Uncategorized

The Many Faces of Russia

Rewind-FacesofRussiaIt’s never been simple for Americans to picture Russia. One second we’re thinking of it warmly as a key ally in the Second World War, and an instant later it’s the frosty enemy in the Cold War. The Soviets are the opposing team in our country’s sports contest, the bad guys in our favorite spy movies; and yet Russia has also given us writers like Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Chekhov, authors American book lovers can’t get enough of. We cringe at images of Russian citizens waiting in line for goods; we simultaneously demonize their leaders and police. An episode of Family Guy once famously depicted the entirety of Russia’s citizens as bears in hats on unicycles.

Such stereotypes suggest that we should pay attention to nuanced writing that tackles Russia as its subject—and so much contemporary Russian literature comes with an equally noteworthy publishing story. Take one of the writers who’s reviewed at a link below, Ludmila Petrushevskaya: she spent two decades blacklisted by the Soviet government before Penguin published the English translation of There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby (that, friends, is a book title).

Books like the ones featured below, and many others, serve to shatter and remix the images of Russia we have swirling in our heads. Russia is difficult to understand, yes. But for American readers, that complexity means we’ve got a trove of memorable literature to work through.

Some of Rain Taxi’s best reviews of contemporary Russian literature:

There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister’s Husband, and He Hanged Himself by Ludmila Petrushevskaya (Spring 2013, online), reviewed by Alta Ifland.

The Little Russian by Susan Sherman (Spring 2012, online), reviewed by Malcom Forbes.

Russian for Lovers by Marina Blitshteyn (Spring 2012, online), reviewed by Vladislav Davidzon.

Return to Rain Taxi Rewind

HELL, I LOVE EVERYBODY:
A CELEBRATION FOR JAMES TATE

Saturday, April 23
Uptown Church
1219 31st Street South, Minneapolis [map]
3:00 pm and 7:00 pm; see below for details
FREE and open to the public!

Join us as two dozen poets from around the country gather to pay homage to one of the greats through talks, readings, stories, films, and even song. Participants include:

Ralph Angel • Betsy Brown • Rob Casper
Dan Chelotti • Gillian Conoley • Christopher DeWeese
Paul Dickinson • Kelly Everding • Dobby Gibson
Matthea Harvey • James Haug • Steve Healey
Richard Jackson • Lisa Jaech • Louis Jenkins
Ben Kopel • Seth Landman • Eric Lorberer
Frances McCue • Emily Pettit • Guy Pettit
Alex Phillips • Bin Ramke • Donald Revell
Eugene Richie • William Waltz
Rosanne Wasserman • Dara Wier


Music by Brian Laidlaw and the Family Trade


Plus the release of a NEW chapbook
of unpublished poems by James Tate!

 

Download a flyer for this event and spread the word!


SCHEDULE

We have so many great poets participating in this James Tate tribute that you have two chances to see them—come for either or both segments.

Afternoon Program 3:00 - 4:30 pm

talks, readings, music and film, with coffee reception

Betsy Brown
Rob Casper
Dan Chelotti
Christopher DeWeese
Kelly Everding
Steve Healey
Richard Jackson
Lisa Jaech
Louis Jenkins
Brian Laidlaw and the Family Trade
Eric Lorberer
Frances McCue
Eugene Richie
William D. Waltz

Evening Program 7:00 - 8:30 pm:

evening talks, readings, music and film

Ralph Angel
Gillian Conoley
Paul Dickinson
Dobby Gibson
Matthea Harvey
James Haug
Ben Kopel
Seth Landman
Brian Laidlaw and the Family Trade
Emily Pettit
Guy Pettit
Alex Phillips
Bin Ramke
Donald Revell
Roseanne Wasserman

 


local business partners

p-magers
Coffee-Shop-Logo-Round-Red-web grumpyslogo


ABOUT THE AUTHORS:

