10 vows, mostly broken.

1. Our neighborhood has magnolias trees that turn into babas at night. The retired probate judge to our left owns a dog that roams free. At night, the dog comes to the hill near our house and lets me pet him. He has fleas. I want to grow up so I can save money and drive the dog to a place that will help him stop itching. It hurts to watch him quiver and scratch, to watch the tiny dark dots leap from patch to patch over the abyss of white fur. I am already sorry for what we do to animals we can't claim to love. I vow never to have a dog or children.

2. I am 8 when the first list begins. A list of men. This one is populated with the names of my parents male friends who berate or insult their wives in public. At first there are only seven but one day, on the back porch, I listen to the dads talk about wine and two of them say they are chained, while another calls his wife a prison. They laughed as they speak but I add their names to the list. Soon I have ten such men. I vow never to marry a man and let him turn me into a prison when I am sleeping or feeding his children.

3. It is American Easter. My friends carry their baskets like bouquets - some have their first and middle names embroidered along the edge of pink-and-white checkered fabric. Since my mom did not send a basket to school, the teacher lends me a plastic bag. My name is Dollar General. The girls with the cheaper baskets laugh loudest when a girl with a fancy basket jokes about Dollar General. They laugh to win the favor of the powerful girl, which is always the one that has the fanciest basket. I don't want to celebrate American Easter or compete with others for plastic eggs. The teacher asks why I'm not participating. I say it is nice to watch others get what they want, and watching is my way of being present. But I am afraid of the girls, their laughter, the word friends. 

4. This is the year of the dogwood, the age when names left stones begin to haunt me. Emily Dickinson understands. There is a boy I want to kiss on a swing set. There is a novel by Nikolai Gogol on my nightstand, a land where a character purchases the dead souls of serfs to turn absence into money. I vow to remember love without worshipping the color of absence, the echo of parents' arguments wreathing the porch. 

5. Between train stations and Greyhounds, the world grows eyes, ears, wings. I spend hours speaking to strangers about things they have seen, desired, or imagined. Did you know Anton Bruckner barged into the chapel where Ludwig van Beethoven's excavated corpse was being studied by scientists? Bruckner was 64 when he stole Beethoven's pince-nez before being forcibly removed from the chapel. Beethoven was dead but Bruckner was elated to share a pince-nez with Beethoven's bones while  finishing the drafts of his 8th Symphony. I vow to keep moving, touching, tasting, learning.

6. I am 16, 17, 20, 22, 23, 25, 27, and then quiet each time a friend or a friend's family member dies in a drunk driving accident. I vow never to drive late at night or during fireflies.

7. I am older, wiser, unbelievably married, the mother of articulate mammals. My husband hugs me when I cry on anniversaries and pick a bouquet of weeds for the girl I left behind to become a wife. We go for long, restless hikes along rivers. I want to tell time differently. When the breeding naked mole rat – the den's single, gestating mammal – gets pregnant, all the colony members, male or female, experience swollen, growing teats which reach their peak size at the birth only to begin shrinking immediately after. Just prior to birthing a litter of pups, the pregnant naked mole rat runs wildly through the underground tunnels, crashing, screaming, thrilling, and tapping her tongue. Most pups don't survive. All the naked mole rats are blind. A non-blind naked mole rat would be tortured by sight. My son says naked mole rats have magnets inside their membranes. I vow to write a book narrated by a naked mole rat who creates a nation-state.

8. I celebrate Ovid's nickname, Big Nose, as evidence that my own sizable infrastructure is lovely. The world is too large for our narrow, button-nose aesthetic. People have noses bigger than hats, wider than luna moth wingspans. I vow to try and love the unusual part of me.

9. In this land, I drink fancy cocktails near tea lights, and there are no crickets to make the night feel real. One friend rages against dying her freshly-grayed hair. She says, I am going to grow old naturally, fuck the patriarchy, pass the pink zinfandel. This space is familiar, and I note how its boundaries change every year to include new aspects of female hygiene and grooming. The problem of women dying their hair pink or brown or getting a nose job or breast reduction assumes that these things have moral value, which is to circumnavigate the argument for personal autonomy, which is to replace one body policing regime for another, which is to say women have made an industry of doing this to each other for centuries. I want to sit at a table of complicated beauty: scars, imperfect teeth, body variance, human beings who regard one another with the fascination given to works of art rather than magazine glossies. I vow to bleach my hair ad infinitum and never trend. 

   Another friend says she feels fake because she got her nose done, and she wishes she could reverse it, or be the self that existed before the revision. The grass was greener with a small nose, and now the grass is greenest with the original nose. It's a bad example of self-love for my kids, the friend says. I put my shoe over her shoe and tell her to stop it. A so-called "natural nose" is not more moral than a "fixed nose" - the problem isn't our noses at all. The problem is our obsession with valorizing some aesthetic ideals over others, whether thinness, curviness,  white teeth, "natural skin", etc. Life gives us so few choices about how our bodies will be used or injured. The choice to explore and imagine, to inhabit these sacks of strange flesh,  shouldn't be punished by puritanism, no matter how healthy Puritanism claims to be. And besides, how does natural include a Peloton and a weekly massage? Surely nature is a mess and less expensive. I vow to leave wildflowers on this friend's windshield with a love letter and a limerick. 

10. Outside the art museum, my children hunt pigeons, the plaza-adjacent fauna. I take stock of my urges and moral failings, including the impulse to flabbergast the wealthy lady whose servant or nanny carries two dogs like a train, a system of tired choo-choos. There are no pigeons present at all. The son samples a bread crumb. The youngest daughter removes a green gumdrop from her mouth and sets it in the monument's southern-most orifice. There, she points. It looks vivid. Our attention swerves towards a child with a leather umbrella the color of church shoes, the glamour of first communion spectated from a pew, the memory of my friends promising miraculous things for the favor of broken bread laid on their tongues by a man who often wore a brass tiara. The line outside the museum does not move, but a fellow carrying a poster and a banjo offers free infotainment for cash prizes; he accepts Venmo, Bitcoin, credit cards. The sun torches all shoulders equally. It is summer. It is endless. And I remember the elderly librarian who told me I smelled of molding books and wet cinnamon when I asked if he was an archive on the day twelve televangelists swore the world had ended, and what we were experiencing was an illusion or an afterlife. In the early stages of something unpredictable, I vowed to read more translations.

52 poetry prompts (& a list of angels).

1. Free-write whatever comes to mind after reading the above excerpt from Helene Cixous’s Stigmata: Escaping Texts.

2. “Any soul may distribute itself into a human, a toy poodle, bacteria, an etheric, or quartz crystal,” Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge writes in A Treatise on Stars. Write a 7-line poem that distributes a soul into an unusual object that needs it.

3. Write a poem that touches a corpse without flinching.

4. Use Robert Pinckney’s “Lifeboat” for an ekphrastic elegy or ode.

5. Charles Wright once said that "all landscape is autobiographical", and psychogeography inflects poetry, whether erotic (per Richard Siken) or identity-shaping (per regional poets). Forrest Gander's Lynchburg writes from landscape, which is to say, Gander creates a landscape of certain words, a wordscape of living textures. Write a poem centering landscape as biographical subject.

6. Write a poem from the perspective of the tea-cup in the hands of stranger who speaks a language you can’t understand.

7. “The sun, in winter, is an estranged event, almost strident, as it comes in slanting...” Ann Lauterbach gives this to us in "The Night Sky VI". I love her comparison of season's sums, what they give, what they take, what they deploy leaving a context--an existing heat, or light, or whatever else we use to describe what amounts to the thing that sustains us. Lauterbach prefers winter for its "episode, the event, the quick kiss in frosty air." Write a poem about what seasons give and take. Address it to a parent or a caregiver.

8. Catasterism, the practice of comparing individuals to stars in poetry or narrative, originated in ancient Alexandria, with the Catasterismi (Greek: Καταστερισμοί Katasterismoi, "placings among the stars"). It’s all very exciting and it led to a habit of addressing individuals as those particular stars in poems. Use catasterism in a poem about a person. Pick a constellation. Or pick several. Or invent a new one from existing constellations.

9. Pick a favorite poetry book. Now write an index poem that lists fascinating phrases or ideas or objects or places or people in this book. Structure the poem as an index which includes page numbers. No integument or explanation: just a list.

10. Pick up a literary magazine and sit with it for a few hours. Go through the poems (or prose) and make an inventory of lines that you love. Then go back and create a list mag cento from them. Of course you can craft a cento from lines in a review or an essay as well. You can do anything that presents itself to your mind with enthusiasm.

11. Pick a word. Broach. Gas lantern. Free associate around that word. Or choose a letter and make a list of associations--emotional, fictional, scientific, clinical, commercial, religious, social, prescriptive, etc. Use it as a starting point.

12. Write a poem for which an insect you have never seen is the interlocutor.

13. Alice Oswald said she came to poetry from childhood terror and being alone in a room at night. She was eight years old and had found herself alone and terrified through the night in “this scary room”. “I saw the dawn coming up and I realised I couldn’t describe it other than in a different language,” she recalls. “I still remember the white clouds in the blue sky and the fact that they weren’t saying anything about what I’d been through, though their actuality was very communicative.” Write your own poem of origin. Or write a poem about the memory of being a child in a room at night, knowing that something existed which you couldn’t explain to adults.

14. Write a poem about a playground. Invite an exterminator into it.

15. In Ancient Greece, worshippers left offerings to the gods on the temple floors in mangled heaps. Describe one of these mangled heaps, detailing the offerings, the person who left it, why they left it, what they want from the god.

16. Now write a poem about a single object in temple offering heap. This offering attempts to trick the gods by asking for something that seems appropriate in order to get something that seems inappropriate. Give us details.

17. Write a list poem or instructional map guiding us back to your childhood, through its secret routes and landmarks, to its hideout, the magnolia where you practiced your first kiss on the back of your hand.

18. Reflection, interruption, and expansion are techniques that help thicken the resonance. Aim for a bisque. You are writing a poem about visiting a graveyard, the endless parade of flowers, the rotting red carnation who reminds you of prom, of not having sex for the first time when you planned, of failing in a interior sense, of finding yourself alone near a trash dump leaving the fake satin wristband flower as a memento. His name was Jerry. Like the one that died in 1917 from the influenza pandemic.

19. Write a poem addressed to Kay Ryan, in response to her statement: “I think poets should take the lesson of the great aromatic eucalyptus tree and poison the soil beneath us.”

20. Write a poem from analogy. Read Samatar Elmi’s “The Snails” for an example or model.

21. Babies who die before they can speak will rule the world after it ends. Introduce us to one of these babies.

22. Write a self-elegy.

23. In “Of Things Gone Astray”, Janina Matthewson writes: If left unused, conversations can grow rusty over time. The opinions and feelings we’ve expressed before, when left to their own devices, can grow sluggish and curmudgeonly. They become too used to sitting alone and unconsidered, and if you ask them to move, their joints can ache, or parts of them can crumble away. Sometimes you can return to an opinion you’ve not visited in years and find it’s died and rotted away without you even noticing. Sometimes a feeling we assume we’ll have forever can abandon us and leave a gap we don’t notice until we suddenly feel the need to call upon that feeling. Write an elegy to an opinion you once held that has died. If the opinion is shameful or embarrassing, even better—subvert that shame by narrowing it into sonnet form.

24. Captive magpies are the only birds who remove a sticker placed on their feathers after seeing themselves in a mirror. Write a poem that grows from or includes this strange fact.

25. "Wrongness has its own color and it is not like anything else,” Anne Carson wrote in her essay, "Totality: The Color of Eclipse." Write a poem with fourteen lines, a vestigial sonnet, that describes the color of wrongness. Include an insect and turn at least one verb into a noun.

26. Mary Cappello calls the lecture "nonfiction's lost performative"; the lecture’s origin lies in "the note," that morsel allotted to space in a notebook. The good lecture "errs on the side of rapture rather than vehemence." And the notebook is "the lecture's tipping point;" it "combines the energy of containment with the velocity of scatter." Of course you should write a lecture poem. Haven’t you been wanting to do this since reading Anne Carson and Mary Ruefle?

27. Start with a title that does the work of framing. For example, here are a few titles inspired by Philip Metres' craft essay, "More Than Just A Pretty Hat": Title that cat calls the form of your poem. Title that whistles. Situating title. Title from 4th Dimension. Title of poem I wish I had written. Title with an American word in it. On luminous mystery Etc. Title that is a question. Title beginning with an ing verb. Title after song. Title made from two titles with or between them. Title with its finger on the trigger. Or write a list poem of possible titles that ends in a childhood memory.

28. An epitome (/ɪˈpɪtəmiː/; Greek: ἐπιτομή, from ἐπιτέμνειν epitemnein meaning "to cut short") is a summary or miniature form, or an instance that represents a larger reality; also used as a synonym for embodiment.   An abridgment differs from an epitome in that an abridgment is made of selected quotations of a larger work; no new writing is composed, as opposed to the epitome, which is an original summation of a work, at least in part. Choose five books and write an epitome about each one. Limit yourself to a page of text, whether prose or lineated.

29. Write an abridgment of a book written by a neighbor who doesn’t exist. Play with how to list the quotations. The title will do a tremendous amount of work in creating context for this poem.

30. “Epitomacy” means "to the degree of." Write a poem that includes: an uncommon hue of blue, a mathematical formula or a paradox, a dead relative, water (in whatever form), and the word epitomacy. You can use it in the title and leave it out of the poem, or you can bring it into the poem.

31. Write a blazon. Then write a counter-blazon addressed to the lover’s pony.

32. Why not try the cameo form invented by Alice Spokes? Pick a small worthy of a cameo. Or keep a list of small things which deserve cameos and choose three of them to work on.

33. Write a poem of praise for an ordinary day that lists its beauties — anything from litany to inventory. See Afua Ansong's "Saturday, Like This" for inspiration.

34. A curio cabinet is a space of access to nostalgia, a jumping-off point towards strange juxtapositions. Spend some time exploring Geoffrey Nutter's compendium and then select a few pieces to combine in a poem that uses a second-person narrator.

35. Arthur Rimbaud fell in love with Paul Verlaine, and got shot in the wrist by him. Then saw him go to jail for it. What is love in poetry? It is blood. It is the blood of the words and their gauntlets. Write an ode to a particular gauntlet love has left in one’s path.

36. Write a list poem of love gauntlets. Include fine art paintings and pop-culture movies for referents.

37. Read “Anxiety” by Frank O’Hara, and write your own response to it.

38. Knowing how to bring the bend of a blue note into a line break is astonishing. The reader can't unhear it in Carolyn Oliver's "Listening to Ralph Vaughan Williams on a Tuesday Night." Edit an old poem with an eye to bending a blue note. Or write a poem while listening to a favorite blues song.

39. Read “Making Love To Myself” by James L. White, and write an epistolary poem to White’s speaker.

40. Read Beth Gordon’s “Elegy With Flying Tires” and use it as model or prompt.

41. Read Sylvia Plath’s “Sheep In Fog”. Select a line from this poem to begin your own poem. Use Plath’s stanza-lengths as a constraint.

42. After reading Yannis Ristos’ poem, “Broadening”, free-write ten images that the word "broadening” elicits. Then select a few of these images to build into a poem that includes a landscape altered by climate change. Don’t write images related to climate change landscapes—let tension emerge from the weird juxtapositions.

43. Tug-of-war is a time-honored American game that originated in England, where two captains were appointed for this game, and they took turns choosing partners and team members until all present were equally divided. We play division. A line is drawn or scratched on the dirt’s surface. The object is to draw the other over the line. The game isn’t over until the entire party has been pulled over. But one cannot let go of the line. To be a team player means to never let go of the line. Write an instructional poem on how to play tug-of-war in a corporate workplace. Use the grammar and syntax that speaks to a child audience. Evoke your own sensual memories of childhood tug-of-war to create tension in the voice and to dislocate the narration.

44. Dietrologia is the Italian word for the science of what is behind something, what is behind an event. Write one. Use neologisms.

45. Read Philip Metres’ essay, “In the Den of the Voice,” and write a persona poem from the perspective of Dimitri Psurtsev. Or pick a descriptive paragraph to create an erasure from it.

46. At the top of a blank sheet of paper, write the following title: “This is for me to say since the old times." Then add a note attributing this title to Diane Williams’ short story, "Tureen". Now write the poem.

47. “There is a man trying to remember his life / as a single incident and a few words.” Use these two lines from Mary Ruefle’s "The Blue of October" to recreate the man and the memory. Limit yourself to 7 lines, and the single incident should appear in the fifth line. See if the final line can consist of three words with commas between them and no prepositions.

48. Write a poem in response to Saidiya Hartman’s incredible "The Plot of Her Undoing." Borrow the first clause or just the conceit. Make sure to attribute it. “The undoing of the plot begins when everything has been taken…..”

49. The image of the seraph below is from medieval book of hours. Explore the iconography collection in The Morgan Library and Museum and see if any of them deserve a poem portrait. Or a litany. Or a ballade.

50. Using the ridiculously long list of angels [see below], write a poem that invokes a non-canonical angel. Note that many of these angels are also considered demons, which is why they live outside the canon of acceptable angels.

51. The poem encounters Harahel, the angel of archives, in a gym. Why?

52. The poem invokes Rochel, the angel of lost things, in a strip mall parking lot. What is missing?

List of Angels

Nadiel, the angel of migration
Poteh, also called Purah, angel of forgetting and oblivion
Artiya'il, remover of grief
Baraqiel, guardian of lightning 
Cassiel, archangel of solitude and tears
Israfil, archangel of music
Kalka'il, who oversees the fifth heaven
Lailah, angel of night and conception
Nakir, angel of death and guardian of the faith of the dead
Pahaliah, throne of virtuosity
Radueriel, angel of song, leader of heavenly choirs who can create lesser angels with his mouth
Raziel, keeper of secrets
Sandalphon, protector of unborn children
Purson, fallen angel who rides a bear and carries a viper and knows the past and the future 
Mach, who can make you invisible
Shateiel, angel of silence
Ridyah, angel of rain
Rochel, angel of lost objects
Satarel, guardian of hidden things
Abuioro who reveals rare books if requested
Aftiel who governs twilight
Almiras who teaches invisibility
Amaliel, angel of weakness
Andas, the angel of the air
Ardarel, the angel of fire
Barachiel, angel of the altitudes, guardian of lightning 
Naamah, angel of prostitution
Harahel, angel of archives
Rahardon, angel of terror
Balberith who notarizes pacts made with the devil
Temeluch who cares for babies born from adultery
Radueril, angel of poetry
The Angel of Clouds who has no other name
Gazardiel who oversees the rising and setting of the sun
Azarel who writes the names of the born and the dead in a book named eternity
Belial, angel of darkness, angel of the earth, also known as Satan
Cerviel, angel of courage
Chosniel whose dominion is human memory and who assists in passing examinations 
Dumah, angel of dreams
Ebuhuel, angel of impotence
Eirnilus, angel who rules all fruit
Sulphalatus, angel of the dust
Flaef who rules human sexuality
Fromezin, angel of the second hour of night 
Gabuthelon who will govern at the end of the earth
Gagiel, angel of fish
Hamal who rules the waters
Harbonah, angel of destruction and confusion who drives a donkey around the cosmos
Israfel, angel of resurrection and music
Jazar, angel of the seventh hour of the day who can create love between two humans
Jeliel whose name is inscribed on the Tree of Life and who inspires passion among us
Lumiel, angel of the dawn, angel of the light, also known as a Lucifer, and misunderstood for centuries
Mahzian, angel of eyesight
Miniel whos name, when invoked, can  induce love in a frozen maiden
Mumiah, angel of longevity and science
Nahaliel who rules creeks and streams
Narsinah, angel of heroes and heroism
Orifiel, angel of the apocalypse, among the angels of creation, ruler of wilderness and untarnished landscapes
Otheos, guardian of hidden treasures
Tablibik, angel of fascination
Tahariel, angel of purity
Tezalel, angel of fidelity
Theliel, angel of love
Tubiel, angel of small birds who heals broken nests.
Yurkemi, angel of hail.
Zachriel, angel of memory, angel of surrender.
Zahun, angel of scandal.
Zianor, angel who gives artistic talents.
Zikiel, angel of comets and meteors.
Zi'iel, angel of commotion.

