Ulises Carrión
with essays by Felipe Becerra, Mónica de la Torre, Verónica Gerber Bicecci, Annette Gilbert, India Johnson, Michalis Pichler, Heriberto Yépez
with translations by Christina MacSweeney aand Shane Anderson
Ugly Duckling Presse ($20)

by Michael Workman

Widely recognized as a source of what is now discussed loosely as the “artist book” movement, the Mexico-born, gay conceptual artist, thinker, and theorist Ulises Carrión first published the pieces contained in Sonnet(s) just prior to the twelve-issue run of his now-famous Ephemera magazine. Counter-intuitively, it’s actually not useful to discuss here the sonnets themselves, which begin with “BORROWED SONNET” and range from “EXPLICIT SONNET” to “PROSE SONNET” and so on. Part of the aspiration of Carrión’s artistic practice was a kind of “appropriation art,” which emerged out of collage and its practice of drawing directly from the lived, visual culture. It came to find greater notoriety in New York in the early 1980’s among artists such as Sherrie Levine, who appropriated many male artist’s works to powerful and important feminist effect.

In one work included here, Carrión appropriated the 1871 sonnet “Heart’s Compass,” by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and broke down the love poem into forty-four reimagined versions. In fact, it’s a bit of a misnomer to call it “appropriation”—Carrión intentionally left out any citation of Rossetti in the original chapbook, with the aim of committing outright plagiarism. Of course, as pointed out in Annette Gilbert’s essay in this collection, this is also an attempt to liberate himself and his artistic practice “from the excess of what is already existing.” Still, as a former philosophy student, it is likely the poet-artist was reading the same texts as those who eventually came to influence appropriation in the 1980s.

The sonnets here emerge from Carrión’s foundational move away from traditionalist narrative structure as insufficiently capable of providing space for his experiments, representing, in fact, a “rejection of linear language.” This accounts for a sense of the novel and other similar approaches to publication as contexts defined by a too-narrow use of books for “’utilitarian purposes’ and ‘commercial value,’” the rejection of which allowed Carrión to push forward into the polysemies of language “as a means to forge a community.”

These sonnets-as-vessels serve as “bookwork,” a portmanteau Carrión used to describe his effort to step outside of linearity into the materiality of the things language is used to describe. Semioticians might have described this as signifier and signified, but this would be an insufficient descriptor of the context in which these language acts take place. In that sense, the concept of “Materialzärtlichkeit,” referred to frequently in the back matter essays, and which the essayists in general seem to agree on, is also usefully traced to French Symbolist Mallarmé as “the ultimate point of reference and key figure for the ‘bibliographic version of site-specific art.’”

In this important republication, we are reminded that part of Carrión’s posthumous reception rests on this lineage and his rejection of originality in a way that was critical to activating artistic “networks outside institutional frameworks.” Through it, his efforts to engage community building around the expansive notions of what a bookwork could become have cemented his place in the history of a now continuously-emergent publishing avant-garde.

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Julia von Lucadou
Translated by Sharmila Cohen
World Editions ($16.99)

by Joseph Houlihan

The High-Rise Diver by Julia von Lucadou describes the world of today from an inevitable future, evoking a city deeply entrenched in surveillance, social media, and influencer culture. In this future, children are selected through trials to participate in different career and life paths. There is a periphery of the city, cut off from resources, and a center where the privileged live according to a hyper-monetized logic of surveillance and performance. Against this backdrop we meet two young women, Hitomi and Riva.

Hitomi is a psychologist who specializes in emergency interventions. She is contracted by the sport agency to bring Riva, a high-rise diver, back to her fans. Hitomi prides herself on a methodical and unflinching commitment to leaving her emotions outside her work. But her job becomes personal as she watches Riva all day through high-definition camera feeds, planning strategies for counsel and intervention.

Riva, a professional athlete, has lost the will to compete and thereby participate in the soap opera of her life as an athlete and influencer. Her sport is one of the most popular entertainments in this fictional universe: “When you open your eyes, the woman is diving headfirst from the skyscraper roof. At first you’re scared. Your body tenses up as if it were falling beside her. But then you see the diver as a bird in flight. You feel her absolute certainty that she will be able to withstand the fall.” Riva was raised within the sport and found her place there, a dream scenario, as an artist: “She’s creative. She’s not one of those divers who only perfects the standard forms. . . . Perfectionism is not a compliment. No one wants to admit it, but it’s true. What counts is creation.”

But Riva has decided to leave that world behind. She spends her time alone in her luxury loft with her partner, Aston, unspeaking. “The most popular internet conspiracy about Riva’s resignation is that it has to do with relationship drama, that Riva left Aston for someone else and that he’s now forcing her to stay with him against her will,” the author tells us. Of course, this drama is simply another symptom of why Riva has lost the will to participate.

A recent New Yorker article noted that three out of four workers identify as experiencing burnout, characterized by “exhaustion, cynicism, and loss of efficacy.” In the future of The High-Rise Diver, however, “Burnout is not a valid diagnosis. Ms. Karnovsky has completed various happiness and resilience trainings as part of her training program, far more than those recommended by the health authorities. The academy implements a rigorous mindfulness program. . . . Your diagnosis is obsolete and plain illogical.”

Julia von Lucadou captures the fragmentation of culture towards consumer choice and magnifies it, illustrating the sadness of this fragmentation. Nostalgia becomes irresistible as social media influencers adopt the lenses of archaic media to capture stories that they never experienced. This feels all the more prescient in 2021, as the collective desire for an Endless Summer takes hold. This tendency, like the manufactured memories in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, persists across the techno-consumerist morass of a life lived through fragmented media streams, social media personae, and flickering DMs.

