On a recent trip to California, I visited an exhibition at the Getty Villa Museum titled “Persia: Ancient Iran and the Classical World.” As I marveled at artifacts from a bygone age, I wondered why antiquity fascinates us. For one thing, there is romance in history—when we encounter distant lands and times, we are compelled to contemplate how other peoples lived and worked, how they managed their economies and governance, what they believed and taught to their children, and so forth. Moreover, the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern region is the root of Western civilization. The Persian Empire of 550-330 BC was the world’s earliest empire, operating for over two centuries on a vast scale—from the Nile valley and Anatolia (Asia Minor) on the west through the main Iranian plateau to the Indus valley and central Asia on the east.
As it turns out, three recent books offer a wealth of information about this ancient empire and its founder, Cyrus the Great. There are not many sources to piece together the biography of a man who lived 2,500 years ago, but historians have done an amazing detective job with extant records, including several ancient Greek books—notably, Historia by Herodotus (“father of history”), Persica by Ctesias (a Greek physician at the Persian court), and Cyropaedia (“education of Cyrus”) by Xenophon—as well as a number of cuneiform inscriptions and clay tables in Mesopotamia (today’s Iraq) and Persia (Iran), all found in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The narratives of Cyrus the Great in Matt Waters’s King of the World and Stephen Dando-Collins’s Cyrus the Great understandably overlap in content. Both books also use a non-technical language; nevertheless, they show significant differences in style and depth. In King of the World, Waters, a professor of ancient history at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, discusses how Cyrus rose from a young prince of a small city state (Anshan in southwest Iran) to overrun the Median empire in northern Iran in 550 BC, the Lydian empire in Anatolia in 547 BC, and finally, Babylon in 539 BC. King of the World is a handbook on all things Cyrusian, with scholarly end notes, a comprehensive bibliography, and thirty-nine illustrations dispersed throughout the book.
By contrast, prolific writer Dando-Collins in Cyrus the Great takes a more journalistic tack; he gives, in twenty-one brief chapters, a sweeping account of the life and political career of Cyrus, emphasizing how Cyrus became many things to many people, including “founder” of the Persian Empire and “liberator” for the Babylonians and the Jews captive in Babylon. We learn that Cyrus’s name is mentioned nineteen times in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament), and he is the only non-Jewish man of antiquity referred to as God-sent Shepherd or Anointed One (Ezra, 45:1-2).
In 1879, during excavation of a great temple in Mesopotamia, a barrel-shaped cylinder of baked clay with Babylonian inscription was uncovered. Named the Cyrus Cylinder, it is now preserved at British Museum in London. The inscription is a proclamation by Cyrus as to how he entered Babylon peacefully, brought justice and liberty to the people, and restored temples and religious freedom. A readable translation of the Cyrus Cylinder is given in King of the World. Indeed, the title of Waters’ book comes from the first line of Cyrus’s declaration: “I am Cyrus, King of the World, Great King.”
Broader in purview, Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones’s Persians: The Age of the Great Kings recounts the birth, growth, and fall of the Persian empire under the Achaemenid dynasty. Like Waters, Llewelyn-Jones is a prominent scholar of ancient Persia, though on the other side of the Atlantic; he teaches at Cardiff University, Wales, and directs the Ancient Iran Program of the British Institute of Persian Studies in London.
Llewelyn-Jones has distilled a great deal of recent research on the Persian empire into captivating prose. After Edward Said’s Orientalism (Pantheon, 1978), many scholars tried to re-narrate histories of Eastern civilizations through fresh eyes. Llewelyn-Jones has done this for ancient Persia, drawing on some Greco-Roman documents, but also on Iranian inscriptions, arts, and archeology. The author acknowledges that the great kings of the Persian empire, like other empire builders, accomplished their feats through imperial ambitions and military conquests. Nevertheless, he argues that we should not fall into the Greco-Roman cliché of the Persian kings as “lustful, capricious, mad tyrants.” In fact, the Persian empire respected pluralism, and the kings did not impose the Persian language, religion, architecture, and customs on the peoples of their empire (as the Romans did, for instance). Persian palaces were decorated by artworks commissioned to artists of various ethnicities, and thirty different ethnic peoples lived under what Llewelyn-Jones calls Pax Persica. The Achaemenid Persian empire designed an efficient governance based on “provincial administration” introduced “the first use of coinage,” built “first-rate roads,” the most important being the Royal Road which ran for 2400 km from Susa in Persia to Sardis In Lydia, and created “the earliest forms of the Pony Express.” The empire was conquered in 330 BC by Alexander the Great, who paid respect to Cyrus the Great by visiting his tomb twice—although, as Llewelyn-Jones remarks, Alexander did not live to enjoy the rewards of his world conquest, as he died in Babylon on his way back to Greece at age thirty-two.
As we go back in time with books such as these, words from ancient languages gain our curious attention. At the end of Persians: The Age of the Great Kings, Llewellyn-Jones explains the Old Persian pronunciation and meaning of the names in his narrative that may now sound strange and meaningless. For example, Achaemenes means “a person with a friendly mind”; Cyrus means “humiliator of the enemy”; Darius means “holding firm the good.” While some of these ancient Persian names are rare now and some persist in modern Western usage, all of them stand for living, breathing connections to our roots.
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Franny Choi and Courtney Faye Taylor are two compelling poets of our fraught political moment who succeed in capturing the pulse of the American now. The two poets take different paths; in The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On, Choi offers an expansive meditation on our troubled society and its dystopian state, while Taylor, in Concentrate, channels heartrending research about one forgotten victim of racial injustice into a larger indictment of American institutional racism.
“Good Morning America” provides a sense of Choi’s provocative and well-crafted political verse:
Catch up—it’s the anniversary of the aftermath of another bad massacre, and I’ve got plenty of seats. Come in, I whisper
to the wailing in the attic, Come in to the thunder, to any sound that’ll shake me from doom’s haze. Dispatches from Kenosha,
Louisville, Atlanta, arrive, arrive like a steady kickdrum of sparrows spatchcocked by gravity, little nevers,
little couldn’ts; too late to stop the video,
too late, too late.
