by Tony Magistrale

In an interview I conducted with Stephen King a few years ago, he mentioned that when he and his wife Tabitha graduated from the University of Maine, Orono, in 1970, they debated to which part of the state they should move in order to begin their family and careers. Tabitha argued for the more upscale Portland, while Steve opted for, and eventually won, a move to Bangor. “I wanted to go to Bangor because I thought that Bangor was a hard-ass, working-class town—there’s no such thing as nouvelle cuisine once you are north of Freeport—and I thought that the story, the big story that I wanted to write, was there.”

That story, of course, was It, a 1986 novel replete with many of the themes and narrative techniques that have come to demarcate King’s canon. It is the story of a fictional town in Maine—Derry—where a transmogrifying monster resides and participates in a 27-year feeding cycle, preying particularly upon the town’s vulnerable children. King has acknowledged that Derry is essentially modeled after Bangor; the use of this regional parallelism is a clear borrowing from one of King’s favorite writers, William Faulkner, and his employment of real Mississippi locales as a simulacrum for his fictionalized Yoknapatawpha County.

In Faulkner’s novels, actions set in the present are often held in suspension by an interrupted narrative that allows the events of the past to become reanimated, producing a narrative design in which past and present conjoin. In It, the varying time references from 1958 and 1985 flow into one another, making memory and reality synonymous. Indeed, only by reconnecting with the imaginative properties of their youth can the adult characters in this novel confront and defeat the monster from their childhood.

King’s fiction has always demonstrated a particular fascination with the relationship between past and present. Most often, the past shapes the present in negative ways. Novels such as Apt Pupil, The Shining, and Pet Sematary underscore the fact that sins from the past are capable of tainting the present, essentially dooming those who venture back to explore the nature of the original wickedness. But on other occasions, King suggests that the present can be better understood and enriched by references to the past—indeed, that there are magical properties available to those who find a way to venture back. Narratives such as The Dark Tower and11/23/63, like It, posit that doors exist connecting the past and present, and that crossing through these doors not only offers the potential for personal revivification, but also the ability to alter events that have already transpired. This movement between alternate time zones is a topic that appears frequently in the King canon, but It may contain its most focused and effective utilization.

It also represents the most elaborate and defining representation of Derry in King’s canon, as he returns to the city in other books, most notably Insomnia and the more recent 11/22/63. King’s treatment of Derry is consistent throughout all his work; an entire town has become a haunted landscape. Each time one of his characters ventures inside Derry’s city limits, the air and water are noticeably befouled, the level of violence rises accordingly, and the tension that always exists between children and adults in King’s canon translates into abusive action.

In most of the inanimate, malevolent centers located in King’s fiction—from the Micmac burial ground in Pet Sematary to the Overlook Hotel in The Shining—a connection and/or identification with the human world is absolutely necessary to animate their malefic energies. King may well be suggesting that evil exists only as a theoretical construct without human beings—and that it only becomes real when humans serve as a host. Derry appears to be another one of these places, but on a scale—both geographically and historically—that dwarfs other evil centers in his fiction.

Derry is a town where there is little that is kind or beautiful. However, unlike the Castle Rock novels, such as The Body, The Dead Zone, and Cujo, It is a far more ambitious effort to portray and explain the interrelationship between the town of Derry and the monster, It, a creature with whom the town shares a reciprocal bond: sustaining the city’s economic viability in exchange for the sacrifice of Derry’s youth. As Mike Hanlon recognizes, “It’s become a part of Derry, something as much a part of the town as the Standpipe, or the Canal, or the library. Only It’s not a matter of outward geography. Somehow It’s gotten inside.”

Underneath the veneer of Rotary Clubs and dusk curfews established out of concern for its children is Derry’s hardnosed reality: a history of persecution of outsiders—from African Americans (as Hanlon’s father reveals in his memory of the Black Spot); to the children who play in and around the town; to Adrian Mellon, who is murdered because he is a homosexual, and whose violent death awakens a whole new cycle of It’s violence. In fact, It codifies King’s homophobic affiliation between evil and male homosexuality, an association that can be found throughout his work, from Apt Pupil to The Talisman to Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption. Its core avatar in It is Pennywise, a male adult in clown drag whose lethal orality is primarily fixated on the male children in the Loser’s Club. Fittingly, the young males in this novel establish a kind of protective barrier to Pennywise’s vagina dentata only after they lose their virginities to Beverly Marsh, the Club’s sole female and symbolic earth mother. The bizarre nature of their sexual initiation rite with her—some commentators have likened it to a gang rape—becomes comprehensible only via the implication that the young males’ demonstrated heterosexuality serves as a prophylactic to the clown’s toxic homoeroticism.

Ascertaining the place of It in Stephen King’s prolific canon is no easy task. Certainly it ranks with the best and most impressive examples of the writer’s “epic” fiction, as good and as cherished by his fan base as The Stand and The Dark Tower. That said, It suffers from a liability that often plagues King’s work: the journey appears to be of more interest to the writer than the conclusion. Here, the transformation of the brilliantly perverse Pennywise into a pregnant spider for the ultimate battle scene between It and the Loser’s Club turns out to be a letdown. But getting to that point is a wonderful and wondrous journey that remains the most persuasive of all King’s efforts to establish the sanctity of childhood in the face of adult failings.

Editor’s Note: Stephen King’s It has just been reissued in a 25th anniversary edition by Cemetery Dance Publishers.

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

THE FLAME ALPHABET
Ben Marcus
Knopf ($25.95)

by Robert M. Detman

Ben Marcus, a celebrated young novelist who is an associate professor of literature at Columbia University, has received numerous awards and recognition for his innovative contributions to contemporary literature, including an NEA Fellowship and multiple Pushcart Prizes. He is notorious for a 2005 Harper’s essay, a stern rebuke of—among others—the overly lauded contemporary novelist Jonathan Franzen, in reaction to that author’s comments condemning difficult and experimental fiction as the end of literature. Stated with Marcus’s verbal aplomb and with tongue strategically planted in cheek, he attempted in the essay to reemphasize the primacy of the intellect over the pop cultural simplicity of fiction as a feel good enterprise, and posited that literary fiction might entertain in more complex, and challenging, ways. All of which points to Marcus’s elevated and necessary endeavors in fiction, where he is quietly and successfully doing the work that his contemporary would not dream of imagining.

Broadly a work of science fiction—though one resists limiting Marcus to that genre ghetto—The Flame Alphabet is premised on the epidemic of a language disease in a civilization rattling in its death throes. Specifically, the taunting voices of children make the parents of those children susceptible to a “language toxicity,” which renders them listless and mute, and whose grotesque symptoms include face shrinking and hardening, and eventually, death. Furthermore, to turn the premise to extremes, it is apparent that not only children’s voices kill, but that language in any form, ultimately, kills. The first-person narrator, to his advantage, has inside knowledge and manages resistance to the disease as he develops antibodies that take the form of vapors to be imbibed. Though struggling to develop a cure to the disease, he spends days in hiding, attending to his ailing wife, who is enfeebled in their daughter’s presence. The compelling presentation of this dystopia is narrated in deadpan prose that avoids overt poetry as it delivers sharp observations.

Writing in the high literary tradition, Marcus addresses—alongside Margaret Atwood and Doris Lessing—the existential horror of the overwhelming simultaneity of contemporary life, embodied here in the plague, which parallels the threats of modern technology. In The Flame Alphabet, language signifies the threat of community and the destruction of the family because it fosters conformity in the users of language: “it was a disease of insight, understanding, knowing.” Comprehension implies death, and a compendium of writing ills are enumerated, components to the narrator’s frequent satirical charm. “If you no longer care about an idea or feeling, then put it into language. That will certainly be the last of it, a fitting end. Language is another name for coffin.” In what is largely a novel devoid of sentiment, the apparently inevitable estrangement of children from their parents as they come into their own as verbal beings points to an absurd notion of family expressed in this self-deprecation.

