Anna Kavan's machine head in fog.

Everyone had an opinion on Anna Kavan, the pen name taken by Helen Ferguson.

Jean Rhys, whose complicated relationship to alchohol is no secret, described her close friend in a 1970 essay titled “The Bazooka Girl”—borrowing the title' of Anna Kavan’s story as an emblem for the author’s entire life. She was a heroin addict, Rhys assures us:

She could not escape from the evil of hopelessness. It would arrive at any ordinary moment. Sitting with her in the Café Royal, I found her taking an extraordinary dislike to a waiter, who certainly was repellent physically but otherwise, to my eye, harmless. It was with astonishment that I was to find the episode transformed in Asylum Piece. I had not understood that her brief flight from the restaurant table was done to give herself a shot of heroin, after which she gained detachment from the oppressive hovering of the waiter, who, as related in the book, had indeed followed us from the bar upstairs to serve us in the restaurant below—which, for her, had become pursuit by one of the menacing devils threatening her security. The waiter was in some way connected with a hallucinatory figure awaiting her in the foyer.

She was paranoid, intoxicated, out of her mind, riven by madness, Rhys says, drumming her nails on the table.

*

Everything depends on the patrons, Anna Kavan tells us, at the beginning of her short fiction collection, Machines in the Head and Other Stories (NYRB Classics). Everything depends on powers external to herself, and life consists in pleasing the patrons, the advisers, the men, the women, the anonymous, indecipherable masks which pass for humans.

For Kavan’s narrators—and for the writer, herself—power depends on proximity to the powerful, and in relation to men. We see this reliance on men in Helen Ferguson’s life as well as that of Anais Non (a fan of Kavan’s). This is the psychologized 20th century femme who exists by virtue of her relation to the analyst, a father-figure, a man who knows her better than she knows herself.

Of course, there is “The Enemy.” Though nameless, the enemy controls everything—it is the enemy who determines what the speaker can do, say, or think. One could read structuralism into this, but I’m not sure Kavan was going that far. Her sense of helplessness is personal, despite its emphasis on depersonalization.

*

The story “Ice Storm” describes the narrator’s experience of an ice storm in the US, as she decides whether to stay or return to England, and the entire narrative is interrupted by various media headlines and quotes about the danger of the ice storm and the victims killed by it. The banality of the reportage combines with the pragmatic discussions of privilege and good fortune which the friends use to convince the narrator to stay in New York. But the narrator’s problem is loneliness—and her friends, a married couple, refuse to hear or see her.:

‘I don’t understand you,’ Gloria said. ‘If you really feel as badly as you say, how can you be so articulate about everything and write about everything the way you do?’

“Everything in the world” is “loaded with ice” for the protagonist. The morning reveals the world immobilized by freezing. She is “the only person out in the glacial world.”

Kavan uses the word loneliness again and again, as both description and diagnosis.

*

To quote from Jean Rhys’ portrait again:

She wrote in a mirror. It imprisoned her. Watching only herself, her men are wraiths, and nearly always treacherous—as perhaps shadows must be. Retreat from an intolerable world was to become more a necessity. When, ten years before she died, she retained sufficient of her excellent constructive energy to design herself a house, battling knowledgeably with architect and builders, she was to keep its Venetian blinds down all day, and her small walled garden was secret, a density of foliage such as her favourite Henri Rousseau might have painted, a dream leopard prowling under the lunar-green fronds. In the world of reality her social conduct was apt to become erratic, passing too swiftly from the most delicate perception of a guest’s mood to hurtling a roast fowl across the table at him, then retiring to her bazooka from an objective distance, and a wry joke would be cracked about it. The discipline that sustained writing was helpful—as, probably, a respect for the principles of creative work (surely it is manifest in these stories? helped to keep under control the lying that becomes a nuisance in confirmed drug addicts. That other self carried, too, a sense of guilt. There was also an unfaltering love and knowledge of the Bible.

Des Barry wrote a great read of this book (as published by Peter Owen Publishers) in the context of Kavan’s other work, and Barry compares her mode to that of artist Henry Darger.

