Bob Rosenthal
Beatdom Books ($28)

by Richard Kostelanetz

Though many books have been written about Allen Ginsberg since I profiled him for the New York Times Magazine in 1965, this one told me much that I’d not known before. Uniquely, it is written from the perspective of Ginsberg’s literary secretary, who ran the home office for two decades while his boss traveled and starred around the world.

Its subject is a celebrity who refused to live like a celebrity, which is to say that Ginsberg rented modest apartments in a marginal neighborhood while keeping the same P.O. Box for decades. He retained friends, some of whom became his de facto wards; continued to publish in eleemosynary magazines, even though an aggressive agent had connected him to the literary-industrial complex; and he instructed Bob Rosenthal to give reprint permissions for whatever publishers would pay, which could be nothing.

One recurring theme is Ginsberg’s generosity, indicatively allowing his fellow poet Gregory Corso, a drug-addicted beggar, to steal from Ginsberg’s library rare books that he would then purchase back from the bookseller who’d paid Corso. (John Cage was comparably generous; like Ginsberg he did not have children, and both correctly surmised that their estates would support at least one executor for decades later.)

Filled with modest detail, Straight Around Allen is an intimate portrait written from personal distance; Rosenthal, himself straight and married, notes that Ginsberg preferred manly men, often essentially heterosexual, in part because he simply ignored women (he often got wrong the first name of Rosenthal’s wife). His theme, implicit in the book’s subtitle, is of Ginsberg as a small businessman discharging many responsibilities while worried about income. Do not minimize this last achievement, which few prominent artists have realized as well. Consider also that Ginsberg overcame negative reviews to survive professionally for four decades while establishing a legend that continues for additional decades later.

Rosenthal writes dispassionately about his subject’s last days (here with a full text frequently quoted by others) and more about Ginsberg’s will and estate than most biographers do (though he refuses to mention dollar amounts). Those who consider Ginsberg devoid of calculation should read about his image of “Three Idiots.” One stylistic departure here, which I like, is that brief commentaries appear in smaller type adjacent to the principal text; these function like extended footnotes with asides and additional information. With images new to me—not only photographs but specimens of Ginsberg’s handwritten messages—and an informative text, this is a treasure. However, it does seem strange that Straight Around Allen should appear in 2019, more than two decades after its subject’s death, and that it should be published by a small publisher based in England.

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Interviewed by Allan Vorda

Born in Maryland, Neal Stephenson is the son of a professor of electrical engineering and the grandson of a physics professor. The family moved to Illinois and later to Ames, Iowa, where Neal graduated from high school. He received a B.A. in 1981 from Boston University with a major in geography and a minor in physics. Stephenson first made his splash in the literary scene with the publication of the cyberpunk SF novel Snow Crash in 1992. Since then he has published a number of books, usually of substantial length, in the areas of speculative and historical fiction; these include The Diamond Age, Cryptonomicon, The Baroque Cycle (Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World), Anathem, Reamde, and Seveneves. Stephenson has won numerous awards including the Hugo, Locus SF Award (five times), the Clarke Award, and the Prometheus Award (twice). He lives in Seattle, Washington. His most recent novel is Fall: or, Dodge in Hell (William Morrow, $35).

This interview was conducted on June 18th, 2019, in the lobby of a downtown Houston hotel, before his reading that evening at Christ Church Cathedral.

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Allan Vorda: In Fall, Dodge Forthrast becomes brain dead after surgery, whereupon he is placed in a cryonic state until future technology can restore his consciousness. What was the genesis for writing such a novel?

Neal Stephenson: The idea of uploading the brain is something people in the tech world have been talking about for a while, and of course, people have always thought about what happens after we die. Is there an afterlife? Is there something more? Since it’s a topic of universal interest, it seemed like a good premise for a novel. I have also been interested in Milton’s Paradise Lost lately, and I’ve been looking for a way to do something with it. I came at it from various angles over time, and finally decided Fall was a good way to approach it.

AV: This also raises the mind-body problem. As you write, “The mind couldn’t be separated from the body. The whole nervous system, all the way down to the toes, had to be studied and understood as a whole—and you couldn’t even stop there, since the functions of that system were modulated by chemicals produced in places like the gut and transmitted through the blood. The bacteria living in your tummy—which weren’t even part of you, being completely distinct biological organisms—were effectively part of your brain.” Do you agree the mind is dependent on the body? If so, would you qualify whether your consciousness is you?

