The cover of marcus scott williams’s damn near might still be is what it is immediately clues readers in to the lower-case, mostly punctuation-free writing they’ll encounter throughout the book’s six sections. Anyone who regularly communicates via text will be familiar with the style, abbreviations, and slang the author uses, though grammar purists will be instantly nauseous—and they deserve it, because the prose here connects more genuinely because of this neglect of the rules, not despite it. The book is organized around one to two page “posts,” not unlike captions you might see on a writer’s Instagram page or website. The similarity these passages (sometimes as short as one sentence or less) have to social media is apparent instantly, and it heightens the material.
damn near takes place in a multitude of locations—Denver, New York, Milan, London, etc.—as well as at a great deal of unidentified places on U.S. roads. Often reading like a travel diary, the book draws the reader in with williams’s blunt sincerity about things like eating, drinking, and rest stops, as well as by the inclusion of a dozen or so companions never fully described in exposition. This is a technique first popularized by Frank O’Hara, and it’s a good one, as we come to see the characters not just as the author’s friends, but as our own. The sparkling, near-poetic prose comes across as the result of happy accidents instead of deliberate intention; the author feels like a gifted bohemian who, again like O’Hara, might step away from a party to write a bit before returning.
This global trek isn’t in any way mired down by pretension, and williams isn’t afraid to mention the realities of Panda Express or sleeping on couches. No matter the scenery in front of him, he never fails to mention some telling detail, like that every step is taken in “espresso-splattered Doc Martens.” This counterpoint is fresh compared to so much writing by individuals eager to express how streetwise they are. Williams is a world traveler, but he deliberately grounds the reader in his voice, establishing that this is a personal view, not a pristine, unopinionated travel guide.
No matter the subject, the voice of prose either sinks or swims; here, all this clever technique is buoyed by williams’s down-to-earth voice, which is full of painful self-awareness and surprising humor; the book takes itself seriously, but only just enough, a line that is hard to define no matter where you’d like to be on it. Ultimately, damn near might still be is what it is succeeds because williams trusts his audience not to require him to dress his talent up, which is as startling as it is appreciated.
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Edited by Jessica Hundley and Pam Grossman Taschen ($40)
by Patrick James Dunagan
What makes a witch a witch, and what is witchcraft for? These are among the central questions explored in the lavishly illustrated Witchcraft, the latest release in Taschen’s Library of Esoterica series. Images of witches throughout the ages and in various styles are robustly represented, with visualizations of the coquettish and the stridently sexy appearing alongside hags of old and earth mothers of today. The illustrations are notable for being reproduced at remarkably high quality—which is essential, for often the artists have included key details buried in murky colors and shading. It’s wonderful to be able to notice what’s lurking in dark corners.
Not surprisingly, a colossal number of brooms, cauldrons, ghouls, devils, goats, wands, and outdoor fire dances make appearances in Witchcraft, yet there are also tranquil moon-lit scenes and lush woodland vistas aplenty. Nowadays witches are far less commonly viewed as raggedy and grotesque, flying around on brooms in the night and menacing town and countryside alike. Much discussion in this book is thus given over to unpacking the vast number of preconceptions and misunderstandings about witches, part of a growing tolerance that helps witches today stand proud, announcing themselves to the public without fear or hesitancy. In many communities, particularly in the arts, declaring oneself a witch is even fashionable.
For that reason, it’s also not too surprising that many an artist in Witchcraft self-identifies herself, or rarer himself, as a witch. Practitioners of the arts and the occult readily share affinities: “Like a witch, the artist conjures, shapes reality, manifests . . . One makes magick. One engages in ‘the craft.’” Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington, for example, are two artists associated with Surrealism whose work is included in this book. Close friends while living in the expatriated European community in Mexico City, they were both influenced by occultism; in works by such artists, “many aspects of the witch in art history and in the popular imagination were revisited and reimagined,” opening paths to a wider reinterpretation and embracing of witchcraft. Visual artists Betye Saar and Cameron, for example, both from Los Angeles, offer wonderful instances of the artist embedding (as well as embodying, in Cameron’s case) witchcraft symbolism and practice in works of art.
Many more examples of the Artist-as-Witch abound, and this book may inspire readers to think of them. In the literary world, novelist Norman Mailer's avowed maintenance of his “relationship” to substances (whiskey and pot) in his writing practice seems as witchy as poet Diane di Prima's 1980s declaration that she started putting on a few pounds in order to keep the demons out. Poetry examples are in fact numerous: Alice Notley has used the symbol of a white owl often, and during the presidency of George W. Bush, described her recurring dream of such a creature carrying him far away from the White House; Joanne Kyger developed a practice of breathing along with the bamboo across from her front porch, welcoming and congratulating its breath with her own. Witchcraft invites and celebrates readers making connections such as these, identifying the predominance of witchy practice that inundate and intersect with creative life.
Witch Janet Farrar sounds much like a poet when she makes this recommendation to aspiring witches: “Read as much as you can, but be critical of what you read. Stick to your original vision of what craft is, and don’t be swayed by those who try to shoehorn you into their form of practice.” Any MFA candidate in poetry would be wise to follow this tip. Such common-sense advice is found everywhere in these pages, as in this discussion of practicing Necromancy: “the dead will become visible to you, and you will be able to request information from them. Speak politely and wear an amulet.”
Several statements by contemporary witches demonstrate how witchcraft is not only useful, but essential in our rapidly diversifying appreciation for each other’s differences. “The witch can help us find our way through what I call ‘the evolutionary chaos of now,’” says Robin Rose Bennett, and Edgar Fabián Frías observes that “Witches banish borders and binaries and allow for prismatic visions to take root.” At its heart, witchcraft focuses on the liberation of the individual. Like all good anti-establishment heroes, “Witches only care about empire when they want to burn it down.”
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Join us as we celebrate the internationally acclaimed new novel W. with a special virtual event featuring Swedish author Steve Sem-Sandberg in discussion with the book’s English-language translator, Saskia Vogel.
Free to attend, registration required. We hope to “see” you there!
If you can’t attend the live broadcast, register anyway and you’ll be able to watch the replay whenever you like!
