Nachoem M. Wijnberg

Nachoem M. Wijnberg
Translated by David Colmer
New York Review Books ($18)

Walking on the beach he gets an idea
and immediately guesses its incorrectness
—“Method”

Nachoem M. Wijnberg’s poetry possesses the disconcerting quality of being at once extraordinarily strange and very close to the feeling of life as it is actually lived. Wijnberg brings the world close to us (and it is a sweeping world he attends to: religious and philosophical investigations, encounters with historical figures, and domestic affairs of the most trivial nature) by being exact about the indecisiveness of the human will and by favoring the processes of our understanding of experience over the particulars of experience itself. Take “Letter to the Corinthians”:

Awareness of the world as well as ourselves
is as difficult for us as self-awareness for fish or foxes
although they in their behavior take their own existence
into account as we do the existence of the world.

These poems deal with the obstacles we face in “taking into account . . . the existence of the world”: the incompatibility of desires, the misapplication of attention, the strangeness of the other (particularly when the other is familiar), and the oddity of the revealed self. Here’s the opening to “Replying”:

Starting with what is the same for everyone

or can be (can everyone come over here),
looking at oneself and leaving out what reminds
one of oneself
to be able to say what can be said

without waiting until the same thing has been said in reply.

Understanding and loving, so that one of the two
can rest while the other watches.
Having the courage to say when no one is there:

how I wanted to live is incomprehensible to me
but maybe not to everyone.

Wijnberg is a professor of business studies at the University of Amsterdam; value systems, and our attempts to ascribe them coherently, are recurring themes throughout his poetry (“Continuing with what I do, recognizing what might be important enough to / justify putting everything I have into it — both of those are brave, aren’t they?”). Over the course of the twenty volumes collected here, from 1989’s The Simulation of Creation to 2022’s Naming Names, there is arguably little in the way of formal inventiveness—we are presented with songs, jokes, parables and ghazals—however, Wijnberg’s approach doesn’t require new forms to astonish; his singular voice makes existing forms seem new.

This is due partly to Wijnberg’s casual poetic register, which flattens any hierarchy of concepts and abolishes the mind’s value rankings of the quotidian and the profound. “Power and Knowledge and Justice,” a meditation on the existence of God, reduces the divine to a doorman “who does have power / over you but not much, and you can take a lot of it away by walking off and / standing somewhere else.” The poem opens:

Imagine there is someone far away who has almost no power but loves us—
our existence matters to him and he wants to know as much as possible about
each of us.
Or else he could have power but has set the condition that he only wants to
know that much if he doesn’t have to have power.
If you have had a lot of power, you can never give it back entirely, you still
know something about how it works.

Such cursory language unmoors us; it reproduces the disorientation we experience when thinking about such enigmatic concepts. Much of this is achieved through Wijnberg’s syntax, which employs a bewildering repetition of pronouns (especially “it”) with their exact referents often difficult to determine, as well as run-on sentences and other devices to produce complex layers of meaning. Take, for instance, the short poem “What an Actor the World Has Lost in You”:

An actor on another actor: he turned from left to right and stopped, at the
same time gesturing with his hand.
Being an actor was unbearably lonely if no one noticed him doing it, the chill
from its beauty went right through me.
Someone who always comes in too early or too late comes in like that, a bad
actor can do it now and then, only a very good actor can do it all the time.
They are acting and they go on for too long or stop suddenly and you can see
they’re glad to be allowed to stop.

We are never entirely certain what any of the four “its” are. The poem seems to turn on the line “Someone who always comes in too early or too late comes in like that,” but Wijnberg leaves us unsure as to which of the referents in the previous lines “that” refers to. This uncertainty destabilizes us as readers, but it replicates our understanding of the world as we experience it, and the accompanying feelings of surprise, confusion, and disorientation. To create such ambiguity through simplicity is Wijnberg’s greatest talent as a poet.

Increasing this uncertainty is the way the logic of many of these poems progress. Wijnberg’s associations often have no obvious point of contrast or connection; his declarative sentences are always slightly askew and his statements are just shy of making sense—close enough to be intelligible, far away enough to be obscure: “A poem must be about something; otherwise no one can say / if the poem is superfluous if it is about him. // What can he say, what is in his heart: a poem if one is bigger than the other, / disappointed if it is not a good poem.” His poems register the large impact of small differences.

They also make innovative use of those things we normally associate with poetic effect. Wijnberg’s rare similes are paradoxical in nature: “like wanting to fight / far above your weight, / but not against someone else”; “More reason to assume / someone is the Messiah / when he arrives / like someone politely leaving / at the earliest possible moment.” He also has an obvious talent for aphorism—“Where words mean something, Ghalib’s are law”; “No one knows what desire is until Ghalib says something about it. / He reads the history of the world and when he is finished, he says what is / missing”—though he rarely utilizes it, perhaps because this kind of rhetoric tends to take the reader out of the poem, or make us realize we are in a poem, devolving the feeling of lived experience into literature about it.

Perhaps it is fitting that one of Wijnberg’s most convincing and effective modes is that of the parable. Take “Laziness and Patience,” which echoes the Biblical story of the prodigal son:

The three sons of the father who says that when he dies,
The entire inheritance will go to the laziest son.
A judge has to find out which of the sons is the laziest.
The first son says: I go quiet when I think someone loves me.
That’s not bad, especially the haste, like someone
who has come to tell someone they don’t love them.
The second son says: my father has worked hard his whole life
to say that the inheritance goes to the laziest son
and that it’s up to a judge to find out which son
is laziest. If it was more I know what I’d do,
says the third son to the woman he spends the inheritance with
in just one night. The woman tells the judge.
The judge asks the son: how did you know that she was the woman
who would tell me about it?

Auden wrote that anyone who attempts to interpret a parable only ends up revealing themselves, but Wijnberg’s poetry compels us to try by asking us to find our bearings in disorientation. Here as elsewhere we might conclude that Modernity, with its pitch of distraction, its savagery masked in convenience, and its slogan- and corporate argot-riddled double-speak, forces us into constantly making sense of the world through the nonsensical. Confusion is our natural state, Wijnberg’s poetry confirms, and where we find meaning.

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Book Review, Poetry Reviews

Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2023 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2023

The End of Reality

How Four Billionaires Are Selling a Fantasy Future of the Metaverse, Mars, and Crypto

Jonathan Taplin
PublicAffairs ($30)

by Doug MacLeod

Jonathan Taplin takes on two roles—cynic and hardcore realist—in his newest book, The End of Reality: How Four Billionaires Are Selling a Fantasy Future of the Metaverse, Mars, and Crypto. Taplin sees the United States as going down a dangerous road of what he calls “techno-determinism,” which he argues has been sold to a naïve public by four anarcho-libertarian technocrats. These four men—Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, and Marc Andreessen—promise projects that will “deliver us a bright future”: Web3, cryptocurrency, human life on Mars, and transhumanism. Taplin’s billionaire subjects propose that what is best for the world is not only the creation of new worlds and digitized economies but also the merging of technology and human life, disregarding the moral, political, and economic dangers that have already developed due to our avarice and incessant need for immortality.

