Paul Celan, _Threadsuns_, trans. Pierre Joris

THE ONLY CELAN I have read is the selected poems volume translated by Michael Hamburger, and that was years ago--mid-nineties, I think. Reading Yoko Tawada's novel (see yesterday's post) inspired me to seek out Threadsuns (in the original German, Fadensonnen), the volume that is the subject of the paper Patrik is planning to deliver at the Paris Celan conference. I was in luck--a handy library had Joris's Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry of Paul Celan.

Joris's commentary includes the observation that "Threadsuns may well be the least commented on and most critically neglected volume of Celan's oeuvre." That made a neat additional datum on Tawada's character; he does seem like a reader who would gravitate to the less-populated precincts of reading. Not only is he drawn to the famously difficult Celan, but also to Celan's least read book. According to Kai Fischer, whom Joris goes on to quote, Threadsuns "is not only the gateway into  the late work but also introduces and performs a new way of saying that will be characteristic for the following volumes." In other words, this is when things get really challenging.

I cannot shed much light on the poems, I'm afraid. I found them baffling, though baffling in a compelling and arresting way. Sorry about the self-contradiction--that is, saying the poems both compelled me, which suggests they pushed me along, and arrested me, which suggests they brought me to a stop--but there you go. I was, indeed, compelled and arrested.

The poems are full of abrupt turns, opaque allusions, and newly-coined words. For instance:

THE HEARTSCRIPTCRUMBLED vision-isle

at midnight, in feeble 

ignition key glimmer.

"Vision-isle" conjures up something without much readerly effort...but "heartscriptcrumbled"? The effect is a little like the coinages of Finnegans Wake, but only a little--somehow they land differently, less playfully than Joyce's compounds, seem more effortful, harder-won. I always felt like something was at stake that could be said no other way,, even without knowing what the something was.

The word "Trans-Tibetan," as used in Tawada's title, shows up in one of the poems: "Ashrei, // a word without meaning, / trans-Tibetan, / injected into the / Jewess / Pallas / Athene's / helmeted ovaries, // and when he, // he, // fetally, // harps Carpathian nono, // then the Allemande / bobbins her lace for / the vomiting im- / mortal / song." There's a Thomas Mann  novella in there somewhere.

I recently learned that Celan, a Holocaust survivor, on one occasion met Heidegger, a former member of the Nazi party. What was that like? There is at least one book about it, apparently. 

Yoko Tawada, _Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel_, trans. Susan Bernofsky

YOKO TAWADA WRITES fiction in both Japanese and German. From what I gather, her writing in both languages is not just a switch, as Milan Kundera switched from Czech to French or Jhumpa Lahiri switched from English to Italian, but an actual going back and forth. Remarkable, no?

She came to my attention via a review article in the LRB by Adam Thirlwell that discussed several of her novels--I picked this one because the title was irresistible. It was originally written in German.

The main character, Patrik, is also the narrator, although he usually refers to himself as "the patient" or "Patrik," only occasionally slipping into the first person. He lives in Berlin and may be German, although there is some uncertainty about his nationality. He is a Celan scholar but has no institutional affiliation, although he may have had one once. He is supposed to give a paper on Celan's volume Threadsuns at a conference in Paris, but perhaps he only thinks he is supposed to give one. In either case, he is flummoxed by the procedures he has to complete to get to the conference.

The outline of Patrik's identity, we could say, is insecurely fixed--mobile and porous. He is like a Thomas Bernhard character, a kind of laboratory animal trying to solve the maze of his own personhood and not making much progress. There is also a kind of Bernhardian eventlessness to the novel, which does not so much have a plot as a Debordian dérive as Patrik wanders about the city at the same time he is wandering through his psychological maze.

Within the maze, though, he finds a reward: Leo-Eric Fu, a deeply simpatico figure that Patrik encounters and then re-encounters. A budding friendship with Leo-Eric seems to hold out a tantalizing possibility of solving the riddle of Patrik. Leo-Eric has some kind of connection to the Asian continent, so he may be the the Trans-Tibetan Angel ("Trans-Tibetan," by the way, is a descriptor that appears in Celan's Threadsuns).

