Kim Stanley Robinson, _The Ministry of the Future_

 I DID NOT much like this novel, I may as well say. I do not usually enjoy science fiction (although this is not much like typical science fiction except for being set in the future, roughly 2020-2050). But Ministry for the Future is about clearly important matters--climate change and what it will  take to address the problems we are already facing. 

In a way, it this moment's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Even though Harriet Beecher Stowe was not among the greatest novelists of her time, you really did need to read that novel; it vividly represented the most urgent question facing American society at that time. Robinson does that for us. Ministry for the Future is not a great novel, but it is still a must-read.

As a novel, it's a grab bag. There are two main characters. Frank, who works for an  international aid organization, is the sole survivor when a heat wave hits a village in India where he is working. Traumatized, he is anxious to do something, anything, to address the climate crisis, but as an individual he has painfully limited options--so he attempts to (in a way) kidnap Mary, the other main character. 

Mary is the director of the (fictional) UN agency named in the novel's title, which has the job of working to make sure the earth has a future. Compared to Frank, she has a lot of influence, a lot of institutional heft behind her, but she can't actually make anything happen, either. She can get meetings with people, make proposals, speak to the media...but she can't order the world to stop using fossil fuels.

Frank eventually goes to prison for not-exactly-kidnapping Mary, but she visits him, and they develop a relationship, both being vitally interested in the climate crisis. Their conversations make up a good chunk of the book. I never warmed up all that much to either Frank or Mary, but I learned a lot from their conversations.

But a lot of the book, more than half I'd guess, is a variety of other things. Riddle chapters, in which you have to guess the identity of the speaker, who turns out to be (e.g.) carbon, or money, or capitalism. Chapters that are the minutes of Mary's group's meetings. Chapters that are vignettes of people doing something to address the crisis: restoring the ice cap, or sequestering carbon, or figuring out how to make a "commons" work. There are more dramatic events--bombings, assassinations, economic crashes--but these occur offstage. They are reported rather than narrated.

Eventually, by the time we are 450 pages or so along, progress is made--an actual reduction of CO2 in the atmosphere is achieved. It feels good. 

The novel is mainly about how hard it will be to reverse the damage already done to our world, but it does leave you with a vague sense that maybe we can do it.

Sam Riviere, _Kim Kardashian's Marriage_

 THIS IS RIVIERE'S second book of poems, from 2015. It follows a very regular organizational plan.

 Suppose we have a "List A" with the following nine words or phrases: american, beautiful, girlfriend, grave, ice cream, infinity, spooky, the new, and thirty-three. Now suppose we have a "List B" with the following eight words: berries, dust, heaven, pool, sincerity, sunglasses, sunsets, and weather. Now take a word from List A and pair it with a word from List B: "girlfriend berries," or "spooky sunglasses," or "the new heaven." Make each possible pairing the title of the poem, and you will have 9 x 8 or 72 titles--the 72 titles of the 72 poems contained in Kim Kardashian's Marriage, a number arrived at because her marriage to Kris Humphries lasted 72 days. 

The 72 poems are arranged in eight sections of nine poems apiece, the sections bearing titles--"Primer," "Contour," "Highlight"--taken from the stages of Kim Kardashian's makeup routine.

In other words, we have a mathematically-generated structure as rigorous as that of Dante in the Divine Comedy, with all its threes and sevens and nines, but instead of being based on the harmony of the cosmos it is based on numbers arbitrarily chosen from aspects of the career of a celebrity who is a byword for superficiality. 

The poems themselves are composed with techniques that in the USA are called "flarf." In the words of the jacket copy, the poems "have been produced by harvesting and manipulating the results of search engines to create a poetry of part-collage, part improvisation." For instance, the poem titled "the new hardcore" begins with this couplet:

This is an all-out onslaught
that very much lives up to the  tech spec.

The poems are not exactly expressive, then--they do not proceed from  the observations, ideas, and emotions of the poet--but they can be read as though they are, I'd say, and are even very effective read that way, funny, surprising, even fresh, despite none of the language having actually popped up spontaneously in Riviere's imagination.

These are poems that don't want to be Poems--that want to leave far behind everything that Heidegger waxed lyrical about in "The Origin of the Work Art." And maybe that's healthy, given how things unspooled with Heidegger. Or is it an abdication? Or a renunciation? I'm not sure I like it, but it may be important, I have to admit, a poetry for after the demise of Poetry, a poetry that is important for its renunciation of Importance.

Sam Riviere, _81 Austerities_

 I LIKED RIVIERE'S novel, Dead Souls, so much that I decided to try his poetry, which turns out to be "interesting," as we say when we think something might be important but don't want to risk declaring that we like it.

81 Austerities contains, as you might have guessed, eighty-one poems, all originally published on Riviere's blog in 2011, at a moment when the British government was adopting "austerity measures," that is, raising taxes and cutting public services.

The eighty-one poems leave the impression of practicing certain austerities themselves, as they are generally brief (only a few require more than one page) and largely do without upper-case letters and punctuation marks.

The no-caps, no-punctuation style, the brevity, and the syntactic plainness of the poems ("I was watching TV / with the windows open / it was a warm night"), combined with their first appearing in a digital medium makes a reader think of Instagram poetry, but in many a wink to the reader Riviere reveals he is cannier than that. For instance, there is a poem at the very end titled "81 Austerities" that seems to consist of quick comments on the other poems in the volume.

I found myself thinking instead of Chelsey Minnis (see posts of March 17, 2019; October 13, 2019; and January 22, 2020). Minnis's poems, too, seem superficially like the kind of poem you would find in an intelligent but anxious teen's journal or social media account. Often enough, though, they seem to be deliberately trying to sound like that, a poetic knuckleball wobbling its way past you for a strike. Is this poem the pathetic little squib it looks like at first glance or is it...important? 

But what in the world makes a poem important? Should we refrain thinking of importance, however defined, as the right goal for a poem?

I am also reading Michael Hamburger's translations of Holderlin currently, and I wonder if Riviere and Minnis are programmatically renouncing ambition. 

Holderlin lies behind Heidegger's exalted idea of poetry as the Un-Concealing of Being, as the basis of all art, as the basis of history...you name it. For Heidegger, poetry is where the big meanings are. But what if going for the Big Meanings opens the door to the political commitments for which Heidegger is so (rightly) notorious? Is ambitious poetry complicit with horror? (Pound, for instance).

This in turns reminds me of a passage in "A Sunset," which Robert Hass recently published in the New Yorker.

This may be where
John Ashbery would introduce a non sequitur,
Not from aversion to responsibility
But from a sense he no doubt had
That there was a kind of self-importance
In the introduction of morality to poetry
And that one might, therefore, be better off
Practicing one’s art in more or less
The spirit of the poor juggler in the story
Of Christmas who, having no gift to bring
To the infant god, crept into the church
In the night and faced the crèche and juggled.

Ashbery steers as far as he can from sounding like a vates, to be sure. Paul Celan and Samuel Beckett also could be said to be trying to tack as hard as they could away from the poetic course celebrated by Heidegger. So I wonder if  Riviere and Minnis are looking for ways  to write poetry without being Poets. 

Georges Bataille, “The Psychological Structure of Fascism” (4)

 HERE WE ARE, the day after. I guess our level of anxiety about fascism will have to remain in the red for at least another four years.

A few people have objected that Bataille's analysis of fascism itself smacks of fascism. Richard Wolin's chapter on Bataille in his 2004 book The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism is a handy example.

Wolin, I am guessing, aligns with Jürgen Habermas in identifying left politics as part of an Enlightenment legacy, relying on reason, evidence, and public discourse as the best instruments for shaping the polity, rather than tradition, revealed religion, mystical notions of race, and so on. From that perspective, Bataille's suggestion that we dip into the heterogeneous to find ways to resist fascism seems to be saying, let's use right wing instruments to combat the right wing! But the moment we start using right wing instruments, don't we become right wingers? I'm probably over-simplifying, but that seems to be Wolin's objection.

This may put us in mind--today especially--of Trump, who has been eager to draw on various dark energies  to fuel his successful campaign: white supremacy, male supremacy, fear of the other, and other charged varieties of unreason. Could the left draw on some kind of dark energy of its own without ceasing to be the left? Does the left even have dark energies to draw on? 

The closest the left comes to the adrenalin-amping of fascism may be religiously-inspired movements like abolition or some phases of the civil rights or anti-war movements of the 1060s. Not that religion is a dark energy, exactly, but it carries more an emotional appeal than a rational one. And it can be effective--I think it made a difference when mainline Protestants swung into line on same-sex marriage, for instance. Most leftists I know are chary of making God-based appeals, though. And if Wolin is right, they should be. 

And is Wolin right? I don't know. 

It's been a long day.

Georges Bataille, “The Psychological Structure of Fascism” (3)

 STILL WITH ME? Okay. According to Bataille, the homogeneous, when it feels threatened, will resort to the heterogeneous to put down the heterogeneous.

To expand that a bit: Capital, which tends to represent itself as Good Decent Ordinary People, will resort to certain kinds of old weirdness, such as tribal loyalties and would-be übermenschen who have no investment at all in enlightenment notions like rule of law or representative democracy, if it fears that the unruly working class can use the rule of law and representative democracy to take control. Capitalism was married to representative democracy and rule of law for a long time, but if its survival requires throwing them aboard...over they will go, and capitalism will gladly marry authoritarianism.

In its bones, this looks a lot like the classic marxist analysis of fascism. Bataille has woven into it, though, a lot of new ingredients, since his idea of the heterogeneous includes not just the classic proletariat, but also a variety of unassimilable and even alarming folks--all kinds of folks who are not exactly Good Decent Ordinary People. This is an interesting development, I'd say.