Taplin expertly picks apart each of these self-appointed saviors and their Frankenstein’s monsters of modern technocracy—while also, for a lack of a better analogy, slapping readers across the face like Cher does to Nicholas Cage in Moonstruck: “Snap out of it!” While partisan in his prose, he retains a relatively objective tone by displaying facts without overt judgement—and by taking the history of propaganda as his context. Taplin acknowledges that the bamboozle has been going on since the days of Hitler and Goebbels, so he directs his disdain forward, at what he sees as its modern legacies: Trumpism, neoliberalism, the politico-media complex, and businessmen who exploit democracy’s gaps for personal gain. If the American public seems to follow these charlatans blindly, Taplin explains, it is because of an ideology of individualism and its barriers to collective understanding. Knowing this, writes Taplin, “all four Technocrats have constructed their companies in a way that stymies the ordinary feedback hoops that help leaders course correct.” Ultimately, he argues, the American experiment is disintegrating to a propaganda machine created by dictators in politics and technology—much like the Weimar Republic did in the early 1930s, but with a modern inflection: Technological advancements, the new face of power grabs, are designed to cause chaos to the point of disorientation and surrender.

How can Americans escape the hyper-unreal morass engineered by Big Tech to ensure unwavering loyalty to a transhuman enterprise? Taplin states that Americans need to resist rather than submit, and create a new age of realism devoted to a regenerative economy that place importance on cooperation, participation, responsibility, and innovation. Reality is right in front of us, Taplin urges, and it is filled with poverty, homelessness, illiteracy, xenophobia, misogyny, white supremacy, food insecurity, violence, and other problems that flashy, profit-focused inventions can’t fix: “Technocrats have no solutions to real problems; in fact they exacerbate them by draining money for ill-conceived space ventures or fomenting discord that gets in the way of solutions.”

As a coda, proof of Taplin’s statement recently materialized with the tragic death of five people who spent $250,000 apiece to see the Titanic’s steel skeleton; their vessel was supposed to have been “unsinkable,” yet cost-saving shortcuts in its design spelled doom. Taplin may be a cynic, but his argument in The End of Reality is valid and sobering.

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Book Review, Nonfiction Reviews

Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2023 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2023

Trusting Your Own Bad Eye: An Interview with David Jauss

by Benjamin Woodard

Born in Minnesota in 1951, David Jauss is the author of four collections of stories: Black Maps (University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), Crimes of Passion (Dzanc Books, 2014), Glossolalia: New & Selected Stories (Press 53, 2013), and Nice People: New & Selected Stories II (Press 53, 2017). He has published two poetry collections—You Are Not Here (Fleur-de-Lis, 2002) and Improvising Rivers (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1995)—and has edited several anthologies, including the craft collection Words Overflown by Stars (Story Press, 2009). His writing has appeared in Best American Short Stories and has won the O. Henry Award and two Pushcart Prizes.

Alone with All That Could Happen: On Writing Fiction (Press 53, $29.95), a collection of craft essays by Jauss, was originally published by Writer’s Digest in 2008. Recently, Jauss released a revised and expanded version of the book, adding in new examples and a brand-new essay on plot structure. Tackling point of view, story collection organization, epiphanies in fiction, and more, the collection is a gift for writers everywhere—a craft book that speaks deeply about technique while offering perspectives that sometimes push against tropes sold by instructors for decades. Once I got my hands on this new edition, I knew I wanted to talk with Jauss about what went into these essays, as well as how the book fits into our current climate of creativity battling AI art.

Benjamin Woodard: What inspired you to revisit these essays, and have any of your ideas shifted since the book’s first publication?

David Jauss: The main reason I wanted to revise and expand the book was to improve my essay on point of view. I can’t tell you how many writers have told me—in person, in letters, in emails, and Facebook posts—that it’s far and away the best essay on POV they’ve ever read. One writer even called it “instantly canonical.” But POV is a slippery, complicated subject, and the more I read and thought about it, the more I realized I’d made some mistakes in the original version of the essay. Also, in the fourteen years that the first version of Alone with All That Could Happen was in print, I came across numerous examples that would better illustrate the various POV techniques I discuss.

I also wanted to update my essay “Autobiographobia” to address the bugaboo of cultural appropriation, which has become an increasingly controversial issue since the first edition appeared, and I wanted to add an essay on plot and structure, two subjects I felt were conspicuously missing from the first version. There are dozens of cuts, additions, updates, and changes in all the essays, but the POV essay is the most altered. The fact that it took me fourteen years to revise it to my satisfaction is proof that the original version was anything but “instantly canonical.” I hope the new version is closer to deserving that kind of praise.

BW: I will join the chorus in praising your essay on POV. It breaks down point of view techniques in ways that are easy to digest and appreciate. I have read and reread that essay, and it has spun me off to reevaluate some of my own writing. While talking about various updates, you mention adding to “Autobiographobia,” which discusses, among other things, moving away from the old chestnut, “Write what you know.” Have you experienced any pushback on this essay when it comes to the idea of writing outside of one’s culture and experience, and can you speak to whether there is a limitation one might face when writing in such a manner?

DJ: I have no doubt that many—maybe even most—fiction writers today believe writing about people whose culture and experience differ from theirs is “cultural appropriation,” a violation of the “copyright” those people have on their culture and experience, but no one has criticized my essay—at least not so far. My essay argues that writing about people whose age, gender, sexual orientation, race, nationality, religion, politics, culture, and experiences differ from ours is a positive thing, just as reading about such people is. Indeed, I’d argue that it just may be the most important reason to write fiction.

What people call “cultural appropriation,” I—and most writers throughout literary history—would call “imagination.” As I say in my essay, I agree with Sherwood Anderson, who said, “the whole glory of writing lies in the fact that it forces us out of ourselves and into the lives of others” and therefore bridges divisions between people. I see writing about “the other” as an empathetic act, a desire to understand other people and see and experience life as they see and experience it. Obviously, if you write about others merely to attack them and assert your superiority, that’s despicable and the fiction that results can only be reprehensible. And even if our intentions are good, we may of course wind up doing a bad job of imagining someone who’s different from ourselves, and if so, we should take our lumps from readers and critics and try to do better the next time. What we shouldn’t do is give up the empathetic attempt to imagine our way into the minds and hearts of others. We shouldn’t be content to “stay in our lane” and write only what we know.

