Yvan Alagbé
New York Review Comics ($29.95)

by Spencer Dew

How to speak of courage or cowardice in the context of colonialism? Are these part of what Fanon dismissed as “white values,” part of the broader epistemological and ethical toolkit settlers hauled from the metropole and used to bash in the minds of those they conquered? Yvan Alagbé, a legend in French comics, addresses such a question in this stunning collection from the New York Review’s comics publishing imprint. This volume represents a contribution to that publisher’s larger goal of providing English language translations of important international works, and Yellow Negroes is explicitly international—international with a “double consciousness” emerging from its black soul.

Blackness—as racialized identity and inherited culture but also an aesthetic mode, an imagining of what scholar Ashon Crawley calls the irreducible otherwise possibility of Blackness as a way of being—shapes the stories here. Visually, the blackness of the lines dominates as well. Alagbé works in lines reminiscent at times of Zen calligraphy, brushwork at once skilled and automatic in the sense of channeled, spontaneous. At other points, the lines resemble gouges, as if, rather than putting ink on a page, the artist were scarifying his subject, imparting a physical trauma to his readers. When one protagonist, having jumped a metro turnstile, is chased down over several agonizing, freeze-frame panels (one cannot but be reminded of the final scenes of Childish Gambino’s “This is America”) and is finally tackled and apprehended by police, the gaze pans out such that the gathered crowd dissolves into blackness, a stain, then a mass of humanity so thick it takes on the appearance of the bars—which, in the final frame of this sequence, with our protagonist in jail, are not merely metal and shadow but also an immaterial and therefore inescapable force, blotting out any idea of freedom, caging this man inside his own doomed fate.

This protagonist, Alain, is undocumented, which is to say the Age of Discovery did not merely mark him with a racialized and thus stigmatized identity, but the Age of Globalism, following on the heels of capitalism’s rampant success with sugar and cotton plantations, furthered marked him as from an unenviable postcode and lacking the golden tickets of those who feel closest to an actual chance of freedom. Lack of documentation is to the contemporary world what legal classification as subhuman was in the past. Alain is no slave—he has a job, or at least had one just before this story begins; he can exercise the supposed free will required to fall in love, rescue a likely unrepairable television unit from the trash, accept an offer of cheese and eggs from another man’s fridge—but he is not a full person under French law. He is trapped in that liminal status of “migrant,” here but not here. I assume his fate, upon arrest, will be deportation, but perhaps that is because I live in America, where the tenuousness of undocumented migrants is such that, indeed, a crime so petty as hopping a turnstile can land one in an open-aired detention camp, then dumped in a country no longer—if ever—one’s own.

America figures in this book, too, of course. Trump’s face makes an appearance in the final, most brutal, story, where Alagbé connects the paving stones by the Seine to a 1961 massacre of Algerians and to a 2017 protest, by a contemporary artist, in favor of migrants seeking refuge in France. “Stones where no distinction can be made” are stones carefully considered by Alagbé, who adds paving stones to the foreground (and a conquistador’s ship in the background) to a devastating one-page inside the front cover: that drowned Syrian toddler, that refugee eternally denied refuge, that image that rose to the status of meme, briefly, and then got drowned in the latest controversy or fad. A dead boy—yet Alagbé, putting those paving stones between us, the viewer, and him, the corpse, seems to say: Look, this is the beach beneath the concrete. A beach of immense human suffering.

Where is the courage or the cowardice in that image, in the original photograph of the dead boy? Do we (with our documentation) applaud the supposed bravery of those who attempt the trek from hell to a better world? Do we castigate ourselves for failing to act, for failing even to imagine an effective path for action? Alagbé, as should already have been established, has no use for cheap sentiment. His characters struggle, they love, they find themselves inadequate vessels for the expression of the agony they bear. In the book’s third story, “Dyaa,” one of the characters from “Yellow Negroes,” Martine, thinks on her husband, who has gone back to Africa, even as she meets and has sex with a cabdriver and fellow migrant, Ibrahima, who thinks of his wife, still back there. “How to tell you that nothing is okay here?” he thinks. Europe, he tells his wife in an imagined letter, is death. “Don’t you come. The water here makes you sick, the air you breathe makes you sick, the cold kills you bit by bit. You’ll have to bring up our child by yourself. The women here do that.” Cowardice or courage? “There is money everywhere here,” he admits, “Just like the lights that shine all night long. But you have to gather it, and that takes time, so much time.”

