Experimental Fiction / Poetry

The Meditating Cougar

2011-04-13T16:14:00.000-07:00

The meditating cougar didn't bother
with the elk when it shuffled by
so close and easy, so available;
it did simply nothing, seeing and hearing
nothing, eyes unfocused and ears
not discerning, a world gone soft,
soft. The meditating cougar may turn
its head to look not here, to hear not
there, with no wondering available,
a full stomach and a mind hidden
and supple, muscles thick and relaxed.
An old beaver died for this meditation.
Perhaps it is worth it. The day's were
numbered. And now the cougar becomes
so much more than its pettiness,
sitting quietly beyond simple earthly
wishes, doing its thing, after satiation.

DOUBLE OR NOTHING by Raymond Federman (published in 1971)

2011-04-03T13:29:00.000-07:00

Go here to get a sense of what this book looks like. Since it needs to be seen to be believed, don't skip this step.

The novel is a typescript in which each page is conceived of as an object and typed differently. Federman may even on occasion have used freehand ink lettering or stencils. (See page 9.) It is a classic contemporary novel, one of the landmarks of meta-fiction, where the author reflects on the making of the fiction as the book is made.

The 18th-century's Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne is an early, if not the earliest metafiction, in that it spins its wheels obsessively focusing on details before the putative beginning of the story so as to almost not get there. Federman's book is similar. It follows an author getting ready to lock himself in a cheap motel room for 365 days with a typewriter, noodles, cigarettes, sugar, coffee, and a few other things in order to write the story of a character he initially calls "Boris" who comes to the U.S. from France after WW II.

The book, however, only speculates about what the author will write or might write about "Boris." He never actually commits to a story, though he does spin a lot of potential story lines that are quite interesting to follow. And it spends an equal amount of time speculating about the daily needs of the author in his motel room. He even worries about how weird it will look when he carries in the dozens of toilet paper rolls he has computed that he needs.

Complicating all of these (playful) complications is the fact that, if you know anything about Federman, you will realize that Boris' "biography" is remarkably similar to Federman's. Both are Jewish and from families who were massacred in the Holocaust. Both are French. Both come to America after the war.

Federman, of course, also shares biographical details with the author. Most importantly, both of them write books. Both of them are also gamblers ("double or nothing"), although the reader would have no way of knowing this.

This book has been written about extensively, and I will probably not contribute anything to this discussion. This post is more about my coming to terms with the book, and I welcome you to come along if you like.

There are five levels of self-conscious play in this book:

1. The typescript - Each page is an object unto itself. It is not simply a transparent window pointing us to the action. At times, we don't even know where we are to read next. This forces the readers to not only help to create the very page, but to encounter the pages not as media but as made. This entails that Federman's book does not stand between the reader and the story, conveying the story to the reader, but is story. Every page is a chapter unto itself, and we encounter it in its singularity, and come away having been at least challenged, maybe rattled, maybe laughing.

2. The character of Boris - Federman refuses to make him a "character." Rather, he is the making of the making of a character. My guess is that Federman believes that fictional "characters" in novels do not resemble human beings. Rather, they are functions of the larger structures and issues at play. He chooses to make this self-consciously and explicitly clear by going no further than suggesting ways to develop Boris. In this way Boris is always at play, always at limbo, always not closed off. The way traditional novels make characters feel "real" is, paradoxically, to round them off, i.e. to close them off, rather than to leave them open, which is the human orientation toward the future. With the future closed off, literary characters are just not people at all. Boris, in all his unfinishedness, is closer to a person, even though Federman keeps reminding us that he, Federman, can make him do whatever he wants.

3. The third level of self-conscious play is between Federman's biography and Boris's. Federman gives us enough teasers to make it clear that the novel is semi-autobiographical, yet at the same time he doesn't spell out the differences, except in a few hilarious places, generally when he claims he wasn't as shy as Boris. We become voyeuristically curious about Federman. What is true? What is not? He is such an interesting raconteur that I find myself much more curious about the gap between fact and nonfact in his writing than in, say, Jack Kerouac's.

4. The author - The author is perhaps the most interesting character in the book. Why doesn't he sit down and just get writing? Why does he spend pages and pages itemizing how many rolls of toilet paper, boxes of noodles, tubes of toothpaste, etc. that he will need to write his book? And why does he keep rewriting the book, or going back to the beginning? Is the author supposed to be someone operating with traditional assumptions about writing but too honest to go through with them? Does he sense on a visceral level the falsity of those traditions? Is there something else that can account for his obsessiveness, both about the things of his daily needs and Boris?

5. The fifth level is the most obscure. It is the play between the author and the writer, Raymond Federman. While he doesn't leave the same teasers about the similarities between him and the author as he does between himself and Boris, we nonetheless can't help but speculate. Things are not as voyeuristic because Federman does not give us enough details: This is a more abstract connection, or disconnection as the case may be. Here, the play seems most uneasy and even haunted, the obsessions are so overwhelming, the concerns so seemingly unimportant. I am not sure Federman gives us enough information to explain this obsession, other than the one I offered earlier, it is an anxiety borne of a visceral recoiling from traditional narrative. And given that traditional Western narrative led, in part, to WWII and the Holocaust, can you blame him?

This book is a made object, asking us to do with it what we will, but refusing a closure that will allow any simple reading. All literature can, of course, withstand multiple readings. But not all literature intentionally creates the playful circumstances for multiple readings. What I've looked at today is one way of going at it. It offers a structure. There are undoubtedly others.

Excoriations

2011-03-24T12:06:00.000-07:00

stretching the edge

of sometime

and drizzling down the

commuted statement —

almost anyone forgot

her exact debt

and the world slightly

crumbled on her

bending the given

of thin

and coming down on the

questioned core —

someone surrendered

his assigned place

and his status

ever so slightly curbed

crawling under the roofs

of anywhere

and dressing down the

extra ones —

strangers peeped out

of almost all

places and their lives

seemed almost cheap

cycloning the fence

of hazard

and wishing down

the segment of core —

a shadow whipped

out a weapon

that was a

mere shadow too

monkeying on the bars

of nowhere

and hoping for somewhere

to materialize just for you —

the words end here

but not the bite

the momentum

excoriations

HECATE LOCHIA by Hoa Nguyen

2011-03-14T16:06:00.000-07:00

I hesitate to write about this book of poems because it is in large part about a mother's bodily response to childbirth and its aftermath. "Lochia" is post-partum vaginal discharge that continues for about three to four weeks after birth. "Hecate" is goddess of motherhood, among other things. I chose to write about it because I write about almost every piece of literature that I read and like, and it is an extraordinary book. I'll do my best, but I encourage you to check it out.

The poems in this book address a certain knot of concerns from a number of different angles. Namely, how does the body of a particular post-partum woman encounter and participate in the degradation of the environment through pollution, war, economics, and politics?

The very first poem places us right in this knot: "Up nursing then make tea / The word war is far." This fascinating couplet claims that war is far from the concerns of this nursing mother, yet her bringing the topic up proves that it's not too far. The poem ends by asking "Why try / to revive the lyric". The book then answers this question: to get this female knot of concerns into the tradition of the lyric.

Four poems from the book can be found here. "Thinking of Bernadette" (I assume Bernadette refers to poet Bernadette Meyers) opens with personal economic concerns. The poem asserts a nostalgia for the gold standard and bartering, and the first stanza ends with a comparison between money and a winding creek. Apparently, the poet feels insecure about money, that it's convertible and not stable. Her broken, hesitating, staccato lines magnify this issue. In this particular poem, her characteristic poetic style asks us to read the offhand ("thinking of Bernadette," "Ate ginger miso") with the crucial.

In "Pusa" Nguyen pulls together a wild variety of subject matter in just 12 lines. The poem is filled with phrases and clauses that do not connect to other parts of language. There's a kind of offbeat stumbling in her poetry that is, I think, akin to Thelonius Monk's music. How does she hold it together? I think the answer is primarily rhythm. You have to hear it, but when you do the poems move in an almost inevitable fashion. Anything can be in these poems, right next to anything else, because her style invites them in.

For more on this book see Stephen H. Sohn's "Effective Instability." His review does a fine job of focusing more particularly on specific themes than I do. I am more concerned with form.

What is There to Write?

2011-03-10T18:41:00.000-08:00

I haven't blogged in a number of days because I didn't know how to approach a pressing topic: how do you talk about literature during times of political crisis? Does it make sense to do so? Is it obscene to do so?

Clearly, parts of the world are in political crisis. And, just as the late-60's became a time for protests throughout the world, we might be seeing the beginning of something similar now. This may be quite a decade we will live through. The Arab protests are one indication. The protests in Madison are another. People of all ages are proving their willingness to march, to stand up and be counted.

It's true that the phenomenon is not happening only among progressives. The Tea Party movement has proven it's appeal: the last election could be seen as a mandate for their calls for smaller government, fewer taxes, and so on. The degree to which it may also appeal to xenophobia is troubling.

My point seems to be that we stand at a political crossroad. Will the moderates and swing voters see the Republican party for what it is, namely, the political wing of the upper classes? Will their anger and frustration be captured by the Tea Party? Apparently, a teacher in Wisconsin voted for Walker in the last election and now felt "betrayed." My sense is that she had a distorted view of the Republican party.

Now things are clarified. The fake phone call in which Governor Walker thought he was talking to a corporate leader proved it. (The ethics of the phone call having taken place I will leave aside.) He admitted to using a "budget crisis" as a pretext for union busting.

What's the alternative? As many have pointed out, the Democratic party has become a wing of the business party as well. They are just a kinder, gentler wing. And this makes all the difference. As the parent of a severely disabled child, I feel directly the difference between Republican and Democratic lawmakers. When the Republicans took over the Minnesota assembly a few years ago a representative was quoted in the paper as saying that we should not be funding every charity case in the state.

By "charity case," he was, of course, referring in part to children like my daughter. The monthly amount we had to pay to keep her in a group home doubled.

Now, the democratic governor of Minnesota, Mark Dayton, wants to severely cut services to the disabled. If passed by the Republican assembly, his cuts will be draconian. Perhaps, as some have said, the Democrats are the political wing of the business class, only they use a kinder, gentler rhetoric in order to do the same thing as the Republicans.

My sense is not that the corporate interests are completely consolidating power. It's true that those sectors of the culture that oppose it — intellectuals, unions, the Democratic party (sometimes) — have weakened markedly. But they have not gone away.

Let's hope that the protests in Madison are not an isolated final flicker before the corporate state takes over. I hope that power in America waxes and wanes, and that there will be a pendulum shift that will allow the country to once again become a more compassionate, progressive place.

"The Discursive Situation of Poetry" by Robert Archambeau

2011-02-27T15:36:00.000-08:00

In this essay, "The Discursive Situation of Poetry"in The Monkey and The Wrench, edited by Bissinger and Gallaher, Robert Archambeau comes to the somewhat startling conclusion that "historically, the conditions under which poetry becomes widely popular are not conditions we should seek out." The two conditions Archambeau identifies are Victorianism and the expression of oppressed peoples toward their government.

In the former case, Victorians used poetry as a sort of moral guide. With an insecure rising middle class who needed instruction on the values and expectations of people of stature, poetry played an invaluable role. Perhaps Tennyson is the perfect example of this poet.

As far as the latter condition goes, Archambeau goes into little detail other than to reference the Celtic Revival in Ireland. However, it is not difficult for us to extrapolate. In many movements for liberation, from China to Africa, poetry has played various roles in the fight for human dignity, from agit-prop to the creation of counter-traditions such as the Francophone Négritude poets.

How does Archambeau see poetry working within U.S. culture at the present time? Primarily as academically credentialed professors writing for others with such credentials. He views this as a rather dry and less colorful extension of Bohemia artistry, where the market could not handle all the art being produced so groups of artists began to produce it for themselves.

How might this situation change? Archambeau seems particularly skeptical about boosterism and publicity. Instead, we need to look at wider social/historical forces impinging on the academy. And the most important one right now is "the encroachment of market values on the previously semi-autonomous academic system." (He takes this idea from Frank Donoghue.) The humanities may be the least well placed educational arenas to defend their utilitarian benefit.

Archambeau says that these changes will bring about a new historical condition for poetry, and we can hardly predict the form it will take. He also seems pessimistic about our ability to direct this movement in any significant manner. (I personally do not want to see poetry lose its foothold in the universities and colleges.)

This provocative article seems convincing on a number of levels. Of course we would not want to live in a society as cruel as Victorian England or as repressive as those suffering under a dictator or one party rule. Having poetry being popular is too big a cost to pay.

But I wonder at the dichotomy that Archambeau sets up:
poetry in a free society is unpopular as poetry in an unfree society is popular.

I profoundly disagree with Archambeau. Poetry is hardly unpopular in the U.S. today. The form of poetry that involves sophisticated words placed on a page, usually with line breaks, to be read quietly alone or to a quiet crowd, that form of poetry is not popular.

But song lyrics are wildly popular. And they are poetry: "lyric" poetry and song "lyrics" come from the same root. The fact that there are a lot of bad pop, rock, rap, country, and blues lyrics does not mean the poetry is bad. Any type of poetry needs to be judged by its finest examples. And there can be no doubt that some of the finest lyrics today serve as good performance poetry. This argument is not even out of the mainstream. The Anthology of Rap recently came out with Henry Louis Gates giving his imprimatur in the form of an afterword.

So the issue is not that we have stopped liking poetry. We have just stopped liking the type of poetry that is read silently or unaccompanied. Why is that? One is because technology has allowed us to. We now have stereos to play the lyrics accompanied by the spectacle of song. In Bryon's day, would his poetry have been sung over synthesizers, beats, and guitars if recording were available?

Old technologies rarely leave when new ones arrive. They just adapt. Wagon rides, after the advent of tractors and cars, switched from a simple necessity to a special celebratory activity, usually during the winter. Scrolls also are still around, centuries after Gutenberg, but they serve an ornamental rather than a utilitarian purpose. Newspapers will still be around for years, in spite of the internet.

What poetry represents, then, is a backwater technology, a nostalgia. The question becomes, if we feel compelled to write poetry, what can we do with this nostalgia? And here is where things get interesting. We could give in to just using it as tradition and allowing the nostalgia to completely overcome us, to become the poetic equivalent of gleeful wagon rides. Or, because poetry is nostalgia, it is not tethered to markets, nor is much expected of it, allowing it to become a sort of free-floating entity if we develop it in that direction,

This, then, becomes a paradoxical argument for experimental poetry, saying that its very nostalgic uselessness is what gives it its most power. What is this power? Here I come back to Archambeau. It is a Bohemian power where people who have, for whatever reason (academia, friends, curiosity, having come across a book in a bookstore or a poem on the internet), been drawn to this free-floating nostalgia and accept its marginalization, while at the same time taking the writing quite seriously.Why take it seriously? Because it is freeing to write and to read. It loosens assumptions and causes beliefs to dance before our eyes, making us ask if we want to continue believing them.

So people have not drifted away from poetry. The means of production simply allow it to be delivered in a more spectacular manner. This causes the marginalization of what we have traditionally termed poetry, words sitting on the page to be read quietly. This marginalization creates a kind of nostalgia to be associated with this poetry that can free poets from most any tethers when it comes to writing, thereby allowing them to experiment freely.

One word of caution: how do you convince a politician or academic administrator to fund difficult, exploratory poetry that few people read?

The Main Media Outlets

2011-02-24T18:45:00.001-08:00

while the main media outlets
looked around and went
beserk
we talked our way through
a night of funky smells
and yellow sounds

a green and red
texture holding us this
morning, warp and woof,
even in the flesh
where there is no going
elsewhere, just forgetting

CHRONOLOGY OF WATER by Lidia Yuknavitch

2011-02-22T18:49:00.000-08:00

The central metaphors in this book concern swimming and water: swimming in lakes, rivers, quarries, pools. Swimming for fun, to win, just to stay alive. And water sometimes comforts the body and sometimes threatens it, can lead to ecstasy and to profound degeneration.

"You can tell a lot about a person from seeing them in the water. Some people freak out and spaz their way around like giant insects, others slide in like seals, turn over, dive down, effortlessly. Some people kind of tread water with big goofy smiles, others look slightly broken-armed and broken-legged or as if they are in some kind of serious pain." (99)

You can tell a lot about Lidia when you realize that, based on what she says in other parts of the book, she probably finds all these swimmers beautiful.

The book tracks Lidia as far underwater — in the bad way — as a person can go. Then it tracks her surfacing.

To say more would be to give away too many details.

www.hawthornebooks.com
www.amazon.com
www.powells.com

BURN YOUR BELONGINGS (Jaded Ibis Press) by David Hoenigman

2011-02-18T07:12:00.000-08:00

First, a word about the publisher. Debra Di Blasi's new publishing adventure, Jaded Ibis Press, combines visual, textual, and musical art in each of its books. In addition, the press makes four different versions of each of its books: an ebook form, a black and white form, a colored form, and a fine-art form. The colored and fine art go for $49 and $8500 respectively. For this review, I read an ebook copy. The song that accompanies the book can be found on the press's web page. The art work appears in a column on the far right or far left of each page. They are by Yosutoshi Yoshida. First, I will discuss the writing, then go into the ways the artwork and sound contribute to it.

Hoenigman's book is obsessive on a number of levels: The concerns of the characters are obsessive. They are part of a highly dramatic and anxiety ridden love triangle. On another level obsessive groups of images return again and again: trains, umbrellas, rain, insomnia. On a third level is Hoenigman's determination to work this love triangle through about 200 single page, dramatic monologue variations.

And these variations are singular. I've never read anything like them. Their attention to bare concrete emotion and imagery, together with the use of pronouns with no clear antecedents, creates, paradoxically, a rather abstract reading experience. For me, I couldn't tell who was speaking in a given monologue, other than that it was one of the two men in the triangle. A close read is repaid by an experience of the intensity and destructiveness of romantic love at a fever pitch, not by a clear sense of what is "going on" between the characters in any conventional way.:

"I barely know her, someone left her on my doorstep. she appears out of thin air if I say her name. I introduce them. she only speaks when spoken to. always some distraction grabs him by the wrist. leads him to futility. grayness. wedges itself between us. I've never seen her here before. has yet to develop the grace of the others. or is she trying to deceive me. I kissed her bare shoulder. considered returning again alone. he's grown smaller and smaller. it's been months since that morning. the threatening little tremors. soon it''ll be over. a perfect opportunity for her to showcase her newly found distrust. for him to take offense. bite his tongue and await the unavoidable. downward so sharply that his ears pop. it must be warm and cozy there. I alone notice how it changes night to night ..." (101)

In this quotation we begin with the metaphor about being left on the doorway. While tired, it nonetheless works for me. The momentum created by this book allows for such tired constructions. It points to the arbitrariness of their love and, in this instance, "his" patronizing feeling toward her. But this will change. All feelings in this book are subject to radical and instantaneous change. The suggestions that she is a child continue: she only speaks when spoken to. Suddenly, we switch to the other "him" in the love triangle. What we don't get here is what we don't get throughout the book: explanations at the first or second level of abstraction which indicate how the characters are specifically related. Instead, we get these truncated, popping sentences that follow the contours of thought and feeling so closely we never come up for air. It is an extreme approach.

On my ebook, the accompanying pictures are brightly colored and usually depict cityscapes or landscapes out in the country. In addition, many depict what I can only call surrealist scenes. Disparate items are placed side by side. Collages or collage-like works contain objects in two different dimensions, such as a head too small for the body. In general, the art by Yasutoshi Yoshida seems to reflect and refract the way the text draws little distinction between "reality" and "fantasy." In this book, a fantasy has as much power, if not more, in shaping perception as simple facts do.

Finally, the song on the website, also by Yoshida, begins with an acoustic piano and a recitation of a part of the book. Then there is crashing noise. I won't spoil the end for you.

This book presents a field of perception defined by fantasy, obsessiveness, and, because of the pronouns without antecedents, a lack of clarity when it comes to fact. The music, text, and pictures combine to form an unsettling, relentless investigation into some of the least explored and most feared aspects of the perceptual and emotive world. It is a courageous book.

Interview with Bruce Holsapple

2011-02-13T13:23:00.000-08:00

Poet Bruce Holsapple's latest book, Vanishing Act, (soon to be available from Small Press Distribution and currently available at La Alameda Press) contains the wit, irony, and attention to detail we have come to expect from him. The first half of the interview involves general questions about the book. It ends with a short discussion of Bruce's recording company, Vox Audio ( PO Box 594 Magdalena NM 87825), which puts out cd recordings of poets reading their work.

The second half of the interview focuses on a specific poem, namely, the first one in Vanishing Act, "title?." I will let Bruce introduce himself his own way, but I should say that he and I knew each other when we were both students at SUNY-Buffalo in the late 80's and early 90's.

Could you give us a few biographical markers that will help us better understand you as a writer?

I grew up in rural Maine in the 1950s, edited a small press in Portland, Maine in the 70s, then wandered off (Washington, Vermont, Texas, New York), working a proverbial variety of jobs, before finding my way into central New Mexico, where I now work as a Speech-Language Pathologist. As you know (because we met there), I earned a Ph.D. in English at SUNY Buffalo in 1991, studying with Robert Creeley, Joseph Conte and Charles Bernstein. I taught briefly at New Mexico Tech and UTPB in Odessa, Texas. I’ve got six books of poetry in print, Air-Rose (1973), Total Eclipse (1977), Sweet Nothings (1984), Tourist (1994), Observations (1994), and now Vanishing Act, plus a couple new books in manuscript. An essay on Philip Whalen recently appeared in Paideuma, and one on the verse line in William Carlos Williams appeared last fall in a special edition of English Studies in Canada. I’m working on a book on Williams.

The title, "Vanishing Act," I find myself quite drawn to. Why did you choose it?

Well, because it works several ways, like in the ironic sense of all of us vanishing, being erased at various speeds—not an act at all, really—& there’s a lot of recognizing that limitation in the book, but also as a kind of self-parody, with the speaker as some dopey magician doing vanishing acts, presto! Or my vanishing into New Mexico; I live out in the country, no phone service, etc. But more importantly the sense of becoming “indivisible,” seeing thru yourself, becoming “the view looking.” I mean, there’s a great concern with subjectivity, lyric voice.

Most of the poems are in the first person singular. It seems to be a version of your self, or your self in the making, that you refer to. Am I correct? When you use the 2nd person "you," you seem to be addressing yourself. Could you tell us what lies behind your choices concerning voice?