Marcus’s novel takes the form of a quest, reminiscent of Kafka’s The Castle, and the interior journeys undertaken by Beckett’s forlorn existentialists—he even name-checks Beckett characters—as well as mirrors the identity confusion found in those writers’ works. Marcus, with his elaborate inventions, emphasizes the estrangement of the language collapse. The narrator sounds at times like the hyper-vigilant Macmann of Beckett’s Malone Dies, particularly in describing the Rube Goldberg-like apparatuses used to find a cure: “My technique was messier than I expected, incoherent in places, letters dropping off pages, failing to come together, breaking into pieces. Imperfections everywhere. I felt ashamed to see it unclothed like that.” Working with words and their component letters, the narrator constructs alternative scripts, uses obscuring visual devices, even explores dead languages to disguise the comprehensibility of words. Solutions range from The Proofs, an abstract containing the history of the language’s intrinsic toxicity, to an enigmatic “Perkin’s Mouth Guard” and the possible cure in a thirty-word lexicon: “A list of rules so knotted that to follow them would be to say nearly nothing, to never render one’s interior life, to eschew abstraction and discharge a grammar that merely positioned nouns in descending orders of desire.” Kafkaesque snafus, a life’s work reduced to ashes, are constants for the narrator pushed to his limit by the futile bureaucracy. This brings the narrative to the brink of farce, yet maintains its extension of the fiction of Kafka, or Bruno Schulz. Marcus’s might be a more self-conscious and explicit rendering of the realms of these socially isolated, modern stylists.

The reader probes this work and arrives at a paradox: since the premise of the novel (that writing kills the messenger) should make the prospect of first-person narration impossible, how can such a story be told? In itself, this could be the supreme gesture of an experimental novel.The Flame Alphabet, though not overtly formally experimental, adheres to an experimental tradition through a rapacious interrogation of the underpinnings of language’s very premises. The theme underlying this work points to the mystery inherent in the complexity of language. Marcus’s intent is both to question the uses of language, and, within its limits, describe an unfamiliar world.

The Flame Alphabet evinces a postmodern aversion to traditional narrative, yet simultaneously dangling conventional storytelling before the reader. As in his 2002 Notable American Women—a novel of linked episodes set in a surreal alternative world lorded over by a group of women following fictional cult leader Jane Dark—remarkable description leads the reader to recognition and surprise from which irony elicits hilarity. The Flame Alphabet executes stunning lexical flights, yet reaches higher perhaps, and more coherently, in terms of theme, in a work that contains its predecessor’s DNA.

Though sharing its bleak landscape, Marcus’s novel serves as something of a counterpoint to the fraught metaphysical and existential emptiness of Cormac McCarthy’s dystopia portrayed inThe Road. Lessing’s Sufism, a less well-known mystical infusion of her beliefs into her fiction, parallels Marcus’s uses of an alternative Judaism in The Flame Alphabet, which is treated as an archaic system that does not provide a solution, though it offers its proponents a salve in its seemingly futile rituals. For example, when the narrator reconnoiters to a secret “Jewish hut” in the woods where a listening device is placed over a hole in the ground attached to underground cables, it is to capture transmissions from a charismatic sage whose sermons provide guidance and hope for the survivors of the epidemic.

In another reference to Judaism, the labs of Forsythe, a kind of “Big Brother” organization that insidiously works to find a cure for the disease, mimic the ethos of what can best be called a concentration camp for the afflicted, as when the narrator observes “the decontamination procedures outside in the courtyard, a man curled up under the harsh ministrations of a hose.” It’s not clear who the administrators are, though they are in cahoots with a ubiquitous figure named Le Bov, also known as Murphy. It remains unclear whether Le Bov is an actual person or cabal.

Marcus’s portrayal of a world on the brink of the end of writing and communication, however fantastic a premise, signals an intriguing aspiration towards some new life for the novel. In its sheer ambition, The Flame Alphabet entices the reader with brilliant and measured language as it pokes clever—and welcome—holes in the fabric of the contemporary novel.

THE FLAME ALPHABET
Ben Marcus
Knopf ($25.95)

by Laird Hunt

Ben Marcus keeps updating his Ben Marcus. The Age of Wire and String presented us with a sprinter author, a quick-heeled maker of mini-cosmogonies, explosions of curiously sentenced ink and light. Notable American Women, out some years later, saw the earlier gestures and geographies stretched, pushed, squeezed, puffed, torqued. Here we had a Ben Marcus who was still taking laps around the language track, but also starting to stare down the gun barrel of narrative, checking out its grooves, getting seriously interested in duration and trajectory. This Marcus had grown more methodical, was a little more judicious with his galloping, and had maybe put on a few non-literal pounds.

The next full-length book (though not a full-length Ben Marcus, as he was its editor and introducer) was The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories. In the introduction to that estimable volume, Marcus gave handsome praise and space to work of all sorts. In it could be found stories linguistically straightforward and situationally bizarre (like those penned by Wells Tower or George Saunders); linguistically straightforward and situationally straightforward (Jumpa Lahiri); linguistically gently bizarre and situationally gently bizarre (Deborah Eisenberg); and linguistically very bizarre and situationally pretty straightforward (Gary Lutz). There were other kinds of stories in there too. Marcus argued that all of it was good in its own way, all of it worthy, all of it had to be accounted for if we were to learn to accommodate a more capacious sense of what early 21st-century realism should mean.

If this was a Ben Marcus in the clutches of a kind of Clintonian, big-tent aesthetics, it was also one who could, not long afterward, nonetheless still fire off a credible rebuttal to Jonathan Franzen’s infamous beware-of-the-Bill-Gaddis-approach essay “Mr. Difficult”—championing traditionalist stories alongside non-traditionalist ones doesn’t mean you can’t stick up for the latter when they come under attack. It is as thoughtful a piece of writing on the value of formally inventive writing as we have recently had. One hopes that someday it and Marcus’s fine introductions to under-appreciated works of experimental fiction like David Ohle’s Motormanand Stanley G. Crawford’s Log of the S.S. Mrs. Unguentine will be gathered and published.

While there is no compelling reason to project this big-tent Ben Marcus back onto the authors ofThe Age of Wire and String and Notable American Women—he may or may not have always been open to it all—one certainly does think of the Anchor anthology when considering The Flame Alphabet. This is because we see here yet another Ben Marcus, one who writes the kind of fiction much extolled in the anthology’s introduction. Much like Wells Tower and his Vikings or George Saunders and his zombies, The Flame Alphabet tells a strange story straightforwardly. Commenters have remarked elsewhere that it displays a Ben Marcus who, long since done with staring down the gun barrel of story, has in the religious sense found narrative. This has been presented by most of said commenters as a great thing and by some as not so great, but whether it is great or not great, it is definitely interesting. Here we have a writer of lasting merit who is capable of striking change, one who would seems to have come to the same conclusions as, say, many contemporary French writers of fiction who build their dislocated and dislocating worlds out of completely straightforward language.

The Flame Alphabet is about a man living in a world where language has become violently toxic. To hear something is to hurt. To hear too much is to die. “Language happens to be a toxin we are very good at producing, but not so good at absorbing,” is how one character, a sinister charlatan-cum-prophet who has more names than one, puts it. First it’s children (Jewish children, supposedly, initially) who inadvertently then advertently strike down their parents. Then it’s everyone. The man’s daughter, Esther, has a particularly nasty tongue, and so the man flees, leaving behind the language bludgeon his daughter has become. He is taken to a kind of detox center and eventually set to work on finding a cure.

While The Flame Alphabet is longer by some good distance than its narrative rewards warrant, the themes are vintage Marcus (not to mention vintage William Burroughs): language as a container for/enabler of/flawed cure for loss, disconnect, sadness, evil, the unbearable burdens of the world. And there are many passages throughout the novel—descriptions of worship huts (Jews in this alt-America worship together and often have sex in huts with specialized listening apparatus to pull sound out of the deep ground), virus-cure methodology, and the narrator’s elaborate efforts to inject smoke into a red wax ball to set atop his daughter’s birthday cake—that hark back to the earlier Marcus, who took a giddy delight in building precise, clock-stopping descriptions of things that couldn’t quite be.