Alagbé employs, for certain emotional moments, various forms of abstraction, often with African motifs—shapes like power objects hovering above a character’s head, for instance, as when Alain, in “Yellow Negroes,” “dreams of broad-hipped women,” his erect penis rising before him, and an image like a fertility amulet, emerges from those dreams. But the more common abstraction is achieved through a reduction of lines—a pair of lovers becoming so many agitated brushstrokes, bulges, and splayed arrays; Martine, kneeling in a prayer for death, becomes a curve and a tuck, bold black lines converging. The first story here, entirely wordless, is a series of images that slowly come into focus as a naked white woman with a black infant suckling at her breast. Serving as something like a preface to the book, it offers a glimpse of peace, even bliss, that is then followed by page upon page of nightmare.

The other central character in “Yellow Negroes”—antagonist seems too strong a word—is Mario, himself a policeman, as he is proud of noting, an example of what he might describe as the colonized made good, what might also be called a collaborator. Here the issue of cowardice—of “yellow”—comes to a boil. He played an active role in that massacre of Algerians in 1961. His cross, now, is a terrible loneliness, though he also suffers from the cold characters here attribute to Europe but that reflects, more precisely, their place in it. He has a badge, a taste for Gauloises and white prostitutes, but he is impotent and desperate, his powerlessness and need manifest in his performance with all three, whether flashing his identification at a racist landlord, or insisting that his Parisian tastes are superior to those of Africa, or, literally, when he fails to perform after paying a prostitute and then begs for a refund. The single frame of her laughter—her condescension, her pitiless revile for this pitiful man—is one of the book’s many disturbing moments. Of the whorehouse carpet, Mario observes “a tragic feeling amid the vestiges of the past, like yesterday’s dirty dishes,” but this is a description, too, of him, of his life, of the native agent serving the colonial state. If migration offers a kind of double consciousness, so too it opens the possibility for a double culpability, an abandonment not only of the lauded, supposedly universal “white values” of French ideals but also a stark and bloody betrayal of his own people—his sons, as Mario insists of Alain in a scene where loneliness tilts to madness.

In such a situation, is life itself an act of courage or merely the cowardice of postponing suicide? Is love an act of bravery—the persistence of human dignity—or is it more like the mindless need of the addict, an opiate, a way to defer pain? Alain’s white girlfriend points out, in one scene, that if they married, he could get paperwork, documentation, legal status. He dismisses the idea, insisting that one should not get married for ulterior motives. But isn’t it a lifeline, similar to a rescue boat, or groceries taken for free? Alagbé nudges us, in this book, to question the value—not the application, but the value—of documentation. The difference between buying a ticket for the metro and vaulting over the turnstile is more than a legal distinction. There are multiple desires, and angles to desires, at play in the circumstances of every character here—even one I have not mentioned, who stuffs a suitcase full of grilled fish, agouti, and monkey nuts so as to bring a palpable taste of home to this new world of Europe. Alagbé observes, in his final story, this recent trend: “all the talk of ‘migrants,’ or in other words ever since people started fleeing and dying in such numbers and washing up in such numbers on beaches.” Yellow Negroes takes us beneath the beaches to which migrants flee, down to the concrete of their irreducible, multivalent (which is to say messy, sometimes ugly, sometimes euphoric) lives. It is an extraordinarily gripping book, an urgent mirror through which to examine our moment—in its terror and violence, to be sure, but also in the otherwise possibility produced by such shadows.

Click here to purchase this book
at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2018 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2018

Tom Perrotta
Scribner ($16.99)

by Esther Fishman

In the first few pages of Tom Perrotta’s new novel Mrs. Fletcher, the titled character, Eve Fletcher, posts a picture to Facebook of her van loaded with new stuff for her son’s dorm room. “So excited and proud. First day of college.” Her son, however, is not in the picture, nor has he helped load the van, nor does he care about the color of the sheets she has picked out. Her aggressively cheery tone in the post is all she has to mark a milestone in her life, the departure of her only child from the home the two of them have shared since the divorce.

When the story switches to the son’s voice, we instantly recognize that casual and unconsciously cruel tribe, the “bro.” His main concerns, if they can even be said to raise to that level, have to do with partying—how he can continue his high school love of drinking, being team captain of whatever sport was in season, and getting blow jobs from his girlfriend who ups her skills by watching YouTube tutorials. His estranged father is proud of him, but his mother is deeply skeptical about his future. Inherent in her assessment of her son is Eve’s understanding of what he has lived through—divorce, and watching his father start a new family. But her son disappoints her from the start by breaking his promise to text her every day. He is drunk on his very first weekend at college, and busy chasing the first girl that presents herself. He is starting a new life.