The poems are basically lyric, & concerned with voice, but as I say, the lyric subject is more or less under watch, tho who is watching is up for grabs. As you say, whatever we are, we’re in the process of remaking ourselves, & the poems involve self-transformation. The pronouns do drift off-base, shift in reference, as perspectives shift. I think of self as dialogic, emerging from an outside conversation we learn to engage, “oneself as other,” as Ricoeur puts it (& of course Rimbaud before him).

Vox Audio — You seem to be making an effort to get on record NM poets who might otherwise be lost. Is this accurate? I am wondering what you think of the notion of the "minor" poet as a positive marker. What can a minor poet accomplish that the major ones, in the Norton anthologies, cannot?

Vox has two missions. One is to preserve poets reading who wouldn’t otherwise get recorded, like Gene Frumkin or Jim Bishop, and two, to build community. The physical facts of voice are instrumental to how the poems mean, so important to the poetry community. I don’t think of major and minor, but I do think in terms of cultural change, poetry’s work, and of the people I actually know— who’s in front of me; that’s what’s local,. But the Vox project extends from Maine (Wright, Wilde, Sharkey), thru Buffalo (Sylvester, Clarke), Toronto (Boughn), Indiana (Kalamaras), Texas (Huffstickler, Bird, Welsh), into New Mexico (Higgins, Tarn, Rodney, Moore, Goodell, Tritica, etc.), where I live.

Title?

You clutch too much, friend

try too hard, like there were a pose

you could freeze into place

& it would be there for you

a point of reference,

Me & What I Believe

you feel like falling in love

you feel like mourning the loss

all this melting snow

endless rehearsals

a slippery dance floor

You try figure, arrange, classify

like you could capture events

make the connections

a 3 ring circus & you the master of ceremonies

you pull out the plastic

“Customer Service. This is Angie

Can I help you?”

My favorite color is beige

My favorite turtle is soup

She talks math, loves algebraic expressions

Substitute zero for x & solve for y

It’s the economy, stupid

your credit is stretched

What pain that attachment brings!

another force inside

speaking thru you

using your voice

locked sick feet speed

pray read frog stop

you want to go away & not care

It’s the passion I feel

what she engenders

causes me such loss

What I feel for you

What you produce

a boost into the air

no forwarding address

bee gift crowd stew

owl boy involve

skid flip call crash

Won’t somebody make contact?

the ice is closing in

I’ve broken to new depths!

short green leaf

short eye grass

shot glass

fall short

near high

go between

impossible gap

It’s hopeless

nobody likes you

you need to cut your throat

snow fire spoken star

mobile tire goal

Dear X: You’ll know I’m invested

by how rigid I get. If we met

I’d pose, tell a joke, etc.

I’m not so much making claims

as paying off deficits

I want to see those connections

how the tree lights up

a locus of identity

something reflected back

not exactly “I want”

but “therefore”

this forgetting dust

this insistent sand

this abandon

these babies born every day

in every city

proliferating what?

Mothers

death

dharma

diapers

new shoes

that’s exactly what I want:

to keep walking

1. In this poem the "pronouns," as you call them, switch around a bit. You go from addressing a "you" to a first person stance.

Okay, can I give some of the background? We regulate behavior by self-talk, private speech, as with commands like “be brave” or say with scolding our “self,” and there’s extensive use of self-talk in the book. But speech is communal. There’s not much distance from the imperative “be brave” to second person “you,” hence addressing oneself as other. In this instance, there’s an emotional shift, right? A sense of exasperation.

2. In several places you simply list words: "locked sick feet speed / pray read frog stop," and later "Mothers / death / dharma / diapers / new shoes." This seems to me a quite original technique, and it appears throughout the book. What is it's function?

Well, there are models in Whalen and Duncan, but hey, wait a minute—you use word lists too! Is this a trick question? Yes, I use word lists in fairly systematic ways, mostly as a structural device to keep the notes bouncing, up in the air. Sometimes it’s a flat surface, sometimes like scratchy noise, sometimes for transitions, sometimes just elliptical speech.

3. The first stanza seems to be held together, in a tightly wound manner, by rhyme, off-rhyme, and assonance.

Hopefully the sound values ring thru-out, and the rhythm, and voice. Word lists are often knitted into the text by sound contrasts. Sound values are key.

4. I love the sly humor: "My favorite turtle is soup," for example.

Thanks, I’m told the humor is pretty dry! The book is about conflict, impasse, developing flexibility, transformation. Self-deprecation—or getting distance from oneself (learned from Whalen)— was an important way to unlock from cherished thoughts.

5. The poem seems to shift focus each stanza, although remain united under a certain set of concerns: effort, attachment, loss, passing thoughts. Do you see it this way?

Yes, a trajectory gets established & you’re off to the races, one word to the next, as far as “it” takes you. Go with the Force, Luke! Lots of jumping about, drifting off topic, shifting perspective, feints, various forms of address, rhetorical ploys, who knows where you’ll land. Hopefully on your “feet.” That’s exactly right.

6. Anything you would like to add?

It’s physically a beautiful book, thanks to Estelle Roberge’s cover painting, and Jeff Bryan’s design. We kept the price low so people would take a chance.

The Heart (as muscle) and Poetry

2011-02-11T07:56:00.000-08:00

See a recent entry in Trancepoetics by Kistin Prevellet to learn about some fascinating research some German scientists did on the effect of poetry on the heart, and the effect of the heart on the rest of the body, including the brain.

Jaded Ibis Publications

2011-02-10T19:52:00.000-08:00

Debra Di Blasi has started an ambitious publishing venture that combines visual art, music, (and sometimes other artforms), and literature in multiple and complex ways. In addition, revenues will be shared with both writers and charities in unique ways. Things are so unusual, that even Forbes magazine took notice. Links to the press catalog and the interview are below.

New Jaded Ibis catalog

Forbes Interview

David Mitchell's CLOUD ATLAS

2011-02-10T19:31:00.000-08:00

David Mitchell's 2004 novel Cloud Atlas is on a lot of people's lists as one of the best innovative novels of the last decade, and for good reason. So far in my read it is symphonic in its structure and reach, virtuosic in its command of style and texture, and a fantastic, fast read all in one.

The book is divided into six very distinct narratives, taking place decades and even centuries apart, with different plots and characters in each. Five of the six narratives appear twice. If the narratives are represented by letters, they go as follows — a,b,c,d,e,f,e,d,c,b,a.

Right now, I have completed the first three narratives, a,b, and c. a is entitled "The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing." It concerns a man who begged his way on board a Dutch ship as it went east across the Pacific to San Francisco in the1830's.

This is an example of a few typical sentences: "Torgny the Swede knocked on my coffin (i.e. cabin) door. Surprized and intrigued by his fertive manner, I bade him enter. He seated himself upon a 'pyramid' of hawser and whispered that he bore a proposal from a ring of shipmates. 'Tell us where the best veins are, the secret ones you locals are keeping for yourselves. Me 'n' my fellows'll do the pack work. You'll just sit pretty and we'll cut you in a tenth share."

Torgny was referring to California mining fields, which he assumed Ewing was aware of. What's of interest in this passage is the pompous and melodramatic word choices: "bade" rather than "asked." "pyramid" instead of "pile." "Whispered" instead of "spoke quietly." "Ring" instead of "group." In this little paragraph we learn a lot about Ewing and, since he is the narrator, a lot about the narrative as well. It is pompous, overblown, and not particularly observant. Why should Ewing trust Torgny?

The next section is also in first person. It is entitled "Letters From Zedelghem" and is set in Belgium in the early 1930's. A young musician and composer, Robert Frobisher, is serving as an aid to Ayrs, a great, but elderly musician. Together, the two of them begin to excite the music world once again. Frobisher's writing is tighter, more direct, often leaves out the assumed subject, and is cynical and skeptical. In other words, miles from that of Ewing.

"Cause for minor celebrations. Two days ago. Ayrs and I completed our first collaboration, a short tone poem, "Der Todtenvogel." When I unearthed the piece, it was a tame arrangement of an old Teutonic anthem, left high and very dry by Ayrs's retreating eyesight. Our new version is an intriguing animal. It borrows resonances form Wagner's Ring, then disintegrates the theme into a Stravinskyesque nightmare policed by Sibelian wraiths. Horrible, delectable, wish you could hear it. Ends in a flute solo, no flutterbying flautism this, but the death-bird of the title, cursing the first-born and last-born alike."

All of Frobisher's writings are letters to his friend Sixsmith. We may question his behavior: he apparently sends over a valuable book he had no right to to Frobisher so that he could have some money. Frobisher's sense of himself is quite high. He punches out verbs with no subjects, banging away at the idea that he had perhaps more to do with the creation of these pieces than he is given credit for. It's a fascinating juxtaposition -- the dry, worldly Frobisher versus the foolish, melodramatic Ewing.

There is one explicit connection between the two. While in Belgium, Frobisher comes across a copy of Ewing's diary and reads it. Other than that the connection is nebulous.

Not so with the next narrative, "Half-Lives: The First Luis Rey Mystery." Here, the Sixsmith of the previous narrative is in his 60's, it is now the 1970's, and he is a scientist working for an energy company building nuclear power plants. He has found out compromising information, and they may want to kill him for it. The 39 pieces tend to be straightforward, third-person vignettes told from the perspective of more or less one character. They are a page-turning mystery.

I don't want to go into it any deep other than to say it's a genre piece: it is a mystery, filled with the sort of clichéd talk and clichéd characters you might expect there. What rescues it? Well, that it is in the middle of a novel with such interesting stuff going on around it. I am not yet sure why it is here and what it is doing. But it was fun to read. More later as I move through this important work.

5 Short Poems

2011-02-06T12:46:00.000-08:00

exhaustion marks

the beginning of thinking,

not the end:

what of the sentence

that lingers and languors

picking up

whatever hangs around

until it means itself

and opposites too

and then the misstepping

dancer fakes it

just right

very few catch it

and those that do

admire her

for it

before the wish

before the thought

before the wild

and the tamed

there is the wave

the rhythm

the pulse

to ride

to be bare and lost

to stand before the blankness

to wonder into a void

to stand with no feet

to breathe with no lungs

to hear with no ears

to smell with no nose

to touch with no skin —

fear and possibility

scent-encing my way

across a prairie

hoping to find

the lit house

it could be

around the bend

straight forward

but I don't know

what is a bend

or what is straight

just now

LANDSCAPE PAINTED WITH TEA by Milorad Pavic

2011-01-30T08:14:00.000-08:00

I simply couldn't get my hands around this complex, dense, ambitious, playful 1988 novel (translated 1990). So, I decided to look at what some critics and reviewers had to say. Well, I dug into some databases and couldn't get beyond any simple reviews. However, it was interesting that the reviewers didn't all agree on what happens at the end of the book, at what the solution to the crossword, at the center of the book, is.

The story centers around Atanas Svilar and his second wife, Vitacha Razin. A brilliant but failed architect, Svilar searches for where his father was killed in WWII. He finds out he was betrayed in a monastery. While there Svilar also learns that he is not fated to be an architect.

At this point, the book becomes a crossword. The reader can choose to read it across -- straight through in a conventional manner -- or down.

In this section Atanas leaves his wife and children for his first love, Vitacha Razin, and they put down roots in California where Svilar changes his name to Razin and makes millions of dollars selling a toxic defoliant to the government.

What characterizes his prose more than anything else is his magical, agrarian images supporting stories loaded with digressions. One of the most fascinating digressions concerns the monk who actually turned in his father. He frequently wears his clothes backwards.

There is one critical article on this book that I came across. It is by Jasmina Mihalovic and entitled "Landscape Painted With Teas as an Ecological Novel." It is fascinating the way the article sees this book as a call away from alienation and back to "the art of living." It sees the book as cautiously optimistic, I think it would be safe to say, even if it is a highly stylized Satan, in this topsy-turvy world, who ends up as Savior.

"The picture in Landscape Painted with Tea of the upside down world of historical and perverted reality is the reflection of our own selves. The cathartic power of the book as a mirror should prevent the headlong plunge into nothingness and should return to the world its lost essence and internal balance." (The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Summer 1988)

It's interesting that this apparently Slavic author of this article believes in such things as "internal balance." It would seem to be the furthest thing from what a Postmodernist would believe. Pavic collage and montage techniques are both Modernist and Postmodernist, but I don't know if his ultimate sensibility is. In an interview with Thanassis Lallas, Pavic describes himself as "always trying to act as an ancient epic poet...To me the best literature is oral...To understand how someboy writes a novel, you must feel the breath of the book." (Review of Contemporary Fiction, Summer 1988)

Could it be translation difficulties that are bringing these seeming incongruities up? I don't think so. Here I point out Pavic's imagery, something that is easy to translate. Yes, it is often magical, but the magical elements are made up of agrarian elements. There is a nostalgia in Pavic's writing, that is sometimes explicitly stated. It's not naive. It's not conservative. It feels as if we need to get back to our own, specific, historical moment when reading him.

I'll repeat that:

It feels as if we need to get back to our own, specific, historical moment when reading him.

I am not entirely sure what that means. But it feels so accurate, I'm going with it. Obviously, we feel many other things when reading him. For me, this is predominate.

Close Read of Passage from Pavic's LANDSCAPE PAINTED WITH TEA

2011-01-24T17:55:00.000-08:00

The character of Amalia Riznich is introduced as follows:

"'October has never come as often as this year; every time you turn around, there it is again. At least three times ahead of schedule...'

Thus whispered Miss Amalia Riznich in German into her Sévres cup. For the past one hundred years, her family had spoken German in autumn, Polish or Russian in winter, Greek in Spring and Serbian only in summer, as befits a family of grain merchants. All past and future seasons thus blended in her consciousness into a single eternal season, resembling itself as hunger does hunger. Spring merged with spring, Russian with Russian, winter with winter, and only summer, which was enclosing Miss Riznich now, broke step with this sequence to take for a moment, but only a moment, its temporary calendar place between spring and autumn, between Greek and German."

My overriding response to this passage is perplexity. Why does it befit a family of grain merchants to speak a variety of languages over the course of a year? Why would all seasons blending into one another resemble "itself as hunger does hunger"? Why is it that only when speaking Serbian does she "break step with this sequence"?

There is something magical here, suggesting that the Riznich family traces its origins to the agrarian rhythms of the seasons, and their suborning language to these rhythms. They are grain merchants, and dependent on this agrarian rhythm.

But why aren't they farmers? Aren't they more agrarian than merchants? Yes, but they are not rich. Pavic needed to create a rich family in order to give this, at times, fairy tale-like story the necessary gravitas. These are ancient people from ancient lines coming together fully only in summer, in the Serbian present, when their own language spills from their lips as they live the most carefree season.

This book was published in 1990. Could he have been asking for Yugoslavia to stay together? It broke up a couple years after the publication of the Landscape Painted With Tea. By this time, Pavic was an important voice that people heeded. We learn elsewhere that these notebooks are filled with information about Tito, the Yugoslavian Communist strongman.

I suspect both readings hold up: the magical, fairy tale agrarian one and the political one. I prefer the former because it seems less tethered to a specific time and place.

2011-01-23T10:52:00.000-08:00

easing into traffic
wishing I could stay home
today is my favorite show
but obligations call
and I am still
easing
then cussing
still wishing
and cussing
I might get there on time
for something I hate doing

2011-01-23T10:49:00.000-08:00

liminal like
the last day of autumn
like the edge of cotton
liminal like
the way
guesses caress
the truth
every edge has
a reason
if we give it
one

Roscoe Mitchell's THE FAR SIDE

2011-01-16T16:56:00.000-08:00

My review of jazz saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell's latest release is up at the Jazz Police website. Mitchell is a member of the Art Ensemble of Chicago and of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians.

Pavic's LAST LOVE IN CONSTANTINOPLE: A Tarot Novel For Divination

2011-01-13T08:40:00.000-08:00

For background on Pavic, see my many entries on him by looking him up in the list of topics to the right or by going to this webpage: Milorad Pavic Homepage.

One of Pavic's last works, this fascinating book can be read one of two ways: straight through from beginning to end or based on various tarot readings. A pack of tarot cards is provided, and as well as models of the various ways of laying out the cards. Every chapter of the book coincides with one of the cards, so it is possible to read the book in the order demanded by the tarots rather than front to back.

I read the book twice: once front to back, and once using the tarot method. I suggest that anyone who wants to tackle the book do as I did because things get confusing if you don't have a overall, global sense of the book. This may, in fact, be a criticism of Pavic because it means that the book is difficult, if not impossible, to be read in a wholly reversible manner. By 'reversible' I refer to Pavic's wanting to write novels that were like sculptures or paintings in that there was no linearity to how viewers work their way around the art object. But this is hardly damning.

The book is about the hostile and friendly interactions between three families, the Opujic's, the Tenecki's, and the Kalopervic's around the turn of the 19th century. The hostile aspect has to do with them fighting on different sides of a war between Serbia (I think), and France. The friendly aspect has to to with intermarriages.

Each chapter is a fairly self-contained story about members of these families. They are replete with magic: a woman growing out of a tail, a man having three deaths, an ability to hear below ground, and so on.

Randomness, of course, is at the structural heart of the book. In a way, it takes the place of the traditional plot. With all the magic and the wild characters it adds up to a book that presents us with a world that is in many ways ordered according to our imaginations. Yes, it is true that the cards we are dealt are random and we have no control over them. But we do have control over how we respond to them and interpret them.

There is a bouyancy and ebullience to this book. It revels in how magical stories can be and, in addition, how magical we can be if we let ourselves.

A Critique of Milorad Pavic

2011-01-06T14:47:00.000-08:00

I am surprised at how many well-informed people remain unfamiliar with Milorad Pavic's brilliant 1984 novel Dictionary of the Khazars, English translation 1988 by Christina Pribcevic-Zoric. The book is about determining the Khazar Polemic, or which of the Abrahamic religions the lost people known as the Khazars ultimately converted to. This provides the platform for Pavic's wildly imaginitivate leaping across centuries, across fact and fantasy, from reality to myth. Charles Fenyvesi actually said that Pavic "writes with such imaginative cultural extension as to make Garcia Marquez seem like James Mitchener."

The book is a cross-referenced dictionary of events and people divided into three parts: Christian, Jewish, and Muslim. Readers are literally encouraged to read the book in any order they prefer. Pavic wants his novels to be "reversible art," meaning that it does not have a beginning or ending. It is like sculpture or painting: it can be seen from different angles, and the viewer moves about it freely.

What's more, the book comes in two versions, the male and the female. One crucial paragraph is different in the two. Thereby, Pavic forces the book to remain open, to always invite another reversible reading.

A very interesting, although very unconvincing, critique of Pavic is developed by Andrew Wachtel in his article "Postmodernism as Nightmare: Milorad Pavic's Literary Demolition of Yugoslavia" in a 1997 issue of The Slavic and East European Journal. Now I am not interested in writing a boring entry that critiques an obscure academic article. Rather, I find myself challenged by the ideas Wachtel brings forth. He should be heard.

This is his argument in skeletal form:
--He takes his definition of postmodernism from Lyotard, profound skepticism about metanarratives.
--He says that postmodernism developed in stable states in Western Europe and North America where such skepticism would not bring down "the whole house of cards." In Yugoslavia during the 80's it did a lot of harm by being one factor in causing the metanarrative that made Yugoslavia possible become questioned. The result was civil war.
--The Enlightenment inspired meta-narrative proved a necessity for Yugoslavia; it was a luxury for what Wachtel implies are Ivory Tower intellectuals of the West.
--Postmodernism appeared in Yugoslavia just as the country started to disintegrate.
--In Yugoslavia, imaginitave literature was a high-status activity that provided the country with its narratives. In such a cultural milieu, it's not an exaggeration to say that a work of fiction played a role in causing a country to fail.
--Early in Yugoslavia's history, emphasis was placed on the unity of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, not their differences. Intellectuals at the time saw the importance of cultural figures in forming the notion of a Yugoslav and a Yugoslavian state. Conversely, Postmodernism lauds difference over unity.
--By the 60's, ethnic difference was being emphasized more. What kept the country together was supra-national Communism, i.e. ideology, and cultural concerns were secondary.
--A number of novelists began to question and unravel the metanarrative of nationalist unity. This article will look at Pavic's novel.
--The purported structural complexity of Pavic's novel is actually a gimmick. It actually has a conventional plot centering around two questions: What religion did the Khazars convert to in the 9th century and why do representatives of the various religions come together to try to solve the problem?
--When investigating in later centuries, each religion is convinced that their religion was chosen by the Khazars.
--This is Wachtel's crucial point: this is a radically relavitizing vision of history that leaves us with only language games and not unifying narratives.
--Wachtel prefers the novelist Ivo Andric's novel The Bridge over the Drina to Pavic's because it acknowledges the various views of history held by the Muslims, Christians and other groups in Yugoslavia, but then it worked to find, and did find, the truth.
--Pavic's novel was hugely popular and influential in Serbia. It helped to deligitimize any claim for truth, leading to disunity and, Wachtel implies, ultimately a might is right situation.

What I find most intriguing about this argument is that Wachtel is arguing that various cultures can withstand postmodernist critique better than others. I also really appreciate that he takes literature so seriously.

I don't know that Pavic would call himself a Postmodernist. Based on an interview in the Review of Contemporary Fiction, he would seem to be a theist! In addition, by placing the truth, ie what the Khazars converted to, in an impenetrable, agrarian past of myth-like and folkloric stories, his book is a lot more like Genesis than it is like Federman's Double or Nothing.

What makes the novel seem so innovative is its structure. It is innovative, but not as much as it might seem. Essentially, it is an episodic novel put together so that readers can encounter the sections in the order they choose. It's Cervante's gone choose your own adventure.

However, the real reason to read Pavic isn't his structural innovation. It's the magically fertile nature of his mind, that leads to some of the most surprising sentences and passages imaginable. See my March 24 post to see examples of these sentences.

Room 4

2010-12-30T12:21:00.000-08:00

a room is not a

/level/ room when

the ceiling caves

because of a weight

like indecision

on the roof

Ideology 13

2010-12-30T12:16:00.001-08:00

code drift

like guesses

reverberating through a system

from skin through synapse

through wire through

grid

into venues

the guesser never

could know

Ideology 14

2010-12-30T12:15:00.000-08:00

not much remarkable

other than bones

aching through

the afternoon

calling us into stupor and longing

the wishes climb

the walls and every

tomcat in the neighborhood

cries into the dampness

Purgatory Hill at Palmer's Bar

2010-12-17T11:52:00.000-08:00

Last night we at Palmer's Bar in Minneapolis were treated to a visit by the inimitable two-person band Purgatory Hill. Composed of Pat MacDonald and melaniejane, they have one of the most unique sounds in all of American music.