Choi deftly captures here the tumult of our American moment; in this, she joins poets such as Danez Smith, Morgan Parker, and Justin Phillip Reed. The image of sparrows “spatchcocked”—literally split open at the spine to lay flat—evokes images of police brutality, mass murder, and other events that have indeed become a “steady kickdrum” of injustice. We’ve seen the smartphone videos surface with endless evidence of American racism at work.
The poems in The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On are spare in language and brutally direct; Choi’s honest style of attack gives her poetry stinging irony. However, Choi doesn’t preach. Her instinct is to avoid commentary and instead to use her keen eye and ear to lay out the facts. In an age during which the very nature of truth and fact have been contested, Choi captures the moral conundrum implicit in Hans Christen Andersen’s tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” As Andersen does in his parable, Choi challenges the reader to see the truth behind our delusions, spin, and split seams of absurd reasoning. She reveals the truth hidden under the imaginary cloth of our showy malfeasance.
Choi’s list poem “Things That Already Go Past Borders” is a perfect example. The title immediately undermines our simplistic belief that building a physical border wall will prevent all future threats. “Things That Already Go Past Borders” begins:
trade deals; pathogens; specific passports; particular skill sets; vegetables; car parts; streaming rights; seasonal workers; some insects; certain birds; religion; dialect; music at the right volume; headlights; human remains; wireless signals; all manner of money; of memory; people
This mix of abstract and concrete nouns suggests the insoluble paradox of trying to keep out of the country “trade deals” and “vegetables,” or “religion” and “human remains.” The irony is heightened when we consider how ubiquitous American culture has already become, spreading globally despite the efforts of the most advanced of nations.
In “Science Fiction Poetry,” Choi is again ironic. The tag at the start of each line is “Dystopia of,” and by repeating the word, Choi plays with hyperbole and understatement to undermine the term’s grim prophecy. The Oxford Englsh Dictionary defines “dystopia” as an “imagined state or society in which there is great suffering or injustice, typically one that is totalitarian or post-apocalyptic.” Choi contrasts this “imagined state” of “great suffering or injustice” with what we see today in plain sight—for example, the contrast between the discomfort of sitting “all day in an air-conditioned conference hall with no sweater” and the suffering of “houseless people and boarded-up houses on the same city block.” She continues: “Dystopia bail out the coal plants if you want to live” and “Dystopia very lonely on Mother’s Day.”
In the end, Choi points out how, historically, this dystopian self-delusion has been cyclical and generational. She draws on the struggles of her Korean grandmother and great-grandmother and her own childhood memories of discrimination in the U.S. Like Andersen, Choi points to the bizarre paradox between what truth tells us and what American society would have us imagine, and reveals how we equivocate between our claims to morality and our already existing semi-totalitarian injustice. Through poetry that is stunningly well-crafted and fresh, Choi bares the naked realities under our thinnest of ethical pretensions.
• • •
In 1973, the author Alice Walker searched through the overgrowth of a segregated cemetery, the Garden of Heavenly Rest in Fort Pierce, Florida, before stumbling upon the unmarked grave of Zora Neale Hurston, a literary star of the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston was rescued from her anonymity and recognized as a victim of cultural and economic racism. In a like manner, poet Courtney Faye Taylor, in her new book Concentrate, searches the impoverished cemetery of Paradise Memorial Park in Santa Fe Springs, California. She is looking for the grave of Latasha Harlins, the fifteen-year-old Black girl who was shot to death in Los Angeles for supposedly shoplifting a $1.79 bottle of orange juice. Soon Ja Du, the fifty-one-year-old woman who shot Harlins in the back of the head, was convicted of voluntary manslaughter and sentenced to ten years in prison, but her sentence was suspended to five years of probation and community service with a restitution of $500. Du’s light sentencing was one of the events that sparked the 1992 Los Angeles riots.
Taylor never finds Harlins’s grave—her remains were allegedly exhumed in a cemetery scheme to dispose of minorities in mass unmarked “piles” while burying lucrative customers in traditional graves.
The title of Taylor’s book, Concentrate, is a provocative one: It refers partly to the fact that the bottle of orange juice Harlins was accused of stealing was the cheap concentrate variety, not the tonier kind that is a staple of middle-class suburbanites far beyond America’s food deserts. Concentrate has several definitions, according to Merriam-Webster: “to bring or direct toward a common center or objective, i.e., focus”; “to gather into one body, mass, or force”; and “to focus one’s powers, efforts, or attentions.” Indeed, Taylor has sharply focused on a singular objective: to concentrate on the undiluted truth and formidable outrage that Harlins’s death provokes to this day.
Through prose poems, found poems, essayistic freeform, and visual imagery from leaflets and in collages, Taylor seeks to restore Harlins’s dignity and bring the injustice of her death back to national attention. As with the murder of George Floyd and the growth of the Black Lives Matter movement, a new effort is being made to preserve the memory of victims of injustice such as Treyvon Martin, Breanna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, and to draw the focus of a nation too often distracted and overwhelmed by the sheer number of episodes of racist violence which play out and disappear in our daily news cycles.
In the poem “Arizona?” we are introduced to Taylor’s beloved Aunt Notrie. As a young adolescent girl, Taylor listens to her aunt give her “The Talk”: that discomforting lecture about how Black boys and girls in America must navigate a racist society to ensure their survival. While Notrie does Taylor’s hair, she implores the child “<*keep still now*” as Taylor replies “>I’m trying to.” Notrie tells Taylor to “concentrate” on the story of Latasha Harlins and her death in order to drive home the dangers Black people face on a daily basis should they not practice passive and deferential behavior around whites. Taylor says she is “trying to” keep still when her aunt says:
<Ain’t about trying, it’s about doing. How else you plan to survive? Live a life of trying and you just end up tried . . . All that child was tryna buy was a drink.