I’m intrigued by the emphasis on mechanization, and on the machine—the administration of the mind as experienced by certain classes of women with mental illness— and the relationship to substance abuse. There is copious tragedy in believing that a man, whether analyst or caregiver, can save a woman. There is, of course, an absence of countervailing narratives that don’t rely on an empowerment feminism which leans in to the language. Who can forget that Margaret Thatcher spent a decade in speech therapy to make her voice sound more masculine, and therefore, reliable?

The Child Voice in Fiction: Strategies from James Schuyler.

Reading James Schulyer’s Alfred and Guinevere, which he wrote in 1952, one marvels at his deployment of the child voice. I sat down and studied the way Schulyer accomplishes this…and one easy word would be “intrusive imaginations,” for the kids are always bringing some wildly imagined thought into the room as an argument.

1. Dialogic structure that imitates the non-sequential talk of kids.

Since Schulyer doesn’t always use dialogue tags, there is a sense in which these dialogues between kids pick up their own momentum, or exist in a world seperate from the linear, explicative, attribute world of adults.

The speakers interrupt randomly, or throw in accusative forms, which allows the subject to be changed, or to open a fold in the backstory of speakers—a lot happens after one of the kids says “You’re just jealous…”, and explains why. Also achieved with “Oh yeah, then what about…?” Whataboutism is very effective at enriching the characterization and tone.

2. Inclusion of random facts as evidence in the dialogue—taking books as real, com-possible places.

There is a constant sense in which all is compossibly true. See page 54 for a sharp example of this taking the book as a place. The kids also reeanctment their readings in scenes from their created plays. Page 53 and 53 give examples.

This constant reference to fictional books gives us a sense of aspiration that is markedly different from that of the adults. Schulyer’s child voices describe the novel’s actions as their own “ambitions.” Real life is constantly interpreted to stories and books so that the indeterminate, or the helplessness of childhood, becomes a mental expansiveness in which anything can happen. Examples on pp. 46-48. Adages and folklore are included as evidence or explanation in the conversations between kids, no book is useless.

3. The intrusion of adult world as a strangeness, another country whose means and meanings need decoding.

This occurs repeatedly throughout the novel, and one sees it in Schulyer’s depiction of the charged, hostile silences between adults (as on p. 50), as well as the childrens’ attempts to make sense of these silences and words. What’s marvelous is overhearing how the kids attribute wild, romantic motivations to particular silences, absences, and patches of evasion in adult-land (see p. 86).

4. Detailed description of gendered socialization occurs through conversation among peers and allusions to media.

We see how girls learn what is expected of them as a particular performative aesthetic in the images cited, and the chit-chat between the young girls, and the vocalizations of adults. Guinevere’s horror at her own freckles is described in this way on pages 49-50.

The duty of aesthetic self-improvement infuses Guinevere’s friendships, and the “freedom” of the female gender in Schulyer seems to end with young adulthood (p. 100). Guinevere repeatedly mourns the way her desire to talk about feeligs or books with girlfriends gets snuffed out because the girls just want to to talk about “stuff”, and stuff-ness (p. 113).

5. Death presented a melodramatic moment of significance rather than harsh reality of non-existence.

There is a romance to the death scenes, as on p. 48. The children cope with trauma by inventing fantastic alternative scenarios which resemble a childhood epic constructed from various fictional heroes and heroines, as seen in the very beginning when Schulyer frames the book as part of this epic, pp. 4-5.

Death is surreal in the child-mind. This also shows up in the hyperbolic language about health that doesn’t take mortality seriously—Guinevere is always imagining she will die of something, and talking about this imagined death (p. 93).

6. Inclusion of random comments from adults that add strangeness and suspense to the adult world.

Page 31. These also include wacky religious or moral commentaries (page 20), or even the forebodingness of conflict between generations, as towards the end when the grandmother is so set in her ways, so dedicated to tradition, that it keeps her from flourishing, thriving, or surviving—but these ways, these traditions, aren’t completely devoid of truth. Where the adult would have a normative binary, the child mind allows both to co-exist in Schulyer.

