Emily Wilson on Anne Carson: WTF?

 I WAS TAKEN aback by Emily Wilson's dismissive, mean-spirited, and inappropriately personal review of Anne Carson's Wrong Norma in June 2024 Nation. 

Wilson opens by comparing Carson to Rupi Kaur and Margaret Atwood because Carson is Canadian, often writes in short declarative sentences about her own feelings, and has a large audience. This is neither perceptive nor helpful--and then seven paragraphs in Wilson acknowledges "And yet Carson is a very different kind of writer from either Kaur or Atwood, or indeed anybody." True...so why make the comparisons in the first place? They seem to have no point but to gratuitously diminish Carson's career.

Among the ways Carson differs from Kaur and Atwood is that she is a classicist and in her work draws extensively on her familiarity with ancient literature. This seems to be a point that particularly annoys Wilson; one can almost hear her snort, "pfft! Her, a classicist? Give me a break!" Wilson is a genuine classicist (she is famous for her Homer translations) and in a position to ding Carson for the incorrect lunate sigmas in the Greek text of If Not, Winter and to let us know that "Carson, for all her literary fireworks, did not get tenure at Princeton." So there! Again, why mention this? Most poets don't even get hired at Princeton, so here too Wilson seems to be aiming to humiliate.

Wilson also seems ticked off at Carson's popularity, as reflected in sales, Goodreads comments, and the existence of such merchandise as an Anne Carson hoodie. Given the popularity of Wilson's translations of Homer, I don't see why she has to begrudge anyone's commercial success, or be snide about authors who are popular enough to get their image on a t-shirt.

Or, for that matter, be snide about how people prepare themselves for going onstage. Apparently Carson likes to say "I am Anne Carson" repeatedly to herself before she does lectures or readings. "It's the kind of line that many public speakers, even those of us who are socially anxious or shy, would not feel the need to practice," Wilson tells us. True enough, but why bother mentioning it? Ridiculing anyone's private preparations for public speaking sounds like middle-school badgering.

The whole review--quite long, by the way, seven pages in the print edition--seems motivated by spite. Left a nasty taste in my mouth. I am sorry The Nation gave Wilson so much space in which to vent.

Louis Zukofsky, _"A"_; Mark Scroggins, _The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky_(2)

AMONG ZUKOFSKY'S BETTER-KNOWN statements is his description of his poetics as "An integral / Lower limit speech / Upper limit music" ("A"-12). I  never took calculus, but I am guessing he means pure sound lies at one verge, pure discourse at the other, and poetry navigates in between. I further take this to mean Zukofsky is willing to come asymptotically close to sheer sound, if he feels like it. He is willing to approach the condition of music (as Walter Pater put it) as nearly as he can without actually reaching it. Zukofsky takes sound seriously.

Zukofsky's approach to translation, probably best known through his version of Catullus but also abundantly on display in the later sections of "A", reflects this seriousness about sound.

The old Saussurean distinction of signified and signifier was useful for me in thinking about this; for Ferdinand de Saussure, a word combined a sound or a written sign (the signifier) with a concept (the signified), so when I hear the sound <hors> or see the word "horse," I think of the tall, handsome animal that runs so well.

Translation typically renders the signified and lets the signifier fall away. If I were translating from French and came across the word cheval, I would translate it "horse," not "shove all," because the French word's signified is "horse," and the fact that the English phrase "shove all" sounds a lot more like the French signifier cheval than does "horse" doesn't matter. "Takyth the fruyt, and lat the chaf be stille," as Chaucer's Nun's Priest says. The signified is the nourishing grain, the signifier the useless husk. Keep the grain, toss the husk.

But! As Zukofsky's poetics emphasize, sound matters in poetry, perhaps matters as much as semantic meaning. 

So--thanks to Mark Scroggins for this example--when Catullus writes:

Argivae robora pubis

a signified-based translation would give us:

the flower of Argive strength

but Zukofsky gives us:

Argive eye robe awry pubes

which is "wrong," of course. Zukofsky is giving us much of the sound of Catullus, but little of the meaning. But he is also giving us poetry, I would argue, not the mustily Victorian English equivalent of Catullus's phrase, but something arresting, puzzling, maybe a little ribald...in short, something that makes the Argonauts pop into view a little bit, sound a little more like the lusty young troublemakers they perhaps were...and doesn't that seem closer to Catullus than "the flower of Argive strength" does?