NS: There is a kind of naïve idea about this distinction between the mind and the body that hasn’t been taken seriously by people who think about it a lot. The idea is that you could just take the brain out of the skull, then keep it alive somehow, yet still have the same person. Everything you’ve just read in that passage is not based on my own ideas, but ideas that have been explored by philosophers, neurologists, psychologists, and so on.

From my point of view as a storyteller, I’m looking for ways to relate an interesting yarn. In the beginning of the novel, when the characters are beginning to scan the brains and put them up as digital simulations on the Internet, they are coming at it from that naïve point of view in which the brain is the only thing that matters. That has some unintended consequences as the situation develops, which eventually get rectified as people come up with a more sophisticated and nuanced view of what it means to be human. The questions you’re raising are explicitly discussed by characters in the book, which they’re working out among themselves as the situation develops.

AV: From a religious standpoint, various philosophers argue the soul can be separated from the body. The metaphysical existence of a soul is debatable, but throughout Fall you refer to the consciousnesses in cyberspace as “souls.” Why did you choose that term?

NS: Because it’s short—it only has four letters and it’s a term that people would use. I’m trying to depict realistic characters, and I’m trying to use terminology they would adopt, even if it is not the terminology I would use. It’s my job to think about what fictional characters would do and say, and not just what I would do and say.

The word “soul” has all kinds of religious significance, but it’s also used in other kinds of settings. When people talk about an airplane that has crashed or a ship that has gone down, for example, they’ll frequently say, “It was lost with 152 souls on board.”

I wouldn’t read too much into my use of the term. When the characters use it, what they’re getting at is a rebooted consciousness: this digital simulation which has the complexity of the brain on which it was based. It has some of the personality and memories, and it acts and behaves as if it had the full complexity of a living human. When we talk about a human being, it implies a physical body. When we talk about a soul, it seems to be a more precise term for what we’re denoting.

AV: At one point in Fall, El Shepherd wants to destroy the less developed souls who are wasting his money to keep the Process going. El states these “new ‘fruit fly’ processes have to be terminated.” Corvallis Kawasaki counters by saying these souls “are based on human connectomes.” Can you comment on this moral question of what constitutes life, and who has the right to decide who lives or dies? Not insignificantly, this is being debated right now in our country regarding abortion.

NS: The fruit fly reference is to new animals that are being booted up by Spring; she feels the Bitworld isn’t complete until it has birds and bees and other lesser creatures in addition to humans. Spring is trying to create those animals to more fully realize the world in which they’re living. I think both El and Corvallis agree that souls, based on a human connectome, should not be terminated. What they’re arguing about is this new phenomenon of less complicated creatures that have emerged due to the creative efforts of Spring within the story.

AV:“The mass of people are so stupid, so gullible, because they want to be misled. There’s no way to make them not want it.” A lot of fake news is disseminated by the Internet, or what you refer to in Fall as the Miasma. Do you see any solution to preventing all of the disinformation we see? How do we preserve free speech?

NS: I’m not too worried about free speech. The constitutional guarantee of free speech refers to governmental activities, and basically says the government doesn’t have the power to restrict people’s exercise of free speech. It doesn’t say anything about private companies and their activities. Platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter have been gamed by hostile state actors who are actively using them as part of a disinformation campaign, and to engage in a kind of non-shooting war with the United States. That is all completely obvious and out in the open at this point, and by failing to prevent this from happening, social media platforms are failing in their responsibility as corporate citizens. It appears they’re trying to clean up their act and get better at this, but I don’t think they’re doing it fast enough. I question whether or not they have the ability to ever completely succeed at it, given their whole corporate valuation and revenue model is based on running these systems algorithmically, without any humans in the room.

I can’t remember who is quoted in that line and I’m not sure it matters, but to answer the question on disinformation: I don’t see a solution. I think it’s a terrible problem, and we’re in a terrible situation because of it. It will be very challenging for the responsible companies to change their ways. The only way I can see forward is for people to get more skeptical about what they see, which is difficult, because a lot of people are happy to swallow inaccurate information that aligns with what they feel. Along with skepticism, part of the solution might be that these platforms will fade away over time and be replaced by new ones. Maybe in ten years, we will be using different platforms that have been invented in the wake of the situation of today.