If you don’t trust me, or Sherwood Anderson, maybe you’ll trust Toni Morrison. When she was teaching creative writing at Princeton, she always began the semester by telling her students to forget the conventional advice to “write what you know.” Instead, she said, “Think of somebody you don’t know. What about a Mexican waitress in the Rio Grande who can barely speak English? Or what about a Grande Madame in Paris?” We can’t entirely ignore our own culture and experience when we write—that’s impossible—but clearly Morrison believed, with Grace Paley, that we should write from what we know into what we don’t know. Just as reading a wide variety of fiction expands our understanding of other people, and of ourselves, so too does writing fiction about a wide variety of our fellow humans.

BW: Your answer keys into one of the elements I find most impressive in the book—that being the sheer number of quotes and examples from other writers and thinkers that appear in each essay to support your points. You mentioned earlier the desire to add in new passages while constructing this expanded version of the text, and on a nuts-and-bolts level, I wonder if you could talk some about building these essays. I kind of imagine a file cabinet full of passages that you’ve gathered over the years. Really, though, how did, say, the new essay on plot structure come together?

DJ: All of my essays were originally delivered as lectures at Vermont College of Fine Arts, and it was my custom during each residency to choose a subject to explore for the next residency’s lecture. Often, the subjects of my upcoming lectures were suggested by something in my current residency’s workshop. For example, in one workshop, nine out of the twelve students turned in stories told in the present tense—sometimes to good effect and sometimes not—so I decided to write my next lecture on the advantages and disadvantages of present-tense narration. In another workshop, several students turned in stories that ended with high-octane epiphanies, so I chose epiphanies as my next residency’s topic. The examples I used for my lectures were taken primarily from whatever I was reading that semester.

When I collected the essays in the first edition of the book, however, I added numerous examples that I’d come across since I initially wrote the lectures. And in the new version of the book, I added many examples that I accumulated during the fourteen years since the publication of the first version. I also added numerous quotations about fiction from writers far wiser than I am. Ever since I started studying the craft of fiction fifty-some years ago, I’ve been typing up advice and insights from writers I admire, and although I don’t have a “file cabinet full” of them, I have accumulated nearly 1,000 pages of brilliant quotations that I’ve drawn from in writing my essays.

“Beyond Plot: Structuring Fiction” is the only essay that I wrote specifically for the new edition, but the idea for it began much like the others. A student in one of my VCFA workshops mentioned that he couldn’t understand why Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” was considered such a great story when, in his opinion, it was plotless. So I hit on the idea of writing an essay that compared and contrasted the structure of O’Brien’s story with the structure of Ha Jin’s marvelous story “Saboteur,” which has the same kind of conventional causal plot—a causes b which causes c, etc.—that “The Things They Carried” has but presents its events in chronological order. Ha Jin’s story is divided into five sections—the first introduces the story’s conflict, the next three complicate that conflict, the fourth brings the conflict to a climax, and the fifth presents the resolution. In “Saboteur,” the plot and the structure coincide. In “The Things They Carried,” they don’t—and given O’Brien’s subject and theme, they shouldn’t.

Plot is a far more complicated subject than most craft books suggest, and causality is not the only organizing principle for a plot. I’ve written a much more comprehensive essay about different organizing principles—and therefore different kinds of plots—that will appear in my next craft book, Words Made Flesh, which is due out from Press 53 next spring.

BW: I look forward to checking it out! It’s exciting to hear that more craft writing is coming from you, particularly amidst constant chatter about artificial intelligence and storytelling. It seems to me that strong stories require nuance that a program cannot replicate, but maybe that’s just my own naïveté showing itself. Have you thought about this subject at all? If so, do you think it is logical to fear algorithms when it comes to the stories we consume?

DJ: Today I watched a YouTube video of John Lennon singing David Bowie’s “Space Oddity.” Lennon never covered that song, of course, nor did he (or would he) don Major Tom’s space helmet for an MTV-style video. The video was created by AI. If I hadn’t known that fact in advance, I might have been fooled into thinking someone had discovered a previously unknown tape of Lennon recording Bowie’s song. So yes, I do think it’s logical to fear AI. If it can bring Lennon back from the dead to sing a song he never sang, it can certainly generate Hemingway stories, and given that Hemingway’s actual stories would be the source of the AI-generated stories, I think at least some of the fake stories could have the kind of nuance that we associate with bona fide Hemingway stories. If so, an unscrupulous publisher (and that’s not an oxymoron) could pass the AI stories off as legitimate “long-lost” works.

Even if a publisher made it clear upfront that this “new” book of Hemingway stories was created by AI, would we really want AI-generated Hemingway stories to take up shelf space in bookstores and compete not only with Hemingway’s actual stories but with everybody else’s actual stories? And much as I hate to say it, I believe they would compete. There’s already a strong market for fan fiction—witness the retellings and spinoffs of Pride and Prejudice that appear with Old Faithful-like regularity every few months—and I suspect the fans of Austen fan fiction would be just as willing to read an AI-generated version of the Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy saga. And I suspect there could also be a market for stories “in the manner of” many other much-loved authors.

And here’s another reason to fear AI: since AI of necessity uses what already exists in order to create something “new,” lawyers could have a heyday with copyright infringement suits. As I see it, anything that could possibly create a new revenue stream for lawyers is something well deserving of our fear.

BW: You spoke earlier about how many of your essays blossomed from experiences in the classroom and workshop. After writing (and revising) these and other essays, as well as teaching and editing for decades, is there one go-to piece of advice that you might offer someone just starting out when it comes to the craft of fiction?

DJ: If I were limited to only one piece of advice, it would be the obvious one: read your ass off. We learn how to write mostly via a kind of osmosis, unconsciously absorbing the writing lessons novels and stories teach us, and the more you read, the more you’ll learn. But there are a couple of other pieces of advice I feel compelled to add to this all-important one.

First, as the Russian proverb says, “Don’t trust your brother, trust your own bad eye.” Even if you know your brother has your best interests at heart, and even if you know you don’t see your own work as clearly as you should, you ultimately have to trust yourself, not your teachers, friends, or family. And not the authors of craft books, either, especially those whose advice tends to be prescriptive rather than descriptive. You need to discover the vast panorama of techniques and strategies that are available to fiction writers, so you can choose the ones that feel most appropriate to the characters and story you’re creating.

Second, as every boxer knows, if you step into the ring, you’re going to get hit—and often, and hard. To become a writer, you’ll need to weather a lot of criticism and rejection, both from others and—most painfully—from yourself. As the long-time editor Gerald Howard once said, a writer’s life consists of repeatedly vacillating between two contradictory thoughts: “It’s just not worth it” and “Don’t give up.” Do whatever you can to make “Don’t give up” win by a knockout.

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Interview

Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2023 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2023

Enheduana

The Complete Poems of the World's First Author

Sophus Helle
Yale University Press ($30)

by Pierre Joris and Nicole Peyrafitte

Pierre Joris: It is excellent to have Sophus Helle’s new collection of translations of texts attributed to the Sumerian poet Enheduana framed by a very insightful series of essays. He points to her importance today as the “world’s first known author,” whose poems also include a “complex and self-reflective account of authorship, as she depicts herself stepping into literary history.” Under that light she can be seen as a post-modern—thus totally contemporary—author, despite the fact that she lived around 2300 BC! Though even more interesting is how Helle sums up her themes, all of which are also highly relevant today: “exile, social disruption, the power of storytelling, gender roles, the devastation of war, and the terrifying forces of nature.”