In fact, many of the characters in Mrs. Fletcher are in search of a new life. Not that there is anything wrong with their old ones, at least not materially. Nevertheless, they can be said to be caught in a uniquely American dilemma, a type of restlessness that will not be satisfied by physical motion. It stems not from a vision of freedom in wide, open spaces, but is instead a quest for themselves, perfected. This is their very birthright. It is advertised to them personally with every keystroke. Their phones are always at hand, checked compulsively, as if any second the answers to all their problems will be revealed. Woe to them if they miss the message.

Each character in Perrotta’s work is fundamentally alone, no matter how digitally connected they are. In fact, the more connected they are by social media, the worse their isolation becomes. Relating to real people face to face becomes problematic the more their thoughts and emotions are reduced to what can be expressed in a short and pithy text, punctuated with an emoji. An anonymous message comes in to Eve’s phone one night: “U r my MILF! Send me a naked pic!! I want to cum on those big floppy tits!!!” This sends her into a state of confusion, followed, after a quick google search, by a new obsession with porn, specifically sites that specialize in amateur performances: “you could forget you were watching porn and accept it, if not as the truth, then at least as a glimpse of a better world than the one you lived in, a world where everyone secretly wanted the same thing, and no one failed to get it.” Suddenly, everything around her is permeated with sex and the promise of sex. Not only does she wonder who in her life would write such a hungry invitation, she begins to question her own sexual history, and wonders what she has missed. Instead of questioning the information she receives on-line (never google random initials!) she is sure there is a whole exciting world out there in the digital stratosphere, if only she could access it.

Meanwhile, her son continues to try to define himself at school. For the younger characters, who are more used to seeing the world through the distorting lens of the Internet, the quest is a little different. In a world where just about any sexual partner (including yourself) can be summoned and made to perform with just a few clicks or swipes, these characters are isolated twice over. They sometimes long for complex and human relationships and yet understand beyond their years how damaging reality can be. Every independent action seems fraught with emotion, and this complexity is hard to process.

Perrotta is an expert at portraying the free-floating anxiety that pervades our lives. An uncomfortable miasma is present on every page of the book. Some might say that this is our post-modern plight. We know exactly how small our own problems are in comparison to the huge issues our world faces. We know we should care more, should do our part to help change what is going on—global warming, sexual harassment, LBGT issues—but isn’t it just easier to drink too much, and regret your social choices? Mrs. Fletcher illustrates in a style both mournful and hilarious, something we know already: “Doesn’t matter where you live. You’re always just kind of alone with your own shit, you know?”

Click here to purchase this book
at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2018 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2018

Live from Medicine Park is a pure distillation of the dream that is America, one with little time to waste on the clichéd façade of hard work and success we so often associate with that dream. A tale of anonymity, fame, redemption, and remembrance that rises like myth from the sweltering heartland itself this is, nonetheless, a deeply realistic story of postmodern America, of disappeared rock goddesses, space-suited guitar wizards, Toyota dealerships, documentary filmmakers, and last gasps at fame. Filled with characters struggling more than they know, Live from Medicine Park is an unflinching portrait of America’s realities, Constance Squires just the sort of clear-eyed stylist to steer her characters and America towards the truth about themselves.
—Kurt Baumeister

Constance Squires is the award-winning author of Live from Medicine Park, Along the Watchtower: A Novel and the forthcoming story collection, Hit Your Brights. Her numerous short stories have appeared in Guernica, Shenandoah, Atlantic Monthly, and other magazines. She teaches creative writing at the University of Central Oklahoma.

Brilliantly plotted and linguistically nimble, Kurt Baumeister’s Pax America is a high-flying book as arch as it is deft. The spy thriller plot, particularly as we know it from James Bond films, serves as a surprisingly flexible skeleton for Baumeister to tell a dystopic tale of a not-too-distant American future after thirty plus years of right wing control. Part satire, part homage to the form, Pax Americana also resonates with other parodies like Archer and the Austin Powers movies—there’s an unabashed glee in playing with the loopier elements of the genre—hidden islands rigged out with nuclear devices, sharks, henchmen, allegorical names, and a suitably oh-no-whoever-controls-it-controls-the-world Maguffin in the form of a technology, called Symmetra, with vast, cryptic spiritual power. Beneath all the fun, there’s a serious critique of tendencies in our culture that are scary, but in a way that makes considering them go down as easily as a Righteous Burger. James Bond for the #MeToo moment.
—Constance Squires

Kurt Baumeister has written for Salon, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, and others. His debut novel, Pax Americana, was published in 2017. He is currently at work on a novel, The Book of Loki, and a hybrid collection of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry entitled Superman, the Seven Gods of Death, and the Need for Clean, Romantic Poetry.