Similar transmutations often in the closing sections of "A", apparently, not just from Latin but also from Hebrew, Welsh, Arapaho, and who knows what else. So one gets lines like "agog o league a-god ran-on" ("A"-23). Puzzling? Yes. Arresting? Yes. Poetry? I certainly would say so. And closer to poetry, I bet, than whatever the literal translation of the source phrase would be.

Louis Zukofsky, _"A"_; Mark Scroggins, _The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky_(1)

 I READ "A" as a graduate student; more precisely, I read it in that rather long four-year stretch when I was not taking classes or prepping for exams but writing my dissertation. Whatever reading I did in that long stretch was always part scavenger hunt, as I was always reading with half a mind on what the writer was trying to do and half a mind on what I could glean, if anything, for my dissertation. This left me with the feeling, circa 1980, that I had not really done "A" justice (I barely looked at the parts written after WW II) and that I really ought to read it again when I had the time.

I retired a little over a year ago and thought, okay...now's the time to get back to "A". I've been re-reading it for about a year now--not continuously, obviously (even "A" doesn't take that long if you stick to it)--and I'm ready to record some impressions.

My dissertation was on Yeats's late-career politics, which have certain regions of congruence with his friend Ezra Pound's interwar politics (e.g., fascism), so "A", a book-length poem by a friend and disciple of Pound (as Zukofsky was) seemed worth examining. The poetry was interesting, but struck me at the time as junior varsity Cantos, and the politics were well to the left of Pound's and Yeats's, as just about every reasonable person's politics were in the 1930s, so as far as my dissertation went, "A" was a dry hole.

The drilling was not entirely in vain, though, as Zukofsky remained in my consciousness as a strong example of how one could be firmly committed to poetic modernism (as represented by Pound) and at the same time be firmly a person of the left. 

Mark Scroggins's lucid and graceful 2007 biography was helpful on this point. Zukofsky never actually joined the Communist Party, but in the 1920s was taken to a few cell meetings by none other than Whittaker Chambers--that right, Mr. Pumpkin Papers, a friend of Zukofsky at Columbia--and did in the 1930s join the League of American Writers, a group affiliated with a counterpart association in the USSR. Rather than pull a Coleridgean revolutionary-to-reactionary switcheroo, Zukofsky remained a leftist right through the turbulence on the 1960s. He read deeply in Marx; Marx has a role in "A" like that Major C. H. Douglas has in the Cantos--much to the advantage of "A", I'd say, as Douglas was a crank at best. 

"A" may have the advantage of the Cantos in a few other ways, too. "A" is more generous in its glimpses of the poet's life. I am one of the readers grateful that Pound came down from the austere heights and wrote of his own circumstances in the Pisan cantos. Zukofsky does so occasionally throughout his poem, but especially in the latter half. His love for his family, wife Celia and son Paul, is affirmed several places, sincerely but not fulsomely.

It also has more stylistic variety, which helps. The collage-like effect of the Cantos, the juxtaposition of apparently heterogeneous elements whose implied underlying unity is left to be intuited by the reader--there's a lot of that. But the poem also has several intriguing forays into closed forms, such as the sonnets of section 7 and the canzone of section 9--complete with the internal rhymes, and dealing with the ideas of Marx and Spinoza, no less. 

The most remarkable formal device in the poem may be its Zukofskian translations--a topic that will need a post of its own.

Tess Gunty, _The Rabbit Hutch_

 I HAVE NOT BEEN this captivated by a debut novel since White Teeth...well, that's not true, actually, as I have been roughly equally captivated by Bennett Sims's A Questionable Shape and Kate Briggs's The Long Form, but The Rabbit Hutch, which is Tess Gunty's first novel, captivated me in ways that reminded me very much of Zadie Smith's first novel. 

At the center of Gunty's novel is Blandine (formerly Tiffany) Watkins, an intelligent, perceptive young woman from a part of the world that, like Irie Jones's Willesden, often gets written off: rust belt Indiana. Like Irie, despite her intelligence, she is capable of big mistakes; like Irie, she holds deep core values that she can sometimes articulate piercingly but other times has a hard time so much as naming.  And like Irie, she is trying to find a footing for her selfhood in the wake of a massive betrayal by a mentor, which leads to a spectacular confrontation. I found myself rooting for Blandine as fervently as I did for Irie Jones back in 2001.