If I remember correctly, the first place we came across one of those Sumerian poems was in Jerome Rothenberg’s anthology Technicians of the Sacred (University of California Press, 1985). There Jerry reproduced a translation he worked on (via a literal translation of the Sumerian by Betty Meador and Renata Leggit) of a poem called “The Vulva Song of Inanna,” without mentioning its possible author, Enheduana. You immediately took to this poem and included it in your performance work. Can you speak to the importance of this text for you?

Nicole Peyrafitte: This is how it went for me: I was interested in feminine representations that would directly address the vulva and you pointed me to “The Vulva Song of Inanna,” in Technicians. This text blew my mind and I started looking deeper into this Inana* character, who sounded totally unleashed—and unleashed she was and still is for me!

But let’s be very clear—and it is important because there is a lot of confusion about this—“The Vulva Song of Inanna” is not attributed to Enheduana, nor is “Inanna’s Descent to the Nether World.” “The Vulva Song of Inanna” comes from another collection of tablets often referred to as “the Sacred Marriage.” Betty Meador worked with Jerry on this translation for Technicians, and later published Inanna Lady of the Largest Heart, Poems of the Sumerian High Priestess Enheduanna (University of Texas Press, 2000), and in the acknowledgments of this book,she mentions she began translating Sumerian Sacred Marriage Hymns in collaboration with J.R.

By the way, a recent review of the Barbie film, titled “Barbie is the New Inanna,” compares Barbie’s quest and travel to the human world with Inana’s descent into the netherworld. The reviewer, Meg Elison, makes an interesting point in the online magazine “The Wild Hunt,” though she too was a bit fussy about authorship of those two poems, as she attributes them to Enheduana. I have seen this conflation often made by popular culture stories inspired by Inana; it is not a big deal, but now we have info like this incredibly well done and accessible book to help us appreciate the depth of the complexities of this culture that lasted many thousands of years.

So yes! It was immediately important; Inana resonated deeply. She was full of paradoxes, irreverences, uninhibited. The way she sang and celebrated her vulva was so liberating. The con/fusion between vulva and vagina had always bothered me. I had already been thinking of the vulva in terms of a hidden face, and as vestibule to the vagina. In some prehistoric caves, like the one at Gargas, both representations are present.

As for Enheduana, it was you who got into this material via a book you found in the mid 1990s that got you fascinated by the linguistic intricacies of Sumerian—also mentioned by Helle when he explains the Sumerian dialect called “Emesal (literally, ‘thin tongue’), which in literary texts is spoken only by goddesses. . . . [and] associated with the female gender.” I, on the other hand, was looking into the material translated and studied by Samuel Noah Kramer and his French associate Jean Bottéro. It was exhilarating to discover this complex culture, and it was so refreshing and empowering to be able to read four-thousand-year old, pre-monotheistic material where women had autonomy, with, on top of their pantheon, a female deity that would go to hell, steal the “me’s,” the powers of other gods, and sing the plowing of her vulva loud and clear!

Kramer was the first to translate this material in the late 1930s. Material had been excavated in the late nineteenth century, but the decipherment of Sumerian—which is neither a Semitic nor an Indo-European language—was difficult and time-consuming. As Kramer put it in Sumerian Mythology (Harper Torchbooks, 1961): “The very name Sumer was erased from the minds and memory of man for over two thousand years.”

Besides the vulva song, the other text I was truly fascinated by was “Inanna’s descent to the netherworld.” Though none of these texts are part of the corpus attributed to Enheduana, she most certainly drew both literary and political inspiration from them. We are pretty sure she had read or heard all these stories and was fully aware of Inana’s importance in that part of the world her father King Sargon had conquered. Just for context, the Nippur excavation unearthed some 30,000 tablets, mostly in Sumerian, and ninety-five percent of which are of an economic character.

PJ: I first came across “Inanna’s descent to the netherworld” in Charles Olson’s The Chiasma, or Lectures in the New Sciences of Man, where he proposes the need to study a group of women he links back to what he calls “Cro-Magnon” culture and forward to the next cultural complex, the Greeks, pitching Inana’s descent as the opposite of Orpheus’s, etc. But we’re getting too far away—although the various ways we both came to those Sumerian texts is enlightening, too, showing the complexity of the situation. And this is also important because Helle’s book clears up much of these matters and is an excellent way into this very complex domain in which information is continuously shifting as new material is discovered and as new insights are gained into a very complex language and culture.

NP: Yes, indeed, the depth of the essays is impressive! They move from the historical to the political, from the question of authorship to that of translation, and address how all these layers play into each other—a true tour de force that gives many tools to contextualize Enheduana from then to today.

PJ: Though at this point, a wide range of more general books on Sumer and Sumerian literature is available, which enables Helle to focus on this figure and the questions she raises. There are also good websites where you can get info about all matters Sumerian, such as: https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/. Also mentioned by Helle, the second episode of the podcast series Ishtar Diaries, featuring the Iraqi American poet Dunya Mikhail (now living in exile in these States) speaking about her relation to Enheduana and the latter’s influence on her work: https://soundcloud.com/columbiaglobalcenters/in-praise-of-ishtar?in=columbiaglobalcenters/sets/ishtar-diaries.

NP: One of the core interests of the book is the proposition that here we have the first named author we know of. Even if this proposition may raise questions, Helle is clear: “Regardless, the fact that the ancient scribes saw Enheduana as the author of these poems is significant . . . The idea of authorship, the notion that a poetic text could be traced back to a named and identifiable individual rather than to a collective and anonymous tradition was born when these hymns were ascribed to Enheduana, and that is true regardless of whether the attribution was correct.”

PJ: Indeed, there probably were, before her and elsewhere in the world, named poet-authors, whose work and identity completely escapes us. Still, it is interesting to think that we now know of an author, a woman, who is way earlier than good old “Homer,” whoever he was, if he even existed as a person, and who in the Western-civ tradition is pitched as the first and greatest of poets. No place here for details, but we need a translation of Raoul Schrott’s book, Homers Heimat (Homer’s Homeland), which shows how, whoever Homer was, the Iliad, rather than the brand-new poem inaugurating this new Greek “high culture,” is in fact linked to and even derived from Assyrian and other Middle Eastern models. At any rate, fascinating as all this is, it will have to remain hazy to a great extent; the book under hand is however very helpful in a number of ways.

