.”

Steve Tomasula: At first I thought of it as sort of a ”chamber opera” — a story told to an audience of one, on a tiny stage, as if a 12-inch monitor were puppet theater—and told, through its staging, music, and sets, the way operas, or graphic novels, or other word-image hybrids are staged—except I didn’t want any of it acted out, or even illustrated, as in these other forms. Rather, I wanted the images and the rest to work as text, the way I used them in my earlier print novels; I wanted to use all these languages we use to make stories—text, images, graphs, data, ads—as other ways to speak. For me it always starts with asking, what are the things a book can do? In this case, the book could include music, and animation, and the programming that makes it richer in texture and layers, hopefully, than it would be with words alone.

YT: Since the reader/viewer drives the process of reading TOC, the work bears some resemblance to computer games. Did you consciously pattern TOC on computer games, hoping to engage the user in the same way?

ST: Yes and no. The interactive nature of TOC came more out of “C-U See-Me,” a short story I originally wrote for print, but then adapted to the web. The story is about surveillance, so I wanted to give the reader a sense of being watched as he or she reads, and to let the reader watch or spy on others. I tried to weave the unease of watching and being watched into the story in a way that wasn’t possible in print: for example, at one point, the story asks the reader to supply his or her name, then the software of the story checks the reader’s computer to see if it was registered in that same name—that is, the story spies on the reader to see if they are stealing software or lying about their name. At another point, the story has the reader do the spying by letting them watch people at work through web cams.

Something like that was the experience that I was going for in TOC, and while to me it is still a book, and its “user” is still a reader, I guess these terms would have to be thought of more broadly: it is a “book” in that the reader experiences it one-on-one, and reads it as they would any novel, but it uses graphics, video, and music to help set the mood and to help tell the story.

YT: There is a well-known novel that encouraged the reader to select his own path before the availability of personal computers—Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch (Rayuela). Were you influenced by this book or other predecessors in any way?

ST: Yes, very much so—I don’t know if I was consciously trying to model TOC on those earlier novels, but they make up the backdrop in which we understand formally adventuresome literature. I’m thinking here of Hopscotch, but also of Raymond Federman’s Double or Nothing, Walter Abish’s Alphabetical Africa; George Perec’s Life A User’s Manual, Gilbert Sorrentino’s Mulligan Stew, and other image-text novels like William Gass’s philosophical Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife, Lee Siegel’s great (and fun!)Love in a Dead Language, the first wave of hypertext novels, of course, and many, many others. . . .

YT: Much of TOC is narration accompanying still photography and animation; in this, it feels very much like a film. Were you influenced by film? Writing TOC, did you think of yourself as writing a movie script?

ST: No—maybe more like a graphic novel, or poetry that uses space as part of its poetics, as Apollinaire does. As with my earlier image-text novels, I did consciously write using images as part of the narrative, so it’s not like the novel is written and the images added in afterwards. I’ve always used imagery as another form of “text” that can add layers to the story. Once upon a time, all books were like this: children’s books, of course, but also Victorian novels and illuminated manuscripts. That is, thinking of a novel as a construction that can be made of lots of things, not just text, is liberating, and this is even more true when sound and motion can be included. So from the start, I’m thinking of how images, music, sound effects, can be part of the narration. I guess the influence of film did come in as I began to imagine what would happen on screen as the story was read or told. And decisions about what to present as text and what to present as a voiceover to be listened to began to push it toward a hybrid of film and book. Maybe that’s the best way to think of it: as this hybrid, in that the writing was very much like writing a novel, but with stages that novels don’t usually go through. For example, I had to storyboard out what was going to happen, and when or how, and tie it all to the programming—when to scroll, when to click, etc.

YT: A number of other people contributed to TOC. Stephen Farrell provided images and design, and you use video and other art, animation, and lots of music, including some by Eric Satie. How did you manage to meld all of this into a cohesive work? Was there much of going back and forth between you and the collaborators?

ST: Yes, there was a lot of back and forth with the artists who contributed work to TOC, most of whom never actually met each other. I think I and Chris Jara, the programmer, were the only ones who saw the entire novel before it was published. A lot of time was spent recruiting people to be voice actors, or musicians, or one of the other kinds of artists needed to pull this off, with some collaborators joining the band, so to speak, and eventually dropping out, and then others coming on board as the needs of the project dictated.

