Ocean Vuong, _Time Is a Mother_

I THINK THIS is actually a bit stronger than Vuong's first collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds (2016). The longer poems, in particular, struck me as sturdier, more surprising, and more ambitious than those in  the debut collection.

A good deal of this collection reflects the passing of Vuong's mother, who was vividly represented in Vuong's novel, On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous. My having read that novel likely added to the impact these poems had with me.

The title (I think) refers to the idea that time gives birth to us, but no doubt it also means that time can give us a very, very hard time.

Johnny Marr, _Set the Boy Free_

AS YOU MIGHT expect, Marr’s memoir is clear, unfussy, down to earth, and a reminder of how different he is from his onetime songwriting partner in the Smiths.

He is especially good at conveying his excitement about music, which goes back to some of his earliest memories, and at capturing the euphoria of the extraordinary takeoff of the Smiths.

As to the breaking up of the Smiths, in Marr’s telling it seems somewhat comparable to that of the Beatles. Like McCartney, Marr wanted to entrust management to a certain party, and the other three wanted a different party, and they could not settle the question. So no more Smiths.

Marr is full of praise for his many later collaborators (e.g., Bernard Sumner, The The, Modest Mouse, and the Cribs), but this part of the book is anticlimactic, I have to say.

Set the Boy Free came out in 2016, by which time Marr had started making solo records, beginning with The Messenger in 2013. I saw him live in I think 2014, in Omaha. It was a not-very-large club, and the crowd was not that large either, but Marr gave us a fiery, no-holds-barred set that even included great Smiths songs such as “How Soon Is Now” and “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out.” It was a glimpse into the molten core of rock and roll for the two hundred or so people who were there--one of the best shows I have ever seen. The encore included “I Fought the Law,” in the Clash arrangement. Stunning.

I saw Morrissey about a year later, and he fully lived up to his reputation for petulance. His Smiths cover was “Meat Is Murder,” which might be the consensus pick for the Smiths song one is least interested in hearing played live. No encore. Yes, Morrissey and Marr are different indeed.

Henry James, _The Outcry_

 YOU DON'T HEAR about this one much—it’s the last novel James completed, published in 1911. Don’t go in hoping for anything like The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl, or The Ambassadors, though, for you will be (as I was) disappointed.

For one thing, it comes from an idea James had for a play. As such, the novel is mainly scenes of dialogue, and particularly ponderous dialogue at that, as it carries much of the novel’s exposition and tends toward people staking out debate positions rather than having conversations. The sympathetic characters line up tidily opposite the not-so-sympathetic, and there is a not-very-interesting romance that tips towards matrimony by the novel’s end. The Outcry seems more the work of James the would-be playwright than James the novelist…and that’s not good.

For another, the novel is (by James’s standards) topical, and the topic is probably of slender interest for a contemporary reader. James was inspired by a 1909 newspaper-led campaign to dissuade the Duke of Norfolk from selling an Old Master painting his family owned (Holbein’s The Duchess of Milan) to the American millionaire Henry Frick. (The campaign succeeded, and the portrait is now in the National Gallery in London, not in the Frick Collection in New York City.)

In The Outcry, Lord Theign is in embarrassed enough circumstances (thanks to daughter Kitty’s gambling debts) that he is tempted by American millionaire Breckinridge Bender’s interest in a Joshua Reynolds portrait of one of Theign’s ancestors. Stakes are raised when a bright young English connoisseur, Hugh Crimble, spots another of Theign’s families Old Master paintings as the work of an Old Master other than the one to whom it has been long attributed, making it much rarer and more valuable.

Theign is meanwhile hoping that his younger daughter, Grace, will agree to marry Lord John. Lord John is serving as middleman for Bender, probably in hopes that the painting’s sale will pump up Grace's marriage settlement. But Grace has eyes for…Hugh Crimble.

It all seems a bit on the rattletrap side, doesn’t it?  I have read about two dozen novels or short novels by James, and The Outcry, I’m sorry to say, is the first one that seemed to me not really worth the reading.

Catherine Lacey, _The Möbius Book_

 VERY UNUSUAL TRICK here. One side presents title, author, and a white outline of a Möbius strip on a blue background. Open it up, and you get jacket copy, title page, copyright page, a dedication, and a memoir of what sounds like a terrible break up. Flip the book over, and you have the very same cover, the very same jacket copy, title page, and copyright page, but a different dedication, and (it turns out) a different text: a fiction (88 pages, a short novel or long short story) in which the character whose point of view gets the most attention is worrying about the (apparent) bloodstain seeping from the door of the neighboring apartment while she is being visited by a friend who has been through a terrible breakup.

The neat thing about a Möbius strip, as you may recall from math class, is that one starts with an ordinary two-sided strip of paper, but a half-twist and a piece of tape will you give you a strip of paper with only one side--as you can confirm by yourself by trying coloring it with a crayon.

So the memoir and the fiction seem like two texts, but are in some sense one text.

But in what sense? 

The memoir part, which by sheer chance is what I read first, tells a grim story. The man who in the text is only known as The Reason (as in "A man downstairs was The Reason I'd turned from inhabitant to visitor") breaks up with Lacey via an email, even though they are in different rooms of their shared apartment at the time he sends it. Most of The Reason's reported behavior is similarly odd and cruel. (Googling suggests that writer Jesse Ball is The Reason.)

The memoir might remind you of other getting-myself-back-together narratives, like those of Elizabeth Gilbert or Cheryl Strayed. Lacey explores quite a few different avenues--spiritual, sexual, pharmaceutical--and makes what seems like progress in purging her life of The Reason and his inexplicable behavior. The most interesting parts for me, I'd say, are Lacey's memories of an intensely Christian adolescence in Mississippi. It was easy to connect these memories with the setting of Pew or X's Southern Territories years in Biography of X.

The fiction is interesting in that even though it does have a character who has been broken up with, it gets (for the most part) well away from the experience of the broken-up-with person. The fictional situation includes but also gives the slip to Lacey's own breakup, and that bloodstain under the door becomes the focus of our attention.

I'm not sure The Möbius Book will catch on with the book clubs, but it certainly shows Lacey's resourcefulness and powers of writerly invention.

Solvej Balle, _On the Calculation of Volume, I_, trans. Barbara Haveland

THE QUICKEST WAY to describe this novel is to invoke the film Groundhog Day. Like Phil, the character Bill Murray plays in that movie, Tara Selter keeps waking up to find she is starting anew the day she lived yesterday—November 18th, in her case. The 121st time this happens, she starts keeping a journal of her experience of being stuck in the calendar, and that journal is the novel. The novel ends when she attains a full year of November Eighteenths and decides she has to get out of where she is (setting up Volume II).

Not an original concept, then, obviously, but I thought this novel was actually more interesting than (the undeniably charming) Groundhog Day for a couple of reasons.

First, this being a novel and a first-person novel at that, we get a lot more interiority than we do from a movie (from just about any movie, really—novels are the hands-down champion art form for interiority). Tara does a lot thinking about what is happening, what she can do to get back to the calendar everyone else is on, what the rules of her new mode of being are, and so on. We get to know her a lot better than we get to know Phil.

Second, her situation is more interesting than Phil’s. For one thing, she can move around. On her original November 18 she was in Paris on a book-buying trip (she and her husband are rare book dealers), but she finds that she can leave Paris and go back to her own house in her own hometown. When she wakes up in her own house, though, it is November 18th again, and her husband is surprised that she is not in Paris.