Not a cranky luddite manifesto, The High-Rise Diver is a clear and clamoring warning bell, a classic Zen koan kick in the head. Beautiful and strange and scary, the book is a call to stick our heads above the water and breathe fresh air.

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Katie Kitamura
Riverhead Books ($26)

by Mike Alberti

Early on in Katie Kitamura’s new novel Intimacies, the narrator encounters three municipal workers walking down a pedestrian street, directing a machine with a long, hose-like protuberance. They look as though they are “leading an elephant by the trunk,” and it takes her a moment to discern what they are actually doing: painstakingly vacuuming cigarette butts from between the cobblestones. “I looked down and realized that the road was strewn with cigarette butts, this despite the fact that there were several well-placed public ashtrays on that stretch of street alone.” The men’s work, she realizes, is necessitated by the “heritage aesthetic of the city, not to mention the carelessness of a wealthy population that dropped its cigarette butts onto the pavement without a thought.”

This scene dramatizes a dynamic that will recur again and again in the novel: the narrator—an unnamed woman living in The Hague—notices a dark reality carefully concealed by a polished façade. The men and their cigarette vacuum are “one example of how the city’s veneer of civility was constantly giving way.” This short, unnerving novel is full of other examples, including when, at a dinner party, a rare book dealer tells the story of selling “forty meters” of books to an interior decorator who, caring nothing for their literary value, wants only “leather and gilt.” The bookseller upcharges him for “junk, subscription editions, encyclopedias, remaindered monographs,” and later encounters those same books in a wealthy friend’s library, a symbol of his obscene wealth that is worthless when looked at up close.

The book takes place in 2016, just before the Brexit referendum and Trump’s election, at a moment when rising fascism and xenophobia were just becoming visible to many upper-class white people in the U.S. and Europe. “I’m worried about the Dutch election next year,” one character says, “this country has a reputation for tolerance but peel back the skin of it—.” That the rest—what’s under the skin—is left unsaid is fitting. Kitamura’s characters are often unable, or unwilling, to look directly at the violence swirling in the sewers beneath them. More broadly, Kitamura is interested in whether language is capable of representing the barbarism that underlies our society, and this novel raises the possibility that it might even serve mostly to conceal that barbarism.

The most dramatic context in which this question is explored is the narrator’s work as an interpreter at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, where she has a one-year appointment. She is assigned to interpret for the high-profile trial of a West African dictator, probably modeled on Laurent Gbagbo. This job requires her to translate witness testimony describing the particularities of the accused’s crimes against humanity: to speak the unspeakable as calmly, clearly, and accurately as possible.

Unsettled by these duties, she begins to see the other interpreters differently: “They no longer seemed like the well-adjusted individuals I had met upon my arrival, instead they were marked by alarming fissures, levels of disassociation that I did not think could be sustainable.” As the trial drags on and seems to flounder, she wonders if the entire project of the International Court of Justice might be yet another veneer, thus complicit in the horror it’s meant to prevent.

When the narrator meets the dictator in person, she is struck by his ability to dismiss the charges against him, as if mass murder and ethnic cleansing were trifles and the entire trial a mere inconvenience. His power and charisma, she thinks, come from his understanding of “the depths of human behavior. The places where ordinary people do not go.” At one point, the dictator raises the question of her complicity directly, accusing the court of Imperialism and asking her why she, an American, whose country has also “committed terrible crimes and atrocities,” is in any position to judge him. These are profound, disquieting questions, and Kitamura dramatizes them with subtlety and skill.

The novel contains two other, more prosaic subplots. The first concerns the off-screen mugging of a bookseller, with which the narrator becomes slightly obsessed. The other concerns her lover, Adriaan, who vanishes early on in an apparent attempt to save his marriage. After he leaves, the narrator continues to live for several weeks in his apartment, pining, hoping to hear from him, reluctant to accept the truth. Though the stakes here are much lower, they add to the mood of menace that pervades this book, and illustrate that, even in our domestic lives, we are more than capable of averting our eyes. True intimacy, Kitamura suggests, might require a reckoning that most people are unwilling to risk.

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Friederike Mayröcker
Translated by Donna Stonecipher
Seagull Books ($24.50)

by Walter Holland

On June 4, 2021, the Austrian poet Friederike Mayröcker died in Vienna. Born in 1924, Mayröcker wrote a multitude of literary works, including prose poems, audio plays, memoirs, novels, children’s books, dramas, and a libretto, many of which garnered major Austrian and German literary awards. In 1946, she met Otto Basil, who published her early work in his avant-garde journal Plan. Later, her poems were published by the literary critic Hans Weigel, and soon after Mayröcker became a member of the Vienna Group, a loose coalition comprising mostly surrealist and expressionist Austrian writers such as the poets Ingeborg Bachman and Ernst Jandl (the latter of whom was her long-time romantic and collaborative partner from 1954 until his death in 2000). Études, a collection of prose poems and part of a three-part series, was originally published in 2013, but is now available in a magnificent English translation by poet Donna Stonecipher.

Long celebrated in the German-language world as a daring and inventive writer of the postwar period, Mayröcker was a passionate participant in the European avant-garde tradition, with all its highly mystical and experimental esotericism. Though not widely translated, her work has long been known in Europe as intense and freely associative, lyrical and wildly expressionistic. With an eclectic taste in reading and a strong rooting in modernist assemblage techniques, her poems have been described as linguistic collages, surrealist montages of language and experience. These collages frequently included fragments of correspondence, newspaper articles, journal entries, observations of the everyday, allusions to European cultural history, and quotations from private conversations.