The core of the novel is a 30-minute animation that was originally published as a text-only story. At the time I was working with Stephen Farrell, the graphic designer, on a literary magazine, and thought it would be kind of cool as a word-image story, so we put in a lot of time together developing it that way. Some of the photography I shot—the astrolabe that is sort of an icon or visual motif that runs through the novel—came from the storeroom at the Planetarium in Chicago; I shot the photos of the Mayan calendar in the National Museum of Mexican Art. He used found footage and created artwork, and we worked together to come up with ideas for the layout and graphic design, which he created. Since the story is about time, it seemed to be a natural step to incorporate time into the story, to animate it—and of course animation asks for music, and music for composers and musicians. You can see how the project began to grow. It was a lot like putting a band together, or maybe an indie film.

With the writing finished, my role as author shifted from one of writer to conductor, or producer, or director, or grant writer—and sometimes mediator, music and art director, and programming director. Over fifteen people, spread out across three countries, contributed work to this, so I spent a lot of time coordinating their work. For example, Tim Guthrie did the final animation, which is kind of a solar system fly out: I would give him a match frame, a frame of video (which was made by Chris Jara from my storyboard sketch) that Tim was supposed to match the first frame of his animation to, and describe what I’d like him to do; he’d go off and work, then come back with what he’d done, and then we’d discuss what was working or not working with the overall conception for the novel, or with parts of the story that other artists were working on. When his piece of the puzzle was done, I’d give it to the programmer to fit into the overall structure he was creating. So TOC came together mostly through years’ worth of exchanges like that; most of the time it was working in this fashion, though in a few cases—Zoe Beloff and Chris Speed, for example—I’d seen work they’d already made. The whole book in this way is a gigantic mosaic, with the individual pieces made by lots of hands.

YT: When you started to work on the text, did you know that it was going to be “illustrated” so to speak? Did you already have a visual conception of the final work?

ST: For the core story, no. I wrote it like any other text-only story for print publication, though it did have a collage structure, so its form lent itself to thinking of it in frames or panels. After I worked with Stephen to turn it into a word-image story, though, I started writing the other pieces of the novel with visuals in mind. At the time a general rule of thumb for writing for computer screens was to limit text to the words that could fit on an index card, because that was about all the text on screen that most readers could handle comfortably. So I tried to write short sections, though not necessarily sticking to cards. As with VAS and The Book of Portraiture, my other word-image novels, I tried to use visuals as part of the story, especially in terms of what parts of the narrative I was going to tell through words, and what parts of the narrative would be carried by images. I did have a conception of what this would all look like visually—you had to in order to storyboard it out—but sometimes this consisted of just brief descriptions; for example, I described a clock-tower that would incorporate lots of devices people have used to measure time—water clocks, sundials, etc. —then Maria Tomasula made the oil painting of it that Chris Jara animated. So it went through transformations each time another artist was involved, and at each stage these collaborators brought their own ideas to it, made refinements, suggestions, gave it form.

YT: Speaking of time, “toc” of course asks for “tic” to precede it. Why are you interested in time? Novels are typically written about people, or at least about living things. What made you write a book about time, and how does time reveal itself in human beings?

ST: I don’t really write autobiographically, but at the time I began working on the story that would become the longest animation in the piece, both of my parents were dying. There was something eerie about that synchronicity—like a whole way of life being swept away the way a village at the bottom of a dam might be if the dam bursts—and that was sort of the genesis of the piece. While my father was ill, we’d talk a lot about his life, and about “his time,” as he put the era he lived through—the Depression and WWII—and you could see how “his time” shaped who he was, how he lived. He could see “his time” passing into “my time” —the time of those who didn’t live through all of that, who thought in terms of different histories or contexts—the progression gradually making him and his way of thinking an anachronism, as time will make all of us anachronistic. So I guess that ultimately I do think of the novel as being about people, though the approach is to get at things by making visible something that is as invisible to us as the air.

YT: Let’s go back to the formal aspects of TOC. It seems to me that TOC is not nearly as “individualizable” as a typical computer game. The user has two basic choices—the Chronos path or the Logos path. The Chronos path offers a film that one can skip around in but probably won’t, because it feels like a film. In the Logos path there are more possibilities—you can go clockwise, which reveals that “Tic” means “the people” and “Toc” “the non-people,” or counterclockwise, which gives you the opposite definition of the words. You can also go nonsequentially through the various stages, but since there is no logical interdependence between them this will not produce significantly different readings. Are there more fundamental consequences?

ST: The short answer is that TOC is a novel and not a game, so though it might have some elements in common with a game, it has a lot more affinity with a novel: the main navigation screen, for example, the screen where you can select a path, is essentially an animated table of contents, eliciting different paths through the book, but also recording which parts have been already visited. The main differences are in the reading experience itself and in what story is ultimately told: it is possible for readers to take a direct line through the novel and reach its end without seeing some of the sections that would change their understanding of the story. On the other hand, a reader could take a more meandering path through the novel, and at the end have had a very different experience. As in theater or other time-arts media, the experience of the novel is very much part of the novel.

