Szilárd Borbély, _Berlin - Hamlet_, trans. Ottilie Mulzet

 A HUNGARIAN WRITER who died by suicide in 2014 at the age of 50, Borbély wrote plays and a novel as well as poetry. This particular collection is extraordinarily cohesive, centered on Berlin as it might have impressed the sensibilities of (1) a Walter-Benjamin-like flâneur, (2) Franz Kafka during his prolonged and tricky engagement to Felice Bauer, and (3) Hamlet. 

All three are intellectual, supersensitive, a little edgy, under a lot of pressure, and on a slightly different wavelength from most people. Two of them are Jewish, as Borbély might have been, which adds a few quanta of anxiety to being in Berlin.

The overall mood of the book is wintry, overcast, bleak, no one here gets out of alive. It's very good, but it's not, you know, heartwarming. 

I was reading this about a month ago while on a vacation with a group of old friends. Several of them came upon me one morning in a lovely screened-in porch; they were returning from a walk. What are you reading? A Hungarian poet. Oh, read us one of his poems! 

I realized immediately that there was not a single poem in the book quite suitable for reading to a group of not-exactly-literary friends on a lovely spring morning. On, the other hand, declining to read a poem would have seemed churlish, or so I thought. I didn't feel I could say no. I did say, "these aren't happy poems," but that did not get me off the hook. I went with "Wannsee," in which the flâneur visits the place where the Wannsee Conference was held--that is, where the Nazis laid plans for the Final Solution--thinking that having a historical reference point would work better than trying to explain Hamlet or Kafka's engagement. I read the poem. It cast a pall. 

Well...they asked. They probably won't ask next time. 

I need to memorize a Mary Oliver poem or two just to have something ready for such occasions.

Mark Lilla, _Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know_

 I BECAME AN admirer of Mark Lilla mainly through his work as an intellectual historian: The Reckless Mind, The Stillborn God, The Shipwrecked Mind. All three touched on matters of contemporary relevance, certainly, but mainly through a kind of excavation of the ideas of influential thinkers. His previous book, though, was more explicitly an intervention in debates of the moment; The Once and Future Liberal made the argument that liberals and/or Democrats would improve their electoral chances by placing less emphasis on identity-related issues. He had a point, maybe, but one more white guy arguing that we should put identity issues on the back burner mainly just pissed everyone off. 

Ignorance and Bliss splits the difference, we could say. It's about the don't-know-and-don't-want-to-know stance that underlies our current impasse of polarization. No one wants to have a calm, give-and-take discussion about Trump and MAGAism. You're either passionately behind him or passionately opposed, and whichever side you are on, you are not about to change your mind. Thus Ignorance and Bliss is about an important contemporary political phenomenon. It approaches the phenomenon, though, with an historical array of illustrations, many drawn from the Bible and classical literature, but with additional insights from Freud, Kafka, Hobbes, Locke, Pascal, Ibsen, and quite a few more.

Lilla generally adopts the sensible (and liberal, I'd say) position that yes, one ought to seek to know the truth, with all that implies about freedom of speech and the press, open debate, objective investigation. But he certainly understands why it might not always be best to insist (he makes some interesting points about Ibsen's The Wild Duck). 

He frames the book with discussions of Plato's famous Allegory of the Cave. Might one leave the cave and find the blinding illumination of broad daylight a little...oppressive? Intense? Or just uncomfortable? Might we want to go back into the cave, to the familiarity of those dancing shadows, and just hang out? "Think very hard before answering that question," he concludes. It's worth thinking hard about.

Louise Erdrich, _The Sentence_

 MANY INGREDIENTS HERE. The main one is a ghost story. The narrator, who works in a bookstore, thinks she is being haunted. I'm not sure whether we, the readers, are supposed to accept the haunting as actual or to see the narrator as under a compelling delusion. A bit like James's Turn of the Screw, let's say. I (and some of the narrator's fellow employees) think the haunting is real, but several members of my book club thought the narrator (who has had a difficult past, serving time for a crime she was set up for by "friends") was having an episode.