About the Book
W. (The Overlook Press) is a literary reimagining of one of modern literature's touchstone texts, the play Woyzeck. Considered the first modern drama, Woyzeck tells the story of a poor soldier who kills the woman he loves. In 1836 this true story inspired Georg Büchner to write the play, unfinished at his death at just twenty-three years old.
W. grippingly recounts the lovers' relationship, the murder trial, and the soldier's execution. The novel unfolds as W. struggles to recount the events of his life, grasping at understanding his feelings and circumstances. Sem-Sandberg searched court archives to bring new light to this story, and he masterfully sustains a rich period atmosphere through poetic and controlled prose, brilliantly translated into English by Saskia Vogel.
Against a landscape devastated by inhumanity and greed—yet somehow managing to sustain hope, too—W. tells a ruthless, moving, and utterly relevant story as one human desperately fights to make something of the life given to him.
Purchase a copy of Steve Sem-Sandburg’s W., or any other of Saskia Vogel’s works in translation, from Magers & Quinn Booksellers:
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About the Authors
Steve Sem-Sandberg's novels include The Emperor of Lies, winner of the August Prize;The Chosen Ones, winner of France's Prix Médicis étranger; and W., which was awarded the Eyvind Johnson Prize. His books have been bestsellers around the world and have been translated into thirty languages. In 2020 he was elected to the Swedish Academy, the body that chooses the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Saskia Vogel is an author and translator from Los Angeles, currently living in Berlin. She was a 2021 PEN Translation Prize finalist and Princeton University's Fall 2022 Translator in Residence. Her debut novel, Permission, was published in five languages, and she was awarded the 2021 Berlin Senate Grant for Non-German language Literature for her writing.
Steven D. Schroeder doesn’t like profiles. “From my end,” he said in our concluding in-person interview for this article, “the poems speak for themselves. If someone has questions for me, I’m perfectly happy to go along with those. I don’t think, ‘Oh, we need to talk about X more.’ Because if I wanted to talk about X more, I’m gonna throw it in the poem, and that’s how I talk about X more.”
The X of Schroeder’s new poetry collection, Wikipedia Apocalyptica (swallow::tale press, $16), is the complicated techno-existentialism of our contemporary Western life. Schroeder works as a Creative Content Manager for a financial marketing agency in the St. Louis area, a job that provides no shortage of opportunities to dwell on the shortcomings of late capitalism. He also edits the online literary journal $ (Poetry Is Currency), whose manifesto is explicitly anti-capitalist and radically inclusive.
Schroeder sees himself, though, “ultimately as a writer because that’s what I’m doing all the time. I stopped editing for quite a while, and obviously I missed it because I started again. I think the editing serves the literary community and my own writing. If you set aside the poetry aspect of it, I’m at least as much an editor as a writer.”
Despite how utterly contemporary the poems in his new collection feel, Schroeder says he’d begun drafting them in 2012, long before the idea of a Trump presidency or a global pandemic were a fathomable reality. The following exchange took place over a couple of weeks in a shared online document, perhaps a perfect space for writers to muse on poetics and their practical ramifications.
Kenneth J. Pruitt: I’d love to start with how the book’s poem titles are ordered: Many of them are roughly in reverse alphabetical order. Given the title of the book, how interested are you in playing with expectations of a “wiki” as an encyclopedia of information?
Steven D. Schroeder: There are multiple aspects of wikis in general, and Wikipedia in particular, that I find appropriate as a title and thematic organizer for this book. First, their frequently edited nature, which pairs well with how much I tinker with individual poems and the overall manuscript. Second, the potentially valuable information coming at you in a barrage that can easily get overwhelming. Third, the amusing but harrowing petty power struggles that go on over even trivial topics.
Wikipedia is, in many ways, a valuable resource and a mind-boggling accomplishment. In other ways, it’s a fascinating car wreck and/or trash fire, and it seems tied into a lot of the techno-dystopian elements we’re currently dealing with that I’m trying to evoke with these poems.
KJP: The car wreck/trash fire aspect is so ripe for exploration. In lots of popular dystopic visions, we often have lies being sold as truth. I remember as a teacher telling my students they weren’t even allowed to cite Wikipedia as a source. Granted, that was 15 years ago. The question remains: How reliable are the speakers of this wiki? Is authorial integrity being toyed with here, too?
SDS: There are certainly fights over “truth” or “facts” on Wikipedia pages, but also a legion of unintentional errors. Beyond that, the occasional completely unparseable sentences irk me but are nonetheless in the spirit of language mangling I perform. I very much hope readers will have at least a dash of skepticism reading my book, which may not be entirely trustworthy. Or maybe that’s just my excuse if any typos got past my proofreading.
KJP: So many of the poems throughout the book use a first-person plural pronoun. Often it feels like a moral indictment, albeit inclusive of the speaker, of the reader’s complicity in the decay that occurs in this apocalypse. What is the emotional response you hope for in your reader with this constant repetition of “we/us”?
SDS: One of my reasons for the first-person plural calls back to the internecine wiki editor battles I mentioned: the idea of a supposed collective that’s actually deeply divided and fights among itself (themselves?), as the “we” narrator does in multiple poems here. I think of it as a lie the group tells both internally and as a front for outsiders.
Another reason is, as you say, complicity. I want to remind the reader (not to mention myself) that we’re almost always at least a little implicated in those situations where the “we” is in the wrong. Self-examination can help prevent this kind of poetry from being overly self-righteous.
In poems where the “we” is the wronged or oppressed party, I’d like it to suggest standing together against whatever force. Third person in those situations can come across as voyeuristic, and an “I” narrator might seem appropriative of experiences that aren’t mine, even if the mode isn’t realist.
KJP: I’m inferring a lot of first-hand knowledge about being a wiki content generator. Is that a world that you’re familiar with? Can you say more about what that world is like? It’s so fascinating to me.
SDS: Though I’ve made a few Wikipedia edits through the years, most of my knowledge comes from observation, wanting to know how things work. The talk and history tabs of contentious Wikipedia pages can be amazing if you’re wonky like me. Kooks using sock-puppet accounts to maintain their own self-aggrandizing bios, rejection of factual edits with cited sources on the grounds that they’re “opinion,” etc. I’d never get deeply involved with that subculture.