Like Smith, Gunty invents a profusion of plausible, sharply individualized secondary characters. The other residents of the apartment all pop into three-dimensionality, especially Joan, the reclusive obituary website worker, and Hope, who is slipping into post-partum depression. Not only is the high school drama teacher (genus Assholeus Charismaticus) who betrays Tiffany/Blandine deftly drawn, but so also is his wife, who would have been just a stereotype in most novels. And then we have the sublimely cranky Moses Robert Blitz, a brilliant comic creation...but even the priest to whom Moses Blitz idiosyncratically confesses is interesting in his own right. Gunty has a Dickensian/Smithian fecundity in conjuring character.

And again like Smith, Gunty has extraordinary control over her prose. It is versatile, for one thing, managing not only Blandine's explications of the spiritual thought of medieval mystic Hildegard of Bingen, not only Moses's diatribes, not only the final message-to-the-world of dying child star Elsie Blitz, but also the bizarre confession of an online poster who signs himself "Mr. Boddy" and fears he is about to kill his wife with one of the weapons represented by the game pieces of the board game Clue.

Gunty's gifts, as that last detail may suggest, are so exuberant that they at times run away with her, and the ending of the novel is as open ended as that of White Teeth, but to tell the truth, I don't even see those as faults. For me, this was a Goldilocks novel--everything just right.

Ange Mlinko, _Marvelous Things Overheard_

 I AM WAY, way behind with Ange Mlinko. The last book of hers I read was Shoulder Season, and there are at least three since then.

Marvelous Things Overheard  is a bit more linear, a bit less oblique, than Starred Wire, more in New Yorker territory. I thought of the New Yorker particularly as I was reading "Bliss Street," a poem that juxtaposes the relative privilege and security of Mlinko's current circumstances with the hazards and precariousness of her grandmother's circumstances growing up in eastern Europe--a graceful, lucid, subtle poem, but, you know, well-behaved--and sure enough, it was published in the New Yorker.

Rather like Paul Muldoon, though, Mlinko is not so domesticated as to never flash a streak of anarchy. "Wingandecoia" reminded me often of Muldoon with its audacious (near-)rhyming ("camera/emerald," "emerges/emeritus"), its gleeful rewiring of the villanelle, and its tragicomic handling of the founding and disappearance of the Roanoke Colony.

The volume's other long poem, "Cantata for Lynette Roberts," about a Welsh poet who is only beginning to be rediscovered, was the book's highlight, I thought. Both that poem and "Wingandecoia" demonstrated that Mlinko has a deft and confident touch with the architecture of a long poem.

Shane Book, _Congotronic_

THIS ONE TOO has been on the shelf waiting for a while--among the benefits of retirement is getting around to the books I couldn't find time to read when I bought them, which in the case of Congotronic must have been quite a while ago. It was published in 2014; I think I bought it in 2019 or so, just before the pandemic.

The book's title sounds like a nod to Afrofuturism, which I wasn't sure was a term in much circulation in 2014, but it turns out the earliest citation in the OED is to a 1993 article by Mark Dery in South Atlantic Quarterly. The term seems to be most often used in discussing technology and science fiction  in relation to Black culture and experience; Congotronic deals with neither topic, but the term might nonetheless fit this collection of poetry. Book works with many of the most familiar topoi of Black-centered writing--enslavement, colonization, national liberation, ancient African civilization--and rewires, remixes, and reboots them in a way that both defamiliarizes them and revivifies them, that makes them new.

In "Mack Daddy Manifesto," for instance, the main voice is that of an Iceberg Slim kind of character, but the voice also channels Freud's The Ego and the Id and Marx and Engels's Communist Manifesto. The effect made me laugh out loud on first reading, but since sex work has affinities with both (a) sex and (b) work, stirring in the voices of Freud and Marx with that of a procurer had a weird aptness.

In "Flagelliforms," a series of poems that blends events from the west African epic Sundiata with contemporary ones, with rapid changes of register and cinematic jump-cut montage.

For me, though, the book's highlight was "The Collected Novellas of Gilbert Ryle." I read Ryle's Concept of Mind way, way back while taking a course called "20th Century Philosophy"; he's a British philosopher for whom the mind is not a thing, but a cluster of events that we interpret to be a thing. Interesting stuff, but the poems Book calls Ryle's "novellas," each with its own title clipped from The Concept of Mind, are quite a bit trippier and maybe more fascinating. What are they about? I don't know! But they use a kind of post-syntactic syntax that reminded me of some of the effects Zukofsky gets in his translations of Catullus. To wit:

He had been busy culling spores
from the frothy air as the para-mechanical
cloud test came in low over the valley.

