Tag Archives: Fall 2024

The Sentence Is the Portal: An Interview with Bhanu Kapil

by Suparna Choudhury

I first encountered Bhanu Kapil through BBC Radio 4 at my kitchen table in Montreal. Her voice was calm, each word carefully weighted. She was reading from her latest collection, How to Wash a Heart Pavilion Poetry, 2020), after winning the T. S. Eliot Prize. I was struck by the way Kapil connects bodily sensation to language, especially in relation to experiences of displacement and hybridity, and her words about home and hospitality drew me to explore the rest of her work. As a neuroscientist and writer, I’m interested in the interplay between biology and culture, and the embodied experiences of people at thresholds—and Kapil’s poems are investigations of these themes. Her words slice through strange intimacies; they get underneath the longings and losses of immigrants and unravel the fragments of memory and experience with greater precision than many scientific methods seem to do.

Kapil is a British poet of Indian heritage; in addition to the T. S. Eliot Prize she has received a Windham-Campbell Prize from Yale University and a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors. Prior to How To Wash A Heart she published six full-length collections, including The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers, (Kelsey Street Press, 2001), Incubation: A Space for Monsters (Leon Works, 2006), Schizophrene (Nightboat Books, 2011), and Ban en Banlieue (Nightboat Books, 2015), as well as several chapbooks. For twenty years, Kapil taught creative writing, performance art, and contemplative practice at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. She returned to England in 2019 and is currently based in Cambridge as a Fellow of Churchill College.

Suparna Choudhury: When I first opened Schizophrene, I was alone on the grass in June, struggling with research questions about the city and psychosis—including how to make sense of psychosis. Schizophrene created a sudden spacious opening: a felt understanding that poetry is both method and language to study the psyche, a mode of inquiry. The words and the form cut things open; they are not just experiment-al, they experiment, they investigate. Does this resonate with you?

Bhanu Kapil: Suparna, thank you for your beautiful questions. Firstly, on “city and psychosis”—your language prompted the memory of a visit to the Chandigarh Architecture Museum, which houses an homage to Le Corbusier complete with faded originals of his correspondence with Nehru. In an out of the way corner, facing away from the flow of museum goers, I saw this fantastic thing, the “Hyperbolic-Paraboloid Dome of Assembly”:

I thought immediately of the Wertheim coral reef (crocheted in the hyperbolic plane) that I’d seen at Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art earlier that year. Was I attending a workshop? I remember crocheting something inexpertly. I remember asking Margaret Wertheim a question about schizophrenia and the brain. A conclusion: the topology of the schizophrenic brain is hyperbolic. I am simplifying the conversation, but it was remarkable to me that there in India I encountered a third iteration of the term. Architecture and psychosis: discuss.

I spent long summers in Chandigarh, the city I want to answer your question with or through. As a child, I can recall the cadence of a Corbusean city block in which “the endless rhythms of balconies and louvres on its long facade are punctuated by asymmetry . . . geometry . . . the texturique” (from Le Corbusier’s planning notes). In the museum, I also saw the tapestry designed by Le Corbusier for the Capitol Building, replete with lightning bolt, cobra, and inverted red triangle, symbols of tantra:

How does this image fuse questions of psyche and city? It’s not a map, and yet it feels like a kind of map.

In the art museum next door, I attended an exhibition of ghost-animal, demon, and angel-human Mughal miniatures. From the windows, I kept glancing at the Corbusean plaza. I observed a baby Jesus in a yellow dress, an “angel on a composite animal” (as per a caption from the exhibition). I saw a concrete landscape of outsize abstract symbols, derived from theorems, decaying and water-stained in the sun.

Chandigarh is a post-Partition city, built as a new capital after the trauma of the short war. “Gold was polished with a tiger’s claw,” I read in another caption. I remember mermaids, the Buddha’s footprint indented with geometric flowers. There was a terracotta fragment of a hand holding a rotted wreath. Outside, there was a sky the color of butter. On my last night in Chandigarh, I went to a Mother Goddess ritual (puja) in a Shiva temple. A mendicant in an intensely violet sari and turquoise blouse, her hair in dreadlocks, took a central position on the green baize mat next to the fire (cobra) pit.

“Everything is folded here. Think more about what a fold is. Think more about color, geometry and the circulation of symbols in an architecture without end.” That’s a note from a blog entry now deleted, the documentation of that visit.

SC: I’m not sure what it is about your work, but sometimes it seems convulsive, creating openings through rupture. It feels fleshy. What is your relationship to skin—your own or anyone else’s?

BK: To think skin is to think its wounds, and to learn about wound care. I think of the legs of someone I loved, covered with silver scars. Dark brown skin. He died many years ago, but I still recall those scars which were also indents, flesh that had a story to tell.

If experimental writing ruptures skin, then to be clear, I don’t think that’s ever a good idea in actual life. In life, I prefer an intact boundary. Rupture is exhausting.

The sentence is the portal, the place that keeps opening. I am trying to write sentences so slowly that they might become something else. In this way, perhaps even the portal can re-set by closing itself, for as long as it needs to.

SC: There is something tentacular and deeply sensory in your work that ends up creating temporary shapes for homes—like molehills—for the feeling of displacement in your reader. I don’t mean that they are comfortable sentences: They get at disarray and dissonance in ways that feel impossible to articulate in everyday life, in ways that give expression to that vertiginous feeling that occurs when something happens—with an intimate partner, with an old photograph, with the remnants of a dream—that pierces the core of unbelonging. I drink up those lines because they make me feel understood. In that way, you create little homes, homes that have texture. (Perhaps because fault lines, the way I feel them, are taut and spiky, the opposite of silk or sand dunes.) How do you do that? Do you mean to?

BK: I am not quite sure, but it’s so helpful to read your language about something I don’t intend, or don’t imagine in advance. Perhaps the quality you describe happened, most effortlessly, on my blog, a quotidian space, a space to think about teaching but also to document the ritual time with friends by the river, or in other places. I wrote Ban en Banlieue right into my blog. These days, my writing feels private, minimal, undeveloped, and stilted. One thing that’s changed is that I am asking questions about home and belonging, but directing them at this other kind of reader, a non-genetic descendant, the person who might be reading these notebooks twenty or thirty years from now, at the limit or beyond the limit of my own life span. I hope that this other kind of poet might experience what you experience, Suparna. I wonder what a day will be like in 2079.

SC: Do you remember when we met in Cambridge on that sofa and I told you I’m from NW9? We felt strange in that room in Cambridge, and we talked about the bus and the roundabouts between Ruislip and Queensbury that we could both conjure up. You told me about your piece in The Yale Review that describes Kingsbury. I couldn’t believe you put my hood on the map. What does it feel like for you to return “home”? Is home north London?

BK: West London feels like home, yes, on the bus. And at the same time, having been in the U.S. for the bulk of my adult experience, I can’t say that that’s reciprocal. Does the home I am returning to experience suction? Can it smell me in turn? There’s no family home, for example, that I can slip into, and no way of recreating one that resembles the one we had.

An experience I had soon after returning really stayed with me. I was waiting at a bus-stop. The son of my father’s oldest friend walked by, someone I had seen on so many Friday or Saturday evenings of my childhood. He said a brief, polite hello, then kept walking. In that moment, which caused me brief, sharp pain, I realized that people and places and scenes and moments that had crystallized in my diasporic heart, or time, had faded at their point of origin. I had faded from the memory of the place I was from, something made complicated by my non-native, non-white British status.

That said, I feel a sense of home in the company of other poets. Diaspora poets feel like family. I’m grateful to know them and to be able to spend time with them in the unexpected present of being here again.

SC: Your writing exposes lines and cracks and the violence of living with/as fragments. How do you (or how should we) create moments of cohesion?

BK: Sometimes I think this is what a performance might do, more than the writing itself. I am thinking of the experience of collaborating with a young British-Pakistani writer/dramaturg/performer, Blue Pieta, and their own collective of musicians and movement practitioners. We’re rehearsing now for a performance at Soho Poly this Autumn, derived loosely from How To Wash A Heart, my last book of poems. In our rehearsals and emails and conversations, we openly talk of what it is to share imagery. Can ancestral trauma be discharged, through our bodies, during these performances which decrystallize images and let them flow as voice, the text that’s now a score and also gestures, dance?

SC: Do you still practice bodywork?

BK: My bodywork practice was a deeply moving and practical part of my life since my twenties. I am not sure, as someone who now identifies as a caregiver, that I would have the capacity to set up a practice in the UK. I did have a chat with a local salon about an unused room at the back of their building, and the potential to share it part-time with a local reflexologist. We’ll see.

Bodywork is exorbitantly expensive in the UK, and I’ve noticed there is less training or expertise when it comes to soft tissue or orthopedic approaches. I love to offer or receive bodywork at home—my table is always set up; I can see it from here!—and to think, that session would have cost a hundred pounds!

SC: Are you a heavy dreamer? Do you wake up with impressions, affects, details or all of it? Do they enter your work?

BK: I dream intensively, and I record my dreams. Each year, on December 31st, a “void” night, I dream for someone else, asking their permission first.

I am not sure that what I dream enters my work. A parallel daily practice is mandala drawing. I recently drew something I did not expect to draw: a person carrying a load of firewood on their back, entering the trees. I am writing a novel of the jungle, of walking into the jungle as a child and spending the night there, and somehow this figure began to speak, and spoke in my writing later that day, as if to say, follow me. So, there are elements of active imagination, or extended imagination, to writing like this. I think the issue with drawing from dreams is that I tend to scrawl them down very fast, so they are less legible when I return to my notebooks for an idea.