NP: Helle raises all kinds of complexities and controversies such as, did she really write all those texts attributed to her or not? But recently as we visited the excellent show at the Morgan Library “She Who Wrote: Enheduanna and Women of Mesopotamia, 3400-2000 BC”; it was interesting to listen and talk to visitors and hear how Enheduana is immediately mythologized into “the first woman poet ever,” a figure of pure genius to be admired and adored without looking further into her historical situation—

PJ: —Yes, a sort of absolute origin—and thus Enheduana gets reduced to just another myth—

NP: —Everybody immediately puts her on a pedestal and that’s not right, that’s not what she is. We have proof that Inana qua deity to be worshipped, as well as the poems and stories about her, go back at least 2,000 years before Enheduana. Essential also to see Enheduana’s total appropriation of an earlier culture as she was sent to Ur by her father, the Akkadian conquerer-king and empire founder Sargon, and as far as we know, she had to first learn Sumerian, both the language and the culture, in order to do her job as priestess to Inana and simultaneously as the political head of that city-state.

So, yes, give Enheduana the credit due her, but see her in the light of who she actually is and what she did—and here, Helle’s book is much better informed and richer in setting the context. In the essay “Enheduana’s World” he writes: “Enheduana lived through one of the most turbulent periods in the history if the ancient Near East. . . . her family was at the heart of it. . . . cities were caught in a web of conflicts, peace pacts, and exchanges of goods and ideas, but each was its own political entity. . . . Then came Enheduana’s father, Sargon of Akkad. He united the cities under one rule, creating the first known empire.”

PJ: I of course find it very exciting to think that she, the “first female author” thus wrote in her second language, a language that wasn’t her mother-tongue! And so, if Jerry Rothenberg and I get to finish another anthology we have in mind, Blows Against the Mother-Tongue, a world-wide survey of poets who wrote in their second or third languages, Enheduana would of course open that book. Now in today’s terms, there then also arises the specter of cultural appropriation . . .

NP: Well, it is possible that she did know some Sumerian, because in those days, cultures in adjacent “countries” were probably more porous than we think. Instead of imposing her religion, smartly enough she adopts and uses the locally established religion—though as a woman, of course, she might very well have been seduced and felt totally empowered by the figure of Inana.

PJ: Yes, one could suggest that the figure of a powerful goddess must have been very attractive to her, a deity that was not only the goddess of love and sex, but also that of war and chaos, and who turns out to be maybe the major god-figure of that area for centuries to come, as the Acadian, then Assyrian, then Babylonian figure of Ishtar.

NP: Both the Hymn to and the Exaltation of Inana prove that Ehneduana has done her research and was rewriting that earlier material for her own purposes, be they personal, ritual or political—

PJ: —and here we may actually use another Olsonianism, though rather than making that word into “his-story” we can say “her-story”—

NP: —The tablets that predated her informed her and/or her scribes’ writings. As we mentioned the corpus is huge, it goes from myth of origins to wars and ecological disasters, to love and its rituals.

PJ: From a purely literary p.o.v. it seems that the oeuvre we can attribute to Enheduana qua author consists essentially of two poems plus a set of hymns—the first and most celebrated being “The Exaltation of Inana”—and Helle shows how this is a poem as much about its author than about the goddess and details the reasons why this is important: The priestess has to make sure the goddess has power over the land so that she, her priestess, also can have and hold power, and she has to do this via the power of the poem. As Helle puts it: “In a sense, the Exaltation is a poem about itself, about whether Enheduana will succeed in elevating Inana, overcoming her loss of eloquence, and so saving her own life.” The second is the so-called “Hymn to Inana,” a longish poem which Helle reproduces with the expanse of its missing sections indicated (many tablets were broken or lost) showing the fragmentariness of the work as it has come down to us.

NP: The Hymn, or what we have of it, is very interesting because it shows the complexity of Inana: her mighty power over the main gods, her sympathy for the less fortunate, and her protection of women (as in “and build a home / for the women, to / fill it with goods”), while at the same time she is certainly not perfect—an aspect that is usually anathema to the idea of a supreme godhead’s character.

PJ: How do you see / hear / sense—both qua poet and performance artist—Helle’s translations in comparison to the older ones?

NP: So far these translations are my favorites. They are tight, have great rhythm, and are stripped of “literary embellishments.” All the things I learn from you about what a good translation needs!

PJ: Let’s just give one example. Here is a section from Meador’s translation of The Hymn to Inana (first column), juxtaposed with Helle’s version (second column):

fighting is her play
she never tires of it
she goes out running
strapping on her sandals
a whirlwind warrior
bound on a twister
she tears the king’s robe
dust-dry south wind
sweeps at her bidding
leaves in its trail
breast-beating despair
lioness Inanna
crouched in a reed thicket
leaps to slash the fearless
mountain wildcat
prowling the roads
shows wet fangs
gnashes her teeth
wild bull queen
mistress of brawn
boldly strong
no one dares turn away

Her joy is to
speed up conflict
and combat: ever
restless she straps
on her sandals. She
splits the blazing,
furious storm, the
whirlwind billows
around her as if
it were a dress.
Her touches bring
despair: the south
wind. . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Sitting on leashed
lions, Inana tears
apart those who
feel no fear of her.
Like a leopard of
the mountains, she
bursts onto the road
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Queen, huge aurochs!
Fierce in her might,
no one turns to fight
her. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The Meador does have its qualities, it reads well, but the tightness of Helle’s lines (it would be interesting to know how or if those line-breaks correspond to indications on the tablets) feels less lyrically contrived, and if they don’t seem as melodically flowing, that may well have to do with his attempt to render the Sumerian as literally as possible (using, for example “aurochs” rather than the generic “bull” informs us of the age of the poem, because the aurochs is by now an extinct species). Also indicating the missing parts, i.e., unreadable or broken off parts, of the tablets (something used to great effect by Armand Schwerner in the poems of The Tablets), makes us aware of the actual, physical substratum of the text, thus keeping the poem linked to its double origin, especially its second age—that of the Babylonian scribes’ clay copies. Rather than trying to restore a lost original, Helle’s version allows us to stay aware of the level of translation the poems incarnate.

NP and PJ: Stephen Orgel argues in his recent The Invention of Shakespeare (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022) that “no version of a Shakespeare play is ever a final version,” because texts are always under construction, showing that even as recent and massively studied an author and oeuvre as Shakespeare(‘s) is never fixed or absolute but always in the process of being translated and retranslated (all language and writing, one of us has written elsewhere, are translations ab initio). This is certainly also true of Enheduana’s work.

To close, let us take note of Helle’s rare (for a scholar) conviction that the work presented in his book is in no way final. For him, “the translations given in this book are necessarily temporary,” because, he is sure “within the next decade the philological interpretation for Enheduana’s poetry will probably change, because it is always changing, and updated translations will have to be produced.” Which is an exciting prospect. As Helle puts it: “In her third life, Enheduana is still in the process of being born.”

Footnotes:

*Unless we are referring to a book title by another author, we will be using the spelling of Inana and Enheduana with one “n” only, as suggested by Sophus Helle.