YT: You provide an on-line user’s manual which may or may not be referred to. How do you expect readings to differ between the naïve and the initiated user?

ST: How readers would read was the big mystery when bringing the book to production—how would people actually use it, how much direction they would need, and how much could they be left to their own devices. To try to answer these sorts of questions, I mainly followed my own experiences with hypertext and print books, trying to avoid the things I’d always hated about hypertext—e.g., not knowing when I was done, not being able to tell how much of the book was left, not having a sense of the whole. Getting caught in loops where links keep sending a reader back to a section they’d already read was another frustration I wanted to avoid; in TOC, it’s pretty clear what you’ve read. You can revisit it, as in a print book, but it’s just as easy to skip ahead and keep moving.

This seemed especially important in a novel about time, since the ability to tell where you’re at in a book shapes how you understand the section you’re in (just as an awareness of where you are in time shapes how you understand the past). But I felt like I also needed to build in some “directions for reading,” cues that would tell the reader when to just sit back and enjoy the parts that the computer performs on its own, or when they need to use the mouse, or do some work to move the narrative forward. (In VAS I’d tried to build in similar “directions”: one section has bold headings along the tops of collage pages that tell the reader it is okay to keep turning pages, or to go down into the collages as one would read footnotes.) But really, my hope is that these sorts of directions would be subliminal, the way furniture in a room can direct traffic without calling attention to the fact. I’d prefer people to just start reading TOC, without consulting anything.

YT: Have you had any interesting feedback from readers you could share with us?

ST: In addition to what I mentioned above, I will say that along with genre expectation, there seems to be a generational divide—or maybe it was a media-orientation divide, which just happens to break down along generational lines. But the older, book generation were most likely to sit on their hands, only using the mouse to “turn the page” and read fairly linearly. Those born post-PC would use the mouse to race through the entire work, to get the lay of the land, to see what was there and what did what; then they would come back and read, dipping in here and there according to those sections that had piqued their interests most. They also thought they “caused” things to happen in the novel much more than print-oriented readers, who thought that the ones who “caused” things to happen in the novel were the characters, and they, the readers, were just spectators. I think this illustrates something about the nature of reading and readers and the nature of the book, especially as books move into an electronic format, but I’m not sure what.

YT: Tell us a little about the history of TOC. How does it relate to your earlier work? What stages did it go through? How long did it take for you to write it?

ST: A poet once told me that novelists are lucky because they only have to come up with one idea every five or six years. I always thought that I must be even luckier than that as it seems like I’ve only had to come up with one idea at all, as all my novels seem to deal with different aspects of representation: how we depict ourselves and each other, who has the right or power to depict others, and how this plays out both across time and within the different means we have to do so, be they scientific, literary, visual, or whatever . . . So TOC is an extension of this. It’s also an extension of how I’ve always incorporated the materials of the book into the story. In VAS—a novel about the bio-tech revolution we are living through—I made a conscious effort to use the body of the book as a metaphor for the human body and vice versa; if you look at the edge of The Book of Portraiture, the pages appear as strata in an archaeological dig, which evokes, I hope, the central idea of that novel: the archaeology of human representation through layers of history that make up its chapters. “C-U See-Me” was another early work that incorporated things like interactivity and tracking and links—things you can’t do in print—into the telling of the story itself. There’s that concern with materials in TOC, too, except the materials in this case include the clock of the computer, the 1s & 0s of machine language, as well as the text of human language: it’s a time-arts piece in that it is both read and plays out in real time, and given that it’s about time, these materials are central to the telling of the story, and the experience of reading it. They might be used to elicit a meditative mood, for example, or, at other times, a more accelerated experience of time, such as a person might have while playing a game.

The main story of TOC was originally published as a text-only story in Literal Latte in 1996; a year or so later I worked with Stephen Farrell to make a word-image version, which came out in Émigré. Spreads from Émigré were hung as a Moebius strip from the ceiling in an exhibit at The Center for Book and Paper Arts (in Chicago), where Maria and I also did a reading of the story with images projected on a screen behind us, and this was sort of the genesis of TOC as a multimedia piece—theater, in a way, was always part of it. I began thinking of it not just as a stand-alone story, but as a piece in a multi-media whole: I began to write brief chapters around it, basically using that story as the “present” and extending the story back towards mythic time, and forward toward a future. I began to write other sections, thinking about how they all relate as part of a matrix of stories about customs, and history, but a history in which characters don’t know all the parts because some parts haven’t happened yet, while others are so old they’ve been forgotten. Mapping it out was pretty much just taping paper sheets together and creating a flow chart for how things would link together, sketching out a storyboard for how they would fit together, as well as create a flowchart for the commands that a reader would activate to move through the story.

