Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse
Siglio ($24.95)

by Abraham Avnisan

Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse’s Between Page and Screen is a singular book of literature: aside from the colophon and cover, the book contains no text. Leafing through its seventeen pages, one finds instead a series of white abstract geometric shapes enclosed in black squares, beautiful in their own right but a far cry from legible in any conventional sense. To “read” the book—or perhaps more accurately, to access the words coded into the page’s geometric ciphers—one needs a computer, a web browser and a web cam.

Navigate to the book’s site, betweenpageandscreen.com, and you’ll find yourself looking at an image of yourself holding the book you can’t yet read. The strangeness of this experience is striking—seeing oneself mirrored through the eyes of the technology that makes legible the world around one. Open the book and angle it back and forth before the eye of the webcam (the website offers helpful tips on how to present page to screen), and letters spring up out of the page on the screen, assembling themselves into words and blocks of text. The book’s title is, among other things, a quite literal description of the condition of the book’s mediated textuality. The words that make up this book aren’t bound between its pages; they exist in a virtual space.

Written language is so ubiquitous, we often take it for granted as a natural extension of spoken language—but this isn’t the case. The development of the phonetic Greek alphabet in the early eighth-century BC was revolutionary—and was, crucially, a technological revolution. As the technology of writing continues to evolve—from the printing press to the typewriter to the personal computer, to name just a few of its manifestations—it continues to transform and challenge the possibilities of what can be called literature. Of the experimental works that mine the literary/technological frontier, those that succeed most exploit the possibilities of their technology as a “material metaphor” to embody the subject matter with which they engage (see, e.g., Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines). Or put another way: it’s too easy, in the age of digital reproduction, to fall into the trap of the gimmick. Which offers all the more reason to marvel at Borsuk and Bouse’s impressive technological/literary feat.

Between Page and Screen is a self-reflexive work that seeks to understand print and digital media—and the tensions between the two—in ways that are poignant, smart, and funny. Not the least bit gimmicky, Borsuk and Bouse’s use of the technology of augmented reality is inventive, dynamic, and surprising. The book is written/programmed in two interleaving modes. Roughly half of the book’s pages feature a story told through the stereoscopic lens of letters written between the characters “Page” and “Screen.” But between these letters, readers will encounter dynamic texts that move in three-dimensional space, words that rearrange themselves into derivative combinations and permutations, or are arranged, in the style of concrete poetry, into representative shapes.

Though not set explicitly in any one time period, the texts, replete with puns and other literary word play, use a register that often feels archaic: “I prefer arras to arias, you’ve guessed, a bard of scabbards, a chorus of cuirass,” writes “S.” One page of the book is a block of text ornately arranged into the shape of a shield that features the definitions and etymologies of five interrelated words “scaramouch,” “scrimmage,” “skirmish,” “scararamouch,” and “screen.” Borsuk and Bouse’s historical/etymological thrust gives depth and new life to the contemporary debate about the fate of print media in the age of the digital.

Page and Screen, who flirt just as much as they fight, struggle to define themselves in relation and opposition to one another. Page is defensive in her first letter to Screen: “Dear S, I fast, I fasten to become compact, but listen, that’s only part your impact.” “Page, don’t cage me,” Screen responds in a later letter, “Why this mania to define what’s between us?” Their playful skirmish is never quite resolved, but we are left feeling that page and screen need one another, and will find a way to coexist—which, of course, is embodied perfectly in the book’s materiality, which requires both page and screen to bring the words in between to life.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2012 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2012

Robert Kelly & Contemporary American Poetry

by Jordan Reynolds

It would be a disservice to Robert Kelly’s virtuosity to label him as a certain kind of poet who writes a certain kind of poem. Instead, it is instructive to investigate his work as kindred to his contemporaries. Of the kind of poetry he writes, Kelly finds good company with a poet of similarly enormous stature, Charles Olson. Inside of Olson’s breath, on the space of his reaching pages, the place of the poem is investigated, resolved, questioned. The poem and the poet are moored by the body and the breath to the very moment of the poem just as a shadow is moored to the ground. Olson’s poems are found “among stones,” as in his great work, “The Kingfishers,” but he also uncovers his honey within the place of his body:

I have this sense,
that I am one
with my skin

Plus this—plus this:
that forever the geography
which leans in
on me I compell
backwards I compell Gloucester
to yield, to
change

Polis
is this
“Maximus to Gloucester, Letter 27 (withheld)”

The Oxford English Dictionary traces the word place back to 12th-century Old English, where the meaning was often difficult to pinpoint, being used to signify town squares and fortified outposts as well as a private residence. The term coexists publically and privately, both interior (in the sense of a room-as-place) and exterior (the place of the field, open, exposed). Olson’s polis (the perfect city-state of his body and of Gloucester) is kindred to that sense of place that Kelly identifies with in his quietly important poem, “Wintereve:”

There is nothing but this purple landscape
fell down on us from the hump-backed moon

at the middle of a month, a mouth
under a mountain.

Wives yearn with eyes & mice & crows
across this river topped with blades of ice

too thin to walk on, too slow, too slow.
There is an hysterical logic of winter nights
quiet women afraid of their porches,
their spruces blue in moonlight. I too am afraid

that I am really here, that this shadow on the snow
is my own weltering eternal shadow

that the birds fly past with ice in their beaks
& this place is my place.
(from Kill the Messenger 1979)

If this poem is addressed to anything, it is addressed to Olson’s “Songs of Maximus,” song two:

where
shall we go from here, what can we do
when even the public conveyences
sing?

how can we go anywhere,
even cross-town
how get out of anywhere (the bodies
all buried
in shallow graves?

The fear in “Wintereve” arises from a fear of being stuck in place, unable to cross the razor-thin ice blades, the women afraid, even, “of their porches.” Kelly interrogates place, the terror of the given outside, there being “nothing but this purple landscape,” and nowhere to go. The yield and change of Gloucester that Olson insists upon in “Letter 27” is in this poem mimicked by the very words of place as they morph in stanza two from “month,” to “mouth,” to “mountain” (from the abstract, to the personal, to the public/exterior). In Kelly’s poem this shifting is not fast enough (like the ice: “too slow, too slow”) and/or does not allow a “forwarding,” as Olson calls it in “I, Maximus of Gloucester, to You.” Still, Kelly’s poem is received directly from place, “There is nothing” but it, after all, at the beginning of the poem.

For Kelly the fact of his “eternal shadow,” of his really being there in his place, forever generates the anxiety of the poem. It is the possession of this private space, of his own realization that he is one skin, that permits Kelly’s projection onto the wives who “yearn with eyes” for what is outer (beyond the frozen blue exterior that they have at their disposal). Again, Olson’s company provides a foil for Kelly’s issue, in his poem “The Distances”: “Love knows no distance, no place / is that far away.” For Olson, the realization of a possessed and personal space is the ultimate freedom and the culmination of a spiritual as well as a physical geography.

The resolution of Kelly’s anxieties of rootedness can be found in his poem “Binding by Striking,” where it becomes clear that it is a proliferation of spaces that suits him, where he can make the shifts, quick, between “month, mouth, and mountain,” and through those shifts in his physiological and geographical landscapes, arrive at a place where he can compel the assumed strictures of geography, as Olson finds himself doing in “Letter 27.” Here is the poem entire:

Say I come to you by circles. Say the line
that carries my name keeps me
from knowing you as a car knows a garage.
Say I am a wine you know better than to drink.
Say I, seeing the pale skin inside your upper arms,
become a better animal and become water.
Say this water doesn't pull but when you fall
takes you altogether in. Say you are in.

Say we sit on some steps together, or a wall.
Say something falls. I come to you then confused by lime,
sand, long hair holding the mortar together.
Say we stand a long time and one of us falls and one
catches, one catches and one lets go and it's night already.
We are still together. Say I am oily and you're dry.
Say a straight path and a twisted gate. Say something
not easy to say. Say the self-renewing knot of flesh
they call the rose blocks at times the future prong.
Say we belong to each other. Say the same thing
that holds us holds us apart. Say we struggle
to get in and stay in and not ever leave. Say for a change
you are out and I am in and I have trees too
your path gets lost in. Say you have numbers I can count
and numbers that leave me out. Say we change
but say we are always being held to the same.

Not to say little of same. Not to say one is more than some
or some less worth than every. Not to say every.
Not to say your pale skin is paler than this or this wall higher.
We rise where we fall. Not to say the word that draws us
doesnt some way let us in. Not to say in is the only.
We are held where we call. We know something and are held
to what we know. We fall through the wall. Not to say
there is only one garden or one car. Not to say one
when we mean “a road” and not to say going when we mean “home.”
Not to say time when we mean space. Not to say stone
when a wind blows through the place where we've fallen.

Say you come to me by line. Say the circle you understand
has more light than a bone and more air than a tower. Say
the broad leaf of burdock plays two pieces of music:
bug-holes and leaf-shadow. Say a skin is like that and that
what we have consumed gives us light and what is gone
is the constellation that guides us. Say you have come
and will come. Say the language is dry and the wall is low.
Say a word gets over the wall. Say we are in. Say my skin
draws you. Say what we do with each other goes on.

Say a voice that you hear. Say that we know ourselves
chiefly in many. The Oil of Others is the light-giving flame.
Say we are the same. Say we come to it simply again.
(from Under Words 1983)

It is “the line that carries [his] name” that keeps Kelly from knowing his beloved; instead, Kelly comes to the beloved “by circles,” by the infinitely complete, with centers all around. His instruction here is taken directly from Emerson in his great essay, “Circles”: the “incessant movement and progression which all things partake could never become sensible to us but by contrast to some principle of fixture or stability in the soul. Whilst the eternal generation of circles proceeds, the eternal generator abides.” And, elsewhere in that same essay: “The only sin is limitation.”

The power of the anaphoric “say” in this poem allows Kelly literally to assume everything. His beloved is all, already in the first stanza: “Say you are in.” And it is by comparisons of the nature of fixity and the nature of an infinite generosity that Kelly can come to assume knowledge of both himself and the beloved by the end of the poem: “Say we change / but say we are always being held to the same.” Here is Emerson’s “contrast to some principle of fixture or stability in the soul.” Kelly is already wine, an animal, a circle, and skin at the beginning of the poem, and his release of a vocabulary of stricture and fixity releases him into the infinite unity of his soul-self, what is Olson’s personal and spiritual geography, by the end of the piece:

Not to say in is the only.
We are held where we call. We know something and are held
to what we know. We fall through the wall. Not to say
there is only one garden or one car. Not to say one
when we mean "a road" and not to say going when we mean "home."
Not to say time when we mean space. Not to say stone
when a wind blows through the place where we've fallen.