We also have some nice workplace comedy. Erdrich owns a bookstore in the Twin Cities (a very nice one, Birchbark Books) and the depiction of bookstore culture is lovely. It got me thinking that someone should set a sitcom in a bookstore--I guess they tried that with Ellen, and it didn't quite take off, but the idea still appeals to me.

Then there is the time setting. Twin Cities, All Souls Day 2019 to All Souls Day 2020--which means we get COVID and the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent protests. 

On top of all that, the narrator, Tookie, is indigenous, and the ghost, Flora, is a particularly annoying instance of a Euro-Anglo-American becoming obsessed with a romanticized idea of indigenous cultures, so the haunting is wrapped up in the issue of cultural appropriation. (The title refers to a sentence in a unique book Flora has appropriated, the reading of which was so shocking to her self-conception as practically indigenous herself that it killed her.)

I like Louise Erdrich, but there may be too many eggs in this pudding. It's a swift read, though, and the book club liked it.

Ocean Vuong, _On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous_

 IT TOOK ME longer than I expected to get around to this autobiographical novel by the author of the poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds (which I thought well of), but I finally did, and yep, it's good.

It reminded me somewhat of Edward Dahlberg's Because I Was Flesh, another memorable account of a son's growing up with a working mother (barbershop in Because I Was Flesh, nail salon in On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous) and an absent father. Little Dog (Vuong's narrator) emphasizes the tightness of the bond by addressing his mother as "you" throughout.

We don't find out exactly what circumstances led to Little Dog and his mother to leave Vietnam--something went wrong somehow--but his grandfather's being a U. S. citizen and a Vietnam War veteran makes it possible to relocate in Connecticut. Little Dog contributes to the family income by (illegally) working on a tobacco farm (they grow tobacco in Connecticut, surprising but true).

And that is where Little Dog meets Trevor and the novel turns into a gay coming-of-age story. Trevor comes from a very laissez-faire working class family and is already familiar with opioids. Their backgrounds, obviously, are quite different, but they become close friends and then lovers. The circumstances are not idyllic--they are exploited child labor, after all--but there is sweetness in this part of the story.

As in any coming of age story, though, childhood and adolescence end. Little Dog has a chance to go to college and takes it. Trevor is not going anywhere. 

But Little Dog knows about getting out in  time--as, we are reminded in  the closing pages, his mother did.

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _To 2040_ (2)

 ALL BUT ONE of the poems in To 2040 is either a "rivulet" poem (my own coinage for Graham's poems in very short lines of just a few words, grouped as quatrains, justified on the left) or a justified-on-the-right poem, with greater variety in the length of the lines. Both forms were repeatedly used in Runaway, but now they account for almost the whole collection (eleven "rivulets," nine justified-right). 

Several poems in Runaway were in long-lined quatrains, and there is exactly one poem following that form here: the title poem, "To 2040." Does that mean it was written earlier than most of the others? 

I read the book first in January 2024, not that long ago, but reading it after re-reading its predecessors involved noticing different things and asking different questions. For one thing, I kept trying to discern a pattern to the justified-left and justified-right poems. (Give me a difference, and like many of us I will attempt to attach meaning to it.)

Are the left-justified poems more lyrical, the right-justified more discursive? This works up to a point, as the left-justified ones are swifter, more focused, more colloquial, "sing" more. The right-justified ones tend to looser movement, more detail, more connections, arguing with themselves. No sooner did I construct this pattern, though, than it deconstructed itself. Lyrical moments aplenty in the right-justified poems, plenty of position-taking in the left-justified. The lyrical/discursive difference often holds, but not always.

To 2040 seems set in some near post-collapse future. When two of the left-justified poems ("They Ask Me" and "Dusk in Drought") seemed to be about the disappearance of actual birds and their replacement by mechanical simulations, I wonder if left-justified = future, right-justified = now. But in the right-justified "Fog" we read, "I remember / what it was like  to make coffee in the / mornings. I remember mornings." That would have to be set in a future in which we have lost access to coffee beans, no? And the left-justified "Why" seems set now. So I'm not sure. 

Part of the book's balance of an anxious present and a terrible near-future may imply, though, that it's later than we think, that the future is already here in ways we haven't learned to notice. So any "now" poem could be about the future, any "future" poem would remember now. Draw no hard lines. 