Kurt Baumeister: Connie, I’ve been eager to talk to you about Live from Medicine Park. First off, let’s cover the fact that this is a Rock n’ Roll Novel. More specifically, this is a book with a certain kinship to Great Jones Street, one of our mutual hero Don DeLillo’s earliest books. The books seem like mirror images in a way; in Great Jones Street, rock star Bucky Wunderlick is trying to escape fame. In yours, you’ve also got a rock star at the center of things, Lena Wells, but Lena’s trying to regain the fame she lost decades earlier. Do you think this is a fair comparison?

Constance Squires: I love Great Jones Street and definitely wanted to tip my hat to it in the media kit section of Live from Medicine Park. There’s always a question of how to represent the music on the page in a book that deals with music, and of course you always want whatever you do to deepen character, so I wrote a media kit inspired by Great Jones Street that contained Lena’s lyrics and some reviews. I wanted the lyrics to show sides of her that she wouldn’t show Ray in person. I don’t go so far as to think of my story as a reversal of Great Jones Street, though, mainly because Lena’s not the main character and her ideas about her career and music aren’t what drive the story. Lena is sort of a Gatsby figure, someone who the main character, Ray, thinks a lot about, but she probably changes less than anyone of the other key characters. She’s at the heart of the book, but she’s not the engine.

KGB: The idea of Lena as a Gatsby figure is an interesting one. DeLillo and Fitzgerald share an iciness in tone, a detachment critics have commented on. I don’t notice that with your work. In fact, the balance you show in developing and presenting emotional conflict is striking. Live from Medicine Park is no tear-jerker, but you take quite a few characters here and give them meaningful inner lives, even the minor ones. Is there a sort of North Star you look to as you develop characters, something that helps you succeed in developing their interiority?

CS: Thank you! I know what you mean about DeLillo’s iciness, and I’m glad to have a warmer book. I think we’re all trying to write the kind of book we’d like to read, and everybody has a different set point for what they want in an emotional conflict. I’m bored and sickened by sheer melodrama, but stuff that’s too ironic and glib feels almost like cowardice to me, like a writer not wanting to go there. I think in life I try to notice this tendency in myself when it comes up and then to make myself think about or feel or act on whatever it is that’s uncomfortable, so maybe I just extend that expectation to my characters. I do know that my favorite kind of characters are very flawed—I always feel grateful to writers that give me a flawed character I can relate to at the same time I get to watch her figure things out. It’s no different than life; a person that will say, “Hey, you know what, I was such an asshole and I’m sorry,” is a thousand times more compelling and admirable than someone who shirks and blames and avoids.

So, Kurt, to bat one back at you here: On the subject of iciness, I admire the way you manage to warm up Tuck Squires in Pax Americana so that he is so much more than just a type. I’ve read a lot of stuff in which it’s clear where the writer’s sympathies lie, and so often it means that the character representing the values the writer disagrees with is not given much humanity. Satire can be especially cold, because the conceit often trumps the characterization, but you really surprised me in how reasonable and even admirable Tuck was in certain moments. Again and again we see that he is loyal and determined; that you let those traits coexist with his less likeable ones took this book to another level for me. Tell me about writing Tuck—where did that character come from and how did you feel your way into his voice?

KGB: Tuck is a fantasy/anti-fantasy persona. Speaking superficially, he’s everything one could ever want to be—young, rich, handsome, athletic, sure of his place in the world, confident—but he’s also a complete fucking mess. To the extent Tuck is successful as a protagonist, I think the thing that makes him work is his conviction that he’s doing right even when he’s not. Like so many of the characters in this book, Tuck is, on some level, a failed Christ figure. He wants to save the day and I do think there’s nobility in that. Sure, he wants all the accolades that might go with it, but even if you’re the worst person in the world, if you want to save the world, there’s something good about you. And I think this is applicable to all the characters, including the villains. The funny thing about villains is very few people or even characters would cop to being one. With few exceptions, each of us is the hero of our own story. When people talk about heroes and villains, antiheroes and antivillains, my ears always perk up, because our perceptions of heroism or villainy, good or evil, are subjective. One woman’s hero is another’s villain.