KJP: Though it’s never heavy-handed, you do grapple with current systemic inequities like racism in the book. And you also name these systems in the “about” section of the literary magazine you help run, $ (Poetry is Currency). How do you toe the line between engaging with the issues of our day and finger-wagging at your reader? I’m thinking here of a poem like “Official Incident” and how it takes the structure of a prepared press statement, which brings to mind so many deaths of unarmed Black citizens at the hands of police.
SDS: It's a tough line to walk for sure. The ways I handle it are “very carefully” and perhaps “not all that well according to some people.” I try to use absurdist wit to finesse dark subject matter into the reader’s mind, and sonics and wordplay to make the poems more of a pleasure to recite and hear. On the other hand, I’m happy to buck the line of thinking that poetry should be timeless or apolitical, as if the issues I’m talking about aren’t age-old and woven into every aspect of our lives.
In fairness, I’m wary of the tendency to write and publish topical reaction poetry much too quickly—Knopf released an anthology of pandemic poetry in November 2020, which comes across like media outlets that have pre-written obituaries ready to rush out in case of celebrity deaths. However, I also regularly see statements like the one that sparked a recent Twitter ruckus by suggesting you should never use pop culture references for fear of dating your work. As with so much of writing, it all comes down not to whether you include contemporary specifics, but how well.
KJP: Overall, most of the poems in the book are not only acutely aware of themselves as poems, but as vessels of some attempt at a capital-t-Truth. Yet, they’re overwhelmingly, winkingly sarcastic in tone. How do you see the role of humor in these poems as a means to get to the more serious themes they point toward?
SDS: A long time ago, one of my poetry friends told me that my poems start by making people want to laugh, but then punch them in the gut instead—the funny is the foot in the door. It wasn’t a conscious choice at first. I have an instinct to be funny, but also a learned tendency to go dark. At this point, it seems like I’ve developed that combination into a 90% of a poetic voice.
KJP: I don’t disagree. I’m also thinking of a poem you read at a St. Louis Poetry Center reading late last year that was an absurdist take on end notes. Though the poem was really dark, the audience was absolutely cracking up. Is there a point where the humor detracts from the seriousness of the themes of the poems?
SDS: Probably so. On one hand, I don’t necessarily mind if one of my poems goes a little too heavy on the ridiculous humor and becomes more of a grotesque litany of jokes. On the other hand, I think my instinct turns toward serious relevance quickly enough that it doesn’t happen to me too often. There’s always a point in my writing where I read a line and think “Am I still just being funny here, or am I starting to bring the weight?”
KJP: I initially always think of you as a writer of ideas, meaning that you’re typically creating narrative poems that rather concisely posit a way to view the world. However, there are some gorgeous lines in these poems (“The fastest route out retreats // faster than that. Whatever the threat…” from “Officer Lost in a Logistics Office”). Does this attention to the sonic, more lyrical aspects of the poem happen while drafting the story of the poem, or does that occur elsewhere in the process?
SDS: You don’t have to attend many readings before you realize sound isn’t a priority for a lot of contemporary poets. I’m always thinking about the sound of poems, even in the little phrases I write in notebooks, from internal rhyme and assonance to anaphora and the beat of a line. However, those earliest stages are almost always silent, until a certain point in drafting when I read the poem out loud to myself for the first time. That’s a critical step, mandatory for all my poems.
I always try to balance the sonics with the more communicative aspects. There are poems I adore that lean far more heavily on the pure sound than my brain will let me. (Donna Masini’s “Mindscreen” is an example.) I’d like to break through to that sort of subconscious or irrational space more, but it’s a rarity.
KJP: I also want to discuss the difference between injecting surrealism into one’s poems and doing intentional world-building that has surreal aspects to its reality. Can you explain that difference and which side of that spectrum you find yourself most drawn to as a poet?
SDS: I want things to be systematic, to know the “why” of them. That probably comes in part from my childhood love of fantasy and science fiction novels. My poems aren’t telling a single interwoven story in a single world by any means—I lack the attention span. My absurdism simply has a framework by which it can be understood as one aspect of a whole, rather than the strange juxtapositions being the point.
I don’t demand the same thing in my reading. Even poems with similar forms and themes can be quite surrealistic with great results. For example, Matthea Harvey’s delightful “Future of Terror” and “Terror of the Future” post-apocalyptic poem series, a big influence on my book, tend more in that direction.
KJP: Sometimes I wonder if I leaned toward poetry because it absolved me of the duties of worldbuilding over the course of a novel or a screenplay or some kind of longer work. That being said, I also know you’re into fantasy and sci-fi. Who are some writers in those genres whom you admire who do that better than poets do?
SDS: The Lord of the Rings, which I’ve read at least a dozen times, is a formative influence for me (though I don’t think you need to create your own languages and thousands of years of lineages to be a successful poet). Another fantastic worldbuilder who creates vivid speculative milieus that tie into important contemporary issues is Octavia Butler. I particularly recommend the Patternist series (start with Wild Seed). Plenty of others spring to mind: Ursula Le Guin, Philip K. Dick, George R. R. Martin, N. K. Jemisin, Ann Leckie.
KJP: It’s hard not to read your 9-to-5 professional life into “Words Revised by the Client.” As a poet with a full-time job that doesn’t involve poetry, how does the moneymaking aspect of your life as an American with a job inform your artistic life? What’s the symbiosis?
SDS: It’s not just a moneymaking job, it’s a moneymaking job focused on money! I work for a marketing agency whose main clients are banks, insurance companies, investment firms, etc. The consuming nature of capitalism and the Kafkaesque uncaring inefficiency of business feature heavily in this book, explicitly and spiritually. That said, my job also provides a solid separation between employment and personal life, so I’m not completely burned out when I write creatively.
KJP: You’re a really good performer of your own poems. Do you imagine your ideal reader reading them aloud? Do you think of your poems living primarily visually on the page or in the mouth of the reader—or both?
SDS: My imagined audience for a poem is usually myself if I were coming to it without any prior knowledge. (I know that’s solipsistic, but I’m realistic about the average size of the poetry audience.) In my poems, one thing that approach means is that I want a poem that’s engaging both on the page and aurally.