SC: How do you wrestle with ghosts? Ancestors, lost lovers, past versions of you, old homes?

BK: I haven’t, when it comes to my time in Colorado, shed a sense of ongoing loss. That loss is related to being with others in ordinary ways. Coffee with a neighbor in the morning, hooting like an owl as I walked down the alley with my dog—that was her signal to put the kettle on. Or, every August, another friend would come through town, and text me LAKE SWIM. Off we’d go to swim in a freezing mountain lake. My soul longs to swim in that lake, and to drink the delicious coffee.

Rachel Pollack, my former colleague at Goddard College, had this amazing card, The Ghosts of Healing. It doesn’t have that name in any book, it’s just what she called it, and it’s the last card she selected when she “blessed” my art deck, of her own Shining Tribe Tarot. Energies rise from stones in a cave, holding roses at their hearts, and without true shape. What is the difference between an ancestor and a ghost? My longing is to spend time with these energies and to receive them, to listen to them deeply, and to hold my seat in the face of anxiety and fear, a response to their arrival in the first place, as Rachel pointed out.

There was a past version of me who taught three three-hour experimental writing seminars a week for twenty years at Naropa University, or twice a year at Goddard. It’s been an adaptation not to be teaching in that intensive way, and at the same time, to figure out other ways to be with poets, or to be one myself. I am no longer sure if I am a poet in the way that I thought I was. I feel like a twelve-year-old version of me, sitting on the windowsill and longing to write.

SC: Sometimes I become such a stranger to myself when I speak my mother tongue. Is your tongue at ease in languages other than English?

BK: I speak broken Punjabi/Urdu/Hindi mixtures to a variety of people, but I feel ease and peace in the gurdwara listening to an archaic language, the poetry and sound vibrations of the Sukhmini Sahib being read/sung aloud. It feels good to have more of these mixtures around me/us than was possible or available in Colorado.

I understand the strangeness. The mouth formed its shape around the alphabet we spoke. What is a mouth?

SC: What is grammar [doing]?

BK: It’s absorbing something, then releasing it, like a cloth soaked in water.

SC: At Poetry Clinic, an epistolary apothecary of poems (at which you’re going to be resident poet soon, thank you!), the premise is that poetry can do something, something that will equip our imaginations to deal with uncertainty and suffering. What do you mean for your poems to do to people?

BK: I think I don’t mean or intend or pre-hope anything for my poems. Where they arc and lodge or fall or reach is not something I can ever know or predict. I’m hoping that the experience of the Poetry Clinic will be what you dream it is. How will we know?

SC: Your work and my current interests lead me to ask you: What is wilderness to you? What remains wild?

BK: The wilderness is a jungle at night. Night has fallen, or is about to fall, and it’s too late to turn back. You reach a puddle. Should you skirt it by taking a wider, less certain path through the trees, or go straight through?

Memory is wild.

That particular memory is a memory of wildness that I am trying to write. My epigraph comes from a poem by Alejandra Pizarnik, translated by Cecilia Rossi: “All night, I walked into the unknown rain.” That’s what I’d like to do.

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Into the Good World Again

Max Garland
Holy Cow! Press ($16.95)

by Catherine Jagoe

Poet Max Garland’s quiet and profound fourth collection uses themes of the pandemic—isolation, distance, time, breath—to approach the existential question of how to live with the knowledge that we and everyone we love will die. Into the Good World Again is haunted not just by the “lethal math of plague,” but by the brevity, fragility, and loneliness of human life. “Soon enough,” Garland writes, “the breath of air that shaped itself / into the syllables of my name will be elsewhere / and otherwise.”

In a way, Garland is a contemporary Metaphysical poet, and indeed he alludes to Andrew Marvell while keeping vigil in “What’s Left For You To Say?”:

this slag of earthly light, this world
enough and time to watch the one
you’ve loved the longest raft away.

Alongside his preoccupation with mortality, love, and religion, Garland’s cosmic vision encompasses both the galactic and the infinitesimal, the “300 million worlds / in the habitable zones of sunlike stars” and the “outer shell of the carbon atom.” Grit as a motif resurfaces throughout Into the Good World Again, a grit connected to both the small life forms that often operate in darkness (worms, zebra mussels, crayfish, morels) and to the “grit of the ongoing” in the human world, where change and suffering “may be the Bible.”

Time in this book is elastic and nonlinear, compressed to a mere blink (an image Garland uses in several poems) and infinitely expansive. It is destructive and consoling at once, since it softens jagged shards into “the rounded shape of the shining world.” Each human life contains ongoing pasts—and Garland’s own memories are conjured with extraordinary cinematic clarity in poems such as “Morels,” which uses mushroom imagery to link the shape of the now-dead elms of mid-century America, the atomic bomb’s mushroom cloud, and the “small dark churches” with “convoluted steeples” of morels writhing in a pan.

Garland’s vivid evocations of place and time sometimes resemble those of Dylan Thomas; he works with controlled use of alliteration and judiciously chosen line breaks:

But there was no crossing the river without dead-
dragging home behind—caved-in creekbank,
brick thick Bible, the habit
of hunkering in the presence
of whatever glittered godlike and won.

His style is notable for a lucid musicality that feels hard-won, achieved by distillation. Fittingly, he lives in a city named Eau Claire (“clear water”), and his writing is similarly deep and crystalline, returning again and again to light, water, bedrock. The tone is typically controlled but illuminated now and again by glimpses of gorgeous lyricism: “Kingfishers, like exiled gods, / patrol the varieties of glitter”; “the landscape shook loose like a ribbon”; “light / through the windows was briefly honey.” There are also flashes of humor, as when Garland notices his peers’ aging skin “randomly splotched and riddled / as if scrawled by a drunken cartographer” or the mouse in his trailer who every night “climbed his sink pipe, / and sank his teeth into the soap.”

The closing couplet in “Ocracoke” encapsulates Into the Good World Again: “The deeper the listening, / the richer the world.” We are fortunate indeed that Garland is listening.

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1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left

Robyn Hitchcock
Akashic Books ($26.95)

by Frank Randall

Some lifetimes are marked in music rather than time, where the pivotal moments are forever linked to a chance encounter with a particular song. The revelation of hearing Fats Domino and Jerry Lee Lewis on the same cassette copy of Dick Clark 20 Years of Rock and Roll. The summer you spent your birthday card cash on a cutout bin copy of Let It Be, reckoning with the meaning of “A New Phase Beatles Album.” The pressure-packed week your older sister’s boyfriend loaned you both Bridge of Sighs and Are You Experienced and asked you to choose between Trower or Hendrix—because clearly, your answer would reveal the essence of your being.

My senior year in college, I wrangled a part-time gig at the town’s only record store, and the various employees (mostly other students) would take turns providing the soundtrack to our shifts. One employee had a record so rare the store had no copies for sale. It was a far-flung import that had somehow made its way to our shores, and on a good day, she would bring it to work to play. This was a mostly acoustic, introspective music, not quite belonging to any one genre; it used a language unlike any I had heard before, with lyrics sung in a British accent that cut new paths through the sonic landscape. It sounded like it was recorded behind the singer’s bedroom door, where I did my own hopeful strumming. Personal and peculiar—and absolutely essential—it was I Often Dream of Trains by English singer-songwriter Robyn Hitchcock. I begged my coworker to let me borrow it for a weekend so I could make my own cassette copy. She agreed, but only after I swore an oath to let no harm come to this precious musical testament.

Nearly forty years and many acclaimed albums, paintings, films, videos, stage digressions, liner notes, and comic strips later, Hitchcock has pulled a marvelous and relentlessly inventive memoir from his creative well. 1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left, focuses on the unforgettable moment in time when the latest release from the Beatles was the most important thing on earth—next to, of course, the latest release from the keeper of the keys to the universe, Bob Dylan. For an impressionable young person, new music had meaning like never before, and it was changing at an unfathomable, exhilarating speed. As Hitchcock recalls about first hearing “Strawberry Fields Forever”: “The Beatles are developing so fast, and yet, because my friends and I are developing too, this seems only natural.”

Hitchcock’s journey begins in pre-revolutionary fashion with him passing his teenage Sundays in the family driveway, wheeling a transistor radio around in his little sister’s doll carriage and listening to the latest hits on BBC’s Pick of the Pops. His move from a reasonably normal family home to the private Winchester College boarding school proves as unsettling as one might imagine for a boy of thirteen, but it’s a timely immersion into a new universe for a young introvert ready to embrace new sounds.

Limiting his coming-of-age story to a single year could have produced unreasonably narrow results, but Hitchcock uses this focus to his benefit, introducing us to the academic tradition and psychedelic ether in which his personality coalesced. His observations of key moments are alternatingly transportive (“Incense caresses the air, while John Coltrane’ s saxophone plays from one speaker and Hendrix’s guitar from another”), moving (“Occasionally, I still destroy my favorite things . . . and I still don’t know why”) and revelatory (“And I will become a songwriter. ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ hooks me, ‘Desolation Row’ pulls me in, and ‘Visions of Johanna’ . . . more subtle, more engulfing: it becomes me.”).

