Eduard Mörike
translated by Leopold von Loewenstein–Wertheim
Oneworld Classics ($14.95)

by W. C. Bamberger

Eduard Mörike first published this novella in German in 1856. There have been attempts for at least the last half-century to elevate it to the status of a recognized classic. George Steiner, for example, has called it “a novella to set beside Thomas Mann’s I or Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata.” Yet it remains an enthusiasm for specialists, and neglected by most.

Mozart’s Journey to Prague is a much sleeker, more modern work than most of its 19th-century contemporaries. Mörike’s voice, while still retaining some of the emotiveness of the Romantic period just passing out of style, is in sensibility closer to that of modern self-aware fiction than it is to the narrative style of his own time. The first page, for example, moves from straight narration, to a quotation from a letter generally describing a coach, to this: “Anyone familiar with the taste prevalent in the seventeen-eighties can complete this vague description of the vehicle with a few touches of his own.”

When the narration goes on to describes details of this coach, we understand that the narrator is making it all up—and wants us to realize that fact. There are only a few such overt instances here of this tone, but enough that we don’t forget for long that what we are reading is imagined, idealized. Mörike uses this awareness to create an overall air of tall-tale charm: the descriptions, the stories told by the narrator and by Mozart himself—who at one point recalls a series of water tableaux he saw when he was thirteen—are impossibly detailed, reminiscent in fact of Raymond Roussel.

The plot itself is very simple. Mozart is on his way to Prague for the premiere of Don Giovanni, and during a stopover he absent-mindedly eats an orange from a valuable tree. When the owners of the tree learn who he is, Mozart and his wife are invited to spend the night in their castle; there is a banquet, a telling of stories, and a brief musical program by a young woman and by Mozart himself. The following day the Mozarts are presented with a fine coach, and go on their way.

The book proceeds through this minimal action by way of small, self-contained scenes, achieving its effects cumulatively. It does this very well, with each charming yet almost static vignette reinforcing those that have come before, as well as those that follow. With small touches here and there, almost without our noticing, a fleshed-out portrait of the composer’s emotional life is presented.

Mozart’s personality here is much the same as the one familiar to many from Peter Shaffer’s play and the film of Amadeus—giggly, childish, addicted to the social whirl. The narrator is both enraptured of Mozart (or, more precisely, the idea of him) and coolly thoughtful. After describing the experience of hearing the beginning of a familiar great work, he says,

The party at the castle, however, was placed very differently from ourselves. This work, which we have known all our lives, they were to hear for the first time. Apart from the good fortune of hearing it performed by its author, they were not nearly as well placed as we are today; because a pure and perfect interpretation was really not possible then and for one reason and another could hardly have been hoped for . . .

This layering of the imagined charms of the past onto the mid-19th-century present colors the narrator’s voice throughout. Overall, the effect of Mozart’s Journey to Prague is like a Calder mobile, its beauty coming from the balance of each individual part with all the others.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2010 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2010

Ernst Weiss
translated by Joel Rotenberg
Archipelago ($17)

by Micaela Morrissette

The perversity of Ernst Weiss's staggering novel Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer takes some time to reveal itself. It is not a tawdry perversity of titillating little wickednesses but a deep and thoroughgoing moral deviation, a brute injury to conscience. The degree of corruption cannot emerge, in fact, until the narrator is at last possessed by his conscience, mangled between violent oppositions of good and evil. What begins as a bourgeois, selfish little murder curdled by a petty, injured madness becomes a fathomless descent into the moral self, where murder is martyrdom, love death, and sin repentance.

Humiliated by his wife's hold on his purse strings, revolted by and helpless before her cringing masochistic advances, experimental bacteriologist and practicing surgeon and gynecologist Dr. Georg Letham murders the woman with an injection of his own invention, Toxin Y. This opening space of the book is narrated in an insistently rational manner, tinged with a nerve-wracking self-obsession. Despite intense passages of self-revelation, and morbidly detailed analyses of each occurrence and emotion, the tone is chilly, rigid:

She doubled over in pain, her enameled mask twitched like a fish, but suddenly a sentimental, sensual smile came to her lips, she threw herself at my feet, and when I pushed her away, disliking such theatrical scenes, she crawled after me, she began to giggle coyly, and the more brutally I kicked her, the more blissful she became.

And the ghastliest thing of all was that her arousal was transmitted to me, that she overpowered me sexually. Ugly, aging, with gold-rimmed porcelain teeth . . . —what is the point of enumerating all her physical imperfections, down to the singed smell of her body—she was stronger than I. I, who had wanted finally to break with her, was possessed by her in the midst of my cruelties. . . .

My father had taught me how to do away with a living creature and do it coldly. It came back to me now, the thing he had stirred up in me when I was young, perhaps thirteen. Pleasurable sensations, disgusting animals, and death had parts to play. This is not the time to go into it. But why was I thinking of him now, now of all times? Was I not “making love” to my wife? Or was it that I hated her, was I clinging, still, more than ever, to him? My wife—but why speak of it?

Her little dog was howling.

There's a strong, very nearly deranged anxiety to this passage, but also an aggressive self-analysis that has Letham insisting on his essential sanity, his detached ability to look back at this incident with contempt, to explain and dissect it even as he gives a dizzying sense of its lurid irreality. His obsession with analyzing his crime initially appears to be an act of hubris, of ownership; in fact, it will turn out to be the first stirring of a bludgeoning sense of conscience that, while it cannot quite be said to triumph absolutely, will wrestle the doctor until it nearly kills him.

Not for some time, though. Weiss won't be able to move irrevocably into his nightmarish moral enquiry until Letham is incarcerated at the prison camp on the wretched tropical penal colony C, engaged in a fight against the malevolent yellow fever ("Y.F.") that is gorging itself on human lives there. On C, Letham's central conflict of conscience—being scientist, doctor, and killer; pledged to knowledge, shackled by mercy, and drenched in blood—will ravage him and those who fall in thrall to him. But before that can fully occur, Weiss—who almost never toys with time, but sternly drags his story along each grasping, clinging detail of each day—must bring Letham through prison, his trial and conviction, and his passage to C on the ship Mimosa.

On the Mimosa two lunacies are warring. In long flashbacks that relate Letham's rat-plagued childhood, there's the lunacy already hinted at during the period of the murder—the frightened, damaged, sniveling madness inflicted on Letham by his father:

Now and then an animal was caught in a wire-mesh trap. I remember one such event. My father, looking down from his window with his eagle eyes, spotted something moving in a trap at the foot of the plane tree in the courtyard. It must have been late in the evening. He took me down with him. He gave me his silk-lined smoking jacket to protect me from the cool and damp of the night. I was still so small that it came down to my knees. . . .

Grappling with its claws, the animal had let itself down onto the floor of the trap. It was not running now. It sat with its annulated, naked, ugly, very long tail coiled around it, swiveling its head about with great urgency and unease. . . .

"Now show what you can do, George Letham," my father said, with cool but tender mockery.

Childhood anxieties like these float in and out of another long, gorgeous, narration, of Letham’s father's failed Arctic expedition, and are mingled with fragments of the opiate-dream biography of "the faithful March," a beautiful young convict who falls tenderly and slavishly in love with Lethem; and are fragmented by punishing episodes from the hellish ocean voyage to C. Those episodes foreshadow the second, true lunacy that will come to fruition in the latter part of the book, the grimly heroic madness of the damned. In Weiss's hands, it's a madness that, while bleakly solitary, consumes love with the same focused need that a man dying of a cut throat may bring to drinking cool water.

Until the convict ship docks at the penal colony, the novel has a boundless immensity in which the reader gropes about fearfully. Once Letham and March, along with the doctors Carolus and Walter, arrive at C and are assigned together to the hospital to fight the Y.F. epidemic, a dangerous, urgent sense of purpose begins to knife its way through the rest of the book. There is almost no more talk of Letham's father, almost no more talk of Letham's wife. There's only the disease and the unremitting war that the murderer makes against death.

A stench for which there is no name, so nauseating and intolerable that the demonic imagination of a Dante could not have conceived it, assaulted us from the small, electrically lighted, relatively cool underground room. . . . Lying in its perfume was a blond corpse, quince yellow, poison yellow, wearing white gloves and a shirtfront, a once white but now very unsightly dress shirt, on its concave chest. In its gloved, graceful, long hands a silver crucifix.

In this place, at that moment, I was encountering Y.F. in nature for the first time in my life, and I silently paid it due reverence.

To say that the book relentlessly and even savagely interrogates moral questions is not to put it within a conventional religious framework with regard to morality. There is no dependable knowledge of good and evil on the penal colony C. But Letham does undergo what must be described as a religious transformation when he attends the deathbed of a child martyr stricken with Y.F.