The difference here is that these moments are built into a non-digressive narrative template that has much more in common with Stephen King’s The Stand or the comic and TV series The Walking Dead or the five billion other apocalyptic fictions that have appeared recently than it does with Tristram Shandy and its heirs. Put otherwise, The Flame Alphabet is full of time. Our narrator does things. These things lead to other things. There are evenly disbursed passages of description, action, and dialogue. There are chapters, chapters that finish with a little lift that leads into the next. There is an internal clock ticking loudly from one end of The Flame Alphabet to the other, and this clock goes tick-tock, not tock-tick, tock-tock, or tick-tick.

In a 2003 article on the work of John Haskell published in The Believer, Marcus wrote:

If something must be overcome, ruined, subverted in order for fiction to stay matterful (yes, maybe the metaphor of progress in literary art is pretentious and tired at this point (there’s time again, aging what was once such a fine idea)), then time would be the thing to beat, the thing fiction seemingly cannot do without, and therefore, to grow or change, must. Time must die.

Marcus clearly didn’t feel obliged in this book to follow his own prescription; here, traditional narrative time is alive and well and that’s probably a good thing, as it helps The Flame Alphabet get at many a sharp, chilling observation about our shared humanity. Still, it is thrilling to think that the author’s project of killing time may yet be alive, that time may be dead and buried by the time we get our hands on his next book. We will just have to wait and see.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

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

Chan Koonchung
Translated by Michael S. Duke
Preface by Julia Lovell
Doubleday ($26.95)

by Lucas Klein

The cover screams “The Book No One in China Dares to Publish,” the Financial Times and The Observer have offered ad-like reviews, and copies have spilled off bookstore displays in Hong Kong and London for months; The Fat Years is the new must-have for the politically righteous book consumer in the English-speaking world. Consumer, that is, not reader, since most reports mention little about the story other than its premise. Probably better this way, since aesthetics too often fail when put up against political righteousness.

Alas, the book is as heavy-handed as the state propaganda it criticizes, and there is more intrigue behind the no one in “no one in China” than within the book’s pages. The premise is interesting enough—a month of recent history has gone missing, and a small group of intellectuals and dropouts from the Party agenda are on a mission to find out why—but the 300-page novel offers two hundred pages of exposition as preface to a hundred page-long epilogue.

The obvious touchpoints for such political paranoia in English and American literature are George Orwell and Thomas Pynchon. But think of the tense urgency of Winston and Julia running from Big Brother in Nineteen Eighty-Four, or the slaphappy imagination of the “eleven lost days” of the Calendar Reform of 1752 in Mason & Dixon: instead of imaginative allegories and dramatic development, The Fat Years reads like a failed experiment in telling rather than showing. Questions about whether contemporary Chinese fiction need adhere to English and American standards have their place, of course, but since the novel refers not only to Huxley’s Brave New World, but also to Joyce and Proust, comparisons are not quite cultural imperialism; nor does diversity require fans of modern and post-modern literature in English to like this book if they read it.

In the epilogue, for instance, the three protagonists—writer Old Chen, vagabond Fang Caodi, and lawyer-turned-activist Little Xi—have kidnapped central government official He Dongsheng, and now get to listen to him lecture on recent Chinese history and political economy. It is a captive lecture, not a captivating one: what he says is informative, revealing, and boring. Even the author seems to know this: “This was certainly a long, slow night. As Old Chen, Little Xi and Fang Caodi listened to He Dongsheng bombard them with information, their emotions went on a rollercoaster ride; they were totally exhausted, and yawning continuously.” In his afterword the translator attempts to salvage this section, saying “Some readers may regard this as a tedious ‘soap box monologue’ lacking in drama, but they would be mistaken,” because the lecture recreates “the way the Party leadership talks to the 1.3 billion Chinese.” An interesting tactic for a book whose primary selling point is political virtue—it’s as dramatic as Party leadership lecturing the people!

A fundamental problem to The Fat Years is that the main characters are not on the run from the government but chasing it. This is not only a problem of plot design but of politics, as well, since instead of compelling the reader to ask “At what price stability?” stability itself is made victim, and the protagonists cast as chaotic elements who threaten the only system China knows. Such would be the political concerns, at any rate, if more than a handful of citizens of the PRC could read the novel (expecting censorship in the mainland, Chan Koonchung sent it only to publishers in Hong Kong and Taiwan, so the “no one” who dared publish the book in China includes Chan himself); meanwhile, we Anglophone readers can congratulate ourselves for being brave enough to oppose totalitarianism.

We will, however, have to muddle through Michael S. Duke’s translation, which reads like a solid second draft rushed to publication before the editors could suggest revisions. While the plot of the Chinese version drags, at least the sentences come in a colloquially zippy style, which the English has not reproduced: it stumbles over Chinese forms of address, overuses adverbs like “certainly” and “actually,” and is stuck in simplistic sentence structure throughout. Compare how Duke writes in the Translator’s Note (“The novel posits a mystery while at the same time offering a social and political critique of the nation in which the mystery takes place”) with how he translates:

This year is the year of my zodiac sign, and a lot of strange things are bound to happen. Things like getting so worked up that I burst into tears, or like meeting Little Xi and Fang Caodi one after the other after such a long time—I think all these things are vaguely connected.

And shouldn’t a sentence like “After I returned to Hong Kong, I happened to see an advertisement for property in Taikoo Shin, so I quickly placed a down payment on the apartment I’ve mentioned before, and started to build a nest for two” provide either less (“After returning to Hong Kong I noticed an ad for property in Taikoo Shin, so I made a down payment and started building a nest for two”)—or more (in Chinese the sentence mentions putting down his entire savings from ten years of work)?

But even a great translation could hardly make The Fat Years compelling enough to match its claims on political virtue. Towards the end of He Dongsheng’s lecture, he threatens his listeners with worse than what they know: “I can see that you lack the imagination to comprehend genuine evil.” At this point, the reader will have a hard time avoiding a similar conclusion about the novel itself: not that its author cannot comprehend the evils of China today (evil is banal, after all, and does not require much imagination to comprehend), but that he could not avail himself of the imagination necessary to describe its pervasive erasure of the historical knowledge dissent requires, as well as the necessity of acting against it.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

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

Thomas P. Balázs
Aqueous Books ($14)

by Weston Cutter

If you’re a fan of straightforward, character-driven stories, Thomas Balázs’s Omicron Ceti III, despite its seemingly sci-fi title, is right up your alley. The title story, for example, takes place in a mental institution and features a depressed narrator who is obsessed with the number three and paralyzed by self-awareness and self-doubt. In the hospital, he meets his foil, a woman who manages to escape her depression and mental trappings. Many of the book’s stories are structured around such an oppositional pair—there are no stories in here of best friends discovering something together—and are thematically linked around notions of self-awareness.

The book is split into three sections of three stories each, and each of the sections is prefaced by a quotation from a Star Trek episode. That Star Trek episode is crucial because it featured a planet named, yes, Omicron Ceti III—a world of drug-induced bliss, where even emotionless Spock falls in love, although by episode’s end, he is cured. He famously says, as the Enterprise is preparing to leave, “For the first time in my life, I was happy.” And indeed, how we achieve happiness—or at least some sense of completeness—is another recurrent theme in Balázs’s book.

Consider, by way of example, “My Secret War,” the volume’s second story. In it, a high school student slowly awakens to his homosexuality, and, in doing so, begins a war against his boarding school’s English teacher, who also happens to be gay. The story is well plotted and rich with great characters (Dr. Pierce, the English teacher, is a rigid authoritarian figure rumored to be connected to the FBI, facts which serve to heighten the supposed hypocrisy inherent in his, as far as his students understand, closeted homosexuality). By story’s end, the reader understands the title as ironic: the young man has not, in fact, been battling a hypocritical adult, but has been engaged in a sort of war with himself over whether or not he’ll grow up to be someone capable of allowing more mystery and shades of gray than he’s willing, as a teenager, to tolerate.