W. G. Sebald's emigrants and APSTogether.

I love #APSTogether, so I couldn’t resist reading W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants (translated by Michael Hulse) along with Elisha Gabbert this month, and because it helps to keep my thoughts in one place, I’m doing so here. You can still join or dive in…

“Dr. Henry Selwyn”

Dr. Henry Selwyn is "a kind of ornamental hermit" to the garden of the house owned by his estranged wife, Mrs. Selwyn, also known as Elli, a sharp businesswoman. The ruined tennis courts, the things "fallen into disrepair" for lack of use or context, pick up the theme in Sebald's work. One sees the things fallen into disrepair as an extension of their marriage, which has long been uninhabitable. 

A mystery: what Sebald calls an "annihilating verdict" on our lifestyles follows Elli's simple remark that the bathroom "reminded her of a freshly painted dovecote." 

The servant, Elaine, is the house's only full-time resident, since Mr. Selwyn lives in his hermit house and Elli is often away on business. Elaine is alienated from the outset; Sebald compares her short hair to that of inmates in asylums, bringing both carceral systems and madness into the room. Although no food comes out of the kitchen, Elaine seems to always been there, doing kitchen work, being invisible.  The "shadows of servants" roam behind the walls, and Sebald senses them, saying the employers should fear "those ghostly creatures who, for scant wages, dealt with the tedious tasks that had to be performed daily." 

*

A fragment from “Dr. Henry Selwyn” puzzled me to distraction: it felt significant. In this fragment, Sebald describes a chateau he had visited where “two crazy brothers had built a replica of the facade of Versailles”, which Sebald described as “an utterly pointless counterfeit.”

What does it mean for a facade to be counterfeit, given that a facade is, by definition, not an original, and therefore counterfeit? I wondered if this was a question of translation, although it felt like a reflective space, a Sebaldian tourniquet that contains others.

In 1939, Benjamin Péret published the essay, "Ruins: Ruins of Ruins" in a small surrealist journal. It is hard not to imagine that Sebald read this essay at some point, hard not to find a similar surface when Péret speaks of ruins as serial - "One ruin drives away another, the one that preceded it, killing it." 

A few paragraphs later, Péret adds: 

Revolting Versailles, incapable of producing a ruin because it is bereft of ghosts it couldn't give rise to, is as opposed to the ruin of the Middle Ages as the waterfall is to the electricity station. Enemies to the death because the first is killed by the second which springs up from it.

Doesn’t this evoke the counterfeit ruin of the Versailles facade built by the two crazy brothers? Peret moves towards articulating an aesthetic of ruins which feels kindred to themes in Sebald’s own work, and “Dr. Henry Selwyn” seems to be in conversation with this essay, or with Péret’s discrimination between ruins, which he takes the medieval ruins as “fresh” while Versailles is “degenerate”, suggesting that one ruin has some form of life in it while the other remains uninhabitable.

Unlike the Goths or Romantics, Péret doesn't read sublimity into the ruins so much as decay and wreck. Since leaving the womb, man seeks a castle, a cave which his image can haunt. The death gesture is "another castle, a ridiculous bogey....built to the scales of the worms that gnaw him."  As for man, he is "a ghost for himself and the castle visited by his own ghost." I hear Elaine in the kitchen, and wonder what Elli’s name was short for— and whether it was Elaine, shortened to Elli to distinguish and set the two women apart?

Again, the empty house and servant ghosts come to mind when Péret describes the silence of the oyster or snail as something which man covets and envies. Man covets the safe shell straight into the "hideous suburban villa" of the "pathetic petit-bourgeois". (*I'll be darned if Bachelard isn't implicated in this.) To quote Peret again:

The dog born of a dog barely recognizes the wolf's ruins, but those of the tiger are for him no more than a trace in the sand, this sand whose ruins he has forgotten, derisory images of those he fails to recognize.

Haunted by "the phantoms of his childhood", man seeks answers from excavated origins. "There is nothing in that childhood to disown, except by someone who has become unworthy of it," Péret suggests. Sebald's characters are somehow unworthy of those childhoods, aren't they? Or that is how they see themselves-- as Germans who are unworthy by association, by affiliation, in relation to the origin they have claimed?

Thus "Stalin tries to make Lenin a dead ruin, the better to betray him." And Peret suggests that poets throughout history have fed on the execution, on the sepulchral death mask of a ruined man, on the corpse who can no longer speak. But in the museum - and in literature - "One ruin drives away another, the one that preceded it, killing it."

Going back to the “freshly painted dovecote” that replaces the hothouse: is Sebald taking this as a counterfeit Versailles facade? Is that why it’s an "annihilating verdict”?

"I have never been able to bring myself to sell anything, except perhaps, at one point, my soul," Henry confesses to Sebald, without expanding on this Faustian bargain.  We are left with Henry’s suicide, in the small house he called his “folly”, in the garden of the wife and nice life from which he remained estranged.

Cape Varvara

Sebald alludes to it on page 129 (“into the wings of Cape Varvara with its dark green forests, over which hangs the thin sickle of the crescent moon”). The closest thing I could find was Varvara Village on the Bulgarian coast of the Black Sea, which seems distant from the boat trajectory in the text, and yet, it has it’s own ghosts. On the south side of the beach, there are rocks known as the Dardanelles, beloved by divers. Currently, the village has 250 residents. More from wikipedia:

In the middle of the 19th century, the site of the modern village was uninhabited, except for the small monastery or chapel of Saint Barbara with holy springs, after which the village was named. An older settlement may well have existed, as indicated by the marking of the name Vardarah on Max Šimek's 1748 and Christian Ludwig's 1788 map in that area. Until the Balkan Wars, Varvara was a small Ottoman village of ethnic Turkish refugees from northern Bulgaria who settled there following the Liberation of Bulgaria in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78. After 1913, the Turks moved out and were replaced by Bulgarian refugees from Eastern Thrace

The village is best known for its intellectual community of artists and writers. Many young artists came to Varvara in the 1970s and 1980s and populated a small camp called The Sea Club which the Academy of Arts in Sofia had purchased for them. Over the years a larger group of artists established themselves in Varvara and started to buy real estate and build a small community.

Kissingen

The narrator strolls the grounds of Kissingen looking for answers about Ferber and Luisa Lanzberg. He sits to read the local newspaper, and finds:

The quote of the day, in the so-called Calendar column, was from Johann Wolfgang Goethe, and read: Our world is a cracked bell that no longer sounds. It was the 25th of June. According to the paper, there was a crescent moon and the anniversary of the birth of Ingeborg Bachmann, the Austrian poet, and of the English writer George Orwell.

Again, time is told by the moon—the crescent—which reminds me of how critical theorists have spoken of the end of the village, and how Sebald haunts those spaces, inhabits the ghosts, and so telling time by the moon, or using it as a form of location, is antiquated. It feels out of time. Even as it establishes time and temporality.

An Archaelogy of Nightmares

an excavation inspired by twitter

*

Jeff dreamt he could not stop screaming at the students. Then he dreamt he could not stop screaming. Then he dreamt he could not stop. Then he dreamt he could not. Then he dreamt he could. Then he dreamt he. Dreamt he was. Dreaming.

*

Lori dreamt she had to catch a flight in an hour but she couldn’t find her passport, nor had she packed for shit. There was someone flying an airplane she needed to board, and someone else cleaning their car so it would look nice when they picked her up from the airport later. Lori looked under the mattress for the passport as she had see someone do successfully once in a movie, but there was no passport or suitcase under the mattress, only a bread knife.

*

Dolfi dreamt that they had stolen a toy from a boy who stood near the metal gate, waiting for the toy to return. But the theft made the toy unrecognizable to the boy. That one is not mine, the boy said, small and strong. He refused it.

*

J. D. dreamt of many connecting rooms, an effort to exit, the word exit, itself, an effort; the many so hyper-connected. The more the merrier it was not.

*

Jennifer dreamt she was in a familiar place, but the door would not open. When she sought a more familiar place, she realized the corridor was going the wrong way. She opened a door and there was a terrible thing in a chair, waiting.

*

Michael dreamt of an escalator without a handrail in a mall where the shadow-people hovered near windows, casting their horrid silhouettes against the interior walls, at the treelike in is grandparents’ garage, where all the old trees lived at night, where they plotted the end of humanity in a grey, cold dusk: the color of missing rubber handrails.

*

Lisa Marie dreamt she was trapped in an elevator with the realization that she would be trapped in an elevator soon. At some point, the doors would not open. There was no way to predict when that point would begin, thus transforming a point into a line, a mutant moment which acquired its own momentum and demand for resolution. She wanted it to end in the dream. Sometimes bugs arrived. Sometimes bugs ran beside her as tried to catch the flight she kept running late for. The point kept extending itself into a line.

*

Math dreamt the curtain was rising on opening night, a dimming, the absence of script in his mind meeting the audience’s expectation. While it is common for actors to dream that they won’t know who they are playing when the performance begins, it is very rare for puppeteers, or the voices which emerge from inside a hand.

*

In Ed’s dream, he climbs a tower and encounters three severed heads in the belfry. He knew the belfry was for bats because they lived there in a horrifying story. He wonders what went through his head, or what made him want to climb higher, to this belfry filled with abject horror, in his head.

*

Veronika dreamt herself inside a tower, hiding with others from the apocalypse— realizing the tower, itself, was crumbling, falling apart. To know the end is a nested story inside a story about the failure of nests.

*

Jayaprakash dreamt he was the oldest one at school, but others only knew he was old, and not the oldest, so there was a pressure to keep this extremism secret. He is ashamed to be back, to be among the young and their newness. He hides in a backyard at the school. Weeds hide their feet from the naked concrete under gravel. The sky holds a sunlamp for the newest to shine, to look newer. But he is alone, antique, ancienne-regime as a ruin the students sit on when googling the sun.

*

When Michael S. appeared at the school, it was to dream that he’d taken a class he never attended. And yet he was required to take the exam. He was too old to google the sun and too young to unknown that he was too old to google it, and to know he had skipped things in the past which may have happened when he did things which weren’t studying. He felt guilty for the things he had not done, the things he had done, the things he dreamt he should be doing, the knowing he could have, and nothing.

*

Emma dreamt raging bears had entered the building, their fury occupying hallways. She tried to hide in small spaces and dark corners to escape but the bears followed, all corridors carrying the echos of growls.

*

Lynne dreamt she was on a freeway to nowhere and missed the last exit ramp. Also: the vague scent of Los Angeles or Seattle, train cars and canals, separate.

*

Hope dreamt of snakes in terrible situations where the snakes seemed dangerous, thus estranging Hope from the self who loves snakes in real life. She couldn’t decided which part to fear: the snakes or that self.

*

In Ilinca’s dream, the mossy, slimy stairs can kill her. The weblike attic floorboards won’t support me. Everyone and their mother lies. She knows this because ambulatory buildings follow her around the city. She meets someone who tells her she is herself.

*

Joseph dreams there is a number he must call, urgently. There is also a phone. There is a reason he cannot complete the number, and this reason is related to the phone, the number itself, the pattern of digits, and toilets which are not what you think.

*

Great Aunt Xenomorph dreams of cement blocks with emotional needs. They are so heavy. They are so heavy and the elevator door will not open. There is no magic word, no expiation.

*

Claudia dreams she is crouched inside the clean stall of her elementary church/school barthoom, trying to get away from someone she fears. The pipes above her head are dripping pipes. There are multiple crucifixes painted red by the light from an "exit sign". She is in the woods behind her childhood home, trying to escape again. Something adult keeps interrupting.

*

Nina dreams someone drives up. This person parks outside her house. She knows the person must not enter the house under any condition, so she locks all the doors quickly. Then she locks them again, slowly, dreadfully, as one must when there is no other option. Although she cannot see anyone, she hears someone walking around the house, their shoes crunching the grass, trying to open windows. The hamster who loves the red wheel keeps running in circles around it.

*

Brian dreams he is in second-floor bedroom window looking out over the suburban neighborhood, where he can see soldiers climbing over fences using special equipment, scurrying under hedges like sophisticated mammals. He knows they are coming to kill everyone he loves. He knows because he’s seen it on television, happening to others around the world, and now the world has come to meet him.

*

Ilze dreams a tornado is headed towards her just before the giant wave at the beach swallows her — the reward for having imagined is having it happen. She is in her mother’s house as it begins crumbling to pieces, the floor moving, shifting, splitting open. She has never written about an earthquake. She will not even dare utter that world aloud. Her teeth are falling out.

Grotesque or Nothing: Aubrey Beardsley

“I have one aim—the grotesque. If I am not grotesque, I am nothing."

On a recent binge-read Decadents, Neo-Decadents, and Graveyard-Goth poets, I found an old book on my shelves — Aubrey Beardsley: The Man and His Work by Haldane MacFall, published in London in 1928 — and fell in slight love with the awkward necro-romanticism of the introduction:

About the mid-July of 1894, a bust of Keats had been unveiled in Hampstead Church--the gift of the American admirers of the dead poet, who had been born to a livery-stable keeper at the Swan and Hoop on the Pavement at Finsbury a hundred years gone by--and there had foregathered within the church on the hill for the occasion the literary and artistic world of the 'nineties. As the congregation came pouring pitof the church doors, a slender, gaunt young man broke away from the throng, and, hurrying across the graveyard, stumbled and lurched awkwardly over the green mounds of the sleeping dead. This stooping, dandified being was evidently intent on taking a short-cut out of God's acre. There was something strangely fantastic in the ungainly efforts at a dignified wayfaring over the mound-encumbered ground by the loose-limbed, lank figure so immaculately dressed in black cut-away coat and silk hat, who carried his lemon-yellow kid gloves in his long white hands, his lean wrist showing naked beyond his cuffs, his pallid, cadaverous face grimly set on avoiding falling over the embarrassing mounds that tripped his feet. He took off his hat to some lady who called to him, showing his "tortoiseshell" coloured hair, smoothed down and plastered over his forehead in a "quiff" almost to his eyes--then he stumbled on again. He stooped and stumbled so much and so awkwardly amongst the sleeping dead that I judged him short-sighted; but was mistaken--he was fighting for breath. It was Aubrey Beardsley.

British illustrator and author Aubrey Beardsley is known for his black ink drawings that foregrounded the grotesque, the gruesome, the excessive, the decadent, the queer and the erotic. He lived a short and difficult life, committed to irreverence and a refusal to blur the line between artists and persona. Beardsley was eccentric in public and private; he was weird and fine with it. He selected his clothing intentionally, including dove-grey suits, hats, ties, yellow gloves. Arthur Symons qualifies his creative process:

….he hated the outward and visible signs of an inward yeastiness and incoherency. It amused him to denounce everything, certainly, which Baudelaire would have denounced; and, along with some mere gaminerie, there was a very serious and adequate theory of art at the back of all his destructive criticisms. It was a profound thing which he said to a friend of mine who asked him whether he ever saw visions: "No," he replied, "I do not allow myself to see them except on paper." All his art is in that phrase.

After a massive lung hemorrhage at 23, Beardsley converted to Catholicism. His health continued to decline and he died of tuberculosis two years later, in the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Menton (one of my favorite cities on the French Riviera). Following a requiem mass in the Menton Cathedral, his immortal remains were interred in the Cimetière du Trabuquet.

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Because Haldane MacFall’s introduction to the book is a fireworks of crackly syntax and necro-romanticism, I’ve included it in full below, for those who need a new temporality, a “twelvemonth” in which to exist….

On a side note, Donald Olson has chronicled Beardsley’s decline for The Gay and Lesbian Review, and he attributes the fall his association with Oscar Wilde and the aesthete crew.

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I appreciated how MacFall captioned some of Beardsley’s drawings with the word “suppressed,” which is not quite the same as “censored.” To me, censor lies close on the tongue to censure, which indicates a punishment, a price to pay for touching the forbidden, whereas suppressed is closer to muffling, gagging, preventing from speaking at all.

Suppression is preventive rather than reactive. Someone drowns when I read it.

MacFall also says Beardsley was “expelled from The Yellow Book” in its first year of publication. Expulsion evokes Edenic imagery, a sense of moral trespass which involves one’s relation to the forbidden.

The forbidden is that which may consume us if we consume it. The forbidden is what gives rise to the need for expiation. Someone must devise a ritual which undoes the anxiety of influence, the peculiar power to taint that characterizes the condition of forbiddenness.

Three versions of César Vallejo in translation.

César Vallejo’s “Black Stone Over a White Stone” (the title’s literal translation) has been a poetic obsession this year. Like Donald Justice and countless others, I found myself writing from its meridians. Because my variant from that meridian, “On the Death of the Day of the Bear,” is forthcoming — and because I’m in the middle of a translation workshop— I wanted to think aloud about why it haunts me, and how different translators have approached this particular self-elegy.

Here is the original version.

“Piedra Negra Sobre Una Piedra Blanca” by Cesar Vallejo

Me moriré en París con aguacero,
un día del cual tengo ya el recuerdo.
Me moriré en París -y no me corro-
tal vez un jueves, como es hoy, de otoño.

Jueves será, porque hoy, jueves, que proso
estos versos, los húmeros me he puesto
a la mala y, jamás como hoy, me he vuelto,
con todo mi camino, a verme solo.

César Vallejo ha muerto, le pegaban
todos sin que él les haga nada;
le daban duro con un palo y duro

también con una soga; son testigos
los días jueves y los huesos húmeros,
la soledad, la lluvia, los caminos…

*

According to legend, the poem was born when a very melancholy Vallejo strolled the streets of Paris in his black overcoat, and paused to sit on a white stone. This poem moves around this image, a sort of mental monument, and winds up elegizing the speaker’s life with a sort of loose irony that reminds me of Benjamin Fondane, Tomaž Šalamun, Ryszard Krynicki….

It looks like a sonnet. It walks like a sonnet. It turns like a sonnet after the octave, and this turn is a change in temporality, or the tense used by the speaker. I can’t stop palpating the posthumous voice which seems to revoke a post-ness, or a past, by layering time into an ongoing present.

“Black Stone Lying On A White Stone” translated by Robert Bly

In his 1971 translation, Robert Bly titled the poem “Black Stone Lying On A White Stone", and this subtle shift from “Black Stone Over a White Stone” seems to give the black stone more agency: the black stone is lying on the white stone rather than merely existing in a positional relationship over it.

Here is Bly’s translation.

The first line of each stanza is indented; the speaker begins in what seems to be a first-person “I” and uses the future tense, only to switch after the octave, where the envoi begins: “César Vallejo is dead.” It’s possible to read this as an identification with death, with deadness, with an epitaph or a headline. But this poem manages to avoid self-pity—there is something courageous and gorgeous in how it lays out the descriptions without being maudlin.

I don’t feel sorry for the speaker when I read it. What I feel is a sense of existential and ontological respect.

Bly’s translation, like Seiferle’s, puts a negative between the dashes in the third line: “—and I don’t step aside—”. The negative makes the speaker’s voice more passive than it might otherwise sound (which you can see in Andreas Rojas’ version, which translates that line “— and by this I stand—”.

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“Black Stone On A White Stone” translated by Rebecca Seiferle

Rebecca Seiferle’s translation also does something with the title, namely dispenses with the positional modifier “over” and keeps the black stone simply on the white stone, which sounds less hierarchal, or begins the image without an undertone of dominance.

Here is Rebecca Seiferle’s 2008 translation.

Like Bly, Seiferle preserves the stanzaic structure: two quatrains and two tercets.

Like Bly, she indents the first line of each stanza — though she doesn’t do this in the first stanza, a practice I normally associate with prose (i.e. leaving the first paragraph unindented and beginning indentations with the second paragraph). Maybe the self-elegy plays into this choice, or maybe the translator wants to begin with a more anchored I, a more assertive first-person that will increase the impact of the shift in “I” across the poem.

In the translator’s note, Seiferle says she gave up the metric form of the original (a hendecasyllabic count, except for line ten) in order to keep the the language and images, or permit the interruption of time in grammar to be louder than the interruption of time in form.

I thought it interesting that Seiferle’s translation is the only one of the three to not use “Everyone beat him” in the third stanza, choosing a lowercase “they kept hitting him” which isn’t entirely in past tense but closer to something ongoing. “Kept” also feels talismanic here, as something the poet “kept”, or something which creates a fascinating relationship with the “witnesses” of the final stanza. Witnesses keep things they have seen; witnesses are the keeper of visual events, and in this poem, the witnesses are not humans — they are objects or abstract states or segments of time.

To me, Seiferle’s translation inflects the white stone, or draws back to the title in which a rock might speak, or see, and there are monuments in that juxtaposition.