Ralph Angel’s latest collection, Your Moon, was awarded the Green Rose Poetry Prize. Exceptions and Melancholies: Poems 1986-2006 received the PEN USA Poetry Award, and his Neither World won the James Laughlin Award of The Academy of American Poets. In addition to five books of poetry, he also has published an award-winning translation of the Federico García Lorca collection, Poema del cante jondo / Poem of the Deep Song.
Ralph Angel photo
Betsy Brown is a Minneapolis poet and author of the prize-winning book Year of Morphines. She studied with James Tate at the Iowa Writer's Workshop when he was a visiting professor there from 1986-87.
BetsyBrownPhoto2
Robert Casper is the head of the Poetry and Literature Center at the Library of Congress. The founding publisher of the literary magazine jubilat, he has also worked at the Poetry Society of America and the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses.
Rob Casper photo
Dan Chelotti is the author of x (McSweeney’s, 2013) and a chapbook, The Eights (Poetry Society of America, 2006). He teaches English at Elms College and lives in Massachusetts.
Dan Chelotti photo
Gillian Conoley is the author of seven collections of poetry including Profane Halo, Peace, and A Thousand Times Broken. A recipient of the Jerome J. Seshtack Poetry Prize from The American Poetry Review, as well as several Pushcart Prizes, she is Professor and Poet-in-Residence at Sonoma State University, where she is the founder and editor of Volt.
Gillian-Conoley
Christopher DeWeese is the author of The Black Forest and The Father of the Arrow is the Thought, both published by Octopus Books. He is Assistant Professor of Poetry at Wright State University.
Christopher DeWeese photo
Paul D. Dickinson's poetry has been featured in two films: The Last City in the East (2011) and Tired Moonlight (2015) Dickinson teaches in the English Department at Concordia University in St. Paul. He is currently the host of the Riot Act Reading Series.
dickinsonPaul
Kelly Everding received her MFA from the University of Massachusettes, Amherst and has published poems in numerous journals, including Colorado Review, Black Warrior Review, Conduit, Caliban, and Exquisite Corpse. Her chapbook, Strappado for the Devil was published by Etherdome Press in 2004. She lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota where she works for the nonprofit organization, Rain Taxi, Inc., which publishes Rain Taxi Review of Books.
Everding photo 2
Dobby Gibson is the author of Polar, which won the 2004 Beatrice Hawley Award, as well as two books from Graywolf Press: Skirmish and It Becomes You. His poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, Fence, New England Review, and other magazines and journals. A graduate from the MFA program at Indiana University and recipient of a fellowship from the McKnight Foundation, he lives in Minneapolis.
Dobby Gibson photo
James Haug is the author of eleven books and chapbooks of poetry, including Legend of the Recent Past, Walking Liberty, Fox Luck, Why I Like Chapbookss, and Scratch. Haug’s poems have appeared in American Letters & Commentary, American Poetry Review, Conduit, Field, Gettysburg Review, jubilat, Open City, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. He’s received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and serves as an editor for UMass Press’s Juniper Poetry Prize.
James Haug Photo
Matthea Harvey is the author of Sad Little Breathing Machine (Graywolf, 2004) Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form (Alice James Books, 2000), and Modern Life (Graywolf, 2007), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and a New York Times Notable Book. Her first children’s book, The Little General and the Giant Snowflake, illustrated by Elizabeth Zechel, was published by Tin House Books in 2009. An illustrated erasure, titled Of Lamb, with images by Amy Jean Porter, was published by McSweeney’s in 2011. Her most recent collection, If The Tabloids Are True What Are You? (Graywolf Press, 2014) combines poetry and visual art. Matthea is a contributing editor to jubilat, Meatpaper, and BOMB. She teaches poetry at Sarah Lawrence and lives in Brooklyn.
Matthea Harvey Photo
Steve Healey is the author of the poetry volumes 10 Mississippi and Earthling, both from Coffee House Press. His essays and criticism have appeared in the Writer’s Chronicle and Rain Taxi, and his poems have appeared in the anthology Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century and the journals American Poetry Review, Boston Review, jubilat, and others.
healey-new
Richard Jackson has published over twenty books including thirteen books of poems, most recently Retrievals (C&R Press, 2014), Out of Place (Ashland, 2014), Resonancia (Barcelona, 2014, a translation of Resonance from Ashland, 2010), as well as four chapbook adaptations from Pavese and other Italian poets. He has translated a book of poems by Alexsander Persolja (Potvanje Sonca / Journey of the Sun) (Kulturno Drustvo Vilenica: Slovenia, 2007) as well as Last Voyage, a book of translations of the early-20th-century Italian poet, Giovanni Pascoli, (Red Hen, 2010) and edited books of poems by Slovene poets Tomaz Salamun and Iztok Osojnik. In addition, he has edited the selected poems of Slovene poet, Iztok Osijnik. He was awarded the Order of Freedom Medal for literary and humanitarian work in the Balkans by the President of Slovenia for his work with the Slovene-based Peace and Sarajevo Committees of PEN International. In 2009 he won the AWP George Garret Award for teaching and writing.
Richard-Jackson-crop
Lisa Jaech is a Seattle based artist and animator. She started reading James Tate in the 8th grade when she was assigned to select and read poetry aloud to her English class. Her classmates thought Tate's poetry was pretty weird, and she was thrilled by that. Besides animating to poetry, she loves combining documentary and animation. She graduated in 2015 from California College of the Arts with a BFA in Animation.
Lisa Jaech