Mayröcker had a pictorial interest in the visual that is borne out by her frequently quoted statement, “Writing poetry is like painting in watercolors. Writing prose is a hard art, like making a sculpture.” This view of the parallels between her poetry and impressionistic water color sketches can be seen in Mayröcker’s swift, though delicate, brushstrokes of text, which often blur or bleed into each other. Moods, emotions, memories, and regrets all coalesce into a stream of consciousness:

fly or flee (1) 3 wild roses in deep
grotto I plunge into purple lilacs and shimmering tears
fly or flee (I) Fauré’s études in deep
grotto green shimmering crepe paper namely portrait

The visual confluence of images such as “purple lilacs,” “shimmering,” and “deep/grotto green,” with verbs of movement such as “fly” and “flee,” and the textured medium of “crepe paper,” all provide a colorful and tactile visual fluidity. This is emphasized by the mention of the French impressionistic composer Fauré, who employed coloristic effects in his music. And indeed, Mayröcker not only draws from the pictorial, but also from musical form and composition, as can be seen in her poem of April 14, 2011:

on 1 voice : on 1 mignonette green this branchlet this blossom this
instant of a teardrop in your eye this raining in your voice swept
forth by spring this scent of white tears this scent of whiteness this
white of spring of voice this little white bell of April (= Fratres)
this whiteness of little bells = Fratres this whisper of voice this
whisper from the vineyard (“April”) these twigs little bells of April
swept away trembling delphinium cress lungwort Bach’s Virgin
chorales &c. disheveled little bird April violin handbooklet April
naked this soul weighted with sleep (= ”Fratres”) ach your voice
+ + + + + + + + + + white from spring white from April spring’s twigs
opened and blossom-amble where the plumed

This rush of romantic images, tremulous with emotion, captures through repetition and accumulative serialism the compositional techniques of Arvo Pärt, the Estonian composer of the 1977 mystical and minimalist string quintet Fratres I. Even more so, there is a tone of jubilance in this poem that speaks to the voice of spring and the “naked . . . soul weighted with sleep,” symbolizing resurrection, the soul’s awakening, and new birth. Mayröcker also alludes to Bach’s ecstatic lyrics in his famous religious motets and chorales, drawn from scripture and Germanic verse, and further to the purity of the Virgin as associated with white blossoms of springtime and tears of joy and reverence. Mayröcker clearly grasps Bach’s mastery of counterpoint and harmonic and motivic organization in this piece as well.

Mayröcker’s dense, allusive poetry, with all its alternatively beatific and disconsolate language, can be seen as a culmination of the European cultural tradition. Her diaristic poems are reminiscent of the ideogrammatic Cantos of Ezra Pound, and though a poetic heir of Gertrude Stein and Francis Ponge, she breaks free into a 21st-century post-modern sensibility, one of polystylism and eclecticism. She also seems to have drawn from her Austrian heritage the continued experimentation of the Second Viennese School, which developed the dodecaphonic system and the use of serialism in music.

Throughout études, Mayröcker shows herself to be the descendent of many European schools of thought, artistic movements, concepts, styles, and praxes: German Romanticism, Rilkean Modernism, German Expressionism, Postwar Surrealism, Postmodernism, Deconstruction, and on and on. Take, for instance, her poem of April 8, 2011:

the aroma of spring little gullet inmost sensation while the heart
cherries days : little forest bird in DADA airs and imploringly with
folded hands (namely 1 PUNK boyphriend in the “Dreschsler”
staring into the OPEN : Andreas O.)

Here, she simultaneously alludes to Dadaism; the Punk movement of the late 1970s with its fast-moving and aggressive music and subculture (as well as possibly the highly academic “Austro-Punkism” debate between young and older Austrian economists in the early 2000s); and Ulrich Dreschsler, an Austrian saxophonist and composer of improvisational jazz who was inspired by Scandinavian folk as well as Sufi music.

In many ways Mayröcker’s études acts as a Rosetta Stone, a “key” to cross-reference and thereby understand her vastly imaginative and often divergent thoughts and emotions. The collage effect of Mayröcker’s textual poems, while fragmentary and elliptical, does convey a highly Romantic tone—one committed to nature, individualism, memory, and self-contemplation.

Technically compact, the poems are in paragraph form and often superseded by short epigraphs. Utilizing Stein’s repetition and Ponge’s fascination with the simple contemplation of objects in everyday life, Mayröcker pulls us into an intimate engagement with her doubts, concerns, obsessions, and memories. Typographical and syntactical play, with frequent capitalization “errors” or misspelling of words and use of underlining, italics, and ellipses, blend together the conventions of 19th-century novels, plays, and Romantic poetry with the clipped, abbreviated slang of modern texting or conversation.

But Mayröcker is not all about obscure references and experimentation. While these poems do, of course, embody an elevated hermetic style and European aestheticism that may prove at odds with poetry of the present day, these works are also richly passionate, elegiac, and mystically personal. Her effusive and mannered textual bricolage can sound obsessive and self-dramatic, but ultimately Mayröcker prevails in her constant search for personal truth, no holds barred.

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Brecht Evens
Drawn & Quarterly ($29.95)

by Jeff Alford

Like a metropolis of vampires, this city comes alive at night, and we join Brecht Evens’s cast of miscreant wanderers in its bars and streets as they stagger towards oblivion, clarity, or a blur between the two.

An intoxicating, meticulously painted graphic novel, The City of Belgium is a technicolor carnival, a visual and formal masterwork that confidently upends conventions with its dazzling artistry. The story takes shape on pages soaked in watercolor and riddled with the clamor of roiling nightlife. Multicolored figures are drawn in what looks like a runny, felt-tip pen layered over the wet base. Packed bars and overbooked restaurants come alive in painstaking detail: checkered floors, floral wallpaper, and sartorial patterns are all lavishly illustrated. Shadows speckle the streets like reanimated ghosts, semi-transparent but bursting with vivacity. The story unfolds without panels or any traditional framing, Evens instead allowing loose scenes to recalibrate repetitively over a white background until their action gets swallowed by densely-rendered, full-page spreads, brimming with woozy marvel.