Tara tries explaining to her husband what is happening—something Phil never tries to do—and he is sympathetic and wants to help. The problem is, she has to explain it all again the next day, which is November 18 again, and eventually this wearies her. She starts staying in the ground floor guest room and avoiding her husband—whose November 18 movements she knows by heart—just to avoid the frustration of the explanation that never moves things along.

Tara also discovers that she does leave traces as one November 18 is followed by the next. If she has three apples in the kitchen and eats one, on the next November 18th there are only two applies in the kitchen. Similarly, the books she bought in Paris on November 18 are still with her the next November 18th…sometimes. 

The accidental discoveries accumulate, experiments are made, and Tara is growing towards something even though she is on some kind of time loop.

We figure out soon enough why Phil is stuck in a loop—he has to keep reliving February 2nd until he is a better person. With Tara, it’s not that simple, obviously. But why, then? Perhaps there will be some answers in Volume II.

Laura K. Field, _Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right_ (2)

 FIELD PROVIDES A classification system in a chart on page 7 of Furious Minds, dividing the scene or movement she is surveying into four groups: "National Conservatives," “Claremonters,” “postliberals,” and “Hard Right Underbelly.” The groupings don’t seem to represent sharply distinct schools of thought, though there are differences in style and emphasis, we might say.

The “Hard Right Underbelly” people are mainly online presences and tend to be wilder and more ferocious in their rhetoric. Field places Raw Egg Nationalist, Mencius Moldbug, and and Bronze Age Pervert in this group. Their outrageousness places them outside the mainstream of the movement in some ways, but they have large followings among the base, and Mencius Moldbug (Curtis Yarvin) apparently has the ear of Peter Thiel, who has the ear of J.D. Vance, so they are not exactly marginal. 

“Postliberals” tend to be Roman Catholic with theocratic tendencies. Patrick Deneen, whose Why Liberalism Failed got a nod from Obama a few years ago, is the best known of them, Adrian Vermeule the most formidable. A key idea here is “integralism,” that is, incorporating Catholic doctrine and values into civic laws and institutions. 

The “Claremonters” are associated with Hillsdale College and the Claremont Institute. The Founders and the original Constitution, with its varieties of brakes on full democracy, are particularly revered in this group.

The “National Conservatives” tend to take a very hard line on immigration.

The thing is, the Hard Right Underbelly also takes a hard line on immigration, the Claremonters would also like to see church and state get cozier, the National Conservatives like the idea of restoring traditional patriarchal family arrangements, etc. Mutual influence, networking, and ideological convergence mean that Field’s group lines can’t be tidy—she often makes remarks along the lines of “we will see more of him in a later chapter,” so the whole phenomenon is more a rhizome than her categories suggest.

As I mentioned in the previous post on this book, Field disagrees with her subjects on most topics and does not bother to conceal her feelings. Michael Anton, discussed in her book as a “Claremonter,” went on at length about Field’s abandonment of any kind of objectivity in a flame-snorting review in a recent issue of the Claremont Review of Books. I found her book immensely enlightening, but I would be curious to read a book on the same people by someone more sympathetic to their views, just to get an idea how things look from their perspective. I imagine, though, that Field’s take is the one that would sound most true to me. For all of them, making America great again seems to boil down to “put white straight Christian men back in charge of everything.” I would hate to see that happen.

Jorie Graham, _Killing Spree_ (5)

A CURIOUS COUNTERPOINT is struck, though, when the next poem, “Suddenly,” begins by suggesting that farming is still going on:

as if beside me

the solitary horse

neighs in the

 

neighbor’s distant

 

field […]     (77)

The furrows, the field, and the horse together recall Edward Thomas’s “As the Team’s Head-Brass,” written in 1916, less than a year before Thomas was killed on the Western Front. The poem’s speaker is having an intermittent conversation with a farmer, who pauses for a minute at the end of each furrow he cuts with his horse-drawn plow. The conversation is about the devastations of the war. Had the war not come, the speaker says, they would be living in “[a]nother world”; “‘Aye, and a better,’” the farmer replies, “‘though / If we could see all all might seem good’” (Thomas CP 29). The farmer has some faith in the future; indeed, the very act of plowing affirms that faith. At the beginning of the poem, two lovers are glimpsed slipping into a nearby wood, slipping out again at poem’s end. Their presence, too, suggests ongoing life amid disaster.

     Graham re-envisioned and expanded Thomas’s poem in “The Hiddenness of the World,” published in Runaway(2020), developing the idea of the disruption and possible renewal of natural cycles. She winked in the direction of Thomas’s poem, I believe, in “In Reality” in To 2040: “The winning ticket is still in my pocket. / The disappearing lovers are still in my satchel. / I have the stories we needed ready” (46). That the two closing poems of Killing Spree make contact with “As the Team’s Head-Brass” floats just a whiff of hope, as does an even more surprising quotation from Pound on the book’s last page: “what thou lovest well / remains” (80)—a line from the Pisan Cantos, a line about what cannot be lost even in defeat.

     And we also have the cicadas. They appeared in “Dawn 2040” in To 2040 and reappear in “Suddenly,” at a crucial juncture:

& the rising & falling silences

of terminal hunger

like the cicadas

revving up again

 

after having ceased long enough

 

for us to have forgotten the story

 

completely, for us to be

 

surprised again

 

by their engine     (78)

The disappearance of the cicadas, even for long periods, does not mean there are no more cicadas. Similarly, perhaps, some hopes can disappear, some principles can disappear, poetry of the farthest-reaching kind can disappear, but all these things may be underground, biding their time, to reappear when we have forgotten all about them. 

Raise yr voice in my voice.

Or raise my voice in yrs.

What remains is

 

always, only, voice—this, here,

this creature in the bony

enclosure, these cicadas in

 

the burning trees.  (79)

Laura K. Field, _Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right_ (1)

OUR CURRENT PRESIDENT does not strike anyone, I guess, as an ideas-and-principles person. He himself says he likes to go with his “gut”; people who like him might instead talk about his instincts and intuitions, while people who don’t like him (as I do not) might talk about his whims and impulses. He’s a canny gamesman, we could probably all agree, but he probably hasn’t cracked a book since college, if he did even then.

There are plenty of ideas-and-principles people around him, though—Stephen Miller, Russell Vought, and J. D. Vance come to  mind—and plenty more in various think tanks, foundations, and  the blogosphere who are making and disseminating arguments for why Trump is the right person at the right time for the U.S.A. Field’s book, which has been cited all over the last place during the last half-year or so, is a survey of a wide array of these folks.

Field has a doctorate in political science—more specifically, in political theory (the three main domains of political science as an academic field are U.S. politics, international politics, and political theory). Political theory shares a long border with philosophy, going back to Aristotle’s Politics and Plato’s Republic. Field came up as a Straussian, that is, someone working within the conceptual frameworks created by Leo Strauss, an influential and controversial figure who thought the west made a terrible wrong turn in the early modern era.

Most Straussians would be roughly classed as conservative or neo-conservative, and Field herself might have been classed so before (as she writes in her preface) she had a crucial encounter with the conservative movement’s deeply rooted sexism and patriarchal assumptions. 

Field’s own experiences with and takes on contemporary conservatism are a large part of the book, actually. Even though her book is published by a university press (Princeton, no less), it does not seem academic, at least not in the narrowest sense. First person singular pronouns crop up often, and she does not conceal her distaste for some of the ideas held by her subjects. The book is more intellectual journalism than an academic study, we might say.