Louis Jenkins has been writing and publishing poetry for more than 40 years Recently, he and Mark Rylance, actor and former director of the Globe Theatre, London, co-wrote a stage production titled Nice Fish, based on Mr. Jenkins poems. The play premiered April 6, 2013 at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis and ran through May 18, 2013. A revised version of the play was performed at American Repertory Theater in Boston (Jan.-Feb 2016) and at St. Ann’s Warehouse in New York (Feb.-March 2016)
ljenkins
Ben Kopel is the author of Victory (H_NGM_N Books). He lives in Austin, TX where he teaches creative writing and composition to junior high and high school students. He reviews books, albums, and shows for FLOOD Magazine, and is currently working on his second full-length collection, possibly titled Sutras of Love & Hate.
Ben-Kopel-photo
Seth Landman has two collections of poems, Sign You Were Mistaken (Factory Hollow, 2013) and Confidence (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2015). He lives in Northampton, MA and watches a ton of basketball games with friends.
Seth Landman photo
Frances McCue is a poet, essayist, and arts instigator. From 1996-2006, she was the founding director of Richard Hugo House in Seattle. She has published four books, including a book of essays about Richard Hugo and the Northwest Towns that inspired his poems: The Car That Brought You Here Still Runs, and two books of poems: The Bled, which won the Washington State Book Award, and The Stenographer’s Breakfast, winner of the Barnard New Women Poets Prize. Her most recent book of prose, Mary Randlett Portraits was released in 2014. Currently, she is working on Where the House Was, a documentary poem and film about the demolition of the Richard Hugo House building in Seattle.
Frances McCue photo
Emily Pettit is the author of Goat in the Snow. She is a writer, visual artist, teacher, and an editor for Factory Hollow Press and jubilat. She teaches at Columbia University.
Emily Pettit photo
Guy Petitt was the director of Flying Object Press until 2015. Currently, he is pursuing a Masters degree for graphic design at Rhode Island School of Design.
Guy Pettit photo
Alex Phillips is a senior lecturer and director of University Summer Programs at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Since the fall of 2013, he has been a faculty-in-residence in the Creative Expressions learning community. His poetry and translations have appeared in journals such as Poetry, Open City, and jubilat, and in Ted Kooser’s newspaper column “American Life in Poetry.” He is the author of CRASH DOME (Factory Hollow Press) and Unkindness (H_NGM_N Books).
Alex Phillips photo
Bin Ramke intended to become a mathematician, but studied literature at LSU and eventually received a Ph.D. from Ohio University where as an assistant on The Ohio Review he transcribed an interview with James Tate. He taught in Georgia, now teaches at the University of Denver and sometimes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His most recent book, his twelfth, is Missing the Moon (Omnidawn, 2014).
Bin Ramke photo2
Donald Revell is Professor of English & Graduate Studies Director at UNLV. Tantivy is his twelfth poetry collection, published by Alice James Books. Donald Revell's previous translations include The Illuminations by Arthur Rimbaud, and A Season in Hell by Arthur Rimbaud, both of which were published by Omnidawn. A Season in Hell won the PSA translation award. His books of essays include Invisible Green: Selected Prose, published by Omnidawn. He is a poetry editor for Colorado Review and lives in the desert south of Las Vegas with his wife, poet Claudia Keelan, and their children Benjamin Brecht and Lucie Ming.
Donald Revell photo
Eugene Richie is the author of Moiré (Intuflo Editions, 1989), Island Light (Painted Leaf, 1998), and—with Rosanne Wasserman—Place du Carousel (Zilvinas and Daiva Publications, 2001) and Psyche and Amor (Factory Hollow, 2009). His translations include stories by Matilde Daviu and Jaime Manrique’s My Night with Federico García Lorca (University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), a Lambda Literary Award finalist. With Wasserman, he has edited John Ashbery’s translations from the French—most recently, Pierre Martory’s The Landscapist, a London Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation and a National Book Critics Circle Award poetry finalist; and Ashbery’s Collected French Translations (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and Carcanet Press, 2014). He is a founding editor of The Groundwater Press and Director of Creative Writing in the Pace University NYC English Department. Photo Credit: Jill Krementz (2013)
Eugene Richie photo
William D. Waltz is the author of Zoo Music (Slope Editions) and Adventures in the Lost Interior of America (Cleveland State University Press). His poems have recently appeared in Court Green, Denver Quarterly, jubilat, and Washington Square. He lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota with his wife and children, and is the founder and editor of Conduit.
William Waltz photo
Rosanne Wasserman’s poems have appeared widely in anthologies and journals; both John Ashbery and A. R. Ammons have chosen her work for the Best American Poetry annual series. Her poetry books include The Lacemakers, No Archive on Earth, and Other Selves, as well as Place du Carousel and Psyche and Amor, collaborations with Eugene Richie, with whom she also runs the Groundwater Press. She’s been teaching sailors at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy for the last twenty-five years. See http://groundwater-zanne.blogspot.com. On Tom Weatherly, visit HERE.
Rosanne Wasserman
Dara Wier's books include Remnants of Hannah, Reverse Rapture, Hat On a Pond, and Voyages in English. Among her works are the limited editions (X In Fix) in Rain Taxi's Brainstorm Series, Fly on the Wall (Oat City Press), and The Lost Epic, co-written with James Tate (Waiting for Godot Books, 1999). Her poetry has been supported by fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the American Poetry Review. Her work appears in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Conduit, Denver Quarterly, The Fairytale Review, Hollins Critic, and jubilat, among others.
Dara Wier photo