A web of protagonists emerges, many costumed as if en route to a gala. They each feel like archetypes in some theatrical pastiche: Victoria, dressed in a beaded wig like a Hollywood Cleopatra, grows restless and anxious during a night out with her sister and friends and unravels in the club bathroom; Buzz, a hulking ex-con, attempts to find a stable path forward but struggles with vices and memories from his past; Rodolphe, dressed in a Cordovan hat and a wildly patterned smoking jacket, seeks to shed his shell and find a new beginning; and Jona, the faded party boy, looks for one last memorable night before he leaves town for good. Brilliantly, all the characters are color-coded: each is drawn in a particular palette and their words are written in a unique, complementary hue.

Visually and textually, The City of Belgium is a work of decadence. Page after page of stunning artwork land like endless courses of a Michelin-starred tasting menu, any sense of stylistic temperance lost in the moment. The book’s sumptuous visuals parallel its characters’ tendency to over-indulge, and these intersecting themes create a work that is self-aware and intentional about being too rich and too potent, simultaneously about excess and an excess in its own right.

Evens continues to over-serve and over-stimulate his readers as his characters fall apart. An unshakable loneliness creeps into each of their threads: Jona has no one to party with on his last night in town, Rodolphe leaves a dear friend to wander the night in solitude, Victoria shuts herself away as her anxiety wrestles with (and loses to) her drunkenness. And while this may appear to be a story about desolation and destruction, Evens is careful to pull back from that brink and position The City of Belgium as a hopeful tale instead.

Ultimately, this is a book about gaining perspective and finding a way to see the togetherness that’s inherent to even the most solitary evenings. Evens wants us to expand our sights and notice everything around us at all times. Late in the novel, two characters philosophize about their place in a “city of millions! . . . on a planet of billions! . . . in a universe with billions of planets!” “That’s right kid,” one explains, “We contain multitudes. The voices of a thousand generations. Everything is recorded in us, all the time and for all time.” “Did you know,” he continues, “our molecules are connected to molecules all the way on the other side of the universe? All are but parts of one stupendous whole.”

The Where’s Waldo-esque over-saturation of the visuals in this book isn’t simply there for wow factor; it’s a reminder that there is so much going on in a single moment, so many lives buzzing along in tandem. In one scene, a dollhouse cutaway shows three floors of the club Disco Harem: a bustling open-kitchen restaurant on one floor, a piano bar on another, and, between them, an orgy taking place in a packed, red-lit room, its occupants literally drawn over each other in various states of sordid overlay. To Evens, this decadent beauty is the neon pulse of capital-L Life, for better or worse. Lonely, grimy stories unfold alongside beautiful, glittering ones, colliding at times like drunken, spinning atoms.

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Danielle Evans
Riverhead Books ($27)

by Serenity Schoonover

Danielle Evans’s The Office of Historical Corrections is an unflinching perspective on the most polarizing issues facing the U.S. today. Through six short stories and a novella, Evans’s protagonists—savvy, hell-bent, unapologetic women survivors—wrestle with the disparaging realities of socioeconomics, race, and gender.

The stand-out story is “Alcatraz,” where we meet Cecilia and learn about her bi-racial mother’s fight for financial reparations regarding Cecilia’s white great-grandfather’s wrongful imprisonment at Alcatraz during World War I. When the last hope for justice snuffs out, Cecilia attempts to provide closure through a reunion with estranged family members at the prison, now a tourist destination. Cecilia’s tattoo, referencing a Faulkner quotation, resonates with the pivotal role history plays in not only this piece, but every story in the book: “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.”

As a whole, The Office of Historical Corrections speaks to the importance of race in U.S. society—past, present, and future. But equally powerful, and potentially overlooked, is Evans’s candid examination on the consumptive power of grief. In “Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain,” photojournalist Rena does her level-best to negotiate a tenuous bridal party weekend. Evans examines the roots behind Rena’s risk-taking lifestyle:

People have asked Rena why she goes to such dangerous places, and she always wanted to ask them where the safe place is. The danger is in chemicals and airports and refugee camps and war zones and regions known for sex tourism. The danger also sometimes took their trash out for them. The danger came over for movie night and bought them a popcorn maker for Christmas.

The prose is somewhat discursive in “Anything Could Disappear,” but it’s a gutsy piece of writing that is hard to put down, as we watch twenty-something Vera’s search for reality within a borrowed fantasy. When a toddler is abandoned on the bus seat next to her, rather than seek the authorities, Vera says nothing. What follows is a psychological minefield as she (and the reader) try to reconcile whether Vera is this child’s ally or abductor.

A departure in style from the other pieces, “Why Won’t Women Just Say What They Want” is an entertaining, absurd parody about a nameless artist’s self-serving attempt to make amends to all the women who ever orbited his sadistic planet (and there are quite a few). While this story is dark comedy at its best, it is also a chilling reminder about the shocking exploits brought to light by the #MeToo Movement.

The novella, “The Office of Historical Corrections,” introduces us to Cassandra, a pedantic field agent with The Institute for Public History, a fictional government agency charged with setting the historical record straight in “the contemporary crisis of truth.” Like Cassandra’s Greek namesake, truth-telling proves something of a curse, a situation that only escalates when asked to rein in former agent and childhood frenemy, Genevieve. In her role as mediator, Cassandra gets thrown into a decades-old murder investigation in small-town Wisconsin. An intriguing whodunit, this piece affirms the tactical role the historical record can play regarding reparations and raises incisive questions that resonate long after the last page. Chief among them: Can the truth make a difference?