Kelly’s compellation of the vocabulary of being tethered (“Not to say in is the only”) is essential for the poem to culminate in a space where lover and beloved are free to be everything (“Say that we know ourselves / chiefly in many”) as well as one thing (“Say we are the same”). Susan Howe, who must also be entered into the conversation here, quotes Felix Guattarri and Gilles Deleuze in the beginning of her poem “Thorow” as stating that:

The proper name (nom propre) does not designate an individual: it is on the contrary when the individual opens up to the multiplicities pervading him or her, at the outcome of the most severe operations of depersonalization, the he or she acquires his or her true proper name. The proper name is the instantaneous apprehension of a multiplicity.
(from Singularities, 1990)

So, Kelly names every thing one and many. The lover and beloved become the names of each thing: in, out, path, rose, and flesh. And after such a radical transformation of the norm (and of the name), living everywhere and nowhere becomes the easiest option, and proliferates in itself: “Say we come to it simply again.” And again, and again, and again, the reader assumes.

Through this assuming, Kelly’s “Binding by Striking” eventually moves beyond language in a way that creates a phenomenology all its own.

We are still together. Say I am oily and you're dry.
Say a straight path and a twisted gate. Say something
not easy to say.

The recognitions of the strictures inherent within a language provide Kelly with the tools for him to begin to dismantle it. “Say a skin is like that and that / what we have consumed gives us light and what is gone / is the constellation that guides us.” The constellation of a language thatmeans is replaced, by Kelly, by the ever-present and infinitely proliferating generosity of a language that is; a language that permits a “forwarding”: “Say what we do to each other goes on and on.”

The privacy of the language generated by Kelly in “Binding by Striking,” is, to call it a thing, a language of love. Michelangelo’s admission of an inexplicable love in the beginning lines of his sonnet XXVIII is perhaps the best primer for discussing a love poetry that exists outside the conventions of a language of love: “What gives my love its life is not my heart, / The love by which I love you has no heart” (translated by J. A. Symonds, quoted in Pater). Like Michelangelo, Kelly’s love poem must function outside of cliché and signified meaning, and does so through both accumulation of things (again, Susan Howe’s “Thorow” is instructive: “Must see and not see / Must not see nothing / Burrow and so burrow / Measuring mastering”) and velocity: something like the explanation Olson gives of Melville in Call Me Ishmael: “He had to be wild or he was nothing in particular. He had to go fast, like an American, or was all torpor.”

And it is his affinity for velocity and his unflagging recognition (he knows it over again; new) of the phenomenological that aligns Kelly with two of the American tradition’s greatest love poets: James Schuyler and Frank O’Hara. In the love poems of all three of these poets, there is a tension between the language used to describe a known world, and the more private language of intimacy used between lovers and loved friends, that participates in combination with phenomenology and velocity to create a new space where love is born new each time, is original (in that it creates new space, departs from the true center and moves out).

It is the intimate connections between these concepts (of the familiar and the most private) that generates the expressions of these poets’ love, and the creation of original frontiers, literally charged, within the spaces of their real lives:

Then I say, yes,
and the world lights up like the hot star they say it used to be
or may become,
burnt by the sun.
It’s still glowing!
That’s not my sleeve, that’s my heart.”
(Schuyler, “Having My Say-So,” from Other Flowers)

The transformative powers of Schuyler’s loving, in this poem, are activated by his saying “yes,” and the consequences of his actions turn the clichéd into the real: his heart becomes his sleeve and vice versa. A similar consequence occurs in Frank O’Hara’s poem “Aubade,” written to “Jimmy Schuyler” in New York, 1952.

A million stars are dreaming out
the murderous whims of the apples.
Sinking like celestas in the dawn
already growing faint, beyond temples

whose silent throbbing dictates
a green life to my waking heart. Bids
the bones decorate this shore
become the pearl of loved eyelids’

sunlight, withdrawn until unseen
at night, when like the cat’s hand,
the sea, they warmly flutter near
upon the belly of the sable sand.

A meaning of my life volleys
thus into the sky to rest, breathes
upon those vessels by the sea,
to be wrought in the frothing waves.

There is so much making in these lines, and all because of vision: the transformation of bones into the “pearl of loved eyelids’ // sunlight.” The velocity of O’Hara’s enjambment weaves the fabric of his mournful love poem into an entirely new landscape, here, as in Schuyler’s poem, with green life dictated to a heart (i.e. a new heart made). And it is the transformative properties of this “green life” given to O’Hara’s heart that reverberate into new makings of the world surround: “A meaning of my life volleys / thus into the sky to rest” after such velocity up to this point, whereby respiration is enough to make the newborn vessels that arise from the “frothing waves” at the poem’s end.

So, the act of loving and saying it are the qualifications by which O’Hara’s and Schuyler’s love poems intimate language. The conflation of the everyday “yes” of Schuyler and the entirely new “murderous whims of apples” seen by O’Hara bring each writer to an intimate space, newly made. In his poem “The Alchemist,” Robert Kelly discusses love with these same terms (from Red Actions, 1995). In the end notes to the poem, he called it “the first full poem” he had written, because of its “cross[ing] some line that made me me.” Kelly begins the poem at “the origin” and later, in the third stanza proclaims “man, the / origin.” By beginning his poem with an origin, Kelly again orients his writing within the space of Olson’s description of Melville as “an original, aboriginal. A beginner.” The poem begins at the only beginning and stays there. From that origin, Kelly’s alchemist makes a new world (as do Schuyler and O’Hara) through a specific physics of being in the world:

The alchemist
(twenty years over the alembic)
his left hand fisted, snotrag on cheekbone,
who shall weep
and wake up in the morning
selling flowers in the veins of his arm
crying down the street jonquils jonquils
the needle stuck in his brain
inventing true north

The making of “true north” in this poem, is the posturing that Kelly arrives at which allows him, later in the poem, to inhabit an entirely intimate space where “the leaf is subjected only to the patterns of its own green veins / which out of all patterns only will feed it when I am dark.” This arrival, as in Schuyler’s and O’Hara’s pieces, is achieved via a collision between the public and the private (in this poem, the public space of “the street” where the alchemist yells “jonquils jonquils” and the private space of his lab “twenty years over the alembic”). The encroachment of the “I” opens the private space and leads Kelly’s poem into a discussion of the physics of the alchemist’s vision: “brown blood wreathing the heart muscles // he holds to his eye” and eventually the discovery that holds the entire resonance of the poem’s tensions: “NAME IS LOVE.” The climax of the poem is as much a conflation of the word name with the word love as it is a conflation with the concept of body and vision. Susan Howe discusses this same profundity in “Thorow,” realizing that her “whole being is vision.” Kelly’s admitted working with, what he calls (again, in the notes), the “chilly love duet between Calaf and Turandot in Puccini’s opera” is, of course, a given in the original piece of music, but the recontextualization of the moment by Kelly must be examined in the space of the love poem in which it finds its situation, and by way of the velocities of mixture that combine vision and body and a tradition of giving name with a tradition of loving exactly, intimately, singularly and infinitely.

Directly following the admission of “NAME IS LOVE,” is the connection of the poet’s vision to a world made new on account of the fact of his love, and a space made real by “movements somewhere in time / since our own eyes are not still.” For Kelly, the combination of a velocity of sight and a world new-made culminate within the body, itself, which, at the end of this poem, is found “in a cloak chewed into rags by its symbols // a body, / under it, / whose name is love & which only of all light love can eat.” As in “Binding by Striking,” “The Alchemist” resolves in a language that becomes everything: both body and vision, a language that is most intimate because it is distilled in the alembic of experience where the deepest symbol and meaning of any thing is the thing itself. The act of loving for these three poets transforms the world into the new thing called love; the singular prerequisite for a thing made, for Kelly, O’Hara, and Schuyler, is that it be a thing loved.

WORKS CITED
Allen, Donald. Ed. The New American Poetry: 1945-1960. 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960. Print.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Emerson: Essays and Lectures. New York: Library of America, 1983.
Howe, Susan. Singularities. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1990.
Kelly, Robert. Kill the Messenger. Boston: Black Sparrow Press, 1979.
—. Red Actions. Boston: Black Sparrow Press, 1995.
—. Under Words. Boston : Black Sparrow Press, 1983.
Michelangelo. Pater, Walter. The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (Oxford World's Classics). New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 1998.
O'Hara, Frank. The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara. Ed. Donald Allen. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
Olson, Charles. Call Me Ishmael: A Study of Melville. New York: Grove Press, 1958.
—. The Collected Poems of Charles Olson: Excluding The Maximus Poems. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
—. The Maximus Poems. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.
“Place.” Oxford English Dictionary. 2011. October 25, 2011.
Schuyler, James. Collected Poems. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1995.
—. Other Flowers: Uncollected Poems. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2010.
Spicer, Jack. My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2008.

Click here to purchase Red Actions at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2012 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2012

On Jennifer Egan’s “Black Box”

 

 
by John Parras

Jennifer Egan’s 8,500-word story “Black Box,” released earlier this summer over a 10-day serialization on Twitter, was met with much hand wringing by those worried about The Fate of the Book. How could anything serious be said in 140-character bits and pieces? Doesn’t the superficial Twitter platform preclude the nuance and heft we expect of literature? And wasn’t The New Yorker’s Twitter gambit a mere publishing gimmick, a wretched example of literature co-opted by encroaching corporate technologies?

The story of an alluring female spy attempting to gather information on a suspected white-collar terrorist, “Black Box” is a thriller peppered with elements of science fiction. As narrative that flaunts more dulce than utile, “Black Box” has less to do with the quality of its content than with the highly unusual circumstances of its transmission. The “publication” on Twitter of a Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author was a noteworthy media event. Yet The New Yorker seemed concerned that it might be crossing a dangerous line—the magazine was prudent to publish the story in print concurrently. Too bad The New Yorker wasn’t audacious enough to rely solely on the electronic feed, because the readers who followed “Black Box” on Twitter were treated to a thrilling new kind of read.

If you followed Egan’s tweets for an hour each evening, there was a certain frisson in realizing that, as “Black Box” unfolded on your small screen, it was also unfolding on the smartphones, tablets, and computers of numerous thousands of other readers. The personal luxury of being solitary and attentive was combined with the socially satisfying awareness that other people were indulging in the same activity simultaneously, in real time—a type of shared reading unprecedented in the history of literature. And if you consumed the story on a sleek device in a dark room, you were also treated to a sensation akin to that of the movie theatre experience—of relishing a relaxed time in a cozy, dim place, intimately near yet comfortably separate from strangers, as you together-and-individually savored an appealing dramatic narrative. A story Twittered, then, alters and enhances the very experience of the experience of literature.