Keep the End Times Rollin’

Rewind-EndTimesRollinHere’s a word that’s both specific and open-ended at once: apocalypse. A vast majority of people from all walks of life agree that, at some point, the world as we know it will end. It’s a concept embedded into our religious imagery, our political hyperbole, and our art, and as we learn increasingly more about our natural environment and the effects humans are having on it, it’s become an all-too-real theme in our science too. Exactly how we will meet humanity’s collective “end,” though, is where the theories branch out to reflect the great diversity of our world. We’re all just guessing. And we’ve had a lot of time to think about it.

All this means that apocalyptic writing is one of the liveliest genres in all of literature. The spectrum encompasses anything from John Milton’s cosmic imagery to countless young-adult series about what the world might look like once The Event happens, whatever it may be. And those are aesthetically very different than some of the most thought-provoking nonfiction writing, from science writers, theologians, and others. It’s a topic for young and old audiences, “serious” readers and those looking for a good thriller.

The “when” fuels the genre, too. Things always tend to pick up when we have a date in the near future that enough people agree will surely be the end. In 1999, the incoming millennium was treated by many authors as the End of Days, as was the foreboding date in 2012 that aligned with the end of the Mayan calendar. The apocalypse is the ultimate renewable resource for speculative writing: we’re all certain that in one way or another it’s coming, providing the urgency our imaginations crave, and yet the canvas is wide open.

Perhaps most importantly, our apocalypse theories often represent the most striking way of talking about our worldviews, our insecurities, and our truths. What are we scared of? What, at our cores, gives us the most comfort? So naturally, this type of writing promises to be of interest: it’s based on writers asking themselves the toughest questions, and teasing out their answers in the most vibrant way possible.

Some of Rain Taxi’s best reviews of apocalypse literature:

The Apocalypse Reader edited by Justin Taylor (Spring 2008, Online) reviewed by Spencer Dew.

Serpent of Light by Drunvalo Melchizedek, Beyond 2012 by James Endredy, and 2012 by Daniel Pinchbeck (Spring 2008, Online) reviewed by Kelly Everding.

The Sea Came in at Midnight by Steve Erickson (Winter 1999, Online) reviewed by Aidan Baker.

Return to Rain Taxi Rewind

2010: A Midwest State of Mind

Rewind-MidweststateQuick: where do writers live?

Many people when faced with that question envision New York City. The thought conjures images of lofts on the Lower East Side, or some studio apartment in Brooklyn, or (as the writer you’re picturing gets richer) a desk in front of a window overlooking the Park. Another answer could be the pastoral South, or somewhere in California (for when that same successful writer has inevitably just had it with New York). With each of these places, we can also imagine the writing that comes from them; the Southern novel is as robust a genre as any in the American literary canon, and see how many of your favorite books don’t, at some point, take place in New York.

But this of course leaves out a giant chunk of the country, and when we do talk about the Midwest, it often gets slighted: Middle America. Flyover states. The prairie. America’s heartland. These terms aren’t necessarily insulting, but they do suggest a blanket, monolith simplicity to the Midwestern lifestyle that often gets contrasted with coastal dynamism. This extends to literature, where pinning down the hallmark traits of Midwestern authors or writing can take more than a moment’s thought.

