m. nourbeSe philip, _Zong! As told to the author by Setaey Adamu Boateng_

 THE HISTORY BEHIND this book-length poem: navigation went so badly awry on the Zong, a slavery ship, part of the triangular Africa-America-England trade in the 18th century, that the captain of the Zong decided the only way to make a profit on the voyage was to drown the captive Africans on board and collect the insurance money. Under the circumstances, the insurers did not want to pay, leading to the court case Gregson v. Gilbert, the conclusions of which are included as an appendix to the poem.

It's a story with a lot of resonance, obviously. It highlights not only a fatal flaw in human relations--the ease with which we can see the Other as a means to an end, an object, even a commodity--and a fatal flaw in capitalism--its tendency to put profit above all other priorities.

philip does not present the story in a direct, straightforward way, however. To a large extent, the reader has to already know the story before he or she can discern it in the poem. The poem relies on strategies that reminded me of Gertrude Stein, H.D., Pound, Zukofsky, Charles Olson--disjunction, fragmentation, parataxis--and thus demands a high degree of readerly engagement. This is most marked in the section titled "Ferrum," from which the following is taken:

 [...] circe how                                          ls des

                           troys a riot                                       a circ

                  us of mur                        der she who cre

ates & des              troy s is no mo                              re give us this

                  day our ne                       groes our profits

The reader has to slow down and concentrate a little to see "circe howls / destroys a riot / a circus of murder / she who creates & destroys is no more / give us this day our negroes our profits."

Not a quick read, then, but you can see what philip is getting at: this is a story that immediately tried  to occlude itself, did not want to be known, that scarcely knows how to be  told...so the poem is almost unreadable, but not quite, not really...the truth is right there under the surface if you keep looking, although part of you does not want to look.

I read the new (well, 2023) fifteenth anniversary edition of the poem, which includes new essays by Katherine McKittrick and Saidiya Hartman as well as a new foreword by philip herself, much of which is about how the work has been performed (excerpts of some performances can be found on YouTube).

Robert Fernandez, _Wild Child_

WILD CHILD IS another more recent chapbook by Robert Fernandez, this one published by Illicit Zines, which is part of Blush (https://www.blush-lit.com/illicit-zines). 

The five poems on these thirty pages are the typeset-and-printed versions of poems also found at Fernandez's website The Chimeras (https://www.the-chimeras.com/) in their original form, "poems composed using nontraditional media and supports," e.g., poems written in (I am guessing) chalk, crayon, or felt tip marker on cloth, or fluorescent light tubes, or silver balloons. The site is worth a visit whether or not you pick up the chapbook.

Is the chapbook worth picking up? Lord, yes. I read the poems without knowing they came from a project in a liminal zone between poetry and visual art, and they amazed me. "Natasha" has a kind of narrative arc to it, like a shattered reflection of some long ago episode. "Antigone" adds a dimension to Fernandez's ongoing fascination with Sophocles' tragedy. "Neck Braces" and "Book of Black Cigars" feel like action paintings turned into poems. "Winter Dreams," a riot of bubblegum colors in its original form, is Fernandez in his relentless mode: "LSD / RIMBAUD / BLOOD". 

This is the first Illicit Zine I have looked at, but it seems like a worthwhile operation. And it's always good to have more Fernandez.

Robert Fernandez, _Las Moradas_

 IN MY OPINION, Robert Fernandez is one of the best poets now writing in the United States. It has been a while since his last book came out, so it is a fine thing to have this chapbook from Arrow As Aarow. 

Las Moradas ("the dwellings") is twenty-three poems "excerpted from The Living," as explained in an endnote. I've read it three times, each time more convinced that the "I" of the poems represents a unified character or perspective and the poems cohere, but until the whole of The Living appears, that will have to stand as simply my best guess.

The poems present us often with an "I," but rarely with a he, she, or they. A "sunflower man" appears, and a "master," and "the lyricists / along the river bank / playing soccer," but we mainly have a single person in the middle of a singularly intense passage. There is an important "you" in the fourth poem, and that "you" may be part of the "we" sometimes named. By and large, though, we are connected to an individual consciousness.

