Catherine Barnett, _Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced_

HAVING READ BARNETT’S other collections, I decided to go back and read the first, first published in 2004. My copy looks to be from the fourth printing, which is doing better than okay, I would say.

Barnett’s hallmarks are already present here in her first book; the poems are lucid and subtle, take short but striking lyric flights, and feel honest.

A good many of the poems in the first part of the book seem to be about the death of two nieces in a terrible plane crash. A few minutes of internet search suggest to me that the nieces may have been on Alaska Airlines flight 261, which fell into the Pacific after “a catastrophic loss of pitch control,” according to Wikipedia.

As in Barnett's other collections, we get some good poems about her son, who at this point seems to have been in the toddler/pre-schooler era. 

Barnett’s poems don’t dazzle, I would say, but one can keep coming back to them and they are just as good as one remembers them.

Jorie Graham, _Killing Spree_ (3)

SINCE PART OF the failure is not saying the right words at the right time, implicated in that failure is poetry itself. Opening poem “The World” ends:

[…] the words even

the right words

 

cannot be un-

 

furled from breath from

mind oh

memory no cannot be

dug up dug up from

 

this buried world.     (5)

Even for one with Graham’s astonishing command of language, words seem to have lost their power in “You Shall Not Speak”:

[…] I don’t know

if there’s anything left now in

my heart. It is so 

 

dry. I must 

scour it with 

words. They must bring 

moisture 

 

back. As they rise up in me 

they almost touch 

my fingertips & then 

they flee onto this 

 

page, they leave bits of 

themselves, right here, this trace, these skins…. 

Once they rivered everywhere—    (42-43)

She has a voice, and feels the imperative “to / sing instead—sing!—and the right / song the surprising one full of / forgiveness good- / natured among the many / shrieks” (53). But in the very next poem she asks, “Who am I kidding” (56). At moments poetry seems capable of making a difference: “I clench my hand around / this pen. / I staunch the current” (64). More often, it fails:

Are you almost done I hear myself say,

but when I throw my words onto the scales

nothing moves.  (32)

 

     What feels like the failure of poetry in Killing Spree might be more narrowly described as the failure of a high modernist project belatedly undertaken. Yeats, Eliot, Pound, and the Auden of the 1930s attempted to address the entirety of the cultures in which they lived about the questions of greatest moment for their time, drawing on the more serious intellectual currents then in circulation and working in the more advanced frontiers of their form. Similar ambitions animated many of modernism’s immediate inheritors: Charles Olson, Louis Zukofsky, Robert Duncan, Robert Lowell, Delmore Schwartz—naming Schwartz, however, may suggest how foredoomed such ambitions are. Historically, these or like ambitions lie behind great poems not only of the visionary prophet tradition, like those of Milton, Blake, and Whitman, but also poetic monuments like Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Pope’s Essay on Man, Wordsworth’s Prelude, and Tennyson’s In Memoriam. For the modernists, though, such undertakings faced seemingly impossible odds. Their culture had become too various and incoherent—an “immense panorama of futility and anarchy” as Eliot memorably put it in “‘Ulysses’, Order, and Myth” (Kermode Selected 177)—for any poem or poet to address, organize, and interpret the whole of it. The political positions their cultural commitments led them to take seemed suspect (and, in Pound’s case, literally criminal). The project asked too much.

     Poets understandably moved away from it. Poets born after 1980, the year Graham’s first book appeared, look less towards the example of the high modernists than towards those of Elizabeth Bishop, Jack Spicer, Frank O’Hara, and John Ashbery, all of whom certainly had ambitions, but less grandiose, less delusional ones. They were, arguably, more modest, more honest, and clearer-eyed about poetry’s reach and capabilities. The need to address urgent questions remained, but strategies like the poetry of witness, more reportorial than hortatory, seemed more effective than that of the Cantos. Explorations of marginalized identities and communities made the unified, integrated culture Eliot hoped to call into being seem not at all desirable. Poetry that seems to declare, “I am writing to clarify and illuminate where we, as a community and culture, stand right now,” as attempted by Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and Auden in his twenties, scarcely seems tenable now. It is hard to think of any living poet apart from Graham who is even trying. Killing Spree often seems like an acknowledgement that the project is not just difficult, but impossible. 

Thomas Pynchon, _Shadow Ticket_

THAT DETECTIVE AGENCIES early in their history (e.g., the Pinkerton agency) were involved in industrial espionage, union breaking, and red baiting has given Pynchon ample opportunity to combine noir-derived plot lines and tone with his conjuring of (nearly) ubiquitous and (nearly) omnipotent networks of secret power and authority. As he did in Against the Day and Inherent Vice, he takes full advantage of the opportunity in Shadow Ticket. Lew Basnight of Against the  Day even makes a cameo appearance. (I imagine he is not the only crossover detail, but I will leave such trainspotting to others.)