Bataille took a lot of criticism, though, for suggesting that the workers' movement could learn a trick or two from the fascists--by which he meant, I think, trafficking in the heterogeneous. He writes (in  the Lovitt translation): 

Not only are the psychological situations of the democratic collectivities, like any human situation, transitory, but it remains possible  to envision, at least as a yet imprecise representation, forms of attraction that differ from those already in existence, as different from present or even past communism as fascism is from dynastic claims.

Fascism is not just a simple  revival of the ancien régime--it has added some powerful updates; it is juiced up with some powerful heterogeneous mojo.  But why couldn't the workers' movement work in its own new mojo, creating new and powerful "forms of attraction"? 

He gives no examples, just as Walter Benjamin (writing a couple of years after Bataille) gives no examples when he calls for communism to politicize art in response to fascism's aestheticization of politics. Presumably Bataille did not have in mind drum circles at union meetings, just as Benjamin presumably did not have in mind WPA-style Post Office murals. But what did Bataille have in mind?

Whatever he had in mind, there may be a problem, as Richard Wolin discussed long ago. I'll try to sort that out tomorrow.

Georges Bataille, “The Psychological Structure of Fascism” (2)

 “TODAY WE KNOW,” writes Michel Foucault in his 1970 introduction to Bataille’s collected works, “Bataille is one of the most important writers of his century” (“On le sait aujourd’hui: Bataille est un des écrivains les plus importants de son siècle”). Not sure how well that statement holds up fifty years on, even coming from Foucault, but “The Psychological Structure of Fascism” is original and interesting and maybe even true, in spots.

Bataille draws on Marxism—as I mentioned earlier, the piece first appeared in a French journal that was Marxist but anti-Stalinist—but also on Freud, and quite a bit on anthropology. For a time in those days Bataille was running with the Surrealists, and he also attended Alexander Kojève’s lectures on Hegel. The man got around.

The crucial distinction in Bataille’s analysis of fascism is between the homogeneous and the heterogeneous. The homogeneous are the Good Decent People of the World, who largely agree on all important questions and are the bedrock of society, etc. The heterogeneous are everyone and everything that does not fit into the homogeneous. This has two zones, shall we say. One zone holds all the abject and despised: “trash, vermin, etc.,” “dreams or neuroses,” “mobs,” “impoverished classes,” “madmen” and “poets.” The heterogeneous needs to be kept out of sight, repressed, cleaned up, stuffed away somewhere. But—a big but—the heterogeneous also includes everything that transcends the normal, as well as that which fails to attain the normal. That is, the pure, the sacred, the noble, the exalted. In short, the revered and the despised have a kind of secret kinship (here we see  the anthropological dimension of the argument).

We’re not done, though. The heterogeneous also includes the working class, which homogeneous society (a) requites for its labor but (b) would rather not acknowledge as a reality or share power with. 

And this is where Freud comes in. “The exclusion of heterogeneous elements from the homogeneous realm of consciousness formally recalls the exclusion of the elements, described (by psychoanalysis) as unconscious, which censorship excludes from the conscious ego.” This helps account for why a certain cruelty and remorselessness will enter into the efforts of the homogeneous to extirpate the traces of  the heterogeneous. Bataille is willing to call this “sadistic”—sadique.

Bataille asserts that “the fascist leaders are incontestably part of heterogeneous existence”—that is, part of the elite, exalted zone of heterogeneity, the realm of the pure, the forceful, the disciplined, the elite. The homogeneous is not itself the elite—it’s Good Decent Normal People, remember. However, the Good Decent Normal People may feel the need of the forceful and disciplined to keep the dodgy end of the heterogeneous—the vermin, the diseased,, the queer, the alien—under inescapable control. 

…Mussolini and Hitler immediately stand out as something other.Whatever emotions their actual existence as political agents of evolution provokes, it is impossible to ignore the force that situates them above men, parties, and even laws: a force that disrupts the regular course of things, the peaceful but fastidious homogeneity powerless to maintain itself (the fact that laws are broken is only the most obvious sign of the transcendent, heterogeneous nature of fascist action),

This is starting to sound a little like Trump, no? His base does not mind that he breaks the rules or crosses lines or violates the Constitution. The important thing is to have the sheer brutality needed to put the heterogeneous back into the outer darkness. Then all we Good Decent Normal People will be safe again.

Gregor von Rezzori, _Memoirs of an Anti-Semite: A Novel in Five Stories_, trans. Joachim Neugroschel

 FIVE RELATIVELY FREE-STANDING novellas (the stories tend to be sixty-some pages), all with the same narrator at different ages, and all of them seemingly drawn from Rezzori’s own experience, so these days “fictionalized memoir” or “autofiction” might be the handier descriptor, but the book was published in German almost fifty years ago, so, sure, “novel,” why not? It’s an interesting book, however we categorize it.

Rezzori’s family was part of the nobility of the Austro-Hungarian empire, with holdings in Romania, but Rezzori was born in 1914, just five years before the Treaty of Versailles did away with the Austro-Hungarian empire and (as a side effect) his family’s place in the world. His parents and grandparents never quite leave that vanished world, with its dueling scars and hunting in the Carpathians, but Rezzori has to figure out how to live in post-war world with not much beyond charm and upper-class manners. 

The first four stories track him from boyhood in the 1920s to young manhood in the late 1930s, with a final chapter on his life after World War II. The settings shift, as do his circumstances, but a unifying element is, as the subtitle indicates, the narrator’s anti-semitism. He is not an ideological anti-semite, not at all fanatical about it, but it’s how he was raised, and it seems perfectly natural and understandable to him, persisting even as he has friendships and even love affairs with Jews.

And then, after the Anschluss, with Austria now bound to Nazi Germany, anti-semitism is state policy. The narrator isn’t a Nazi, does not exactly approve of the Nazis, but he’s no dissident, and on some level the policy seems not exactly wrong to him if a little exaggerated. 

In this way the book is a subtle and perceptive study of how our own unexamined assumptions, given a little family and social encouragement, can lead us to acquiesce in evil. 

The prose has a somewhat over-stuffed, Victorian-Beidermeier style at times, but the whiff of the 19th century novel in the languor of the descriptions seems deliberate and ironic, given the 20th century horrors hovering unstated in the background.

George Bataille, "The Psychological Structure of Fascism" (1)

 THE TRUMP YEARS have (all too understandably) seen a lot of writing done on the question of what fascism was and is, and I have read a fair-sized chunk of it. Often writers who grappled with the phenomenon in its first manifestation get brought into the discussion--Gramsci, Arendt, Benjamin, Adorno--as they should be. But I haven't come across anyone mentioning Georges Bataille or his essay "The Psychological Structure of Fascism."

But why not? Michel Surya, Bataille's biographer, notes that "He was the first person in France [...] to introduce the effective methods of psychoanalytic analysis into the body of political analysis, methods that, even more remarkably, had been filtered through his own personal experience." Since Trumpism seems to come red, wet, and howling right out out of the American Id, why not a little psychoanalysis? 

Surya notes parenthetically that Wilhelm Reich also has a claim to being first to the party in using psychoanalysis to understand fascism, but Reich's Mass Psychology of Fascism does not seem to be getting revived either. 

Back when I was in grad school [sound of creaky rocking chair], Bataille's essay had a certain currency. A translation by Carl Lovitt that appeared in 1979 in the journal New German Critique kicked things off; I remember reading the essay in a xerox of a xerox, which I promptly xeroxed. The need for further xeroxing was circumvented by the essay appearing, again in Lovitt's translation, in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, a selection of Bataille's shorter pieces skillfully assembled by Allan Stoekl and published in 1985. 

Visions of Excess was number 14 in the University of Minnesota Press series "Theory and History of Literature" when that series was just about the coolest thing going in the humanities [creaky rocking chair audible again]. 

The essay's original publication is a story with some interesting angles. It was published in two parts in the last two numbers (November 1933 and March 1934) of La Critique Sociale, a journal edited by Russian emigré and anti-Stalinist Marxist Boris Souvarine. (I don't know whether Souvarine would count as Trotskyist, but his journal is roughly comparable to the Partisan Review of the 1930s.) 

Souvarine republished the whole contents of the journal in  the early 1980s, at which time he had some sharp criticism of Bataille. Back in the 1930s, Souvarine's wife had left him for Bataille, so personal animosity may have entered into the question. But Richard Wolin's The Seduction of Unreason (2004) had some pointed criticism of Bataille's argument as well.

Another interesting detail: between the publication of Part I in November 1933 and Part II in March 1934, Paris saw the violent far-right near-coup of February 6, 1934. Part II was no doubt already written when that event occurred, but I wonder if Bataille revised in the light of what had just happened. The events of February 6 were a very big deal for right-wing intellectuals and eventual collaborateurs Pierre Drieu La  Rochelle and Robert Brasillach.

This is already too long. I'll write about Bataille's argument itself in another post.

G. C. Waldrep, _Feast Gently_

 THIS IS THE fifth collection by Waldrep that I have read, and it’s my favorite so far (he has published another since this one, I should mention, with another coming out shortly).

I kept thinking of Hopkins—and let me immediately qualify that and emphasize that Waldrep does not sound like Hopkins at all (no one should try to sound like Hopkins). What I have in mind is that Hopkins had an astonishing, even preternatural gift for presenting sensory details but at the same time a kind of mistrust in the body, a suspicion that it was too easily snared. Waldrep likewise serves up an astonishing array of sensory imagery (“From waxy cells bees tender their last dances”) but feels a degree or two of anxiety about the body (“We are all cages / of meat”).