Perhaps what most links the characters in Omicron Ceti III is that they consistently fall into something like a weird trap that might be summarized as The Cure Is Worse Than the Disease. In “Notes From Art History,” an epistolary story from a husband to a wife, the husband is upset by the strange sexual shifts that have happened in their relationship at his insistence (it’s slightly more complicated, but part of the joy of the story is plot-derived, and I won’t spoil it here). In “April Paris,” a young man flees his PhD studies (English, natch) at the University of Chicago for a spell in the dirty, druggy Manhattan of the 1980s, and, having solved the problem of his lack of interest in academia, finds himself with the new problems of poverty and drug use.

Again, the repetitive structure of the book isn’t necessarily a bad thing: if you’re in the market for stories that feel structurally similar, you’ll enjoy Omicron Ceti III immensely. If, however, you’d like greater variety in the flavor of your fiction, you are probably best off hoping that Balázs—a clearly talented writer—stretches a bit further next time out.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

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

Susan Sherman
Counterpoint ($25)

by Malcolm Forbes

Berta, a haughty young girl employed as companion to the daughter in a prominent Moscow family, finds her services are no longer required and is sent home. To get there she must travel two days by train, from Greater Russia to Little Russia—namely the Ukraine. Gone is the size and splendour of Moscow; her birthplace is a dusty provincial town whose inhabitants converse only in Yiddish. The many versts she has travelled are nothing compared with how far she has dropped down the social ladder, her debilitating demotion from Greater Russian to Little Russian.

So begins this entrancing, meticulously researched debut from Susan Sherman. Preoccupied with Berta’s journey, from her travels within her native Ukraine to her ultimate desperate flight from it, the novel takes us back to the beginning of the last century and charts Berta’s development alongside that of her beleaguered country. Through the vicissitudes of twenty years—a short but tumultuous history—Berta must mature to survive. She sloughs off her pride when she meets and falls for Hershel, a wheat merchant. Through him she accepts her identity and her status (“They were Jews and, worse, Jews of an indeterminate origin”), but after witnessing the brutality meted out during a wave of pogroms, she is made to realize that identity and status are the key factors contributing to her people’s merciless persecution.

“Nobody likes a spy,” we are told at one point, but the more we read, the more we can exchange “spy” for “Jew.” Sherman writes wincingly well on each new outbreak of scattershot violence. “Kill the zhydy and save Russia and the czar!” a baying mob chants, at once reminding us that violence stems from fear and irrationalism. Similar hatred appears at unexpected moments in the book, manifesting itself verbally as well as physically. Snide references test Berta: when she invites a fraudulent medium to one of her soirées, the old charlatan is surprised, saying, “I have never been to a Jewish home before. I didn’t think they were so nice and clean.” (Berta does what she always does in such situations— “she kept her expression neutral and said nothing.”)

Preconceptions merge into prejudices when the Kaiser wakes “the sleeping bear” and war breaks out. Pavel, a member with Hershel of the General Jewish Workers’ League, is shopped to the police on suspicion of being a Jewish agitator. What’s more, “A Jew owned the corner store. Jews did business with the devil and some even had horns and a tail.” Just as fanciful but no less tragic is when one of Berta’s friends informs her that Jews killed her husband: “They tell the Germans where to bomb. They have a lotion, you know. The Jews I mean. They put it on and it makes them safe from the bombs.” Eventually a new, more virulent strain of anti-Semitism takes hold as rumours circulate that ninety percent of Jews are traitors “and the rest are spies.”

Life becomes tougher for Berta when she has to fend for herself. Hershel, now her husband, has been smuggling arms to the shtetls to protect them from the spate of peasant-led pogroms. After a botched operation he senses the Okhranka, the czar’s secret police, closing in on him and urges his wife to pack and flee the country. But Berta decides to stay put with their two children. As young patriotic men sign up to fight the Germans, “pledging their lives to Mother Russia” and vowing to “do their part for the Little Father,” Sherman’s Little Russian feels her world caving in on her. The bank repossesses her house in Cherkast and her Jewishness prohibits her from finding a new one, or an accompanying job. The glittering salon society she recently mixed in has dissolved, her friends too scared or unwilling to help. Just when we feel Berta’s lot can’t get any worse, Sherman ushers in the book’s magnificent though harrowing set piece, a calamitous assault on Berta’s community by hordes of marauding Cossacks. Berta is made to endure the ultimate adversity, a mother’s grief, but her will remains unshaken, and we follow her progress anxiously as she first struggles to make ends meet and later runs for her life.

Berta’s courage renders her admirable, but we also find ourselves captivated by her series of shifting transformations. Each part of the novel carries her latest incarnation as its title. Thus “The Lady from Moscow” morphs into “The Wheat Merchant’s Wife”; “The House Jew” soon has no option but to become “The Border Stealer.” Berta makes the dramatic transition from persona non grata into an undesirable who must be exterminated, and as Sherman turns her into a fugitive the reader is presented with a thrilling denouement that dextrously manages to showcase heroism intermingled with tragedy. It is refreshing, if sobering, to read of a heroine whose abrupt change in fortune is dictated by her ethnic background and not her own moral choices. Berta may not be up there with Anna Karenina, Emma Bovary, and Hedda Gabler, but her suffering is skilfully manipulated enough for us to be affected by her plight. Sherman deserves praise for also shining a light on a little-known world during one of its darkest hours, and for reminding us that 20th-century Jewish persecution did not begin with the Third Reich but was simply a continuation of history.

Unfortunately, while Sherman is wonderfully adept at spinning a tale and creating a memorable cast, she does not always excel with small but key descriptive details. Put another way, her prose is uniformly assured—no small feat for a debut—but it never goes the extra mile to evolve into the miraculous. At times she resorts to the usual clichés that hamper the first-time writer: Berta has “almond-shaped eyes”; a building is “raw-boned”; when Berta is disorientated everything seems unreal, “as if underwater.” But elsewhere Sherman impresses with descriptions that glow with originality. Berta’s voice, we hear, “sounded muffled, tremulous, like it was coming from a wax cylinder for a phonograph player.”

The Little Russian is a masterful study of one woman’s fight to stay afloat and alive in an era in which governance was consolidated with oppression and barbarism. Berta undergoes the severest baptism of fire followed by one hardship after another, and throughout Sherman possesses unwavering authorial control, making the hurt and the trauma believable and never diluting pathos into crass sentimentalism. We are swept along with Berta and her changing fortunes and end up rooting for her in the closing chapters. Sherman keeps us guessing as to whether her heroine can make it over the border to be reunited with her given-up-for-lost Hershel, and we devour the last pages greedily.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

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

Emily McVarish
Granary Books

by Afton Wilky

In A Thousand Several, Emily McVarish explores the space of a book through its relations to cityscapes. As if she has positioned her reader at a busy intersection, each page becomes a place that text and image move into and out of. In this way, the experience of reading A Thousand Several feels more like turning the pages of a flip book animation than following a continuous line of text from left to right and top to bottom.

The sense of motion produced by figures photographed in the act of walking, extends McVarish’s earlier experiments with duration and presence. In both A Thousand Several and Was Here (2001), words and images are the empty shells of what has already passed. By rendering the figures as silhouettes, outlined forms, or monochrome cutouts, McVarish calls attention to layers of blankness that accompany forms of representation. Additionally, by flattening three-dimensionality and cutting the figures out of their original context, she produces a page-space at once strange and familiar. On these pages, both image and text float until they intersect with another figure; this intersection cuts and connects at the same time.

It’s these “risk-slits” and “torn encounters” which surface as the subject of A Thousand Several. Once the “thin outer coating” of the book is opened, the “several” of the title becomes “sever al” on the title page, suggesting that the wholeness of words is merely the layer most often seen. “Kept in parts,” and “built in passing,” language and image are understood here as the sum of letters, outlines, and shadows, and as the “byproduct” of what is now over. By these terms, cuts seem to bleed glue.