At its crux, that same nondescript, unassuming quality of the Midwest may actually be what makes this region’s literature so alive and complex. Where else could Jonathan Franzen set The Corrections or Freedom, two explorations into the deepest recesses of American love and family? Or take Iowa’s Marilynne Robinson, whose writing contains a spiritual depth that pushes the very possibilities of words on a page; could the soulfulness of Gilead be heard against the noisy backdrop of Manhattan? The Midwest is where writers and their characters hear themselves think, whether they want to or not. It’s where they contend with their own anonymity, and are forced to forge voices and identity without the crutch of a world of distraction. The Midwest is a place for journeys, and for finding things out. It’s where you can’t get away with ignoring your interior self, because often, that’s all there is to pay attention to. The best Midwestern literature reflects all this; yes, that’s hard to put a finger on, but that’s exactly the point.

Rain Taxi’s best Midwestern-themed pieces from 2010:

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen (Fall 2010, Online) reviewed by Tim Jacobs.

Not Normal, Illinois, edited by Michael Martone (Spring 2010, Online) reviewed by Stephanie Hlywak.

Empty the Sun by Joseph Mattson (Summer 2010, Online) reviewed by Andy Stewart.

Return to Rain Taxi Rewind

CHRISTOPHER ATKINS

Spring2016coverChristopher Atkins is a photographer, writer, and the Curator of Exhibitions and Public Programs at the Minnesota Museum of American Art in St. Paul, Minnesota. He holds an MA and M.Res degree in visual cultures from Goldsmiths College at the University of London, and has taught museum studies and contemporary art at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and Macalester College.

Volume 20, Number 4 Winter 2015 (#80)

To purchase issue #80 using Paypal, click here.

INTERVIEWS

Sara Jaffe: The Liberating Act of Failure | interviewed by Zhanna Slor
Martine Bellen: Excavating the Poem | interviewed by Piotr Florczyk

FEATURES

Ecstatic Erotic: The Art of Dorothy Iannone | by Richard Kostelanetz
The New Life | a comic by Gary Sullivan
mnartists presents: Marlon James Wins the Man Booker Prize | by Rob Callahan
Preserving the Swamps: Bonnie Jo Campbell’s Source of Inspiration | by Lisa DuRose
Revisiting Thomas More’s Utopia | by Ryder W. Miller

Plus:

80 Cover.indd

Cover art by Mandy Lee Cox

NONFICTION REVIEWS

J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing: Face-to-Face with Time | David Atwell | by Matthew Cheney
The Good Story: Exchanges on Truth, Fiction and Psychotherapy | J. M. Coetzee & Arabella Kurtz | by Matthew Cheney
Study in Perfect | Sarah Gorham | by M. Lock Swingen
Ancient Places: People and Landscape in the Emerging Northwest | Jack Nisbet | by Renée E. D’Aoust
Crowded by Beauty: The Life and Zen of Poet Philip Whalen | David Schneider | by Patrick James Dunagan
The Z Collection | Jan Herman | by Paul Buhle
Islam and the Future of Tolerance: A Dialogue | Sam Harris & Maajid Nawaz | by Allan & Shawn Vorda
The Enlightenment: History of an Idea | Vincenzo Ferrone | by John Toren
Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties | Elijah Wald | by Ryder W. Miller
Harvey Kurtzman: The Man Who Created Mad and Revolutionized Humor in America | Bill Schelly | by Steve Matuszak

FICTION REVIEWS

Juventud | Vanessa Blakeslee | by John Domini
The Art of Flight | Sergio Pitol | by Garry Craig Powell
Innocence: Or, Murder on Steep Street | Heda Margolius Kovály | by Kelsey Irving Beson
Bad Sex | Clancy Martin | by Nicholas Gripp
Making Nice | Matt Sumell | by Meghan D. Smith
The Making of Zombie Wars | Aleksander Hemon | by Garin Cycholl
The Tree With No Name | Drago Jančar | by Alex Brubaker
Bear War-Den | Vivian Demuth | by Daniela Gioseffi
Scrapper | Matt Bell | by Josh Cook
Paris Red | Maureen Gibbon | by Thomas Rain Crowe
Thus Were Their Faces | Silvina Ocampo | by David Wiley

POETRY REVIEWS

Map: Collected and Last Poems | Wisława Szymborska | by John Bradley
How To Be Drawn | Terrance Hayes | by Brian Laidlaw
Swimming Home | Vincent Katz | by Elizabeth Robinson
Sentences and Rain | Elaine Equi | by Renoir Gaither
Heliopause | Heather Christle | by Tyrone Williams
Loose Strife | Quan Barry | by Miguel Murphy
Playtime | William Fuller | by Patrick James Dunagan
The News | Jeffrey Brown | by Anna Kramer
Vincent | Joseph Fasano | by John Bradley
Multitudinous Heart: Selected Poems | Carlos Drummond de Andrade | by James Naiden

COMICS REVIEWS

Abina and the Important Men: A Graphic History | Trevor R. Getz and Liz Clarke | by George Longenecker
Louise Brooks: Detective | Rick Geary | by John Eisler

To purchase issue #80 using Paypal, click here.