AV: This is a peripheral question, but nowadays a writer can Google a topic and get information immediately, whereas before the Internet writers had to scour journals and microfiche in the library to find what they needed. It was almost like being a detective—time-consuming, yet often fun and rewarding. Have we lost something if writers no longer have to spend time in the library, or does it not really matter?

NS: I think it does matter, because serendipity is a valuable side effect of using old school libraries. When you’re walking down a shelf of books, looking for one particular volume you think is relevant, you may see other books surrounding it that are useful in ways you didn’t expect. You can get the same results when flipping through an old paper card catalog or microfiche. One of the things digital information storage systems have not done well is reproducing that kind of serendipitous discovery. Balanced against that is the fact it’s much easier to find things on the Internet; you don’t have to physically go to the library to do research, so everything just goes much faster.

I try to develop skills in how I use the Internet to help make up for that a little bit. Rather than doing one search on one set of search terms, I’ll try to create some serendipity on my own by trying a bunch of related search terms, and then searching outward from the first hit to make sure I’m not missing anything.

AV: The Forthrast homestead is located in northwest Iowa, a borderless, undefined territory called Ameristan that is populated by uneducated, gun-hoarding cults; one group in Iowa is building a two hundred-foot tall flaming cross, and another in Nebraska actually crucifies people. Yet you also suggest that Jake Forthrast, a survivalist from Idaho, can actually change into a reasonable human being, and your depiction of city-dwellers isn’t without criticism. What is your opinion on how people in rural areas differ in thinking from people in cities?

NS: The situation that exists, not only in rural areas but all over the country, is that there is a divide. We tend to refer to it as red state versus blue state, but it’s not really correct to think of it in terms of states—it’s more finely detailed than that, the boundary is a very complicated fractal that can exist even between neighborhoods.

In the case of the novel, this is the same situation. Some areas are strictly blue-state; for example, in the town of northwest Iowa, there are dentists and doctors and all the people have learned to live in the modern world productively; they have money and education and they know how to do things. On the other side, past this invisible boundary, there are the have-nots who are suffering because they’ve fallen under the grip of algorithmically-generated memes that are coming into their eyes and ears all the time, making it impossible to make sense of what is objectively real. This is an exaggeration of the situation which exists today. The purpose of the book is to provide a kind of glimpse into the future, a cautionary tale to make people consider the consequences if we keep going down this road. I try to depict some characters, such as Jake, who are trying to make connections, to address these difficult situations and find ways to work with it.

AV: Your book Cryptonomicon might be the only work of fiction to mention the Reimann zeta function, and Fall also invokes some mathematical statements such as “the plot of the integral.” The majority of your readers probably don’t know the meaning of mathematical or technical terms. In what way does this add to your writing?

NS: Based on my interactions with readers at my readings, I think this may be a pessimistic view. I’ll allow a fair number of people won’t necessarily understand these terms with absolute precision, but that's not what I’m thinking about when I’m writing this stuff. I’m in the business of writing stories about fictional characters, some of whom are well-versed in technology, mathematics, engineering, computers, etc. My strategy is to show them doing and saying things people like this actually do and say. Some readers may not totally understand some of the jargon, but that’s how real life is. I’m hoping the result is to make the book seem more like real life, and in that way help the reader suspend their disbelief, and find the whole thing realistic and plausible.

AV: In Fall, Time Slip Ratio refers to the differences between Meatspace (real world) and Bitworld (cyberspace) time. Enoch Root is a recurring character in your novels who is essentially immortal and never seems to age. If we consider the hypothesis that all reality is a computer simulation, then can Meatspace in the novel also be a simulation, and is Enoch Root from a reality outside this simulation? This could provide an explanation of Enoch Root’s ostensible immortality due to Time Slip Ratio.

NS: What you just described is something I’m hinting at in the book, so I would say that you correctly pieced it together in a way that makes sense. I’m reluctant to say, “Yes, that’s it,” because the heart of this is not to just baldly describe the state of things. It is a natural question that arises: If you posit we can simulate reality with our computers, then the next question you have to ask is, could our world be a simulation on someone else’s computer. Then it turtles all the way down.

