by Rasoul Sorkhabi

As Anglophile readers and art lovers already know, the Bloomsbury Group included several British writers, artists, and intellectuals who lived, studied, or worked together in or near London’s historical Bloomsbury district in the first half of the twentieth century. Many of these figures are little known today, but some, like Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster, are still household names. Two recent books, both profusely illustrated and written by authorities in the field, rejuvenate the memory and legacy of the Bloomsbury men and women who, even though they did not consider themselves an official organization, ushered in new waves of artistic expression.

The Bloomsbury Group began in 1904 when Vanessa Stephen (aged 25) and her siblings Thoby (24), Virginia (23), and Adrian (21) moved from their parental home to a new one in Bloomsbury. Their father, the prominent literary critic Sir Leslie Stephen, had died in February that year, and their mother Julia had passed in 1895, after which the family lived in grief. The four siblings, all intellectuals, wished to leave their conservative, patriarchal, gloomy Victorian background behind and create a “house of their own.” As Virginia recalled after she married Leonard Woolf in her account titled “Old Bloomsbury,” “We were full of experiments and reforms. We were going to do without table napkins . . . we were going to paint; to write; to have coffee after dinner instead of tea at nine o’clock. Everything was going to be new . . .”

Thoby Stephen, a Cambridge graduate, invited his circle of friends to join the Stephens’ Thursday evening “at home” gatherings; known as the Cambridge Apostles, this group included Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf, Clive Bell, John Maynard Keynes, and E.M. Forster. The Cambridge contingent was greatly influenced by the English philosopher George Edward Moore, author of Principia Ethica (1903), who believed in the importance of physical beauty, pleasure, and personal relationships in life, rather than the abstract, metaphysical, or idealistic views of the nineteenth century—an idea which the Stephens siblings adopted wholeheartedly as well.

Frances Spalding’s The Bloomsbury Group (National Portrait Gallery, $24.95) is published by the National Portrait Gallery in London, which houses many photographs and paintings of Bloomsbury Group members. Spalding (who has previously written biographies of Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, and Duncan Grant) touches on the life stories of nineteen Bloomsbury writers, painters, and intellectuals. Vanessa and Virginia Stephen, who did the most to hold the group together, are justifiably pivotal figures in the book; missing from the list, however, are their brothers Thoby and Adrian. Although Thoby died in 1906 (an untimely death from typhoid fever he contracted during a trip to Greece), his death brought the Cambridge Apostles and the Stephens closer. Adrian introduced not only his gay friends Duncan Grant and David Garnett but also Freudian psychology to the group, becoming (along with his wife Karin) one of the first British psychoanalysts. Vanessa, shortly after the death of Thoby, married Clive Bell, and the couple had an open marriage; indeed, open marriages, triangle relationships, homosexuality, and bisexuality were common among the many members of Bloomsbury.

Reading through Spalding’s book, it becomes apparent how close-knit the Bloomsbury Group was. For instance, Freud’s Complete Psychological Works—published by the Woolf’s Hogarth Press, which also released books by T. S. Eliot, Vita Sackville-West, and Virginia Woolf  herself—was translated and edited by James Strachey (Lytton’s younger brother). The index for the entire twenty-four volumes was compiled by Frances Partridge, the wife of Rex (“Ralph”) Partridge, who was previously married to Dora Carrington (Lytton Strachey’s partner).

Wendy Hitchmough’s The Bloomsbury Look (Yale University Press, $45) uses nearly 180 archived photographs, paintings, and cultural materials to visualize the lives and works of the Bloomsbury Group. Hitchmough is well positioned to write this fascinating book: She was curator for more than a decade at Charleston Farmhouse in Sussex, where the Bloomsbury painters lived and created art works beginning in 1916 (Duncan Grant continued to live there until his death in 1978).  The Bloomsbury Look begins with an informative introduction to the group’s imagery and identity, followed by chapters analyzing the group’s photographs, fashions, and their decorative arts and paintings—all a big part of the group’s activities.

Perhaps at no point in history had literary and visual artists so closely interacted with each other as happened in Bloomsbury. Virginia Woolf, in search of a modern literary style, was so impressed by the post-impressionist works of her painter friends that she set aside the rigid rules of plot and characters, and created novels based on “stream of consciousness” and “inner dialogue,” as evident in Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Orlando. Paintings of humans with no facial features found their equivalence in Woolf’s novels as non-articulated feelings and meanings. The Bloomsbury artists were not interested in big-picture politics or historical heroes; they were more concerned with ordinary people and small things of daily life.  Not surprisingly, the members inspired and supported each other in many ways; they read and critiqued each other’s works; they painted each other’s portraits; they wrote thousands of letters to each other and wrote about each other in diaries as well as books (Virginia Woolf’s biography of Roger Fry was published in 1940, and E.M. Forster’s biography of Virginia Woolf was published in 1942, only a year after Woolf drowned herself).

The sheer quantity of writings, paintings, and cultural materials that the Bloomsbury Group produced is staggering. The group was active, on and off, for six decades, from 1904 until the death of Vanessa and Clive Bell and Leonard Woolf in the 1960s. Interestingly, as the Bloomsbury leaders were fading away, their legacy was starting to be rediscovered by a new generation of free spirits, hippies, and feminists. The Bloomsbury Group came mostly from upper-class families; they, however, rejected bourgeoise mentality, and created their own sort of fashionable Bohemian lifestyle. Centennial celebrations of the Bloomsbury Group in 2004 coincided with the death of Francis Partridge, aged 103, the last surviving member of the group.