The first sound I heard from the child was a low, brief cry of pain. . . . All there was on her fingertips was a little blood, at which she gazed in wonderment with her large, still quite childlike, yet already womanly eyes. A mosquito, no doubt one of the young ones from my matchbox, had bitten her . . .

I couldn't take my eyes off her, and she returned my gaze. Or was she only looking at her new doctor with childlike curiosity? I have said that I had the gift of being able to awaken trust, and what could be more important for such a young creature, one who is seriously ill, than to find a doctor who inspires trust at first sight? . . .

But the first vomiting bringing up only water had already begun. The child was astonished. . . . She was unwilling to vomit . . . she fought, she was ashamed, well-bred as she was . . . She had hardly a minute of rest. . . . Before long thin filaments of blood appeared in the vomitus, soon mixed with black granules, and in a very short time I saw that she was already vomiting almost exclusively blood. . . .

At that moment I thought of my wife. I saw before me the vial of the toxin that I had used to murder the poor woman, I saw the finely made old syringe that I had used in my crime . . . "All things repeat themselves in this short life"—this thought flashed upon my mind. Flashed like a light, and I saw.

For a second I hesitated. I understood my fervent wish that this dreadful sobbing, this mindless animal suffering of a totally doomed being simply cease. Whatever the cost. Why not fill the syringe again, give this wasted yellow arm a jab . . .

But I did not make this split-second movement, and will that also be understood? That I, Georg Letham the younger, let fate take its course?

It took many hours for the Y.F. poison to break the little Portuguese girl's body and spirit. I sat and watched her. I stifled my wish to act, to do something. I put my hands in my lap. Not on the dying girl's brow, not on her morbidly bloated, bright yellow body. . . .

Murder is for nature the merciless, or for God.

Letham's decision not to put the child out of her suffering is morally enigmatic, but deeply worshipful. In due course, he will repeat her suffering in a second devotional act, when he and his colleagues inject themselves with blood from Y.F. patients to demonstrate the transmission of the pathogen by way of mosquito. He emerges from that ordeal morally transformed again: he will now come to believe he's willing to endure the punishment for any sin if that sin could mean the eradication of Y.F. on C.

For all the terrifying confusion of the book's moral terrain, Weiss is fundamentally interested in good and evil, life and death, fear and compassion, cleanliness and corruption. For example, he invokes with stark symbolic simplicity the cleanliness of Letham's hands. Long before his wife's murder, Letham unrelentingly practices "the imperative of antisepsis" as he moves between his contaminating research into the scarlet fever pathogen and his intimate surgical work with patients. He is unassailably hygienic. Yet two patients die, he fears, from the toxic stains his scientific research has left on his hands. Much later, on C, at the shattering crux of the novel, Letham again holds death in his hands:

It would not have been responsible to appear unwashed at the bedside of a woman in labor. All the laws of morality may not always have been holy to me. But the laws of asepsis were. . . . The conservative school of obstetrics . . . had always recommended as the first recourse that the baby's body be shifted with the greatest care . . . bringing the head away from the side and downward, if possible without surgical intervention. I, an experimental bacteriologist, attempted this now. I would work only on the outside, on the abdominal wall . . . if at all possible, my hand would not even touch the exposed internal organs. . . . Then the mother would not be infected by my bacteriologist's hands; but only then.

Although Letham in fact contaminates the mother spectacularly, she is not infected. A miracle? That would read like a kind of moral reward from Weiss to Letham. And Letham, while he has endured tremendous punishment and has been scoured by conscience, is hardly a saint. True, there's a fanatical purity to his conviction that he at last holds a knife to death's throat. But the woman for whose life he fights so desperately is the same woman he has recently allowed to be bitten, without her consent, by a Y.F.-infected mosquito, in order to continue his experiments. Yet against all odds neither mother nor baby contract Y.F or succumb to bacterial infection.

Letham's sins are nearly impossible to judge, but Weiss's account of Letham's long struggle to save his victim’s life is pummeling and magnificent. The doctor is simultaneously martyr, murderer, and worker of miracles. Doubly penetrated by passion and compassion, Letham is splayed out helpless and eviscerated by Weiss, driven to the extreme of self-knowledge.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2010 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2010

Javier Marías
translated by Margaret Jull Costa
New Directions ($24.95)

by John Toren

In the last twenty years the Spanish novelist Javier Marías has produced a string of novels bearing a remarkable consistency in tone, all narrated by a solitary, ruminative observer who is obsessed by the untold histories of the people he encounters. This narrator works as a translator, has a wife named Luisa, from whom he is often estranged; he quotes Shakespeare and other writers more than occasionally—not to others, but to himself; he has a solid grasp of European history and a voyeuristic interest in what’s happening outside the windows of his apartment. The similarities among the novels, and between the novels and the personal history of the novelist himself, doesn’t trouble Marías in the slightest. As he writes at the start of Dark Back of Time (1998):

I believe I’ve still never mistaken fiction for reality, though I have mixed them together more than once, as everyone does, not only novelists or writers but everyone who has recounted anything since the time we know began, and no one in that time has done anything but tell and tell, or prepare and ponder a tale, or plot one.

The three-part novel Your Face Tomorrow continues along the same path, echoing earlier works while offering new episodes in our narrator’s story. It’s longer than anything Marías has done before (roughly 1270 pages) and the fact that he succeeds in holding our attention throughout its course makes it arguably his most impressive achievement to date. The layers of intrigue it contains may be suggested by the fact that the narrator, one Jacques (or Jaime, or Jack) Deza, discovers a spot of blood in the home of a former Oxford don he’s visiting on page 131 of the first volume, and we don’t learn where that blood came from until a thousand pages later, as we near the end of volume three. But we’re never allowed to forget that it exists, because Deza, who had tried to clean it up and found the rim impossible to remove, takes that persistent stain as a symbol of the dark deeds that are continually (though seldom completely) being washed away by time.

There are several dark deeds within the story itself, which involves the narrator’s experiences working for MI5 or MI6 (he isn’t quite sure which) as an interpreter, not of speech, but of character. He’s been recruited by a man named Tupra on the recommendation of some Oxford friends who had once been involved in the same business and are impressed by his almost novelistic insights into character. He spends his days sitting behind a one-way mirror, listening in on interviews and then discussing with Tupra whether the man or woman in question is lying or trustworthy, would have courage in a dangerous situation, is “to what extent resentful or patient or dangerous or resolute.” Although it’s all rather nefarious, he acts as if it’s really none of his business. Yet near the end of the second volume he witnesses a scene of shocking violence initiated by his boss in a nightclub restroom (though he does almost nothing to stop it, to his later chagrin), and in volume three, he finds himself faced with the challenge of committing a similar act himself to protect his estranged wife Luisa.

Though the story is intriguing from beginning to end, the events themselves are few and far between; much of the richness of Your Face Tomorrow is to be found in the narrator’s private ruminations on those events and on the lives of his colleagues, several of whom did intelligence work during the Second World War. Their cryptic references to the past repeatedly bring to mind his father’s experiences during and after the Spanish Civil War (which, not surprisingly, mirror those of Marías’s own father Julien, a philosopher and protégé of Ortega y Gasset). During such moments of introspection, the narrator piles thought upon counter-thought, clause after clause, with mesmerizing beauty and clarity, into delicious sentences that can run to a page or more. To take a relatively brief example:

Everything that exists also doesn’t exist or carries within itself its own past and future nonexistence, it doesn’t last or endure, and even the gravest of events run that same risk and will end up visiting and traveling through one-eyed oblivion, which is no steadier or more stable or more capable of giving shelter. That's why all things seem to say 'I'm still here, therefore I must have been here before' while they are still alive and well and growing and have not yet ceased. Perhaps that's their way of clinging grimly to the present . . . and to stop other people saying 'No, this was never here, no one saw it or remembers it or ever touched it, it simply never was, it neither strode the world nor trod the earth, it didn't exist and never happened.’

Alongside this theme, which we might call historiographic, runs an ethical one initiated by Deza’s boss. At one point, after Tupra has nearly murdered an associate and Deza objects, Turpa relies blandly, “Why can’t one, according to you, go around beating people up and killing them?”

Such weighty issues provide a steady, gentle passacaglia beneath the narrator’s acute yet unhurried observations of the life going on all around him in London (and later Madrid), his problems with his wife, and his asides on Spanish and English culture, medieval history and literature, warfare, James Bond, and other subjects too numerous to mention. As he puts it, “books speak in the middle of the night just as the river speaks, quietly and reluctantly, and their murmur, too, is tranquil or patient or languid—” A reader new to Marías might profitably begin with one of the earlier novels, but if Your Face Tomorrow lies close at hand—even the third volume—by all means take the plunge.

