Sharon Olds
Knopf ($18.95)

by John Kendall Hawkins

Since things and my body are made of the same stuff, vision must somehow come about in them; or yet again, their manifest visibility must be repeated in the body by a second visibility.
—Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,”
The Primacy of Perception

The opening line of “No Makeup,” the fourth poem in Sharon Olds’s new collection, Arias, states: “Maybe one reason I do not wear makeup is to scare people.” It’s funny, has a political edge, and gets you thinking about all the people who hide behind thin-skinned masks. Olds’s engaging humor always leads the reader toward an edgy question, like: Makeup for what?

A winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and the only woman from the U.S. to win the T.S. Eliot Prize, Olds is in a fine fettle here. Mixing up memory and desire, but with nothing wasted, her humane, savvy, lyrical takes on ordinary experiences, albeit ones that often exist somewhere between the concrete and the abstract, are thoroughly enthralling and often movingly accessible. There are many strands and streams of themes that run through the river of Olds’s work. In Arias, she has many poems about dealing with strangers, human self-destructiveness, sexuality, motherhood, and the brilliant flashes of a personal pantheism. All that, in addition to paeans to language, love, and social awareness.

Born in 1942, Olds spent her early childhood in the Bay Area before being sent to the Dana Halls School in Massachusetts. She did her undergraduate work at Stanford and earned her PhD at Columbia University in 1972. According to the biographical information at poetryfoundation.org, she grew up a “hellfire Calvinist,” which seems to have had a significant effect on her psychosexual development and later personal mythopoeia. She has lived in New York City for decades.

Olds has been called a “confessional” poet, but that label is not quite right, as confessional poets are often stuck recounting trauma from their past, which can strain an empathetic read. But Olds, for all her mother-meted (and metered) childhood abuse, survives with witty and strange ontological bursts of insight. She puts her head into gas clouds of life-affirming atoms. She never strains empathy, but seems to produce new streams of it.

She’s also too hip to be darkly backward—she’s tuned in to the Now and Future, politically, sexually, intellectually, and poetically. Her poem “My Godlessness” fits right in with the times. Surprisingly, and anti-confessionally, she writes:

My mother beating me was not the source
of my godlessness. The source was not
the rape and murder of my classmate, or the rapes
and murders of our fellow citizens.
It was not earth, or water, or air.

Instead, perhaps envisioning Trump and the circus in Washington D.C., she writes: “The source of my godlessness was cruelty / and abuse of power, its minions were like the / flame-headed one roaring now / from the pulpit, the orange-haired extinctor.”

Arias contains six parts: “Meeting A Stranger,” “Arias,” “Run Away Up,” “The New Knowing,” “Elegies,” and “First Child.” This gives some of the game away, but there’s more. I like to think of the collection as an opera, loose, decentralized, postmodern, but full of arias—38 of them to be exact—and leitmotifs (“My mother beat me in 4/4 time” being the main one), and it's a collection that features beginnings, middles, and ends. An opera, but more Tommy than Rigoletto—and Olds is a diva from birth to death in these poems.

Early in the collection, Olds conjures up a familiar remembrance of the confusion and horror of 9/11. Suddenly, there is that image of white dust and smoke coming at you like a billowing fog monster, people running for cover. In “Looking South at Lower Manhattan, Where the Towers Had Been,” the poet in Olds wants to make sense of the horror and panic, but stops herself:

if you see me starting to talk about
something I know nothing about,
like the death of someone who’s a stranger to me,
step between me and language.

She observes: “oxygen, carbon, hydrogen” and the “sacred ashes / of strangers,” coming at the onlookers—the in-your-face failure of humanity.

But there is humor, too, in these transactions with strangers. At the airport, in “Departure Gate Aria,” she imagines herself at the airport as a “guardian spirit,” who comes across a beclouded woman with sandals and engages her in conversation just long enough to praise how her sandals complement the woman’s garments and soul: “You look / beautiful and good,” she says, and watches the clouds disappear from the woman’s face. The poet is chuffed and thinks:

I bustled off—
so this is what I’ll do, now,
instead of kissing and being kissed, I’ll
go through airports praising people, like an
Antichrist saying, You do not need
to change your life.

Olds is known for going to poetic places where other more angelic types fear to tread, like the joy of sexuality—as if it only belonged on TV, but must get itself to a nunnery in poetic form. Olds mocks this notion immediately in “Breaking Bad Aria,” when she imagines why the shifty Heisenberg (Walter White) resonates with men: “he gets sexually aroused by cooking meth and having / killed someone, it excites him so much he fucks / harder than he has ever fucked.” Later in the poem, she has her own quake: “What was arousing, to me, / for three decades, was faithfulness, the / chains of orgasms extreme beyond violent /in safety.” She never lost her faith.

In “Gliss Aria” she celebrates the bliss she’s had with the gliss of her lower lips, although, she writes, “sometimes I have left them untouched, / so they cannot sing, yet they’ve been sweet to me, / liquidy, sleek, lissome, with some / faint fragrance of salted nectar.” At other times it’s more about the music, as when she carts some LPs over to her lover’s place and gets laid for the first time in “Long-Playing Aria”:

—my body which had hardly been touched,
even through my clothes—to be that passive
verb, with flowered in it, by a light-shedding
laughing man who seemed to not love
anyone, like a god.

Her caesuras open like orchidal maneuvers in the dark, an erotic mythopoesis at work.

Some of the best poems in Arias come in the joie de vivre and humor of her baby poems. In “Objective Permanence Aria,” Olds imagines that first self-conscious moment of delightful other-being:

What a moment it was, in my life, when my mother
would leave the room, and I knew she still
existed! I was connected to that giant
flower on legs, that huge human
bee, even when the evidence of her
was invisible to me.

In “My First Two Weeks,” the baby drolly recalls that “I lived in a collective, / a commune of newborns” and, as for her relationship to Mom, “I commandeered those teats!” Oh, sweet liebfraumilch!

But such Blakean songs of innocence are more than balanced out by the poet’s songs of experience in a childhood of beatings at the hands of her mother. In “Waist Aria,” we hear the child being told, “Young lady—go up and wait for me / with your clothes off, below the waist.” Over and over again, these words cry out from the page—unexpectedly, at first, until the 4/4 time becomes the scene of a crime the poet must return to or die in.

Because of her ardent love for her mother, Olds keeps searching for answers in the poetry of her pain. In “I Do Not Know If It Is True, but I Think,” she introduces the musical pathology she shares with her mother, as if the mother, too, found release in rhyme and time:

My mother beat me to the meter of “Onward,
Christian Soldiers.” She speeded up
the tempo which dragged, in church—Slow-ly
On-ward Bo-ring Chris-tian Sol-diers—
and she got to give pain, maybe the same
pain her mother had given her
and her mother’s mother had given her mother . . .

She is beaten because her mother wanted a boy, pre-named Timothy, and, instead, much to the mother’s dismay, a girl emerged out of the pain and quagmire of birth. In “Timothy Aria,” Olds writes, “I had been a star, / for a while, and I did not forget that I’d been / held, once, at some length, in passionate regard.” She holds the moment like a changeling, taking simple succor in the fact that her mother can love. In “Cold Tahoe Today,” the poet sub-merges with elements and goes to watery places: “I was an agate hunter, /a diver for transparent stone. / It meant so much to me to be / entirely inside that liquid world”—because there, “No one could hit you, in there, no one could / pull their arm back fast enough / to strike.”

Several lovely poems are devoted to the release of her trauma after her mother dies. She tends, with her sister, to her mother’s pain-driven last hours from this realm in “Morphine Elegy.” She becomes mother to her mother in “Dawn Song,” laying to rest a woman never at home in the world with these words:

And I want to say, to my
mother, my journeying laborer
who wandered here, with me in her hobo
sack—I want to put her to sleep
like an exhausted animal. Sleep, baby,
Sleep.

Olds possesses a keen sense of existence as not merely anthropocentric, but as pantheistic—that there is a divine force identifiable in everything, right down to the molecular level. Such phenomenological poems here include “Her Birthday as Ashes in Seawater,” where her mother’s ashes have been dispersed, leaving “her nature unknowable, dense, / dispersed, her atomization a miracle.” She is part of the sea and the sea is part of the galaxy and the galaxy is part of at least one of the universes. It’s a reminder that when we scale up, anthropocentrism doesn’t fare well.

“My Parents’ Ashes (New York City, October, 2001)” returns the reader to the earlier poem written not long after 9/11, when the acrid dust of bones and buildings was still in the air, holding memory in place. It evokes an image of her parents’ ashes dispersed 3000 miles away in the San Francisco Bay:

Maybe a molecule of her
has lain beside a molecule
of him, or interpenetrated
it, an element of her matter
bonding to an element of his
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
the currents carry them
back and forth under the Golden Gate.

Olds’s caesuras move back and forth, with and against the current, her rhythms and imagery stretching into the diaphanous reaches of language’s primordial brine.

For Olds, these interpenetrations of being can be playful and funny, too, as in “Animal Crackers,” where she pokes fun at the notion of transubstantiation: “I ate Christ, and the bunny, / I want a Levine matzoh, I want / Dickinson by her own recipe, / and Keats, bright oatmeal brooch.” It’s pagan cannibalism: ingesting the other, incorporating their power. But like most poets of Olds’s caliber, intertextuality has significant influences—she’s read everybody, and it can be difficult to discern her responses to other poets’ language. There’s some Plath, but only in an anti-Plath way; there’s Dickinson in her caesuras and maybe in the loneliness at the core of her ostensible extroversion; in at least one poem, “Cervix Aria,” I hear Blake:

When I held a snapdragon gently by its jaws
and squeezed, so they opened, it was as if
the volt at the hinge of the maw of the blossom leaped
open at the same instant as the glug!
at the core of my body
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
We almost knew this, at five, four,
three—when we saw the truth of beauty,
our body, abashed, gulped.