<Arizona?
<South Central.
Aunt Notrie mentions the death of Trayvon Martin to point out that this threat is real to all Black children regardless of gender:
<Boys ain’t the only cause of chalk- ines. You got that allergy to sixteenth birthdays too, understand?—*sit up straight*—This was OJ.
Taylor’s language is concise, and her tone is direct—her messages are sobering but poignant. Harlins died at fifteen. Trayvon Martin died at seventeen carrying Skittles in his pocket. Taylor is told she may never reach sixteen just for being a target of white suspicion.
In “A thin obsidian life is heaving on a time limit you’ve set,” the racist assumptions behind surveys of both white and Black women, in the magazines Country Living and Ebony/Jet respectively, are revealed. The women must identify their three greatest fears: The white women list “1. Nuclear war in US / 2. Child dying of terminal illness / 3. Terminal illness of self,” while the Black women list “1. Dogs / 2. Ghosts / 3. CCTV.” Taylor’s take on this is nothing short of dazzling:
Stereotypes are centipedes at ease in bowls of bleach. Or liberation lit
with wicks, and then Katrina—that’s a stereotype. When company’s mixed. I’ll pet
king shepherds, adore mausoleums, suck my teeth in corner store camcorders, although
privately—under nouveau R&B and the tutelage of quick weaves—the Chesimard in me counts horror on
a matte black abacus. There is no fear on earth that has ever gone unhad or
unbereaved, but the Diaspora won’t have it be known that dogs, ghosts, and CCTV are
a melody defining out costs, copywriting our loss.
The lethal music of Taylor’s language, with its internal rhymes and unfettered consonance, is evident: “lit” joins with “wicks,” “R&B” with “quick weaves,” and “unbereaved” with “CCTV.” We hear the speaker’s sharp sarcasm as she points out the angry undercurrent of her thoughts, which must be suppressed in mixed company; we hear too how she silently counts the many racist horrors through history on her “black abacus.” Concentrate inventively inserts edgy, caustic observation under the veneer of a complicit understanding. In language that festers as though buried alive, Taylor succeeds in disturbing even the most silent of cemeteries and in resurrecting the desecrated dead.
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Holy Profane / Permitted Forbidden Gouache, ink and pencil on watercolor paper, 9” X 11” / 2018
Raised amidst Yiddish endearments, I learned how to draw very young. Political activism in high school, including Ban the Bomb, Civil Rights, and Anti-War demonstrations, led to a few years on Magic Forest Farm, a leaderless, egalitarian, West Coast commune. My drawings of country hippie life, (under the name Judith St. Soleil) were published in several books, including Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Epilogue. Thus I became a professional artist before I even graduated college.
Along with raising three children, I studied Art and Psychology at Cooper Union, Lone Mountain College and USC, all the while drawing, painting, making collages, publishing artist’s books, teaching art in colleges and writing for ARTweek Magazine (1986-1991), and since 2000, as Art Editor of NASHIM, Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies and Gender Issues (U.of Indiana Press).
Since 1993 I have been designing and publishing limited edition and unique books, under the imprint Bright Idea Books. These have been acquired by numerous public and private collections, including Yale U, The New York Public Library, UCLA, U. of WA, U. of Denver, U. of Michigan, Arthur Jaffe Center for Book Arts, and UC, Berkeley.
My book Life Support Invitation to Prayer, (Penn State Press Graphic Medicine Series, 2019) was reviewed by Julie Stein for the Winter Issue 2020 of Rain Taxi.
In February 2022, an online interview with Rain Taxi’s Eric Lorberer, was conducted with myself and CS Giscombe about our book Train Music Writing and Pictures, (Omnidawn Publishing/ Oakland, 2021)
I worked on this book, which was originally called Praise Emptiness, all during the Covid pandemic, with Philip in LA and me in Jerusalem. Considering art from every era of my adult life, he chose to include so many, that Philip eventually changed the title to Praise Emptiness Essays Verbal and Visual.
I would like to mention how I came to use hand-drawn letter forms for the book cover and chapter titles. I was at a friend’s house and a book cover with a hand-drawn font caught my eye. It was Prince of Mist by Carlos Ruiz Zafón. I loved how it looked and tracked down the designer, Jon Gray (who goes by 318.gray). I was inspired by his work to hand draw the words on the book cover and all the chapter titles. This gives, I think, the weighty content of the book a bit of a cheering up, “Unhappiness,” on page 33, being the best example.
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INTERVIEWS
Judith Margolis and Philip Miller: Let Us Now Praise Emptiness | interviewed by Yael Samuel Rebecca Goodman: Why Write About the Shoah Now? | interviewed by David Moscovich Yxta Maya Murray: Art and Atrocity | interviewed by Will Corwin Patrick Parr: Slice of Life | interviewed by Arthur Shattuck O’Keefe
FEATURES
If and Only If: Imaginary books reviewed | by Scott F. Parker The New Life | a comic by Gary Sullivan
Love, Loosha: The Letters of Lucia Berlin & Kenward Elmslie | Chip Livingston, ed. | by W. C. Bamberger My Life as a Godard Movie | Joanna Walsh | by Joseph Houlihan Hotel Splendide | Ludwig Bemelmans | by Phia Holland Postscripts | John Barth | by Allan Vorda A Kidnapped West: The Tragedy of Central Europe | Milan Kundera | by Steven G. Kellman Not the Camilla We Knew: One Woman’s Path from Small-Town America to the Symbionese Liberation Army | Rachael Hanel | by Joseph Houlihan Saved: Objects of the Dead | Jody Servon and Lorene Delany-Ullman | by Tom Patterson
FICTION REVIEWS
An Autobiography of Skin | Lakiesha Carr | by Nick Hilbourn Any Other City | Hazel Jane Plante | by Eleanor J. Bader City of Blows | Tim Blake Nelson | by Chris Barsanti Siblings | Brigitte Reimann | by Daniel Byronson Mrs. S | K Patrick | by Linda Stack-Nelson Tell Me I’m an Artist | Chelsea Martin | by Joseph Houlihan The Loophole | Naz Kutub | by Nick Havey
POETRY REVIEWS
Early Works | Alice Notley The Speak Angel Series | Alice Notley | by Patrick James Dunagan A Summer Day in the Company of Ghosts | Wang Yin | by Jeffrey Cyphers Wright Spectacle | Lauren Goodwin Slaughter | by Havilah Barnett in ghostly onehead | J. D. Nelson | by Zack Kopp Paradise is Jagged | Ann Fisher-Wirth | by Jacob Butlett Triptychs | Sandra Simonds | by Tiffany Troy The Wine Cup | Richard Berengarten | by Michael Jennings Lyon Street | Marc Zegans | by Lisa Francesca
COMICS REVIEWS
Armed with Madness: The Surreal Leonora Carrington | Mary M. Talbot and Bryan Talbot | by Paul Buhle
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I met Jerome Sala in a college class in Chicago in 1970. We became fast friends and, always being hipper than me, he introduced me to many strange byways in poetry, art, and music. I moved to New York City while he continued writing poetry and creating new ways of presenting it in Chicago; in 1981, he was crowned the first “heavyweight champion” of competitive literary bouts in that city, in a format that pre-dated (and inspired) the poetry slam. A few years later, Sala moved to New York City, where he and his spouse, the poet Elaine Equi, have been a vital part of the city’s poetry scene.
