Roy Kesey
Dzanc Books ($13.95)

by Blake Butler

The fledgling independent press Dzanc Books chose wisely in selecting Roy Kesey’s All Over to launch their label; in this debut collection there is something for everyone. Kesey is a shape-shifter, a voice-imitator, a puppet master. His storytelling weaves and takes on several forms: spare dialogue, collage, formal interview, short vignettes, Zen koan, dossier, and simple narrative. He writes from places that seem immensely foreign, full of fable, like some court jester. He is Barthelmean in his ability to make something dense or highbrow come off as funny or gamesmanlike, which is high praise.

Kesey deploys an arsenal of voices: regal, grandfather’s knee, loaded babble, tongue-in-cheek, curt, perverse, timeless, and timely. Likewise, his scenarios are the stuff of dreams: a man responds to an ad by a company that claims to breed personal perfection, and after undergoing an unknowing treatment, quickly finds his bruises, weird hair, and cruddy home transformed; a group of travelers stuck in an airport develop sects and come to blows, turning the terminal into a war room. “Fontanel,” a story wherein we are guided through a strange childbirth via an unseen hand taking pictures, is so explicit and exact that the book would still be worth buying if all the other pages were blank. Like Jim Shepard, Kesey maximizes the utility of whatever host body he chooses to enter.

In the end, Kesey’s writing (which has appeared in places such as McSweeney’s, Ninth Letter, and Best American Short Stories 2007) is more than the sum of its parts. All Over is, in the book’s own words, “a collage-within-a-collage,” much like a set of Russian dolls—each one layered within the others, each single incarnation alive and new.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2007/2008 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2007/2008

Jerry Stahl
Open City Books ($14)

by Anna Rockne

Filled with seemingly cheap thrills that reveal unusual originality and depth, Jerry Stahl’s latest collection of short stories throws the reader into scenes of vulgar eroticism and vulnerable uncertainty. Love Without explores love, of course, but also perversion, drug addiction, and even Dick Cheney’s secret homosexual affairs. Stahl demonstrates the universality of alienation, apathy, and desperate restlessness by approaching these emotions from perspectives as diverse as the straight-laced dentist and the half-dead junkie.

Stahl often leaves crucial details to the reader’s imagination, requiring one to distinguish reality from the characters’ nightmares, fantasies, and delusions. In the second vignette, “Cossack Justice,” recently orphaned Raymond is sent to a boarding school for boys where his roommate introduces him to Smythe, the night watchman, in dimly moonlit stairwell:

As Raymond squirmed, the watchman’s eyes grew huge and then disappeared. He grunted. Raymond tried to break away, but the old man’s hands were in his shoulders like claws.
“Be still," he growled.
The air around him smelled like asphalt, hot tar, impossible to breathe. He brought his large face closer. His lips were moist, white flecked. His breath whistled through his nose, wind in a storm. The sound grew louder and Raymond twisted in his grasp. He cried out, “Gavin!” but the other boy only giggled. . .

Later a counselor tells Raymond’s guardians about the incident. “The adults’ words floated back and forth behind him. ‘. . . traumatic. . . watchman. . . withdrawl.’” This unresolved suspense clarifies the perspective of the traumatized eight-year-old boy; the reader experiences his repressed memories exactly as he does. At other points characters feign ignorance, placing the reader in a position of genuine ignorance.

Another vignette, “L’il Dickens,” serves as comic relief. It chronicles a confused hunter who encounters Dick Cheney at a gun shop in a rural town, where a chat about his Mauser turns into a drug-induced turn toward the homoerotic. The man learns Harry Whittington, the victim of Cheney’s wayward bullet on a quail-hunting trip, was in fact Cheney’s cheating lover. The man is left struggling to forget the Brokeback Neo-Con: “For another beat, I lingered. And then, I left him. The vice president the rest of the nation would never see. The burly, pink-thighed, sneering buffalo of love. I’ll never forget you, Dick. Though, God knows, I’ve been trying.”

Each story is linked by the main character’s struggle to find contentment, and Stahl masters the internal voices of the traumatized child, the junkie, the horny teenager, and the detached middle-aged man with startling authenticity. A page-turner for its suspense and sexuality, Love Without is also a worthwhile read for the commonality it establishes between the private ambitions and struggles of many very different people.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2007/2008 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2007/2008

Chris Abani
Akashic Books ($12.95)

by Joel Turnipseed

Chris Abani’s Song for Night is so good that it really only deserves a three-word review: “Go Read This!” Or maybe it’s four, adding, “Now.” The story of a fifteen-year-old boy soldier named My Luck—a grimly evocative name whose echo of hope also carries with it a shout of despair—Song recounts his voiceless journey from a land-mine explosion in which his platoon leaves him for dead toward his haunting reunion with them downriver.

My Luck has been silenced by the cold logic of war: his vocal cords were cut by a surgeon so that any screams he might let loose while defusing mines would not give the enemy a clue to their location, but also so that the germ of fear carried by such screams would not infect the other child soldiers. It’s a bold conceit on Abani’s part, and he wields it like a well-honed machete; his chapters open with a slash of poetry, the silent signs of My Luck and his platoon (“Death Is Two Fingers Sliding across the Throat,” “Imagination Is a Forefinger between the Eyes,” “Will Is an Emphatic Finger Pointing”) then descend into the brutal hurt of the speaker’s prose narration.

The voice of this narration is complicated; though only fifteen, My Luck speaks as an adult—but prematurely, even preternaturally, so. Occasionally this voice seems to stumble (as such a voice might), but it usually has the confidence of someone who knows what he has seen and speaks it bravely, mastering complex emotions as tenderly as a wooden spade digging for a mine. In one scene, the boy comes across an empty, bombed-out soccer stadium and remembers how he and his pals used to play, a love that extended to the making of trophies from rubbish. Now, a different contest has disrupted the turf:

Here and there, patches of red earth spill through like giant puddles of blood. It is as though the very earth is peppered with sores. Scattered as far as I can see are corpses. Like a field of cut corn, cropped and lying in untidy rows, drying slowly in the sun. Further back, behind the bullet-holed stands, the trees straggle in an untidy shade. . . In this place everything is possible. Here we believe that when a person dies in a sudden and hard way, their spirit wanders confused looking for its body. Confused because they don’t realize they are dead. I know this. Traditionally a shaman would ease such a spirit across to the other world. Now, well, the land is crowded with confused spirits and all the shamans are soldiers.

This is but one scene, and there are many more as ugly and as beautiful. Throughout his journey My Luck remembers with harrowing detail not only the experiences of a brutal war, but those with whom he has fought it—those who, like his girlfriend and fellow soldier Ijeoma, kept some part of his heart alive and warm to love, as well as those who taught him, sometimes at gunpoint, the soul-killing arts of murder and rape and pillage. In all this, he also struggles with the three religions that quarreled among themselves in his youth while simultaneously shaping his own spirit: Christianity, Islam, and Shamanism. Each has its own power, and each leaves its mark on his journey. My Luck literally incorporates them into his story, inscribing scarified crosses into his arm for each of his fallen comrades, etching an X into his skin for each life he has stricken. These then become, when he is worn and tired, a fleshed out rosary to which he prays.