Hicks McTaggart is our gumshoe here. It is late 1932. Hitler is on the brink of taking power in Germany, and the USA has just elected FDR. The Depression is showing no signs of lifting. In Milwaukee, Hicks gets handed a tricky assignment involving the wild daughter of a dairy magnate. Tracking down the daughter and the swing musician she loves will eventually take Hicks to Hungary, where….

…well, you know, things happen. The novel has its plot, knotty in classically noir ways, but the real treat is Pynchon’s writing, the dialogue that seems to come right out of Ben Hecht and George S. Kaufman, the arcane lore, the evocation of time and place, all those  things at which Pynchon is simply better than everyone else. 

If you like Pynchon (as I do), I expect you will like this (I did), and if you are just curious about Pynchon, this might be a good book to start out on, at just under three hundred pages. Shadow Ticket probably will not dislodge The Crying of Lot 49 as everyone's favorite among Pynchon’s relatively shorter books, but it does provide a modest-sized sample of how Pynchon can fascinate.

Jorie Graham, _Killing Spree_ (2)

IN PLACES, THE book’s anxiety that some last opportunity to avert a slow-motion disaster has been missed takes on a generational aspect. Born in 1950, Graham is a boomer, part of a generation that came of age both in the U.S.A. and in Europe with a sense of mission, an aspiration to enlighten and transform the world. As an undergraduate, Graham took part in one of the more spectacular attempts to realize that vision, the student uprisings of Paris in May 1968. Recalling les évènements later in “The Hiding Place,” a poem in Region of Unlikeness (1991), Graham depicted a state of confusion, even the leaders having scarcely an idea of what was happening or what might be achieved; a similar cloud of worthy but futile intentions hovers in “Demonstration” in Killing Spree. “I took off my glasses / & pocketed them” the poem begins, a sensible precaution as the speaker approaches the crowd.

[…] The others

were all already

there. There was

 

chanting, there were orders, the instructions were

loud.     (10)

The year may be 1968, or we may be at a No Kings rally. Whenever this event is happening, the speaker hopes it will be unifying and effective, will “become a river of selves, of dis- / appearing selves, us all / stepping again now into the self-erasing / crowd […]” (11). The chanting intensifies: “it sounds just like / answers but what was / the question” (13). It turns out no one knows, exactly. 

[…] I think one sd

it’s a game, it’s a theory, but 

just then everything

 

you’ve read about  

for all these years

began. Right then. As if it were planned. As if we were

expected. It has not ceased since.      (13)

Whatever the demonstration was aimed at, the Fifth Republic or Donald Trump, was ready and waiting and was not about to abdicate, no matter how intense the chanting. The poem ends:

If you can hear me there,

if this reaches you,

forgive us,

we did not know who we were.

Whether the setting is 1968 or 2025, we hear a generation saying to its children, its grandchildren, and its great-grandchildren: we intuited something was wrong, we tried to do something, but we failed. In “Who,” Graham writes, “that power that / ferocity we had / to reach out—reach out-- / something was done to that” (6).

Bennett Sims, _Other Minds and Other Stories_

I’M A RETIRED professor of English, so I am sometimes asked whether there I have recommendations of young/new/emerging fiction writers. I always mention Bennett Sims (as I always mentioned Ben Marcus thirty years ago and Joshua Cohen fifteen years ago). Not that many people have taken up my recommendation, but one day, they will wish they had.

Other Minds and Other Stories is Sims’s second collection and is just as strong as his first, White Dialogues. The title story is explicitly about the famous philosophical question of how we know what other people are thinking (and whether we can tell that they are indeed thinking—that too is part of the question). The story follows the thoughts of someone in the tricky situation of composing an email to someone she is in the earliest stages of a relationship with as she guesses and re-guesses how her correspondent would feel about this word or that word, this tone or that tone. 

The book’s other stories also engage the question in some way. For instance, the POV character in “An Introduction to the Reading of Hegel” is trying to anticipate the thoughts of the reviewers who will be evaluating the fellowship application he has but a few hours in which to complete. “A Postcard” is a detective story in a Paul Austen vein, in which the detective has to puzzle out the minds both of his client and of the man he is being paid to watch, who may turn out to be the same person.