MacDonald is a master at an instrument known as a Lowebow. Created by John Lowe, it consists of a square box with electric controls at one end and two dowels about the size of broomsticks coming out the other. Here is a picture and another one. MacDonald plays the lowebow with plenty of bottom and with a merciless, slashing slide. All the while he kicks out the beat on an electric stomp board, and sometimes plays a lonely and fragile-sounding harmonica on top of it all.

Purgatory Hill's music is boogie with a bad face, in all meanings of the word "bad." It is groovy, scary, and deeper than deep. While MacDonald plays his chunky, hard-bottom funk, melaniejane ferociously shakes and bangs castenets, tambourines, bells, and other percussion instruments like a woman possessed. Sometimes she crashes the tambourine into the handle of the bells to create a textured and multileveled ringing.

The lyrics are about desperation, obsession, and actual prayers for redemption, to "reset me lord." The strange thing is this music does not sound as if it comes from a theistic universe. It is the music of wanting a lord in the face of psychological devastation and severe desperation.

I left Palmer's Bar at 2 a.m. feeling good. The music is danceable, and ended up being cathartic. MacDonald's music, with all of it's darkness, wrung all my troubles out of me. He brought me into a dark, dark place filled with anger and obsession, only to then leave me free for a time.

it's the pits

2010-12-12T06:44:00.000-08:00

the snow killed my snowblower
I smell like gasoline
I think I have to sneeze

the snow covers the windows
thank god the furnace didn't die
we are stupid and less than sly

what would the neighbors do
left in their houses of snow
except die from cirrhosis

exaggeration whistles its stop
the snow hardened into drifts
this is like dying, it's the pits

Jefferson Hansen

Story in UNREQUIRED READING

2010-12-11T08:19:00.000-08:00

I have egg on my face. This entry originally said I had a story in THE BEST AMERICAN NONREQUIRED READING OF 2010. That's not accurate. My story was selected as "noteworthy" in a section in the back -- a lot less fancy. Oh well, there are worse embarrassments.

like

2010-12-11T08:03:00.000-08:00

let it come like
snow like the breeze
like the air blowing
in from the furnace

let it come like
breath like blinking
like an empty car
warming on a cold day

let it come like
microwave cooking
like blood like melting
snow on the roof

let it come like
branches drooping like
a phone's ring like
skin turning to dust

let it come like
a grey sky like drifting
snow like a plow's
roar and rattle

and let it go like
demands and derivitives
like a mind
just not knowing

— Jefferson Hansen

BARTLEBY, THE SPORTSCASTER, by Ted Pelton

2010-12-08T09:08:00.000-08:00

This novella is far from an attempt to mirror reality or to point out how artificial novels are. It is neither realism nor metafiction. Instead, it uses intimate experience to approach a literary classic in a manner that reinterprets it. It also uses the literary classic to consider experience in a profoundly personal way.

This novella is a triple-allegory: experience allegorizes literature and literature allegorizes experience. Finally, Pelton's book serves as an allegory for the original "Bartleby."

"Bartleby" is originally a story by Herman Melville. It concerns a law scrivener, or copywriter, in a 19th-century law office. The lawyer hires Bartleby and is stunned at his output, but haunted by his person and demeanor. He once describes him"scarcely human." A series of strange incidents ensue. The lawyer finds Bartleby living in his offices. Then Bartleby "prefers not to" do any more copying. Instead, he just stands silently in the middle of the office while work goes on around him. I won't spoil the ending, in case you haven't read it.

Pelton's book, "Bartleby, the Sportscaster," the lawyer is replaced by a minor-league sportscaster. He is joined in the booth by Bartleby. Pelton's story differs from Melville's in an important detail: The sportscaster, Ray Yarzejski, is forced to work with Bartleby by the team owner, Simonelli. This proves crucial because in the original Bartleby the lawyer was somewhat responsible for Bartleby given that he hired him. In Pelton's case, Bartleby and his eccentricities were thrust upon Yarzejski. Yet, he reaches out to Bartleby repeatedly, as does the lawyer in the original story.

The most original part of this book is chapter 5, where Pelton suddenly breaks in and provides us with a memoir of his, Pelton's, real break up with his first wife. In it we learn that his wife became mentally and emotionally paralyzed by a number of personal and familial circumstances. Pelton tried to get her out of her funk, but it all failed. He tells us how he became more sympathetic toward the lawyer in "Bartleby." He used to see the lawyer as the law-giving oppressor forcing Bartleby to live a certain way. Now he saw him as trying to help Bartleby.

Here's where Pelton decided to bifurcate the lawyer into two characters, Simonelli and Yarzejski — one is sympathetic and one is, well, capitalist scum.

This is where the allegories begin to be clear: the experience with his wife is compared to the lawyer's experience with Bartleby. Pelton's original interpretation of Bartleby is compared to Simonelli's behavior. Pelton's sympathy for his wife is compared to Yarzejski's feelings for Bartleby, Pelton's and Melville's books as a whole are comparable.

Comparison, of course, is the heart of allegory.

The book raises fascinating questions about the way the stories we tell each other affect the way we treat each other and the way we understand how we treat one another. This book is not "postmodern" or "metafiction," where the very makings of the novel are exposed in their artifice. This book takes the artificiality of the novel as a given, then offers us something new. While this is a funny book in many places, it is a dead serious book in a way many so-called postmodern works didn't seem to be.

It feels as if the author is convinced that literature and stories matter. Absolutely. Novels may be constructions, but they are necessary constructions that set up allegories with experience, if we let them.

hat was merely

2010-12-07T08:05:00.001-08:00

The hat was merely

dropped. No

matter. It is what

was needed at the time

to get your simple

attention, to articulate

a necessary instant.

I wanted you.

A hat showed that just fine,

evidently.

Then the rest of the

universe trailed behind

us like ants.

Until we grew bereft

of the right signs,

like hats

like ants.

Ctheory.net

2010-12-06T19:14:00.000-08:00

I came across the above site, edited by Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, which explores the way digital technologies have affected, infected, formed, taken over, mixed with and so on contemporary experience. The essay that has meant the most to me so far is entitled "Code Drift." The thesis seems to be that human evolution is now tied up with the drift of code as it is absorbed, remixed, and rearranged. Creativity stems from random combinations and recombinations of code, not from individual genius. While it is true that individual human beings do the recombining, it is the code itself, both local and global, that is the source of this recombining, the individual is merely the occasion.

Here are some quotations from the beginning of "Code Drift."

We want to argue that data has come alive in the form of our extended network of technological organs, that the growth of information culture is the real world of evolutionary development literally, not metaphorically.

digital cosmology has its own laws of motion -- code drift; its politics are based on the deeply paradoxical situation of our being tethered to mobility

the beginning of something fundamentally new is now upon ... this new onrushing event of code drift, tethered mobility, enhanced data flesh, and digital trauma.

Code

2010-12-06T17:56:00.000-08:00

"Who was ready for the immediate mutation of the human species into half-flesh/half-code?" — Arthur and Marilouise Kroker

in your ears the sounds

of another century

recorded in another

decade

framing your walk

down a busy city street

past a market with a fruit

stand out onto the sidewalk,

under a roof

over the sidewalk

to protect pedestrians

during construction

bumping into people

saying "sorry"

and sensing only

the slightest echo

of your word in the

bones of your jaw and

ear

Reader — give no significance

to the connotation

of the word "sorry"

it is just what

she said

made long ago and elsewhere

2010-12-05T16:23:00.000-08:00

with little reason,

gone running

give the

best bestial cry and

issue a less than solid

ultimatum —

lives hang

in the grey haze

the grassy base

the torn, thorny tube

while your insistence

walks down a long

narrow hall

plenty else waits

in various

unknown rooms

around unlit

corners

wishing you

would do for them

dependence and you

are dependence

elsewhere

someone says,

"this is a trial"

and the curtain

shimmers

across the side

of your path

you could go there

or here or here

none is

more insistent

and on your

choice may hang

nothing less

than a swoosh or

a creak —

may

Debra Di Blasi, Miekal And, and Vernon Frazer at Moriapoetry.com

2010-12-04T17:54:00.000-08:00

I am going to do a series entries where I discuss material that is readily available on the web. This has two advantages: 1) you readers can have ready access to it, and 2) I won't have to buy anything.

Today, I am discussing writing at Moriapoetry.com All three pieces are in the current issue: Debra Di Blasi, Miekal And, and Vernon Fraser.

1. Debra's is a fascinating piece of visual poetry. It appears to be two pages frayed from a larger book entitled "What the frond delivers." It looks like an illustrated novel or even an illuminated manuscript, but the sharp edges and off-kilter repetitions of the word "frond" give it an uneasy, maybe even menacing look.

Then comes the writing. While it looks to be two frayed pages from a prose work, it is definitely prose poetry. It is thorny, difficult and syntactically radical. Thematically, it also addresses ponds and dragonflies and other things associated with lots of fronds near the water.

We also come to see there is a third-, then first-person narrative buried in the thick language, language as "green pea" dark, thick, and full of fronds as any lake side. It tells the story of a male twin, apparently a drowning victim, saving his twin sister as she goes down screaming, three times.

Diane refers to her at one point as "Little Miss Nobreath." Then later comes, "Golly, Mother." The tone is at times so flippant, that the subject matter is almost not able to come forth. When it does, it is all the more horrifying. The girl almost doesn't make it.

The second page gives the dead boy twin's perspective: "Was I pushed you through the jade blades." It also falls into Gerard Manley Hopkins sprung rhythm, even using some of his famous words "doppledreams," 'dappled." Characterized by internal rhyme and alliteration, sprung rhythm allows for a lot of repetition and reinforcement.

These two pages show what the green fronds deliver: life and death. The murkiness of green lake water, water dark as jade, we come from and go to. The text is surrounded by green on the side of death, and blue on the side of life. But the green will always swallow the blue, "that dreamy place my twin still hides, biding his time until my time's up."

2) Miekal And
I would have no idea what to do with this piece if I didn't know some of what Miekal has been up to the last decade or so. He is fascinated, if I understand him right, with the various relations between fonts and nature. I recall seeing one piece of his which had letters hanging in trees. Was the concept that letters grow from our nature, which is connected to wider nature, namely, trees?

This piece looks to me like a hide. On it are pictures, but they seem to be pictures verging on fonts. The philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty famously observed that song, historically and developmentally, precedes speech. In a similar manner, drawing precedes fonts. Written language evolves out of drawing. In this piece we see one font that is repeated. It is the second from left on top and the third down on the far right. This may be a representation of beginning of writing.

Leaving Miekal's piece at this level is a little unfair. There are other things to consider such as how the light is hitting the piece, the resemblance to animals and people that many fonts have, and the sheer beauty of the fonts themselves. One value of work such as this is that it helps us to see fonts rather than simply reading through and past them.

3) Vernon Frazer

Writing about nonrepresentational language is also difficult. How do we contextualize a line such as "salmon feet" in "The Future Brings"? Obviously, we can't, if we try to look at it from a representational point of view. Instead, we have sound and rhythm.

How do we say this piece, and these pieces, work, as I think they do? How are they different from a child randomly putting magnetic poetry words on a refrigerator? What skill does it take?

It has tremendous energy, coming I think from all the active verbs, including some interesting ones such as "mottle." The energy itself is excessive, pushing the language and spilling beyond semantic limits and into alternative spaces. It's exciting. Finally, the poem is an event, not a meaning. It's about this excessive excitement, together with the rhythm and sounds riffing throughout.

This is the answer to why it's better than magnetic poetry: there's a controlled excessiveness, that breaks the taboo of "making sense," but does so in a musical way that keeps the poem from spinning apart.

And I don't think there is any more to say.

We Don't Read Mysteries For the Plot

2010-11-28T19:28:00.000-08:00

We don't read mysteries for the plot. We read them for the characters and the genre. That's why there have been so many series with the same detective in them. We want to see the development of the character. But we also want that character to ultimately be safe. And that is the promise of genre. Doyle famously could not kill off Sherlock Holmes. This was a violation of the genre: it promises a return to order with all the central characters intact. It may be dark, but it is not tragic.

In some ways, mysteries are an optimistic art form, rather than, say tragedy. Even hard-boiled mysteries revere justice. To not do so would be to violate the genre. The detective needs to be a hero who sacrifices much to create some justice in what seems, on the surface, a world ripe for cynics. But the cynicism is so often stylized, so often sentimentalized. What is not sentimentalized is the demand of the reader for a genre. This is what is most "real" about a mystery.

Another way of looking at mysteries is as a genre that lets all hell break loose only to clear things up nicely and neatly. I think this is generally not the case, although mysteries as a whole have been multitudinous. This much I am sure of: to break the dictates of the genre, which states that justice must be served in the end, is to write an anti-mystery. Paul Auster has written some anti-mysteries.

Mysteries are fun. Unlike horror stories, which are exciting. Mysteries promise a sort of mind game. Horror stories cause us to be sucked in by extravagance and excess, thereby losing ourselves into the fearful spectacle. Mysteries do not ask us to lose or leave ourselves.They ask us to wonder and ponder over a manageable and discreet set of possibilities. Neat, clean, efficient. Kinda bourgeois?

the assault of the mice

2010-11-28T19:07:00.000-08:00

1.
in the time of computers
and talking robots
traps could never end
the assault of the mice:

we are less than we hope
which hangs out before
us in clear, sharp relief

while here the talk is of
mice in orifices of
wall coating the heat
with strange squeaks

they can't hurt us it's true

but the aura is the thing

flitters, flakes of sound
in the walls your blue
eyes tell me news
of a distant death brought
close by technology

history now, here makes
everywhere creepy, with possible
dread always available
in a screen the size of a hand

hope is beside the point
it is merely an orientation point
here we have walls
where electrical wires and
mice find their way
work their way

we talk at angles and curves
hope as orientation
angles and curves

and that's fine, enough,
only too much hope says
'it's not enough'

getting down to angles and curves:

2.
a meteor last night
chipped its way across
the sky in a stutter like your
sudden departure from whim and
the cost of desire lost and pena-
lized but no solid sentence
available let the nailing
down off the hook
where are you going in this last issue of instance
what could give you such pluck in the face of
merriment the size of Crazy Horse's statue
oh no the living isn't worth the aggravation which
is in its way constant and not constant complications the merriment issued from
a scratch in the throat the size of a small seed or nut roughing up the deliv-
ery for a good long time but not forever compare pulses to trajectories
waves to thrusts to tangents and the way becomes provisional per-
haps lit by a small tangent of hope going all the way to the base
of the thing and letting you see some sort of wavering trail
but missing everything outside the light which matters
too of course but not at that moment unless it
suddenly throws itself into the scene
surprising or menacing or perp-
lexing will give no necessary
show the light itself a
condition of lithium
of nature of even
hope for them
lasting

outsizing

2010-11-18T09:17:00.001-08:00

your bounded silence

and tertiary code

sometimes mere

gravel ways

sometimes

black hearted loam

sometimes brick

by brick

displeasure
or inept
secondary pain
your wicked insistence?
the genuine attempt?
an aspect spun sharp?

danger follows

like any breeze

and ricochets

inside the layers

seemingly genuine
structures

strictures

beyond the size
of sense

Paul Auster's THE NEW YORK TRILOGY

2010-11-17T14:22:00.000-08:00

In the mid 80's Paul Auster wrote three novels that have come to be known as The New York Trilogy: City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room. Each book is a destruction of the detective genre, one where a mystery and a detective are proposed, but the mystery only thickens and mutates rather than unravels. In a way, they are anti-mysteries.

In his great introduction (I usually hate intros), Luc Sante points to how the books are about a part of New York City that has always been there but that we rarely notice; the passed over graffiti, the symmetry, the doubleness, the "surface flimsiness."

This is a novel of neutrinos, those strange, sub-subatomic particles that move through matter as if it's nothing, that are right now moving through our bodies, that move through these books in the most haunting of ways. They carry no electric charge. They do not gather or orbit. They just stream.

What they touch, how they touch, if they touch is all unknown.

As with these books. Does Peter Stillman walk the streets of Manhattan so that his wanderings will spell out "Tower of Babel"? Or does the character of Quinn just project this belief of his? What is the role, if any, of coincidence? of the higher order notion of "randomness"?

Again and again we are faced with the flatness of facts. Are the facts all there is? Or is there a story that unites them? If so, is it a discovered story or an invented one? If an invented one, then it is just one of many ways of dealing with the facts: there is no solution, not even close, to the mystery and, as we move through each book, mysteries, plural, as they multiply.

This is a New York riddled with possibility, haunted by the random, more than able to carry within itself contradiction after contradiction after contradiction. It is, paradoxically, a wilderness.

Stephen Paul Martin "Changing the Subject"

2010-09-12T01:09:00.000-07:00

This is an interesting concept for a group of short stories: somewhere in each one of them Martin buries the line "changing the subject." The contexts vary, but in each story they appear.

As usual, these Martin stories are hilarious, philosophically rich, absorbing, and just plain fun. As he contineues in his career, it seems to me, Martin is developing the ability to make his philosophically complex stories more and more accessible (and that's a compliment). He has created quite an oeuvre of books like this, and a selected stories by him would be an absolute killer. He is at the forefront of American storytellers.

Pat MacDonald's "Purgatory Hill"

2010-09-12T01:03:00.000-07:00

If you have any interest in the following buy this album: americana, Captain Beefheart, Hound Dog Taylor, Howling Wolf. He uses this new, primitive sounding instrument in which you slide down on two thick dowels, with two strings a piece on each. See a picture of it here. He also plays his lonely harmonica.

MacDonald is best known for his hilarious mid-80s anti-nuclear hit "The Future's So Bright I Gotta Wear Shades"with the group he led, Timbuk 3.

Going to Have to Take a Break

2010-09-12T00:55:00.000-07:00

I've taken a job working writing for a couple SEO, so I won't have a lot of energy for the blog until I get habituated to writing stuff like "What is the Best Bike for Teenagers." It wears you out. I always wanted to get paid to write, but I never pictured that it would be like this (moment of bitterness.) I will try to continue the blog with little entries, then go back to longer ones when I get acclimated to my new job.

Louis Armstrong and His Typewriter

2010-09-08T07:55:00.000-07:00

Fascinating post over at the Blood and Gutstein blog: Daniel Gutstein is doing an analysis of Louis Armstrong's unique punctuation in his letters, found in Louis Armstrong in His Own Words: Selected Writings (Oxford UP, 2001). To me, at least, Gutstein's analysis clearly shows that Armstrong is a poet with a unique take on the language. Check it out.

Rene Marie at Dakota Sept. 5

2010-08-29T10:20:00.000-07:00

Jazz singer Rene Marie will be appearing at Dakota Jazz Club in Minneapolis on September 5. Marie is one of the great contemporary stylists of vocal jazz — she takes tremendous chances. I am not sure what her personal thoughts are about Betty Carter, but it strikes me that she is one of the few singers following her lead. She takes the Great American Songbook and stretches it, compresses it, and otherwise makes it go in ways completely unexpectable.

Marie is also a clever and important songwriter and performance artist. Her "Slut Energy Theory" received rave reviews. And she is known for singing "Lift Every Voice and Sing," the black national anthem, to the tune of the "Star Spangled Banner" at the beginning of a Denver city council meeting. (Link) It was very controversial, but I found it deeply moving.

She leaves Minneapolis for a four-night stand at the Jazz Standard in New York City Sept. 9-12.

Jefferson Hansen

like a beginning

2010-08-26T21:05:00.000-07:00

walked the distance

of the stand
stared at me

unnerved me

and the smoke

eased its way out

of the trees

early enough for

me to see

exactly what

was going down —

wishing its way

through a trumpet's

regal squack —

looked me over

like hungry

and I wanted that

look in your

eye just fine —

ended like a beginning

waiting the length of desire

2010-08-23T13:43:00.001-07:00

waiting the length of desire

gone nomad

clicking our way

just outside

just inside what feels

an understanding

more solid than rivers

even more determined

than mud yet

it remains just

a feeling

emanating perhaps

from a desire

for stasis

which may feel right

for a time

then get boring

and we would

wait the length of desire

for anything at all

to go nomad

to break the stale

to tip us off balance

or even send us

rippling into

a distance not

wanted but as inevitable

as the swirling map

of the world

showing you anyplace

in a simple picture

almost instantaneously:

but no justice for

the array of grasses

in a simple prairie

Unhinged and Inconsequential

2010-08-17T20:40:00.001-07:00

leaving aside the antiquated

and little known substituting

the lithe and liquid

the intrepid and barely correct

this could have gone

only several several ways

and went in another direction

entirely because no decision

allows a shadow

past a certain instant:

the clothes came

from their drawers today

and the room became theirs

they waltzed and fox-trotted

wondered at the corners

of the walls and ceiling

determined the floor

was as insubstantial as doors

unhinged and inconsequential

when the lipid and insufferable

cries its way home

to give all a new site

for the background and fluidity

before it:

the tools paraded down

the block today

hammers and pliers

screwdrivers and socket wrenches

bouncing their way toward

an arbitrarily designated

end point where all leapt

from their joy back

into a box almost as unhinged

and disorganized as a useless door

issuing its poor cry across canyons

of indecisiveness

but then again

anything can happen

like the day enveloping

itself into a neon spray

let go at the nadir of night

— Jefferson Hansen

At the Level / Of the Electric

2010-08-17T17:57:00.000-07:00

we are worms

we are bobcats

we are grizzlies gone

a different branch of raw

as the haywire

or electric can

become

at the level of

the electric

maybe it is the same

if a robin's wings

click their

way south or

a bear turns to

hibernate in a nook

or we get too

entangled to

light out the path

we suffered and

bumbled into

in our mumbling

state

at that level, too,

too, as hollow

as bells, the pulling

of which is

as electric

as sound in

humid air

— Jefferson Hansen

the quiet of inconsequence

2010-08-13T17:29:00.001-07:00

what's the point when

the drivel comes

across for the fourth time

in a morning

and the fifth minor

key gives you half

the money you thought

you had coming and

what's the point when

a partial eclipse of wonder

at any mere movement

brings in the frost

brings forth the guessings

and nothing leaves the

constricting premises and

what's the point when

perplexity and peacable

join with nothing

left for the supper

but the frozen the

unsatisfied and unendurable

trying against reason to

limit the return of favor

and the bellicose response

in the wicked

cry giving up quiet

gesture and we are the sport

of drum the quiet of

inconsequence the

gesture of inestimable

--Jefferson Hansen

Rob Stephenson, PASSES THROUGH

2010-08-07T16:14:00.000-07:00

Let's make it official: I am jealous. Rob Stephenson in his novel Passes Through does something I have been wanting to do for years. He is able to work in language that coheres wonderfully through the use not of traditional narrative techniques, but through loose associational logic and rhythm. Only a quotation can give you a flavor:

"Steel pellets hit the window near the table I write this on. Someone is tapping on a computer keyboard in the next room. I'm using a pencil worn down to the wood. These sounds should be mixed better. All the time I've spent writing this book I have returned to this one specific incident. It's not in my journal. I sat on the toilet. There were cacti in pots on the window ledge. I looked outside at the flat roof of the garage two houses away. It caved in as I stared. It made a loud unfamiliar crash that split my thoughts into two parts. The part that knew it had happened and the part that couldn't yet believe it had."