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edited by Michael Martone
Indiana University Press ($22.95)

by Stephanie Hlywak

Is writing regional? Flannery O’Connor, whose prose was often categorized by the part of the United States in which she wrote, certainly thought so. But while we’re comfortable identifying, say, Southern gothic, is there a voice typical of the vast Midwest?

This anthology aims to answer that question. Comprising thirty-two short stories (and one nonfiction piece) from a diverse cast of authors whose styles, subjects, and geographies are as far ranging as the Midwest itself, Not Normal, Illinois doesn’t quite succeed in convincing us there is a cohesive, or at least recognizable, Midwestern style. It does, however, accomplish something perhaps greater: it draws attention to the great diversity of talent at work in a region known more for its homogeneity and flat topography. After all, only in a place this big could you have Louise Erdrich, whose narratives of reservation life speak to the Native American experience of the Upper Midwest, alongside Stuart Dybek, whose urban youth on the near south side informs his gritty fictions of Chicago. And indeed, both Dybek and Erdrich appear here, as if to challenge the notion of uniformity or conformity. That’s ultimately the idea that’s being exploded here: that the Midwest, with its pancake breakfasts and church-going folk and voting patterns that represent the tenor of the country as a whole, is normal. It’s about, as editor Michael Martone writes in his introduction, “turning all those middles inside-out.”

Martone’s collection takes its title from a small college town near the geographic center of Illinois—a place so normal, it’s called Normal. But is it really? Two hours south of Chicago, Normal is home to fertile farmland, acres upon acres of cornfields, and Illinois State University, on whose campus sits one of the tallest dorm buildings in the world (and likely the highest structure for a hundred miles in any direction). ISU also hosted one of the tallest talents in the Midwest (or any region): from 1992 till he decamped for California ten years later, David Foster Wallace taught English in Normal, during which time he completed and published Infinite Jest. It’s jarring to think of Wallace as simply a Midwestern writer because his reach was so broad. But is his the voice that typifies the Midwest? Is ours a prose of ambitious vocabulary, copious footnoting, and wild imagination? Though he isn’t represented on the table of contents, Wallace and his legacy haunt this collection. It is also to him that the book is dedicated.

To survey what’s being written in the flyover, Martone brings together both established names and new talents and arranges them, in the collection’s one nod to order, alphabetically, so that the reader encounters unexpected pleasures on her travels through the book. Aside from their shared geography, these stories all together celebrate the extraordinary, the ugly, the peculiar, and the unpredictable in the mundane moments of life. In one of the collection’s standouts, Robin Henley’s “All You Can Eat,” a church pancake social turns surreal when Aunt Jemima appears, shills for syrup, leads a sing-along, and dies. Deb Olin Unferth writes about loneliness, separation, and otherness in her story about squatters in a basement apartment. Steve Tomasula uses the absurdity—and ubiquity—of roadside, big-box-style Medieval-themed dinner theaters to riff on modern warfare and combat deaths, the Bush years, and torture. And though these stories have a Midwesternness about them (you can picture the dirty linoleum titles in Henley’s church basement or the off-ramp that leads to Tomasula’s “Medieval Land” just about anywhere in the Central Time Zone), some are spectacularly placeless. Kellie Wells’s haunting story of conjoined twins is everywhere and nowhere, but it’s not the location that gives the piece its relevance, it’s the technique: Wells gives both twins voice literally side-by-side, as columns that interrupt and respond to one another. This bifurcated text mimics the separate yet competing identities of her characters, and the disorientation of the narrative evokes their confusion.

But it’s Erdrich’s previously unpublished “Fuck With Kayla and You Die” that could function as the collection’s thesis, as it is most definitely Midwestern but far from normal. Erdrich’s tight control of the narrative—which threatens to veer in one direction then quickly turns another—is extraordinary; she explores assumptions and yet defies expectations. In the story, Roman, an Indian man standing outside an Indian Casino, is handed car keys by a white man who mistakes him for a valet. With that tacit permission, Roman drive the man’s car to his home, ruffles through his drawers, and imagines his life. The suspense that builds here only crescendos when Roman’s adventure is interrupted by guests arriving for the man’s surprise birthday party. Just as the man assumed Roman was a valet, the guests assume Roman is the man’s friend, a fellow-party guest, who belongs among them. These multiple levels of assumption, deception, and identity converge in the story’s haunting denouement.

The Midwest can be derided as being the middle of nowhere, but Not Normal, Illinois makes a strong case that it’s actually in the middle of everywhere. The ordered grids of farm land you see as you gaze out the window of a plane flying over this vast, unpopulated region are a deception—look closer and you’ll see immense literary talent sprouting from and feeding off this fertile loam. Martone’s collection may not convince us there is one voice that typifies the Midwest, but that’s not the point. Like any good road trip with pit stops at roadside attractions and detours on unfamiliar routes, it’s not so much the destination as the journey.

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KASSANDRA AND THE WOLF
Margarita Karapanou
translated by N. C. Germanacos
Clockroot Books ($15)

RIEN NE VA PLUS
Margarita Karapanou
translated by Karen Emmerich
Clockroot Books ($15)

by Kristin Thiel

Born in 1946 and writing through the Greek and international upheavals that marked the following decades, Margarita Karapanou today remains a unique writer, though during her lifetime she was not alone in plumbing and picking at the definitions of novel and chapter, fiction and dream and character. In part this is due to her strong female voice, which will be heard loud and clear in these two new translations of her work.

Kassandra and the Wolf, for example, is a book about girlhood, reading like Angela Carter-meets-Judy Blume. A series of one-line- to a-few-pages-long “chapters,” Kassandra offers the narrator's observations, wishes, dreams, nightmares, daymares, thoughts, obsessions, pathologies—the reader never learns which (if any), or to what extent. Indicating both the mentality of a child and the nature of the subconscious, the topics jump without understandable transition from child abuse to Sunday church and dinner rituals to the repeated (and varied) suicide of Kassandra's uncle. At times the book could be a fairy tale—our young protagonist is very casually presented with both wolves and baskets of sweets—and at other times a parable, with many of its characters named simply by their profession or relationship to Kassandra.

Readers will be disturbed by the matter-of-factness with which young Kassandra talks about the multiple times men in her own household rape her, as well as the narrator's related obsession with “pipi” and “poopoo” and creepy attitude toward her often-absent mother. It's also difficult to read that Kassandra seems to like her premature sexuality, encouraging men sometimes through playful flirtation and physical advancement. Child Kassandra writes, “On Sundays, I become a child, filled with joys and beautiful thoughts; I brush my hair 100 times; I become good.” Certainly one would not think that, despite the narrator's words and actions, this sex is consensual and allowable, but by discussing this taboo and complex subject in a taboo and complex way, Karapanou gives a new strength to her female character.

While even adventurous readers may be uncomfortable with this book’s nonlinear telling and relentless lack of answers, readers will also be delighted by what grounds Kassandra and the Wolf: Karapanou's language. The word-pictures kaleidoscope—at times literally, as dinner becomes after-dinner games becomes Kassandra running down the stairs to demand of the housekeeper stories from the Greek Civil War—and at other times metaphorically (“A word like a snake stares at me: there's a pot like Grandmother's chamber pot, a mouth in the middle, and next to a nail scissors. . . . At the tail there's a ladder. I count the scribbles, examine them closely. I like this word.”) In still more places, Karapanou pulls off being both literal and metaphorical at once: “I'm alone again. I stick my tongue out vaguely at Miss Benbridge because she's driven away my friends and lovely pictures. I act the ape at her, the Chinaman, and then the frog. In a picture, I cover her in dung, turn her into a horsefly and a cockroach, and, finally, I turn her into a water glass, which I throw out of the window.”

And when the dark gets to be too much, sometimes—sometimes—Karapanou sheds some lightness, impossible to resist despite the ever-present crust and the reader's attempts to remain sober. The following is the odd, but also oddly cute, eleventh chapter: “One afternoon Zakoúlis came to play with me and Konstantínos. It was cold and he was wearing a coat with a hood. We said we'd play hide-and-seek. I lifted Zakoúlis up and locked him in the big cupboard, near the ceiling. Then we forgot about him and went to eat lemon creams. 3 days later, they finally found Zakoúlis. He was still wearing his hood, but he'd gotten to be very small, like an olive.”