YT: Do you envision the “new media novel” becoming a new genre, with many writers/artists working in it? Do you think it will eventually replace the paper novel?

ST: Nothing will ever replace the paper novel, any more than film replaced theater, or photography painting. They do remediate each other, though, to use Bolter and Grusin’s insightful concept, or as Sukenick put it, they make each be more essentially itself: once photography was invented it allowed painting to be more painterly, less about documentation (depicting kings and queens, for example) and more about painting itself. I imagine something like this will happen to paper books once electronic books are ubiquitous: there will have to be a justification for printed paper—they will become more about their materials, the experience of reading, or maybe back to something like artist books, or one of a kind books made by a scribe, or some other form that gives an answer to, Why not just read on a Kindle?

TOC is a different genre, somewhere between reading and film—a Frankenstein of a book I would love to see more of—a genre of literature in the way theater is a genre of literature. I love theater but I also love to read printed novels; they’re different experiences, but lucky us, we don’t have to choose only one or the other, and I imagine that’s what will become of books like TOC: there will still be lots of authors working as authors long have, in print, just as there are those who write for the stage or screen, but there will also be some who create multimedia novels, and these novels will be very cool given the increasing ease with which something like this can be done. As the materials themselves become more fluid, authors will be able to focus on the story or poem itself rather than on the technical challenges. And of course, if there’s money in it, the way there is with video games, you’ll see big commercial interests moving in to make hybrid best sellers by Tom Clancy, etc., the way they already turn those kinds of novels into games. Hopefully the money won’t squeeze out books as art, or the indies, as it has tended to in film.

YT: What are your plans for the future? Will you continue working in this genre or will you go back to something more traditional?

ST: Right now I’m working on a collection of word-image short fiction, and a novel, Ascension, which traces our relationship to nature through our depictions of it—from naturalist sketchbook to folders of genetic information. Both will be image-text print books; all the maps, gene sequences, networking maps, and other visuals associated with subjects like this are just too rich not to draw on, and given the historical sweep of the story, it seems like paper has to be involved—at least for the first chapters. Maybe the last chapter, which is set today, should be an app.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2011 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011

 

  by Dylan Hicks

With two slim but ambitious books and many short works scattered around literary journals, the poetically named Evan Lavender-Smith has emerged as a writer about whom hype-abused words such asdaring might legitimately apply. Last year’s From Old Notebooks (BlazeVOX, $16) was a hybrid-genre work (a “memiovel” in one of its own proposed classifications) composed of epigrams, anecdotes, confessions, and fragments about, among other things, thanatophobia and pornophilia, epistemology and scatology (he was, at the time of composition, the parent of diapered children), reading and writing and the pleasures and anxieties thereof. Scenes of domestic life both tender and jokey abut philosophical musings both serious and playful, until we seem to glimpse Wittgenstein’s Twitter feed. The book is structurally reminiscent of David Markson’s late novels (an acknowledged influence), mindful of the long epigrammatic tradition that would include, say, La Rochefoucauld and Nietzsche, and, in the clarity and wit of its self-consciousness, a more austere cousin of David Foster Wallace’s work.

Lavender-Smith’s new novella, Avatar (Six Gallery Press, $15), is the interior monologue of a person of unspecified name, age, and sex floating in space. More precisely, the narrator (hereafter called N. for these introductory purposes) is floating between two stars, or, N. has feared, not so much floating as “caught right in the middle where the gravities from the two stars [meet] in a tug of war.” (That period is my own; Avatar is one long unpunctuated block of text.) N., understandably insane, increasingly amnesic, endlessly qualifying (“I still feel even now some degree some slight degree of second hand relative confidence,” is as uncertain as we are as to how this space-floating began, only that it’s been going on for “a great number of years,” from the early days when N. was crying tears of boundless loneliness, which tears floated alongside N. and became N.’s “friends,” to a more recent period of trying to think that most impossible thought: nothing.

I reached Lavender-Smith by phone at his office in Las Cruces, where he’s a visiting assistant professor of English at New Mexico State University. The following is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

Dylan Hicks: Did you grow up in Las Cruces?

Evan Lavender-Smith: I did. We moved here when I was about nine, and I’ve lived here ever since, with the exception of going off to college in California.

DH: Yeah, I see that you went to Berkeley. And did that precede getting an MFA?

ELS: Yes, that was for undergrad. I had no intention of getting an MFA. I was planning to get a Ph.D, but I was homesick, so I came back here to New Mexico. I was bored, so I took a writing class and enjoyed that, met some people in there who became my friends, ended up taking more writing classes, and eventually accumulated enough credits to qualify for the MFA.