7. Narrative as a form of power.

The difference between “true stories” and “lies” is the engine of this book, and that becomes clear on pp. 94-95, but the reader feels this already in the tension between adult-land and child-land as well as the competitive tall-tales between kids. Arthur and Guinevere aim to oneup each other in freaky, scary stories, and this is also an element in friendship with their peers (pp. 8-9).

Ultimately, Schulyer evokes the way adult narratives, and the stories adults tell, have power over the young. And kids fight back with their own stories, their own variants—by refusing to write what some might call a “trauma narrative” of child abuse with a plot structured around harm, elucidation, and redemption or therapy—-Schulyer sets us inside the child-mind the whole way through. I read this as an anti-adult book, in so many ways, a repudiation or reclamation of narrative power.

The kids tell stories, or create stories, to deal with the parts of life that can’t be processed or discussed, including their parents’ divorce. Stories don’t solve so much as ameliorate the helplessness, as in conversation on page 76.

“True stories aren’t as scary as made-up ones,” the child-speaker says.

8. Self-help discourse and self-improvement chat is gleaned and modified from adults.

This adds a sort of fantastic layer of meaning to the words “aptitude” and “ambition.” These words sound different when used by children—they feel flimsy, and their constructedness is revealed.

10. Repetition of adult phrases with slight changes in syntax that renders the cliches and platitudes absurd, humorous, silly.

As on page 41.

11. Physical gestures and body as text to be decoded—and performed.

pp. 67-68.

The kids control adults, or influence adults, by “acting the part” (p. 118)—and they are conscious of this. Which makes the extent of their acting other parts—from books, movies, media, etc.—seem less child-like and more integral to social life in late-capitalism.

The book essentially ends in the performance of a good-night prayer, as when Arthur says a prayer so fast it becomes a jumble of sounds, and Guinevere calls him names, and the mood descends into rhymes and a sort of light jibberish. A heavy frivolty.

Alice Fulton's sumptuous language.

"Love, if true, is tacit."

Alice Fulton, "Nugget and Dust"

*
I want to eat Alice Fulton's poems.

Sometimes I want to just eat them for the sumptuous repast and sensuousness they lay on the lips.

“Triptych for a Topological Heart” is so rich—it’s like a triple layer cake. Here’s how she ends the first layer…with a feast of vowels, a roll of o’s and a’s:

Without ardor
theory suffers. That’s why I’m stuck on you with wanton glue, per-
severing, styling something blobbish and macabre
into something pointed, neat. Love is a gift
that springs from an unlit spot. Resin and rue.
Even when I’m in the dark I’m in the dark with you.

*

Speaking of the dark—and the dark You—my notebooks hold the past for me against the fear of forgetting.

I know that in November 2014, I woke up twice with the same nightmare: P telling kids they could live with him in Virginia. I don't remember the scene, but the notebook says I asked him if it was true. Half asleep, he said that was a month ago. A pre-emptive strike when he wasn't sure how I felt.

I know: the clouds weigh too much today. Planes coming. The fear of terror, itself, is a terrorism and constant. The color of my eyes: cumulus.

I remember this was around the time I was doing a tremendous amount of free labor for a local old-blood Southerner who kept spreadsheets of who owned property and had money in Tuscaloosa. I don't remember thinking: Posture is a pose that suits the clothes. We select based on what we plan to feel, perform. Anything on Sunday might turn opera. Baroque, rococo, harmony requires this overwhelming aesthetic of fake. But if I look at my poems, I can see the baroque brought to the page suggesting a sort of gaudy conflict and turmoil, a deep, ongoing fear of being blacklisted by Southern elite.

“Without ardor, theory suffers.” Uncertainty—the enemy of ardor and theory—is the heart of poetry. The mouth is torn between these modes.

*

Fulton tells us the trees “don’t suffer openly,” and then pivots into details. And the way she uses neologisms, the way she sprinkles anachronisms over the top of a skyscraper, as in “Orientation in Hades”:

Heaven's that blotto yonder,
under digits of sun.
Light always has a point to make
in kingdom come, as in religious pictures
or Disney-animation. That paradise

looks like a salt mine
may come as a surprise.