As the bibliography at the end of Hitchmough’s book shows, a large number of books have been published on the Bloomsbury Group: There are individual biographies as well as coffee-table books, encyclopedic handbooks, and detailed histories of the entire group (one of the earliest ones was written by Quentin Bell, Vanessa Bell’s son). Nevertheless, these two new illustrated works by Spalding and Hitchmough bring a fresh breeze to the life stories and legacy of the Bloomsbury Group, which has exerted a huge impact on literature, art, thought, and even fashion in our age.

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Pamela Uschuk
Red Hen Press ($16.95)

by Tara Ballard

“So you think that you can live remote / from city streets paved with bullet casings, / mass shootings in churches, refugee mothers in cages,” Pamela Uschuk questions in “A History of Morning Clouds and Contrails,” challenging both herself and the reader. Fortunately, it’s a challenge well met; Refugee reveals itself through a tapestry of well-crafted poems of urgency and the hope for meaningful change. Uschuk, winner of an American Book Award, here rejects the assumption that nature poetry is apolitical or unengaged with the social realm, instead asserting that climate crisis is inseparable from human crisis, domestic and international. She also rejects the myth of the solitary poet and draws on community, which she defines as an ecosystem of people, flora, and fauna. Through poems that powerfully render a world where individual action holds value and every life is one that matters, Refugee chronicles the many ways in which environmental and political disaster, cancer, and racism affect our ability to exist, live, and thrive. Through the literal and the metaphorical, the sensory and the narrative, Uschuk urges this recognition: “The mountains are burning and we cannot sleep.”

Uschuk begins Refugee with two epigraphs that serve as an anchor, pulling the reader into a bardic relationship in which the poems become messengers; they ask for writer, speaker, and reader to address their own obligations to the content and how it relates to the wellness of the world. Uschuk offers first Audre Lorde’s powerful acknowledgment that “My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.” She follows this with an excerpt from Adam Zagajewski’s “Try to Praise the Mutilated World,” a poem that riveted the world in the wake of 9/11. With these epigraphs, Uschuk sets the tone and the expectations for the collection ahead, as if warning: Yes, reader, I implicate myself, I implicate my country, and you, too, must join the work for social, political, and environmental justice.

Refugee is divided into four sections, titled “Skull Song,” “Axis,” “Liquid Book of the Dead,” and “Speaking of Angels and Ghosts,” respectively.  The sections grow in length, from seven poems to eleven to fifteen to nineteen, creating a crescendo-like accumulation, of story, tension, and the sensory as a place for healing and discourse.  Throughout, images are interwoven with specific political moments from 2016 to 2021, harrowing occasions that highlight the need for greater understanding and action.

In poems such as “Solar Eclipse in the Land of Sandstone Hoodoos and Cranes,” the collection highlights the speaker’s varied interactions with her environments, including beautiful (but not romanticized) depictions of Arizona, Florida, and the Himalayas. In many instances, Uschuk weaves resonance between these locales and the resilience needed to overcome cancer: “I have to make you sick to make you well, / the oncologist says, five months / we’ll scour each cell of your abdomen clean.” In doing so, Uschuk departs from the taught hierarchy of worth and recognizes how survival and death equalize us all, from the human to the hummingbird. In the sonnet “Green Flame,” the speaker portrays one such hummingbird and its death after hitting the poet’s window: “Too weak from chemo not to cry / . . . / I lifted her weightlessness into my palm.” The poem ends: “Mourning doves moaned, who, who / oh who while her wings closed against the tiny body / sky would quick forget as soon as it would forget mine.” Through poems like this, Uschuk cultivates a position of empathy and reflection, understanding that both are required for forward motion.

Throughout Refugee, Uschuk does not shy away from the difficult, and she uses particular species as entry points into much-need conversations about human rights. In “Cracking One Hundred,” Uschuk narrates a scene where “preschoolers worry about butterflies” being able to fly over the U.S.-made border wall along Mexico; by conjuring this image, Uschuk addresses the camps where children and parents seeking asylum are separated and held under inhumane conditions. The poem closes with a reference to the president’s declarations from “across the lush White House lawn where Monarch butterflies, / who’ve migrated all the way from Mexico, land / on bright rose petals.” Likewise, in “Talking Crow,” Uschuk immerses the reader in our nation’s history of violence, from lynch mobs to continued police brutality: “Here bullet holes chip downtown streets, / alternative facts to ropes slung over oak / branches that still remember”; the poem builds to the sonic echo of crows imitating the words of “mothers, wives” and “a child’s witness face”: “Don’t shoot. Don’t / shoot”—an irrefutable exposure of the oppressive systems that pervade American society.

Reaching the final poem of Refugee, “Gardenias at Easter,” one is compelled to start again at the beginning; the realizations she has offered permeate like “the gardenias that resurrect us, . . . call us back // ecstatic to the forgotten.” In this powerful collection grounded in the now, Uschuk calls for the re-membering and reconstructing of perceptions between place, animal, plant, and human.