AV: If given the option to upload your consciousness, would you do it?

NS: I’m quite skeptical of this kind of thing myself. I would have to know a lot more about the process and how it’s supposed to work before making such a decision. This book isn’t so much me advocating that process as just saying, “Let’s suppose this would work to some degree and use that as a basis for a yarn.” I want to tell a story and see where the story takes us.

AV: Do you play video games? If so, which ones and does this add or detract from your writing?

NS: I used to play them more in the past. I like solo games, and the trend in the last decade has been towards multiplayer games. This is driven by economic considerations: game publishers get more bang for their buck if they can get customers to entertain each other. I would rather be on my own. My time spent playing video games has gone down, but I’ve played a little bit of Red Dead Redemption 2, and a little bit of Anthem recently. I’m probably more apt to play board games than video games at this point.

AV: Fall incorporates straight fiction, science fiction, and fantasy. Was it difficult to plot out three distinct genres?

NS: I don’t see genre that much while I’m writing. Those are distinctions that are drawn by people outside who want to classify books. There is nothing wrong with those distinctions—by assigning genre labels to different books, we make it easier for readers to find books they’re going to like, to find each other, and to form communities. So I have nothing against it, but those distinctions are all invisible when I’m actually doing the work. I don’t have any mental sense of shifting gears; it’s all an organic whole to me, and so there are no hurdles or difficulties associated with moving from one to the other.

AV: As a writer, you received a lot of recognition for writing science fiction, but do you feel that you’ve been stereotyped as an SF writer? Do you think this prevents critics from considering you for awards such as the National Book Award or the Pulitzer Prize?

NS: Probably to some degree, although I’m not particularly worried about it. There is an odd mentality around genres versus so-called literary fiction that I’ve been observing for some time, although more as a kind of anthropologist than a participant. I wrote about this a long time ago in a Slashdot interview, explaining what I call Beowulf versus Dante writers: Beowulf and The Divine Comedy are both great works of literature, but The Divine Comedy was written by a person who had a patron, whereas Beowulf probably just bubbled up from some guy telling stories in a bar. The same situation occurs today; you have some people working in a more literary area, where typically they’re not supporting themselves through writing—they’re employed by a university or something that effectively acts as their patron while they work on their art. Then you have writers who are making their living at it, and they sell a whole lot more books. Occasionally, you have someone who can do both, which is a marvelous thing.

I’m completely uninterested in drawing value judgments between those two styles. Consequently, I’m not a big fan of people who live in one camp and look down their nose at people in the other. It’s quite possible I’m in a weird place and I’m not going to be winning a lot of awards, but I really don’t care. I’ve been amazingly fortunate in my career. There are a lot of writers who make more money than I do, and a lot of writers who make less. My position has given me the ability to write full time and have a good standard of living, so I consider myself lucky. Whether I win awards or literary acclaim means nothing to me.

Click here to purchase this book
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Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2019 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2019

INTERVIEWS

The Quixotic Search for Melancholy: An Interview with Mark Haber
Interviewed by Allan Vorda
Haber discusses his debut novel, Reinhardt's Garden, a unique and playful take of a journey into the heart of darkness as a Croatian attempts a treatise on melancholy.

“How Multiple and How Simultaneous”:
An Interview with Éireann Lorsung
Interviewed by Elizabeth Fontaine, Evelyn May, and Sarah Degner Riveros
Poet Éireann Lorsung discusses her recent work, and how poetry is the synaptic alchemy of all that is happening at any given moment.

A Shaming, Damning, Beautiful Moment:
An Interview with Stephen Markley
Interviewed by Benjamin Davis
Markley discusses his debut novel, Ohio, which combines a murder mystery with large-scale social commentary on the opioid crisis and the Midwest.

Unspeakable:
Conversation Between Michelle Lewis and Jeffrey Morgan
Winners of two Conduit book prizes, Michelle Lewis (for Animul/Flame) and Jeffrey Morgan (for The Last Note Becomes Its Listener), interview each other about the unique experiences that shaped their books and the challenges of translating inexpressible moments into language.

The Spatial Lattice of Consciousness:
An Interview with Neal Stephenson
Interviewed by Allan Vorda
Renowned speculative fiction author Neal Stephenson discusses his newest contribution to his oeuvre with Fall, or, Dodge in Hell, a futuristic take on Paradise Lost.