As far as Tuck’s voice goes, I hear him as someone who’s developed a veneer of confidence, someone who conveys the conviction he’s doing right, no matter how wrong he obviously is. Because he’s so convinced of how right he is, Tuck can say and do things that are awful and funny all at once. He’s not politically correct. In this way, he’s the voice of the far, religious right in America, the part of it that seemed to be ascendant under W. Bush.

CS: I adore unreliable narrators and love Tuck for that reason, but Diana is another key voice. The alternating chapter structure, Tuck and Diana, really works; did you conceive the book that way or did you find you needed Diana for certain things?

KGB: This book was a lot longer at one point, perhaps up to 130,000 words, and there were more points of view. As I trimmed the word count, one of the obvious (though not easy) things to do was get rid of POV characters. I knew I needed Diana and Parlay; they are the drivers for the story, so I had to be able to get inside their heads directly. Tuck and Clarion drive the plot, so I had to keep them as well. I toyed with Jack Justice as a POV character and he was fun to write but ultimately superfluous. Beyond all this, if there’s one thing I absolutely needed Diana for it was her goodness, her heroism. She’s the best of these characters, the most admirable and the most intelligent. I think she understands the limits of human knowledge, the fact that we’re constantly evolving our understanding of the world.

Thinking now about heroism, and, also, failure—Diana’s, Tuck’s, Clarion’s, but also your main character, Ray’s—Ray is the protagonist in Live from Medicine Park, the hero in a way, and he’d understand that about himself, auteur that he is. He’s also a realistic character, and though ultimately successful on some level, he spends a lot of time failing.

CS: Right. Ray believes he is a cool, objective filmmaker who never gets involved or steps from behind the camera. His mantra from Star Trek about the prime objective—never interfere with the fate of a civilization you’re visiting—articulates this position. He fails utterly at this, and so the crisis of the novel involves a moment when someone he cares about on the Medicine Park set is gravely hurt because he’s practicing the same character flaws that got someone shot on his last set—he’s finally having to get real with himself about that.

KGB: Coming to terms with the truth about themselves, the realities of their lives . . . there are a lot of characters doing that in this book. What is Live from Medicine Park saying about truth?

CS: This space is also filled with the family story around Lena—her son, Gram’s search for his father, Gram and Jettie’s band, the Black Sheep, and their approaching make-or-break moment, the mystery of Lena’s relationship with Cy, and the further question of Lena’s heritage embodied in her claim to be Geronimo’s great-granddaughter. The place—the Native American history, the military-industrial history of the base, the buffaloes and the trashy bars, the prohibition-era myths of the old hotel and the rock myths walking around in silver lamé spacesuits—is important to me. It’s not a part of the world most people have their own experience with, so it felt important to show it.

KGB: Poetry and lyrics, fiction and music reviews—your book has just about everything stylistically, something few writers can pull off. Do you feel confined by form? Is the variation of form in Live from Medicine Park an attempt to move past the novel’s traditional boundaries, or are you simply doing what your material demands?

CS: I loved writing those lyrics and reviews—it was tons of fun, and there’s actually more that the editors talked me into cutting, with good reason. I felt like I had to do it. I’ve read a lot of rock novels, and it’s so important to try to find an equivalency on the page for the experience of hearing live music and watching someone in concert. You really can’t do it, but it’s important to try, because I’m not too interested in Lena as a public figure, I’m interested in her as an artist. So, I have to show her art, at least what I can. And I tried to make Lena’s lyrics and Jettie’s lyrics different—I used different models and went for different effects. I wanted them to be of equal quality but distinct stylistic variations.

As far as moving past the novel’s traditional boundaries, I don’t feel like I did that much with this novel. Aside from the lyrics, this is a very linear narrative with quite a traditional structure, really. My first novel was much more modular, not plot-driven, and the one I’m working on now is very definitely pushing against the restrictions of the form, but Live from Medicine Park felt like it needed a strong, recognizable structure. I thought of it like a song—a listener will tolerate a lot of harmonic weirdness and cryptic lyrics and what-have-you if the rhythm section keeps driving hard, pulling you forward.

Kurt, speaking of cryptic . . . I’m sure it’s pure coincidence that your initials are KGB, but I’m enough of a dork to want to try to make something of that and the fact that you’ve written in a form that reached its pinnacle during the Cold War. I guess I’m curious about your relationship to the spy thriller genre and how you chose it. Are there certain books or movies that imprinted on you? Do you want to talk about any deliberate homages, like the way my media kit is a direct homage to DeLillo?

