I WAS JUST about convinced that Ronald Johnson's Radi Os was an astonishingly lucky fluke--that is, that there could not possibly be another great erasure poem--before I read this. Reddy has found not just one but three compelling poems in Kurt Waldheim's memoir, In the Eye of the Storm, three poems moreover that together make a even more compelling whole.
The title derives from there having been a message from Kurt Waldheim, at the time the secretary-general of the United Nations, on the 1977 Voyager space probe. The energy of the poem derives from the idea that Waldheim, who served in the Wehrmacht during W W II, may well have had insider knowledge of certain war crimes, and that knowledge, entirely scrubbed from the surface of his memoir, nonetheless may dwell within it, to be discovered by erasure.
And discover it Reddy does. It took years, apparently (according to an online "note on process"), but the short, punchy lines of Book One, the blocky prose poems of Book Two, and the WCWilliams-like three-stairstep lines of Book Three find in The Eye of the Storm the confession it was assiduously not making. Sorry to resort to a cliché--so many poems are praised as a "deconstruction" of x or y--but here the term genuinely applies, as Waldheim's text is brought to utter the truth it sought to conceal. An amazing accomplishment.
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
Tuesday, May 29, 2012
John D'Agata, _About a Mountain_
I EXPECTED TO like this somewhat more than I find I did. I thought Halls of Fame was excellent, and the two prose anthologies D'Agata edited were beyond praise--watersheds, in fact. Accordingly, I had this on pre-order at Amazon, and started reading it as soon as it arrived...but only finished it a couple of months ago.
It's good--no doubt about that. D'Agata and his mother move to Las Vegas; he volunteers at a suicide hotline, and has reason to think that he took a call from and failed to help a teenaged boy who jumped from the roof of a hotel; meanwhile, the government is planning to construct an enormous but perhaps not very safe nuclear waste storage facility under Yucca Mountain, about a hundred miles away.
That D'Agata retouched some details in writing this account outraged the person who reviewed the book in the New York Times Book Review, and D'Agata's correspondence about this very issue with a fact-checker at The Believer (which published an excerpt) recently came out as a short book. About a Mountain has thus inspired a good amount of discussion of truth and art, or Truth and Art...
...which is interesting, certainly, but it's hard to see that D'Agata has taken any broader liberties than Joan Didion, Janet Malcolm, John McPhee, Lillian Ross, Tom Wolfe, or a variety of other skillful non-fictioneers have taken. He has only (as others did not) pointed out where he refashioned details and has refused to be apologetic about it--more power to him, say I.
But there's a bit of déjà lu in About a Mountain. It kept reminding me of a certain vein in Didion: a similar conjunction of American desert landscape, deadpan assessment of the shallowness of our amusements, and tight-lipped anxiety about our future that occurs in "The White Album," "At the Dam," "On Morality," and Play It As It Lays--a nearly affectless anomie. a dread that barely surfaces into expression, a chill that persists even under the desert's relentless sun. D'Agata does Didion damn near as well as Didion herself, but I would still like to hear the distinctive note I'm sure he has in him.
It's good--no doubt about that. D'Agata and his mother move to Las Vegas; he volunteers at a suicide hotline, and has reason to think that he took a call from and failed to help a teenaged boy who jumped from the roof of a hotel; meanwhile, the government is planning to construct an enormous but perhaps not very safe nuclear waste storage facility under Yucca Mountain, about a hundred miles away.
That D'Agata retouched some details in writing this account outraged the person who reviewed the book in the New York Times Book Review, and D'Agata's correspondence about this very issue with a fact-checker at The Believer (which published an excerpt) recently came out as a short book. About a Mountain has thus inspired a good amount of discussion of truth and art, or Truth and Art...
...which is interesting, certainly, but it's hard to see that D'Agata has taken any broader liberties than Joan Didion, Janet Malcolm, John McPhee, Lillian Ross, Tom Wolfe, or a variety of other skillful non-fictioneers have taken. He has only (as others did not) pointed out where he refashioned details and has refused to be apologetic about it--more power to him, say I.
But there's a bit of déjà lu in About a Mountain. It kept reminding me of a certain vein in Didion: a similar conjunction of American desert landscape, deadpan assessment of the shallowness of our amusements, and tight-lipped anxiety about our future that occurs in "The White Album," "At the Dam," "On Morality," and Play It As It Lays--a nearly affectless anomie. a dread that barely surfaces into expression, a chill that persists even under the desert's relentless sun. D'Agata does Didion damn near as well as Didion herself, but I would still like to hear the distinctive note I'm sure he has in him.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