The use of "blotto" to defamiliarize and then suddenly turn the wheel into what may be paradise is brilliant.

Free will comes down to meaning
we can eat anything with the hot sauce on it.

Our banter, in contrast, clanks
like cashboxes slamming closed.

And "the lamentation of the damned"—what does that sound like?

"The Body Opulent" trafficks in alliterations and sensual imagery. Fulton mixes religious words with mechanical ones, see "polychromed partitions", that raise the stakes and situate the body in a time of space of particular sanctity.

Particular sanctity. What does that mean? What is sacred now that wasn't sacred ten years ago? I think of privacy and how sacred it is in the States compared to Romania, where extended families still share houses after getting married. I think about how this relation to an abstraction changes our notions of right, wrong, intimacy.

Each cell got busy, singing
the dawnsong of its name.

What is a dawnsong? What is an aubade at the cellular level? What does it sound like if every cell has one? Fulton's jumbling of science and religious ritual is so evocative and strange and perfect here. 

Let's see how she ends the poem:

The freeway's glowing
dot and dash, a path of crumbs to follow home. 

And how she ends “Barely Composted”:

They say a trader can protect herself
with scales or acid.
They say it makes a nice death mask.
Tears won't change it.
Is that not great?
Why then do I scruple
to entirely embrace it?
It is too precious
for small transactions
and too heavy
for large ones.
It has nothing to prove.
Paper is its substitute.

I keep thinking there is no substutite which doesn’t become an icon.

Maybe Christianity is religion of the incarnation where God writes themselves with the world they created to unify it and bring it closer.

William T. Vollmann's "Goodbye".

And then re-read it in light of Vollmann’s end-notes. To note—Vollmann populates his end-notes with so many riches and keys to the text. I never skip them.

Robert Walser's Microscripts.

Robert Walser made use of the miniature form in his Microscripts — tiny embodiments of the miniscule.  The microscript form came to Walser as a result of a writer's cramp, which he qualified as: "a swoon, a cramp, a stupor - these are always both physical and mental."  His formally ornamental scripts turned tiny, microscopic, using pencil rather than pen, breaking with what translator Susan Bernofsky calls "the aesthetic ideal of the elegantly inscribed page." 

The Microscripts are written on found materials which make the texts look like collages, modernist mashups toeing the line between mechanical and personal production.

In English, the gloss is often taken as a form similar to the interlinear gloss of medieval text or marginal comments (as one sees in Coleridge's the Ancient Mariner). In the introduction to Robert Walser's Microscripts, translator Susan Bernofsky describes the satirical gloss as a well-known form in German literature, popularized by Karl Kraus. One thinks of Robert Musil—who loves them – and Walter Benjamin, who seems to be influenced by them.

W. G. Sebald called Walser "the clairvoyant of the small," and Walser took this smallness literally as his handwriting got smaller and smaller over the course of his career. He even squeezed out a final short novel, The Robber, on 24 sides of octavo-size paper in what scholars believed to be a secret, uncrackable code.

Nothing remains from Walser's final years in the institution, the asylum where he died and disappeared.

Here is one of Walser's microscripts as translated by Bernofsky.

Image source: The Improbable

Maira Kalman’s illustrations and notes are also marvelous, and they exist in dialogue with Walser’s biography. They are captions for glosses—-or glosses on images.

The gloss form is still fantastic, and it’s defined as a brief notation, especially a marginal one or an interlinear one, of the meaning of a word or wording in a text. It may be in the language of the text or in the reader's language if that is different. Here is the wikipedia:

A collection of glosses is a glossary. A collection of medieval legal glosses, made by glossators, is called an apparatus. The compilation of glosses into glossaries was the beginning of lexicography, and the glossaries so compiled were in fact the first dictionaries. In modern times a glossary, as opposed to a dictionary, is typically found in a text as an appendix of specialized terms that the typical reader may find unfamiliar. Also, satirical explanations of words and events are called glosses. 

Short lesson on craft from William Maxwell.

I will begin with a scowl.