Hopkins found comfort and meaning in traditional rituals of worship, but also experienced terrible doubt. Waldrep moves into the subjunctive mood of prayer often in the book (“Let my frame be a honey-stanchion then, / a sill, a dry milk” or “Let me be the only / casualty, the waking wound towards which the forest / of my fading heat is climbing”), but serenity is elusive (“In the marriage plot / of faith, I drew the Hanged Man.”)

Like Hopkins, then, Waldrep seems a composition of incompatibilities, an ascetic sensualist, a doubting believer. Joshua Corey captures some of this in a back cover blurb, writing of “an ecstatic sobriety.” Even the title—“feast gently.” Indulge yourself, live it up, but with restraint, tenderness, a delicacy of touch.

One last kinship: Hopkins never sounds like anyone but Hopkins, and Waldrep, even when he is going in for self-abnegation, never sounds like anyone but Waldrep. And I am glad of it.

Martin Amis, _The Rachel Papers_

 OUCH. AMIS’S DEATH gave me a chill, he being only a few years older than I am. Brr.

As I wrote a while ago (6/16/2016), Amis’s oeuvre has an arc roughly comparable to that of Evelyn Waugh, turning from an early run of shorter, snarkier, more satirical novels to longer, more ambitious, more weighty ones. Waugh’s earlier ones have a somewhat higher standing now, it seems to me. Vile Bodies and A Handful of Dust capture something of their time that no one else caught as well, but it takes a hardcore commitment to Waugh to get through the Sword of Honour trilogy. In Amis’s case too, I suspect, the bad boy early career fiction will stand a better chance with posterity than the more mature work, and for the same reason—it seems to tune in on something definitive about the moment it was written.

Take The Rachel Papers, for instance, his first novel, published when he was just 24. There he is in the back cover author photo doing his best Jagger-circa-1972, shaggy hair, direct gaze, pouty unsmiling mouth, dangling mostly-consumed cigarette. 

The narrator, Charles Highway, is hours away from turning twenty and saying farewell to youth as he tells us of his preoccupations of the last year, which are mainly about getting into Oxford and bedding a young woman named Rachel. Charles is a highly recognizable character: callow, shallow, horny, and hyperliterate, "having a vocabulary more refined than your emotions” as he puts it. So yes, he is a stereotype, but Amis so perfectly renders that stereotype as it manifested in 1969-71 (e.g., Charles’s conviction that turning 20 makes one irrelevant) that, fifty years on, the book is valuable as a portrait of its era. One doesn’t exactly like Charles Highway, as one doesn’t exactly like Holden Caulfield, but he is as recognizable as your face in the mirror.

And then there’s the style—fast, fresh, funny, a firecracker or two on every page. Amis is a young writer showing off, true, but that can be a lot more diverting than a mature writer trying to be Saul Bellow.

Well, rest in peace, Mr. Amis. I think you have an excellent chance of continuing to be read.

Robert Hass, “A Sunset” and “Meditation at Lagunitas”

 ROBERT HASS HAD a poem, “A Sunset,” in the September 9 issue of the New Yorker, and its final line—“That burned, that burned and burned”—reminded me suddenly and sharply of the final line of what may be Hass’s best-known poem, “Meditation at Lagunitas”: “saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.”

Interesting coincidence, both poems ending with a thrice-repeated word, so I fetched down Hass’s Praise (1979) to re-read the earlier poem and see whether they were related in any other way. I would say they are. 

“Meditation” addresses the inability of language to achieve plenitude, that “a word is elegy to what it signifies,” making the repetition of “blackberry” at the end poignant. Can poetry use language to transcend  language’s limitations? Can it bring us a little closer to the truth that language falls so short of? The poem does not exactly say “yes,” but it does leave an opening for “maybe.”

“Sunset” also begins with a nod to the duplicity of language, claiming that “sordid” can mean “bruise-colored, a yellow-brown.” News to me, and unrecorded in the OED, but certainly a good instance of language being slippery—and if language is that slippery, can poetry be anything but slippery? Can it (Auden not withstanding) make things happen? Could it, for instance, have prevented the school massacre at Uvalde? If the “angry adolescent boy in Texas / Who shot and killed nineteen children / With a high-powered weapon my culture / Put into his hands” had read poetry rather than play first-person-shooter games, would that have made a difference?

The question of whether “culture” in the old sense (books, paintings, and opera, rather than the NRA and computer games) can make anything happen occupies most of “A Sunset.” Ashbery knew better than to try, Hass suggests, not out of indifference but out of modesty. Hitler’s record collection (“Wagner, of course, the operas / Especially, but also Mussorgsky, / Rachmaninoff”) did not stop him from being Hitler, nor did Monet’s painting the waterlilies at Giverny lessen the carnage of trench warfare.

Beauty ought to make a difference, right? But will we ever know that it does? Just as “Meditation” has no evidence that language gets us somewhere other than the uncanny lift of “blackberry, blackberry, blackberry”, “Sunset” has no evidence that beauty gets us somewhere other than our capacity to be brought up short by a sunset: “In the dark / I thought of an ordinary radiance / That burned, that burned and burned.”

Larry Levis, _The Gazer Within_

 MY INTEREST IN Larry Levis led me to this volume of his occasional prose, assembled a few years after his death by James Marshall, Andrew Miller, and John Venable, “with the assistance of Mary Flinn.” I’m not sure what the editors’ tie to Levis was…friends, former students, I imagine. The foreword is by David St. John.

I obtained a copy through interlibrary loan. Thank you, South Dakota State University!

Levis’s prose is intelligent, light on its feet, vivid, witty, and passionate about poetry…no surprises there. Of particular interest:

—An autobiographical essay written in the last year of his life. Levis devotes most of his space to his childhood and youth on his parents’ farm in the San Joaquin Valley, a recurring landscape in his poetry.

—An essay on his most crucial mentor, Philip Levine. 

—An essay on elegy (Levis’ s late work includes about a dozen poems he identified as elegies), with particular attention to Heaney’s “Station Island.”

—a lengthy and candid interview with the poet David Wojahn.

—“Some Notes on the Gazer Within,” an essay of twenty pages that looks to be Levis’s most developed statement of his poetics. Judging from this essay, and drawing on the typology I sketched in the Sept. 11, 2024 post, I feel safe calling Levis a “Camp A” poet, interested in paying attention to and faithfully representing actual phenomenon (e.g., in this essay, landscapes and animals).

—“Eden and My Generation” interested me because it hinted at the existence of what in that same post I called “Camp B” poets, whose work is based less on actual phenomena than on the processes of language. As Levis sees it, “In a way my generation has had to invent a way of thinking and a language which could not only record its losses, but could also question the motive behind every use of that language—especially its own.” Case in point, Levis’s discussion of Robert Hass’s “Meditation at Lagunitas,” which both evokes a place in Hass’s memory and “all the new thinking” about language.

Coincidentally, I had just been thinking about that Hass poem since Hass published what looked to me like a re-boot of it in the September 9 New Yorker. But that’s another post for another day.

Heather Christle, _Heliopause_

 I WAS LOOKING for The Crying Book on my shelves last week, in anticipation of Christle's forthcoming book on Virginia Woolf, and came across this, her fourth book of poems. Have I read this? I asked myself. Turns out that I have not, even though it came out in 2015. Well, now is the time.

"Heliopause" is "the boundary of the heliosphere," according to the online dictionary I consulted, and the "heliosphere" is defined as "the region of space, encompassing the solar system, in which the solar wind has a significant influence." We are, then, dealing with boundaries, with the liminal, with zones where one place becomes another place. 

The word shows up in its literal sense in the sequence "Dear Seth," a group of verse epistles. "Neil Armstrong died / the same day Voyager finally reached the limit / of our solar system," Christle notes in one letter, then adds in the next: 

     I am still thinking about space
For a long time they did not know
if Voyager had crossed the heliopause
and we lived
     in the strange interim
of an event perhaps having occurred
in the uncertainty of something 
having happened

Those moments that distinguish a "before" from an "after" recur throughout the book, like the deaths of friends ("Poem for Bill Cassidy"). The poems are often set in the "during," when we are no longer "before" but not yet "after." One of the longer pieces is an erasure poem based on the transcripts of Neil Armstrong's communications with mission control as he took humankind's first steps on the moon, for instance, but we also have that more familiar and longer-lasting watershed, pregnancy: ("Tomorrow the baby hits the size / of a banana"). 

The theme is a good fit for Christle. The shorter poems in the collection reminded me a lot of her earlier work and her ability to somehow situate her poems between whimsy and terror. This is how "Keep in Shape" ends:

               See how
the weather does not write me
never phones
          I can't pretend
that doesn't hurt
               but I can
pretend I'm burning down my home

The little joke about the weather as bad boyfriend or negligent child turns into a confession of feeling and then into a vision of destruction...that is the echt Christle note, right there. Where are we? We are all over the map, all at once...that's where we are. I hope her (deserved) success as a prose writer does not mean she won't be publishing more poetry.

Hergé (Georges Remi), _Tintin en Amerique_

 JUDGING FROM THE COVER, I guessed this early (1931-32) entry in the Tintin series was full of unpalatable stereotypes of indigenous American peoples, and in fact it is, so I am not sure why it has not yet been shuffled off into the same limbo where Tintin au Congo now resides.

More surprising was that the whole United States is satirized from first page to last: organized crime (page 1 et seq.), the hypocrisy of Prohibition (p. 36), lynching (pp. 35-37), sensation-seeking journalists (p. 44). The French are among the nations that have a robust strand of anti-Americanism in their culture, I know, but the strength of the satire took me a little by surprise.