Rain Taxi Print Edition, Vol. 20 No. 4, Winter 2015 (#80) | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2015/2016

2000: The Necessity of Small Presses

Rewind-NecessityMany literary writers share a similar dream: to have their work considered by the “Big 5” publishing houses, incur a bidding war, and receive a contract with sizeable advance to go with it. This is a perfectly reasonable dream, but for the most part it doesn’t reflect the true landscape of literary publishing. The largest publishing houses can’t usually afford to take risks on writing that doesn’t fit what they see as a profitable and proven sales track, whether that’s a brand-name author or a category of book they know has wide appeal. This does not make them Bad Guys—these houses are large businesses, and they’re perfectly justified in making decisions like large businesses. This, of course, is the crucial spot where small presses come in and play an important role.

Before I go on, there are some truths worth stating about the small presses of this country. A small press fights for its meals. It puts together lists each season that must not only pay the bills with little margin for error, but also hold true to the specific mission that the house has remained small in order to accomplish. Most importantly, it’s filled with the exact sort of idealistic, innovative people that the same author dreaming of the large advance is hoping will work on her book. While I was an editor at The Overlook Press, its legendary publisher Peter Mayer said something that stuck with me: “commerce creates culture.” So if all the types of books and writing we love are going to survive as more than just academic or artistic exercise, be it experimental fiction, the literary essay, the classic reissue, or anything else, we’ll owe it to the small presses. They’re the ones figuring out how to forge ahead with the amazing writing a larger house can’t afford to touch.

Some of Rain Taxi’s best profiles of small presses:

“Coach House Books at the Turn of the Century” (Winter 2000/2001, Online) by Tom Orange.

“The Post-Apollo Press” (Spring 2000, Print) by John Olson.

“Logging Laughlin” (Fall 2000, Print), a profile of New Directions by Doug Nufer.

Return to Rain Taxi Rewind

Surrealism in Belgium: The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

surrealisminbelgiumXavier Canonne
Translated by Patrick Lennon
Marot ($55)

by M. Kasper

It took decades, but the Belgian Surrealist painter René Magritte, with his perceptual games, his unsettling substitutions, juxtapositions, and transformations, changed the way we see. For that he's considered one of the great artists of the last century. The specific environment in which he thrived, however, is very little known. This exhibition catalog from the first major American survey show of Belgian Surrealism, at the Baker Museum in Naples, Florida in early 2015, is part of an effort to redress that.

For the most part, this new treatment focuses on visual art (the Belgian movement was also strong on the literary side), and the selection of works amply illustrates the range produced over roughly seventy-five years. The Brussels Group, as it was known at first, got started at the same time as its more celebrated Parisian cousin, in the mid 1920s. From the beginning, though, they distinguished themselves from the main branch by rejecting automatic writing and drawing and other attempts to plumb the unconscious. The Belgians did share with André Breton's circle a commitment to revolution, surprise, and transgression, but theirs was a more rational aesthetic. In addition there was, as Xavier Canonne (Director of the Museum of Photography in Charleroi and one of Belgium's pre-eminent scholars of modernism), who curated and wrote the catalog texts, puts it, "the difference of attitude and form that distinguishes the Brussels group from its Parisian counterpart: acting in the shadows rather than under the chandeliers of salons . . . [relying] on their own cunning and anonymity." The book's title, thus, borrows Buñuel's to refer to the middle class, rather than bohemian, lifestyles of many of the Belgian movement's main participants, exemplified by Magritte's signature bowler hat, Paul Nougé's career as a chemist (though, he was, in addition, a founder of the Belgian Communist Party), and Paul Colinet's as a suburban civil servant, for a few examples.