Is the last paragraph of the novel a kind of magical happy ending or the final dissolution of "the patient"? I don't know. I don't know what to conclude about the ending of "The Yellow Wallpaper," either. But we are airborne, and it feels right. Fly, Patrik, fly!

Anne Berest, _The Postcard_, trans. Tina Kover

A NOVEL, BUT based on Berest's own family history. Indeed, a lot of it could qualify as memoir, I think. Is the distinction between the two, always smudged, in the process of disappearing entirely?

The postcard of the title is received by Berest's mother, Lélia, in early 2003. On it are written the names Ephraïm, Emma, Noémie, and Jacques--nothing else. Berest's mother is shocked and scared, because these are the names of her own mother's father, mother, sister, and brother, all four of whom were Russian Jews who emigrated to France in the 1930s and were then sent to their deaths in the camps in 1941. Who sent the surprisingly knowing card, and why? 

The book is about Berest's and her mother's efforts to answer those questions. This involves a lot of detective work, which is the part that feels most like a memoir. As they learn more about how Myriam (Lélia's mother, Anne Berest's grandmother) lived in the 1930s and how she evaded capture during the years of the Nazi Occupation, Berest narrates an imagined version of what Myriam's life was like, which feels more like a novel.

All questions about the postcard get answered in the book's last few pages.

Worthy of note: Berest's family is Jewish, but not particularly observant. Early in the book, Berest attends a seder where she gets criticized for not being more familiar with Jewish traditions than she is. She can't come up with much of a reply in the moment, but near the end of the book (Chapter 38), she comes to some very striking conclusions about what her Jewishness means.

This was a book club pick--probably not something I would have chosen to read on my own. Good, though.

Mary Jo Salter (guest editor) and David Lehman (series editor), _Best American Poetry 2024_

 I WONDER WHETHER David Lehman is thinking of hanging it up. There's a valedictory tone to his foreword this year--reflections on Keats's "When I Have Fears," on the passing of Louise Glück, some parting advice he gave to one of his classes. Hmm.

And can we read anything into this being the first BAP to include some of Lehman's own poetry? We get thirteen stanzas from a longer poem called Ithaca that similarly feels like closing up shop, as though Lehman were about to light out for the territory where oars are taken for winnowing fans.

That's not all. Three of this year's contributors--Glück, Saskia Hamilton, and Mark Strand--are no longer alive, and two of the poems are about getting messages from dead poets: Jeffrey Harrison's "A Message from Tony Hoagland" and Mitch Sisskind's "Jack Benny," which begins, "John Ashbery called me after he died [...]."

Is Lehman thinking hard about taking his journey west?

I hope Lehman hangs around for a while, but he is getting up in years (born 1948) and he has been managing BAP since its beginnings in 1988, so he's certainly earned the right to hand it off. 

This year's guest editor is veteran anthologist Mary Jo Salter. Salter gives us a wide swath of the middle of the road here. The poems that are not from the New Yorker or one of the longer-established  reviews (Kenyon, Gettysburg, Hudson, Sewanee) sound like they could well have been from the New Yorker or one of the longer-established reviews. All solid and professional, but a bit watered down, with no surprises.

Nice to have a crown of sonnets from A. E. Stallings, though. Are these coming back? Sara Nicholson had one in her recent book. 

Anahid Nersessian, _Keats's Odes: A Lover's Discourse_

HAVING JUST READ Edmund Wilson's 1950s journals, I wondered whether he could  be considered the last great American literary critic who did not have a secure academic position (although he did have a few prestigious-visitor sorts of positions).  I couldn't think of another one from the last four or five decades. 

There have been some university-based literary critics who made significant efforts to write for broader, culturally literate but not scholarly audiences. Lionel Trilling, for instance. Harold Bloom was trying to do that in his books on the western canon and on Shakespeare, but both those books feel eccentric and polemical compared to Wilson's Patriotic Gore. There's Camille Paglia, while we are on the subject of the eccentric and polemical. Stephen Greenblatt made some headway with the larger public in the Shakespeare biography and The Swerve.