“Cervix Aria” could probably go far in summing up the aim of this collection. We come into the world already full of the knowledge we will spend our lives seeking and we talk each other out of wisdom; our common language is also our common ignorance. We can only approximate each other’s being, and that we do through the poetry of love.

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Click here to purchase this book
at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2020 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2020

Poets Steve Healey and Ed Bok Lee both live in the Twin Cities and have known each other for over a decade. Both have published a number of poetry books with Coffee House Press, their most recent ones coming out in 2019—Healey’s Safe Houses I Have Known (Coffee House Press, $16.95) and Lee’s Mitochondrial Night (Coffee House Press, $16.95). Both collections were named finalists for the Minnesota Book Award.

There are intriguing overlaps between these books. They both explore fatherhood and family experience in starkly personal ways. They consider how past trauma haunts the present, and how imperial and colonial brutality has continued to manifest new forms through the Cold War and into our twenty-first century.

But these books also come from radically different social positions. Lee writes through the lens of his Korean ancestry, his parents’ experience of physical and cultural displacement as refugees and emigrants, his life growing up in the U.S. with its uniquely insidious ways of marginalizing Asian Americans. In contrast, Healey’s book dissects his white suburban childhood and complicity in his father’s covert professional life as a CIA spy—how that same culture of secrecy infected their family and caused large-scale devastation around the globe.

This conversation was conducted prior to the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic and the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. Of course, the social inequities and atrocities spotlighted in recent months have deep histories and contexts, so it is our hope that readers will find this conversation even more relevant for our current moment.

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Steve Healey: Congrats to you, Ed, for publishing Mitochondrial Night—such a powerful book with so many layers. One pervasive theme I find in these poems is how the past, memory, history, ancestry, ethnic identity, all continue to emerge in our present lives and bodies (our mitochondria). Can you talk about how this theme became so important for this book, for you as a poet & person? Is there something empowering and healing about this accessing of the past, tracing these continuities? Is there also something dangerous and destabilizing about it?

Ed Bok Lee: Thanks. And congratulations to you on the incredibly poignant, thought-provoking, formally playful Safe Houses I Have Known. The Cold War as a ghost that has moved so quietly through so many families is chillingly felt in your new book. As the child of immigrants from the two Koreas—my mother from what is now the communist North and my late father having haled from the (capitalist) South—your book makes me think about how the Cold War has affected my own family. Maybe we’ll get more into that. But, to your question, I’ve spoken before about how our cellular mitochondria, with their own “invasive” history and specific DNA, seemed like an apt, centralizing metaphor for Mitochondrial Night. My book explores what it means to be a migrant, a refugee, an immigrant, by looking at certain commonalities not only between all humans, throughout history, but also fundamental commonalities between all seeds, stars, cells, and ancestors.

One thing I haven’t touched on before is the Korean cultural patriarchy. This is changing slowly due to #metoo and other social injustices coming to full light in the digital age, but bloodlines on one’s father’s line are still to this day immensely important, especially to the classes that have the most to maintain in terms of power. Becoming a father for the first time, as well as becoming very aware that my mother doesn’t have much time left on this Earth, catalyzed something very deep in me. I wasn’t taught by any culture to think this way, but often when looking at my daughter, it’s very clear to me that I’m literally half my mother, half her genes and in many ways, also half her physicality. I see myself more wholly through my daughter. I see my mother more wholly as a human being through my daughter. I think I can also see certain glimpses of all of humanity through my daughter. A lot of men grow up identifying more physically with their fathers—that is, we often look for our wholeness as a man through our fathers—yet we’re half our mothers, and partly their mothers, their mother’s mother, and so on, ad infinitum, back to what biologists term “Mitochondrial Eve.” (Mitochondria, the energy factories in each of our living cells, is inherited solely matrilineally.) The book is dedicated to my mother, a refugee three times over before she was ten years old, and also was written with my daughter’s future questions about who she is and where she comes from in mind—questions that I realized I can't truly ever hope to answer until I satisfactorily pose those questions to myself, and not just as a current member of the human species.

Your own book contains many poems about growing up as the son of a CIA agent during the Cold War. Yet I’m as intrigued by the mother’s silence as I am the father’s silence (or secrets). I find myself wondering what it was like to be her? What was shared with her, what was not? In this way, the State enters into her unspokenness like a third patriarchal (to the child) figure. Can you speak to what was healing and what was destabilizing in the process of composing this book in poems?

SH: Great question—you’re getting at something that was really unexpected for me while writing this book. I’d thought it was mostly about my relationship with my father—how he lived a secret life as a CIA spy, how he descended into mental instability and alcoholism, and then died decades ago at the age of 62.

But my mom is still alive, now 80 years old, and I still feel the effects of this past family history in our present. We’re very close, but she’s always been a private person who doesn’t talk much about feelings, and I was getting anxious and uncomfortable about that long “unspokenness.” So the last poem I wrote for the book, “How I Become a Son,” was one I never thought I’d write while my mom was still alive. It reveals some particularly painful events that triggered my parents’ divorce. I decided to share the poem with my mom, and we finally talked about what had happened, and it was such a relief to break that silence.

You’re totally right about that silence being bigger than individuals—it was (still is) built into the State and the larger culture. In a way, it was the coldness of the Cold War, and my mother was produced by it like so many others. She came from an Italian Catholic family, and her own father was a demanding, abusive man who actually tried to erase his ethnic identity, changing the family’s last name (Loschiavo) to one he thought would assimilate more into mainstream American whiteness (Higgins). My mother was ordered not to reveal their true Italian identity to anyone, so she too lived “under cover” while growing up.

I think deciding to divorce my dad was her most powerful act of self-expression, her way of gaining some control in her life. But as so many poems in Safe Houses I Have Known show, we still didn’t have the tools to cope with the psychic mess that unfolded from there. We still didn’t know how to talk about it.

I’m wondering about how you depict your mother in Mitochondrial Night, especially in a poem like “Metaphormosis,” not only as someone who remembers or connects you to various pasts, but also as someone who increasingly forgets. Later, there’s a poem called “Portrait of a Blind Couple Reverberating,” with these great lines: “Each body is an ark. We store enough / clarity and obfuscation to survive.” How might obfuscation and forgetfulness be ways of surviving? Your book obviously yearns for memory and clarity, but do you see obfuscation and forgetfulness operating in these poems as well?

EBL: This idea of forgetting is interesting, especially given that some old people, as they’re losing their memories, seem to remember things they haven’t experienced in years, like a childhood song or figure from their childhood. I don’t mean to romanticize losing one’s memory. But I’ve been thinking lately that every human being is drawn to poetry at an instinctual level, in part because when you’re an infant and teetering toddler, everything in the world, every sound and image and sensory detail, is new and mysterious and just beyond comprehension, yet monumentally present, even potent. In short, the world and everything suffusing us in it feels like a powerful, slowly unfolding poem. I don’t think we ever really lose this relationship to the poetic. At some point, we convince ourselves that we can finally now understand the world in a rational way as adults. But it’s all akin to an illusion. Ask anyone on their deathbed. The world, life, was one long poem, they will tell you just before they close their eyes for the final time.

Knowledge, it seems to me, is parochial, as is “reality.” Ask any scientist from a hundred or a thousand years ago about the nature of “reality.” As Richard Wright wrote, in part in the context of Black and White America, “Literature is a struggle over the nature of reality.” On that tip, power just as much as poverty warps one’s experience of “reality.” Thus, some who are powerful are often simply doing what they feel with every bone in their bodies is moral and just and for the betterment of all. So it’s not necessarily that they’re evil, or gone over to the “dark side,” as some would have it, or are even lying to themselves to remain sane. It’s that their reality, the formation of molecules around them and everyone else around them (also usually powerful) is a kind of different plane of existence. But the error comes too often in the sense that that plane is inherently superior. I think poetry can be very useful here.

In the case of Safe Houses I Have Known, the father is co-existing in two different realities, with two different identities. Once the son, you, learns of his secret in adolescence, and especially after the divorce, it’s as if the speaker gets atomized, disintegrated, spread so thinly across various competing realities. This is where poetry comes in, as a form to hold all these disparate realities into one larger, more comprehensive and cohesive whole. If you’d written a prose memoir, I wonder how you would have been able to get at the kind of disembodied psychic state of the speaker and situation and nation. The U.S. and world was living for the first time in a constant mode of potential sudden annihilation.

In “Invisible Civil War,” you write of a neighbor boy, Brad, who later killed himself as an adult. The speaker articulates: “I wish I were making this up, but I’m not. It’s really true that / I threatened to kill him if he didn’t sponsor me for a charity walk. / I must have needed an easy way to forget my own pain by / threating someone who was nervous and spoke with a stutter.”

We then learn that these boys live in “Stonewall Manor,” which was named after “’Stonewall’ Jackson, / the Confederate general known for killing many Union solders,” and that the speaker’s parents are in the process of divorcing. The recursive nature of the poem, with its repeating lines and sentiments, captures the speaker’s deep urge to both remember and forget what the people in the poem are striving so hard to remember and forget. The final result is silence and death. Yet the poetry lives on.