Song for Night is a lyric intercession of the ghosts of poetry on behalf of the prose horrors of war, a hymn to the blurred line between life and death. To the soldier at war, these are not opposites, but a continuum that flows like a river between two banks—as well as, sometimes, around islands of doubt and difference dotting the middle space. The end may come suddenly, or it may linger, but in war it is always a surprise. In his river journey through war and the ugliness of his fate, My Luck provides a constant register of these ambiguities, letting them flow through his soul even as he moves toward their dark fulfillment. In telling his story, Abani proves that he is not only a master of the word but also a loving caretaker of dead spirits: guiding them to their rest, even as he unsettles our own.

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Kerry Shawn Keys
Presa :S: Press ($14.95)

by Robert Murray Davis

Readers encountering Kerry Shawn Keys for the first time may be confused by his movement from rhapsodic lines (e.g., “The kitchen is eating lava from a shoe beneath the stove”) to somber, even at times prosaic, meditations on time, death, heresy, and other weighty topics. At its best, the first kind of poetry is pleasurably dizzying in its jamming together of images wrenched from normal contexts, but at worst seems almost programmatic, as if words from a large vocabulary list were being dropped randomly into a sentence. Perhaps a justification can be found in “What Do You Write About” which ends with “you, here, stuck, a prisoner in the soft-/deposit of this spoken sentence.”

Sometimes, it is enough to sit and watch the pyrotechnics without looking for a message. At other times, reading Keys’s poems is like watching traffic in Paris: there may be some principle of order, but the uninitiated can’t discern it. However, a number of poems deserve not merely admiration for their precisely rendered detail, but contemplation of the vision that emerges. “Vida,” for example, an autumnal poem with molding leaves and “almost posthumous wasps,” asserts at the end: “The tree of life is a willow weeping on water. / The Tree of knowledge is a door standing in the forest.”

Many of the poems in the book’s third section, “Back of the Belt,” appeal not just to the fancy, in Coleridge’s terms, but to the imagination. “Almost Invisible” is a portrait of a woman alone, perhaps lonely, in grey and muted tones. In “My Ramada Armada,” the speaker engages in a silent dialogue with the picture of an egret who just might, in response to his kiss, “wind the sheets up / in her beak and carry me to another shore” in a kind of rebirth. “At Kant’s Grave” fuses subject and images into a somber whole.

Keys often combines meditation and dissociation effectively. “Governor of Goodwill”—the source of cheap clothing, not the intangible asset—may be metamorphosed into an animal, or Ovid, or perhaps “a poet or a barber at the door of Paradise.” At the end, though, the speaker imagines the man on the move, perhaps “hitchhiking to New York for a fresh start.” Here the poem has a single character and a kind of plot to which the wealth of images is subordinated. Even better is “Chernobyl,” where after a list of the more obvious effects of the disaster (“in Finland reindeer are banned from the manger scene”), we find “a child with a hummingbird for a nose / stares at the lampshade waiting for the sun to rise.” The conclusion is startling but not unimaginable.

The poet creates an even more effective jeremiad in “The Bush-Blair Link: Baghdad to the London Bombings,” mingling the Potomac, the Thames, the Styx, and the Tigris as places where the onlooker can find his or her image. Yet, though “Everything is abandoned,” the prophet is “the pure thing of Death, featureless amputee, spokesman / for the green flags of ferns waving over Hollywood and Babylon— / I’m becoming dark and free, you can’t hear me, you never could.”

It is obvious from the book that Keys’s art needs the freedom of association across images and cultures, but it also seems clear that it benefits most from the discipline imposed by a narrative thread, however improbable, or by a particular idea. Regardless, The Burning Mirror is a fitting introduction to a poet who has penned over thirty volumes of poems and translations.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2007/2008 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2007/2008

Heidi Lynn Staples
Ahsahta Press ($17.50)

by Katie Fowley

Heidi Lynn Staples revels in using words in the wrong ways. She uses adjectives as nouns, small parts of speech as subjects, and she butchers and inverts common idioms and clichés. Her poetry is one of homonyms and near-homonyms. Some poems are homonymic echoes of poems by Paul Celan, and almost everything she writes begins to sound like a homonymic echo of something else. For example, when she writes, “I was having a reeling god’s wine,” we hear I was having a really good time; when she writes, “I can’t street straight,” we hear I can’t see straight. Sometimes her idiosyncratic use of language puns on the conventional phrase; having a really good time is kind of like drinking “a reeling god’s wine.”

There is an exuberant quality to Staples’s poetry, and her rhyming, sing-songy, tongue-twisting verse, filled with invented words and alliteration, does much to pleasure the ear:

crows caw grackle haw
we stand on the street and gawk
brave a core within
wind as rave ore wind as land
mind has savor mind has and

There is something of “Jabberwocky” in these poems; at one point, she even uses the word “galumphed,” and she invents hybrid words such as “gaudaciously.” Her poems move from resembling an unedited stream of consciousness—“a comment, a comma, a coma”—to sounding somewhat witty and contrived: “His eyes shined with hackers. I opened my codes.” Likewise, at times, the mistakes or eccentricities in her writing seem intentional; at other times, they seem arbitrary.

Many poems in the book garner their titles from the names of poetic forms spliced with months of the year, e.g. “Februallad” for February and Ballad. Several poems in this book are ekphrastic poems inspired by the Japanese photographer Kanako Sasaki whose photographs feature a lone young woman engaged in slightly subversive behavior. Throughout, Staples addresses themes such as sex, marriage, pregnancy, and miscarriage with the same jubilant wordplay. In “Margic,” a prose poem, she splices together the language of grammatical rules with the language of lust: “a come pound me subject me, a come pound me prettily, a come pound me sex instance, and a come pound me come sex me sex instance.” In “The Village,” a poem about miscarriage, she writes, “I feels sad tonight… I feels like I wishes I had the children / I had on the night I wasn’t sad.” Slurring her words in a way that sounds childish and places emphasis on the “s” sound, she addresses a sad and troubling occurrence with deliberately simplified sentiment.

There are three poems entitled “Prosaic” in Staples’s book. They all contain some prose, but they are hardly prosaic in the sense of commonplace or dull. In fact, these poems contain some of the steamiest content in the book. “I was winking that maybe we could heave an opine marriage…” If sex and relationships are ordinary and commonplace, then the way Staples makes them unordinary is through linguistic excesses and ever-multiplying play on words.

