yet WHEN THIS CAME out about a year ago, and Marcus was interviewed on NPR, I was, I admit, a little worried that he had succumbed to some sort of commercial imperative for suburban-domestic fiction. But when I finally commenced the book last summer, and the first paragraph describes the narrator packing a bag with "sound abatement fabrics" and "anti-comprehension pills," I thought, well, this is promising, and then soon enough Thompson appeared, and I knew all was well.
The Flame Alphabet stirs into its mix a little of the Burroughsian language-is-a-virus idea, a little of Roth's The Plot Against America, perhaps a little of James's Sacred Fount, a little bit of your workaday post-apocalyptic thriller genus (species: "mysterious plague"), and yes, even a little suburban domestic realism. But the novel is plumped down squarely in Marcus-World, which, like Nabokov's Antiterra, is recognizably like our world in many ways, bewilderingly different in others. For instance, there are Jews in The Flame Alphabet, but they worship at holes in the woods, where they listen to radio broadcasts by Rabbi Burke. (We don't learn the cantor's name, but I'm guessing it's O'Flanagan.)
In The Age of Wire and String, Notable American Women, and The Father Costume, the hobbyhorses of parents create perilous obstacle courses for their children, but the polarity reverses in The Flame Alphabet, and parents are being made ill, sometimes fatally, by the utterances of their children. Marcus succeeds in making this both hilarious and terrifying. The novel literalizes the familiar phenomenon that parents feel judged and found wanting by things their children say, and there is an easily recognizable Archie Bunker/Bill Cosby kind of humor in this; it also literalizes the idea that words can injure, central to a lot of arguments, policies, and treatises within academic life in the 1980s and 1990s, and there is a kind of satirical humor in this. At the same time, Marcus draws sufficiently on the resources of realism to make the whole scenario vivid and plausible, so the novel is deeply unnerving.
Grisly ironies abound. Language, the medium that makes society possible, disintegrates society. In his desperation to save his family, Sam, our narrator, abandons them. Made ill by their children, the adults eventually--here the Shoah echoes become more intense--decide to corral, control, and eventually attach themselves like vampires to the young, sacrificing the human future in order to seize whatever little they can of the evaporating present.
There is a bubble of hope, perhaps, at the end of The Flame Alphabet. Sam has escaped the grim "research facility" directed by Murphy/LeBov (the novel's most fascinating character, malign as he is), reunited with his daughter, and awaits the return of his wife. However, language remains toxic, his daughter does not trust him, and his wife is more than likely dead. Even McCarthy's The Road seems like Frank Capra next to such reflections as this:
Thinking is the first poison, said someone. One often fails to ask this of a crisis, but why was it not worse? Why was the person himself not gutted of thought? Who cares about the word made public, it's the private word that does more lasting damage, person by person. The thinking should have stopped first. The thinking. Perhaps it is next in the long, creeping conquest of this toxicity, another basic human activity that will slowly be taken from us.
Oh, I fucking hope so.
But my abiding impression is that Ben Marcus has once again created a world that is manifestly a tissue of language, that is utterly fictional and deeply strange, while nonetheless managing to get closer to the aching bone of family emotion than any "realist" going. How does he do it? Dunno, but he's done it again.
Friday, January 18, 2013
Wednesday, January 16, 2013
Jacques Rancière, _The Future of the Image_
I MAY BE--in fact, almost certainly am--missing something here. The back of this Verso paperback explains that "Jacques Rancière's work returns politics to its central place in understanding art," that "there is a stark political choice in art: it can either reinforce a move towards radical democracy or help create a new reactionary mysticism."
Problem is, I'm...just...not...seeing...it. Perhaps I need to read this in the context of some of Rancière's later work, get some ideas that close the circle. As it is, all I have read is Mute Speech, and my main impression of the five talks/essays collected here, originally delivered 1999-2002, is that they bring the crucial ideas of Mute Speech to bear on the visual arts: cinema, photography, painting, design. Mute Speech just did not hit the Christopher Caudwell/Edward Upward/Granville Hicks/Ben Shahn/Pete Seeger kind of keynotes the the Verso blurb announces, and I do not see how these five pieces do, either.