The most surprising instance--also, I have to say, one I was glad to see--occurs on pp. 28-29. Tintin, while sitting on a rock on indigenous land, accidentally discover an oil gusher. He is instantly surrounded by oil speculators, who offer him five thousand, then ten, twenty-five, fifty, and finally a hundred thousand dollars for his oil rights. He explains that the land and its oil rights belong to the indigenous people he has just been spending time with. The oil men then offer the chief of the nearby settlement twenty-five dollars for the rights. "Le Visage-Pâle est-il fou?" ("Is  the Paleface mad?") asks the chief. The oil men then send in the army to dispossess the natives and set up an oil operation. 

It's like Killers of the Flower Moon in ten cartoon panels.

Larry Levis, _Winter Stars_

 PAINFUL BUT BEAUTIFUL. "My Story in a Late Style of Fire" aligns unnervingly with two of the poems that appeared in The Darkening Trapeze, "Elegy for the Infinite Wrapped in Tinfoil" and "Poem Ending with a Hotel on Fire," but the figuration of self-destruction as arson is if anything more direct and confessional in this earlier poem. I got the feeling that some headlong but doomed affair had once and for all finished off Levis's marriage, that he knew it was futile and wrong but wasn't about to stop himself, and ended up burning down his own life. I'm just guessing, of course.

That poem and the two final ones in the book would be part of any argument that Levis's work is worth reading and heeding, I think. "The Assimilation of the Gypsies" and "Sensationalism" both start from photographs by Josef Koudelka, with Levis opening the photos up into stories or screenplays that turn out to be about our relationship to time, which is mainly our relationship with death, and so we might connect these to an earlier poem in the book, "Those Graves in Rome," one of which is the grave of one whose name was writ in water...and it's all painful. But beautiful. I'm going to go see if I can recall the last stanza of "Ode on Melancholy" now. I had it memorized once. I bet Levis did too.

Larry Levis, _The Dollmaker's Ghost_

HIS THIRD BOOK, first published by Dutton in 1981. The edition I read is a "Carnegie Mellon Classic Contemporary" reprint, which appeared in 1992. My copy must be later than that, though, as the back cover copy refers to Levis's death in 1996. The book is still in print, which means it must still be finding readers twenty-eight years after Levis's passing--good to know.

The collection previous to this one, The Afterlife (1977), was the first of Levis's books I read, and the difference between that book and this one felt large. The Afterlife was by no means a light-hearted or sunny book, but it had streaks of whimsy and spots of hope in it. The Dollmaker's Ghost feels bleaker. A lot of it seems to inhabit rural spaces or those small, nearly deserted towns scattered on the highways between Iowa City and Fresno. It feels lonely.

From the reading around I have done since I read The Afterlife, I know that Levis wrote much of it in the happier years of his marriage to poet Marcia Southwick. But something seems to have already gone awry in Part One, which finds Levis back on his parents' grape-growing operation, haunted by memories of his growing up and wondering where he lost the plot. 

The book has a lot of retrospection in it. Levis's last, posthumously published work is mainly retrospection, I would say--all those elegies--but it's a little different here, more about being haunted by old photographs and drifting smoke as well as by actual ghosts, who show up often in Part Four (e.g., the dollmaker of the title). 

Here are some lines from one of the poems in Part Four, "Some Ashes Drifting Above Piedra, California":

And now,
if we listen for their laughter,
Which vanished fifteen years ago
Into the cleft wood of these boards,
Into the night and the rain, 
It will sound like cold jewels spilling together,
It will sound like snow...
We will never have any money, either,
And we will go on staring past the sink,
Past the curtain,
And into a field which is not even white anymore,
Not even an orchard,
But simply this mud,
And always,
Over that, a hard sky.

The "they" are the farm workers who used to live in the shack the speaker is describing. I'm not sure who the "we" could be, but I suspect the other person acknowledged in that "we" is not actually physically present in  the shack with the speaker, because he seems really, really alone.

James McBride, _The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store_

 I WAS A little irritated by a misstep in Chapter 17, "The Bullfrog." Most of the chapter is the dialog of a meeting of the chevry ("the men's group that decided important matters at the temple") of a Jewish congregation in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. The meeting occurs, we are told on p. 207, in 1936. But on p. 208, in the conversation before the meeting actually gets down to business, notice is taken that "Paul Hindenburg had chosen a young Austrian named as Adolph Hitler to serve as chancellor"--but that happened in early 1933. Are the men of the chevry years behind on the news, or did the author and his editors just not catch the problem?

The latter, I suspect. McBride does seem really interested in  the 1930s, so far as that goes. There was a presidential election in 1936, but the novel does not mention Alf Landon or Franklin Roosevelt, nor any New Deal program. No one listens to the radio. No one mentions Will Rogers or Shirley Temple. No one mentions the Yankees' amazing rookie, Joe DiMaggio. No one mentions Satchel Paige. Pottstown seems to be under some kind of giant glass dome separating it from the rest of the USA, save when someone needs to make a trip to Philadelphia.

Oh, well. I guess a novel set in the 1930s doesn't really have to mention  the 1930s, and McBride is clearly more interested in the Jewish and the Black populations of Pottstown, who are united in their resistance to the oppressive practices of the Klan-joining population of Pottstown. They cooperate to spring a deaf orphaned Black 12-year-old, Dodo, from a nearby state institution for the disabled, Pennhurst, which has a reputation for cruelty and mistreatment, especially as practiced by a guard known as Son of Man.

Why does Son of Man call himself Son of Man? What made him such a predator? What is his relationship to Nate Timblin, who plays a crucial role in the plan to spring Dodo? We never find out, unfortunately.

The novel does have its virtues, though. Chona Ludlow, one of the Jewish characters, is a beacon of light and righteousness, an embodiment of the Kabbalistic principle of tikkun olam. The chapters narrated from the point of view of Dodo are brilliant.

A likable book in lots of ways. But I can't tell why McBride bothered specifying that it takes place in 1936.

Jeff Tweedy, _Let's Go (So We Can Get Back): A Memoir of Recording and Discording with Wilco, Etc._

 JEFF TWEEDY'S 2018 memoir is a likable read.  The voice is down-to-earth and conversational, with plenty of self-deprecating humor. Tweedy is a son of the Midwest, so there you are. His accounts of growing up in Belleville, a small  town in southern Illinois, and of his life with his wife and two sons are tender and affecting; his account of recovering from addiction to opioids is candid and straightforward.

I found myself wanting a little more, though about the "two different guys named Jay covered in this book," as Tweedy puts it in his introduction, two people who were especially crucial in his artistic development as a musician and songwriter.  Jay Farrar and Tweedy founded the band Uncle Tupelo when they were teenagers, and it was with Farrar that Tweedy first stepped on stage to perform, began working on his craft, and began building a reputation. Jay Bennett joined Wilco, Tweedy's second band, after their first album and served as the fuel that enabled Wilco to achieve the escape velocity that took them out of the roots/Americana orbit (where Son Volt, Farrar's post-Tupelo band, largely remained) and brought them to stardom.

The relationships with both Jays ended in strife. but what exactly happened? Did Farrar dislike that Tweedy wanted equal time as a songwriter on the albums? Why did the last iteration of Uncle Tupelo (bassist John Stirratt, drummer Ken Coomer, and multi-instrumentalist Max Johnston)  follow Tweedy into Wilco rather than Farrar into Son Volt? Did  they volunteer? Were they recruited? How did that go down?

And Jay Bennett. What happened there? What made their collaboration so fruitful for a few years, then unsustainable? How did the Wilco of A.M. turn into the Wilco of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot? Why did Bennett eventually get fired from the band?

Tweedy does write about how Farrar was uncommunicative, even a bit sullen, and about  how Bennett could be manipulative and unreliable. but one feels there is a whole lot more to the story. 

If you are interested in Tweedy's growing up and his family life, Let's Go (So We Can Get Back) is your book, but if you are mainly curious about Uncle Tupelo and Wilco, I would recommend Greg Kot's Wilco: Learning How to Die.

Jeff Tweedy, _How to Write One Song_

 THE FIRST SECTION (on why you should definitely go ahead and try to write a song, if you have ever had the wish to) and the fourth section (on why you should be brave and perform the song for others, once you have written it) were not all that germane for me, since I have written dozens of songs and performed them for small but indulgent audiences here and there, but I nonetheless appreciated the core messages: first, that creating something is one of the best ways available to spend your time, and second, that sharing what you have created builds human community.

The middle sections, on generating lyrics and music to accompany them, were brilliant--they certainly accorded with my own experience and would be helpful, I think, both for someone who had never written a song and someone who had written a good many.

On the subject of lyrics, Tweedy does not say "look in your heart, and write" or recommend soul-baring confession. The exercises he recommends depend quite a bit on the aleatory and improvisational, on not taking yourself utterly seriously, and that's perfect. That way, the songwriter is going to come up with something to work with, and once the work begins, the heart and soul are going to be coming to the party in any case.

On the subject of music, Tweedy emphasizes (rightly, I'd say) that being an instrumental virtuoso is not at all required. If you can carry a tune most of the time and hit a few key notes on your piano or guitar, you are good to go. Tweedy recommends learning how to play songs you like, and I would second that--figuring out Lou Reed and Elvis Costello songs was my own training in song architecture. How much of the brilliance of Lennon and McCartney as songwriters derives from the hours of covers they learned to play in the Hamburg days? A lot, I bet.

He also recommends, bluntly, "steal." Well...yes. Take a song you know and like, re-jigger it some way, and there you are. As John Lennon remarked when George Harrison got legally dinged for the resemblances of "My Sweet Lord" to "He's So Fine," all songwriters steal, but you need to cover your tracks. 

A helpful, generous, and very down-to-earth book.