It’s certainly illuminating, though. Having recently read two books covering adjacent territory—Quinn Slobodian’s Hayek’s Bastards and Matthew Taylor’s The Violent Take It by Force—I noticed that while Slobodian and Taylor end up talking about distinct, non-overlapping groups of MAGA-ites, Field talks about some people discussed by Slobodian, some discussed by Taylor, and a whole lot discussed by neither. She gives us a very wide chunk of the MAGA intellectual spectrum.

Furthermore, she gives us an important clue about what may be holding that spectrum together. The free-market fundamentalists Slobodian writes about may not have a lot in common with the independent charismatic Christians Taylor writes about, and neither group may have much in common with mavericks like the Bronze Age Pervert, but they would all agree that white straight (or profoundly closeted) men should be in charge. And that, Field helps us see, may be the real core of the phenomenon.

Jorie Graham, _Killing Spree_ (4)

IRONICALLY, THE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT of ultimate defeat may itself belong to this particular high modernist tradition. Eliot’s last major poem, Little Gidding, written when the outcome of the Second World War was in doubt, dwells on “a king at nightfall,” on “three men, and more on the scaffold, / And a few who died forgotten / […] / and of one who died blind and quiet” (CPP 143). The warriors and combatants in Yeats’s late poems are badly besieged (“The Black Tower”) or sole survivors (“The Curse of Cromwell”) or finally overcome (“Cuchulain Comforted”); “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” faces the problem of having nothing left to say, and “Man and Echo” wonders whether what he did manage to say did more harm than good. Auden’s “poetry makes nothing happen” could not be terser or more final, and Pound’s admission of defeat in Drafts and Fragments of Cantos CX – CXVII could not be more explicit:

But the beauty is not the madness

Tho’ my errors and wrecks lie about me.

And I am not a demigod, 

I cannot make it cohere. (Canto CXVI, Cantos [1972] 795-96)

Defeat was perhaps inevitable. Acknowledging defeat, though, is not the same thing as wishing one had never made the attempt. Even Pound, amid his wreckage, “a blown husk that is finished” (“from Canto XCV,” Cantos [1972] 794), seems to feel the effort was worth making. And so with Graham in Killing Spree. She did not win the race. Hypocrisy, cruelty, greed, and exploitation won the race. But she is still on the track, taking her defeat lap, and there is a dry, radiant joy in seeing her take it.

     Killing Spree is dark, but even so, there are cracks where the light gets in. Some of the cracks, examined closely, open into surprising vistas. The book’s penultimate poem, “Then,” begins with a moonrise and the speaker’s arm around a sleeping beloved. The speaker wants to “let go / of the world / as it was / once,” and chastises herself for past delusions:

& we thought we were

free, we thought

there was history

 

in the world—

but it was an

illusion, wasn’t it, it

must have been,

 

because otherwise how

could it have

disappeared

so suddenly.     (75)

The poem ends with the image of surviving wildlife—"all the watchers in their dens”—inhabiting

what were once

the sun-warmed furrows

farmers cut

into the earth

 

when there were farmers.   (76)

Farmers have disappeared along with the hummingbirds in this terrible future. Since farming relies on an enormous reservoir of faith in the future, faith that the labor will be worthwhile, that the plants will survive, that the social structures distributing food will be intact, that there will be people to whom the food will be distributed, the imagined disappearance of farmers is as dire a dystopian detail as any in Killing Spree. 

 

Catherine Barnett, _Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced_

HAVING READ BARNETT’S other collections, I decided to go back and read the first, first published in 2004. My copy looks to be from the fourth printing, which is doing better than okay, I would say.

Barnett’s hallmarks are already present here in her first book; the poems are lucid and subtle, take short but striking lyric flights, and feel honest.

A good many of the poems in the first part of the book seem to be about the death of two nieces in a terrible plane crash. A few minutes of internet search suggest to me that the nieces may have been on Alaska Airlines flight 261, which fell into the Pacific after “a catastrophic loss of pitch control,” according to Wikipedia.

As in Barnett's other collections, we get some good poems about her son, who at this point seems to have been in the toddler/pre-schooler era. 

Barnett’s poems don’t dazzle, I would say, but one can keep coming back to them and they are just as good as one remembers them.

Jorie Graham, _Killing Spree_ (3)

SINCE PART OF the failure is not saying the right words at the right time, implicated in that failure is poetry itself. Opening poem “The World” ends:

[…] the words even

the right words

 

cannot be un-

 

furled from breath from

mind oh

memory no cannot be

dug up dug up from

 

this buried world.     (5)

Even for one with Graham’s astonishing command of language, words seem to have lost their power in “You Shall Not Speak”:

[…] I don’t know

if there’s anything left now in

my heart. It is so 

 

dry. I must 

scour it with 

words. They must bring 

moisture 

 

back. As they rise up in me 

they almost touch 

my fingertips & then 

they flee onto this 

 

page, they leave bits of 

themselves, right here, this trace, these skins…. 

Once they rivered everywhere—    (42-43)

She has a voice, and feels the imperative “to / sing instead—sing!—and the right / song the surprising one full of / forgiveness good- / natured among the many / shrieks” (53). But in the very next poem she asks, “Who am I kidding” (56). At moments poetry seems capable of making a difference: “I clench my hand around / this pen. / I staunch the current” (64). More often, it fails:

Are you almost done I hear myself say,

but when I throw my words onto the scales

nothing moves.  (32)

 

     What feels like the failure of poetry in Killing Spree might be more narrowly described as the failure of a high modernist project belatedly undertaken. Yeats, Eliot, Pound, and the Auden of the 1930s attempted to address the entirety of the cultures in which they lived about the questions of greatest moment for their time, drawing on the more serious intellectual currents then in circulation and working in the more advanced frontiers of their form. Similar ambitions animated many of modernism’s immediate inheritors: Charles Olson, Louis Zukofsky, Robert Duncan, Robert Lowell, Delmore Schwartz—naming Schwartz, however, may suggest how foredoomed such ambitions are. Historically, these or like ambitions lie behind great poems not only of the visionary prophet tradition, like those of Milton, Blake, and Whitman, but also poetic monuments like Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Pope’s Essay on Man, Wordsworth’s Prelude, and Tennyson’s In Memoriam. For the modernists, though, such undertakings faced seemingly impossible odds. Their culture had become too various and incoherent—an “immense panorama of futility and anarchy” as Eliot memorably put it in “‘Ulysses’, Order, and Myth” (Kermode Selected 177)—for any poem or poet to address, organize, and interpret the whole of it. The political positions their cultural commitments led them to take seemed suspect (and, in Pound’s case, literally criminal). The project asked too much.

     Poets understandably moved away from it. Poets born after 1980, the year Graham’s first book appeared, look less towards the example of the high modernists than towards those of Elizabeth Bishop, Jack Spicer, Frank O’Hara, and John Ashbery, all of whom certainly had ambitions, but less grandiose, less delusional ones. They were, arguably, more modest, more honest, and clearer-eyed about poetry’s reach and capabilities. The need to address urgent questions remained, but strategies like the poetry of witness, more reportorial than hortatory, seemed more effective than that of the Cantos. Explorations of marginalized identities and communities made the unified, integrated culture Eliot hoped to call into being seem not at all desirable. Poetry that seems to declare, “I am writing to clarify and illuminate where we, as a community and culture, stand right now,” as attempted by Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and Auden in his twenties, scarcely seems tenable now. It is hard to think of any living poet apart from Graham who is even trying. Killing Spree often seems like an acknowledgement that the project is not just difficult, but impossible. 

