STRAYS & OTHER STORIES by SHAWN ROHRBACH

Strays and Other Stories

A new collection of short stories by Shawn Rohrbach

Like the title story, this collection resonates with strays, people
disconnected from family, from religion, from the conventional
norm of society. In stripping from the stray those things that we
usually equate with identity, Rohrbach shows something closer
to truth and allows the human soul to shine through in all its
splendorous beauty.

Available everywhere November 1, 2009

www.sabellapress.com

www.shawnrohrbach.com

DISTILLED INTO EFFERVESCENT PURITY: Zinta Aistars on Pamela Erens’ The Understory

The Understory, Pamela Erens, Ironweed Press

Many, many years have passed since I read Knut Hamsun’s Hunger. I read it in its Latvian translation, a young writer eager to learn from the masters—and the Danish writer Hamsun was that. It was a novel about nothing, really. No car chases, no maddening mysteries, no ravishing love stories, no epiphanies. It was a simple story of survival—a homeless man coping with hunger—but it has remained with me all these decades later while so many other books I’ve read have faded into oblivion. It was a book touched with greatness.

I recall Hamsun’s Hunger now because in reading the slim novel called The Understory by Pamela Erens, winner of the Ironweed Press Fiction Prize, I sensed the same effect. Yes, the same touch of literary greatness. This, too, was a story about nothing. It is simplicity itself; not even a story, but an “understory.” The story behind the story, you might say, the diving deep into the mind and heart and soul of a man. There is little action, almost all the recording of observation, the gradual coiling and tightening of a spring, and all leading up to a stunning conclusion—that one moment of action—that is the perfection coming together of all that we have read to that point.

As in Hamsun’s masterpiece, we experience truth, as a human being experiences truth that is found in the minutiae of the every day. Life is like this, after all. The earth shattering upheavals and volcanic happenings are remarkable enough, easy to nail down on paper, memorable (or not) without even trying, but genius enters when one can create reality sharper almost than reality itself. Erens follows this haggard, lonely man in his unremarkable every day without missing a detail, and so brings him into the room where we sit, brings us into his room where he lives his solitary life, and lets us taste of it. He is poor, he is alone, he is a child abandoned by his parents through a car accident that took their lives, and so has learned to live in this quiet, unobtrusive way. He lives a life that happens mostly inside his mind. He reads and mulls over what he has read as a gourmet savors every bite of an exquisite meal. Indeed, when he is evicted from his home—an apartment where he has lived for 15 years as something of an imposter of his deceased uncle of similar name on a $500 monthly stipend left to him in a will—he wonders how is it that we do not value the thinkers in our society? Only the doers. Someone has to read all the books? Someone has to think all the thoughts? He is that someone.

Even when something does happen in this man’s days, it moves in a kind of slow motion, giving us time to note all the details of the scene, evoke the emotions one might have living the moment in real time rather than sound bite. We watch the building burn. We watch him resist leaving the ashen shell of his home, living among that ash when all others have moved elsewhere. We see him creep into odd emotions of need and want, not falling in love, but more a kind of cell by cell transforming into a man who wants another man. His presence in the room, just that. We settle into the cramped corners of his brain as he becomes obsessed.

So there it is, all of it, after all, but without the distraction of special effects. There the story of survival, the story of loss, and grief, the love story, too. Distilled into effervescent purity. A moment in the abbey, where he takes refuge for a while, is fully as remarkable as a moment of encountering human need at its most base:
Night is the worst time. After the long regimentation of the day, the enforced silences, the men want to talk. At first it doesn’t matter what about: TV, movies, travel, jobs. I lie on my side on my mattress as the words pool around me, reciting to myself the botanical classifications for peach, cherry, apple. Magnoliophyta, Magnoliopsida, Rosales, Rosaceae… I smell the smell of other bodies: stale skin, flatulence, cologne. I long to open the windows and let the fresh air sweep the smells away, sweep the bodies away, too. Gradually one man drops out of the conversation, then another. Soon there will be only two men left speaking. And these two—they are not the same two every night—will drop their voices, speak in an intimate murmur. Perhaps they are only gossiping about one of the monks. Perhaps they are complaining about the food. But no, there is a reticence that lets me know that they are trying, clumsily, to reach each other. (27)
He is obsessed with two. Two in connection, twins, kindred souls, brothers, lovers, even as he himself is profoundly one. This solitary man who cannot connect even in a crowd, eventually implodes, and explodes, and the sense of following him through this process is a literary meditation I will long not forget. It is for this kind of fine literature that I hunger all my reading life, and find all too rarely.

*

Zinta Aistars, writer and editor-in-chief for The Smoking Poet.

SOME NOTES ON LAURIE SHECK’S A MONSTER’S NOTES from Matthew Hittinger

A Monster’s Notes, Laurie Sheck, Knopf

I have mixed feelings about paying attention to the reviews, in particular the starred ranking system, on the website GoodReads, a social networking site for authors and book lovers. I’ve seen too often good books get flamed by people with the dreaded one-star. With Laurie Sheck’s new book A Monster’s Notes I’ve found most of the one-stars come from people who left comments that they were unable to finish the book or found the writing style difficult to adjust to or enter. So I feel a need to come to the book’s defense and help others find a point of entry as it is quite brilliant and I’d hate to see people not even attempt to read it based on some reviews by people who weren’t up to the challenge. And the book is that, but if you stick with it you’ll find it quite rewarding.

First a note on the nature of the text. Sheck is known for her poetry and this is her first foray into, as the book is labeled, “Fiction,” though even she acknowledges the hybrid nature of the text. The reader must be prepared for a variety of narrative approaches—notes, letters, journal entries—that as a pastiche convey the greater story. A story which, in the end, is more of an investigation of a distinct period of each character’s life and the Monster’s take on that life. The “narrative” is often implied or running beneath the surface as Sheck foregrounds these snapshots of the character’s thoughts written in their (imagined) own hand.

The book is divided into three distinct sections: “Ice Diary” which triangulates the Monster, Claire Clairmont, and accounts of explorers on arctic expeditions; “Dream of the Red Chamber” which triangulates the Monster, Clerval (and Cao Xueqin by extension), and his leper friend in Aosta; and “Metropolis/The Ruins at Luna” which triangulates the Monster, Mary Shelly, and Mary’s mother. Between each section there are “interludes” of “notes” the Monster takes.

The Monster loves to read; we know that from Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. His “notes” investigate humanity, the people who made him, by reading their philosophy and literature, by looking at their experiments and artistic and scientific achievements. In the interlude sections his mode is to copy down quotes from books and interviews and events, and then follow the quotes with his own reflections on what he has read. The reader will also find he shares a psychic link of sorts with Claire, Clerval, and Mary and can observe what they write, so you will also find his notes and reflections on what he sees and reads as he watches them read and write.

The bulk of the book is done in an epistolary mode where the main characters of a section compose letters, the actual sending of which is often beside the point. What matters is that all these modes share one thing: the mind at work on the page in its most exposed state. And if you are up for noting patterns, I found there are few pages where the word “mind” does not appear at least once throughout the entire 520 page tome.