Do you see any useful parallels or differences between the constant threat of the Cold War in your childhood, and the constant threat of terrorism in our children’s and all our lives in America now?

SH: For sure, the supposed threat of terrorism we still live with is really an extension of the Cold War threat, and then you can keep reaching back in history (to the Civil War, etc) to see this pattern of gaining power by creating a false threat of the “other.” In the Trump era that bogeyman has become the immigrant or refugee, and clearly Trump became president by magnifying that threat to provoke fear and resentment.

As you say, those in power often really believe that they’re doing the right and moral thing, creating “security,” protecting people, even while devastating others along the way. As I was doing research for my book, I confronted so many disturbing atrocities the CIA committed “to save the world for democracy” from the “Communist threat,” and those who suffered most were often poor, nonwhite people, often in former colonies, in Asia, Africa, Latin America. It occurred to me that the modern intelligence industry was built to continue colonial control in less obvious ways. As overt colonial rule became too messy and morally questionable, global superpowers invented covert operations to make their power less visible or more justifiable.

That bullying I describe in “Invisible Civil War” is a true story, and I still feel great shame for threatening that kid in that way—I’m still haunted by that memory. And yes, that tension between remembering and forgetting in the poem—it happens not just on a personal level for the speaker and me, but also on larger social and historical levels.

In a way, that suburban neighborhood was like a monument to forgetting the real Civil War, a whitewashing of the real racism, pain, and death. The suburban American dream says, “Let’s forget the trauma, keep smiling, keep moving forward.” But of course the trauma keeps manifesting and repeating, not only in little acts of bullying but also in the anxiety and paranoia that pervade society, in systemic inequities, and in State-sponsored acts of mass violence and war.

I love that idea of life being one long poem, experienced most intensely by those recently born or about to die. Do you think becoming a father for you has been a kind of link between these two spaces? The speaker in Mitochondrial Night so often composes the world of the poem around his daughter, observing her, but also observing himself as a parent. How has becoming a father inhabited your poetry or changed it? Do you write differently now?

EBL: She was born in 2016 (the first year of this current presidential administration), and I think this intensified the experience of both events. But it’s hard to generalize. As much as a parent, I feel like a steward of this “new” soul on earth. Watching her go through phases of what Piaget termed disequilibrium and equilibrium, and learning these cycles continue throughout one’s entire life, albeit at varying lengths, lately makes it clear to me that we’re presently in a social and cultural stage of disequilibrium. Just look around and listen not only to what people are saying, but to the quality of their voices. I think writing is like that, too; even the creation of a poem, even a single line.

As the son of a man who was spy for the CIA, did putting the poems and book together in any way give you any revelatory perspectives on him that you wouldn’t have otherwise arrived at? Which of these perspectives, if any, have been most surprising? And what do you think he would have thought about the book?

SH: I think my father would’ve been okay with the book’s larger critique of the CIA and U.S. interventions abroad. Earlier in his career he believed he was doing ethical and patriotic work, helping to prevent World War III, but late in his life he grew pretty cynical and disheartened about his CIA career. I don’t think he fully reckoned with the devastation the CIA caused—propping up brutal right-wing dictators, training death squads, etc. But he occasionally talked about how the CIA consumed enormous resources but never really accomplished much, and how some of its biggest intelligence victories were just happy accidents, like some janitor walking into an American Embassy asking if they wanted to buy a classified document he’d found in a trash can.

Safe Houses also looks at the personal tragedy of my father’s life, and I’d probably be less comfortable sharing those poems with him—the fact that he’s been dead for over two decades perhaps gave me the distance to be more blunt and honest. I think what surprised me most is when I started to admit that my father had severe but undiagnosed mental health problems. He was actually very kind and gentle as a father, but he was deeply troubled, probably battling depression, anxiety, and suicidal thinking for many years. The title poem, “Safe Houses I Have Known,” and another one called “Drinking,” show my dad at his rock-bottom worst.

That Piaget term “disequilibrium” could certainly describe the last half of my father’s life. He was never able to find equilibrium. And I agree that disequilibrium happens on larger levels of society and culture. I see my book as at least partly investigating the dysfunction of privilege—this might connect to what you said earlier about how power warps reality as much as poverty does. I grew up with all the safety and benefit of my white suburban middle-class life, but there was something broken or diseased at the core of that privilege. I have my story of that dysfunction, but so many other people who grow up with privilege have their own stories. And I really believe these stories need to be heard—we need to keep diagnosing the dysfunction, because that can help move us closer to equilibrium, equity, empathy, justice.

I wonder how that social disequilibrium might be reflected in the formal aspects of Mitochondrial Night. I’d say your poems—more than those of many other contemporary poets—have a wide range of impulses, so they don’t all look the same on the page. There are compressed associative lyrics, like the amazing “Reading in Bed Is Like Heaven.” There are prose poems—or almost prose poems—driven more by narrative or essay-like inquiry. And there are others that mash-up multiple formal impulses. Why are you drawn to this kind of formal range, and is there any connection to what’s happening in the world?

EBL: Here’s a terrible (but hopefully terribly effective) metaphor. Anyone into martial arts knows that the most effective style of defense/fighting is no one single style of martial arts; the most effective method is to become familiar with many styles to be employed as the ever-shifting situation requires. In an actual fight, in the ring or bar or street or combat field, the more styles of martial arts you’ve become familiar with, the better you can hope to deal with the wild, unpredictable force of the matter that is rushing toward you. I think poetry is similar. If I’m going to take on a poem, I’m less interested in poems that don’t risk hurting me with their sometimes hidden weapons of awareness and insight. In other words, in extreme cases, regarding form and content, is it better to have a naked human being running around wild, screaming gorgeous, haunting, ear-splitting songs, or a fashionable, impeccably dressed corpse? Both are a kind of death.

In Safe Houses, you employ many forms such as pantoums and erasure poems to contain the often raw and gangly emotions and subject matter. It seems to me that living as a spy is all about formalities, and yet what about the incredibly messy human being within the vessel of the professional formality? We all experience this to varying extents, because we all subscribe to identities. Can you pan way out and speak to what surprised you most about what the various forms you employed yielded—things you perhaps hadn’t even seen in the material before examining them through the prisms of these forms?

SH: I get what you’re saying about cultivating a multitude of styles or forms, whether in martial arts or poetry. I’ve seen this impulse especially when I teach creative writing—I find myself trying to help each student become many different kinds of writer. I don’t want them to find their “one true voice,” which the traditional workshop model encourages, but to keep gathering diverse approaches and techniques, always defamiliarizing themselves.

In this new book I explore traditional form a lot more than I have before: pantoum, villanelle, haiku, sestina, ghazal, rhyming couplets. Some of the poems follow traditional rules more closely, but some are more flexible, occasionally adjusting the rules beyond recognition. The pantoum-like poems scattered throughout the book—they use tercets instead of quatrains, and each stanza only repeats one line instead of two from the previous stanza. But they still have that spiraling pantoum motion, and I found this variation to allow more nuance for the material.

For a long time, I was kind of terrified of traditional form, afraid I’d either fail at it or it would limit me too much. But I’ve been learning how liberating it can be. The constraints led me to all these unexpected, weird, off-kilter ways of organizing my life on the page. I found that you can be loose and playful with it while still respecting where it comes from. Which makes me wonder—can poetic form have that kind of mitochondrial memory you investigate in your book? I mean, whenever we build a poem, either in traditional or organic form, are we tapping into a poetics DNA?

I like how you see the forms in Safe Houses containing the “messy human being.” I agree—that plunge into autobiography needed something else to hold it together, like a spy needs identities or safe houses, like we all need just to survive in the social marketplace.

But there’s the danger of losing the balance, suffocating in that identity. Maybe that’s what happened to my father—he covered up his messy self so completely, eventually he couldn’t breathe.

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Click here to purchase Mitochondrial Night
at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase Safe Houses I Have Known
at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2020 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2020

Edited by Daniel Lukes
University Press of Mississippi ($25)

by Chris Via

At this point, one cannot dismiss William T. Vollmann. Far from being a mere cult sensation with subversive inclinations and a penchant for publishing unwieldy books, Vollmann has in recent years made waves with unassuming reportage (Poor People, Imperial); a National Book Award-winning novel (Europe Central); another installment in his heptalogy about Native-European clashes in North America (The Dying Grass); and a two-volume exploration of the ideologies behind coal, oil, gas, and nuclear energies (Carbon Ideologies). Perhaps the only rival of his staggering prose output is the mythos surrounding the man himself. Conversations with William T. Vollmann offers readers an illuminating portrait of the enigmatic writer through articles and interviews from 1989-2018 that often temper wild assumptions with even more stimulating truths.

The mythos of William T. Vollmann. “He won a scholarship to Deep Springs College . . . that solicits applications from high school students whose IQs are in the top half-a-percent.” He wrote his first novel at night while working for a software company, sleeping under his desk and subsisting on Three Musketeers. He crossed into Afghanistan in 1982 to join the mujahideen in a quixotic blunder. He almost died alone in the magnetic North Pole. He developed Repetitive Strain Syndrome from sixteen-hour days typing his manuscript about Jesuit missions to New France. He smuggled a Thai sex slave to safety while on assignment for Spin magazine. He is intensely private, eschewing the Internet and email. His phone has been tapped and his mail has been opened without consent—due to the Patriot Act, he suspects.