This (almost) random selection illustrates much of what makes this an extraordinary book. In the first two sentences he slips between describing "steel pellets" of typing to long hand writing. We don't really learn why computer writing is violent (pellets), but we learn that it and long hand are sounds that don't mix. A sense of unease and perhaps foreboding is creating.

Next, we learn that this is an obsessive memory: he never journaled about it, but he can't stop thinking about it. We learn more uneasy details: the toilet, the cacti. Notice also the hard consonants, something that appears in this staccato, polyrhythmic prose throughout the book. Here it is so important as it draws the seeming extraneous tidbits of toilet and cacti into the larger rhythmic pattern. Look at the hard consonants, and you will see it happening.

The paragraph ends with the description of the cracking flat roof of the garage. The splitting of the thoughts is of paramount importance: this book is about spelunking that very space between perception and conception, between consideration and action, between repetition and obsession. And it forces us to experience it viscerally.

Viscerally. That's right. Let me rephrase: the book is not about anything. It enacts as a writerly object and as a readerly process the tensions involved in such spelunking. This is a book that perhaps could only really benefit from a kind of phenomenological reading where the entire text of the book is reproduced in one column while in the opposite column is a description of a process of reading it.

And I mean a description and a process. The book holds together marvelously, but it has a quality about it where people are bound to respond in wildly different ways. In fact, one blurb talked about how the book has something to do with compulsive hate. I don't see it at all, but I don't deny that this rich book could sustain such a reading.

I hope I am being clear: this is not a book where every reader can take his or her own meaning. That's a ridiculous cliche that is true of all books and no books at the same time. This book is one where readers who take their time, determined to find and learn what is here, come away convinced that the book coheres, but do so in wildly different ways. And the reason is that I think he has tapped a language source so close to phenomena as we experience and talk about them that we are drawn to its coherence and perhaps seduced into thinking our specific reading is more central to the book than it is.

On a more mundane note, the book is divided into three sections. In the first section the associations are most closely linked, and quasi-journal entries are fairly coherent in a conventional sense. Stephenson tells us how he came to write these entries: "Initially, I felt this story was encompassing too many ideas. I keep changing as I go. I had hoped to stay true in some sense to what I started. But then I began to wonder if a writer's instincts should be disregarded. Maybe I should let them go. These little documents of my personal moments."

The second section is one, 60-page paragraph and is much more loosely connected. The sentences are all conventionally coherent, but the connections between them are quite complex and sometimes hard to fathom. It reminds me of the early Ron Silliman, when he was developing his aesthetics of the "New Sentence" in works such as Ketjak.

The third section consists of short prose poems, and the level of conventional association seems to be right between where the other sections lay. What is also of interest is that the sentences, throughout the book, retain their staccato polyrhythms, while the wider forms the sentences are placed in changes from journal, to extremely long paragraph, to prose poem. A close analysis of how these sentences perform differently in different contexts would, of course, be useful, but it is beyond the scope of this entry. Perhaps in the future.

Rob Stephenson is interviewed by Davis Schneiderman in Big Other.

Too Tired for Demanding Literature

2010-07-29T17:51:00.000-07:00

In his introduction to the book I am now reading, Rob Stephenson's excellent Passes Through, Lance Olsen notes that the book "is the opposite of an easy or fun book, at least by current Oprah-ized standards. It is, rather, a limit text — one that takes writing to the edge of readability, then challenges us to invent new ways to speak about its strangeness."

I love literature that does this sort of thing well, as Stephenson's does. I hunt for good examples of such writing to highlight on this blog (I rarely write about books I dislike.) But there is a practical problem most people have with reading such material: It isn't that they can not learn how to read it if given some instruction and time, it's that they are too damn busy and tired to read anything but Oprah-ized books.

I know. I feel an urge to read those books, or just watch tv, when faced with Stephenson's. I worked on computer web pages for seven hours today. I am exhausted, my eyes are tired, and doing more 'work' with my brain or my eyes is out of the question. How can I read Stephenson's book?

It is a question we who work in this field need to ask ourselves. While Lance, of course, is not accusing anyone of being lazy in their reading habits, he is implicitly pointing to the energy we expect of our readers. It's not unfair — nobody has to read our books. But is it impractical?

The answer is a resounding yes. Experimental literature is impractical to its very core; in fact, that may be one of its reason to exist. To display the limits of practicality.

But it is a privileged position to be able to question practicality. So many of us are so ensnared in it that we have little hope of participating in any more than a tangential way in the literary world. I suppose it is true that everyone involved in the literary world feels some alienation from it. But it is clearly true that some more than others feel this, and it has an impact on how we read and write.

The ironic thing is that this alienation may in the end be a blessing more than a curse. As Stephen Kuhn's Structuer of Scientific Thinking points out, a lot of new discoveries in science come to those new to the field. In other words, people for whom the dominant paradigm is known, but who still have not fully become ensconced in it. Creativity occurs in the gap between the dominant paradigm and the gradual awareness of its full implications.

Science is very different from literature, and its ways of knowing are much more rigidly policed and institutionalized. But there are similarities. And the liminal space of being in and out of the practical world, in and out of literary world, and so on, creates the space for some spectacular creativity.

But the problem is time and energy. The practical world, the very practical world that offers so much to what could be a good engagement with writing, can suck you dry, leaving any creative reading or writing unfinished.

Brenda Iijima's poetry book "revv.you'll-ution"

2010-07-24T19:22:00.000-07:00

This book is intense, has a tremendous momentum, and is at times hilariously funny. The most obvious example of the latter are some photographs taken of stuffed animals and placed in natural settings. She says of her mother who appears in one such photograph, "The only animal perceptible in this photo is Erika Uchman."

This brings to the fore one of the central concerns of this book; the way there is, on one level, no interaction between humans and nature because we are nature and everything we do is, on one level, "natural." It also teases out some of the complexities of how nature and artifice interconnect, interfere, and hurt one another. This is a book concerned with "mending" the earth. At times Iijima does not shy away from even using scientific statistics to help with her themes.

The poetry is something else. It is taut, tight, and has little extraneous. Some poems are mostly lists of rhythmically and aurally powerful words. Others feature long, sometimes broken up lines that retain the intensity, just in a different way. The poetry is so full of energy it leaps off the page and, for me at least, grabs me wholeheartedly. In addition, to hear her read on youtube, the intensity is immediately evident, but the crowd does not seem to respond to her humor -- such as the unabomber being fed dehydrated mash potatoes in his supermax prison.

This is a poetry of the local, how we interact in a variety of ways even with dirt. It is also poetry of the earth and the sky. Everywhere, however, Iijima insists on the intersection of human with nature. There is never one without the other, at least not now, when every tree seense either to have been planted or to have been allowed to live because of a choice on the part of people.

This is difficult poetry that tries to articulate the almost inarticulable — that space between the natural and language where we can see what an aspect of nature is, including our interaction with it, only with the most careful parsing of words, and only for a glimpse.

This book, full of generosity of spirit, takes a multi-faceted and multi-various approach to the ways language, human culture, and nature interact in complex ways. Her language manages to offer glimpses of this dynamic that actually get beyond the language a little bit. At times with her writing I felt as if I left the poem partly behind and encountered a phenomenon of real clarity. This I can say of very few other writers.

improvisations

2010-07-24T08:22:00.000-07:00

before

the instant

the unrealized plan

response among artifice

among nature

among the interplay

in &

about

— Jefferson Hansen

Huth, my book, and so on

2010-07-23T08:31:00.000-07:00

check out Geoff Huth on telephone poetry.

Also, I have a new book out, entitled Jazz Forms (Blue Lion Press), which is essentially my selected poems from 1988-2008. The press, run by Peter Ganick and Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, uses Lulu as its printer. My book is available for either $9 hard copy or for free as a download.

"Poets have long been mesmerized by jazz. And when they get together in the same room they tend to resemble each other. But Jefferson Hansen has done something different in Jazz Forms. The impulse might still be mimetic but he translates what is is listening to into a work that is full of ecosystems and associations, full of things like birds and fires and air and bears and babies. The jazz in Jazz Forms leads to trance, is transformative."
— Juliana Spahr

Federman #5

2010-07-18T16:25:00.000-07:00

This is the 5th post on Raymond Federman's last novel, SHHH.

A reader backchanneled me because she was concerned about whether the closet incident actually happened since Federman's own daughter seemed to question it, and what sort of aid such questioning might give to Holocaust deniers.

These are good questions. I am not an expert on Federman, I was merely reviewing his book. So if others want to jump in, I would be delighted. That said, from my reading of this book, Federman's fidelity is to a complex notion of 'honesty.' At the end of the afterword Pelton quotes him as saying,

"There is no distinction between memory and imagination, I would not falsify, because I would not lie, because when I walk down the street, my sisters might turn the corner ahead of me and meet me there, and I have to believe that, and how could I tell them when I saw them that I had lied."

By 'lying' I don't believe Federman is referring to getting his facts straight. I believe he is talking about getting his memory straight, all the while knowing that it is riddled with imagination. Did he get put in the closet? Or did he put himself there? Did his mother tell him to "shhh'? We will never know, not because we were not there, but because memory and imagination are profoundly interconnected. To deny this is to be dishonest.

As for Holocaust deniers, in order to keep them from doing any profound harm, we must keep them out of political power. On one level, it is a political struggle of our imaginations, and our stories, against theirs.

But this is not good enough for me. On another level I want to securely say that we Holocaust believers are in the right. And here is where I believe Federman does run into trouble, and he is conscious of it. He writes of himself in the book: "Federman ... your readers are ... going to wonder what's happening to you." My contention is that it is not simply his telling the story of childhood that pushes him to "the edge of the imposture of realism," but the need to tell his story of the Holocaust.

Perhaps the sheer weight of witness testimony is what we need. With so many stories, partly imaginary as with all stories, of the Holocaust, denying it becomes quite difficult. That said, it may be wishful thinking. How often are people more swayed by facts and evidence rather than ideology?

I end with the rather depressing conclusion that Holocaust deniers are probably more a political, rather than an evidentiary, problem. Because you can get some people to believe anything. Hence, Federman: be honest to your memory and what it constructs for you, not to what it is supposed to construct. Resist easy stories.

In this sense Federman is a hero. He could have written his own great success story: escapes the Holocaust, comes to America, fights in Korea, gets an advanced degree, gets a professorship, becomes an important novelist. It was perfectly available to him. Federman tried to write this novel, then destroyed it, because it was a lie, because it forced his life to a frame, namely, the traditional Western plot-line. He chose to become a lesser-known avant-gardist and remain honest.

This individualistic honesty leads to a complex worldview, which tends to resist the simplifications of Fascism and other authoritarian ideologies.

the erotic sounds

2010-07-18T11:03:00.000-07:00

like the governors of
the down side
unstable
and unable to hold
the erotic sounds

the tapping around
the touching
demanding and soft
at the same time
and maybe easing
it all up and
down a bit

no prescription here

but glorious

       governors play
       the elected
       number of shells
       but justice makes
       the number go higher

translating
the suspected and
the spread
going down:
incidental rains
rising and falling
all wet, all dry
all wet, all
barely dry

                — Jefferson Hansen

Interview with poet Crag Hill on his book 7x7

2010-07-16T13:19:00.000-07:00

Crag Hill's 7x7 is a book of poems with each poem given the title of a card from the traditional playing deck. He makes use of a lot of randomness and quotation, as he will make clear below. Also, the book was written in 2003 and concerns itself with the early years of the George W. Bush presidency.

1. Is this the first time the whole collection has been published? I had no idea when I read this book that it was written in 2003. I thought that it was written recently and it was looking back on the past decade. I find this impressive: Your commentary on a specific political moment has some staying power beyond that time. What strikes you when looking back at them now? Do you see them as a type of political poem?

Yes, this is the first time this series of poems, composed in 2003, has been published in its entirety. I had been holding out, looking for a publisher who could print them on 8 1/2 x 11 playing cards in an 8 1/2 x 11 box (with rounded corners no less). As they appear in this book from Otoliths, they are in the order of composition, the year 2003 unfolding chronologically as it were. I'd like for the reader to be able to shuffle that chronology, seeing what happens, for example, when all the Kings and Jacks are juxtaposed. I'd like to subvert the notion of chronology itself-as if any present can be experienced without the past or future breaking into/through its chronic/logic.

The poems in 7 x 7 are first and foremost political poems, even if they may not have started out that way. I knew that in 2003 Cheney-Bush would invade Iraq (many of us knew that on 9/11); Colin Powell had already given his bogus presentation to the U.N. to gain international support (which never materialized the way it had for Afghanistan). Simply put, the 7 x 7 project was designed to keep me writing everyday (difficult to do then as a classroom teacher), envisioned as a daybook with Oulipian constraints (each stanza constitutes a day in a week in the year), cutting across what I was reading, seeing/hearing on radio and television, what I was thinking and writing in prose and poetry, the poems as documentation of what was happening within/without the spheres of my attention/s.

I'm gratified you find that the political moments have staying power; I worried that not getting 7 x 7 out while Cheney-Bush was in office would diminish the impact of the poems, our short public memory disappearing the references (the risk all political poetry takes, events receding into cultural obsolescence). Alas, our continued involvement in two wars keeps the poems pumped up with relevance.

I am struck by how much of my attention was consumed by the war that should never have been (which, of course, could never compare to the time and energy and turmoil of those who served in Iraq or those who lost loved ones). I wish I could have found something to do about it but fume and fester and write. If this is a daybook, I'm struck by how little of my domestic life entered these poems-my family, my travel, my job teaching high school English, my own study working toward another degree. Yet my reading-news, fiction, poetry, lit crit, my own notebooks-glares through.

2. [Please refer to these poems as they were published in the net journal "Hamilton Stone" throughout the rest of the interview.] All the poems in 7x7 take their name from a card from a standard playing deck. How does this randomness fit with the formal discontinuities in other parts of the poems?

I cannot recall if I chose playing cards to title the poems before or after other aspects of the project in place (ultimately each title corresponded to the card I slid from the diminishing deck). One of the 7s in 7 x 7 represents the number of days in a week. Thus the first day of the week has one line, the second day two lines, etc. (I have used the seven days of the week before-see The Week, The Runaway Spoon Press, 1991-to structure a writing project). The other 7 denotes the number of different sources I worked with to write the content of each stanza. I used seven playing cards to select each source for the day. If I pulled an Ace from the short stack, I selected from poetry in my notebook. For a 2, I selected prose from my notebook. With a 3, I chose a quote from a book I was reading. With a 4, I rewrote a passage from a book I was reading, changing the sense while retaining as much of the sound as I could. Drawing a 5, I quoted news from the internet or magazines (primarily Newsweek). With a 6, I quoted from a newspaper (most commonly The Moscow-Pullman Daily News, circulation 8000). Pulling out a 7, I quoted-or slightly misquoted/misheard-television and radio programs. For instance, in "Queen of Hearts," the first line is a taken from a prose passage in my notebook about Ken Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion. The next two lines are quotations from a political news show. The next three lines are a rewriting of a passage from something I was reading (I didn't keep a record of these texts). The next four lines are a poetry excerpt taken from my notebook, a poem written on a drive across Montana to visit family in Wisconsin. For the next five lines I again drew an Ace and excerpted from a poem based on a dream. The last two stanzas are direct quotations from my reading (direct quotations of text are marked by italics).

In short, the procedures were deployed to create discontinuities, to disrupt the recursiveness of my writing process. I wanted the language material around me to construct its own meanings with as little "supervision" from me as possible. As a teenager I was struck by Lautreamont's chance encounter of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissection table. Though much of surrealism has been rendered cliché, there's still much to be gained from these unintentional juxtapositions. Since, I have endeavored to make possible as many impossible encounters as I can, making volatile neighbors of Fox News and MSNBC, of fiction and poetry, philosophy and trivia.

I'd argue that this isn't random randomness, chance for chance's sake. The world's quick and immense, impossible to encompass or comprehend; chance procedures can bring order to chaos (and chaos to order), although it may not always appear to be so on the surface.

3. How does the italics work with and against the standard font?

The italics, as I mentioned above, mark quotations from books I was reading. In a future edition, I'd like to take this marking a step further, making the font uniform for each of the seven sources, e.g. Cambria for quoted poetry from my notebook, Arial for prose, Times New Roman for quotations taken from my reading, etc. That would add texture to the poems and enhance the intertextual readings between the poems, between sections (the collection could be read through selections of my notebook, poetry and prose, excerpts from my reading rather than beginning of poem to end-the series of poems then becomes one poem with many interconnected strands).

4. Are there chance operations or collage elements in the poems other than the deck of cards?

Answered in #2?

5. Do you consider George W. Bush a work of randomness itself, and is this an ode to his Presidency and his time in office?

I wish George W. was a work of randomness. Alas, George had too many people pulling his strings to be random, the ultimate puppet, a wooden creature with no original thought. There are many painful things about 9/11, one of them being that that event reassured his re-election (as a 16 year old student I had in Republican-swarmed Idaho predicted that very same day). The U.S. would have backed any sitting President at that time; patriotic fervor comes with its own peculiar blinders. Bush was in the right place at the time but was he the right person to respond to such a cataclysm? Time-7 x 7 as an anti-ode-answers in the negative.

Raymond Federman, SHHH (starcherone books), part 4

2010-07-16T07:51:00.000-07:00

[This is the final in a four-part series of blogs on Raymond Federman's last novel, Shhh, The Story of a Childhood.]

I attended SUNY-Buffalo during some of the years Raymond Federman taught there. I never got to know him well, but I did attend a number of readings and observed him in passing. He can only be described as a raconteur — to my mind, someone for whom the story, not the facts or memory, takes priority. Usually, the raconteur engages in storytelling just for fun. And, while Federman obviously had a lot of fun, he also turned the raconteur's position into an aesthetic.

At one point in the book he even takes on a belligerent tone about just this issue:

"To remember is to play a mental cinema that falsifies the original event. Souvenirs are fiction.

When I write, I don't give a damn about what I owe to memory. Otherwise it would mean that I write to repay what I owe to those who forced me to write. What do I owe them?"

These sentences are uttered by an interlocutor who interrupts Federman's string of vignettes to question what he is writing and how he is doing it. Much of the time, it feels as if it is a version of Federman's voice coming through, even when he seems to divide himself into two voices who go into dialogue. One voice refers to himself in the second person, the other in the first.

Federman's visceral reaction against 'responsible', 'dutiful' writing is, ironically, a call to honesty. He believes that straightforward, realist stories are "responsible" and indefensibly dishonest: "Those who exterminated my family believe themselves to be responsible for cleansing humanity of a verman." An 'honest' story, it would seem, is self-aware of itself as a story, as a construction. It doesn't pretend to represent in any simple and clear way.

I end by returning to my first post, the one where the interlocutor wonders how Federman can be "so serious. Your readers are going to find it boring...What! No more mad laughter, no more sexual effrontery..."

This is a book where Federman risks his raconteur aesthetic in order to tell the heartbreaking story of his early childhood. It is a book where he seems as much interested in history (he even says so at one time) as he is with the story. He seems to risk realism, which he clearly associates with fascism, in order to be true to his vignettes.

But there is a final twist. In his afterword publisher Ted Pelton says that Federman's daughter Simone commented about the closet incident, "if it ever happened." This is astounding: she is questioning the very basis of this entire book. The raconteur could have the last laugh, having created out of thin air the perfect Holocaust, rags to riches story, only to break it up into discontinuous vignettes and the voices of interlocutors.

What did or did not happen becomes indifferent. What we have is the writing. However, this should not be taken as a frivolous postmodernism that claims all human communication/thought/reality is writing. Hardly. Federman came to his aesthetic in part through his painful participation in the Holocaust, whatever his faulty memory might offer us of the particulars of that time.

There is no free play of the signifier when they come for your family. Yes, there might be a lie that keeps the police from searching the closet where Raymond was hiding, but that comes from desperation, not freedom. This book is called "Shhh," not "because of her I can write." Federman emphasizes the closing down of language.

I hope I am not stretching it by saying that this book, in part, shows that the free play of the signifier ends at the point of a bayonet or the barrel of a gun. As Federman worries as early as page 9, perhaps the raconteur cannot tell this story in the face of such devastation, no matter how fast and loose he plays with the facts. Death is absolute. Mass murder is moreso, since it echoes among those yet to be killed. And that echoing is not a sign. It's too deep, too sickening and revolting for such a word. Perhaps the best we can do is use words like "aura," "atmosphere" and so on.

What is Federman's solution in this book? To use ellipses: ...

Lance and Andi Olsen, HEAD IN FLAMES video

2010-07-16T06:47:00.000-07:00

See 1/20/10 of this blog for my review of Lance Olsen's collage novel Head in Flames. He and his wife Andi have created two films based on both the book and the film that in part inspired it: Head in Flames, Part one and Head in Flames, Part Two.

Federman's SHHH, 3rd post

2010-07-13T17:07:00.000-07:00

Federman's prose is relaxed and conversation; it goes down easily. He manages to describe heartbreaking vignettes in such a way that we readers are not overcome emotionally. In part, he does this by unflinchingly describing his emotions. For instance, when he as a young boy, before he was interested in girls, was shown how to masturbate by a young woman in his apartment building, there is no sense of violation on his part because, apparently, there was none. He was just happy to be masturbating.