Which perhaps explains some of the difficulty readers have with this text. It’s heavy on process, showing the mind at work on the page and in conversation with others, often a pretense for the mind to talk to and explore its own boundaries and territory, especially in the case of Claire who continues writing letters to Fanny long after she kills herself, and Clerval, who in Frankenstein is Victor’s friend killed by the Monster, but in Sheck’s tale escapes East to translate Cao Xueqin’s Story of the Stone (Dream of the Red Chamber). With Clerval we not only get his notes as he translates, but the letters from his leper friend in Aosta, and the responses he often writes but never sends to his friend.

Because of this preoccupation of the mind and its workings, of the mind trying to define itself, I would recommend starting with Sheck’s previous book, the poetry collection Captivity, before diving into the pages of A Monster’s Notes (also a good idea to read Frankenstein first!). Captivity and A Monster’s Notes share similar concerns and overlap not just thematically but, as she confirmed in correspondence with me, chronologically: “a good year or so I was working on both at the same time, and in part saw the Monster as the more outgoing sibling of the two.”

A note on voyeurism. Most of the texts we as readers see and read are also seen and read by the Monster, often as the person is writing them, the text presented on the page with cross-outs and X’ings, allowing the reader and the Monster to ponder over half-starts, thoughts written and then erased, and sometimes simple blank space where a thought trails off or abruptly ends. Which leads me to ask: why is the Monster such a voyeur? Quite simply, I found him lonely. He admires and envies the ties these people have to each other, to their friends, even though with each character those ties often exist more in the mind than in reality. The voyeurism is also a continuation of the Monster’s attempt to understand humanity, to understand the basics of human nature, our highest achievements (landing on the moon), or spirit of exploration (mapping the unforgiving territory of the arctic, which also becomes a metaphoric space to describe the mind), the very simple bond of friendship or familial relationships.

And I must also ask, why are we invited to be such voyeurs by this text and by Sheck? That question is what I found most compelling about the book, the ability to see into others’ minds as they attempt to record the workings of their minds, that grand attempt to know and define the self through the written word, and the valiant attempt of a creature who, when it comes down to it, tries to understand why he is called a “creature” by Mary and a “being” by Percy. The book is one big act of becoming as each character and the Monster and we as readers reach for that thing known as “being” which seems to be unattainable, or only attainable in the attempt to attain it, and the recording of such an attempt.

Some final notes: back in June I had the pleasure of watching Sheck launch the release of A Monster’s Notes with a multimedia presentation at the Mercantile Library Center for Fiction here in New York. The first thing that struck me in the 40 minute mini-movie was the question of the creator vs. the created, or in the case of the Monster, the “creature.” Sheck’s process in researching Shelly’s notebooks to write this book mirrored Shelly’s research to create the Monster in her book, and we have three creators present: Laurie Sheck, Mary Shelly, and Victor Frankenstein. And three creations: Frankenstein’s Monster, Mary’s novel about Frankenstein and his Monster, and Sheck’s novel about the Monster’s inability to speak to his creator, left to live in his absence, and his encounter with Mary when she was a girl. Sheck’s take is that Mary did not invent the Monster, but had met the Monster when she was a girl, and thus he became the basis for her story as he haunted her the rest of her life.

The genesis for this project was “a weird adventure” as Sheck describes it. Her husband was ill and the way he was shuffling around reminded her of the Frankenstein walk from the movie versions. She bought the book and discovered (as many of us book lovers have) how different and complex and more rewarding it is from the movie and fell in love, starting a conversation with the Monster in her head that lasted for the duration of the composition of the book, always negotiating with the Monster over his interests and her interests, which are sometimes shared, and sometimes wildly divergent. In many ways Sheck allows the Monster to speak to his creator, as Sheck joins Victor and Shelly in such a role. It’s a rehabilitation or reclamation of sorts, but also dangerous: “the mind’s a terrible place; it knows how each horizon crumbles.” So if you are up for having some of your horizons crumble, for pondering what it means to perceive and that ultimate frustration in trying to perceive the mind, the vehicle that allows the act of perception, then delve into the often humorous musings of this long black-haired, black-lipped, yellow-eyed Monster. You might find yourself keeping your own notes. And you might find a certain Monster watching you as you turn the pages.

OUTSIDE AND, THUS, FREE: Daniela Hurezanu on Aleksandar Hemon’s Love and Obstacles

Love and Obstacles, Aleksandar Hemon, Riverhead Books

Like Nowhere Man and The Question of Bruno, Aleksandar Hemon’s Love and Obstacles is a collection of short stories whose main narrator is a Bosnian man of Ukrainian extraction, or an American man of Bosnian-Ukrainian origin, whose father has worked as a diplomat in Africa and the Middle East during communism. We know that Hemon is indeed from Bosnia, but I am personally very curious to know whether indeed he is of Ukrainian origin and whether his father has worked as a diplomat, as the story “Stairway to Heaven” (in Love and Obstacles) or “The Sorge Spy Ring” (in The Question of Bruno) suggests.

Another element that seems to be autobiographical is the fact that in the early nineties, when he was a recent immigrant in Chicago, Hemon (apparently) worked as a door-to-door magazine salesman. “Good Living,” a story that takes its title from the magazine with the same name, narrates one day in the life of the young salesman with a strong Bosnian accent. This very short story condenses in several pages the portraits of a drunk, miserable priest, and an arrogant, handsome young man who wants to be an actor, through whom Hemon sketches in several strokes the life of an entire neighborhood.

The narrative continuity present not only within one book, but from one book to the next is so strong that one can only conclude that the narrator in these stories is indeed the same as the author, and that all the biographical information is autobiographical. Unless…it’s not. Hemon may very well be re-creating here a persona whole life is modeled on his, yet all—or most of—those elements that appear to be autobiographical because they recur in so many stories are in fact fictional.

One of Hemon’s gifts is that he knows how to use dialogue to create lifelike characters, all the while preserving their eccentricities and avoiding the trap of banality, which characterizes so many young contemporary American writers. For these writers, most of whom are products of workshops not of intense reading, “lifelike” dialogue consists of imitating some excruciatingly trivial dialogue one can hear in everyday life. Hemon knows that literature is not life even when it claims to stand for it, and a good, “natural” literary dialogue resides in giving the illusion of life, while at the same time searching for the essence of things, that is, for the very opposite of a real-life situation. One doesn’t find the essence of things by copying their appearance, as is presented to us in daily life. “Lifelike” dialogues and characters are never to be found in life; they are “life-like” precisely because they are not life, or rather they are life with a twist, i.e., literature.

Thus, “Szmura’s Room” goes to the essence of immigrant life by focusing on the one element that constitutes the very definition of an immigrant: a room—the minimal space of survival of the destitute person who arrives in a foreign country with no possessions of his own, has no relatives, no friends and only enough money to survive from one day to the next. The story’s conflict and drama are built around this apparently innocuous space, and the ending brims with irony: the immigrant who has survived the Bosnian war and made it to the land of the free, has his left eye blown out of its socket by the room’s owner.

Among the stories that recall the narrator’s (an American writer of Bosnian origin), and thus, presumably, Hemon’s childhood, “American Commando” reminded me of my own childhood in communist Romania—though, being a girl, I was simply a spectator not a participant in the “neighborhood wars” described by Hemon. This story also reminded me of Nostalgia, a novel in stories by the Romanian writer Mircea Cartarescu, in which the rather prosaic reality of the war games played by inner-city kids among gray blocks of cement is transfigured into a mythical (and almost lyrical) paradise lost.

