James Shea, _Last Day of My Face_ (1 of 2)

 JAMES SHEA'S THIRD collection includes a poem, "That's That," about the word "that." It's short, so here is the whole poem:

Certain words I dislike.

Ooze. Lozenge. Other words

I love. Katydid. Bumblebee.

Take that, for instance,

how it comes fat from the mouth,

nowhere to elide it (massage it).

It's a pronoun (that's what I like)

a conjunction (that I might love),

an adverb (that much),

an adjective (that word

sounds like what it stands for:

is-ness). This is quiet,

less of a claim. I defer

to the sure sense of things.

That's how I approach catastrophe.

It seems to me that this poem provides a key, of sorts,  to Shea's poetry. 

For one thing, he likes echoes; another poem is titled "A Void's Void," and the collection has lines like "wind / enters every window" and "a shout from a field / very far afield." 

More crucial, I think, is the difference between "that" and "this." I would concede that "this" is quieter, "less of a claim," as Shea puts it, but "this" also often indicates proximity, while "that" suggests a certain amount of distance. Suppose we re about to enjoy a picnic at the park. When I say, "Let's not take this table, let's go over to that one," I am probably recommending we pick a table that is farther away than the one right at hand. When my grandson says, "I don't want to wear this hat, I want to wear that one," he is declining to wear the hat I have just handed him, preferring one still up on the shelf. 

Similarly, Shea's poems are less likely to say "look at this" than they are to say "look at that." In some subtle way, they gesture away from themselves to something a bit farther off.

I saw the streetlight turn on from my bedroom window,

it was dusk, the sun behind the hills still casting

a white glow against the remnants of a backlit sky,

like the sky in Magritte's painting of men falling anonymously [....]

A lot of poems, I submit, would stick quite closely to that "I" in the bedroom. Shea's poem casts out to the horizon, then for a painting even farther away (Houston, if you're curious). The difference between "look at this" and "look at that" is quite a bit like the difference between "look here" and "look there," and the above lines are a good example of how a Shea poem will gravitate towards "look there."

There are a good many windows in Last Day of My Face, and that may be a sort of key as well. Sometimes the poems almost seem to want to vanish, to become the windowpane that one does not notice because one is focused on the object beyond it. This is not a typical move in English language poetry; what one takes away from "Ode to a Nightingale" is not the nightingale, and "The Snow Man" does not try to make you see the snow man. Since Romanticism, poems tend to be, sooner or later, about the poet.

But not always. Lorine Niedecker's poetry has an effect a bit like Shea's, as does some of George Oppen's. Shea has spent a lot of time with Chinese and Japanese poetry, and that too may be making a difference.  The poems are not ego-less, exactly--first person singular pronouns do crop up--but somehow the objective that-out-there outweighs the subjective this-in-here. 

Let's look again at the last line of "That's That": "That's how I approach catastrophe." Several of the poems in Last Day of My Face do feel like they are approaching catastrophe, upheaval, loss--"Fresh Report," "Recovery Time," "Saccade"--and they all do "defer / to the sure sense of things," as calm as the two figures in the sculpture at the end of Yeats's "Lapis Lazuli," whose "ancient, glittering eyes are gay."

I haven't even gotten to the long final poem yet. Next time.

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, _Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas_, trans. Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Peterson

 I HAD BEEN meaning to read this for quite a while, and it seemed like a great followup to Zama (see post for May 20). As in Antonio di Benedetto's Zama, our main character is a 19th century upper-class South American man (Brazilian in this case) who does very little but expects a great deal. The author's intentions seem, broadly speaking, satirical. 

Neither Di Benedetto's Zama nor Machado's Brás Cubas is likely to earn much readerly sympathy, but their sheer presumption makes them interesting, and Cubas has the added distinction, unusual in narrators of novels, of being dead. Machado's novel was published in 1880 and may be the first fiction to attempt this trick; I know of no earlier examples, and hardly any later--about the only example that comes to mind is the Billy Wilder film Sunset Boulevard.

Death seems not to have made Brás Cubas wiser, more generous, or more grateful. He has no misgivings about the institution of slavery, for instance (legal in Brazil until 1888), or the the affair he conducted over many years with the wife of a friend. He never got any kind of career going, but that seems not to bother him. He seems not to have any intellectual interests other than an attachment to the eccentric theories of his friend Quincas Borba (the subject of another novel by Machado), nor to have held tight to any principles, nor to have thought much about using his high status to forward any kind of social progress. He doesn't get much accomplished at all, really.