A whole crop of younger literary critics seem to going for the brass ring of the wider audience in recent years, writing for n+1 and NYRB and the New Yorker and the NYT Book Review, such as Merve Emre, Christine Smallwood, and the author of Keats's Odes, Anahid Nersessian. Nersessian has already published a couple of more straightforwardly academic books, but this one seems to be written for a broader (though still well-read) public.

I liked it a lot. I'm not sure I learned much that I did not already know about the six great odes (or the five great odes and Ode on Indolence), but the book had a wise and appealing voice, took some meaningful detours into Nersessian's personal history, and did Keats due honor. I especially liked how Nersessian drew on Roland Barthes in structuring her approach, and I loved how she put Keats into a conversation that included Alice Notley, Juliana Spahr, and Anne Boyer.

I wasn't always persuaded by the claims about the poems. Nersessian dislikes the complacency with which the speaker of Ode on a Grecian Urn regards the sexual violence depicted on the urn and the fatuousness of equating truth and beauty, and she has reason to dislike them--but why let Keats off the hook with the assertion, "Another thing that distinguishes this poem is that its speaker is not Keats, but a character or persona"? Not Keats? I cannot see why the speaker of Grecian Urn is any more a character or persona than any of the other speakers. I mean...come on. 

Nersessian (following Jerome McGann) is a bit more willing to call Keats out for leaving the Peterloo Massacre out of To Autumn. In general, she wishes Keats's poetry manifested more of his awareness of and attraction to radical politics than it does. I get that. But she (and McGann) ought to appreciate more how erratic poetic inspiration is. I can imagine a survivor of Hiroshima, say, a month after the dropping of the bomb, writing a poem about something completely unrelated--the  changing of the seasons, even. And why not? Is that a problem? Poets are not editorial writers.

On the other hand--Nersessian's chapter on Ode to Psyche is far and away the best thing I have ever read on that still under-appreciated poem. 

Keats's Odes and Joe Moshenska's book on Milton make me think there may be a whole dazzling wave of books by literary scholars that are aimed at the literary-but-not-necessarily-academic readers. As a retired academic who has waded through enough dissertation-ese to satisfy me for this lifetime, I'm ready. 

Edmund Wilson, _The Fifties_

 WHEN I WAS in graduate school in the late 1970s and early 1980s, there were a few critics/theorists whose names, when dropped, would elicit wise head-nods from one’s peers: Adorno, Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson. I was too cowardly to mention my own great allegiance, except when I had had too many drinks, but there was a secret shrine in my heart for Edmund Wilson. 

Wilson was a bit dated, not very theoretically rigorous, had tended to publish in the New Yorker and similarly unscholarly publications. His politics were left, but in an Old Left way, and well short of 1980s sophistication about race and gender. His prose was lucid and graceful, which seemed a sign of shallowness at the time. You knew Derrida and Jameson were the real deal because you could barely understand what they were driving at.

I loved the lucid and graceful prose, however; I loved that he had learned as many languages as he had and could read the great Russian novels and the Hebrew scriptures in the original languages. I loved that even when writing about relatively minor figures—James Branch Cabell and Henry Blake Fuller, say—he read the whole corpus of their work. An essay by Wilson on anybody was a portrait in the round, a full tour.

The north side of Chicago had a used book store on every other block in those days, and with a few years of diligent scouting I acquired and devoured Axel’s Castle, The Wound and the Bow, The Triple Thinkers, To the Finland Station, A Window on Russia, The Dead Sea Scrolls, and my very favorite, Patriotic Gore. I read through the collected reviews and literary journalism: The Shores of Light, Classics and Commercials, The Bit Between my Teeth, The Devils and Canon Barham. 

His journals had been published, too, edited by Leon Edel. I started in on the first volume, The Twenties, in keen anticipation, but didn’t get far. Wilson had a habit, in those days, of writing long passages of natural description—a writing exercise recommended to him by a beloved professor of his at Princeton, Christian Gauss. I can take a certain amount of landscape writing, but not pages and pages, and I just bogged down.