There are moments when hope breaks through. "Why," in which granddaughter Sam touches a bud. The cicadas of "Dawn 2040." The earth healing itself in "Then the Rain." 

Okay. I feel as ready as I could possibly be for Killing Spree.

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _To 2040_ (1)

JORIE GRAHAM ON Copper Canyon? Did not see that one coming. I associate Copper Canyon with poets like Hayden Carruth, David Lee, Marvin Bell, and [clears throat] James Galvin—that is to say, poets older than and not all that much like Graham—and Ecco (or Harper Collins) seemed to have a handle on what Graham wanted (wider than usual pages, Bulmer font), so what happened? Presumably these questions will be answered when the definitive Graham bio comes out, if I live that long, and people keep writing poets’ biographies.

I did notice on re-reading Runaway that the pages are already getting a little brown at the edges even though my copy is only six years old. Cheap paper, obviously. The pages of To 2040 are still bleach white. Yes, my copy is only three years old, but Copper Canyon obviously used better paper.

No dust jacket, though. Tsk.

Copper Canyon also said yes to the generous page dimensions Graham has preferred starting with Never and to using the services of designer Erica Mena, who also worked on the Graham collections Fast and Runaway. (This is not the Erica Mena who is a model and actress, by the way. It looks like Erica Mena the designer now goes by E. Rowan Mena.) 

In her acknowledgments, Graham thanks “the whole crew at Copper Canyon Press […] as we start down this new path together,” but the path has apparently come to an early end, as the new Graham book to appear in May will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

So what happened? I may never know. I hope FSG goes with really good paper. 

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _Runaway_ (2)

 SOME FORMAL DEVELOPMENTS are going on in Runaway. The right-margin-justification form that Graham used for “Mother’s Hands Drawing Me,” the final poem in Fast, is used again in several poems, some of which seem crucial to the architecture of the book: “[To] the Last [Be] Human,” “Prayer Found Under Floorboard,” “Scarcely There.”

It occurred to me that this form would be tricky if one were writing a first draft by hand, as you have to guess how much space the line’s letters would need before you started writing it. In a word-processing program, however, nothing tricky at all, just hit a couple of buttons. Does this mean Graham composes directly into a word-processing program? I suppose a lot of poets do these days.

The poems with classically Grahamian long lines tend to be arranged in quatrains, giving them a seeming regularity that turns out to be only superficial, because within those very stately-looking four-line arrangements we have that old Grahamian cataract going wherever it wants to go.

The new departure is what I am going to call the “rivulet” poem, with (for Graham) startlingly short lines, one, two, three words long, dropping vertically straight down the page. There are just four “rivulets,” but they include the title poem, “Runaway,” and the collection’s last three poems, inclining one to think that Graham has come up with something new that she is keen to explore. And explore it she did in To 2040.

Besides "Runaway," the rivulet poems are "In the Nest ®," "The Wake off the Ferry" and "Poem." 

"In the Nest®" is in the dystopian vein that widened in To 2040, the "Nest" being a collective name for some of Google's "smart products." Amid the anxiety over surveillance are some poignant lines addressed to "Mother": "Mother. See us. / Mother it's / a strange new // winter here."

"The Wake off the Ferry" and "Poem" combine Graham's penchant for longer sentences with the drops-like-a-plumb-line verticality of the "rivulet" poems, and the combination...definitely...does something. Damned if I can say what. But the rhythm feels very different, somehow, more headlong, more we-are-getting-somewhere-before-we-are-ready-to-be-there. Something urgent, insistent. The poem is about a couple on a ferryboat, looking at its wake, and addresses the problem that we are always already not the persons we think of ourselves as being. Short but packs a punch.

"Poem" could be a key note for eco-Graham: "The earth said / remember me."

"Runaway" deserves  to be the title poem. The long sentences in very short lines creates that urgency again, that feeling that like Alice we are not keeping up with ourselves, combined here with the crisis of our own technology rapidly consuming our substance and likely to consume a lot more of it before we get around to applying the brakes. 

Runaway makes a terrific introduction to To 2040. Or To 2040 makes a terrific sequel to Runaway. Take your pick.