The vision of William T. Vollmann. As he tells one interviewer, “One thing I think is so beneficial to all of us as human beings is that we can set ourselves the mission of trying to identify with and appreciate as many different people and things in this universe as we can.” Or as he puts it to another, “my whole work is an attempt . . . to try to understand the Other.” Vollmann’s mind overflows with curiosity about the world and a concomitant disregard for his own safety and ignorance. His altruistic plight to present the Other in the fullness of their humanity is backed by his famous unwillingness to make editorial trims to his writing, even at the cost of readership and money: “he agreed to a one-third cut in his advance in order to have [The Royal Family] published in its voluminous state.”

The craft of William T. Vollmann. Throughout the interviews Vollmann shares his desires as a craftsman. As he says of himself versus Thomas Pynchon, delivered in winking braggadocio: “I think my sentences are better.” Indeed, he cites poor attention to good writing as his indictment of a lot of American literature. Such invectives gain authority in the volumes of the Seven Dreams series, where his innovative prose matches the time period of each book. It seems Vollmann can take command of any style from at least the tenth century to the present and make it shine.

The selections in this volume are arranged chronologically, highlighting the development of Vollmann and his work, and there is a good balance of pithy banter and slower, more thoughtful conversation. Despite a fair amount of topical overlap, each interview colors in a little more of the author’s portrait—and it is a complex portrait, though one feels Vollmann would disagree. He can be egotistical and humble, reckless and prudent, passive and empathetic, subversive and reverent, evasive and direct—sometimes in the same breath. As such, he is a contemporary writer well worth reading, and Conversations helps get to the meat of why.

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Jeff VanderMeer
MCD ($27)

by Michael MacBride

I tried, but failed, to write a review of Jeff VanderMeer’s latest novel, Dead Astronauts. The first draft began by describing the work as “a beautiful abstract mosaic.” That was both right and not right. Like an abstract piece of art, the more time you spend with it, the more it reveals itself to the reader. But that isn’t quite right either, VanderMeer’s text rewards a careful, thoughtful reader, and does that reader the honor of treating him or her with respect. Too often novels feature sections or characters whose only purpose is exposition, to make connections and allusions obvious—but this is lazy writing and makes for lazy readers. Had I said that in a review, though, my fear would be that readers would assume that Dead Astronauts is a difficult book, which it isn’t.

Is it a beach read? It depends. Do you like foxes (blue or otherwise), salamanders (and beings made entirely of them), astronauts (dead and/or alive), animal experiments, The Company, and Charlie X? A friend of mine would call this a “thinky” book, which describes every book I enjoy; I want to be able to engage with something new and to see artists push boundaries and challenge convention. That’s what VanderMeer does. Contrary to what other reviews have said, nothing here is frivolous, nothing is accidental or intentionally included for the purposes of obfuscation. In the tradition of Richard Adams’s researching rabbits in order to write Watership Down, VanderMeer researched the various animals in the novel—salamanders, foxes, beetles, a Behemoth, a Dark Bird, and more—and produces convincing, unique perspectives from each animal. The animals are treated with the respect they deserve.

In my failed attempt at a review, I addressed various design aspects: the ridiculous beauty of the dust jacket, the ornate section dividers in the text, the gray-colored font to help readers recognize a consistent voice later in the novel, the inclusion of hand-drawn art, and the careful alignment of the author’s name and title of the book on the spine, so that it reads, “Dead Jeff” and “Astronauts VanderMeer.” I also included a mention of the staff at the Tallahassee Midtown Reader, and how they orchestrated signed copies to all who wanted. And what review would be complete without mentioning that 20% of the book’s royalties go to the Center for Biological Diversity and to the Friends of the St. Marks Wildlife Refuge in Florida?

Where other reviews spoke about the narrative unwinding towards the end, mine argued that while the narrative structure became more experimental, the narrative actually came more into focus, providing a sense of cohesion (and gravitas) to everything that came before. I also challenged the label of “Weird Thoreau” that I so often see attributed to VanderMeer. It really didn’t have anything to do with this specific book, which is part of why my review failed, but I feel like the label diminishes VanderMeer’s work. Thoreau seems to be a lazy adjective for “environmentalist,” which isn’t a label VanderMeer would deny, but a comparison to Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy is more apt.

Finally, I also wrote about my experience of listening to the audiobook versus reading the physical text. When a book like this—one so beautifully constructed and carefully laid out in print—becomes adapted to the audiobook format, I’m always curious to see how that translates. It is both the same and not-same experience. Voices carry the weight of differentiating between characters, but the illustration, white space, and other graphical flourishes are lost in audio form. The audiobook is as good an adaptation as could be hoped for, and I certainly found myself engaged in different ways—catching things I missed in print—but the beauty of the book design makes the print format the way to fully enjoy this work of art.

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by Zhanna Slor

I first came to Rufi Thorpe’s writing several years back upon discovering the paperback release of her second novel, Dear Fang, With Love, at a favorite bookstore in Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood. I happened upon it completely at random and was shocked to find how much it spoke to the themes of home I’d been mulling over for years as an immigrant from the former Soviet Union; even more shocking was how accurately Thorpe was able to write about this longing without being an immigrant herself. I’m an avid reader, but as a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant who has spent much of her life in the Midwest, I don’t often see myself reflected in the books I read. This was not the case here, in a story about a despondent 17-year-old girl visiting her Lithuanian homeland for the first time. Once I finished Dear Fang, With Love, I read the author’s first book, The Girls from Corona Del Mar, which analyzes and reflects on the subject of friendship—a common thread in all of her work. Thorpe’s third novel, The Knockout Queen, (Knopf, $26.95), has recently been named a May selection for the Book of the Month Club, and is as fascinating as her previous works. We discuss the book and more in the interview below.

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Zhanna Slor: I know at heart this is a story about a unique friendship, but it seems equally tied to the idea of female violence. I think Michael says it best when talking about how if his mother were a man, she would not have gone to prison for stabbing her abusive husband. This echoes back later when Bunny is given the same prison sentence of three years for an accidental moment of violence, while Michael's male attackers get away with beating him half to death. Is this hypocritical treatment of female vs. male violence the seed from which this novel grew, or did the characters and their relationship come first?

Rufi Thorpe: Certainly, as I was writing, female violence was what I saw as the novel’s subject. How the novel grew is a much more chaotic process that took place over many years. I first wrote a book about Bunny Lampert ten years ago, and while there were good things in it, it was not a successful novel and not one word of it made it into this present incarnation, although even way back then she was a bisexual female boxer.

ZS: So how did Michael come into play? Did his character come to you first, or the realization that Bunny needed a counterpart? Was it important that he be as nonviolent as Bunny is violent?

RT: I had been writing this iteration of the novel for about a year from Bunny’s point of view, and it just wasn’t working very well. She couldn’t see herself clearly enough to give the reader a sense of what was at stake. So I started to imagine someone who could act as a kind of counterpoint, nonviolent where she was violent, intellectual where she was instinctive, discerning where she was oblivious. I am not sure I thought about it so clearly. He just kind of came to me. And he came very fully formed and with that voice and that backstory. When I first started writing from his point of view, I was kind of astonished because suddenly I was writing, fast and fluidly and with great urgency, a project that I had been stalled on for months.

My experience is that when a character comes to you like that, kind of erupting into your consciousness, it’s usually some part of yourself you locked away. So that’s another way to understand him. I think with fiction it is always some serendipitous coincidence of your front brain making craft decisions and your subconscious, you know, kind of screaming into the void.

ZS: You write friendships so vividly and with such complexity. I remember with The Girls from Corona Del Mar thinking some of the same things I wondered here: Is this what serious friendships are like? As full of hatred as love? A thing of beauty that is also half-drowning in ugliness? So I am curious to know if there was a life-altering Michael or Bunny from your youth that you might have drawn from in your writing.

RT: Yes and no; I think I often reach for friendship when I want to talk about moral ambiguity because it is one of the only relationships you are free to abandon. I mean, you can abandon a spouse, but it takes a lot of paperwork and moving house. A friendship is entirely voluntary and for my purposes acts as a nice blank canvas. It gives the narrator enough distance to see the other character clearly, whereas if the relationship were familial, a mother and daughter, say, it might take years of therapy before they were even able to conceptualize their separateness enough to see each other clearly. So in many ways, friendship is a short cut, a sterile petri dish in which to grow the moral experiment.

On the other hand, I have had many profound friendships in my life, and I’m not sure if the intensity I experience is normal. It took me a very long time to understand that I was bisexual, and for many years I believed female friendship was inherently romantic. And honestly, I still kind of think it is, or can be. I don’t have any firm convictions about the way the two things are related.

ZS: Has what you look for in a friend changed as you get older? I was just talking with another mom about how we used to be more attracted to friendships with girls who would ditch you half the time you made plans, but the other half would show you the night of your life; now that we have babies, it’s more about women who have similar parenting philosophies, live nearby perhaps, and understand when to stop refilling their wine glass (among other things). For me this alone can explain the distance that grows between Bunny and Michael as their lives take such different turns.

RT: Absolutely. When I was younger, I was much more prone to become friends with someone because they captivated me, because they were mysterious or frightening or represented something that seemed impossible to me. The more mythic the person was, the greater my susceptibility. Now my criterion for friendship is more: Do I respect this person? Which is just another way of framing what I think you are talking about.

ZS: Yes, totally! That’s a beautiful way of putting it. Another thing that really stuck with me was Bunny's size. How important was it to the story that she be so tall? Did her tallness, in some ways, doom her? And did it also save her?