By late spring, the Holy Grail of Highway 61 Revisited gives way to the long-awaited arrival of the Beatles’ most secretive recordings to date, the era-defining Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Hitchcock’s crooked path through boarding school involves the influence of unforgettable schoolmates and tragicomic staffers, unexpected encounters with groundbreaking musician and producer Brian Eno and dream cameos by Bob Dylan, Donovan, and other colorful icons. As in his songs, he makes room for fictional sojourns, where the rules of strict biography are gleefully abandoned in favor of dream play and teenage fantasy—a fitting device to convey the convergence and emergence of young lives in 1967.

Like the best of creative memoirs, Hitchcock’s account helps describe how the simple and strange events in a young life turn out to become culture itself, seeding the history we all assume occurred without the assistance of countless anonymous players. For instance, despite having encountered dozens of references to the notorious Boxing Day broadcast of the Beatles’ film Magical Mystery Tour, here we finally have an eyewitness account that it wasn’t that bad a show after all.

We certainly don’t need a book from every musician wrestling with their status as a “cult artist,” but Hitchcock’s expansive coming-of-age tale effectively combines the intangible magic of the 1960s with actual events that help illuminate his work. For example, Hitchcock has always made room for vividly drawn water creatures in his songs, so to learn that his childhood home had a river running adjacent helps explain the frequent presence of these animals in his lyrics; why not make a song about your pet crayfish? Or the druids that you know dance among the ancient circle of trees on the hill overlooking your school? Or the UFOs that have collected your schoolmate along with his cheese? (Spoiler alert: This last was only a temporary and relatively harmless abduction.)

While often (and fairly) categorized as psychedelia-inspired, Hitchcock’s songs have never been limited to a particular genre. They careen from topical to romantic to surreal, and his knack for inviting absurd characters and fantastic situations into his music is on full display in 1967 as well. His inventive stage banter, rich with humor and showcasing his unique talent for the well-placed non-sequitur, has made his storytelling as delightful as his music over the years, and here it makes a seamless transition to the written page. Like any performer worth his salt, Hitchcock leaves us wanting more when he finally exits the stage of this memoir. He takes care not to burden us with unnecessary verses, nor does he commit the mortal sin of repeating the bridge, closing his micro-history with a strong chorus and tidy epilogue. The appreciative audience sends him off with well-deserved applause, lighters raised, hoping for an encore.

1967 is one of the epochal years that make us who we are, responsible for countless ripples of influence across culture. There are other such years, of course: Some musicians might need to write a book about 1976 with New York City as the setting, or coming of age in Minneapolis in 1984. But Hitchcock is a proud flag-bearer of 1967, revealing that annum to be as unrepeatable and unique as the author himself. In 1967, Hitchcock deftly captures the mercurial spirit of the time, and his luminous prose shows he’s not only a singular maker of music, but has been a secret writer of books all along.

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Diary of a String

Mark Francis Johnson
Spiral Editions ($18)

by Eric Tyler Benick

“Je est un autre” wrote Rimbaud, famously suggesting the writer’s inherent split as well as the larger aporia of selfhood-as-construct. It’s a split that is reflected in the literary reader: “Many readings are perverse,” Barthes claims in The Pleasure of the Text, “implying a split, a cleavage.” Barthes continues to explain that this cleavage rests in the paradox of literacy to know and unknow simultaneously, to both familiarize and estrange. Yet if reader and writer are doubles, and if both are cleaved not only in their solitary interaction with the material but in their spectral engagement with an other through the material, the bodies of literacy begin to fractal quickly.

In Mark Francis Johnson’s new poetry collection Diary of a String, the lyrical I is obfuscated not only by the relational estrangement housed in the act of writing but also in the quotidian estrangements of labor. In “Woody Excrescences,” Johnson writes, “What all is missing // and I have forgotten my life, / it.” Here, the poet explores a double loss (both missing and forgetting) as well as the inaccessible subsistence of this “it.”

As the Johnson lines quoted above might suggest, the pronouns used in Diary of a String are rhizomatic and irresolute. Just as Rimbaud’s I is an other, the poet’s selves show up in the conglomerate experiences of the outer: “‘They’ is clearly the voice of self-love,” he writes in “Also and Too.” By inverting the impressions of the pronoun, Johnson shows that the “inner life” is actually a breezy dialectic of further estrangements. He closes this section with an attentive apostrophe: “O sensitive parrot aware you / never encountered language.”

It’s a key point: Ecological wonders, subject to destruction by the Anthropocene, are spared its logocentric tragedies. In contrast, we know at this very moment there are microplastics in our oceans, intestines, and genitals, yet the shock of this knowledge is readily absorbed by language rather than by our actions. Johnson’s inverted pronouns and attention to the outer unfold this order of things; the aforementioned parrot is both “aware” and saved by its own illiteracy—not from death, because death is certain, but from suffering the slow termination of value we are daily subjected to, which we render and materialize through language.

Diary of a String is wrought by these questions. In “Date of Last Attack,” Johnson writes that “every hemorrhoid was first an idea,” which brilliantly takes the material effect of stress and strain and dematerializes it. We are no longer talking about the hard facts of the body but about the imperious design of language to impersonate experience. If Stein’s “rose is a rose is a rose” tautology works to unify word and object, Johnson’s ideated hemorrhoid exploits a more painful aspect to the realization that reality inheres in naming: Language is neither empirical nor consistent, and yet our understanding depends on it. The section ends with another shift to the exterior: “Take new little // fishes, destitute upon arrival no / recollection of offense. O fishes! // your use is to teach us / a fish is better off never / encountering its troubles.”

Interestingly, in this context “destitution” would appear to be more of an asset than a lack. The fish’s instructive value is expressed by its freedom from language, which constitutes a paradox: The fish is illiterate yet elocutes a model existence through that illiteracy. Note also how the notion of “encounter” is rooted in logocentric failure. Would many of us even notice the hemorrhoid without its semiotics, or does their very creation offer us access to an interiority that the hemorrhoid itself is entirely estranged from (leaving aside the question of whether the hemorrhoid is separate from “us”)?

Poet Ted Rees says that Johnson’s collection contains “the palpable sickness of the plaintive.” Yes, and worse, this sickness resists clear diagnosis. It would be easy to launch a polemic against the sickness of global capitalism in light of its demands on the body, its egregious contributions to war, genocide, and climate change, its molecular infections of commodity, etc.—but we would also be fabulizing a convenient bogeyman. Still, no part of the “world” is untouched by this illness, which at times feels moribund. If Édouard Glissant is correct to say that “every poetics is a palliative for eternity,” then might we see Johnson’s poems as addressing these miasmic illnesses of modernity, a mode by which to make sense of subjugation, exploitation, and destruction? Aren’t we who reject the frameworks of capitalism forced into some kind of palliative care against the terminal diagnosis of its forces? If the Industrial Revolution marked the decline of the sublime, how might we subvert the mechanized and colonized systems of our era to nurture all that it has taken from us?

Diary of a String offers constructive ways to consider these questions. Take the poem “One Hot Afternoon”:  

Very far from
day and night

due to wind? And the next “morning” I
-a spontaneous production of the earth

;no memory
disputes this-

am requesting a transfer. It’s given,
I speedily perish,

the
spontaneous productions of the earth get rarer.

Even while shattering the spatiotemporal, Johnson still cannot shed the language of labor, a language that continuously haunts his poems. His speaker is fully uprooted as a “spontaneous production of the earth” forced into the nihilism of commerce, where even the permission to die must be sought from some arbitrary superior. This final line—one of the most affecting in the book—is our diagnostic moment, our chance to reckon with the forced obsolescence of the sublime. One might recall William Carlos Williams’s observation “The pure products of America go crazy”; they certainly have, and they are no longer pure but beaten to shit by we who are also daily beaten to shit, who in order to be beaten slightly less must beat others to shit, until absolutely no part of us (and by us, I mean everything) resembles its natural state. There is no option of return, which anyway would present its own ethical problems.

So yes, “the / spontaneous productions of the earth get rarer,” and they will continue to do so until our collective illness is no longer tenable, our palliative efforts futile—until, as Williams’s “To Elsie” portends, there is “No one / to witness / and adjust, no one to drive the car.” Meanwhile, books like Diary of a String make a laudable effort to focus our attention and our will on this dilemma.

Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

I Became Synonymous with Leaving: An Interview with Claudia Acevedo-Quiñones

by Erik Noonan

In her debut work of creative nonfiction, The Hurricane Book: A Lyric History (Rose Metal Press, $15.95), poet Claudia Acevedo-Quiñones takes the reader on a trip into two of the oldest forms of art—history and lyric—and combines them in a new way. The book’s subtitle might even describe a genre of its own, one that asks: What if your personal history weren’t only yours, but other people’s too?

The element missing from history, the self, is what the lyric is all about—even though lyric isn’t really any more personal than history. After all, the most intimate areas of life aren’t ours alone, but are experienced by many in ways that seem nearly universal. And yet the lyric creates a space for emotion and imagination, as history typically doesn’t. For example, when the poet Sappho writes, “If I look at you even for a moment, / my tongue stops moving and I can’t speak anymore,” whose gaze is it that looks back at the reader? The image is singular, but it’s no longer specific.