DH: But at some point you must have realized that was happening.

ELS: I did, though I think I denied that it was happening. I’ve always struggled with the idea of an institutionalized writing curriculum, so finding myself engaged in such a thing was a little troubling. But I think its helpfulness outweighed any reservations I might have had about it.

DH: When you say “helpfulness,” do you mean that your fears weren’t particularly realized or that it was subsequently helpful?

ELS: Well, in my case it was very specifically helpful in that I discovered a teacher in Kevin McIlvoy. We just really connected in a powerful way. My thinking about literature, especially with regard to form, has been strongly influenced by him.

DH: This is “Mc” in From Old Notebooks?

ELS: Yes. In some regards he authorized a path for me in which language was prioritized in fiction. That was always a real struggle for me, thinking about the prioritization of language. Does that have a place in fiction? He absolutely confirmed that it did. And I was just so drawn to that idea that I wanted to take more and more classes from him.

DH: Were you a big reader as a teenager? And were you reading pretty sophisticated things?

ELS: I was. That’s when I started reading Pynchon and DeLillo and Barth and Hawkes and Barthelme and Gaddis and all those guys. Also, Kevin McIlvoy was a friend of my parents’, and my mother is an English professor. So I had people who were helping me to navigate this course of reading. It started with DeLillo and Pynchon.

DH: It seems like, having read those writers when you were quite young, you would already be primed to accept the idea of a linguistically driven fiction.

ELS: Yes, that’s a good point, but I don’t know how much of that I was actually perceiving in, say, DeLillo and Pynchon—I don’t think I had the diacritical judgment to perceive their work as being in contrast to another type of writing, or that there were two worlds in contemporary literature. To me it was just fun. It took someone presenting this contrast to me, this argument that has been taking place in contemporary literature for some time. And it wasn’t until many years later that I saw that there was yet another tradition even more language-oriented, the tradition that follows directly from Joyce and Beckett. Of course we feel some of that in DeLillo and those other guys, but I would say that there’s a kind of third tradition that is in some ways just as much in opposition to the DeLillos and the Pynchons as it is to . . . that other nebulous group of writers, those who shall not be named.

DH: So as an undergrad you studied philosophy, is that correct?

ELS: No, this is kind of embarrassing, but—

DH: You have no formal philosophical training whatsoever.

ELS: None at all. I’ve actually never taken a single philosophy course. Which I think may be telling about the state of philosophy in academia nowadays. It seems that, in order to study the kind of philosophy that I’m most interested in—

DH: Which is contemporary European philosophy?

ELS: Yes. I mean, I wasn’t very interested in philosophy when I was at Berkeley, but had I been, if I’d wanted to study Deleuze, I probably would have ended up doing so in the English department. I had friends at Berkeley who were studying philosophy with Hubert Dreyfus, a famous Heideggerian philosopher who wrote a seminal book called Being-in-the-World. I didn’t even know what they were talking about. Now I quite regret that, because it was a rare opportunity that I missed. But no, I’ve never had any training; it’s all come to me rather late. I was quite afraid of philosophy for a very long time, and finally just kind of abandoned myself to it in my mid-twenties. That was an important moment for me.

DH: How so?

ELS: Well, despite having felt in Pynchon and DeLillo a fanciful relationship to language—and I think also to philosophy—I never felt that a pathway in fiction was available in which philosophy bore heavily. I’d never had the confidence to do something like that until I began seriously reading philosophy. Maybe this is largely about confidence: Kevin McIlvoy instilling in me the confidence to pay attention to language, and Brian Evenson making me feel that it was okay to pay attention to philosophy and feel confident about combining my interests in philosophy and fiction in some way.

DH: To not feel like an amateur—or perhaps you want to retain some of that.

ELS: I think I do, yes. When I think about the professional philosopher, my stomach turns. But there is a kind of armchair philosophizing that is really provocative to me, and as a fiction writer—whatever that means—I very consciously look for opportunities to do a little armchair philosophizing.

DH: The recent book has an epigraph from Kierkegaard, and the previous book has one from Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein plays a role in both, so it seems you’re attracted to philosophers who are also gifted writers, or in philosophy that’s linguistically driven or has a poetic sensibility. Is that fair to say?