Rien ne va plus is, at first glance, a more traditional telling, of a marriage and of a woman in her marriage. Louisa is the narrator in all but the book's final “chapters”—as in Kassandra and the Wolf, they are really vignettes, though here there are more solid transitions between them—and she has an aunt and an uncle and a beloved dog named Lyn. She marries Alkiviadis, Alkis, who has purple eyes and works in the very definable profession of veterinarian. But Alkis's eyes turn out to be more shifting than originally assumed: “cold, the eyes of a fish” in the first version of his and Louisa's relationship, and “warm, friendly” in the next. Louisa begs for her fickle, cruel husband, and then she is the cold aggressor, leaving Alkis for a man who lives around the world and whom she knows only through letters, then for a giant, gregarious woman.

There are versions of this story because there are multiple versions of real marriages and people, too, and because, manifested as literature, the multiplicity of these relationships is downright fascinating to read. What is confusing, however, isRien's second part, a skinny prayer sandwiched between the book's other two much heartier sections. Who is praying—likely, but not assuredly, Louisa or Alkis—and if the prayer's recipient is God alone, or someone else as well, are not clarified. That may be frustrating but acceptable, an unfinished puzzle to languish over, but what is truly sad is that Karapanou's language becomes obtrusively coy here, with phrases like “The game starts again from the beginning. The end is always another beginning” and “Eros is diabolical.” Readers would understand the similarities and distinctions between the book's other parts without this hint in between. Perhaps the line that will really make readers wonder if Karapanou trusted us to read along is this: “My God, so distant and close: —If I come to hate you, it will mean I have finally begun to believe in You.”

In both Kassandra and Rien, Karapanou is at her best when her female characters are unrelentingly in charge—and also, one could argue, most out of control. It would certainly be worth reading more of Karapanou's books, as well as those of her Greek female contemporaries. Hers are horror stories wearing sparkling, precious jewels.

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Rikki Ducornet
illustrated by T. Motley
Dalkey Archive Press ($13.95)

by Steve Tomasula

On the eroded hillside of a graveyard near my childhood home, we often found the bones of infants. Throughout one spring, we kids played with the tiny skulls and tried to arrange ribs into skeletons, thinking they’d come from monkeys. Then one day, our innocence evaporated enough for one of us to ask: Why would monkeys be buried in a cemetery for people?

Rikki Ducornet’s fiction has often mined the spirit of these sorts of awakenings, the moment when the marvelous becomes the monstrous or excess enlarges the world. It’s easy to imagine her fiction collections as having a family resemblance with those 18th-century wonder cabinets, containing, maybe, the last breath of Galileo trapped in a beaker, the deformed spine of a dwarf, a dragon’s tooth, or an odd fossil. Unlike a museum, the objects were gathered not into some scientific hierarchy, but as a collection meant to inspire wonder/revulsion, and through these reactions, larger meditations on the strangeness of the world, and our place in it. And so it is with Ducornet’s latest collection, The One Marvelous Thing, a wonder cabinet of twenty-nine short fictions quirkily illuminated with line drawings by T. Motley.

From the opening sentence, readers will realize they are in the presence of a lyrical author engaged with large themes: “In those years when I bounded about on all fours and on my elbows fled those I feared; when, in those lucent days I scaled trees fast as a cat and sailed the treetops as squirrels do, spreading their wings of fur and flesh, I was, I assure you, a better creature for all that, my desires both innocent and private, and what’s more, easily assuaged.” The narrator of “The Wild Child” goes on to recount memories of living as a feral child who was captured, and then beaten into conversion, by those with a “righteous need to have me tamed.” Despite the success of her patron’s program, starving her in a dungeon until she cries out “I repent!” she cannot repent her nature. Though she sits in chairs, and allows her hair to be pinned up, she can’t stop gazing at the throat of her patron’s daughter, longing for the days when she lived by eating the “hot red hearts of sparrows.” What’s more, she can’t help but notice the rush righteous visitors get, “their eyes sparked with something like envy,” when she’s put on display—like an exotic object in a Wonder Cabinet—and made to recount her formerly “wicked” and wildly free life for their edification.

The facing illustration is drawn as one of those “find-the-kettle-in-the-trees” kind of drawings published as puzzles in children’s magazines. But in this case, the child depicted is sitting forlornly up in a tree, and the cups, saucers, chairs and books hidden among the branches—the stuff of civilization and consumerism—play a role in subsequent stories. That is, “The Wild Child,” and her fall from a state of grace into the prison of religious and societal stricture, can serve as a parable for a number of the stories that follow.

Sometimes, of course, those cast from Eden manage to get back in. In the title story, Ellen dreams of a “portal opening upon a grove of citrus trees. Within it a naked goddess tossed grain to a large rose-colored bird.” Then she awakens “alone in a room so banal it made her weep.” Ahead lies a day of shopping with a friend, Pat, whom she doesn’t like. Pat, we are told, has Botox lips the size of her SUV, “is addicted to the buying and selling of properties,” and brings all the Machiavellian skill she can muster to shopping at the mall. Why? Because, she explains as the two women stand in a sea of recliners, “there is always one marvelous thing” and her life’s motto is to not “settle for less than better.” That is, no matter what a person has, it can always be better.

Pat spots this day’s one marvelous thing, a gilt, faux antique birdcage as tall as a person, just as it’s about to be purchased by one of the common herd, shopping at the mall. A battle over the birdcage ensues, with Pat trying any lie, claiming she had put a hold on it, while the other shopper, Magda, stands her ground. The more fiercely Magda resists, the more Ellen is attracted to her, to her strength, to her sensuality: all the things she’s allowed Pat to suppress in her own nature (a consumerist update of “The Wild Child”). She joins in on Magda’s side, until Pat stomps off, leaving a “stench of sulphur and White Diamonds in her wake,” and Ellen goes home with the one marvelous thing she found at the mall—Magda herself. The story ends with the two women entwined in bed.

Paintings, visual artists, gallery dealers, and collectors of various kinds figure in a number of these stories (unsurprisingly, given that Ducornet is also a visual artist herself). “Koi” (as in ornamental carp) is one of the funnier stories in the collection. An aging grande dame of art, whose gallery once gave her “status and access to men,” is growing into the realization that the “youngstuds are taking their stuff to a rival across town,” while her stable of artists are, like her, growing old fast. After thirty years of exhibiting plastic sushi nailed to the floor, or mounting shows wherein the art consisted of barrels of boiled spaghetti, she’s exhausted. What’s worse, the wave is passing her by. Indeed, the straw that breaks the gallery’s back comes in the form of a performance piece she agrees to exhibit: an idea one of her aging artists comes up with that consists of him climbing naked into a tub of centipedes. The problem is that neither of them realizes—as do the critics, collectors, and other, hipper, gallery owners and artists—how closely this work looks like a cheap imitation of a reality TV show. In the end she’s forced to sell the gallery to a Japanese teenager who exhibits erotic cupcakes as art—and, one imagines, the cycle for the gallery begins again.

The descriptions of these stories do not do justice to the most “marvelous thing” about them, though: the writing. Some stories seem to be told through a series of arresting and unexpected images, say of the pontificating woman at a cocktail party, “dressed as a goddess in the many folds of some sort of tent,” who corners the narrator with certitudes on life, on the cosmos, and has the mesmerizing power of a “herring pond.” Or when a collection of snuff boxes, “made to look like figs with hinges, precipitate a new set of private associations.” Or when a wife realizes that she’s wasted her life serving a “great man” who turns out to be a brute and the realization makes her feel as though “a swarm of bees has taken possession of her skull.” As often as not, the idea or emotion is expressed with poetic economy, as when this same wife squeezes “every last drop of bile from her bitterness so that it came to resemble worldliness.” Line by line and in story after story Ducornet does both: fusing unexpected and pristine imagery with large ideas: “He inhales; despite himself, he breathes.”

The sum effect is a collection of stories that makes the marvelous and the grotesque permeable. She moves effortlessly between the once-upon-a-time of fairytales and the here-and-now of contemporary realism (if stories told through such diamond-like imagery can be called “real”). The stories reanimate that Renaissance literary quality of “marvel”: that which creates wonder in the reader through the depiction of probable impossibilities, e.g., the ideal lover found in a mall, “bologna quesadillas” or the fact that “conversation has this ideal property: it alters our moods.” Their idiosyncratic nature makes them wholly unique, except in the context of Ducornet’s previous short fiction, novels, and poetry: a genre of one that delivers literary pleasures and surprises nearly line-by-line.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2010 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2010

Joy Ladin
Sheep Meadow Press ($15.95)

by Warren Woessner

Someone once wrote that there are only two plots to a story: "a man sets out on a journey" or "a stranger comes to town." Transmigration, by Joy (once Jay) Ladin, is a collection of poetry that tries to develop both of these themes: a male becomes a female and thus takes up physical and psychic residence in a new body.