The Hurricane Book is therefore about Acevedo-Quiñones’s life, but it’s also about the lives of her forebears and family members, along with the history, politics, and culture of Puerto Rico. The book is organized in six parts, all named for hurricanes that struck the island. Each of the first three parts opens with a family tree, followed by a section titled “Historical Notes”; in the next three parts, the family trees are absent. The first three parts present bits of lore, memories, and hearsay about elder family members, while the rest present a fragmentary account of the author’s childhood, adolescence, and entry into adulthood. The Historical Notes consist of statistics and dates, but they are arranged so as to trace Puerto Rico’s trajectory from Spanish colony to United States commonwealth. The data themselves focus on disenfranchisement, the unequal share of resources, cycles of exploitation and neglect, insults in the media, and mass emigration—but also on the concomitant popular movements to resist and campaign either for statehood or independence and self-rule.

The structure of The Hurricane Book thus links Puerto Rico’s destiny and the author’s. The hurricanes serve as a metaphor for the tempestuous living conditions of the Puerto Rican people, and the conditions of the author as an instance of that populace (“a facsimile of a facsimile of a facsimile,” as Acevedo-Quiñones says). Storms are often used to convey meaning in literature—readers might recall Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Montale’s The Storm and Other Poems, the thunderclap in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, or the meteorological opening lines of Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities—and here they are an especially apt figure for Acevedo-Quiñones’s twenties. She spent these years “acting out scenes” in which “the drinking and the pills and the not eating” could only drag out “the feeling that I am not a good enough reason to get healthy.” As she reaches “an understanding that we all do what we can to hold still in the thrashing,” her recovery comes closer to the center of her being than her malaise ever did.

The style of Acevedo-Quiñones’s autobiographical sections is laconic in the extreme; one can feel the burden of history in every utterance, what it costs the speaker of so many historical lines about her community to say a few lyrical lines on her own behalf. “Like many people in their early twenties who have time to examine their feelings, I was confused and afraid,” Acevedo-Quiñones writes, and pretty much leaves it at that. Her direct prose offers a bracing sort of pleasure, although there are poetic flourishes as well—“If I was a house, I was a crumbling one, gothic-style, with a woman in the attic waiting to set fire to it all”—and when Acevedo-Quiñones writes in verse in The Hurricane Book, the emotions strike with gale force:

did you wonder
as you rocked me sleepless
through the ache
in indefinite darkness
what good a storm window was
when the rain came from inside

Acevedo-Quiñones received an MFA from Stony Brook University in 2019; in 2021, her poetry chapbook Bedroom Pop was published by dancing girl press, and in 2022, she was awarded a Letras Boricuas Fellowship by the Flamboyán Arts Fund and the Mellon Foundation. She lives in Upstate New York; we conducted this interview on Halloween of 2023, shortly after The Hurricane Book was released.

Erik Noonan: How are things going, Claudia?

Claudia Acevedo-Quiñones: I work a nine-to-five job laying out puzzles and Highlights magazines. I haven’t talked to anyone all day. I do book events, where I talk about things that frighten me. Then I’m back to Farting Cats, Volume Six. It’s a little jarring.

EN: Hopefully it will be less jarring to talk about The Hurricane Book. In the Author’s Note, you tell us that prose didn’t come easily to you. Your book is “a lyric history” but the language is exact, and the style is plain.

CA-Q: Right—I shy away from the figurative. I’m a literal person; I actually didn’t want “lyric” in the title, but the publisher wanted the subtitle to be “a history,” and because I felt uncomfortable with that—I’m not a historian, I’m not a journalist, I don’t know anything—they told me we could call it “a lyric history,” since there are poems in the book. That’s why those words are there.

EN: The paragraphs in this book are small, hard, and clear—like the diamonds your Beba hid from your father so that a nurse could put them in your ears after you were born. The form of your book reflects the facets of your life.

CA-Q: The only thing I was sure of when I started writing this was that I wanted it to be as direct and unadorned as possible. It ended up being formatted the way it is because I built on it. I actually started it in 2009 as a fictionalized version of my ancestors’ immigration from Spain in the 1600s. Then in graduate school I wrote a series of hurricane poems. Later I took a workshop where we only wrote fragments; my fragments ended up being connected to the hurricane poems because all I could think about was hurricanes.

Later that year (2017), I started writing the book in earnest. I didn’t intend it to look a certain way, and I didn’t have a final structure until shortly before it was published. I printed everything out and laid it out on the ground and saw how the pieces fit together. The bullet points at the beginning of each section didn’t come about until the end.

I felt uncomfortable calling the first draft a memoir, a biography, or a history. The only thing that kept me grounded was my habit of contextualizing everything I write—I’m insecure and anxious by nature, and I feel as if I need to justify everything. When there’s no truth in what I write that involves other people, then at least I can give you some information. If you don’t get anything else out of the book, or if you think I’m a liar, then you know that much is true. It wasn’t an aesthetic move. It was a matter of covering my tracks. I didn’t embellish.

EN: You explore your relationships with your uncles, father, and grandfather; later in the book, the sections “Keepsakes” and “Passenger Seat” deal with your mother. These parts show you at your most vulnerable. What was it like to write them?

CA-Q: Those two sections were the most difficult to write. My mother is the only person in the book I have a relationship with; the others are dead or I’m estranged from them. My relationship with my mother has been untraditional. I’ve always felt a sense of responsibility towards her, which is common among children of parents with substance abuse and mental health issues. It felt necessary for me to write about because it shapes who I am. But I was also trying to protect her.

While I was writing the autobiographical fragments, I struggled with my conflicting needs: to say and not say. Keeping secrets and staying quiet about certain things has protected me and others. I wrote down everything I knew, then edited. There are things I didn’t keep because I didn’t think they were necessary; it would have been cheap to use them. But I still revealed a lot, and that was difficult, because I didn’t talk to any close family members or friends about this stuff. My mother is the only person I had serious conversations with as I was writing: I asked her about her experience in mental institutions, and I asked her about her relationship with my father. Even though she gave me permission to write about these things, I don’t think she’s aware of how much detail is in the book, or how much I left out. I’m not sure how that comes across to her.

So I’m glad you pointed out those sections as seeming more vulnerable; they felt different as I wrote them. It feels strange to be so naked and concrete; I don’t have poetry to protect me. In a poem you can be direct and autobiographical, and people will still react as if the “I” of the poem were a convention—“the speaker,” a character, rather than you yourself. There’s something about the lines and stanzas in a poem that protects the writer. The person who wrote this book—I don’t know her. I don’t think I could do this again.

EN: Do you think the truth-telling in The Hurricane Book will have consequences for you?

CA-Q: I agonized over it for three years, ever since Rose Metal Press picked up the book. The manuscript I sent them was actually fifty pages shorter; I’d already taken out a lot of the material they asked me to add.

EN: Did they know?

CA-Q: No, but they wanted all the things I’d removed.

EN: They wanted you to trust your instincts.

CA-Q: Right, and that’s cool. It was scary. Most of the conversations I have about this book are focused on fear—I’m afraid of what people I’m no longer in touch with will say or do. But a lot of this process has been a matter of relinquishing control; I can’t decide how other people feel about it. I can’t manage what they do or dictate what they say. Some of my family members are writers, columnists, people who have a platform, and I have no idea how they’ll react. I’m confident I strove to be as generous and honest as I could. I hope I’m portraying people, not good people or bad people.

EN: So much for fear. What about courage?

CA-Q: I dedicated the book to my grandparents and my mother, and I included the saying con las tripas en la mano, which is something my grandpa used to say. The literal translation is with my guts in my hand. Whenever I was nervous about speaking in public, or anything scary I had to do, he would say, “Do it with your guts in your hand.” Meaning even if your innards are spilling out, keep going. That’s courage.

EN: You started life as a hydrophobe.

CA-Q: Yes. Now I love water.

EN: At the conclusion of a section about childhood, your stepmother is bathing you, and she says, “You’re fine, water”—

CA-Q: —“won’t kill you.” 

EN: It’s powerful.

CA-Q: Stopping with no explanation gives it a certain weight, even if I don’t mean anything else.

EN: If your family members talked to you about the book, what would they say?

CA-Q: I would expect the ghost of my grandfather to ask me about royalties and say he doesn’t care about the rest. “What did you get paid for the job?”

My grandmother would make sure the names had been changed, and she would buy ten copies, and not read it, which I would be grateful for.

I can see my father writing a long essay to tell his side of the story and contest what I’ve set down. It’s hard to imagine. Today is Halloween; I feel like I’m trying to be a medium that can channel the living, because I haven’t involved them in the process.

EN: You write, “Secrets are our family members too.” What’s the opposite of a secret?

CA-Q: Common lived experience. Whatever is the case on the surface. No, I can provide a more articulate answer: I think the opposite of secrecy consists in the everyday. What you count on, what you live with. It’s knowing who a person is, the way their shoes sound, the cadence of their steps. Knowing what someone’s going to cook that day. It’s the expected, what doesn’t surprise us. The happiest periods in my life have been the ones when nothing took me by surprise. Secrets were all around, but I wasn’t aware things were hidden from me. I don’t come from a place where we talk about what bothers us.

I don’t know. I’m speaking to you right now, but I’m in my grandmother’s closet. That’s what I’m picturing.

EN: What else is in there?

CA-Q: Photo albums, wigs, pearls, and sewing kits.

EN: Did you take any of those with you?

CA-Q: I did not. My cousin got them. I got a lot of the photos, though.

EN: You write “A father is a legend.” [41] What is a mother?