Or try this:

From where may I not pour me over, a wispy helmsman
nearly undone in fevered looking?

I see Book has a new collection, out last November. I need to find it and not wait five years to read it.

Jenny Xie, _Eye Level_

 I CAME ACROSS a couple of poems by Jenny Xie recently...in the New Yorker, I think, and somewhere else...which inspired me to read this, which has been sitting on the shelf since it won the Walt Whitman Award (now known as the "First Book Award") back in 2017. 

It reads like a debut collection in the early going, with poems based on travel impressions ("Phnom Penh Diptych,""Corfu") and childhood memories of China ("Lunar New Year, 1988"), very visual and elliptical. The poems towards the latter half of the book seem written later--at least, they don't seem written with the intention of dazzling the rest of the workshop. They are more introspective, more candid, based on longer experience...more mature, in a way, but in the way suggested by Dylan's line, "I was so much older then / I'm younger than that now." 

The first half of the book makes some canny transferred epithets, as when the description of a  garment becomes a description of being an immigrant ("The new country is ill fitting, lined / with cheap polyester, soiled at the sleeves") or words that might describe a mother's hair are applied to her emotions ("Her sorrow has thickness and a certain sheen"). They are consistently skillful, but sometimes feel a bit designed or calculated.

The poems of the latter half seem not be trying so hard but to be getting more work done. Take a line like, "The simplicity of it is difficult" (from "A Slow Way"). Boom! as the mic hits the floor.  Or Xie's pointing out that in the multiplicity of our selves, one of the selves will decide that it is boss: 

One self prunes violently
at all the others
thinking she's the gardener.

I know I have a self that thinks it's the gardener, and I bet you do too. 

Or the lines in which the book's title occurs: 

She had trained herself to look for answers at eye level,
but they were lower, they were changing all the time.

Xie has published another collection of poems since this one, as well as a novel. If I am right that the poems in the latter part of Eye Level were written late than those in the first part, the second collection will be worth getting a hold of. 

Mathias Svalina, _Thank You, Terror_

 MATHIAS SVALINA IS not so old as all that--I think he is in his forties, perhaps--but here he seems to be already developing a "late style," the kind of stripped-down, frill-free approach that artists adopt in their seventies. The old eye-catching tricks disappear--the desertion of Yeats's circus animals--so Thank You, Terror does not have the floral bursts of surreal surprises that characterize a lot of Svalina's work, nor the same blind-siding dada humor. Some kind of terrible (but perhaps cleansing) fire has passed through here. We're in a valley of bones--on several pages I found myself thinking of Eliot's appropriation of Ezekiel in "Ash Wednesday." But at times, too, the bones are putting forth shy, pale green leaves.

As often with late style, ambition and sophistication are renounced in favor of the big, simple truths that have a chance of staying true--gratitude, fear, gratitude for fear ("thank you, terror"), mourning, love. 

Thank you astonishment.
Thank you fear.
Thank you.
I failed you.
I loved  you.
I fail you.
And I fail you.
And I fail you again.
Thank you for my failures.
Thank you for my love.

The quoted lines come right after about 200 lines each thanking one of Svalina's friends. The renunciatory simplicity of that--the abandonment of any attempt to dazzle in favor of acknowledging what people have meant to him--I found very affecting. 

This is Svalina's most openly personal book, I think, especially in its fifth and final section, most especially in its final poem, where he is (compared to his earlier work) startlingly candid about his memories and losses. To invoke Yeats again, we are in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart here.

(I would give poem titles here, but in true Svalinian fashion (cf. Destruction Myth, Wastoid, and Wine-Dark Sea), all the book's poems have the same title--"Thank You, Terror.")

I think this is his best book, and I say that as someone who loved the earlier books. For a writer as wildly imaginative and verbally inventive as Svalina to come down to the plain, unadorned, and undeniable--"We need each other. / We are each other"--just takes me apart, when I think of what a perilous voyage he seems to have made to get to that plainness (please do note the passages on Odysseus in the next-to-last poem). Takes me apart and puts me back together. 

In a parallel and better-managed universe, Mathias Svalina's books are in all the libraries, and they are in constant circulation.