In her own words, he (Jay) felt dead: "To be dead you have to have been alive, and though I walked, talked and so on, I knew I had never really been alive." If form in fact dictates function, Jay was not functioning very well, and Joy was not functioning at all. How much of what we take for granted as the very essence of our being will shift or simply fall away if we to change from one sex to another?

Part One of Transmigration is entitled "Marriage," but it does not contain predictable confessional poems about the disintegration of a conventional union due to one partner's repressed identity. Rather, the poems are mostly about the separation of Joy's persona from Jay's. The images circle and repeat themselves, trying to define what it is to break up with yourself:

I never meant to live,
To become the flesh
Of disappointment groping toward you
From the empty side of the bed,
The life you won't believe

I never meant to live. ("Steam")

This is powerful material, but sometimes the poems seem to get lost in their emotional maze:

I want to love
The want that is talking
About the failure that is loving
The love I am failing

Talking and failing
Failing and unfailing
I want to talk
About unfailing love ("Unfailing Love")

These poems are more like a pilgrim's progress through a strange land, where the pilgrim takes two steps forward and one step back as he/she proceeds toward an uncertain goal past a myriad of hazards.

The second section, "Transmigration," primarily meditates on the soul of the transformant. Although some readers may crave more concrete imagery, the atmosphere Ladin establishes is appropriate to her exploration of such unknown—and unknowable—territory. In the particularly vivid "Somewhere Between Male and Female," Ladin recognizes that the genders

Split out the seams
Leaving the soul naked

Crisscrossed with scars
Male scars and female scars
Breast scars and testicle scars

Scars like doors
And scars like fingers
Fingers point at the naked soul

The book's third section, "A Difficult Birth," is a difficult read, as Ladin moves back and forth in time and place. The poems here are full of death, fear, pain, and finally resolve, as in "Finding Your Female Voice":

Your voice breaks
On the scale of want.
You need to add inflection. The want
Men speak in a monotone

Women sing and scale. Sound and feel
The voice you want.
The voice you voice.
The want that voices you.

In "Maiden Voyage," the last section of the book, Ladin seems to be seeking a new lexicon; according to the poet, these poems "were composed entirely of disparate words found in the Dec. 2006/Jan 2007 issue of Cosmo Girl." Oddly, this technique helps Ladin to find her voice; rather than rehashing the expected magazine fare of make-up, orgasms, and fashions, these poems are like stories long hidden in code, offering vivid snapshots of the challenges that emerge as the transmigration comes to an end:

You thought
Your death would soon be over
You did the routine for years:

Broken-hearted girl
Hiding in a complete stranger,
Trying to choose to survive.

Girl, the information is out there:
Main characters.
Are not supposed to die

Of the birth of their lives. You
Are in an episode
You haven't been watching. ("New Year, New Body")

Whether or not this is a journey the reader will ever take, Transmigration offers to stamp the passport and usher the reader into an ever-shifting landscape of loss, hope, and love.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2010 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2010

Allison Benis White
Cleveland State University Poetry Center ($15.95)

by Stephen Burt

I fell for these prose poems the moment I started to read them, and I liked them even more once I figured out their donnée. Each of White's elegant one-to-two-page works takes its title and one (only one) of its subjects from a sketch, painting, or sculpture by Edgar Degas, he of the dancers (White was once a dancer herself). The other, usually more important, subject is White's own childhood, marked sometimes by the wonder and confusion almost any of us remember from our own first years, and sometimes by White's distant, troubled mother, who seems to have died young. ("Crayon" suggests a modern child's crayon but denotes a nineteenth-century painter's tool.) You don't need to see the Degas images to love the poems; you do need to have some sense of Degas's work—especially, perhaps, of his famous young dancers, with their unripe poise, their way of facing, and yet not facing, the adult world.

This technique of double exposure—one title, two topics—works so beautifully at the level of the single poem because White works so thoughtfully, at such striking levels of generality, at the level of the sentence: you could take her best sentences and print them separately as individual poems. "When a child throws a stone into a lake, God is pleased, and opens in rings, then fades to prompt the child to throw again." "I will not let you sleep follows the pattern of most affection." "I recognize is the reversal of I disappear."

A compelling aphorist, White also sets scenes: in "Dancers in Blue," "To remember now is then, or the difficulty of wearing an off-shoulder dress. Their dance is rehearsed before mirrors until grief is perfected." Describing herself even as she describes a Degas, White tries to describe anyone, everyone, me, you; as much as she says "I," she also adopts the (grammatically) impersonal voice of wisdom literature, with abstract nouns for the subjects of sentences, recurrent or "timeless" present tense for the verbs.

White is thus "experimental"—you can hear faint echoes of Lyn Hejinian's My Life—but her goals are very old: to record her life not for its own sake, but for the discoveries about emotion, memory, grief, beauty, and embodiment that her life has allowed her to make. White portrays characters who change inside, who mourn or fall in love and want to know why, but nobody will mistake her prose poems for short stories—when she asks "why" the answers she gives are not sets of events but emotional states and ideas, arranged in language that reflects on its own reflection, like the mirrors in rehearsal rooms: "I am loneliest with other people and require their absence in order to love them. Like the white impression of a headboard on the wall after a move, proof of the past is the occupation of the mind."

When White becomes well known, people will call her book "lyrical," but as with Killarney Clary—by far the writer she most resembles—it would be better to call them "harmonious," since she uses so much of the overlapping resonance within individual words: each poem builds up a sort of chord progression, with one line of notes in the "Degas" voice, one in the autobiographer's voice, one or three in more general terms. Purposely sparing on sensory details, the collection makes each detail go a long way, much as in the sketch that gives White her title: each line, each thing seen, carries an emotional weight the poet finds no reason to deny.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2010 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2010

James Schuyler
edited by James Meetze and Simon Pettet
Farrar, Straus and Giroux ($28)

by Claude Peck

In a 1965 letter to his painter friend Fairfield Porter, poet James Schuyler mentioned his non-light summer reading, which included Proust, Dante, and Shakespeare. Schuyler liked Shakespeare’s late comedies best, with his favorite being As You Like It. “It’s so artificial,” he wrote. His elaboration speaks volumes about what makes Schuyler’s own writing so appealing: “It doesn’t make the faintest pretense that its existence was obliged, was called for. Bigger works of art always seem to threaten to help one in some way. As You Like It is just there, like the one red poppy across the lawn, pure excess of delight.”

Other Flowers gathers many poppies into a big, showy bouquet, artfully arranged and still fragrant with life nearly twenty years after the death of this first-generation New York School poet—a man who is perhaps, as critic David Lehman puts it, “the best kept secret in American poetry.” Tidbits of this book have appeared over the past two years in a tantalizing trail of petals: twenty-three previously unpublished poems surfaced in the glossy art journal The Sienese Shredder in 2008, with more poems following inHarper’s, The New Yorker, Nation, and Granta.

And now we have the book, with 161 poems (plus two translations). While Other Flowers contains fragments, curiosities, and failed experiments that Schuyler may have preferred were never seen, these “lost” works are far more than castoffs. To the contrary, many stand alongside Schuyler’s best. Open the book anywhere and you’ll discover the oddness and delight that comes from Schuyler’s discriminating, sky-scanning eye, his distinctive style and a voice equally attuned to the tender and the fierce, the gorgeous and the comical. “Short Poem,” for example, waxes eternal in just five lines:

My muse plays tennis
and has a body like a Greek god.
My muse wears glasses
and looks swell in them.
I could go on like this forever.

The New York School was never really a school in the sense that its voices sounded alike or shared stylistic preoccupations. There were common obsessions—visual art being perhaps the biggest one—but friendship, taste, timing, and geography united the New York School poets more than a joint aesthetic manifesto. Among its founding poets, only John Ashbery, at 82, lives and continues to publish. Frank O’Hara died young, in 1966; Schuyler in 1991 (he was 67); Kenneth Koch in 2002.

Since Schuyler’s death there has been a steady stream of published Schuyleriana, including his Collected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), The Diary of James Schuyler (Black Sparrow Press), Just the Thing: Selected Letters of James Schuyler (Turtle Point Press), and Selected Art Writings (Black Sparrow Press). All of them, and especially the delightful Letters, are highly recommended and still available.