Sala, who holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from New York University and works as a copywriter, is the author of eight books of poems, the latest of which is How Much: New and Selected Poems (NYQ Books, $20). Other titles include Corporations Are People, Too! (NYQ Books, 2017), The Cheapskates (Lunar Chandelier, 2014), and Look Slimmer Instantly (Soft Skull Press, 2005). His poems and essays have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Conjunctions, Pleiades, Boundary 2, Rolling Stone, among other places, and he keeps a blog on poetry and pop culture called espresso bongo.
Jim Feast: It used to be noted how advertising and political platitudes were woefully diluting terms such as “democracy” or “freedom”; now, as you point out in poems such as “To Content,” it seems all language has lost significance. In response, your poems often take words from corporate jargon that never had any meaning in the first place and infuse them with a wild vitality. Is this one of your goals?
Jerome Sala: Definitely. Having worked as a copywriter for many years, I witnessed how sometime in the ‘90s, all types of creativity—music, video, writing, etc.—got dumped into a single category, “content.” Just as industrial capitalism gave birth to new abstractions such as “labor power” and “value,” the information economy now gave birth to this abstraction, and “To Content” is about this change. It begins:
you are like a word-picture-video flow whose every element is special, but as part of a feed (feeding whom?) also generic
a textual form of meat product: like the old Aristotelian notion of “substance” nothing in itself but the something out of which all is made
Since, as you mention, language is losing its specificity, I try to bring attention to this through satire; I treat the insignificant, the debased, as a source of great truth. Philip K. Dick, one of my idols, once theorized that the Logos could be found in cheap ads on the back of matchbook covers—I play with this idea in my poetry.
JF: In “Corporate Sonnets,” a sequence of Browning-like monologues, you present a gallery of sham entrepreneurs, cutthroats, business nobodies, and flimflammers, revealing the souls of speakers who, by definition, have no souls. I wonder whether these portraits are taken from life or are invented to represent the corporate typology.
JS: When I first started writing “Corporate Sonnets,” I collected business clichés from email solicitations, work conversations, business magazines, online ads, and motivational books. The idea was to satirize the language by collaging these expressions—none of the poems were portraits of actual people. But I discovered something surprising as I wrote: though the sonnets were made of nothing but jargon, they started to seem, almost by accident, as if they were characters speaking—Browning-esque, as you mention, or perhaps even like the voices in Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology. Here is the first “Corporate Sonnet” I composed:
I don’t know if I still have the bandwidth to think outside of the box. I’m good at identifying the low-hanging fruit but innovation? Disruptive technologies? That stuff may be for the millennials to decide. Good luck to them. As for me, well, there comes a time in all our lives when you’ve got to just drink the Kool-Aid and get with the program. Ok, sure, you’ve no longer got the mojo to break down any silos, but at least your morale is no longer in the toilet. I’m still entrepreneurial and proactive, I’m collaborative, competitively priced and non-reactive.
The fact that this collection of expressions sounded like a someone baring their “soul” made me wonder if our souls were in fact made of clichés. In any case, when I performed the “Corporate Sonnets” at readings, it wasn’t just people who worked in offices that appreciated them; social workers, academics, and factory workers related to them too. It seems all walks of life are now defined by their jargon—and people are delighted when you make fun of it.
Today, cliché has invaded all realms of language. Sometimes I think that a dramatic play in which the actors communicate only in cliches might be both hilarious and poignant—it would “speak” to our moment in a particularly engaging way. As Umberto Eco quipped: “Two clichés make us laugh. A hundred clichés move us.”
JF: In a dialogue with Jack Skelley on the Best American Poetry blog, you say that in your poetry you often take “the most fleeting instances of culture and write about them as if they were holy monuments.” In conversation, you’ve told me this nuanced approach to pop culture was something you witnessed in the Chicago art and writing scene, and I wonder if you can say more about that here.
JS: One of the Chicago artists I was thinking about was Kevin Riordan, who created the cover for How Much? and many of my other books. With a connoisseur’s eye for trashy culture, he takes pop influence into a whole new dimension, collaging imagery not just from icons, but more esoteric sources. My wife, the poet Elaine Equi, guest-edited an issue of LAICA Journal (Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art) with Riordan on the theme of “discarded icons.” The contents of the issue, derived from ads, comic books, film, etc., wasn’t merely pop, it was obsolete pop—in a way, what was being celebrated was the fact that our culture is impermanent. Such an approach to pop culture is also influenced by punk, another strong force when I was growing up in Chicago. As an example of how Riordan’s pop collage approach has affected my writing of poetry, here are a few lines from “Hollywood Alphabet”:
I am an amateur alien living in Amityville in a Batman costume, on leave from Babylon 5. I can’t tell a cat from a canary from a Wes Craven movie from a William Castle movie yet I get déjà vu when I think of Philip K. Dick dancing with Judge Dredd after dancing with a wolf. T.S. Eliot once said that ethnographic study offered a form of empowerment for Everyman – that and exploitative cinema. Well maybe he didn’t. . . .