Federman describes this way of discussing masturbation, along with other topics, honesty. This may seem like a strange word coming from Federman, from a writer so suspicious of verisimilitude, but I don't think he is contradicting himself. Rather, he is being honest to memory, not so much to historical fact. And the two are different. (However, at other times in the book, he describes things as historical, such as the cockroaches and mice and lice they share their apartment and hair with as the "historical" facts of life in 1930's proletarian Paris.) What carries us through this fascinating book is this fidelity to memory. The book moves associatively, from one memory to another, jumping around in time, describing events even Federman cannot remember how old he was when they happened. (The fourth part of this series will deal, in part, with the problematic of memory in this book.)

He describes his childhood as chaotic. His father was a tuberculor chronic gambler, his mother a long-suffering house cleaner for rich people, and his Uncle Leon a tailor always trying to get him to come into his shop to do menial chores such as picking up pins from the floor. And then his cousin Salomon, whose hand-me-downs he received, and who treated him with real disrespect. Federman does not describe his sisters, Sarah and Jaqueline, very much at all.

While Leon and his family escaped, Federman's didn't, and whatever their foibles, especially the father's, none of course deserved what they had coming to them from the Nazis. There is almost an innocence in the way that he relates these vignettes.

I have come to wonder how how he has created this relaxed, associative prose at the sentence level. On page 176 he is describing the little birds who came to the apartment window. He thinks they were sparrows.

"I wanted so much to be able to fly like them. Maybe that's why years later in America, I volunteered for the paratroopers during the Korean war. Just to be in the sky. But that's another story.

"I would have liked to have been a bird. Except that in the winter, when it was very cold outside and it snowed, I could imagine how the poor birds were suffering."

This may seem sentimental to some, but to me it's not. The desire to fly comes at a time in the book when Jewish kids were basically forced to remain in their homes by the German occupiers. So there is a double association between the birds and the paratroopers: one is the explicit statement about flying, the second is a military association. When he is actually flying, he is doing the fighting, not being passively holed up in an apartment.

But Federman chooses to cut off this association. The question then becomes why he chooses to bring it up in the first place. Why not cut it out? Apparently, Federman wants to highlight the pruning process that he is applying to his memories. He begins a new story, perhaps even teasing us with it a little, only to shrug and say, "But that's another story." It's a little silly, kind of conversational, and all Federman.

So, the association carefully packed away, Federman returns to thinking about how he would have liked to fly. But he cannot leave it so simple: he also remembers how when he was a boy he imagined the birds suffering. This is a perfectly formed sentence: he delays the man clasue as long as possible, thereby getting all the necessary information in before introducing it. The delay also creates the necessary drama.

This example is one of the smooth, conversational, associative moves that makes this book go down so smoothly. Somehow, Federman makes this representation of a difficult life, that ended in tragedy for most involved, sing in a terrifically accessible manner.

its own good offering

2010-07-11T15:17:00.001-07:00

katydids' strident
song beneath the
highway traffic —
there is no hurry
left to home —
for its own good
offering only
the last way out

— Jefferson Hansen

halls & cylinders

2010-07-11T15:16:00.000-07:00

Creatures lumbering &
posturing their
way down halls
& cylinders,
an interloper
offers other
approaches
questionable &
expansive, the
capacity
of alert seedlings,
perhaps the last way
out of the last
way home
like words knocking
at the wrong
door.

— Jefferson Hansen

AACM Saxophonist Fred Anderson Dead at 81 years of age

2010-07-09T18:05:00.000-07:00

One of the leaders of Chicago's 45-year-old avant-garde jazz artist collective, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, Fred Anderson, died last month. This article gives a good rundown of his life. Here are a few of his albums that I own and like. I am sure there are others, such as the highly touted "The Missing Link," which are equally interesting:

On the Run: Live at the Velvet Lounge (delmark)
Back Together Again: Hamid Drake and Fred Anderson (thrill jockey)
The Milwaukee Tapes (atavistic)
Timeless: Live at the Velvet Lounge (delmark)

Federman's "Shhh", part 2 — the poem "Before That"

2010-07-08T13:11:00.000-07:00

[This is the second of a number of entries that trace my thoughts as I read Raymond Federman's last novel, Shhh, which is about his early life with his family before, at age 13, his mother pushed him into a closet, telling him "shhh," when the Nazis were coming and saved him from the fate of the rest of the family, Aushwitz.]

Throughout his fine prose — and the word is "fine," — Federman intersperses poems. The poems often surprise me at how old-fashioned they seem in their thematics. This is not a put down, it is just an observation. Perhaps the poem that affects me the most is also the most old-fashioned, "Before That." On the surface, it is a simple longing for a long, rooted family occupation, as farmers, builders, or sailors.

The first stanza reads:

Some say, can say: my father was a farmer,
and his father before him, and his father
before that. We are of the earth.

The poem goes on to say that a family of builders is "of the stone" and a family of sailors is "of the water." Then he says that "I have no antecedent" because nobody in his family has been a writer. He claims to write to establish an "antecedent for my children."

The last two stanzas are devastating. Federman wonders if he can say anything of his father given his "erasure from history." In the next stanza, the answer is "yes." He can say his father is "a wanderer" from "nowhere" to nowhere. "He came without earth, stone, water, and he went wordless."

What I find so devastating here is the intense longing for family that comes through. The desire for stone, earth, and water, for the elemental, to touch and become one with the elemental, is almost overwhelming. It is what he sees others have that he cannot because his family was taken from him.

In the prose of the book, where he comments on the poem, Federman suggests that it is about his family's historical tendency toward failure and poverty. And I believe him, but only on one level. The "that" in the title could refer to familial antecedents or to his family being taken away Aushwitz. In the latter case, the earth stone water are the fundamentals of life being stripped from him.

Singers from "As the Rhythm Changes"

2010-07-08T12:45:00.000-07:00

I wrote a blog response to Mankwe Ndosi's "As the Rhythm Changes," a fascinating performance piece sung, danced and acted by her and four other women and staged in St. Paul. It was dated May 16, 2010.

Mankwe has announced that she and some of the others in the performance will appear on Twin Cities television over the next couple days. You can also see them over the internet.

"Prior to working on As the Rhyhtm Changes - I got together with my friends and outstanding singer/artists, Aimee K. Bryant and Libby Turner-Opanga, to record for Twin Cities Public Television’s new weekly arts series, MN Original.

Our segment is scheduled to air on TONITE's MN Original Thursday, July 8th at 7:30pm, on tpt2. It will repeat Saturday, July 10th at 6:30pm on the statewide MN Channel, and Sunday, July 11th at 6pm on tptLIFE. (all times listed are Central Time.)

If you're outside the Twin Cities, or miss it the full episode will also be posted on TPT's companion website www.mnoriginal.org. Visitors to the site will find additional content,web exclusive videos, more background and links to MN Original artists."

Poe Poe

2010-07-04T21:46:00.000-07:00

      we've been
      here before and
      no science
      can explain
      the treachery and
      trajectories we
      will travel -
      what is it
      when the bottom
      falls out
      and we find
      no footholds
      no landings

awakened by a
perpendicular
appeal
and we give no
ground
except the toe
that digs back
to hold
us steady
against
what we fear
will materialize:
an onslaught

that has
never happened -
wrapped together
like fence
and vine,
studying faces
for the wobbling
'facts':
just guesses
plus their
probabilities

if there weren't
an evil demon
behind human
perception we
wouldn't have to
invent one -
tangling
together our
hunches in
elaborate
evident
contradictions

a knocking
came to our door
today
announcing
itself as 'Poe, Poe'
and we gave
ourselves over
to the crack
crack
and we've been
here before
      and nothing
      looked right
      again

SHHH (starcherone books) by Raymond Federman, Pt. 1

2010-07-02T14:24:00.000-07:00

This was Raymond Federman's last book. While there is a temptation to write a review that is also a sort of elegy, especially given that the book is to a great degree autobiographical, I will leave the elegies to those who knew Raymond Federman better than I. Here and in a couple subsequent entries I will focus on the writing.

I am about a third of the way through the book so far, and here is what I am noticing.

The book begins with autobiography, by telling how Federman escaped the Nazi purges in France. He did so because his mother pushed him into the closet when the French collaborators came for the family and said, "Chut," French for "Shh." His family then when on to die in the camps.

Federman pours his heart out in existential anguish: why did my mother pick me and not my older sister? Then, at least for nonreaders of Federman, he makes a startling turn. He says, to himself, not so serious, Federman . This all happens within the space of eight pages

This is serious, indeed. Here is a man confessing the most harrowing moment of his life, one that few of us will ever come close to experiencing, only to question the way he tells it. Is he saying that even at our most emotionally vulnerable we wear a mask, even at 13 years old, completely alone, completely silence?

But isn't the French collaborators' violence a bottom-line reality? People behave in certain ways because of the threat of violence. Or, does the Nazi story, with its masks, masques, and dramas make the violence occur? In other words, was Nazi power rooted in violence or in propaganda?

The answer is probably both, depending on the situation. But each was necessary. This means that violence alone could not do it.

Could it fairly be said that the collaborators' came to the Federman house in part because of propaganda, because of stories, because of a presentation of 'reality'? If so, wouldn't any presentation of 'reality' be suspect, even that of a little boy, who stayed in a closet as the police marched his family away?

When Federman breaks into the story and questions how he is telling it, he creates a dialogue with himself. One side of his persona asks why he has allowed himself to slide so far from his usual literary fare. The second voice often answers that risking realism is the price of writing the story of childhood, "one is always on the edge of the precipice of sentimentality that makes you crumble into whining realism" (9).

But Federman decides to "go on anyway" (9). I take it that Federman feels impelled to tell this story just as he is suspicious of stories that claim too much authority for themselves. How will this work itself out?

birds are these things

2010-07-01T13:13:00.000-07:00

a bird arrived in time
for your unscheduled
investiture
your rude
graciousness
your silly formality

and it was just right
because birds are
these things —
at least little birds
like sparrows

raptors are something
else they are like
your sadness
sailing alone in
a vast sky
searching for
rodents

my sadness
is this also

for now though
we are on the ground
where some sparrows
apparently found
something to eat
— jolly & jostling
stretching their
way on,

—— Jefferson Hansen

the pivot of yesterday

2010-07-01T12:55:00.000-07:00

there is no point
no portion
or partiality
to hold this flat
together —
we weather numb
as asthma
and the creatures parade
in the night
for reasons even
they apparently
forgot
or am I speculating
again and
again
the pollens come at
us again today
with a sullen
violence like
the moon slivered
and red behind clouds
that I like to think
are stupid but are
probably just themselves
as we are as
we are I guess
supposed to be

— Jefferson Hansen

no future other

2010-07-01T12:41:00.000-07:00

no future other
than the one
you forget yourself into
maybe with me
maybe with her
each step an excuse
a rationalization
explanation
a thank you like
the rest of them

— Jefferson Hansen

Interview with Kyle Muntz, author of the novel VOICES (Enigmatic Ink)

2010-06-26T08:24:00.001-07:00

1. Since you are a new writer, how about beginning with your biography. Was your family artistic or literary? What has your education (formal and informal) been like?

When I think back, I’m not sure how I came to be a writer—or at least, one who works with experimental fiction. I don’t come from an artistically inclined family (my grandfather was a painter, but that’s about it), but I’ve read for as long as I can remember, though I don’t know exactly when I began to write. I was exposed to Joyce at a very young age (and soon after, some of my other initial influences, such as Pynchon, Barthelme, Barth, etc), which really affected the direction my writing took later.

I’m in my second year of college right now, so I still have relatively little formal literary education. Voices was written when I was a junior in high school, and was largely influenced by the writings of Roland Barthes, Lacan, and Sartre, despite my avoidance of existential and poststructuralist vocabulary in the novel itself. I can’t be sure of my stylistic influences at the time, but looking back, I detect strains of Haruki Murakami, Samuel Delany, Borges, and Pynchon as well, who continue to be some of my favorite authors today.

2. If you were asked to describe Voices in a few paragraphs, what would you say?

Voices is a strange (and hopefully, unique) exploration of narrative structure/form that touches on, among other things, the relationship between the Novel and the Idea, manifest in various forms of experience. When describing it, I prefer to avoid descriptions of the plot, so I generally address the concepts themselves: the stipulations, limitations and context of selfhood; the position of the individual in reference to society, in particular, the artist, and the extent to which we are semantic extensions—fabrications—of that context; and also, oddly enough, a very modern take on the Platonic Idea in reference to gender perception and the semiotic “mythologies” (as Barthes would put it) that comprise subjective experience and form our—only—notion of the world around us. In Voices, to the greatest extent possible, the external is a reflection of the internal, rather than the other way around—but if the components of individuality are solely “a distorted mirror of the external,” what is left of selfhood? Much of the novel is an indirect exploration of this concept, and an (equally indirect) attempt to answer some of the questions that ensue.

That said, it isn’t an excessively dialectic novel, but simply an attempt to harness language, form, and concept to create something as beautiful as possible. There’s a very serious difference between discourse and the object of discourse (or, in this case, the predication of discourse in motion), and Voices is made up primarily of the latter. The main emphasis is on the contours of language and feeling; its philosophical (and even structural) underpinnings serve largely to facilitate the formation of the text, rather than dictating the manner in which it is read.

3. How does the title of the book relate to the book itself?

The notion of voices—or simply “voice”—is built into various levels of the novel as a symbol, narrative device, and also stylistic preoccupation. Voice assumes its immediate symbolic context as the expression of individual identity, stipulating presence and expression, but also comes to represent society itself (a conglomerate of many voices), and even the echoes of the past—that, heard together, form a monotony entirely without speech. At one point early on, the narrative becomes a conduit for various disembodied voices, describing one of the central characters (who, herself, represents something akin to Platonic beauty, in a psychological, as opposed to traditionally metaphysical context) from various conflicting perspectives. The text itself is composed entirely of voice; arguably (at the time, I agreed with Lacan, though now I’m not so sure), even thought is composed entirely of semantic units (language), of which spoken voice and written speech are a derivative, and that gets touched on in the novel as well.

4. [If you go to page 4, which is excerpted on the Amazon page for the book, you will see the use of poetic space and line breaks about halfway down on the left. Muntz throughout the book uses such poetic devices to present his characters' thoughts. Most of the time, the poetic interventions are much more extreme.] What do the poetic forms allow you to do that straight prose does not?

In Voices, my primary stylistic aim was that the narrative itself be “broken,” but not disharmonious. The disparate placing of words across the page draws attention to the individual delineations of each sentence, the contour of each phrase. Yet the writing itself still feels distinctly like prose, with a focus on narrative exposition. Despite the line-breaks permeating the text, the paragraph is still its foundation, even when each is broken into many pieces, or concrete shapes, and stretched over multiple pages. The overall effect is something I’ve started to call “narrative cubism,” implemented on the level of the individual sentence as well as the overarching narrative. Initially, it served as a means of differentiating Voices even from other experimental pieces (though similar things have been done by Federman, Gass, and doubtlessly many other authors I’m not aware of), but rarely so fixated upon modulating the singular unit of the paragraph.

5. I hesitate to call your narrator "first person." How would you describe him?

The narrator does, indeed, speak in first person, but the presence behind the voice—the terminal subject—is strangely absent, to the point it seems the narrator has become only voice. The notion of the simulacrum (a copy that has become detached from its original, so much it might have no original at all) is especially evident here. Because of his inability to escape what Sartre calls “Bad Faith,” the submission of self to societal identity, prior even to the beginning of the story, the narrator’s persona has actually been divided into two separate entities. Even then, of course, the separation can’t possibly be complete: as long as one exists within the context of an external environment, they are subject to that environment, but this attitude is evidenced in his almost completely unrestrained behavior and disregard of social norms. One of the most enigmatic things about Voices is the narrator himself, but this is largely because he doesn’t understand either.

6. In many places, particularly early in the novel, you have your narrator write "I am hearing voices." How is this comment related to the structural concerns of your novel? Without giving the book away, how would you describe the wider structural concerns of the book?

In Voices, symbols have a tendency to become physical objects. When the narrator says “I am hearing voices,” he is referring, literarily, to the symbolic hierarchy I mentioned in question 3: the individual, their society, and the past, attempting to be “heard” in the present, but, altogether, muffling themselves. At one point (in one of the character’s basement, where no one would hear them), the voices literally take shape, to form a frail “shadow creature” that, after standing for a moment, collapses to the ground and dissipates. More than anything, this illustrates the position of the individual voice in our commercialized society—particularly that of the artist. Eventually, this becomes so prominent that when the narrator himself speaks, no one can hear him, simply because he is an artist.

The entire structure of Voices is a simulacrum, whose very reality (not to mention its individual components, down to the “self” so essential to the narrator) has become uncertain. The setting is both mental and physical—not to be confused with traditional philosophical idealism, because the mental contours here are primarily psychological and sociological—and therefore neither. The narrative has been taken apart and put back together. The different sections are usually out of order, but on occasion, one event will transition continuously from one to the next. At such a late stage of digression, the most one can do is outline its parameters, rather than isolate any singular cause—especially when, now, that cause has been obscured, and has taken so many disparate forms.

7. Your prose is often quite lush and rich. Could you discuss why you chose this writing style?

I’ve always had a notion of the literary text as an aesthetic object, and I try to incorporate that to the greatest extent possible in my writing. My work never pretends to duplicate film or other physical-oriented media, but focuses principally on the strengths of language itself: the expression of gradations of perception and feeling, emphasizing conceptual depth and exploration. Descriptions are primarily subjective, rather than objective; in fact, often the exposition is concerned solely with mental reality, utilizing associative logic, though rarely verging onto true stream-of-consciousness. The text is sometimes difficult, but rarely opaque—I’m not interested in using technique to abolish narrative, but, to the greatest extent possible, enhance it. When writing, I try to work at the level of the individual sentence: if one sentence doesn’t work, then neither does the paragraph. If the language is faulty, then the text (that is, we must remind ourselves, composed entirely of language) doesn’t work either. The aim, though, is simple: beauty. That beauty is sometimes complex, sometimes obscure, even cerebral, but always anchored in fundamental experience, even if the only experience is the experience of beauty.

species not yet invented

2010-06-26T08:02:00.000-07:00

you arrive with a
pointedness
because
your position is
shivering,
has lost its steady —
I try to meet you
with my instant
but it loses
its contour,
slips out of
its suppleness,
goes somewhere slightly
out of my
poor reach — this
is the era of
foreign habitats
beamed into our
neuronal
make-up, being
tripped up
by the thrill
of being tripped
up — wondering
what was the effect of the
invention of the
wheel on the
brain —
bungled
refraction and
wave interference,
I blink myself
over the brink
of sleep, muttering
to you about
species not
yet invented

— Jefferson Hansen

no nuance can account

2010-06-16T18:40:00.000-07:00

I like your little lies,
ones about foreign
efforts, collecting
flies, stilling face.
Your big lies too.
They amount to
less than insidiousness
and more than
futility.
My guess is that
you guess your
way beyond any
inanity, at least
in your way
in your mind.
I am as much with
you as the dirt is,
which isn't saying
much — the dirt's
bounty is as capricious
as its years gone dry,
dead. But that doesn't
mean I am not with
you. Just be serious here.
You and dirt have
something in common
too. It gathers in the
creases of your face,
a tenacity, a responsiveness.
Perhaps you see it
with me, perhaps
something more
desperate, less
determined. I just don't
know. No nuance
can account for the
squirm and tick
beneath our
breathings —
more of the dirt
and flies, perhaps,
than we, we who rely
on them more than anything.

— Jefferson Hansen

Lily Hoang's THE EVOLUTIONARY REVOLUTION part 3

2010-06-01T12:10:00.000-07:00

[See Parts 1 & 2 for my considerations of Lily's prose style.]

The plot of this book is fascinating: it spirals. There is a clear linear progression toward the Golden Tree and to and away from The Evolutionary Revolution. However, we keep going back and forward in subplots that run throughout the book. In short, we move forward at the same time that we spiral from side to side in subplots in this fabulist world populated by many subspecies of humans.

Before getting further into the implications of this book, we need to take a step back and consider the reading experience itself. The chapters are 1/2 to 2 pages long, and are often discontinuous. They leap about among four or five subplots. (This is the spiraling I spoke of earlier.) Lily is quite merciful with her reader in that she always gives good hints to resituate us into a plot when we suddenly return to it at the beginning of a new chapter. Now, the plots do (seem to?) come together in the end. One plot concerns an Emily who grows wings on her thighs, another the Sylvester twins, who are connected to each other and treated as freaks at circuses. And so on.

A larger mythic substructure asserts that the earth was once all fresh water, no land. The species we now call "man" lived in the sky and slept on the fertile moon. "Man" was all female. Down in the waters was a nasty, vengeful form of humanity, mermen. It would seem that they are all connected twins. For reasons not entirely clear, "man" becomes sexualized, then leaves the moon and attacks the mermen unmercifully, until they are all dead. What remains of them today is in the salt in the ocean.

How do we know such things? Through the poets, storytellers, and prophets, of course. But they are problematic. It was the poets' job to retain "the stories of the past in the various cavities of their bodies" (28). Politicians and wealthy families kept poets to help them with their affairs. There was only one problem. The poets were a jolly sort, lovers of mischief and "misconstrued facts." This means that one of the fundamental sources of knowledge about the past is unreliable.

Storytellers couldn't be trusted anymore than poets. And neither could prophets. So what we have is a fabulist society built on these myths that might be "full of shit" as Lily puts it. So what is this book? An elegantly written pile of shit?

Not entirely. It's also about connectivity. It's about the joy of stories, of language, "the symphony of disagreements" (229). Of wondering about the past and future of the planet, of us, of everything. Sometimes it's not the truth that matters so much, it's the webbings of stories upon stories, giving meaning, distraction, perspective.

Ultimately, it seems to me that Lily shows a humanity to be capable of incredible destruction and incredible creativity, a creativity not based on simple truth and fact-finding. But on the tussle of individuals, cultures, and societies in the disagreements and agreements.

As Lily points out, the scope of the environmental difficulties in front of us might not get addressed in time. But, then again, stories can take us most anywhere.

Lily Hoang's THE EVOLUTIONARY REVOLUTION part 2

2010-05-30T13:07:00.000-07:00

As a writer, I will forever have an affection for the close reading of prose and poetry. For me, nothing helps me on the micro-elements of my craft than paying close attention to what others, whom I respect, are doing.

Just in case any readers are unfamiliar with the "intentional fallacy," I'll explain it in the next two paragraphs. Oftentimes, close readers pick up stuff that is clearly there but was not intentionally placed by the author. This often happens to me not only with the small stuff, but large scale themes as well. Friends of mine, some of whom do not often read literature, will frequently see something that is evident in the work on the thematic level that I never picked up on.