Other Flowers is gleaned from poems not seen in any of Schuyler’s five commercially published volumes of poetry, which include his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1980 book The Morning of the Poem. While those books usually contained a long poem, the poems in this book are all short, a page or two.

A “treasure trove” designation applies, even just based on the sheer volume of work: Other Flowerscontains about three times more poems than appeared in any of Schuyler’s previous stand-alone volumes. His Collected Poems, in fact, had just 259 works, including twenty-eight previously unpublished “Last Poems,” written late in life. That explains why this book is heavily weighted toward older poems.

While numerous poems lack dates, of the sixty-one for which editors James Meetze and Simon Pettet provide a date of composition, over half were written in the 1950s. This is when Schuyler, who was born in suburban Chicago and grew up in Washington, D.C. and the Buffalo suburb East Aurora, was a new New Yorker, working at a bookstore and rooming with Frank O’Hara.

Unlike the Harvard-educated others in the New York School, Schuyler had dropped out of Bethany College in West Virginia during his second year. He joined the Navy and saw active duty during World War II, but was dishonorably discharged after going AWOL and then revealing his gayness. Plagued by mental illness, Schuyler’s adult life was marked by poverty, unemployment, minimal recognition, and regular hospitalizations—along with, thankfully, a rich network of creative and supportive friends, a legendary wit, and dedication to writing.

A few postwar years spent in Italy exposed Schuyler not only to W.H. Auden, for whom he house-sat one winter, but also to the early 19th-century poet-philosopher Giacomo Leopardi. Other Flowers ends with two translations by Schuyler of Leopardi poems, and Schuyler’s own marvelous “Distraction: An Ode” gives it up to the melancholic and skeptical Italian:

Leopardi,
who would not believe
what you could not believe,
I love you so!

Schuyler relates his and Leopardi’s musings on the night sky, 150 years apart. His sense of kinship and aesthetic constancy is touching and almost certainly reflective of a young poet’s search for creative influence:

Yet still the moon you sang
in the last song you wrote
on that volcanic slope—
how like a New York street . . .

The charismatic O’Hara had an electric effect on poets and painters in his crowd in the 1950s, when he began publishing his distinctive, French-inflected, pop-culture-obsessed, “I did this, I did that” verse. It’s easy to see his impact on the slightly older Schuyler, whether in the high-low chattiness of such lines as “it’s fantastic how people don’t love beauty / yet you love Hoboken” (“So That’s Why”), or the bizarre art-world similes in “Grousset’s China (Or Slogans),” where a Dubuffet smells like germicidal soap and a Giacometti makes “you want to slip an Ingres girl a feel.”

Ashbery-like dense wordplay and surrealism also crops up, but with Schuyler’s own unfailing sense for the sound of long and short vowels and consonants knocking around like big nails in a small can, as in “Love’s Photograph (Or Father and Son)”:

Detected little things: a peach-pit
basket watch-chain charm, an ivory
cross wound with ivory ivy, a natural
cross. The Tatoosh Mountains, opaque
crater lakes, a knickerbockered boy
who, drowned, smiles for a seeming ever
on ice skates on ice-skate scratched
ice, an enlarged scratched snapshot.

Though gay, Ashbery and O’Hara were less likely than Schuyler to write overtly about their love of men. Schuyler, on the other hand, was plainspoken about his gayness—a bold stand in the closeted years before Stonewall. When he crushed on the attractive painter John Button in the late 1950s, Schuyler waxed rhapsodic about him in “Having My Say-So”: “Surely it’s undignified for a gent to want to take another gent bouquets, and absurd? / Just as surely I could not care less.”

Other Flowers features numerous nature-observed poems. Skies, storms, flowers, clouds, trees, and seascapes were continuing fascinations for Schuyler, who spent years living with friends in leafy Southampton, coastal Maine, and verdant Vermont. Schuyler sparks a rush of recognition on the part of the reader with a sensitivity that can make us mere mortals, with our point-and-shoot cameras, feel half-alive, as in this Maine scene in “September Summer House”:

Out into the harbor mouth
sticks a rock blob
barred to shore by sea gunk
a bar stretched thin as pulled bubble gum
but it doesn’t snap back.

Also present are some forms and approaches long favored by Schuyler, including sestinas, a sonnet, letter poems, occasional poems dedicated to friends, and poems written in hospitals.

While not as dedicated as O’Hara was to the city as backdrop, Schuyler also wrote beautifully about New York. The terrific “Jack Frost Sugars,” set around a Hudson River dock in Queens, ends with a dynamic flourish worthy of Hart Crane:

Downriver, by the delicately webbed gasometers
and the antennae, frailly tensile,
lumber kindles into golden flames
curling like shavings from a plane.

Several poems in this book resemble nothing else in the Schuyler canon. Heightened anger and images of the agonies of madness—while they were states of mind with which Schuyler was intimately familiar—were rare in his published volumes, for example, but “The Exchange,” full of unsheathed nerves, lacerated lips, “barbwire hair,” and “a fishy curse,” offers a lyric somewhere between David Lynch and Céline. And the poet is overtly aware of his phobias and fixations in such lines as

. . . How can
I fear so many diverse things?
I want to think of other things.
Is it all
in how you think?”
(from “Via Della Vite”)

Overall, Other Flowers, with its thought experiments, surrealist probings, and denser textures, most resembles Schuyler’s first book, Freely Espousing. The better-known later books are more likely to combine an elegiac tone with more comic, conversational, free-associative amblings.

But really, by its nature, this book resembles none of the others. Created posthumously by others, how could it? The happiest outcome of its publication is that it injects a large number of new Schuyler poems into the universe. The saddest is that there are unlikely to be any more flowers from this sensitive and memorable poet of the small emotions—emotions that, as Van Gogh once wrote, are the captains of our lives.

Claude Peck, an arts editor at the Star Tribune in Minneapolis, is working on a book about James Schuyler.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2010 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2010

Hiromi Itō
translated by Jeffrey Angles
Action Books ($16)

by Lucas de Lima and Sarah Fox

Hiromi Itō has enjoyed literary acclaim in Japan since the 1980s, particularly after the publication of On TerrItōry 2 (1985) and On TerrItōry 1 (1987), both of which broke new ground in their forthright explorations of the female body, sexuality, and motherhood. Itō grew up with a shamaness grandmother and a mother who “believed in magical spells,” and she extends this spiritual tradition to her own work as a self-proclaimed shamanic poet and performer. Her fascination with Native American poetry and cosmology led her to the ethnopoetic movement and an introduction to Jerome Rothenberg, who encouraged Itō to visit the United States in the early 1990s. She relocated to Encinitas, California, in 1997, and currently divides her time between there and Kumamoto, in southern Japan. Despite sustained literary prominence in Japan, Itō has remained a mostly obscure presence in American poetics.

Sarah Fox: First of all, hats off to Action Books for continuing to shove at the margins of poetic convention with Killing Kanoko, a project deeply rooted in feminist, shamanic, and oral traditions. Not exactly trend ideologies—I suspect that few American poets would feel comfortable aligning themselves with such seemingly sacralized associations.

Lucas de Lima: It’s hard to think of a North American counterpart to Itō, isn’t it? Maybe that has to do with our preoccupations as postmodernists—how, by holding promiscuous linguistic play as our poetic ideal, we aim to disengage from ideology altogether.

SF: Well, I might argue that Anne Waldman and Alice Notley are among Itō’s North American sisters. Both embrace shamanic expression and the vatic. Both also reveal, and re-imagine, the feminine in mythic time, and share a blatant and outraged rejection of patriarchy. Itō contributes to their feminine mythopoesis, and helps model an alternative ideal. Her association with Rothenberg, too, involves her in his advocacy of poetry’s visionary, mystical potential. But I think we both agree that Killing Kanokokicks some serious ass and is one of the more original collections we’ve come across in awhile.

LdL: Agreed; KK is a force to be reckoned with.

SF: For me, Itō models a truly innovative feminist aesthetic—in terms of both form and content. Readers may be anxious to nose around in the poet’s infanticidal fantasies and scatological excess, and may even wonder how Kanoko, Itō’s actual daughter, feels about all this—I mean, in the book’s title poem Kanoko is despised, and murdered, by her mother! But first, I’m eager to examine Itō’s shamanic framework. Her elevation of poetic objective to shamanic act elicits a complex reading of the more audacious and shocking personal narratives; I might even suggest that the poems have magical intention. If we think of the poetic voice as shamanic, perhaps we could read the text as exorcism, or a ruthless enactment—both cleansing and metaphoric—of repressed cultural impulses.