RT: When I was nine and ten, I was the tallest girl in my class, and not knowing my father, I didn’t really have any genetics to go by, so I believed I would continue to grow and be tall. But at eleven or so, I stopped growing entirely, and I am now five foot five, if the person measuring is feeling generous. Nonetheless, I have always pictured myself as very large and physically powerful, and so on some level Bunny must be a kind of wish fulfillment self-portrait, though I never explicitly thought of her as such.

Growing up, I spent maybe an inordinate amount of time worrying about my femaleness. As I came to understand the historic subjugation of women, I just kept wondering why. Basically, I was worried that maybe men really were better, smarter, somehow more serious or worthy. For the most part, I convinced myself these disparities were imagined or socially constructed. But physical strength—this was not a difference that could be dismissed so easily.

Any woman who has had to physically fight a man, you come up against your own physical weakness. And it’s terrifying to understand that they could kill you, and you would not be able to stop it or even really slow it down. I think this knowledge, this primordial kind of inequality, is always there between men and women to some extent, and so Bunny is kind of this fantasy of physical power. The safety of that power, and the danger of that power.

ZS: Yes! I have an Israeli husband and before I became pregnant, he got me obsessed with learning Krav Maga. My gym held classes for both men and women at the same time, and I was amazed at how much more powerful even the most out-of-shape man was over me. I’m sure there are exceptions, especially for women who train for years, but it’s definitely a difference as you say. Did you take any martial arts classes to prepare yourself for writing a boxer?

RT: No, I didn’t. To some extent, I don’t think I was truly interested in the boxing. In other words, I was not trying to capture something authentic about boxing. I was using boxing to explore something else, and so I was really only interested in reading about boxing, watching boxing. I didn’t make any attempt to understand what boxing is fundamentally about, which I think would have required me to train as a boxer to understand. People who love boxing will be disappointed with this book because it says nothing uniquely insightful about boxing at all, I’m afraid.

ZS: I don’t find it disappointing; to me, it felt more like Bunny finally putting her enormity to good use now that she can no longer play volleyball. It was probably better for her to box than turn to alcohol, like her father did. Do you think some of the violence so prevalent in the book is a direct result of living with alcohol and alcoholism? There’s also some bad parenting depicted; does that play into the violence as well?

RT: In my experience, you can have violence without alcohol, and alcohol without violence, but if you put alcohol and violence together the alcohol will almost invariably cause the violence to escalate. Even more than that, the cycles of crisis and denial that come with any addiction help to mask the violence and excuse it so both the person being violent and the people living with them tend to blame the violence on the alcohol. They were “just drunk.” They are going to do better. And how can they do better if you keep throwing their past bad actions in their face? In order for them to believe in themselves, they need you to believe in them! And on and on.

ZS: I spent half my life in Wisconsin, where everyone drinks so much it’s hard to define who is an alcoholic and who is not. And my middle school in Wisconsin was also called North Shore, despite being nowhere near any body of water. It could be a depressing place, so it was easy for me to understand what drew Bunny and Michael together. Like many friendships, especially at that age, theirs sprung from loneliness more than compatibility. Is this perhaps why it was doomed to fail? They really didn't have much in common outside of their incompatibility with their peers. In some ways, they end up feeling like siblings; they have this shared history and deep feelings for one another, but they don't necessarily seem to want a relationship.

RT: I love that your land-locked middle school was called North Shore! That’s fantastic. I think siblings are a very interesting comparison. It’s true, they are brought together by their loneliness more than compatibility, and especially as adults they have almost nothing in common. I think if the plot elements of the book that tie their lives together had not taken place they might have just drifted apart in a more typical fashion. But I think they would always think of each other wistfully. Sometimes a person in your past kind of comes to symbolize something for you, or you learned something important about the world through them, and it feels like you wouldn’t have become who you became without them. I think Bunny and Michael are like that.

ZS: One thing I keep coming back to is the total absence of Michael's father. Like Bunny's dead mother, his absence is so deep and intense it almost feels like a presence, except in his case it's a voluntary absence. Where is he all this time? What do you think keeps him away?

RT: Men sometimes just abandon their children. Women do too, but they don’t do it quite as often. It’s really one of the great mysteries of the world, how easy it seems to be for them to do this. My own father did this, and I guess I think he probably just didn’t think about me very much—out of sight out of mind.

In some ways, I think children are sort of the opposite of friendship because the entire relationship is predominantly characterized by our moral obligation to them. And if you are fucking up your life, doing so with a kid around feels so, so much worse. So I think Michael’s dad stays away because he is ashamed, but also not interested in changing.

ZS: I don’t really understand how any person can abandon a child like that, especially after having one myself; you definitely don’t hear about women doing it as frequently, probably because it’s in our DNA to be nurturing. I think it’s why I found myself not totally able to understand Michael’s mother. She still sees him occasionally, sure, but why do you think she didn’t she try harder to get him back? Was it really a miscommunication between her and his aunt?

RT: I have also felt the primordial, biological protectiveness over my children, and yet I feel so hesitant to say it is in our DNA, some way that women are inherently different than men. Certainly women do abandon their children and so I think it must be different for everyone. I don’t think there is just one experience of motherhood, but more of a range, a distribution.

As for Michael’s mother, I think they become distant while she is in prison; three years is a long time in the life of a child, and when she gets out, Michael is kind of at the height of his Pollyanna-ish moralizing and I think he makes her feel like dirt when she involves the kids in stealing gift cards to eat or other petty crimes. I think he probably did tell Aunt Deedee he didn’t want to live with her, and I imagine he was as little able to hide his emotions as most children. His mother would have felt that as a huge rejection and condemnation, almost as if Michael were siding with the judge in revoking her right to be a victim and making that trauma fresh all over again.

ZS: The idea that living with continual fear changes you, which Michael brings up while studying for his PhD, is intriguing. Was that at the back of your mind while writing Michael's history?

RT: Well, I think anyone coming out of an abusive relationship or having been raised in an abusive home, a kind of deformity of consciousness takes place that you aren’t truly aware of until you leave. As a child, Michael’s sense of himself was entirely as his mother’s best friend and confidante in the kind of war against his father, and during this time his sexuality was suppressed. Then after he moved in with his aunt, he was more focused on both courting and preventing social ostracism, this kind of need to signal that he is different while not wanting everyone to really know exactly in what way he is different, and the relative stability and yet lack of intimacy of his home life is actually pretty alienating, and he becomes this anthropologist walking around, observing everyone, taking notes on middle class life in the suburbs. Then through the friendship with Bunny, through his affair with Anthony, and through college he grows up into a man who is remarkably well adjusted and pretty happy, and so he has to kind of go back and make sense of all those disparate selves. And in each period his perception of the world was different as well, his understanding was changing.

And the paradigm he keeps returning to in his attempt to understand human beings in general and himself in particular, is the human as animal, as body, as organism, and I think that is why evolutionary biology appeals to him so much. So in that sense, I never really meant it as like a motif that I, the author, was creating, I just honestly thought that someone so obsessed with these questions might decide to study them professionally.

ZS: It definitely made sense to me that he would study evolutionary biology; he was always more observant than anyone around him. Bunny puts it perfectly on page 266: “You study yourself. You study life instead of living it. And everything you feel is like a fine wine and you sniff it and swish it around and in the end you barely fucking drink it.” Although I do not agree with her subsequent assessment—that he let those boys beat him up. Does she think that because at her size she can’t imagine letting anyone rough her up?

RT: Complicity and victimhood are interesting and complicated things. I had a bad thing happen to me, and it always bothered me afterwards that I had had my car keys. Why had I not tried harder to get away? In the moment I had felt very trapped, but was I really? It nagged at me. I would say, “You had your keys,” in my head all the time. It was very self-punishing, but at the same time I think I was desperately trying to figure out some way in which I was still in control.

Michael is in no way responsible for what those boys do to him, but I think that actual victimhood is just a lot less tidy than we are comfortable with. I’m thinking about the way the defense attorney grills Michael’s mother about why she continues in this situation, why she doesn’t just leave, and thinking about how victimized Bunny feels by her own violence. Sometimes when you are the victim, you feel you have no other option, that you are helpless, and sometimes you feel that way when you are the perpetrator, that you couldn’t help doing it, that it was somehow involuntary because who in their right mind would do such a thing?

So for Bunny, the lesson of her life has been that the moment she felt most helpless, most out of control, most a victim, was also the moment she was most truly morally responsible for. I think that is why she refuses to let Michael be a victim; if she doesn’t get to be, no one gets to be.

ZS: I can't decide how I feel about Ray. He is terrible, but also, he is sometimes a little bit comic relief. He's like a very drunk Saul Goodman. Or maybe it is Michael's hatred of him that's funny. But he's also the only parent who actually sticks around, which, sadly, makes him technically the best one. What should readers make of this?

RT: Ray is terrible, but he is also one of my favorite characters I have ever written. The thing about bad parents is that they aren’t bad all the time. Even the worst parent usually has a clutch of shining moments where they manage to do the right thing. And sometimes a good parent, or one who is trying very hard to be good, and I would put Aunt Deedee in this camp, has a moment where they truly fail.

But the way that Ray is evil, vain and venal and almost physically incapable of being honest, does indeed strike me as very funny, and I am not sure why. I have known so many Ray Lamperts in my life and even when I think of the men themselves, I kind of get the giggles. Maybe it is the disparity between the way they see themselves and the way I perceive them to be, a kind of tension created by the sheer magnitude of their delusions, which for all their unreality are of the most predictable quotidian nature imaginable. Watching such a man feel powerful and worldly as he is ordering sushi or a martini or something is so painful and exasperating that you almost have no choice but to laugh. A lot of life is like that!