Thomas Pynchon, _Shadow Ticket_

THAT DETECTIVE AGENCIES early in their history (e.g., the Pinkerton agency) were involved in industrial espionage, union breaking, and red baiting has given Pynchon ample opportunity to combine noir-derived plot lines and tone with his conjuring of (nearly) ubiquitous and (nearly) omnipotent networks of secret power and authority. As he did in Against the Day and Inherent Vice, he takes full advantage of the opportunity in Shadow Ticket. Lew Basnight of Against the  Day even makes a cameo appearance. (I imagine he is not the only crossover detail, but I will leave such trainspotting to others.)

Hicks McTaggart is our gumshoe here. It is late 1932. Hitler is on the brink of taking power in Germany, and the USA has just elected FDR. The Depression is showing no signs of lifting. In Milwaukee, Hicks gets handed a tricky assignment involving the wild daughter of a dairy magnate. Tracking down the daughter and the swing musician she loves will eventually take Hicks to Hungary, where….

…well, you know, things happen. The novel has its plot, knotty in classically noir ways, but the real treat is Pynchon’s writing, the dialogue that seems to come right out of Ben Hecht and George S. Kaufman, the arcane lore, the evocation of time and place, all those  things at which Pynchon is simply better than everyone else. 

If you like Pynchon (as I do), I expect you will like this (I did), and if you are just curious about Pynchon, this might be a good book to start out on, at just under three hundred pages. Shadow Ticket probably will not dislodge The Crying of Lot 49 as everyone's favorite among Pynchon’s relatively shorter books, but it does provide a modest-sized sample of how Pynchon can fascinate.

Jorie Graham, _Killing Spree_ (2)

IN PLACES, THE book’s anxiety that some last opportunity to avert a slow-motion disaster has been missed takes on a generational aspect. Born in 1950, Graham is a boomer, part of a generation that came of age both in the U.S.A. and in Europe with a sense of mission, an aspiration to enlighten and transform the world. As an undergraduate, Graham took part in one of the more spectacular attempts to realize that vision, the student uprisings of Paris in May 1968. Recalling les évènements later in “The Hiding Place,” a poem in Region of Unlikeness (1991), Graham depicted a state of confusion, even the leaders having scarcely an idea of what was happening or what might be achieved; a similar cloud of worthy but futile intentions hovers in “Demonstration” in Killing Spree. “I took off my glasses / & pocketed them” the poem begins, a sensible precaution as the speaker approaches the crowd.

[…] The others

were all already

there. There was

 

chanting, there were orders, the instructions were

loud.     (10)

The year may be 1968, or we may be at a No Kings rally. Whenever this event is happening, the speaker hopes it will be unifying and effective, will “become a river of selves, of dis- / appearing selves, us all / stepping again now into the self-erasing / crowd […]” (11). The chanting intensifies: “it sounds just like / answers but what was / the question” (13). It turns out no one knows, exactly. 

[…] I think one sd

it’s a game, it’s a theory, but 

just then everything

 

you’ve read about  

for all these years

began. Right then. As if it were planned. As if we were

expected. It has not ceased since.      (13)

Whatever the demonstration was aimed at, the Fifth Republic or Donald Trump, was ready and waiting and was not about to abdicate, no matter how intense the chanting. The poem ends:

If you can hear me there,

if this reaches you,

forgive us,

we did not know who we were.

Whether the setting is 1968 or 2025, we hear a generation saying to its children, its grandchildren, and its great-grandchildren: we intuited something was wrong, we tried to do something, but we failed. In “Who,” Graham writes, “that power that / ferocity we had / to reach out—reach out-- / something was done to that” (6).

Bennett Sims, _Other Minds and Other Stories_

I’M A RETIRED professor of English, so I am sometimes asked whether there I have recommendations of young/new/emerging fiction writers. I always mention Bennett Sims (as I always mentioned Ben Marcus thirty years ago and Joshua Cohen fifteen years ago). Not that many people have taken up my recommendation, but one day, they will wish they had.

Other Minds and Other Stories is Sims’s second collection and is just as strong as his first, White Dialogues. The title story is explicitly about the famous philosophical question of how we know what other people are thinking (and whether we can tell that they are indeed thinking—that too is part of the question). The story follows the thoughts of someone in the tricky situation of composing an email to someone she is in the earliest stages of a relationship with as she guesses and re-guesses how her correspondent would feel about this word or that word, this tone or that tone. 

The book’s other stories also engage the question in some way. For instance, the POV character in “An Introduction to the Reading of Hegel” is trying to anticipate the thoughts of the reviewers who will be evaluating the fellowship application he has but a few hours in which to complete. “A Postcard” is a detective story in a Paul Austen vein, in which the detective has to puzzle out the minds both of his client and of the man he is being paid to watch, who may turn out to be the same person.

I revere Jane Austen is part because of how well she represents the experiencing of the problem of other minds. Anne Elliot trying to read Capt. Wentworth’s mind in his words and actions, Elizabeth trying to read Darcy’s…it’s her trademark, almost. Sims is a different cup of coffee than Jane Austen, to be sure, but it’s interesting to see they share this particular skill.

Jorie Graham, _Killing Spree_ (1)

JORIE  GRAHAM TURNS seventy-six this year. For all anyone knows, she could still be publishing poetry five, ten, or even fifteen years from now, but if Killing Spree turns out to be the final collection in the career that began with Hybrids of Plants and Ghosts in 1980, it will stand as a compelling and honorable conclusion. Not that it lands on a resounding major chord or feels like a victory lap—if anything, it feels more like a defeat lap, painfully mindful of failures and fallings short. Our failure to take care of our one and only planet has mattered in Graham’s poetry for a long while now and matters again in Killing Spree, but alongside climate concerns she also insists we face our failure to protect each other from violence and war (words like “massacre” and “slaughter” turn up frequently). The failures of the baby boom generation to live up to its best hopes get some attention, as do the failures of poetry itself. From its title on, the collection could hardly be more sobering. Even so, hope curls around its edges. It’s among her strongest books.

     Like its predecessor, To 2040 (2023), carries the atmosphere of dystopian science fiction, often seeming to be set in a near-future in which some catastrophe has overturned most institutions and social practices as well as natural processes. The book’s opening poem, “The World,” begins, “didn’t change much / at first” (3). Changes occurred, however, then accelerated, “And that was when / the end began” (4). The book’s title phrase occurs several times, including as the title of a poem, but its most arresting instance is in “The Eloquence”: “The killing spree began one day in the suburbs” (68). Littleton? Sandy Hook? A few lines on, “bullets whirred like hummingbirds when there were hummingbirds” (68), and since hummingbirds are still with us, the killing spree must occur in an imagined future, but the book unsettles by continually suggesting that our catastrophic future has already arrived. For instance, the statement “I remember the rule of law” (11) teeters between Orwellian pre-imagining and last week’s op-ed. “The classrooms exploded. The bits of desks lay about / in the dust-filled amnesia” (26) could be dystopian fiction or just news from Ukraine, as could “They burned / the silver icons down / to tiny pools” (33). “Once I watch them drag / the whole cuffed family / out” (33), depending on where one lives, could be local news.