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“Black Stone Over A White Stone” translated by Andres Rojas

Andrea Rojas titled his translation directly, matching Vallejo’s title word-for-word. The black stone is over the white stone. The positionality leaves us wondering if the black stone covers the white stone, or reduces the white stone’s visibility. We are seeing the black stone, and the physical relationship between the stones is clear from the outset. That kind of clarity in titling provides space for visual subversion later: the obvious begs to be undone.

Here is Andreas Rojas’ translation (from his blog).

Rojas doesn’t indent the first lines (and this may due to technical formatting issues on blogs) but he, too, keeps the stanzaic structure. What I value about this translation is its proximity to a direct, word-for-word model that allows one to see the bones. Describing his translation as “inelegantly worded”, Rojas explains his choices:

I am told the 10th line should properly read “without HIS doing anything to them.” I almost instinctually translated it as “without HIM doing anything to them,” and that’s how I’ve kept it for the clarity the “wrong” usage affords.

My solution is inelegantly worded, but it conveys both meanings Vallejo implies with his switch from the past tense (“le pegaban”) to the present tense (“les haga nada”): they beat him “without him doing anything to them” to cause the beatings and “without him doing anything to them” after he was beaten. Since “he” is dead now, impunity for prior beatings is guaranteed. Vallejo’s shift in tense also implies that the beatings were carried out with impunity even while “he” was alive.

He focuses on the double-meaning of the poem’s last word, “casinos”, often translated as “paths” or “roads”:

In Spanish, however, “camino” also means “a journey taken from one place to another.” (See the Royal Spanish Academy’s Dictionary of the Spanish Language, definition 3). I have translated “caminos” as “journeys” to capture the broader meaning I believe Vallejo intended. The same translation is possible in at least one other Romance language: “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita” (“In the middle of the journey of our life”).

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What James Wright said of Vallejo, in the way that only Wright could say things, along that blade of love and despair which drew him to other poets, and led him to memorize their poems, to preserve them as talismans, feels true to me. I leave you with his word:

“I think he is one of the greatest poets in any language I know of. There is not a single poem in which any human being is treated with irreverence. There are a great many poems in which death is hated and fought. And it is fought back, not by some vague 'spiritual value'. It is fought back by Cesar Vallejo, lying sick in a charity hospital, dying of hunger and fury.... As a poet, he perpetually took a direct part in the creation of his own identity. He turned his back on the marketplace; he denied the popular press is right, and the academic community is right, to judge the imagination by standards that have been comfortably dead for a hundred years; he was true to his inner self. He was a dangerously religious man.”

The lovely contrary in Kay Ryan.

1.

Reading Kay Ryan’s Synthesizing Gravity: Selected Prose, one is struck by the note on the back cover:

“A jewel. Beautifully articulated.” (Patti Smith, from Instagram)

One is, of course, delighted to see Patti Smith lay one of Ryan’s favorite complimentary words—articulated—to rest on a social media grave that it may travel like an everlasting silk buttercup to grace the book’s cover matter.

As for the essays, themselves, one appreciates the continuity of Ryan’s contrarian keynote— as if she put her foot on the sustain pedal and loved the sound so much she could not let go for an instant—“The whole ball of who we are” brought to bear on the downstroke. The performer’s commitment to tone at the expense of dynamics is remarkable; it would ruin a lesser poet or pianist.

That’s the uncanny part: the way Ryan’s prosodic voice leans on the experience of marginality, or a view of the self an Unimportant Poet which is at odds with reality. Perhaps this sense of alienation is tied to her experiences as an LGBTQA person in California, or maybe it’s just the soil of a certain Americana.

In “Con and Pro,” Ryan draws an exclusive circle: “My poets are a dryish people. Lonely, and what of it. They don’t gather round a campfire.” This circle doesn’t include Walt Whitman, whose “big stride” is too “bulky” and “all-encompassing”… “I like skinny-bodied poets, the stringy ones who don’t impress the boys on the beach,” she writes. The shape of the poem, its body, is an aesthetic matter for Ryan, and she likes them lean.

Nevertheless, Ryan’s story of literary origins is as American as it is heartwarming. She and her partner, Carol Adair, taught for over thirty years at a small community college in California. While serving two consecutive terms as U.S. Poet Laureate, starting in 2008, Ryan used her platform to champion community colleges. If there is a prestigious, literary financial grant, Ryan has won it. President Obama awarded her the National Humanities Medal. By 2010 (the year she won a MacArthur Genius Grant), Ryan had published no less than 25 poems in the New Yorker, averaging a rate of two New Yorker poem-pubs per annum since 1995. If this isn’t a sign of being among the Established, one might wonder if establishment even exists.

In her own words, Ryan remains a “whistle-blower,” “an advocate for underpraised and underfunded community colleges across the nation”:

“I was reluctant to think of myself as a writer because it required a kind of emotional exposure that I didn’t want to commit to. I never liked the image of the poet, and I still don’t to this day. There is something way too romantic about it, and way too emotional and way too posturing. I come from clean-scrubbed people who would be embarrassed by that.”

In the words of others: “Ryan’s compact poems – which have been compared to the short, humorous piano pieces of composer Erik Satie and to Faberge eggs – are typically less than 20 lines long and her lines often contain fewer than six syllables.”

2.

The fear of being influenced by literary trends comes up in everything from her surly, lovely gripes about AWP to her writings about other poets. Anxiety of influence is present more as a systemic fear than a nuanced, particular one, and in this concern, one senses a fidelity, a first principle.

Poetry, for Ryan, is "this impossible pang" where the poem, itself, functions as a "trap — that is a release." It enables us to enter a room filled with treasure — a room available whenever we choose to enter it —but we can take nothing out. We don't go home with a receipt. The experience of the poem is singular, even when repeated.

As to whether she considers her audience, Ryan nods. Of course she does—and doubly. One part of her hopes they will sit up in their graves:

“I am at the table of the gods and I want them to like me. There I've said it. I want the great masters to enjoy what I write. The noble dead are my readers, and if what I write might jostle them a little, if there were a tiny bit of scooting and shifting along the benches, this would be my thrill. And I would add that the noble dead cannot be pleased with imitations of themselves; they are already quite full of themselves.”

The other part plays the poetry game, and “seeks good journals for the poems and good presses for the books, accepts reading dates and agrees to interviews, so that the poet might gain name recognition, by means of which the poet's poems might reach an audience and rise or fall fairly, based upon their merit instead of simply resting upon the bottom because nobody ever saw them.”

3.

Ryan often begins an essay by clarifying the essay was solicited. She writes about walking because an editor asked for her thoughts on poetry and walking. Hence, a brief essay on walking appears. Ryan describes a poetics of peripatetic observation, noting “the brain anticipates significance; it doesn’t know which edge may in fifty yards knit to which other edge, so everything is held, charged with a subliminal glitter along its raw sides.”

Ryan writes against notebooking with the toothiness of a brilliant marketer generating buzz for the scandalous surprise of posthumous notebook publication. The problem with note booking is Kodak, or the Kodak moment which develops memory a certain way, rather than allowing memory to return and mingle and exert subterranean influence. Her concern circles "the memory that might result from repetition." The details of the snapshot are less compelling than the "long way of knowing,” and "we must be less in love with foreground if we want to see far." Not for her, the spicy art being devised by those who take photography as a disruptive medium. Not for her, the Barthesian punctum. Notebooks enact a "dangerous piety" of preservation. They are religious in their remembering, and this religiosity tends to sanctify the notes. Loss is a gift which enables finding and discovering. Loss, for Ryan, is part of life. 

Although she isn’t one for notebooks on principle, Ryan certainly reads them. And reviews them — she prefers Robert Frost’s poems to his notebooks or his biography, noting that “the main thing one discovers in the notebooks is Frost's great fidelity to himself.”

Source: “Kay Ryan rises to the top despite her refusal to compromise” (Marin Independent Journal). By refusing to compromise, does this mean teaching at a community college rather than a state college or a private school? How is “compromise” defined on the American poetry scene? I hope someone intransigent and dedicated has written an essay on this.

In an essay on nonsense and slant, Ryan uses Edward Lear's "To Make Gosky Patties" as a slant ars. She lists the elements which are unique to this poem, and to poetry more generally (though certainly this is true for certain kinds of poems more than others). Among them:

"An invented goal”—because no one actually needs gosky patties; no one even imagined a need for them before this poem..

"Cowbird technique" — The Cowbird lays eggs in another bird's nest and borrows the form of it. " Nonsense isn't shapeless"… it comes to us in order forms, rhymes, limericks. "You can tell real nonsense from garbage because nonsense is shaped and tense."

“Exactness.” “Incongruity”. “Awkward proximities.” “A sense of immience” — the build-up towards a sneeze, that sense of a game underneath. “A highly personal idea of cause and effect,” which is to say, relationships and time. “The reader made into co-conspirator.” “A perfect absence of sentiments.” “ Indifference to outcome.” “Frustration of ordinary expectations.” “A wonderful sense of helplessness.” A modified glee. An object which resembles delight.

4.

Confession: Ryan’s essay on AWP was my favorite. It begins in the key of not-for-me (a key I know intimately), the drizzle of schadenfreude one expects more from minor writers like myself than major ones like Kay Ryan.

Let it be clear: not for Ryan, the academic conferencing and inner circulariums. Not for Ryan the movie set, the theatre, orchestral music, team sports, the migraine sure to appear alongside a crowd. Instead, Ryan will have “the solitary, the hermetic, the cranky self-taught…. the desert saints, the pole-sitters, the endurance cyclists, the artist who paints rocks cast from bronze….” She will have the metaphysical in plain language without extra pickles, hold the mayo.

How she ends up at AWP is simple: she was “invited to attend as an outsider, and to write a piece for Poetry.” How one can be an “outsider” while serving as US Poet Laureate is never explained or expounded upon. Presumably, all American poet laureates get to wear the tremendous laurels while also maintaining an excited foot or steed in the Outsider-Poet stable. A poet laureate may be under-recognized, under appreciated, and under-funded but they are also as Inside as one gets. It’s important to recognize that so that words continue to have meaning. Pyramids aren’t expressions of belonging—they are material, physical objects whose definition isn’t related to emotional events.

Planning to go while retaining her “alienation,” Ryan acknowledges this fun is only possible due to her “age,” defined as the time when one is no longer young and unpublished. Although Ryan conflates poetry prestige with age, assuming that all poets start young, get their degrees, and ripen into fruition, one is tempted to overlook it, as one must overlook such conflations regularly in certain circles. One overlooks such things because the skid-marks are familiar. “Maybe I would never have been influenced, as I feared I would, but to this day I believe I needed to guard against something, even if that something was imaginary,” Ryan writes.

“The most important thing a beginning writer may have going for her is her bone-deep impulse to defend a self that at the time might not look all that worth getting worked up about”—certainly all of us have been there, staring at the shape of the ice pick which masquerades as a migraine in a room where no one speaks your native language and editors, like all of humanity, struggle to balance calls from ailing kids with the demands of the book fair.

"Simone Weil would have starved herself to death before she would have gone to AWP," Ryan announces.  

“But you lost the opportunity to stay as pure as your idol by having kids,” my husband reminds. And he is right. Like Weil, I love humanity so much I can’t help being infuriated by humans. Unlike Weil, I am beholden to more than my ideals, my hopes, my life.

O, that level of moral purity - impeccable, impossible, and unlivable, how I miss it! How I mourn the way motherhood revokes it. I was so pure before looking young mammals in the eye and swearing that ghosts would not hurt them. My commitment to nonsense outweighs any credible moral claims I can make about the universe, but I long to be that clean again, to be abominable as the white cartoon snowman. 

Reading Ryan is like seeing myself in the mirror of my own Puritan peccadillos — minus the magnificent fellowships, awards, and prizes, of course, and the laurels of official Outsider Poet status.

5.

If I keep trying to understand Ryan’s see-sawing between Poetry-As-Nonsensical-Delight-Raft and Poetry-As-Space-Of- Moral-Purity, it’s because she is serious about seriousness, yet conflicted about self-reflective writing.

There is an anti-confessionalism current in her poetics that seems related to notebooking, a logic the says the mirror is the mirror but only the poem which pretends not to be a mirror is a good mirror. I wondered if it was the seriousness, the open-handed earnesty of notebooks, which makes them distasteful or decadent? Remember what happened to punk in the late 90’s— how the divide between the unaffiliated decadent and the identitarian straight-edged kept simmering below the surface until we fell in love and sold out and resurrected to find Trump got elected as the most hardcore members of our former punk coteries unveiled their Proud Boy flags on social media?

This is not to suggest Kay Ryan is punk but, rather to trace the tonal defiance, the countercultural opting-out, which can robe an ontological puritanism,and which starts off in the tempo-marking of punk, shooting a bird at the sunshine happy posters that lie from the walls of school hallways. I have no conclusions to draw that aren’t self-indictments, and maybe I’m looking too hard at a point which wants to be a line, as one is inclined to do in a notebook.

Despite the anti-sentimental keynote, Ryan raves about Milan Kundera’s prose, particularly his view of forgetting as a form of remembering. There’s also a fantastic section on Tantalus (page 106), and a moving, inspiring story of poetic origin (page 114). There are warnings, sirens, injunctions, and permissions. There is so much one can say about Ryan that I prefer to end without saying it—not because “my people” were “clean-scrubbed”, but because my people are complicated, messy, raucous, known for their tonal thickness.

I loved Kay Ryan’s prosodic company for its consistent contrary-key, and the She insisting upon it. Even though Robert Frost is not my hero, I loved reading her rapture. It is instructive to study the pantheons of wonderful poets because humans are more interesting and thoughtful when describing what they love than when ranting about what they hate.

Ryan mentions "the hot thing" in poems—the things which can burn us or start fires, those with the potential to combust or illuminate. One cannot make a poem if one removes all the hot things, since "it is the job of poetry to remain open to the whole catastrophe." And I love this as a note on revisions. I wrote it down. I refused to forget it just in case I could use it or share it:

When revising, look at the poem. Find the hot thing. If there is more than one hot thing, how do they relate? Are they even related? Are both needed? Honor the hot thing/s by not asking them to carry too much - give them space to breathe. Remember, a conflagration needs air, oxygen – and that space around it is part of the weight, part of what creates the possibility of fire.

Too many fires in one poem makes leaving the room easier. Or, if one wishes to make the leaving easy, then be sure to use direct address, as Ryan does in “Blandeur”:

Unlean against our hearts.
Withdraw your grandeur
from these parts.

And don’t be surprised if posthumous notebooks appear. I, for one, look forward to sitting in a meadow with a cold beer and all the gorgeous contrary that is Kay Ryan doing the thing she said she wouldn't do until someone invited her.

The poetic blazon (or blazon).

Blason means “coat-of-arms” or “shield” in French. From French heraldry, blason translates as “the codified description of a coat of arms”

As a poetic genre or technique, blason (or blazon) comes to us from 16th century French poet Clement Marot, who penned a poem celebrating a particular woman by listing parts of her body which he then compared to incredible things. Although Marot’s blason anatomique set the standard for blazons to come, its roots come from medieval heraldry, with its iconic representations of families and their attributes. Heraldic devices represented the entire family, or, in some cases, knightly qualities (e.g., the pentangle in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight).

In the blazon, the physical traits of a female subject are catalogued, often in sonnet, sonnet sequence, or love lyric, and described by individual parts rather than the body as a whole, so parts of the body compared to gems, jewels, celestial bodies, sunrise, and various aesthetic glories. Gilded by ornate, eroticized, the "real" woman disappears, and her image is reconstructed according to the male poet's point of view, resulting in the recreation of an idealized woman who thus becomes his possession.

It is the poem that gives the man the woman of his dreams. And should it be otherwise? Shouldn’t the man possess the woman he has invented for his poem? Ethical aesthetics aside, one sees the blazon move into English through the influence of Petrarch, whose sonnet form thrived during the Elizabethan literary period. Edmund Spenser, for example, uses blason in his poem, “Epithalamion,” where

Her goodly eyes like sapphires shining bright,
Her forehead ivory white … 

The simile compares his subject’s eyes to shiny jewels; the describes her perfect forehead, etc. Spenser also used this technique in “Sonnet 64” from Amoretti, comparing each feature of the beloved woman to a flower. A whole garden in a woman’s body! A stunning tablecloth!

Sir Philip Sidney’s “Sonnet 91”, a Petrarchan sonnet from Astrophil and Stella, parodies the blazon by questioning singularity. Here, we find the speaker, Astrophil, missing his love, Stella, and warning her not be jealous if he sees or interacts with other beautiful women, since all he can see when he looks at them is her:

They please, I do confess; they please mine eyes,
But why? Because of you they models be,
Models such be wood globes of glist’ring skies.
Dear, therefore be not jealous over me,
If you hear that they seem my heart to move.
Not them, oh no, but you in them I love.

It’s a self-soothing parody of what the blazon idealizes, namely, a single beloved woman — though perhaps this isn’t clear to Astrophil, who uses pieces and body parts drawn from other women to keep himself from getting despondent with longing. All women lead back to you, Astrophil suggests.

Sidney published this sonnet in the 1580s, more than a century years after Martin Behaim, a German cartographer, made the oldest existing globe existing in 1450. In a line from the sonnet, Sydney compares the beauty of the women he sees to wooden globes, with painted constellations and planets — which, again, points back to the visual.

*

The male speaker's voice carried the 16th century "blason" poetic form, with its erotic declensions of female body parts — but one man’s sacred cherries may be another’s man scarlet marbles. Another convention: in its earliest forms, the blazon leaned on syllabics at the level of the line. The octosyllabic or decasyllabic verse often culminated in an epigraphic conclusion.

Thomas Campion’s use of blason is infamous — and visible in the illustration at the top.

“Her eyes like angels” would return in 1990’s pop and various porcelain motifs stored in curio-cabinets.

The contreblazon inverts the convention by describing “wrong” parts of the female body (as in the visual form at the top), and the antiblazon relies on negations and negatives to describe the female, as William Shakespeare did, insisting his mistress’ eyes were “nothing like the sun.”

In antiblazon, an individual woman is fragmented, but this division is done to describe reality, not to create (or sustain) an idealized portrait. Supposedly.

So what would happen if the female voice set her sights on the male body in blazon? Isn’t it subversively playful for a woman to narrate a blason, to bring it closer to a pastiche, to lay a tooth inside the heart of the erotic pulse driving the male gaze?

For a contemporary example in which the female speaker catalogues the male lover, read Camille Guthrie’s “My Boyfriend”. I suspect Jean Valentine uses a fair amount of blazon in her love poems, particularly “First Love” (more on this in another post, if time permits).

*

Cards on the table: what drew me to the blazon this week was a mystery which may be a misunderstanding, certainly a fascination in Louise Labe’s Love Sonnets and Elegies, edited and translated by Richard Sieburth for NYRB Imprints.

Controversies about Labe’s identity and authorship abound, but I incline towards the assessment of Samuel Beckett’s Dream of Fair to middling Women, whose character, The Polar Bear, declares Labe: “A great poet, perhaps one of the greatest of all time.”

The pleasure of paradox formed an aesthetic, a flourishing field of paradoxical encomiums inspired by Erasmus’ In Praise of Folly. The Venetian poet, Ortensio Lando, published a book of paradossi in Lyon around the same time as Labé. Sieburth defines the umbrella term, adoxography, as “an ancient rhetorical practice based on a wry, semi-satirical laudation of persons, objects, or states that are in themselves unworthy of praise—such as poverty, drunknenness, ugliness, blindness, stupidity, folly, or, as the case may be, woman.”

Louise Labe's "Sonnet II" incorporates the blazon, which translator Richard Sieburth takes to be "queered"  by the fact that the first two quatrains, the octave, are identical to those of a sonnet published two years later by Olivier de Magny in his own book of poems, Soupirs. de Magny was Labe’s former lover; they wrote together in Lyon. Francoise Rigolot suspects Labe and de Magny drafted the octave together “perhaps as a game or contesting the idiom of the Barthesian lover’s discourse of he day; then, in the sestet, the two went their separate ways.” Thus, the paratactic apostrophes could be his or hers.

These is Labe’s version of the sonnet. Now for de Magny’s, which I will pick up from the shared final line of the second quatrain:

O stuttering steps, O flames that burn too warm
O sweet errors, O thoughts of my soul
That, day and night, whirl me back and forth,

O you my eyes, no, not eyes but fountains,
O gods, O heavens, O humankind,
For the sake of God, be witness to my love.