Perhaps most unique to this new reading practice were the sixty-second pauses between tweets, pauses which served as technological reinforcements of the story’s plot suspense. For some readers, the pauses were moments of meditation that encouraged thoughtful reflection, moments in which readers could unhurriedly ponder and appreciate each tweet without being rushed onward. For other readers the pauses were opportunities to retweet or connect with others—for no doubt most Twitter users were checking their email and other social media accounts at the time. The pauses were like television commercials without the commercials—time to check if the rice was done, or brush your teeth, or pour yourself a glass of wine. After all, you could easily let a few tweets accumulate and still follow the story’s transmission. Strangely, life between the tweets seemed oddly surreal and detached compared to the extraordinarily engaging fiction happening online.

Consuming fiction on Twitter, then, is not necessarily shallow, evil, or demeaning; on the contrary, “Black Box” heralds fascinating possibilities of how our notion of reading might evolve. But what of the story’s content, its literary worth?

There’s no doubt the story makes valid claims to be “substantial” (intricate, relevant, original). Unlike most tweets, “Black Box” was not a text spun nonchalantly off the fingertips of a driver veering precariously in her lane on the New Jersey Turnpike. Egan approached the project with the utmost seriousness, and her method of writing was decidedly un-Twitteresque. She claims she spent over one year thinking about, writing and revising the story—and she did so using a very special (and mobile!) technology: pencil and paper. Composing in a special notebook made in Japan, Egan faced Twitter’s 140-character limits like a poet grappling with the formal challenges of a haiku, as when, in one tweet, she compares a moment of self-discovery to “a dream in which a familiar home acquires new wings and rooms.”

The story’s leitmotifs seemed to have been planned with similar careful attention. The narrative touches on a host of controversial issues: terrorism and patriotism, sexism and gender relations, identity and masks, and the integration of technology with the human. Though some of these themes are not so subtly presented in the short story (e.g., beautiful women giggle, criminal men are rapists, outward appearances obviously belie inner realities), the story slowly but surely accumulates greater significance, eventually achieving the multifaceted complexity of Literature.

To an extraordinary degree, the story also encourages an active, cerebral engagement on the part of its readers. Egan deserves much credit for assuming that her audience is endowed with a certain interpretive sophistication; rather than spoon-feeding us meaning, Egan relies on our participatory intelligence to bring the story to full fruition. This faith that her audience can contribute to the creation of the text’s significance—one of postmodernism’s more important tenets—may be taken as a high form of compliment to Egan’s readers.

Thus Egan can blatantly present sexism in the story, knowing that the audience can parse and critique it. And when she writes about the Data Surge—”You will feel the surge as the data flood your body”—she knows that we share certain key assumptions underlying the story: for instance, that the information age can be utterly trite on the surface even while it somehow affects our deepest emotive core. Or when the main character gazes at the moon and remembers her sympathetic, virile, and successful husband, Egan can assume that we are aware of the story’s deliberate manipulation; we are proffered cliché imagery of soothing nature (“The moon can seem as expressive as a face”) and fed the sentimental fantasy of a perfect husband. Yet despite our awareness of the story’s obviously suspect constructions, we are nevertheless moved emotionally—in the same way that Beauty is moved into a feeling of solidarity with the other beauties even though she is merely an imposter: “Kindness feels good, even when it’s based on a false notion of your identity and purpose.”

In short, the genius of this story is that is works effectively on at least two levels—that of the exhilarating spy thriller, and that of a postmodern text, full of paradox, playfulness, and sophistication. Egan seems to urge her readers to enable a double consciousness, much as Beauty enables her own double consciousness throughout her fictional ordeal. Take delight in the story, Egan encourages us—admire the pretty heroine, the glamorous Mediterranean setting, the 007 action sequences—yet also step back into an analytical perspective on the story’s themes. Enjoy the non-realistic “genre” aspects of the story, but no matter how inane they are, don’t forget how they point to troubling ideological assumptions undergirding our culture and society.

Perhaps the most pioneering aspect of “Black Box” is the way it creates a unique fictional discourse comprised of what Egan calls “terse mental dispatches.” The story seems to record the thoughts of the protagonist, but not as first-person, nor in the close-third-person as that perspective is typically deployed. Instead, Egan has invented a subtle but significant variant on free indirect discourse; whereas normally this style morphs the third-person point-of-view so that one can hear the idiosyncratic voice of the character seeping into it, in “Black Box” an omniscient or outside voice is transferred into the mind and voice of the character.

Such “mental dispatches” vary from so-called universal truths (“Experience leaves a mark, regardless of the reasons and principles behind it”); to lessons acquired in training (“An angry subject will guard his words less carefully”); to personal reflections (“Fatherless girls may invest the moon with a certain paternal promise”); to internalized instructions that border on commands (“Always filter your observations and experience through the lens of their didactic value. / Your training is ongoing; you must learn from each step you take”). One result of this newly honed point of view—in which the voice of the individual has fully absorbed the creeds and doctrines of her social group—is that the distinction between the personal and the cultural becomes blurred, even erased.

Indeed, the working title of Egan’s story was “Lessons Learned,” and in virtually every tweet the text illustrates how thoroughly the protagonist has absorbed not only the practical wisdoms of her training as an undercover agent but also the ethos of her culture, the tenets of her tribe. This observation points to the most significant messages the story conveys: that our thoughts are not our thoughts (they are culture’s thoughts), and that even our intimate experiences are filtered through limited emotional constructs learned from society. Rather than despair at such apparently bleak conclusions, however, Egan’s story suggests we should approach them with an HTML-era mindset—one that accepts the limits of authenticity by embracing masquerade with a stoic playfulness and with a highly engaged intellect comfortable with irony and paradox.

Was the distribution of “Black Box” on Twitter merely a publisher’s gimmick? Who cares? Give us more! And thank Jennifer Egan for setting the bar high. Let’s keep our fingers crossed that the quality of future Twitter Fiction will also hit such brilliant marks.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2012 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2012

Clickthrough Culture and Difficult Literature

by David Huntsperger

In the world of web technology, UX designers, content editors, advertising managers, technical writers, marketing specialists—people like me—pour over reports and peruse usability studies and conduct A/B tests and solicit user feedback and review eye movement data to find out one thing: how do you read?

Because knowing how you read is the key to knowing what you’ll read and what links and ads you’ll click. In the world of web technology, this stuff matters. After all, if no one reads below the fold (the point at which you have to start scrolling), it’s not a great marketing strategy to place paid advertising at the bottom of a long web page.

Reading, it turns out, is highly quantifiable. Internet marketing is about metrics—site visits and clickthrough rates and organic search rankings. Suddenly there’s big money in literacy, or in understanding the new literacy of what we might call clickthrough culture.

So what do the studies show? Well, we don’t read like we used to. Jakob Nielsen, an oft-cited usability expert, explains, “People rarely read Web pages word by word; instead, they scan the page, picking out individual words and sentences. In research on how people read websites we found that 79 percent of our test users always scanned any new page they came across; only 16 percent read word-by-word.”ⁱ Nielsen suggests that web writing should employ “highlighted keywords,” “meaningful subheadings,” “bulleted lists,” “one idea per paragraph,” “the inverted pyramid style,” and “half the word count (or less) than [sic] conventional writing.”ⁱⁱ

Now take a step back from that and think about Virginia Woolf. Think about To the Lighthousewritten in web style. Or think about Samuel Beckett. Think about the “meaningful subheadings” you could apply to Endgame. Okay, so that’s not fair. I’m conflating genres and media. But the train of thought begs a question: what happens to literature (and by that I mean ambitious, challenging, modern and contemporary writing that aspires to make a significant cultural contribution) when we redefine literacy? What value does it have? What purpose does it serve?

Perhaps none. It’s possible that shifting technologies of reading have made modern literature unviable, or have obviated the need for it. In his book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (Norton, 2010), Nicholas Carr suggests that “books and book reading, at least as we’ve defined those things in the past, are in their cultural twilight. As a society, we devote ever less time to reading printed words, and even when we do read them, we do so in the busy shadow of the Internet.”ⁱⁱⁱ What gets lost, according to Carr, is “deep reading,” which is “a form of deep thinking.”^iv

If this is so, then one would expect literature, as a traditional subspecies of book reading, to be in its “cultural twilight” too. If it is, very well. Nostalgic and vaguely moral laments about the fate of one’s brand of cultural literacy are a dime a dozen and unpleasant to boot. This essay is not going down that road. But I don’t think literature has exhausted its usefulness. In fact, I’d like to make the modest argument that, in the era of clickthrough culture, literature serves an important new function: It offers a model of reading that is more luxurious, more intellectually engaging, and more challenging than the emergent Internet norm. I would argue that this is the case even if you read literature on the web or on a mobile device or an e-reader. Though there are interesting literary experiments that use web technology to advantage, most works of literature are still the products of a different, deeper (to borrow Carr’s metaphor) kind of literacy, even when consumed on an e-reader or tablet.

Literature’s new role as a corrective to clickthrough reading is particularly apparent when we look at limit cases—at works that require a reading style that is absolutely anathema to clickthrough consumption. Judged by the standards of web technology, some of the most interesting experimental works of postmodern and contemporary American literature are just about unreadable. These, I would argue, are the best of the good stuff, and they’re worth reconsidering in light of the new cultural freight they have to truck.

PARANOID CONNECTIONS

Everybody knows Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) is difficult. It’s one of those works that, when people like it, they go out of their way to tell you it’s not really that difficult—which means it is.

The 1973 New York Times review of Gravity’s Rainbow is interesting because it tells us something about Gravity’s Rainbow before it became Gravity’s Rainbow. The reviewer, Richard Locke, found the book to be simply too long. Not too long in some relative or conditional sense (e.g. too long because it wasn’t well edited, or too long because it lacked focus). It was just too much print on paper. “Reading it is often profoundly exasperating,” Locke writes. “[T]he book is too long and dense; despite the cornucopia of brilliant details and grand themes, one’s dominant feelings in the last one to two hundred pages are a mounting restlessness, fatigue and frustration.”^v

This is before Gravity’s Rainbow became a monument of postmodern literary culture, at a point when a reader might evaluate the book, and not the other way around. Joshua Gaylord, in an essay cleverly titled “Enduring Literature,” writes that his first reading of James Joyce’s Ulysses felt like “staring down the business end of Literature.”^vi The same could probably be said of many readers’ first approach to Gravity’s Rainbow. Gaylord suggests as much by alluding to a canon of literary works that must be endured before they can be appreciated:

Wracked, enlightened, tortured, exhausted, bettered, you come out the other side of a book like Ulysses feeling as though you’ve had an experience, as though you have actually, actively read. And there are, for those of us who enjoy such literature of endurance, many authors who write books like bricks you could use to build a sound shelter for the three little pigs: William Gaddis, John Barth, Doris Lessing, Thomas Pynchon, Neal Stephenson, David Foster Wallace (to mention just a few of the most recent examples.^vii

Probably, Locke and Gaylord are both right. Gravity’s Rainbow is too dense and meandering, yet the length and difficulty of such a book makes it all the more engaging for the reader who is willing to undertake a thoroughly immersive textual experience. It’s also a book that requires the reader to make narrative connections that are often barely hinted at. In The Shallows, Carr points out that the technology of the book produces “new insights, associations, and perceptions, sometimes even epiphanies.”^viii Gravity’s Rainbow is a prime example of this effect. The novel is full of opportunities for readerly insight and association. It not only asks the reader to make connections; it constantly foregrounds the fact that there are connections to be made. This reflexivity or meta-commentary—whatever we want to call it—is, in Gravity’s Rainbow, called paranoia.