ELS: I think so. However, a philosopher I grew very interested in a couple years ago is Alain Badiou, and he argues very forcefully that the poeticization of philosophy has been to philosophy’s detriment. And at least in the context of Badiou’s ontology, I think that’s very accurate. I’m interested in reading many different kinds of philosophy, but when writing From Old Notebooks I was particularly interested in a kind of philosophy that would emerge from narrative. I think that Kierkegaard was up to something quite similar; I think that Nietzsche was too, at least occasionally. I don’t know if narrative is quite the right word. I might say a philosophy that is engaged with formal affects; the art form itself produces affects and percepts that are verging on concepts, the stuff of philosophy. I’m really interested in that possibility, but I don’t know how rigorous it can be. When I think back on From Old Notebooks, I fear that the effects of the book finally aren’t as thoroughly rigorous as the effects of philosophy. They aren’t as intellectually bracing, I suppose. Maybe it’s just something I’m incapable of. But the thought of producing new concepts is a big goal for me, as I imagine it is for many serious thinkers—I don’t mean to call myself a serious thinker, because I’m actually quite a playful thinker. But I wonder if that’s something that can be done through narrative and prose. It’s something I’m constantly thinking of; it was something I was going for in Avatar as well.

DH: From Old Notebooks is kind of an audacious first book: a debut by an obscure writer that asks readers to care about things they might think unremarkable, such as your domestic life. I find the book very engaging, but I was also sort of puzzled by how it managed this, because, taken out of context, some of the items could easily be, say, a Facebook entry. And then there’s also this high intellectual aspect put into that stew. You talk in the book about your self-consciousness about the project’s potential vanity—it seems that you must have been quite anxious while writing it.

ELS: I think the book acknowledging its own audacity is a way for it to appear less audacious; the book attempts to preempt a reading in which someone points at it and says, “That’s too audacious for a first book.” I do think it’s too audacious in some respect. I think I would probably say that about Avatar as well. There’s almost a self-conscious positioning of the work within very serious trajectories of writing, canonical trajectories. I don’t know what to say about that. Now I’ll read from From Old Notebooks and think, Oh, God, Evan, who do you think you are? But those thoughts were very true at that moment. I feel very passionately about whatever it is I’m writing, generally, and I feel very serious about whatever it is that I’m writing, maybe a bit too serious. I think some of these lessons of postmodernism have been lost on me. I still have this decidedly modernist outlook on the position of the author in relation to the work, and in society at large—that the author is an important force for artistic creation, even for change. So when I inhabit this persona of the author, especially in the writing I do that is more self-reflexive, I think that idea of the author comes through. It’s something of an antiquated notion of the role and the power of the author, but it’s one that for whatever reason I can’t quite shake.

DH: I was just reading John Barth’s “The Literature of Exhaustion,” an essay from 1967. He would be considered a quintessential postmodernist, but he aligns himself with this same sort of modernist idea of the author’s power, of championing the work that very few people could do.

ELS: Yes, I feel that in Barth. I feel something in that essay particularly, a kind of riven quality about the argument. He seems to retain a modernist outlook on the role of the author while making what is something like, as you say, the quintessential postmodernist argument about literature and writing. I feel very close to that essay in many respects.

DH: From Old Notebooks is full of ideas for stories, essays, screenplays, and poems—the sort of ideas people jot down, after all, in notebooks. One, from the last page, is: “Epic poem in which hero floats between two stars—one in front, one behind,” which obviously became Avatar. What most attracted you to this idea, and what were the chief technical problems you encountered while writing it?

ELS: Well, a consciousness alone with its own process of thought is the material I return to most often, and Avatar was an attempt to strip down that scenario to its most basic elements—in this case someone or something that is in the middle of nowhere with almost no stimuli. It feels like it’s paradigmatic of the material that is closest to me. I look back on those two books and I see that similarity in particular, a consciousness that is questioning the nature of consciousness itself through some form of narrative. So that’s where it originated, with that impulse to get a consciousness completely alone. And then the technical complications were many. The book went through many formal iterations, including ones in which there was very little white space, and later iterations in which it looked more like composition by field. In its current iteration I struggled with simply reading the thing over and over and over, which is something I do—I try to barrage my consciousness with the writing. It was difficult just to read it, and it remains difficult.

DH: Difficult emotionally, or . . . ?

ELS: Kind of tedious, I’d say. The absence of punctuation creates a certain demand on the reader that might not otherwise be there. I don’t feel compelled to return to the book the way I do, say, From Old Notebooks. I enjoy taking up From Old Notebooks and reading something at random; there’s a certain belletristic quality about it that I enjoy and am kind of amused by. I don’t quite feel that way withAvatar. When I see the book on my desk, I nudge it even farther away. It feels almost like a violence on me when I try to read it.

DH: Another fragment from From Old Notebooks that you just gave me an occasion to bring up simply reads: “My tumultuous relationship with the semicolon.” Avatar is, I suppose, a kind of trial separation from semicolons, and from all punctuation. I’m wondering when that decision was reached, especially considering how second-guessing the narrator is—conventionally punctuated, the book might’ve been a Jamesian sea of commas and em-dashes and what have you.