Notice how de Magny placates all gods, all deities, moves from the minor gods to the major God, as capitalized in the last line. His poem is speaking to the sky, to the troubadour of abstraction, while Labe’s poem ends by addressing the lover, himself. Both endings reflect different levels of amatory commitment and agency: one by disclaiming emotions to the ether, the other by questioning the male’s commitment to desire and love.

Siebruth calls it “the perfect palimpsest of an androgynous poem.”

*

Another interesting connection between the language and the performance of the poems, which is to say, the formal tools and the parodic possibilities of embodiment, appears In Labé’s Sonnet XII, “Luth, compagnon de ma calamité” (“Lute, sounding board of my calamity”), where the poet-speaker describes composing the poem as a process in which she discovers the words while hunched over a lute, her tears dripping onto the instrument’s body.

Since members of the cultural elite were expected to demonstrate their vocal and instrumental skills in salon-like social events, artists like Labé may well have tried to maximize the impact of their new poems by performing them musically, not just reciting them.

The octave ends with “toning the major into a minor scale,” but major and minor scales as we know them, in the modern sense, had not been invented yet. The end-notes have Labe referencing whole tones and semitones, that practice of music ficta that required the feigning of pitches which lay outside the strict theoretical conventions of music recta. Sonnets may have been transposed into musical form for public performance, and this may have been more true for female poets than males at the time.

One must add to the list of Labe’s influences: the lyre a woman needed to play in order to be heard, the performance of convention to pacify the male poets on the scene. One must acknowledge a theme in her poems, namely, the resistance to crediting gods or invisible entities for love — an insistence on individual agency and responsibility for the heart’s hungers. One must give the poet, herself, the last word, in Sonnet 24:

No need to blame Vulcan if you’re on fire,
Nor Adonis to explain your desire:
Love alone decides when you lose your mind

Forbidden.

1.

As the child of Eastern bloc defectors in Alabama, I grew up forbidden. True things hid inside the mother-tongue that kept the heart secret.  I blame my parents for my fascination with walls, fences, boundaries, barriers. I blame the sky for beguiling me. I blame language for carrying oceans. I blame myself for everything else.

2.

It is April 2020, the first month of pandemic; the book in progress, sidelined by childcare. Time coils, crackles, loosens: I am torn between restlessness and the recklessness, the loneliness of being housebound with three children. Solution: leave, run, escape by packing kids into the car and roaming backroads, our eyes peeled for meadows, space outside the choir of sirens arriving and departing the three hospitals near our house. 

Forty miles outside the city, a locked green metal gate appears, the road behind it winding towards hills. I tell the children this is it. I park along the edge of a ditch. The son notices the sign says NO TRESPASSING. He misunderstands the invitation. 

"There is nothing forbidding here," I assure him as an ordinary yellow butterfly settles on the gate, two long metal beams shaped like wings on a hinge with a side padlock. It is inviting. It is idyllic. It is the middle of nowhere: what a map calls Chalkville.

I have more to say but I keep the other things to myself. I turn the word bucolic on my tongue but do not offer it to the children. I keep bucolic quiet, preserving its connotations from their curiosity. I save this word for a poem I haven't written. The poem is always there, simmering beneath the surface. At this point I care more about the word than the clamor of three children who make buzzing sounds in the absence of bees. 

Look, I have done worse than what we are doing, I tell myself as we scale the gate, throw our legs over the top, drop our backpacks to the ground in different pitches of plunk. The sun lengthens our shadows. The sun sprawls across shrubs like a mother at the beach who silences the world by unimagining it's existence. We walk past a paved driveway lined by trees, soaked in fresh chirps, a tiny creek dawdling to our left. 

"It's not even a real creek!" the youngest announces, "it is a tod-dler creek." (She is the proud older cousin of a toddler.)

To the left, the son identifies a patch of cultivated daffodils--definitely planted, he confirms, not wild. Brown hair crawls over his shoulders like uncombed snakes. His hair is a separate wilding. "This place had an official gardener on staff at some point," he says. He can tell from the layout. 

The unreal creek toddles along with us for ten minutes, rounding a curve, passing a monstrous patch of kudzu, at which point, a silhouette of a steeple appears in a vague forward, also known as the future, and it rubs against the past, rubs against that once when the middle daughter smelled a rotting rat beneath the porch. Now her eyes narrow. The middle daughter expresses concern about the vast kudzu kingdom--its hollows and hills, the shape and dull rolling--clearly haunted. She has a strange feeling about this place which strikes me as hopeful; hope being the condition of having and holding strange feelings close to our hearts. 

When she lowers her voice to a whisper, I follow suit. "Micah is being exemplary," I whisper, stunned by how the change in volume changes the hue of the green things. This feels appropriate, the awe-filled tone correct when addressing a kudzu patch. It is respectful. 

"But you are confusing awe with foreboding," my son corrects. He is very articulate and a frisbee of meaningfulness at odd moments. He is not the voice of reason, though he resembles this voice from a bird's nest. 

"No," I insist. "This is the Church of Wandering; and there is the steeple. Every stop along the way may be part of the passion or else a tussock where a donkey paused to eat clover as a god thought his cross-thoughts. Surely we are monks in this."

I consider what it means to be a monk in an unforbidding place as we pass around a water bottle and start walking again. I resist the temptation to draw an analogy between sharing bottled water and drinking from the same chalice which might contain the blood of a man who is no longer alive. I maintain a relation to abstraction: we are monkish. 

3.

We approach the ruins of a stone chapel with a hole carved by a wrecking ball in the front. "Something massive must have been removed," I say. 

The son suspects it was a big old bell: a bell-tower with an open wound. 

The urge to write slams into me like a train. 

The kids want to keep going. One has a caterpillar on her shoe. 

"But we are monks," I say, "this is our discipline--to bring all possible attention to bear on that gape-mouth wound." Life is a form of poetry, and poetry is a form of discipline, namely, the focus and attention of one who wants to be raptured. The methodology is to see what lies before us with the lover's insatiable eyes, the gaze that can't touch or taste in moderation.

The son makes disgusted noises. 

I tell them to go ahead and ramble without me. 

A purple flower lifts her anonymous face from a crack in the pavement. There is this breeze, I think, which is not quite a wind.

"What is Mom doing?" the son groans. 

"She is staring at that hole with all her mightiness!" the youngest declares. 

"Oh look at that vine climbing through the window's eyeball," the middle daughter warns--"Oh this place is for sure haunted by horrors happening to children. It's like a tinfoil pinwheel."

Her simile disarms me. A good simile is a light that reveals without sterilizing the room for surgery. It is visible--it offers a tactile picture, its plastic tinfoil physicality embodying fear--not the abstraction but the cheap kitsch of its connotations clinging to what should be fun. And isn't it funny how so much of what should be fun in childhood is actually terrifying? 

I want to come back to the hole in the wall or the wound in the bell-tower, specifically, the location of this wound over the larynx of the bell-tower's throat. Is a bell-tower without a bell still a bell-tower? 

When the son expresses hunger, I groan. The burden of childcare: entirely mine during pandemic. A childless female friend celebrates the extra time at home: "I'm going to finish my book," she announces. My husband has taken over my study to work from home. 

I am somewhere between a steeple and a simile, thinking about mothering and losing your voice in winter and whether bells are like children who have disappeared behind the tall grass growing over the tennis courts. Whether children are closer to bells than missing balls. Only when faced with the weed-smothered tennis courts do I begin to wonder where we are. Why the tennis court nets are doused in vines. Why the children are hesitant. And I think about James Longenbach, who said a poem's power comes from its ability to resist its conclusions while being pulled toward them. I think about what it means to be haunted or remembered--and why the middle child is the one who keeps mentioning it. So much hinges on how we carve implication. Or what we want from the landscape.

“The Word Is a Lamp Unto My Feet….”

4.

Crouched beside the tennis court, a long, ranch-style brick building waits, its edges thick with the white blooms of privet, the flowers open, sickly fragrant. The scent is too sweet, almost odious. 

The children wander in circles, back back to the chapel whose entrance way is now visible, a hot pink, purple, orange and green clown face spray-painted across the wood front doors. 

"Teens must have been here," my son says. He is a teen, and therefore an authority on teen-ness. He helped spray-paint a mural on a city wall last year under quasi-legal circumstances. 

Above the clown's fluorescent leer, an engraved stone plaque makes its claim: Thy word is a lamp unto my feet. 

"It doesn't make sense," the youngest says, "unless this was a night-night church and people needed night-lights to find it?" 

The night-night church with a clown mouth and a wound in the bell-tower's throat. 

There is another brick building across an empty parking lot. There is a pink flowering dogwood holding an umbrella over the shoulders of a cairn. There is no one here except us and the paint-tracks of teens and the scandal of empty buildings you can't see from the road. 

Micah runs her eyes over the terrain. She reminds us that something awful was done here. She can sense it in her tummy like that time she ate too many roses off the brick wall and had to go to the doctor who said parents should know better than to let kids eat roses. 

The middle child has carried this guilt for years: "You told me not to eat roses, Mom, but you never told the doctor that you told me." 

I remember the doctor was pregnant, tired, probably not even listening. 

I ask my daughter to let that go, just drop it in the Church of Wandering's invisible confessional where all is forgiven but not forgotten--all is important, luminous, but also one single impression. Not the whole story.

This, too, is a discipline. I have learned to give joy my full attention from failure, particularly, my inability to find joy in home decorating, in settling, in using the scripts shared by friends for recipes, good workouts, affirmations, crunches. As a child, I was the joyfullest melanchole in Tuscaloosa County. Now I am mothering it's worried expressions. 

My son rolls his acorn-eyes as I sit on the last moment this rock could be called a step and open my notebook. 

"What happened to wandering?" he asks. 

His voice fades. I wander inside. I wander off in my mind.

"You can still eat violets," I tell the children. Violets are packed with vitamin C and stardust. I gesture towards a clump nearby. 

A purple clover actually resembles the instant before black hole swallows matter. I take notes. I confess. Here's what I know: it is easier to parse birds than to discuss how a face turns ominous or the way bricks change the tenor of nearby dahlias or the mist in his eyes when he kissed me. The not-blue of it. 

The notebook carries the conversations no one wants to have with me. My commitment to the notebook —and to writing — includes a commitment to these conversations that raze me, that raised me, that keep razing and raising the roof. I am happy when writing these things which make the world in which no one talks about reality, about what it means to live in bodies which betray us, a little more tolerable. 

The notebook is a secret closet where I go to resolve things. 

The notebook is the stable where the horses I've invented by discipline wait for me to ride them. 

"I'm really scared," the middle child says. Her voice is trembly, willow-like. She wants to go home and maybe come back with Daddy. There could be teens hiding in the buildings. No one knows where we are. 

Where are we? 

The wind lifts the hair round her face and I think if any of us can read the sky, it is this one--it is this child, the little limner. I give in. 

5.

Two days later, we return with my husband, official Daddy, paterfamilias, patriarch in residence. 

"Since I'm driving," he says, "I need to know where we're going."

I say we don't know exactly. Near Chalkville. It's a place that existed with a steeple and a creek and tennis courts. Someone may have stolen the bell. It's behind a padlocked gate. It has thickets of rolling kudzu. It's a room in the world we want to know further. It's somewhere on this road if we keep going. 

My husband merges, follow directions. When the metal gate appears, he pulls in and parks close to it. He takes his time collecting blankets, books, apples, extra water, a few beers. 

A white truck passes slowly on the county road, looking official. 

The son says we should probably hurry and jump the gate and get in there before someone stops us. Girls beat him to it. I follow. 

As my husband locks the car behind him, the white truck reappears. The kids and I watch from the other side of the gate, safe within the Church of Wandering, as the white truck parks next to our car and an alarming white male emerges wearing a t-shirt tucked into his khakis. 

"This is state property!" the man yells. "I am the city manager! It's a felony to trespass on state property!" He is walking and yelling in tandem, like sirens. 

I remember sirens with no stitches between screams.

He waves his arms for me to come back: "Those kids have no business back there with Satan worshippers! There are Satanic people that go back there and I arrested two last week!"

My husband lowers the rim of his baseball cap until I can't see his face as he asks the city manager what this place was, or is, and why it belongs to the state. 

The manager spits, his face flushed, camellia-like, two red dots on his cheeks resembling those of the church-going clown painted over the doors. "This was the home for Bad Girls! They kept misfitted daughters here!"

The middle daughter steps on my shoe, says she knew it. Didn't she warn us that awful things happened to kids here? 

The son is as tall as the city manager, or so he is thinking, when he straightens his posture and notes: "It's hard to see the No Trespassing sign from the road. We must have missed it." 

A blue truck honks three times in passing. 

It is unfathomably sunny. I imagine thorns growing from teeth.

Something inside the city manager is rumbling, changing, struggling with something outside the city manager and it's impossible to name either thing--the most I can do is note the conflict. 

"Look over there!" the manager points to the massive kudzu patch. "That is a crime! That was a Confederate graveyard until contractors used it as a dump for their clean-up." 

The middle daughter says she knew it. 

The manager asks what she knew. 

The son says no one knows anything anyway we should just leave. This isn't fun anymore. 

I tell the manager that we just wanted to have a family picnic, experiment with family values in a place we'd never explored. 

The manager approaches me with his pointer finger directed at my chest: "I hereby declare myself a constable. As a constable, I have the capacity to haul you into jail and arrest you for a felony."

Constable. Capacity. Arrest. The last word isn't unfamiliar. 

The littlest daughter tightens her grip, the sweat between our hands sealing us closer, a diluted glue. I want to comfort the kids and my man, but I'm mesmerized by the shape-shifting: how the manager has morphed into a constable without any strobe lights or magic smoke, only the power of a few words thrown from his mouth.

I hear myself saying I have never met a constable and how nice to finally meet one. What feels like magic may be the beard of a breeze my daughter construes as haunted. Or just a man using words to reinforce walls used to imprison young girls.

The manager's finger descends, the muscles in his neck soften, he says this whole place is haunted and we don't know the half of it. 

My husband picks a tendril of honeysuckle vine and puts it on the dashboard as he repacks the car. 

A brown chocolate labrador retriever appears from nowhere and nudges the dirt near the gate with his nose. The labrador lacks a collar. We don't know how long he's been here. Even the patch of white daffodils seems ominous--it must have been planted by the people who worked at the home for bad girls. The daffodils watched a graveyard get ploughed over. 

Since the manager's abracadabra, I wonder about signs, things I missed. 

The middle daughter didn't miss any signs. 

The littlest knows toddlers, the oldest knows teens, the middle one knows ghosts. Each has their angle of insight. I am here for the poem intended to house the word bucolic. 

“When the past is not preserved but discarded (the way you might clip hair or fingernails), the dead have fallen out of favor. They find themselves in the position of an aggrieved minority. They lose the right to our attention (and the ability to dodge said attention); they no longer have a say—they are remembered as others see fit.”

- Maria Stepanova in Paris Review. Her words came back to me when I thought about how the graffiti at the detention center demanded memory, refused burial of the past.

6.

In the car, it is quiet. I lay the honeysuckle over my left shoulder and let it slither across my arm like a feather boa or an honest snake. I let it settle into the snake it wants to be….."So where were we?" 

I ask this knowing where we were is never far from where we are. 

The map shows nothing. I search my phone for youth prisons and Chalkville. The words open it up. Known locally as the school for bad girls, the Alabama Training School for Girls housed "incorrigibles", "delinquents", or "waywards", most of whom were never formally charged with a crime. It was constructed in the 1930's to hold more than one hundred and fifty youth with non-criminal violations. The Works Progress Administration helped dig the swimming pond and design the recreation areas for what would later be known as the Chalkville Detention Center.

In the ranch-style dorm building, there is a time-out room with a heavy metal door and tiny glass hole through which guards could view the girls placed in solitary confinement. Metal bunk beds lined the walls of the dormitory, and the heavy metal doors to the windowless sleeping rooms were locked at night. 

We didn't get to explore this part. I learn about it by doing what a poet does when she finds a plant she can't describe--I looked for the root word, the etymology, the ways this plant had been used by others, the history. 

"I knew it," the middle daughter says, her voice low to the floor.

The original bell tower at the “Alabama State Training School For Girls,” which was a WPA project. Source.

7.

Other things I learn and share with the children: the 10,000 pound silver bell from the chapel was probably stolen by construction crews working to clean up the site after a level EF3 tornado with 150 mph winds barrelled through on January 2, 2012. Only eighteen girls and eight staff members remained in the school when the tornado hit during the night. As if by miracle, the dorm housing the residents and staff sustained the least damage. The cafeteria, school, and gym were completely levelled. 

In 2001, forty-nine plaintiffs sued the state of Alabama for sexual misconduct involving the state Department of Youth Service's Chalkville Detention Center. The girls revealed that, between 1993 and 2001, they suffered sexual, mental, and physical abuse at the hands of the guards and staff. 

The plaintiffs had been sentenced to serve time at Chalkville for shoplifting or drugs or skipping school or behaving in "unbecoming" ways. When their wealthier peers got expelled for similar behaviors, they went to elite private schools. 

The line between good and bad in Alabama depends on income and access. None of the girls at Chalkville came from middle-class families. All were raised in poverty. In 2007, the state of Alabama settled the suit for $12.5 million. Each plaintiff received $255,102, from which they were required to first cover the trial expenses and attorney fees.

Things I don't share with the children: S. slept with a guard who promised her early release in return for her sexual cooperation. The guard then proceeded to do the same thing with S.'s room-mate. When S. rejected his advances, the guard added to her work detail and physical exercise regimen. S. said it was easier to just let him screw her--to lay there and watch her life leave its body in suspended animation. The school's superintendent did not believe her. According to media reports, the guard was a great guy, and beloved. 

T. was surprised by the attention a shift supervisor paid her. At home, T. felt like an absence, a blank space, a mouth to feed. At Chalkville, T. was fascinating, worthy of a man's time and seduction. There were rumors of other girls he'd seduced at Chalkville. When T. realized she was pregnant, she sued the shift supervisor for paternity.

Across the street in Chalkville’s nice residential, planned communities, other fathers watched football and wept for their favorite teams between fists of beer and french fries.

“Students” at the swimming hole built for the Chalkville Detention Center by the WPA. Source.

8.

In “Faith in the Now: Some Notes on Poetry and Immortality", a lecture on poetry, Jericho Brown says: "I am more interested in learning about why we'd be interested in immortality than I am in immortality itself." This is how I feel about poetry, about the notebooks, about what I want to taste, share, or keep separate. I am more interested in the source of the hunger than the fact of the hunger. 

"Writing the poem is how we face the terror," Brown said. In this, "the poem mirrors the process of prayer." And the line-break is like doubt, waiting for the next line, holding faith in what follows from the word, the image, the thing which must be written. This is the thing you must write. 

When the kids ask what the girls did that was so bad, I say it wasn't necessarily bad so much as forbidden.

The word forbidden comes from the English verb, to forbid, meaning to prohibit or command against. By the early 13th century, the expression "God forbid" is recorded. In Genesis 2:17, the Garden of Eden contains the "forbidden fruit." 

There is no simple answer that doesn't violate human complexity. Nothing is fair but there are moments which teach us to kneel towards them. A story about surviving is complicated by what people expect from survivors, a redemption, an eschatology driven by guilt.

In this pandemic, I don't tell the kids other things I know about words--things I cannot translate into a mother:body. 

We are complicit in your silences as much as our statements. See, I am the mother who withholds her own rape from the narrated life she offers her kids. I still cannot talk about it. The words are the metal gate I don't want to explore or open. It is forbidding, though not forbidden. It is something I cannot climb with any word that has ever touched me. It changed my life and yet I cannot help internalizing the belief that my sheer existence in a garden assumed the snake. 

The patriarch's story wants my tears tangled in shame. The patriarchy includes allies who believe carceral systems can make us safe. What if the systems intended to save us are the sites of cyclic violence which ensure the continuance of the master's house? 

Against the canticle of closed mouths, words can do difficult things. The city manager, for example, became a constable just by saying the magic words. But words cannot do everything. Not for women or girls. Words cannot remake a world broken by its cruelties. They cannot save our bodies. They cannot restore the past or redeem it: at best, words can reveal it. 

