Camille Ralphs, _After You Were, I Am_

CAMILLE RALPHS IS the first woman to be poetry editor at the TLS, which is impressive all by itself, and she is only thirty-three, which is even more remarkable. This is her first collection, published in 2024 by Faber in England and this year by McSweeney's in the USA. I picked it up by because of a favorable review by Ange Mlinko--I'm something of a Pavlovian dog whenever Mlinko or Stephanie Burt praises a poet, slobbering all over the keyboard as I look online for a copy of the book. I think I scored this one  through Open Books in Seattle.

The normal approach for a debut collection is "these are the best poems I have so far," but After You Were, I Am is a good deal more thematized and focused than that, with its three sections all orbiting the idea of the religious or the spiritual. The book is actually a bit darker and less vaporous than the phrase "the religious or the spiritual" suggests, but that's the best I can do.

The first section remodels and rewires eighteen prayers, mostly Christian and mostly ancient (none post-date George Herbert), somewhat in the way Alexander Pope rewired Horace or Ezra Pound rewired Propertius, with saltings of contemporary vocabulary, contemporary references, and contemporary anxieties. Kyrie Eleison morphs into: "True plutocrat and understrapper, / sugar daddy, spirit rapper, / organ donor, entity-- / O world, have mercy on me." Too audacious to be adopted by anyone's meditation retreat, I imagine, but authentic. You hear the satire and the longing at the same time.

The second section is a series of dramatic monologues from an historical and disastrous witch trial in 17th century Lancashire. Most of the women we hear from were found guilty of witchcraft and put to death, and Ralphs's collective portrait of them, among its other virtues, makes a powerful case for the separation of church and state.

Finally, we have "My Word: From the Spiritual Diary of Dr. Dee." John Dee was astrologer to Queen Elizabeth I, and Ralphs's dramatic monologues in his voice evoke the last moment before religion and science go through their messy divorce. Besides his astrological pursuits, Dee studies alchemy and searches for traces of the original, unfallen, Adamic language, in which the phenomenon and its name would be fused in an integral whole--the goal of a good deal of poetry, as Charles Taylor has explained.

Ralphs's "Note on Spelling" at the end of the book might be worth reading *before* you read the book. It's not just an archaizing mannerism, á la Spenser or Chatterton, but more of a Finnegans Wake strategy, getting the word to reveal its many mycelial connections.

Maggie Nelson, _Pathemata, or, The Story of My Mouth_

 I WAS A couple dozen pages into Pathemata and persuaded that it was one wild ride when I checked the acknowledgements page in the back--I wanted to see what Nelson may have said there about partner Harry Dodge. At the end of the acknowledgements, I found this "Disclaimer":

"This work conjoins dream and reality; all representations of people, places, and events should be understood in that spirit."

Hence the wildness of the ride. The territory explored in Pathemata is a lot like the Wonderland explored by Alice, logical and absurd at the same time, frightening and consolatory at the same time, monstrous and familiar at the same time. And like Wonderland, it's a dreamscape--or some of it is. 

For me, it hearkened back to the old Maggie Nelson. After The Argonauts landed on so many coffee tables and syllabuses, Nelson seemed to be working from her new standing as a public intellectual in On Freedom, and she just did not seem comfortable. Nelson is more at home in the disruptive and transgressive, the strange and unsettling. In Pathemata, she is back home.

Pathemata is a (dream?) journal about buccal-and-dental health issues during COVID days, and it deserves shelf space alongside Huysmans's A Rebours or Mircea Cartaresçu's Solenoid in its evocation of the nightmarish aspects of dentistry.

It's not just about that, of course, given the range of Nelson's interests and the acuity of her perception, not to mention the complexity of her life. I was wondering whether Dodge was mentioned in the acknowledgements because throughout the book Nelson's relationship with "H" seems strained. Was the estrangement just in dreams, provoked by 2020's gamut of anxieties? Or actual? None of my business, anyway, and the acknowledgements do thank "the magical creatures with whom I shared heart and home during this time, including Dodge, presumably.