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Dolores Dorantes
translated by Jen Hofer
Kenning Editions and Counterpath Press ($14.95)

by Mark Tursi

In his “Notes Toward a Nomadic Poetics,” Pierre Joris advocates a poetry that is “always changing, morphing, moving through languages, cultures, terrains, times without stopping.” Poetry, then, becomes a “displaced drifting” that is always in the process of becoming—a poetics that is unsettled and always in flux. Dolores Dorantes’s sexoPUROsexoVELOZ and Septiembre, books two and three of her ongoing project Dolores Dorantes, epitomizes this displaced drifting—a nomadic poetics—that, as she notes in the introduction, is part of “a continuous trajectory.” This trajectory, Dorantes continues, will have no “stopping points” so that “each book might be an ‘I’ in motion.”

By evoking her own name as the title of this work-in-progress, Dorantes collapses the traditional separation between author and text, subject and object, writing and written. She makes of herself a text that is written, fashioned, constructed. This gesture, which at first seems effusive and almost Whitmanesque, is actually diffuse and, at times, self-effacing. Rather than a grandiose vision dominated by a single ego, a lyric “I” at the center of the poem, Dorantes creates a kind of metonymical splintering and displacement throughout both books presented here. The self is, in fact, dislocated along with stable notions of meaning.

One of these dislocations arises as a metonymical construction with the name “Dolores,” whereby the objectified figure of the poet herself, as title of the project, is representative of all Mexican women. (Jen Hofer, in her “Translator’s Note,” suggests that Dorantes makes a similar gesture with the name “Jen” representing women from the U.S.). The “Dolores” metonym is further complicated by examining the actual meaning of the word “dolores” in Spanish. The plural of “dolor,” meaning pain or sorrow, implies that “Dolores” is a figuration for the “overall condition” of Mexican women—one inherently imbued with sorrow and pain. The entire subtext underlying the book involves similar themes that often emerge with an eerie kind of violence:

I offer
my head:

the knife
of your breathing
dazzles

From the title of the first book, sexoPUROsexoVELOZ (PUREsexSWIFTsex) one expects something sensual and erotic, and the poet certainly doesn’t disappoint. This sensuality, however, is often ironically rendered, whereby it resides in language itself, explicitly and self-consciously a text. Sexuality exists, or is re-presented, via the imagery and the often ephemeral descriptions of the body in relation to others or to objects as words (and words as objects). It is as if the physical act, when reproduced through language, becomes something that only ever was imagined. Of course, physical and sexual acts are real, so the effect is one of desolation. She writes:

From the other side
(in the part of me
that doesn’t show) throbs the fog
of our kiss: is that you? You open. You enter

questions from my mouth

Sexuality, like the self, the body and the author—in the spirit of jouissance—is textual. Shadows, fog, reflections, and water are the tropes that sex and love seem best reflected in and through. There exists an ongoing struggle to define what it means to be and what it means to love. This struggle is constant and constantly mobile:

TO HEAR OURSELVES
there’s an entire lifetime
that doesn’t want to stay

(love
it’s your murmuring) you

The dazzle of that body

Multiple tensions arise, ignite, and then disperse, only to reappear in another version, an ulterior, and often mysterious, incarnation. For instance, in Septiembre Dorantes suggests the soul is the “plank with no handhold // empty / of all sorrows.” And earlier in sexoPUROsexoVELOZ, she couches love (i.e. the “soul’s prostheses,” to borrow—and alter—a metaphor from Hofer), within this intriguing metaphor: “AS IF LOVE / harbored the city / I construct for you.” Although Dorantes seems to reject certain varieties of surrealism—especially what she refers to as contemporary confessional poetry in Mexico that “venerates the creation of image after image with no importance whatsoever given to meaning”—some of her most intriguing, and powerful, gestures are imbued with bizarre oneirism: “We all ran / to pull down the fruits / off that flaming / tree of rubble.” For Dorantes, the poem is a kind of “war,” as she states in her introduction. The war is waged against a certain kind of poetics, a way of being, and perhaps with the very structure of thought. It is a structure that demands investigation, even if the result is a troubling isolation. Or, as the poet herself suggests:

THERE’S A SCAFFOLD climb it
Each flex of your step leads
to metallic
hot
solitude

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2007/2008 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2007/2008

Kaya Oakes
Pavement Saw Press ($14)

by Katie Fowley

In her first book of poetry, Kaya Oakes details a transient and fervent existence, stemming from wayward road trips taken with her family as a child: “We were always breaking down. The intersection ought to have been called a landing place.” Oakes approaches childhood memories from an adult perspective and writes about inheriting smarts, Irish appearances, and a tendency to go blind, yet as much as she recounts sensory experiences and specific incidents, she revels in the non-fixity of experience and events. She writes, “I am repelled by fragmenting, / yet desire it so astutely, I might / cut off all my hair.” Likewise, Oakes’s poems fluctuate between narrative sense and a lust for fragmentation. She moves from enjambed to unenjambed lines, from run-on sentences to short matter-of-fact statements, from clear, descriptive phrases to open, disruptive ones.

Age is one of Oakes's preoccupations, and she writes about childhood, adolescence, and “this not young, / not yet frigid age,” exploring how we work through expectations and disappointment. Take, for example, this stanza about attitudes towards youth:

Naïveté of being young:
I used to label it as something
to be grown out of, a little piece
of today’s misery to irrigate tomorrow.

Invoking age-related concerns that will resonate with many—fear of lost promise, dissatisfaction with work—her poems include descriptions of fighting with a lover about nothing, living in a “boring city” full of “stupid objects,” drinking, and making manifesto. Discontent gives them a certain restless energy. Oakes comes across as someone who has had a lot of experiences, and in a tone bordering on jaded she dispels illusions about writing, communication, relationships, and work. About work, she writes: “Work was a room with just one window, / and every few years, the window moved, so that the view / while still the same, was slightly altered.” But even in her most cynical-sounding poems, she expresses a drive to keep writing and to keep living “in spite of life.”

Sex is another nexus of these poems—“she wants to be in it, his isosceles triangle. Each / corner to own her, banging hard on the edge.” In “Always Coming Second,” Oakes describes all the relationships she’s had with guys in bands, numbering and inventorying them. About “the third,” she writes, “He wasn’t the brightest thing, lost in classes / where polysyllabics flitted around / but after I read him Kubla Khan one night / he made a song that kept me awake until college.” Oakes does not look back on herself as your typical, vulnerable groupie—“Hadn’t I put them second too?”—and she relates her actions without regret or remorse. This poem is perhaps the best example of Oakes’s ability to collect experiences, plunge into relationships, and celebrate what is vibrant and temporary.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2007/2008 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2007/2008

Inger Christensen
translated by Susanna Nied
New Directions ($17.95)

by Douglas Messerli

It seems rather ludicrous to dredge up the name of the silent film star Clara Bow—known as the original “It Girl”—in connection with the great Danish poet Inger Christensen, but in 1969, at the time of the publication of her important collection of poetry det (the Danish word for “it”), Christensen might have herself been so described. Although literature has a less immediate impact upon popular culture than film—certainly Christensen did not triple the national sales of henna (Bow’s hair was an unnatural red), nor start a craze for heart-shaped red lips—the author did alter the whole of Scandinavian literature and bring major changes to the writing of her nation that is felt among younger poets even today.