“American Commando” begins with a narration that could play the role of metaphor for Hemon’s own position within the context of American literature and culture: while in grammar school in Bosnia, he was in charge of wiping the chalkboard, so he would often leave the classroom to wash the sponge. As he walked back to the classroom, he would stop by the door, taking an intense pleasure in eavesdropping on what was going on inside. The pleasure came from the feeling that, while everyone else was inside, he was outside, and thus free. Later in the same story, he comes back to this feeling and redefines it: maybe the pleasure came from the ambiguous state of being both inside and outside. I can testify to the fact that this is the pleasure one feels when writing in a language not one’s own.

CONTEMPORARY VISIONS: Rick Marlatt on Charles Simic’s Sixty Poems

Sixty Poems, Charles Simic, Harvest Books

Throughout this collection, Simic captures what can be safely encompassed as truly contemporary visions. Socially, Simic’s themes and images range from entertainment with television, film, theatre (“The Devils,” “Cameo Appearance”) and dining, to travel with hotel rooms (“Hotel Insomnia,” “Paradise Motel”), strange cities and night spots, human relations, (“The Secret,” “Mummy’s Curse”) and of the realities and consequences of war (“Empires,” “Reading History”). In addition, Simic focuses on the human mental and physical reactions to these stimuli. Simic’s work is reminiscent of the work of his two U.S. Poet Laureate predecessors, Kooser and Hall. Like Kooser in works such as Sure Signs and Delights and Shadows, Simic demonstrates the uncanny ability to freeze-frame moments in time and render them poetic. That is, many of Simic’s poems such as “In The Library” and “Mirrors at 4 A.M” follow structure around a single incident, thought, or situation.

Where Simic seems to move beyond Kooser’s realm is in the range of emotional weight and connotation associated with his central image. While many of Kooser’s snapshots reveal simple, great-plains kinds of themes and sensibilities, Simic is able to work with a plethora of feelings, including the terrifying and melancholic. Poems like “Late September,” “Unmade Beds,” and “Transport” offer deep ripples of emotion which manifest themselves in fashions similar to a haunting. Because so many of these Simic poems depict a central image and operate through the use of concrete language, the poetic voice approaches that of an analysis or response to a visual photograph. In terms of structure and style, Simic’s pieces in this work are collectively clear. Yet, when we examine several of the poems in detail, a key element is visible in each which carries the weight of interpretation for the entire poem. For instance, in “The Secret,” while the speaker contemplates death and his existence, he catches a glimpse of his white cat “picking at the bloody head of a fish.” (47) This kind of fresh equivocation, something like the Hitchcock swerve perhaps, makes for great possibilities in interpretation and meaning and serves to recharge the poem midway through. In this generally satisfying collection, a few of Simic’s poems appear to suffer from a noticeably overt movement or lack of suspense, particularly at the conclusion, in comparison to many of the other poems. “Country Fair,” for example, ends by following up a rather ordinary set of descriptions with the final stanza: “She was drunk and so was the man / who kept kissing her neck. / The dog got the stick and looked back at us / and that was the whole show.” (33) Read within the spectrum of the other excellent poems in the text, this is a final line which leaves much to be desired. In other words, the unfulfilled feeling in the last lines has less to do with the poem being a failure than with the sheer completeness in the bulk of work which precedes and follows it.

On the other hand, Sixty Poems demonstrates many instances in which Simic is fully capable of blasting his way through an excellent poem with a surcharge of unrelenting momentum. “Club Midnight,” for example, rolls out in a series of questions directed at the reader and through this repetition, formulates a conception that is extremely interesting, literary, and imagistic. Other times, Simic’s diction can create a memory so specific and so quiet, that it demands reader meditation and search for deeper meaning, such as in “The Toy.” What I admire particularly about Simic’s work in this collection and of Hall, Kooser, and some of Collins (much of the latter’s work may not be as applicable to the current discussion as the two formers) is the faithfulness to the simple, plain-speak in contemporary poetry that defies other trends. Interestingly, Simic’s immense popularity forces us to engage in dialogue concerning what constitutes as formal contemporary poetry and what characteristics we can apply to that definition. Though much of Simic’s language is, indeed, simple, it doesn’t lack the ability to be insightful and to bring meaning to the world the poetry depicts. Poems such as “At the Cookout” reveal the intricacy of human relations and the power they have to manipulate emotions and meaning.

“Entertaining The Canary,” which originally appears in Simic’s 1996 collection, Walking the Black Cat, is a poem that exudes a unique personality and layers of interpretation worthy of a focused response. The speaker has a specific name to which he refers to the canary, which makes the address personal and justifiable, as well as adds more weight to the poem and puts more at stake for the speaker. The speaker makes two demands of the canary: desist and sing. There is a connection in the final two stanzas between the three characters in the poem and this relationship is captured by the use of the physical body parts each character demonstrates. That is, the third stanza is comprised of detailed physical descriptions including back, chin, shoulder, breast, and crotch. And it is with the wings that the bird will applaud. In a sense, all communication, verbal, emotional, sexual, is done via the utilization of limbs and attachments. A brief look at the verbs used in the poem reveals a simplistic formula which allows the reader to focus on what is happening inside the moment. Chirp, desist, turn, soaping, putting, sing, flutter, applaud, and throw are very deliberate and specific, meaning the speaker isn’t intended to fool anyone. Instead, through this calling to the reader to turn our gazes inward, we see an urgent plea for communication offered in the scene. Moreover, the speaker ends the poem by making known the consequences for ignoring his plea; that is, a complete and utter shut-off from the rest of the world—a total blackout, as it were.

Ironically, the reading and interpreting of the poem demands an inversion of the title. That is, through the speaker’s marked isolation and want of the bird’s attention, we quickly get the sense that it is the bird that possesses the ability to entertain the speaker. Subsequently, the relationship between poet and reader or artist and audience quickly emerges. As the maker of love, cleanser of the body, and poet of the world, the speaker calls to the canary who serves as the viewer, reader, art consumer in a chillingly honest manner. Further implicit remarks can be made about the speaker’s meaning when we consider the use of “as if you were applauding.” (57) One must wonder what questions Simic might be attempting to raise here regarding audience and entertainment in contemporary culture. Simic’s poem forces us to once again ask ourselves, what is art, specifically poetry? What is the intention and use of poetry in relationship to society and what is the poet’s role within that society? What is the reader’s role? Indeed, Charles Simic’s collection has much to add to this imperative discussion, and through interpretation of the poems therein, we are able to understand more clearly our own specific roles in contemporary poetics. Visually stimulating, metaphysically fulfilling, and artistically mesmerizing, Sixty Poems showcases Simic’s unique poetic gesture.