Having heard that he to some extent had abandoned the habit in his  later years, I last year started in on The Fifties. It was like meeting up with an old, old friend. Here was the Wilson I loved, ruminating on what he was reading and the people he was meeting, which included not only various informants behind such books as Apologies to the Iroquois and The Dead Sea Scrolls, but also W. H. Auden, Dawn Powell, André Malraux, Vladimir Nabokov…Max Beerbohm, of all people. 

Should I try The Sixties? I think so. I may even try The Forties to see whether he had already started getting away from the landscape compulsion.

Martin Heidegger, _Hölderlin's Hymn "The Ister"_, trans. William McNeill and Julia Davis

 THE THREE OR four people who regularly look at this blog may be growing weary of my returning to the topic of Heidegger. Sorry. The fever has not passed, unfortunately.

To resume: I love the way Heidegger talks about poetry; he seems to give it its full due. Take "The Origin of the Work of Art," for instance, or his insistence in this book (lectures for a course he gave in 1942) that poetic ideas are not simply philosophical ideas with a lot of frosting and bows. One does not subtract or scrape off the poetry to get the "real" idea. The idea is in the poetry, damn it.

However, I worry that Heidegger's thinking about poetry is fatally compromised by his support of Hitler and Nazism.

Heidegger has some insights here that left me slack-jawed in admiration. The main subject is Hölderlin's hymn to the River Ister (a.k.a. the Danube), and in Part I Heidegger describes a river as at the same time a locality and a journeying. Which struck me as profoundly true. The river is here before us, so it is a locality, but the water we see was upstream yesterday and will be downstream tomorrow, so the river is also an elsewhere. Similarly, the river is a now, while before us, but in its movement is also the past and the future. 

Part III declares that the poet is a river.  The poet is of the now--but also, if he or she is mindful of tradition, also a voice of the past and, in prophetic mode, a voice of the future. And the poet is of here--but also in his or her awareness of other traditions, perhaps also an elsewhere. Great idea, no? So the poet is a river--

--which means the poet is a demi-god, like the river. "Uh oh," you might think here. And then history gets married to the idea of locality and Heidegger starts suggesting  that the West is special, thanks to the Greeks, and the German are special too, since they come closest to grasping what the Greeks were about...and we are well past "uh oh" at that point.

Can we say poets are rivers and call it good, without saying they are demi-gods?

Part II, the longest section of the book at about 70 pages, is about the first choral ode in Sophocles' Antigone, and it too is astonishingly insightful, thankfully without raising so many red flags. A key point: the word deinon in the first line, most often translated "wonder," actually shades off into concepts like  anxiety and terror as well as awe--the frightful, powerful, and inhabitual is Heidegger's formula--so the chorus's claim that humankind has more deinon going on than anything else in the world is worth pondering, and ponder it Heidegger does. Part II is a neat demonstration that the poetic idea is not the pill under the sugar coating, but integral to the poetry itself.

Final note: German has a verb, dichten, which means "to compose" and is not quite the same as the word "to write." Rather than translate it as "writing poetry," McNeill and Davis render it as "poetize," which was odd at first but made sense, as it helps capture the act of discernment or framing that is part of writing poetry.

Mark Volman, with John Cody, _Happy Forever: My Musical Adventures with the Turtles, Frank Zappa, T. Rex, Flo & Eddie, and More_

THE BEST ROCK memoirs are often not by the biggest stars (e.g., Keith Richards, Bruce Springsteen) but by those who instead were off to the side a little--Al Kooper's Backstage Passes and Ian McLagan's All the Rage, for example. Happy Forever is another such case.

Mark Volman was not a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame kind of performer, but he was certainly busy--first as founding member of the Turtles, who had several hit singles, including the still-beloved song alluded to in his title, then as the "Flo" of Flo & Eddie with fellow ex-Turtle Howard Kaylan, singing leads for the early-seventies Mothers of Invention and backing vocals for such luminaries as Marc Bolan and Bruce Springsteen. He knew loads of people and saw the whole dazzling late-sixties L.A. pop scene up close.