The hyphen may be the perfect model for this cut/glued condition of language, since it literally “divides and figures . . . streets and open spaces” on the page. Straddling distinctions between text and image, the hyphen can be both a punctuation mark and a line. Here, thousands of hyphens strung together into dotted lines create the cross section of a “street” which cuts across each page.

Often, these lines darken a large stripe across the book, which appears strangely flat in relation to the depth suggested by the floating figures. However, like McVarish’s figures in which there is a range offered between silhouette and outline, a dotted contour also indicates this street. In this way, the street demarcates a space for occasional crossing and for the traffic of words.

Fluctuating between fullness and emptiness, the street refigures a dilemma of language and image—a dotted line fills in space at the same time that it draws the line to be cut along. The street then alternately makes visible and invisible the sedimentation of cut-marks. As can be seen in the second image, if we drilled all the way through this sediment, we would find ourselves in another world, or at least on the inside of a mirror. The implications of these organizations are further compounded when we realize that the cross section of this street might also be seen as the cross section of a book.

What takes shape in McVarish’s work, through the interaction of grounds, forms, and the text itself, is the idea that a word or an image is always a figure in unseen motion. Like a city, A Thousand Several is an amazing trace of its struggle, holding open the space of its passing by.

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

Charles Russell
Prestel ($65)

by Eliza Murphy

All experience lodges within us—states of ecstasy and despair, what we absorb with our senses, and the bombardment of delight and conflict imposed on us by our cultural milieu. Our psyches mysteriously absorb this barrage of stimulus, and then combine the effects and impacts with genetic matter to inform who we are. When filtered through a fertile imagination, this process can make sparks, causing a spontaneous combustion of passionate creation that emerges through the hands, spilling onto canvas, walls, paper, wood, bone, metal, rags, skin, rock, glass, clay, or numerous other materials. The outpouring can alter the creator’s consciousness and offer the rest of us a gift capable of shifting the way we see the world.

At the heart of scholar Charles Russell’s new book, Groundwaters, is the egalitarian premise that all art bubbles up from a deep well and “flows toward the stream in many rivulets, many expressive impulses run in many creative paths into the great stream of art.” Rather than dwelling on the inability of the mainstream art world to shift its rigid ideas about what constitutes art, Russell focuses on how art arises from a multiplicity of sources and influences. In the process, he effectively expands and illuminates the evolving field of outsider art.

Russell presents a clear history of how the field developed, beginning with two psychiatrists, Hans Prinzhorn and Walter Morgenthaler, whose fascination with the art made by their institutionalized patients inspired each of them to write seminal books about this radically new art, although neither had a name for it. They both drew comparisons between the extraordinary work of their patients and the creative currents running through Europe in the early part of the 20th century, a time of intense interest in both the primitive and the workings of the subconscious.

This sort of unusual art received its first label when artist and ardent art collector Jean Dubuffet called the wondrous, original creations made by the mentally ill and outcasts art brut, or raw art. Dubuffet championed art brut by amassing a vast collection and writing extensively about its importance as “an expression of an antisocial or asocial spirit that belied the false legitimacy of culturally defined art.” Russell credits Dubuffet for helping promote art made by people on the margins of society through his initiation of international discourse about the interplay between such makers of art and the culture from which they are estranged.

On the other side of the Atlantic, however, the spirit of individualism was well established and novel approaches to art were “seen as truly representative of a culture of nonconformists.” Russell contrasts the rivulets of creativity flowing here against artistic currents coursing through Europe, pointing out that America was young and without the long history of “rigid traditions against which to struggle” that European artists possessed. These fundamental differences generated different types of discussions about this art and its relationship to the broader culture.

In Europe, the issue transcended aesthetics. Critics and collectors wondered if these radically new forms of expression generated by the mentally ill and people living on the fringes were “an act of renewal or . . . a form of social collapse.” Self-taught artists in the United States, however, were less pathologized. Instead, they were viewed as the embodiment of the spirit of independence, their work lauded as valid and vital expressions of the common man. This art “symbolized and contributed to cultural identity, not opposition to it,” but that is not to say that folk or naïve art was welcome within the established art world with its pedigrees and rigid traditions.

art by Martín Ramírez from Groundwaters: Untitled (Tunnel with Man, Woman, and Dog), 1954

After Russell clarifies and summarizes the numerous problems surrounding the field, he proves a marvelous, erudite guide who ushers us past abstract arguments into an otherworldly dimension of undeniable beauty. Genuine innovators like Adolf Wölfi, Martín Ramírez, Madge Gil, Nek Chand, and Henry Darger are regaled and redeemed in the broad cultural context Russell provides. Whatever you call this art—outsider, self-taught, folk, art brut, art singulair—it has the capacity to challenge and provoke the viewer with its beautiful and often disturbing content.

Russell has chosen a variety of artists from around the world and arranged them historically. His insightful analysis of formal and aesthetic concerns of the work of an individual artist at the start of each chapter enriches and enhances the accompanying high quality reproductions. He deftly weaves events and changes occurring within the culture during the time the artist was alive, revealing conditions that influenced, or may have influenced, each artist. Some influences are open to speculation due to the level of isolation each artist experienced. For instance, Wolfi and Ramírez were institutionalized for much of their lives, which makes it difficult to identify exactly what nourished their imaginations.

Some of the dissent within the field is entwined with lingering romantic ideals of the artist as an acutely sensitive being who, out of necessity, chooses isolation in an effort to remain unscathed by external influences. Before mass media and pop culture infiltrated our world, many people were cut off from creative expression, but not necessarily by choice—they were often relegated to the margins by virtue of race, gender, geography, or socioeconomic or mental status. Many simply felt compelled to make stuff with what they had on hand, and were not specifically intent on making art.

While conveying how each artist developed and articulated his or her own vision, Russell seamlessly expands the evolving theories surrounding outsider and self-taught art. By narrowing his focus to a single exemplary artist before including other lesser-known artists working in similar veins as well as contemporaneous mainstream artists, he deepens the discussion, offering clear proof that this work is art and stands alone as art, regardless of how strange it might appear to the viewer. Once he establishes this undeniable truth, only then does he veer into the territory of biography, which has often been given more weight than necessary when critics evaluate or explain imagery that defies convention. While this work seldom shows the restraint, clean edges, or self-consciousness of mainstream art, it nonetheless exhibits masterly control and imaginative use of unusual materials.

Groundwaters is an important book about an important tributary of the art world. Even today, self taught artists play a precarious role in a culture uncertain of what to make of their art, beyond its ability to permit entrance into utterly captivating alternate realties.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

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

Martín Espada
W.W. Norton & Company ($24.95)

by J. D. Schraffenberger

The title poem of Martín Espada’s The Trouble Ball is dedicated to the poet’s father, Frank Espada, who is pictured on the cover of the book as a young ballplayer in 1947, his leg kicked high, his arm reaching back with the ball mid-pitch, as though it’s the book itself he’s delivering, the poems in its pages meant to “trouble” something inside us. The poem recounts a trip Frank took as a child to Ebbets Field, where he expected to witness the pitching of the great Negro League player Satchel Paige: “¿Dónde están los negros? asked the boy. Where are the Negro players? / No los dejan, his father softly said. They don’t let them play here.” Among the intriguing and playfully named pitches Satchel Paige invented were “The Trouble Ball, / The Triple Curve, The Bat Dodger, The Midnight Creeper, The Slow Gin Fizz, / The Thoughtful Stuff,” this last pitch so called because it gave hitters something to think about as the ball crossed the plate. Over the course of his career as a poet and a poetic “troubler” of official narratives wherever they assert themselves too emphatically or unjustly, Espada’s stuff, like Paige’s, has been nothing if not thoughtful. Here he recognizes the national shame of racial segregation, but the poem does more than simply point out injustices of the past, filling in some historical blank or other; rather, it transforms the past so that “It is forever 1941,” and we’re asked as readers to try our hands at pitching, or catching, or taking our best swings at Trouble Balls of our own.