Paranoia seems to be both the precondition and the result of making connections in the fictional world of Gravity’s Rainbow. Tyrone Slothrop, the character who is closest to the center of this de-centered novel, often dramatizes the connection-making process that the reader is also going through. We see Slothrop puzzling over details and teasing out plot connections right along with us. At the beginning of the long third section of the novel, “In the Zone,” the narrator explains, “Signs will find him here in the Zone, and ancestors will reassert themselves.”^ix This vaguely ominous warning seems to refer simultaneously to the reader and to Slothrop. Is Slothrop going to encounter signs of his ancestry and destiny? Or are the signs that “will find him” part of a larger revelation for the reader?

Yes, as it turns out, to both. Slothrop does encounter signs, particularly in the form of clues about the mysterious Rocket Number 00000 that is at the center of the novel’s labyrinthine plot. But the reader is also confronted with revelation—or perhaps taunted and teased with it, would be more accurate. The narrator often reminds us that we’re in the middle of a paranoid world where connections suggest themselves but without producing certainty or finality. The “Zone” of Gravity’s Rainbow is not unlike Baudelaire’s forests of symbols. Signs have designs on us.

Some of the paranoid connections suggested by the novel are geopolitical and involve recognition of a global conspiracy designed to protect the interests of manufacturers and technocrats. Oberst Enzian, leader of a group of Afro-German rocket soldiers called the Schwarzkommando, is riding a motorcycle through the Zone when he abruptly recognizes the secret (metaphorically) vampiric power behind the war: “. . .[T]his War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, just to keep the people distracted . . . secretly, it was being dictated instead by the needs of technology . . . by a conspiracy between human beings and techniques, by something that needed the energy burst of war, crying, ‘Money be damned, the very life of [insert name of Nation] is at stake,’ but meaning, most likely, dawn is nearly here, I need my night’s blood, my funding, funding, ahh more, more . . . The real crises were crises of allocation and priority, not among firms—it was only staged to look that way—but among the different Technologies, Plastics, Electronics, Aircraft, and their needs which are understood only by the ruling elite . . .”^x Such geopolitical paranoia about cartels is prevalent in the novel.

On a more metatextual level, paranoia is linked to the unreliability of narrative itself. This is a novel of “alternate histories”^xi in which “[t]hose like Slothrop, with the greatest interest in discovering the truth, [are] thrown back on dreams, psychic flashes, omens, cryptographies, drug-epistemologies, all dancing on a ground of terror, contradiction, absurdity.”^xii Uncertain or indeterminate moments in the narrative—moments at which we wonder if the plot adds up—make us doubly suspicious. Perhaps the plot hints at certain connections not because it’s enacting paranoia, but because it’s not well developed. (Getting paranoid about the paranoia . . .) Ultimately, Slothrop learns “that the Zone can sustain many other plots besides those polarized upon himself” and that “this network of all plots may yet carry him to freedom.”^xiii Here Slothrop’s moment of recognition is concomitantly a moment of recognition for the reader: Gravity’s Rainbow is itself a network of plots through which the reader moves, making connections or not, becoming embroiled in paranoid theories or leaving them well enough alone.

I am inclined to see in the paranoid connections of Gravity’s Rainbow a foreshadowing of the hypertext connections of clickthrough culture—a kind of commentary avant la lettre on a new mode of reading. Obviously, the novel is not about the Internet. But it does point to certain tendencies in a society that would, forty years later, have been revolutionized by web technology. If paranoid reading is a practice of suspecting connections everywhere in the text, it has something in common with hypertext, which literally does embed connections in the text.

But the difference between these two modes of connectivity is significant. Hypertext connections require no thought and leave no uncertainty. Either there’s a link, or there isn’t. There’s no such thing as an ambiguous URL. If a web design is good, you should be able to spot links effortlessly, thoughtlessly. Some nifty mouse-over event may even make the link pop off the screen a bit. In short, with a good web design, you should never feel compelled to say, as the narrator does at a chaotic moment in Gravity’s Rainbow, “It is difficult to perceive just what the fuck is happening here.”^xiv

Are we, the reading public, better off for such clarity? Maybe. But I like making my own connections.

NOT ENTERTAINING ENOUGH

The acclaim was staggering. “A work of genius.” “A virtuoso display.” “Spectacularly good.” “Ambitious and frequently brilliant.” “A comic masterpiece.” One could be forgiven for thinking that the late David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996) marked a novelistic eschaton of sorts. No need to trouble yourselves further, folks. It’s been done. The novel has.

Infinite Jest is a stylistic tour-de-force. "The book is 1,079 pages and there is not one lazy sentence," writes Dave Eggers. It’s dazzling even when it’s awkward—no, especially when it’s awkward. One of the most memorable characters of Infinite Jest, recovering addict Don Gately, works in a men's homeless shelter where the walls and floor are befouled by various excretions. Gately encounters “barrackses's cots” that “reek of urine and have insect-activity observable.”^xv Any competent stylist would know better than to use a locution as awkward as “barrackses’s cots.” And what MFA workshop wouldn't collectively demand a recasting of that “have”? More muscular verbs assert themselves.

Put another way, how good do you have to be not to be more elegant? Not to be less awkward?

Pretty damn good. Listen to the awkward in context.

The whole place smells like death no matter what the fuck you do. Gately gets to the shelter at 0459.9h. and just shuts his head off as if his head has a kind of control switch. He screens input with a fucking vengeance the whole time. The barrackses’s cots reek of urine and have insect-activity observable. The state employees who supervise the shelter at night are dead-eyed and watch soft-core tapes behind the desk . . .^xvi

Now listen again, sentence by sentence, to the voices (in brackets):

The whole place smells like death no matter what the fuck you do [Don Gately thinks]. Gately gets to the shelter at 0459.9h. and just shuts his head off as if his head has a kind of control switch [the narrator says]. He screens input with a fucking vengeance the whole time [the narrator says like Don Gately would say]. The barrackses's cots reek of urine and have insect-activity observable [the narrator says like the state employees of the next sentence would write in their bureaucratic pseudo-jargon that displaces agency]. The state employees who supervise the shelter at night are dead-eyed and watch soft-core tapes behind the desk. . . .

We hear them before we meet them, the state employees, in that tone-deaf passive locution “have insect-activity observable.” We don't need to be told that one of them has made the rounds, clipboard in hand, and observed the insects, noting their observability.

The thing is, we could do this kind of close reading for every paragraph of the book—parse it, tease it out, untwine the voices—and often as not it would pay off. So yes. Pretty damn good.

But how to go about reading a book like this, this interminable tome? Seriously, how? Preparing to write this article, I read most of it on the bus. I’d get up at five and take a shower and empty the cat litter and pour coffee into a paper cup and drive to the park-and-ride and wait for the bus with the book in an old bike messenger bag slung over my shoulder. Then I’d spend the 35-minute commute absorbed in the novel until I got near my office downtown and had to find a stopping point in the middle of one of those four-page paragraphs supersaturated with ugly acronyms from the novel’s administrative dystopia and I’d realize that on the ride I’d read maybe ten or fifteen pages out of 1079. Sometimes it was demoralizing.

I had intended to read Infinite Jest for some time. A few months before I bought a copy, a friend loaned me hers. “You have to read it,” she said. “Here. It’s amazing.” “Wow,” I said, “How long did it take you to finish this?” “Oh, I haven’t finished it.”

I told another friend I was finally reading Infinite Jest. He’s a writer who did grad work at Yale, one of Harold Bloom’s students. He reads voraciously, and well. “I made it to around page 400,” he said.

A coworker who loaned me Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men—a man who has read much of Wallace’s work carefully—told me he made it half way through. “I hate the French part,” he said, meaning the Québécois separatist subplot. “So do I,” I said, intending primarily to agree with him and then realizing that I really do hate the Québécois-separatist-wheelchair-assassin subplot.

Half way through the novel I realized that the reading itself had become performance art, with this article as the record of the performance. I started wondering how much of a book you have to read to say that you’ve “read” it. During a year of grad school at University of Minnesota, I took a seminar on colonial American history. The reading load was unbelievable. How could anyone read that much week after week, I wondered. One day a colleague took me aside. “We don’t read like that,” she said, meaning, We don’t read from the beginning of the book to the end, and all the pages in between.

But Infinite Jest is a magnum opus of contemporary literature, and it demands just such a reading—front-to-back, fully attentive. There seems to be a tension, then, between the novel’s purported literary merit and its tendency to put off sympathetic readers. In a beautifully subtle move, the novel explores this tension via the filmmaking career of one of its characters, Jim Incandenza, an experimental filmmaker and the novel’s absent father figure.

Late in the novel, Jim Incandenza’s son Hal, a first-person narrator in some sections of Infinite Jest, watches part of his father’s film Good-Looking Men in Small Clever Rooms That Utilize Every Centimeter of Available Space with Mind-Boggling Efficiency. In the film, a thumbless, balding actor named Paul Anthony Heaven delivers a lecture to a room full of painfully bored students. He reads in a “deadening academic monotone”^xvii material that satirizes overly metaphorical philosophical discourse, while his students fidget:

A number of shots of undergraduates with their heads on their desks, reading their mail, making origami animals, picking at their faces with blank intensity, established that the climactic lecture wasn’t coming off as all that climactic to the audience within the film. ‘We thus become, in the absence of death as teleologic end, ourselves desiccated, deprived of some essential fluid, aridly cerebral, abstract, conceptual, little more than hallucinations of God,’ the academic read in a deadly drone, his eyes never leaving his lectern’s text.

Of course, the reader of Infinite Jest also endures this academic underperformance. In reading the scene, we become part of an implied meta-audience (meta-meta audience?), and with all of the metatextual, self-referential, ironic self-awareness indicated by this scene, it’s tempting to read the reported critical assessment of Jim Incandenza—“technically gifted but narratively dull and plotless and static and not entertaining enough”^xviii—as a rather brilliant preemptive comment by the author. Bored as we may be, we would rather not identify with the obtuse undergraduates making origami.

Like Incandenza’s art film and the lecture that it depicts, Wallace’s novel requires an act of sustained attention. It is not designed to be scanned or skimmed. Wallace’s famous footnotes are not there to be particularly helpful. The information in the novel is not effortlessly accessible. If it were possible to do usability testing on the novel, the novel would fail.