*

Rick Marlatt holds BAs in English and Philosophy and a MA in Creative Writing from the University of Nebraska, and he is currently pursuing a MFA in Creative Writing from the University of California Riverside at Palm Desert. Marlatt’s most recent publications include New York Quarterly, Pedestal Magazine, and Poetic Diversity

LEAVING CREATION TO UN-CREATE ITSELF: Carah Naseem on James Chapman’s Degenerescence

Degenerescence, James Chapman, Fugue State Press

The storyteller has many faces and many voices. It is his responsibility to hide behind the faces and voices of peoples past to tell about the things that have happened. He weaves beautiful often obtuse words into a quilt of drama and intrigue wrapping you in it, kindling the fire of familiarity in your mind. The storyteller tells the same seven stories in words forever sevenfold.

James Chapman is disenchanted with the storyteller. In his Degenerescence, Chapman undermines the storyteller, he takes the story and breaks it over his knee; he then cares for it, nurtures it, and strips it of what it’s worth, leaving only the raw event, the ‘it’ of the story, and tosses everything else aside. Chapman captures the ostinato of the ancient mind pattern, conjuring the habits of the pre-Sophoclean man. In essence, James Chapman has written an epic.

Said epic begins in a world defined by lack of definition. It is a world constructed of words; if a word exists, then so the object exists. Each named thing, each thing in existence, is divine, and has purpose to exist. We enter into a world of primordial semantics, devoid of all implication. Take, for example, this excerpt:

Speak of fish. Take it in your hands. Fish is brought here by the speech of the name “fish.” Speaking the name “fish” enables fish to appear. First fish appears in the mind, then in the hand… (16)

In this, Chapman has portrayed the rudimentary desire to obtain, and to do so by speaking words. He communicates with the reader not in a cerebral fashion, but instead taps into a more primal brain function, for the proto-Babel language.

In Degenerescence, we see the world being destroyed and recreated by a tumultuous goddess named WOE, who takes it upon herself to define the world through the speaking of words; she speaks words for one thousand eight hundred days, and creates a world of her own. She births seven daughters, with the stillborn inkling of an eighth, with the intention to send them into the world that she created, only to have them each fail in succession, and return to their heavenly abode—a hut—where their mother cares for them once more.

WOE watches on as the world she created moves without her. The people have appointed themselves a king, with whom she speaks regularly. The rest of the people, however, deny the presence of WOE’s daughters, her only ambassadors to her world:

They live together among the white cedars. WOE has created the world, yet only her seven daughters know her. All other persons of her creation ignore her or shun her as a shamed mother, an unmarried mother. She created them, and they treat her as a shamed mother, an unmarried mother. (39)

Note the usage of repetition, calling to mind ancient Sumerian devotional literature. What that particular excerpt has in common with ancient epics is that they have concepts that any reader can relate to. The words used are remarkably relatable, and yet eerie in their foreignness. There’s something queer about reading your life 2000+ years ago. Are we so mutable and recyclable? So the story goes.

And so the novel begins to tell things that happened. WOE looks on in horror as Portuguese explorers, Magellan and Pigafetta, step foot on the land of her people and give them words empty of substance. They give them the flowery, obtuse words of story, and the world she founded begins to collapse before her. Her words hold no water, and her world, too, holds no water. She comes to find truths about it, flaws. It is not, in fact, a world, but a mere island, to be called Mulatto, amongst many islands that the Britons (to represent the Western people) have conquered, and plan to conquer. WOE laments as the history of her people, however ungrateful they are, succumbs to this new story of Veni, Vidi, Vici.

It is interesting to note, for all those historians and anthropologists out there, Chapman’s geographic placement of WOE’s world. Upon further research, one can see that Magellan indeed circumnavigated the globe. However, Pigafetta accompanied him on his voyages to the Maluku Islands of the Indonesian archipelago only. Our created people of the novel, the Mulattans, are mentioned alongside the races of Dyaks, Jakurs, Battaks, and Fuegans, who were actually tribes of people from Borneo, Sumatra, and South America. Chapman, therefore, remains painstakingly within the confines of Magellan’s knowledge, but also filters it through the voice of the people, ignorant to all other things. The effect is a curious one, such that one feels the people live on a sort of congealed continent, a Pangaea of sorts.

WOE perceives her world as a Pangaea, a giant mass which she recreated on her own. And now, having nearly forgotten herself and her meaning because of her people’s neglect, she decides to leave. She sinks into her Panthalassa, the endless sea, and leaves her daughters, all her creation to un-create itself and to write itself a history.

RESILIENCY BY DEGREES: Megan Burns on Summer Brenner’s I-5

I-5: A Novel of Crime, Transport, and Sex, Summer Brenner, PM Press

Summer Brenner enters the dark underworld of the sex slave trade in this fictional account of a young Russian woman’s attempt to escape from bondage as she is transported across a stretch of highway, the I-5 of the title. From the first page, Brenner inundates the reader with the sensory experiences of Anya, an illegal immigrant from Russia who has been lured to the United States with the promise of jobs and money, but who finds herself forced to perform sexual favors to pay off an undisclosed debt to her captors for her transport and upkeep. Descriptions of the enclosed life that Anya leads as well as the control exerted over her least decisions and movements help to portray the hopelessness of her life as overtly as the descriptions of the sexual escapades that she is supposed to perform with agility and acquiescence in order to earn her freedom do. Her character is intriguing because she is able to objectively present the atrocious scenarios of her life interspersed with the hints and shades of past horrors of a different order left behind in Russia.

As Anya’s world is explored through a series of mishaps that occur along the I-5, the reader slowly learns the pervading knowledge that Anya carries within herself: she will never be able to escape as the outside world is as dangerous and untrustworthy as her own secret world as a sex slave. The only sex scene in the novel ironically occurs not when Anya is “working,” but after a car accident that leads her and her captor to a nearby prison facility for medical attention. The scene illustrates that even the law as represented by the prison sergeant is complicit in the abuse of Anya, if the opportunity presents itself. As Anya kneels before his unzipped pants with her breasts exposed, the scene encompasses the violent mindset that allows these women to be treated as objects: “The sergeant observes from above. It is only two feet, but it feels like a great height. A spectacular aerial view over an inviolable law. Not his law but nature’s: women are born to satisfy men” (80).

Anya, who has been working for four years at this point in the story, is surprisingly strong willed and spirited in comparison to other girls such as her friend Cerise, who is presented as an example of a woman completely broken by her circumstances. Fear of being deported and sent back to a country where her brother was picked up and murdered without cause by the authorities keeps Anya imprisoned as much as the violence does that she will endure if she does not comply. Anya truly believes in her ability to pay her debt and earn her freedom, and the turning point in the novel is her dawning realization that this promise that she has clung to so fervently is actually a lie. Nothing else truly penetrates the thick shell that Anya has created to preserve her inner self as much as the hint that she may never be free.

Brenner begins her tale with a mysterious sound that Anya hears repeatedly while locked in her hotel room for days on end, and towards the end of the novel, the source of the sound is revealed to be the tones of the traffic light signaling for the blind. “She laughs sadly. ‘I fantasized it was a bird.’ Anya thinks she should have felt sorry for the bird, but instead she hated it. Now that she knows it’s for the blind, she hates it still. She wonders if she is a bad person. She doesn’t think she was born bad, but life has turned her. She has even lost pity for the blind” (172). Symbolically, Anya is blinded by the lies of her captors, and ultimately her survival depends on her ability to respond quickly relying on whatever senses she has left at her disposal. Brenner braves a subject matter that is not easy to embrace, and she manages to create a character that is neither cliché nor uninspiring. I-5 moves at a clipped pace towards its conclusion, and the reader is wholly invested in finding out how Anya finally resolves her life.