Furthermore, coming as it did at the end of a decade known for its social, political, and sexual upheaval, Christensen’s work was very much about love—and a great many other things. Anne Carson, writing in her introduction to the new English language translation of it, suggests one must understand this work within the context of figures such as John Lennon and Yoko Ono, James Brown, Allen Ginsberg, and Valerie Solanas (of “SCUM manifesto” and attacking Andy Warhol fame). Translator Susanna Nied writes of its immediate and later effects:

On its publication in 1969, det took Denmark by storm. It won critical praise and became at the same time a huge popular favorite. It was quoted by political protesters and politicians alike; lines from it appeared as graffiti around Copenhagen; some parts were set to rock music and became esoteric hits. When portions were translated into German, det brought Christensen international critical acclaim. Today, over thirty years later, det is considered a seminal work of modern Scandinavian poetry. Some of its lines are so familiar to Danes that they have slipped into conversational use. For example, the journal of Denmark’s city planners took its title, Soft City, from a line in det.

Of equal fascination is that this popular and moving document depicts the beginning of life grown out of nothingness, a kind of cosmology of life on earth that is structured, as are many of Christensen’s works, according to systematic numeric units that could only be matched by the Oulipo writers of France. The work overall is divided into three sections: “Prologos,” “Logos,” and “Epilogos.” The “Prologos” is broken down into eight sections, the first consisting of one poem with 66 lines, the second of two poems of 33 lines each, the third of three poems with 22 lines each, the fourth of six poems of 11 lines each, the fifth of eleven poems of 6 lines each, the sixth of twenty-two poems of 3 lines each, the seventh of thirty-three poems of 2 lines each, and the final of sixty-six poems of 1 line; each line in the original Danish publication represents 66 characters. In short, as the number of poems in each section increases so does the number of lines decrease, creating a kind of double helix pattern, the very essence of DNA or life itself.

The central portion of the work, “Logos,” is organized into three sections, each with eight subsections of eight poems, the eight poems in each section titled “symmetries,” “transitivities,” “continuities,” “connectivities,” “variabilities,” “extensions,” “integrities,” and “universalities”—grammatical categories Christensen borrowed from philosopher Viggo Brøndal (in his A Theory of Prepositions) which, as Christensen wrote, express the various “network of relationships that writing builds up as it goes along. From his book I chose eight terms that could stay in a state of flux and at the same time give order to the indistinctness that a state of flux necessarily produces.”

The final “Epilogos” is a long screed of 515 lines, a language after language, that alternates between a sense of despair—

losing your strength
your mind
your dreams
and of ecstasy
tremors
and emptiness
of vestiges
dissolution
death
and transformation
Fear of death
Fear of death

and what might be described as the ecstasy of conquering those fears—

to conquer the fear
of informing others of
your conquered fear
it’s theirs
Eccentric attempts
when a man
steps out of himself
steps out of
his daily life
his function
his situation
steps out of
his habits
his peaceful
condition
we call the process
ecstasy
....................
when he says
that he is dancing
with the Earth
hanging limp
between his legs
and when he summons
the sea
to rise up
and spurt from his organ

It is indeed this alternating pattern, the wonderment of life itself—the fact that our being has come out of nothingness and the recognition “it” will return to nothingness that functions as Christensen’s engine for meaning in the poem. The bleak reality she expresses near the beginning of “Prologos”—

It’s burning. It’s the sun burning. For as long as it takes to burn a sun. As long before and as long after times measurable in terms of life or death. The sun burns itself. Will burn up. Some day. Some day. Intervals to whose lengths there is no sensitivity. Not even a tenderness. When the sun goes out, life (death) will long have been the same as it ever was. It. When the sun goes out, the sun will be free of it all. It. That’s it.

—is juxtaposed with a stunningly lyrical and joyful cataloging of the human race and their various activities as they wait for the inevitable death. And although Christensen’s humans are presented abstractly as “they” and “someone,” we begin to sense by the end of “Prologos” their possible interconnectedness with one another:

They wait in incubators, beds, baby carriages, nurseries, orphanages, preschools. In schools, jails, homes, reception centers. Institutions for wayward youths, disturbed adolescents, and higher education

They wait in gymnasiums, riding schools, public pools. Wait in cars and ambulances, emergency rooms. Wait and wait in operating rooms and on respirators, in deeper chemical sleep oblivion hushed.

They wait in barracks for draftees and conscientious objectors, contagious illness and poverty. In control towers, on permanent commissions, in supersonic transports. On security councils. Launch pads.

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

They wait in places where they live while they wait. Wait to live while they wait. Live to live. While they wait. Live to live. While they live. While they wait. While they live. Wait. Live.

Despite her obvious fears, Christensen bravely moves forward with the flow of these beings, transforming the general fears she has for the human race to very personal admissions, a sudden first-person expression of her own fears and loves. By the time she reaches the fourth section of “Stage” in “Logos,” the abstract pronouns have switched from the general to the specific as she admits her own methods and the fears behind them:

I’ve tried to keep the world at a distance. It’s been easy. I’m used to keeping the world at a distance. I’m alien. I’m most comfortable being alien. That way I forget the world. That way I stop crying and raging. That way the world becomes white and inconsequential.

And I wander where I will. And I stand completely still. That way I get used to being dead.

It is this utter honesty, her willingness to face the “dog’s bray,” that ultimately makes it such a glorious work. Her need to reach out to her fellow beings, to convert her fear to happiness (“Happiness is the change that comes over me / when I’m afraid”) leads her into the social, political, and sexual spheres of experience. Throughout Christensen’s career she has been notably anti-war, and in det she vents her angers and frustrations concerning the “stone-hard” society that sends soldiers to “improbable places,” to “further the interests of wealthy cartels,” in process mutating human genes—the helix structure with which she has begun her poem—by converting “their semen” to “superheated TNT.”

Obviously, given these concerns, Christensen is quite politically sensitive, and although she does not bog down her poem in events current to the time of its creation, she does make references to the war in Vietnam (“napalm is merely America’s trademark”), to incidents in Chile, Italy (which she refers to as Mafia), Romania and elsewhere, and to other occurrences of the 1960s (“They dance in the streets. They have flowers in their mouths”). In a section of “Text” and elsewhere, moreover, Christensen describes various normal and abnormal sexual actions (“They masturbate their skeletons”; “The orgasm makes normal cities quiver”).