** http://www.holladaypaganism.com/goddesses/cyclopedia/l/LE-HEV-H.HTM#return

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Feature

Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2023 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2023

VOLUME 28, NUMBER 3, FALL 2023 (#111)

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INTERVIEWS

Ronnie Pontiac and American Metaphysical Religion | by Zack Kopp
Grant Maierhofer: Keeping the Circulating Happening | by Alex Kies
Amanda Gunn: Black Pleasure vs. Black Joy | by Eileen G’Sell

FEATURES

If and Only If: Imaginary books reviewed | by Scott F. Parker
The New Life | a comic by Gary Sullivan
Remembering Brian O’Doherty (1928–2022) | by Richard Kostelanetz

PLUS: Cover art by Korynn Newville

NONFICTION/ART REVIEWS

Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Thinking, Inquiry, and Hope | Sarah Bakewell | by John Toren
Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, And Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan | Alex Pappedemas and Joan LeMay | by Angelo Gentile
The Tribe: Portraits of Cuba | Carlos Manuel Álvarez | by Jesus Francisco Sierra
Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City: A Memoir | Jane Wong | by Genevieve Hartman
Soundwriting: A Guide to Making Audio Projects | Tanya K. Rodrigue and Kyle D. Stedman | by Cam Miller
Jean Conner: Collage | Rory Padeken, ed.
Mina Loy: Strangeness is Inevitable | Jennifer R. Gross, Ann Lauterbach, Roger L. Conover, & Dawn Ades, eds.
Betye Saar: Heart of a Wanderer | Diana Seave Greenwald | by Patrick James Dunagan

FICTION REVIEWS

POETRY REVIEWS

COMICS REVIEW

The Planetoid and Other Stories | Joe Orlando and Al Feldstein | by Paul Buhle

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KORYNN NEWVILLE

At the time this was a final piece, but it actually created the space and thought process to begin Indiscernible Elements: Calcium. The painting is an exploration of the next life, after the process of grieving the planet. Bringing the question, after grieving is the future of the planet only a fairytale? Visit Korynn Newville at: www.newvillekorynn.com.

Anne Enright

In conversation with Francine Prose

Wednesday, September 13, 2 pm Central
Free Virtual Event (registration required)

Rain Taxi proudly presents Anne Enright, one of Ireland’s greatest living writers, to celebrate the U.S. publication of her newest book, The Wren, The Wren—a searing story about the ravages of love across three generations of women that will both break and warm your heart. At this unique event, Enright will be in conversation with acclaimed American author Francine Prose. Join us for an exploration of literary fiction at its finest!

Book Purchasing Information: The Wren, The Wren, other books by Anne Enright, and a selection of titles by Francine Prose, are available from Magers & Quinn Booksellers at the link below. Don’t forget, when you buy books at an event, you support not only the authors and their publishers, but a great independent bookstore and the event host.

About the Book:

Nell McDaragh never knew her grandfather, famed Irish poet Phil McDaragh. But his love poems seem to speak directly to her. Restless, Nell leaves her mother Carmel’s home to find her voice as a writer and live a life of her choosing. Carmel, too, knows the magic of her Daddo’s poetry—and the broken promises within its verses. When Phil abandons the family, Carmel struggles to reconcile “the poet” with the man whose desertion scars Carmel, her sister, and their cancer-ridden mother. The Wren, The Wren brings to life three generations of women who contend with inheritances of both abandonment and a sustaining love that is “more than a strand of DNA, but a rope thrown from the past, a fat twisted rope, full of blood.” In sharp prose studded with crystalline poetry, Enright masterfully braids a family story of longing, betrayal, and hope.

"These pages practically crackle with intelligence, compassion and wit. Phil McDaragh is so real I almost googled him. The Wren, The Wren might just be Anne Enright’s best yet."

—Louise Kennedy

“A true masterpiece by one of our greatest novelists. Rich, emotional and brilliantly observed, Anne Enright’s eighth novel, The Wren, The Wren, may even beat her Booker-winner, The Gathering."

—The Telegraph

“A novel where shards of brilliance flash in every direction.”

—The Times

About the Authors:

Anne Enright is the author of seven previous novels, most recently Actress, as well as story collections and nonfiction. She has won numerous awards for her writing, including the Man Booker Prize, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Irish Book Awards. She lives in Dublin.

Francine Prose is a novelist and critic whose most recently published book is CLEOPATRA: Her History, Her Myth. Coming up next is a memoir titled 1974: A Personal History, to be published by Harper next year. Her previous books include the novels The Vixen, Goldengrove, A Changed Man, and Blue Angel, which was a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award, and the New York Times nonfiction bestseller Reading Like A Writer: A Guide For People Who Love Books and For Those Who Want to Write Them. She writes frequently for the New York Times Book Review and the New York Review of Books and lives in New York City.

American Midnight

The Great War, A Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis

Adam Hochschild
Mariner Books ($29.99)

Book Review, Nonfiction Reviews

by Robert Zaller

Adam Hochschild, the author of the acclaimed study King Leopold’s Ghost (Houghton Mifflin, 1998), has made a career out of unearthing the ghosts of the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. He might simply have made a single volume of that singularly bloody period, which saw the Western world’s hegemony collapse in two great wars and climaxed in the greatest atrocity in history and the most powerful weapon ever developed—a weapon that would soon prove capable of endangering human life on the planet. But that story, in its broad outlines, is already familiar; in his work Hochschild has aimed instead to tell it indirectly and episodically—to do what a sequence of novels might do, but using the tools of a historian.

Like a novelist, Hochschild works with protagonists, but the consequential figures of history who lead his narratives are more than storytellers of particular events—to the author, it is the legacy of each that ultimately shapes them. Leopold II is remembered for Belgium’s brutal colonization of the Congo, an imperial venture that set the pattern for Europe’s exploitation of Africa in the latter nineteenth century, including the precedent for German genocide in today’s Namibia. His “ghost” is thus not merely what was done by him and in his name, but also what persisted until the collapse of Europe’s African empires fifty years after his death, which haunt the continent to this day.

The same spectral image defines Hochschild’s The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin (Viking, 1994), which presents the Soviet dictator as an object of memory, defining the decades since his death for his nation as perhaps no other world personality has—a ghost now revived ominously in the figure of Vladimir Putin. But dictators are an easy target, even if, as in The Unquiet Ghost, Hochschild is after a more multidimensional portrait. In his most recent book, American Midnight, he fixes on the half-forgotten episode of a century ago colloquially known as the Red Scare, which he presents as a nadir of our history that has shaped it ever since.