*

Megan Burns holds a MFA from Naropa University and edits the poetry magazine, Solid Quarter (solidquarter.blogspot.com). She has been most recently published in Callaloo, Constance Magazine, and YAWP Journal as well as online at horseless press, shampoo, trope_5, Exquisite Corpse and BigCityLit. Her book Memorial + Sight Lines was published in 2008 by Lavender Ink.

WALKING THROUGH THAT VALLEY: James Reiss on Jonathan Thirkield’s The Waker’s Corridor

The Waker’s Corridor, Jonathan Thirkield, Louisiana State University Press

I.

A poet in his mid-thirties whose first book wins the Walt Whitman Award has a lot to celebrate. His book comes wrapped in the blessings of its sponsor, The Academy of American Poets; it is all but guaranteed to be reviewed, not relegated to Dustville among dozens of other debut volumes; and it will forever be linked with Whitman, whom Emerson famously greeted in 1855 “at the beginning of a great career.”

At the start of his gig on Parnassus Jonathan Thirkield may not yet be our preeminent bard, who happened to be from Brooklyn – Thirkield’s a Manhattanite. But even a casual glance at “The Waker’s Corridor” reveals its awesome precocity, along with its flaws. From time to time if Whitman slipped, so does Thirkield – and who doesn’t? – even when the causes for their pratfalls are as different as banana peels and black ice.

From the get-go, let me say that I’ve seldom read lines of poetry quite as fresh as Thirkield’s. When George Orwell declared, “Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print,” he might well have been hoping for language as unusual as what you’ll see in the very first chiseled lines of Thirkield’s book; here’s the beginning of the sonnet-like “Streamside”:

A perfect scene: a voice unwarrantedly
sweet exiting the shade: a man’s red mouth
rough cheeks white skin: in wood – a gondolier
plays the scattered pieces of his fiddle-form
in broken light and audience estranged
from living sound: but sweetly arcs his song:

Aside from the opening gambit, “A perfect scene,” an essential but perhaps a slightly hackneyed turn of phrase – as well as “rough cheeks,” which could be scripted from a Gillette commercial – these lines sound new-minted. The man’s voice being described as “unwarrantedly / sweet” alters the common adjective “unwarranted” – as in “Your cruel remarks are unwarranted, Don” – to an adverb I find exotic. Furthermore, the man’s voice is “exiting the shade,” rather than “emerging from the shade,” “shining forth from the shade” or some such crap. In context “exiting” could almost be called a neo-geo locution. Lines 3–6 depict a man in the midst of singing an opera or an operetta like Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Gondoliers.” But notice how the image, “the scattered pieces of his fiddle-form,” evades plainspoken photo-realism and evokes something more visually abstract or surreal. The penultimate quoted line in isolation, given its continued iambic-pentameter underpinnings, suggests the first canto of “Paradise Lost,” partly because of the inversion of the verbal “estranged.” At any rate, the sixth quoted line rounds off this portrait, which turns out to be of a son and his father, with panache and a nostalgia emphasized by the “sweet” in line two becoming “sweetly.” Please notice the Spenserian echoes in “sweetly arcs his song.” Considering these half-dozen splendid lines, I’m red-faced – red-mouthed? – when I say that the seventh line of Thirkield’s little elegy is sappy as can be. “[W]ith the innocent abandon of a child” is thematically central to “The Waker’s Corridor,” but that doesn’t prevent it from being the tritest line in the book. Thank goodness, it’s the only howler I’ve detected in sleuthing through 84 pages.

The opening sequence of eleven 14-liners, “Fatherland,” uses colons the way A. R. Ammons did lo these many years ago, to give the impression of a continuum. Rather than interrupting the “flow” of things with those stop-sign punctuation marks, periods, Thirkield creates the illusion of A giving the green light to B, B giving the green light to C and so forth. The result may be something like Whitman’s catalogues incorporating multitudes, although Thirkield steers clear of Whitmanesque parallel-structured lists. He doesn’t steer clear of sequential narration, rhyme, iambs and, as Mark Levine writes in his blockbuster blurb, “formal procedures.”

Still, Thirkield’s formalism is a whole nuther sort of ism than the one I associate with, say, the Expansive Poets of the 1980s. Of the 41 poems in this book, 23 have titles followed by numbers in parentheses as in: Upstate (7:127). If you’re citing a passage from the Bible, you refer to chapter and verse, i.e., Psalms (23:4). Yea, though Thirkield has walked through that valley – “The Waker’s Corridor” is surely about the shadow of death – in his day job he is a Web designer and refers to more than half the poems in his book by the number of their stanzas and lettered characters. To describe “Upstate” as having seven stanzas seems ho-hum enough. To specify that each line in “Upstate” has 127 characters, minus spaces, bespeaks an obsession with form unique to an era of Twitter. Not one line of the prose poem “Upstate” approaches the maximum limit of a Tweet, 140 characters, yet the poem’s choppy, retarded sentences and fragments suggest Twitter’s newspeak. Here is the first full basket case of a line from “Upstate” – count the characters (minus spaces) for yourself:

The mental institution was funny. The way the mad are funny. From the cement recreation area. She could not see beyond the figures. Left by felled trees.

“Upstate” is certainly not funny ha-ha! It recalls a boy – one of Thirkield’s high frequency words throughout is “child” – visiting his father in a sanatorium. Whereas the poet takes pains to depict the woman in the first stanza with a compassion he expresses in subsequent stanzas – only then to focus on his emaciated, exhausted father – his modus operandi is as cold-blooded as a king in his counting house. I don’t know much about the tools of a Web designer’s trade, but perhaps the “sodal” – a “modular java irc bot” – which Thirkield gives thanks to on his acknowledgments page, has something to do with formatting his “stanza/character” poems. Whether he uses a techie’s tool or counts out his characters on his fingers, his poems press the digitized envelope in ways I haven’t seen. Back in the 1980s, without using a computer, the excellent Cincinnati poet David Schloss labored to justify both the right- and left-hand margins of his poems. More recently, another Ohioan, now transplanted to Charlottesville, Kevin McFadden, came out with a strenuous first poetry collection, “Hardscrabble,” much of which is based on brilliantly recast anagrams. Well, Thirkield sings in his chains like a different sort of sea. In fact, to belabor the pun, he represents a kind of sea change in poetry.

What does Thirkieldian poetry entail? Two-thirds of the way through “Lilac (9:111)” a line and a half put forth an ars poetica: “You read. I am, for you in ink, the voice / undressed. Tear this sheet from this whitewashed stone. Wear it!”