Such hyper-sensitivity to life, combined with her self-acknowledged fears and her sense of being “alien,” all lead the author to speak throughout much of the poem—particularly in the “continuities” section of “Text”—about the psychological conditions of people institutionalized: patients in mental hospitals, workers in factories, soldiers in barracks. The repeated phrase “So I don’t think he understood me” serves almost as a talisman to make sense of a mad world that often points to its prophets as being insane. Here in particular Christensen reveals a wry sense of humor:

Today all the patients agreed to say it was snowing. We all took our places by the windows and pressed our faces to the glass and exclaimed joyously over the snow and described it and dreamed about how wonderful it would be to play in it. Meanwhile the sun was shining away and the doctors got confused by our total agreement and couldn’t figure out if they should act like they were crazy and say it was snowing or act like they were crazy and say it wasn’t snowing… But it really doesn’t matter. Because the press showed up and took pictures of the employees running around and throwing snowballs and sledding and making snowmen and rolling each other in the snow. In the newspapers it said that all the employees had gone crazy.

It is this kind of viral craziness, Christensen makes clear, that is necessary to save the world. For these are the lovers “who catch it / any and all / all who / are enthroned on the pillar of despair why not.” It is only through a parallel, non-rational language, the poet argues, that one can tell how to “waken the dead”:

to let this
parallel language
grow
how
to let
the cells
in it
proliferate
find their way
to the parallel brain
how
find their way
to the parallel mouth
lips that speak
as they never
have spoken
as they always
have spoken

Given the fact that the original “It Girl” spent most of her later life in mental institutions suffering from schizophrenia, perhaps the distance between this Danish “it” girl and the sexy silent film star is not as vast as one might have thought.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2007/2008 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2007/2008

Rod Smith
University of Iowa Press ($16)

by Noah Eli Gordon

From his editorship of the journal Aerial to the dozens of titles released by his press Edge Books, from numerous readings organized in the D.C. area to his management of Bridge Street Books and its standing as having one of the nation’s best poetry selections, Rod Smith has for two decades been a singular, sustaining force in innovative poetry circles. It is no wonder that the work collected in his latest book—his fourth full-length collection—has been circulating for years in one form or another and has already garnered a small body of critical response. Deed is a dynamic, stunning, smart, and hilarious book, and one destined to reach beyond the coterie of initiates who’ve been following his writing all along.

For those not yet initiated to the pleasures of Smith’s poetry, suffice it to say that a Smith poem might contain at once the variousness of O’Hara, the conviction of Oppen, the insistence of Stein, the speed of Tom Raworth, the wit of Kevin Davies, as well as the ideas and actions of thinkers like Debord, Chomsky, Cage, Duchamp, and Wittgenstein. It’s not that his work is merely an amalgam of these folks; rather, it is enlivened by and tinged with an understanding of the specifics behind how each of them has worked out in a unique way the problems they have encountered, created, and surmounted as writers.

Thus Smith’s Deed is the latest stop along the ongoing, expansionist railway of American innovative poetry. That the tracks lead both forward and back is a given; that this particular station offers a respite which will undoubtedly determine future routes is a joy. Originally titled The Good House & Other Poems, Deed is divided into four sections: “The Good House,” a 40-page tour-de-force serial poem; “The Spider Poems,” a wacky, shorter sequence; “The Given,” a sort of new and selected grouping of singular works; and the Spicerian send-up “Homage to Homage to Creeley,” also a serial work.

The book’s first and longest poem, “The Good House,” is an expansive lyric exploration of the idea of a house, of what it does, what it is, how we enter and interact with it, how we experience it, and how it shapes and houses that experience. Before it opens, one encounters two short, untitled introductory poems, the first of which begins innocuously enough with an egret ruminating on what a house might be: “the egret says / the house, it is something to eat or sunlight, the egret / thinks, the house, it wills, is a subcanvas I can scribble.” Up to this point one reads the egret as an exterior consciousness, as something outside of the sweeping mediation that will follow. The egret gives us perspective. What do the physiological, economic, or domestic conditions of housing matter to a bird? But in characteristic Smith aplomb, the poem is quickly launched into a twisting complex of exchanges and skewed logic “the egret moves / or is awake, loving the familiar solution of loving, this explains / the egret to the egret in the house / to the house & sunlight, we become intelligible because the egret / says elliptical.” So much for perspective! Now it seems the inclusive pronoun has trapped even the reader in this systemic intertwining. Not to worry, as the sequence which follows builds from the ground up a place where one might recognize both the comforts and conundrums of a house, of housing, of architecture’s ability to save us.

Gaston Bachelard opens The Poetics of Space by asking a question which encapsulates the work’s overarching concern: “Transcending our memories of all the houses in which we have found shelter, above and beyond all the houses we have dreamed we lived in, can we isolate an intimate, concrete essence that would be a justification of the uncommon value of all of our images of protected intimacy?” Smith offers up this essence in the form of a fluctuating sequence of lyric passages, a series of stills and bits of narrative movement that dance around definitions to create something part cubist portrait, part action painting, and part improvisatory free jazz equivalent of a particular house that is at once all houses. Like Dickinson’s “What I can do—I will—,” Smith activates the potential and imaginative power of a deliberate choice of action that is also one of probability, intention, and even uncertainty. “The Good House” is everywhere beholden to the will. It is “in being, the house we will,” and “is where we will.” It “brace[s] / the heart’s chosen will,” and gives us “the will / whether human, nascent, or / lathered.” And while “the house seems / to be a verb though it dislikes / the term ‘housing’,” “there it is, & will / be, 'til it was.”

Smith’s poem teeters between notions of agency. Is it the house that wills us into being? Is it we who will allow it to do so? Will it shelter us, as Bachelard argues, from the Heideggerian anxiety of being thrown into the world? Although the questions begin to trail the reader throughout the poem, Smith is always quick to dispel them before they are fully formed: “It does not matter if we trust / the house. Because I am the one / speaking right now I can say / we. Therefore I think, to the / degree that you can, you should / trust me.” And trust we do, since even if “anything can be made out of a house,” and “the good house / summers on Long Island, reads / Debord, & rests / like a scythe,” Smith warns us against the default allegorical interpretation: “If the house is just poetry / we’re in trouble.” Such trouble is hastened by the return of the egrets in one of the poem’s closing volleys. What are we to make of these birds who “are wise / & do not fail to understand,” when their wisdom remains a thing remote, a thing removed from the house, from what Bachelard calls “our images of protected intimacy”?

That final phrase, “protected intimacy,” is echoed and altered in the title of Smith’s earlier book, Protective Immediacy, pointing toward one of the most intriguing facets of his work: the ability to display a deep erudition, an understanding and engagement with the world of ideas, while also being playful, having fun in exposing the fragility of the authoritative statement, no matter how well articulated it may have been. There is something of the spirit of the Shakespearean fool in Smith. When we laugh while reading his work, which happens often, it belies something more troubling, even ominous. Thus Smith’s work is political, but not didactically so, as his poems point out our follies without swelling with the stuff of trumpeting polemic.