LdL: Yes, there’s a highly oral, aural, and visionary quality to Itō’s lines, as if they were being transmitted to and through her in real time. Simultaneous rather than linear, Itō’s spatiotemporal reach evokes the shaman as much as the pregnant body. Porous are the boundaries between speaker and subject in her poetry. Take the first poem “Harakiri,” in which homoeroticism foregrounds the ritual suicide by disembowelment that, having once caused Yukio Mishima’s death, now excites a certain Mr. O (the moniker, of course, is a throwback to that classic of S&M literature, The Story of O). Mr. O, we gather from translator Jeffrey Angles’s annotations, acts out scenes of harakiri for erotic pleasure. The speaker, initially merely witness to this subcultural eroticism, seems to occupy Mr. O’s subjectivity through the immediacy of the final lines: the first- and third-person pronouns suddenly disappear in a “weird and kinky” identification/obliteration of voyeur and queer exhibitionist. Ushering in the masturbatory ending, after all, is the line "He said he could commit harakiri face-to-face with a woman, he'd be in seventh heaven." Perhaps the speaker joins her subject through what Saint Genet’s version of shamanism would look like—a sadomasochistic avowal, on all fronts, of sexuality and its regulatory construction. So, participation and perversion. In a way, Itō is very Lady Gaga.

SF: Talk about bad romance! She does share Gaga’s affection for grotesque parody and erotic hyperbole, no doubt. I felt the influence of Kali on the poems’ trajectory of shameless destruction: anarchy as the catalyst for radical transformation. (I’m thinking especially of depictions in which Kali, wearing a necklace of skulls, stands triumphantly on the head of Shiva, her tongue sticking out with irreverent insouciance.) The more redemptive outcomes of destructive events emerge in the book’s final piece, “I Am Anjuhimeko,” which is Itō’s retelling of a Japanese folktale. Originally recited by traveling storytellers, the tale was only recently written down, having been transmitted telepathically, “over 20 centuries,” through a spiritual medium. In this story, a young girl is confronted with a series of horrific tasks—in Itō’s version they involve attempted murder and multiple rapes by various manifestations of the father/taskmaster—on her quest towards shamanic initiation. The story has, in a sense, three narrators—the girl Anjuhimeko, her original storytellers, and the medium, all inhabiting the “I.” By retelling this story, Itō adjoins to the polymorphous “I,” and declares her allegiance to mediumistic and oral forms. Over and over again, the narrator asserts, “I am Anjuhimeko,” a sustained projective identification. The allegorical resonance of Anjuhimeko’s narrative allows Itō to assemble a simulacrum of the book’s collective voice and demonstrate how the mythic mirrors and absorbs the autobiographical. She speaks as both mother and daughter in the narrative’s assorted embodiments of those roles, and consequently recontextualizes, if not converts, the annihilating energy of her more personal revelations—the meaning of destruction in the preceding poems is renegotiated. ”I Am Anjuhimeko,” and hence the book, resolves in gratification: “all I have is language, I respond with language, I respond, and as I respond, I sense the desire of the leech-child I carry on my back slowly being satisfied.” The leech-child is Anjuhimeko’s symbol of salvation—the offspring of a yamanba (trickster witch).

LdL: Notice how one of the manifestations of the father in “Anjuhimeko” is destroyed precisely through his own mirroring: “. . . when he saw his reflection in the water, his mouth was ripped open so wide his lips extended to the back of his neck and his teeth jutted out in every direction. . .” As you suggest, such oral grotesquerie condenses the modus operandi of Itō’s feminist-shamanic project. For her, it’s always necessary to embody, hyperbolize, as well as disfigure phallocentric speech to the point of fatigue or, in this case, violent dissolution. Hence the need for a yamanba to deflate the “huge, huge, huge phallus,” which she lustfully achieves while “completely wrapped up in having intercourse.” Quite a feminine power fantasy, especially when you throw in sublime leech-children.

SF: Yes, it’s an exhilarating finale. I see the yamanba as a vessel for the sublime—she endows Anjuhimeko’s shamanic authority at the end of her “wretched” journey. The yamanba enacts a revised, healed version of feminine sexuality: ecstatically commandeering the now disembodied and powerless object of Anjuhimeko’s abuse (a “rediscovered phallus” she had “located in the past.”) She illustrates uninhibited self-expression (“listen to what kind of voices I make! watch what kind of expressions I make!”), and echoes, in the forfeiture of her offspring, the poet’s infanticidal performance in the book’s title poem. There, Kanoko is like a “leech-child,” who “pilfers my nutrients” and “wants to bite my nipples off.” Itō’s Kali-esque mantra in the poem “Killing Kanoko,” congratulations on your destruction, supports the poet’s objective to liberate herself (by obliterating child, father, husband) in service to language, the channeling of shamanic/poetic utterance. In “I Am Anjuhimeko,” Itō accommodates the full breadth feminine experience—maternal, filial, sexual, victimized, annihilating, nurturing, generative . . .

The poem “Snow” likewise describes a literal shamanic enactment. The speaker observes the ill fate of a rabbit by tracking its footprints alongside those of a fox. She begins to undress, notes that fur has begun to sprout from between her toes, and instantaneously transforms into an animal—as shamans often do on their journeys. “You see that / I am writing / You see that / I want to show it to you . . . / You finish writing and put it away / You don’t seem to want to show me.” Rather than repress (“put away”) confrontation with death, the speaker “want[s] to show it to you,” and does so by actually embodying the metaphor—becoming the rabbit who awaits the devouring fox. The white fox, or kitsune, is a noted trickster figure in Japanese mythology, sometimes associated with the female demon goddesses known as Dakini.

LdL: Don’t tricksters traditionally bring fire, language, and other tools of civilization to humans? It seems Itō assumes the rabbit’s role in order to burrow inside the ambivalent power figure of the fox—literally and figuratively.

SF: Yes, that’s good! She invites her own destruction. Again, the evocation of Kali, the dark feminine force of time, death, and transformation: surrendering oneself in order to transcend the gendered conditions of creation. It’s enacted in almost every poem. Itō ruthlessly evades remorse, rejects decorum, reconfigures ethos, in a vocal register at once demotic and incantatory. Her poems graphically report both the mundane physical details of a woman’s life (pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, masturbation, defecation, leaking fluids, breast infections, diaper rashes, etc.) and the darker edges of feminine desire and despair. In “Logical Like a Baby,” she recounts the chronic diarrhea of her infancy and its corresponding obesity in later childhood (“I was the fattest in my whole grade at school.”) She credits her “cure” from diarrhea to her mother’s post-weaning loss of interest followed by her father’s growing monopolization of her, which “fattens” her. The poem makes transparent early psychological patterning and its persistence in consciousness and family systems. When the father began to interact with her (“Father had not just shown his desire to monopolize me but had started to act upon it”), the mother “started treating me meanly.” Itō elaborates on the psychic extension of early relational patterns by bringing the father as sexual object into the poem’s present, in which both poet and father engage (or do not engage) in writing poetry and in masturbating:

On days I cannot write poetry, I do not masturbate
On days father can write poetry, he masturbates
On days I can write poetry, I masturbate
On days father can write poetry, he masturbates
On days I can write poetry, I do not masturbate
On days father can write poetry, he masturbates
On days I cannot write poetry, I masturbate
On days father can write poetry, he masturbates

Variations on these lines repeat—like a refrain, like a child acquiring language—dozens of times in the poem, positioning the banal events of physical daily life and its privacies alongside the complex interplay of psychic presences and pressures. The Oedipal drama of Itō’s childhood is transposed onto Kanoko, whose own chronic diarrhea makes “the area from her rectum all the way to her labia began to grow inflamed.” Kanoko “[pulls] at her own labia. / In other words, she couldn’t stand not touching herself.” At this point, Kanoko’s father (“Daddy” in the poem) enters the narrative, to masturbate or not masturbate, to cause the speaker to get fat or not get fat, to prompt Kanoko herself to “[masturbate] for Daddy” and “[get] fat for Daddy” and “[have] diarrhea for Daddy.” Here, Itō underscores the inevitable philos/aphilos between mother and daughter—from both perspectives—as it arises specifically in response to the father’s monopolizing interventions.

LdL: Like Pasolini before her, Itō posits the body as a site of transgression as well as destruction. Hers is a message of shit in a culture of death. The body is so pronounced, exaggerated, its capacities and failures constantly rehearsed, that it stands in for poetry. Or better yet, poetry’s flailing puppetry. It’s no coincidence that the text insists on linking poetic composition and masturbation—both circumscribed, self-involved, yet potentially seditious acts—so intimately. In other words, the body enacts the limitations of signification while providing a way through the latter: a means of momentarily irrupting our subjection to language. I think this possibility for extralinguistic excess is the occasion for “Logical Like a Baby,” especially in light of the poem’s frame in childhood and the thwarted pursuit of a coherent, precultural, prelinguistic self.