This essay began with a barrier that felt formal, an inheritance of crossing borders. It progressed through a formal mode, namely wandering, that challenged the essays' linearity by invoking daydreams, unspent similies, strange bells. Now it ends in a space haunted by forbiddenness--a space whose history includes sexual abuse and cruelty at the hands of the carceral state. And silence: my inability to enact sexual violence on the page, my attempt to explain how a woman that jumps fences and risks arrest still cannot speak about rape. And this refusal is also poetry; my poetic "no" is complicated by a sense of duty to children and to our communities. 

Rather than pretend to give a "fair account" of the horror that happened in Chalkville (an account I do not believe anyone outside the students is equipped to give), I must foreground the uncertainty, the fluctuating ideals of safety, the unknowable and known in our own adventure as a family--and my continuing silence in certain poems where what I want to say remains what I refuse to be said by. 

I am here for the mystery. I am here for the power of words to break bread without breaking bodies. I mother my way through the institutions that fail children, the fences that hold us back from witness, the silences heavy in my own life and blood. I know so little over the long-term, and the poem accepts this uncertainty, this complicity in erasure, this silence of bars. 

The poem denies the innocence of culture in its construction of the criminal. It permits the unknowingness which counters the prison industry, the profit made from criminalization of underprivileged bodies.  

The patriarchy wants an answer, a clear delineation, an us vs. them which makes war and violence possible. But this is what the poem cannot give you. 

I hope we trust the “bad girls” more than we do the system that violates their humanity. I hope we realize that the god of Progress remains fairly Puritan — certainly masculinist — in the US, and the price of neoliberal progressiveness is more boxes, more fake allyships, more therapeutics that lack lived experience, more faith in theory as divorced from life. And because I have no words for the shape injustice lays over recovery, I hope we find a way to poem the most haunted places without shoving ghosts into boxes that suit our pet ideas.

“What do you know, Mom?” A litany of pandemic time, a question I elide, given the limits of what I know, given the forms in which I am known.

I know my middle daughter is the queen of foreboding. My son rarely combs his hair. My littlest daughter forbids her invisible pony from eating apples in the living room. I know the poem wants to touch what lies hidden behind a locked metal gate. I know reality cannot fit the pastoral. I know the word bucolic is still there, in my mouth, where it waits. It waits. Let us wander towards the poem. Let us meet in the ruins of the belltower: the hole in its torn-open throat.

*

[Sources: I have left the names of the Chalkville survivors as initials, though they are easily accessed in public records and news reports. I am grateful to Val Walton's reporting for details on the lawsuit against the Alabama Dept. of Youth Services. Additional details and the stories of plaintiffs were sourced from Amy Singer's "Girls Sentenced to Abuse", Marie Claire, June 2002. And to see the condition of the prison-space itself, to understand what happens to the girls who disappear into the carceral pipelines of American justice, see Kelly Kazek’s photographs of Chalkville, or this video.]

Yvan Goll, Claire, surrealism, and Paris.

Isaac Lang is born. Yvan Goll is reborn.

Ode to gift of free copy! I had a poem in this year’s Asheville Poetry Review, which brought some fantastic resonance into my mailbox, particularly Keith Flynn's review essay, "The Remaining Mystery: A Review of Yvan Goll's Selected Poems," which outlines Goll's life in the context of his oeuvre, and includes new translations of Goll’s poems.

Yvan Goll was born Isaac Lang in the borderland of Alsace-Lorraine, a contested space, a borderland of languages and ethnic affinities. After studying law and philosophy in Berlin, Goll became part of the new wave of German expressionism that flourished in Berlin before the War.

In his Expressionist phase, Goll befriended Lasker-Schuler, Hugo Ball and E. Hennings. When the First World War broke out, Goll’s commitments as a socialist pacifist led him to seek refuge in Geneva, Switzerland in 1914, to avoid being conscripted into the German army.

The spirit of the time encouraged self-discovery, which is to say, it demanded a certain self-definition as new identity claims (political, social, artistic) entered the discourse. Goll called himself "Jewish by destiny, French-born by chance, and designated German by a stamped piece of paper." He worked across mediums, writing poetry, plays, and even "an emotional surrealist film", Die Chaplinade (1920) — which I imagine Mihai Sebastian must have seen or heard about prior to the lecture he gave on Charlie Chaplin at the Criterion event in Bucharest.

In his flurry of finding the right name, Goll used two pseudonyms with the first name Tristan; it wasn't a popular name at the time, and so, to me, it suggests a sort of limning of Tzara, a marker that Dada was near.

But— one cannot tell a story about Yvan’s life without centering the woman who laid herself in the heart of it.

Klara Liliane Aischmann Studer Goll, or Claire Goll, as we know her.

Claire Goll (a.k.a. Liliane).

Klara Liliane Aischmann was born on October 29, 1890 and raised in Munich, the second child of a wealthy, assimilated German-Jewish family: her mother, Malvine, came from a family of bankers, and her father Joseph was a trader in hops, acting as the Argentinean Consul.

Claire married publisher Heinrich Studer, and gave birth to a daughter, Dorothea Elisabeth, her only child. But World War I was on the horizon, and Claire decided to emigrate in protest of this war. She wound up in Geneva at the beginning of 1917, among revolutionists and peace activists, studying psychology and contributing to newspapers and pacifist publications.

Chronologies dispute the dates associated with 1917 and 1918 in Claire’s life, and it’s difficult to reconcile them across sources, but many sources claim Claire first met Ivan Goll on February 10, 1917 in Geneva. They maintained an epistolary romance which included, according to some, a promised engagement in 1917, depending on who owns the chronology.

Claire and Studer divorced in late 1917, the same year, she met Yvan Goll, and a year after her emigration. Although the suburbs of Studer’s infidelities were vast, it was Claire’s affair with Kurt Wolff that served as the legal reason for which she lost custody of her daughter, who was sent to Zurich to live with Studer’s parents. (According to sources, Claire and her daughter never developed a close relationship.) But Claire went back home to resolve the divorce, and then met up with Yvan in Geneva in 1918.

At the end 1918, while in a relationship with Goll, Claire had an dalliance with Rainer Maria Rilke. Claire was crossing frontiers, and she heard Rilke was opening his residence and life to left leaning artists. They became lovers for what appears to be a matter of weeks, at a time when Rilke was also nurturing a two-month-fresh epistolary romance with Elya Nevar.

In a note, Rilke told Claire to come and visit him the same day. Claire answered at once. She had come to Munich to make contact with Rilke, she was determined to resist the pressure for marriage from Yvan. In her memoir, she describes stopping at Paul Klee's apartment, next door, to gather up courage to meet the famous poet. She found him to be a fragile man with luminous blue eyes and a mustache. She was impressed by his apartment furnishing.

For Claire, Rilke was the "romantic" aesthete whose anti-war position came only in the face of defeat and revolution. In a sense, Rilke's politics was always aesthetic – and one sees this also inflects his later reverence for Mussolini's speeches and voice.

Unlike the world-of-two Nevar described with Rilke, Claire's memoirs are acutely aware of other presences in the rooms of Rilke's life. Ralph Freeman qualifies:

Claire's imagination constantly focused on others in the background. When she mentioned his reclusiveness, she also suggested that his protected in was literally beleaguered by women.

Rilke’s nickname for Claire was Liliane —this was a time when noms de guerre or secret names held a certain frisson ing artistic circles, as they indicated an underground life, so having a nickname, or a private name, points to the increasing proximity between politics and aesthetics during the interwar period— and the fact that Liliane was Claire’s middle name suggests the presence of childhood in their relationship, or in the way they wanted to perceive one another. Middle names, after all, are intimate, known only to family, and usually it is one’s parents or relatives who use those names, and evoke those names. There’s something innocent about a middle name, something private behind a garden wall with heirloom roses.

In her memoir, Claire extolled Rilke’s omelettes, his aristocratic grace, his tenderness (which she interpreted as a form of self-protection). She described his request that she perform for him the dance of the seven veils from the Arabian Nights, and the experience of being devoured by his eyes.

In one of three passionate letters to Liliane, Rilke posited that a true seduction lasts four days. So she moved in with him. But he did not write during that time. She link this to crashing, or being overwhelmed by social life; Rilke seemed divided between aesthetic and political responses to the war. 

According to Claire’s telling, it was when Rilke started receiving phone calls threatening him for housing a dangerous Bolshevik that Claire made plans to move. She left in December; Yvan had been wooing her in letters throughout. But Rilke was on a list of writers to watch. And Liliane kept trying to connect with her Berlin friends and Rilke until the revolutionary govt there was overturned by Hindenberg.

From Charles Freeman again:

In early February, feeling vulnerable, Claire took off for Switzerland and Ivan Goll. If her memoir is to be trusted, she found herself pregnant with Rilke's child. When she confronted Rilke with this discovery, he had just been buoyed by the news from the Insel-Verlag that despite the heavy political weather his books were moving well....

According to Claire, who remains the only witness of her own pregnancy, Rilke and Goll  engaged in a lengthy exchange of polite letters. Neither man wanted the responsibility of a child, so Claire underwent an abortion. After their extremely courteous epistolary dialogue, the two men agreed to destroy each other's letters. Rilke continued to maintain a friendly if somewhat distant relationship with Claire, who he continued to call Liliane, before and after her marriage to Ivan.

As for Rilke, himself, he despised the call to the front; despised the uniform; despised his job at the Viennese archives which required him to produce a current history of the war, which he likened to "hero grooming," the propaganda of verbal monument-making to assist in the war effort.

Words could be statues for Rilke, and the embellishment of military exploits were not statues he wanted near his name. Freeman maintains Rilke wasn’t politically a “conscientious objector publicly acting from pacifist convictions but rather an artist acting from a strong belief that he was a cultural monument."

In wartime Vienna, Rilke's circle included the recently-wounded Oskar Kokoschkca.

In 1918, Claire published two books: a poetry collection, Mitwelt, and a novella, Die Frauen erwachen.

From Yvan Goll’s Four Poems of the Occult, published by Jacob Quinlan Books.

Yvan and Claire in Paris, before and after exile.

Yvan and Claire moved to Zurich and Ascona before settling in Paris in November 1919.

Despite turbulence and infidelity on both sides—including Claire’s affair with Rainer Maria Rilke, by whom she claimed to have been pregnant—Goll remained the focus of Claire’s life until his death from leukaemia in 1950. Thereafter she devoted herself to maintaining and promoting her husband’s memory with unflagging (but often editorially unreliable) publications and re-issues of his work.

The two married on July 21, 1921, on the same day as the launch of the Eskimo Pie, originally called the "the I-Scream-Bar". In Russia, the Civil War continued, and the Soviet ship Sawa was shelled and sunk by the Soviet submarine Trotsky in the Black Sea while trying to defect to the Whites. The vessel and most of her crew were killed. Four men were rescued and imprisoned. On this same day in Yugoslavia, Serbian politician and Minister of Internal Affairs for Yugoslavia Milorad Drašković was assassinated by a member of the Yugoslavian Communist Party. The killing, coupled with the June 29 attempt on the life of Prince Alexander, prompted the passage of the Law Concerning the Protection of Security and Order in the State" eleven days later.

Yvan loved Paris, loved its surrealist circles, loved the churn of aesthetics rubbing shoulders with history. In 1924, Goll published his own Surrealist Manifesto in opposition to Andre Breton (whom he thought relied too much on Freud and automatic writing).

Goll's work was blacklisted by the German government, and poet Paula Ludwig posed a challenge to the Golls' marriage. Others have written about this.

When France went Nazi in 1939, the Golls fled to New York, where they would remain until Gall got sick with leukemia (the same illness which killed Rilke) near the end of his life and returned to France for treatment. Optimistic by temperament, the rise in global nationalism bothered Goll, and this unrest shaped his poetry, which moved across borders and countries, bearing witness to greed, which he considered the primary force of destruction on the planet.

Buried in Pere Lachaise, near Chopin, Goll’s bones lay within walking distance of Paul Celan’s. In Goll's final years, Celan was frequently at his bedside, donating blood to help him survive leukemia, and trying to help him finish his last manuscript, Dreamweed.

The Goll Tomb at Pere Lachaise. To die in one’s chosen name, as the persona one wrote, rather than the Lang one was born. The 20th century began.

After 20 years in the United States, Goll had "returned to the German language" seeking, again,  a relation with unbidden, ineffable things in the key of dread, in the pulse of surrealism, in what Flynn calls " incendiary images" that might uncover something solid and monumental to leave as testament. In a sense, it was a gift for Claire, a reward for the years of companionship and support that she provided, a poem to bind them together after death.

Flynn doesn't mention the Goll affair in this review at all, an interesting elision. But Flynn does something else wonderful: he references Walter Benjamin's 1929 essay on surrealism, "The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia”, which traces the surrealist's edge-narratives alongside the tensions inside the artistic movement, noting: "the true creative overcoming of religious illumination certainly does not lie in narcotics. It resides in a profane illumination, “a materialistic, anthropological inspiration, to which hashish, opium, or whatever else can give an introductory lesson”— but a dangerous one; and the lesson offered by religion is stricter.

For histrionic or fanatical stress on the mysterious side of the mysterious takes us no further; we penetrate the mystery only to the degree that we recognize it in the everyday world, by virtue of a dialectical optic that perceives the everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday. The most passionate investigation of telepathic phenomena, for example, will not teach us half as much about reading (which is an eminently telepathic process), as the profane illumination of reading about telepathic phenomena. And the most passionate investigation of the hashish trance will not teach us half as much about thinking (which is eminently narcotic), as the profane illumination of thinking about the hashish trance. The reader, the thinker, the loiterer, the flaneur, are types of illuminati just as much as the opium eater, the dreamer, the ecstatic. And more profane. Not to mention that most terrible drug, ourselves, which we take in solitude.

Italics, here, are mine. I love that statement. It keeps me company in the way ordinary life with humans who don’t want to talk about books cannot.

Benjamin rejects the assumption that drugs are required for surrealism, and drops a small bomb at Lenin's feet by suggesting that Lenin brought drugs and religion closer than anyone. In this distance, Celan and Benjamin stood in aesthetic counterpoint to Goll.

Translated by Donald Wellman, available at Asymptote.

The Goll Affair

I have loved a few men and more than a few have loved me, but it was not until I reached seventy-six that I had my first orgasm.

These words for Claire Goll’s posthumously published memoir, Ich verzeihe keinem (I Forgive No-one), should be appreciated for the ribald honesties they offer. Claire’s writing never strayed from the sexual, and from clarifying the importance of eros in the female life. I appreciate this aspect of her voice.

But the Goll Affair is more complicated — it is complicated not just by the charge of plagiarism that Claire launched against Paul Celan, but also by her memoirs, which she published after his death, alluding to Celan’s attempt to rape her.

It is complicated by Claire’s assertion that Celan killed himself out of fear this information would be released —and that she chose to publish this information after he was dead, and could no longer defend himself.

It is complicated by the extent to which a writer’s depression and trauma become vehicles for posthumous alienation by those who outlive them, and who would like to imagine themselves at the heart of a story which does not belong to them.

This deserves another post….

*

Robert Vilain, “Claire Goll”, Jewish Women’s Archive. + Ralph Freeman, Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke. + Rennette Watson, “Yvan Goll: Between Expressionism and Surrealism”, The Grandma’s Logbook.

The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas: Me and a worm.

Posthumous voice and Machado de Assis

The posthumous voice can be serious, but it can also be light, humorous, critical, as in Machado de Assis' The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas, first published in Brazil in 1881. For me, what makes Machado delicious in the present is his tonal irreverence, the techniques he mobilizes to establish it, including metafictional strategies, direct reader address, continuous irony, self-referentiality, intertextual intimacy, and typographical experimentation.

As Larry Rohter commented in the #APSTogether meeting for A Public Space:

“Experimenting with margins, punctuation, and typography is common enough today, but Brazilians in 1880 must have found it disconcerting, even revolutionary. Methinks me spies the influence of “Tristram Shandy” in XXVI, with more to come in LV & CXXXIX.”

Machado’s notion of time and temporality, I think, plays into much of this innovative narrative technique, and what it asks of the reader (see unreliable narratives).

Flora Thomson-DeVeaux’s translation

In the 2020 Penguin publication, Dave Eggers provides an introduction to Machado’s wit. The translator notes by Flora Thomson-DeVeaux are fantastic, elusive, rich, and refer back to his newspaper publications at the time (the form in which this book was first serialized). Machado’s "cronicas" ( news columns where he used pseudonyms to reflect on current events)  are not held separate here. Thomson-DeVeaux’s translation is the only one to include materials from the earlier serialized editions of the novel, as opposed to the other translations, which translate from the basis of later editions.

I love how Thomson-DeVeaux introduces him as "a ghost with memoiristic ambitions”—and how she translates the open field of the page by beginning each of Machado’s chapters on a new page, as did the author. Since the chapters are short (some only a paragraph), the decision to publish the open field enacts the textual pauses and motion—the shifting temporality and cronica-style insights—in a way that feels closer to the flow of the text as well as the memoir form.

Born in 1839, the mixed-race grandson of slaves, Machado does not ignore ancestors or the past. He leavens it, makes it “of the time” somehow, brings into the bourgeois ordinary in a way that structures what many have called his “unreliable narrator.” The existence of enslaved persons is a continuous backdrop in the text. Thomson-DeVeaux's translation pays close attention to how slavery complicates the narrative, for example, by offering context for the scene in which the formerly-enslaved Prudêncio beats his own enslaved persons in the neighborhood of Valongo; Thomson notes Valongo was the site of Rio de Janeiro's slave market, at one time the largest in the Americas, and so the site of the beating continues the brutality “inflicted in the same place over centuries on literally millions of men, women and children.”

She also notes an anti-nationalist spirit that prefers the "local subject" to the imperial one. Her introduction combines the historical memory of slavery with the yellow fever pandemic of 1850 in Rio, which killed many Europeans rather than Africans – and was read as the revenge of Saint Benedict (who was Black)  after white parishioners refused to carry his statue on their shoulders during an 1849 procession through the city.

During the #APSTogether book club meeting, Thomson-DeVeaux spoke a little bit about how love underlies the task of the translator, particularly in William Grossman’s case. While teaching aerospace engineering in Brazil, Grossman fell in love with Machado during his Portuguese language study, and felt compelled to bring him to an American audience back home. He actually self-published his translation of Bras Cubas in Brazil in 1951—and Thomson-DeVeaux noted that there were no existing translations of Machado’s work during his lifetime, apart from a few pirated translations into Spanish.

“A historical note: the Hotel Pharoux, where Bras Cubas spends so much time in his declining years, was a real place. Rio’s first modern hotel, founded in 1816 by a French exile, it closed only in 1959, & during its long zenith was often painted or photographed.” —Larry Rohter

The “status” of death + “the grand idea”

I am interested in the way death, itself, becomes a “status” marker in this status-conscious fictional memoir.

In this first chapter, the narrator describes himself as “a deceased man recently an author, for whom the tomb was another cradle” – and he announces his death as another author might announce his birth—with regalia. We learn of Cubas’ illustrious passing at his country home; we learn his status signifiers, a bachelor of 64 with money to his name, and “eleven friends” at his grave. The narrator renounces tragedy, insisting that he lived a good life - and who are we to doubt it when reading, when realizing the lack of meaning in the status oriented Brazilian culture?

It is clear that Cubas wants to be famous, but there is nothing clear beyond that—and perhaps fame is an empty and meaningless wish which one must pursue in the form of a posthumous memoir. Although the narrator’s official cause of death was pneumonia, he leads us to think what actually killed him was “a grand and useful idea”. And then, in a fascinating fictional move, he tasks the reader with reading his memoir but also serving as a judge. It is the reader who must determine if it was the idea that killed him. This is the new role for a reader.

So what is this grand idea? In “The Plaster,” the narrator describes as the invention of "an anti-hypochondriacal plaster destined to alleviate our melancholy humanity." And then, he does what will become characteristic, namely, he leans over and whispers an aside to the audience:

Now, however, that I am on the other side of life, I can confess it all what drove me most of all was the gratification it would give me to see in newsprint, showcases, pamphlets, on street corners, and finally on medicine boxes, those four words: The Bras Cubas Plaster. Why deny it? I had a weakness for hubbub, banners, pyrotechnics.......... My idea had two faces, like a metal, with one turns toward the public and one toward me. On one side, philanthropy and profit; on the other, a thirst for fame. Let us call it a love of glory.

Cubanos’s love of glory is cultural, socialized—and I’ll return to this—but for now, it’s interesting that Machado keeps letting his narrator indulge in limpid self-critiques which reveal the limits of self-reflexivity.