More power to it.

EXTREME BOREDOM

Kenneth Goldsmith’s conceptual poetry exists at the outer limit of unreadability, and of another negation as well: uncreativity. That’s Goldsmith’s term for the compositional process he used to create (copy? construct? remediate?) Day (The Figures, 2003), an 836-page cover-to-cover retyping of the September 1st, 2000, edition of the New York Times. That’s it. No semantic value added, unless you count labor (typing) or form (book) as semantic vehicles.

Parts of Day are interesting in the same way that any old newspaper story is interesting. Local vignettes can maintain their human interest long past the point of being breaking news. But in our information-saturated culture, it’s fair to ask why, more than a decade after the event, one would want to read about an explosion of asbestos outside NYU:

Blast Spews Asbestos Near N.Y.U. Library
By NICHOLE M. CHRISTIAN
A steam pipe near the entrance to New York University’s main library burst yesterday morning, spewing debris and traces of asbestos onto dozens of people and several cars and buildings in the area.
The explosion, at 7:12 a.m., created a 15-foot-deep, 30-foot-wide crater in front of the entrance to the Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, which occupies most of one block on Washington Square South. It also caused parts of the street to buckle, forcing the authorities to reroute pedestrian and vehicle traffic in that part of Greenwich Village for hours.^xix

In an episode of J. J. Abrams’s science fiction TV show Fringe, the blast would undoubtedly portend a dire threat from an alternate reality. In this case, it’s just a mundane happening. But while the content is not especially piquant, the presentation bears further consideration. Here we see newspaper text with all of the formatting stripped away. Goldsmith has copied the characters but not the markup used to display them. (One wonders how this project would have been different if he had remediated a web edition. Would he have typed out HTML tags?)

The author’s name also gives one pause: Nichole M. Christian. It’s one thing to steal content from a business like the New York Times. It’s another to take another writer’s work, especially a journalist. As a profession, journalism has not flourished in the era of crowd-sourced content. As a group, poets are used to working at an economically marginalized craft. I’m not saying that I’m looking for empathy or solidarity here, or that Goldsmith’s re-typing of Christian’s article demonstrates a lack of either, but—as someone who makes a living as a technical writer—I feel a little bit defensive on behalf of the journalists whose work Goldsmith appropriates. He is, after all, furthering his poetic career by transcribing their work, even if—legally—it belongs to the Times.

But whatever reservations I may have about Goldsmith’s appropriations, Day is—by its very existence—starting a discussion, inviting scrutiny, begging the question. Even at its most unreadable, Day is interesting if for no other reason than that it asks us to reconsider what reading entails. What would it mean to say one had “read” this book, given that it contains nearly 200 pages of this:

26.50 10.06 AAR .34 3.0 94372 11.26 10.38 11.26+0.94 2800 1925 ABM .62 2.3 16 170 27.69 26.94 27.00-0.81 260 1 138 ABN Arnro .83 a 3.3 806 25.06 24.56 25.00-0.06 26.25 20.25 ACE Cap n 2.22 8.8 37 25.44 25.06 25.13-0.31^xx

This is not text to be read like a work of literature, with close attention to detail and nuance. This is not text to be “read” at all, if reading is what we do with a novel or a magazine article. This is data to be skimmed, to be mined for relevant information. Yet here it is, asking us to rethink our expectations about literature, about reading, and perhaps even about beauty. For the pages of stock reports in Day, with their many zeroes and decimal points laid out in forbidding blocks, are weirdly beautiful, and perhaps it’s the case that their unreadability is a precondition for their existence as visual art.

In an interview with The Believer, Goldsmith discusses the unreadability factor inherent in his works:

My books are better thought about than read. They’re insanely dull and unreadable . . . But they’re wonderful to talk about and think about, to dip in and out of, to hold, to have on your shelf. In fact, I say that I don’t have a readership, I have a thinkership. I guess this is why what I do is called “conceptual writing.” The idea is much more important than the product.^xxi

He finds this same unreadable quality in other works as well:

My favorite books on my shelf are the ones that I can’t read, like Finnegans Wake,The Making of Americans, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, or The Arcades Project. I love the idea that these books exist. I love their size and scope; I adore their ambition; I love to pick them up, open them at random, and always be surprised; I love the fact that I will never know them.

But there’s something qualitatively different about Goldsmith’s work. It’s not unreadable in the same way that the writing of James Joyce or Walter Benjamin or Thomas Pynchon or David Foster Wallace is unreadable. Their works are long, yes. But behind their difficulty lies the promise of literary depth. Imagine accusing Joyce of “uncreativity,” for example. No, the difficulty of a work by a Pynchon or a Joyce is of the backed-by-deep-literary-meaning variety. There’s something else going on with Goldsmith. His work is less about allusion, myth, or trope than it is about transcription. In Fidget (Coach House Books, 1999) he transcribes 13 hours of his own movements. In Soliloquy (Granary Books, 2001) he transcribes a week’s worth of his own speech. In The Weather (Make Now Press, 2005) he transcribes a year’s worth of weather reports. He is not so much an author as a transcriber, which is interesting in its own right, but more interesting still is the effect of the transcriptions, which take unreadability to a whole new level. Here, for example, is the beginning of “Act 2” of Soliloquy:

Go to sleep. Just do you want to sleep? Huh? No? It’s early. I have to work at 9. Testing. How you doin? Alright. Alright. Yeah. Nope. Nope. Naw. Definitely not. I don’t remember. It was OK. It was forgettable, I think. I’ve already forgotten. Well, we’ll find out where we are or were. Yeah where are you . . . ? Oh. If we can get it done, sure. Let me just look and see what we’ve got here. OK now this you was OK, right. This we want to be yellow. You want it in yellow. I don’t know why we’re not getting this image. It think it’s been lost. I’m gonna hafta. It’s not reading right, oh god.^xxii

On the one hand, this is banal to the point that a 487-page book full of such material sounds intolerable. On the other hand, there’s something fascinating going on here. Because the speech is taken entirely out of context, the deictic expressions have come unhinged. Here where? This what? It which? For this reader, there’s a tendency to want to read these areferential indexicals as self-referential. That is, here, this, and it, become the text itself. “It’s not reading right, oh god.” I’m inclined to take this as meta-critique.

Fidget feels less readable still, yet there’s a poetry to it that’s not evident in Soliloquy. Here is the beginning of section “11:00”:

Thumb and forefinger grasp. Pull toward floor. Right hand moves palm up. Back of hand holds as thumb and forefinger grab. Forefinger moves away. Thumb and middle finger grasp. Palm of hand receives. Thumb and middle finger grasp. Palm of hand opens. Holds bottom side of thumb. Left hand releases and moves to top. Hand retreats. Right hand lifts. Left hand grabs. Turns over. Left tips of fingers dig into scalp. Left hand, grasping with left thumb and two fingers, thrusts into palm. Fingers grasp as body swings left. Head turns. Left thumb, middle and forefingers grab. Left finger lifts and releases. Body moves, arching forward. Knees straighten. Body erect. Step right foot. Step left foot. Step right foot. Step left foot. Hips swing to right. Right hand grasps, moving away from body.^xxiii

Repetition and permutation, the minutiae of obsession, the absurdities of physicality—this is the territory of Gertrude Stein and Samuel Beckett, to say nothing of Joyce, whose work is obliquely referenced by the choice of Bloomsday for the transcription. It seems that this most unreadable of poets—a poet who calls his own works “insanely dull and unreadable”—is wresting from unreadability an unexpectedly mellifluous text, a prose poem of pulling and palming, grabbing and grasping, all active verbs and displaced agency. Yes, it’s literally and metaphorically masturbatory. But it’s a reminder of the potential for pleasure concealed in “unreadable” literature.

THE ALPHABET

There’s a long and honorable tradition of unreadable modernist and posmodernist long poems. They’re usually referred to as “difficult” rather than unreadable, but what one encounters in navigating them is a disruptive reading experience, or potentially so. You have the option of plowing full steam ahead through, say, Ezra Pound’s Cantos without worrying about lost allusions and arcane untranslated fragments. But at some point, if you want to have more than a passing familiarity with the Cantos (or with T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land or with William Carlos Williams’s Paterson, to name just a few) you’re going to have to come to terms with the fact that these works can’t be read in the same way that you’d read a newspaper article or a more traditional poem (think Wordsworth). Modernist long poems are always pointing at something outside the poem—a citation or translation or excised passage. They feel like hypertext with all the links broken.

Ron Silliman’s The Alphabet (University of Alabama Press, 2008) comes out of this modern tradition of difficult long poems, but in that context it feels remarkably consumable. Compared to Pound’s Cantos or Louis Zukofsky’s “A” (both obvious antecedents), The Alphabet is a page-turner. Silliman’s rhythmic chronicling of urban detritus and quotidian events is, on the whole, pretty accessible, and it shows a warmth and humor that I don’t normally associate with modernist difficulty. (Try to imagine Eliot including this bit of quotidian social analysis in The Waste Land: “Any number of men will distribute themselves at the urinals so as to permit each a maximum of space.”)^xxiv

At its most readable, The Alphabet works like a catalog of postindustrial objects. “Jones,” written in 1987, is a good example—particularly the prose poetry sections. Of “Jones,” Silliman writes, “Every day for a year I looked at the ground. Jones is a street in San Francisco’s Tenderloin that was then favored by transvestite prostitutes.”^xxv The poem begins thus:

Socks on the floor by the door. After the rain the sidewalk dries unevenly. Pyramid of cans in a corner of the yard, waiting to be crushed by a hammer, then piled into a plastic bag (bags of cans stacked high against the fence). Yellow thorny weed that rises between the cracks in the cement. Small grey dead bird, crushed, feathers matted, nearly unidentifiable in the rain beside the sturdy motorcycle chained to the phone pole, glistening. Little yogurt cup wedged into the catch basin at the corner—shreds of old newspaper dissolve into pulp.^xxvi

Here everything is in a state of tension. Largely inanimate objects are, nevertheless, active (note the verbs: “dries,” “rises,” “dissolve”). Nothing is exactly in motion, yet things are not quite at rest either, save for the bird—a lyric poet’s surrogate—and it’s dead. There’s an uncanny agency here that, coupled with the poet’s attentiveness, makes this passage wherein nothing happens surprisingly engaging.

The difficulty of The Alphabet lies in the massive accretion of detail (the book is 1062 pages) and in the density of the prose poetry. A lot of the poetry unfolds not in lines and stanzas but in sentences and paragraphs, employing what Silliman has elsewhere called “new sentence” form, wherein a kind of semantic rupture occurs between sentences. For example, “I let these adjectives worry me, their half-fluorescent distortions. From the perspective of survival the most successful evolutionary design belongs to the cockroach, which has no brain. Don’t think of bop ear as limit. The term for this is cornhusking.”^xxvii None of these sentences is difficult in itself, but in the aggregate, laid out in a paragraph—a prose structure that we expect to be thematically unified—the sentences disrupt our expectations.