ELS: It was a decision that was made in the moment of the work’s inception. The voice and the form were one thing from the beginning: “I am floating between two stars just floating one in front one behind.” The voice emerged without punctuation in my mind. It never contained punctuation. It did, at an early moment, do certain things with white space in order to control pace, but that was quite laborious to maintain and finally, I think, offered very little benefit. In my shifting around the white spaces I began to see the book without any punctuation or simulation of punctuation, and for whatever reason that felt most organic to this voice. I do think that there could be a tendency for a reader to project punctuation in his or her reading experience. Is that something that you did while reading it?

DH: There were a few repetitions that worked like a period, and a few miscues that would normally be resolved by punctuation, but after a few pages I felt I was pretty much in its rhythm. I would note the absence of an apostrophe after a possessive, so I guess that by noting it I was putting it there. I may have been thinking too literally—this kind of relates to the punctuation thing—but in the early parts of the book I was trying to figure out how old the narrator might be, trying to place it in time. There are some semi-antiquated words and phrases in the book—like “all this while,” “upon,” “atop,” “for” in the sense of “because” —I mean, these are not Elizabethan words or anything, but maybe those and the absence of contractions put me in mind of a somewhat elderly narrator. But then it’s revealed that the narrator is wearing Air Jordans, so I imagined the narrator as having been, at some point after the mid-1980s, an American teenager—except one who speaks in this language that seems a little older, kind of Continental. Maybe that’s just me inserting voices from other books—the book is sometimes very wittily circular in that Thomas Bernhard way, for instance. But that was one of the interesting parts of the book for me, this hard-to-place tone, matched with a figure that in my imagination was not unlike myself.

ELS: I think that’s very accurate. The paradoxical quality of the voice that you mention is something I find myself doing in the more conventional fiction I’ve written, especially the short stories. It often involves a folding over of narrative distance in some way, where the voice of the child and the retrospective voice of the adult are somehow telescoped into one paradoxical voice. In Avatar particularly the book does present a timeless, or even an untimely, quality, yet it’s still littered with references—like Air Jordans and baseball cards—that might serve to locate it in time. I suppose I imagine those as cracks in something like a timeless regime of representation, a quality that we might associate with some of Beckett; I feel some of his narrators are outside of time. But yes, I think Avatar is after a paradoxical treatment of time. There’s a certain reading of it by which the speaker or thinker is revealed as being thousands or even millions of years old. That is

contrasted with a childlike voice, occasionally a childlike voice, and at least occasionally a more Continental voice, as you describe it.

DH: I happened to read Avatar around the time I went to an exhibition here in Minneapolis of Yves Klein’s work, much of which attempted, at least in his sometimes coy rhetoric, to deal with the void. That seemed appropriate to me since Avatar is very much concerned with emptiness, nothingness, with types of nothing that are in fact something or become something, and I guess with the challenge or impossibility of emptying one’s mind. Were there particular books or even meditative practices that informed your treatment of this stuff?

ELS: Well, I don’t know that there were. I guess perhaps both Being and Time and Critique of Pure Reason are books I return to in my own mind when I think about thinking, when I think about presenting a rigorous image of thought. I do think that that’s what Avatar finally is: an attempt to present a truly rigorous image of thought, and to me the best way to go about that is to attempt to show a mind struggling with the extremes of its own process. Is there such a thing as a thought of nothing? Is that a worthwhile goal? Is that a goal that would come about for this narrator in that position? I think so; it felt quite appropriate to me. But also these formal correspondences suggested by the novel became quite important to me, the formal correspondence between a thought of the void and the void itself—he doesn’t have the void as a realistic material option in his world, but he does have the thought of the void. (I’m saying “his,” though the novel goes out of its way to avoid gender specificity.) I think the book is concerned in some way with this formal displacement, which is language standing in place for materiality, a condition of his world. I remain very interested in placing characters up against their perception of nothing and nothingness, and the impossibility of such perception. I don’t know why I’m drawn to that; I suppose it’s something I do in my own thinking. I’m eager to sort of figure it out, and the way that I tend to figure out my own thoughts about life and death is to sort of perform them in my writing.

DH: There’s a thanatophobia at work in From Old Notebooks that seems to relate to Avatar, in that one could imagine the narrator’s situation as an afterlife. Perhaps you didn’t, but I guess I did, when thinking, what might this be?

ELS: Well, it’s an important question: To what extent does the book invite that? It’s a question that, at a late point in the composition of the book, concerned me: Is a reader going to be willing to accept the immanent terms of this world without attempting to apply a hermeneutics that’s looking for transcendent meaning? And of course it’s impossible for me to say. I did, at a late point, consider the space of the novel as the space of purgatory, but of course your reading is just as valid as mine.