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A.E. Copenhaver
Ashland Creek Press ($19.95)

by Garin Cycholl

The lost subtext of climate change is not in the mounds of data or winnowed diversity of lost species and habitats, the redrawn frost lines or earlier arrivals of “spring”—it’s in how denial has disfigured humanity. Is there even language for the uncanny shapes taken by time and space in this moment? Deep into A.E. Copenhaver’s novel My Days of Dark Green Euphoria, her protagonist Cara pokes the news buttons of her vehicle’s radio, thinking, “What fun to ponder the vocabulary of climate change with a reporter . . . whether climate breakdown, crisis, or emergency was more appropriate . . . while roaring down the freeway at seventy-seven miles per hour, getting fourteen miles per gallon.”

Winner of the Siskiyou Prize for New Environmental Literature, My Days of Dark Green Euphoria travels at that velocity. Cara, who seeks to maintain a negative carbon footprint, works at a nonprofit that advocates for more ecologically responsible choices and daily sorts through the Whole Foods dumpster for her breakfast on her way to work. She refuses to establish a permanent address; rather, she only housesits, shrinking into the lives of others. Stung with perpetual self- (and species-) awareness, she journeys within a “small, sad self.” From the moment that she was appointed as the “primary outhouse coordinator” in a school internship, this cursed insight has led her into an “eerie kind of evolutionary exile.” Her tolerance for other human beings has almost disappeared, although she realizes that solitude is not sustaining. Locating herself somewhere between the prophet Jonah’s Nineveh and Thoreau’s Walden, she has reached the recognition that there is “nothing noble anymore in living isolated from society.”

Through a housesitting gig, Cara meets Dan. Their relationship “works” through mutually satisfying sex and heightened “alone time” due to Dan’s intense travel schedule for his job, but Cara tries to imagine stitching her life further into his. One night, she puts him through an unknowing test as she watches him deal with a spider in the bathroom. Will he simply kill it? She furtively observes him in this eco-moral dilemma, then celebrates that he has to leave on business immediately thereafter, joyful “lest I allow my disappointment in him to fester into passive-aggressive reality.” The next weekend at brunch she meets Dan’s mother, Millie, who takes an entranced Cara out for a pedicure, street tacos, and a memorable trip down the liquor aisle in Target. Fascinated by the depth of Millie’s unthinking consumption, Cara crashes somewhere between the cosmetics counter and the drive home, having been derailed by their pilgrimage for fun.

The anxieties of finding an impossible balance that most of us feel ring deeply and physically from the outset of this novel. A wounded creature on a wounded planet, Cara seeks “some kind of sublimation . . . so [her] entire being disappears into ecological harmlessness.” Numbed and enraged, she follows cycles of self-denial and hopelessness; neuro-prophet and YouTube viewer, she recognizes that the necessary remedy is somewhere “deeper than molecular repair.” In COVID-tide, where so many of us feel spun between guilty binges of junk TV while also being laid open to the ugly realities at hand, Copenhaver’s insights strike a chord. Cara laments, “This was not the land of freedom; this was the land of dependency and disconnect,” and she realizes that everything is “bought and paid for . . . with the very fabric of our existence.” Against and within this insight, Cara works to come to terms with being alive in an increasingly broken world. With language that both makes the reader laugh out loud and awakens a cutting empathy, the novel follows her embodied journey splendidly.

Given its humor, sharp voice, and playful tone, readers might be tempted to label My Days of Dark Green Euphoria as Sex in the City turned inside out, with fewer characters and fuller ecological angst. Copenhaver, though, reaches much deeper into our consciousness of the shifts around and within us. This is a tough novel, replete with Cara’s consumption of graphic videos of the food-industrial complex and intense moments of personal disintegration. At the opening of the novel, she notes, “It’s almost a talent, to read the subtext of the world.” Copenhaver has brought that story into the light of our eerie present, recognizing the force of denial and how deeply planetary crisis has been a part of ourselves and our days.

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How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts

Matt Bell
Soho Press ($15.95)

by Matthew Duffus

Matt Bell’s Refuse to Be Done is destined to join the upper echelons of the pantheon of craft books. Like Peter Ho Davies’s The Art of Revision (Graywolf Press, 2021), the book focuses on an oft-neglected aspect of fiction writing: revision. What’s more, he provides useful advice specific to novel writing, another underrepresented aspect. Bell’s three-draft approach begins not with a rough draft but with a “generative revision.” The emphasis here is on “an exploratory, organic, and above all playful approach” that will get words on the page and provide fodder for subsequent drafts.

As revision is recursive, Bell notes that these are better referred to as “stages,” which require moving both forward and backward, rather than drafts. No matter where one is in this process, Bell’s guidance will assist and encourage. Each chapter contains useful subheadings that allow readers to dip in and out as needed. For instance, “First Draft: Forward Progress, Generative Revision” includes sections such as “Learn What Book You’re Not Writing” (addressing the need to narrow one’s focus) and “Feed Your Imagination” (which includes a discussion of art versus life: “You’ll need to draw upon the art/life experience you already have, while replenishing and enlarging your experiential stockpile whenever you find your supply of inspiration wearing down.”) Bell provides one of the most useful explanations of these aspects around, in down-to-earth language that will help writers achieve these aspirations.