The Red Scare began with America’s entry into World War I, just as Russia’s ability to maintain a second front against Imperial Germany was in doubt. Nominally neutral, the U.S. under President Woodrow Wilson had made extensive loans to the Western Allies, Britain, and France, which were unlikely to be repaid in the event of Allied defeat. As Hochschild points out, this was a decisive factor in Wilson’s request for a declaration of war in April 1917—although, as he also notes, the enthusiasm for war in Congress mirrored that of the general population, for which war had partly the character of a great adventure and partly that of a natural extension of the position America had assumed as a Pacific imperial power at the turn of the century, as well as the world’s captain of industry.

At the same time, Hochschild touches on the reluctance of many in the country to abandon George Washington’s long-held counsel to avoid foreign entanglements, and Wilson’s own boast, in his reelection campaign only months before, that he had kept the U.S. out of Europe’s war. Some of the opposition to war, he notes, was ethnically based in the country’s large German population, and some in the only independent party of the Left, the Socialists.

From the beginning, Wilson cast the war as a crusade, in his words, to make the world safe for democracy, even while privately admitting that it would mean “autocracy at home”—a marshaling of manpower and resources such as the country had never seen, and consequently a repression of dissent. Wilson’s sloganeering would be, as Hochschild observes, a capstone for the idea of American exceptionalism that had developed in the nineteenth century and would define it in the twentieth and beyond. In this, Wilson would shape American ideology profoundly, the personal tragedy of his failure to bring the U.S. into his postwar League of Nations notwithstanding.

To what extent Wilson expressed a hopeful idealism, and to what extent he was the partly cynical captive of his own rhetoric, is a subject that historians will long debate, and by foregrounding it Hochschild not only makes him the protagonist of this story but also places the legacy of our twenty-eighth president in a sharper light. As the war proceeded, Wilson’s rationale for it became broader and more grandiose. It would be, he claimed, not only for the advancement of democracy but for the ultimate peace of the world.

Hochschild leaves us in no doubt of his conclusions about the cost of the war for American democracy, quoting the distinguished historian David Brion Davis: “The years from 1917 to 1921 are probably unmatched in American history for popular hysteria, xenophobia, and paranoid suspicion.” By June 1917, Congress had passed the Espionage Act, the broadest and most draconian restraint of free speech, activity, and assembly in the history of the country, and still in force today. The government’s chief targets were home-grown socialists, whose leader, Eugene Debs, received almost a million votes in the presidential election of 1920 while imprisoned under the Espionage Act, while its largest union, the International Workers of the World (IWW), was crushed by mass arrests culminating in the largest civilian criminal trial ever held in the U.S.

The war itself, of course, had many consequential results, which Hochschild details. The government assumed virtual control of the economy, enriching giant corporations while putting antitrust regulations to sleep. The military draft upended millions of lives and cost 116,000 of them. But the chief focus of Hochschild’s story is less about the vast redistribution of national wealth or the cost of battle, and more about what he regards as its ultimate price: the suppression of native dissent. The Great War would prove not merely a pause in American democracy, but, despite the enfranchisement of women at the end of it, an enduring degradation. The country would not again know a worker’s movement such as the IWW, or a political party as progressively committed as that led by Debs. American public discourse, in Hochschild’s view, has been hobbled by this ever since.

Hochschild makes his points through a series of vivid portraits of antiwar radicals silenced or thrust into prison or exile—Alexander Berkman, W.E.B. DuBois, Marie Equi, Emma Goldman, Big Bill Hayward, Kate Richards O’Hare, and John Reed—as well as a lone voice of dissent within the Wilson administration itself, Louis F. Post. Against these figures, he depicts those who abetted the war in their efforts to curtail the Left and civil liberties in general. The best-remembered among them would be J. Edgar Hoover, then at the outset of his career but already a powerful force, but together, as Hochschild demonstrates, their work would help to make Wilson’s second administration one of the darkest and most lawless periods in American history.

As for Wilson, his desire to justify the war and his vision of America’s world leadership led him to promote the League of Nations that his fellow countrymen would soon reject. The result was a paralyzing stroke that left Wilson himself the mere spectator of the last eighteen months of his presidency, and the witness of the vindictive Treaty of Versailles that virtually guaranteed the far greater war that followed it twenty years later. Beyond that, Hochschild’s account of America’s long-ago “midnight” has much to tell us about the politics we have inherited in our own day.

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The Illuminated Burrow

A Sanatorium Journal

Max Blecher
Translated by Gabi Reigh
Twisted Spoon Press ($23)

Book Review, Fiction Reviews

by Rick Henry

The heart of reality is so unfathomable and of such great magnitude and grandiose diversity that our imagination is only able to extract a tiny fraction, enough to glean a few lights and interpretations to weave its “thread of life.”
—Max Blecher, The Illuminated Burrow

Max Blecher was born in Moldavia, raised in Romania, and began studying medicine in Paris until, at eighteen, he developed spinal tuberculosis. For the ten years that followed, he published fiction and poetry (much of it written from various institutional beds where his condition was treated) and corresponded with writers ranging from André Breton to Martin Heidegger. His two published novels, which have been translated into English as Adventures in Immediate Irreality and Scarred Hearts, secured his international reputation.

This biographical sketch, of course, says little about the “thread of life” Blecher sorted through in his writing; to address that, we now have an English version of his sanitorium journal Vizuina luminată, here translated from the Romanian by Gabi Reigh as The Illuminated Burrow. The book is a meditation on the nature of significant moments, written as Blecher approached his own death in 1938 at the age of twenty-eight. In the afterword, Gabriela Glăvan suggests that this final prose work and Blecher’s two novels “comprise a vast narrative of physical suffering.” Yes—but his work covers so much more of the world as he navigates his suffering, his body, and his imagination.

In one particularly striking moment, a man is dying in the adjacent room while Blecher, post-surgery, is desperate for a sip of water that is forbidden and just out of reach. Death and thirst: “Every minute the momentous and the banal happen simultaneously,” he writes. This disconnection reappears in a moment of excruciating pain as his bandages are changed; the doctor is amazed that he didn’t “scream the whole sanatorium down.” Blecher could have, but he had been conducting an experiment based upon the observation that “while one particular nerve is assailed by pain, the rest of the body, including the brain, continues to function normally.” However excruciating it might be, pain is a highly localized “nuisance,” but ignoring it only makes the suffering worse. To attain even the semblance of control, pain must be given “unadulterated ‘attention’.”

The beauty of Blecher’s prose and the focus of his observations often pull the reader away from the depth of suffering, as does the variety of events he experiences as he grapples with the unfathomable. Some appear to be ordinary—he dines with other patients and goes to the cinema—but in the end, his experience is foreign and isolating. The dining hall is “where the patients ate their meals while lying on gurneys wheeled to the table by porters in this vast and seemingly ordinary room.” In the cinema, a row of gurneys occupied by patients lines the back wall. Amid these experiences are descriptions of hanging dogs, a “petite Parisian girl” smoking “a cork-tipped Craven A cigarette,” a gentleman checking his watch on his daily walk, and how what he sees morphs into light and shapes, colors and planes, such that “such episodes deeply shook my faith in a stable, coherent reality . . . as well as revealing the essential dreamlike quality of all our everyday actions.” Other moments examine those dream states, thoughts, reveries, and memories.