KGB: I think my parents were trying to be funny. Maybe? Those are just my initials, though. Certainly, the Bond books (and movies) are key. You’ve very astutely homed in on my writing relationship with the genre, at least with this book. Tuck Squires sees himself as an American Bond. And his partner, Ken Clarion, I mean, he’s only fifty-something but I’ve joked about him being a geriatric Bond. To a certain extent, I think I’m also satirizing a lot of “Christian” fiction a la the Left Behind books, other spy thrillers, and to some extent perhaps something like The Da Vinci Code.

CS: Your fictional computer program Symmetra, with its genuine spiritual potential, as well as your examples of a power-mad Christianity that resonate powerfully with our own America (like “Righteous Burger,” which is so great), suggest you have something to say about the distinction between spirituality and religion. Do you, or what concerns about religion are you manifesting in these story elements?

KGB: Absolutely. I draw a distinction between spirituality and religion. I hold out a little hope for some sort of metaphysical world beyond, though I’m fairly convinced this is it. When we die, the game stops. No second chances, no bonus rounds. One never knows, though. I think what I was trying to get at with Symmetra (or maybe better to say what its inventor, Diana Scorsi, is trying to get at) is that the chances of one of the many thousands of religions being right—or really billions, if you consider that even people who accept the same dogma interpret it differently in their heads—that in the face of all that, the idea of one religion, any religion, being right, (Christianity, say, or Islam), well, it is sort of ridiculous. If any fundamentalist interpretation of one religion is correct, it voids all the others. So, it’s just sort of funny that everyone’s running around convinced they’ve got the secret sauce and everyone else is doomed. Now, what Diana’s tried to envision, which seems more likely to me, is that if religions en masse are right, it’s in their commonalities. So, she builds a database of religions and uses this as the genesis for her technology.

CS: In their commonalities—I couldn’t agree more. Onto your dialogue: it’s snappy and smart and it veers away from anything that felt expected or formulaic. You’re great with indirection and with attitude too. How do you write dialogue? Does it come easily or have you had any embarrassing experiments as you learned your craft?

KGB: What a great thing to hear. I love writing dialogue. Honestly, it’s the easiest thing for me. The conversations just sort of come to me as I sit thinking about them. I don’t use many tags when I’m drafting, just write stuff down as it drops into my mind. My editor had to convince me to put more tags in so that readers could keep track of who’s saying what.

I just try to imagine the conversation going back and forth and write it down, then go back over it again and again until it sounds true and says everything that needs to be said. Dialogue is an easy way to provide key details—I mean, it can be a trap, too, if you go too far with it—but, used correctly, it’s an easy way to accomplish just about everything from characterization to exposition, story, and plot without being too clunky about it.

Click here to purchase Pax Americana
at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase Live from Medicine Park
at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2018 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2018

Orlando

Sandra Simonds
Wave Books ($18)

Yeah No

Jane Gregory
The Song Cave ($17.95)

Lecture Notes: A Duration Poem in Twelve Parts

Deborah Meadows
BlazeVOX ($18)

by Greg Bem

What is being written in books in 2018? What is being written in books of poetry in 2018? What are feminist voices saying in these books? I ask these questions again, again, and again. Reading, literally and figuratively, is a system of world-building, undertaken both by a book’s author and its reader. For the author—the instigator of this project—the forces that influence this world-building can come from her interior life or the external life spent negotiating society, if not some combination of the two. This triangulation, the intersections, the crossing over spaces of thought between realms of existence—these all offer insight into lives that are not our own.

In Sandra Simonds’s Orlando, Jane Gregory’s Yeah No, and Deborah Meadows’s Lecture Notes: A Duration Poem in Twelve Parts, three unique women write unique works using powerful systems of style, tone, and image. These authors maintain individualities wrapping around their books and their identities. And yet, despite their distinct methods of self-expression and how each book stands on its own, there are astute similarities in how these poets approach fragments of worlds larger than themselves. As they grow in complexity and dimension, their worlds inform and complement one another, all three connected by common values of clarity, intellectual inquiry, and responsibility. There is a sense of the marvelous here, too: The worlds within these publications continue a journey for American poetry, and American feminism, that welcomes, challenges, and evolves our collective aesthetic.