FEATURES

A Body of Work: The Tour
Essay by Don Cummings
Author Don Cummings describes the trials, the tribulations, and the weight gain during the book tour for his memoir earlier this year.

Two Roads Diverged: Jack Kerouac and Robert Creeley
Essay by Jonah Raskin
Contemporary writers could learn from both Creeley and Kerouac—who came from opposite sides of New England—how difficult it can be to resist the temptations of ego and competition.

FICTION REVIEWS

Night School: A Reader for Grownups
Zsόfia Bán
Hungarian author Zsόfia Bán riffs on subjects far and wide in this assortment of "night school lectures" that mix the historical and meta-historical. Reviewed by John Toren

Save Your Eyes
Vicente Huidobro and Hans Arp
translated by Tom Raworth
Save Your Eyes, a previously ‘lost’ Surrealist manuscript discovered in a cupboard, was published with the blessing of its translator, poet Tom Raworth, shortly before his death. Reviewed by Patrick James Dunagan

Every Mask I Tried On
Alina Stefanescu
In her debut fiction collection, Stefanescu conducts an exploration of the self in order to give shape to the unshapable. Reviewed by Ralph Pennel

Aerialists
Mark Mayer
The short stories in Mark Mayer’s Aerialists are epicenters of rituals and patterns where characters ruggedly assemble themselves, appropriating whatever matter is around to fill themselves out. Reviewed by Nick Hilbourn

Practice Dying
Rachel Stolzman Gullo
Two chance encounters instigate the plot of Practice Dying, illustrating the way various forces (religious, political, cultural, economic) bring people into collisions or convergences that shape their lives. Reviewed by Andrew Draper

Time For Bed
Wendy Rawlings
Rawlings' stories in her recent collection offer a rich study in powerful contradictions, employing comic and absurdist modes of writing to produce dissonant effects. Reviewed by Hugh Sheehy

MIXED GENRE REVIEWS

Motion Studies
Jena Osman
Motion Studies is the most recent installment in Jena Osman’s ongoing interrogation of the intersections between human bodies and our technology-obsessed culture. Reviewed by Joseph Houlihan

NONFICTION REVIEWS

The Problem with Everything: My Journey Through the New Culture Wars
Meghan Daum
In eight chapters, Meghan Daum refreshingly pushes against “the weaponization of ‘social justice culture,’” herd mentalities, and nostalgia, giving readers a look at the state of America and themselves. Reviewed by Erin Lewenauer

Beat: The Latter Days of the Beat Generation: A First-Hand Account
Andy Clausen
Andy Clausen’s memoir of his relationships with Beat writers, including lesser known or unknown poets, is notable for its unpretentious working-class perspective. Reviewed by Christopher Luna

The Pull of Politics: Steinbeck, Wright, Hemingway and the Left in the Late 1930s
Milton A. Cohen
The Pull of Politics tells the fascinating stories of John Steinbeck, Richard Wright, and Ernest Hemingway, who all wrote successful novels with leftist politics at the end of the 1930s. Reviewed by Ryder W. Miller

Straight Around Allen: On the Business of Being Allen Ginsberg
Bob Rosenthal
Written by Ginsberg’s literary secretary, who ran the home office for two decades while his boss traveled around the world, this memoir offers a new perspective on the poet. Reviewed by Richard Kostelanetz

POETRY REVIEWS

1919
Eve L. Ewing
Ewing, a poet and sociologist at the University of Chicago, sets out to elucidate the 1919 Chicago race riots through vibrant, poetic voices. Reviewed by Deborah Bacharach

Solar Perplexus
Dean Young
While the hallmarks of Young’s singular style are on display in Solar Perplexus, the tone of these poems is, on the whole, less wry than previous collections, and more candid, both somber and ecstatic. Reviewed by Thomas Moody

At the Last Minute
Estha Weiner
Weiner employs her theatrical background to her poetry, applying nimble precision, careful line breaks, rhythmic mastery, rhyme-sense, Shakespearean allusions, and, above all, simplicity. Reviewed by Walter Holland