Evans’s imaginative narratives possess an uncanny ability to unpack controversial issues like gentrification, misogyny, and white privilege. The collection is nothing short of a masterful accomplishment, a negotiation between art and activism that dares to foster belief in the existence of a “last best hope.”

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Judy Halebsky
University of Arkansas Press ($17.95)

by Lee Rossi

Poet Judy Halebsky spent five years in Japan studying the theatrical and dance forms Noh and Butoh, an experience that informs her third book, Spring and a Thousand Years (Unabridged). Charming, self-effacing, and deeply reverent of Tang and Heian poetry, she offers a contemporary take on a world and world-view that flourished more than a thousand years ago.

Li Bai, aka Li Bo, aka Li Po, born in 701, is perhaps the most important presence haunting this book. We meet him in “Between Jenner and a Pay Phone” through the narrator’s direct address when she observes, “Li Bai, the shadows tonight are from street lights,” not the moon. Like him she is preparing for a life of austere simplicity as an artistic hermit: “I cut my hair flat against my forehead . . . / from now on: / only practical clothing / only blank pages.” Sometimes the writing is austere as well, borrowing images and tone from the Tang and Heian poets Halebsky so admires. But the overall effect of Halebsky’s work is warm and inviting, laced with humor and intelligence.

Li Bai is often a spokesman for Halebsky’s reservations about American life and culture. In “The Sky of Wu,” we encounter Li Bai, Du Fu, and the narrator hanging out together during a poetry workshop:

Du Fu is smoking an e-cigarette. Li Bai is laughing at him. They want to meet Charles Wright but I don’t have his number.

We don’t write the poems together, I explain, we just talk about them

Li Bai rolls his eyes

America, he says, it’s worse than I thought

This is the same character, who, in “Li Bai Considers Online Dating,” composes a “note to self: before writing profile, eat cookies / then resolve to lose weight, then drink beer.” Halebsky’s Li Bai might be an early incarnation of Walt Whitman: contradicting himself, containing multitudes.

One blurb calls this volume “a translator’s notebook,” but while it’s true that Halebsky has done frequent translations—from 2009 to 2011 she co-edited the bilingual poetry journal Eki Mae (In Front of the Station)—the “translator” in this volume is just one of several masks worn by the poet, a ploy we might expect from someone versed in Noh drama. “Poet,” “girlfriend,” and “naive American” are other masks, equally revelatory, equally reticent. A translator is charged with faithfulness to the spirit of a text, to the spirit of the author. Halebsky is less interested in reproducing texts than in reproducing their spirit in her own work. What better way to be faithful than to adopt the sly indirectness of her favorite authors, their focus on insight and truth, on the essential?

Not surprisingly, Halebsky, a poet with a postmodern sensibility, finds echoes of that sensibility in much earlier poets. In their company she is able to indulge her love of disjunction, seeming contradiction, and the incommensurate. Her own anything-but-elegant life is a declaration on behalf of hermit poets everywhere and a gentle rebuke to court ladies. The Pillow Book, perhaps the most famous book from Japan’s Heian period, was a private affair, a series of miscellaneous lists drawn from daily life at court, intended only for its author, Sei Shonagon. Like its inspiration, Spring and a Thousand Years (Unabridged) attempts to capture the ephemera and the ephemerality of life, even the most comfortable of lives.

This approach can be seen in “Glossary”—the title alluding, of course, to the mechanisms of translation—which offers a series of short, haiku-like poems, disguised as a guide to understanding:

Geographic Distribution—Range, wingspan, shade cast by tree branches, how to count whales, bird habitat, air temperature, ice floe, polar, panda, grizzly.

How do we read this list? What is its arc? Are we to feel a certain unease, as we scan the melting polar ice and visit those vanishing species? Perhaps because we in the U.S. may be reluctant to look beneath the surface, the poet helps us with a note: “This is a record of what is living now. In the future, it will serve as a historical record.” The almost offhand tone of that last sentence cannot obscure its anguish and regret.

Yet while Halebsky visits the past, she is not trapped in it; as a poet she is alive to ways that language renews itself. In “Addendum: Fifth Moon,” she notes: “these words are thousands of years old,” and yet they keep finding new ways to combine: “concrete streets with tires, a hydro river dam, legions of kung fu seven-year-olds with analog synthesizers, a ukulele revival, and a phone that can name constellations of stars.” The poet is also at times wryly personal, as in another entry in “Glossary” (“Height”) where she tells her lover, “I wish you were one foot shorter so we could talk easier standing up. And so I wouldn’t feel like a tiny person from a different tribe, one of grandmothers and twelve-year-olds, the undernourished, gymnasts, girl twins, snow men.”

Spring and a Thousand Years (Unabridged) is an invigorating book, offering readers not just the pleasures of the imagination but also a way to avoid the spiritual poverty which afflicts so many modern lives. Halebesky approaches contemporary disasters (climate change, post-industrial surfeit) with insight and unflinching strength; she confronts her own time with a stoicism learned from an earlier time, when self-abnegation, simplicity, and discipline provided a path to freedom.

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The Essential June Jordan
June Jordan
Edited by Jan Heller Levi and Christoph Keller
Copper Canyon Press ($18)

The Jean-Michel Basquiat Reader
Writings, Interviews, and Critical Responses
Edited by Jordana Moore Saggese
University of California Press ($34.95)

Universal Tonality
The Life and Music of William Parker
Cisco Bradley
Duke University Press ($29.95)

by Patrick James Dunagan

Black art in North America has long been robustly diverse and extremely lively. There is no chance of adequately surveying the many artists at work across its broad landscape. The following consideration, then, of three recent publications concerning three historically distinctive Black artists, offers but a snapshot of the abiding vitality and interconnections across artistic discipline that keep Black art abundant and enthralling.