In "The Fixed Idea," Cubanos warns again the prowess and power of “the fixed idea,” which is what happened to his own idea, or what brought about it’s demise, noting, “My idea, after all it's somersaults, had become a fixed idea.” And then he warns the reader: “God save you, reader, from a fixed idea.” He defines fixed ideas as “what make strong men and madmen; wandering, vague, or shimmering ideas make for Claudius's – in Suetonius’ version, that is.”

 My idea was fixed, as fixed as..... nothing comes to mind that is quite so fixed in this world: perhaps the moon, perhaps the pyramids of Egypt, perhaps the late German Diet.

The narrator’s dream includes this plaster which he intends to serve as a solution to melancholy and misery—and he is very clear about wanting acknowledgement and glory in return for his invention. I found myself imagining Bras Cubanos Instagram feed too frequently, or considering how the desire to create a perfect product complicates what ,,,,

Do not laugh at the joint triumph of pharmacy and Puritanism. Who does not know that at the foot of every large, public, prominent flag, there are often a number of other, more modestly proportioned flags, which are hoisted and flutter in the shadow of their larger counterpart, and which quite often survive it?

Machado toys with death in order to tell the story he wants to tell. Death reveals the extent to which literary lineage or inheritance continues in novel form - to have the conversation he wanted, Bras Cubas had to die (or Machado had to kill him), thus setting up a narrative voice that speaks from beyond the grave where all voices are equal. Supposedly. Maybe.

Symbolic objects: The plaster, desire, hippos, clocks, and the worm

Machado makes us of many symbolic, recurring objects, and I will note a few that stood out, starting with the entrepreneurial dream of a special plaster.

In "The Plaster," the narrator describes the sublime idea that hopped into his head while walking, the invention of "an anti-hypochondriacal plaster destined to alleviate our melancholy humanity."

"Now, however, that I am on the other side of life, I can confess it all what drove me most of all was the gratification it would give me to see in newsprint, showcases, pamphlets, on street corners, and finally on medicine boxes, those four words: The Bras Cubas Plaster. Why deny it? I had a weakness for hubbub, banners, pyrotechnics.......... My idea had two faces, like a metal, with one turns toward the public and one toward me. On one side, philanthropy and profit; on the other, a thirst for fame. Let us call it a love of glory."

It feels prescient for theory to be commodified as a sort of entrepreneurship-vessel for the chattering classes, an economic opportunity for leisured libidinals. One can’t help but notice a resemblance between Bras’ Cubas’ aspirations and the contemporary economic muscle of self-help industry experts. We have it all, from Emily Oster’s “evidence-based, statistical parenting” (and other emergent parenting scientists) to the lean-in feminisms of Sheryl Sandberg and Jia Tolentino and straight to the plaster face masks of the Insta-influencer scientists—to be so rich in plaster solutions and yet disoriented, miserable, and clueless. This is the American dream as it plays out in the bourgeoisie classes.

All this content isn’t intellectual, but it’s awfully theoretical. Which brings me back to Cubas, whose relationship to desire and love is closer to theory than practice. Certainly, the desire for desire is there in descriptions of Virgilia. But I’m also fascinated by references to death, religion, salvation—or, as he says in “Trust”, something ”with the religious zeal of a desire seeking to rise from its deathbed.”

The chapter "In Which A Lady Betrays Herself" gives us the lover as a "ruins,” which connotes the statue or the monument after it has fallen into disrepair or misuse:

She was then 54 years old, and she was a ruin, and imposing ruin. Just imagine, reader, that we had loved each other, she and I, many years before, and that one day, having taken ill, I see her appear at my bedroom door.

As the narrator lies in bed, clearly ill, he reflects on the nostalgia of seeing his former lover in her advanced years:

Believe me, remembrance is the lesser evil; let none place their faith in present happiness; there is a picture drop of Cain’s drool in it. Once time has worn on and the rapture has ceased, then, perhaps only then, may one truly take pleasure in what has passed; when given a choice between two illusions, the better is that which may be enjoyed without pain.

For Cubas, pain is the thing to be avoided. Life is the journey towards an afterlife of importance, towards fame and glory. Life is pointed towards death. This is why time, clocks, and pocket watches carry significance.

The chapter, "The Pendulum Clock," lays the sleeplessness after a kiss next to the tick-tock of the clock which makes us aware of time's passing. But I'm interested in how the narrator foreshadows here, or builds significance into the pocket watch:

Some inventions are transformed or fade away;  institutions themselves come to grief; but the clock is definitive and everlasting. The last man on earth, as he bids farewell to the cold, sapped sun, will have a watch in his pocket so as to know the exact hour of his death.

Chapter CXXXIX is an ellipsis. Time is not the thing with feathers so much as the endless dots. Notice how ellipses lack causality—they don’t indicate the consequences of an act but the fact that an act may happen. Anything could step into the blank and be gilded by theory’s hindsight.

There’s something fantastic about hindsight and how Machado uses it to undermine respectability and status—something surreal in the aspirational posthumous voice. And the reader is prepared for with “The Delirium,” the long hallucinated description of riding atop the back of a swift hippopotamus, the juxtaposition of absurdity with respect, an opening into that fantastic. Cubas says no one else has narrated their own delusion before. Then he becomes a Chinese barber:

Shortly thereafter, I felt myself transformed into St Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologica, a volume bound in Moroccan leather, with silver clasps and illustrations; this idea impressed upon my body the most incomplete immobility; and I still remember that my hands were the clasps of the book, I had crossed them over my stomach, and someone uncrossed them (Virgilia, undoubtedly)  because the position made me look like a corpse.

The hippo tells Cubas that they are going to the origin of the ages. The hippopotamus reports that they have passed Eden and as they go, the narrator reflects on what he sees, including the particular silence: "the Silence of that place was like that of the tomb: one might have said that the life and things had fallen stunned in the presence of man." And then the figure of a woman appears, and that figure holds in itself boundlessness, or what the narrator describes as “the vastness of the wilds.” Cubas says nothing at first and then finally asks who she is and what she is named.

She tells him to call her Nature or Pandora:" I am your mother and your enemy."

She tells him not to be frightened because her energy does not kill but rather affirms itself through life: "You are alive: I desire no other torment." 

And here, somehow, as the narrator digs his nails into his palm to make sure that he is really alive, the idea of a worm returns as the woman continues:

“Yes, worm, you are alive. You must not fear losing the tattered rags that are your pride; for a few hours yet you shall still taste the bread of pain and the wine of misery. You are alive: now, even in your madness, you are alive; and should your mind retrieve an instant of sense, you will stay that you wish to live."

There's a sense in which the entire reason for wanting to live is undermined by the monologue of the strange woman. But it’s the worm that haunts my notebooks.

Machado dedicates his coffin-composed memoirs to "the worm that first gnawed at the cold flesh of my cadaver" – and he does so fondly ( though the translators introduction says he dedicated it to worms, plural, and this sounds different to me). In a brief chat note, Thomson-DeVeaux said that the worm doesn't come up in the book but her personal opinion is that he dedicated it to that worm as "a sort of reward for having gotten there first."

Later on, in the chapter "Sad, But Short," Cubas witnesses the death of his own tender, kind mother. The next chapter, "Short, But Happy," gives us the response to it, particularly, he has to decide who he is and what he will do in life, the idea of inheritance weighs heavier on him now.

He says that what he learned in university were formulas, skeletons, some Virgil and Horace, things that he could use in conversation but nothing substantial.

" The reader may be taken aback by the frankness with which I exposed and emphasized my own mediocrity; you should recall that frankness is the primary virtue of a late man. In life, the gaze of public opinion, the clash of interests, the struggle between rival greed's obliged as to hide our old rags, to disguise splits and stitches, to not extend to the world that which we reveal to our conscience; and the best of this obligation is when, by dint of diluting others, one dilutes himself, because in this case he is spared humiliation, which is a painful sensation, and hypocrisies, which is a ghastly vice. But in death, what a difference! What an unburdening! What freedom! How we can shake off our cloaks, toss our spangles into the gutter, unbutton ourselves, unpaint ourselves, unadorn ourselves, confess plainly what we were and what we failed to be! because, after all, there are no more neighbors, nor friends, nor enemies, nor acquaintances, nor strangers;  there is no audience. The gaze of opinion, that piercing judicial gaze, loses all its power as soon as we set foot in the territory of death; this is not to say that it doesn't reach this far, examining and judging us; but it is we who have no compunctions about the examination or the judgment. My good living sirs and madams, there is nothing so in commensurable as the disdain of the deceased."

In a sense, this “freedom” of death is the freedom from sacrilege. one cannot blaspheme a god from inside the grave.  

addenda

In 2020, two new translations of Posthumous Memoirs have appeared almost simultaneously, one translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson (Liveright), who translated Machado's Complete Stories, and the other by by Flora Thomson-DeVeaux (Penguin). In "A Playful Masterpiece That Expanded the Novel’s Possibilities," Parul Seghal compares them and draws attention to the differences. Here’s Borba comparing conscience to why a pretty woman is vain and likes to look in the mirror often: "Conscience...contemplates itself frequently when it finds itself beautiful. Remorse is nothing but the grimace of a conscience that sees itself to be hideous." 

Jack Gilbert, loosely.

1.

Would Jack Gilbert have rejoiced at being named the “poet-laureate of my life” for Elizabeth Gilbert?

I don’t know, but the question interests me. It interests me because what Elizabeth loves about Jack (in her own words) is what others have loved about Rainer Maria Rilke—the dedicated focus on commingling of joy, beauty and terror (not to mention the view of children as a curse in the writer’s life). Although part of me wishes to know nothing the poetry that undergirds Eat, Pray, Love or its endless cacophony of sequels and lifestyle products, the other part of me feels it holds a key that unlocks the cultural mood as The Secret unlocked the prior decade.

A different part of me is exhausted by the number of humans who fall off cliffs to catch the perfect travel-selfie in the species of journey that the Elizabeth Gilbert industry has propagated.

A fetal part of me accepts critiques wherein birthing a few kids is bad for the planet as the adult part of me sees planetary catastrophe in industry of navel-gazing travelogues and conspicuous-travel-media birthed by E. Gilbert Inc.

Is this because I envy it? Is my envy a critique about myself as individual or a critique of the culture which monetizes envy through aspirational production targets? Of course there is a mirror in anything I write when staring across this particular room….

2.

Maybe it’s the tone: a triumphalist redemptive positivity bestowed as a reward for living one’s life without worrying too much about what it asks of others. This tonal fool-hardiness, rooted in Americanism, is infectious, of course, as our COVID-denying tribes demonstrate in the past year of “just living” their (maskless) lives. And so I turn again to both Gilberts when wanting to speak of the man.

Elizabeth references Jack’s interview in The Paris Review, where he explains how the only time he was hospitalized was after falling 90 ft from a tree and breaking his spine. Why did he climb the tree? The poet says:

Showing off. I was with Linda and her father didn’t approve at all. I mean, he was resentful that I was bedding his daughter without any official rights. On Christmas Day we went up on his mountain to find a tree that would suit Linda. We were walking along and he was behaving himself. We kept walking until we came to these trees. He was crazy about nature. He said, You know, if you cut off the top of that tree—if you could cut just the top—the tree wouldn’t die, and it would make it a more attractive tree without that spindly, weak top. 

Being the bad guy with his lovely daughter, I immediately took the rope and saw and started climbing. I didn’t know anything about it. I knew a lot about apple trees because I’d spent time in an orchard. But not a forest. I was way up there. I climbed to the top, but I’m no fool—I tied myself to the trunk. I thought I would tug on the treetop until it snapped, except in the middle of doing this there was a big gust of wind that snapped the thing, and it fell on me and was pushing me down…. I was heroic about it, but my thighs gave way, and the rope too. I plummeted down, shearing off the branches. I was going so fast that the speed just butchered the tree. Luckily I landed on dirt.

Jack goes on to evoke a childhood memory of being 13 and living through the Great Depression in Pittsburgh:

During the day, my mother and father went into town, leaving my siblings and me all alone in this magnificent house, three stories high and no one there but us. We played on the roof, in the laundry chutes. It was extraordinarily dangerous. It was lovely, legendary. We owned that little world. In the back of the house were two orchards, one filled with peaches, the other with apples. We were always in the apple trees—frequently falling down.

In an interview with Gordon Lish (also referenced by Elizabeth Gilbert), Jack offers more insight into what he takes to be a lack of subject and inspiration in poetry peers. He laments the banality of life, or the dullness of poetry which takes its tone from ordinary survival and bourgeois comfort:

Isn’t a great part of poetry now being produced to support an established reputation? The poet is actually tired of poetry, but he must turn out poems to qualify for prizes, grants, and academic positions. What’s he going to do? He manufactures verse. And it’s a lot easier to deal with a small subject when you’re getting by on merely careful technique. And if he’s a man teaching at a university, as he probably is, and married to a wife he courted years ago, and has several quite healthy children…what’s he going to make his poems out of? He makes them out of books or he makes them out of the incidents of a normal, commonplace life. If he goes sailing off Long Island on Sunday afternoon and he wants to write a poem after dinner, he will probably write a poem about sailing off Long Island.

The solution, for both Gilberts, requires traveling to exotic places and landscapes where one cannot speak the local language in which people live what many might describe as ordinary lives. They aren’t committed to becoming part of the culture or learning the language or raising children in those countries—thus showing an actual emotional and literal investment in places that fascinate them.

It is lovely to breeze through for the postcard or the essay or the feature piece, and I don’t mean to disparage it as a mode so much as note how the mode, itself, is noncommittal and slightly inflected by histories of colonialism. It is okay to acknowledge this. I think Gilbert, himself, acknowledges it the posthumously-published conversation in American Poetry Review.

It is better to begin from acknowledgement than repudiation on a planet where the American footprint is so costly to other nations.

Photo source: Guggenheim Foundation.

3.

Which brings me to Jack Gilbert’s magnificent poem, “Thinking About Ecstasy”, where adjectives modify the subject in a way reminiscient of property ownership and national projection of power.

Notice the juxtapositions of violence, image, glass, sacralized female suffering, and pain:

Gradually he could hear her. Stop, she was saying,
stop! And found the bed full of glass,
his ankles bleeding, driven through the window
of her cupola. California summer. That was pleasure.
He knows about that: stained glass of the body
lit by our lovely chemistry and neural ghost.
Pleasure as fruit and pleasure as ambush. Excitement
a wind so powerful, we cannot find a shape for it,
so our apparatus cannot hold on to the brilliant
pleasure for long. Enjoyment is different.
It understands and keeps. The having of the having.
But ecstasy is a question. Doubling sensation
is merely arithmetic. If ecstasy means we are
taken over by something, we become an occupied
country, the audience to an intensity we are
only the proscenium for. The man does not want
to know rapture by standing outside himself.
He wants to know delight as the native land he is.

“Ecstasy is a question” I like to pose to mirrored ceilings over beds in motels that charge by the hour.

This is where I go in order to see what I want from the ecstatic, or how much I can afford to pay it.

It’s difficult to see what one wants if the gaze focuses on the desired rather than one’s relation to the desired.

It is humbling to realize what we crave is a form of power, and to witness ourselves in its expression, its verbiage, its rapt attention and actions.

4.

Everyone agrees that Jack Gilbert is a complicated poet—one who sought a form of lived authenticity which made space for error, for humanity, for risk—and most accept that his conception of humanity de-humanized other humans.

William Doreski reflects on the excavations in Gilbert’s poems:

Genuine honesties are hard to find because the world itself has concealed them. Gilbert’s best poems—and certainly he has his clunkers—require subtle and ironic readers to appreciate them. If that makes their essential honesty difficult, it is difficult in the way that Robert Frost (in “Directive”) required, “so the wrong ones can’t find it, / So can’t get saved.”

Alex Dimitrov describes meeting Jack Gilbert at Linda Gregg’s place:

What comes to mind, as I type this now, is a moment months later (I would continue to go over to Linda’s apartment every two to three months and we’d do the usual thing: talk, drink, smoke for hours) when she said to me, “that day when you met Jack, that’s probably going to be the only time you see him. He’s not coming back to the East Coast.” But I also knew that what she meant was, he was dying.

Curtis Faville reads this hunger to “be close to lived experience” in Gilbert’s poems, and how it takes the shape of “incremental disagreements with expediency” to the point where “even language itself may seem an expedient” with respect to expressing emotions.

I can love Jack Gilbert’s poems while acknowledging that his choices are not available to me, and that the form this unavailability assumes is both iconic and blasphemous.

I can sit in the pew while wishing others had the time, ability, and funding to sit in the pew beside me, in the church of famous men.

Erik Satie's desiccated embryos.

1.

At this time in 1913, Erik Satie began composing Embryons Desséchés, a triptych for piano. He would finish it in two months, inspired by words for strange crustaceans discovered in his Larousse dictionary, using these words as entry-points for an ironic portrait of Classical musicians and pieces.

When asked about memorable images, Jorge Luis Borges remembered the tigers in illustrated versions of childhood encyclopedias better than “the eyes or the smile of a woman.”

2.

How Satie describes the piece in the introduction to the score:

This work is absolutely incomprehensible, even to me. Of a singular depth, it always amazes me. I wrote it in spite of myself, driven by destiny. Maybe I wanted to be humorous? It would not surprise me and would be quite in my way. However, I will have no mercy for they who would ignore. May they know it.

Holothuroids.

3.

The first dryed-up embryo, “D’Holothurie”, is about a sea cucumber observed in the Bay of Saint-Malo, and Satie parodies here a popular 1830 French song, Loisa Puget’s "Mon rocher de Saint-Malo", by using it as the second subject in the dominant, while keeping the accompaniment in the tonic. The parodic final cadence builds on Puget’s refrain before ending pompously and repeatedly in the wrong key, which Satie has made to sound like the right one.

The second embryo, “d’Edriopthalma,” focuses on a crustacean with immobile eyes. Rather than parodying the "celebrated Mazurka by Schubert", as written in the score, Satie actually pokes fun at the famous funeral march from Chopin's sonata Op.35, rendering the soaring trio melody flat, mundane, and un-Romantic. Elements of Chopin’s posthumous funeral march (1837, op.72 No. 2) also appear in this creature with immobile eyes.

The third embryo, “De Podohthalma”, another crustacean with eyes on slim stalks, eyes held apart from the rest of the body, quotes the refrain from Fiametta’s “Orang-utang Song” (in Edmund Audran’s operetta, La Mascotte, 1880), where the orang-utang puts on pants to become an official councillor, a legitimate member of the Court that poses no threat to the established members — because he agrees to wear the costume. Backstory here includes the French song "Good King Dagobert" ("has put his culottes on backwards..."), written in the eighteenth century to mock the figure of the King.

The final cadence, “Cadence obligee (de l’auteur), or mandatory cadence by the author, parodies the 23 "ad libitum" optional cadences, found in certain virtuoso romantic piano works, particularly the finale of Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony.

Satie’s composition can be taken as a critique of over-emphatic closure and grandiose closing strategies in music composition, which reminds me of our own tendencies as poets to want to make the poem end in something immense, and how immensity often results in melodrama or tonal displacement.

4.

“The most challenging part of playing this piece by Satie is deciding on how to add timing. Satie doesn’t give us time signatures, so lots of this is left to the individual performer, including how much we want to parody the parodies.”

- My son on preparing to play Embryons Desséchés

5.

In 1991, Eliot Weinberger published an collage-essay, “Dreams from the Holothurians,” which traces the myth of Atlantis through the mouths of various explorers, politicians, religious leaders, philosophers, and thinkers across time.

There is no integument which connects one explanation to the other; Weinberger uses an exclamation — “Atlantis!”— to start each paragraph, and it is the word, itself, which, connects Mesoamerican myths to Herodotus:

Atlantis! Herodotus tells of a people in the west, the Atarantes, who have no names for individuals, and who curse the sun at noon for its heat. And west of them are the Atlantes, named for Mt. Atlas, which they call the Pillar of Heaven and whose peak is permanently hidden in the clouds. A people who eat no living thing, and never dream.

On and on we go through Francis Bacon etc. until Weinberger returns to the holothurians at the end, which is where the book, Outside Stories (New Directions) also ends, which is where, in a sense, the author begins.

6.