All this is to say that a close read for me is not an effort to read a writer's mind, it's an attempt to see how he or she works the language as a craftsperson. The degree of intentionality is not important in a close reading ( though it certainly is in more autobiographical & historical readings of literature).

I want to look at four sentences on page 132.

"It is not because we want to regress that we explore the past. That would be a complete mischaracterization of our intentions. Nor are we the type to look back upon yesterday with a milky, romanticized eye, an eye that does not scrutinize, an uncritical eye.

"Rather, we look to the past because we must find the errors of our ancestors."

First, I want to emphasize that what is being said here about why we may study history is not necessarily Lily's beliefs. Point of view in this book is complicated, to say the least.

What interests me is that we have four sentences, only two of which have commas. One of those, however, is just after a brief introductory word, so it hardly counts. For all practical purposes we have three fairly simple, very short sentences without commas. Then, in the middle of these three, comes a very long one with three commas central to the expressive power of the sentence.

These commas contain the phrases that help explain the metaphorical "eye" with which this "we" looks at the past. There's an insistence on completely denying the romanticized mind by not having the sentence end at the first "eye," but having us readers hover over its negation for an extra half sentence.

On top of that is repetition and rhyme. "Eye" is repeated three times, the rhyming syllable "ize" twice in this one sentence. There is a tremendous determination to keep the word and the sound "eye" before us for the entire lingering, last half of the sentence.

She does this with no awkwardness, and nothing feels forced. I read to the bottom of the page and felt that something remarkable had happened, so I went back to look for it. I think she is able to keep the emphasis so strongly on "eye" without sounding clunky largely through her rhythms (I will not do a traditional scan, but I looked at it from that view point and there does seem to be some interesting emphases that come up) and her long consonants. When we get to the last half of the sentence hard consonants are usually buried within words, where they lose some of their fricative power, and she begins words with soft consonants.

In short, she draws us through the heavy repetition in the last half of the sentence by using rhythm and sound. The heavy repetition helps to thoroughly negate the "romanticized" way of looking at the past.

My next entry on this book will be a review of the book itself.

1/3 through Lily Hoag's THE EVOLUTIONARY REVOLUTION

2010-05-25T17:24:00.000-07:00

Before starting this book I thought, "No, Lily could not possibly do it again." She has written two terrific books in the last couple years, Parabola (Chiasmus) and Changing (Fairy Tale Press). Finally, Les Figues has just come out with The Evolutionary Revolution, a wild fabulist book where a number of remarkable things happen, among them females living in the sky and eating on the fertile moon at night. So far in my reading, it would seem she did it again.

Since I am not finished with the book, I would just like to share some of Lily's fine prose at this point. She writes in very short, half-page to two-page chapters that are often discontinuous. In one, entitled "Merman's Dream," these sentences appear:

"Emily is caught in a merman's dream..Once, she tried to sing, to comfort herself, but her voice came out as soft cashmere ... Then, out of nowhere, she hears him singing. His dream is a muted song and Emily uses her fingers to draw out the lyrics, which she must translate into Man, and when she has, she will be able to talk to the merman...Emily doesn't know about the merman's vengeful nature. She doesn't know that the merman isn't dreaming at all, that he's letting her think he's dreaming so she can waste the little breath she has left in interpretation. He has no problem killing little angels...He laughs broadly. Emily hears this. She thinks it's another clue to help in her escape."

This parable about interpretation, which I take to suggest that interpretation often has absolute limits beyond which is profound misunderstanding, is part of a larger narrative in the book about mermen and women with wings on their thighs and wax on the eyes. It's a remarkably inventive book, sentence after sentence right on. I am looking forward to the rest.

What is the value of reading & thinking about reversible novels?

2010-05-19T18:15:00.000-07:00

The only answer to the question I pose in the title is that it loosens our assumptions and perceptions, making our world richer, subtler, and more nuanced. In a variety of ways we can join with others interested in this stuff, helping to create a culture of greater richness and subtlety, hopefully one less easily controlled. It's not surprising that the artists, especially the experimental artists, and the intellectuals are among the first rounded up by abject dictators.

That's the value: it insists on the complexity and richness of life. And this is a threat to dictators who need to keep things simple.

Pavic on "reversible" and "nonreversible" art

2010-05-19T17:52:00.000-07:00

"Long ago I came to understand that the arts are "reversible and nonreversible." Some arts are reversible and enable the recipient to approach the work from various sides, or even to go around it and have a good look at it, changing the spot of the perspective, and the direction of his looking at it according to his own preference, as is the case with architecture, sculpture, or painting. Other, nonreversible arts, such as music and literature, look like one-way roads on which everything moves from the beginning to the end, from birth to death. I have always wished to make literature, whish is a nonreversible art, a reversible one. Therefore, my novels have no end in the classical meaning of the word."

This is perhaps the key paragraph in Pavic's aesthetic. And it is far reaching. He sees the end of the 20th-century and the beginning of the 21st as not the end of the novel but the end of reading as we have known it. In a way, he preceded the computer, yet anticipated it. I believe it was Lance Olsen who said that Dictionary of the Khazars was the first book of the 21st century.

But if a book has no definite end, don't we have some sort of anarchy? Doesn't every reader approach it in a different way? Yes and no.

Think of a sculpture. Yes, every viewer's walk around a sculpture is unique, but that does not mean that there is not some sense of a whole that remains fairly consistent. The philosopher Edmund Husserl famously pointed out that when we didn't see a side of a box, we knew it was there, and that this knowledge seemed to precede some sort of empirical learning. It is just how we are.

If this sense transfers to Pavic's reversible novels, they will hold together, just in a different manner from nonreversible ones. They will hold together as a concatenation of events rather than a string of events. Neither is more "true" than the other.

What's more, let's face it, with nonreversible literary novels we often remember stuff that has little to do with their nonreversible quality. We remember a line. An image. A character's name or face or description. What's more, we remember a world or many worlds created by the author, worlds that, to a degree, hung together, and not solely because of a linear plot. In fact, in literary fiction the plot is often the least important part.

Not true with a mystery or a horror novel. A lot of science fiction is more about the building of a world than a linear plot, but a plot often shows up there as well.

Reading Pavic novels feels like doing a puzzle where there is no last piece. And its a delightful frustration.

Mackey: SONG OF THE ANDOUMBOULOU 28

2010-05-18T18:34:00.000-07:00

[This is one of a continuing group of entries that focuses on Nathaniel Mackey's Song of the Andoumboulou poetic series. To read all the entries in the group, click on Mackey in the labels section below.]

"Song of the Andoumboulou 28" tells the story of a bus accident from three different angles, each one getting progressively briefer, more compact, and more elliptical.

The first section is a page and a half long. It begins by saying "I dreamt we rode / in dreaming," but there seems nothing dreamlike about the description of the bus accident on a slippery road that is a "split-second short / of Ever After." They rest on snow.

Mackey keeps circling back to this image of snow, both as a protectress, pillow, and as "awayfulness, numb." Eventually, they are rescued when "a chain / came / down, yanked us out of it." The violence of the imagery, "yank," is typical.

The second section is more metaphorical. "We were ... / fish reeled / in prematurely tossed back, / script / hastily written hurriedly /erased ."

In the third section he turns to "tricks played with letters": the anagram of "bus" is "sub," and they seem to be under the snow. The Andoumboulou, according to Dogon folklore, lived inside the earth, a failed first draft of humanity.

Mackey often compares us humans to them, since we, too, have not fully defined ourselves, are drafts in the making. He ends by pointing out how the numb fingers cannot turn the pages, which, nonetheless, are stuck together from being wet.

This poem seems to begin by denying dream and denying reading. Could it be about the intrusion of violence and fear and pain into our sedate worlds of ritual and calm expectation? If so, what does it gain from coming at the accident from three different perspectives?

Perhaps ending with people stuck in the snow, not knowing if they are up or down, literally in the middle, Mackey's vision of us humans, as rough drafts, perhaps confused, always incomplete.

Pavic-TWO VERSIONS OF DICTIONARY OF THE KHAZARS

2010-05-16T12:51:00.000-07:00

There are, literally, two different versions of this novel. The male version and the female version differ by a fairly short paragraph. And the paragraph is not all that different. They both make sense relative to the paragraph above and below, which are identical.

This is a book that is blocks of text. After an introduction, the next three sections, which correspond to the Jewish, Muslim, and Christian sources on the question of the Khazar's conversion to Judaism, can be read in any order. We may read these huge blocks of texts in any order we want. Then, apparently, the appendices and closing note we read last.

But, maybe not. In the end is a list of main characters. We can trace each one as they appear in each of the main sections, and that, too, is a way of blocking.

This book demands a read and a rereading. And maybe more. We must enter and exit in different places, come to inhabit it. It is true that we come to inhabit most good novels, but with them a literary convention pulls us through: we start at page one and end at the last page of the book.

Here, the only way to come to inhabit the book is to give that up, to inhabit it at different angles, and other ones. To enter many doors. To leave through many others.

Back with Pavic and Mackey

2010-05-16T12:39:00.000-07:00

I've been away for a month. I wrote a story that I then decided to expand into a novel. It was going to necessitate some serious research. Ultimately, I decided I could not adequately contextualize the material. So now I am going to cotinue working on Milorad Pavic's Dictionary of the Khazars by exploring quotations and using it as the springboard for my own writing. I will also take a look at some of the lit. crit. on the book, some of which is interesting. He was featured in a Review of Contemporary Fiction.

I am also going to continue discussing Nathaniel Mackey's poetry series, Song of the Andoumboulou. I will take a different tack, however. I will begin to compare and contrast poems more rather than discuss them one at a time. I feel that I've gotten all I can hope to get going in that direction.

Mankwe Ndosi & AS THE RHYTHM CHANGES

2010-05-16T10:33:00.000-07:00

What should I do? The 20th-century is replete with examples of white people, like me, defining, evaluating, and stealing the cultural works of Africans and African Americans. Yet I saw a decidedly Afrocentric show last night in St. Paul, put on by five black women, that I feel compelled to write about for three reasons. One is for a practical reason — what if no one else writes about this? — and the second is because I am a writer and I write about what moves me. The third reason is because art work coming from this and similar perspectives is once again under attack in portions of the U.S. Arizona is attempting to water down or get rid of its ethnic studies classes. I guess they want one ethnicity at the center of study: white. Maybe all of us need to celebrate non-white art before we are all impoverished by losing it.

All that being said, what should I do? I don't want to be some authoritarian critic "explaining" or "interpreting" the work.

Perhaps, I will write questions to hold that voice at bay.

Some background first: The piece was written and produced by Mankwe Ndosi, a singular talent from Minneapolis who is of Tanzanian & Midwestern descent. She has performed internationally, and works in the media of theater, dance, music, spoken word and improvisation. Go here to see an example of her work. Here is an example of her singing with Nicole Mitchell's her band in Italy.

At the show they used instruments built by Douglas Ewart, who has had some of his pieces purchased by major museums. They were made out of, I kid you not, plastic cartons, skiis, racquetball racquets, crutches with bells attached, rolling pins, and so on. The quality and sound of this seeming detritus is amazing. When you see and hear them, you realize why museums would want to purchase them. See some of his instruments here.

"As the Rhythm Changes" was based on interviews with 20 Minnesotans conducted by Mankwe. Most dwelled in the Twin Cities, and a few lived on a farm that had been in the family for generations. She asked the same questions of all of them: 1. What shapes our everyday routines? 2. How do you keep your spirit nourished? 3. What about the changes, either by your own will, or because life changes? 4. How do you see humanity in relationship with the natural world?
The four different pieces performed last night were all inspired by an interview with a single person. The performance itself was funny, joyous, at times scary and angry. There was some talking, a lot of singing, some dancing, some improv.

MY QUESTIONS
Question 1: What is the relationship between art and the everyday? How do Ewart, with his musical skiis and rolling pins and Ndosi, with her interviews and musicality and dance, approach this relationship? similarities, differences?

2. Mankwe during the performance said that the percussion and singing (the art) provided a bed for the people's stories to float on. Does this entail that art can coax out and offer portions of the everyday to the audience? How is the everyday changed by being held up by such a bed? To what extent does it matter?

3. In a related question, could Mankwe be anything but gentle in her way of characterizing these interviews (i.e. she doesn't say that she "wrested the essence from the interview and boiled it down to its crucial points")?

4. Could the everyday be a construction made by the art? In a crutch with bells on it, does Ewart see himself as pulling the musical possibilities out of the crutch, realizing its latent possibilities, projecting an imaginative construction on it, or something else I am not thinking of?

5. This I am sure about: in some of Ewart's instruments there is a hidden gentleness. After the show a performer, Aimee K. Bryant, kindly showed me two of Ewart's shaken percussive instruments that, even after the sound falls away, the body of the performer can continue to feel the vibrations. Is there something sly about this "hidden" conversation from the instrument to the body? We obviously think about the body's impact on instruments all the time, but what about vice versa?

6. Mankwe asked her interviewees "What shapes our everyday routines?" To what extent does art do this? To what extent is a dinner table, set up with care, itself a work of art? It is art - ifice. To what extent, then, is Mankwe remaking art of art, thereby helping us to appreciate it all the more?

7. "We are the world we live in." Is the world art? Is the world art - ifice? Do we want to make a distinction?

8. Here is probably the most important question, given Mankwe's stated activist concerns: How can what I have written help us to better life?

I am going to try to answer this question. It will be based on something Alan Golding wrote a number of years ago in a book entitled From Outlaw to Classic. What I have written is read by people interested in the vanguard of fiction, poetry and jazz. They are culturally involved people and cultural workers who feel that more "mainstream" venues do not allow them to explore and express what they must. For the most part they are white, but not exclusively.

Since they focus on art more for the sake of their vision or compulsion, it is more likely to be tied to the nerve endings and radical fissures in the culture. To use an overly simple opposition, their culture is wedded to exploration; the other culture is wedded to the market. This piece I have written is one small part of the culture of exploration. It helps to build on it, to push, to trouble it, to wonder. Obviously, it won't have as great an impact as a Mankwe's play or a Toni Morrison novel, but that's not the point, is it?

This vanguard culture is hardly going to create any sort of revolution. What it does is attract people in college towns and big cities into groups of like-minded people who can support each others' values, work, and ideas. In that way everyday lives can be affected, and electoral politics can even be changed on a small scale. It is possible for left-wing candidates to be elected from neighborhoods where such people live. And, given what's happening in Arizona, we need all of those types we can get.

Well, this wandered a bit but I think you get the idea. Let me end by listing the other people in the show: Libby Turner-Opanga, Sarah Greer, Aimee K. Bryant, and Kenna Sarge.

Mackey's Song of the Andouboulou 27 (entry 2)

2010-04-15T10:30:00.000-07:00

[This series of posts reflect on Nathaniel Mackey's Song of the Andoumboulou, a series of poems that Mackey has been working on through three books. His latest book with Andoumboulou poems in them, Splay Anthem, won the National Book Award. I take into consideration, in addition to the poems themselves, his allusions, Mackey's prose, interviews with him, and critical discussions of his work. As always, I look forward to hearing your thoughts. To access all of the posts, click on "Nathaniel Mackey" in the list to the right.]
The next section continues the images of alienation — "dreamt of lone coast" — but in a language more taught and punchy. The lines, filled with one or two syllable words, range between two and five words long (excluding the short one-word lines that frequently end stanzas.)

In the previous stanza we have lines filled with multi-syllabic words, and the lines are often a little bit longer. When we reach the end of the second section, the lines become quite short.

While Mackey's poems never stop dancing, this is as close as he comes to claustrophobia: "cut string caroling / world / relapse." The final section uses very short lines, goes by very quickly, is short, and returns us to worldly imagery and away from dream imagery. The persona in the poem, "the she" who would seem to be the female half of the original twins of the Dogon mythology. Punning, Mackey writes "'mu' more related / to miss than to myth."

A poem that pushes and pulls, formally, thematically, imagistically, and so on. It pushes towards embrace, sometimes violent, sometimes comforting, then pulls toward isolation at "Nudge." The poem is the process of reading it, one that leads us through a thicket of complications, "line blurring truth," emphasis on the adjective "blurring," so that truth itself is like a verb, always blurring, never clearing.

Nathaniel Mackey's Song of the Andoumboulou 27

2010-04-12T16:44:00.001-07:00

[This series of posts reflect on Nathaniel Mackey's Song of the Andoumboulou, a series of poems that Mackey has been working on through three books. His latest book with Andoumboulou poems in them, Splay Anthem, won the National Book Award. I take into consideration, in addition to the poems themselves, his allusions, Mackey's prose, interviews with him, and critical discussions of his work. As always, I look forward to hearing your thoughts. To access all of the posts, click on "Nathaniel Mackey" in the list to the right.]

Song of the Andoumboulou 27 immediately struck me as different from 26 in three ways: it is less broken up into subsections, the texture of the language feels tauter and rougher, and it describes less traveling.

The poem is divided into three parts: one is two pages long, one a page long, and the last about a half a page long. It begins with horrifying images of alienation told in a language ungraspable but all too evident: "Could / even feel the grain of his / back, whose hips would/ be hers were she her own to / remake..." This is one of many images of discomfort, "grain," coupled with powerlessness — "were she her own." She ends up on Loquat Cove, "also known as Nudge" — which seems an undeniably ugly word.

There she is connected with a man who may physically rape who, but who certainly does on an emotional level. He seems to leave in a space ship after the act. This is based on Mackey's reading of The Pale Fox by Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen. It states that in Dogon cosmology a trip to a distant, twin star is described. In an earlier post, I discussed some of the present controversy surrounding Griaule and Dieterlen's work in anthropology.

But what does this mean poetically? In Dogon cosmology the Andoumboulous are not particularly evident. They live in the earth and are small, considered a "rough draft" of humanity. The "Song of the Andoumboulou" is just a minor funeral song. Mackey has not gone after the most important aspects of Dogon belief. He has taken little slivers and slices, from the edges, from the margins. He believes that we humans are the Andoumboulous, in that we are the rough drafts, at the edges, in that we are always remaking ourselves.

This poem is always remaking itself as well.

I will work with other aspects of this poem tomorrow.

Nathaniel Mackey's Song of the Andoumboulou 26 (Post 3)

2010-04-01T07:36:00.000-07:00

(See below for first two posts.)

As with most of Mackey's poems, this is a poems of motion on the literal (traveling), figurative ("transcendent" planes) and allegorical (the buried narrative as a search for knowledge) level. What we see is that this search for knowledge takes place within fog, within the clamminess near the ocean, within thunderstorms, and in the brittle dryness of a low-branched forest.

It also begins by describing how what seems a valley turns into a precipice. It ends with the fissured earth after an earthquake.

Such is the sight and site of communication, miscommunication, writing and miswriting. The wet book and the burning book. The final fissure is the bass, the foundation, and the shaken frame, what makes possible the weaving in a Dogon loom. It is the instability that makes weaving, and language, possible. (Mackey discusses this in his essays.)

The bass itself is moving. Music works by setting up patterns and altering them.

The earth is moving.

"Stra" for "stratum"; "stra" for "stray."

Nathaniel Mackey's Song of the Andoumboulou 26 (Post 2)

2010-03-31T09:04:00.000-07:00

(See below for the first post on this poem.)

This is a decidedly dramatic, narrative poem that nevertheless buries it's story. Before getting to some of the poem's myriad subtleties, it would help to identify some of the broad outlines of the narrative. I am taking some liberties here, but this is what I see as the basis of what is going on.

1. We begin with the narrator and at least one companion traveling. They come to a valley, but the closer they get to it the more it becomes clear that it is a precipice with exposed rock stratum.

2.One of the traveler's keeps uttering a pessimistic phrase, apparently having received a great, gaping psychic wound.

3. The first section ends with a sort of religious rite, with altars, horns, flutes, and drums. This seems to be the conclusion of that: "Edge be my birthright." The ritual reveals that we are all always already at the precipice, on the edge of time, on the edge of one culture relative to another, and in our decisions creating an ever changing culture.

4. The next stanza begins halfway down the next page and below a horizontal line, meaning that it has the status of both a stanza and a poem within a poem. Again, they are traveling. Apparently, on a rope bridge beyond a ledge and across a gorge. It creates vertigo. The word "home" becomes relative, and seems to be only the ledge at the other end of the bridge. Is there no "home" in this radical fluidity and dynamism?

5. Next, they are apparently traveling on the ocean and washed up on Lone Shore. Apparently, the coast was supposed to be the place of the utopic city Zar. Instead, it was the apparent site of a massacre: "stripped limbs / catching / late October / light." The stanza also repeats words such as "again" and "rebegan," emphasizing how often such actions occur.

6. The next section is quite difficult to get a hold of. A ta'wil is an explanation or interpretation of the Qar'an. Above the mention of this are the images — champagne, roses, grapes — associated with the image of the altar in section three. Somehow, this interpretation seems to leave the people in the poem bereft and "twinless," twins being important to the spiritual beliefs of the Dogon. It is important to note that in this place there is an image of a book with blank, watery pages.

7. We are back on Lone Coast and beginning to bid the senses goodbye. They hold a hollow head to his ear. Most of the rest of this stanza focuses on how listening through the shell connects him to nature but divides him from people, who for the first time he refers to as "they." They seem to climb a precipice to the land of low branches, which Mackey seems to figure a little more positively than the damp beach. Here, the "book is drawn in flammable ink," and it ends by emphasizing the book of undone. Nonetheless, the dry underbrush scratches the bare skin.

8. This is another poem-within-a-poem. First it says that they now go by "two new names, / Hummed Outer Meat" and "Hollowness." Then it describes a nasty tale rehearsed by the sea shell he is still listening to. It is a meeting described by a lot ob abusive-sounding verbs.

9. It ends with three people separating. Two people run toward Loquat Cove, and the narrator runs by himself away from it. Then an earthquake intervenes, and the "whistling / fissure" seems to cause everyone to stop their running.

My next post will be more interpretive

Nathaniel Mackey's Song of the Andoumboulou 26

2010-03-31T08:11:00.001-07:00

[After about a six-month break, I have decided to return to this continuing series of posts that reflect on Nathaniel Mackey's Song of the Andoumboulou, a series of poems that Mackey has been working on through three books. His latest book with Andoumboulou poems in them, Splay Anthem, won the National Book Award. I take into consideration, in addition to the poems themselves, his allusions, Mackey's prose, interviews with him, and critical discussions of his work. As always, I look forward to hearing your thoughts. To access all of the posts, click on "Nathaniel Mackey" in the list to the right.]