In Sandra Simonds’s collection Orlando, the transformation of “Orlando the city” into “Orlando the friend” is a tidal turn. Simonds confides in Orlando, shares her history of victimization and receiving of abuse with Orlando, explores power through Orlando. Orlando thus becomes more than its 80 pages of poems. It is the transition of the city. It is the intimacy of personification. It is the beauty of maturity. It is the countenance before and beyond revolution in being:

the Small World: how they weave their way inside a collective eureka,
they shriek a giddy shriek
into the phantasmagoria of this trashy arrangement, a spell on each
reverberating culture,
lit by electronic candles, the moon happy as a soldier, every piece
dances to the gnawing

Orlando represents an incredible feat of poetic prowess by its breadth and by its representations of place, person, and truth. The book explores the most human moments of the systems within which we live—systems that layer, stack, take on new meanings. We are reminded of tragedy, violence, and sadness. Systems bring us interlocking moments of emotion, thought, and reaction. A microcosmic muse in a bubble of tropical noise, Orlando becomes a sequence that shatters with the breathing of a poet who has been broken but survives, a poet who accepts mutation of and transgression toward self.

Simonds’s book is structured into two pieces, the title poem and “Demon Spring.” Written in tercets, “Orlando” tracks the speaker’s experiences with stalking and abuse, which result in a solitude that offers chances for reflection and serenity. The work is written in a sprawling verse that reads more like prose than poetry—the words are hungry to move from line to line, expressionistic and hedonistic all the same. The brutality, the seizing of ideas upon ideas through the author’s narrative turns Orlando into a gauntlet for writer and reader both, as in this passage from “Demon Spring”:

Locked in the beauty of the pearl,
far from frail, a mellow rain flows
over Orlando
Orlando, place of raw material, place of affect,
place of this lush box, the pulse so lush
it makes the live version of history
stream before you like tears

While the structure of “Orlando” breaks toward the experimental (or, rather, chaotic) in form and tone by breaking down the tercet sprawl into jagged, staccato lines, the second half of Simonds’s work is equally enticing and rupturing. It falls into place through its most gratuitous descriptions of a life built upon systems. This is a necessary repetition, a validation, a heartbreaking and entrancing position of a storyteller whose life subsides in cycles of cruelty. The book resonates with both approachable horror and the unapproachable banality of peace. An exploration but also evocation of the very environment which continues its brutality, Orlando is a book that is relentless, bold, and thorough, and yet fulfills the chaos of life, the vision of destructive and regenerative energies. Like the city which is carries its name, the book succeeds, continues, and grows.

Growth is a form of illumination, by what it brings into being and what it coincides with. While Simonds manages to explore space and time through the confines of a large, empowered symbol, Jane Gregory, in her latest book Yeah No, begins from within. Growth in Yeah No is challengingly personal and cryptically impersonal. What at first glance appears to be rush upon rush of the delusional is also consciously formed with patterns and systems in mind.

Yeah No is a book of fierce curiosity. A puzzle box of intertwined experiences that range the gamut of emotional context, this collection bears an identity of lenses, the spectral and layered models. Gregory’s persistence of language is striking. There is a dualism in form through the programmatic and the faded: language of certainty is emboldened and language of passivity lingers just beyond. On the page this appears through the poet’s use of literally lighter text, and yet the idea, in multiple iterations, extends to other spaces and forms. The language itself is thoroughly, if not universally, capable of keeping itself in check:

This is a book of paranoia obviated by paranoia      It exists a delusion
scrapped by reality      It is called RUIN HATH / THEY HAVE ME

Gregory’s work explores critique, doubt, and the means of explanation. To most poets, the act of expression is one that, in being made, represents truth. But what is truth through the myriad of emotions and other factors that make up autonomy in our own, singular sentience? And at what cost are we to take on and responsibly deal with these qualities? A system of investigation and understanding, of awareness and empathy, by and for the self, is raised up and up. The cost is investment in a mindful approach to a poetics of precise introspection. Yeah No is about the acknowledgment and respect of contradiction through the process of care.

For the reader, this form of exploration turns out to be quite dark. Despite the illumination and the complexities of engagement, Gregory’s work is often wrought with linguistic difficulties, shifts in perspective, and the challenge toward refinement and clarity. The result is a textured, polyvocal presentation of a core of humanity:

and I don’t want to work
on what’s prepared for never

to end and wonder can you
feel my love point from many a wondrous

grot and secret cell . . .