That consciousness is vibrantly attentive, marked by both desire and wariness. There are quite a few animals (a tiger, a wolf, vultures), and there is blood. There may be rituals or ceremonies--

(the soap-

stone sucks up the

splashing blood that resists

Brazil-wood bowls

as much as it can)

--and we may have the molecules of a sort of bildungsroman, as the speaker seems to in a period of new challenges and new dangers in the territory he (or she--"moradas" brings to mind Teresa of Avila) is exploring. We get hints that the passage will prove transformative:

it is the first gnosis

fist host been but eye can see

it is the chapter of hammers

of froms

of planes

And in the final poem, we even get a sense of arrival:

& for a moment 

there was a world

 

there was a world

& silos still-

ly in the distance

I don't know why I think those silos mean we got the harvest in, the granaries are full, we got past the hammers, and we are going to be okay. But that is what I think. 

I'll have to wait for The Living to see how good my guess is. In the meantime, Las Moradas is definitely worth seeking out.  Thank you, Arrow As Aarow.

John Philip Newell, _The Great Search: Turning to Earth and Soul in the Quest for Healing and Home_

JOHN PHILIP NEWELL is a former clergyman in the Church of Scotland (he "let go" of his ordination a while ago, as he says in his introduction), and the search named in his title is for a spiritual movement that can provide the wisdom, energy, and inspiration needed to act on climate change.

As he mentions at points throughout the book, a lot of traditional Christian teaching will not be helpful toward this end: the doctrine of original sin and fussing about the ontological status of Jesus of Nazareth, for instance. Insisting on the duality of spirit and matter will cause problems as well; one of his chief recurring ideas is that he need to think of the Earth and the natural world as being as ensouled as we are. The Golden Rule should extend not just to our human neighbors, but to our animal and plant neighbors as well, the whole of the environment.

Most of the book is devoted to discussions of nine figures from several traditions whose ideas could contribute to the Earth-focused spiritual movement: Thomas Berry, Nan Shepherd, Martin  Buber, Carl Jung, Julian of Norwich, Jalaluddin Rumi, Rabindranath Tagore, Etty Hillesum, and Edwin Muir. The friend who lent me  this book likely had in mind my attachment to Julian, and what Newell says about her resonated with me. All nine chapters were illuminating, especially those devoted to people I knew little about (Hillesum, Muir, Berry, Shepherd).

One surprise: American indigeneous spirituality seems obviously well-suited to Newell's search, but he does not mention it. As much as he gets around--he mentions being at Ghost Ranch, New Mexico--he surely knows about it...but not a word. I hope someone hands him a copy of Jerome Rothenberg;'s anthology Technicians of the Sacred soon, and that he writes about it.

David Foster Wallace, _Both Flesh and Not_

BOTH FLESH AND Not collects essays, articles, and reviews by Wallace that did not appear in either of his essay collections, A Supposedly Fun Thing I Will Never Do Again (1997) and Consider the Lobster (2005). I bought it in December of 2012, not long after it came out, but I have put off reading it for (brief pause for arithmetic) almost fourteen years because even though I knew I would enjoy it, I also knew it would sadden me to know that this is it, there’s no more.  That’s exactly what happened.

The title essay, which comes first in the book, may be the best thing in it. It originally appeared in the New York Times Magazine, where it was titled “Federer as Religious Experience,” and it describes the unique and astonishing prowess of the tennis player Roger Federer. I know almost nothing about tennis and never watched Federer play, but the essay was such a bravura display of Wallace’s characteristic virtues as a writer—patient and conscientious explanation of fine points, mastery of infinite shades of tone, verbal ingenuity, and the eerie sense that he is talking just to you—that my ignorance of tennis proved no obstacle to deep relishing of the essay.

Also excellent are Wallace’s review of Peter Johnson’s The Best of the Prose Poem and his introduction to the 2007 edition of The Best American Essays (which Wallace edited). Both take original and inventive approaches, but their dazzle is not strictly for dazzle’s sake, as it only makes clearer Wallace’s love of the possibilities of writing.