I’ve learned through long experience which of my poems perform better aloud. Despite how this answer began, I love my work making a live connection with an appreciative audience, and it’s something I’m pretty good at. Zoom readings, on the other hand, are a weird form of solitary-confinement torture for me as a reader.
Thank you for these thoughtful, detailed questions. My reflexive response in these sorts of situations is glib jokes, and this interview demanded more of me.
Early in her book-length erasure of Herbert Read’s The Meaning of Art, Jennifer Sperry Steinorth reveals one of the aims of her project—“Distort/the given world”—and clears out space for the shock of new recognitions: “Even/Aphrodite/is difficult.” Of course, the world being distorted is one in which women have been erased throughout—or presented only as the subject of the male gaze and its concomitant reveries. In Her Read, the odalisque snatches back the brush and pen (and Wite-Out) to stretch a new canvas: one punctuated with thread and blood from pricked fingers, possessed of its own desire and fully possessing a body hungry for iron.
Over the 240 pages in which Steinorth tropes the very idea of “erasure” in reclaiming womxn’s representation and participation in art, she clears spaces for hope, joy, and the real work of living in and with pain, this latter most insistently: “I would like to free / colour / and so emancipate / my / shadow / from this / connoisseur’s enthusiasm for pain.” Hers is no scholar’s pain, no writing on the anguish of another subject, but a gloriously full-throated song of direct experience. She contrasts Read’s armchair celebrations of despair and struggle (referring to him throughout as “Imp”) with her reclamation of the fully fleshed self, realized in “R skin.” As the Imp and R Skin appear on page after page, the dialogue becomes something of an invitation to a new forthrightness: “I / may / step / out / with / the devil / to / escape /no no no / to / be amused at / the / ambition / of / tombs.”
Steinorth’s poetic techniques are empowered by correction fluid, embroidery, ball-point, brush wash, collage, Sharpie, and her own blood, making her engagement with Read’s Meaning truly visceral. This is a handiwork of necessity, making its voice from what is at-hand, carrying around work for the time when it can be accomplished—for and by a body that knows what it is like for one body to give forth not just a work, but another body. This is the work of informed creation: it knows itself and its efforts. There are great sections where the techniques of erasure continue the work of making the poetry physical, as when a scalpel is brought to bear on a tableau of Abraham and Isaac: “please /let / us! /re / fashion / the story.”
The work of refiguring the world of art and its meanings is vast, of course, yet Her Read does a wonderful job of tackling it in specifics, and especially in the opportunities brought to bear by erasure’s discovery of new worlds within the old words. Here, language is not the limit of the world, but a forest of signposts on the way (though often in desperate need of maintenance): “O, he art/o / o / human / continent / confine / ment / ornament / catastrophe.” Steinorth’s clearings can be hilarious, righteous, and sometimes just blunt: “NO.” Throughout, the book builds from its initial argument with Read and his patriarchy toward an engagement with just what an art that respects the bodies which produce and encounter it might require. A new sense of honesty, for one, about the pain we consume in art: “(over which, stretch the skins of human / terror, / sadism is intense / myth and folk-lore fairy tales, / and horror/we / know too little / too much about / our own righteous dog.”
A (mostly implicit) question that Steinorth’s work raises again and again as it confronts Read’s erasures of womxn is: “What kinds of erasures are worth undertaking—and how should we go about them?” In explicitly foregrounding her engagement with Read’s erasure of womxn in The Meaning of Art, she offers that there will always be a kind of violence in erasure, even where it is a necessary labor (as, say, birth is often traumatic). In making her offering, she avers that in any wreckage there may still be a thread worth saving, possibly with delicacy in the attempt. She clearly spent years chasing that thread, building up Her Read—”an embroidered wound.”
Erasure is an almost limitless technique, but it is one best served by the richness or expansiveness of the possibilities of its specific encounters. When Tom Phillips and R B Kitaj walked into that thrift store to find W. H. Mallock’s A Human Document, already waiting for Mallock’s florid prose was Phillips’ incisive wit and spirit for detournement—which gave us one of erasure’s greatest wonders, A Humument. Jennifer Sperry Steinorth is similarly matched to her material, taking Herbert Read’s The Meaning of Art as a medium for a revelatory remaking of the sites of meaning, of the possibilities of art made by womxn in the fullness of their bodies. Her Read is a transfixing journey from the outrage of one form of erasure to the boundless possibilities for discovery and invention contained in another.
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A 21st Century Anthology Edited by Nancy Perloff Reaktion ($35)
by Richard Kostelanetz
Concrete Poetry has been getting critical attention since the appearance of several anthologies some sixty years ago, but Nancy Perloff wants to examine its stars more closely in her new anthology. She correctly notes that these poets were reflecting earlier Concrete Art as defined by the Dutch artist/writer Theo van Doesburg in 1930—a definition Perloff’s summarizes as, “the building up of painting with purely plastic elements (surfaces and colours) that exclude lyricism, drama and symbolism.” Thus concrete poems at their purest are, simply, arrays of linguistic material apart from familiar syntax and horizontal configurations.
Perloff’s book concentrates initially on the purposes and careers of poets from Brazil and the German-speaking countries of Switzerland, Austria, and Germany; later chapters cover countries such as United Kingdom, Japan, and “United States and Canada.” Surveying poetry by country seems old-fashioned in the 21st century, especially when talking about word-artists who, like the Concretists, traveled greatly and sometimes wrote in tongues other than their mother’s.
A major problem with earlier anthologies of concrete poetry is that many of the best examples appear to be visualpoems, which defines language structures visually enhanced to a higher degree than the familiar poetic form of a single typeface in horizontal lines. Others appear to be sound poems that are meant to be declaimed for an acoustic experience unavailable from merely seeing the text.
Though these distinctions seem clear and simple, Perloff is confused when she writes, “Today we understand visual poetry as a larger category that subsumes concretism.” If subsumes means includes or absorbs, this is askew. As Dick Higgins and Bob Grumman have separately shown, visual poetry has its own tradition, one that intersected with concretism but did not define it. Likewise sound poetry. Perloff further blurs the issue when she states: “I would argue that visual poetry departs from concrete poetry in its tendency to combine typewriter text with imagery and computer graphics.” Nope, most visual poetry has used handwriting, traditional typefaces, letrasets, and then computer-generated typefaces.