[I am currently discussing Mackey's book Whatsaid Serif. If for some reason you cannot buy it (and I sincerely hope you do), many of the poems can be found here.].

Allusions / Definitions
>This poem is the first of a group of ten that go under the heading "stra." I am not sure what Mackey is referring to. It could be a simple anagram for "star." It could also be the name for "sîra," what seems to be an Arabic name for a story that is part of a larger saga. Maybe it will come clearer later.

>Ra — Egyptian sun god

>Raz — unsure. Certainly negative relative to the majesty of Ra.

>C'rib — seems to be the proper noun for the blow he suffered to the back of the head.

>Zar — Religious ceremony in the Sudan and Southern Egypt conducted by women and intended to cast out demons.
>Loquat leaves — In China and Japan, special healing qualities are attributed to these

>Profligate — wildly licentious

> Ta'wil— explanation, interpretation, esp. of Qur'an.

>twin / twinless — In Dogon cosmology, according to the anthropologists Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, twins are important in their creation myth. [See here. After you get to the page, click on the html given about half way down.]

>gremlin — Created in the Royal Air Force during World War II, this is a mischievous folk figure who causes trouble with planes and aeronautics.

_________________________________________

Before jumping into a discussion of the poem proper, I want to address the experience of reading it. It can be frustrating.

On the one hand, Mackey writes with enough power, authority, and narrative momentum to create a desire for knowing what is going on. On the other hand, he does not provide enough information for figuring this out. So we are left with the sense that something mysterious is happening, but we cannot get to the bottom of it.

No matter how many allusions we track down, no matter how much unusual diction we make clear, we will remain ill at ease.

Obviously, frustrating the reader cannot be the goal of these poems. So we must look elsewhere than traditional notions of how a poem is held together. I will need to formulate this more carefully later, but Mackey seems to be aimed at the reading process itself, at the coming to fruition of a sense, and insight, a togetherness, only to watch it dissipate.

Other poets have done this sort of thing: Ashbery, Ron Silliman, Lyn Hejininian and so on. What sets Mackey apart is that he does this in a cross-cultural arena. In a way, he ups the stakes: with him, we are not just learning how to read complex poetry, we are learning how to read each other in our cultural differences, in what Mackey would call the difficult creakiness that attends all communication, both intra- and inter- cultural.

My next post on Mackey will consider #26 more particularly. At a later date, I will consider how he specifically contributes to contemporary poetry.

Milorad Pavic Imitation #4

2010-03-24T14:37:00.000-07:00

"language so wild that ink could not hold it"

clunk and clatter
kick and pop
it's a tick
it's a trick
it's a words gone wild show!
win your tickets
batter and butter
bee bob a dee do
slum dumb and sloo slop
pick a winner
with no criteria
coo coo and zoo
what should you do
no rule no pool
no zule jewel fool
a choice with no reason
pick a packa picka
naked as a nincompoop
oop oop oop

Milorad Pavic's DICTIONARY OF THE KHAZAR'S #4

2010-03-24T13:40:00.000-07:00

[This is one of a series of entries on Milorad Pavic's writings, click for the first post in the series.]

These are lists of quotations from the book that are quite beautiful, I think. I am quoting them in order to share my enthusiasm and to hope the magic rubs off, a little.

Note: At some point I will need to discuss Pavic's use of nonsequitars in paragraphs and even, occasionally, in sentences. His paragraphs are often difficult to digest because they drift through a series of topics, often without transitions, rather than developing one or two carefully defined ones. At times, even his sentences shift topic half way through. I don't yet know what to make of this, but I am noting when it happens and will discuss it later.

Below are some more interesting quotations:

The he yielded and picked one her breasts like a peach. 43

I, who have experience with colors, inks, and letters, recognize each letter by its smell in the damp night, and, lying in my corner, I read by the smells entire pages of the sealed and rolled scrolls that lie somewhere in the attic of the castle. 45

Kyr Avram prefers to read in the cold, clothed only in a shirt, subjecting his body to shivers, and the only part of his reading he considers worth remembering and noting in the book is what penetrates the shivering to reach his attention. 45

One night in Gyüla, Father came across an enormous snowman seated on the latrine. He struck him with the lantern, killed him, and went to dinner. 51

It is only an illusion that our thoughts are in our heads...Our heads and we as a whole are in our thoughts. 61

He was creating the first letters of the Slavic alphabet. he started with rounded letters, but the Slavic language was so wild that the ink could not hold it, and so he made a second alphabet of barred letters and caged the unruly language like a bird. 64

for at the bottom of every dream lies God. 68

Milorad Pavic - Imitation #3

2010-03-21T08:53:00.001-07:00

       red sadness

eyes too tired
for attention are
rimmed
with a red sadness

the maple limb,
tilting limp
from the tree is
rimmed with a
red sadness

the pock mark,
the excema, the
ringworm are
rimmed with a red
sadness

the way to drink
is blocked,
all doors
rimmed with
a red sadness

apples and oranges
are not rimmed
with a red sadness,
neither are tulips
or geraniums

this cat, restful, tail
curved and curled
seems rimmed with
no red and no
sadness

it seems half asleep
ready and not ready
in the midst and
slightly removed,
rimmed with blue

Milorad Pavic - Imitation #2

2010-03-21T08:45:00.001-07:00

[This is one of a series of entries on Milorad Pavic's writings, click for the first post in the series. In addition, this is one of a number of imitations of Pavic's writings.]

Before the morning of the sideways sun a fish darts and flutters in the watery sky. In the darkness, a fish that looks sound. In the night before the sideways sun fish flit like purple and dart like blue. In the evening before the night of the watery sky, before the morning of the sideways sun, fish could look a sound but not be seen in cloaking dusk. Birds cry against fish. In the afternoon before the night of the watery sky birds inched their songs left, their songs right. In the morning, fish sleep their sound in the curtain of light.

Milorad Pavic - Imitation #1

2010-03-21T06:18:00.001-07:00

[This is one of a series of entries on Milorad Pavic's writings, click for the first post in the series. In addition, this is one of a number of imitations of Pavic's writings. The first sentence is taken directly from Pavic.]

At night there appeared a letter inscribed on each eyelid. If you kept track of them, night after night, they spelled out two-word lines of poetry.

But it was never apparent where one poem ended and the next began. Great scholars were brought in to discuss and decide on where the breaks between poms were. Some argued for temporal breaks based on weeks and months, for instance. Others on thematic development. And still others on the shifting cadences that billowed and slackened; spinning, twisting; up, down, left, and right.

The discussion continues today, even as the woman has become older than old, and the first generation of scholars has mostly died and been replaced by a second.

She herself has never spoken about the words on her eyelids. Except to say, "I don't see what the fuss is about. If the words on my eyes were magnets on the refrigerator nobody would be talking."

Could it be that the significance is in an accoutrement of the eye offering the poem rather than only reading it?

Pavic's "Dictionary of the Khazars" #3

2010-03-21T05:58:00.000-07:00

[This is one of a series of entries on Milorad Pavic's writings, click for the first post in the series.]

These are lists of quotations from the book that are quite beautiful, I think. I am quoting them in order to share my enthusiasm and to hope the magic rubs off, a little.

"During his long life he and a monk from another monastery played chess without a board or pieces." 190

"He took off his uniform in a hotel and for the first time saw his scars in a copper mirror. They smelled of bird-droppings." 191

"For, as they caressed the rocks, slipped through their crevices, and skirted their tops, the winds always played a different tune, until the marble and the masons disappeared forever, washed away by the rains, whipped by the glances of passersby, and licked by the tongues of rams and bulls." 199

"Contemporaries say that Mutsaf Beg Sablak could not keep food down and that, like a turtledove, he ate and secreted simultaneously." 200

Because the book does not have to be read in strict order, these quotations jump back to early in the book now.

"At night she wore a letter inscribed on each eyelid...each letter kills as soon as it is read. They were written by blind men, and the ladies-in-waiting shut their eyes when they attended to the princess in the morning, before her bath. Thus, she was protected from her enemies while she slept." 21

"Every morning she would create a hitherto unseen image of her own face." 21

"'Khazar face' referred to ... starting each day as someone else, with a completely new and unfamiliar face, so that even the closest of kin were at pains to recognize each other." 22

"Family inheritances are meted out according to the color of one's beard." 26

"Years passed like turtles." 27

"He has a broad chest the size of a cage for large birds or a small beast, and is often the target of murderers, for there is a popular poem saying that his bones are made of gold." 28

"I saw him stand beneath a tree, his saber drawn, waiting for the wind to blow; as the first fruit dropped, he slashed it with his saber in mid-air." 30

"A look that fells birds" 31

Milorad Pavic, DICTIONARY OF THE KHAZARS, Post #2

2010-03-19T14:01:00.000-07:00

[This is one of a series of entries on Milorad Pavic's writings. Here is the first post in the series.] Here is a list of some of Pavic's remarkable sentences. I am copying them down simply to share their wildness and weirdness, and, to fess up completely, in the hope that some of his tremendous skill might rub off on me:

"It is impossible to tell what the 1691 Daubmannus edition of The Khazar Dictionary looked like, since the only remaining exemplars, the poisoned and the silver (companion) copies, were both destroyed, each in it own part of the world." (8)

"Only fragments of the Daubmannus edition have reached us, just as sleep leaves a dusting of sand in the eye." (9)

"The hierarchy of death is, in fact, the only thing that makes possible a system of contacts between the various levels of reality in an otherwise vast space where deaths endlessly repeat themselves like echoes within echoes." 127

"He left behind his lute of white tortoiseshell, which that very same day began walking, turned back into an animal, and swam off into the Black Sea." 128

"After that, they never really abandoned Islam, although they went on to convert to Christianity and then to Judaism." (135)

"They are so resourceful they have oysters growing on trees." (144)

"The river that flows through the Khazar Empire has two names, because in the same riverbed half of its course runs from east to west and the other half from west to east." 144

"He was fond of saying that this revelation had come to him once when a fly was drowning in his eye as he watched a fish, and thus the fish fed on the fly." (154)

"He had a horse so swift that its ears flew like birds, even when it stood in place." (156)

"hot bread which has the dark face of your father and the navel of your mother." (159)

"He would string and tune his lute by the stars." (161)

"If all human dreams could be assembled together, they would form a huge man, a human being the size of a continent." (165)

"she with the dappled eyes that changed color in the cold like flowers" (161)

"She traveled thousands of miles to die in your dream" (163)

"In dream hunting the words of the Khazar dictionary are like a lion's tracks in the sand to the ordinary hunter." (165)

"He was a feminine key with a hole in its shaft, looking for a masculine lock with a bolt in its keyhole." (170)

"She suffered from an unusual disease: her left hand was faster than her right. She claimed her left hand was so fast that it would die before she did." (173)

"Darkness was falling in reddish flakes." (177)

"His deaths tore him into such shreds that nothing was left of him except this story." (181)

More Later

Pavic's "Dictionary of the Khazars"

2010-03-19T13:27:00.000-07:00

The Serbo-Croation novel Dictionary of the Khazars, by Milorad Pavic, stands out, for me, as the single most memorable novel of the last quarter century. It is a book about reading, about linearity and non-linearity, the nether world of dreams, poetry, and art.

After a short introduction, it takes the form of three "books" — Christian, Islam, and Jewish. Each loosely pertains to a time when the Khazars worshiped that particular Abrahamic faith. Pavic informs us that there is no need to read the books in order. You could start with the Jewish and end with the Christian, or even jump around a lot more than that. In addition, Pavic has provided an index so that readers can trace characters and events as they appear in the various books.

The Khazars existed as a nomadic tribe of the southern Caucasus who came to their greatest power in the 6th and 7 centuries CE. However, the novel focuses on the scholarship on the Khazars that was written in the 17th century. It was at that time that the original dictionary was written. However, through various happenstance — from one copy being poisoned to another that was used for fire, the dictionary only survived in scraps. That's what we have today: scraps written in the 17th century in various languages about a people who lived a thousand years before.

Obviously, Pavic is asking us to move into the realm of representation. He is eliminating the origin, the historical Khazar people, and even much of the representation of them, the dictionary. What's left are signs, many decontextualized. This does sound like standard post-modernism.

But it doesn't stop there. For me Pavic is more than the play of signs and representations. After all, there is a dark side to the stories here. And a randomness. In one, for instance, "dream hunters" pursue a certain precursor. "If we follow our angel precursor when he is ascending the heavenly ladder, we approach God Himself, and if we have the misfortune to follow him when he falls, we move away from God, but we can know neither one nor the other." Then, in the next paragraph, he says that it "is a matter of technique."

Pavic has moved us into a field where he takes back what he gives, refuses to assert how much of our most important efforts can be attributed to luck or technique, and goes on his merry way. This is a book of magic. But underneath the surface, always, it is a horror novel. Is it stretching it to say that Pavic wrote this book as Yugoslavia was disintegrating, and the political events had an impact? I don't know. Writers living in political upheaval are as likely to use writing to escape from such horrors as to explore them, however obliquely.

What is certain is that we can just imagine Milorad Pavic's twinkling, mischievous eyes throughout our reading of this book. But I also imagine them to be rimmed with a red sadness.

We already are and never will become fully what we are.

Geoffry Gatza on his book KENMORE

2010-03-11T23:32:00.000-08:00

Geoffrey Gatza is perhaps best known as the indefatigable publisher behind BlazeVox Books, which puts out a couple dozen titles of innovative literature each year. However, he also writes. He has a number of adult and children's titles under his name. This interview concerns one book, Kenmore: Poem Unlimited. (In the interests of full disclosure, BlazeVox published a novel by me, ...And Beefheart Saved Craig.)

1. Before we get to Kenmore, you're created an amazing press with BlazeVox.
How many books do you put out in a year? What is your guiding philosophy? Do
your books stay in print? What else should we know about BlazeVox?

Our mission, after ten years is still very hard to pin down. We represent
neither a group of writers nor one mode of writing. We enjoy innovative
works of literature in whatever format that it chooses to find itself. We
wish to promote new style, emerging voices and provide an outlet for these
artists to express their artistic visions. This sounds good, and in turn we
will try to live up to these standards and will do whatever is humanly
possible.

BlazeVOX Books has published over 190 volumes, mostly poetry, and will
publish approximately 50 to 75 more each year during 2010 and 2011. Our
latest book authors include Anne Waldman with illustrations by George
Scheenman, Ted Greenwald, Celia Gilbert, Raymond Federman and Craig
Paulenich. A detailed list of all of our titles is located in our online
catalog blazevox.org/catalog.htm .
Also just out is the latest issue of BlazeVOX2k9 and online journal of
voice. But wait, there¹s more; our Wilde Reading Room has 75 ebooks
available for free download. As you can see, BlazeVOX [books] presents some
of the most original voices writing today. Check out our new catalog here:
http://www.blazevox.org/catalog.htm

Outlets of publications:

Online Journal:
Coming into our tenth year BlazeVOX 2kX Spring 2010 will be out on May 1,
2009. We publish about 50 writers from around the world in each issue. We
publish in HTML and PDF and enhanced PDF, Podcasts, and now including movies
of original performances.

Online Free Ebook Library: Wilde Reading Room
Each issue of BlazeVOX had an update to our ebook section. Named for Oscar
Wilde, our Wilde Reading room is one of our most popular section on our
site. Each of our titles have around 6 to 7 thousand unique downloads on
each of our titles. This is astounding when most of our POD books sell
rather infrequently on Amazon.com or through SPD. It seems that people do
want full-length collections of contemporary writers but are reluctant to
purchase a book. This is wonderful for us, as it costs next to nothing to
make an ebook. We use the same method to produce an ebook as we do to make a
POD book, only we do not have use the materials to make the thing so it this
is an area we plan to focus in on in the future.

POD Book Catalog:
We have been making print on demand books since 2004. Since then we have
published 200 titles and have plans to continue on for a great long while. A
book is the primary object of the writer. A painter can take her painting
and place it in any venue she sees fit and her goal is accomplished. But an
author without a tangible means of publication is stifled. Even with the
appeal, popularity and cost of the ebook, a writer still wants to have a
book in hand, if only to show Mom, hey I have done something. We have found
a small bit of success in our business model. Books do not sell well, so we
cannot rely on one title to make a splash. Instead we publish many titles of
very deserving authors to make things even out. With this kind of model we
are able to be more accommodating to writers who may not be able to publish
their works in other venues.

2. I am intrigued by the subtitle of Kenmore, "Poem Unlimited." What's the
story behind it?

The phrase comes from Hamlet, in scene two when the actors are coming into
Elsinore. This is part of the description of the works that they can
perform.

The best actors in the world, either for tragedy,
comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical,
historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-
comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or
poem unlimited:

LORD POLONIUS, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark Act 2, Scene 2

I loved the idea of this as a work and I tried to accomplish a poem without
limits. The whole of the Kenmore project takes place in four volumes of
works. This is not what I thought would happen when I started. I thought
this would be an epic poem with memories and photos and whatnots of found
items to capture the conscious of a community. Over years I gathered up
materials and this slowly became untenable as one volume as a poem cannot
contain all these items into one, but slowly these ideas fell into separate
entities and so became several items. I published the first volume as it is
a traditional book. Volume two is a photopoem book of Kenmore, NY. It is
five years of photos looking at a wonderful village through springtime, a
devastating October ice storm and the destruction and rebuilding of the
elementary school I attended, Jane Addams. The third is craft elements and
very anti computer. Comprising hand written memories, scraps, found objects
to create a moving experiment of scrapbook and hysterical diary. Taking the
idea of non-computer generated memories in a one sitting purge of ideas;
this becomes a moving portrait of a town through touch.

The fourth volume is a mirror image of the first volume. Set in one-word
poems this is the ghost image of the first book, and the setting of private
memories using street names as titles with one-word as the poem. This
evocative display of one-word poems takes the reader on a side street of
what a poem should be and what a single word can provoke and provide. The
one-word poem depends on two elements to work. In this case the title is the
street title and it corresponds to a memory. There is also the element of
mirroring to the first volume the published book. So Tremaine Ave. Volume
One will has a direct connection to the Tremaine Ave. in Volume Four

3. The book is organized around events that happen in two tales, one about
Gwion and the Wisdom Potion and the other from The Book of Enoch. What is
your personal relationship to tales and, perhaps, fairy tales? I know that
you have written some children's books.

I do write for children, it's very fun and it comes more naturally to me
than say, detective fiction. I think all of my work has some element of the
fairy tale in them, for better or worse. I am intrigued by the small stories
we tell one another and how they turn and develop into other stories. In one
sense, we are nothing more than the stories we tell each other. And in this
I wanted to understand who I was by delving into the base stories that make
up a formulation of myself by the texts that moved me. I choose core ideas
such as religion and the hero-myth. The ballad of Taliesin and the Mabinogi
is a root story of the King Arthur legend and the book of Enoch is still
used today in many forms of Christianity.

Both stories are myths about great poets and so making the poet into a
lively hero, taking him from life to death to rebirth then in the second
half have the poet hero ascend to heaven as receives a tour, of sorts. So
the blending of the two make for a unique story perfect for poetry.

4. Could you tell us a little about The Book of Enoch? about Taliesin? You
have biblical and old welsh references here.

Taliesin was a master poet of the 6th century and is believed to be the
court poet to three Celtic British kings. He became the basis for the
literary figure Merlin the wizard. I chose to use the myth about his
becoming the poet. He ate a magic fish, which was meant for another. There
is an ensuing wizard battle in which he looses by being eaten. However,
instead of dying he becomes a child in the womb of the witch he was
fighting.

The second half is based on the Book of Enoch, the man who walked with god.
This is an apocryphal apocalyptic text from the Old Testament of the Bible.
This backbone of a story tells of how the angles fell from heaven when they
fell in love with human women. They marries them and had children who were
giants. God kills the children and buries the bones and sends all 200 devils
into hell. Enoch gets to witness this from God's vantage point. From there
Enoch is guide through the heavens by several angles.

5. You tend to write long lines. Is that typical of your work? What do you
see as the long lines' contribution to this work?

There is a combination of writing styles in this book. Long lines help with
the narrative functions in this poem. I think this helps to tell the story
and move it along. The more abstract ideas are woven into shorter poems and
using shorter lines. There are also differing uses of tone for each part.
The first is lively and has a verve to the story telling, while the second
part becomes tedious in it's use of the religious / biblical language.

6. If we can speak of the religion and tales loosely as myths, would you
agree that the book mythologizes the present and offers contemporary
examples of the myths?

Yes indeed. I took both of these as myth, being careful with the Book of
Enoch, as it is still in use today with certain branches of Christianity,
especially in Ethiopia. This story does take place in the present time and
is a new vision for the originals. Both sections are from myths that are
quite still popular today, so in a sense it is going back to the roots to
find something fresh.

7. What about Kenmore, the contemporary city, is worthy of myth?

Well no of course not :-) It is no different than any other suburban area
and part of the reason for the myth. After Olsen and William Carlos Williams
how can one address place in poetry? I am not suggesting that this is on par
with their work, but it was the only way I could find to adequately admire
the place I grew up and lived in at the time of writing the pieces. I
dreamed many fine dreams walking those streets and those dreams all had a
foot in one or both of these myths. So it was tremendous fun to put all
together.

Interview With John Jeffire about MOTOWN BURNING

2010-03-09T19:57:00.000-08:00

Motown Burning is a fine second novel by Detroit writer John Jeffire. In it, he tells the story of an usual love between a small-town upper middle class girl and a lower class city boy. By the end of this novel, which is set in the late 60's, Detroit burns in the worst riot in US history and we visit painful and debilitating scenes in Vietnam.

1. Congratulations on winning the award for "Motown Burning." Could you tell us a bit about it? The book actually won two awards. The first was the Mount Arrowsmith Novel Competition when it was still in manuscript format. The second was the Independent Publishing Awards Gold Medal for Regional Fiction. The second award was cool because Dave Eggers won a gold medal in the same competition in a different category, so to be in the vicinity of someone like that, even if it’s just out in the parking lot, is kind of a rush.