SF: Do you think the speaker reclaims autonomy over language, and body, by finally eliminating the father from her incantations? The poem’s closing word, “iiyoo,” is actually Kanoko’s: iiyoo repeated in eleven one-word lines, a kind of tail. “The day the diarrhea stopped, Kanoko started to say iiyoo.” In his notes, Angles describes iiyoo as a “childish pronunciation of the words meaning ‘That’s nice’ or ‘That’s good.’” It’s not a proper Japanese word at all, but rather, as you note, a prelinguistic projection of meaning and/or self-identification—the baby’s native logic undistorted by cultural determinism.

LdL: Yep, Itō’s sheer use of repetition suggests just how hard-earned the speaker’s autonomy is in the end. For me, though, such reiteration is as boring as it is heroic. Whereas repetition for a Language poet might serve as an anti-closural device that loosens and proliferates meaning, in Itō’s writing its primary quality is tedium. This isn’t to say that her poetry’s echoes stagnate. On the contrary, they’re uncannily generative because of their dullness, like hypnosis gone awry. Itō, to invert Baudelaire’s phrase, creates an oasis of boredom in a desert of horror. Even in a refrain as ironic and damning as “Congratulations on your destruction,” the speaker explodes the negative space of death by filling the page with it. That line—a stand-out from the title poem—achieves, above all, the paradoxical effect of propagation by naming its Other again and again. Call it a backwards biology, if you will.

SF: The structure of repetition also accommodates the multiple projections and thematic mirroring throughout the book, most notably between Itō and Kanoko—the infant girl reflecting the infantilized mother/wife, in one sense, and thus the object of infanticidal fantasy as explored in “Killing Kanoko.” Itō recognizes, in Kanoko, both a reflection and a product of a culturally prescribed identity, and the poem seeks a mutual destruction where identity and infantilism are “disposed of.” At the same time, Itō exposes—as an ideally cathartic event—suppressed maternal fury in response to an infant’s demands on body, time, and autonomy (“Kanoko eats my time. . . Kanoko forces me to deal with all her shit. . . I want to get rid of filthy little Kanoko”). Her acknowledgment of an essential hatred for her infant recalls Winnicott’s theory of the “good enough” mother, one who provides reasonably successful attachment for her child by accepting, rather than repressing, her emotional ambivalence. Also, Melanie Klein’s concept of the “devouring mother” whose breast is met by the “devouring infant”—a reflective sadism co-existing with the sexual, emotional, and physical gratifications of breastfeeding for both mother and infant. In “Killing Kanoko,” Itō channels a collective maternal rage—for which she continually congratulates herself—with shamanic ceremony that in its fanaticism has, as you suggest, a paradoxical cleansing effect. I’m reminded of the medieval women mystics who professed great gratitude to God for “killing off” their children so that they could devote themselves entirely to spiritual merger.

LdL: Infanticide in the poem is tantamount to exorcism, consisting in a kind of passionate detachment. By killing Kanoko, Itō not only liberates herself for her own poetic-shamanic pursuits, but she also frees her daughter from future enslavement to motherhood and phallocentrism. It’s also possible that Itō is liberating herself by allowing the text to subsume the narrative voice. Kanoko’s name overshadows the “I” on the page, amplifying and complicating the drama of individuation you’ve identified, in which Itō lives and Kanoko dies. Notice the multiple “Kanokos” on the same page where an “I” alone constitutes a line. If doubleness, in the Freudian sense of the word, is a harbinger of death as well as unfulfilled, but possible, futures, we could say that the text also entertains the idea of Kanoko killing her mother. All in all, a pretty radical disruption of the ideologically inscribed mother-daughter dynamic.

SF: It certainly is. The poem, in fact, employs two narrating voices—in separate columns—and also engages in intertextual conversation (with Magda Denes’ book In Necessity and Sorry: Life and Death in an Abortion Hospital), reiterating its doubleness. We might think of “Coyote” as the antidote, or alternative power structure, to “Killing Kanoko.” Here, Kanoko’s affiliation with the mythical coyote produces a multivalent cultural re-imagining. Itō alludes to Joseph Beuys’s 1974 performance piece, when he isolated himself in a small room with a coyote for three days. Itō addresses her own sympathies with Native American mythology through her enlistment of the coyote figure (equivalent here to the fox/kitsune of “Snow”), while also paying homage to her matrilineal shamanic heritage. Kanoko’s exchange with the coyote confirms her birthright to intuitive rapport with the animal world (where Beuys separated himself from the coyote by erecting physical boundaries, Kanoko and the coyote—at least in the world of the poem—enjoy an unobstructed interchange).

LdL: “Coyote,” in this sense, displaces Beuys’s performance onto the feminized familial scene. If Beuys was apologizing to the coyote—thereby indirectly and symbolically apologizing to Native Americans overall—Itō is apologizing to Kanoko for letting her leave the womb and initiating her into culture. But Kanoko’s exchange with the coyote—centered on their collaborative and nearly nonsensical revision of the Buddhist “Heart Sutra”—pollutes as much as it purifies. Coyote and child don’t recite the mantra correctly because they are themselves re-signifying what it is to be female, victim, and most controversially of all, human. Kanoko, by virtue of her contact with the coyote, lives the dream of dehumanization. The agent of spiritual invention and cultural transformation, she calls to mind Europe’s enfants sauvages, or wolf-children, whose flight from civilization collapsed our most fundamental categories of identity.

SF: Notably, the father’s participation is considerably diminished in “Coyote.” Itō attributes a slightly altered quotation from Beuys to the father: “I wanted to concentrate just on the coyote / I wanted to isolate myself, insulate myself, see nothing other than the coyote / And I wanted to trade places with him.” She insinuates that unlike Kanoko, or the feminine generally, the father is denied access to animistic merger. He “insulates” himself against chthonic interplay and subsequently stands outside of the drama. That’s more or less all we hear from him in this poem, although Itō catalogues extensive biographical details of daughters, mothers, grandmothers, and sisters. Elsewhere in the book, “my father is everywhere,” as violent obstruction to feminine autonomy. In “Father’s Uterus, Or the Map,” Itō describes a room in which the father’s “various body parts / Are stuffed into various bottles,” among them an exhibit of his “uterus that had grown teeth.” The father’s body: dismantled and reduced to relic, his feminine or maternal aspect (uterus) not only floating around in formaldehyde, but rigged to devour (in this case, and from his vantage, one assumes the teeth are a threat to the father himself—if he gets too close, that nasty uterus will eat him up). His “insulation” from somatic intelligence in favor of a clinically verifiable (cartographical) system reflects his antagonism towards nature itself, which he denigrates to the symbolically feminine. In Itō’s vision, the father is explicitly abstracted. As a map for navigating the underlying configuration of dominant culture, it’s a pretty dismal picture.

But Itō transcends this in “I Am Anjuhimeko”—indeed, she symbolically situates Kanoko (as “leech-child”) at the threshold of matriarchal renaissance. Here, the revisionist heroine is subjected to patriarchy, completely violated—literally raped—by it, but exploits those abuses for transformational gain.

LdL: Indeed. Anjuhimeko breaks the shackles of patriarchy by becoming a woman with shamanic agency. In response to the leech-child’s desire, she recognizes language and poetry as instruments of her shamanic technology. In this affirmative scenario, mother and child empower and complete each other by symbolically feeding and gratifying one another. The outcome, then, of individuation is equanimity: a reclamation of relationship and matrilineal rites/rights. “I Am Anjuhimeko” thus declares the book’s transgressive ethical core by ultimately redeeming motherhood, feminine sexuality, and sexual otherness as sources of transcendence. And by conjuring, on the page, a shamanic performance, Itō opens a channel for healing to her readers—at least those brave enough to celebrate the potency of her shadowy revelations.

SF: In addition to its many aesthetic and intellectual pleasures, Itō’s poetry has practical applications and wide-ranging cultural relevance. While the agents of empire blithely congratulate themselves on their increasingly perilous acts of planetary destruction, poets like Hiromi Itō locate in poetry’s ancient but ever-present and life-affirming technologies a powerful mode of resistance as well as a vehicle for cultural and personal transformation. It might be reasonable to consider whether we can accept anything less from the poetry of our times. Killing Kanoko is a stunning achievement, one that will surely inspire continued translation of Itō’s oeuvre, and establish her as a significant presence in American poetry.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2010 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2010