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.

Joanna Klink, _Days and Chances_ (2)

 KLINK'S ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS INCLUDE thanks to Jorie Graham and Peter Sacks, which got my attention because Klink's poems often reminded me, very generally, of Graham's. I may not have noticed this had I not been reading a lot of Graham recently, because there is no very close resemblance in voice or tone, but it did occur to me that both Graham's and Klink's poems tend to be situated outdoors and to render a fine-grained, multi-sensory inventory of a chosen outdoors moment. 

Nothing all that surprising about this, I suppose, since it has been going on since Wordsworth (at least), but there is a particular heightening or intensity in the poetry of Graham and Klink. It's a little as though psychotropic pharmaceuticals were involved, although I imagine that Graham's and Klink just have more amplitude in their sensoria than I do. Nothing in the great blooming, buzzing confusion is lost on them.

Even in the sequence "Rothko Chapel," about an indoors space, Klink places us outdoors.

We are stone changed by light.
We brood against walls of
violet, see by feeling, moving
our eyes into the black silk 
surround. We hold 
still like flames. Bored through
by dusk, skeletons of dusk
watching the tides' silver shadows
blow out across  the lawn.
We pass like the day through
clouds--watching cargo
cross cold water, a blurred
phosphorescence flowing beneath
ice.

I'm not sure whether we are in an actual outdoors here or an "outdoors" conjured up by Rothko's paintings,  but whichever it is, we are immersed in it, and there is no clean separation between it and us. We and it make a whole--not exactly an "everything fits together" whole, not a "no loose ends" whole, but an inseparability, an evaporation of boundaries.

"Called" is a good example.

     [...] the rising 
scale of that bird I cannot 
see, burst of burbling
gold from the tree where
walking I heard voices not
mine, glowing dust in my
lungs, past orchards and
the stone wall. Here I
can unfold, in such
relief, diaphanous as the
spaces left by those branches
in the old orchard, burnt
sticks, emptied of who I 
was [...]

"Phenomenological" is the word that comes to mind. "Descriptive" won't do, because we get not just a picture, not just a scene, but the mutual near-dissolution of the perceiving subject in the perceived surroundings and of the perceived surroundings in the perceiving subject. One of my favorite Graham poems, "Emergency," does this, and Cole Swenson might be cited as an example too. I wish Charles Taylor's Cosmic Connections had taken up these poets.

Yongsoo Park, _Boygenius_

 I HAVE NOT been able to find out whether the title of this novel inspired the name of the group formed by Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus, and Julien Baker. No such rumors are afloat on the internet, I can attest. Even so, it seems at least possible that at least one of them might have picked up on this novel, a cult favorite in some quarters. 

Boygenius was published in 2002 by Akashic Press, and it is still in print, which is no small accomplishment. It struck me as a revision and updating of Candide. 

Narrator and main character Boy Genius was born in South Korea in the middle 1960s (I would guess) and became a national hero with his own TV show after getting the nation's highest score on an intelligence test.  His fame and privileges (which include occasional meetings with President Park Chung Hee) are abruptly yanked from him, without explanation, after an attempted assassination of President Park. 

Shunned and disgraced, he and his parents choose to emigrate, arriving in a city that is like New York City in every respect save that it is named Bogota. After a rebellious period, some of which he spends with a gang of talking dogs, he decides to go straight, finish school, and make it big. This leads to extended time in (southern) California and a total makeover in which he becomes a handsome Euro-American. He marries another Korean emigré who has similarly become a beautiful Euro-American.

Memory of the wrongs done to him and his parents will not leave him alone, though, and he embarks on a mission of vengeance, ending in...well, I'm not sure. I think he ends up in heaven, though.

Like Candide, Boy Genius in his youth is loaded up with a wobbly bundle of assumptions and expectations that go disastrously wrong for him, after which he acquires a new set of assumptions and expectations which also eventually backfire, and so on. People take advantage of his naïvete or do their best to help him out, and neither he nor the reader quite know whom to trust. As in Voltaire's tale, the structure is picaresque, a series of episodes taking Boygenius all over the world, the mode satiric, in that what Boygenius learns is that no institution or authority should be trusted. We arrive at an expectedly happy ending though, Candide in his garden, Boy Genius in paradise. If that's where he is.

(By the way, there is a very insightful 2004 blog post about the novel's relationship to Candide from a writer who goes by "Mumpsimus.")

Solvej Balle, _On the Calculation of Volume II_, trans. Barbara Haveland

 IN VOLUME ONE, Tara Selter was preoccupied with how to break the spell and get out of November 18 and into November 19. When Volume Two opens, she has been in November 18 for over a year--that is, she has had more than 365 November Eighteenths--and she seems to have decided that for the time being she will just have to reconcile herself to being in November 18 indefinitely. If she is well and truly stuck on this day, how can she make the best of it?