CA-Q: A mother is a legend too, but instead of Odysseus, she’s Penelope. She stays behind, fends off the suitors, and takes care of the child, who also wants to leave. She does all this while working at her loom. They’re both legends, but they represent different archetypes.

EN: As a younger person, you liked Operation Ivy and Bright Eyes. Who else?

CA-Q: I went to punk shows and became friends with my stepbrother’s friends, who were into music and played in bands. They introduced me to a lot. That was the time of Dashboard Confessional, Yo La Tengo, Fiona, Tori, and PJ. Lilith Fair vibes. Also Iggy Pop and Television. I still love them. I moved to New York because I watched a documentary about 1977 that featured Television and I thought their  music was incredible, I’d never heard anything like it. They’re still one of my favorites to play on the jukebox, because they have fourteen-minute songs.

EN: How about poets?

CA-Q: Elizabeth Bishop. She only published a hundred poems; I can relate to playing your cards close to your chest. Louise Glück. Natalie Diaz. I love economy, control, and space.

EN: Do you read Puerto Rican poets?

CA-Q: I’ve been wanting to, because I feel removed from Puerto Rican literature—I’m stuck in the Nuyorican Poets Café. Most of the Puerto Rican authors I think about are the ones I read in school. I wasn’t thinking about them as I was writing this book; they’ve come to me after the fact. When Hurricane Maria passed through, my cousin sent me books by Puerto Rican authors—my uncle helps run a press, and I know indie presses are publishing a lot there—but I’m not very aware of what’s going on right now.  I’m getting back into it, but I feel like I should have been doing this the whole time. I do think Puerto Rican poetry seeps into all aspects of my life as a reader and writer.

EN: Do immigrants give their culture to their children, or does it get lost?

CA-Q: I think the second generation is different. I don’t have children, so I’m experiencing the phenomenon that second generation kids undergo: trying to regain, or get reacquainted with, certain aspects of their parents’ culture. You see people who grew up in homes where mainly English was spoken saying later in life, “Wait, I’m also from this other place.” They reclaim parts of themselves that their parents didn’t—how do you say it?—inculcar.

EN: Inculcate. I think it’s a cognate.

CA-Q: Yes, inculcate. So a lot of this experience is a matter of trying to bridge a gap. There’s a difference between people who put a barrier between themselves and the place they’re from because they want to, and those who have no choice, who grow up in the next generation. This can be especially confusing when one is Puerto Rican, because technically I’m not an immigrant—geographically I am, but I’m a U.S. citizen. My leaving the island means I can vote in a presidential election, whereas I couldn’t when I lived there. I can now develop the half of myself that liked Operation Ivy and Bright Eyes. I’m all over the place with this.

EN: Maybe “all over the place” is the place to be. The Hurricane Book deals with Puerto Rican people’s views on the question of independence. Did you think about invisibility while you were writing it?

CA-Q: Yes, a lot. My job was to bring to light the things I had kept hidden, as well as aspects of the relationship between the U.S. and Puerto Rico that I was not even familiar with because of the barrier I put between myself and the island, and the barrier that stands between the U.S. media and the Puerto Rican media, and the things that are hidden from Puerto Ricans by the Puerto Rican government and the Puerto Rican media. There are all these layers, all these degrees, of invisibility.

As I wrote this book, I realized I was in the dark about so much—something as simple as the names of five Puerto Rican poets working right now. I don’t know what’s going on on the island, and I don’t know if it’s because of the geographical distance, but I want to find out. There’s a part of me that’s still there, and I don’t want to let it go.

I’ve also been thinking about how invisibility has helped the status quo—how it has kept communities in need from receiving aid in a timely manner, or receiving aid at all. The fact that water and food sat abandoned in a field because no one knew where to send them; the fact that people had to write “help me” on their roofs because there was no way for them to go anywhere; the fact that an island measuring a hundred miles by thirty-five miles couldn’t get electricity for a year—all this is horrifying.

If invisibility weren’t so essential, things might have turned out differently. I recently saw pictures of the Puerto Rican governor laughing as he looked at a parking lot full of trucks loaded with bodies being taken to the morgue, cracking jokes about how the corpses smelled . . .  and this is while he was claiming that not a lot of people had died. If more people had seen those pictures, maybe they would have voted for the progressive candidate. But that’s the governor of Puerto Rico, a Republican. Most of Puerto Rico is Republican, which is crazy, because they can’t vote for the president, and their one representative can’t either. 

EN: You write, “I became synonymous with leaving.” [56] What would be the antonym?

CA-Q: Good. I would be a good daughter, a good citizen, a good granddaughter. My leaving was a betrayal, even though my family was supportive of my move to the States.

EN: Is it really called vendepatria? Did your father say that to you seriously?

CA-Q: Yes. It was a judgment, and it was a joke. But now the number of people I speak to in Spanish is limited to one, because of the barriers I’ve put between me and one side of my family. Here in the United States I have Puerto Rican friends, but a lot of them speak Spanglish. I’ve lost language every single day, and I don’t feel capable of writing in Spanish, because I spent so much of my early years in the U.S. trying to assimilate, trying to change the way I wrote.

Writing in Spanish is different. My high school essays and short stories were florid, baroque; there was a music to them. I would take my time. I snapped out of it when I got here, however, so I’ve been writing this way for half my life now. I don’t even dream in Spanish anymore. No one tells me it’s shameful, but that’s the way I feel. I was a different person back then. Plus, I’m by myself. It would be different if I had moved here with a family—my mother, both parents, or a sibling. My sister moved to the United States and she and I speak English, even though she doesn’t speak English with her family.

EN: It seems like there’s more opportunity to publish multilingual writing these days.

CA-Q: There’s so much opportunity. I’m trying to figure out why I don’t write in Spanish. What am I afraid of? Is it that I think I’m not allowed, that I’ve lost the privilege? This is a fight I’m having with myself. I am speaking the language of the colonizer, the people who invaded, but in this way I resemble my grandfather; he was in the nationalist party, but he was also in the U.S. Army. We live a contradiction. It’s a very strange experience, because you have access to both. It’s hard to live in both.

EN: Some writers who use different languages respect writers who use English. Some oppose English, and/or quit using English, and switch to their first language. Or all of these, or none.

CA-Q: I don’t know if I can write in Spanish the way I do in English. I haven’t tried. But life is long.

Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

The Swans of Harlem

Five Black Ballerinas, Fifty Years of Sisterhood, and Their Reclamation of a Groundbreaking History

Karen Valby
Pantheon ($29)

by Charles Green

Karen Valby’s compelling new history tells the forgotten story of Dance Theatre of Harlem, a Black ballet company that gave dancers of color the opportunity to perform and star when most doors in the industry were closed to them. Formed in 1968 by Arthur Mitchell after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, the company was soon performing around the world, playing before Queen Elizabeth II and David Bowie and meeting celebrities like Mick Jagger. Celebrated as groundbreaking dancers at the time, DTH is not widely known today. During the pandemic, five of the company’s founding ballerinas reunited for regular Zoom sessions to reminisce and share their legacy with the world; Valby’s book compiles their stories.

Although all five dancers shared a love for ballet, each came from different backgrounds. Lydia Abarca grew up in the New York housing projects, having abandoned any hopes of actually performing. Sheila Rohan, from Staten Island, initially lied about her age (she was twenty-eight) and claimed she had no children in order to join the company; when she finally told Mitchell, he gave her a slight raise and was more lenient if she showed up late. Gayle McKinney-Griffith, the daughter of a mechanical engineer, grew up in suburban Connecticut; she would later become the company’s ballet mistress. Marcia Sells was from an elite Black community in Cincinnati whose family hosted DTH when they were on tour. Karlya Shelton-Benjamin, the only Black dancer in the Colorado Concert Ballet, was inspired to join DTH after seeing Abarca on the cover of Dance Magazine.

These ballerinas worked incredibly hard both on and off-stage. On tour, they would have to unload their own equipment from the bus and often prepared makeshift stages by pouring soda on the floors to make them sticky. They learned how to dye their ballet shoes and tights brown, experimenting to find shades that suited each of them.

Mitchell was a fiercely demanding personality, pushing the dancers to perfection; he was also verbally abusive, frequently berating the dancers about their weight. On one tour, he sniffed at each dancers’ hotel room door to tell who was baking their complimentary pastries. He also drove away board members and advisors who dared suggest improvements to his vision; despite his talent and ambition, he was his own worst enemy. Yet Mitchell worked well with children, letting the neighborhood kids take lessons in their street clothes, showing them how dance techniques could help them jump higher in basketball, and breaking down street dances into ballet moves.

Valby goes into great detail about the five dancers, even presenting entire chapters in their own words. Abarca, however, seems to be the main character of the book. It makes sense, as she was the “star” of DTH and her story is one of the most dramatic. After leaving the company, she taught Michael Jackson the moves for the movie version of The Wiz; following her dance career, she married and took administrative jobs, falling into alcoholism before her daughter helped her back to sobriety. Indeed, The Swans of Harlem begins with Abarca’s granddaughter confused after a school presentation where classmates honored current ballet star Misty Copeland, wondering if the stories she had heard about her grandmother’s pioneering performances were true. By spending so much time on Abarca, the book almost unwillingly turns her into a Copeland figure, a lone history-making woman, whereas the dancers of DTH shaped history as a group.