But I can see something like that, I guess. Mute Speech and the affiliated pieces gathered here posit a revolution in the "regime of representation" that occurred in the late 18th century, a break in the way literature and art were imagined, away from the early modern era's re-codifications of Aristotle (the artistic unities, decorum, mimesis) into something more rarified, perhaps, or less strictly organized, but maintaining while re-conceiving a relation between the visible and the sayable.
The ordinary history of this break, as Rancière frequently explains, emphasizes a divorce between the visible and the sayable--the break had a logic in it that led to blankness, silence, inanity. Not so fast, he says. Were the visible and sayable divorced, or was their relationship re-defined? Hence his discussion of the "sentence-image" in the second of these pieces, "Sentence, Image, History" (which would get my vote as pick of the litter were not "The Future of the Image" and "Are Some Things Unrepresentable?" perhaps even more interesting).
As the third term--"history"--of that second essay's title suggests, if the visible and the sayable are not--indeed, have never been--in fact divorced, then a lot of arguments about po-mo futility of art, desperate situation of art, ultimate dead end of art, and so on, simply collapse. If the visible can still get us to the sayable...well, where the sayable is, you can have history, and where you have history, you can talk about where we have been and where we should go next, and you arrive at the political.
So, in this sense, yes, I can see how Rancière restores a possibility for talking about art and the political. Furthermore, he can do this by focusing on the procedures and techniques of figures like Balzac, Flaubert, and Mallarmé, rather than on their explicit politics. Still, I do not detect much that is exhortatory in the essays here, although that is the impression the Verso blurb leaves.
However, Rancière does take on the best arguments for seeing art and politics as inhabiting incommensurable, incompatible spheres and shows the problems with those arguments, not just in their logic, but also in their failure to see what happens in canonical works of art.
Art does not face a stark choice between radical democracy and reactionary mysticism; we do. We can let ourselves be persuaded that art and literature, by their very nature, cannot help us much; Rancière gives us good reason to think they can.
Problem is, I'm...just...not...seeing...it. Perhaps I need to read this in the context of some of Rancière's later work, get some ideas that close the circle. As it is, all I have read is Mute Speech, and my main impression of the five talks/essays collected here, originally delivered 1999-2002, is that they bring the crucial ideas of Mute Speech to bear on the visual arts: cinema, photography, painting, design. Mute Speech just did not hit the Christopher Caudwell/Edward Upward/Granville Hicks/Ben Shahn/Pete Seeger kind of keynotes the the Verso blurb announces, and I do not see how these five pieces do, either.
But I can see something like that, I guess. Mute Speech and the affiliated pieces gathered here posit a revolution in the "regime of representation" that occurred in the late 18th century, a break in the way literature and art were imagined, away from the early modern era's re-codifications of Aristotle (the artistic unities, decorum, mimesis) into something more rarified, perhaps, or less strictly organized, but maintaining while re-conceiving a relation between the visible and the sayable.
The ordinary history of this break, as Rancière frequently explains, emphasizes a divorce between the visible and the sayable--the break had a logic in it that led to blankness, silence, inanity. Not so fast, he says. Were the visible and sayable divorced, or was their relationship re-defined? Hence his discussion of the "sentence-image" in the second of these pieces, "Sentence, Image, History" (which would get my vote as pick of the litter were not "The Future of the Image" and "Are Some Things Unrepresentable?" perhaps even more interesting).
As the third term--"history"--of that second essay's title suggests, if the visible and the sayable are not--indeed, have never been--in fact divorced, then a lot of arguments about po-mo futility of art, desperate situation of art, ultimate dead end of art, and so on, simply collapse. If the visible can still get us to the sayable...well, where the sayable is, you can have history, and where you have history, you can talk about where we have been and where we should go next, and you arrive at the political.
So, in this sense, yes, I can see how Rancière restores a possibility for talking about art and the political. Furthermore, he can do this by focusing on the procedures and techniques of figures like Balzac, Flaubert, and Mallarmé, rather than on their explicit politics. Still, I do not detect much that is exhortatory in the essays here, although that is the impression the Verso blurb leaves.