While appreciation for the work of poet June Jordan (1936-2002) has never ceased, The Essential June Jordan provides renewed testament to the continuing power and relevance of her words to spark fierce defiance and offer abiding insight into complex issues of race, class, and gender. Bassist, composer, and bandleader William Parker (born 1952) has been active in the international improvisation and experimental jazz scene for decades, and Cisco Bradley’s new biography, Universal Tonality, encourages landmark recognition of his tremendous contributions as well as consideration of his spiritually rich personal life. The Jean-Michel Basquiat Reader, impressively edited by Jordana Moore Saggesse, represents an unprecedented gathering of primary sources documenting the conflicting perspectives surrounding the voluminous work and too-short life of visual artist Basquiat (1960-1988).

In this July’s issue of the international music magazine Wire, pianist Matthew Shipp offers a short reflection on New York City in the early 1980s (when he first arrived on the music scene). With his abstinence from heroin use, William Parker was a rare presence among older jazz musicians. Although he never held it against any player so long as it did not interfere with their playing, his own spiritual commitment to “the tone world” always kept him firmly away from drug use. In a nearly throwaway yet enlightening aside, Shipp also mentions spending his earliest years in the city away from the jazz scene and frequenting instead the burgeoning DJ-centered clubs of the era, where he shared the dance floor with none other than Basquiat.

Anecdotal as it may be, Shipp’s commentary demonstrates how closely knit varying art worlds are, especially in a locale like New York. Considering the profusion of references to Black jazz musicians scattered throughout Basquiat’s work, the fact that he and Shipp were frequenting the same clubs just a few years before Shipp shared stages with Parker comes as more of a validation of mutual influence across artistic disciplines than a surprise. In a darker commonality, Basquiat’s long-term girlfriend Suzanne Mallouk recalls how in the NYC club and art scene of the era, “most of us were heroin addicts and drug addicts that stayed up all night and slept all day.” Such behavior led to Basquiat’s tragically early death by way of overabundant drug use; heroin was also the suspected cause of William Parker’s brother Thomas’s death in 1978.

In another twist of perhaps casual yet nevertheless meaningful interdisciplinary connection between these artists, biographer Bradley at one point mentions Parker’s “Poem for June Jordan,” a tune written “for the ‘unsung writer’ who had always had an influence on Parker”; as he wrote in liner notes, “her words were always insightful and very honest and again, filled with compassion.” Just as Basquiat drew inspiration from and paid tribute to jazz musicians—for instance, his works Discography, 1983 and Discography (Two), 1983 list names of well-known figures such as Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Max Roach, alongside the less famous Sadik Hakim, Curley Russell, John Lewis, and Nelson Boyd—Parker profoundly identified with how Jordan wove language together that reflected both the beauty and tragedy of Black life. The draw he feels towards her insight, honesty, and compassion is easily apparent in lines from any number of her poems:

Consider the Queen

a full/Black/glorious/a purple rose
aroused by the tiger breathin
beside her
a shell with the moanin
of ages inside her
a hungry one feedin the folk
what they need

Consider the Queen.

Heralding the power of Black cultural lineage is a constant across the work of these artists, even as it (of necessity) is accompanied by bitter awareness of how maligned the magnificent and vast contributions of so many have been at the hands of white America. In The Jean-Michel Basquiat Reader, Mallouk testifies how Basquiat continually confronted the matter of his Blackness: “He would play with these Black stereotypes and present himself in the form of threatening Black stereotypes to fuck with people. To be subversive. To make people stare at their own racism in the face.” Franklin Sirmans, meanwhile, describes critics playing up Basquiat’s skin color as a sign of his primitiveness while downplaying any possibility of his background as being culturally rich, “as if to say, ‘never mind that properly French name, this is a Black kid!’” Sirmans quite accurately labels it as a “misguided dependence on stereotype and cultural mythology.”

As Sirmans avows, “the hand was definitely stacked against Basquiat, and he knew it.” Artist and pal of Basquiat Keith Haring describes how “there was very little criticism that actually talked of the works themselves. Rather, the talk was about the circumstances surrounding the success of the work.” In fact, “people were more interested in the phenomena than the art itself.” In a piece that is little more than a litany of derogatory attacks, critic Robert Hughes provides ample evidence of how disparaging the mind-set among critics was, with pronouncements such as “the very nature of Basquiat’s success forced him to repeat himself without a chance of development” and “these were the 1980s. And so he became a star.” Hughes even judges some groundbreaking Basquiat work as “worthless ‘collaborative’ paintings with Warhol” and declares, “His ‘importance’ was merely that of a symptom.”

This handling of Basquiat comes as no surprise to any Black artist. Jordan’s poetry, for instance, encapsulates the ridiculous and horrific reality of being Black in the U.S.A. Like Basquiat, she knows it is up to her to call out and challenge all figures of authority imposing such views, as she does in the 1980 work “Poem about My Rights”:

I am very familiar with the problems of the C.I.A.
and the problems of South Africa and the problems
of Exxon Corporation and the problems of white
America in general and the problems of the teachers
and the preachers and the F.B.I. and the social
workers and my particular Mom and Dad/I am very
familiar with the problems because the problems
turn out to be
me
I am the history of rape
I am the history of the rejection of who I am
I am the history of the terrorized incarceration of
my self
I am the history of battery assault and limitless
armies against whatever I want to do with my mind
and my body and my soul and
whether it’s about walking out at night
or whether it’s about the love that I feel or
whether it’s about the sanctity of my vagina or
the sanctity of my national boundaries
or the sanctity of my leaders or the sanctity
of each and every desire
that I know from my personal and idiosyncratic
and indisputably single and singular heart
I have been raped
be-
cause I have been wrong the wrong sex the wrong age
the wrong skin the wrong nose the wrong hair the
wrong need the wrong dream the wrong geographic
the wrong sartorial I