The poem is constantly reflecting on its own disruptive qualities, its own attempts to thwart readability. Where Goldsmith discusses the readability issue paratextually, Silliman works it into the subject matter. He doesn’t take for granted the reading process. In fact, reading becomes one of the recurring themes of The Alphabet, as does writing. These two acts of attention become a collaborative process, as Silliman describes it. The book is divided into twenty-six sections, one for each letter of the alphabet. In “Albany,” on the very first page, Silliman writes, “If it demonstrates form some people won’t read it.”^xxviii Silliman then spends the next 1000-plus pages demonstrating form and inviting readers to engage with it.

Silliman’s investigation into collaborative meaning-making is particularly apparent in the “P” section, “Paradise.” Here he constantly foregrounds both the acts of writing and reading. For example:

The words merely crawl across the page, leaving a trail of syntax.^xxix

These short words hammer small meaning.^xxx

Typewriter hums, awaiting new paragraph.^xxxi

I’m impatient that each word takes so long to write.^xxxii

Little words inching into syntax, itching into context.^xxxiii

The ink is an oily film on a metal ball that turns as the pen rolls over the paper.^xxxiv

The page went by very quickly.^xxxv

This was and now you are constituted in the process of being words, your thought actualizing through the imposition of this syntax.^xxxvi

This was a reader-potential sentence.^xxxvii

And here’s a favorite, in context:

A hill of white houses in a white fog. The unreadable. Traffic bunched and backed up on the freeway.^xxxviii

What’s “unreadable”? Well, to a certain extent, lacking a more obvious antecedent, the statement points back to the text itself. These reflexive, metatextual depictions of the labor of reading and writing are abundant. Compare this reflexive mode of production to Nielsen’s best practices for web writing and you get a sense of just how disruptive—and therefore valuable—a work like The Alphabet is. Instead of scanning and clicking with the goal of finding a piece of information, we’re reading and reflecting with the goal of understanding how the text came into being. If, in my work as a technical writer, I give the reader the impression that the writing process was difficult, I have fallen down at my job. The reader is not even supposed to think about the labor that went into the writing, or the technology behind the production of it. With The Alphabet, it’s another story entirely. This is a work that asks us to think about where writing comes from, and where meaning comes from, and how provisional and contingent the whole reading process can be. After all, we’re just following the trail of syntax that Silliman leaves for us. But thinking about such things (production of writing, production of meaning) is out of step with clickthrough culture, where the goal of writing is to get you from one place to another as effortlessly as possible, so that (let’s be honest here) you can buy something.

Perhaps, to various degrees, all literature (or the best of it, anyway) takes up the same questions that The Alphabet implicitly poses and, in doing so, issues a challenge to the instrumentality of clickthrough culture, and to the instrumental reading that clickthrough culture cultivates. Literature doesn’t just deliver information, and it doesn’t necessarily do so efficiently, either. In some ways, as we’ve seen, some of the most interesting contemporary literature flirts with unreadability. Perhaps that’s part of its value, and part of its appeal.

---

Footnotes:

ⁱJakob Nielsen, “How Users Read on the Web,” Alertbox, October 1, 1997. http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9710a.html ⁱⁱIbid.
ⁱⁱⁱNicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, (New York: Norton, 2011), 110. ^ivIbid., 123.
^vRichard Locke, “One of the Longest, Most Difficult, Most Ambitious Novels in Years,” New York Times, March 11, 1973. http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-rainbow.html
^viJoshua Gaylord, “Enduring Literature,” in The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books, ed. Max Magee and Jeff Martin (Berkeley: Soft Skull Press, 2011), 69.
^viiIbid., 69.
^viiiCarr, 74.
^ixThomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, (New York: Penguin, 1973), 286.
^xIbid., 529-30.
^xiIbid., 341.
^xiiIbid., 592.
^xiiiIbid., 614.
^xivIbid., 512.
^xvDavid Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (New York: Back Bay Books, 1996), 435.
^xviIbid., 435.
^xviiIbid., 911.
^xviiiIbid.
^xixKenneth Goldsmith, Day (Berkeley: The Figures, 2003), 164.
^xxIbid., 239.
^xxiGoldsmith, Interview with Dave Mandl, The Believer, October 2011. http://www.believermag.com/issues/201110/?read=interview_goldsmith.
^xxiiGoldsmith, Soliloquy, (New York, Granary Books, 2001), 108.
^xxiiiGoldsmith, Fidget, (Toronto, Coach House Books, 1999). http://archives.chbooks.com/online_books/fidget/11-00.html
^xxivRon Silliman, The Alphabet, (Tuscaloosa, University of Alabama Press, 2008), 54.
^xxvIbid., 1058.
^xxviIbid., 113.
^xxviiIbid., 51.
^xxviiiIbid., 1.
^xxixIbid., 409.
^xxxIbid., 410.
^xxxiIbid., 410.
^xxxiiIbid., 414.
^xxxiiiIbid., 415.
^xxxivIbid., 416.
^xxxvIbid., 419.
^xxxviIbid., 422.
^xxxviiIbid., 423.
^xxxviiiIbid., 428.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2012 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2012

an interview with Matt Bell

by Gavin Pate

Matt Bell is the author of the short story collection How They Were Found (Keyhole Press) and the recently published Cataclysm Baby (Mud Luscious Press, $12), a series of twenty-six stories about parents enduring the apocalypses of children. His stories seem to be one part fable, one part prose poem, one part investigation into the fears and desires of those often unequipped for the scope of the world. His stories have appeared in Best American Mystery andBest American Fantasy anthologies, and he is an editor for Dzanc Books, where he also runs the magazine The Collagist. In the fall he begins his appointment as an Assistant Professor at Northern Michigan University.

Gavin Pate: Let’s talk a little about the origin of Cataclysm Baby, specifically its particular style and structure. In How They Were Found, stories work in quite a few different registers. InCataclysm Baby, you zero in on a very consistent and specific style. How did this specific style come about, and more generally, how does a style find its footing in your work?

Matt Bell: There’s a lot of luck and instinct at the beginning of a project: I’m searching for a voice, a bit of language or speech that I can then extend or unpack until I get my footing in the story. In Cataclysm Baby I became aware fairly early on of an almost Biblical rhythm and diction, which became prevalent throughout the book. I also started using kennings and kenning-like word combinations, which added to the kind of antique speech I seemed to be building. Once I recognized these possibilities, I started to look for ways to make them stronger: I liked the idea of writing a book about the future in the language of the past. I hoped that it might make the book seem timeless, in the same way that all of the fathers raising similar voices would make them seem part of a whole: they’re individuals, but they’re also united in this role they all share.

GP: Parenting, childbirth, and children are also subjects we also see in How They Were Found, for instance in “His Last Great Gift” and “Her Ennead.” I’m wondering what drew you back to these themes in Cataclysm Baby.

MB: The particular kinds of fear and anxiety that most parents seem to feel are incredibly generative of story: parents aren’t just afraid of the external world, what others might do to their children, and what the future might hold. They’re also worried that they won’t be good enough parents, that they’ll let their children down, that they won’t be able to provide all the things kids need. That tension between the dangerous world outside the family and the fraught one inside is everything a writer could ask for.

It’s possible that the two great arenas for contemporary stories to be set are the family and the workplace. Both of them contain almost limitless possible conflicts, and both involve people constrained to close proximity with each other. You can hate your co-worker or your father, but good luck just avoiding them. It doesn’t matter if it’s a cubicle or a Thanksgiving dinner. Sooner or later story is going to happen.

GP: As I was reading, I secretly hoped the book was a commentary on America’s Cult of Having Children. I mean, if you’re thirty and without a kid, isn’t there something wrong with you?

MB: I’m thirty-one, have been married for eight years, and am currently without children, so I know what you mean. I don’t want to overdetermine the reading of the book by answering this too closely, so maybe I’ll just say two short things: the first is that almost all of the environmental and social problems we have globally are either the effects of overpopulation or are worsened by it. The second is that there is some truth to the idea that children consume their parents, just as they’ll later consume the earth. The only thing a newborn’s body can be made of is its parents, especially its mother—who herself is consuming the animals and plants of the earth to feed the baby. We don’t think of it that way very often, for obvious reasons, but there it is. As they grow up, children have to consume some great portion of their parents’ time and energy and talent. And the better the parent, the greater that portion is likely to be.

GP: I have three children myself. In this book, I felt a strong connection to the sense that my children, more than anyone, will be the final jurors of my life. I think the line at the end of “Justina, Justine, Justise” is frighteningly astute: “I want this good behavior to matter.”

MB: Isn’t that what we all want? I’m not a Christian anymore but that sense of preparing to be judged takes longer to go away. Even with the best of intentions, we constantly hurt the people we love—and are hurt by them. There’s almost no one who can hurt a parent more than a child, almost no one who can hurt a husband more than a wife—but almost all of that hurt is accidental, or worse, happens because we are trying to do good, for us and for them. There’s so much power in that paradox. I at least worry that the good won’t be remembered, only the times I let my loved ones down.

GP: You obviously pay close attention to the acoustics of language and syntax. Cataclysm Babyis full of lines like “Only my wife cries. Only the birds caw, flap their wings. Only again a howl of spoor, cigar sputter,” and “All around me, my wolf-children gather, licking my face and chest, pulling loose what matters they find fouled upon my fur.” This is one of the things that stands out about Cataclysm Baby, but I wonder if you ever find this attention at odds with narrative itself? Can a writer over-emphasize or spend too much time on the sound of sentences?

MB: I think that fiction writers are generally more guilty of not spending enough time on the sound of their sentences than too much, but I know that’s not exactly what you’re asking. The benefits of working at the sentence level and at the level of sound is that often getting the sound of a sentence as right as I can will push the story, or reveal some bit of character, or take me in a direction I wouldn’t have otherwise gone. Richard Hugo said, “You carry to the page one of two attitudes, though you may not be aware of it . . . One is that all music must conform to truth. The other, that all truth must conform to music.” I believe that if you make the music right then it will eventually come to contain the truth, and that the truth it contains might be somehow surprising even to the writer. I can’t get at the truth of my feelings by starting with them. I have to sneak up on them through language. I’m a pretty serious writer but there’s a part of the craft that requires play and it’s in the sentences that I do most of that playing. When I don’t know what to say next I can at least make music, I can at least play with sound.

Later in the process these sentence-level effects often do get in the way of plot or character—when that happens, then I trim them back, cut away the scaffolding, and it has to go. You can be too precious about this cutting but its best to approach it in a workmanlike way, to just get it done.