Annelyse Gelman, _Vexations_

 I BOUGHT THIS back in January, inspired by Anahid Nersessian's review in the NYRB, and when it arrived I was surprised to see a little badge on the cover announcing the book had won the James Laughlin Award--doubly surprised, I can say, first because the Laughlin Award goes to a poet's second book and Nersessian had called the book an "extraordinary debut," second because Laughlin Award winners are mailed to me every year as a membership benefit by the Academy of American Poets, and thus I did not need to purchase the book at all. Well. Turns out that yes, this is Gelman's second book (the first was Everyone I Love Is a Stranger to Someone), and when my membership copy arrived in the mail I found it a good home.

And it deserves a good home--an extraordinary book. It's a single poem, 220 sestets--a narrative poem, perhaps, although that may be assuming too much. Something apocalyptically catastrophic has happened, ecologically or epidemiologically, but we don't know what it is. Somewhat as in Ben Marcus's The Flame Alphabet, we learn little to nothing about the actual catastrophe but experience instead its effects: removals and dislocations, the vanishing of things long taken for granted, improvised communities, strained relationships.

We do not get a plot, exactly, and thanks to the unvarying regularity of the sestets and some recurring details (a song called "Elsewhere, Elsewhere," the word "creamy," a grasshopper that gets killed) time seems to be standing still. Gelman mentions in a note that the poem was in part inspired by Eric Satie's "Vexations," a one-page piece of piano music that is to be repeated 840 times, with performances taking as long as 20-some hours. Gelman's Vexations has a similarly mesmerizing here-we-go-round-again feel. 

Part of the trance is that the text has no periods, making the reader's parsing of individual lines somewhat mobile. Sometimes two consecutive lines will seem to be syntactically and semantically entangled, but just as often they seem to be non sequiturs, and sometimes they flicker back and forth, now waves, now particles...an Ashberyean effect that kept things from ever settling down into predictability (that great hazard of post-apocalyptic fictions).

We know time is passing, though, because the narrator gives birth to a daughter on the first page and by the last page the daughter is (I think) on the verge of puberty. The narrator's valiant attempts to honor the duties of parenthood in the wake of civilization's collapse might remind you a bit of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, but making it a mother-daughter story places it in quite another key, with (for me) the Persephone archetype looming awfully on the final page. 

Quite a book. Hard to put down, and not just because it has no end-stop punctuation.

Diane Seuss, _Modern Poetry_

 I WONDER WHETHER the Pulitzer-winning success of Frank: Sonnets and Diane Seuss's subsequent appearance in high-profile publications that publish only a handful of poems (New Yorker, NYRB, New Republic) put her in a retrospective frame of mind about the formation of her calling and her relationship to poetry. Breaking through in one's sixties must feel odd...not that I would know, but so I would guess, and the breaker-through might well think back to early influences, classes and teachers, the anthologies one worked through, all of which get poems in this new collection. Her becoming a reader and writer of poems is presented both directly ("My Education") and indirectly ("Allegory").

Seuss is not particularly oriented towards looking back. "The danger / of memory is going / to it for respite. Respite risks / entrapment, which is never / good," she writes in "Weeds." Likewise, she is not oriented towards composing her own ars poetica. "Poetry," which could pass for an ars poetica, at first gravitates towards talking about beauty, truth, and wisdom, but seems immediately uncomfortable with such abstractions.

So, what
can poetry be now? Dangerous
to approach such a question,
and difficult to find the will to care.

Seuss seems a little more comfortable in the poem "Against Poetry," (as in Moore's "I, too, dislike it," I imagine), but even as she admits "Lately, / I've wondered about poetry's / efficacy," she taps on the brakes: "Fearsome, to doubt / your life's foundation."

Poetry is a dog--"this dog I've walked and walked / to death"--or shoes left behind by the dead ("Legacy"). It is "useless at its core, / but not valueless." 

Still, even though Seuss has misgivings about looking back and more misgiving about poetry, she ends the book by looking back to her early love of Keats, and Keats himself, whose commitment to poetry defined his brief life and has kept his poems in circulation these two two hundred years now. The incongruity of a poet in her sixties cherishing a poet who died at twenty-five, the diffident battered-by-experience modern poet celebrating the High Romantic one--the embrace of that incongruity in the book's final section is the volume's most Seussian moment. The incongruous is her happy place. What matter if the actual Keats, had we a time machine, would not quite be, umm, Ben Whishaw? Let me quote the book's final poem in its entirety.