For example, in its entirety, the poem “Barnes & Chernobyl” reads: “It’s got everything you need // It’s an artist // It don’t look back.” The title itself is a humorous yet haunting conflation of the ubiquitous chain store Barnes & Noble and the city that suffered one of the worst nuclear disasters. So one might read the poem as a comment on rampant consumerism, on its steamrollering homogeneity, and the inevitable cultural devastation left in its wake. The machine of capital will never become a pillar of salt. Such a reading, however, is made all the more complex when one realizes that the poem is riffing on the opening lines of Bob Dylan’s “She Belongs to Me.” Although the song pays homage to an artist’s autonomy, one can rest assured that Barnes & Noble has sold innumerable shrink-wrapped copies of the CD on which it appears. What does it mean when the revolutionary impulse enters the marketplace? The poem doesn’t answer the question, but it does seem to ask it, however askance and slyly, all the while wearing a knowing grin, and dancing à la Emma Goldman to the background music.

After all, maybe in the act of writing poems, no matter how relevant, timely, or topical they might be, we remove ourselves so far from the near insurmountable problems of the real that we become an embodiment of Smith’s “Poem”: “sacred // dumb guys // standing in the fake world // flipping out.” Of course, Smith gives us one quite tangible answer to such anxiety in the book’s final poem, “pour le CGT”: “We work too hard. // We’re too tired // To fall in love. // Therefore we must // Overthrow the government.” Although that final line carries a shock in its surprising directness, and demonstrates Smith’s mastery of Jack Benny-like timing, he’s not kidding.

This unexpected directness makes for some of the book’s most memorable moments. “Ted’s Head” is perhaps its best known work, having already appeared in Smith’s last book, a few anthologies, a CD, and a handful of journals; and rightfully so, as it’s a funny, poignant, biting poem, a poem which, through the clarity of anecdote, allows its final zinger of a sentence to force one into a serious reconsideration of all that had come before:

Ted’s Head

So there’s this episode of Mary Tyler Moore where Ted’s trying to get a raise & after finagling and shenaniganizing he puts one over on Lou & gets his contract changed to non-exclusive sos he can do commercials which is not cool w/Lou & the gang because Ted’s just a brainless gimp & it hurts the image of the news to have the anchorman selling tomato slicers & dogfood so Lou gets despondent because the contract can’t be rescinded but then he gets mad & calls Ted into his office & says, “You’re going to stop doing commercials, Ted” & Ted says “why would I do that Lou?” & Lou says “Because if you don’t I’ll punch your face out” & Ted says “I’ll have you arrested” & Lou says “It’ll be too late, your face will be broken, you’re not gonna get too many commercials with a broken face now are you Ted?” & Ted buckles under to force & everybody’s happy, except Ted but he’s so dumb nobody cares & everybody loves it that Lou’s not despondent anymore he’s back to his brustling chubby loud loveable whiskey-drinking football-loving ways. Now imagine if Ted were Lou, if Ted were the boss. You know how incredibly fucking brainless Ted is, but let’s imagine he understands & is willing to use force. That’s the situation we’re now in as Americans.

Smith’s stripped-down, Nicanor Parra-like antipoem is only one of the many modes he employs. We’re just as likely to find a zany, sound-driven poem dipping in and out of referential language, a breathless, dense prose work, or an angular, speedy lyric. One thing is certain in all of his writing: for as much as he’s willing to mock, parody, and pull the rug out from under poetic conventions, whether those of romanticism or current experimental practices, it’s always done with a deep respect and understanding, an irreverence which is somehow reverent and celebratory. Our neo-situationist, sub-modern spokesperson has in Deed given us a document of empowering, risky, and lasting work, an engaging testament to the complexities and contradictions of our current moment, and one of the few formal contracts worthy of everyone’s signature.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2007/2008 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2007/2008

by Brian Whitener

Davis Schneiderman's work, which takes the conventions of postmodern fiction and pushes them one step further, has established Schneiderman as a thoughtful and energetic presence in the experimental fiction scene. The year 2006 saw the release of a limited edition work entitled Multifesto: A Henri d'Mescan Reader from Spuyten Duyvil, and Chiasmus Press has recently published Abecedarium, a collaborative novel written with Carlos Hernandez. A new novel DIS will be appearing shortly from Blaze Vox. Schneiderman is also the co-editor of Retaking the Universe: William S. Burroughs in the Age of Globalization (Pluto Press) and chairs the American Studies department at Lake Forest College in Illinois. In this interview, he talks about experimental fiction and the market, the relationship between media, politics, and writing, and other goings-on in the experimental fiction world.

Brian Whitener: A great deal of your criticism touches on issues of literature's relationship to the market. I'm thinking in particular of your "Notes from the Middleground: On Ben Marcus, Jonathan Franzen, and the Contemporary Fiction Combine," where you write: "As my students reject Marcus's argument in its more obvious moments ('Not to stand by when a populist pundit says what literature can and cannot be,' it suggests to me even more forcefully that the lasting marks in this pseudo-debate will be hopefully struck—as with Marcus's, Tomasula's, and Sterne's prose—in the code of our best literature, explicitly aware of its market status, and even more disruptive for it." I'm really interested in how you see your own writing as being aware of its market status and if these considerations are registered on a textual or formal level in your work.

Davis Schneiderman: Anyone working with a small press is, of course, keenly aware of market status. What attracts me to places like Spuyten Duyvil, Chiasmus, and Blaze Vox, is the fact that these are largely (but not exclusively) personality-driven presses, which, counter-intuitively in my mind, publish works that rise against the Romantic idea of the Author.

What I mean here is not that the work of these publishers always or even often explicitly takes on these questions, but that by virtue of the alterity of the fictions, by the distance that the prose of a writer like Lance Olsen pushes away from whomever is leading the larger houses’ fall lists, these presses reject certain limits of contemporary literature. This isn't to say that there aren't writers—Mark Danielewski comes to mind—working with larger houses to innovative effect, but that rather, if you're me, for instance, my books are marked by the conditions of their existence as economic objects.

Now, to deal more precisely with your question: the limited edition version of my novel Multifesto: A Henri d'Mescan Reader has a sandpaper covering—so it will destroy other works its rubs against. It works, too, as I once placed the book in my bag next to my critical collection on William S. Burroughs, Retaking the Universe, and found the latter's cover rubbed to shit afterwards. All the better, because I want Multifesto to be aggressive.

I used to give readings, in my mid-twenties, as if I were a coked-up, fast-forwarding tape machine. I breathlessly plastered the crowd with impossible-to-follow sentences, creating a wall of words, and well, if the audience didn't get it: fuck them. I've mellowed a bit in my aesthetic (although some might disagree!), but I wanted the book with its sandpaper to connote the positions of the beleaguered author—the author whose work seems so antithetical to those around her (which, to some extent, was my grad school experience), that its very physical existence remains rough, marked.

Another quick example: Abecedarium, which I co-wrote with Carlos Hernandez over a long weekend some years ago, well, that book scores itself via the rules of its Oulipo-like construction: we created a character, Fex, based loosely on an ancient emeritus professor at SUNY Binghamton, each wrote for an hour and half about this character, then switched seats and edited/overwrote the other's work for one hour, and then switched back for one hour—and, voila!—oh yes, and each excerpt contains a Carnival dragon, and foie gras. The method, which I only sometimes articulate when publishing excerpts, takes away our individual positions but also reminds the reader of the possibilities of the random factor in literature. The method of production is all over the text in ways I won't go into here.