However, Rancière does take on the best arguments for seeing art and politics as inhabiting incommensurable, incompatible spheres and shows the problems with those arguments, not just in their logic, but also in their failure to see what happens in canonical works of art.
Art does not face a stark choice between radical democracy and reactionary mysticism; we do. We can let ourselves be persuaded that art and literature, by their very nature, cannot help us much; Rancière gives us good reason to think they can.
Sunday, January 13, 2013
Kevin Young and David Lehman, eds, _The Best American Poetry 2011_
I REALLY OUGHT to read these always worthwhile anthologies before the next one appears.
I do get to them, though, and I have a hypothesis to advance. It seems to me that the volumes in the series edited by male poets are much likelier to concentrate on poetry similar to that of the poet himself than are the volumes in the series edited by female poets.
In the 2011 volume, we have a great many poems that are largely in conversational language with occasional tweaks of rhetorical heightening or fancifulness, lots of poems that handle closed forms in ingenious, contemporary ways (owing to the serendipity of alphabetical order, we have two consecutive poems, by Rachel Wetzsteon and Richard Wilbur, that use a rhyming haiku stanza), lots of poems about family and personal history... in other words, lots of poems with a certain kinship to the work of Kevin Young.
I had a similar feeling about the Charles Wright (2008) and David Wagoner (2009) volumes, whereas the Heather McHugh (2007) and Amy Gerstler (2010) volumes were remarkable for their variety. Even Lyn Hejinian (2004), who is closely identified with a particular tendency, came up with a volume of greater breadth than the male poets tend to (Paul Muldoon [2005] excepted).
It's not that the poetry Young selected is weak, or not worthwhile; there is a lot of great work in here. It's that one would finish the book with the feeling that the shoreline of American poetry is a much narrower strip of beach than it actually is.
Yes, I realize that the editor's task in these volumes to pick the poems s/he really feels are the best, rather than to try to come up with an array of work that could be called "representative." The series is not "The Most Representative American Poetry," after all. Even I, fatally drawn to poetry anthologies based on suspect premises, would think twice before acquiring such a thing. But I do wonder whether women poets--perhaps women writers generally, I don't know--are prompter in seeing the value in work quite unlike their own than men poets are.
I do get to them, though, and I have a hypothesis to advance. It seems to me that the volumes in the series edited by male poets are much likelier to concentrate on poetry similar to that of the poet himself than are the volumes in the series edited by female poets.
In the 2011 volume, we have a great many poems that are largely in conversational language with occasional tweaks of rhetorical heightening or fancifulness, lots of poems that handle closed forms in ingenious, contemporary ways (owing to the serendipity of alphabetical order, we have two consecutive poems, by Rachel Wetzsteon and Richard Wilbur, that use a rhyming haiku stanza), lots of poems about family and personal history... in other words, lots of poems with a certain kinship to the work of Kevin Young.
I had a similar feeling about the Charles Wright (2008) and David Wagoner (2009) volumes, whereas the Heather McHugh (2007) and Amy Gerstler (2010) volumes were remarkable for their variety. Even Lyn Hejinian (2004), who is closely identified with a particular tendency, came up with a volume of greater breadth than the male poets tend to (Paul Muldoon [2005] excepted).
It's not that the poetry Young selected is weak, or not worthwhile; there is a lot of great work in here. It's that one would finish the book with the feeling that the shoreline of American poetry is a much narrower strip of beach than it actually is.
Yes, I realize that the editor's task in these volumes to pick the poems s/he really feels are the best, rather than to try to come up with an array of work that could be called "representative." The series is not "The Most Representative American Poetry," after all. Even I, fatally drawn to poetry anthologies based on suspect premises, would think twice before acquiring such a thing. But I do wonder whether women poets--perhaps women writers generally, I don't know--are prompter in seeing the value in work quite unlike their own than men poets are.
Saturday, January 12, 2013
Mathias Svalina, _I Am a Very Productive Entrepreneur_
THE TITLE REFERS not to Mathias Svalina, I take it, but to the speaker of the 44 prose poems herein, but Svalina can fairly be called productive: he published his first book in 2009, this his second in 2011, and just published his third at the end of 2012. That's not even mentioning the chapbooks. What's more, they're all very good.