So why he does he become interesting? His candor? His indifference to what we think of him? His lack of remorse? He's past caring about anything, and that carries its own kind of allure.

Tommy Orange, _Wandering Stars_

 IT TOOK ME a while to start appreciating this book. It happened on p. 221, when a couple of the characters are talking about Donnie Darko.

     "What about the sequel?"

     "It was really bad. Like, we couldn't even finish it."

     "That bad?"

     "I think most sequels are bad."

     "Yeah, I think they are."

I think I laughed out loud at the point. Since Wandering Stars is a sequel to Orange's 2018 novel There There, the conversation struck me as an inspired metafictional wink to the reader, Orange letting us know that he knows that there is nothing easy about what he is trying to pull off.

Wandering Stars follows the example of one of cinema's most successful sequels, The Godfather, Part II, in being set both before and after the events of There There. The twelve chapters of Part One, "Before," present some of the ancestors of the Bear Shield and Red Feather families that we meet in There There; among those ancestors are survivors of the Sand Creek Massacre and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. The ten chapters of Part Two, "Aftermath," show how Orvil Red Feather's being shot at the catastrophic conclusion of There There affects him, his brothers, his grandmother, and his great aunt. Two final chapters in Part Three, "Futures," take up how Orvil and his younger brother Lony have moved into adulthood.

The novel really began to engage me once it focused on Orvil and his brothers; a story took shape as the three young men struggled in their different ways to make sense of what had happened to their family. While I was reading Part Two, Part One retrospectively gained meaning, as I began to see that the family had been living for generations with attempts to erase them and their culture, first through literal murder, then through "education" and addictive substances. Against all odds, though, the family survived.

Orange writes as brilliantly as he did in There There. He again varies the narration--sometimes first person, sometimes close third, occasionally second--and there is a lyricism, too, that I don't remember noticing in There There, suggesting a reality behind appearances that unites the generations, even though the Red Feather brothers have no information about ancestors like Jude Star or Opal Viola Bear Shield. 

Wandering Stars reminded me a bit of Dara Horn's People Love Dead Jews. Horn takes up the irony that a large audience exists for stories in which the reader or viewer identifies with Jews who were killed or driven away or are in some way long gone--Anne Frank, Maus, Fiddler on the  Roof--but a lot of the same folk find the presence of living, here-and-now Jews just a bit discomfiting. Similarly, Wandering Stars takes up the irony that romanticizations of the vanished indigenous way of life can be very popular--e.g., Dancing with Wolves--but living, here-and-now indigenous peoples still have to resist marginalization, incomprehension, and erasure.

Ariana Reines, _The Rose_

WRITTEN CONCURRENTLY WITH Wave of Blood, perhaps? The Rose is mentioned a time or two in Wave of Blood, so perhaps it was already finished by October 2023, even though it appeared after Wave of Blood had already been out a few months. If conceived concurrently, they would be fraternal rather than identical twins--a lot in common, but easily told apart.

Reading The Rose reminded me a lot of reading Reines's other collection of poetry--not so much because she revisits material she has written of before (although, yes, she does) as because it conjures that same headlong feeling, that feeling that you had better not stop reading, that there is no way off this roller coaster until it comes to its end. That, and the feeling that you are playing a game of chess with Reines, but she has already finished the game in her head and has already started playing the next game while you are still trying to figure out her moves in this one.

So: familiar material? Yes, in that Reines again writes of her mother and again embraces abjection...that is, somehow, Reines turns being treated badly into a kind of agency, an assertiveness, a claim to power...ehh, that doesn't make any sense. But if it made sense, why would she write about it?

     If our fathers

& mothers loved us right

Would we need to write

At all? If we were more tele-

Pathic as a species

Which we should have

Become by now, let's

Be honest, what would

Become of writing & art

But explosions in the heart

Mansions of great intricacy

We'd create invariably'& constantly

On behalf of one another

With no need of a culture

To transact these things

For us?