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Marcel Duchamp: The Barbara and Aaron Levine Collection

Edited by Evelyn C. Hankins
Prestel Publishing ($50)

Marcel Duchamp and the Art of Life

Jacquelynn Baas
The MIT Press ($50)

by Patrick James Dunagan

The legacy of Marcel Duchamp at the end of the 20th Century found him reigning as a defining figure in the art world whose work cast a far-reaching shadow. At times he played the self-assigned role of trickster and near-charlatan; his mischievous nature came accompanied by both obvious natural talent, displayed early on in his paintings, as well as the savvy intelligence, if not clear genius, with which he navigated his way through the art world’s upper echelons in his later years. His work is less understood, especially in terms of the variety and depth of his various possible intentions, than it is popularly recognized and celebrated as tres chic among art dilettantes. Duchamp’s opacity, as intentional as it no doubt was, remains central to any engagement with his work.

Marcel Duchamp: The Barbara and Aaron Levine Collection comprises a recently promised gift to the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington D.C. The show advances engagement with opacity in the work of Duchamp by way of addressing “a pivotal aspect of [his] practice [namely] his interest in reproductions, specifically making replicas of his own work.” These replicas, all of which are sumptuously treated here with full color photos and extensive commentary, run from singular examples to fairly large editions reproducing work over a period of time or in relation to previous work. The latter is the case with The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Green Box), 1934, while Comb (Peigne), 1916/1964, is an example of the former.

The Green Box was issued in an edition of 300 with an additional twenty deluxe versions, each featuring “one of the original notes or drawings” of the ninety-three individual “exacting reproductions” which comprise the work. These scraps of ephemera dating from 1911-1915 are in effect the working notes Duchamp kept as he began contemplating one of his best known pieces of the same title, also known as The Large Glass, 1915-1923. In order to reproduce these ephemera at the highest level possible “instead of employing a halftone reproduction process, such as lithography, Duchamp again turned to collotype, a more expensive photomechanical printing process that ensured the reproduction of finer details, particularly handwriting.”

He also insisted on “replicating the unique shape of each note in zinc, which was then used as a template to hand-tear 320 likenesses” printed on “a variety of papers that closely matched those he had originally used.” His intention was for this “album” to accompany any viewing of The Large Glass itself, which he thought “must not be ‘looked at’ in the aesthetic sense of the word.” He hoped an audience would “see the two together” since “the conjunction of the two things entirely removes the retinal aspect,” instead immersing the viewer into the artistic process to thereby create the work anew with each engagement.

Continuing this exchange of roles between audience and artist, Duchamp’s Comb, an everyday “steel dog comb, inscribed along the edge with the phrase 3 ou 4 gouttes de hauteur n’ont rien a faire avec la sauvagerie, which might be translated as ‘Three or four drops of height have nothing to do with savagery’” captures the seemingly sterile challenge presented by his infamous readymades (his most recognized being the urinal signed “R. Mutt,” Fountain, 1917). With these works, as Helen Molesworth describes, Duchamp achieves a central goal:

the viewer completes the work. . . . Duchamp’s readymades, shot through as they are with ambivalence and humor about the problem of work, offer us these enduring lessons: A lot of work goes into making an artwork. Sometimes that labor doesn’t look like work, but it is, and the interpretative acts that give art its meaning, the acts of judgement that bestow value on art, and the complex deliberations that establish what is and is not a work should not be left up to the artist, curator, collector, or critic alone.

Embracing this challenge, the Levines, as the range of their collection demonstrates, have long pursued collecting Duchamp. A most charming inclusion here is editor Evelyn C. Hankins’s interview with the collectors. Aaron Levine demonstrates his informed, if modestly amateur, critical perception regarding the centrality of the readymades:

The readymades are very, very important. . . . It’s thrust. You take a doggy comb and you thrust it up into the sphere of the Picasso and the Rembrandt. It’s the thrust. That’s something difficult for most people to swallow. Well, and also the infrathin. . . . When you shoot a gun, from the time of the bang to the time the bullet leaves the chamber of the barrel, that’s the infrathin. I don’t quite get it. But it’s basically the space between things. And that’s why he liked glass, because there is a space. And no surface.

Duchamp himself claimed the “infrathin” was impossible to define and could only be referred to by example, to name the feeling for that flashing awareness of recognition for what’s now but just gone. In Buddhism there is the symbol of the Wheel of the Dharma marking awareness of the constantly vanishing truth of the world around us. In her pioneering study Marcel Duchamp and the Art of Life, Jacquelynn Baas aligns this archetypal symbol with another important readymade, Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel:

An undated note by Duchamp connects this Wheel of the Dharma with Bicycle Wheel via his typical wordplay: “between the lions / lines / Riding between the lines / lions / Riding between the lions—” Duchamp turns the usual pair of reading/writing into reading/riding: reading between the lines of the turning bicycle wheel, riding between the lions of enlightenment.

Although Baas doesn’t directly mention the infrathin, this “reading between the lines” serves as a fitting description of it: Naming what isn’t there by pointing to everything around it which remains.

In her enlightening work, deeply grounded by details of Duchamp’s biography, Baas explores new territory for peering into the heretofore unmapped background behind Duchamp’s artistic accomplishment. She unravels numerous spiritual and occult esoteric influences upon his development as an artist dating from his earliest years in Paris and Munich, reading extensively into his some of his earliest figurative paintings; she also exposes the possible role tantric practices regarding sexuality and gender played in the maturation of his outlook, and links up, as well as contrasts, his later work in the 1940s with Georges Bataille’s Acéphale group. While not every reader will be swayed by the totality of her argument, it nevertheless uncovers a number of lasting insights that dispel more of the opaque aura that Duchamp drew around himself. Always at the center of the art world even as he increasingly held it seemingly at arm’s length, Duchamp utilized the keeping of secrets behind his work to further define the mysterious nature of the work.

Echoing Molesworth, Baas closes her book by noting how “the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualification and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.” The imposition of there being a shared responsibility between artist and viewer to define the work of art arguably remains Duchamp’s most significant contribution, ensuring that, as Hankins comments in her chat with the Levines: “He’s the one artists love and he’s the one they have to beat.” Yet while there is no doubt that Duchamp reigns, he does so from beneath layer upon layer of intentionally self-imposed obfuscation—a situation that, despite the successful insights Baas has brought to light, will likely always remain the case.

Eve Babitz, in her 1991 essay “I Was a Naked Pawn for Art,” remarks on the legendary photograph of herself, naked, playing chess with Duchamp while surrounded by a retrospective exhibition of his work at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1963: “I want to be on the cover, immortal, but I don’t want anyone knowing it’s me.” Duchamp would no doubt be sympathetic; he also would likely have rephrased the end of Babitz’s statement to something like: I don’t want anyone knowing who or what I believe myself to be. He was, of course, even more interested in getting his viewers to ask such questions of themselves—hence his continued relevance and the ongoing need for books such as these.

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Donald Shambroom
David Zwirner Books ($12.95)

by Jeff Alessandrelli

By sheer coincidence I started reading Duchamp’s Last Day shortly after reading Japanese Death Poems, an anthology that contains work “Written by Zen Monks and Haiku Poets on the Verge of Death,” as the subtitle says. One specific passage from the anthology’s introduction lingered in my head while reading Donald Shambroom’s short account of the final day that Marcel Duchamp spent alive on earth. It reads:

However strange it may seem, many poets chose to end their lives with a satirical poem, and some even mock this mockery itself. One kyōka poet wrote down, before dying, the well-known death poem of another poet, prefacing it with the words “I borrowed this poem from someone,” and adding after it, “This is the last act of plagiarism I shall commit in this world.”

Duchamp was hardly a plagiarist—he was a determined originalist, if an idiosyncratic one—but Duchamp’s Last Day highlights how, up until his very end, the artist placed substantial emphasis on gaiety and irreverence. “I am extremely playful . . . and I believe it’s the only form of fun possible in a world which isn’t always much fun” is, as Shambroom relays, how Duchamp put it in 1966, two years before his death, and this jesterly predilection extended to his final evening. After Duchamp dined with his close friend Man Ray and a few other guests, Man Ray slipped and fell outside while walking to his car. After the shock wore off, the episode struck all in attendance as inexplicably funny:

“You’d thought I’d dropped dead,” [Man Ray] said in English. The phrase struck a nerve, and the hilarity returned. On the ride home, the friends improvised a melody with variations on the theme. “Drop dead! Drop dead!”

A scant few hours later Duchamp was indeed deceased and, at the scene almost immediately, Man Ray was photographing him on his deathbed, carefully orchestrating his beloved friend’s death mask for posterity.

Although a substantial amount of Duchamp’s Last Day is given to discussing this posthumous “collaboration” between Duchamp and Man Ray, along with the somewhat nonsensical consideration of whether the canonical artist’s last work had been his own death—“Had the master chess player done it again? Could Duchamp’s death have been a time-bound readymade?”— the most engaging parts of Shambroom’s volume instead contextualize Duchamp’s life and art within 21st-century culture, where words like “hybridity” and “mixed genre” are so ubiquitous as to be meaningless. Yet that wasn’t always the case, and it was Marcel Duchamp who played a significant role in blurring the distinctions. Disregarding or ignoring established painterly figuration (and then, in 1918, quitting painting altogether), inventing the concept of the “readymade” artwork in 1915 by signing a snow shovel and declaring it a Duchamp original (entitled In Advance of the Broken Arm), and eventually creating the now iconic readymade Fountain in 1917, a “sculpture” that to the untrained eye might appear to be an entirely pedestrian urinal with the name R. Mutt graffitied on its side—all of these schisms of Duchamp’s put forth the decree that, in Shambroom’s words, “anything can be art that is seen and treated as art.”