The bond between these women, even decades later, is powerful to witness. In several Zoom sessions, Abarca shares deeply personal stories, including of having an abortion in 1968 and of Mitchell once kissing her after an event. When the others are asked if they felt resentment for Abarca getting so many of the lead roles and being Mitchell’s clear favorite, they defend her, knowing it was not her intention to steal their thunder. There is also frank acknowledgement that Mitchell preferred lighter-skinned and thinner dancers; even while he wanted to promote and celebrate Black dancers, he was influenced by traditional white ballet.

In 2008, DTH went on hiatus for five years due to financial difficulties. During this time, publicity heightened around Misty Copeland as a groundbreaking Black ballerina, which contributed to the company becoming forgotten. (The dancers and Copeland meet at several events, and while Copeland gratefully acknowledges them and the dancers are gracious about her stardom, some awkwardness and resentment is evident.) The five dancers contemplate other reasons for their erasure as well, noting the tendency many women have to downplay their talents and how Mitchell encouraged them to consider their individual accomplishments as the company’s.

Well-researched and written with an easy, flowing style, The Swans of Harlem gives a platform to these talented women who have been hidden for too long. It also raises questions about race, gender, and publicity in the arts, and reminds us that even now, few dancers of color belong to U.S. ballet companies.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

Our Long Marvelous Dying

Anna DeForest
Little, Brown ($28)

by Xi Chen

In the opening pages of Anna DeForest’s sophomore novel Our Long Marvelous Dying, the nameless narrator, a first-year palliative care fellow at a hospital in Manhattan, speaks to a patient who claims to have psychic visions. The patient, bedbound and dying of pancreatic cancer, sees “disaster” and “catastrophe” in the world, but when asked about his future, he is afraid to look: “I want only one thing, he tells me, but I already know what it is. He wants to live forever.” But the narrator, with the aid of medical science, can envision the future too: “He will suffer a lot, and then he will die.”

This isn’t the first time DeForest has set fiction in the medical world. Their first novel, A History of Present Illness (Little, Brown, 2022), is a tale about the trials of medical school and residency told by a narrator “raised with a reverence for catastrophe.” That narrator makes a telling comment: “This fascination with disaster, both fear and fetish, I never quite outgrew. The truth is, you start to sort of wish for it.” Similarly, the narrator of Our Long Marvelous Dying trains “to be an expert in pain unto death,” surrounded at every moment by patients at the end even as the television reports pandemic deaths continuing to snowball and a cyclone hitting New York, drowning tenants in basement apartments. 

But why do some people pursue a medical subspecialty always surrounded by death? This question is often levied at people going into palliative care, which prioritizes minimizing suffering over curing disease—often but not always in patients with terminal illnesses. For many, the field of palliative care means escaping, at least to some degree, the plagues of academic medicine: elitist medical students, bigoted doctors, and detachment from the lived experiences of patients. Others may have a spiritual calling, or like DeForest’s narrator, they may be seeking spiritual enlightenment themselves. As a chaplain “from a line of monks who follow in the steps of the great Buddhist saints and meditate in the charnel grounds in India” says in the novel’s last chapter, “If you get through the morning forgetting that you will die . . . the morning has been wasted.”

While DeForest’s narrator may be looking for a deeper understanding of death, however, what they find instead is PR. During orientation, the fellows are given a lecture about “talking points, branding, an early introduction to the field’s bad rap.” The problem, the lecturer claims, “is all this talk about dying. The public does not want to hear about death. Lead with life, she says, lead with what you have to offer.” The fellows are instructed to avoid words like “Hospice,” “End-of-Life,” and “Terminal Illness,” which are “too aversively death-oriented and therefore unattractive” to patients and their families.

Medical bureaucracy’s penchant for sanitizing language and “burying the lede, elevating the plus side so patients will be willing to talk to us” is the villain of DeForest’s fiction, and it rears its ugly head throughout the book. Providers shield themselves with clinical lingo; for instance, the palliative nephrologist who observes the narrator question a patient about his metaphysical visions asks, “What was the therapeutic intent?” Many characters use gallows humor; after declaring a patient dead, a nurse practitioner laughs. “I used to have nightmares that my patients would die, she says. But now I have nightmares that they will not!”

Author Danielle Spencer, a scholar of narrative medicine, has written that the medical training tale is typically a quest narrative in which new trainees lose their idealism during the demanding rite of passage to becoming a doctor, until a “humbling and epiphanic experience about the essential humanity of doctors and patients” changes them and allows them to “practice medicine with greater empathy and caring.” DeForest’s novels are unique in the world of medical fiction in that they leave out this final redemptive step. Many patient encounters are described in Our Long Marvelous Dying, but not once does the narrator perform an action that substantially helps patients in any way. If they grow, it is not in clinical acumen but rather in helplessness and vulnerability, since patient encounters are frequently used as springboards for unearthing fragments of the narrator’s past traumas. 

Perhaps that is the point: the all-knowing physician only exists in the imagination. DeForest has no interest in showing their narrator being a healthcare hero, a figure whose illusory omnipotence comes from the assumption that clinical work is unambiguously empirical rather than interpretative. The narrator muses that if a doctor’s role is to save lives, then every life-saving act by a doctor is necessarily a failure because we all die. Medical crises frustrate patients and their families because seeing doctors appear powerless to help them can indeed feel like being abandoned by an uncaring god. 

Existential despair about this absence of authority under the weight of the medical sublime suffuses DeForest’s work. In A History of Present Illness, the narrator contemplates theodicies in the hospital and has long conversations about early Christianity with a seminarian. In Our Long Marvelous Dying, the narrator continuously ruminates on the missing male figures in their personal life: the sudden death of their bigoted father, the disappearance of their brother into drug rehab, and their increasing distance from their possibly cheating husband Eli, who is also a pastor. Where DeForest’s debut explored academic medicine’s obsession with absolution as an analog to Christianity, however, Our Long Marvelous Dying finds a religious parallel to palliative care in Buddhism and its interest in the worldly attachments responsible for human suffering.

After witnessing a series of deaths near the start of their fellowship, the narrator escapes upstate for several weekend trips to a monastery—one where nuns and monks have names like Sister Empathy and Brother Emptiness and speak only in Vietnamese. It immediately feels like home, the narrator says. Among strangers all traumatized by recent losses, the narrator can shake the role of doctor and become an anonymous listener in communion with others. One visitor has lost his son to suicide; another reveals that she’s been diagnosed with cancer and is awaiting surgery. When it’s the narrator’s turn to unload, they simply state, “I am taking a break from work.”

In an essay titled “Narrative Medicine and Negative Capability,” physician-writer Terence Holt argues that the dominant mode of public medical writing has been confessional: Atul Gawande admitting he botched a procedure in The New Yorker in 2011, for example, or Jerome Groopman atoning for missing a fatal diagnosis in her 2007 book How Doctors Think. Here, DeForest’s narrator refuses to confess. One could read this as evidence that the narrator has been rendered apathetic by their work, or worse, that they’re a parasite, only interested in collecting other people’s stories. Even when seeing a therapist, the narrator admits that they “avoided any self-disclosures; I turned all of our talks onto him . . . his time in finance, brief work as a Baptist pastor.”  But the reader has a different relationship with the narrator, who is constantly revealing aspects of their personal lives to us, including the “same tearing pain in the chest” that comes with every patient’s death. So, why doesn’t the doctor weep?

On their first day working in a clinic outside the hospital, the narrator meets a patient known as a “splitter,” a person whose judgments fall into stark binaries of good and evil. “I tend to fall on splitters’ good sides,” the narrator notes, “a tendency that points to something I know is wrong with my character: I allow too much.” The splitter has been treating her lung cancer with essential oils, and at a later visit reveals that she’s an anti-vaxxer, an anti-masker, a chem-trail believer, and a 9/11 truther. The narrator begins to “listen with two ears, two minds, one for what is real and one for what is true.” They become afraid of the splitter, to the point of canceling upcoming appointments. “She has shown me something strange inside of me,” the narrator explains, “a wound shaped like distrust and disgust and familiarity.”

Later, when the narrator hears that the splitter has died, they hardly seem fazed at all. This negative capability, or the ability to tolerate an ego divided by uncertainty, is the true endgame for both medical training and writing: It’s a way of being that allows humans to endure the daily assault of death, be it in our families, in the news, or in the dying person who needs care if you’re a medical professional—all while thinking about one’s own life and past traumas without breaking down. DeForest aims to cultivate this negative capability in the reader through their driven, elliptical prose, which even within one paragraph can shift from the practical details of organ donation to the emotional resonance of childhood trauma and calls to family members informing them of their loved one’s death. Among the most risk-taking American physician-writers working today, DeForest nimbly toes the line between fact and fiction until we find some footing in our mortality.

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Who's Afraid of Gender?

Judith Butler
Farrar, Straus and Giroux ($30)

by John M. Fredericks

During a 2017 conference in Brazil that Judith Butler helped organize, a group of protestors burned the world-famous philosopher in effigy. They claimed that Butler’s work threatened to dissolve the meaning of gender and undercut cultural values, responding to ideas presented more than twenty-five years earlier in Butler’s career-defining book, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge, 1990). Amidst the constant oversimplification of the book’s arguments outside academia, Butler, who uses they/them pronouns, has been maligned by many in the conservative movement, often unfairly cast as a feminist agitator out to destroy concepts like biological determinism not only at UC Berkeley where they teach, but around the world.