     Killing Spree is also like To 2040 in alternating between two forms. The eleven left-justified poems use short lines (very short, compared to Graham’s practice for most of her career) of only a few words, quatrains dropping vertically down the page like a plumb line. Combined with Graham’s penchant for longer, unscrolling sentences, the main effect of the very short lines is of speed and headlong movement, of arriving sooner than you expected—underlining the book’s dystopian message that the future we have been anticipating in dread may already be here. Text-message abbreviations (u, yr, bc, and ampersands) lend these poems an intimacy and vulnerability less evident in the right-justified poems. The eleven right-justified poems have longer lines, feel relatively more discursive than lyrical, and sound more like what longtime Graham readers are used to, but the shunted-to-the-right visual orientation creates the feeling that we are looking at things from a new angle, a previously ignored vantage point. This form is superficially closer to that of Graham’s symphonic poems with their page-wide lines and distinct movements—“The Dream of the Unified Field,” “From the New World,” “Emergency”—but are rougher and faster, as though neither she nor we have time for the slow and stately.

Lucy Sante, _I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition_

I HAVE BEEN reading Sante for years, but always in pieces in periodicals, mainly book reviews in NYRB, so this is the first of her books proper I have read. I should try some of the others, though, for this one is excellent. Sante’s prose is light-footed but sinewy, her curiosity omnivorous, and the subject matter here of unusual interest.

After living sixty plus years as an assigned male, Sante realized she was actually female and set out upon the transition mentioned in the book’s subtitle. The book begins with the email she sent to her friends announcing this new departure (which began, remarkably, with a photo app that can switch the photographed person’s gender). Roughly half the book tracks how Sante managed that transition, and roughly half recounts his first sixty years as an assigned male, with particular attention to a chronic anomie that she now sees as a sign that she needed to transition.

I Heard Her Call My Name does not go into what surgical or other medical treatments Sante pursued, apart from taking hormones, nor into how the transition played out in her sexuality; that is, it skips the whole tabloid side of the story. What it does do is make vivid and palpable the unnameable tension Sante was living with as a man and the immense relief it was to live as a woman. What possible compelling state interest could there be in denying people like Sante the opportunity to live as themselves? The book deserves its wide audience not only for its writing, which is brilliant, but also for raising that question.

Sam Tanenhaus, _Buckley: The Life and Revolution That Changed America_, Part 3: Buckley’s Revolution (1961-1965)

 1. Barry Goldwater lost in a landslide, but the story of how Buckley and his movement helped gain him the 1964 Republican presidential nomination makes for swift and exciting reading (as Rick Perlstein also demonstrated in Before the Storm). The relative youth of many of the most active participants, the sense of overcoming entrenched powers in the Republican party (pragmatic moderation had prevailed for decades), and the delirium of victory at the 1964 convention all make for a thrill-ride narrative that the Reagan campaign of 1980 cannot match, even though it was much more successful. 

2. An irony of Buckley’s career is that he was a writer as much as anything else, a graceful and lucid and prolific one, yet he never wrote the conservative classic that everyone assumed he must have in him: no Road to Serfdom or Witness or Ideas Have Consequences. He did publish a lot of books, including fourteen novels. His books sold well, and one of them, his first, God and Man at Yale, was a center of national attention for a while. Tanenhaus describes Buckley’s attempt to write his definitive statement of principles, to be titled The Revolt Against the Masses, but Buckley eventually abandoned the project despite fervent encouragement from Hugh Kenner (no less). Since it’s the books of public intellectuals like Mencken, Niebuhr, Hofstadter, and (gag) Ayn Rand that keep them part of the conversation, I wonder whether Buckley’s not having a "you-really-should-read-this” book will lead to his fading from the conversation as the people who remember him from television succumb to mortality.  You can still watch Firing Line on YouTube, though.

3. Tanenhaus argues that Buckley’s quixotic but stylish campaign for major of New York City in 1965 was an early and influential example of the “white grievance” approach later successfully deployed by Nixon, Reagan, Trump, and a few thousand others. This is ironic, too, given Buckley’s patrician background and his tendency to speak de haut en bas, but I think Tanenhaus has a point.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, _Dream Count_

DREAM COUNT KEPT reminding me of Sex and the City, in that we have four women characters experiencing the vicissitudes of family, career, sex, and life in general in the contemporary city (Washington, D. C., for the greater part). All four are originally from Africa (three from Nigeria, one from Ghana), three now live in the USA. Or maybe Dream Count is more like Designing Women, if you remember that one, in that one of the women is working class.

Chiamaka is the hub character; the other three have closer relations to her than they do to each other. An aspiring travel writer from a wealthy family, she has “always longed to be known, truly known by another human being,” as she tells us in the novel’s first sentence. Her family badly wants her to marry and have children, but each of the men with whom she gets involved turns out to be not quite what she is looking for.

Zikora is Chiamaka’s best friend, a successful professional but under the same family pressure to marry and have children. She gets pregnant and believes her seemingly deeply committed boyfriend will be ready for the next level, but whoops, no, he isn’t, and he vanishes like a puff of smoke.

Kadiatou, who grew up in a village and does not have the formal education  the other three have, is Chiamaka’s sometime housekeeper who also works as a hotel maid. In the course of her work she endures an assault like that of which Dominique Strauss-Kahn was accused, turning her and her daughter’s life upside down as she finds herself under punishing media scrutiny. Chiamaka helps organize support for her.

Omelogor is Chiamaka’s cousin, a successful professional in Nigeria, whose main work seems to involve laundering money for heavyweight Nigerian politicians. She has also gotten a doctorate in cultural studies in the USA  and has a popular blog called “For Men Only.”

Dream Count does not have a strong central plot, but it does have a strong central theme: epistemology. What do we know, how do we know it, how do we know we know? Chiamaka wants to be known, but no man so far really knows her. Zikora thought she knew her boyfriend, but was way wrong. Kadiatou has to fight her way through assumptions about who she is and who the man who attacked her is—much or most of the world thinks it knows her, assumes she is lying, or a prostitute, and so on, and are dead wrong. Omelogor’s blog is all about what men ought to know but don’t, and her dissertation is about the problem that much of men’s “knowledge” of female sexuality comes from pornography, which is based more on male fantasy than on anything else.

I would have to say of the four Adichie novels I have read (Purple Hibiscus, Half of a Yellow Sun, and Americanah), this is the one I enjoyed least…I did enjoy it, though. All four women are vividly presented, the sentences brisk, Adichie’s eye for revealing detail sharp. But a bit like Sex and the City, it’s entertaining without being thought-provoking.

Michael M. Weinstein, _Saint Consequence_

 I DECIDED TO take a chance on this after reading a couple of Weinstein’s poems in Conjunctions. He is “a trans/crip poet, essayist, and photographer,” according to the note on the back cover of Saint Consequence, and the poem “Cut” (which appeared in Conjunctions and also appears here) is the most arresting poem I have ever read about a gender transition.

Quite a few of the other poems likewise take on trans identity and experience, but the collection also has poems based on Weinstein’s year in Tomsk, a city in Siberia, and “Brother,” a very affecting sequence about his brother, who apparently lives with a cognitive disability. Weinstein’s own disability (that is, his own self-claimed status as “crip”) may be reflected in another sequence, “Crip Album,” although the sequence is mainly quick, imagistic poems about others. 

Weinstein’s handling of the sequence form is a strength. Besides “Brother” and “Crip Album,” the collection includes a sequence about Weinstein’s time in Russia, “Street of the Friendship of Nations.” He has a talent for using the sequence providing multiple perspectives on a phenomenon, shifting temporally and tonally while still creating a unified effect.

I was also struck by two longer poems, “The Center” and “Anniversary,” because they suggested the influence of Jorie Graham. This likeness may have occurred to me only because I have been immersed in Graham lately, but in making a case I would note these two poems' longer lines (Alice James Books printed these poems on the vertical axis, so you have to rotate the book ninety degrees to read them), their presenting of personal experience while simultaneously mindful of one’s historical situation, and their ambition—that is, a willingness to swing for the fences. A big swing can mean a big whiff, but Weinstein connects.