Hollywood, you see, is more about image appropriation than individuation— as such it’s a Janus-faced town, a kind of Jurassic Park where dinosaurs like Steven King, Freddy Krueger and Stanley Kubrick have gone extinct quicker than you can say Herschel Gordon Lewis, or the Legend of Hell House.
JF: The approach of treating mass culture as if its icons “were holy monuments” is a perspective not unknown in universities—an environment you are familiar with, since you have a doctorate in American Studies. However, something not typically found in campus productions is the slashing humor you use in such works as “Let’s Hear It for Frederick’s of Hollywood.” Indeed, you often have a triple-barreled comedy, poking fun at the absurd solemnity of pop culture, the pretensions of academic studies of pop culture, and the sacrosanct classics of poetry, which also come in for some good-natured swipes. How did your use of humor develop?
JS: There are three influences I’d like to mention when it comes to satiric/comedic touches. First, I’ve always loved comedians such as Rodney Dangerfield, Jerry Lewis, and Sarah Silverman. Second is a very traditional literary mode, the mock-heroic—I’m thinking here of Swift and Pope, who, to achieve their satiric effects, would write about commodities such as makeup and earrings as if they were mystic, alchemical objects.
Third is having worked as a copywriter. Marx, a great satirist himself, admired capitalism’s tendency to profane whatever it readied for sale, and an ad writer experiences this process in a very intimate way. You work with the arbitrariness of words—anything can be made to mean anything else. From this perspective, not just pop culture but academic study of it can seem a bit pompous. Nevertheless, I value “theory” and academic criticism highly; such writing helped me get through my job as a copywriter by exposing the ideological clichés that fuel business writing (something satirized in “Corporate Sonnets” and many of my other poems).
Speaking of ideology, it’s funny how even a classic cartoon series like The Flintstones reflects it. Historical research suggests that Stone Age societies were communistic; in the cartoon series, though, the society we see is a thriving, industrial capitalist one. The beginning of my poem on this series alludes to this goofy transformation:
stone age communism turns capitalist
owning property working for the man and loving it
natural as a brontosaurus crane or a purple pet dinosaur dog named Dino
JF: I see your work as addressed to a specific audience. In your early Chicago performance poetry, there was a raucous give and take between you and the audience, with listeners often taking lines as individual insults or jokes. Now, in less raucous days, the audience is incorporated in each poem; not only is a sketch provided of the persona speaking the piece but there is an implicit profile of the audience this speaker is addressing.
JS: Thinking about audiences reflects, I guess, a vain wish that what I write could extend beyond a strictly poetry audience. In the old days, Elaine and I performed to crowds that were literary, arty, and punk. This mix is called out in a playful way in an early poem, “In the Company of the Now People”:
I wasn’t going to talk about all you over-the-hill go-go dancers but here you all are in your little white go-go boots and there’s Joe Tiger and Lenny Leopard along with the lady wrestler with a bone in her hair and mamma mia what next? a Dalmatian in a tutu? it just makes me stop and think— I must be in the company of the now people
I guess you could say this early work addresses the nightlife of the crowd. Later, I started addressing daytime life—office work, for example. The approach turned to satirizing business talk, or even business fashion, and the funny ways the drama of nightlife gets funneled into the banality of daily work.
I’m not sure whether such writing appeals to a specific audience or not, but, judging from response at readings, people seem to get a kick out of poems written with this goal in mind.
JF: Both you and Elaine are fascinated with everyday products and how they change over time, but there is an interesting variation in the way you write about them. In her poem “Monogrammed Aspirin,” for example, she examines with a phenomenological lucidity how she reacted to the change in pill shape of Excedrin. By contrast, in your Coke sequence, you reflect on the philosophical implications of product change. What do you make of your mutual love of these objects—and the difference in the way you approach them?
JS: I think what both of us find appealing in these common objects and products is their very commonness. We both believe, in keeping with that Philip K. Dick quip I mentioned earlier, that if you’re looking for secrets about the way a culture works, you need to look at what you are numb to—the banal items you encounter daily. As you say, Elaine’s approach is more phenomenological, literally—phenomenology is her favorite branch of philosophy. In her poem “The Thing Is,” for example, she writes about how objects lack “the inner life” once bequeathed them; they have become cold, reified things. Her writing, influenced by Francis Ponge, rediscovers the aura of objects in witty, often humorous ways. An unusual feature of her style is that her writing can be mystical, even visionary, and humorous at the same time. If Elaine’s work is more concerned with the “object” part of the commercial object, I’m more fascinated by the marks of commerce it bears. What caught my interest about the marketing of New Coke, Classic Coke, and Cherry Coke back in the ‘80s was how the flavor of each carried an ideological message: New Coke’s sweetness preached the optimism of youth (it was closer to Pepsi, a brand marketed as “young”), Classic Coke the seriousness of tradition, and Cherry Coke predicted our current moment, in which brands turn profits by marketing diversity.
JF: When we were in college, you introduced me to an older painter, Lady Bunny, and her Bohemian friends. The Bohos, I learned, had preceded the Beats and considered themselves the real outlaws. Your verse sometimes portrays this division between outsider groups. In poems such as “Beatnik Stanzas,” where you intone, “no madness / no angels / . . . / no gone daddios / no haunted lightning,” you look askance at the Beat zeitgeist; in other pieces, such as “The Stoners,” you speak of a more authentic underclass group that contains “rogue impulses.” I see this as you suggesting that even if some countercultural groups may end up seeming “square,” there will always be a group resisting the corporate program.