First of all, then, these poems present “the voice / undressed.” Recall Yeats, in “A Coat,” celebrating the poetic “enterprise in walking naked. ” Recall also Stephen Berg and Robert Mezey’s 1969 anthology, “Naked Poetry: Recent American Poetry in Open Forms.” Somewhere beyond Yeats and Berg/Mezey, Thirkield’s voice is attuned to bare feelings, particularly grief. The disorder and early sorrow of a twelve-year-old who lost his father to suicide pervades every single page of this book. The fact that its poems are “dressed up” in costumes sometimes as elaborate as Pavarotti’s only underscores their transparency, how well they fit a tragic libretto. To switch metaphors: as if robed in the emperor’s new clothes, Thirkield accompanies his father’s ghost across the stage in his very own revival of New York’s Circle Repertory Theater, which Papa Robert Thirkield co-founded in that same Berg/Mezey year, 1969. Naturally, “Hamlet” features prominently in Thirkield fils’s book, as do Edgar and his father, Gloucester in “King Lear,” along with Miranda and Prospero in “The Tempest.” Which brings me to Point Two:

More than a little of Thirkield sounds Shakespearean. Take, for example, Thirkield’s colloquial iambic-pentameter line, “Now turn our thoughts to bangers and to mash”; or else “A bout of grief whirrs the priest i’ the rib cage”; or certain lines that distill the essence of a song sung by a Globe Theatre actor: “I had a clock it woke all day / in hiccupped white embattled cries / I broke my glasses on the street / to blind my sense of dignity” – these four tetrameter lines are part of “Father’s Song.” Obviously, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree; young Jonathan is haunted enough by his dad to have inherited – or deliberately acquired – his old man’s thespian gifts. The thing is, the son’s grins and grimaces aren’t the poetic equivalent of “staged” gestures that derive from, say, Stanislavsky’s method. If all the world’s a stage, one thing seems sure: the emotions infusing Thirkield’s book are not programmed but real.

A dozen “Mystery Plays” constitute the poet’s homage to the medieval York Cycle of dramas popular centuries before Shakespeare. No wonder the superb scrivener of historical poems, Linda Bierds, chose “The Waker’s Corridor” as this year’s Whitman winner. Thirkield’s “Mystery Plays” pilfer from Bierds Territory, which is vast but includes the fifteenth century, as slyly as a cat burglar. Here’s one of them in its entirety:

IV. The Chandler’s Play (6:36)

On the wall, a horse tied to a change-house,

Tiny. A candle in the glass above, its flame

The same burnt hay sloping across the whole

Encaustic pasture: snow patched, trees to

Hazel strings, a bird trap. Unpeopled now,

Three crooks lean against a flat muted sky.

II.

Short but not sweet like “Streamside,” “The Chandler’s Play” is not so much a play as it is a description of a painting in a candle maker’s house. Notice the painted horse “tied to a change-house,” possibly a tallow factory, in synch with the sinister “bird trap” in line 5. Notice the “encaustic pasture”; this hot beeswax painting, a style famous as far back as 100 A.D. in Egypt, may well have been completed by the candle maker. If his landscape bristles with the hayfields and pastures Brueghel relished, the countryside is “unpeopled,” sans Brueghel’s vast unwashed crowds of Flemish peasants. Instead, three shepherds’ lonely “crooks lean against a flat muted sky.” Auden might have appreciated how these stringent musical lines complement his own deceptively nonchalant “Musée des Beaux Arts.”

Notice also that “The Chandler’s Play,” along with Thirkield’s eleven other mystery plays and some other verse here, is double-spaced. This style of printing has gained favor with various avant-garde writers. I can find no reason why the format is deployed except to give a poem some airy space between its lines. It may be merely a waste of paper, but poets are experimenting with ways of making a reader plow (like Auden’s “ploughman”?) through lines more slowly and deliberately. As I’ve noted elsewhere, the poem comprised of stanzas with an equal number of lines has lost favor among the new millennium’s upstart crows, who, like Thirkield, have resorted to other means of expressing their obsessions, their rage for order.

It’s as if the phrase “Alles in Ordnung,” as well as its Dionysian twin, “Gefühl ist Alles,” reverberate as rallying cries throughout this book. Accordingly, Thirkield uses German, at one point fractured, to set his ducks in order. He’s more of a Wunderkind than an enfant terrible, even if his surname is Danish, not Deutsch. And the title of the second section of his book, “Abendland,” reminds us that German speakers refer to the Occident, or New World, as “evening land.” Americans call Japan the “Far East,” despite its being west of Seattle. So it makes sense that, for Germans, the land of the setting sun is a locus of darkness.

No doubt about it: “The Waker’s Corridor” (as opposed to “The Walker’s Corridor”) is, in the mightiest sense of the word, a “dark” book. It is dense and sometimes nearly impenetrable, like an infernal dark forest. Its 100-plus-line title poem, like many of the most nakedly emotional pieces here, is not a stanza/character Kunstwerk. Rather, it is an insomniac child’s rite of passage, a sleepwalker’s tour of a house during a night of thunder and fantasy in New York City; his parents are away, while a neighbor woman baby-sits, cracks an egg in “a simple white bowl of German design” and tries to reassure herself and the child that “it was thunder,” not the world’s end. The child’s mind fills with names of distant places, and suddenly the waker’s corridor turns into the Wakhan Corridor, an area in northeast Afghanistan so remote that only Osama bin Laden and the CIA may have heard of it. As the poem chuffs and rumbles on its far-reaching itinerary with nary a blooper of a line, nary a phrase that is not musical or painterly, you may realize that the ”corridor” in Thirkield’s book title is anything but narrow and confining. Nope, the Northeast corridor – that parochial hall of mirrors – opens out onto a Great White Way reaching beyond the stars because, at under forty years of age, Thirkield is one of those precious few poets who has arisen from dogmatic slumber and is fully, intensely awake.

*

James Reiss, whose last name rhymes with “peace,” grew up in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City. http://www.jamesreiss.com/

A JOURNEY INTO AN INNER LANDSCAPE: Gary Kay on Barbra Nightingale’s Geometry of Dreams

Geometry Of Dreams, Barbra Nightingale, WordTech Communications

Samuel Johnson famously (and inaccurately) described metaphysical poetry as, “heterogeneous ideas yoked by violence together.” Geometry of Dreams,” Barbra Nightingale’s new collection, contains poems filled with heterogeneous ideas, but they are blended skillfully and imaginatively into compelling narratives that engage and challenge and the reader, who is invited to explore a literary landscape where numbers, quarks, spatial planes and velocities keep bumping into feelings.

The initial poem, Irresistible Force, reflects the typical trajectory of Nightingale’s “metaphysical” poems. The reader is asked to contemplate the possible meaning of polynomials, discrete angles, gravitational fields, the Pi of existence. “Having done this,” the speaker suggests, “it might/ just be possible to imagine/ numbers that don’t exist,” which naturally leads to the unanswerable question: how are speaker and reader, both concepts, precisely aligned? The last stanza, however, does not offer an answer for the head, but instead, “a blow to the heart,”

Thinking all the while
there must be a stop to motion,
the headlong rush into nothing
so sensible as a plan,
wondering if anything
could stop it once it began
except the grey thud of a body
falling, forward, then backward,
whipped, as it were by velocity
of an object, say a bullet, or a blow
to the heart, even if it wasn’t quite
physical, even
if there were no blood.