Blecher’s situation is also marked by dissociation: language, images, story, and ‘reality’ have little to which they can affix themselves. Unlike the surrealist project of making the world strange, Blecher finds the world is strange. At best, we are in a state of irreality: “we create our lives each moment through our imagination, and in that instant life makes sense, but only in that moment and only in the way our imagination contrives it.”

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Valley of the Many-Colored Grasses

Ronald Johnson
The Song Cave ($18.95)

Book Review, Poetry Reviews

by Ross Hair

First published in 1969, Valley of the Many-Colored Grasses, Ronald Johnson’s third book of poetry, consolidates the strengths of his earlier work while foreshadowing his epic poem ARK, which he began writing in 1970. The book is comprised of two parts; the first, “A Line of Poetry, A Row of Trees,” consists of a selection of poems from Johnson’s 1964 debut volume of the same title, and the second, “The Different Musics,” collects poems Johnson wrote between 1966 and 1967. The title of Johnson’s book is taken from the Valley conjured in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “Eleanora”—an idyllic place where, amidst its “thousands of forest trees” and “many millions of fragrant flowers,” the story’s narrator dwells with his cousin Eleanor and her mother.

Existing somewhere between scrupulously observed fact and visionary transmutation, the worlds evoked in “A Line of Poetry” are not only as luxuriant as Poe’s Valley, but also as utopic. “This is the Garden,” Johnson writes in “Shake, Quoth the Dove House,” “where all is a poet’s / topiary. Where even the trees / shall have tongues, green aviaries, / to rustle at his will”:

Here—
both lines of poetry, rows
of trees,
shall spring all

seasons
out ‘of the lust of

the earth,
without
a formal seed’.

In “Four Orphic Poems” we find the poet evoking Thoreau—one of several Transcendentalists that inform the poems in Johnson’s Valley—as they attempt to read the Book of Nature:

& I (like
Thoreau) sit here engrossed,

‘between a microscopic & a telescopic
world’,
attempting to read

the twigged, branchy writing

of frost, spider & galactic cluster.

As well as reading nature’s “green / script,” Johnson also reads what others before him (poets, botanists, painters, composers, scientists) have written about it. Thus, throughout the book he liberally quotes the words of others, plotting his transplanted material on the page with the care of a gardener who seeks “clear space // to cultivate // the Wild, Espaliered, Tangled, / Clipped // estate.” However, compared to the open field collage poetics of the Black Mountain poets, Johnson foregoes extemporization for a more proportioned, more serene approach to composition that circumvents the bluster his older peers could be prone to.

As much as the poems comprising “The Different Musics” continue Johnson’s fascination for the “sweet proportion / & order” of both micro- and macrocosm, they also more explicitly acknowledge the sensual, erotic forces—the “rude / & stammering / organs”—by which “NATURE CONSPIRES.” Whereas in “A Line of Poetry” we find sowers, including Johnny Appleseed, casting their seeds in dark fields, and sunflowers “heavy in the head, with / seed,” in “The Different Musics” propagation assumes more phallic proportions. This is evident in Johnson’s series of ekphrastic poems on the dream-like jungle scenes created by French painter Henri Rousseau. “The Snake Charmer,” for example, depicts Rousseau’s eponymous subject, a “flautist of the sinuous phallus,” amidst a lush amatory landscape wherein “two pale fox-gloves secretly erect themselves, // deeper within the thicket” and “soft, foliaceous / labials” suggest fellatio.

The erotic charge of “The Different Musics,” and the new perspective it brings to Johnson’s cosmopoiesis, recalls the transfiguration that the Valley in Poe’s “Eleanora” undergoes following the sexual awakening of the story’s young protagonists. “A change fell upon all things,” Poe’s narrator writes: “And life arose in our paths; for the tall flamingo, hitherto unseen, with all gay glowing birds, flaunted his scarlet plumage before us.” As the young lovers’ sexual awareness burgeons and grows, new strange flowers blossom on the trees in the Valley and “ruby-red asphodel” (an omen of morality) grows where before were only daisies.

In “The Different Musics” this correspondence between sexual agency and a heightened perception of “the great grassy world” is evident in “Letters to Walt Whitman,” a suite of ten poems that answer the poet’s Leaves of Grass. “But I have come O Walt,” Johnson writes in Letter III, “for the interchange, promised, of calamus, / masculine, sweet-smelling root, / between us”:

Calamus, ‘sweet flag’,
that still thrusts itself up,

that seasonally thrusts itself up for lovers.

This “interchange” often occurs via homonyms and double-entendres. In Letter II, for example, “the vast organic slough / of the earth, / the exquisite eye / —as myriad upon myriad of dandelions— // seeding itself on the air,” adumbrates the ejaculatory act implicit in the foregoing exhortation: “I have come O Whitman.” At the same time, such dissemination also speaks to “the intimate kernel,” the germinal life force, of the “ample prairie” that is Whitman’s Leaves of Grass: “The intimate kernel putting forth final leaf // from The Valley Of The Many-Colored Grasses.” Here, “leaf” suggests both a “stalk of grass” and the page of a book: Whitman’s, Johnson’s, and Nature’s.

Johnson writes in “Letters to Walt Whitman” of having “lain in the open night // till my shoulders felt twin roots, & the tree of my sight / swayed, / among the stars.” A similar fusion is evoked in Johnson’s earlier poem, which quotes Henry David Thoreau’s elegiac essay “Autumnal Tints”:

            ‘When Men Will Lie Down
                        as Gracefully & as Ripe—

            with such an Indian-summer serenity
            will shed their bodies
            as they do their hair & nails’.

Fall leaves, Thoreau (dying of tuberculosis at the time) writes, “teach us how to die.” For, Johnson, however, who omits a portion of Thoreau’s original text—“One wonders if the time will ever come when men, with their boasted faith in immortality, will lie down as gracefully”—this image of recumbent men shuns the hubris of immortality for the more modest grace and fecundity of seasonal time and change; the “subtler harmonies, coming of growth / & of death.”

The reclining figures in both of Johnson’s poems are repeated on the cover of this beautiful new edition of Valley, which uses a photograph by Johnson’s friend Ralph Eugene Meatyard. Meatyard’s multiple-exposure technique makes his male subject appear to fuse with (or dissolve into) the rocky terrain about him. If this recalls the way in which the poet in “The Different Musics,” searching the dictionary, humbly finds “among DUST / vapor, storm, breath, smoke: // ‘the earthly remains of bodies once alive— / a confusion— / a single particle, as of earth,’” it also reiterates the affirmation that Johnson expresses throughout his book for the largesse of life itself. To have this book finally back in print, and reminding us of such verities, is simply a splendid thing.

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