"Pathemata" is Greek for "suffering" or "pain," and the word is often used in a phrase, "pathemata mathemata," that means "learning from suffering." Does leaving "mathemata" out of the title imply nothing was learned? I would say no, it doesn't imply that, since the book ends with Nelson telling of a lesson about pain she did not get around to learning while undergoing labor but may be at last ready for: "The moment for the lesson is now."

Patricia Lockwood's four new poems in n+1 #51; Ben Philipps, "Evasive Species"

QUITE A FEW poets I like--Lucy Ives, Maggie Nelson, Ocean Vuong--seem to publish more prose than poetry lately. Can't blame them, really, given the relative sizes of the audience for poetry and the audience for prose, but I still feel a twinge of regret. Such being the case, it was heartening to see four new poems from Patricia Lockwood in the most recent issue of n+1.

I have been a fan of Lockwood since Balloon Pop Outlaw Black, and that is going back a ways, even back before "Rape Joke." Lockwood has not published a collection of poems since 2014, but in the meantime the brilliant autofictions/memoirs Priestdaddy, No One Is Talking about This, and (quite recently) There Will Never Be Another You have made her famous (profiled in the New Yorker, no less).

The new poems did not remind me much of her earlier poetry, but after all, it's been ten-plus years, and a lot has happened in the meantime (see the three autofictions/memoirs). These poems still have some of the anarchic, she'll-say-anything streak of her early work, but I'd say they seem under more control. There are bows to illustrious precursors, Plath (not at all surprising) and Yeats (surprising, to me, but happy to see it), a fascination with minerals, and an idiosyncratic religious inflection.

I hope more are coming.

The same issue of n+1 has an interesting essay by Ben Philipps on climate-conscious poetry--okay, I admit it, I did not expect an essay on climate-conscious poetry to be interesting because, you know, déjà lu, but Philipps began with an interesting move, talking about the two large camps of American poetry. I think of them as representational and non-representational (see post for Sept 11, 2024); Philipps goes with "confessional" and "experimental." The poetry Philipps wants us to pick up on, which he calls "eco-confessional," perhaps bridges the divide, because it tends both to say "I have to tell you about this" and to aim at a kind of dislocation and upsetting of familiar tropes, trying to jar the reader out of complacency. 

Sounds promising, no? Philipps persuaded me to look into the poetry of Rachel Allen.

Daniel Mason, _North Woods_

 SO, I AM wondering, how does Daniel Mason maintain an enviable career as a novelist--this, his fifth, was a NYTBR "10 Best Books of 2023" honoree, and A Registry of My Passage upon the Earth was a Pulitzer Prize finalist--while also handling his duties as an assistant professor of psychology at Stanford--Stanford!--a position that the author's bio tells me he holds. I mean, how does one do all that? 

North Woods has an unusual structure in that the main element of continuity is neither a character nor a plot but a setting, an old house in a wooded area in a remote part of western Massachusetts. The first version of the house, apparently rudimentary, was thrown together by a pair of lovers escaping the Puritanic rigors of Plymouth. It was added to over the years by a retired soldier who wants to grow apples and later by a wealthy man who wanted to turn it into a hunting lodge, but it finally falls into ruin, its abandoned grounds visited by amateur archaeologists and dendrologists.

So we get the longue durée of a novel like, say, Yaa Gyasi's Homecoming, but instead of following a family's genealogy, we see the transformations of a certain place, as in Prairyerth, William Least Heat Moon's non-fiction "deep map" of central Kansas.

Mason keeps this all moving along with well-tempered prose and intriguing characters (spirit mediums, lobotomy practitioners). We don't get to spend more than a chapter or two with any character, which is somewhat unfortunate, because of all of them are distinct enough to be interesting. Mason incorporates a supernatural element, though, that means that some of the characters, or their traces, reappear when we are not expecting them. And then there is that mountain lion. And that ax.

Percival Everett, _I Am Not Sidney Poitier_

 NOT EVERETT'S MOST audacious novel...but that is a high bar. 