2. Could you tell us a little about yourself -- family, work, interests, history with writing?
Me? I turn 48 this year and I’m still trying to figure out what the hell I’m about. I was born and raised in Detroit, and later I grew up working in my parents’ bar in Ohio. They were regular blue collar people, no college education, working very long hours every day. I was actually the first person in my family to earn a college education, whatever that’s worth. But I didn’t go to college right away after high school because I was a competitive wrestler and had a chance to train overseas for a year. In fact, wrestling has been a large part of my life, and I just gave up full-time coaching a few years ago after my second spinal surgery. I didn’t really understand writing until I got to college, and one great teacher, Albert Glover, lit the fuse. We studied Philip Levine, and that was it for me, I was hooked. Levine described Detroit and its decay and pride and fierceness and I got it, probably the only kid in that class of upper-crust budding yuppies who understood what the hell this poet guy was talking about. I said to myself, If this is poetry, I think I can do it, or at least try. Beginning as a very bad poet, I’ve branched off into decent poetry, short stories, a play, and two novels. On a personal note, I was married right after my sophomore year in college, and my son and daughter are both grown and out of the house now. Life is moving very rapidly.

3. How would you describe this book to someone who has not read it, but needs enough information to follow our interview? Why did you entitle it Motown Burning?

In a basic sense, it’s a love story. Aram Pehlivanian, A.P., the protagonist, is a high school drop-out working at his uncle’s bar. One night at local concert, he meets Katie, and they are crazy about each other. It’s a classic match of opposites: the inner city street punk and the prim, proper suburban girl. Their relationship is complicated when A.P. gets into trouble during the 1967 Detroit Riots, and he is given an ultimatum: go to jail or go to Vietnam. He chooses to go to Vietnam, which a lot of kids in the same situation did back in the day, and that’s where the title comes from. While he’s over in Vietnam, he learns that Katie is pregnant. So literally the city of Detroit is burning from the riot, a true historical event, but A.P., who is nicknamed Motown in Vietnam, is also burning to get back home to be with Katie and his child.

4. What sort of research did you conduct for this book? Did you interview people? If so, what effect did it have on your writing?

I actually began researching just by going back through my memories of that time period. I was a little kid in ’67 and remember the tanks and army men in the streets. That was quite a sight for a kid. My family was living in Dearborn at the time, and the mayor, Orville Hubbard, called in the National Guard and ordered them to shoot on sight anyone crossing the border into the city. I also talked quite a bit with my parents about this when I was younger before they passed away, and it’s funny but people from Detroit in that era can tell you exactly where they were when the riots broke out, kind of like people today know the exact moment and place they were when they learned of 9/11 and the towers being hit. It’s indelible, there forever, and it’s never going to leave. I also talked to a number of Vietnam vets to get a sense of what it was like, the fear, the nerves, the futility. I also recalled some of the sergeants and officers I worked with when I was in ROTC in college. I eventually got kicked out of the army at my officer’s basic course in Fort Bragg after I flunked the physical because of a knee injury I got wrestling, but I remember those people and the stories they told. That’s probably what fuels me most as a writer; I’m a real listening junkie.

5. Please tell us a little about the Detroit riots, and why you wanted to work them into your book. Why do you think they have received so little attention in the national mythos?

The ’67 Detroit Riots were one of the most significant events to take place in this country’s history, certainly its history in the 1960s, and yet there’s basically nothing on it out there in movies, books, plays, and the like. It’s bullshit. After my book was out I picked up Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex because I had heard that it mentioned the riots, but the book bored me in the early going and I never even got to the Detroit parts. That probably makes me sound lunk-headed and probably isn’t very fair to the book, but so be it, I get impatient with stories that don’t move at a certain clip. If you want to understand the United States in the 1960s, though, and all the tensions that were fomenting there, you just have to look at Detroit to see what it was all about. The social, racial, political, and artistic conflicts plaguing America at the time blew up in Detroit. The brief mythology is that two black Vietnam vets returned home and their neighbors were going to throw them a party a local blind pig, an unlicensed after-hours club. Well, the cops, who were notorious for cruising around the city in their Big-4 units abusing minority citizens, showed up but they weren’t prepared for such a huge crowd on hand. And the crowd said, That’s it, we’re not taking it anymore, fuck you, and the place erupted. The next four days were total chaos; Baghdad today has nothing on Detroit in July of ’67. The 82nd Airborne Division and the National Guard had to be called in, tanks, troop carriers, out and out warfare in the streets. The official death toll was 43, but they were finding bodies long after the riot was officially over and some bodies were never found. I talked with one woman who was a nurse and she said that her hospital alone had at least that many people brought in who died. But officials wanted to downplay everything, like they had the whole ordeal in hand, the iron fist bringing order. The old-timers say the death total was closer to 200, and over 7,000 people were arrested. Fourteen square miles of the city burned down. No city in America has experienced this, and yet where are the stories? To this day several neighborhoods have never recovered. Which is why I shake my head when the government is giving out millions to the silk-suited executive assholes of these companies they ran into the ground, like that is helping America. There are real people in real neighborhoods who could use a small fraction of that money to make their city livable and safe. I better stop there because I’m starting to get pissed off.

6. This book keeps switching the first person point of view among characters, in the manner of Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying." For instance, Opie narrates the first 10 or so pages, Saint the next 25, and so on. Why did you choose this point of view?

You know, the story is born in a riot, so I wanted there to be a sense of chaos, of confusion, in the narrative. In several cases, the different characters’ accounts overlap but their perspectives are very different. In one way or another, A.P. is in every chapter, sometimes just in passing. Like any traumatic event, though, it can seem to make no sense when you’re in the middle of it trying to survive, but afterwards, when you have the safe distance to reflect, you can say to yourself, Oh, so this is where it started, and that’s why this person did that, and that’s what happened off in the corner that I was unaware of. So much of what happens in the book centers around the riot and the war in Vietnam, so it didn’t make sense to me to tell the story in traditional narrative. There had to be some confusion, frustration, dislocation. Structurally, though, the story is as old as it gets, following The Iliad and The Odyssey. The Iliad begins in medias res and we’re already on the shores of Troy; Motown Burning begins with A.P. already in Vietnam. A.P. is a Motor City Odysseus, and Katie is his Penelope. The story is based upon a journey and a return, and someone who likes to find parallels can find several others. But I didn’t want the book to be a mere retelling of The Iliad and The Odyssey with names and settings changed. If readers get that layer of meaning, fine, but it shouldn’t carry the entire story. At least they should like the chapter epigraphs, which are from Detroit music of the time, The Temptations, the MC5, Iggy Pop, Dinah Washington, Bob Seger. It don’t get no better than that.

7. From my reading, I think the difference between your point of view and Faulkner's is that you do not write in stream of consciousness. Usually, the characters seem to be narrating something in the past that they have already processed. Am I right? Does this square with your sense of how the book unfolds?

Absolutely. A.P. is the only character who speaks in stream of consciousness; outwardly, he is inarticulate and would never be able to express himself verbally at such length, so it was necessary to get in his head a bit. He’s not a talker, but a lot is going on in his thoughts and he feels very deeply. With the other characters, I wanted to create a kind of confessional tone, like this was their chance to tell someone what happened to them, to set the record straight and explain how they saw matters, like they were talking to a journalist.

8. I was really impressed with how adroitly you had various characters approach the same incidents in the book. The one that sticks out the most for me is when you have this skinny kid show up during the riot. Only later do we learn that it was the main character whom we have already gotten to know. What do such techniques show us about point of view, perspective, attention? (Here, I am asking you to offer some thoughts on what your book can offer readers in terms of enriching their experiences.)

I’ve always been amused by the statement, “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” It’s also interesting how much the world today knows of Jesus Christ, yet very little appears about him in Roman records; he simply didn’t matter very much to them, barely a blip on the radar. So much of what we think and believe today is based upon point of view, much of it often manipulated or based on outright lies. Weapons of mass destruction, anyone? In the chapters dealing with the riot, the narrative voices are from a cop, a Black Panther sniper, a National Guardsman, and a citizen who loses a child (this was actually based on the death of Tonia Blanding, the youngest casualty in the ’67 Riots). In the Vietnam chapters, we hear from various soldiers in A.P.’s unit but also a Vietnamese soldier. History as a story is hardly fair, but I at least wanted to try to be fair in telling this particular tale.

9. Does A.P. die in the end? Does the disconnect between he and Katie -- Katie can't figure out how to hug him and he falls into his own hands, not hers -- signify the impossibility of bridging the differences in their experiences?

These are great questions because 90% of the comments I get about the book focus on the end. A.P. doesn’t die, but he is definitely broken, both in body and spirit at the end. I wanted to show that he has come to the realization that he cannot face the world in the same way he always has. Whenever something got in his path, he responded physically with violence out of pure instinct. It was how he was raised. Now, however, he cannot even physically stand up. This is devastating to him, and he must try to figure out who he is and how he can get about in the world. Katie is there waiting for him, and she isn’t sure how to approach him, to touch him in a way that won’t cause him any more pain. This is where I needed to leave the characters—no easy closure, no happily ever after. So many of the Vietnam vets I talked to expressed that sense of alienation and uneasiness when they returned home, and many still struggle with knowing their place in the world after what they experienced. A.P. is home and Katie is there to greet him, but he is a new man, tragically reborn, and he must face the world in a new way he does not understand or necessarily embrace. That split second with his hands covering his face will be the last he has before he must see the new world and his new self within it. I wanted that sense of uncertainty because that is what the characters are challenged with.

10. Tell us about the journal and press that you are starting up. What other projects do you have going on now?

I was approached by a fellow Detroit writer, Rhoda Stamell, about starting an on-line magazine, as if I don’t have enough to do, and Renaissance City was born (www.rencity.net). I wanted something that was sharp but straightforward and unpretentious, something that would be more than just poems on a blank flat screen. So we do have stories and poems, but several of the pieces are film clips of the authors reading, which I think is new and vibrant. We’ve also got art and music in the form of live performances I’ve taped and sound files I’ve been sent. My hope is to have more input and submissions from more artists in the future, but the start has been fun and we had one hell of a launch party! The press I started is Motown Rising, and I began by publishing my daughter Lea’s memoir, Lady Hazardous. It’s about her struggles with drug addiction, and for me it was a challenge to edit the book but also to confront what she says, because so much of it is personal to our family, and not always very flattering. It was draining. The book is solid, though, and it’s built on truth, so we’ll see where it goes.

ANNOUNCING THE FIRST MAD HATTERS' REVIEW KNOCK OUR HATS OFF CONTEST

2010-03-05T14:56:00.000-08:00

Mad Hatters’ Review is considering submissions to our Knock Our Hin FICTION or POETRY until June 30th (11:59 p.m., USA EST).

First prize winners in both genres will receive $250 (each) plus publication of their entries in Issue 12. The winning works of 5 runners-up in each genre will also be published in Issue 12.

All winning entries will be published in a print anthology called “Knock Our Hats Off: A Little Book of Curious Delights.” Each winner will receive a copy of this deluxe collector’s item.

The terms “fiction” and “poetry” may be interpreted broadly. Take a walk on the wild side through our pages. Take liberties. Governments are taking them away from us, so we’re giving them away free.

Our honorable judges:

Cris Mazza , Fiction
www.cris-mazza.com

Sheila E. Murphy , Poetry
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheila_Murphy

Our entry fee and modus operandi:

$12 per entry via PayPal to madhattersreview@gmail.com.
Poetry: 3 poems max per entry.
Fiction: 3000 words max per entry.
By all means, enter as many times as you wish.

All submissions must be sent to madhattersrev@yahoo.com with the following information in the subject line:

Your Name
Genre (Fiction or Poetry)
Title/s of submission
Word Count

Submitted works should be copied and pasted into the exquisite corpus of your email AND attached as an RTF Doc. If you’re submitting visual poetry or visual fiction, attach your entries as jpeg/s or gif/s. If you absolutely MUST, submit these offerings in PDF format.

Pages of texts should be titled, but your name should only appear on the subject line of your email, as submissions will be read blind. We’ll ask for your bio and optional pic if you’re a first place winner or runner-up.

Simultaneous submissions are expected. Just tell us immediately if some other lucky editor has grabbed your gem/s. But please realize that we won’t refund entry fees.

Winning entries will be announced by September 15th. Please address queries to madhattersrev@yahoo.com (subject line: QUERY).

Susan Smith Nash and her stories in the 2009 Big Bridge

2010-02-23T12:20:00.000-08:00

[This is a part of a series of interviews of fiction writers who appeared in the last Big Bridge (2009), many of whom are among my favorite fictionistas, and several are close friends. In the name of full disclosure, I do have two stories among them. My motivation in doing this series is to learn more about some stories and writers I admire, and to promote Big Bridge which, along with Jacket and Madhatter's Review, is one of the few web journals that is exploring the possibilities opened by the internet rather than simply transferring print practices to the web.]

"Crystal Skulls"

Where did you come up with a name like Tinguely Querer?

That’s a great question. It’s a blend, based primarily on the Swiss kinetic artist, Jean Tinguely, who built moving sculptures and installations – “nonsense machines” -- often designed to self-destruct.

One of my favorites is his “Tinguelybrunnen” (fountain) in Basel, Switzerland. The moving parts spray water in all directions in a random way. Other parts of the fountain illustrate fruitless efforts (a shoveling machine that shovels nothing / nothingness).

I like the idea of giving the character the name “Tinguely” to resonate with levels of empty action, and also the self-aware self-destruction (or even self-aware deconstruction) of one’s own cognitive processes as one observes and perceives the world around one.

Querer is Spanish for “to love, to desire.” I like the idea that love and/or desire is subverted if one thinks back to Tinguely’s core essence. Also, I like the notion that if one reads “Querer” quickly, one is likely to see “Queer.” The “queer” gaze deconstructs the conventional in society, and undermines the authority structures we are not supposed to question.

I find it interesting that you chose to have the skulls stolen from the British Museum, given Britain's colonial past. You also bring up the Mayans. In what ways is this story exploring the significance and implications of colonialism?

In the story, Tinguely’s identity has been stolen, and she has to steal it back. That parallels the Mayans’ own history – their identity was stolen and partially placed in the British Museum. In essence, they had to steal their identity back. Yet, instead of being a formative, unifying experience, the action of getting one’s identity back makes one even more aware of the self-destruct button in our consciousness – one that finds expression in Jean Tinguely’s machines, and in the Mayan prophecies of the end of the world in 2012.

The skulls stolen from the British Museum turned out to be fake, which problematizes the entire issue of identity – Mayan identity – and the integrity of the predictions of apocalypse in 2012. Are our apocalyptic narratives constructed from fake or faked texts? If so, the issues brought to the surface are quite interesting. If our ancient texts are fakes produced in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, then what we think we know about the past is, in reality, an extension of modernity and the modernist teleology, such as it is.

What are you establishing as the relationship between memory and "branding"?

Branding can be an attempt to recreate oneself in a permanent manner. Consumer products are perceived as the most meaningful markers in a world where one’s experience of life, and one’s very consciousness are tied to commercial products. The way to assure one’s immortality (at least in the sense that people remember you) is to create a durable brand of yourself.

But, the issues become more complicated “between brands” – identity is in flux. The issue is that of erasure – and often deliberate self-erasure in order to re-create oneself. It sounds easy in theory, but in reality, it is not.

Anything else that you would like to add?

Just that I enjoyed the idea of building identity and then deliberately dismantling it, or effacing it by subjecting it to the attendance of a useless (but very busy) machine.

Arroyo

This story alternates narriticules relating self-mutilation with narriticules about technology and love. Do you see a relationship between masochism, or something like it, and technology? between masochism and love?

In each case, people are seeking some sort of truth about the human condition. Whether there is, ultimately, any kind of “truth” is not really settled. There are definitely certain “truths” or, perhaps better said, “realities” – but the truths and realities are multiple, and they are all equally valid. The possibility that all are equally invalid is also a possibility. The “narriticules” ( I love the term!)

I do see a relationship between technology and love. I believe, in my heart of hearts, that technology makes love possible. Human behavior alone is just not enough. It’s necessary to have a neutral intermediary – a bridge, so to speak – to bring together two human beings whose own human natures are so perverse that they inevitably and invariably equate self-torture with love. Big emotions require big pain (or pleasure), I suppose. Left to us, we mess things up.

So, in terms of the narrative itself, it fascinates me to see the kind of technologies that facilitate the coming together of two things. The whip used by the flagellant is definitely a technology – but, it’s something that unites body and soul (in an uncomfortable way), but it does not necessarily unite individuals.

GPS and communication technologies most definitely can unite people, although the technology itself becomes the object of love. .

Big Big Sky

This one does not seem to be a Tinguely Querer story. How do you determine which stories work in that context?

I like the idea of doing stories that explore the intrusive thoughts that come to one, and to put it in an autobiographical form, even though the story is not autobiographical.

You again juxtapose technology with nature: antelope with windfarm, songbird with car, birds with farm implements, running track, and i-pod. The juxtapositions are interesting because they are not necessarily absolute. The birds, for instance, make a home of the farm equipment.

That’s a great observation about the juxtapositions and the fact that they are not absolutely. I love the idea of putting together unexpected items – not to necessarily draw meaning or to create a metaphor, but to introduce possibilities.

Lily Hoang's CHANGING

2010-02-23T11:27:00.000-08:00

I love this novel. Yes, I like this book and I am impressed by it, but more importantly, I love it.

Let me explain: this book is unique, touching, intimate. It almost feels autobiographical, but it is not. On page after page Hoang's riffs on Jack and Jill and other nursery rhymes, on romantic relationships, on cruelty and tenderness, on family, feel so intimate that to not love them would seem inhumane.

Changing, a 2009 Pen America Award Winner, is based on the ancient Chinese uber-text I-Ching or Book of Changes. The book is composed of 64 hexagrams, each one with six stacked horizontal lines. Some lines are composed of just one dash (—) and some are two (--). The unbroken lines are associated with yang, the creative principle, and the broken with yin, the receptive principle.

For our purposes, it is enough to know that these 64 hexagrams refer to combinations of concrete natural phenomena; namely earth, mountain, water, wind, thunder, fire, swamp, and heaven. For each hexagram, the first three lines refer to one of these phenomena and the second three refer to another. (This is how we get the number 64; there are 64 such possible combinations.) Water, as an example, is composed of a broken line followed by a solid line and another broken line, respectively.

To use the I-Ching for divination, you ask a question then randomly pick a number. Studying that hexagram should help you understand your question better. In an appendix at the end of the book, Lily says that she wants the book to be read that way. For all practical purposes, we can assume that the book need not be read sequentially.

Hoang's book is a new translation of the I-Ching. And it works by, for each hexagram, riffing off of its implications for two pages. (i.e. Each chapter is two pages.) A chapter is divided into six blocks of text, three on one page and three on the other. Some of these blocks are broken into two columns and others are completely solid. They correspond to the broken or solid lines in the hexagrams.

To see what Lily does with three hexagrams, go here. Note that there are six text blocks under each hexagram, and that in the book a page break takes place between the third and the fourth ones. Since it is easilly accessible on the net, I will use this excerpt as an example of what happens throughout the book. I will concentrate on the first one, "Obstruction."

The most direct discussion of the hexagram itself is in the text block that begins "This hexagram is not..." Since heaven is the ultimate creative force (with its three solid lines) and earth the ultimate receptive one (with its three broken lines), it would seem that this hexagram would be water. But it is not: it is obstruction or barricade. Hoang imagines the Princess Jill living in a castle behind a moat. Where did this come from? Throughout the book, in every discussion of a hexagram, Lily goes into Jack and Jill at one point. What's more, other nursery rhymes and fairy tales are quoted. So here, Jill is a princess, evoking all sorts of other tales. This quoting while riffing is very similar to what many jazz artists do, who, while soloing, "quote" the melodies of other songs as a playful and generative act.

This riffing and quoting occurs throughout this excerpt and throughout the book. Each chapter is composed of more than six riffs on the title coming from different imagist, allegorical, and conceptual frameworks. For an example of an allegory, look at the text block beginning "That us lovers..." The whole piece is about the narrator's inability to play chess well and, by implication, the lover's "clean" ability. This is an allegory about the narrator's difficulty with bringing intense emotional scenes (what else could the chess game suggest other than arguments, stressful decisions, an inability to be decisive?) to a conclusion. Perhaps they tend to fester.

Other text blocks under this hexagram are equally interesting. If we remember that with the bottom three lines we are dealing with ultimate receptivity, the block beginning "Impossible for the great..." becomes fascinating. It is a paean to the Taoist idea that the insignificant and nonfunctional (the traditional example is of a severely bent tree) will not be hurt. Here we see how crafty and impossible to catch are the small ones. The very nature of ultimate receptivity implies a strength, an ability to take powerful pressure and yet still remain. The total obstruction of the receptive is impossible (and this is also in keeping with the Yin Yang philosophy) no matter how hard anyone tries.

In the long text block beginning "Memory of the city..." Lily works the notion of water and rain as obstruction once again. Using conjunctions, repetition, and agrammatical structures she causes us to plunge down the text block like heavy rainwater. And it ends with the rye comment "before we're real stuck." The playfulness in this section is quite typical. There is a bouyancy to this novel in spite of its many tragic elements: cancer, growing old, homophobia, racism, breaking from family, and so on.

The playfulness, perhaps, comes from the the conception or intuition that animates the novel, the use of the I-Ching— coupled with the wildly free, agrammatical style. What's more, the play seems inexhaustible. Each chapter could be discussed for hours in terms of how Lily is riffing off of the hexagram. In the sections of the hexagram "Obstruction," she deals with memory, fear, sadness, definitions, Heaven, Earth, small vs. great, family, translating, allegory, and housing. All in two pages!

What's more, this intricately textured novel is not dense. There is so much room to breathe, so much tenderness — the mother lying next to a sick little girl and asking her to give the illness to the mother, and the little girl not wanting to get her mother sick; lovers hearing "how sounds move in groups to our ears"; & Jill walking "into a forest & there she sang with rabbits & birds & a very charming prince overheard melody. And there is tremendous pain — cancer and chemotherapy, racist comments aimed at the little girl and her parents, love affairs breaking apart, a young man almost completely rejected by his family because of being a homosexual. Each of these, returned to again and again under different hexagrams, causes us to read each text block in at least two ways: one in relation to the hexagram it is under, and the other to the other text blocks under different hexagrams that deal with the same issue.

I love this novel because of its tenderness, its playfulness, its ability to look at some of the most horrible aspects of experience yet not despair. To read this novel and inhabit its world is to feel that almost anything can happen, and it might be horrible. It also might be beautiful. But in that very randomness is the possibility for a a spaciousness and openness that is the source of endurance, perseverance, play, and good fortune.