The book is not exactly written by him, though. Not that he had a ghost writer--instead, co-author John Cody has put together a kind of oral biography of Volman, compiling quotations from interviews he conducted with Volman's family, friends, collaborators, and so on. In other words, it is a great deal like Jean Stein's Edie.

This could have gone wrong in a great many ways, but the reminiscences of Volman's wide range of associates are so vivid and Cody is so astute an arranger of his mosaic of quotations that the book is a brisk and continually entertaining read (even, remarkably, when Volman becomes an academic).

Curiosity about the Turtles or even Frank Zappa is probably relatively slight compared to curiosity about Jim Morrison, Joni Mitchell, or his Bobness, but Cody constructs through these Volman-vignettes an evocative picture of the pop music business at a particularly interesting moment.

Bruno Schulz, _The Complete Fiction of Bruno Schulz_, trans. Celina Wieniewska

I HAVE BEEN meaning to read this for a long time--I bought it decades ago--and I am highly pleased that I  finally did. It is every bit as good as I always heard it was.

The book's two collections of short stories (The Street of Crocodiles [also known as Cinnamon Shops] and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass) both feel like novels, as almost all the stories have the same narrator, an adolescent named Joseph, and are about his family and neighborhood.

The family and neighborhood are probably quite a bit like Schulz's own. He was born in 1892 in a town named Drogobycz (or Drohobycz), which is currently within the borders of Ukraine, but within the boundaries of the Austro-Hungarian empire when Schulz was born and then in those of Poland after World War I. It was invaded and occupied by the Soviet Union in 1939, but in 1942--the year Schulz, a Jew, was murdered on the street by a Gestapo officer--it was occupied by the Germans. 

A lot of tumultuous and terrible history there, but the stories are all set in the years before the First World War, in what turned out to be the twilight of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Franz Joseph is still on the throne, but throughout the stories the reader gets a sense of a world only superficially stable, that may be dead but is refusing to lie down. The fires of adolescence are burning, but in a twilit world.

The tone is everything. Imagine a triangle whose three points are Franz Kafka, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Marc Chagall. Schulz would be right at the center.

And hats off to Celina Wieniewska. She seems to hit an unusually happy word choice again and again. This is from the story "Cinnamon Shops": 

"The Professor delved into a deep bookcase, full of old folios, unfashionable engravings, woodcuts and prints. He showed us, with esoteric gestures, old lithographs of night landscapes, of tree clumps in moonlight, of avenues in wintry parks outlined black on the white moonlit background."

I don't know Polish and cannot make comparisons, but I imagine that Wieniewska had a few choices available for "unfashionable," "clips," and "wintry," and I am convinced that she found exactly the right one. And "delved"! She must be the Gregory Rabassa of Polish.

Jefferson Cowie, _Freedom's Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power_

A TERRIFYINGLY ILLUMINATING book, and a winner of the Pulitzer for history to boot. By looking at just one county, Barbour County in southeastern Alabama, from about the time of statehood (1819) to late 1960s, Cowie explores how "freedom" in our political discourse has often amounted to "the freedom of white men to do whatever they want with the lives and property of non-whites" 

The four principal sections of the book take close looks at moments when the federal government tried to circumscribe the actions of the white men who ran Barbour County and, basically, failed. 

In the 1820s and 1830s, during the Andrew Jackson administration, a treaty put together by the federal government ceded the Creeks a large piece of territory in southeastern Alabama in return for their withdrawal from Georgia. White settlers had discovered, though, that the land in question was excellent for growing cotton, so they just moved in and started plantations, completely ignoring the treaty. Federal officials (including, bizarrely, Francis Scott Key) were sent to enforce federal law. No dice. The white settlers got the land.

Reconstruction: in a scene enacted all over the South in 1872, white men secretly brought firearms to the polling place and shot at the formerly enslaved, now newly enfranchised Black citizens who were trying to vote. Federal officials were sent, again, and protests made in Congress. Were the voting rights of the formerly enslaved restored? Umm, no.