DH: Does that jibe with your earlier statement about the power of the author?

ELS: No, it does not.

DH: There’s a recurrent phrase in the book— “quarter of a fingernail” —that I confess I don’t entirely understand. I thought for a while it was the narrator’s description of how big the star he’s floating toward looks, but then I thought other things as well, all fairly prosaic.

ELS: Yes, that was the intention: a measurement of the star. But I think also his body becomes quite important.

DH: Right—the funniest parts of the book for me were the discussions of friendship and reciprocity with respect, for instance, to his arm potentially being one of his friends.

ELS: Yes, this strange objectification of his own body is something like the comic relief of the book. It’s a pitiful humor. I do find myself laughing at him in his miserable existence—not unlike the way I laugh at characters in Beckett, with their sucking stones or whatever.

DH: Can you talk just a bit about the title? When I first saw the book I was reminded, because of the film Avatar, of how the Replacements’ Let It Be playfully echoes the Beatles’ like-titled album—the distinction being that I happen to love both Let It Be albums, but only your book in the case at hand. So I’m wondering if the title preceded the film. The title seems to suggest allegorical readings.

ELS: The title did present a problem for me when I learned of Cameron’s film. But I went and saw the film, and I didn’t really like it at all, so I decided to retain the original title. Perhaps if I’d liked the movie, I would have changed the title. It’s a difficult question for me. I’d heard the word avatar for years, but I think I first encountered it in print in Ellmann’s biography of Joyce. The young Joyce is meeting someone for the first time, I think it’s a famous poet, and he says, “There’s an avatar in Ireland.” He’s referring to himself, and I didn’t quite get his use of the word. The word consequently existed in my memory in an ambiguous capacity.

DH: He was using it cheekily as a “god come to earth,” I take it.

ELS: Yes, I think so. But of course the word is now in common usage in reference to the substitution of a figure for a person, say, on the Internet. I suppose these various meanings and associations of the word sort of colluded to produce, for me, an image of a word disassociated from a stable meaning, and so I think in a certain early moment I simply called it Avatar for that reason, and then subsequently, through the writing of the book, I began to feel other vague associations between the word and the narrative sitting there beneath the word. I think the sound of the word carries with it certain associations—an association of flight, for me, that I don’t think follows from the word’s etymology.

DH: Did you happen to see Ed Park’s essay in a recent New York Times Book Review about the one-sentence novel?

ELS: I didn’t.

DH: It was just a back-page thing in praise of the one-sentence novel. So I guess I thought of Avatar as being potentially Zeitgeisty. I’m not sure if you consider it a one-sentence novel; it’s almost a part of an endless sentence.

ELS: Right. I think that that was actually an important way for me to imagine the form of the novel, especially at an early moment in its composition, as a fragment from something endless. I maybe lost sight of that through its composition—in my attempt to provide the narrative with a kind of shapeliness that would be perceived as a real contrivance if in fact this were simply an excerpt. Or maybe it was an excerpt that was selected on account of its shapeliness. Likewise, at an early moment I imagined this being printed on a scroll, and this being almost like a section torn out from the scroll, and that’s what’s been presented to us.

DH: This last question may be unwieldy, but you talked about your interest in trying to deal seriously with consciousness, and I know you’ve studied Joyce. So when you’re writing and revising, what sort of things are you mindful of in terms of the ever-present challenge of trying to represent consciousness while at the same time dealing with a linguistic presentation that also seeks to be art, and may as such be distancing from the thing you’re trying to get at, but may also be clarifying . . . this question is so huge that now I’m regretting having even—

ELS: No, this is exactly the sort of thing I think about. Something that I seem to have to do, and I recall doing this with both of these books, is to get my thinking as the writer and the thinking presented by the book to achieve an alignment, so we become one and the same thing for a certain duration. It’s a great challenge. With Avatar it involved reading the book over and over and over and over until my thoughts were very much proceeding in the manner of this narrator’s, so that I could return to the book and the voice was right there. There was little distinction between my own thoughts and this insane narrator’s thoughts, which was quite scary. In both books, this process of a consciousness looping back on itself is repeatedly performed—very self-reflexively in From Old Notebooks, perhaps less self-reflexively inAvatar, although it is still a consciousness constantly returning to its own process. So that seems to be the way I deal with representing thought—I have to become it. I’ve likened it to method acting.

DH: It seems analogous to what a more traditional fiction writer would say about getting inside the character.

ELS: I suppose it is, but thinking about my writing as containing a cast of concepts, rather than a cast of characters, has been important to me. When I think about inhabiting my fiction, I tend to think about inhabiting forms and concepts rather than characters.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2011 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011