In a recent poem published in Sublunary Review, I used a tempo-marking which is more of a notation, from this piece by Satie to write a vestigial sonnet. “Pour charmer le gibier”. I also played with the translation of Satie’s marking — which the score translates as “to charm the victim”, and which I rendered as “to charm the game”.

As to why I translated the marking differently, moving from victim to game, perhaps this post helps to explain it. A piece without time signatures asks something different from the performer.

Pasternak and Ghirlandaio: The irradiated smile.

1.

When Boris Pasternak published his memoir of poetic influence, Safe Conduct, the critics in Soviet Russia got excited. His affinity with Rainer Maria Rilke's immaterialism and transcendence were taken as implicit critiques of Marxist materialism (as interpreted by the RCP).

Pasternak was accused of subjective idealism, a form of counter-revolutionary activity. The book was published in censored form in 1931, and later removed from libraries, and reprints were forbidden.

The manuscript, itself, ends with a letter to Rilke that he never mailed or sent. Written after Rilke’s death, the letter speaks to Rilke in the present (as Marina Tsvetaeva did in her New Year’s elegy to Rilke), and it is unique in its repudiation of temporality. A confessional epistolary form reserved for the dead.

2.

I am interested in how Pasternak speaks of women in relation to light — and how this relation to light leads him to aesthetic statements which elide ethics.

3.

“I have just finished writing Safe Conduct, dedicated to your memory,” Pasternak begins his appended letter to Rilke’s posthumous spirit. And then he explains his silence:

I feared that, content with corresponding with you, I would never reach you in person. And I had to see you. Until that time came I would not write to you. When I put myself in your place, (imagining your wonder at my silence), I comforted myself with the knowledge Tsvetaeva was writing to you, and while I could not be a substitute for Tsvetaeva, she could be a substitute for me. 

At that time I had a family. Sinfully I embarked on a venture for which I had none of the requirements;  I drew  another life into it with me and she and I conceived a third life.

Pasternak then goes on to describe two women: artist Evgeniya Lurye, whom Pasternak married in 1922, and the mother of his son, Evgenii; and Zinaida Neuhaus, the wife of the Russian pianist Heinrich Neuhaus, with whom Pasternak had fallen in love.

In the letter, Pasternak offers both women to Rilke, beginning with Evgeniya (whom he called Zhenya), his wife at the time of publication:

A smile gave roundness to the young artist's chin and poured its light upon her eyes and cheeks. When she smiled she would narrow her eyes as against the sun, but not with an intense gaze, rather with a hazy narrowing like that of people who are frail or nearsighted. As the light of her smile rose to the beautiful broad brow causing the whole image to waver between round and oval, one was reminded of the Italian Renaissance. Irradiated by the smile, she was very much like the portrait of a woman by blank. At such moments one could not tear one size from her face. Since her beauty depended upon such illumination she could be attractive only when she was happy.

4.

Curious to know which portrait Pasternak evoked in his description, so I browsed a gallery of paintings by Domenico Ghirlandaio (1448-1494), a Florentine artist who worked mainly in fresco (though several of his famous works were executed in tempera).

Pasternak focuses on the luminosity of his paintings, so it’s interesting that Ghirlandaio was among the first to abandon the use of gilding in his pictures, choosing to represent objects made of gold with paint rather than gold leafing.

5.

So Zhenya needs light to be beautiful, on Pasternak’s view. And then he compares this “only pretty when happy” wife to Zinaida Neuhaus:

Some may say that all faces are like this. Not so. I know others. I know a face that is as striking and moving in grief as in joy and becomes only more lovely in circumstances that would make another's beauty fade.

Whether this woman is mounting the heights or plunging into the depths, her frightening fascination remains the same; she has much less need of anything earthly than the earth has need of her, for she is femininity itself, a rough-hewn, indestructible monolith of pride extracted whole from the quarry of creativity. Since a woman's character and disposition are revealed most truly in her appearance, the second woman, whose life, honor, and passions, and inner essence are perceived independently of lighting, has less reason to fear life's vicissitudes than the first one.

In 1934, Boris and Zinaida divorced their spouses to marry each other. Neuhas was crushed.

6.

It’s not clear to me that Zinaida had “less reason to fear life’s vicissitudes than Zhenya, since Pasternak would win the Nobel Prize for a book that he wrote about a love affair with another woman — and Zinaida was expected to play mother, wife, hostess, and proud matriarch through the entire show.

Boris reading congratulatory telegrams about the Nobel Prize, with his wife Zinaida (looking very wary on the right) and Nina Tabidze, 1958.

7.

Returning now to Pasternak’s letters to the living, particularly one he wrote to his first wife, Zhenya —the irradiated smile— on July 29th, 1926 while she was in Germany for a month with their son. Here, Pasternak was trying to explain what breaking off his correspondence with Tsvetaeva meant to him, but I think we also see, in an interesting sense, the way he had chosen Zhenya’s suffering in advance. The way he painted it without gilding the golden objects.

I'm not trying to test your feelings by jealousy. I am at present absolutely alone. Marina asked me not to write to her anymore after I told her about you and what I feel for you. This upsets you, too. It is indeed absurd. It seems I told her I love you above all else on Earth. I don't know how it came about. But don't attach any significance to it, good or bad. People join our names together before we ourselves know where we are. People love us with the same sort of love before we become aware that we breathe the same air. That cannot be helped, cannot be changed.

I cannot see you separately from the forces constituting my fate. And I don't have two lives and two fates.  I cannot sacrifice these forces and I cannot, for your sake, change my fate........ But it would be inhuman even to think of allowing you, unarmed by a great idea or a great feeling, which is to say not one of the forces constituting my fate, to enter this circle, these lists. Through no fault of mine you are doomed to a perpetual suffering. I do not want you, a person of great courage and strong will, to fight an unequal battle. You do not deserve defeat.

Boris in his coffin, with his widow Zinaida and son Leonid, 1960. (Source)

8.

Pasternak’s poem, “Fresh Paint” as translated by C. M. Bowra and Miss Deutsch.

I should have seen the sign: “Fresh paint,”
But useless to advise
The careless soul, and memory’s stained
With cheeks, calves, hands, lips, eyes.

More than all failure, all success,
I loved you, for your skill
In whitening the yellowed world
As white cosmetics will.

Listen, my dark, my friend: by God,
All will grow white somehow,
Whiter than madness or lamp shades
Or bandage on a brow.

"At Least I Wasn't Earthbound": Barbara Comyns and The Vet's Daughter

According to the 1981 Virago edition, Barbara Comyns “dreamt the idea” for The Vet’s Daughter while honeymooning “in a Welsh cottage lent to her and her new husband by the Soviet agent Kim Philby in 1945.”

Narrated by a girl named Alice Rowlands, a young Londoner who has the misfortune of being born to a cruel, domineering father and a kind, effaced mother who is dying, the novel hinges on a peculiar ability (which some critics have called “the occult” but which seems to me a little off, given Comyns’ own descriptions and references in the text).

Alice’s father is a veterinarian, so the house is filled with animals, which might seem lovely if not for the reason some humans seem to value possessing animals. In this house —“all overshadowed by my father and cleaning the cats’ cages and the smell of cabbage, escaping gas, and my father’s scent” — one gets the sense that Alice’s mother is classed among the animals by the vet. The third chapter begins:

Autumn came and Mother was still dying in her room. It was peaceful in there because Father was frightened of her illness and never visited her.

Like several historically-powerful megalomaniacs, the father loves animals and hates humans. Or maybe the father loves animals because he has absolute power over them when they come to clinic for treatment, so he loathes humans for having needs and feelings and emotions which he cannot control or fix or end.

One night, Alice’s mother dies while Alice is sleeping, and the daughter wakes up to a world in which her father possibly “put Mother to sleep” with his vet-meds like the animal he took her to be. The suspicion that the father killed the mother renders sleep, itself, unstable — a dangerous, vulnerable state in which one can be destroyed or erased. Although Comyns doesn’t have the narrator express this directly, the way she allows is to emerge is a testament to her narrative skill. The author tells a story that haunt abstract states as well as objects.

The original cover of the novel.

“Awake and floating….”

Three weeks after the funeral, the vet returns with a young, “bawdy” gal-pal (Rosa Fisher) who moves into her mother’s room. Comyns sets Rosa up as a type — a certain femme whose currency is male attention, and who over-invests in cruelty, stupidity, anything that placates insecure men. When Rosa’s head waiter colleague, Cuthbert, says Alice is attractive, Rosa expresses sudden interest in the vet’s daughter. Eventually, she convinces her to go out for tea at a nice restaurant, where Cuthbert pays a surprise visit. The three go for a walk — Alice is terrified — and eventually it ends with Cuthbert raping her as Rosa looks on.

Girl power is exhausting, and sisterhood, here, has the synthetic feel of a frat party. After Rosa sets Alice up to be sexually assaulted by Cuthbert, Alice goes home and tries to deal with the feeling that no water will ever render her “clean again.” But that night, after the rape, something strange happens: Alice discovers herself “awake and floating” through the room, holding a glass globe and trying not to break it. She falls asleep peacefully after floating, and then, in the morning, she sees the blankets on the floor and the glass mantle broken and the chalky powder on her hands, all evidence that the floating hadn’t been a dream.

At this point, Mr. Peebles, a fellow who has an unrequited crush on Alice, finds a way for her to leave the horrible house of animals, girlfriends, and fathers — “nothing can be worse than home” — by sending her to care for his depressed mother out near the ocean. The vet says disgusting, inhumane things to Alice in parting; her mother’s "happy” ghost appears and smiles on the train ride away from London; she meets Mrs. Peebles and falls in love with the enchanted, large house.

On the first night away, in the beautiful house with the large fireplace on an island, Alice lays in her little room:

The bed was most comfortable, and I was just drifting off to sleep when a strange thing happened: I seemed to be floating. I tried to touch the mattress with my hands, but it wasn't there. I was floating above it and the bed clothes were slipping from me...... I did not try to feel it with my hands, because I kept them — I can't think why — neatly folded on my chest. I suddenly realized I was feeling sick. I thought, 'This is bed sickness, not seasickness.'

And then Alice remembers “a similar thing had happened” to after Cuthbert assaulted her. More things happen: Alice learns to ice-skate, discovers the sea, falls in love with a young, privileged townie named Nicholas, learns more about Mrs. Peebles (there was a fire and a suicide attempt, and this explains Mr. Peebles’ concern for his mother).

“At least I wasn’t earthbound….”

Chapter 16 is outrageous and important. While pining for Nicholas, Alice discovers it happens again:

And then in the night it happened again and I was floating, definitely floating. The moonlight was streaming whiteley through the window,  and I could see the curtains gently flapping in the night wind. I left my bed, and except for a sheet, the clothes lay scattered on the floor. I gently floated about the room. Sometimes I went very close to the ceiling, but I wouldn't touch it in case it made me fall to the ground. If I came here to an object - a wall, or the tall wardrobe, for instance – some sixth sense seems to steer me away, rather as I've heard it does with bats, and the feeling that this was so gave me confidence. 

There is no danger because Alice notices the window is closed, so she can't just float out into the sky. Instead, she bobs about inside the house, where floating is safe, bounded, circumscribed by the house itself.

Finally, she wears herself out floating, and settles back into bed where she sleeps soundly. ,The next morning, she asked Mrs. Peebles if she has ever heard of anyone floating around in their rooms, and Mrs. Peebles brightens up, recalling:

"Yes, levitation I expect you mean. It used to be quite common, I believe, at one time, but I can't remember when. There was a monk I seem to remember hearing about called some name like Joseph of Cupertino, or is that the name of the place in Italy? This man used to behave most strangely, and was not allowed to sing in the choir because he used to rise up and remain suspended in the air and caused quite a sensation and upset the service. This went on for many years, and the poor monk had to remain in his room, where a private chapel was arranged for him. I heard he fasted and practice mortification, but to no avail. Poor man! it was quite an embarrassment for him! My mother used to tell of a man called Home, who was taken up by some society gentleman. He floated in and out of the windows of some big house in London - Ashley House, I think it was. One doesn't hear about that kind of thing now."

It is Mrs. Peebles who first names the floating event for Alice--who provides a word that carries this strangeness.  Levitation. When asked if she, herself, ever floated, Mrs. Peebles replies that she would never do a thing like that because: "I'm not peculiar." 

And so Alice learns that floating is something “peculiar”, like being left-handed, and therefore something that one must keep to themselves and practice quietly alone in a room rather than “boasting” about in public.

Later on the same day, while sitting among the yew trees in the graveyard, Alice spies Nicholas on a horse with a lovely wealthy girl cantering beside him.... and she wanders out to get a better glimpse, settling on a felled beech tree in a clearing.

As Alice lays down on this beech tree's toppled trunk— calling it her bed — sadness claims her "in waves." She weeps a little, and self-soothes with the idea that maybe the girl is a family friend and Nicholas will introduce them, and she says of this idea:

I almost believed this would happen, but not quite. Then I comforted myself with the knowledge that at least I wasn't earthbound like most people. I lay there on the field tree completely relaxed, and try to will myself to float. I lay there and nothing happened, but I felt drowsy and limp and light. Then I rose in the air, only a few feet. All the noises of the world ceased, and there was a great silence as if from shock at all the laws of Nature being broken. I became afraid, so afraid I became all rigid. Then suddenly I was down on the grass, rather shaken but quite unhurt. I felt a small thrill of triumph. I could float when I wanted to;  it wasn't a dream or illness. I really could levitate myself. Walking home in the fading afternoon, I felt a new pride.

And here the chapter ends. Italics mine.

“Much to the alarm of his brethren at the table…”

On May 7, 2021, I am reading an essay titled by “Giuseppe” by Eliot Weinberger when I realize Barbara Comyns must have been here (Weinberger says Giuseppe Desa, Comyns says Joseph of Cupertino, but they are two names for the same man).

Also known as “The Flying Friar”, Giuseppe Desa was born to a poor carpenter’s family in a small Italian village in 1603. By age 8, Giuseppe was known to ecstatic visions that left him gaping and staring into space. The story of his life is fascinating—and worth a read—because this wayward soul couldn’t find a home or please anyone or do anything of value until it was discovered that he was peculiar, which is to say, he had inexplicable spiritual gifts or magic powers.

Then Giuseppe Desa became known as the man whose reverence for God was so intense that he lost his toehold on earth. Giuseppe levitated constantly:

On hearing the names of Jesus or Mary, the singing of hymns during the feast of St. Francis, or while praying at Mass, he would go into a dazed state and soar into the air, remaining there until a superior commanded him under obedience to revive. In the refectory, during a meal, Joseph would suddenly rise from the ground with a dish of food in his hands, much to the alarm of the brethren at table. When he was out in the country begging, suddenly he would fly into a tree. Once when some workmen were laboring to plant a huge stone cross in its socket, Joseph rose above them, took up the cross and placed it in the socket for them.

He died in 1663, was canonized in 1781, after which a large marble altar was erected in the Church of St. Francis in Osimoso that St. Joseph’s body might be placed beneath it, where it remains to this day.

“I don’t want to be peculiar….”

Catherine of Siena saw Jesus in the sky when she was seven. A few years later, she ran away from home and sat in a cave where she prayed to God and began levitating.

Hyacinth Cormier of France (1832-1916) levitated while in prayer.

Levitating is part of the ordinary extra-ordinary in hagiographies, and one wonders if Comyns came across such book on the shelves of Kim Philby’s Welsh cottage. That, at least, is my working theory for some of background magic in this book.

Although Comyns is known for her wacky-lovely character names, Cuthbert stood out to me. It’s an usual name—a Celtic name, a (surprise surprise) name common to Celtic hagiographies, likely present in the book of saints Comyns found on Philby’s shelf. The sainted Cuthbert performed some miracles, though its unclear whether he levitated, and he may have envied the levity of a young girl after standing all night in a freezing river as penance, two otters warming and drying his feet (per Eliot Weinberger’s legend).

The contrast between the seriousness of levitation and the frivolous lightness of levity is Comyns’ chord in this novel, and it gets very loud and fractious towards the end. Tragedy forces Alice to return to London, where her father —who hasn’t changed — is drunk and furious and abusive. He hits her and attempts to attack her more, but she floats above him to escape. Like Joseph of Cupertino, she is awake.

The next morning, her father wants to speak to Alice:

“Alice,” he continued, “you behaved very strangely yesterday…er…it was most peculiar.” Peculiar! that word again! “You seemed to leave the ground in the most extraordinary manner and …er…actually appeared to float in the air. I’d be very interested to see you do this again.”

I said, “Oh no, Father, I really don’t want to. People don’t like it, you know. They think it’s peculiar. Oh, please, I don’t want to be peculiar!”

After more haranguing by her father, Alice levitates around the room and descends, feeling depleted, drained, and worried. Remember how Alice learned from Mrs. Peebles that boasting about one’s peculiar parts wasn’t wise?

The word boasting deserves a certain mention here, as the vet’s interest in Alice is directly tied to her peculiar ability to levitate, which is impressive and possibly financially-viable as a public spectacle. He invites his friends over to watch, and they love it; they can’t get enough; someone bring in the parish to witness the mystery-pageant; someone hire a mystery-agent to market this:

Although my levitation had had such a strange effect on these men, they couldn't see enough of it. They kept pestering father for another demonstration, then another, although I heard father say he didn't want me to be worn out already. It was true I was becoming worn out.

Alice calls it my levitation, asserting ownership of it, and the tension arises from what others to wish to make of this peculiarity. When her father plans a public demonstration at Clapham Common that Alice begins to despair:

Rise up before people on the Common and in music-halls and circuses! Please God, don't let that happen to me. Father, don't make me do this thing. I don't want to be peculiar and different. I want to be an ordinary person. I'll marry Harry Peebles and go away and you needn't see me anymore - but don't make me do this terrible thing.

Notice how Comyns switches from Please God to Please Father, mixing up the two a bit, allowing the spectacles of sainthood to share a pew-breath with the spectacles of circus life and capitalism. Earlier, when I said “occult” wasn’t quite the right word for the bang-up sacred-profane stew that Comyns is serving in this novel, this is what I meant. The patriarch is the head of the house, the king of the church, the master of ceremonies, the deliverer of death, and the daughter — at best— may get to play steeple to his te deum.

Like most decent female characters in this book, Alice Rowlands dies in what could be considered a tragic accident or else the plan of a powerful man-god playing with chess pieces to better his game. I love how it ends in the tawdriest inquest. I love how an inquest may be the carnival-modern version of a hagiography. I love how the tragic language of recent young moms murdered by spouses in the latest Birmingham news story always creates a portrait which verges on sainthood, as if the only worthwhile grief is that shed for a saint or a martyr. I love how Alice’s dread turns out to be correct. I love how Comyns does nothing to make this ending cozy or instructive. There’s nothing to learn, really. One can’t levitate one’s way out of the mess, the vet, the system, the obit.

Speaking of making one’s peculiar parts public, the writer’s role (or unique privilege) is to reveal their peculiars on the page. We all hope that the inquest is distant and the audience enjoys the show we make of our minds for their entertainment and pleasure.

Intonation 2021.

1. The concept

I am deeply grateful to Paul Rabinowitz (and David Crews) for enlarging my world in a way that now feels irrevocable. Here is the project concept, which I was fortunate to be a part of this year.

The Intonation Project, sponsored by Arts by the Peoples, is a collaboration between North American poets, musical composers from the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, as well as dancers and choreographers from Montclair State University. Six poets will participate in two (virtual) writing residencies to create new work. Artists working in dance and other medias will be invited to the residency to conduct workshops to inspire and broaden an understanding for the project’s focal themes. Once completed, the poems are given to six choreographers who will set each to dance. They will record their work, then both the dance and poems will be sent to Jerusalem where composers will create original scores. This is a circuitous project that emphasizes collaboration, interpretation, and a deeper understanding of the creative voices of others.

I am deeply grateful to Paul Rabinowitz (and David Crews) for enlarging my world in a way that now feels irrevocable.

Jack Puluka dancing in “Retrograde”, which he also edited as videographer.

2. The “kindred souls” and kindling

While working on this project, I couldn’t help thinking how much composing and choreography feels like a form of translation—the generative creational mode that brings art into another language.

Any poem should be translated as many times as possible, even by the same translator over the years. Only fundamentalists believe in a "definitive" translation.