According to its cover, I Am a Very Productive Entrepreneur is a novella, but, as noted above, it registered on me more as a collection of related prose poems. Each section begins, "I started this one business that..." and goes on to give a brief history of the business, sometimes two or three pages long, sometimes only a sentence:
I started this one business that opened up everything that is closed & held it up in front of the gathered public one time & with great ceremony before closing it up again & burying it forever.
I started this one business that allowed children to remain children for their entire lives.
Is the speaker the same in each prose poem, or chapter? Maybe--the narrator twice mentions having a son who died--but it's hard to say. We do not have a plot so much as a loop, in which our narrator again and again starts a business and recounts its fortunes, which unfold more like surreal lyrical explorations of the labyrinth of capitalism than like narratives.
For instance, one business "installed rustic, old-fashioned stone wells inside people's bodies." Recounting this particular business's history, the speaker observes, "When you stand next to another person you begin to absorb them, which is why lovers have only three legs between them. Love depends on the separating skin, otherwise sex would be a mess of blood and broken windows." Furthermore, "The inside of a person is like patricide, but when you pull the bucket up it becomes just another show in an all-white gallery space with a vague smell of citrus."
I Am a Very Productive Entrepreneur often made me laugh--it would be more strictly accurate to say it made me emit a chortling bark of horrified recognition, as Ben Marcus and Gary Lutz often do--but I suspect the book has a dark heart. It concerns what we desire and what is commodifiable, and the dialogue of the deaf between the two. There is what we need and long for, which is one thing, and there is what we can buy, which is quite another, although what we can buy has a well-developed knack for disguising itself as what we desire.
"I started this one business that rented out parts of people's lives to other people," one section begins. If you were, the speaker explains, writing a novel about caves, but had never been in a cave, you could rent the memories of someone who had. This example seems whimsical, but speaks to anyone's desire to escape solipsism, for connection to others...which is unobtainable, the text cruelly reminds us, but it can sell us something to take the edge off that pain:
You can never know the mind of another person, even in the moment someone's sweat mingles with yours. Empathy is a convenient fable of morality. But for a small fee we could change that.
As Zizek pointed out some while back, the basic logic of the commodity is to offer itself as the remedy for lacks we cannot name or even acknowledge. Svalina's entrepreneur thus hits on the most potent commodity of all when s/he "started this one business that discovered one new thing every day but never told anyone about any of these things, never ever ever." Let's see--how large would the market be for vague, inchoate hopes in a somehow transformed future? Very large, could we say? "What a perfect commodity is mystery!" Svalina's speaker exclaims.
Having read the book in a big gulp, I wonder if I would have done better to spread it out--one business per day, say. Hmm, could we add 321 businesses and market this as the "I Started This One Business" desk calendar?
According to its cover, I Am a Very Productive Entrepreneur is a novella, but, as noted above, it registered on me more as a collection of related prose poems. Each section begins, "I started this one business that..." and goes on to give a brief history of the business, sometimes two or three pages long, sometimes only a sentence:
I started this one business that opened up everything that is closed & held it up in front of the gathered public one time & with great ceremony before closing it up again & burying it forever.
I started this one business that allowed children to remain children for their entire lives.
Is the speaker the same in each prose poem, or chapter? Maybe--the narrator twice mentions having a son who died--but it's hard to say. We do not have a plot so much as a loop, in which our narrator again and again starts a business and recounts its fortunes, which unfold more like surreal lyrical explorations of the labyrinth of capitalism than like narratives.
For instance, one business "installed rustic, old-fashioned stone wells inside people's bodies." Recounting this particular business's history, the speaker observes, "When you stand next to another person you begin to absorb them, which is why lovers have only three legs between them. Love depends on the separating skin, otherwise sex would be a mess of blood and broken windows." Furthermore, "The inside of a person is like patricide, but when you pull the bucket up it becomes just another show in an all-white gallery space with a vague smell of citrus."
I Am a Very Productive Entrepreneur often made me laugh--it would be more strictly accurate to say it made me emit a chortling bark of horrified recognition, as Ben Marcus and Gary Lutz often do--but I suspect the book has a dark heart. It concerns what we desire and what is commodifiable, and the dialogue of the deaf between the two. There is what we need and long for, which is one thing, and there is what we can buy, which is quite another, although what we can buy has a well-developed knack for disguising itself as what we desire.