Ben Lerner, _Transcription_

AUTOFICTION? WHO KNOWS? I appreciated Tara K. Menon's review of Ben Lerner's new novel for the Nation for pointing out that the episode where the (unnamed) narrator visits the famous glass flower museum at Harvard goes to show how convincing a simulacrum can be, even while you remain aware of its artificiality. The characters and events of Transcription seem utterly plausible, and the narrator is again a near-ringer for Lerner himself, but could this very short novel be 100% fiction? Of course it could. Do we really need ti know whether it is?

In the first chapter, "Hotel Providence," the narrator returns to the Providence, RI, where he attended college, to interview his famous mentor Thomas for a magazine. In his hotel, before heading over to his mentor's house, he gets water in his phone, which means he will be unable to record the interview. Embarrassed but unwilling to own up to his klutziness, he goes ahead with the interview. His mentor, while obviously brilliant, is showing signs of dementia and goes off on some startling and unfiltered digressions about his wife (who died by suicide) and detailed memories of a trip to Switzerland with the narrator...a trip the narrator has absolutely no memory of. 

In the second chapter, "[Hotel Villa Real]." (why the brackets? I don't know), the narrator gives a talk at a conference about Thomas, who has died since the first chapter (by assisted suicide, in Switzerland, it seems). The talk is about the circumstances of the interview the narrator did publish after all, which turned out to be Thomas's final public utterance. Accordingly, the interview has gotten a lot of reverential attention from Thomas-philes. In the narrator's talk, however, he spills some beans about the circumstances of the interview (that is, that he had to rely on memory? That Thomas betrayed signs of dementia?), and now everyone is angry at him. Thomas's son, Max--a college friend of the narrator--is, we hear, especially furious.

A lot of the talking in the second chapter is from Rosa, one of those wondering what the hell the narrator thought he was up to in his talk on Thomas, and almost all of the talking in the third chapter, "Hotel Arbez," is done by Max. Is this before or after the narrator's talk at the conference? After, one would assume, given that novels typically move forward in time, but Max does not seem angry and makes no reference to the talk...another little puzzle. Max, like the narrator, has a tween daughter with baffling issues that her parents have no idea how to handle, and Max, it turns out, not the narrator, was the young man accompanying Thomas on that trip to Switzerland.

The Thomas-Max-narrator triangle is at the heart of things, somehow. Max and the narrator are vaguely doppelgänger-like; besides their being the same age and having daughters with unfathomable issues, a mentor-mentee relationship between men has plenty of father-son overtones, making Max and the narrator sibling rivals, of a sort. Neither can quite relax and take Thomas's approval for granted; both constantly look for signs of how they stand. 

Max and the narrator do not quite understand and are a little in awe of their parent; they do not quite understand and are a little in awe of their daughters. To me, this is an utterly recognizable situation, autofiction or not.

So much for summary--I've failed, though, to get at how captivating the novel is. I could hardly put it down. 

Lucy Ives, _An Image of My Name Enters America_

 I BELIEVE THIS is poet and novelist Lucy Ives's first collection of essays, but I may be wrong. There are thirteen titles listed in the front matter of An Image of My Name Enters America; I have read eight of them, and none of them was a collection of essays, but who knows?

The book's first essay, "Of Unicorns," gives the reader a good idea of how Ives works. It blends personal history (Ives's youthful passion for My Little Ponies) with scholarly investigation (medieval and early modern lore of the unicorn) and adds some dashes of high theory (Michel Serres, Anna Dufourtmentelle), all tightly woven with a poet's touch for language and sentence construction.

Ives's essays remind me somewhat of Guy Davenport's in that he too could happily blend diverse kinds of specialized knowledge into a surprising but convincing whole. Davenport rarely added any personal history, however, and Ives's candor about her own life does a lot to raise the stakes in each essay. A youthful passion for My Little Pony could be observed in many American households in the early nineties, including ours, but the book's other essays are about graver matters. 

The title essay mainly has to do with Ives's learning only in her thirties that an ancestor had escaped the Armenian genocide, but it also has to do with memory, the American period rooms in the Metropolitan Museum, Virginia Woolf, and Ives's (ill-fated) marriage. 

"Earliness, or Romance," has to do the idea of romantic love, which Ives is ready to dispense with, making her case with through the movie musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, the Stephen Vincent Benét short story the musical was based on, quite a few literary works, and the ideas of Lauren Berlant. 

"The End" is about Ives's experience of depersonalization disorder in her twenties, coinciding with her exposure to advanced literary theory (under the guidance of Barbara Johnson, no less). 

"The Three-Body Problem" discusses the science fiction series by Cixin Liu, of course, but it is really about the birth of Ives's son. Yves. I have only witnessed childbirth, never experienced it, but Ives's account is the most convincing I have ever read. Midwifery, caesarians, and Margery Kempe are among the topics blended into the mix.

"Of Unicorns" is the book's shortest essay, and it is not exactly short at thirty-some pages. The others run between forty and sixty--deep dives, in other words. No periodical these days is likely to run essays like these in their entirety, so all the more thanks to Graywolf Press for publishing the book.

Heather Altfeld, _Post-Mortem_

 I PICKED THIS up because I admired "Obituary for Dead Languages," a...lyric essay? prose poem?...anyway, it ran in Conjunctions, and I admired it. 

As the title Post-Mortem suggests, the theme of the book is writing based on someone or something having died. Seven poems have "obituary" in the title, two have the word "kaddish," two more have the word "autopsy," and we also have "After Poetry Died" and "The Death of Beauty." 

The poems in the earlier part of the book are witty and inventive, so I was thinking of the theme as playfully dark or darkly playful, but in Part IV it gradually becomes clear that Altfeld and her partner lost one of their kids. Reading those poems, I felt like my heart fell into a deep hole. That Altfeld was able to write about the event at all astonished me, to say nothing of how powerfully she wrote about it, how moving the poems are.

She has published a few more essays in Conjunctions, and I enjoyed those, but I wonder if another poetry collection is on the way. I hope one is.

Szilárd Borbély, _Berlin - Hamlet_, trans. Ottilie Mulzet

 A HUNGARIAN WRITER who died by suicide in 2014 at the age of 50, Borbély wrote plays and a novel as well as poetry. This particular collection is extraordinarily cohesive, centered on Berlin as it might have impressed the sensibilities of (1) a Walter-Benjamin-like flâneur, (2) Franz Kafka during his prolonged and tricky engagement to Felice Bauer, and (3) Hamlet. 

All three are intellectual, supersensitive, a little edgy, under a lot of pressure, and on a slightly different wavelength from most people. Two of them are Jewish, as Borbély might have been, which adds a few quanta of anxiety to being in Berlin.

The overall mood of the book is wintry, overcast, bleak, no one here gets out of alive. It's very good, but it's not, you know, heartwarming. 

I was reading this about a month ago while on a vacation with a group of old friends. Several of them came upon me one morning in a lovely screened-in porch; they were returning from a walk. What are you reading? A Hungarian poet. Oh, read us one of his poems! 