She makes a kind of farewell visit to her family, explaining to them daily, as she did to her husband Thomas in Volume One, why she is popping in so suddenly on November 18. Then she simply starts moving around Europe. It occurs to her that she can create a kind of "year" of her own by traveling to a place with a wintry November 18, then a while later to a place with a springlike November 18, and so on. This creates a focus for her for a while, but eventually the tactic ceases to satisfy her, and she hits a Slough of Despond.

In her lower moments, Tara reminded me of a Clarice Lispector narrator: minutely attentive, self-aware, articulate, but at a profound loss for how to account for her own circumstances.

Tara settles into Düsseldorf. November 18 was a pleasant day there, she won't be bumping into anyone she knows, she finds comfortable accommodations, and there is lots to do: attending university lectures, for example, and studying up on the history of Rome. And then, after more than another couple of years have passed, she meets someone else who is stuck in November 18. I expect an interesting development is in store in Volume Three.

It's not suspense that keeps one reading On the Calculation of Volume, though, but the voice Balle has conjured for Tara and the resourcefulness and resilience Tara has to keep finding in herself.

Alan Hollinghurst, "It's queer how I'm lonely"; Edmund Wilson, "A Revival of Ronald Firbank"; Evelyn Waugh, "Ronald Firbank"

EMILY WILSON'S SMACKDOWN of Christopher Nolan's film adaptation of the Odyssey no doubt got more attention than anything else in the August 13 issue of the London Review of Books, but the real keeper in that issue,  the real gem, the real prize, was almost 8,653 words from Alan Hollinghurst on Ronald Firbank. 

Hollinghurst is one of the great British novelists of his generation, I am convinced. His recurring theme is English queer culture in the 20th and 21st centuries. His first novel, The Swimming-Pool Library, could serve as a history of that culture from Wilde to the advent of AIDS, as The Stranger's Child could for the period from World War I to Tony Blair. The Line of Beauty and The Sparsholt Affair cover shorter time frames but are likewise vivid historical portraits.

I should emphasize that I do no mean that Hollinghurst is a chronicler, or produces elephantine historical novels like those of Edward Rutherford or James Michener. He is, I suppose, a historical novelist, but one more like Anthony Powell or Proust--sharp, observant, writers of graceful and assured prose.

Novelist Ronald Firbank is a kind of icon in English queer culture because his novels (which appeared in the teens and twenties of the 20th century), while far from realistic, capture something of the queer sensibility of their time. It's hard to say what that something is. The novels are campy, but not simply that; they have a gravitas even while seeming to float free of reality. The effect is hard to describe, but Hollinghurst comes closer to explaining it than anyone else I know of has.

That "anyone else" includes such distinguished writers as Edmund Wilson and Evelyn Waugh. Wilson and Waugh, as it happens, are the ones who got me reading Firbank forty-five years ago or so. They too tried to get at what makes Firbank's novels much more than period pieces, and I appreciated Hollinghurst giving both of them a shout-out. I would say, even so, that his is now the go-to short piece on Firbank. As Wilson and Waugh got me once to read Firbank, I suspect Hollinghurst will get me to re-read him.

Joanna Klink, _Days and Chances_ (1)

 I HAVE BEEN reading Joanna Klink since her second collection, Circadian (2007).  Around 2008, she gave a reading on the campus where I taught. I remember telling her how much I appreciated Circadian and mentioning that I wanted to read her first book, They Are Sleeping. “It’s not very good,” she said. I think that’s the only time a poet ever steered me away from one of their own books. (By the way, the book was good, although perhaps not as good as Circadian.)

I read her subsequent books—Raptus (2010), Excerpts from a Secret Prophecy (2015), and The Nightfields (2020)—and they were consistently excellent (I reviewed Excerpts somewhere about ten years ago).

Even so, the people I know who would recognize the name “Joanna Klink” I could count on one hand…and I know lots of bookish people. Writing as well as she has for as long as she has should, one would think, attract measurable general attention. She has gotten some kinds of recognition: a job at a prestigious institution (Michener Center at University of Texas Austin) and a major publisher (Penguin). No Pulitzer or National Book Award, though (I hope that changes soon), and a profile a good bit lower than those of (say) Mary Oliver or Patricia Lockwood or Ocean Vuong.

I bring this up because whenever I read someone’s article on poetry’s declining prominence, on its loss of cultural centrality, or its diminishing audience, or (fill in the pessimistic blank), the assumption always floats up that poetry has been its own worst enemy, it isn’t addressing our main concerns, it’s become too hermetic…that sort of thing.

But after reading Richard Siken’s last book, then picking up this, I’m thinking…why would anyone say there’s a lack of good, strong poetry now? It’s abundant! There is so much of it! 

Why do so few people know this?