“Rhetoric and the Math Melodrama” is good to have, too. Like Everything and More, it highlights Wallace’s lonely eminence as a great American writer who was also a math nerd.

Some of the pieces from the 1990s have not aged as well. Wallace’s review of David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Daughter is a welcome tribute to that excellent book, but seems over-lengthy at almost fifty pages.

But it’s all good to have. After all, there will be no more.

Michael Clune, _Pan_

 PAN IS CLUNE'S sixth book and his first novel; it is also, as it happens, the first book of his I have read. I had heard his memoir White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin (2013) was good, but I tend to avoid drug memoirs. I probably would not have picked this one up had it not gotten adulatory blurbs from Ben Lerner, Maggie Nelson, Blake Butler, and Tao Lin, all writers I read with great delight. So I did pick it up, and a few pages in was thinking, "Is this as good as I think it is?" By the time I finished, I thought it was a masterpiece. 

Our narrator and main character is Nicholas, or Nick, a high schooler in Libertyville, Illinois (a relatively remote suburb of Chicago) in what seems to be the early 1990s (Nick listens to CDs, goes on the internet, and has a Guns 'n' Roses t-shirt). He lives with his divorced father, having proven too much to handle for his mother. Early in the book, he starts having panic attacks. He confides in Sarah, a girl he likes, after they bond over Boston's "More Than a Feeling," and she joins in his search for answers about his attacks. Sarah comes up with the hypothesis that Nicholas is occasionally possessed by the god Pan.

This supposition gives Nick entrée into a group of kids, some a little older, that Sarah knows. Led by college student Ian, the group meets a little outside of town in the Barn--a disused barn repurposed and re-decorated to serve as a place to take drugs and listen to music. Ian takes a particular interest in Nick's case, and the history of that interest gives us our plot.

What did I particularly like here? 

One, Clune gets the Midwest as hardly any other recent writer of comparable skill has. David Foster Wallace got the Midwest in The Pale King, I'd say, but I can't think of anyone else who quite conveys that reverberant emptiness, that featurelessness that becomes a feature.

Two, Clune conveys that sense of burgeoning selfhood when one is fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, and riding a surge of self-stuff that has no particular shape at all, but seems able, for a few hours at a time, to take any shape that anyone, friend or foe, suggests. Tell me who I am, the burgeoning selfhood asks the world. And the world has an infinity of answers, any one of which can take us over completely and then abruptly vanish.

Three, the climactic epiphany, which has to do with the flight of a fly and what we might see if we could see time as we do space, feels like a real epiphany.

In the acknowledgements at the book's close, Clune writes: "Dave, T. , S., L.: je n'ai pas oublié." (Actually, in my copy the accent aigu on "oublié" was missing, but I assume it is supposed to be there.) That Clune wants certain folks to know he has not forgotten inclines me to think that the Barn has some kind of analogue in his own background. He would have been in high school circa 1990-93. Maybe someday we will know. But Pan is a masterpiece in any case.

Joanna Klink, _Days and Chances_ (3)

 SEVERAL POEMS TOWARDS the end of the collection speak to the final illness and death of Klink's father. She had written about his illness before in The Nightfields, and very movingly, but these newer poems seem to me even more remarkable in their honesty and their willingness to think about death. 

Klink's love for her father is well to the fore, understandably, particularly in "Sand Woods," but these poems step beyond simple elegy into a kind of reckoning. She does not deal in any of the more familiar kinds of consolation or comfort, but there is in them a kind of peace or reconciliation that feels real.

I should quote something at this point, I guess. "Inner Vase" seems to be working with the idea of the body as a vessel--a classic trope if there ever was one--and the idea that, when all is said and done, what is inside the vessel is actually the same as what is outside the vessel. It ends with these lines:

          Who was I

then but the space that had

always been around me, never

not touched, the end, was it?

of my distinction, having

worked so hard to separate

myself, to distill, for decades, 

who I was, vessel, given

in in reverent surrender,

thinking always of the world

that let me stay this

long, the branch of 

air I become that is the room's

air, and the meadow's.

I'm not sure whether the poem is meant to be in her father's voice or is just imagining how the letting go of death might feel, but it sounds true to me.