You would not have loved him,
my friend  the scholar 
decried. He brushed his teeth,
if at all, with salt. He lied,
and rarely washed
his hair. Wiped his ass
with leaves or with his hand.
The top of his head would have barely
reached your tits. His pits
reeked, as did his deathbed.

But the nightingale, I said.

The poem is titled "Romantic Poet." But who is the Romantic poet, Keats or Seuss? Exactly.

Bob Kaufman, _Collected Poems_

 I OFTEN PLAY pool with one of the nation’s best poets—sounds like bragging, and I guess it is—but I mention it by way of explanation of how I came to pick this volume up. My pool partner once mentioned that he thought Bob Kaufman was the best poet of  “that whole scene,” which I took to mean the writers loosely classified as the Beats—Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, et alia. I thought, but did not say aloud, “really?” What I actually said was probably something like “hmm,” since I had read only a few anthology poems and did not remember them well enough to confirm or contest any opinion of Kaufman’s oeuvre. I decided that I needed to look into this and ordered this volume, published by City Lights (how Beat is that?), from Open Books in Seattle.

First bit of new information, when the book arrived, was that Bob Kaufman was Black; I had lazily assumed, given his name, that he was Jewish. Judging from the foreword and biographical chronology at the beginning of the volume (which, following my usual practice, I read last), he had an almost painfully archetypal poète maudit kind of career: nomadic, with lots of couch surfing, sporadic, with many and brief stints of gainful employment, occasional stays in jails and institutions, drugs, a ten-year silence, Buddhism…he checked every box.

And the poetry, which is all that matters at this point, really is worthwhile. It has a lot of what I think of as classic Beat moves: strings of participial phrases, Whitman-like catalogs with surreal twists, a kind of bop rhythm. I wouldn’t say his best poems are better than Ginsberg’s best poems, but he has a lot fewer forgettable ones than Ginsberg does. And in three longer and later poems—“The American Sun,” “The Poet,” and “The Ancient  Rain”—he sounds more Blakean than Ginsberg ever did, tapped in more deeply to the visionary vein denouncing empire. “The American Sun” is actually terrifying, as it seems perhaps even more true about America’s global presumptions than it was at the time of its composition in the 1970s.

And then what seem to be his last poems, the ones at the end of the “Uncollected Works” section, which seem to be the fruit of his study of Buddhism—“A Closer Look,” “A Familiar Tune,” “The Struggle of Muscle,” “Falling Forward,” “Mining,” and “Human Being”—I expect I will be returning to these. This is how “Human Being” ends:

Thoughts
will come
and go
if we allow.
Just let them
go about
the business
of illusion
on their own.

If you think

them real,
at where

they came from.

gently look

at where

they came from.

No one’s home.

See?

Now you are free

to be. 

Selby Wynn Schwartz, _After Sappho_

 A NOVEL, BUT an unconventional one. 

It has a lot in common with group biography (as in Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club or Jenny Uglow's The Lunar Men), since it presents a cast of notable lesbian writers and artists who lived in Europe and England in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: Nathalie Barney, Romaine Brooks, Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, René Vivien, Radclyffe Hall, and quite a few others. The title points to how discovering Sappho was a moment of recognition for many of these women, and how those tantalizing fragments became a place for them to meet and know each other. 

Given its objects of attention, it also has a lot in common Lisa Cohen's All We Know in depicting the relatively more privileged regions of a 20th century lesbian cultural milieu.

However, stylistically, it also has a lot in common with Eduardo Galeano's amazing three-volume history of Latin America, Memory of Fire, which also told its story through short, vividly written vignettes rather than in conventional historiographical discourse.

Schwartz begins the 17-page "Bibliographical Note" at the end of the volume by acknowledging that the genre question is up for grabs: "This is a work of fiction. Or possibly it is such a hybrid of imaginaries and intimate non-fictions, of speculative biographies and 'suggestions for short pieces' [...] as to have no recourse to a category at all." 

Several dissertations worth of research went into the book, as the note attests, but Schwartz felt free to invent, embroider, rearrange, and omit. As she mentions, she simply omits Gabriele d'Annunzio, the flamboyant writer who loomed large in the lives of some of her subjects, which would be a problem if this were meant to be a comprehensive history--but it isn't. A comprehensive history would likely also spend more time on Stein and Toklas, but I was glad to read instead about Lina Poletti and Sibilla Aleramo, figures much less known in the English-speaking world than Alice and Gertrude.