I realized immediately that there was not a single poem in the book quite suitable for reading to a group of not-exactly-literary friends on a lovely spring morning. On, the other hand, declining to read a poem would have seemed churlish, or so I thought. I didn't feel I could say no. I did say, "these aren't happy poems," but that did not get me off the hook. I went with "Wannsee," in which the flâneur visits the place where the Wannsee Conference was held--that is, where the Nazis laid plans for the Final Solution--thinking that having a historical reference point would work better than trying to explain Hamlet or Kafka's engagement. I read the poem. It cast a pall. 

Well...they asked. They probably won't ask next time. 

I need to memorize a Mary Oliver poem or two just to have something ready for such occasions.

Mark Lilla, _Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know_

 I BECAME AN admirer of Mark Lilla mainly through his work as an intellectual historian: The Reckless Mind, The Stillborn God, The Shipwrecked Mind. All three touched on matters of contemporary relevance, certainly, but mainly through a kind of excavation of the ideas of influential thinkers. His previous book, though, was more explicitly an intervention in debates of the moment; The Once and Future Liberal made the argument that liberals and/or Democrats would improve their electoral chances by placing less emphasis on identity-related issues. He had a point, maybe, but one more white guy arguing that we should put identity issues on the back burner mainly just pissed everyone off. 

Ignorance and Bliss splits the difference, we could say. It's about the don't-know-and-don't-want-to-know stance that underlies our current impasse of polarization. No one wants to have a calm, give-and-take discussion about Trump and MAGAism. You're either passionately behind him or passionately opposed, and whichever side you are on, you are not about to change your mind. Thus Ignorance and Bliss is about an important contemporary political phenomenon. It approaches the phenomenon, though, with an historical array of illustrations, many drawn from the Bible and classical literature, but with additional insights from Freud, Kafka, Hobbes, Locke, Pascal, Ibsen, and quite a few more.

Lilla generally adopts the sensible (and liberal, I'd say) position that yes, one ought to seek to know the truth, with all that implies about freedom of speech and the press, open debate, objective investigation. But he certainly understands why it might not always be best to insist (he makes some interesting points about Ibsen's The Wild Duck). 

He frames the book with discussions of Plato's famous Allegory of the Cave. Might one leave the cave and find the blinding illumination of broad daylight a little...oppressive? Intense? Or just uncomfortable? Might we want to go back into the cave, to the familiarity of those dancing shadows, and just hang out? "Think very hard before answering that question," he concludes. It's worth thinking hard about.

Louise Erdrich, _The Sentence_

 MANY INGREDIENTS HERE. The main one is a ghost story. The narrator, who works in a bookstore, thinks she is being haunted. I'm not sure whether we, the readers, are supposed to accept the haunting as actual or to see the narrator as under a compelling delusion. A bit like James's Turn of the Screw, let's say. I (and some of the narrator's fellow employees) think the haunting is real, but several members of my book club thought the narrator (who has had a difficult past, serving time for a crime she was set up for by "friends") was having an episode.

We also have some nice workplace comedy. Erdrich owns a bookstore in the Twin Cities (a very nice one, Birchbark Books) and the depiction of bookstore culture is lovely. It got me thinking that someone should set a sitcom in a bookstore--I guess they tried that with Ellen, and it didn't quite take off, but the idea still appeals to me.

Then there is the time setting. Twin Cities, All Souls Day 2019 to All Souls Day 2020--which means we get COVID and the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent protests. 

On top of all that, the narrator, Tookie, is indigenous, and the ghost, Flora, is a particularly annoying instance of a Euro-Anglo-American becoming obsessed with a romanticized idea of indigenous cultures, so the haunting is wrapped up in the issue of cultural appropriation. (The title refers to a sentence in a unique book Flora has appropriated, the reading of which was so shocking to her self-conception as practically indigenous herself that it killed her.)

I like Louise Erdrich, but there may be too many eggs in this pudding. It's a swift read, though, and the book club liked it.

Ocean Vuong, _On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous_

 IT TOOK ME longer than I expected to get around to this autobiographical novel by the author of the poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds (which I thought well of), but I finally did, and yep, it's good.

It reminded me somewhat of Edward Dahlberg's Because I Was Flesh, another memorable account of a son's growing up with a working mother (barbershop in Because I Was Flesh, nail salon in On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous) and an absent father. Little Dog (Vuong's narrator) emphasizes the tightness of the bond by addressing his mother as "you" throughout.

We don't find out exactly what circumstances led to Little Dog and his mother to leave Vietnam--something went wrong somehow--but his grandfather's being a U. S. citizen and a Vietnam War veteran makes it possible to relocate in Connecticut. Little Dog contributes to the family income by (illegally) working on a tobacco farm (they grow tobacco in Connecticut, surprising but true).

And that is where Little Dog meets Trevor and the novel turns into a gay coming-of-age story. Trevor comes from a very laissez-faire working class family and is already familiar with opioids. Their backgrounds, obviously, are quite different, but they become close friends and then lovers. The circumstances are not idyllic--they are exploited child labor, after all--but there is sweetness in this part of the story.

As in any coming of age story, though, childhood and adolescence end. Little Dog has a chance to go to college and takes it. Trevor is not going anywhere. 

But Little Dog knows about getting out in  time--as, we are reminded in  the closing pages, his mother did.

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _To 2040_ (2)

 ALL BUT ONE of the poems in To 2040 is either a "rivulet" poem (my own coinage for Graham's poems in very short lines of just a few words, grouped as quatrains, justified on the left) or a justified-on-the-right poem, with greater variety in the length of the lines. Both forms were repeatedly used in Runaway, but now they account for almost the whole collection (eleven "rivulets," nine justified-right). 

Several poems in Runaway were in long-lined quatrains, and there is exactly one poem following that form here: the title poem, "To 2040." Does that mean it was written earlier than most of the others? 

I read the book first in January 2024, not that long ago, but reading it after re-reading its predecessors involved noticing different things and asking different questions. For one thing, I kept trying to discern a pattern to the justified-left and justified-right poems. (Give me a difference, and like many of us I will attempt to attach meaning to it.)

Are the left-justified poems more lyrical, the right-justified more discursive? This works up to a point, as the left-justified ones are swifter, more focused, more colloquial, "sing" more. The right-justified ones tend to looser movement, more detail, more connections, arguing with themselves. No sooner did I construct this pattern, though, than it deconstructed itself. Lyrical moments aplenty in the right-justified poems, plenty of position-taking in the left-justified. The lyrical/discursive difference often holds, but not always.

To 2040 seems set in some near post-collapse future. When two of the left-justified poems ("They Ask Me" and "Dusk in Drought") seemed to be about the disappearance of actual birds and their replacement by mechanical simulations, I wonder if left-justified = future, right-justified = now. But in the right-justified "Fog" we read, "I remember / what it was like  to make coffee in the / mornings. I remember mornings." That would have to be set in a future in which we have lost access to coffee beans, no? And the left-justified "Why" seems set now. So I'm not sure. 

Part of the book's balance of an anxious present and a terrible near-future may imply, though, that it's later than we think, that the future is already here in ways we haven't learned to notice. So any "now" poem could be about the future, any "future" poem would remember now. Draw no hard lines. 

There are moments when hope breaks through. "Why," in which granddaughter Sam touches a bud. The cicadas of "Dawn 2040." The earth healing itself in "Then the Rain." 

Okay. I feel as ready as I could possibly be for Killing Spree.

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _To 2040_ (1)

JORIE GRAHAM ON Copper Canyon? Did not see that one coming. I associate Copper Canyon with poets like Hayden Carruth, David Lee, Marvin Bell, and [clears throat] James Galvin—that is to say, poets older than and not all that much like Graham—and Ecco (or Harper Collins) seemed to have a handle on what Graham wanted (wider than usual pages, Bulmer font), so what happened? Presumably these questions will be answered when the definitive Graham bio comes out, if I live that long, and people keep writing poets’ biographies.