End of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century: the state of Alabama discovers that a lot of revenue can be generated by using convict labor. The prisons fill up with convicts, enriching both the state and local  manufacturers. Federal officials try to stop this practice. Do they succeed? Nope.

Mid-1950s to mid-1960s: the civil rights movement galvanizes the country, leading to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Alabama governor George Wallace, native son of Barbour County, becomes notorious for leading the resistance to integration. Federal officials make some headway this time, and the federal legislation is enforced. Local officials, however, begin a decades-long project of whittling away at it. They have made a lot of progress.

The real looming shadow at the end of Cowie's book, though, is that George Wallace discovers that the political trick of marketing white supremacy as "freedom," as in "the freedom the founding fathers bequeathed us and that our patriots died for," is a hit all over the country. The Republican Party takes due note.

And that is why this important book is not just illuminating, but terrifyingly so. 

Brilliant book--not only energetically researched, but written with verve, some scenes (Election Day 1872, Wallace's one-on-one with LBJ) having a novelistic intensity.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, _The Blithedale Romance_

 WE KNOW ABOUT "dystopian" novels, of course, but Hawthorne's may be the earliest example of an adjacent phenomenon, the "anti-utopian" novel, in which some bold and idealistic experiment in reforming human society comes a cropper due to all-too-human venality, pettiness, and short-sightedness. The inspiration for the novel lay in Hawthorne's time at Brook Farm, an 1840s experiment in communal living partly inspired by the ideas of Charles Fourier (there were quite a few comparable experiments at the time). He ended up not much caring for it.

The novel is funny, in a satirical and somewhat ungenerous way, and has some brilliant writing. The most memorable character is Zenobia, who may be one of the first fictional depictions of an American feminist, apparently based in large part on Margaret Fuller. There's a tablespoon of spite in the portrait, I'd say, but she jumps off the page. She's certainly more interesting than Miles Coverdale, the Hawthorne-like narrator.

Literary works puncturing the balloon of human presumption have a long history. We could go back to Candide or Gulliver's Travels, not to mention Hamlet, the theology of John Calvin and the Book of Ecclesiastes. But circumstances change after the French Revolution, say, and the idea takes hold that humans can re-design their communities to make them more rational. Hawthorne's novel must be one of the earlier takedowns of that kind of overconfidence.

Modern inheritors--perhaps T. C. Boyle and Michel Houellebecq? And most campus novels, come to think of it, since they tend to contrast higher education's noble mission and its often shabby shortcomings. And definitely most writing program novels--Lan Samantha Chang's All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost, Lucy Ives's Loudermilk, Brandon Taylor's The Late Americans...all descendants of The Blithedale Romance.

Robert Browning, _Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Saviour of Society_

 I'VE BEEN READING Jonathan Beecher's Writers and Revolution, an engaging account of the effects of the revolution of 1848 on various writers (e.g., Marx and Flaubert), and in consequence occasionally thinking of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, or Napoleon III. His election as President in December 1848 was a thumping anti-climax to most of the high hopes of that year, and his coup d'etat of three years later killed off whatever lingered. 

He has his defenders, no doubt, but I get the impression he is mainly remembered as a hypocritical opportunist whose main appeal was his association with his uncle, the Napoleon who conquered Europe. His main electoral appeal, back before he cancelled the new constitution and made himself emperor, was to make France great again. He was president for four years then emperor for another eighteen.

Thinking of Napoleon III led me back to this (which I first read in 1987 or so)--a 2,155 line dramatic monologue about a deposed monarch who finds himself exiled in England and sits down with some attractive young woman to explain what happened. It was published as a book in 1871, by which time Napoleon III had, indeed, been deposed and driven into exile in England after France's defeat in the grande debâcle of the Franco-Prussion War. 

Turns out, though, that Browning wrote at least some of the poem in 1859 or so, before things ended so badly. At that time, his wife Elizabeth Barrett Browning was still alive, and she was one of Napoleon III's more vocal English defenders. Browning was sometimes a defender, too, though not so keen a one. It may be significant that he did not publish the poem until after Elizabeth died.