BW: Another topic that a great deal of your writing (critical and otherwise) approaches in one way or another is the media, and often, the omnipresence of the media, and it seems that you draw on your understanding of Burroughs when thinking about these issues. I'm curious as to how you see experimental fiction in relation to the mass media (especially post-Iraq War 2) and in what ways fiction can embody resistance. Is it resistance to a larger culture? A hegemonic culture? What is the ideal relation, for you, between your writing and the media at large (or the culture at large as represented by the media?).

DS: Burroughs fought fire with fire, or, better yet, a recording of fire. Or, actually, a recording of every fire every recorded, cut, and mixed by a cement mixer. His position was to take control of the means of production, and some of his less well-known experiments in sound and film (see his work with British filmmaker Anthony Balch in the late 1960s) dramatize this in different ways than his writing.

I'm a bit skeptical about the possibilities for resistant fiction, and even more despondent over the potential for politically engaged writing to do much of anything outside the dominant means of production and distribution. I recently had a discussion, via email, with the publisher of a well-known and long-established innovative press, about a possible collection of innovative writing, and he told me, of course, that the word "innovative" would basically guarantee no sales. It's a labeling problem, I think, but with small-publisher press runs, and the difficult nature of promoting these books, I'm not sure this work relates to the mass media in any tangible way. This isn't to be totally negative, or, to completely contradict my earlier answer. One demonstrable effect this type of work can have is in its viral promulgation. Take Kathy Acker for example: her work exists mainly through academic channels. Students are exposed to her novels, and some read her, then, on their own, but some also go to grad school: teach her, write about her, keep her going.

In other words: Lather, Rinse, Repeat.

These people, well, some of them, like me, start organizing conferences and editing journals, and maybe even become tenured professors talking about Empire of the Senseless with a bunch of wide-eyed kids from the farmland. And if only one of those kids goes back home and lets her hogs out of the pen to go plum wild rolling around in their own slop while the neighboring farmers scratch their chins, well, then, isn't that worth it? No offense to our nation's breadbasket intended. Insert the same scenario with stockbrokers, stock-car drivers, and stock characters in the post-baccalaureate working (wo)man's sideshow, and well, that's viral reproduction.

And as you well know, all media is moving, at light speed, toward development through viral channels.

BW: I get the sense that your teaching, but more specifically the local conditions of your work as a teacher, has informed both your writing practice and how you think about it. If that's not totally off-base, could you talk a little bit about how your environment has changed you as a writer and what you've drawn from it? Did you move straight from the PhD program at Binghamton to Lake Forest? Was that an important shift?

DS: I moved straight from kindergarten (at age 4) to graduate school to my position at Lake Forest (at age 26). No break. No bumming around Europe. No peace corps. No corporate cubicle job. No stint as a Starbucks barrista.

When I first started at SUNY-Binghamton in the summer of 1996, one week after finishing my last summer undergrad course at Penn State (still catching up from a one-semester detour as a student at the Culinary Institute of America in 1992), a well-meaning advanced graduate student, already on her second field exam, gave me the tour. When I finished my MA and PhD, five years later, she hadn't advanced one iota—paralyzed, it seemed, by the environment. I'm not sure if she ever finished.

The traps and snares of that thing lay along the basement corridor walls of SUNY-Binghamton like mushrooms under the canopy of dark forest. For some, there's simply no getting out without some bad trips.

I recall workshops where I was clearly the odd-person out (along with one or two other partisans). A retiring professor very much from the New England school of mannered short-story writing once told me a piece I wrote based very loosely on the public perception of a grisly California child murder was "interesting." He gave the class an autographed copy of his one short-story collection from the early 1970s on his last day, a paean to what could have been, I suppose. I used it to hold up a corner of my couch, and never read a word. I imagine that my classmates may not have gone so far as to put it to utilitarian use, but I doubt anyone ever read it.

In the workshop version of my story "The Unholy Grammar of Unabashed Sentence Words," (in English Studies Forum), which is also part of my forthcoming novel DIS, a student asked me "Why can't you just write it so it makes sense, using simpler language"?

It took me some years to decide that I should ignore that sort of thing, but the "environment" is of particular interest because for all the affectation of alterity in my work, I remain an academically trained writer. I have advanced degrees in creative writing. I read all of Proust in a seminar, for sweet Marcel's sake, and I've never had a "real" job outside of academia beyond the juvenile (carny, amusement park worker, line cook…).

I'm in a profession with a dismal success rate, in an academic field with a dismal hiring rate. And I don't write, really, about any of that—rather the institutional structures I've negotiated my way through, with healthy doses of luck, provide a breathing, parasitic glimpse into the bureaucratic monolith of the creative-degree machine.

BW: You are someone who is involved in a number of different, sometimes overlapping, writing communities, from the experimental-fiction community to the community gathered around the blog Now What (nowwhatblog.blogspot.com). As someone who's not directly in dialogue with these communities, I'm really interested in the debates, ideas, etc. that are currently fueling them and your perceptions of where these communities are headed. What do the aesthetics of experimental fiction look like right now (that's supposed to be an open-ended and not annoying question)? What books would you recommend to an "outsider"?

DS: Well, first, no one can agree on what to call this type of work, and one of the early discussions on the Now What blog, a somewhat uneven bulletin board for 17 or so of these types of writers, focused on this exact question. I've taken to using the word "innovative"—but that has as many problems as "experimental." One of the reasons I like Chiasmus Press so much is their slogan: "Correcting Culture." Like Tod Thilleman at Spuyten Duyvil, they don't shy away from being straight up: our stuff is better (more vital) than the mainstream crapola.

Yet, what's interesting to me is my sense—and I could be wrong here—that many of those in the innovative community would not necessarily balk at publishing with a larger press with mass distribution. I've said before on the record that I would take such an opportunity seriously, so long as I felt comfortable with the terms. I certainly want people to read what I've written. Yet, and here's that question of economic position, because I have a secure job, I don't need a wide readership to survive. I'm a participant in the indirect economy, what sociological critic Pierre Bourdieu would call the "economic world reversed." I get "paid" (in promotions, time, etc.) by writing whatever I choose. That's a pretty good position to be in, but I don't pretend for a moment that it is not a privileged one.

Okay, so how does this relate to where this innovative fiction is headed? Well, you can find the direction of this literature in not only the market underpinnings of the small presses, many of whom are staffed by writers who are also academics, but also, in events like the next &NOW: A Festival of Innovative Writing and Art, to be held at Chapman University in April 2008. It seems to me there is an exuberance to the work currently being produced that ranges from writers such as Kass Fleisher, who deals directly with these institutional questions, to my favorite book of the last years, and the one recommendation I will make for everyone to check out: Steve Tomasula and Stephen Farrell's VAS: An Opera in Flatland. Part comic book, part opera, part anti-eugenics manifesto, part Foucaldian genealogical deconstruction of postmodern science, this book, more than any other I've encountered as of late, suggests the biopolitical directions for the innovative work in the coming decades. It's a book made of paper, but its stuffing is purely virtual and ethereal. It's an open source thrill ride.