Part I seems to come out of the aftermath of a difficult love affair, while Part II seems to be written during the affair, creating the odd feeling that that the difficult affair has already been lived through before it has been experienced. And then Part III is a long poem, "Theory of the Flower," which starts with Molly Bloom (if you have not heard Siobhan McKenna's reading of Molly's soliloquy, you should find it just to hear her say "swimming in roses") and pinballs through Joni Mitchell, Cynthia Nixon, Ezra Pound, and the Roman de la Rose before, in its last four pages...turning into...something utterly...different...and pivoting back to Joyce, only not exactly. Whew. Maybe the best thing she has ever done. 

I have often thought of Reines as a contemporary confessional poet, and I still do, but I am grateful for the clear line she draws on p. 107:

& long ago I made a solemn vow not to go

The way the Confessionals went.
I just don't see my death bringing Justice.

Tommy Pico, _Nature Poem_

THROUGHOUT THIS BOOK (published 2017), Pico explains why he doesn't want to write a nature poem.

I can't write a nature poem
bc it's fodder for the noble savage
narrative.

 

I can't write a nature poem
bc I only fuck with the city

I don't like thinking abt nature bc nature makes me upset there is a god

I can't write a nature poem bc English is some Stockholm shit,
makes me complicit in my tribe's erasure--

You can't be an NDN person in today's world

and write a nature poem.

All compelling reasons, but Pico ends up writing a nature poem anyway. Deciding that nature does not only mean streams and fields and clouds and trees, but (à la Wittgenstein) nature is whatever is the case, Pico writes his nature poem just by noticing whatever is going on around and inside him, presenting detail after detail, impression after impression. 

As in Frank O'Hara's Lunch Poems, the accumulation of detail and impression usually feels random, haphazard, until a killer closing line pulls everything into focus. (I am not going to quote any of the closing lines, because they only work if you have read the lines leading up to them. Just take my word on this.)

Indeed, one of the book's one-line poems--"I'm going to be so sad when Aretha Franklin dies"--made me wonder if what Pico was really up to in Nature Poem was writing his own  Lunch Poems, since that book's most famous poem is "The Day Lady Died," about hearing the news of Billie Holiday's death. 

On the book's next-to-last page, Pico acknowledges that he may have written a nature poem after all--"Admit it. This is the poem you wanted all along"--but is "you" Pico or the reader? Both, maybe. Pico has written his nature poem by not writing one.

David Keenan, _This Is Memorial Device_

I WANTED TO read this the very minute I read a description of it in a review of one of Keenan's more recent books. This Is Memorial Device presents itself as an oral history of the musical scene of a particular city at a particular time, on the model of McCain and McNeil's Please Kill Me or Goodman's Meet Me in the Bathroom, but the city is not New York or London or San Francisco or Manchester but Airdrie, Scotland, about twelve miles west of Glasgow, population about 37,000. 

All the bands in this book are fictional, and even within the fiction none of them get noticed beyond the boundaries of Airdrie--not even Memorial Device, by unanimous assent the scene's leading band, whose recorded output consists of a couple of self-released LPs and a few self-released cassettes. For the initiated, however, for the true believers, for the early disciples, they were transformative, visionary, a once-in-a-lifetime glimpse of the possibility of transfiguration.

Judging from their cited influences--Sun Ra, La Monte Young, free jazz--Memorial Device and the other bands of the Airdrie scene would have been a challenging listen for the uninitiated. They had little in common with other bands coming out of Scotland in the early 1980s (Big Country, Aztec Camera, Mike Scott of the Waterboys) and they would have looked on such phenomena as Culture Club, Duran Duran, and Wham with bottomless loathing. But a key ingredient of any scene is the music you all hold in unreserved contempt.

I don't know whether Airdrie actually had a lively post-punk scene circa 1978-81, but Keenan evokes with heartbreaking accuracy that feeling of being in a scene, where everyone seems to be in a band or about to form a band or just devoted to seeing the shows and getting the cassettes, and a tiny stage with a buzzy PA in a basement with damp walls and a reeking bathroom seems like the perfect setting for glory.

I hit a bump about halfway through, where Keenan has a chapter that tries to render the sound of Scots vernacular (à la Irvine Welsh)--somewhat taxing for an American reader. But the rest of the book I gulped down, and the only problem was that, like most scenes, it was all over all too soon.

Philip C. Almond, _Mary Madalene: A Cultural History_

AS THE SUBTITLE alerts us, Almond is interested not only in the woman identified in the gospels as the the first person (or one of the first two or three persons) to learn and report that Jesus of Nazareth had risen from the dead, but also in the complicated figure cobbled together in western Christianity over the next few centuries.