While “First Draft” is the longest chapter, its generative approach prepares writers for the work to come. For as much time as it takes most writers to get the first draft on paper, Bell views it as “not the novel itself but an idea of what a novel could be.” Moving from this “scale model” to the novel it will become requires new strategies, including what Bell calls a “narrative outline,” drawing on work from Anna Kesey and Jim Shepard, both of whom address pacing and what the latter refers to as “the rate of revelation.” Bell uses this outline to create a plan to “better take advantage of the inherent qualities in the structure you’ve chosen.” Following this, he recommends rewriting the book, beginning to end. This is time-consuming, but he argues that “the raw confusion of what book am I writing? will recede as you become surer and surer of what it is you’re making.”

This increased confidence will propel writers into the third draft, which supplies the book’s subtitle. Bell preaches patience throughout this process, recommending shifting editing between screen and paper, reading aloud, and “break[ing] the prose into manageable chunks.” These are in service to “figuring out less what happens and more the best way to show it happening.” Refuse to Be Done’s three-draft approach may not be able to provide the what of a novel’s plot, but it will help in virtually every other aspect of the process. All writers, whether first-time or experienced, will benefit from allowing Matt Bell to serve as their novel-writing guide.

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marcus scott williams
Noemi Press ($18)

by Steve Roberts

The cover of marcus scott williams’s damn near might still be is what it is immediately clues readers in to the lower-case, mostly punctuation-free writing they’ll encounter throughout the book’s six sections. Anyone who regularly communicates via text will be familiar with the style, abbreviations, and slang the author uses, though grammar purists will be instantly nauseous—and they deserve it, because the prose here connects more genuinely because of this neglect of the rules, not despite it. The book is organized around one to two page “posts,” not unlike captions you might see on a writer’s Instagram page or website. The similarity these passages (sometimes as short as one sentence or less) have to social media is apparent instantly, and it heightens the material.

damn near takes place in a multitude of locations—Denver, New York, Milan, London, etc.—as well as at a great deal of unidentified places on U.S. roads. Often reading like a travel diary, the book draws the reader in with williams’s blunt sincerity about things like eating, drinking, and rest stops, as well as by the inclusion of a dozen or so companions never fully described in exposition. This is a technique first popularized by Frank O’Hara, and it’s a good one, as we come to see the characters not just as the author’s friends, but as our own. The sparkling, near-poetic prose comes across as the result of happy accidents instead of deliberate intention; the author feels like a gifted bohemian who, again like O’Hara, might step away from a party to write a bit before returning.

This global trek isn’t in any way mired down by pretension, and williams isn’t afraid to mention the realities of Panda Express or sleeping on couches. No matter the scenery in front of him, he never fails to mention some telling detail, like that every step is taken in “espresso-splattered Doc Martens.” This counterpoint is fresh compared to so much writing by individuals eager to express how streetwise they are. Williams is a world traveler, but he deliberately grounds the reader in his voice, establishing that this is a personal view, not a pristine, unopinionated travel guide.

No matter the subject, the voice of prose either sinks or swims; here, all this clever technique is buoyed by williams’s down-to-earth voice, which is full of painful self-awareness and surprising humor; the book takes itself seriously, but only just enough, a line that is hard to define no matter where you’d like to be on it. Ultimately, damn near might still be is what it is succeeds because williams trusts his audience not to require him to dress his talent up, which is as startling as it is appreciated.

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Edited by Jessica Hundley and Pam Grossman
Taschen ($40)

by Patrick James Dunagan

What makes a witch a witch, and what is witchcraft for? These are among the central questions explored in the lavishly illustrated Witchcraft, the latest release in Taschen’s Library of Esoterica series. Images of witches throughout the ages and in various styles are robustly represented, with visualizations of the coquettish and the stridently sexy appearing alongside hags of old and earth mothers of today. The illustrations are notable for being reproduced at remarkably high quality—which is essential, for often the artists have included key details buried in murky colors and shading. It’s wonderful to be able to notice what’s lurking in dark corners.

Not surprisingly, a colossal number of brooms, cauldrons, ghouls, devils, goats, wands, and outdoor fire dances make appearances in Witchcraft, yet there are also tranquil moon-lit scenes and lush woodland vistas aplenty. Nowadays witches are far less commonly viewed as raggedy and grotesque, flying around on brooms in the night and menacing town and countryside alike. Much discussion in this book is thus given over to unpacking the vast number of preconceptions and misunderstandings about witches, part of a growing tolerance that helps witches today stand proud, announcing themselves to the public without fear or hesitancy. In many communities, particularly in the arts, declaring oneself a witch is even fashionable.

For that reason, it’s also not too surprising that many an artist in Witchcraft self-identifies herself, or rarer himself, as a witch. Practitioners of the arts and the occult readily share affinities: “Like a witch, the artist conjures, shapes reality, manifests . . . One makes magick. One engages in ‘the craft.’” Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington, for example, are two artists associated with Surrealism whose work is included in this book. Close friends while living in the expatriated European community in Mexico City, they were both influenced by occultism; in works by such artists, “many aspects of the witch in art history and in the popular imagination were revisited and reimagined,” opening paths to a wider reinterpretation and embracing of witchcraft. Visual artists Betye Saar and Cameron, for example, both from Los Angeles, offer wonderful instances of the artist embedding (as well as embodying, in Cameron’s case) witchcraft symbolism and practice in works of art.