Odd footnote on Larry Levis

 This shows up on p. 70 of Elegy:

Lovely convulsion of thighs lathered as a horse's back,

Because, as Marx said,
Sex should be no more important than a glass of water.

When I read this, I recalled the same idea had shown up in The Darkening Trapeze, p. 67, when Levis is explaining that "the only surviving son of Jesus Christ was Karl Marx":

One thing he said I still remember, a thing that's never there 

When I try to look it up, was "Sex should be no more important...

Than a glass of water." It sounded vaguely like the kind of thing

Christ might have said if Christ had a sense of humor.

Levis's difficulty in looking up the quotation likely results from the quotation usually being attributed not to Marx, but to Alexandra Kollontai, a key figure in the Bolshevik intelligentsia. 

Larry Levis, _Elegy_

THIS IS THE FIRST of the two posthumous collections of Levis's poetry, edited by his teacher and friend, the late Philip Levine. It's very strong--the strongest of the three books by Levis I have read, I would say.

The collections with nine poems titled "Elegy...," e.g. "Elegy with the Sprawl of a Wave Inside It" and "Elegy with an Angel at its Gate." There are two similarly titled poems in The Darkening Trapeze (the second posthumous collection), and in  the afterword to that book David St. John speculates that Levis had in mind making his own version of the Duino Elegies. That would be worth bringing out, if any enterprising publisher is interested. All eleven are ambitious, unnervingly dark, but powerful, and the cumulative impact if published as a stand-alone book would be large, I suspect.

The "Elegy" poems are mainly memory poems, naturally, conjuring up the vanished, or maybe they are not conjuring up the ghosts so much as they are haunted by them. There are some good memories, like the work Levis did alongside the farmworkers in his father's vineyard, but the poems are all in the key of loss, and some are staggering. 

What are we but what we offer up?

Gifts we give, for oblivion to look at, & puzzle over, & set aside.

Oblivion resting his cheek against a child's striped rubber ball
In the photograph I have of him, head on the table & resting his cheek
Against the cool surface of the ball, the one that is finished spinning, the one

He won't give back.

The "him" in the photograph: Levis's son? Levis himself? Oblivion? The ball has completed its movement and is at rest, but is gone, irretrievably gone, as the child is too, another example of "time's relentless melt," as Sontag says all photographs are. Nothing remains of what we offer up save that we did, indeed, offer it up. 

Yet we still have these poems, and the poems are not nothing.

Ruben Bolling, _Tom the Dancing Bug Awakens_

 THIS COLLECTION (VOLUME 6) gathers Tom the Dancing Bug comics from 2012-15. Ruben Bolling made his big pivot to political topics in the Trump years, but there was already a lot of politics in these strips--wealth inequality in the "Lucky Ducky" installments, middle class precarity in the "Chagrin Falls" installments, various hypocritical compromises of the second Obama administration, like the drone program, in several comics. Odd to be reminded how disappointing that second Obama administration often was, given what we have to deal with since.

Bolling knows his comics history and, as always, astonishes with his ability to conjure up the look of several distinct styles: Hanna-Barbera, Carl Barks, EC comics, Sunday School pamphlets, the ads that blossomed in the back pages of comic books back in the pre-Maus days before started taking themselves seriously. He's a master.

I wonder--will we ever see Louis Maltby navigating the perils of middle school again, or Billy Dare again take crafty advantage of the conventions of narration? Bolling has bigger fish to fry these days, true, but I look forward to seeing Louis and Billy again when things calm down...if they ever do.

Larry Levis, _The Darkening Trapeze_, with a long digression on two camps in American poetry

THIS IS THE second of two posthumous collections of Levis's poetry, both edited by friends and fellow poets. The first, Elegy, was put together by Philip Levine and appeared in 1997, the year after Levis died; this one was edited by David St. John and appeared in 2016. 

Readerly gratitude is in order. Going through the work Levis left behind and deciding which poems were finished, which version was the definitive one, and how he intended to organize the poems would all be difficult enough, but to do that while also remembering a dead friend would be heartbreaking.

The poems are excellent. Darker and sadder than those in the only other book by Levis I have read, The Afterlife, but with the same originality of vision and figuration: "The village slept in the gunmetal of its evening." One notices an interest in self-destruction in "Elegy for the Infinite Wrapped in Tinfoil" and "Poem Ending with a Hotel on Fire." In "Threshold of the Oblivious Blossoming" Levis describes himself "Sitting inside & waiting for my dealer to show up so I could buy / Two grams of crystal methedrine from her," which seems like a risky thing to mention in a poem, but I suppose the police rarely read poetry.

I don't know David St. John's own work, but seeing his name reminded me of American Hybrid, an anthology he edited with Cole Swensen and published in 2009. The anthology took as its working hypothesis that (a) there are two broad camps in contemporary American poetry and (b) there is a lot of interesting work going on in the in-between, when poets associated with one camp try on the moves of the other camp.

The two broad camps--as I would describe them, not necessarily as St. John or Swensen would--look like this:

Camp A is representational or mimetic; it aims for a kind of fidelity to phenomena, to a "getting right" of what is sensed, experienced, remembered. Work in this camp would likely be praised for being honest, or moving, or vivid, or "so true." Mary Oliver, for instance.

Camp B is non-representational; it tends to see the relationship between language and reality as unstable or unknowable, so "getting it right" is out of the question. Writing a poem is more about form, procedure, method, working with language itself. Work in this camp would likely be praised for being innovative, ground-breaking, experimental, radical. Lyn Hejinian, for instance. 

It's not exactly a Crips and Bloods situation. Poets in one camp, a few drinks in, may say snarky things about poets in the other camp, but there is a lot of interaction between the camps--hence American Hybrid.

This made me wonder: would St. John have put Levis in the anthology had Levis still been alive in 2009? Levis is certainly Camp A--the poems routinely focus on his memories and experiences and the places and people he has known--but at the same time, the reader gets the uncoupling-from-reference effect that one gets in Stéphane Mallarmé (the great-grandaddy of Camp B) or Wallace Stevens (whom Levis obviously admired). This mainly happens when Levis's genius for figuration seems about to leap off into wild blue synaesthesia: "a flash of green silence almost alive / In the palm of your hand," for instance. There is a simple signified behind this dazzling signifier--water--but the signifier trembles on  the brink of autonomy. 

The more of Levis I read, the more interesting he gets.

Nathalie Léger, _The White Dress_, translated by Natasha Lehrer

 THE WHITE DRESS is the third in a trilogy of prose portraits of women artists. The first two--Exposition and Suite for Barbara Loden (LLL 12/24/2021 and 4/14/2022)--bear witness to delayed but fulfilled justice or vindication, since the Countess of Castiglione's photography project and Barbara Loden's 1970 film Wanda, disregarded and undervalued at the time of their making, did eventually find audiences and recognition. The White Dress tells a more sobering story.

Pippa Bacca was an Italian performance artist who, in 2008, was video-recording herself hitch-hiking around Europe and the Mediterranean in a wedding dress, with the goal of promoting world peace. The project was brutally ended when she was raped and murdered by a man who picked her up in Turkey (who was eventually caught because he kept and used the camera, with Bacca's footage still on it). 

Braided with this story is that of Léger's parents' marriage--a story not as terrible as Bacca's, but grim enough, with Léger's father seemingly set on humiliating and wounding his wife and daughter with his flagrant infidelities. This story has previously appeared in the trilogy, in Exposition, but here Léger pays particular attention to how marriage (the white dress) damaged her mother's life. 

Decidedly downbeat, then, and for that reason an unexpected way to end a trilogy about women artists whose work is brought back to life thanks to archival research. Or is the book suggesting something like that will happen in Bacca's case? A painful but worthwhile read.

Anne Dufourmantelle, _Power of Gentleness: Meditations on the Risk of Living_, trans. Katherine Payne and Vincent Salle

THE ORIGINAL FRENCH version of this book, Puissance de la douceur, was published in 2013; when this translation appeared in 2018, Dufourmantelle, only 54, had already died. Cancer or car accident, I guessed, but it turns out she died while trying to save two children from drowning in the Mediterranean. How many philosophers, or intellectuals in general, have died trying to save another's life? It's a short list, I expect.

Power of Gentleness reminded me of Sianne Ngai's Our Aesthetic Categories. The history of aesthetics largely involves philosophers wrestling with what "beauty" is, or "the sublime," but Ngai upended things and started new conversations by trying to understand the "cute," the "interesting," the "zany." Similarly, while many philosophers have thought about power and duty and necessity, Dufourmantelle started a new conversation by taking up "gentleness." Or douceur--her translators point out in a prefatory note that the French word covers a different semantic landscape than the English word does, as douceur can refer to sweetness and softness as well as mildness or tenderness.

The book is in thirty-six chapters, short essays of two or three pages--the whole book is scarcely over a hundred pages in the Fordham University press edition--all working through the apparent paradox of the title. We tend to associate power with force, but refraining from force also makes things happen. Dufourmantelle makes some unsurprising points along these lines--for instance, about Tolstoy and Gandhi--but also some very surprising ones--for instance, about animals: "So close to animality that it sometimes merges with it, gentleness is experienced to the point of making possible the hypothesis of an instinct that it would call its own." A strange idea--nature, red in  tooth and claw, has a gentleness instinct? But we do see animals being gentle with each other, and where does that come from? Not from having taken an ethics course.

Dufourmantelle offers some important caveats. Gentleness ought not to be confused with "mawkishness," and we should keep in mind that it can be "bastardized into silliness." She notes that "gentleness does not belong only to the good." But we need what it makes possible, as she particularly emphasizes in the section "Justice and Forgiveness" and the final section, "A Gentle Revolution."