Although Jordan is the “poet proper” among this gathering, Parker and Basquiat each prove themselves avidly apt at utilizing language as well. Parker composes his own poems, often including them along with, or in place of, liner notes:

She was carrying the people
Carrying them on her back
Through the deep blue-purple cotton fields
Not eating or sleeping for days
She would take two sometimes three people across the long corridor
This small woman did not know the word enemy
She was carrying the people on her back
The cotton sack on her waist was always filled with sunshine
Sunshine

One day the cracker police
Beat her with clubs and leather straps
They beat her on her legs
Until they groped like Okra
Blood poured from these wounds
Blood mixed with tears of compassion
They beat her until she fell to her knees
But she would not let them win
She stood up
They looked in her eyes
She stood up as thunder gathered
In the left side of the sky
They beat her again
And again and again

And Haring sees his friend Basquiat as “the supreme poet; every gesture symbolic, every action an event,” and comments, “he used words like paint.”

All three of these artists were, to varying extents, lifelong autodidactic learners. Jordan, a Barnard drop-out, was by far the most “officially” educated; both Basquiat and Parker, for different reasons, completed only high school. They never stopped pursuing any knowledge or interest, however, continually punctuating their works with new factual information turned up by way of curiosity and dogged effort. As Jordan serenades in “Something Like A Sonnet for Phyllis Miracle Wheatley”: “Chosen by whimsy but born to surprise / They taught you to read but you learned how to write.” Art collector Bruno Bischofberger notes that Basquiat “was constantly reading something,” and art historian Robert Farris Thompson relates how in an interview, “he told me, ‘I get my facts from books,’” going on to describe his impression of how Basquiat “never ever passively copies; his is always readapting it at the very least for rhythmic phrasing on the page.” Thompson also draws an intriguing comparison with the writer Walter Benjamin, quoting scholar Peter Demetz’s introduction to Benjamin’s Reflections:

Jean-Michel, like Walter Benjamin before him, has the ability to work with “texts” that for most of us would not constitute texts at all. “The ancients may have been ‘reading’ the torn guts of animals, starry skies, dances, runes, and hieroglyphics, and Benjamin, in an age without magic, continues to ‘read’ things, cities, and social institutions as if they were sacred texts.”

Parker’s work, too, strongly “reads” things—the city’s noise and abundance, weather, natural land formations such as mountains and lakes and rivers—as “texts” that few indeed would likely recognize “constitute texts at all.” Given the largely improvisational nature of his music and the free jazz background from which it arises, some listeners may not even recognize it as “music,” for that matter. Yet Parker is one of the foremost practitioners of what is arguably the greatest Black-led American artistic tradition, i.e. jazz, and Universal Tonality casts him in the full light his work deserves. With Parker’s full cooperation, Bradley weaves as complete a tracing of Parker’s ancestral roots as possible, from West Africa to his grandparents in South Carolina and his early years growing up in the Bronx, as well as revealing the humble circumstances Parker’s own family grew in starting in 1988.

Even though Parker has recorded dozens of pieces (Bradley includes a complete discography as an appendix) and performed hundreds if not thousands of shows around the world, “he still has many hundreds of compositions that he has never had the opportunity to record or even perform.” This speaks, in part, to the fact that there simply has not been enough funding to preserve and support all the work Black artists have dedicated their lives to producing. Two decades on since her death, The Essential June Jordan signals that her place in the world of poetry as an acknowledged wonder is only now slowly solidifying. Editors Jan Heller Levi and Christoph Keller have avoided chronological ordering, allowing sympathetic themes between poems to guide their gathering. The inclusion of four poems not previously published along with an opening gallery of photographs make for a true celebratory tribute. And if Basquiat’s ultimate fate in the annals of art history remains unknown, it is Saggesse’s Reader to which the future will turn for guidance as she expertly maps out the historical territory.

In “Breath and Precarity,” presented as the inaugural Robert Creeley Lecture in Poetry and Poetics at SUNY Buffalo, poet Nathaniel Mackey asserted, “Blackness is the sign and the symbol of risk, preeminently at risk in a scapegoating, sacrificial world order for which black is the color of precarity itself.” Nowadays Mackey’s sense of “precarity” is ever too easily—even if finally—recognizable. And thirty years ago, Jordan was asking questions that remain far too relevant in our own time:

Tell me something
what you think would happen if
everytime they kill a black boy
then we kill a cop
everytime they kill a black man
then we kill a cop

In its unswerving commitment to bespeaking shared experience of injustice without capitulation to oppressive cultural forces, Black art presents an endless song of renewal. In Basquiat’s deep, expressive use of and reply to Black characterizations and symbols, there lies clear indication of his keen awareness. Parker’s life and music continue to shine forth, indicating a path forward. And in Jordan’s poetry, the beauty and importance of language is most keenly felt. These three are all landmarks in 20th century art, and the publication of books that understand this is long overdue.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2021 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2021

Anne Garréta
Translated by Emma Ramadan
Deep Vellum Publishing ($15.95)

by Jeff Bursey

In Concrete has a simple plot: parents of two precocious children purchase a concrete mixer to restore a hovel in the country inherited by the father from a long-ago acquaintance and, in the course of the renovations, someone ends up encased in concrete. But plot is the least promising feature of Oulipian Anne Garréta’s latest novel to be translated into English. After classifying the book as “a fable, a feminist inversion of a domestic drama,” among other things, translator Emma Ramadan concludes in her Note at the end of the text that In Concrete “is, above all, an exploration of language.” The statement acknowledges that the actuality of the events (which are narrated by Fignole, a “12-year-old” of unspecified gender), is secondary to how they’re told, which is by turns straightforward and outlandish, scatological and impish.