GP: But isn’t the scaffolding sometimes seductive in itself? What “workmanlike” process do you undertake to determine in the end what stays and what goes.

MB: “The seductiveness of scaffolding” is a craft essay waiting to be written. It absolutely is. I’m not good at talking about numbers of drafts or revisions, in part because I might go over a passage dozens of times in any particular “draft” of a project. I read the work aloud. I read it on the screen, I read it on the printed page. I look at its physical shape. Sometimes I zoom way out in Word so the page is just blocks of text, so I can see the size of the units. I think about whether what I’ve written seems true to character, to plot, to real life. I try to determine if I’m just attached to it or if it’s truly necessary. Francine Prose called writing “putting every word on trial for its life.” I like the fraughtness implied in her phrasing. I think it should matter that much when you’re trying to get it right.

GP: In your own reading, what qualities do you enjoy most in fiction, and how have your reading habits changed over the years?

MB: Maybe the most of the seminal events of my writing life are really events in my life as a reader: The first time I read Sam Lipsyte’s Venus Drive or Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, Brian Evenson’s The Open Curtain or Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, David Ohle’s Motorman, Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves. The first times I read Christine Schutt or Amy Hempel or Rikki Ducornet. Those are all pretty deeply ingrained experiences that had a lot to do with who I turned out to be as a writer.

I think my reading habits have mostly changed by opening up. I’m reading more different things than I ever have. There’s a certain muscularity of prose that I need to enjoy anything—I just can’t abide flat prose, although I do have a lot of admiration for writers who appear flat while actually doing a lot of interesting things at the sentence level—but once that’s in place I’m willing to read just about anything. I almost don’t care about subject matter—what the book is about is always less interesting to me than what the book does to make me feel. I want a book to generate emotion, and I want it to leave me changed somehow, even if it’s in a very minor way, even if it’s temporary.

GP: Do you see these changes in any specific way played out in your writing?

MB: When I was starting to find my voice as a writer I needed the range of what I believed was good to be small, so that I could handle working with it. I wasn't ready to allow for a toolbox with a hundred tools. I could barely use one with two or three or five. But over time I've wanted to let more and more in, to admit the success and power in much of what I had to dismiss earlier. I'm not at one hundred tools yet but I want to get there. I’m probably never going to say yes to everything I read—there are always going to be things that fail to move me, or that I don't find particularly strong. But hopefully I can be more generous as a reader without giving up my standards. If anything, I hope those standards expand and complicate and lead me in new directions, new ways of feeling and thinking.

GP: Speaking of new ways of thinking, you’ve stated elsewhere that you’re working on a novel. What challenges have you encountered, if any, in structuring a large narrative?

MB: The challenges of the novel are immense, but I think that the day-to-day work isn’t very different: the building blocks of the novel are still sentences, and you can only work on one sentence at a time. So the drafting wasn’t terribly different than it is with a story. The hardest part of a longer work, at least for me, is being able to hold enough of it in my head at once to effectively rewrite and to maneuver the plot. My stories have been getting longer over the past few years—a lot of the stories in How They Were Found were between six and twelve thousand words, and the few I’ve published since have almost all been over six thousand. So I was starting to work in those bigger units already, and what I learned rewriting those stories—later in the process, once the bulk of the writing had been done—was how to go end-to-end on a piece by a quicker method. It’s almost impossible to hold four hundred pages of fiction in your head, when you’re working on one or two pages a day, as you might be in the beginning. When you’re drafting page 398-400, the chances that you remember pages 120-122 seems pretty slim. But later you can work in bigger chunks, moving faster, maybe working on five pages at a time, then ten, then thirty. By the end I was doing huge chunks of the book a day, which also required more hours—last summer, I was working six hours in the morning, then two or three or four at night, something I’d never done before. But if I worked that hard, then I could keep the entirety of the book more present in my thoughts, which allowed for more accuracy and stronger ligatures spread throughout the book. You can’t go that fast forever—it’s exhausting, and you also need to not lose sight of the book at the sentence level—but over a couple years of rewrites I found that switching between that faster large-scale process and the slower mode of sticking with one sentence or paragraph for a long time were very complementary processes, and that by working them together I might be able to finish my book.

My most recent revision involved almost nothing but cutting: I’d made this big thing, and for a while I was too proud to do the unsentimental work of changing it from something I’d made for me—which is how all my work starts—into something that might affect a reader. I hope that it’s getting close to being only what applies, what affects, what the reader needs and wants. That’s all a reader wants to receive, and if we’re doing our job right then that’s exactly what we give them—not a sentence more, not a word less.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2012 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2012

an interview with Matthea Harvey

by Louis Bourgeois

Matthea Harvey is the author of the author of Sad Little Breathing Machine (Graywolf, 2004) and Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form (Alice James Books, 2000). Her third book of poems, Modern Life (Graywolf, 2007) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and a New York Times Notable Book. Her first children’s book, The Little General and the Giant Snowflake, illustrated by Elizabeth Zechel, was published by Tin House Books in 2009. An illustrated erasure, titled Of Lamb, with images by Amy Jean Porter, was published by McSweeney’s in 2011. Matthea is a contributing editor to jubilat, Meatpaper, and BOMB. She teaches poetry at Sarah Lawrence and lives in Brooklyn.

Louis Bourgeois: I would like to begin by asking you to describe your background and development as a poet. What led you to write poems, say, rather than stories or novels?

Matthea Harvey: Rhyme drew me in. Encountering rhyme out of the blue is like finding a long-lost twin (fraternal), or a suitcase that closes with a particularly satisfying click. One of the first poems I can remember memorizing is “Bed in Summer” by Robert Louis Stevenson, from A Child’s Garden of Verses. It starts out:

In winter I get up at night
And dress by yellow candlelight.
In summer, quite the other way,
I have to go to bed by day.

I was probably six or seven at the time, and I remember being very impressed by the way that poem managed to capture something I felt so acutely. I liked that the poem puzzled its way through its confusion—there was something Rubik cube-like about it. Unconsciously I must have felt how meter and rhyme connect those two contradictory situations—going to bed when the sun is shining, getting up when it is dark. Another rhyme I remember from early on is from the song “You are my Lucky Star” (in Singing in the Rain): “You’ve opened heaven’s portal here on earth for this poor mortal.” There’s something delicious about that, right? I remember visiting my friend Frances whose son Sebastian was then four years old—he and I were reading a book called Snake Cake by Yukido Kido, which runs through families of simple rhymes: Snake. Bake. Cake. Goat. Oat. An hour later, while we were eating lunch, he looked up at me and said, “Tortilla . . . Matthea!” I don’t know which of us was more delighted.

In my own writing, I’ve mostly abandoned end-rhyme, but wordplay is still a huge part of my process. I’ve written a series of mermaid poems in the last few years. The first one was called “The Straightforward Mermaid” which arose from my delight in that word combination. After that, I decided that future mermaid poems would have to be words ending in “d” or “t,” which led to “The Deadbeat Mermaid,” “The Morbid Mermaid” and so forth . . .

LB: Please explain the provocative title of your first collection, Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form.

MH: Is it provocative because of its length? I remember talking to Mary Jo Bang about this, and at the time she was writing her second book, The Downstream Extremity of the Isle of Swans. We agreed that if we could each remember the other’s title then they weren’t too long. I’ve never forgotten hers. One of my favorite titles of an art piece is “Première Communion de Jeunes Filles Chlorotiques Par Un Temps De Neige” or “First Communion of Chlorotic Young Girls in Snowy Weather” by Alphonse Allais. It’s essentially a joke of a title, since the accompanying image is a simple white square.

The title-phrase “pity the bathtub its forced embrace of the human form” came to me in the middle of the night. I try to keep a pen and paper by my bed for those ideas because it’s very tempting to tell myself I’ll remember the idea in the morning, and I never do (at one point I had a wonderful pen light—I keep meaning to find another one of those). In the morning I read the phrase and I carried it around in my head for a few months until I could write a poem about that idea—that bathtubs don’t have a choice when it comes to embracing humans. I do have a tendency to invest inanimate objects with human qualities—for example we used to have a kitchen faucet which I named “The Eager Alien.”

LB: There seems to be a great density of language in many of the poems in Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form: some of the poems extend so far to the right-hand margin of the page that they nearly become prose poems. Can you talk about the use of the line in this book as well as the use of other forms, such as the double-column, the spatial poem, as well as the prose poem?

MH: In what I call the “swivel poems” (poems where one word ends a sentence and begins the next), I didn’t want to let any silence or white space in. I wanted the readers to feel like they were somersaulting down a hill so that they’d arrive in a new place, dizzy and disoriented. I felt swept up in a whirlwind in writing them, because a sentence would end on a word—say, “strange”—and suddenly I had to start a new sentence with that word. It was a really exciting compositional strategy for me because of the way it provided cliffs, back alleys, diving boards, dead-ends. InModern Life I had the same feeling in the “Future of Terror” and “Terror of the Future” series, where I was using a rough abecedarian technique—making word lists between “terror” and “future” in the dictionary. I love the push-pull of these kinds of strategies—sometimes the form seems to be leading, sometimes I do.

In Pity the Bathtub, I used a double and triple column in a poem called “The Illuminated Manuscript,” in sections titled “Diptych” and “Triptych.” I was experimenting in a rudimentary way with having the visual presentation of the poem correlate to its subject. The same thing applies to “Ornamental,” the poem in the shape of an “O” which echoes the gaping mouths of the stone carp in the poem. I am charmed by concrete poetry (but it’s very hard to do well, I think) and in general by the idea of mixing the visual and the textual. For this reason, I read a lot of graphic novels—some of my favorites graphic novelists or artists are Rebecca Kraatz, Gabrielle Bell, Graham Roumieu, Tom Gauld, and Renee French. Right now I’m writing a book of poems that has photographs and silhouette cutouts as titles.

LB: I found the poem “Ceiling Unlimited Series” particularly intriguing—what was the genesis of this poem, and what were you are attempting to convey?

MH: “Ceiling Unlimited” is something I heard a weatherman say on the Weather Channel—it means a completely clear sky. I thought that perhaps if the sky was truly free of clouds and any other distractions (birds, kites, skywriting), we could see if there was something else out there. I wasn’t really raised in any religion (in England I attended an Anglican school and went to a Methodist church, but I left that all behind at the age of eight when we moved to the U.S.), but like most people, I sometimes wonder if there’s anything or anyone out there. “Ceiling Unlimited” is a series of attempts to communicate with that. I could say I was addressing God, or gods, or aliens, but really the poem names the “other” in more accurate ways than I can now describe: “God of Seedpods,” “dust-ghost,” “magnet mine,” “sweet triple trochee,” “finite font of counsel,” “constant corrector,” and “absent gauze over my gaze.” The language in that poem made a leap into a more private vocabulary because I decided that if I was addressing someone so possibly all-knowing, they would understand what I was saying.