I did notice on re-reading Runaway that the pages are already getting a little brown at the edges even though my copy is only six years old. Cheap paper, obviously. The pages of To 2040 are still bleach white. Yes, my copy is only three years old, but Copper Canyon obviously used better paper.

No dust jacket, though. Tsk.

Copper Canyon also said yes to the generous page dimensions Graham has preferred starting with Never and to using the services of designer Erica Mena, who also worked on the Graham collections Fast and Runaway. (This is not the Erica Mena who is a model and actress, by the way. It looks like Erica Mena the designer now goes by E. Rowan Mena.) 

In her acknowledgments, Graham thanks “the whole crew at Copper Canyon Press […] as we start down this new path together,” but the path has apparently come to an early end, as the new Graham book to appear in May will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

So what happened? I may never know. I hope FSG goes with really good paper. 

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _Runaway_ (2)

 SOME FORMAL DEVELOPMENTS are going on in Runaway. The right-margin-justification form that Graham used for “Mother’s Hands Drawing Me,” the final poem in Fast, is used again in several poems, some of which seem crucial to the architecture of the book: “[To] the Last [Be] Human,” “Prayer Found Under Floorboard,” “Scarcely There.”

It occurred to me that this form would be tricky if one were writing a first draft by hand, as you have to guess how much space the line’s letters would need before you started writing it. In a word-processing program, however, nothing tricky at all, just hit a couple of buttons. Does this mean Graham composes directly into a word-processing program? I suppose a lot of poets do these days.

The poems with classically Grahamian long lines tend to be arranged in quatrains, giving them a seeming regularity that turns out to be only superficial, because within those very stately-looking four-line arrangements we have that old Grahamian cataract going wherever it wants to go.

The new departure is what I am going to call the “rivulet” poem, with (for Graham) startlingly short lines, one, two, three words long, dropping vertically straight down the page. There are just four “rivulets,” but they include the title poem, “Runaway,” and the collection’s last three poems, inclining one to think that Graham has come up with something new that she is keen to explore. And explore it she did in To 2040.

Besides "Runaway," the rivulet poems are "In the Nest ®," "The Wake off the Ferry" and "Poem." 

"In the Nest®" is in the dystopian vein that widened in To 2040, the "Nest" being a collective name for some of Google's "smart products." Amid the anxiety over surveillance are some poignant lines addressed to "Mother": "Mother. See us. / Mother it's / a strange new // winter here."

"The Wake off the Ferry" and "Poem" combine Graham's penchant for longer sentences with the drops-like-a-plumb-line verticality of the "rivulet" poems, and the combination...definitely...does something. Damned if I can say what. But the rhythm feels very different, somehow, more headlong, more we-are-getting-somewhere-before-we-are-ready-to-be-there. Something urgent, insistent. The poem is about a couple on a ferryboat, looking at its wake, and addresses the problem that we are always already not the persons we think of ourselves as being. Short but packs a punch.

"Poem" could be a key note for eco-Graham: "The earth said / remember me."

"Runaway" deserves  to be the title poem. The long sentences in very short lines creates that urgency again, that feeling that like Alice we are not keeping up with ourselves, combined here with the crisis of our own technology rapidly consuming our substance and likely to consume a lot more of it before we get around to applying the brakes. 

Runaway makes a terrific introduction to To 2040. Or To 2040 makes a terrific sequel to Runaway. Take your pick.

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _Runaway_ (1)

 A BRAND NEW dedicatee this time around—Samantha Lorraine Almanza. I wondered whether Graham had broken her pattern of dedicating collections only to family members, but several poems in Part III of Runaway led me to think that Samantha Lorraine Almanza must be a granddaughter. “Sam’s Dream” is about Sam in utero and then being born; “Sam’s Standing” is about her learning to walk; “I Won’t Live Long” is about her acquiring language. 

Even when all the news is bad (I can attest) grandchildren give one hope, and the Sam poems have a certain lift and sprightliness that is not Graham’s most familiar vein.

That more familiar vein--unease, anxiety, dread--shows up too. "When Overfull of Pain" is the title and the opening phrase of one of the poems, for instance. "[To] the Last [Be] Human" has the atmosphere of a dystopian or post-eco-disaster novel:

One of us had come back from some other place--

Alaska, a father dying in rage, screaming on his

floor, saved by

nothing.

We're so full of the dead the burnt fronds

hum, getting going each day again into too much sun to no

avail. I was human. I would have liked to speak of

that. But not now. Now is more

complicated. I have no enemy except day. The edges

turn hot and

stay

hot. Shadow hard to find [...]

Later in the poem the collection's title appears: "What are our rates of speed. Where is runaway. How far / away."  Do these questions without question mark hope for an elsewhere not yet visited by the disaster? It is not at all clear that there is one.

The possibility, as a disaster unfolds, of a future or an elsewhere also occurs "The Hiddenness of the World," a re-casting of Edward Thomas's great poem, "As the Team's Head Brass." In Thomas's poem, written as World War I was in its catastrophic course, the speaker engages in an intermittent conversation with a farmer plowing his field behind a team of horses. They talk about the war, naturally. The war is a disaster, but the farmer is still plowing, still intends to plant, still assumes his crop will grow, that people will need food. In the distance, a pair of lovers slips into and then out of a small wood, perhaps conceiving a child who will live in the hard-to-imagine future. 

It's an uncannily balanced poem. Thomas was soon off to war himself, and he was killed. The immense human cost of the war looms just underneath the lines--yet some idea that life will continue is also present.

Graham's poem folds our own eco-catastrophe into this scenario. Can we get out? Is there an elsewhere to get to? Can we even imagine one? "Feel the outsideness here. Here on this page. Here in my head. / You. You in me in this final time."

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _Fast_ (2)

 FAST MAINTAINS THE no-notes-in-the-back policy of the preceding two volumes, so when “Cryo” included phrases like “this peine driede uppe all the lively spirities of flesh" and “I saw in him a doubille thurst one bodely and another  gostly,” which sounded like quotations, I checked the internet and learned that they were from Julian of Norwich’s Showings (a.k.a. Revelations of Divine Love). 

As a longtime reader and admirer of Julian’s book, this pleased me for several reasons. Besides just the plain fact that I appreciate any evidence that contemporary poets are reading Julian, the quotation also established another underground passage between Graham and T. S. Eliot (Julian is a key presence in “Little Gidding”), who often seems a crucial precursor.

The quotations are from Julian's 8th showing, chapters 16-21 in the longer version, a vision of dryness pivoting on the crucified Jesus' words, "I thirst." Julian has prayed to know and understand what Jesus experienced on the cross, so the 8th showing is part of fulfilling that prayer. As she contemplates Jesus' thirst, she comes to a larger understanding of the love he had for humankind.

The speaker of "Cryo" is not exactly Graham, I suppose, since Graham has not had herself frozen. If the speaker is considering cryogenics, she must be on the threshold of dying, as Julian was, but the object of the speaker's attention at this fearful juncture is not on a crucifix but on astonishing machinery and a team of professionals. And, of course, on a prospect of eternal (frozen) existence quite different from anything that might have occurred to Julian.

The body is stiffened by something happening far away--> though the curious bag

inside beats like a heart still --> like a line repeated --> an opinion from the

future --> low, repeating some science --> looking back at that prayer that was not

received [...]