"I started this one business that rented out parts of people's lives to other people," one section begins. If you were, the speaker explains, writing a novel about caves, but had never been in a cave, you could rent the memories of someone who had. This example seems whimsical, but speaks to anyone's desire to escape solipsism, for connection to others...which is unobtainable, the text cruelly reminds us, but it can sell us something to take the edge off that pain:
You can never know the mind of another person, even in the moment someone's sweat mingles with yours. Empathy is a convenient fable of morality. But for a small fee we could change that.
As Zizek pointed out some while back, the basic logic of the commodity is to offer itself as the remedy for lacks we cannot name or even acknowledge. Svalina's entrepreneur thus hits on the most potent commodity of all when s/he "started this one business that discovered one new thing every day but never told anyone about any of these things, never ever ever." Let's see--how large would the market be for vague, inchoate hopes in a somehow transformed future? Very large, could we say? "What a perfect commodity is mystery!" Svalina's speaker exclaims.
Having read the book in a big gulp, I wonder if I would have done better to spread it out--one business per day, say. Hmm, could we add 321 businesses and market this as the "I Started This One Business" desk calendar?
Friday, January 11, 2013
Caryl Pagel, _Experiments I Should Like Tried at My Own Death_
AN EXCELLENT BOOK--in fact, I think I am going to try to review it elsewhere in some more worthy corner of the internet, but I have a Poetry Week to keep rolling as well, so I'll say just a few things here.
Like a couple of my favorite individual poems of recent years, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin's "The Informant" and Peter Gizzi's "On What Became of Mathew Brady's Battle Photographs," Pagel's poems in this volume (her first, I believe) evoke encounters between traditional conceptions of the supernatural and modern scientific inquiry. Though the two tendencies are diametrically opposed in most circumstances most of the time, when 19th century investigators tried to photograph the spirit, or document appearances of ghosts, the two ordinarily distinct conceptions of the universe trundled uneasily allied down the same road for a bit. There is something of the spirit of William James or W. B. Yeats in Pagel's book--or of, what the hell, Robert Fludd, or Paracelsus, or Robert Burton.
Formally the poems are utterly contemporary, disjunctive, paratactic, with frequent appropriations and re-fashionings, yet they magically exude the air of an attic full of daguerrotypes, yellowed envelopes with spidery script, and butterfly collections. Consider the long-ish poem "The Sick Bed"--its poetic feels perfectly contemporary in its silences and absences, yet contains no word that would have been unavailable to Emily Dickinson.
Like a couple of my favorite individual poems of recent years, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin's "The Informant" and Peter Gizzi's "On What Became of Mathew Brady's Battle Photographs," Pagel's poems in this volume (her first, I believe) evoke encounters between traditional conceptions of the supernatural and modern scientific inquiry. Though the two tendencies are diametrically opposed in most circumstances most of the time, when 19th century investigators tried to photograph the spirit, or document appearances of ghosts, the two ordinarily distinct conceptions of the universe trundled uneasily allied down the same road for a bit. There is something of the spirit of William James or W. B. Yeats in Pagel's book--or of, what the hell, Robert Fludd, or Paracelsus, or Robert Burton.
Formally the poems are utterly contemporary, disjunctive, paratactic, with frequent appropriations and re-fashionings, yet they magically exude the air of an attic full of daguerrotypes, yellowed envelopes with spidery script, and butterfly collections. Consider the long-ish poem "The Sick Bed"--its poetic feels perfectly contemporary in its silences and absences, yet contains no word that would have been unavailable to Emily Dickinson.
Thursday, January 10, 2013
Anna Moschovakis, _You and Three Others Are Approaching a LAke_
THIS WON THE 2011 James Laughlin Award, which must be how it came to be on my shelves. I have not read anything else by Moschovakis, but the Laughlin Award winners tend to be interesting--a slightly better batting average than the Pulitzers, perhaps.
I heard Laughlin speak once--at the Art Institute of Chicago, early 1984, perhaps? I wonder if someone is working on a biography--what a unique career.