“Changing the Direction of the Dawn” begins with the whimsical question: “What if the world stopped spinning clockwise, and then started turning the other way?” Then come a series of questions that develop the strange premise of the first. The final stanza returns to the human realm. But this time the ending is soft, personal, romantic:

Would the sun rise in the west,
The moon take over day?
Would we
wake up to pale light
sometimes golden, then silver?
It is so easy to love in the dark.

Archeology explores not reversals of motion, but the inevitable movement of time, reflected in the solid reality of a rock, worn down to a pebble, reflecting not only physical decay, but the loss of a language and a culture,

Yet this rock, this time, this shale,
is entirely of this world
speaking a language
long since gone to pebble.

“Pondering Stones and Their relation to Mathematics” reveals a different movement. This time it begins as a journey into an inner landscape, Miranda’s descent into the unconscious, which transforms her body as well as mind,

Miranda is getting lost,
She’s always had a problem
negotiating space, bumping
into this or that, aware
only at night finding blue
and purple bruises
scattered like islands
over her body.

“What Is,” a poem that echoes Wallace Stevens’ Emperor of Ice Cream, begins with the following conceptually and musically intricate stanza, rich with sibilants that snake through each line,

It is the mystery that snares us
Muddles our senses, then lets go.
It is the dichotomy of parts
That fits despite their shape.
The poem ends with a clever and playful “sense and scent” of dialectical certainty,
Nothing matters
Only the sense of it remains,
The scent of occasion, event,
The reality of seem and that
Is good enough—enough for good.

The next section of the book contains the sonnet sequence, The Ex-Files. These poems deal with Nightingale’s response to the suicide of her ex-husband. Somehow she is able to summon the courage and imagination to create a remarkable series of poems, and transform her personal tragedy into a stunning work, one which explores her husband’s suicide and her marriage in tones varying from ironic, humorous, sad, regretful to often brutally unsentimental. The sonnets total 18, a number symbolically represented by the Hebrew word Chai, which means life. The first poem begins with the wry observation:

I won’t say your death made no sense—
But when a storm knocks out power,
Can openers are for cans, not veins.
It ends with the poignantly surrealistic:
Where are you now, the rushes whisper
And it matters not if the fish have ears.

The next poem opens with the following confessional, a three line summary of the entire marriage:

But I’m the first to admit
It was good when it was good
And when it wasn’t you stank.

The emotional intensity of the previous opening contrasts with the speaker’s subdued speculations of her ex-husband’s daughter and “non-grieving ex-wife” to the news of the suicide. This poem ends with the oddly detached observation:

Funny
how time wraps itself into a stone, then snowballs
downhill, only to crash
into somebody’s previously good day.

Far different is the sad and haunting description of what the sister wants to do with the human remains,

Your sister wanted the rest
Poured in that wine bottle, the one with your name on the label,
But you didn’t fit through the funnel, too large, too large.

The final poem, chai, starts with a restrained analysis of the speaker’s marriage and its poetic implications, but the underlying regret and anger quickly surface,

The Hebrew word for life also means eighteen.
Eighteen years of marriage, eighteen verses.
It would have been twenty-eight last month
if you hadn’t been such a prick, mid life crisis
be damned.

But the speaker, more poet than bereaved ex-wife, ends by describing the literary implications of life and the death of the husband and her marriage.

You would have loved the irony.
All my attention finally focused
on this one last thing, this chai.

Fittingly, the poem ends on the word, chai, the Hebrew word for life, with all its glories and blemishes — affirmed, preserved, and portrayed.

The best poems in this collection are by far those that deal with the emotional complexities of human relationships, and the wide range of feelings that the speaker is brave enough to explore with the reader. An excellent example is Siren Song, where the speaker boldly, incredibly, gives voice to her vagina. The poem is a piercing cry of lust, longing, and desperation, which takes the reader into an underworld of temptation and desire:

Siren Song

Lethal, according to some.
Flora whose very perfume
Causes anaphylactic terrors,
As if the jaws of hell existed
Not beneath the surfaces of the earth
But in women, their secret spaces
Caverns of death and destruction.
Yet the mouth beckons, a bud opening
To reveal the hidden stigma
Pulsating, slick and so much heat,
Blooming nightshade waiting,
Its song of longing louder and louder
Echoing in empty chambers
Waiting, wanting, waiting.

“Yet with Love,” a poem that explores the difficult relationship of the poet with her daughter, reflects the other side of Nightingale’s emotional continuum. It ends with a peace offering, given to a daughter, whose anger and resentment have yet to poison her mother’s love,

Never doubt for a moment
I tasted your sea breeze,
the salt of your anger
bitter on my tongue.
Yet with love,
yet with love, do I offer
this olive of peace.

The opening stanza of “Three Takes on a Wounded Heart,” demonstrates Nightingale’s lyrical power, and elegant fusion of image and feeling. She is the “drab” bird in the mangrove tree, exquisitely sensitive to everything in her surroundings, whose movement spurs her to song,

When the moon is half
and half again,
look for me
by the mangrove tree.
I’m the bird all brown and drab
whose feathers ruffle
at the slightest stir,
singing a song to every cur
who lifts his leg and shuffle on.

Keep singing, Barbra Nightingale, like Thomas Hardy’s darkling thrush, but not “in blast- beruffled plume,” and not only of “blessed Hope,” but of sorrow, suffering, guilt, regret, love, joy, and the many other human feelings that light up the human heart.

ADVENTURES IN THE DESTRUCTION OF CELEBRITY: Ashley Hood on Andrew Foster Altschul’s Lady Lazarus

Lady Lazarus, Andrew Foster Altschul, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Andrew Foster Altschul’s newest novel, Lady Lazarus, is an in-depth look at the destructive forces of too much célèbre, too soon. It smacks of the Cobain family and the demise of its patriarch, of an author acutely aware of his own genius, and of a professor with certain interests that he lectures on over and over, but the first thing one notices about this novel is how exquisitely “English major” it is. Occasionally, overwhelmingly so.

Heavily laden with poetic inferences and nods to the masters (complete with index in the back of said poets and their works), the story is that of Calliope Bird Morath, the genius poet daughter of the dead Brandt Morath, lead singer of Terrible Children, and the surviving Penelope “Penny Power” Morath, former singer of Fuck Finn. Calliope witnessed her father’s suicide at the age of 4, and the story that follows is that of a brilliant poet eventually consumed by her own success and desperate search for her father.

The themes that Altschul sticks with and links throughout the novel include Buddhism, psychotherapy, and academia. Writing in third-person, Altschul also traces his (as the biographer of Calliope) own development as a writer obsessed with finding and writing the “Truth” about Calliope and her stormy existence as a media darling, first because of her father but eventually in her own right. It is also the distinctions between art and reality, celebrity and privacy, that he delves into, showing the reader a criticism of how célèbre consumes the object of its obsession. Of course, he is not immune from those criticisms; as the reader soon discovers, “the author” will go to any length to find out everything he can about Calliope. He spends time with her former therapist, discovering things about himself on the couch that help him in his hunt for Truth. He also spends time at the Mountaintop Zen Center, becoming a student of the tenets he has so long resisted, and with a former Terrible Children band-member.