And within these small, dense stirrings are the passages we all go through. I read the feminism here as a feminism of nurture, a rite of providing gifts by taking upon weight and allowing weight to be applied. The weight in this case becomes the other, the addition, the arresting and the arousing. The poems chronicle a process of seeking as well as a reckoning with nurturing subtext of being. Being as seen from the sense of resting and restlessness. Being as elevated concept. Being as fragment and fragment as observable. But where there is an internal sense of determination, there is also the welcoming, integrated sense of the communal. Gregory’s work in this collection is jarring for being so warmly dissonant, so difficult and so satisfying.

As it persists through a restless tension between the passive and the active, Yeah No breaks into a freedom of decision: “This book was written from prison or in hiding, depending on how things go after you accept this proposal and fund us and we do the thing and more than once at that” writes Gregory towards (but not at) the end of the book. Additional room to grow? The acceptance of circumstance and that emergence through the poet’s clarity. As such, clarity moves itself to density, and in density we find ourselves, readers, a collected continuum of the poet’s system of the self. A harrowing maze of mirrors, a series of projections and acceptances, and all that we identify with. Yeah No, the contradictory phrase that complements by juxtaposition our very present, very knowing involvement. Whereas Simonds has herself and Orlando, Gregory has herself and us.

What we contain shows its holistic, enduring face in Deborah Meadows’s Lecture Notes: A Duration Poem in 12 Parts. Affirming that “notions of kind masters / are meaningless,” Meadows explores history with via a deft sense of self. She takes the energies she committed to a series of lectures, twelve in fact, mostly spoken by brilliant people, most of which are men, and has revisited these efforts. The lecturers include Ehud Kalai, Volker Remmert, Richard Andersen, Larry Neal, Steven Deyle, Frances Rosenbluth, Steve Squyres, Iwan Barankay, Marc D. Hauser, Andre Carus, Vicente Fox, and Ofer Gal.

On the surface, the writing looks poetic, vague, choppy, circling around truth by way of interpretation, representation, the art of creation. She provides notes, transcriptions, the stream of consciousness as automata arising out of dusty historical footprint, out of the land of pedagogy, where it has entered into her own brief system. With Lecture Notes, Meadows performs—like Simonds and Gregory—an act of personal examination in the context of larger systems and her own systematic reclamation, following her authorial trajectory as another conceptual project aligned with her other, most recent books. It is a book that is a monument, a summary, and an object of beauty and time:

does your brain know
it’s in it?
—moral domain, neural data
—unwind principles &
how does culture
change or shape

The subtitle of the book includes A Duration and this is a curious term. Aren’t all books durations? Aren’t all experiences writing them (and reading them) informed by the individual moments that comprise such experiences? Lecture Notes tackles the reality of the written work but goes beyond. Meadows seeks the human, seeks to portray that liberated spirit of self. It is a mindful session of knowing her own act as an artist, and the energies there, but also in agreeing to this work, she is agreeing to much more, and providing much more for the outward who might experience her system. Much like Gregory’s Yeah No, which brings the reader into a world of the intimate and personal as process, so too is Lecture Notes a magnetizing inward, an attraction to the core. In the case of Meadows, the work is filled with agreements, doubts, joys, angers, and the plethora of other reactions to experiences within the system of learning (the lectures). It is a sequence of splicing that become of relative importance for the reader as they have been of relative, fluctuating importance to the poet:

—light “same” everywhere

—human eye –pupil,
a window
(there is nothing
inherently wrong in
using an instrument.)

Indeed, the pause or break, as a sequence of qualities within the art of this book, are worth further exploration; as much about duration as it is about an anti-duration, a moment of time that is a flash or instant, Lecture Notes seeks to merge the historical with the present through the disjunction and the quizzical entry of form and style of each line. The understanding of a complex system of thought being carried along over the course of history is an understanding of morphs and mutations, as represented in the book. Meadows and her work explores these morphs and mutations by projecting the ideas of her influencers and her moments of encounters into the ether of the future reader. As conceptual works so often do, Lecture Notes invites additional participation assertively, which results in even further, fueled layers of meaning.

All three of these books feel inherently marvelous, rattling from start to finish. From the outside to the within and through the space between the spectrum’s edges come Simonds, Gregory, and Meadows. While these books all contribute to similar feminist goals with fruitful potency, they still move the female voice into uniquely individual spaces. As books of poetry in 2018, these are books that uplift, spirited and capable, proud and enduring. A fulfilling optimism lingers well-lit just beyond the shadows of the overlaying systems we must, all of us, come to terms with.

Click here to purchase Orlando
at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase Yeah No
at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase Lecture Notes
at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2018 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2018