JS: What I was satirizing in “Beatnik Stanzas” was not the actual Beats themselves, who produced some of my favorite writing, but the commodification of their image (think of the classic sitcom The Many Loves ofDobie Gillis or Roger Corman’s wonderful film A Bucket of Blood). That’s why the poem is filled with goofy lines like “my visioned darkened / and I threw away my turtleneck / in a dream.” But the phenomenon you mention, one generation casting doubt on another, helped me see how what’s cool can become cliché within the space of a few years. In comparison, a poem like “The Stoners” displays a hint of optimism. As you suggest, it states that no matter how the image of “the rebel” is commodified, a new generation appears with a workaround; punk, for example, appropriated the appropriators—repurposing trashy culture for its own uses—and that appropriation has already been reappropriated, as might be expected. Nevertheless, when something becomes a cliché, there is usually a segment of the culture that abandons it. Lightning cannot be housed in a bottle. As Bakhtin wrote, “There always remains an unrealized surplus of humanness . . . All existing clothes are always too tight, and thus comical.” Or as “The Stoners” puts it,
How is it then that these flaneurs continually rise from extinction
Are they something more than themselves— rogue impulses without words or images of their own but which nevertheless, like a flood pick up people, houses and trees along the way to a destination they never reach?
Poet, novelist, and translator Anna Moschovakis won the International Booker Prize in 2021 for her translation, from the French, of At Night All Bloodis Black by David Diop. Her latest novel, Participation, also has a lot of “French” in it; possibly written as an echo of her previous novel, Eleanor, or the Rejection of Progress of Love (Coffee House Press, 2018), this new work offers a probing meditation on love. Fortunately, the book’s framing device cuts through any risk of it being overly sentimental.
Participation follows a narrator, E, as she vacillates between the gravity of two reading groups, Love and Anti-Love. E explains: “Anti-Love is not, to be fair, billed as Anti-Love. It’s billed variously as resistance, revolt, revolution. Sometimes it’s billed (tentatively or defiantly) as Self-Love.Love bills itself as itself, eponymous and proud.”
Following the Oulipo tradition of expanding through constraint, Moschovakis employs various experiments, letting the novel unspool through thoughts, fantasies, anecdotes, dialogues, and more. Moschovakis gives her characters from the reading groups letter-names without genders, as well: “This missive earned a single black heart from S, one of the members of Love I’d never met. I jolted when I saw their heart, then I liked it back.” The desire that expressed without gendered language ripples in interesting ways, energizing the description of a prelude to a kiss and dispatches from a live blog in the wake of a disaster. As the book accelerates towards its finish, there is increasing entropy and beautiful irresolution.
Throughout, Participation remains smart, frank, and sexy about its subject: “There is an abundance of emotion—enough years, enough fucks and near-fucks and pseudo-fucks, enough expectations unanswered because unheard or unsaid—and it is that abundance that is known: a partial knowing, as excess is always, paradoxically, partial.” This arch sexiness has the appeal of Marguerite Duras in The Lover or The Ravishing of Lol Stein.
As a poet, Moschovakis has effectively employed and interrogated axioms. She does the same in her fiction, animating the ideas in Participation with language. There is the notion of bodies constituted through exchange—“We absorb such unverifiable facts from conversation, and they become a part of us, they become us”—and she
describes mathematical intuitionism as a metaphor for communication: “Intuitionism is based on the idea that mathematics is a creation of the mind. The truth of a mathematical statement can only be conceived via a mental construction that proves it to be true, and the communication between mathematicians only serves as a means to create the same mental process in different minds.”
Of course, everybody does not occupy the same reality, and even as we describe the world, we can never describe the whole world. This tension, and the tension between love and anti-love, participation or non-participation, or how to live whenthere is no good way to live, is the central theme of the novel. This tension as it relates to love and desire is enunciated in ways that lead the reader to ponder what might be a “good enough” love.
Participation does not have quotes in the title, but one might well imagine them there. E is a material girl in a material world; she burns, she desires, and she dreams. Her fragmented transmissions ring a warning bell, and the result is affecting.
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Cathryn Vogeley uses three hallmarks of effective storytelling in her memoir, I Need to Tell You: vulnerability, uncertainty, and vivid scenes. Consider the opening paragraphs:
My eyes squeezed shut while the ting of metal instruments broke the silence. As if my chest had lost its elastic, I breathed in short, tight spurts. The ceiling tiles with their tiny holes looked down on me as my chin tilted upward. Exam gloves snapped; metal wheels moaned across the cold floor. Dr. Franklin stood from behind the sheet. “No doubt about it. You’re pregnant.”
Vogeley, unmarried in 1968, discovers she is pregnant after her first year of nursing school. Her boyfriend, Gavin, says he can’t get married—this pregnancy must be kept secret. Vogeley’s Catholic mother arranges for her to see her priest cousin Edward, to talk about "the problem,” and the pair arrange for her to be admitted to Roselia, a home for unwed mothers.
When Vogeley goes two weeks past her due date, she suggests to another Roselia resident that they jog in the winter courtyard to induce labor. Her description of the gunmetal sky and the thin layer of snow on the ground pull the reader into the frigid scene. We can see her “gripping both edges of my navy wool coat . . . schlumping along the sidewalk, hands under my belly, a bushel basket with a floating watermelon.”
The girls of Roselia are warned not to look at or hold their infants for fear they will want to keep them. But when Vogeley is handed her baby in the taxi back to Roselia, she can’t help but look at her daughter. “Those moments in the cab, less than the time it takes to brew a pot of coffee, were our entire lifetime together.”
As time passes and Vogeley begins to tell her story, she discovers the people in her life are accepting. Her sister shows compassion and love, and her next boyfriend, Jimmy, doesn’t seem to care. The couple are mismatched, but Vogeley’s urge to be married overwhelms her doubts. “Just the designation of ‘Mrs.’ before my name would give me status, announce that someone wanted me, and allow me the right to have a legitimate child,” she states.