Most of the poems in Concrete Poetry fill a full page (and sometimes two). Under each is Perloff’s critical gloss, never more than a few sentences long, and often brilliant, though in disconcertingly microscopic type. Regarding the cover image by the Brazilian concrete poet Agusto da Campos, which in truth is more of a visual poem, she writes: “Opening with the personal pronoun, “I,” in eight languages, on the outermost circle of text, the poem reads from exterior to interior until it arrives on the acronym ‘sos’ at the centre. The text contemplates the darkness and the mystery of the afterlife, using multiple languages to suggest that we all confront it together.”
Likewise visual is a poem by Gerhard Rühm, a Viennese who has lived mostly in Germany:
by Gerhard Rühm
Perloff states: “This eerie poem begins with the German word for silence. A dialectic ensues between statement and question, always surrounded by ‘silence.’ First, ‘someone is looking for me’ (statement), then ‘who is looking for me’ (question), then a pared-down ‘looking for me’ (like an echo, could be a statement or a question), ending only with ‘ich.’ I cannot be found, Rühm seems to say, and so the silence reigns. The spatial division of the text enhances the mystery.” One might quibble as to whether the “spatial division” is actually a visual enhancement, but no matter.
Consider also Perloff’s gloss to “French Persian Cats Having a Ball,” a more purely concrete poem by the Scottish writer Edwin Morgan:
by Edwin Morgan
“Morgan’s comical French Persian Cats explores repetition by combining the French word for cat (chat pronounced ‘sha’) with a completely unrelated word, shah, which conveys the ‘Persian’ reference. He plays these homophones against the English word ‘chacha,’ which looks similar but differs in pronunciation. Intermittently, he inserts ‘ha’ for humour and virtuosity.” Bingo.
These glosses by Perloff set a new higher standard for the critical reading of avant-garde poetry, whether concrete or visual. The two pioneering critics of avant-garde poetry, Dick Higgins and Bob Grumman, would have loved them, as do I.
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How Do You Live?, the first English translation of a classic Japanese novel, portrays the life of protagonist “Copper” Jun’ichi, a fifteen-year-old student in pre-war Tokyo, as he tries to understand how to move in the world with courage and integrity—how to grow up. His father has passed away, and he begins his first year of high school with his uncle and mother to guide him through his many questions.
Originally published in Japan in 1937 as part of a series of educational books for young people, How Do You Live? was part of a conscious effort to steer Japanese children toward a more humanistic way of thinking and away from (then-common) military-oriented propaganda. One of the many Japanese students who read How Do You Live? was now-revered anime auteur Hayao Miyazaki, who has recently come out of retirement to create a new film based on the book. Miyazaki, now 81 years old, is still months or possibly years away from completing the hand-drawn feature. This creates a perfect opportunity to read the book first, before seeing how the novel’s portrayal of the complex inner lives of young people is translated into Miyazaki’s world.
What follows is a dialogic review between John Colburn, who read How Do You Live? in its new English translation by Bruno Navasky, and Aki Shibata, who read the book in its original Japanese.
JC: As I was reading How Do You Live?, I kept thinking of how it was intentionally meant to provide a less propagandistic coming of age story for young people. In flagrant defiance of a common trope, the main character, Copper, doesn't perform a traditional heroic act—in fact, he fails to be heroic. So in some senses the book asks the reader not only how to live, but what to do when you fail?
AS: Yes, it’s not heroic or individualistic—an important part of this book for me is the way it shows how good it feels as a young person to have a friend. I think Japanese culture is against examining that, especially for boys.
JC: Gender is an issue. Copper gets guidance about humility from both his mother and his uncle: he receives this guidance via written notes from his uncle, but when he's sick in bed, his mother tells him her own story of a small failure—a very intimate moment.
AS: I really enjoyed that part, because throughout the book, I was frustrated by the lack of women’s perspectives. Still, Copper deeply respects and loves his mother; the story she tells him is small, but the impact was formative for her and it becomes so for Copper as well. And that moment when Copper realizes his mother is sharing these stories not to manipulate or move him, but to care for him—that moment is so sweet.
JC: The book shows how small things can be big for children. The interior life of young people can be very dramatic. When Copper is thinking of ways to get around returning to school and facing up to his failure, he considers various lies he could tell. Still, he needs to run through these thoughts when he's lying sick in bed—and that's when the guidance of his uncle and mother comes in, right when he can do something with it.
AS: One of my favorite moments was when Copper took off his blanket during his fever so he would die! I thought back to myself as a child, moments when I thought, ‘I'm not going to eat anymore; I’m bad and I deserve to die.’ Andthen by dinner time, I’d be so hungry I’d think I must be dying! Copper thinks similarly about abandoning his blanket—the feeling of intensity came through. In the internal life of young people, experiencing a moment that makes you want to take dramatic action is a necessary part of learning how to live.
JC: I was struck by how deftly Yoshino focuses on how to transform feelings of shame into wisdom—how to grow from failure. The story starts with Copper feeling small while looking out at all the people in Tokyo, but realizing they're all interconnected, and that idea becomes personal when he connects with his friends at school. The process of staying connected, that's how you transform shame—you connect to other people in an honest way. And based on this focus on the drama of childhood friendship and ethics, I can see why Miyazaki would want to film this book.
AS: Yes, because he wants to do good for children, and depicting the purity of friendship is one way to do that. It's a little bit unusual since he doesn’t often portray a boy as his protagonist. Maybe in Ponyo. But by the end of How Do You Live?, I was very invested in the female characters in this book—for example, I loved the mom in the tofu shop. She is no-nonsense, but also very loving. And Mizutani’s sister is smart and knows how to speak up for herself—an unusual depiction of a woman in that era. And of course, Copper’s mom is a single mother. All the women in this story are strong and outspoken, and it's very carefully done. I would imagine this book was originally read by boys more than girls, because going to school at the upper level didn’t become mandatory for girls in Japan until after 1945.
JC: So even though the book is centered on how young men form bonds that have integrity, portraying the female characters with strength would have stood out at the time.