Arcana: A Stephen Jonas Reader
Stephen Jonas
This first major gathering of work by Jonas, a poet of Boston who died in 1970 at the age of 49, reveals a brilliant wordsmith who introduced a gay, gender-bending, street hustling voice into the Modernist tradition. Reviewed by Patrick James Dunagan

Mea Roma: A Meditative Sampling from M. Valerius Martialis
M. Valerius Martialis
In Art Beck’s new Martial translation, Mea Roma, the blending of the aphoristic and the elegiac defines the Roman mastery of the epigram. Reviewed by Paul Vangelisti

Little Glass Planet
Dobby Gibson
In his fourth book, Dobby Gibson stands closer than ever to entropy, to inertia, to the middle-aged feeling that there can truly be nothing better than this life right now. Reviewed by Stephanie Burt

The Perseverance
Raymond Antrobus
In The Perseverance, Raymond Antrobus explores marginalized experiences and identity in the not-so-distant past and the post-Brexit world, alarming and unsettling his reader in necessary ways. Reviewed by Margaryta Golovchenko

Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2019 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2019

Raymond Antrobus
Penned in the Margins ($14)

by Margaryta Golovchenko

What language
would we speak
without ears?
—“Echo”

In The Perseverance, Raymond Antrobus explores marginalized experiences and identity in the not-so-distant past and the post-Brexit world, alarming and unsettling his reader in necessary ways. The poems not only call out famous figures like Alexander Graham Bell, but pluck from the abundant contemporary political and social landscape. The reader faces questions about how masculinity, language, and race are presented today, alongside how deafness is (mis)understood.

Antrobus’ poems explore what it means to have a voice in a variety of registers, from the poetic to the historical to the everyday. From a negotiation between wealth and poverty in “My Mother Remembers” to the frustration that refuses to admit defeat in “Dear Hearing World,” the speaker’s words glint with a sharp edge:

I have left Earth in search of an audible God.
I do not trust the sound of yours.

One of the central concerns in the collection is an exploration of language as a means of communication, a construct that for many is automatically associated with the auditory experience. Antrobus goes beyond familiar linguistic boundaries and points to people whose forms of expression continue to be silenced. The Perseverance does not set out to speak for, but to remember and challenge the repetitive cycle in which the victim is left to seek reconciliation within themselves. Poems like “Samantha” confront the reader with a simple fact:

I know the deaf are not lost
but they are certainly abandoned.

Not only do the poems speak on paper, they live beyond the page, for Antrobus’ poems belong in the mouth, ear, mind, and heart. The Perseverance creates a loud silence that lingers over the poems, which are both a poetic deconstruction of the author’s life and an exploration of various identities and experiences. Linking these poems is a desire to communicate that is never realized, because their conversation partner fails to accommodate any perspective other than their own. A frantic chorus, bursting out as soon as one opens the book and begins reading, The Perseverance presents a voice that is always coming through but is not always heard—not because it isn’t loud enough, but because some have still not learned how to shut up and listen.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2019 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2019

Dobby Gibson
Graywolf Press ($16)

by Stephanie Burt

If Dobby Gibson can be said to have a single subject, it’s one that makes his collections (four so far) consistent and wondrous, but also makes them hard to praise in brief: he writes about what Sigmund Freud named “ordinary unhappiness,” the discontent and persistent pain that come, not from one or another specific event, not from an especially painful or heroic or unlucky life course, but from the daily repetitions of an American domestic adulthood, driveway to bedroom, sunrise to noon to night. Why can’t we like it? Why can’t we get totally satisfied with the way things are, and (as Blaise Pascal said) remain, contently and quietly, in our rooms?

Pascal also chose to believe in a supreme God, a guarantor of justice if not love. If there are divinities in Gibson’s world, on the other hand, they are plural, and small-scale, and ineffective. Gibson prays (in “Prayer for November”) “Loyal docents, restless spirits of lost chess-masters, / dogs with one eye, lead us home. . . . // Promise it won’t end in any of the ways / we think it will.” The neighborhood in this poem, with its “breeze” and its “skywriters,” promises only that “we can be loved after all.” “Can,” not “are,” not “will.” It’s a slender reed: how’s yours?

