Kristi Maxwell, _Re-_

"A BOOK-LENGTH POEM about a couple" describes Re- accurately while giving an entirely misleading impression.

For one thing, there is no proper noun to be encountered, so the relationship rides out its vicissitudes in no particular place at no particular time. The text unfolds at a certain level of precise, surreal abstraction: "Hiccups and the sea share / a vulnerability should redundancy denounce them."

For another, much of the diction of the text seems generated by its own phonemes, improvising upon themselves As in--

     that they cancelled noon concealed it within a cloudy beaker

or

     that the lords should overlap and lapse into a quarrel

or

     cells might be salvaged. Lard from the carcass turned salve

--where an aural similarity becomes a quick leap into the oblique.

And then one notices the structural features, that the text's four (like the seasons?) sections each have twelve (like the months of the year?) poems, and that the later poems contain spoonfuls of earlier ones, like sourdough starter. The last line of the first section's third poem is:

     to see the progress of the leisure?

The first line of the second section's third poem is

     The progress of their leisure was such

and its final line is one of those quoted above, "that the lords should overlap and lapse into a quarrel." That, in turn, bends itself into the first line of the third poem of the third section:

     Lords lap the quarantine

--and so on, as lines recur but not exactly, the familiar oddly new and the new oddly familiar, very much as in the unfolding actuality of coupledom.

Maxwell is a poet (like, I'd say, Jon Woodward) who can work within very particular and idiosyncratic constraints yet somehow convey the texture and mystery of the lived and the felt.  Many people, I have the impression, carelessly assume that highly formal poetry and and highly expressive poetry are opposite ends of some spectrum. But are they?  Not always, I think.

Third great new find of 2013

IT'S SHAPING UP as a good year for me, having already come across the work of Karen Hays and Lucy Ives, and now that I am finally getting to the May/June issue of American Reader, I have my third amazng new find of 2013: Carmen Maria Machado.

Her "Especially Heinous: 272 Views of Law and Order SVU" looks like an episode guide to the long-running cop series (which I haven't seen) and indeed uses the actual names of twelve seasons' worth of episodes, but the capsule plot descriptions turn into a novella following the outer and inner turmoil, both professonal and private, of Benson and Stabler (and their prankster döppelgangers, Henson and Abler) as they navigate a treacherous urban landscape of abused girls with bells for eyes and insistent subterranean heartbeats.

Sounds goofy, I know, and I don't think I could sell it to my book club, but a deeply felt humanity lurks in the goofiness and the MFA legerdemain. No book yet, so far as I can learn, but I'll be on the lookout.

Does Philip Roth have a magnum opus?

MUCH ENJOYED THE double-barreled page one reviews of the new biographies of Roth and Mailer  in the NYTBR a month ago, especially the review of the Roth bio by Martin Amis, provocative enough to provoke the man himself to write in frosty correction.

The observation that lingered in the mind, though, was from the Graydon Carter review of the Mailer bio. "Unlike his contemporaries Salinger, Capote, Styron, Roth, Vonnegut, Kerouac, Heller, and others," Carter writes, "he [Mailer] produced no single volume that captured and continues to capture the hearts and minds of successive generations." Certainly true, methinks.

But, methought further, does Roth really have such a volume? Carter mentions Portnoy's Complaint, which, yes, every bookish person my age read. But unlike the other novels Carter mentions--Catcher in the Rye, On the Road, Slaughterhouse-Five, Breakfast at Tiffany's, all of which I happen to know high school and college age people continue to read--I don't know of many people much younger than I who pick up Portnoy. It's not often assigned. It may not even be on on Spark Notes, that near infallible guide to What's Canonical Now.

It happened to be about a month ago, too, that I was finishing up a lifelong-learners community course sort of thing on The Great Gatsby. The members of the class wanted to talk about Great American Novels--a bankrupt category, to be sure, in academic literary criticism, but enjoyable enough to kick around in a desert-island-discs sort of way. We mentioned Moby-Dick, The Scarlet Letter, Gatsby itself of course.  Are there more modern candidates? they asked. Well, maybe Beloved, I said. Housekeeping.  The Things They Carried.

I've been thinking: Roth is, to my mind, the great American novelist of his generation, the greatest born between the two world wars. Yet is there a particular volume among his many excellent novels of which one would say, "oh, you have to read that one--everybody has to read that one." I can't think of one. And I've read them all.  Loved them all. I ran the same question by a literary friend.  American Pastoral, perhaps? Maybe, but even that one seems deeply idiosyncratic in a way.  The Counterlife? That's my personal favorite, but you would have to read the trilogy first. Portnoy's Complaint? I think the feminism that burst upon us about the very same moment as Alexander Portnoy made his novel more or less obsolete as anything but a 1960s period piece.

This worries me. Roth is the great novelist of his generation, but does he have an As I Lay Dying, a Huckleberry Finn?  Jesus, does he even have a Slaughterhouse-Five?

Lawrence Wright, _Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief_

LAWRENCE WRIGHT IS not only an excellent journalist but a brave man, if what he says about the Church of Scientology's pattern of subjecting its critics to intimidation, vilification, and worse is true...and I'm not saying it is, mind you, as the last thing I need right now is to be intimidated, vilified, or worse by the Church of Scientology. But he seems to have done his work.