AS: Yes, I think so.
JC: That’s great. I also like that the novel’s characters are so vulnerable—willing to communicate what they don't understand. They have a sense of mystery about the world, and they want to learn. I was thinking that many of the people who read this book today, especially in translation, are going to be fans of Miyazaki, and thinking also that the film version of the story may be very different.
AS: I'm sure it will. Like TheLittle Mermaid compared to Ponyo.
JC: That was a big transformation! And that's the fun part of reading a book first and then seeing what happens in a filmmaker’s imagination. But I also think this book would be great to use in education classes—to have people studying to become teachers consider what's being taught in this novel.
AS: Yes, as we touched on earlier, this book doesn’t promote a strong sense of independence—it’s more about interdependence.
JC: Right: Copper has a vision of everyone being interconnected at the beginning of the book, as well as later, when he sees the way out of feeling dread about himself is to become connected to people again. The book identifies isolation as both a national and individual problem. You went through the Japanese educational system—do you think it's more geared towards interdependence and relationship building or toward individualism and “being right”?
AS: Japanese education tells you what's right and what's wrong, but that doesn’t mean it promotes independence. I think we are very afraid of individualistic thought as a nation. We even have a saying that if you are the nail that sticks up, you’ll be hammered down; everybody says, “don't be the nail that sticks up.” And Japanese education communicates that by regulations. You need to wear your uniform this way. You need to come at exactly this time, otherwise we'll close the gate. You don't have a right to come in. That's not interdependence, it's uniformity: You start to learn it's easier to be like the person next to you.
This is why it’s so important that Copper asks good questions, and I would hope that young people who read this book would be inspired to question like him. And what a caring thing for his uncle to leave him a journal in which to do that questioning!
JC: By the end, Copper can project himself as a person with an interior to express, and that's part of the path to adulthood—to begin to have a dialogue with yourself about what's right and what's not right. I mean, the English title is How Do You Live?
AS: It charms me to think that this book from 1938, written in Japan, will be read by an international audience today. That is something very sweet to feel as a Japanese person.
JC: Is How Do you Live? getting extra buzz now in Tokyo because everyone hopes Miyazaki is going to finish the film soon?
AS: No, remember he's finishing one minute a month. They only have 36 minutes finished.
JC: It's like a race against time. Perhaps there are fears that it's going to be an unfinished film.
AS: That would weirdly coincide with the fact that the original author, Yuzo Yamamoto, became ill and couldn't finish the book, so Genzaburō Yoshino took over.
JC: And here we are, more than eighty years later, reading the book and waiting for the film, hoping that Miyazaki will finish.
AS: In Japanese, the character for “wait” is made of two parts— “to go” and “temple.” So to wait is to go to the temple.
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Photograph by W.C. Bamberger, taken in 1991 in New York City; pictured from left to right are Joe Brainard, Ann Lauterbach, and Kenward Elmslie.
Kenward Elmslie was a lyricist, librettist, poet, novelist, playwright, composer, performer, collage artist, and publisher. When he died in his sleep at his New York City home at ninety-three, he left us more than forty books, chapbooks, and sheet music publications, as well as a generous handful of LPs and CDs of the operas and musicals he helped create. There are recordings and videos of him reading his work and — the true Aleph of Elmslie, in the sense in which Borges used the word: the compact bright point through which an entire world can be experienced — of him singing his poems set to his own melodies. He also left behind countless long-time readers, admirers, and friends. I am fortunate to have been included in these three categories for decades (as well as another category I'll come to).
A typical early-1970s college student (photo of Franz Zappa taped to the gas tank of my motorcycle), I spent more time in the library stacks than in classes. There I found Elmslie’s Circus Nerves (Black Sparrow Press, 1971). (Its cover is also the first time I remember encountering the up-and-at-'em artwork of Joe Brainard). The opening poem, "Ancestor Worship," was almost unintelligible to me, and struck me as brilliant; its vocabulary included technical jargon, corny slang, abbreviations, and coming-attraction-style hyperbole. "Communique for Orpheus," with its recurring "My Army" variations — "My Army loves you, I think," "My Army feels sick today,"
My Army likes you so much. If state secrets arrive in food, lightbulbs, street refuse thank the spies who vie with each other for blueprints. Who envy the corridor-like structure Of your chicaneries.
— was simultaneously zany and unexpectedly affecting, my first-read-through favorite.
In 1973 I came across (in a different library) The Orchid Stories (Doubleday/Paris Review Editions, 1973), which, despite its title, is a novel. I found Elmslie's prose here at least as astonishing as his poetry, though the distinction is often inapplicable to his work: "I'd lie down and reach for my innertube coil, and begin dredging for prophecies, all the while looking for puffs of steam that inched their way across the gymnasium ceiling — actually clouds made by a sonic theatre machine manipulated by our teacher, Miss Hinckle." (A chapter from the novel-in-progress was included in The Ruins of Earth, a 1971 anthology of "Stories of the Immediate Future," edited by New Wave science fiction author Thomas Disch.) I continued to seek out and read all the Elmslie I could find. I learned that he had written librettos for operas, and the "book" (whatever that was) and lyrics for musicals, but as a despiser of both forms I ignored that fact.
In 1984, when I finally found full-time work (in a position typical of MFA grads — night janitor for a school district), I started my own small press. After publishing William Eastlake, Ishmael Reed, and Steve Katz, I wrote Elmslie asking if he had anything he would be willing to let me publish. Upshot: in 1987, I became a member of a select category: those who published Kenward Elmslie. This revised edition of his 1972 play City Junket included a few pages of transcribed music and yet another beautiful cover by Joe Brainard. (Thirty-five years on, the original drawing for this still hangs in my living room.) A half-decade later I published Pay Dirt, a selection of the black and white comics the two had collaborated on beginning in the 1960s.
My long-time hunting and gathering activities eventually begat the ambition of assembling a bibliography of Kenward's work. This led to my first visit with him in New York City; I stayed in a guest bedroom (with art on the walls by Larry Rivers, Joe Brainard, Trevor Winkfield, and more); went through Kenward's bookshelves; asked questions about Z Press, of which he was editor and publisher; visited a theater archive at the Lincoln Center; met with some of Kenward's collaborators (not one, but two doormen escorted me to the door of an apartment in a deluxe high-rise near the UN), and more. During the day, we went our separate ways, but we would have dinner together, with other invited guests.