Vogeley has two more girls, and she throws herself into being a wife, mother, and homemaker while working as a nurse. But she knows there is something missing in her life. She tells herself she cannot think of her first baby ever again, but the haunting guilt remains. As her children get older and begin separating from her, she feels increasingly alienated from her life, and after hitting a low point, she starts college classes and convinces Jimmy to go to counseling with her. He doesn’t engage, and they divorce.
Vogeley begins to build a new life, first achieving certification as an ostomy nurse, then a master’s degree in nursing. She meets her future husband, Charlie, through a dating service. With him, she finds real love and acceptance of her past, and when she realizes she exhibits symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, she begins counseling anew. The therapist suggests she look for her baby, a search that proves long and frustrating. As she moves from the solitude of shame to the loving acceptance of family, Vogeley’s account of the process and her examination of the changing laws on secret adoptions are enlightening.
Throughout I Need to Tell You, questions build: Will she have the baby, will she keep her? Will she look for her daughter, and will she find her? How will she leave the past behind and finally accept herself? While a happy ending isn’t guaranteed, this moving memoir makes all these questions resonate.
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On September 13, 2023, the Twin Cities-based literary organization Rain Taxi presented a virtual event with acclaimed Irish author Anne Enright as the kickoff to its annual Twin Cities Book Festival; Enright discussed her new novel, The Wren, The Wren (Norton), with celebrated American author Francine Prose. In this unique book launch for the U.S. publication of the novel, the two writers discussed how the book came to be, the role of poetry in it, the anti-Romantic stance of Irish women writers, and more. A replay of the event (with optional closed captions) is free to view at Rain Taxi’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/raintaxiinc.
ANGELA RODEL
Friday, July 28, 2023
Rain Taxi was delighted to present translator Angela Rodel for a pop-up literary salon in celebration of her receiving, with author Georgi Gospodinov, this year’s International Booker Prize for the novel Time Shelter — the first time a Bulgarian work of fiction has won this prestigious prize. Rodel (originally from Minnesota!) discussed her translation work and life in Sofia with Rain Taxi editor Eric Lorberer. The event took place in the home of Rain Taxi Board member Eric Ortiz.
MEGAN KELSO
Thursday, June 8, 2023
Acclaimed cartoonist Megan Kelso made her first visit to Minnesota to celebrate the publication of her new book, Who Will Make the Pancakes (Fantagraphics). Kelso gave a reading enhanced with audio and was then joined by local cartoonist and Uncivilized Books publisher Tom Kaczynski. The reading took place at Next Chapter Books in Saint Paul.
RAJA SHEHADEH
Wednesday, May 17, 2023
Renowned Palestinian author Raja Shehadeh began his US tour for We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I (Other Press) with a Rain Taxi sponsored event in the Twin Cities! Shehadeh read briefly from his book, gave a scintillating talk about its genesis, and then was in conversation with Joseph Farag, a professor at the University of Minnesota who specializes in Palestinian literature. This event was held at the East Side Freedom Library and co-sponsored by the Arab American culture organization Mizna. Thank you to all! A video of the event (with optional closed captions) is free to view at Rain Taxi’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/raintaxiinc.
RAIN TAXI 25TH ANNIVERSARY PARTY
Wednesday, May 10, 2023
On May 10, 2023, Rain Taxi held a belated 25th anniversary celebration at the newly restored Granada Theater in uptown Minneapolis, with musical performances, author readings, and fantastic food and drinks! Thank you to everyone who celebrated this milestone with us.
This event was co-sponsored by DISPATCH and the Granada Theater.
TWIN CITIES INDEPENDENT BOOKSTORE DAY PASSPORT 2023
April 24-29, 2023
Another successful Independent Bookstore Day is in the books! Thousands flocked their favorite indie bookstores with the Twin Cities Bookstore Passport in hand to celebrate.
This event was sponsored by Finishing Line Press, The Givens Foundation for African-American Literature, Graywolf Press, Professional Editors Network, The Book House in Dinkytown, Candlewick Press, The Friends of the Saint Paul Public Library, Haymarket Books, Lerner Publishing Group, The Loft Literary Center, Milkweed Editions, Mizna, and the University of Minnesota Press.
For children of the 1990s, the 2001 movie Legally Blonde is a runaway favorite. It’s also a great model for a rom com, which YA author Robbie Couch knows—though, in his eyes, the plot could use a little reinvention for young LGBTQ readers. Following the success of his debut, 2021’s The Sky Blues, Couch’s second novel, Blaine for the Win, transports Elle Woods to Chicago, but in this world, she’s a gay teen boy named Blaine Bowers; while Elle followed her ex-boyfriend to Harvard Law, Blaine follows his into their high school election.
On the surface, Blaine seems to be thriving. He’s got a great boyfriend, he lives with his favorite aunt, his friends are stellar, and he’s got the best side hustle he could hope for: painting murals. That is, until his boyfriend—a golden child archetype who would be a nightmare to date in real life—dumps him on their anniversary; according to Joey, Blaine is not serious enough for him. Joey is going to be their future president, after all, and he needs a Jackie O on his arm, not a whimsical muralist who showed up to the fanciest restaurant in Chicago covered in paint specks from his latest project.
In a bid to win Joey back, Blaine decides to run for class president. He’s never participated in student government before, but that’s not going to stop him, and his friends are more than happy to help. His best friend Trish launches the campaign with an insightful listening tour, realizing that past student governments have been too focused on themselves and their positions to accomplish much. Blaine (meaning Trish) is going to change that with a brilliant plan to address mental health at their school, a topic in desperate need of attention.
Between Blaine, Trish, and the rest of their friend group, the underdog story becomes the heart of the novel. Blaine flames out after the debate—public speaking isn’t for everyone—but his campaign still has a shot, though when cunning fellow teens throw a wrench in his plans, it looks like the election might be lost after all. Just when Blaine is ready to throw in the towel, Couch does what he does best: writes lovable companion characters who turn everything around for the better.