In their latest book, Who’s Afraid of Gender?, Butler addresses the general public as one of the leading thinkers in gender studies: They attempt to reclaim their own work, reposition themself within public discourse, and advocate for the rights of transgender and genderqueer people. Butler wants to understand how the term “gender” has come to represent all that is evil, malignant, and subversive in popular culture, as well as how national governments, political parties, and sometimes even other feminists are attempting to erase the rights of others.

For Butler, the term “gender” has become a phantasm, an emotionally charged and misdirected catch-all used to incite fears, both psychological and material, about the world around us. Butler argues that “this phantasm, understood as a psychosocial phenomenon, is a site where intimate fears and anxieties become socially organized to incite political passions.” Showing how this phantasm morphs into an “anti-gender ideology movement” around the world, Butler maps how gender has become weaponized to “call for the elimination of gender education, the censorship of texts concerned with gender, and the disenfranchisement or criminalization of transgender or genderqueer people.”

Butler’s previous works on gender can be hard to understand; their poststructuralist approach leads to occasionally impenetrable prose and a style of reasoning that is, perhaps intentionally, difficult to parse. Butler seems to be aware of this critique, however, and Who’s Afraid of Gender? is clearly written for a wider audience. Especially in the first half of the book, Butler tries to be as approachable as possible in discussing the phantasmatic effects of gender studies, using a vast constellation of research across disciplines to describe it in various contexts. The first four chapters take on global politics, the Vatican, attacks on gender studies in the United States, and the Supreme Court case Bostock v. Clayton County.

In each of these chapters, Butler presents arguments against gender studies, then uses their expert command of rhetoric to provide detailed counterpoints to (and contradictions in) the logic of the anti-gender movement. Readers might wish at moments for a more structured argument; while the phantasmatic interplay between the fears surrounding gender studies and the material consequences for transgender and genderqueer people around the world is important, Butler sometimes employs straw man arguments to stand in for entities trying to restrict our ideas about gender. This polemical approach leads Butler into uneven territory, appealing to a wider audience at the cost of complexity.

Nowhere is Butler’s argument more impassioned and polemical than when discussing trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) and the movement’s attempt to contain gender under a narrow definition of biological sex. In their chapter on TERFs, Butler runs through the argument that biological sex is immutable and that transgender people, specifically those assigned male at birth, are a threat to society, taking advantage of the gender spectrum to visit violence upon women in bathrooms. Butler invokes author J.K. Rowling, an outspoken TERF in British cultural discourse, and weaves a fascinating argument about the symbol of the penis, patriarchal frameworks of being, and the need to disavow TERFs as anything but feminists: “Feminism has always been a struggle for justice, or is, at its best, precisely such a struggle, formed in alliance and affirming difference. Trans-exclusionary feminism is not feminism or, rather, should not be.” This is an important argument for Butler, because the term “alliance” is central to their argument throughout the book. According to Butler, instead of casting gender as a nightmarish phantasm that negates transgender and genderqueer people’s lived experience, feminism should be allying with everyone who investigates how gender as a framework for social, historical, and cultural discourse can help us understand our material existence.

The most interesting chapters in Who’s Afraid of Gender? come directly after Butler’s discussion of TERFs. In these chapters, Butler investigates the idea of biological sex as immutable, which forms the intellectual and ideological basis for most arguments against transgender identity and expression. Here, Butler seems to be doing a bit of rehabilitation of their arguments in Gender Trouble. They argue that biological sex and gender are not opposite ends of the spectrum, as though biology is only immutable and gender is only performative, but that both biology and the term “gender” (a troubling word that is not easily translated in every language) are products of a set of cultural processes, forever entangled. This entanglement forms the basis for how we understand both biological sex and gender in our particular social and historical moment in time; nature and culture, the environment and the body, dialectically create the processes by which we understand ourselves. As Butler writes:

The “environment” is, thus, not just “over there” at a distance from our bodies. We take in the environment as it takes us up and the environment is fundamentally altered by human interventions and extractions—and climate change is a stark testimony to how those interventions can become destructive. None of us can be formed without a set of interventions, and those external impingements become the conditions of our emergence; they become part of who we are, intrinsic to our forms of becoming, which follow no one trajectory.

Passages like this abound in the book’s later chapters; the ease with which Butler is able to present an entire field of research and apply it to another, equally complicated, field to draw conclusions about our lived experiences prompts some of the most satisfying moments in the book. Whether discussing biological sex, feminist materialism, marxist ideology, colonial power, racial theory, climate change, or the nature/culture dichotomy, Butler displays a remarkable clarity and nuance.

While the reader gets the sense throughout Who’s Afraid of Gender? that one of Butler’s main objectives is to encourage feminists to seek alliances with anyone fighting for social justice, this plea to open up the tent and encompass multiple lived experiences is also what complicates the book. Butler’s ability to tackle so many topics—some of which seem only tacitly connected to the gender debate—can make this volume both challenging and rewarding. An important work within Butler’s own canon and the field of gender studies as a whole, Who’s Afraid of Gender? will undoubtedly have a lasting impact on cultural discourse.

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Until August

Gabriel García Márquez
Translated by Anne McLean
Knopf ($22)

by Emil Siekkinen

Until August, a book often described as Gabriel García Márquez’s “lost novel,” was published this past March, an instant bestseller in countries around the world. The novel was never lost, however; it was abandoned by the author. The quality of the text has thus been debated—as it should be—but its mere presence in a career that includes international fame for the 1967 novel One Hundred Years of Solitude and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982 surely calls readers to ponder both its story and its backstory. 

García Márquez (1927-2014) was afflicted by dementia during his final years, and eventually he couldn’t recognize what he himself had written. The author’s last major effort turned out to be the 2002 autobiography Living to Tell the Tale, which he had intended to be the first in a trilogy, as it didn’t even reach the middle of his life. The last book of fiction he saw to publication in his lifetime was the 2005 novella Memories of My Melancholy Whores.

Work on that novella led García Márquez to shelve a longer, more ambitious novel he had begun; already feeling the effects of dementia, he felt it wasn’t cohering. He stated that the unfinished text should never be published, and actually that it should be destroyed. His sons, however, went against their father’s wishes in the name of posterity; drafts, notes, and chapter fragments, spread over 769 pages, ended up in an archive—the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin—where the material was given the name “We’ll see each other in August.”

Nearly ten years later, the author’s sons decided to betray their father once again: Believing the unfinished text contained some noteworthy literary achievements, they tasked editor Cristóbal Pera, who had worked on Living to Tell the Tale, with compiling a publishable narrative from the archived material. Until August was released on what would have been the author’s 97th birthday, March 6, 2024, nearly ten years after his passing.

Until August is certainly recognizable to those who know the Colombian author’s works. The narrative bears resemblance to the stories in Strange Pilgrims (1992), written in the 1970s and 1980s, and to Memories of My Melancholy Whores. But while these fictions were authored by a master in complete control of his craft, Until August is uneven. At times, the book offers outstanding sentences and surroundings that live and breathe:

The tumultuous market bazaars, which she’d claimed as her own since she was a little girl and where just the previous week she had been shopping with her daughter without the slightest fear, made her shudder as if she were in the streets of Calcutta, where gangs of garbage collectors used sticks to hit the bodies lying on the sidewalks at dawn, to find out which ones were sleeping and which were dead.

Likewise, the protagonist, Ana Magdalena Bach, is filled with the contradictions of being human; as one example, she yearns for yearly one-night stands on the island where her mother is buried, yet these encounters bring not only pleasure, but also anger, grief, and confusion. Elsewhere, however, the text is thinner and unpolished, and the abrupt ending confirms that Until August is definitely an unfinished piece of fiction. The theme might be love—something his sons argue is his main subject—or it might be solitude, which García Márquez himself claimed was his writing’s main preoccupation.

So is the book worth the betrayal? Until August doesn’t display a master in his prime, but it does offer a master class in how a narrative is composed: We watch as García Márquez gives up and continues, fails and succeeds. Here he struggles with a murky passage; there he writes a sentence as bright as the sun. These are moments in a writer’s life that the reading public rarely sees.

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Myth-Making Our Own Selves: An Interview with Milo Wippermann

by Will Corwin

The recipient of a 2023 Whiting Award in Poetry and Drama, Milo Wippermann (previously Emma Wippermann) has updated the story of Joan of Arc for the age of social media in their riveting debut book, Joan of Arkansas (Ugly Duckling Presse, $20). Formally, the book is an inventive hybrid, mixing playwrighting, poetry, and fiction into a book-length narrative that carries all the weight of the mythic figure it interrogates. Thematically, Wippermann does not shy away from unpacking Joan’s own failings, especially vis-a-vis warmongering and power; they also explore Joan’s story from the fertile ground of a trans interpretation (the book is currently a finalist for the 2024 Lambda Prize in LGBTQ+ Drama) and as a way to investigate contemporary social dilemmas, from the machinations of internet discourse and political propaganda to the climate crisis.

Will Corwin: What’s fascinating about using the story of Joan of Arc as a playwriting project is that the trial exists as a transcript already. There are a bunch of artistic precedents as well: the 1923 play Saint Joan by George Bernard Shaw, Carl Dreyer’s 1928 film The Passion of Joan of Arc, and plenty more in the century since. How much were you thinking about this canon as you wrote Joan of Arkansas?