William Maxwell's short story, "The Pilgrimage," grates my nerves. It revolves around an American couple in France trying to get to a restaurant their friend said was the best, and the drama of their pilgrimage - how they call themselves pilgrims - and their outrage over menus and changes in the offerings, all mixed with a ton of fancy dishes, flat dialogue with waiters, chunks of an untranslated decorative French – and a dance scene at the end which is supposed to convey happiness. The Americans dance in the street. Frankly, it's not that interesting. It’s not his best work, yet it gets read more often than his incredibe stuff—which is probably due to over-identification on the part of the American reading audience.

I do love William K. Maxwell’s writing. The one I love most is a lesser-known collection of short stories, or fables, titled The Old Man at the Railroad Crossing and Other Tales. Maxwell dedicated the book to Em, his wife. In the preface, he explains that many of the stories grew from tales he invented for her on sleepless nights.

The compositional method began with the first sentence: “The first sentence was usually a surprise…From the first sentence, everything else followed.”

Structured as fairy tales, many begin with that lingustic frame, as in “Once upon a time there was a man who had no enemies, only friends.”

Or: “Once upon a time there was a man who lost his father.”

And: “There was an old woman whose house was beside a bend in a running stream.”

Or else they phrase the problem at the outset, as in “Not everybody’s heart and mind reside in this body.”

The table of contents, itself, feels like a writing prompt—and I play a fun game where I attempt to match the first line to the title, to trace the tale’s costume to the thread.

“There are things that cannot be said except in a roundabout way,” Maxwell fables, “and things that cannot be done until you have done something else.” So in country where pigs bury their thoughts in hay, everybody has a special relationship to the hayloft, or to their knowledge of it. In a country where it only rains on Sundays, no one makes plans to host picnics on Sundays. Each fable creates a world by describing its peculiarities—or limitations. These are rules. And we can create entire stories by beginning with a rule about a world. The birds eat all the bells. The queens are actually kings. The creek is a highway to hell.

Borrowing from oral storytelling traditions, Maxwell changes the frame by adding explicative statements like “This is not as strange as it first seems..” or “One might have supposed that…”

To express the characters’ alienation from time, Maxwell gives us an image: “Every year the earth grows more out of touch with the sky.”

Here’s an excerpt from “The lamplighter,” one of my favorite stories in this collection—to give you a sense of the language and texture, the structure of the sky and time (see “coda”), and the anachronstic character of the lamplighter.

A large view of the boulevard feels grandiose and magnificent unless all the streets are boulevards, and all the views are large ones, in which case the magnificent grows monotonous. The strange is the storyteller’s best friend. A few writing games for those who love words and language—

Game 1

Write a brief tale titled after one of Maxwell’s stories as listed in the table of contents. Make the first sentence a surprise. Consider using an enchanted object. Develop your images by focusing on strange metaphors and fabulist time.

Game 2

Write a brief fable that begins with the statement: “Twice upon a time…” Let an object be the narrator.

Game 3

“Ahoretia” is the malady of lack of determination. Write a vignette about a character suffering from ahoretia who has gone to see a therapist for help. Let dialogue drive the story. Play with misunderstanding, or the absence of a shared daily world in which the protagonist attempts to create this world for the therapist, only to be met with the therapist’s world.

Booklist for writing the uncanny details

Brutality hides inside banality—beneath the ironed uniform, under the cassock of the priest, in the starched business decorum of the professional—the monstrous is made even more monstrous because it looks safe, ordinary, appropriate.

"Germany declared war on Russia. Went swimming all afternoon."

• Franz Kafka in his notebooks

This juxtaposition is horrifying precisely because it is banal. It reveals how life goes on as usual in the middle of tragedy, in the space after losing a loved one, in the hollows of genocide and wars, in the sunshine that greets a patient leaving the office where she has been given three months to live. The brutality of the ordinary assures us that life continues like a machine without us.