Early on, Magritte, and Nougé, a writer, mostly, and the Group's influential chief theorist (whose notions on plagiarism, for example, underpinned Situationist détournement decades later), dominated the Belgian scene. Here, the large selection of Magritte's paintings reproduced includes some relatively unfamiliar early works (on loan from private and small public collections in Belgium) as well as many postwar pieces, some of which, particularly those from his so-called "cow" period, like late products by his peers Picabia and De Chirico, are fascinating but pretty odd. Nougé is represented by all nineteen anxious tableaux from Subversion des Images, his photo portfolio of 1929 (unfortunately minus his short-prose captions that accompanied the pictures when the piece was finally published in 1968). Other eye-opening, less widely known creations include collages by E.L.T. Mesens, objects by Marcel Mariën, and Raoul Ubac's solarized photographs. There's underwhelming work too, like the kitschy erotica of Paul Delvaux.

The commentary, much of which is adapted from Canonne's comprehensive, one might say already canonical (ha!), Surrealism in Belgium, 1924 to 2000 (published in both French and English versions in 2007), includes an overview of the movement, an annotated run-through of magazines and other documents (well-illustrated with jacket covers, and fascinating), and alphabetically-arranged chapters on each of the forty artists in the show, with plentiful selections of the work on exhibit.

For all sorts of reasons, surveys always have holes. In this show, for example, there's nothing by Marcel Broodthaers (perhaps it was too difficult to get clearances from his notoriously difficult estate?). There's also no Henri Michaux, though it's true he lived in France most of his life and had next to nothing to do with the movement in his home country. That Christian Dotremont, one of the co-founders of COBRA in the 1950s, is largely missing is more glaring; he's acknowledged in the overview and documents sections, but examples of his voluminous visual output, notably his distinctive, calligraphic logogrammes, are absent from the exhibit. And it’s disappointing that Pol Bury's cinétisations weren't included, and are mentioned in the text only in passing; these highpoints of Belgian visual art, from the 1950's and ’60s, were innovative photo-collages that used subtle shifts of concentrically cut circles to dizzying effect, a technique not even Jiří Kolář, the restless Czech montagist who invented rollage, crumplage, and chiasmage, hit on.

The translations in Surrealism in Belgium, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie are, alas, full of grammatical infelicities, and the bibliography could have been improved with citations to English-language works—to the many estimable Magritte monographs, for instance, or the few but precious translations of Nougé. Despite those things, this is a big, beautifully produced, informative attempt to make better known a peripheral and unfamiliar but worthy body of work.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore
indiebound
Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2015/2016 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2015/2016

The Drug and Other Stories

thedrugAleister Crowley
Wordsworth Editions ($7.99)

by Spencer Dew

In this posthumous collection of stories by Aleister Crowley (1875-1947), we see evidence of the Great Beast’s comparative religious and occult knowledge, though too often this is hauled into service for the churning out of tepid pulp pieces. Dust off some Vedanta, plug in the cult of Apollo or a ouija board or the ceremonial conjuration of an angel, add a drop of “the Primal Water of Chaos” alongside a chunky paragraph rehashing appropriately watered-down Kabbalah, insert a murderous dwarf or hunchback or a team featuring one of each, and abracadabra: “Now therefore his disciples came unto the Vault of that Mystic Mountain, and with the Keys they opened the Portal and came to him and woke him.” So let it be written, so let the writer get paid.

Crowley claimed, as prophet of the new religion of Thelema, that his Book of the Law was channeled via automatic writing, the real author being a nonhuman entity. This book, regrettably, reads as if the spirit of Hack took possession of Crowley’s hands and spun off assorted tales of mystery, ornate allegories, and gassy philosophical dialogues.

Not that there aren’t interesting relics hidden in the muck. In “A Death Bed Repentance” Crowley revisits the Plymouth Brethren sect, his oppressive childhood religion, stripping bare their fallacies and using their central, stubborn theological insistence in an omnipotent and just deity to reveal how little that movement cared about the narrative contents of their holy scriptures. This is most interesting as a think-piece, as a revealing glimpse into Crowley’s biography and mind. The same is true of “Felo de Se,” which walks through Thelemic thoughts on suicide (and allows Crowley some punching practice with his nemesis, Christianity, like the jab about that faith being predicated on “the most deliberate suicide possible, since he had planned it from all eternity, even taking the trouble to create a universe of infinite agony in order to redeem it by this suicide.”

Indeed, the best parts of The Drug offer traces of the bombast and wit so evident in Crowley’s other works, though these seem, at best, rough versions of what one would expect from the author of such inspired works of fiction as Moonchild and Diary of a Drug Fiend. There are pleasant one-liners (Sufi poetry may engage the erotic for spiritual reasons “but also, I believe . . . because [the Sufi writer] is just as dirty-minded a beast as you and I” and some clever ideas (those willing “to become the saviours of their country shall be called the Synagogue of Satan, so as to keep themselves from the friendship of the fools—who mistake names for things”), but for the most part these pages are given over to cheap melodrama, to nymphs, and divine gardens, narrators that introduce themselves as “the Key of Delights,” plots exploring “the death-struggle against Nature, to which there is only one end,” and the rumbling of ancient things into abysses as the gods stride by or howl or are suspiciously unresponsive to human entreaties. When Crowley writes that “Of course, no more than one seventh of the wisdom is ever confided to any one of the Seven, and the Seven meet in council but once in every thirty-three years,” the only math that makes sense is the author calculating his payment by the word.