You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake is mainly four long poems, bookended by two short ones, and the long ones--well, I'll just quote the endnote:
The four long poems in this volume were inspired by books chosen by title and appearance from the shelves of Bibliobarn, a miraculous used bookstore in South Kortright, NY. Language is borrowed, premises are adopted or argued with, tones are emulated or thwarted. I am grateful for the existence of these books, all of which take a bold stand towards their topics and the twentieth-century world they inhabited.
Obviously some complex kind of appropriation and adaptation is going on... frankly, I'd like to know more, perhaps in the form of a website, as Srikanth Reddy did for Voyager...? Just a suggestion.
I had never heard of any of the four books, although I had heard of two of the authors (Stuart Chase and Arnold Bennett), so I cannot even guess what kind of process Moschovakis subjected them to--the results are brilliant, though.
"The Tragedy of Waste," from the Chase book, is the source of the volume's title and seems to be a kind of thought experiment about people, tools, and terrain, about how we are made by the things we make.
"Death as a Way of Life," inspired by a book by one Roger Caras, is about death, more precisely killing, but also about love and sex--I'm guessing this is the first poem ever to yoke Emmanuel Levinas with with Bonnie and Clyde.
"The Human Machine (Thirty Chances)" is my favorite, I'd say. Based on a non-fiction book by Arnold Bennett (one of whose novels I got sufficiently far into in grad school to decide that Virginia Woolf truly did have his number), this poem finds a way to talk about both Alan Turing and Artificial Intelligence and Peter Singer and animal rights. If machines can think... do they have rights?
"In Search of Wealth," inspired by a book by Cyril Belshaw, asks what you would sacrifice for what, and yokes the Dani of New Guinea and Scientology... another first, I daresay.
You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake is witty, thought-provoking, and (for me) impossible to put down.
I heard Laughlin speak once--at the Art Institute of Chicago, early 1984, perhaps? I wonder if someone is working on a biography--what a unique career.
You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake is mainly four long poems, bookended by two short ones, and the long ones--well, I'll just quote the endnote:
The four long poems in this volume were inspired by books chosen by title and appearance from the shelves of Bibliobarn, a miraculous used bookstore in South Kortright, NY. Language is borrowed, premises are adopted or argued with, tones are emulated or thwarted. I am grateful for the existence of these books, all of which take a bold stand towards their topics and the twentieth-century world they inhabited.
Obviously some complex kind of appropriation and adaptation is going on... frankly, I'd like to know more, perhaps in the form of a website, as Srikanth Reddy did for Voyager...? Just a suggestion.
I had never heard of any of the four books, although I had heard of two of the authors (Stuart Chase and Arnold Bennett), so I cannot even guess what kind of process Moschovakis subjected them to--the results are brilliant, though.
"The Tragedy of Waste," from the Chase book, is the source of the volume's title and seems to be a kind of thought experiment about people, tools, and terrain, about how we are made by the things we make.
"Death as a Way of Life," inspired by a book by one Roger Caras, is about death, more precisely killing, but also about love and sex--I'm guessing this is the first poem ever to yoke Emmanuel Levinas with with Bonnie and Clyde.
"The Human Machine (Thirty Chances)" is my favorite, I'd say. Based on a non-fiction book by Arnold Bennett (one of whose novels I got sufficiently far into in grad school to decide that Virginia Woolf truly did have his number), this poem finds a way to talk about both Alan Turing and Artificial Intelligence and Peter Singer and animal rights. If machines can think... do they have rights?
"In Search of Wealth," inspired by a book by Cyril Belshaw, asks what you would sacrifice for what, and yokes the Dani of New Guinea and Scientology... another first, I daresay.
You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake is witty, thought-provoking, and (for me) impossible to put down.
Wednesday, January 9, 2013
Robyn Schiff, _Revolver_
TWO OF THESE sixteen poems ("House of Schiaparelli" and "Dear Ralph Lauren") seem to have wandered in from Worth in their pondering of upper-class consumption, but in the main they contemplate the machinery of modernity, mainly of the mid-19th century (the inventions of Colt, McCormick, and Singer) with a nod to the 20th in a poem on the Lustron house.