- Eliot Weinberger arguing that all can be translated; the "untranslatable" as that which waits for its translator

There is a sense in which what was so breathtaking was watching how the words would be translated into music and motion, into the languages which fascinate me. Perhaps because I’ve been reading lots of epistolary forms this year—lots of letter between and among poets—Boris Pasternak came to mind, particularly in his view that artistic creation becomes greater than its creator when passing from the subjective realm to the objective realm, or the realm in which one is read independently of selfhood.

Watching Noam, Jack, and Miguel was a little like Pasternak’s epiphany upon reading Marina Tsvetaeva’s “Poem of the End” and Rainer Maria Rilke’s letter:

“Nothing but splinters all about me: there are kindred souls in this world—and how extraordinary they are!”

How extraordinary to feel this kinship across artistic mediums, rather than simply among poets, and to read one’s self apart from one’s self, especially in the case of “Retrograde” which wears its dread like a wedding dress. So I leave the room with words from Marina Tsvetaeva to Rilke, from one creator to another, staring at Orpheus, admiring the distance between wings.

3. The composer

Noam Leor is a Composer, Music Producer, Songwriter and Audio Designer. Born and raised in Israel, Noam was trained both as a pianist and guitarist. Later, out of curiosity and with the belief that there are no real barriers between music genres in the 21th century, Noam became involved with Hip Hop, Avant-Garde, Jazz, Downtempo, Musique concrète and more. Noam just released his third album under the name 'Hrzl', and is currently a student in Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, finishing his bachelor degree.

4. The choreographers and dancers

Miguel Miranda, originally from Peru, is a current student at Montclair State University pursuing his BFA in Dance. Miguel has had the privilege of performing works by Ohad Naharin, Frederick Earl Mosley, Eduardo Vilaro, Antonio Brown, Gregory Dolbashian, Joshua Manculich, Jessica Di Mauro, Donna Scro, and many others.

Jack Puluka is a New Jersey resident & currently a sophomore BFA dance major at Montclair State University. Jack began his dance career specializing in Irish dance. Under the training of Maureen Collins at Lynn Academy of Irish Dance, he taught & assisted choreographed traditional Irish dance classes. Jack has both performed in & instructed classes for Hammerstep Irish dance Company, since joining the organization in 2018. He started formal contemporary dance training at Somerset County Vocational & Technical High School. At Montclair he’s performed in works set by Jessie DiMauro, Christain Von Howard & Brandin Steffensen. Jack hopes to further pursue teaching & performing in a variety of different genres. As well as continuing to expand his dance vocabulary in choreography, dance education, & editing for dance film.

5. The final performance

And all my gratitude for the beauty and inspiration it brought to my life.

"Retrograde" by Alina Stefanescu
Composer: Noam Leor
Choreography: Jack Puluka, Miguel Miranda
Costumes: Jack Puluka, Miguel Miranda
Videography: Jack Puluka, Miguel Miranda
Editing: Jack Puluka

Posthumous voices: Eric Chevillard's "The Posthumous Works of Thomas Pilaster"

Posthumous voices present

I am using my posthumous voice to explain the consequences of hypocrisy to my children. One daughter quotes Ariana Grande, the other nibbles on the heel of ballet shoe we uncovered in the car trunk. Once upon a pre-pandemic time, the grrrls danced and wore tutus. I learned how to use a curling iron so they would not feel less love than their friends when it came time for recitals. I loathe recitals the way I loathe beauty, which is to say one stays conflicted, worried, disturbed.

The posthumous voice is tempted to shove these memories into the ceiling fan and invent a religion for the end of the world. Or what goes on after one stops living in it.

Dear X Jr., what is memorable is the memorial. It is impossible to imagine life should continue its microaggressions and caricatures and dumb ponies without you.

Literature, itself, often takes the shape of a posthumous dialogue for bibliophiles. Herve Guibert says as much (more on how he says this soon), and perhaps the posthumous voice, like a last will and testament, becomes the voice one tries on, the temporality one borrows to experiment, to stand before the mirror of ones own existence and flip what remains of the “I”s. Or the “I” addressing the living from beyond the grave in a tone that is serious, absurd, worldly, having nothing to lose, having already lost it.

When the dead speak, who are we to dispute them? What facts can we hold against the ghost's eyebrows? Or their argument? The posthumous voice raises the dead; it rattles the catacombs, etc. But why.

"Faith moves those same mountains that give birth to mice, and we're supposed to be filled with wonder!"

I attended the virtual launch for The Posthumous Works of Thomas Pilaster, a novel described by the press as follows:

The literary world owes a great debt of gratitude to the executors who, charged with burning the remaining papers of their authorial charges, refuse, instead publishing them for the fanatic and meddlesome among us. Collected here are the remaining unpublished works—diaries and drafts, aphorisms and ephemera—of the late Thomas Pilaster, compiled by Marc-Antoine Marson, a longtime friend and fellow writer with whom Pilaster maintained a healthy rivalry. With rough edges and glints of genius present in equal measure, scholars and lay-readers alike will treasure these curious texts—So Many Seahorses, The Vander Sons Company, and Three Attempts at the Reintroduction of the Man-Eating Tiger Into Our Countryside, to name a few—for generations to come. [1]

In this novel, a living author uses a posthumous voice while alive to ironize the safety from slander; Marson's entire narrative pretext (a series of introductory remarks, prefaces, foot-notes, etc.) reshape the commentary as an ongoing envy-driven slander. In the critic-peer’s urge to preserve Thomas Pilaster's true legacy lies the urge to define it.

(See page 39 please, on your own, without my assistance, like the mature mammal you tell your living relatives you have become)

Sublunary Editions publisher, Josh Rothes led a discussion with translator Chris Clarke, about this book by Éric Chevillard, a French novelist of the age which occurs when a man born in June 1964 is alive in the present.

Chevillard is known for his innovative novels, his playing with "codes of narration." He also keeps a blog which feels like its own book titled "L'autofictif": each entry is numbered and dated. On April 6th, the entry was "4635". I have taken it upon myself to translate today’s entry, “4634”, for my own pleasure, and also to share with others the flavor of this ongoing text:

Without a doubt, Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt’s oeuvre enjoys tremendous popular success, although it doesn’t receive the consideration it deserves from academic critics or organized literati who fawned over Kafka and Proust. And what a pity—since her ambition is equal to theirs, and her text is woven from an attention to mysticism that draws her near sacred texts: “There comes a moment when a woman must choose between his face and his body. Grace be to the fat, she saved her figure (….), although things became enormous below.” Notice the formulation of images which carry fruitful plenitude and abundance at a richer density and probable vibrance than those of our current days. The dream is capable of realizing its possibility as a flying carpet.

It strikes me that a world without animals would be a more hospitable one. To be finally rid of these crabs and macaques, these parodic insults of our most subtle and experimental ways of being. Do we really need the beaver, the horseshoe crab, the peccary? Without the claims animals lay on our surroundings, our air would be purged of their discordant cries, their bitter little breaths, their grotesque braying events which rips open the silken fabric of our dreams. No more sick droppings tumbling from the sky on our fine hats, no more poisons in fangs, the end of all fangs, really. [2] And all that space just for us, for the commercial exchange of our sensitive, fragile souls—and the display and exhibition of our monumental works!

Still, no adverse effects from the vaccine. I have rarely even felt so happy.

From this entry, one learns that Chevillard received his COVID-19 vaccine and he feels rare about it. Also that he lives in a Western European country where pigeons shitting on one’s head or hat is not taken for the auspicious, life-affirming, luck-bomb that Eastern Europeans know it to be. Also that countless species bray—and this ability is not limited to the donkey.

Beyond that, one sees a similar vein that the author probes in The Posthumous Works of Thomas Pilaster, namely the role of the critic as an interior landscape of narrative voice. [3]

The question of paratexts in the footnotes and preface kept coming up in the conversation between the translator and the publisher. A sort of hopscotch game developed wherein each space conceded included a number which then attached itself to a rock.

Both characters passed the rock back and forth with utmost civility. When Rothes admitted the preface and footnotes are critical to the narrative for him, Clarke urged caution. In an email, Chevillard told Clarke that what he likes best about the book is that the quality for the reader remains undefined: the reader doesn't know whether to laugh or be serious, and this uncertainty mimes that of the author's two sides, one which pairs satisfaction and vanity, the other which reveals dissatisfaction and shame. [4] So when Clarke asked Chevillard to write a blurb for his translation of Pilaster, Chevillard refused on the grounds of not wanting to intervene in the reader's view of the writers which, together, form a "self-portrait." 

How does self-loathing and critique play into writing as a process? What does Marson's condescending treatment of Pilaster's text signify outside the particularity of the book? Maybe there is no meaning outside its particularity, and that is true of any self-portrait, however gaslit. 

Clarke selected a few of "the seahorses themselves" to read aloud. his voice rich, comfortable, parsing evolution and water with slight wonder and matter of fact. Under it, the idea that things "complete each other" kept bubbling to the surface, a sort of foam, over time, a froth. This dichotomy in Chevillard's process and concept relies on the assumption of completion by difference, as this novel would be incomplete with the doppelganger to narrate it. The conflict is between the two sides of the writer--two parts so estranged that they can barely stand each other--and what he wants from the page is also what he wants from the reader. 

The influence of Roman Gomez de la Cerra's Aphorisms is legible. Pilaster never manages to hit the appropriate syllabic form for a haiku except once--and he rhymes them. Clarke described the translation of this book as a practice of "translating images rather than words", particularly with the haikus. But Roman Gomez de la Cerra is dead.

END-NOTES

[1] At the online book launch on April 6, 2021, translator Chris Clarke said this translation was his master's project in translation studies at NYU. He defended it successfully, then tried to sell it, and discovered that publishers (who focus on reading brief samples) could not appreciate what Chevillard was doing in this book. The "yards-long sentences" of Marcon, for example, reveal him attempting to overwrite Pilaster in his introductions. Clarke went back and kept revisising--completing 5 or 6 other translations in the process--and finally discovered Sublunary through twitter, when Josh tweeted about looking for a Chevillard translations. One senses that both Rothes and Clarke are looking for complicated ways to describe what might otherwise be considered a trite, navel-gazing book of midcentury modernism with baroque contingencies and nods towards an emasculating ocean.

[2] Chevillard on the rise of botanical memoirs: “…while it’s not my intent to be an activist for the animal cause, I am preoccupied by the fate of these creatures, and I do rebel against man’s abuse of his power over a world he shares with other organisms no less entitled to live there.”

[3] Chevillard on psychogeographic metereology: “My response to concerns, challenges, crises, all the various events of life, is a written response. Not exclusively, of course, but it’s rare that I don’t feel a need to confront in writing the things that happen to me, to consider them in that manner. It’s a way of not being hoodwinked by the fate I’ve been given, a way of regaining the upper hand. However, I don’t have much imagination.”

[4] Chevillard on Erik Satie and auctioned time-pieces: “Beckett and Michaux were beholden to nothing. They were never bound by the demands of the system, its necessities or laws, and they never surrendered or conceded a single thing, doubtless because they had no need for fortune or glory and because the only thing that mattered for them was to create, through writing, the conditions of a life that was possible in spite of everything. Beckett and Michaux instilled shame in us like a righteous punishment, like a painful realization of what we have become. Writers these days clearly have no idea the extent to which they’re compromised.”

"Because he has a song": Charles Pinckney's "Lifeboat."

1.

Charles Pinckney’s sculpture, “Lifeboat” (1995), is a tribute to his mother.

The “Lifeboat” is also a tribute to the casket he designed for his mother, and the image of that casket passing through the center aisle of the church on its way to unfathomable shores.

Both casket and “Lifeboat” share ingredients: sterling silver, titanium, copper, bronze, brass, mild steel, cherry wood.

The inner lining is made from satin over paper form.

He explains the composition in this video.

The sculpture sits in the Birmingham Museum of Art, where it arrests me. Every time.

2.

The casket is a boat with four legs that resemble ladders. One wants to climb inside the boat which does not float, the boat which stands on the ground as if to repudiate floating.

The ladders in are a repudiation, as legs recuse themselves from walking when attached to a boat, an object that does not need them to get where it is going.

Pinckney’s “Lifeboat” is a metallurgical rejection.

Because the casket is behind a polycrystalline box, I can’t open it.

The metal chain dangles from the side, accessible only to the eyes.

I imagine the satin lining I could see if I could lift the lid.

To open the lifeboat: to see the mother. Is it the museum that makes that lifting impossible? The form, itself, suggests that opening would be natural.

The presence of the chain, the closed eye of the casket, the space inside the poem we cannot touch.

3.

Pinckney lives in Georgia. Primarily self-taught, he makes jewelry and small sculpture from metal, stones, wood, and bone.

His childhood “piece de resistance—a single chain link carved from a Popsicle stick.”

His method: “I arrange and rearrange into a composition until the piece feels balanced and exciting to me.” Each object wants to be revealed; and it communicates this through a language.

4.

Ada Limon, explaining that poetry isn’t an issue to fix or a problem to solve, quotes the ancient Chinese proverb (also quoted by Toni Morrison): “A bird sings not because he has an answer, but because he has a song.”

Once the bird’s song exists, it no longer belongs to the bird alone—it becomes part of the world where others bring their ears and lives and impressions to bear upon the hearing.

The casket is a boat. The casket sits in a museum where it accessible to the public. We see how much Pinckney loved his mother, and how the form of this love protects her from us.

4.

Jaswinder Bolina to the poet: “Your task is to arrange the words strangely in order to explain more clearly what happened.” Charles Pinckney on sculpture: “You have to release yourself from what your preconceptions are and let the thing dictate.”

The words strangely.

The words estranged from the wording, the aura that surrounds the latch.

The poem does not open the casket; the poem tells us the casket can be opened.

I am still circling around the tension between formal expectation and what the artist holds sacred.

5.

From that day forward. From that day, forward. The presence of a comma modifies what the poet asks of time. The absence makes the seam invisible. The seam is the space of asking in a poem. Each punctuation mark makes what is asked more specific.

What happens to a bird song when we score it?

6.

The bird song’s is part of the landscape. It sings whether or not we listen. You who know American Saturdays—know lawnmowers and barbecues bulldoze the song. Leaf blowers erase it and nothing else happens.

The bird does not fight to be heard over the din.

The poet must live with that.

The bind of singing: being ignored. The song’s risk is also it’s sky—it’s particular tenor.

Hoa Nyugen ends the poem, “Diệp Before Completion,”with this line:

“The past tense of sing is not singed”

No punctuation. No italics. We feel singed by the past tense, even though the poet explicitly states the opposite. The ear hears a fire.

The mind finds an ocean. An eye trying to lift it.

What is a lifeboat? “How long after chemotherapy can a DIEP flap be done?” What is the color of locked satin?

The poem from analogy: Samatar Elmi's "The Snails"

The task of poetry educators is to remind students “that the most beautiful light comes from the most unrepentant flame,” D. A. Powell wrote somewhere. In this, the distance between the literal and the figurative can be the poem’s hinge. I am compelled by how poets accomplish this in analogy.

By definition, an analogy is a comparison between two things for the purpose of explanation or clarification. The analogy works on the basis of similarity to reveal something greater about the world. Unlike simile or metaphor which aim to show, the analogy's goal is not just to show but also to explain. To point to something bigger.

An analog is a person or thing seen as comparable to another. (It is also an amorphous evocation of nostalgia for Gen X’ers who remember the days of analog with fondness.)

Some have argued that the analogy is the core of human cognition. Certainly, it relies on language—on the slipperiness of connotation and shifts in meaning, and poet Samatar Elmi makes splendid use of analogy to reveal how cognition relies on re-cognition, or knowing by recognizing.

First published in Poetry Review, 2021.

By locating the analogy itself as a subject in the poem, Elmi uncovers a tension in the analogizing, and this tension conveys a tone of displacement through disorientation and juxtaposition. Pronouns are critical to the pull of this poem, and each pronoun packs and repacks differently.

"The Snails" uses analogy as its starting point and its frame. The speaker declares this outright in the first line:

I mean, the analogy writes itself

The "I mean"  signals that the speaker is thinking, looking for meaning, using the analogy itself as a way to try and explain something difficult. The reader knows that the speaker is thinking aloud, leading into the strange unwinding of the long, enjambed sentence and its nested figurative languages:

like the onion in a grand conceit
though we are really like two slugs
in a derelict mausoleum.

Something uncanny happens inside the first stanza. The first few lines are linked by strange smilies and metaphors - and the recurring consonance of tea sticks to the tongue. T, itself, is sticky – it links in an awkward way. The onion signals that there are layers to be peeled back in a bigger “conceit,” and the next line begins with a qualifier—”though”—where the speaker brings in a plural pronoun, a “we” that designates a couple, a double, “two slugs” in a “derelict mausoleum.”

Then, in the middle of the first stanza, after this heady, strange beginning, the poet changes tone and pace with a directive:

Google “Snails are….”
Dangerous. Slow.
Destroying my garden.
Our jobs and our women.

Here, the syntax changes, sharpens the gaze, tightens the poem, creates a lexical accumulation of fragments which feel threatening and evoke the language of nativist xenophobia.

*

The second stanza begins with a direct address to “You, who cannot speak snail,” and then reclaims the analogy of the immigrant as a snail in a moving home, wearing his shelter on his back.

Read it aloud. Read across the stanza break with its gulf in the middle to hear how a chasm opens between the Google “Our” of nativists and the accusatory turn that hinges on the “You”:

Our jobs and our women.

You, who cannot speak snail,

This is a dramatic You—it is the stuff of dramatic monologue and epic poetry. I hear so many you’s in this, including Rilke’s “[You who never arrived]”…..

Now the shell is a gift and a curse – against the biological or natural view of the snail as a sneaky invader, the  the poet presents the analogy from the snails perspective.  we know this by the shift in pronoun--the way "Our" does the work of recreating a boundedness, pressing into the tension of inclusion and exclusion.

*

So much hinges on the sharp turn between stanzas in Elmi’s poem.

Gaston Bachelard described the poetic image as “a sudden salience on the surface of the psyche.” To experience the image, we have to feel it's reverb, and what Elmi does with the snail—how the snail analog carries the shift in pronouns— reminds me of syncopation in music theory, where one holds a note while the chord changes.

We have the snail as it is seen by the gardener—the property owner—and straight from that clipped syntax, the poem moves into direct address.

In the Bachelardian frame, the empty shell evokes the empty nest, which limns dreams of refuge. But B. qualifies this by presenting the paradox of the “vigorous mollusk,” which suggests “the most decisive type of aggressive, aggressiveness that bides its time."

*

 Ancient burial grounds contain snail shells as allegories of graves in which men would waken. The shells were vessels for the regiving of life – for the return and resurrection—hence the name “resurrection shells”. The body becomes lifeless when the soul leaves it and the shell cannot move anymore; the shell cannot move when separate from the spirit.

The poet here, keeps his shell, insists on its presence, refuses to remove the perceived threat of shell, or to respond to the threat that others make of immigrant. There is something almost Rilkean in this.

Here’s “Part One, Sonnet IV” of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus (trans. by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy).

You who let yourselves feel: enter the breathing
that is more than your own.
Let it brush your cheeks
as it divides and rejoins behind you.
Blessed ones, whole ones,
you where the heart begins:
You are the bow that shoots the arrows
and you are the target.
Fear not the pain. Let its weight fall back
into the earth;
for heavy are the mountains, heavy the seas.
The trees you planted in childhood have grown
too heavy. You cannot bring them along.
Give yourselves to the air, to what you cannot hold.

I read it almost as a response or a dialogue with Elmi’s poem, which focuses on the ground, the planet, the property marks and boundaries created by humans—and Rilke’s call to relinquish these heavy things, to look towards the sky. I think what these poets want is similar—to be the “Blessed ones, whole ones” of Rilke’s fifth line—and it’s transfixing to map the distances across time here.

But also, a resonance in Bachelard’s words: "Wolves in shells are crueler than stray ones." To be in-between, to be trapped between the perception of threat and the home one carries: to study the poignance of Elmi’s juxtapositions and images.

A final note on the poet, who is new to me.

Samatar Elmi (a.k.a. Knomad Spock ) is a British-Somali poet, rapper and neofolk singer-songwriter “who explores musical genres as extended analogies for his own multiethnic heritage,” which includes Somali nomadic traditions and British working class communities. Elmi’s poetics hinges on what the displacements of language reveal about belonging and identity. “The Hope and the Anchor” and “The Invaders” accomplish this in a very different way from “The Snails.” Portrait of Colossus, his debut pamphlet, is available from flipped eye publishing. I am keeping my fascinated, analog eye on this poet.