Certainly that was true before Duchamp’s time as well, and with every new artistic innovation, from chiaroscuro to mixed-material usage, comes denouncing and deploring. In the early 20th Century, however, Duchamp took it one step further—and that step was controversial. The readymades in particular are still able to draw artistic ire. During his lifetime Duchamp said various things about them, from calling the concept of the readymade his “most important single idea” to, conversely, simply stating that the objects were “a very personal experiment that I had never intended to show to the public.” Some think that Duchamp placed idea before artifact, concept before beauty, and that this calculation diluted all artisan-based skill and craft. For the members of this school of thought, both the contemporary viewer and the contemporary artist are still paying the price for Duchamp’s celebrated innovations/denigrations.

Death, of course, is everything and nothing, and on a lesser scale Duchamp’s work also embodies this duality. “Reality is flowerlike: / cold clouds sinking through / the dusk” reads a haiku from Japanese Death Poems. Such is the allure and annoyance. Duchamp, I think, would have basked in the dilemma.

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Jiří Kolář
translated by Ryan Scott
Twisted Spoon Press ($24)

by M. Kasper

“My aim from the outset was to find areas of friction between design and literature.”
—Jiří Kolář

Jiří Kolář (1914-2002) was one of the great collage artists of the 20th century. Like an-other, Kurt Schwitters, he was also a great creative writer, and just as Schwitters’s innovative texts took decades getting translated, Kolář’s writing has been unavailable to us for a long time. Now Twisted Spoon Press from Prague has brought out A User’s Manual, his first book-length literary work in English.

Kolář began as a poet in the early 1940s, publishing in a restless array of styles over the course of two decades: diaristic early on, then documentary, then increasingly experimental, finally concrete and visual. A prominent participant in unofficial art circles, he spent nine months in prison in 1953 for one of his books. Around 1960, he largely abandoned poetry and devoted himself to visual collages, which he’d been making on the side for years.

The collages are extraordinary, among the technique’s most inspiring. Beginning in the 1950s, Kolář (whose name is pronounced a lot like the word “collage”), invented dozens of clever ways to make cut-paper pieces. There’s “chiasmage,” tiny, irregular pieces from printed pages arranged into crazy-quilt textures of gorgeous illegibility; “crumplage,” made with crinkled damp paper; “rollage,” fine art reproductions sliced into strips and reconfigured such that the images wave and stutter; and more. Among his favored collage elements were the above-mentioned printed snippets (in various alphabets, and including musical scores) and art reproductions (Leonardo, Bruegel, Vermeer, Ingres, Magritte) as well as maps, ads, and magazine illustrations of birds, butterflies, and flowers. “Urban pictorial folklore” was how he characterized his raw material. The finished work is polyphonic and unfailingly beautiful, meticulous yet prolific.

Kolář published and exhibited infrequently in Communist Czechoslovakia, as the regime viewed his conceptualism with incomprehension and suspicion. They thought it foreign, though in fact it was mostly homegrown, much influenced by the Czech avant-garde movement of Poetism, a distinctive hybrid of Constructivism and Surrealism with a rich verbo-visual legacy. Perhaps it was shared roots in modernism that enabled Kolář to connect so easily with contemporary Euro-American conceptualists when contacts became possible due to a thaw in East-West relations in the early 1960s. By the middle of that decade, Kolář was exhibiting at Kassel and São Paulo and publishing in avant-garde journals all over Europe. In 1975 and again in 1978, he had solo shows at New York’s Guggenheim Museum.

Kolář’s writing was never as celebrated as his visual art, at least not outside Eastern Europe. Czech isn’t widely read or translated; there were translations into German and French later (Kolář settled in Paris in 1980), but the collages always far outshone them.

Návod k upotřebení (translated here as A User’s Manual) came out in 1969, a year after Russian intervention ended a brief relaxation of repressive government known as the Prague Spring. The book matched fifty-two texts from a series that Kolář had written in 1965 with his Weekly collage sequence from 1967, on facing pages.

In that first edition, the collages, the originals of which are tabloid size and gloriously colorful, were printed in black and white on coated paper and reduced to approximately seven by five inches. Twisted Spoon has done much the same, as befits the near-facsimile this is, except they chose uncoated paper and the new reproductions are consequently grayer and less crisp. They make up somewhat for this uncharacteristic lapse (Twisted Spoon’s production values have been consistently excellent since they started in 1992) by swapping in a half dozen color reproductions, which are bright and clearer.

The collages vary in composition from week to week. Some employ only one of Kolář’s methods, while others combine found scraps with small collages made using different processes, often on chiasmage backgrounds, to create what the artist called “narrative poems.” In addition to his typical imagery, Kolář incorporated self-documentation, and newspaper and magazine photos of current events into some pages. Week 8’s collage, entitled “Death of a Scientist,” features a portrait of J. Robert Oppenheimer, who passed away that February. Week 20, “At Loggerheads,” pairs Hebrew and Arabic chiasmages in a commentary on the run-up to the Arab-Israeli War. Week 49 is “Homage to a Heart Transplant,” the world’s first having been per-formed on December 3rd, 1967.

As for the poetry, it’s hardly that, though Kolář called everything he did, including his collages, “poetry.” Most of the fifty-two brief texts here are deadpan, prosy instructions for disrupting normal routines, laid out like verse. As translator Ryan Scott notes in his afterword, “The focus on the seemingly mundane allows for a poetic voice that doesn’t rely on lyricism and emotion. Instead, the voice emerges from the commonplace rendered unexpectedly.” Week 9’s text, entitled “Lips,” reads, “After bath and breakfast / apply lipstick /to make your lips twice as large / and wear it the whole day / until you’ve finished dinner / and gone to bed.” Week 31, “Sonnet,” goes, “Take a novel / you don’t know/slice off the spine/remove the page numbers/and thoroughly jumble the pages / In this disorder / read the book / and in fourteen lines / summarise its contents.”

By his own account, Kolář independently developed these “action poems” in the late 1950s, at the same time that George Brecht initiated what became Fluxus event-scores (directions for performance), which they resemble. In Kolář’s pieces, though, there’s a distinctive playfulness that seems to derive from and also transcend the grim circumstances of their production, and that maybe helps explain how those circumstances were, or could be, borne with some combination of resignation and self-respect. Week 19, “Amnesty,” reads, “From an empty birdcage / hangs / a white flag.”

We’re fortunate to have in English, at last, a real taste of Kolář’s wry, writerly sensibility. Ryan Scott and Twisted Spoon are to be commended for reviving this particular book, a neglected but significant work of Eastern European visual literature.

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by Stephanie Anderson

On March 30, 2020, I am breastfeeding a baby in a darkening room and looking at my phone. I have a WhatsApp message:

Clap for #SGUnited: From your windows, doors and rooftops for the doctors, nurses, carers, emergency services, delivery workers, warehouse workers, cleaners, supermarket staff and everyone else keeping Singapore safe and stocked at this time.

My partner and I each lug a child onto the porch. For a moment I think it will just be us, two foreigners clapping into the quiet night, surrounded by unlit windows. But it has already begun—not stadium clapping, not knee-knocking, but not embarrassing. Dark figures in bright windows clapping, trailing off and then starting again, and I try to clap around the balancing baby and think, What is this, what is comparable to this experience? It’s not something in my past; it’s something from a shadow memory, an atemporal sense of collectivity and the tenuous threads that lead from our hands to another figure’s across the flowering yellow-flame treetops, to another in the building beyond, to a cluster of figures at the railing of the parking garage, to the flashing phone light of the condo towering above—we can see this scene, imagine it out the windows of cities we’ve never visited, imagine it over decades down history’s deep well. We are listening for small auditory circuits, for clapping as both interruption and continuance. Until like fat drops wind-shaken from tree leaves after a rain, it stops. We stand there for a few minutes more, watching as the other dark figures slowly turn back to dishes and children’s bedtimes. I am grateful and furious: can this clapping initiate hazard pay? Can this clapping manufacture ventilators?

According to the official count, coronavirus appears in Singapore on January 23. Through March, the government implements various public health measures, including the distribution of masks. On March 18 I receive Bernadette Mayer’s Memory (Siglio Press, $45) in its new edition published by Siglio Press. A stay-at-home period called the Circuit Breaker begins April 7. The new edition is a 10 by 7.5 inch hardcover with glossy pages interspersing photo grids, single-frame enlargements, and text—a deeply satisfying visual and tactile object. And after it arrives in Singapore I can barely open it. So lost so you’re lost how lost can you be when everywhere you turn it’s morning & a flag’s going up over a map . . .

Memory has threaded through my life these past five years, but my previous encounters with it occurred when I was nearer to the Mayer who made it, both of us younger and aspiring Art Monsters (to borrow a phrase from Jenny Offill), fascinated by photography. Memory began as a 1972 installation of over 1,110 photos—one roll of slide film taken per day for the month of July 1971—and six hours of accompanying audio recordings. The edited audio was published as a book in 1975 by North Atlantic Books. Then the project became spectral: for a while Mayer’s work continued in Memory’s conceptual mode, and she wrote a short, related piece in 1989, but the book was out-of-print and the pictures in storage and archives. An excerpt of the work was exhibited at a 2008 conference in Orono, Maine. I began writing about it in 2015, and for a while I walked around Chicago saying that the installation should be restaged, until Jennifer Karmin and Fred Sasaki facilitated its showing at the Poetry Foundation in 2016. In 2017, pregnant and on unofficial bedrest in Beijing, I took many Memory-esque photos of tea cups in a fit of loneliness and frustration at not being able to see the work in its newest-oldest iteration; the original photo boards, with the audio, were reinstalled at the Canada Gallery in New York, and the slides were projected at New York’s Museum of Modern Art at an event in 2019.