As others have aptly pointed out, Espada is an heir to Whitman, who called baseball “the American game: I connect it with our national character.” Not surprisingly, Espada has written poems about baseball before: “Watch Me Swing” in Trumpets from the Islands of Their Eviction(Bilingual Press, 1987) shows the poet working on (and being laid off from) the cleaning crew at a ballpark; the graceful and celebratory “Rain Delay: Toledo Mud Hens, July 8, 1994” fromImagine the Angels of Bread (W. W. Norton & Company, 1996) ends as a season of drought ends and “farm boys with dripping hair / holler their hosannas to the rain”; and “The Fugitive Poets of Fenway Park” imagines another of his poetic forebears, Pablo Neruda on the run from the Chilean secret police, “burly and bearded in a flat black cap, hidden / in the kaleidoscope of the bleachers.” When he has written about baseball, Espada has done so lovingly but pointedly, each poem using baseball as an occasion to address other issues, connecting a more or less personal history with the narratives of our national past.

Though the collection as a whole is not really about baseball, it does dwell in the body in a way Whitman would approve of, contending that “national character,” not to mention spiritual truth, can be found through attention to the blood and muscle of our physical selves. In “The Spider and the Angel,” for instance, the young poet discovers a facet of his Puerto Rican identity at a day camp:

The counselors steered us to the roof
of a school building in Brooklyn,
slapped down soggy mattresses
and told us to wrestle.

Because of his “crippled Spanish,” the poet’s Puerto Rican identity is questioned among his fellow campers, but he proves himself fierce enough as a wrestler that the other boys “realized then / that I was Puerto Rican after all.” Proof and approval are found here in violent bodily exertion. Similarly, in “People Like Us Are Dangerous,” the poet recalls how he idolized “Carlos Ortiz, lightweight champion / of the world from Ponce, Puerto Rico.” Part of this hero worship is the swelling of a national pride in the young poet; another part is the desire to embody the boxer, “to be Carlos Ortiz”:

I wanted to crouch and dip into the arc of my uppercut
like Carlos Ortiz on the cover of The Ring magazine,
where they called him a pugilist with clever hands.
I wanted to be a pugilist with clever hands.

Hands are important to Espada. Think of the titles of some of his earlier poems: “Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands” (1990), “Hands Without Irons Become Dragonflies” (1996), “Ghazal for Open Hands” (2002), “Not Words but Hands” (2006). The Trouble Ball continues this meditative concentration on the power of hands. In “His Hands Have Learned What Cannot Be Taught,” for instance, the poet’s son deals gracefully with one of his mother’s seizures: “My son, not yet seventeen, / leans across the table / and shuts her eyelids / with the V of his fingers.” Here the hands of a boxer are traded for the gentle hands of a loving boy, pugilism resolving itself into tranquility. In another poem, hands hold the key to both consolation and salvation:

Somewhere a convict sobs into a book of poems
from the prison library, and I know why
his hands are careful not to break the brittle pages.

For Espada, hands are the sacred vessels for cleverness, compassion, hope, justice, redemption, but in the form of the raised fist they are also the equally sacred vehicle for protest. When Carlos Ortiz says “People like us are dangerous,” he means not only the physically dangerous but also the politically dangerous, among them the poet Jorge Montealegre, “another name on the list of subversives,” who was imprisoned following the military coup in Chile on September 11, 1973. In “The Buried Book of Jorge Montealegre,” which echoes the work of Espada’s Pulitzer-nominated The Republic of Poetry (W. W. Norton & Company, 2006), the Chilean poet uses his hands not only to write his poems but also to preserve them, “clawing at the earth” to bury his book so that he might save it from being burned by the police.

At the heart of Espada’s poetry is a contagiously earnest faith in the written word as a vital means of political protest and spiritual salvation: “Let the blasphemy be spoken: poetry can save us,” he writes in “Blasphemy.” Ironically—or perhaps fittingly for a poet who in a previous collection referred to himself as “a boastful atheist” —the poem following “Blasphemy” is called “Epiphany,” which is blasphemous in its own way, undermining the conception of epiphany as a sudden revelation of the divine:

Epiphany is not a blazing light. A blazing light
blazes when warplanes spread their demon’s wings
and drop their demon’s eggs over the city,
and the city burns like the eye of a screaming horse.

Though the poem is dedicated to the British antiwar poet Adrian Mitchell and alludes to his famous Vietnam War-era poem “To Whom It May Concern,” the “screaming horse” makes it hard not to think of Picasso’s Guernica. Even so, “Epiphany” is not about a specific city or a specific war; Espada wants to evoke the wartime suffering of innocent civilians wherever they are. The poem takes a strange but brilliant turn by introducing a new comic-book hero, “Whit-Man.” Espada lists Whit-Man’s superpowers by incorporating images and phrases from “Song of Myself”:

Walt Whit-Man. Whit-Man could not fly, yet he soared over mountains,
seeing the fur trapper and his native bride, the panther pacing in the branches.
He did not brawl with grinning villains, yet he was one of the roughs,
yanking doors off hinges, shouting about the rights of them the others are
down upon,
as the auctioneer of shackled men and women cowered in his shadow.

Whit-Man’s powers are, like Espada’s own, the visionary powers of the imagination and the connective powers of empathy and identification, each of which is guided by a commitment to advocate for others, especially those whose voices have been silenced. Espada’s poetics of advocacy is certainly on display in The Trouble Ball. His poems fight for “the rights of them the others are down upon” so that we all might experience something like epiphany—not “a blazing light” but “the flickering revelation” that poetry may not be able to save the world, but when it’s written with such compassion and lyrical grace, it can at least save individual readers by troubling something in their hearts.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

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

Peter Gizzi
Wesleyan University Press ($22.95)

by M. D. Snediker

“The Grass inside the song / stains me”: Quoddity’s quiddity

Readers of Nathaniel Hawthorne undoubtedly will hear in the title of Peter Gizzi’s new collection the vibrant affective discombobulations that Hawthorne attached to threshold spaces. In his uncompleted The Dolliver Romance, Hawthorne writes, “I linger at the threshold, and have a perception of very disagreeable phantoms to be encountered if I enter. I wish God had given me the faculty of writing a sunshiny book.” Gizzi’s Threshold Songs is at once a work of threshold-lingering and sunshine, the latter of which is attested to in Gizzi’s brilliant “Analemma”: “Now that you’re here / and also gone,” Gizzi writes, “I am just learning / that threshold / and changing light / a leafy-shaped blue.” Threshold and changing light, here, mark a loss both mobile and intractable. The means by which these poems measure loss—a sundial, a poem named after a sundial—are adequate to the task of measuring, even as the loss they seek to measure always comes up short.

Hawthorne’s letter erroneously imagines sunshine as mitigating, salubrious alternative to the threshold, whereas Gizzi’s poetry insists (with a perspicuity that would seem vatic were it not so grounded in vulgate incessance) that even more trying than threshold without sunshine is the collision of the two—fatal insofar as the collision locates the lyric voice in a present barely recuperated from the past, in which sunlit horizon can’t be wished for or dreamed of, because its immanent limitations are nearly self-foreclosing:

the morning light is in us

a stinging charge in the mouth

this is something everyone feels at least once

here before you started listening to the song

at the beach and soldiers by a desert

if anybody looked we are all stranded by the shore of something

I mean to say seeing pictures inside as they are.
(from “Lullaby”)

We find in Gizzi’s work a crisis in quiddity and quoddity. Both words denote a relation to whatness: Gizzi’s whatness inhabits the elusive architecture between what-as-immanence and what-as-question. These poems underscore the impoverished (and perhaps knowing) pathos of the English language’s provision of a single word to describe our oscillations between wishing for and writing about a given entity. We might, like Romans reaching for quid or quod, need at least two words for this uncanny toggle. We might well need a panoply of non-pronomial terms to describe our vexed, fugitive relations to the pronomial. As Gizzi puts it, “When a thought’s thingness / begins to move, to become / unmoored and you ride / the current with your head.” A poetics ideally accommodates the weather of contingency in more ways than a logic or programmatic, and so Gizzi’s poetics of whatness necessarily betrays its own sedulously uncertain waver between definite and indefinite article, relative and non-relative pronoun.