Many more examples of the Artist-as-Witch abound, and this book may inspire readers to think of them. In the literary world, novelist Norman Mailer's avowed maintenance of his “relationship” to substances (whiskey and pot) in his writing practice seems as witchy as poet Diane di Prima's 1980s declaration that she started putting on a few pounds in order to keep the demons out. Poetry examples are in fact numerous: Alice Notley has used the symbol of a white owl often, and during the presidency of George W. Bush, described her recurring dream of such a creature carrying him far away from the White House; Joanne Kyger developed a practice of breathing along with the bamboo across from her front porch, welcoming and congratulating its breath with her own. Witchcraft invites and celebrates readers making connections such as these, identifying the predominance of witchy practice that inundate and intersect with creative life.

Witch Janet Farrar sounds much like a poet when she makes this recommendation to aspiring witches: “Read as much as you can, but be critical of what you read. Stick to your original vision of what craft is, and don’t be swayed by those who try to shoehorn you into their form of practice.” Any MFA candidate in poetry would be wise to follow this tip. Such common-sense advice is found everywhere in these pages, as in this discussion of practicing Necromancy: “the dead will become visible to you, and you will be able to request information from them. Speak politely and wear an amulet.”

Several statements by contemporary witches demonstrate how witchcraft is not only useful, but essential in our rapidly diversifying appreciation for each other’s differences. “The witch can help us find our way through what I call ‘the evolutionary chaos of now,’” says Robin Rose Bennett, and Edgar Fabián Frías observes that “Witches banish borders and binaries and allow for prismatic visions to take root.” At its heart, witchcraft focuses on the liberation of the individual. Like all good anti-establishment heroes, “Witches only care about empire when they want to burn it down.”

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An Interview with Steven D. Schroeder

by Kenneth J. Pruitt

Steven D. Schroeder doesn’t like profiles. “From my end,” he said in our concluding in-person interview for this article, “the poems speak for themselves. If someone has questions for me, I’m perfectly happy to go along with those. I don’t think, ‘Oh, we need to talk about X more.’ Because if I wanted to talk about X more, I’m gonna throw it in the poem, and that’s how I talk about X more.”

The X of Schroeder’s new poetry collection, Wikipedia Apocalyptica (swallow::tale press, $16), is the complicated techno-existentialism of our contemporary Western life. Schroeder works as a Creative Content Manager for a financial marketing agency in the St. Louis area, a job that provides no shortage of opportunities to dwell on the shortcomings of late capitalism. He also edits the online literary journal $ (Poetry Is Currency), whose manifesto is explicitly anti-capitalist and radically inclusive.

Schroeder sees himself, though, “ultimately as a writer because that’s what I’m doing all the time. I stopped editing for quite a while, and obviously I missed it because I started again. I think the editing serves the literary community and my own writing. If you set aside the poetry aspect of it, I’m at least as much an editor as a writer.”

Despite how utterly contemporary the poems in his new collection feel, Schroeder says he’d begun drafting them in 2012, long before the idea of a Trump presidency or a global pandemic were a fathomable reality. The following exchange took place over a couple of weeks in a shared online document, perhaps a perfect space for writers to muse on poetics and their practical ramifications.

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Kenneth J. Pruitt: I’d love to start with how the book’s poem titles are ordered: Many of them are roughly in reverse alphabetical order. Given the title of the book, how interested are you in playing with expectations of a “wiki” as an encyclopedia of information?

Steven D. Schroeder: There are multiple aspects of wikis in general, and Wikipedia in particular, that I find appropriate as a title and thematic organizer for this book. First, their frequently edited nature, which pairs well with how much I tinker with individual poems and the overall manuscript. Second, the potentially valuable information coming at you in a barrage that can easily get overwhelming. Third, the amusing but harrowing petty power struggles that go on over even trivial topics.

Wikipedia is, in many ways, a valuable resource and a mind-boggling accomplishment. In other ways, it’s a fascinating car wreck and/or trash fire, and it seems tied into a lot of the techno-dystopian elements we’re currently dealing with that I’m trying to evoke with these poems.

KJP: The car wreck/trash fire aspect is so ripe for exploration. In lots of popular dystopic visions, we often have lies being sold as truth. I remember as a teacher telling my students they weren’t even allowed to cite Wikipedia as a source. Granted, that was 15 years ago. The question remains: How reliable are the speakers of this wiki? Is authorial integrity being toyed with here, too?

SDS: There are certainly fights over “truth” or “facts” on Wikipedia pages, but also a legion of unintentional errors. Beyond that, the occasional completely unparseable sentences irk me but are nonetheless in the spirit of language mangling I perform. I very much hope readers will have at least a dash of skepticism reading my book, which may not be entirely trustworthy. Or maybe that’s just my excuse if any typos got past my proofreading.

KJP: So many of the poems throughout the book use a first-person plural pronoun. Often it feels like a moral indictment, albeit inclusive of the speaker, of the reader’s complicity in the decay that occurs in this apocalypse. What is the emotional response you hope for in your reader with this constant repetition of “we/us”?