Headline news in the age of Trump, small parenting victories, and worries about the advance of digital technology all enter this book as shifting foregrounds while that ordinary unhappiness lights up the back. When Gibson picks up his phone, “I swipe down with my thumb / to refresh the present” and “the Next Now arrives in the nick of time. // Next Now, heal us with opportunity. / Next Later, assure us our preferences have been saved.” (They will not be saved.) The “antique Korean fishing bobber” that provides Gibson’s book title speaks to the gradual waste (so it seems on a bad day) or blessed utility (so it seems on a better day) of any human life, especially the poet’s own: “You are a beautiful bauble it’s hard to imagine / anyone hurling you into the sea, / but eventually we all have a job to do.”

The standard Gibson poem—and almost any Gibson poem before this book—consists of indicative sentences, arranged in free verse down the page, their tone either diffident or frustrated or else quietly appreciative, their standout nouns alternately concrete and abstract. It’s a kind of poem other people write too: Gibson is simply better (and quieter and more often realistically sad) than most of the other people who write it, few of whom could admit (as he does) “Most of my predictions are honestly / just hopes.” But Gibson has now determined not to make this demotic lyric the only kind of poem he writes. In between handfuls of typical Gibson constructions in Little Glass Planet come a poem called “Drone,” three pages of rhetorical questions; “Roll Call,” a page-long checklist; a “Litany,” some of whose lines are just first names; a list of rejected titles, called “Selected Poems.”

We also get two longish poems about time spent in Marfa, Texas, where—like other poets who have written about the experience (Peter Reading, Jeffrey Yang)—Gibson had a residency. His Marfa is fire trucks, signs for local elections, flatness, sunlight, and missing his family: “I can still hear the dishes // being put away in St. Paul”; “I tried / and failed to see // the Marfa lights.” There’s less here than in older books about Minnesota, where Gibson still lives, but when Gibson does refer to his Midwest, it shines: “The first time I walked / out onto a lake in the middle of January / I knew I could go anywhere.” Even this symbol of hope can and must crack in spring.

Despite the two long poems, Little Glass Planet feels shorter than Gibson’s prior books, and more powerful, and sadder too: the poet, now older, his neo-Surrealist roots thoroughly pruned, stands closer than ever to entropy, to inertia, to the middle-aged feeling that there can truly be nothing better than this life right now, or not for him, not any more. Few poets since Larkin have chronicled with such force the kind of middle-aged dejection Gibson presents in “What the Cold Wants”:

Room temperature is a miracle.
That’s what the cold wants you to believe,
that it’s perfectly normal
and should be allowed to feel
right at home as it slithers under your door
to begin making a meal of your toes.

Room temperature is a miracle—the existence of people you love, of people at all, including yourself, is a miracle; but it’s a logical fallacy to move from appreciating that miracle to believing things cannot get better, that you or your family or your neighborhood or your love life or your cuisine can’t change and improve. That’s what the cold would like you to believe, and Gibson keeps almost believing it. But hope creeps in.

Then it creeps out. Is hope only what we feed ourselves so we can go on raising children, being parents who don’t cash out? “For reasons no one can understand we believe / that for our children it will not be too late.” That’s how one poem ends. It’s scary: it’s self-erasure, not the dramatic, dangerous, Plathian kind but the kind where the poet may wish he could just fade away, or become a pure creature of habit, sans introspection: “remember being a person / is two thirds being a pattern.” Gibson’s demographics—he is a white cis male Midwestern father married to a woman—are the kind that in previous generations would have gone unremarked: they are what linguists call unmarked, and Gibson sometimes seems to fear that he is (therefore) uninteresting, unremarkable. He dubs himself, in the Marfa poems, “the Forgetmenaut,” as if he were sailing into oblivion: he, or his stand-in, muses “I can’t remember what it was // I urgently sent/ myself into this world to do.” And yet, he concludes (still in Marfa), “We’re trapped inside diamonds // but when we think of one another / we can make the diamonds spin.”

Approach this book in the right mood, and you may weep or smile or spin your own diamonds. Approach it in the wrong one and you may wish either for the poet to cry out that he can’t take this kind of life any more, or for a better life to reveal its shape. As with Thomas Hardy, that earlier pessimist, there’s a great deal of love in this poetry—love for other human beings, for those spinning diamonds, and for the future a post-Trump America might still bring, to Texas and to Minnesota. It’s a kind of poetry every generation may need.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2019 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2019