The narrator's mother, a Poitier but unrelated to the famous actor, named him "Not Sidney," which is a good joke and sets the novel up for the kind of wordplay S. J. Perelman wrote for the Marx Brothers. 

     "Are you not Sidney Poitier?"

    "Yes, I am Not Sidney Poitier."

The narrator's mother also invested in Turner Broadcasting when it was just a blip of a startup, so her death, when the narrator is just eleven, leaves him breathtakingly wealthy.

So the novel is a bit like Great Expectations. Like Pip, Not Sidney comes of age with no worries about how to provide for himself, and encounters a number of vivid characters who help, or hinder, or both as he figures life out--with the important difference, of course, that being a young Black man in the South is quite distinct from being a young gentleman in Victorian London, especially in one's relations with the police. He is also a bit like Voltaire's Candide, though, as these encounters have the effect of knocking down one or another illusion about how things work.

The extra Everettian fillip to the novel is that Not Sidney keeps finding himself in scenarios that are funhouse  reflections of Sidney's films--The Defiant Ones, Lilies of the Field, Buck and the Preacher, In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. Not Sidney physically resembles Sidney, we are told, and does so increasingly as the novel progresses, until he is finally actually taken for Sidney. What's this about? I'm not sure--it reminded me of Max Beerbohm's "The Happy Hypocrite," a story that makes literal the old proverb of wearing a mask that one's face eventually matches. I'm still puzzling this one out.

Elizabeth Willis, _Liontaming in America_

AN EXCELLENT BOOK, but difficult to describe. "This book is not a memoir," the first sentence states, so that point is settled, but even without that caveat few readers, I think, would assume it was one. The word "I" does not occur frequently, and most of the book's attention is devoted to people who lived in the 19th century. 

The book is a poem, I think I can say, an American kind of epic poem that has some affinities with Charles Olson's Maximus Poems, parts of Louis Zukofsky's "A," and Charles Reznikoff's Testimony; that is, it includes a generous amount of the documentary, sometimes foregrounds its own processes, and often seems like a bold attempt to write a poem about the whole United States. (As in The Maximus Poems and Hart Crane's The Bridge, for instance, the woman we are used to calling Pocahontas appears.)

And while the book is not a memoir, Willis's own family background frames the project, for much it concerns the history of Mormonism and that movement's history in Utah. (And the end, unless I am jumping to conclusions, reflects the death of her parents in an automobile accident [p. 294].)

I don't know whether Willis would call herself a Mormon currently, and I would not call her a proselytizer or even an advocate, exactly, but she does provide a different kind of light on the church than we usually get. The section called "Boy" gives us a Joseph Smith who is neither a fast-talking charlatan nor a madman, but a made-in-America visionary. The church he founds breaks with precedent in a number of ways, especially in allowing polygamy, but in Willis's handling this is not patriarchy run amuck, but a willingness to reinvent the paradigm of the family in a way that might actually enable new kinds of communities, especially women's communities.

The book's title, we learn in a concluding "Author's Note," comes from "a 1926 essay in which Robert Walser compares a liontamer to a Mormon polygamist whose wives only appear to obey for the sake of public performance." The Mormon wives we meet in Willis's poem are a bit like the powerful medieval abbesses who, technically, had to acknowledge the authority of the church priesthood and hierarchy, but who nonetheless usually succeeded in managing what they wanted to manage, doing the work they wanted to do and creating communities that ran on their own terms.

Liontaming in America put me in mind not only of Olson, Zukofsky, and Reznikoff, but also of Harold Bloom's The American Religion, Greil Marcus's Invisible Republic, Lucy Sante's Low Life, and Saidiya Hartman's Waywatd Lives, Beautiful Experiments by foregrounding people and movements a little more shadowy, a little more idiosyncratic, a little stranger, a little more obsessed and less assimilable than the people and movements you will meet in, say, a Ken Burns documentary. America, Willis convinced me,  is not what we generally think it is.