However brilliant this book may be, it is not a book for the uninitiated in literary criticism and psychoanalysis. This author (meaning me, of course) has an M.A. in English and is therefore familiar with the poetic references as much as with the heavier elements of Lacanian theory, the Real, the idea of the Other…and yet, at times this text is so dense, so bogged in the psychoanalytic, that I would venture to guess the “regular” reader would get lost, perhaps even put the book down. And yet it is in the 2nd half of the text, during the “heavy” conversations and deep searching, that the point fully emerges in a session with Calliope’s therapist, the author comes to this point: “Then what you’re saying is that there is no reality, no Truth, everything is entirely subjective and without authority…[T]hat my attempts, for example, to tell the truth about Calliope are themselves some kind of game. That she, herself, is a mere symbol…” (400) Though the author “reject(s) that, utterly,” this thought seems to be the core of the obsession with this child of tragedy, this girl who becomes a poet in hopes of reaching the father she still, in some way, believes alive.

Calliope is a symbol: a symbol of what happens when a person grows up in the spotlight of a famous parent’s death; a symbol of the lost soul in all of us, searching for approval from the outside world. Altschul is not mocking this tempestuous relationship between the media and its darlings, but making very strong statements about the destructive forces that, though Calliope sought to control them, ultimately led to her final dissolution. His extensive use of footnotes and references throughout to famous poems and people (including Zisek) lend credibility to this novel, making it seem as though Calliope was a real person. This is the point: truth becomes Truth when backed up with credible sources, when it is created. Celebre is concocted in back rooms by people who, perhaps, are searching for something larger than themselves to pin their hopes upon, or to blame when things go wrong. This is a novel of many layers, many of which are simply too deep for the average reader, but for the brazen and initiated amongst us, it is absolutely a novel worth delving into.

CIRCULAR ARGUMENT: Shiaw-Tian Liaw on Allison Benis White’s Self-Portrait with Crayon

Self-Portrait with Crayon, Allison Benis White, Cleveland State University Poetry Center

1. Where the legs should be

Reading White’s first collection of poems, I imagine a sketch of superimposed circles, each circle certainly a circle, but never an exact replicate of the circles previously drawn. Though the larger shape of the book is clear –meditations, through Degas’ art, on the trauma of abandonment by the mother – each poem offers its own distinct circle, its own insufficient but necessary angle into the author’s experiences of her mother’s absence.

The first poem sketches the situation that begins almost playfully but quickly reveals the underlying menace (“From Degas’ Sketchbook”):

The hidden are alone too. I crouched in the closet, between my mother’s skirts and shoes, where the legs should be…People lose their minds and leave in the middle of cooking salmon. I will tell you something quietly: we tried to send her a birthday card, but it was returned, wrong address.

The poems in this collection function as a stand-in for where the mother should have been, stating that “most desire is the opposite of what we have and identical to lack” (Interior or The Rape). Taking Degas’ artwork as a lens in order to “look two ways at once” (The Bellelli Family (detail)), White’s images reverberate and compile in dream logic, never straying far from the artwork. A strand of thought is quickly, and necessarily returned to the artwork and meditation, bringing back with it surprises and new insights.

2. Being touched lightly on the shoulder forever

Even on the first reading, apparent is White’s insistence on the circular. She is obsessed with words like circles, reversed, turning, and mirror. Even the title – self-portrait – refer to a kind of circle, the loop of visions and expressions, seeing and sketching, during which interpretations occur. This motion is most poignant for me in “Seated Dancer, Head in Hands,” where a hand, and its act of touching, stand as the beginning of an extended simile of which White cautions midway:

More than anything, it is turning around to look for what is lost that creates rotation. Such as being touched lightly on the shoulder forever.

Each moment is a completed circle, concrete but ephemeral, and therefore demands that White draw another one. In “Waiting,”

But I’m afraid of black water and the way women ignore each other at restaurant counters (one sips her coffee while the other draws circles on a paper napkin). When a child throws a stone into a lake, God is pleased, and opens in rings, then fades to prompt the child to throw again.

This collection of prose poem composed of fragments and many short sentences insists on a meditative pace without losing its momentum in its circular movements. It is what happens between full stops and the next word that resembles a deep breath as if in preparation for what has to be said next. At the end of “Absinthe” White negotiates her mother’s abandonment without apologies or sentimental pleas for pity:

Sitting on the sidewalk near a ladder, when asked where my mother was, I said she’s dead. Because it was cleaner. Like a ring of lace around her neck, sugar cubes, or hot glass pipe. Because it was worse than the truth. Than anything anyone could ever do to me. Which means I was mine. Like exhaustion from desire, the embrace was white blond.

3. Because I cannot hurt her enough to grow old

The organization of the book in four parts enacts its own kind of cycle. White begins in the first section with an exploration of memory. She seeks in the unreliability of one’s memory the permission for her grieving (Dancers in Blue) –

Their dance is rehearsed before mirrors until grief is perfected.

while keeping constant vigilance of the limits of memory (Dancers with Green Skirts) –

Just as, when one mirror is held up to another, the reflection cannot stop and burrows a tunnel of reflections. It will be difficult to breathe.

The second section, in response, takes the posture of various embraces, whether to prevent forgetting (Interior or The Rape) –

I will not let you sleep follows the pattern of most affection…The circular crease the rubberband leaves in my hair when I take it down every night cannot be brushed out and wholly is the fear of being forgotten.

or as preparation for action (Torso of a Woman) –

But if you think about the hundreds of possible outcomes, it sounds like a truck crashing through the roof. Listening awake, I will hold my body as still as possible. Doing nothing is an action. Prayer is an action.

While the pronouns in the first two sections are distinct and clear in their referent, they are introduced in the third section as muddled, separated at times and conflated at others. In “La Bouderie” describing the relationship between the speaker and her father:

A boy whose father leaves is called the man of the house. Yet what happens to a girl is not the woman but we … Without her is the oldest meaning of us; my father holds my hand when we walk to the store.

It is as if the trauma requires that the speaker and the addressed, who is often the self, be disparate in order to pounce on the subject of the poems. In “Horse with Lowered Head” where the self and the “you”, as self-address, splits and conflates the speaker reveals the insistence of her mother’s absence in her life:

To place your fingers on her back is natural…How careful we must be that she does not choke…It was best to oscillate back and forth until you tipped over slowly…Because I cannot hurt her enough to grow old. Surely we have tipped over by now.

The coda is the calmest of the four, which moves towards resolution without losing the dream magic of the collection. It is as if White is waking slowly, following the thread of a dream to a place of waking. There is healing (The Ironer) –

Her arms flush above the patience of steam and the collar heals visibly.

and firm conviction that what has stood in place of her mother is only as such:

Back to your own mind and the blank look of the curtain half-lowered and re velvet…And when she is gone, only the backs of their heads who stand and applaud into the absence of movement. Nothing else will ever happen. (Curtainfall)

And across the room, white roses climb the wallpaper. And a portrait of a woman in a red dress, who sat down in a red chair, who held very still. (Melancholy)

The ferocity of the circles, the loops of infinite reflections, sketches a deep-breathed exploration of the subject matter. It seems fitting to end with another image of the kind of transposition White enacts in her poems. From “Self-Portrait–Red Chalk on Laid Paper”:

Periodically pressed to the cut and pulled back to check, the blood on the towel widened, like paper folded in half over paint and opened, as if to say the rest is fascination.