Milo Wippermann: I’d add to that list Bertolt Brecht’s Saint Joan of the Stockyards (1929-31) and the 1953 play The Lark by Jean Anouilh. The Lark was a critical text for me both because of its form and because Anouilh played with the image of the dove, a big part of Joan’s mythology; apparently, as Joan was being burned at the stake, soldiers saw a dove emerge from the flames and fly to the sky. Anouilh turned it into a lark, and rewrote Joan’s story as a bleak, postwar comedy.

So thinking about the genealogy of texts, it felt preposterous to write yet another play about Joan of Arc—and I learned a play came out in the UK a couple of years ago that is also about a trans Joan of Arc. But my feeling was, well, the Joan that we need right now is trans, and they would also be talking about war and climate change. Then while I was mashing up historical representations of Joan, I realized I wanted to mash them up with Greta Thunberg—both are figures that lack a certain nuance, just because of how visibility in the social sphere works. It took a lot of research, which at a certain point just had to stop—I felt I needed to focus on “my” Joan. That said, much of the work’s structure and moves were borrowed from other writers; the important ones are listed in the acknowledgements in the back of the book.

WC: Social media comes up often in Joan of Arkansas—for example, you constantly refer to Joan’s hand as a selfie stick. How do you see social media as a vehicle of spiritual dissemination? Do you see it as something that’s capable of that?

MW: Well, no. But I was interested in the idea of them going viral. Medieval Joan became famous by word of mouth, and I liked the contemporary parallel.

Unrelatedly, I should also point out that the historical Joan obviously used she/her pronouns, while in my book, Joan is a they/them. I think most of the engagement with the book has focused on climate change and the social media elements, but it’s very much also about trans identity. I recently saw an entry about Joan of Arkansas in the Encyclopedia of Arkansas online—it’s somehow catalogued there!—and there was a close reading of the text and thoughtful summaries of the different components, but it totally omitted anything about gender. Perhaps it’s interesting that someone could read this book and go past that—I did want it to be a bit of a Trojan horse in that way—but to omit talking about it entirely is a little weird.

WC: You also play with the pronouns of God: Joan has a sneaky way of addressing this by using neutral pronouns for God, arguing to the priest that “they” is accurate because the angels are plural.

MW: It’s playing with the idea of the Trinity, because Catholicism is kind of a polytheistic religion. The idea of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit, and all the saints, and the various angels and the devil—it’s a very rich world of many characters and aspects, but the doctrine is there’s only one God. I liked the idea of a nonbinary god that uses they/them, or rather They/Them pronouns—in the last section of the book, Joan asks Adrienne if it is sinful for them to use the same pronouns as God, and Adrienne says only if you capitalize them.

But to return to social media: for the plot, it seemed like a good way to convey what happened to the historical Joan. There were prophecies going around at that time that a peasant girl would save France, and as soon as Joan started to do anything, these stories proliferated: Bards sang about her and her battles, and she became really famous, a true phenomenon—but in a medieval way, through song and myth. There’s also a funny interaction that she had with another mystic—Joan was like, this lady’s a quack, she’s not the real deal—so there was that kind of competition as well. Our social media landscape isn’t that much different, except instead of bards and storytellers, we’re all myth-making our own selves. It’s like Don Quixote in that way. And then: Did Joan become famous for spreading spirituality or truth? No. Joan was famous for winning battles, for warmongering. Also: If teenage Joan was able to gain access to power and to crown Charles VII king of France because of the storytelling technologies of the fifteenth century, how would that happen today? Obviously with social media—so that was my entry point.

WC: How do you think social media has affected poetry?

MW: Not well—I think some people write poems now that look good in a square. It just seems like a shame to think in that way and to cater to that kind of reduced attention span. I feel like a bit of a Luddite, but I think social media and its algorithms are doing what capitalism wants them to do, and I am interested in working outside of that. But then, for instance, Instagram is flooded with the poems of Palestinian writers, and that is really cool; it’s beautiful that people are sharing these poems. When the Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer was killed in December of 2023, his poetry was rightfully all over Instagram, but there was also a video circulating with an AI version of his voice reading his work, because someone trained AI to mimic his voice from different speeches that he had given—and I find that to be atrocious. Israel is using AI to bomb Gaza, and now AI is animating Refaat Alareer? I think things like ChatGPT and algorithmic social media are ways of habituating artists and writers to war-making technologies. There is money behind it because people are interested in war and domination.

I’ve also noticed that some writers are starting to use AI uncritically, but we can’t use this kind of technology uncritically because it is currently killing people. There’s no separation, and using it to write poems doesn’t make it any less evil. I wanted to use social media in the book and have it not seem innocent.

WC: Your Joan is positioned against Charles VII, the governor of Arkansas, who is clearly evil. They then go viral, and have 200 million followers—I think Taylor Swift probably has at least that many, if not more—it seems so of our time, yet it’s this idea of wielding influence in the same way that Joan of Arc did six centuries ago.

MW: Totally. And then what, Joan was still killed? She was still killed. Joan crowned Charles VII king in 1429, and he then betrayed her and condoned the English putting her on trial, because he was sick of her. In my book, all the followers stand by and watch as Charles VII, governor of Arkansas, reneges on every single promise to end oil drilling and give reparations, and Joan is institutionalized. People think you can wield actual power through social media, fame, and influence, as if you’re actually engaging in political action if you repost something, but it’s a false kind of power—notoriety isn’t power. Or at least not the kind that lasts.

WC: In Joan of Arkansas you call climate change “The Warmth.” What was the idea behind that?

MW: I was really influenced by Daniel Sherrell’s book Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World. Throughout the book, instead of using the term climate change, he calls it “the problem.” I thought it was a brilliant way to engage this thing that defeats all language. Language is constantly being used against itself—it’s hard to speak if one’s language is constantly taken and then mutilated or made to mean other things. In the early months of the pandemic, for instance, a lot of anti-maskers were saying “I can’t breathe” to complain about mask restrictions, and that was right after the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. They’re co-opting that language for masks? How do you even say anything after that? With climate change, I feel people hear that phrase and zone out immediately. The framing is wrong.

WC: It’s euphemistic.

MW: The climate always changes. Right now, I’m reading a book called Indigenous Continent by Pekka Hämäläinen, and it goes through the history of North America, starting with the Bering Strait. People came to this continent through a series of climate changes; “climate change” means too much and too little. In writing Joan of Arkansas I wanted to find language that would feel visceral—Sherrell used “the problem,” but I wanted it to feel even more bodily—hence “The Warmth.” Finding new language is important, especially if language keeps being co-opted or euphemized. Really, that’s the job of writers: to invent more and more language. There should be so much language that it can’t all be used against us.

WC: I was recently reading your poem “The Fall.” Do you have a specific interest in discussing religion or Catholicism or sacred texts?

MW: That’s a really old poem! I wrote that in college. I think our country is deeply religious and not spiritual—we live in a fundamentalist society. The religion I was most indoctrinated into, and thus am well versed in, is Catholicism (I went to Catholic school for eight years), but in future projects, I would like to veer away from Catholicism and into fundamentalist Christian movements. These stories have been used against us for so long, but I believe they can also be reclaimed and retold. They have to be looked at anew because they are part of our collective consciousness. And a lot of it is really beautiful. I find Catholicism particularly weird and sexy and creepy—it’s bodily, there’s cannibalism . . .

WC: And the fetishization of pain . . .

MW: Totally. It’s a really carnal religion that has been sanitized over and over again in different ways. Also just aesthetically, I’m interested in it. In the book, the character “Mom of Joan” is not super into Joan’s religiosity, but she figures if Joan has to choose something, go Catholic—if you’re gonna go Christian, go hard or go home.

WC: What other poets do you look to for inspiration, or just in general?

MW: When I started writing poems, Elizabeth Bishop, Hart Crane, and Adrienne Rich were all important to me. More recently, Douglas Kearney and Don Mee Choi, and also poets who are in my social circles: Asiya Wadud is brilliant.

WC: What are you working on next?

MW: I’m halfway through a novel. Joan of Arkansas was, in a lot of ways, a study on how to write plot, because previously I’d only written poems that were a page long at most. So I’m working on a novel about climate change and queerness and a love affair between two siblings. I want to have enough juicy stuff in it that people will stay for the climate grief. I’m also working on another play, or rather, an actual play this time. I’m kind of surprised at how much I loved writing in that form.

After the experience of a recent nine-actor reading of Joan of Arkansas, I’m never going to write the same way again. The playscript I’m working on now is of a very different scale. I think there will be three characters, and one of them is a hotshot firefighter (I can’t get away from fire and climate apparently). “Hotshot” is an actual term: there are teams of firefighters who travel across the country and fight the worst wildfires. In 2013, there was a tragedy in which nineteen people from one of these hotshot crews died in a fire; only one crew member escaped. Fires have gotten so hot that the technologies that are supposed to keep these people safe are not working. There are also the ethics of putting out fires: We should be doing more controlled burns. Anyway, I can talk about it for hours.

WC: You make Joan a firefighter at the end of Joan of Arkansas.

MW: Yeah, I’m obsessed. I’m almost like, do I really need to write another firefighter? But I think it’s a way of trying to make people care about it, because people mostly want to look away. On the subway the other day, I saw a poster advertising an exhibition of work from the 1970s to the present about environmental destruction, and I had a panic attack and had to get off the train a stop early. I can’t understand how everyone else seems fine. I kind of wish I could be fine too, but also not, because the house is on fire.

Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024