BW: I'd like to turn briefly to your beautiful book Multifesto: A Henri d'Mescan Reader. One aspect of the book that really fascinates me is its varied approach to the false, which I'm not sure is synonymous with, but which must somehow be connected to, the fake. I bring up the distinction because the book, to me at least, feels more like Orson Wells's F for Fake and less like meta-narrative, which is an interesting shift. Is it the transgression inherent in falsification that interests you? How did you come to write a "fake" book about a "fake" author?

DS: I'm pleased with this reading, because I don't think Multifesto holds up very well as a meta-narrative. Sure, it has all that crap about writing about writing about crap, but it's a joke with an open punch line. I've never pretended that Henri d'Mescan is real, or anything other than an anagram of "Schneiderman," or anything other than words on the page, even as I've occasionally published and collaborated with him and his avatar, Henry Mescaline. There are enough deliberate anachronisms littered throughout the text to throw up red flags for the most casual reader, and, well, that sandpaper makes it hard to even hold the book.

The idea of authorial identity, or that Romantic definition of the capital-A "Author," flows through the text as if through a narrower and narrower set of flour sieves. The book keeps separating out layers of excess, only to find that the remains are equally excessive. There's no core to the book beyond its structure, and that is what makes it an interesting fake: it's a simulacrum of a postmodern comment on authorship. It's no more Giles Goat Boy than it is Breakfast of Champions. It's a deconstruction of the idea of the fake, through the process of open fakery. It's only secret is that there is no secret.

As for d'Mescan's origins, try this: when writing a never published story in the middle of my graduate school period—"Our Arteries Harden with the Pulse of the People"—for a workshop with a particularly rigid set of peers (although excellent writer and now-CUNY-LaGuardia professor J. Elizabeth Clark was the one bright spot!), I edited the text so many times that I removed almost all articles, prepositions, and explanatory material. The thing turned into the unreadable lovechild of Beckett and Stein, and, knowing what I was in for with the group, I decided to fabricate an opening quotation to provide some legitimacy to my method. Henri d'Mescan penned it, and thus, a hoax-that-is-not-a-hoax was born, sort of.

BW: In many ways, history is an important concern of Multifesto. The early writings of d'Mescan are prescient avant-garde texts, and as such, they take up an interesting position with respect to the actual history of modernism: they are both "modernist" and commentaries on our perceptions of the period. The fake introductory and other commentaries of Davis Schneiderman and Phoenelia Yeer spread throughout the text take up a similar set of relations but with respect to the present. In setting up the book like this, were you intending to critique the idea of periodization, where d'Mescan is the quintessential "unclassifiable" author? If you were to write an academic essay about d'Mescan what would the argument be?

DS: The academic essay would perform a Derridean-Sausserian-Barthian deconstruction of the concept of erasure, applied across the syntagmatic vectors of a system that d'Mescan might classify as Deluezian in its deployment of the rhizomatic (rather than root, rather than fascicle) structures. Proving, in fact, that not only is d'Mescan a figment of the literary imagination, but that any writing about his work proves nothing. Well, or something like that.

Another version of d'Mescanian criticism is my novel Blank: A Novel, a short novel that is, well, blank. I'm looking for a publisher, if you know of anyone with the right aesthetics.

BW: A concept that is deployed frequently in Multifesto is "Post-America.” What is "Post-America"? Is there a difference between "your" Post-America and that of Henri d'Mescan?

DS: Post-America is (1) the name of d'Mescan's unpublished 20-year epic, with multiple excerpts in Multifesto (I had been thinking about Ralph Ellison's ever-delayed Juneteenth), and (2) the condition of the United States in the post-postmodern, or post-post-irony period. It's what the country will become when there is nothing left but mediated images of its substance. This positively announces the lack of substance, of unifying principle from the start: that consensus is a lie, and that the absence of consensus is a necessary condition for, not the dissolution of the political entity, and its reconstruction according to both viral and virtual principles, which, are, in practice, user-generated.

In my just-completed manuscript ScatØlØgically Yours, a finalist for the 2007 Ronald Sukenick/American Book Review Innovative Fiction Prize from FC2, Lake Michigan mysteriously drains itself of water, and in that new land flood fugitives from Post-America: a cult worshipping an elder deity World Worm—Umma-Segnus—an embodied nothingness waiting to rise once again in the endless desert the lakebed has becomes. A planned community company, the Quadrilateral Commission, moves into old Lake Michigan and builds a series of Celebration, Florida-like towns, pushing against the Worm-worshipping, anti-capitalist fugitives from Post-America: the image of itself as a great fat zero.

BW: You've been involved, as a board member and maybe in other capacities, with the &NOW festival, whose next installment, as you mentioned, will be hosted at Chapman University in April 2008. What's the point of this festival? What is your involvement with it?

DS: All credit goes to its originator, Steve Tomasula, who started the whole thing at Notre Dame in 2004. Lake Forest College hosted in 2006, and Chapman hosts in 2008. It's a gathering of the tribes, so to speak, a mini-AWP, where people like Lou Mallozzi of Chicago's Experimental Sound Studio can do a piece (from Lake Forest in '06) on synesthesia where he plays a record while eating chicken.

It's also a place for people working in this "innovative" mode—not only in print, but new media and performance art—to communicate, collaborate, and conspire. The event has taken on a life of its own, and I expect for tie-ins down the road: including a publishing project that we will unveil in April. Look for details of that conference here: www.andnowfestival.com.

As for my role, I'm a poorly paid technical advisor.

BW: What are you working on now? What should we be on the lookout for?

DS: Be on the lookout for global warming for God's sakes, although I don't think you can really "see" it. It's something you feel, deep inside, at the moment you have second thoughts about spraying those CFCs outside your home each afternoon in hopes of making it just a little friggin' warmer—is that too much to ask?—in your neck of the woods.

Be on the lookout, eventually, for ScatØlØgically Yours, and some multimedia rearticulation of its premises. Also ahead are more "Memorials to Future Catastrophes" a collaborative series of just that, future disasters, which currently appear at Mad Hatters' Review every issue or so, and will eventually take the form of a seed packet from which you can grow your own paper to print out the secret storyline about the end of existence as we know it—over a period of 32 years!

And, if I ever get a free moment between hanging with my young daughters Athena and Kallista—there'll be a heartwarming family book about the moving changes of parenthood, that no doubt I am the first formerly jaded 30-something to experience.

Click here to purchase Retaking the Universe: William S. Burroughs in the Age of Globalization at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase Abecedarium at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2007/2008 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2007/2008