SDS: One of my reasons for the first-person plural calls back to the internecine wiki editor battles I mentioned: the idea of a supposed collective that’s actually deeply divided and fights among itself (themselves?), as the “we” narrator does in multiple poems here. I think of it as a lie the group tells both internally and as a front for outsiders.

Another reason is, as you say, complicity. I want to remind the reader (not to mention myself) that we’re almost always at least a little implicated in those situations where the “we” is in the wrong. Self-examination can help prevent this kind of poetry from being overly self-righteous.

In poems where the “we” is the wronged or oppressed party, I’d like it to suggest standing together against whatever force. Third person in those situations can come across as voyeuristic, and an “I” narrator might seem appropriative of experiences that aren’t mine, even if the mode isn’t realist.

KJP: I’m inferring a lot of first-hand knowledge about being a wiki content generator. Is that a world that you’re familiar with? Can you say more about what that world is like? It’s so fascinating to me.

SDS: Though I’ve made a few Wikipedia edits through the years, most of my knowledge comes from observation, wanting to know how things work. The talk and history tabs of contentious Wikipedia pages can be amazing if you’re wonky like me. Kooks using sock-puppet accounts to maintain their own self-aggrandizing bios, rejection of factual edits with cited sources on the grounds that they’re “opinion,” etc. I’d never get deeply involved with that subculture.

KJP: Though it’s never heavy-handed, you do grapple with current systemic inequities like racism in the book. And you also name these systems in the “about” section of the literary magazine you help run, $ (Poetry is Currency). How do you toe the line between engaging with the issues of our day and finger-wagging at your reader? I’m thinking here of a poem like “Official Incident” and how it takes the structure of a prepared press statement, which brings to mind so many deaths of unarmed Black citizens at the hands of police.

SDS: It's a tough line to walk for sure. The ways I handle it are “very carefully” and perhaps “not all that well according to some people.” I try to use absurdist wit to finesse dark subject matter into the reader’s mind, and sonics and wordplay to make the poems more of a pleasure to recite and hear. On the other hand, I’m happy to buck the line of thinking that poetry should be timeless or apolitical, as if the issues I’m talking about aren’t age-old and woven into every aspect of our lives.

In fairness, I’m wary of the tendency to write and publish topical reaction poetry much too quickly—Knopf released an anthology of pandemic poetry in November 2020, which comes across like media outlets that have pre-written obituaries ready to rush out in case of celebrity deaths. However, I also regularly see statements like the one that sparked a recent Twitter ruckus by suggesting you should never use pop culture references for fear of dating your work. As with so much of writing, it all comes down not to whether you include contemporary specifics, but how well.

KJP: Overall, most of the poems in the book are not only acutely aware of themselves as poems, but as vessels of some attempt at a capital-t-Truth. Yet, they’re overwhelmingly, winkingly sarcastic in tone. How do you see the role of humor in these poems as a means to get to the more serious themes they point toward?

SDS: A long time ago, one of my poetry friends told me that my poems start by making people want to laugh, but then punch them in the gut instead—the funny is the foot in the door. It wasn’t a conscious choice at first. I have an instinct to be funny, but also a learned tendency to go dark. At this point, it seems like I’ve developed that combination into a 90% of a poetic voice.

KJP: I don’t disagree. I’m also thinking of a poem you read at a St. Louis Poetry Center reading late last year that was an absurdist take on end notes. Though the poem was really dark, the audience was absolutely cracking up. Is there a point where the humor detracts from the seriousness of the themes of the poems?

SDS: Probably so. On one hand, I don’t necessarily mind if one of my poems goes a little too heavy on the ridiculous humor and becomes more of a grotesque litany of jokes. On the other hand, I think my instinct turns toward serious relevance quickly enough that it doesn’t happen to me too often. There’s always a point in my writing where I read a line and think “Am I still just being funny here, or am I starting to bring the weight?”

KJP: I initially always think of you as a writer of ideas, meaning that you’re typically creating narrative poems that rather concisely posit a way to view the world. However, there are some gorgeous lines in these poems (“The fastest route out retreats // faster than that. Whatever the threat…” from “Officer Lost in a Logistics Office”). Does this attention to the sonic, more lyrical aspects of the poem happen while drafting the story of the poem, or does that occur elsewhere in the process?

SDS: You don’t have to attend many readings before you realize sound isn’t a priority for a lot of contemporary poets. I’m always thinking about the sound of poems, even in the little phrases I write in notebooks, from internal rhyme and assonance to anaphora and the beat of a line. However, those earliest stages are almost always silent, until a certain point in drafting when I read the poem out loud to myself for the first time. That’s a critical step, mandatory for all my poems.

I always try to balance the sonics with the more communicative aspects. There are poems I adore that lean far more heavily on the pure sound than my brain will let me. (Donna Masini’s “Mindscreen” is an example.) I’d like to break through to that sort of subconscious or irrational space more, but it’s a rarity.

KJP: I also want to discuss the difference between injecting surrealism into one’s poems and doing intentional world-building that has surreal aspects to its reality. Can you explain that difference and which side of that spectrum you find yourself most drawn to as a poet?

SDS: I want things to be systematic, to know the “why” of them. That probably comes in part from my childhood love of fantasy and science fiction novels. My poems aren’t telling a single interwoven story in a single world by any means—I lack the attention span. My absurdism simply has a framework by which it can be understood as one aspect of a whole, rather than the strange juxtapositions being the point.