Listening as Kenward told stories from the head of the table, I could clearly see how important his theater works were to him. He had originally not been a fan of opera. Then, in 1954, composer Jack Beeson asked him to write a libretto about Amy Semple McPherson. The opera, The Sweet Bye and Bye, was staged four years later, and Kenward warmed to the form, going on to write the librettos for Lizzie Borden (with Beeson), Miss Julie (with Ned Rorem), and Washington Square and Three Sisters (both with Thomas Pasatieri). The wide range of sources here—a controversial evangelist, an ax murderess, Strindberg, Henry James, and Chekhov—only hints at Elmslie’s omnivorous interests.
Kenward had enjoyed musical theater since his youth, and he worked on (and in) musicals of scales both large and intimate his entire career. His most high-profile work in this genre is The Grass Harp, from Truman Capote's novella. At one point he and composer Claibe Richardson flew to Brazil to audition the musical for Peter Pan-originator Mary Martin, with Richardson at the piano and Kenward "belting out" (as he put it) all the parts. Martin politely declined. The Grass Harp finally made it to a New York stage in 1971 — and closed after seven performances. Poetry was not abandoned, thankfully; this was also the year in which both Circus Nerves and the Frank O'Hara Award-winning collection Motor Disturbance were published.
From Kenward's tales, it was clear that in addition to enjoying the excitement (and headaches) of collaborating with composers, auditioning for backers, and dealing with drunken divas in rehearsals, all the clichéd show-biz antics exhilarated him, because they offered an alternative to the static hours of writing alone in a room. Kenward needed both kinds of experience, and his poetry and prose, I came to recognize, combined the two worlds. This unusually wide bandwidth was one source of their unique power. Attempting to overcome my genre-aversions, I found and listened to recordings of his operas and musicals; attended, in 1986, the world premiere production of Three Sisters, in Columbus; even, in 1992, published Postcards on Parade, a comic/tragic musical he had written with musician Steven Taylor.
Kenward found ways to bring this collaborative excitement into his writing, as well. Beginning in 1965 with The Baby Book (Boke Press), a parody of such volumes with drawings by Joe Brainard, he frequently worked with visual artists. These were true collaborations rather than the usual dynamic of an artist acting the subordinate role of illustrator of a writer's finished text. When Kenward was working with Brainard or Ken Tisa or Trevor Winkfield, a page might inspire a drawing, a painting provide the elements for a poem. The monumental 26 Bars (Z Press, 1987), with Donna Dennis, grew out of a tipsy joking conversation at a party on the subject of eccentric drinking establishments. Morning and sobriety only burnished the thought, and over the course of many months the pair created an alphabet of imaginary bars, from "Amazon Club" to "Zanzibars" — the writing sometimes coming first and inspiring a drawing or watercolor, while other times Dennis's art came first. The first years of the new century saw Kenward publishing a pack of his postcard collages, and three art and text collaborations with Trevor Winkfield.
In the late 1990s, I was asked to edit a "Selected Poems & Lyrics" from Kenward's works. In assembling this — published in 1998 by Coffee House Press as Routine Disruptions — I tried to show Elmslie’s range, in form, across media, and, most importantly for me, his range of emotional complexity. I included light poems, songs, dense formal experiments, and works that combine them: "Girl Machine" is laid out on the page in imitation of the famous overhead shots of dancers in Busby Berkeley musicals. I included some straightforward poems too, such as "White Attic" (1967), with its lovely last stanzas:
when it came I grew moved to two rooms in town
where I reach out at night and bat the far air
— and many denser ones, including "Easter Poem for Joe '79," this from its second stanza:
Jane Fonda, so soon. Meltdowns, daffs in prissy clumps growing out of hallowed Loew's Sheridan soil. I'm a mixed-layer micro-organism myself, skating over the imbedded conning tower, prone to clayey metamorpho— have media habit bad.
I included "Champ Dust" (1994), Kenward's long prose poem of hurt and fathomless loss following the death of Joe Brainard:
Lost boy, hunched over all gauche, clutching gloopy entrails "wha' won't stop emigrationing" — read-outs of what's to come, glistening configurations slipping through our fingers fast.
Of course, no "Selected," however wide-ranging, can capture any poet complete. To fully appreciate Kenward Elmslie's achievement, its depth, its mixed-layer read-outs, its sonic theater machinery, we have to follow the corridor-like structures of his chicaneries through all their forms.
Unfortunately, much of Kenward's work (including the books I published) is now out of print. My advice: Seek out his books, read and re-read them, find the vinyl if you can (hear Estelle Parsons belting out "Bang-Bang Tango"), watch his videos online. Look, for example, for him singing his "Who'll Prop Me Up in the Rain?":
What I want to know is: When I'm dead and gone. Who'll prop me up in the dawn?
Kenward Elmslie has now gone off into the far air, but he has left riches behind, and more so than any other writer I've read, the wider your experience of his arts, the richer each work becomes.
Four Crimes Retold Alia Trabucco Zerán Translated by Sophie Hughes Coffee House Press ($16.95)
by Henry Hietala
Alia Trabucco Zerán’s latest book is not about femicide. This is a necessary disclaimer: many recent Latin American books about crime, both fiction and nonfiction, feature women as victims, including Selva Almada’s Dead Girls, Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season, and Roberto Bolano’s 2666. Trabucco Zerán, on the other hand, has written about gender violence from another angle, with women as the perpetrators.
When Women Kill focuses on four murderers from Chilean history. These aren’t likable femme fatales: they kill their husbands, poison innocent children, and engage in SVU-style dismemberment. Drawing on these cases, Trabucco Zerán makes an unconventional argument, that “remembering ‘bad’ women is also a task of feminism.” The author isn’t exonerating these women; she is reclaiming them, a hazardous task she performs with rigor. Trabucco Zerán isn’t interested in motive so much as the public reactions to the murders, which follow similar patterns. Faced with “feminine violence,” the media and legal system turn to gender stereotypes, arguing that women only kill out of jealousy or hysteria. Reporters dissect the killers’ sex lives and frame an interaction with an Indigenous woman as witchcraft. One lawyer even mentions menopause as a likely motive.