Ramadan’s statements aren’t meant to address all the content of the novel. While language exploration is evident throughout—with twistings like “muddernized” and “may swell begin at the beginning” functioning as approximations of heard expressions, and with neologisms arising in phrases like “monstrous scatastrophe”—there is much more going on. Two aspects stand out: comedy and war.

Garréta has written what is, in part, a slapstick novel. The father, Philippe, is a fixer-upper of engines—a hoarder, to be blunt, of rusted machinery—who regularly electrocutes himself, suffers physical damage, and fails to attend to the finishing touches of jobs. That is detrimental to the restoration of the inherited homestead as well as to his children, Fignole and the younger Angélique, but essential for the comedy. His wiser children are aware of this and try to prevent or fix his mistakes. But for slapstick to be successful it requires a certain dimness in at least one character and Philippe must persist as the prime source of the mishaps.

Other forms of comedic writing occur in tart one-liners. When referring to the hoarding done by cousins of toilet bowls—a family trait or the result of severe historical impoverishment?—Fignole tartly says, “They flatter themselves thinking they can resell everything at a profit. That somewhere the secondhand shitter market is booming.” That’s a fine short line. Garréta is also adept at portraying physical comedy through form, specifically seen when a washboiler filled with liquid concrete drops “like a bomb.” To convey this, the prose is broken not only into shorter paragraphs than usual, but indented further and further, sometimes one word to a line, in a way that forces readers to race across and up and down the page, capturing some of the speed and visual chaos of what’s happening. Fignole (whose name, “like Guignol and his band,” is an allusion to Louis-Ferdinand Céline, who also played with the French language and argot) stops to criticize this layout: “And what about the punkchewation, huh!?” Self-referentiality is key here, and is, if you will, a meta-comedic touch, as is the sentence, “We’re like rats in a lab experiment,” bringing to mind the definition of Oulipians offered by literary critic Raymond Queneau: “rats who must build the labyrinth from which they propose to escape.”

As for war, it’s everywhere. From references to the games children play, through historical markers (Agincourt, the Boer War, the Maginot Line), to the last name of their father, Oberkampf, bestowed on him in a “penal colony where the homeland bred cannon fodder” after he and his family lost each other “during one of those lurid debacles that seem to happen so often throughout History. But we don’t know which debacle . . . There’ve been so many.” There’s nothing inherently funny about war, and as In Concrete comes to a close, the lighthearted top layer slips, the lens moving out from a child’s view to encompass the First and Second World Wars. Readers willing to dive into Garréta’s games with gender, language, and form may find content of a more serious nature underlying the comedic surface.

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Simone Muench and Jackie K. White
Black Lawrence Press ($7.95)

by Lydia Pejovic

In their collaborative chapbook Hex & Howl, Simone Muench and Jackie K. White take a firm stance on feminism and women’s empowerment by detailing suffering, self-care, and rebirth. Muench and White set the pace at a slow crawl, growing from patriarchal representations of women to strong, subversive feminist models, as can be gleaned from the title poem that begins Section I:

You studied the orange girls, cinema
gazes, wounded bodies, and angles
that wolves unbend. I looked through the eyes
of chameleons, the nightmare houses they

inhabited with crystalized skins . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

You and I were told to swallow
our hexed howling, refuse the reptilian

and the mammalian, unless it’s tame

Here, men may look at women’s “wounded” bodies through their male gaze, but women look into each other’s cold-blooded, reptilian eyes. The mention of “hexed howling” evokes a sense of magic intermingled with these animalistic features, making women the one thing men fear: powerful creatures. Women’s powers have lain dormant under the shackles of patriarchy; their magic energy threatens the social order. The narrator argues that women will no longer accept this “gnawing // on our bones by canonized men,” that “we’ll not be suckled or bled / to ghosts again. We’re the heart’s rattle, / razored at our core. Full of sharp.”

This razor-sharp picture of women cuts through the core of the collection as it continues to Section II, which is comprised of self-portrait poems. The idea of a self-portrait is inherently injected with agency; the poems in Section II work towards self-actualization as the narrator writes herself out of patriarchal expectations. The work done to understand one’s place in the world in the self-portrait poems then transitions to the resistance poems of Section III. “Disclosure” claims “that nakedness / you love refigures any space you choose.” The woman’s body is no longer clothed in Section III; she revels in nakedness and the shamelessness of her form. “Queue” takes us back to Section I and reminds us of the “shimmering footage of girls,” footage that was initially seen through the “cinema gaze.” The narrator subverts the expectations of Section I, however: The men don’t control the show anymore. “We know how to let loose on our own / terms, tango or two-step, and in our own time.”

At the close of Hex & Howl, the narrator reaches her “Rebuttal.” In a culmination of assertiveness, she claims that “our tongues will not be bridled / as though miniature ponies put out to pasture. / Nor will our tales be jeered as old-wives’ blather.” The women’s “sound surges through / hex                               into galloping hymn.” The book ends on an uplifting, poignant feeling as hexes and hymns alike echo on the page and women are released from the shackles of patriarchal standards and expectations. Muench and White create a hero’s journey, one that gathers readers and guides them through the battle against oppression. The fight is not easy or comfortable, but it is necessary and worthwhile. After living as demure mammals, “we slip off the human and prowl.” Hex & Howl is a shining example of women’s struggle, a reminder to fight for their voices, even though the path to equality is lined with obstacles.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2021 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2021