Teenagers, including the protagonist of this novel, are selfish, fickle creatures. Blaine makes mistakes and does things that should imperil, if not completely cost him, his relationships—but he’s real. And real teenagers aren’t perfect, but when they’re written by Robbie Couch, they are compelling and relatable. As depictions of queer characters become increasingly nuanced in YA fiction, Blaine for the Win will garner readers’ votes.
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A virtuoso with words, the prolific Scottish poet, novelist, short story writer, playwright, and essayist George Mackay Brown remains too little known in literary circles. “I have never seen his poetry sufficiently praised,” no less than Seamus Heaney opined. Heaney repeatedly extolled Brown’s work, claiming “since the beginning of his career he has added uniquely and steadfastly to the riches of poetry in English.”
Shadowed by tuberculosis most of his life and in his later years by cancer, Brown died in 1996 at age seventy-four. In 2021, to mark the centenary of his birth, Scottish publisher Polygon issued Carve the Runes: Selected Poems and Simple Fire:Collected ShortStories. The same year, Polygon also published a new edition of Brown’s classic 1969 treatise, An Orkney Tapestry.
A Roman Catholic convert, the intensely private, granite-jawed author with an impish smile was given to spells of depression. Especially in the early stages of his career, he took refuge in drink; ill health placed the lifelong bachelor on the government dole. Biographical speculation on Brown’s relationships with women is wrapped in a cloud of unknowing.
“I think the only perfect poem or piece of music is pure silence,” Brown said in a 1987 interview in Ron Ferguson’s George Mackay Brown: The Wound and the Gift, one of the few book-length critical works on the author. “The silence which follows a beautiful piece of music or poem is richer and more perfect—something towards which the music or poem aspires, but never quite achieves.”
Numerous honorary degrees and awards came his way, including the Order of the British Empire. When his 1994 novel, Beside the Ocean of Time, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Brown fretted over the attendant publicity and gave no public readings. The final poem in the last book Brown published in his lifetime, Following aLark, captures his stance:
A Work for Poets
To have carved on the days of our vanity A sun A star A cornstalk
Also a few marks From an ancient forgotten time A child may read
That not far from the stone A well Might open for wayfarers
Here is a work for poets — Carve the runes Then be content with silence
The Orkney archipelago, with its roots in fishing and farming and Viking inheritance, lies off the north coast of Scotland. Brown grew up in the seaside town of Stromness on the biggest island, Orkney, otherwise named Mainland. Most of his life was spent there, except for stints in Edinburgh, where he studied under fellow Orcadian poet Edwin Muir at Newbattle Abbey College. Once in the big city, Brown became part of the circle of hard-drinking poets who frequented the Rose Street pubs—Hugh MacDiarmid, Norman MacCaig, and Iain Crichton Smith among them.
Brown did for the Orkneys what William Faulkner did for his fictional Yoknapatawpha County: he conjured a literary universe, often set in the past, from the daily life of ordinary people. The Orkneys bear a hard, elemental beauty from which this bard shaped a sacramental dimension, as in “The Death of Peter Esson: Tailor, Town Librarian, Free Kirk Elder,” an exquisite sonnet that begins:
Peter at some immortal cloth, it seemed, Fashioned and stitched, for long had he sat Heraldic on his bench. We never dreamed It was his shroud he was busy at.
A Calendar of Love, Brown’s first book of short stories published in 1967, prompted a review in TheObserver to note the author “really does possess the magician’s touch. . . . to lighten up the most humdrum detail of an ordinary life and transform it into something unforgettable.”
Brown’s first novel Greenvoe appeared in 1972 and won the Scottish Arts Council Prize. In this bittersweet comedy, an Orcadian island finds itself in the shadow of a sinister, mysterious military-industrial project called Operation Black Star, which leaves the precious patterns of island life suddenly vulnerable: “Afternoon was always the quietest time in the village. The fishermen were still at sea. The crofters had not yet unyoked. There was little sound in Greenvoe on a summer afternoon but the murmur of multiplication tables through the tall school window, and the drone of bluebottles among Mr. Joseph Evie’s confectionary, and the lapping of water against the pier.”
A year later came Brown’s most ambitious novel, Magnus, the story of a saint and martyr that stands at the center of the author’s entire output. As told in the Orkneyinga Saga, Magnus Erlendson vied with his cousin for the Earldom of Orkney. After years of civil war, the two met on the island of Egilsay for a peace conference, and to end the conflict, Magnus went willingly to his execution, a blood sacrifice echoing Christ’s. Brown’s telling adds a dash of magic realism when the 12th-century story of Magnus fast-forwards to the modern era and the martyrdom of Dietrich Bonhoeffer at the hands of the Nazis. The time-shift reminds us that the old patterns come around again and again wearing new clothes (or uniforms).
Magnus features a striking meditation on Christ’s martyrdom: “That was the one and only central sacrifice of history. I am the bread of life. All previous rituals had been a foreshadowing of this; all subsequent rituals a re-enactment. The fires at the centre of the earth, the sun above, all divine essences and ecstasies, come to this silence at last — a circle of bread and a cup of wine on an altar.”
Brown’s posthumous Collected Poems appeared in 2005. A year later came Maggie Fergusson’s essential biography, George Mackay Brown: The Life. Along with Polygon’s centenary titles, these books offer readers access to a singular literary figure, one who railed from his remote outpost against Western culture’s post-World War II torrent towards standardization. There are critics who consider him a Luddite, but better to say Brown staked out his ground as bold counterpoint to the white noise that would snatch us away from the numinous. Brown set out to re-enchant the world, and at his best, he did. Let’s give him the final word:
Death, critics say, is a theme that nags through my work: the end, the darkness, the silence. So it must be with every serious artist, but still I think art strikes out in the end for life, quickening, joy. The good things that we enjoy under the sun have no meaning unless they are surrounded by the mysterious fecund sleep.