LB: The title of your second book, Sad Little Breathing Machine, is a rather intoxicating set of words. How did you happen upon such a title? How does the title help guide the reader throughout the rest of the poems in the collection?

MH: I think the title prepares the reader for the intersection of the human and the mechanical. In the “Introduction to____” poems, whichever word fills that blank (world, diction, addiction, etc) is considered as a system or a machine (speaking on the left column of the page) while on the right column humans try to learn the language of that system and engage in a dialogue with it.

I’m not sure when I came up with that title. I have a vague memory of seeing an image of a child in an iron lung and the phrase “sad little breathing machine” coming into my head. The more I thought about it, the more I felt that on certain days—the worse ones—we could all be described as sad little breathing machines.

Very early on in the process of writing Sad Little Breathing Machine, I saw Rebecca Horn’s sculpture, The Unconsciousness of Feelings, and I knew that was the image I wanted on the cover. It’s essentially a steel rectangle with little arms that spin around, and it has a kind of futile sweetness to it. I picture the satellites in “Satellite Storage” in Modern Life looking similar. In that poem a satellite attendant shows the satellites filmstrips of sunsets and places a tiny city model underneath the retired satellites to remind them of their pasts and prepare them for possible future work, which is probably not forthcoming. In real life, retired satellites go into “graveyard orbit,” which is possibly more tragic.

LB: Please explain the variety of forms throughout your three collections, and the prevalence of the prose poems in your later work.

MH: There isn’t a grand plan at work in the progression of the books with respect to the line. I do want the books to be different from each other, certainly, but I’m more aware of that on the level of theme or structure. I can tell when I’m writing the last of a particular type of poem because the writing is too easy and I start to feel queasy. That happened with the swivel poem and I haven’t written another one since. Maybe it’ll be my chosen form again at age seventy-six.

When I started writing Sad Little Breathing Machine I wanted to create a book with different constituent parts that worked together, and the separate “cogs” did end up having different characteristics—introduction poems, poems with diagrammatic engines under their titles, poems using their own titles as engines, and the prose poems. Initially I was working with only the first three types but I started to feel lopsided—I was consciously evading my narrative impulse and realized that the book wouldn’t feel whole without it. So really it was my attempt to try writing less narratively (with more gaps, with more non-sequiturs or secrets) which led me to writing my most narrative poems.

Eula Biss and Matthew Zapruder co-wrote a great piece for American Poet on how faint the boundaries are between the lyric and the narrative (“Matthew Zapruder and Eula Biss Revisit the Lyric and the Narrative”). I certainly believe you can write a narrative lyric or a lyrical narrative—why not a nyric or a larrative? In Sad Little Breathing Machine I wasn’t smudging those boundaries. I was separating them out. So the prose poems in that book are particularly narrative. I spun each one around one idea, such as “what if we took photocopying classes?” or “what would a life ruled by the theory of the Baked Alaska be like?” then pushed that idea to its most extreme and sometimes ridiculous conclusion. Those prose poems are cousins of some of the more fantasy-based swivel poems in the first book, except that their shapes are different. If you were going to make sculptures of them, the swivel poems would be disparate objects all attached with hinges and the prose poems would be small sheep wrapped in extra wool.

When I start writing a poem, I can usually know quite early on whether it’s a lineated or prose poem, but I don’t think I can explain how. It’s like deciding whether to wear a skirt or a pair of pants. In Modern Life, the prose poem made sense as a form because of the subjects. I didn’t want to be writing about borders and equators and dotted lines in lines—the centaur needed to be able to consider his divided condition (“But what his stomach wants, his tongue won’t touch; what his mouth wants, his stomach recoils from”) without being lineated himself.

LB: What are your views on the prose poem in general?

MH: That’s a bit like asking me to describe snowflakes in general. Or chocolate cake in general. What I like about prose poems is that they seem to make people uncomfortable—people want to define them, justify them, attack them. Prose poems are natural fence-sitters, and since Modern Life is trying to walk that middle line (whether it’s finding the exact center of a strawberry by growing it on a drawbridge or inventing a catgoat), of course I’m attracted to them. I don’t see much difference between prose poems and flash fiction (I’ve often taught the latter as the former), but then I also don’t see that much difference between art and poetry. I think of poetry as a very inclusive term. Still, it’s interesting that people want to make the distinction. I love the magazine Double Room for that reason (contributors have to write about their ideas on the prose poem/flash fiction).

Recently, while I was in England, I saw a documentary on the BBC about the border between India and Pakistan at Wagah. When the border closes each evening around six o’ clock, the soldiers on each side do these amazing high-stepping peacock march-offs (like a dance-off). The displays are almost identical on each side and thousands gather to watch them. Though they’re patrolling along their separate borders, what comes across is how similar they are. Whether you’re talking about political borders or aesthetic divisions (and clearly, the political ones have much more tragic consequences), it seems like once they are created, we want to patrol them, enforce them. I grew up spending time at my grandmother’s farm in Germany and she lived a few kilometers away from the border between east and west Germany. It was so strange that roads which used to connect two towns now ended in the middle.

LB: In your work, there seems to be little “confessionalism” going on. This is not to say that your work is not “personal”—there is a strange type of internal dialog at play, certainly—but the poems always seem to be reaching outward to a world beyond the speaker of the poems, to the point that your work seems to become almost “anti-confessional.” If any of this is accurate, please comment. In any case, this rather convoluted question poses the question: what do you think of “confessional poetry”?

MH: I’m all over my poems, even if their relation to my everyday life is that of dream to reality. Poems can’t help but be personal. Mine are certainly an accurate blueprint of the things I think about, if not a record of my daily life. It’s a matter of temperament—my neurons fire when I’m writing about strange implausible situations. But, for example, my husband and I moved next to Prospect Park in Brooklyn about six years ago, and Modern Life has three park poems in it. Granted, none of them are about me in the park, (in one, the park is a place for word-watching in lieu of bird-watching), but that park crept in.

As a reader I don’t distinguish between confessional and non-confessional work. After all, how do we even know that certain “I” poems are confessional? It’s a tricky business, this correlating of the speaker and the poet. If I begin a poem, “I am a donkey,” reason kicks in and says, “She is taking on the persona of a donkey.” But if I write, “I have taken so many drugs I can’t see my feet,” the tendency is to take that as a confession on the part of the poet. Maybe that doesn’t matter. I’d almost prefer for it to be the other way round. Some of my favorite poems are “confessional” poems written in the voices of aliens (“Southbound on the Freeway” by May Swenson” and “Report from the Surface” by Anthony McCann), sheep (“Snow Line” by John Berryman) or a yak (“The Only Yak in Batesville, Virginia” by Oni Buchanan).

“Confessional poetry” is another one of those labels. It goes in and out of fashion. I suppose it’s useful in designating writing that tends to come from personal experience, work that delineates an “I,” but it’s a loose lasso, one which may rope certain poems by one poet and not others. Plus the way people “confess” can be wildly different. I might go into the confessional and say, “Father, what is my obsession with miniatures?”

LB: Although I am quite pleased with the complexity of your poetry, I was wondering if you ever concern yourself with losing some readers in the whorl of your literary gyroscopics?

MH: Well, not everyone is going to like every carnival ride. I hope that there’s enough for readers to hold onto, but I also like poems that are haunted by a structure or a narrative, or poems that frisk flirtatiously at the boundary of sense.

LB: Do you like teaching poetry writing?

MH: I do. I’ve had amazing students, and teaching is a great way to keep learning. When I get interested in a new topic I teach a class on it. There’s a graduate seminar I teach in which the students and I try to expand the terminology we use to talk about poetry as well as expand our notion of what makes a poem—we read source texts on architecture, dance, photography, film and the graphic novel (books like Geoff Dyer’s The Ongoing Moment, Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, Doris Humphrey’s The Art of Making Dances and Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture by Adrian Forty).

LB: Do you consider yourself an experimental poet, an avant-garde poet?

MH: I try not to consider myself too much at all. I know it has been said before, but to be a poet you have to experiment. But I don’t like the idea of deciding to be a _______ poet unless that adjective space can be left open, Mad Lib-style.

LB: What advice might you have for aspiring poets?

MH: The same advice I give myself: read widely (in and outside of your own genre), keep a notebook with you at all times. Do something that scares you every now and then. Try to locate your own frequency, knowing that one year your voice is on AM 532 and the next it’s on FM 92.8. Read Fanny Howe’s essay on “Bewilderment” in The Wedding Dress. Go to lots of out-of-the way museums, like The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles or the Mustard Museum in Mount Horeb, WI.

LB: Tell me about Of Lamb, which was published last year.

MH: I very much admire Tom Phillips’s A Humument, Jen Bervin’s Nets, and Mary Ruefle’sA Little White Shadow, so about five years ago I bought a book from the sale table at a used bookstore, A Portrait of Charles Lamb by Lord David Cecil and decided to do an erasure of it. Erasures are interesting to me because they prove what particular sieves we all are—of course my erasures ended up being all about lamb and Mary (as luck would have it, Charles Lamb’s sister was called Mary) and evolved into a series of very short poems about the two of them and their relationship. Here are two examples:

13
Lamb, eyes shut,
ran backward.

26
Mary called him
delicious.

Partway through the process I got in touch with an artist whose work I love—Amy Jean Porter—and we decided to make a collaborative book, Of Lamb, which was published by McSweeney’s in 2011.

LB: Have you ever had the impulse to write stories, novels, or plays?

MH: I started writing children’s stories a few years ago—so far I’ve published two, The Little General and the Giant Snowflake illustrated by Elizabeth Zechel and Cecil the Pet Glacierillustrated by Giselle Potter. I think it would be interesting to try and make the leap from prose poem to short story someday. I wouldn’t have said I would ever write a play, but this year I made a sound piece called Telettrofono with the sound artist Justin Bennett. It’s the story of Antonio and Esterre Meucci (Antonio Meucci invented the telephone years before Alexander Graham Bell) told in a number of voices (mermaid chorus, verifiable fact mode, math problem mode) and it’s a little like a radio play. Right now a novel feels beyond my grasp given my love of magnifying glasses, but who knows? In the last ten years I’ve found myself studying photography (I like to photograph miniature constructed scenes—I’ll buy a very sad cake decoration like a plastic computer for a dreary office birthday party and construct a wildly colorful scene to put on its screen, or do a series of dollhouse chairs frozen in ice cubes) embroidering handkerchiefs and making silhouettes (most recently a mermaid-knife hybrid—a “Swiss Mermy Knife”). Clearly I can’t predict what will come next.

Click here to purchase Pity the Bathtub its Forced Embrace of the Human Form at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase Sad Little Breathing Machine at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase Modern Life at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase The Little General and the Giant Snowflake at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase Of Lamb at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase Cecil the Pet Glacier at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2012 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2012