I revere Jane Austen is part because of how well she represents the experiencing of the problem of other minds. Anne Elliot trying to read Capt. Wentworth’s mind in his words and actions, Elizabeth trying to read Darcy’s…it’s her trademark, almost. Sims is a different cup of coffee than Jane Austen, to be sure, but it’s interesting to see they share this particular skill.

Jorie Graham, _Killing Spree_ (1)

JORIE  GRAHAM TURNS seventy-six this year. For all anyone knows, she could still be publishing poetry five, ten, or even fifteen years from now, but if Killing Spree turns out to be the final collection in the career that began with Hybrids of Plants and Ghosts in 1980, it will stand as a compelling and honorable conclusion. Not that it lands on a resounding major chord or feels like a victory lap—if anything, it feels more like a defeat lap, painfully mindful of failures and fallings short. Our failure to take care of our one and only planet has mattered in Graham’s poetry for a long while now and matters again in Killing Spree, but alongside climate concerns she also insists we face our failure to protect each other from violence and war (words like “massacre” and “slaughter” turn up frequently). The failures of the baby boom generation to live up to its best hopes get some attention, as do the failures of poetry itself. From its title on, the collection could hardly be more sobering. Even so, hope curls around its edges. It’s among her strongest books.

     Like its predecessor, To 2040 (2023), carries the atmosphere of dystopian science fiction, often seeming to be set in a near-future in which some catastrophe has overturned most institutions and social practices as well as natural processes. The book’s opening poem, “The World,” begins, “didn’t change much / at first” (3). Changes occurred, however, then accelerated, “And that was when / the end began” (4). The book’s title phrase occurs several times, including as the title of a poem, but its most arresting instance is in “The Eloquence”: “The killing spree began one day in the suburbs” (68). Littleton? Sandy Hook? A few lines on, “bullets whirred like hummingbirds when there were hummingbirds” (68), and since hummingbirds are still with us, the killing spree must occur in an imagined future, but the book unsettles by continually suggesting that our catastrophic future has already arrived. For instance, the statement “I remember the rule of law” (11) teeters between Orwellian pre-imagining and last week’s op-ed. “The classrooms exploded. The bits of desks lay about / in the dust-filled amnesia” (26) could be dystopian fiction or just news from Ukraine, as could “They burned / the silver icons down / to tiny pools” (33). “Once I watch them drag / the whole cuffed family / out” (33), depending on where one lives, could be local news.

     Killing Spree is also like To 2040 in alternating between two forms. The eleven left-justified poems use short lines (very short, compared to Graham’s practice for most of her career) of only a few words, quatrains dropping vertically down the page like a plumb line. Combined with Graham’s penchant for longer, unscrolling sentences, the main effect of the very short lines is of speed and headlong movement, of arriving sooner than you expected—underlining the book’s dystopian message that the future we have been anticipating in dread may already be here. Text-message abbreviations (u, yr, bc, and ampersands) lend these poems an intimacy and vulnerability less evident in the right-justified poems. The eleven right-justified poems have longer lines, feel relatively more discursive than lyrical, and sound more like what longtime Graham readers are used to, but the shunted-to-the-right visual orientation creates the feeling that we are looking at things from a new angle, a previously ignored vantage point. This form is superficially closer to that of Graham’s symphonic poems with their page-wide lines and distinct movements—“The Dream of the Unified Field,” “From the New World,” “Emergency”—but are rougher and faster, as though neither she nor we have time for the slow and stately.

Lucy Sante, _I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition_

I HAVE BEEN reading Sante for years, but always in pieces in periodicals, mainly book reviews in NYRB, so this is the first of her books proper I have read. I should try some of the others, though, for this one is excellent. Sante’s prose is light-footed but sinewy, her curiosity omnivorous, and the subject matter here of unusual interest.

After living sixty plus years as an assigned male, Sante realized she was actually female and set out upon the transition mentioned in the book’s subtitle. The book begins with the email she sent to her friends announcing this new departure (which began, remarkably, with a photo app that can switch the photographed person’s gender). Roughly half the book tracks how Sante managed that transition, and roughly half recounts his first sixty years as an assigned male, with particular attention to a chronic anomie that she now sees as a sign that she needed to transition.

I Heard Her Call My Name does not go into what surgical or other medical treatments Sante pursued, apart from taking hormones, nor into how the transition played out in her sexuality; that is, it skips the whole tabloid side of the story. What it does do is make vivid and palpable the unnameable tension Sante was living with as a man and the immense relief it was to live as a woman. What possible compelling state interest could there be in denying people like Sante the opportunity to live as themselves? The book deserves its wide audience not only for its writing, which is brilliant, but also for raising that question.