I happen to have actually seen a Lustron house; there's one in my brother's neighborhood in Des Moines. Not as creepy as the house in Schiff's poem, I would say, but certainly had the aura of a tomorrow one is glad never arrived.
I happen to have heard a few of these poems, too; I attended a reading by Schiff in, I think, 2007, somewhat before this book appeared, and I am 95% sure she read "Project Paperclip," one of the two 10+-page poems that anchor the volume ("Project Huia" at midpoint, "Project Paperclip" at the end).
Schiff's poetry is complex of syntax but sparing of punctuation, so much so that I am not sure they are not better heard than read. Anyone who imitates Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale" in writing a poem about the bird flu ("H5N1") is A-OK in my book, though.
Schiff's customary procedure is to start down a path, go off on a tangent, then take another tangent, then another...and just when you think she is being charmingly inconsequent, you find you are back on the same path that the poem started out on, although it looks a little different now, scarier perhaps, the light a little more ominous, and there is more at stake in this little walk than you had guessed. What seemed like whimsical departures wind up making a tight braid, a Gordian knot.
Schiff often starts on a light, charming note--a Schiaparelli gown, a tote bag, a fork, buoyant cork furniture--but beware. She is setting you up. The trap is being laid.
Sometimes she does not even bother to start out by being charming. In "Iron Door Knocker the Shape of a Man's Face, by Feetham," the chill has already set in with the opening lines, "Has no fly laid a sac of eggs / in the wet hole in the house finch / dead on the back porch / a week [...]". There is worse to come. Remember the last line of Elizabeth Bishop's "Filling Station," "Someone loves us all"? Here Schiff considers the mayflies on her screen door:
A swarm of mayflies clutching
the wire mesh on their only night on earth.
They defile it until they
die, though it's not exactly
true they live their whole
lives in one humid day.
They were larvae first, that takes years,
then they emerge starving with no
mouth. Someone hates us very
much.
Like the six-shooter on the book's cover, Schiff's poems look ornate and fanciful, but that doesn't mean they can't send a bullet through you.
I happen to have actually seen a Lustron house; there's one in my brother's neighborhood in Des Moines. Not as creepy as the house in Schiff's poem, I would say, but certainly had the aura of a tomorrow one is glad never arrived.
I happen to have heard a few of these poems, too; I attended a reading by Schiff in, I think, 2007, somewhat before this book appeared, and I am 95% sure she read "Project Paperclip," one of the two 10+-page poems that anchor the volume ("Project Huia" at midpoint, "Project Paperclip" at the end).
Schiff's poetry is complex of syntax but sparing of punctuation, so much so that I am not sure they are not better heard than read. Anyone who imitates Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale" in writing a poem about the bird flu ("H5N1") is A-OK in my book, though.
Schiff's customary procedure is to start down a path, go off on a tangent, then take another tangent, then another...and just when you think she is being charmingly inconsequent, you find you are back on the same path that the poem started out on, although it looks a little different now, scarier perhaps, the light a little more ominous, and there is more at stake in this little walk than you had guessed. What seemed like whimsical departures wind up making a tight braid, a Gordian knot.
Schiff often starts on a light, charming note--a Schiaparelli gown, a tote bag, a fork, buoyant cork furniture--but beware. She is setting you up. The trap is being laid.
Sometimes she does not even bother to start out by being charming. In "Iron Door Knocker the Shape of a Man's Face, by Feetham," the chill has already set in with the opening lines, "Has no fly laid a sac of eggs / in the wet hole in the house finch / dead on the back porch / a week [...]". There is worse to come. Remember the last line of Elizabeth Bishop's "Filling Station," "Someone loves us all"? Here Schiff considers the mayflies on her screen door:
A swarm of mayflies clutching
the wire mesh on their only night on earth.
They defile it until they
die, though it's not exactly
true they live their whole
lives in one humid day.
They were larvae first, that takes years,
then they emerge starving with no
mouth. Someone hates us very
much.
Like the six-shooter on the book's cover, Schiff's poems look ornate and fanciful, but that doesn't mean they can't send a bullet through you.
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