Accordingly, Almond goes over the passages in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John in which Mary Magdalene appears, then moves on to:

-- the Mary Magdalene of the 2nd and 3rd century Gnostic Gospels, in which she always seems to get Jesus's point before anyone else does, is singled out as his "companion," and even gets kissed on the mouth by him;

-- the "composite" Mary Magdalene declared by Pope Gregory (the Great) in the late 6th century, blending the Mary Magdalene of the Easter story with Mary of Bethany (sister to Martha and Lazarus, washer and anointer of Jesus' feet) and with the sinful woman in Luke 7 (who, likewise, washed and anointed Jesus' feet); 

-- the Mary Magdalene of medieval saints' legends, who evangelized France and later withdrew to a contemplative life and grew her hair out until it reached her ankles;

-- Mary Magdalene the penitent sex worker who, hair unbound and at least partly undressed, was depicted in painting after painting after painting for centuries; 

-- the Mary Magdalene of Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code and a few works of highly speculative, not to say fantastical "scholarship," who actually married Jesus and had children with him.

Almond is conversant and highly comfortable with the relevant scholarship, and writes briskly, engagingly, and sometimes even playfully ("Henry VIII was ambiguously to embrace Protestantism so that he might bigamously embrace Anne Boleyn"). It's a short book, just over 300 pages, and a brilliant detailed introduction to a fascinating figure.

Gabrielle Zevin, _Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow_

 I READ THIS a month ago and apparently forgot to write a blog post about it. I read it for one of our book clubs, and I probably would not have picked it up save for that circumstance, but I enjoyed it. 

One strength of the novel is its offering a glimpse into the world of video games--a world I have no familiarity with whatsoever. As children, the novel's two main characters, Sam Masur and Sadie Green, bond over some of the same games my kids played--Sims, Oregon Trail--so reading about their fascination with the artificial worlds of these games gave me an idea why game-playing was so compelling to my kids and to many, many, many of my students over the years.

Sam and Sadie become friends--despite frequent misunderstandings and quarrels--and artistic collaborators, the creators of fantastically successful games. The key ingredient to their collaboration, however, is their friend Marx Watanabe, as he is the one who helps them navigate past those frequent misunderstandings and quarrels. He is Sam's best friend, eventually (to Sam's chagrin) Sadie's lover, and his charm and savvy make him the linchpin of their flourishing business.

But--spoiler alert--he dies in a spectacularly tragic fashion. Can Sam and Sadie remain successful collaborators without their Brian Epstein? 

Marx, before becoming the business whiz bringing Sam and Sadie's company to new heights, was an aspiring actor especially keen on Shakespeare, which gives Zevin an opening to bring in a good bit of Shakespeareana, including the phrase from Macbeth's famous speech that she takes for her title. I was not sure what she was up to with this, but it was diverting to spot the allusions. Maybe the novel was a little game-like itself in this way.

Eliot Weinberger, _The Life of Tu Fu_

 TU FU, WHO also shows up in internet searches as Du Fu, was the other great Tang Dynasty poet besides Li Po (circa 8th century CE). Weinberger explains in an afterword that this book "is not a translation of individual poems, but a fictional autobiography of Tu Fu derived and adapted from the thoughts, images, and allusions in the poetry." 

What to make of that description? I don't know. How faithful a portrait of Tu Fu this book is, how close these texts come to recreating Tu Fu's poems in English, whether these texts correspond even roughly to Tu Fu's actual poems--I have no idea. 

The book worked for me, though. I think it was Hugh Kenner who wrote of Ezra Pound's Cathay and Homage to Sextus Propertius that in looking far away from the here and now of Europe during World War I, Pound responded all the more profoundly to the crisis. The Life of Tu Fu is like  that. It manages to evoke the mood of the pandemic and the final chaotic year of the first Trump administration--the dislocations, the ruptures, the estrangements, the sense of being in endless free fall--with renderings of the lines and images of a Chinese poet (and beleaguered bureaucrat) who lived thirteen centuries ago.

Soldiers still guard the ruined palace: rats run across the tiles.

A squirrel with folded hands outside his broken nest.

That dandelion in the wind once had roots.

 Live like a wren, unnoticed on a high branch, and you'll stay alive.

It's been so many years: I imagine her face, looking at me skeptically.