This dialed-in quality can, at times, allow Crowley to play to his strengths. He knows a great deal about classical pantheons east and west, and he can effortlessly bring those deities to life, squabbling and prancing across his pages. In one successful light moment the Buddha is given “Well, so long, old chap” as a line of dialogue. Such moments bring to mind Crowley’s smugly tongue-in-cheek Simon Iff Stories, all exponentially superior to the offerings on hand here. Indeed, the light, snide, characteristically arrogant tone Crowley does so well is here too often discarded for prose that oscillates between “deep-throated mockery of the gods” and a shrieking, crucifix-shattering pitch of horror.

Horror is a real problem here. “The Testament of Magdalen Blair” is famously scary, though it would be a sight more frightening if it didn’t belabor “the essence of horror” in such leaden language—just give us a creepy hint of the scene, please, and spare us lines like “And then there came the cold-drawn horror of stark blasphemy against this God—who would not answer.” Horror hurts this collection, too, by making comparison inevitable: Crowley is no Lovecraft in these pages, nor is he Poe. If, as a reader, you’re interested in a gripping story, told via the text of a personal journal abandoned in the wake of a mysterious catastrophe and purporting to plot the causes of madness, there’s probably a better text out there for you than the one included in The Drug. But for aficionados of Crowley or those interested in the history through which he lived (useful notes in the back contextualize and offer dates for the pieces in this thick volume), this book is worth the investment of a few dark evenings.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore
indiebound
Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2015/2016 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2015/2016

Troy, Michigan

troymichigan
Wendy S. Walters
Futurepoem Books ($16)

by Ashleigh Lambert

How does racism make a space? In Troy, Michigan, Wendy S. Walters turns sonnets into maps that document the terrain of oppression. If a collection of sonnets seems like an archaic approach to confronting the structures that enable racism, consider: sonnets and suburbs both concern themselves with imposing order on what is deemed unruly. Aren’t the suburbs—isn’t America—primarily concerned with “triumph over topography,” and can the desire to control the land ever be separated from the desire to control who inhabits it? Isn’t a sonnet an efficient tool for drawing new boundaries—the line taking the place of the surveyor’s rod, the octave and sestet sketching out the shape of a plot?

Walters’s vision roams freely over the landscape. She peels back layers of history to show the connections between the Troy of antiquity, the settling of Michigan by whites, the rise of the automobile and the suburbs. “Founding,” a crown of sonnets, traces the history of Troy, beginning and ending with the exhortation, “Start with some common interests in escape.” A fall is pre-ordained, inscribed in the name: “A Troy made again / invites myths of walled cities and idols / of speed into the woods to undo us.” Paranoia becomes inextricable from a sense of place: “A fear of mixed-use / space reflected mistrust, a solitude / philosophy.”

In “Prologue, 1970s,” our attention is directed to “snow in right neighborhoods outside one / gray city.” A resonant word, “right,” with its echoes of both angles—as in construction, development—and morality. The nuances of that word are useful to keep in mind, as studies show that even when people of color do everything “right”—graduate high school, get married before having children, find full time-work—they are less likely to be granted the trappings of middle-class life than their white peers.

Walters sketches out the contours of this world with its brutal logic and inviolate rules, then zooms in on one particular resident of this landscape: the speaker herself. Speaking alternately from the positions of I, she, the writer, and our girl, Walters seizes the power of multiplicity. Sonnets and suburbs have historically valued a stable self and Walters’s shifting voice is a welcome departure from this tradition. Midway through the book, a girl appears, hiding in the desolate woods “from those who don’t seek her out.” Is this girl the poet? She is more than that:

The writer illustrates our girl’s worries
as a wall of windows. Look out. See how
she waves as she walks up the road? She wants
you to join her, but you can’t catch up.

Angry and sad that the white world won’t acknowledge her value, this girl still affirms: “I remain.” The Troy of Walters’s poems may not be the stuff of epic, but as the poet tartly reminds us, “This saga / matters as much to me as epics do / to everyone else.”

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore
indiebound
Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2015/2016 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2015/2016