As the trials drag on, the killers and their defense teams exploit these sexist stereotypes to their own advantage. If violent women are hysterical, then how can they be held responsible for their actions? The media and courts almost uniformly buy these informal insanity pleas. The women receive little prison time, or none at all. Trabucco Zerán doesn’t frame these light sentences as a victory for homicidal girl bosses, but as a consequence of patriarchy. If violence is the province of men, then how can you explain a killer woman? The only sensible response is labeling her “crazy.”
In propulsive prose impeccably translated by Sophie Hughes, Trabucco Zerán recounts each case in the present tense. At crucial points in the narrative, she integrates diaristic asides about her research process, which reveal the Chilean government’s efforts to hide the existence of these violent femmes. There are echoes here of other buried histories, other disappearances.
Trabucco Zerán also brings in other works of art related to the crimes. The strangest is an exhibition involving photographs of a victim’s limbs; in a brilliant piece of analysis, the author writes, “And what better than an unidentifiable, mutilated body as the metaphor for the dismembered patria of the early 1990s.” Not every observation is a win, like a meandering passage about the French surrealists, yet even when Trabucco Zerán overstretches her argument, readers can still appreciate the experiment.
Like other great books of crime writing, When Women Kill is more about society’s response to violence than the violence itself. Trabucco Zerán doesn’t excuse her killer women, nor does she condemn them. Instead, she explores how, in a sexist society, the reaction to their crimes is all too predictable. As one mid-century Chilean magazine wrote, “Gone are the days when women would drink vinegar in order to faint like damsels before their cheating partners. No, now they wield automatic pistols and settle hateful betrayals with bullets.”
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Sean Thor Conroe’s provocative debut novel Fuccboi opens with a brief and oddly charming vignette: the narrator has a dispute with the cashier at his local Fresh Grocer about whether coffee filters are on sale. “She was like This muhfucker. What aisle.” After an exchange marked by vague antagonism, the narrator states: “It connected us. It marked the start of a long, fruitful, and strictly nocturnal friendship.” Antagonism, in this refreshing and hard-hitting passage, ultimately gives way to a kind of familiarity, a bond.
Fuccboi has been called a work of autofiction, though neither the similarity between the novel and the author’s life nor the gesture of naming his narrator Sean Thor Conroe are definitive proof of this, and there are places where the narrative clearly diverges from Conroe’s biography. But undue attention to such fidelities or divergences obfuscates the possibility that all fiction, at bottom, is autofiction. As Roland Barthes states in The Rustle of Language with reference to Proust: “‘I’ is not the one who remembers, confides, confesses, he is the one who discourses; the person this ‘I’ brings on stage is a writing self whose links with the self of civil life are uncertain, displaced.” This speaks to the provocation offered by Fuccboi not only because, like Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, the narrator shares undeniable similarities with the author, but also (and more importantly) because of the true autonomy of literature: its resistance to unambiguous determination.
In a recent interview with Alec Gewirtz, Conroe refers to the book’s “narrative voice.” Whether intentional or not, the resonance with Maurice Blanchot’s essay “The Narrative Voice” should not be missed. Here, Blanchot considers a mode of writing that does not afford any distance. He has in mind writers like Beckett and Duras whose writing, in his words, “allows the neutral to speak” through an alienating proximity. This relies on a certain aesthetic flattening, with “characters” no longer fleshed out portraits, but merely voices, figures. In this kind of writing, language itself shines forth in all of its neutrality, disrupting the theater-like distance imagined by writers like Flaubert.
At the beginning of his essay, Blanchot evokes fatigue: “the experience of weariness that constantly makes us feel a limited life.” The twists and turns of Conroe’s novel recall both of Blanchot’s points here (alienating proximity and fatigue), but perhaps inversely: the unrelenting style of Fuccboi—which is consistent to the point of flattening everything out—means that the same weight is given to an account of an event as to an account of a thought. Though it may seem abstract, this introduces an ambiguity into the text, the very title of which seems to invite controversy. On the narrative level, this flattening makes it difficult not only to interpret the events in the novel, but also to evaluate the narrator’s own interpretations.
This brings us to the problem of fatigue. Because the earlier sections are so vital and fresh, they end up being more gripping and effective than later portions; once the narrative style is established—a style that relies heavily on slang, contemporary references, and a text- or tweet-like cadence—its novelty wanes, which ultimately has a deleterious effect. To be sure, there are instances of beautiful poetry throughout, but for the reader approaching the end of the novel, fatigue sets in.
This readerly fatigue coincides with increasing self-reflection on the narrator’s part. Whereas the opening is thematically light and stylistically refreshing, those same qualities might mask the gravity of the latter portions. As Jay McInerny nicely summed up this tension in his review at TheWall Street Journal, “Fuccboi is long on style and short on incident.” Nearing the end, the narrator’s increasingly frequent self-reflection paradoxically results in the reader’s growing confusion as to the narrative’s stakes, precisely because this self-reflection is given the same brisk treatment as the concurrent narrative events.
At the center of the novel is Sean’s intense skin condition, which becomes a major obstacle to his ability to function, both within the narrative and perhaps even as a narrator. However, as McInerny notes, this “may or may not have a spiritual corollary—the author doesn’t seem to invite this kind of analysis.” McInerny is right, and this is an irony for a novel so focused on self-examination: Sean’s condition welcomes a reading in which his physical condition would correspond to his moral character, or at least to his reflections on it. This is perhaps the most apt opportunity for the text to clarify the relative importance of event and interpretation. But it ultimately ends up as one of what the narrator calls “moments of illumination that faded into disorientation before I could even identify, let alone capture them.” Again, if we entertain the parallel between narrator and author, this particular reflection is doubled, to the detriment of both.
These critiques should not be understood as being in service of a value judgment, but rather, perhaps, suggest that Fuccboi demands to be read at least twice: once straight through, and then again from the ending backwards. Only in this way does its social or political timeliness resonate, and the complex relation between its style and its form become clear.
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