I was especially struck by this, in the section titled "Childhood":

We would not survive childhood without gentleness because everything about childhood is so exposed, hyperacute, in a way violent and raw, that gentleness is its absolute prerequisite.

Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, ed., _Did It Happen Here? Perspectives on Fascism and America_

 I SPOTTED THIS in the window of Indigo Bridge Bookstore (rest in power, Indigo Bridge!) last March, and a quick scan of the table of contents--Corey Robin! Pankaj Mishra! Robert Paxton!--ensured that I paid my $28.99, plus sales tax, within the next three minutes.

I am a pushover for this sort of thing. I am also reading David Corn's American Psychosis and John Ganz's When the Clock Broke, as well as dispatches from the front lines by Rick Perlstein, Fintan O'Toole, Ezra Klein...I can't leave this sort of thing alone.

Steinmetz-Jenkins gathers a number of interesting takes on the question of whether comparisons of Trumpism to fascism are valid. Some answer yes, some answer no; Robert Paxton answered "no" before January 6 and "yes" afterward. Everyone has something interesting to say. For me, besides the pieces by Robin, Mishra, and Paxton, the perspectives of Sarah Churchwell, Udi Greenberg, Jason Stanley, and Kathleen Belew were especially illuminating.

"No" answers typically see some crucial difference between 1930s model and what Trump (or Modi, or Orban, or Meloni) is pushing. Churchwell has a succinct riposte: 

American fascist energies today are different from 1930s European fascism, but that doesn't mean they're not fascist; it means they're not European and it's not the 1930s.

So, no uniforms, no fulminating about the USSR, no rallies staged  by Albert Speer or films made by Leni Reifenstahl...but plenty of white supremacy, plenty of willingness to garrote majority rule and subvert constitutions, plenty of toxic masculinity, plenty of threatened and actual violence.

Steinmetz-Jenkins opens up the question helpfully with (1) a "Global Perspectives" section that reminds us the phenomenon is by no means confined to the United States and (2) a "Classic Texts" section with attempts by Reinhold Niebuhr, Leon Trotsky, and Hannah Arendt to understand 1930s fascism as it was occurring.  But, what, no Georges Bataille?

Kaveh Akbar, _Martyr!_

WHEN POETS WRITE novels, I worry about the potential loss to poetry, but the novels so often turn out to be excellent that I ought to quit carping and be grateful. Martyr! is another occasion for such gratitude.

Cyrus Shams, the central character in the novel, is the American-raised son of Iraqi parents, both of whom have died before the main action of the novel begins. His mother has died in a particularly terrible fashion, as a passenger in an airliner mistakenly shot down by the American military. I don’t know whether anything of the sort happened to Akbar’s parents—probably not—but Cyrus does share with his author not only his ethnicity but also an Indiana alma mater, a history of substance addiction, and an ambition to write.

Cyrus is drawn to big questions, e.g., is there a God? On the novel’s first page, he asks God for a sign, any sign, maybe just make the lights flicker…and then the lights do flicker. A sign? Crazy coincidence? Akbar had me hooked right there.

Cyrus also wonders what makes for a meaningful death, which has led to his drafting his poetry collection, Book of Martyrs, excerpts from which appear in the novel. This project in turn has led him to discover Orkideh, a terminally-ill conceptual artist whose last project involves having conversations with strangers about dying. To meet Orkideh and participate in the project, Cyrus and his friend and lover Zee make their way to New York City.

For me, the main pull of the novel was its writing, consistently witty, graceful, aware, smart, able to leap tall buildings at a single bound, but it has a deepening story as well in the rapid evolution of Cyrus’s relationship with Orkideh and the stress thus created in his relationship with Zee. A major revelation looms, which of course I will not reveal here, and a major epiphany, in which Akbar pulls out all the stops in his prose style, with stunning effectiveness.

In his acknowledgements, Akbar thanks Tommy Orange, “bandmate, maestro.” Are Akbar and Tommy Orange in a band? Time for a Spotify search. But what is the band’s name?

Jane Bowles, _Plain Pleasures_

 IN ADDITION TO the novel Two Serious Ladies (see LLL for May 10, 2024) and the play In the Summer House, Jane Bowles published this volume of short stories. It appeared in 1966. 

Anyone who enjoyed Two Serious Ladies would enjoy the short stories as well, I predict. They are in the same dry, deadpan voice, and the two longest of the stories, each about forty pages, strike one as near kin to Bowles’s 1943 novel. “A Guatemalan Idyll” seems to take place within a stone’s throw of wherever Mrs. Copperfield is in the second chapter of Two Serious Ladies, and “Camp Cataract” seems like the kind of place Christina Goering might someday turn up. 

In both “A Guatemalan Idyll” and “Camp Cataract” a female protagonist is mounting a serious effort to put some distance between herself and her family or to get out of the United States or both, and the same impulse appears in some of the other stories (e.g., “A Stick of Green Candy”). Perhaps the protagonists have lesbian inclinations that they realize cannot even be acknowledged or articulated, much less acted upon, within the confines of the family circle or the boundaries of the United States—hence the urgency of getting the hell out, if they can. But neither could those same inclinations be acknowledged or articulated in above-ground publication in the 1940s and 1950s, and this Great Looming Unsayable lends an enigmatic gravity to these stories that might otherwise seem like tales of shabby-genteel eccentrics. Bowles’s protagonists may give the impression of being scatter-brained and affected, but one also senses they are straining every nerve to save their own lives.

Larry Levis, _The Afterlife_

 ENOUGH STRAY MENTIONS of Larry Levis were swimming into my ken (e.g., by Mathias Svalina) that I was starting to think, hmm, I really should read some Larry Levis, and after reading this collection (the second of the five volumes he published in his lifetime, 1946-1996) I am contemplating a deep dive.

Levis tends to be both precise and mysterious, which appeals to me:

Applying to Heavy Equipment School
I marched farther into the Great Plains
And refused to come out.
I threw up a few scaffolds of disinterest.
Around me in  the fields, the hogs grunted
And lay on their sides. 

His figurative language continually surprises ("At night I lie still, like Bolivia," or those "scaffolds of disinterest"), as does his imagery ("And so I think of the darkness inside the horn, / How no one's breath has been able / To push it out yet [...]"). 

What appealed to me most is that this is a poetry of desolation that somehow consoles. Seems impossible, but there it is--in this respect a bit like the poetry of Mr. Svalina himself. "Signs" is a poem I expect to return to. Two of its four stanzas:

And this evening in the garden
I find the winter
inside a snail shell, rigid and
cool, a little stubborn temple,
its one visitor gone. 

[...] 

I stay up late listening.
My feet tap the floor,
they begin a tiny dance
which will outlive me.
They turn away from this poem.
It is almost Spring.

Ange Mlinko, _Distant Mandate_

 DOES STEPHANIE BURT'S descriptor from the late 1990s, "elliptical poetry," still have any currency? I think it would apply to this volume (from 2017) and to Mlinko's work more generally. The real subject of the poem often seems to be not quite there in the poem, but a bit off to side, in the peripheral vision of the poem, vanishing when looked at directly.

Mlinko's rhyming may have something to do with the I'm-not-there of her poems' (let's call it) representational aspect, as her rhymes have a Muldoonian dazzle capable of upstaging whatever the poem's looming question or agon is: isotope/trope, bronchitis/fight this, obol/scroll. Then we have the resourcefulness of her sentence structures, the unpacking of which offers delight even when you are not sure exactly what is being presented:

A replica factory in this pastoral
crushes fake beans
with brushed steel, utterly simulacral;
branded Halloweens
emerge from this maw, as if the plain fact
of horror streams
from a roller coaster, digestive tract
for swallowed screams.

Amid the dazzle, though, I did find myself wondering whether there had been some strain in Mlinko's marriage, especially in "Decision Theory," "Marriage as Baroque Music," "Knot Garden," and two longer poems, "'They That Dally Nicely with Words May Quickly Make Them Wanton'" and "Epic." 

A closing note from Mlinko states that "The myths of Orpheus and Eurydice, and Cupid and Psyche, subtend the book." Orpheus, we could say, was a husband who did not have enough faith in his wife, hence his looking back to see whether she was following; Psyche, on  the other hand, was a wife who did not have enough faith in her husband, hence her following her sisters' admonitions and resorting to the lamp. The two myths make for a nice matched set. Psyche does persevere to a happy ending, though, so I can hope Mlinko and her spouse did as well...if that is even what the book is about.

Joe Moshenska, _Making Darkness Light: A Life of John Milton_

 “MOSHENSKA HAS WRITTEN a new kind of literary biography,” announces the blurb from Adam Phillips on the back of Making Darkness Light, which is just the sort of thing that makes you mutter, “pfft, yeah, right,” but having read the book I can only agree.

Moshenska fulfills all the key criteria of a literary biographer. One, he has the archive down cold; he’s a genuine Milton scholar. Two, he has an excellent grasp of the historical context in which Milton lived, not only of the unbelievably messy political-cum-theological controversies of that time in England,, but of what was going down on the continent as well. Three, he has a lively understanding of why Milton’s work is still interesting all these centuries later, what the unique pleasures of reading him are.

For mastery of the archive, you might say Barbara Lewalski has the advantage of him; for grasp of 17th century controversy, Christopher Hill may surpass him; for seeing why Milton’s poetic imagination still gets to us, especially in its representation of becoming, of unfolding process, Regina Schwartz may have an edge. But can one book combine the virtues of all those essential Miltonists in a well-paced, ingeniously organized, vividly written 390 pages? Moshenska has written it.