Siglio’s edition of the book is unprecedented in uniting the photographs and text for the first time. But now in the Circuit Breaker, though I wish every day that I could gather all the poignancies of my life to myself, I want to do so in a way that has little to do with my actual memories. And so I don’t want to remember Memory and I don’t want to remember my previous engagements with it. I’m not interested in rabbiting down a personal memory hole. Luckily, neither is Memory. It’s a book that constantly bristles against its commitment to comprehensive documentation, and when, at the beginning of April, I finally do open it, I am surprised by how little of its contents I remember. Have I even read it before?

This time through I am drawn to the text’s gestures of collectivity. In various moments, Mayer transcribes conversations with others about the work, or describes the film production: . . . & he says do you have any memory this time at all & I say not so far & he says you will I think . . . If we had to do a plot summary of Memory—even though attempting to do so is as absurd as being told to put a rather large lake in a cup—we would say that much of the book involves the making of a film and features many artist compatriots, sometimes marked by name and sometimes by initial; these people are whirling and recurrent entities, not generally still enough to come into view as characters. To put it differently, we could say that while the work is a massive experiment in documentation, its intimacies are still out of reach, the actions emphasized. We stopped at another gas station about halfway up for coffee, remember? The collectivity is in the motions and the process. In my view, the project isn’t attempting to inhabit collective memory—Memory doesn’t suggest that subjectivities are shared to that degree—yet there is a common reverberation in forgetting.

Reading the book in the Circuit Breaker is often uncanny: . . . the house is dark it’s strangely quiet maybe I dont know how to work anymore: when you awake you will remember everything. . . . I’m itchy I’ve lost my memory I’ve lost my money in a minute. . . . & think about memory with fear, too much time went into the windows, we saw it, so stretch down, a new sign, save it, it’s needed, use it, it’s thrown, throw it & so on, safer at distances, come over here, where were worrying where were time . . . The text is difficult to hold with attention; it almost asks you to drift away, and the photos sometimes bring you back to it and sometimes cast you further out. I seemed more real yesterday to see day today as a form a triangle . . . There are the thoughts you think while reading the book, and that seems to be much of the point.

It’s not the book’s snapshot portrayal of domestic scenes or the everyday that produces this quarantine uncanniness: it’s the weird looping it does with time, clinging to and mucking up seriality, and how the pictures run parallel and at a remove, like old pictures you find while cleaning the house and can’t remember taking. July 20 includes double-exposures, a day of specters. These figures have made the circuit back, which is the anxiety of photography. They are marked as already-past, they are a way of visualizing the present that literalizes its ephemerality. It’s me, we think. I remember how I felt, a few months postpartum, when a nurse looked at my partner standing next to me and said, Where’s the mama? Our circuits leaving trails of light at the expense of our presents. . . . some memories qualify where the present endures not for a minute or an hour or a day but for weeks & months & years . . . We mourn in our temporal unmooring, afraid that the hiccupping, often-stagnant present will never be released into free movement again.

What circuits of movement are possible in the Circuit Breaker? Figurative roads, journeys, detours: literal, the lack thereof. There are circuits as in revolutions of suns and planets, circuits of time traced out. There are circuits of exercise, circuits of streaming movies. Of course there are circuits of electrical current, which circuit breakers interrupt, and the nestled circuits as brain synapses, the ways electricity runs around brains and computers: One day the toddler yells Dinosaurs have brains! over and over at bedtime, caught in several circuits. To circuit as to compass in thought, the thoughts you think while reading.

And again those circuits of attention, of paying attention and releasing attention and forgetting to pay attention in a time of waiting. I read an entry of Memory each night. Even this bit of routine is uncertain—I keep thinking I’ve forgotten my reading. Did I skip a day? Do I skip today? Often I haven’t, the days are just long. The relief when the atmosphere changes: now it’s raining. The tempo of the everyday gone off the rails: today was an eternity. Or: what even happened today? . . . a false perspective like memory laughs at the intuition of time: beyond its borders extends the immense region of conceived time, past & future, into one direction or another of which we mentally project all the events which we think of as real & form a systemic order of them by giving to each a date . . . For me, the present is also an amplification of my recent everyday—I have been on maternity time in a country that is new to me, largely at home. I say this not to minimize the differences between maternity leave and stay-at-home orders, for they are substantive, but to explain that my days and feels were doing this before, but less. It’s really raining now and everyone else is asleep and I want to sit and be alone. The quirks of idiosyncratic time, its druggy blossoming and tightening, bottlenecks and streams and all that, are coming to the front.

. . . what can a diary be not a reconstruction, something put in, use the time, pass it, stain it, pass it, it’s stained, it’s magnified, it sticks, it sticks in my mind & my hand always hurts always hurts still does when I write in this book: book, took three rolls to be developed into seen. Some place, something to drink to change my whole way of feeling & something to read, transform, transform translate transmute transcribe transfer transfuse, transform, chamomile does it make a difference? Everyday, I’m saying there are no days, of, we’ve made too much of days and, thinking & write another way . . .

Memory keeps tumbling into lists as a literary technique. Organized by the day, its realism resides partly in uneven daily duration, each dated piece of text a different length, ballasted by a fairly predictable number of photos. On April 11 we take a night walk. I only remember the date because it is a birthday. . . . & that was the night we stayed up all night willow trees waving doors slamming them some days are longer than others & someone says it might take a while it might have some value . . . I am in the Circuit Breaker with wildlings, I mean small children, which is a great pleasure but also when I step into an empty room or out onto an empty road at night a vice releases a grip on my skull. My temporal desires are all postpartum and Circuit Breaker confusion: faster please, slower please. Memory and the Circuit Breaker share an uneasiness with the day’s sudden reign. . . . a day is over another one begins exactly as it happened so let’s pool all our mysteries into one great mystery and I dont remember this at all at all . . . Oh fickle unit of the day, you syncopated slough, you slippery dream, you field of sand. Sometimes wading through you feels like trying to dry off in a sauna. You turn brittle and hollow in accumulation; we stack you carefully and then a gust comes along and scatters you about.

Mayer has said that she wrote Memory against Gertrude Stein’s continuous present and the idea that you can’t “write remembering,” but the text knows that Stein might be right, that in writing past-as-present the presents bleed all over the room and we can’t figure out which one is wounded. The concept isn’t the problem, the “data” is (. . . this is a conceptual piece lacking conceptual data . . .)—there is so much data and we’re always overloaded and forgetting it and arguing about it. Sleep training my daughter one night, I say, I feel like we’re breaking a horse, I keep seeing an animal thrashing against increasingly small circles, but then she falls into sleep, and when we wake I can’t remember how much she cried. Did we give her what she needed? Where are the handmade masks most needed? Listen, I don’t know what to say about getting through this time, this present that exposes the precarities of our movements and routines and is ripping great gashes through some people’s lives. You’ve already read all the articles. We’re breaking circuits and getting our circuits broken. These circuits are small and large, interior and exterior, a trope that keeps turning into an entire history.

On April 21, Prime Minister Lee announces that the Circuit Breaker is being extended until June 1. He says, “You will naturally ask—where does this lead us? How do we exit from the Circuit Breaker?” Memory doesn’t show an exit, and reading it now also underscores the temporal distance between 1971 and 2020—and other contrasts too. However, it demonstrates ways to willfully engage seriality—chronology especially—even as seriality’s structure becomes a fiction, or just ridiculous. Might as well use the ruler for this, might as well be exact as a calendar like remembering a calendar scares the shit out of you . . . and . . . I thought dusk was morning I thought the esophagus was the glottis . . . and . . . I drew the day up as a series, as a moment in the present, sept 20, & as an action . . . It shows us how to keep making art amidst constant uncertainty about the results. . . . I want to leave this place I want to get out of here . . . & I hate myself for keeping on going as if the production of something out of nothing out of here where there is nothing were worthwhile. Which gets us to the real question of reading it right now: what can be made in the Circuit Breaker, and what is the point? How can one see the structure of the pillow fort when you’re trying to build it in the middle of a hailstorm? What kind of art is necessary right now?

Two weeks after the first instance, the clapping happens again. And then again. Its momentum builds, tentatively. Without advance warning, I am surprised by it each time and each time it is welcome—it reroutes the atmosphere and thus my thoughts, like stepping out of an unnecessarily air-conditioned room. One night I put the baby to sleep and then pick up Memory, only to realize I’d finished reading it the previous day. I am writing and then not-writing and then writing, I am stringing painted pasta necklaces with my child—the book models a process of making that crests between continuance and interruption, a lesson forgotten every day. Together we tug the bead down the piece of twine. A process fills its old bed & then it makes a new bed: to you past structure is backwards, you forget, you remember the past backwards & forget. You have to forget again the question about art’s necessity to continue and/or interrupt the Circuit Breaker. You clap again in gratitude and critique both. You build and rebuild the pillow fort because the child requests it, and you lie down in it, and wake again in another room, on another day.

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Click here to purchase this book
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Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2020 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2020