The rift between knowing what’s antecedent, pining for it, and the duress of antecedent gone missing: such is the distilled grammatical fact of bereavement, such the elegiac way in which we love and articulate what isn’t there, the what standing in for another lyric object even as, again and again, it can do no more than stand alone. Here are some lines from Gizzi’s poem, “The Growing Edge,” whose title conjures not only the collection’s trials in and of threshold, but the Steinian spread of edges that might in some ersatz therapy seek to render more demarcated the limits of what’s potentially indefinite querulousness. “I talk to the air / what is it / to be tough / what ever / do you mean”; “what does it mean / to enter that room / the last time”; “what does it mean / to be tough / or to write a poem.” “What” ribbons through these poems with the ardent opacity of repetition compulsion, as in the aptly titled “Hypostasis & New Year.” Hypostasis—a belief in substance, or (and it’s a big “or”) the fact of it. New year—nascence of a new whatness, occasion (felicitous hazard) for dismantling old immanences into new forms:

Of what am I afraid
of what lies in back of me of day
these stars scattered as far as the I
what world and wherefore
will shake it free

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

Then what of night

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

what then
what silver world mirrors tarnished lenses
what fortune what fate

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

Of what am I to see these things between myself
and nothing

If some collections of poems are written or read as exercises in auto-psychoanalysis, Threshold Songs ends in an analytically oceanic interminability. The final couplet (elegy’s most eloquent structural distillation) of the book’s final poem, “Modern Adventures at Sea”—“How to live. / What to do.”—telegraphically arises as an SOS concealed as exhortation; the latter’s fantasy of buoyancy drowns in the ostensible duress that occasions the exhorting. HELP, as formulation, can be taken as either desperate or altruistic, depending on the parallax between speaker and addressee. Analogously, Gizzi’s final couplet turns on us and itself, in part because its quiddity cannot know or will not communicate its own relation to itself or any possible preceding grammatical subject. The punctuation is final only in form; the finitude of the couplet’s periods betray the desultoriness of fictive closures asked, half-heartedly, to navigate expression in search of forms more convincing than those in which they find themselves. That the turn from “How to live” to “What to do” could be understood as either emergency or response to emergency turns poetry-as-fool’s-Orphic-errand into Eurydice’s flinching flash. The alacrity with which Orpheus turns to and into Eurydice recalls the turbid economies of regret and compensation that mark what often is most moving in the work of Jack Spicer and Hart Crane.Threshold Songs is riveting as a master class in which its own lost teachers and antecedents, for all their splendor, lead one only so far. There is no mastery, just fumbling at the largesse of a viaticum dwarfed by the appetites and confusion it was given to appease.

To call Peter Gizzi one of Whitman’s heirs risks missing the point both of Whitman’s temporal disorientations and Threshold Songs’s meditation on the unavailing consolations of inheritance and outliving. The presence of a certain Whitman in Gizzi’s previous collections—charismatically in the world, of it, and beyond—might, in the spirit of Whitman’s what I assume you shall assume, go without saying. In terms of Whitman’s presence in Whitman’s own poetry—as ambivalent and equivocal as it is ubiquitously effulgent¹—what is able and unable to go without saying illuminates the particular self-inhabitings and withdrawals to which Gizzi’sThreshold Songs lucidly, feverishly lays claim. That one ought not too quickly think one has “found” Whitman in any contemporary poet is underwritten by the challenge of finding Whitman in Whitman. And so trying to find Whitman in Threshold Songs comes to feel like a breathtakingly haunted game of monte thimblerig as played with (or by) matryoshka dolls:

The grass inside
the song stains me.

The mother stains me.
That was the year

they cut my throat
and toads bloomed

on my voice box.
I have kept my head up.

Have kept myself
out of trouble

but deep is trouble
deep is mother.

Deep the song
inside summer.

Did I tell you it hurt
accepting air in a new body?

And since the change
the air burns.
(from “Basement Song”)

Such lines echo Whitman—our fate (our luck, our curse) as readers is to find grass in a poem and conjure Whitman, nearly without effort—but only echo. The conundrum, at least structurally, recalls the psychical tenacities from which arises the wavering “victory” of Dickinson’s “I got so I could take His name”—except in the case of Gizzi’s poem, we are not sure whether to celebrate or mourn that we can or cannot take “his” name (or the image-repertoire that takes its place) without tremendous gain. As Gizzi, echoing Dickinson, writes in the collection’s opening poem, “what does it mean / to enter that room / the last time / I remembered it / an un gathering / every piece of / open sky into it / the deep chill / inventing, and / is it comfort.” That “the air burns” means we acutely feel its Lear-like circulation from one body into another and out again. Every atom belonging to you as good belongs to me: maybe, but not, in Threshold Songs, without consequence.

I am not alone in thinking about Whitman’s poetry in terms of magnanimities (somatic, affective, temporal, et cetera), and likewise not alone in thinking of Peter Gizzi—as both poet and ceaseless poetic world-maker—in terms of Whitman. More succinctly, in reading Whitman or Gizzi, I feel less alone than otherwise, even as Gizzi’s new poems trace abandonment with abandon, a grief whose spaciousness recalls that the Emerson who saluted Whitman wrote not only “The Poet” but also the searingly stricken “Experience.” How one knows one is adequately feeling loss blurs into the predicament of loss as an experience that feels (and continues to feel past its own wake) experientially self-depleting.

Emerson, in “Experience,” grieves the death of his son Waldo, but the essay’s implicative force washes across biographical particularity (in part because Waldo’s death already has riven biography) into unassuagingly brilliant further radii. Threshold Songs likewise takes as point of departure a particular grief which the poems hold and cannot hold—Danaides condemned to carry water in sieves. Attempts to grasp (an enterprise that is lyrical to the degree that it is unable or refuses to distinguish the somatic from the epistemological²), in Gizzi’s new work, are as keeningly rigorous as is the grasped object (somatic, epistemological) untenable. Untenability yields further uncertainty, which spurs (rather than vitiates) the poetry’s stabs at precision. Stabbing nearly describes a phantom memory of violence that Gizzi’s poetry (like the phantasmatically emptied actions of Dickinson’s “I got so I could take His name”) reproduces as shadow puppet or Kara Walker cut-out. This happened; this continues and can’t/won’t continue to happen. The non-recuperability of some anterior scene of loss makes possible the awful quiet intimated by the book’s epigraph by Beckett: “a voice comes to one in the dark.” So subtractive a primal scene refracts ghosts upon ghost, although feeling haunted at best approximates the conditions under which one skulks through one’s own poems. A ghost makes of one a ghost, but of a different order than the ghosts one most misses:

I’m with it, it’s with me
I am quelque chose
something with birds in it
a storm high above Albany
I am ghost brain I
sister to all things cruelty
the mouse-back gray
of every afternoon
and your sorrowing
now that you’re gone
and I’m here or now
that you’re here and
I’m gone or now
that you’re gone and
I’m gone what
did we learn
what did we take
(from “Analemma”)

These poems don’t recuperate what the lived and unlived world no longer can maintain; their generosity (their importance and beauty) lies in giving us more and less than what conventionally we wish of poems. The more and less—the exorbitance of austerity measured even in the stringence of Gizzi’s clipped Spicerian enjambments—speak to the book’s titular threshold. The grass in song, neither underground nor above it, finds itself unmoored from the figurative terms by which it was previously viable. Gizzi’s threshold, as ought be the way of thresholds worth the name, is brightly, phenomenologically uncanny. As Gizzi announces in the poem just preceding the one cited, “We have entered the semantics of useless things” (“Pinnochio’s Gnosis”).