And that’s not all. As Phillips’s blurb notes,  Moshenska’s book is also “glancingly a memoir,” but not at all in any self-indulgent way. He travels to many of the places Milton visited or lived in, giving his impressions of what they are like now, always deepening his portrait of Milton as he does so, especially of young Milton’s European tour. He is also candid about being an atheist and a Jew, culturally separated from Milton in a couple of significant ways, yet turns that separation to account as well, making his insights into Milton’s thinking all the mote striking for those differences. 

It took me a while to appreciate Milton; on first reading him at 19, I admit, I wasn’t at all sure he was worth the effort. But now I find my appreciation ever growing, and Moshenska’s book ha done a lot to deepen it.

Kristin Kobes Du Mez, _Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation_

 IT’S ONE OF the leading conundrums of our time: why do evangelical Christians so fervently support Donald Trump? Not only is he a twice-divorced adulterer and sexual assaulter, which would seem to bar him from consideration for people as keen on sexual morality as the evangelicals are, but he seems also to have no familiarity with or genuine commitment to Christianity itself (seen, for example, in his reference to “Two Corinthians”).

Meghan O’Gieblyn argued years back that evangelicals saw Trump as a Nebuchadnezzar, a pagan prince who supported and encouraged the true prophet Daniel (= Mike Pence?), and I have heard similar arguments that they see Trump as Cyrus, the gentile king who delivered Israel out of its bondage to a hostile government. Helpful…but I think Du Mez has the best explanation yet.

In a nutshell, she argues that white evangelicals in the USA have long been energetic in turning Christianity into a prop for patriarchy. She begins at the the turn of the 20th century, with the “muscular Christianity” of Teddy Roosevelt and Billy Sunday and takes a close look at the mid-century efflorescence of John Wayne and Billy Graham, but really digs in when showing how pushing back against second wave feminism shot to the top of the agenda for evangelicals in the 1970s and 1980s. Patriarchy was taking a hit—women working outside the home, practicing sexual freedom, not having babies—and God was recruited into the effort to Make Men Great Again.

I’m amazed at the sheer perseverance Du Mez must have had to trawl through the mountains of self-help guides to reclaiming masculinity written by evangelical men for evangelical men—not only the famous ones, like Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, and the Promise Keepers, but weird, impossible-to-mainstream ones John Eldredge, Steve Farrar, and Mark Driscoll, with their celebration of William Wallace as the exemplary Christian man—not the real William Wallace, of course, but the one played by Mel Gibson in Braveheart.

If a ruthless, sword-wielding, revenge-seeking warrior with blue facepaint is your idea of a Christian hero, well…you’re ready for Trump, aren’t you? If you see Jesus as a brawny, straight-talking dude who took no shit and probably knocked out a couple of centurions as he was arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane, you are really ready for Trump.

Du Mez’s final chapter addresses why the evangelicals can so readily forgive Trump his wide and frequent deviations from strict sexual morality: they have had lots and lots and lots of practice, as Du Mez shows with story after story of evangelical star preachers caught with their pants down.

I found myself wondering (not that she owed her readers any explanation) what Du Mez’s own relationship to Christianity is. She teaches at Calvin College, which is steeped in the Dutch Reformed tradition, but probably Calvin is willing to hire faculty of other faiths or of no faith. She seems to have seen this whole phenomenon from very close up, though. 

I’d like to buy a copy and just slip it onto the shelves of the local evangelical bookstore. 

Kaveh Akbar, ed., _The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 110 Poets on the Divine_

 BREATHTAKING GEOGRAPHICAL RANGE, with every continent represented, and the widest chronological range possible, starting with Enheduanna, “the earliest attributable author in all human literature,” who wrote in the 23rd century BCE, and ending with three still-living poets. The anthology works with a broad idea of “spiritual” as well, with poems reflecting mystical experience, of course, but also poems of doubt and despair. We get bewilderment as well as affirmation, poems of praise and poems of terror (Yeats’s “The Second Coming”), poems of our many kinds of relationship with the dead.

Akbar includes a good number of the greatest hits, so to speak, the poems you would immediately assume would be included in an anthology with this title: Rumi, Hafez, St. Francis of Assisi, Mirabai, St. John of the Cross, George Herbert. We also get a few curveballs—I didn’t expect to see Federico García Lorca, Octavio Paz, or Nâzim Hikmet here, but the poems Akbar chooses work beautifully in this context. And there is a wealth of poems by poets I had not even heard of: the Inuit poet Uvavnuk, Sarojini Naidu, Edith Södergran…this would be a long list, actually, so I will stop here.

The book makes a worthwhile read, but there are some eccentric decisions, great and small. For a small one: each poet gets a page with name, dates, place of origin, title of poem, and, when called for, translator. Those poets from a politically distinct nation-state are identified as coming from Ghana, Chile, Vietnam, and so on. But all the poets from the United States are said to be from “America.” This seems a little perverse.

Also eccentric: 

Only one poem from each poet? It seems like one could make an exception for Rumi or Dickinson.

Including Rilke’s Second Duino Elegy in David Young’s very idiosyncratic translation. I had to go re-read Stephen Mitchell to clear my palate.

The selections from the big canonical names go for the famous bits rather than something that might be less familiar but better suited to the rest of the anthology. Why Canto III of Inferno, not “En la sua volontade é nostra pace”? Why a Homeric passage in which the gods comment on Odysseus’ situation and a very similar Virgilian passage of the gods commenting on Aeneas’, both of which seem mainly exposition, when we could have had the final choruses of Oedipus at Colonus or The Bacchae or Artemis's final speech in Hippolytus? Why Satan’s speech on top of Mt. Niphates rather than something from Samson Agonistes?

No T. S. Eliot? Worse, no H. D.?

Well, you can’t please everyone. 

Lucy Ives, _Loudermilk, or, The Real Poet, or, The Origin of the World_

 IT OCCURRED TO me recently that, much as I would like to read a biography of Jorie Graham, I am unlikely ever to see one. Literary biography does not attract scholars quite as magnetically as it did in the days of Richard Ellmann, Leon Edel, and George Painter—it is no longer the royal road to academic eminence—and, more crucially, I am only four years younger than Graham and will likely be on the wrong side of the grass before her first biographer has even gotten a research grant. 

Fortunate for me, then, that Graham is glimpsable in a couple of interesting novels: Samantha Lan Chang’s All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost (see LLL for Feb 26, 2023) and this one. Moreover, Ives provides a quick sketch of the era when Graham’s marriage to James Galvin was ending, which I suspect will be one of the more compelling chapters of the biography I will not get to read.

Loudermilk is a campus novel, then, but more in the high farce vein than the satirical one, and witty and poignant even when its characters are in embarrassing binds, as they frequently are. The cleverest touch is that Ives builds the plot around the Cyrano trope. Troy Loudermilk is a handsome, campus stud type of guy who sees a graduate creative writing program as the best way to continue to live the life he desires—a nice stipend, access to lots of young women, etc. However, Loudermilk cannot write, so he recruits Harry Rego, a shy friend who can, to accompany him to the prestigious proghram he has gotten into and write his workshop submissions for him.

Loudermilk/Rego are the hit of the workshop—a big bonus in the novel is that Ives, a poet, can write poems that in their originality and eccentricity do seem like the sort of thing that would draw admiration in a workshop. Loudermilk/Rego s success also fires the envy, naturally, of the workshop’s super-ambitious would-be Top Poet, Anton Beans, whose investigations will eventually topple Loudermilk’s precarious dissimulation. But Harry Rego, one is happy to see, lands on his feet.

Tucked into the novel is the story of Claire Elwil, an aspiring fiction writer with a bad case of impostor syndrome. Her circuitous route to finding her voice and her confidence by writing a short story about an encounter with Courbet’s painting L’Origine du Monde creates a neat contrapuntal melody to the main plot’s story of fraud and ambition.

Emma Wippermann, _Joan of Arkansas_

 I SPOTTED THIS on the shelves at North Figueroa Bookshop (worth a visit when you are in Los Angeles) and plucked it out, fanboy of La Pucelle that I am. I turned it over to read the back cover and saw a blurb from…Cole Swensen! Ring that item up!

When asked for a contemporary figure comparable to Joan, I usually mention Greta Thunberg. Addressing the U.N. Is not quite the same thing as leading an army, but the two young women had to overcome the same kind of prejudiced resistance—why should we listen to a little thing like you?—and did so through moral clarity and sheer persistence. Wippermann’s take on Joan goes along similar lines, setting her story in the present-day United States and making her a climate activist.

The book begins with “The Legend of Petit Jean,”  for whom a state park in Arkansas is named. Christened Adrienne Dumont, Petit Jean dressed as a male and got taken on as a cabin boy on a French ship to North America in the 18th century. He, she, or they died and was buried in Arkansas before Arkansas was Arkansas or the United States was the United States, giving his, her, or their name to a nearby mountain and the park established much later.

Wippermann’s Joan hails from Arkansas, and in the text’s first main section, “Joan of Arkansas,” written in dramatic form, her voices tell her she must persuade a politician from her state—Charles VII (ha!)—to run on a platform of combating climate change. He does, he wins, then immediately becomes the tool of energy interests. 

In a brilliant move, Wippermann’s next section is a kind of erasure poem carved out of the transcript of the original Joan’s trial for heresy. This is an audacious leap, but it makes the point that her Joan would get the same kind of vilifying pushback that Thunberg got from the people whose profits she endangered, and this campaign would be analogous to Joan’s show trial and martyrdom.

Drama, poetry, and in the concluding section, “The Dove,” fiction—a short story written from the point of view of a devoted and loving friend of Joan’s named…Adrienne. (Perfect.) A wildfire breaks out, as is becoming increasingly common, and (spoiler alert) Joan dies fighting it, but Adrienne sees a dove fly out of the fire…just as a witness saw one fly up as the original Joan was burned at the stake in Rouen.