I don’t demand the same thing in my reading. Even poems with similar forms and themes can be quite surrealistic with great results. For example, Matthea Harvey’s delightful “Future of Terror” and “Terror of the Future” post-apocalyptic poem series, a big influence on my book, tend more in that direction.

KJP: Sometimes I wonder if I leaned toward poetry because it absolved me of the duties of worldbuilding over the course of a novel or a screenplay or some kind of longer work. That being said, I also know you’re into fantasy and sci-fi. Who are some writers in those genres whom you admire who do that better than poets do?

SDS: The Lord of the Rings, which I’ve read at least a dozen times, is a formative influence for me (though I don’t think you need to create your own languages and thousands of years of lineages to be a successful poet). Another fantastic worldbuilder who creates vivid speculative milieus that tie into important contemporary issues is Octavia Butler. I particularly recommend the Patternist series (start with Wild Seed). Plenty of others spring to mind: Ursula Le Guin, Philip K. Dick, George R. R. Martin, N. K. Jemisin, Ann Leckie.

KJP: It’s hard not to read your 9-to-5 professional life into “Words Revised by the Client.” As a poet with a full-time job that doesn’t involve poetry, how does the moneymaking aspect of your life as an American with a job inform your artistic life? What’s the symbiosis?

SDS: It’s not just a moneymaking job, it’s a moneymaking job focused on money! I work for a marketing agency whose main clients are banks, insurance companies, investment firms, etc. The consuming nature of capitalism and the Kafkaesque uncaring inefficiency of business feature heavily in this book, explicitly and spiritually. That said, my job also provides a solid separation between employment and personal life, so I’m not completely burned out when I write creatively.

KJP: You’re a really good performer of your own poems. Do you imagine your ideal reader reading them aloud? Do you think of your poems living primarily visually on the page or in the mouth of the reader—or both?

SDS: My imagined audience for a poem is usually myself if I were coming to it without any prior knowledge. (I know that’s solipsistic, but I’m realistic about the average size of the poetry audience.) In my poems, one thing that approach means is that I want a poem that’s engaging both on the page and aurally.

I’ve learned through long experience which of my poems perform better aloud. Despite how this answer began, I love my work making a live connection with an appreciative audience, and it’s something I’m pretty good at. Zoom readings, on the other hand, are a weird form of solitary-confinement torture for me as a reader.

Thank you for these thoughtful, detailed questions. My reflexive response in these sorts of situations is glib jokes, and this interview demanded more of me.

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A Graphic Poem
Jennifer Sperry Steinorth
Texas Review Press ($29.95)

by Joel Turnipseed

Early in her book-length erasure of Herbert Read’s The Meaning of Art, Jennifer Sperry Steinorth reveals one of the aims of her project—“Distort/the given world”—and clears out space for the shock of new recognitions: “Even/Aphrodite/is difficult.” Of course, the world being distorted is one in which women have been erased throughout—or presented only as the subject of the male gaze and its concomitant reveries. In Her Read, the odalisque snatches back the brush and pen (and Wite-Out) to stretch a new canvas: one punctuated with thread and blood from pricked fingers, possessed of its own desire and fully possessing a body hungry for iron. 

Over the 240 pages in which Steinorth tropes the very idea of “erasure” in reclaiming womxn’s representation and participation in art, she clears spaces for hope, joy, and the real work of living in and with pain, this latter most insistently: “I would like to free / colour / and so emancipate / my / shadow / from this / connoisseur’s enthusiasm for pain.” Hers is no scholar’s pain, no writing on the anguish of another subject, but a gloriously full-throated song of direct experience. She contrasts Read’s armchair celebrations of despair and struggle (referring to him throughout as “Imp”) with her reclamation of the fully fleshed self, realized in “R skin.” As the Imp and R Skin appear on page after page, the dialogue becomes something of an invitation to a new forthrightness: “I / may / step / out / with / the devil / to / escape /no no no / to / be amused at / the / ambition / of / tombs.”

Steinorth’s poetic techniques are empowered by correction fluid, embroidery, ball-point, brush wash, collage, Sharpie, and her own blood, making her engagement with Read’s Meaning truly visceral. This is a handiwork of necessity, making its voice from what is at-hand, carrying around work for the time when it can be accomplished—for and by a body that knows what it is like for one body to give forth not just a work, but another body. This is the work of informed creation: it knows itself and its efforts. There are great sections where the techniques of erasure continue the work of making the poetry physical, as when a scalpel is brought to bear on a tableau of Abraham and Isaac: “please /let / us! /re / fashion / the story.”

The work of refiguring the world of art and its meanings is vast, of course, yet Her Read does a wonderful job of tackling it in specifics, and especially in the opportunities brought to bear by erasure’s discovery of new worlds within the old words. Here, language is not the limit of the world, but a forest of signposts on the way (though often in desperate need of maintenance): “O, he art/o / o / human / continent / confine / ment / ornament / catastrophe.” Steinorth’s clearings can be hilarious, righteous, and sometimes just blunt: “NO.” Throughout, the book builds from its initial argument with Read and his patriarchy toward an engagement with just what an art that respects the bodies which produce and encounter it might require. A new sense of honesty, for one, about the pain we consume in art: “(over which, stretch the skins of human / terror, / sadism is intense / myth and folk-lore fairy tales, / and horror/we / know too little / too much about / our own righteous dog.”