After Sappho is a brisk and enlightening read. Given that is subjects are mainly white and independently wealthy, I wonder whether Saidiya Hartman's Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments makes for a comparable project that it is a little nearer the bull's-eye of the zeitgeist. Well, we'll see.

Sara Baume, _Seven Steeples_

 EXTRAORDINARY NOVEL. UNUSUAL, though. The two main characters, Isabel and Simon,  who are referred to throughout as Bell and Sigh, have decided to quit their jobs, detach from what we used to call the rat race, and live as modestly as they can out in the country. They are not off the grid, exactly, but they are only lightly attached to it. The novel describes their first seven years in their new life, one chapter per year.

One unusual thing about Seven Steeples is that there is next to no dialogue between Bell and Sigh--no conversations, no arguments, no discussions, not even much in the way of "what would like to have for dinner?" or "the door handle is coming loose." For that matter, there is next to no interiority, nothing about what either is thinking or remembering or hoping for. Their personalities hardly emerge at all; their two dogs, Pip and Voss, are much more sharply individuated, much more distinct from each other, than Bell and Sigh.

What we get instead of dialogue or interiority is what they perceive and what they do. We get descriptions of the small house where they live and the routines they establish. We get descriptions of the attached property and the local landscape, including glimpses of a neighbor and the nearby village where Bell and Sigh shop, but mainly just the natural environment.

This might strike you as a poor substitute for getting insights into the characters, and if I say Baume's descriptions of the house and region are poetic, you might say "uh oh, sounds like trouble," so let me hasten to say that the poetic quality of the descriptions lies not in the ornateness of their imagery or a bustle of exotic adjectives but in Baume's use of spacing and line breaks. That is, the ending of a paragraph often looks like poetry, with phrases separated by white space, and interestingly enough, this made me read it differently and made the descriptions land differently. It's a simple trick--some might say gimmick--but surprisingly effective.

The main feature of the local landscape is a mountain, from the top of which one can, reportedly, see seven standing stones, seven schools, and seven steeples. Baume has the audacity to sometimes write from the point of view of the mountain--that too might make you say, "uh oh," but she makes that work, too. Bell and Sigh never get around to climbing the mountain, however, until they are seven years in...at which point their long-delayed ascent feels like an acknowledgement of something, a culmination, a ceremony. They have made a home. 

And so this novel that barely has enough plot for a short short story and in which the characters scarcely emerge from the background ends by being moving, insightful, and unforgettable. 

Emily Berry, _Unexhausted Time_

 THE FIRST POEMS by Emily Berry that I read, way back in 2020, were excerpts from this book, which was published in 2022.  I liked the excerpts well enough to buy copies of her first two books, which I also liked, and here I am circling back to “Unexhausted Time.”

The jacket copy leaves it up to the reader to decide whether this book is “a long poem” or “a series of titled and untitled fragments.” I lean toward calling the book’s first and third sections a long poem, with a middle section of prose poems serving as a kind of perpendicular element that is part of the book but not exactly part of the long poem “Unexhausted Time.” 

The long poem does seem to be composed of fragments, we could say. One could connect them into a narrative…actually, one could connect them into any number of narratives, as one could draw any number of pictures from a constellation of dots, but the story I saw was about a “you” that may have been the speaker, may have been the reader, but seemed most often to be a (possibly former) partner, with whom the speaker once formed a “we.” 

There had been a rupture, though. Possibly a death—the poem “This Spirit,” which opens the second part of what I am calling the long poem, occurs in some soft-boundaried, transitional space between this plane and the next one. More often, the rupture felt like a breakup, a separation, a divorce. You wouldn’t call it confessional poetry—far too oblique and disjunctive for such a designation—but it did feel personal and close to the bone.

The middle section of prose poems seemed to be about dreams, e.g., “I went to visit André and for some reason I had a snake with me that I had to kill.” Oddly enough, these seemed clearer, plainer, more down to earth than the poems about the “you,” as though the unconscious mind spoke a simpler, more transparent language than the conscious mind does. Well…maybe it does. 

The prose dreams share elements with the lyrical fragments of what I am thinking of “Unexhausted Time,” creating a kind of intersection, or two different paths through the same material. 

I hope her American audience grows.