So...is the portrait sympathetic or satirical? Readers disagree. I would say satirical--the speaker is engaged in a long and complicated self-justification, a bit like Browning's versions of Andrea del Sarto and Bishop Blougram, and his case for hewing to the middle-of-the-road, being neither this nor that, often sounds like an apologia for mediocrity. It sounds exactly like a hypocritical opportunist's defense of his hypocritical opportunism. 

But the beauty of the dramatic monologue is that the whole performance sounds credible, at points. Hohenstiel-Schwangau ("high-stick swan-place," apparently) has heard all the criticisms of his rule and has a point-by-point  rebuttal ready. All he was trying to do was save society.

Hard to imagine this poem ever finding a wide audience, but it really is a fascinating study of a certain kind of political "leadership."

Patricia Lockwood, “Diary”; Walter Benjamin, “One Way Street,” trans. Edmud Jephcott

AMONG THE MYSTERIES: since Patricia Lockwood is an American national treasure, why do I find her stuff in the London Review of Books more often than anywhere else? 

Every issue of the LRB devotes its final pages to a “Diary,” which is rarely an actual diary in these post-Alan Bennett times but usually a personal essay. Lockwood got the spot in the December 5, 2024 issue, and somehow spun a dramatically diverse array of topics into a beautifully integrated essay: The X-Files, Phineas Gage (the man who survived a tamping iron being shot through his head in 1823), the medical emergencies of some of her family members, the novels of E. M. Forster, and people convinced they have experienced an alien abduction. 

The United States has long needed a Walter Benjamin, and I am starting to think Lockwood could pull it off. She could certainly come up with a contemporary “One Way Street”— Benjamin’s 1928 compilation of wit, parody, observation, and analysis. Lockwood can be hilariously funny but also unbearably poignant; she always has a weather eye open on the zeitgeist and knows the deep truth of any historical moment lies in the apparently trivial. 

The first half of No One Is Talking about This has the “One Way Street” feel: confident and vulnerable at the same time, earnest and satirical at the same time, mercurial, breathless, brilliant. 

I wonder whether she has plans to collect her short pieces? I would read them all again.

Can One Read "A"-24?

 "A"-24 is the final section of Louis Zukofsky's magnificent (say I) and lengthy poem "A". It is much the longest section--240 pages in the edition I have, published by the University of California Press in 1978. What prompts the question of whether one can read it is not its length, however, but its form. It's a score for a musical piece, composed by his wife Celia, with five elements. 

One element, taken from various pieces G. F. Handel wrote for harpsichord,  is rendered in actual musical notation. The other four are excerpts from Zukofsky's writing, arranged in lines under the Handel harpsichord score and to be spoken in cadence with the Handel pieces. One line uses excerpts from Zukofsky's critical essays, a second draws on his play Arise, Arise, a third has passages from his fiction, and the fourth and final part is from "A" itself.

So "A"-24 could be read as one reads a score--only a score is not the music, exactly, but instructions for a performance. When musicians with the necessary competencies and the required instruments read the score and play it, that performance is what registers upon us as "music." So running one's eyes over the pages of "A"-24 does not seem to place the reader in the presence of "A"-24, if you see what I mean. 

I did read it, in a way, adopting the strategy of reading the critical essay line right through from beginning to end, then the play lines the same way, and so on with the other two...but I  lost the effect of simultaneity, of course, which seems to be a key condition of the form: that you are getting four sides of Zukofsky at once. In short, you cannot read "A"-24 and feel like you have, indeed, read it because you have to hear it.

But how in the world are you going to hear it? Rarely as Pericles, Zukofsky's favorite Shakesperean play, is performed, you may actually come across a performance during your lifetime, but what are the odds your local community theater will present "A"-24? According to Z-Site: A Companion to the Works of Louis Zukofsky (https://z-site.net/notes-to-a/a-24/), it "has been performed a number of times," but the most recent occasion they record was in 2009. 