Following Emerson’s “Experience,” the loss out of which this book is carved grieves that it cannot grieve, even as its putative apathy communicates an ardor in excess of the affective field across which it ranges:

23. In space the letterforms “I love” oscillate in waves.
24. I lose myself in waves speaking the half of me that forgot to say “goodbye” when I meant to say “how come.”
25. Memory continues to bloom. More songs about death and dying, songs of inexperience.
26. More songs about being and loss, being in loss, more songs about seeing and feeling.
27. If you are critical, all the better to see and to miss it, to misunderstand, to fail at empathy and love, to not understand love and to love, to be diseverything and to love, whatever.
28. To mercy I leave whatever.
(from “Apocrypha”)

The above lines conclude a poem that looms in and out of the problematics of inheritance already invoked in the context of Whitman. The pathos of a will—I can give you this or that, because and only when I have died—forecloses the variously elusive gift economies which Whitman mobilizes in relation to the lyric premise that one never knows where or when Whitman will next surface. The felicitous execution of a will’s generosity requires the death of its author, even as there are too many authors, too many beneficiaries, and at the same time, a confusing paucity of either (to mercy I leave whatever). We find, earlier in the same poem, an echo of Whitman’s “signature” camerado—“to write is an equal and opposite reaction my comrade, communard, my friendo”—even as the conditions of this lyric will, like the conditions of apocryhpa for which the poem is titled, remain unclear. This Whitmanian friendo feels less like non-problematic channeling than a correlative to Allen Tate ’s account of Dickinson’s relation to New England Christianity. Dickinson’s poetry, following Tate, made use of theology and its tropes less out of belief in them than in a familiarity perhaps adjacent to but never equivalent to belief. She inhabited a structure of faith that was as broken to her as it was immanent. And thus we might imagine Gizzi’s relation to Whitman’s poetry (in the context of poetics, its own structure of fidelity and belief), immanent and broken, endemically irreparable. Because it returned to us as air doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, just as its bare existence can’t rule out its burning.

These poems don’t grieve Whitman so much as take the ruins of Whitmanian promise as point of departure—we wander through a broken world that is most veracious in its breaches and our ambivalent relation to them: “I come to it at an edge / morphed and hobbled / still morphing. There is also / the blowtorch grammar’s / unconquered flame.” Emerson, grieving that he can’t feel grief, inhabits an affective world without (or so he feels) being of it. Being in such a world or on the verge of it describes one of Threshold’s Songs hobbled triumphs, no less triumphant for its attenuated, careful collapse into finish lines (what to do) whose own volatile thresholds bloom further threshold, song swimming to echo and back again.

¹ “Nor will my poems do good only—they will do just as much evil, perhaps more; / For all is useless without that which you may guess at many times and not hit—that which I hinted at; / Therefore release me, and depart on your way.” (Whitman, “Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand”)

² The bleeding of bodies into the epistemologies that make sense of them (and nearly vice versa) materializes (again, nearly) in the dissolving final lines of “Oversong”: “starless, swart, tenebrous / inky, Erebus, Orpheus // vestral, twilit, sooty, blae . . . .” Whence this Middle English blae that trails off into just one of the book’s two elilipses, which seems less a word than the bolus of one; the somatic integrity of the word, if we can imagine it, showing the wear of our ruminating of it? Blae, a non-word, lost word, recoverd word, reduces the project of Threshold Songs to a single morpheme. As the OED notes, blaedesignates the color of lead (commitment of the epistemological to the written) and, as applied to the human body, the color of bruises and exposure, “affected by cold or contusion.” Were Threshold Songs chromatically intelligible beyond the auspex-brightness of a sun, its color would be blae. I am written and bruised. I am the articulation of coldness and contusive proof of a body that cannot feel itself. If after pain a formal feeling comes, then after that formality, or in the interstial, acute honesty between pain and formality, we find the deforming threshold of blae.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

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

Karen Rigby
Ahsahta Press ($17.50)

by Rebecca Farivar

Karen Rigby shares the title of her new book, Chinoiserie, winner of the Ahsahta Press 2011 Sawtooth Poetry Prize, with objects. Chinoiserie refers to a mixture of European and Chinese design aesthetics that combines the delicate blue porcelain of China with the love of the lavish that characterized 18th-century France. Picture gold-rimmed tea sets with pagodas painted on them. The objects in turn reflect both cultures and yet are something new, both ornate and delicate. In this way, the poems of Chinoiserie mirror the title: they too are ornate, filled with beautiful and uncommon words and imbued with influences from many different cultures and places.

When first looking through the collection, titles like “Phoenix Nocturne,” “New York Song,” and “Orange / Pittsburgh” instantly show the geographical spread of the poems’ speakers, but what stands out, perhaps even more, are the notes under many of the poems that explain what art work the poem is addressing. Poems like “Cebolla Church,” noted as a painting by Georgia O’Keeffe from 1945, and “Maps We Have Produced in Technicolour,” which responds to the film Splendor in the Grass, directed by Elia Kazan, display the range of art that Rigby draws on for inspiration.

Whatever material the poems use, Rigby’s rich and specific language highlights it further. One of the collection’s longer poems, “The Story of Adam and Eve” converses with a page from an illuminated manuscript by the Boucicaut Master and Workshop circa 1415, mixing the speaker’s reflections on the page itself, the story of Adam and Eve, and the process of illumination. Rigby writes:

everything I know about beauty I learned
from the body’s ruin:
the rib drawn
through his quartered skin,
the skin sewn and the woman born,
a dark homunculus.

The language of the body certainly is sensuous, but what anchors these lines is the unexpected use of “homunculus,” a fully formed miniature human, which steps outside of the lexicon being used, yet is the exact word that best describes the image. Rigby’s exactness of language is seen again in this poem as the speaker describes the process of illumination, reveling in the language of specific objects used in the craft:

Think of the calligrapher

gesso     lamp-black     oak gall     mineral pigments

While Rigby may use high-culture references such as the aforementioned illuminated page, what makes this book feel entirely original is Rigby’s use of contemporary cultural artifacts as well. With poem titles like “Lovers in Anime” and references to movies like 2003’s The Dreamers, part of the joy of reading this collection is how it jumps from the 15th to the 21st century, from the Getty Museum to your living room couch.

Even when moving to territory that might seem like “low culture,” Rigby’s language remains complex, treating these subjects with the same graceful poetic eye. “Photo of an Autoerotic” provides an excellent example of this technique, as the poem opens with a description of the titular photo: “After the first shock, you have to / admire the body’s hardwood cursive.” Something that sounds bizarre suddenly takes on beauty due to the speaker’s description: hardwood, cursive—these are elements of beautiful objects. The language also elevates the photo itself; the reader first imagines it as a digital image on a computer screen, but then the speaker, reflecting on the photo and its origins, imagines: “the ones bowing to kiss themselves, / holding the pose for the shutter, / the aluminum flash.” Now we are in the world of artifact, an aging black and white photo from a different time.

In fact, throughout the collection Rigby has a sharp descriptive eye, authentically presenting specific images. The poem “Knife. Bass. Woman.” opens with a clear image of the speaker cutting and gutting a bass:

The wood handle thick
as a cattail. Two pegs the color of pewter
anchor the blade. In my left hand,
the knife. Eggs balance on the tip.
The bass hangs, its zippery spine
loose. Each stroke brings down
a host of scales. Skin rolls
like hose. Over soaked paper

The knife, the blade, the fish being sliced—all of this is painted with exact details and similes that bring us closer to the scene. Rigby then uses this description to take the reader beyond the moment at hand:

I understand why a man rapes
before dawn: for the red-rimmed eye,
fearful and waiting. For the puff
of cheek, air catching
her throat.

This understanding of violence becomes all the more palpable because of the exact description that preceded it. In this way, the thought, although provocative, makes sense and carries more weight in the reader’s mind.

Rigby consistently surprises and delights in this collection, weaving together image and reflection, creating beauty out of even the most unlikely sources.

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