Rick Barot, _The Galleons_

 I THINK I first read Rick Barot way back in 2006, when a group of his poems led off the Legitimate Dangers anthology. I don't recall those samples making an impression on me at the time, but in the last few years, in one periodical or another, I kept coming across poems of Barot's that I liked, so...why not try one of his collections?

This one is from 2020 (a new one came out in 2024). The collection's title (also the title of ten individual poems within) refers to the Spanish ships that carried the spoil and pillage of empire across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans to Spain. Barot was born in the Philippines, one of the places despoiled and pillaged (not only by Spain, but also by the U.S.A. after 1898), and many of the poems look at his and his family's relationship to the history.

I tend not to expect elegance from poetry collections with this kind of thematic content, but that's the word that kept coming to my mind. Monica Youn puts it well in one of the blurbs on the back cover: "Rick Barot brings his understated virtuosity and perceptual sensitivity to bear on issues of postcolonialism, representation, memory, and grief." The themes ("postcolonialism, representation, memory, and grief") are what might land this book on a syllabus, but its elegance ("understated virtuosity and perceptual sensitivity") is what kept pulling me in. 

All the poems are in unrhymed couplets, the syntax poised, the imagery clean and telling, as in these lines on spring:

The blooms called forth by a bare measure of warmth,

days that are more chill than warm, though the roots must

know, and the leaves, and the spindly trunks ganged up

by the trash bins behind our houses. The blue pointillism

in morning fog. The blue that is lavender. The blue that is

purple. The smell that is the air's sugar, the sweet

weight when you put your face ear, the way you would

put it near the side of someone's head. Here the ear.

Here the nape.

                       ("The Names")

That spring feeling of a "bare measure of warmth," the exactness of "spindly trunks ganged up," the swerve to the Seurat allusion, the "air's sugar" that turns to an evocation of eros. So good. And I literally, no kidding, just opened up the book at random to find that passage. It's that good all the way through.

Amit Chaudhuri, _Finding the Raga: An Improvisation on Indian Music_

I ENJOY INDIAN music in a casual, hardly-know-what-I'm-listening-to kind of way, so the idea of learning more about it appealed to me, and any book by novelist Chaudhuri promised to be at least readable and likely fascinating. 

Finding the Raga, I'm glad to report, is both readable and fascinating, not only because of Chaudhuri's graceful prose but also because he has, in addition to writing his novels, been practicing and performing this music for most of his life. The book incorporates a good deal of his own personal history as a musician, which includes picking up a guitar in his teens because of a fascination with Joni Mitchell and Neil Young, so his account of the music's history and techniques reflects a performer's intimacy with the tradition.

What I learned: 

Since about my 95% of my familiarity with Indian music derives from listening to sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar's mainly instrumental albums (I also once saw his daughter Anoushka in concert), I had not realized how central to the tradition vocal performance was. I've been listening to some of the singers mentioned by Chaudhuri (e.g., on pp. 74 and 126), and what I now realize about Ravi Shankar is that a lot of his power, like that of great violinists, comes from how his lines "sing." 

I knew Indian music was based on improvisation, but I had not realized there were no "composers" as we understand them. A lot of jazz and rock improvisation is based on pieces known to be written by, say, Rodgers and Hart or T-Bone Walker or Charlie Mingus, but while some Indian melodies have persons' names attached to them, they are no one's intellectual property. They are a shared legacy.

Chaudhuri also emphasizes that Indian music is not mimetic, not representational. This can be said of most music, I suspect, and is why Walter Pater once claimed that all arts aspire to the condition of music. Chaudhuri means, I think, that a particular raga is not happy or sad--the same musical pattern (or thaat) could sound happy or sad, or convey any other emotion, depending on what the performer does. (This reminds me that every time I've heard Dylan perform "I;'s All Over Now, Baby Blue," it seems to mean something different.)

I also learned that the improvisations are not free-wheeling, anything-goes affairs, such as you might get from a stoned American guitarist noodling a scale over a drone and imagining he is playing Indian music. Every melodic pattern has its own allowable moves, and these depend on things like the time of day it is. As in western classical music, the performer has to walk a fine line between precise execution and giving the piece his or her own particular shape.

Chaudhuri has illuminating things to say about the Indian musical tradition's relationship to the literary one (Meerabai, Rabindranath Tagore) and makes some telling connections to English language literary traditions as well (Blake, Cavafy). 

A fine book.