PennSound has two recordings from 1978, featuring Steve Benson, Lyn Hejinian, Carla Harryman, Kit Robinson, and Barrett Watten, with Bob Perelman on piano, and one can only be grateful they exist, but they are not of particularly high fidelity. Something captured with really good microphones and nice stereo separation would be helpful, so that you could follow (if you wanted) one of the lines the way one can follow (for example) the viola when hearing a string quartet. The 1978 recordings provide an often-pleasing and not unmusical babble, but one wishes for more definition in the sound.

I tried some home experiments, using an mp3 of the "Passecaille" from Handel's Harpichord Suite No. 7, but I can't say the results were what I hoped. Matching up the parts to the music was difficult because different performers take different approaches to playing Handel's repeats, so getting a performance that lined up exactly with Celia Zukofsky's score was a bridge too far.

A carefully recorded performance would certainly be a gift to Zukofsky-philes everywhere, and there must be at least a few thousand of us.

Sara Nicholson, _April_

 I PICKED UP this collection of poems (her third, I think) on the recommendation of a friend, and it's really good. I hope to review it for a more serious blog than this one, so I am not going to say much here, save that the book has a lot to do with saints and with poets. Both saints and poets can be major pains in  the tush, but often turn out to be reminding us about something important.

Alain Badiou, _Manifesto for Philosophy_, trans. Norman Madarasz

 FROM 1989–THIS translation was published ten years later. I wanted to look at this mainly because of Lacoue-Labarthe’s mentioning Badiou’s idea of “The Age of Poets” in Heidegger and the Politics of Poetry, so I read only that chapter and two others, “Heidegger Viewed as Commonplace” and “Sutures,” skimming a bit elsewhere.

Let’s start with the “suture.” Badiou posits that philosophy has four conditions: (1) the poem, (2) the matheme, (3) the political, and (4) love. That is, it might explain things through analogy, parable, and metaphor (the poem), or through strictly logical statements (the matheme), while concerning itself with establishing a just and flourishing polity (the political) or the ideal grounds for relationships among persons (love)—that’s how I would gloss it, in any case. A “suture” occurs when the practice of philosophy identifies itself too narrowly, “delegates its functions” as Badiou puts it, to one of the four conditions. A suture works to the advantage of the condition but leads to the “suppression” of philosophy.

A suture to the matheme leads to, for example, logical positivism and a lot of what gets called “analytical” philosophy, which benefited the theoretical understanding of the natural sciences but did not much advance (Badious thinks) philosophy. A suture to the political leads to, for example, Marxism. A suture to the poem leads to Nietzsche, Bergson, Heidegger…a lot of the key figures from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. 

This was great for poetry—hence the Age of Poets in that same span. Badiou identifies seven by name: Hölderlin (“their prophet and anticipating vigil” from the early 19th century), then Stéphane Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud, Georg Trakl, Fernando Pessoa, Osip Mandelstam, and Paul Celan.

Badiou (unfortunately, I think) does not explain why he picked these seven. I wouldn’t challenge any name on the list, but I was a bit cheesed at the omissions. Could we not put Blake, Wordsworth, and Shelley alongside Hölderlin as distinguished precursors? How about Yeats and Eliot? Stevens? If English language poets are ineligible for some reason, why aren’t Rilke and Valéry on the list?

Oh, well. Moving on.

The suture to the poem was helpful in plucking loose the Descartes-to-Kant suture to the matheme. It’s a great move for poetry, opening up fruitful disturbances both in the notion of the Subject and in the notion of the Object. Unfortunately, this suture also produces Heidegger (the chapter “Heidegger Viewed as Commonplace” deals with the downsides of this development). Celan brings the Age of Poets to a close when he sees through this particular problem and shuts that traffic down.

Speaking just for myself, the suture to the poem sounds like a great idea. Philosophy produced by the suture to the matheme, by contrast, leaves me thinking, “is that all there is? Who cares?” On the other hand….Heidegger. Most of Heidegger seems powerfully right to me, but then I hit a toxic patch and think, God, please, no. 

I now think Lacoue-Labarthe’s book may have been looking for ways philosophy can stitch a suture or two into poetry without turning into an apology for totalitarianism.