Joan has an inspired a multitude of well-meant but hokey tributes and a few that are actually worthy of her. Wippermann’s Joan of Arkansas belongs in that smaller and more distinguished company.

_Granta_ 163, "Best Young British Novelists 5"; Merve Emre, "The Critic and Her Publics" podcast

A SURPRISING NUMBER from Granta's 2023 roundup of the best young British novelists: in the twenty author photos, only five of the novelists are looking right at the camera. All were taken by Alice Zoo, so perhaps it's just a stylistic idiosyncrasy of hers, or maybe it's a new trend. If you are an up and coming new novelist, don't look at the camera. Adds mystery.

A less surprising number: of the twenty best young British novelists, fifteen are women. That surprised me when I first made the count, but on thinking about it, I realized a couple of things.

(1) This has been going on for a while. In 1983 and 1993 there were six women and fourteen men, then eight women and twelve men in 2003. The balance shifted in 2013, with twelve women and eight men, and the 2023 count fits the historical trend. 

(2) And that trend reflects who is actually publishing fiction. For a while now, I've been noticing that the "new fiction" displays in libraries and bookstores have two or three new novels by women for every new one by a man. At least that's true in literary fiction--in the genres, thriller, mystery, fantasy, science fiction, it's closer to fifty-fifty. But women are producing quite a bit more literary fiction than men are, so it's to be expected that 75% of the best young novelists are women.

I'll tell you what I was not expecting, though. Merve Emre's podcast "The Critic and Her Publics" includes her conversations with the "best and most prominent critics working today," as she announces in her introduction to each episode. I've enjoyed every episode--she's had eleven great people on, e.g., Andrea Long Chu, Anahid Nersessian, Christine Smallwood, Lauren Michele Jackson--but, as hinted in the title's pronoun, every one of them was a woman. That 75% of the best young novelists are women makes sense...but none of the "best and most prominent" critics are men? That doesn't sound right.

All of Emre's guests were worth hearing, and there are lots of great women critics who weren't even included; I would love to hear Emre talk with Amia Srinivasan, Ange Mlinko, Meghan O'Gieblyn, Patricia Lockwood, Stephanie Burt, Anna Weiner, or Emily Witt if the podcast continues. 

But no men? Not even one? Martin Filler ? (Too old?) Fintan O'Toole? (Too old and too Irish?) Ta-Nehisi Coates? George Scialabba? (Also too old?) Joshua Cohen? Terrance Hayes? Tom McCarthy? Peter Orner? Mark Greif? 

I mean, women may be doing most of today's best criticism, yes. But not all of it.

Howard Sturgis, _Belchamber_

 HOWARD STURGIS WAS the son of a wealthy American man of business who chose to move his family to London. Sturgis attended Eton and Cambridge and was only in his early thirties when both his parents died, leaving him with an enormous fortune. He bought a handsome house in Windsor, set himself up there with "his stolid, pleasant lover, William Haynes-Smith, known simply as 'the Babe'," and for years entertained an "unending stream" of friends, "many of them younger homosexuals," drawn there by "the lively conversation, the alternate currents of stylish bitchiness and genuine affection, and the studied luxuries" (all quotations are from Edmund White's introduction to the NYRB Books edition). Guests included a panoply of literary men, including Henry James, and a few women, including Edith Wharton, who referred to the rest of the set as her "male wives."

I wish Sturgis had written a novel about the scene at his house, but the one he did write is nonetheless worth reading. Belchamber is about Charles Edwin William Augustus Chambers, Marquis and Earl of Belchamber, Viscount Charmington, and Baron St. Edmunds and Chambers, the first-born in (obviously) an aristocratic English family who is still a child when the early death of his father leaves him with a vast fortune and a collection of titles.

Sainty (as he is always called) is, however, in for a hard time. For one thing, as his nickname hints, he is a holy fool, guileless, unsuspecting, unselfish, too good for this world.  For another thing, Sainty is ill at ease with his assigned gender. He likes sewing better than hunting. The word for him in 1904, when the novel was published, would have been "sissy," but we might go with "queer."

Things go about as well for Sainty as they do for Dostoevsky's holy fool, Prince Myshkin, in The Idiot, with the added complication of his queerness. Various prospects for happiness open up for Sainty, but something always goes wrong, usually in consequence of someone or other opportunistically taking advantage of Sainty's trust and innocence. The end is heartbreaking.

Sturgis reportedly was quite cast down by Henry James's not liking Belchamber. James's stated reason was that Sturgis did not know the English upper class well enough to present them in a novel, but one wonders if the Master found the portrait of queerness disconcertingly close to home. In any case, kudos to NYRB Books for bringing this unique novel back into print.

Diana Evans, _A House for Alice_

THE NOVEL BEGINS with a bang, a tour de force chapter of free indirect discourse from the point of view of Cornelius Pitt, a crotchety, irritable old Englishman living among piles of papers in the vicinity of which, despite multiple warnings from his caretakers, he continues to smoke tobacco...well, the long and short of it is that the reader realizes before Cornelius does that his place is on fire, and Cornelius does not survive the novel's first chapter.

Things settle down in the next few chapters, as Evans gives us a chapter-apiece survey of Cornelius's estranged wife and three daughters. We seem to be in familiar contemporary British novel territory. Then, right at the end of Part One, we get another chapter from Cornelius's point of view...as a ghost.

Whoa!

By and large, A House for Alice is domestic realism with a salting of State-of-England (the Grenfell fire, Brexit), within hailing distance of Zadie Smith novels like NW or Swing Time in its portrait of contemporary London. Alice is the estranged wife of the dead but uncannily active Cornelius; the house is one she wants to have built in Nigeria so she can return to spend her twilight years there. Her daughters disagree on how good an idea this is, but the novel ends with Alice about to fly out of Gatwick, her house built and her dream on the cusp of realization. Her daughters and grandchildren have made various kinds of progress in resolving their own issues.

All enjoyable enough, but I wondered about the novel's brush with the supernatural, which seems to involve a grievous sin on Cornelius's part, for which some kind of reckoning is due. I wasn't quite sure how this fit in with a story that otherwise had its feet on the ground, so to speak. 

Alejandro Zambra, _Multiple Choice_, trans. Megan McDowell

 NOW, HERE IS a brilliant conceit: a parody of a standardized, high stakes multiple choice test (like our SAT or GRE or LSAT or the Chilean Academic Aptitude Test, Zambra's actual model) that deftly illustrates how remote from any actually-occurring problems or experiences or life in general the questions in a standardized multiple choice test are.

My favorite section was "Reading Comprehension," in which the supplied narratives were a great deal more true to life (and hence more ambiguous) than those encountered in actual tests, and the questions probing your comprehension of the narrative neatly demonstrated the procrustean absurdities of the choices the test-taker confronts. For example--

71. One can infer from the text that the teachers at the school:

(A) Were mediocre and cruel, because they adhered unquestioningly to a rotten educational model.

(B) Were cruel and severe: they liked to torture the students by overloading them with homework.

(C) Were deadened by sadness, because they got paid shit.

(D) Were cruel and severe, because they were sad. Everyone was sad back  then.

(E) The kid next to me marked C, so I'm going to mark C as well.

An endnote mentions that the Chilean Academic Aptitude Test was no longer administered after 2003; our own elite post-secondary institutions are vacillating on whether they will continue to use standardized admissions tests or not. I hope they eventually decide to drop them once and for all. I happened to be good at taking them, myself, so they helped me personally, but after a career in academe I am convinced they mainly indicate one's talent for taking multiple choice tests, a skill that is no use at all once one leaves school. If Zambra's satire persuades any college administrators that it is time to junk standardized testing, it will have performed a valuable service.

John Keene, _Punks: New and Selected Poems_

 "NEW AND SELECTED" ordinarily signals that the poet has already published four or five collections and is a well-established, mid-career poet who has attracted enough interest to warrant a publisher's venturing on an "introduction to" volume. So far as I can tell, however, this is Keene's first collection. He has published a book of (brilliant) short fiction, Counternarratives, and a book of (likewise brilliant) essays (or perhaps "experimental novel"), Annotations, and a chapbook or two, but no collections from which poems could be selected in the ordinary way. 

Perhaps, though, the subtitle is a way to indicate that this a debut collection that is not exactly a debut, i.e., not a book by someone newly and dewily emerged from an MFA program. Keene is no fledgling. Punks is more like Wallace Stevens's Harmonium or Robert Duncan's Opening of the Field; it's the first collection of someone who has been publishing for quite a while and whose first collection readers have for years and years been jonesing for. In effect, he indeed is a well-established, mid-career poet.

And a strong one, so no wonder  that the book won the National Book Award in 2022 (and a Lambda Literary Award and a Thom Gunn Award). 

The book has wide stylistic variety--not the variety of "I'm going to try to write a sestina now," but the variety of an evolving, exploratory, deeply-considered relationship to form. We get not only some high-polish New Yorker-ish things, some dramatic monologues somewhat reminiscent of that modern master of the form, Richard Howard, but also some poems that seem to have the spoken-word urgency slam and some experimental page-as-field poems. 

We can also tell that the the poems were not all written recently. The book's opening sections, "Playland" and "The Lost World" evoke the LGBTQ social and cultural milieu of the 1980s and 1990s as it was lived in different American cities, the feeling of emerging affirmation and pride strong and salient even while the shadow of AIDS flickers. The same sense of a long-maturing, generations-deep awareness informs the poems that deal with Black history (unsurprising coming from the author off Counternarratives). 

I couldn't say whether Punks is going to have the long tail of Harmonium or Opening of the Field, but I think it very well could. It's really good.