A (mostly implicit) question that Steinorth’s work raises again and again as it confronts Read’s erasures of womxn is: “What kinds of erasures are worth undertaking—and how should we go about them?” In explicitly foregrounding her engagement with Read’s erasure of womxn in The Meaning of Art, she offers that there will always be a kind of violence in erasure, even where it is a necessary labor (as, say, birth is often traumatic). In making her offering, she avers that in any wreckage there may still be a thread worth saving, possibly with delicacy in the attempt. She clearly spent years chasing that thread, building up Her Read—”an embroidered wound.”

Erasure is an almost limitless technique, but it is one best served by the richness or expansiveness of the possibilities of its specific encounters. When Tom Phillips and R B Kitaj walked into that thrift store to find W. H. Mallock’s A Human Document, already waiting for Mallock’s florid prose was Phillips’ incisive wit and spirit for detournement—which gave us one of erasure’s greatest wonders, A Humument. Jennifer Sperry Steinorth is similarly matched to her material, taking Herbert Read’s The Meaning of Art as a medium for a revelatory remaking of the sites of meaning, of the possibilities of art made by womxn in the fullness of their bodies. Her Read is a transfixing journey from the outrage of one form of erasure to the boundless possibilities for discovery and invention contained in another.

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A 21st Century Anthology
Edited by Nancy Perloff
Reaktion ($35)

by Richard Kostelanetz      

Concrete Poetry has been getting critical attention since the appearance of several anthologies some sixty years ago, but Nancy Perloff wants to examine its stars more closely in her new anthology. She correctly notes that these poets were reflecting earlier Concrete Art as defined by the Dutch artist/writer Theo van Doesburg in 1930—a definition Perloff’s summarizes as, “the building up of painting with purely plastic elements (surfaces and colours) that exclude lyricism, drama and symbolism.” Thus concrete poems at their purest are, simply, arrays of linguistic material apart from familiar syntax and horizontal configurations.

Perloff’s book concentrates initially on the purposes and careers of poets from Brazil and the German-speaking countries of Switzerland, Austria, and Germany; later chapters cover countries such as United Kingdom, Japan, and “United States and Canada.” Surveying poetry by country seems old-fashioned in the 21st century, especially when talking about word-artists who, like the Concretists, traveled greatly and sometimes wrote in tongues other than their mother’s.

A major problem with earlier anthologies of concrete poetry is that many of the best examples appear to be visual poems, which defines language structures visually enhanced to a higher degree than the familiar poetic form of a single typeface in horizontal lines. Others appear to be sound poems that are meant to be declaimed for an acoustic experience unavailable from merely seeing the text.

Though these distinctions seem clear and simple, Perloff is confused when she writes, “Today we understand visual poetry as a larger category that subsumes concretism.” If subsumes means includes or absorbs, this is askew. As Dick Higgins and Bob Grumman have separately shown, visual poetry has its own tradition, one that intersected with concretism but did not define it. Likewise sound poetry. Perloff further blurs the issue when she states: “I would argue that visual poetry departs from concrete poetry in its tendency to combine typewriter text with imagery and computer graphics.” Nope, most visual poetry has used handwriting, traditional typefaces, letrasets, and then computer-generated typefaces.

Most of the poems in Concrete Poetry fill a full page (and sometimes two). Under each is Perloff’s critical gloss, never more than a few sentences long, and often brilliant, though in disconcertingly microscopic type. Regarding the cover image by the Brazilian concrete poet Agusto da Campos, which in truth is more of a visual poem, she writes: “Opening with the personal pronoun, “I,” in eight languages, on the outermost circle of text, the poem reads from exterior to interior until it arrives on the acronym ‘sos’ at the centre. The text contemplates the darkness and the mystery of the afterlife, using multiple languages to suggest that we all confront it together.”

Likewise visual is a poem by Gerhard Rühm, a Viennese who has lived mostly in Germany:

Perloff states: “This eerie poem begins with the German word for silence. A dialectic ensues between statement and question, always surrounded by ‘silence.’ First, ‘someone is looking for me’ (statement), then ‘who is looking for me’ (question), then a pared-down ‘looking for me’ (like an echo, could be a statement or a question), ending only with ‘ich.’ I cannot be found, Rühm seems to say, and so the silence reigns. The spatial division of the text enhances the mystery.” One might quibble as to whether the “spatial division” is actually a visual enhancement, but no matter.

Consider also Perloff’s gloss to “French Persian Cats Having a Ball,” a more purely concrete poem by the Scottish writer Edwin Morgan:

“Morgan’s comical French Persian Cats explores repetition by combining the French word for cat (chat pronounced ‘sha’) with a completely unrelated word, shah, which conveys the ‘Persian’ reference. He plays these homophones against the English word ‘chacha,’ which looks similar but differs in pronunciation. Intermittently, he inserts ‘ha’ for humour and virtuosity.” Bingo.

These glosses by Perloff set a new higher standard for the critical reading of avant-garde poetry, whether concrete or visual. The two pioneering critics of avant-garde poetry, Dick Higgins and Bob Grumman, would have loved them, as do I.

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