I think I picked this up partly because I was fascinated by Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master and partly out of a lingering interest in home-grown American religions, initiated by reading Harold Bloom's The American Religion many years ago and recently boosted by Laurie Maffly-Kipp's Penguin anthology, American Scriptures.

At the end of the day, though, L. Ron Hubbard just does not seem to have the true mad village visionary gleam of Joseph Smith, say, or Mary Baker Eddy, or Ellen White. Scientology looks to have been 100% American High Hokum from the outset: a little self-help, a little gadgetry, a little science fiction, a little of the "unleash your hidden powers" appeal from those tiny little ads in the back of the pulpier of those old "men's magazines," like True or Argosy.

Clever of him, though, to set up shop in southern California, where the talented and good-looking arrive in flocks, badly in need of some confirmation that they are special and unique, daily subject to doubts and fears and various humiliations, and willing to pay whatever it costs to get to that psychological place where they can unleash their hidden powers.

I could be wrong, of course.  Perhaps some day Hubbard will be up there with Smith, Eddy, and White--in some ways, he's exactly the messiah we deserve.

Lucy Ives, _Orange Roses_

ANOTHER GREAT FIND in Conjunctions 60 was "Orange Roses" by Lucy Ives, perhaps a poem, perhaps a next-American-essay essay in the d'Agatan mode, but remarkable however one chooses to designate it.

"Orange Roses" is the title piece of Ives's recently-published collection, which seems in part to be a contemplation of her own career, judging from the titles "Early Poem" and "Early Novel," and the final piece, "On Imitation," about a quest of sorts she undertook at age twenty. One of the poems was published in Ploughshares when Ives was only 21 or 22; it was called "The Country House" then, but here it is titled "Ploughshares," which is both a canny gesture and a great joke.

I hope to discuss Orange Roses in a more respectable corner of the blogosphere, so I will say no more about it here, save to note that while the author, born in 1980, may be on the young side to be casting her eye over her journey as a writer, the Grateful Dead had only been a band for five or six years when they sang about what a "long, strange trip" theirs had been, and who are we to deny that their trip had indeed been long and strange? Ives's own trip, on the evidence of this book, has been strange and long enough.

Karen Hays, "The Cubes"

CHALK UP ANOTHER great find by Conjunctions.  As far as I can tell, Karen Hays has not yet published a book, but on the strength of "The Cubes" from Conjunctions 60, I can promise that when she does, she is guaranteed at least one sale in Nebraska.

"The Cubes" is an essay, I suppose we could say, but of a  d'Agatan, next-American-essay kind. Each "cube"--there are twenty-seven--contains up to six passages of one hundred words, as in exactly one hundred words. Each passage has a key word associated with it, placed in the margin, along with an inscrutable three-digit number in what looks like binary code. Although each cube has six available...faces? like the faces of a die?...not all six are necessarily occupied; some are "void."

The passages in the cubes concern several different topics. Quite a few are about the first photographs to be taken from a kite, the man who took them, and his daughter, but we also hear about suicide, about plague, about Nicola Tesla, about quantum physics, about the presence of iron in our blood, about the mathematics of cubes (27 is three cubed), about the author's grandfather...

...and somehow, although "The Cubes" is an essay-poem in a nonce-form to end all nonce-forms, its structure being the most immediately noticeable thing about it, it is illuminating, moving, haunting. I will have to read it a few more times in order to have any idea why it captivated me, but captivate me it did. But before getting around to that, I need to find some more work by Karen Hays.

Giorgio Agamben, _The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans_

...IN FACT, A commentary on just the first ten words of the Epistle to the Romans, but Professor Agamben has more than enough intellectual resources at his command to find in those ten words not just the key to the whole epistle, but to the whole Pauline project, even, before he is done, to Western thought in general.

Back when I was in graduate school in the 1970s and early 1980s, most of my professor had been in graduate school in the fifties and sixties, and they used to chuckle at the memory of the old school Dryasdust dead-but-won't-lie-down philologists clinging like barnacles to the departmental hull, ignorant of New Criticism, Harold Bloom, Northrop Frye as they compiled their tables of irregular datives...but the brilliance of The Time That Remains is all in its philology. (What goes around....)

For one thing, Agamben is able to pick up these ten words of Paul's koine Greek and chip off the centuries of accumulated theology encrusting them, imagining what their possibilities were when Paul first handled them, the leaps Paul might have made in trying to fit Judaic concepts into the language of the eastern mediterranean marketplace. (For instance, words for faith and belief were always already deeply implicated in matters of contract, commerce, and finance.)

Thus, even in this brief book, we get a large glimpse of Christianity before it was Christianity, when it was still a damp yet incandescent newborn heresy of Judaism.

For another, Agamben can track the word Paul uses to describe what faith does to the law--katargein, usually translated as make void, or nullify, or overthrow--and not only unpack it to a fare-thee-well, but also trace it through Luther's translation of the Bible, where it becomes aufhebung, to...well, you see where this is going, don't you?...to Hegel, and the Hegelian, Marx, etc., etc., so that Paul stands at the head of all radical western philosophy.

The final brief chapter discerns the Pauline in the work of Walter Benjamin--utterly convincingly, I would say.

Agamben gives us a Paul who has been galvanized by possibility, who is able to conceive of an unprecedentedly new relationship between people and time, between people and other people, between people and their own brief but unique lives.