*

Brutality, banality, the screwiness of what is familair—and how certain writers have used fictional techniques that play into estrangement. I’m teaching a weekend workshop for Bending Genres (you can sign up for the asynchronous here)—and a weekend doesn’t give us adequate time to do more than dabble through excerpts and short readings. This makes me nauseous in some ways—nauseous because these books are formidable and deserve so much more than a dibble or a dabble.

So I created a booklist for writers who want to study the uncanny weirdnesss more closely—to get a deeper glimpse of the extraordinary, duplicitous banality in modern language. All of these books will be touched upon, or licked a bit, in the workshop. I hope that others find time to do more than to lick, which is to properly masticate and devour.

Not an exhaustive, but a tasty start.

The Promise by Silvina Ocampo, translated by Jessica Powell & Suzanne Jill Levine (City Lights Books)

The Voice Imitator: 104 Stories by Thomas Bernhard, translated by Keith Northcott (University of Chicago Press)

The Collected Stories of Diane Williams by Diane Williams (SoHo Press)

Bessarabian Stamps by Oleg Woolf, translated by Boris Dralyuk (Deep Vellum)

Nadirs by Herta Müller, translated by Sieglinde Lug (University of Nebraska Press)

The Encyclopedia of the Dead by Danilo Kiš, translated by Michael Henry Heim (Northwestern University Press)

A School for Fools by Sasha Sokolov, translated by Alexander Boguslawski (NYRB Classics)

On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry by William Gass (NYRB Classics)

The World Goes On by László Krasznahorkai, translated by George Szirtes, Ottilie Mulzet and John Batki (New Directions)

The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington by Leonora Carrington (The Dorothy Project)

Do Everything in the Dark by Gary Indiana (ITNA Press)

Empire of the Senseless by Kathy Acker (Grove Atlantic)

We Others by Steven Millhauser (Knopf Doubleday)

Microscripts by Robert Walser, translated by Susan Bernofsky (New Directions)

The Walk by Robert Walser, translated by Susan Bernofsky and Christopher Middleton (New Directions)

For writers trying to learn the genre known as the "pitch."

There is this thing called a “pitch” or a “query form” that can be daunting. I say this as someone who has yet to query an agent because the pitch itself is daunting to me.

Here’s a great how-to example from Cassie Maines, an agent and writer with Howland Literary Agency.

Eric Smith has devoted an entire page to the variants of this genre on his blog, including notes on why talking about yourself in relation to other authors may be a mistake. Smith also includes a fabulous list of twitter authors and agents who regularly spend time discussing the system and how it works.

On the book review side, Adam Morgan compiled a long list of sources and references which is right here. And there is a related twitter thread filled with helpful comments from book critics, including this one:

All this is just to say: twitter often serves as a resource for writers reviewing books and looking for agents. Don’t be afraid to engage the generosity of twitter literature community, especially if you don’t have personal access to publishers.

"The world is no place for poets": Notes on infra-noir and Romanian surrealists.

Initially, I had planned to be an alchemist.

This is what my Romanian father said when I asked him why he became a metallurgist. The esoterics of alchemy inflect Romanian poetics, particulary that of the interwar avant-garde movements.

The desire to create an immortal metal exists in poetry as well as science. The poem changes forms in translation, acquires the burden of new borders, new customs, new contexts that the foreign reader can't access. I've been wandering through Romanian surrealism lately, and leaning into the alchemical in a recent series of poem-dialogues with the poets of the interwar period.

The backstory matters.

WHO IS GHERASIM LUCA?

Born in Bucharest in 1913 as Zollmann Locker, Gherasim Luca was a Romanian Jew who survived the Antonescu's fascist Iron Guard regime only to flee the rise of the Communist regime for Paris in the 1950s, where he helped to found the Romanian Surrealist group, an assemblage of un-Breton-like writers and artists who deserve more attention. (More specifics on this under Bucharest Surrealists.)

In 1931 and 1932, as neo-fascist nationalism gained ground in Romania, Luca worked with other Bucharest writers to create two ephemeral magazines with scandalous titles, namely Pula («Dick/Penis») and Muci («Boogers»), which were sent to some important personalities of the time, such as Nicolae Iorga, considered by many to be an intellectual apostle of nationalism. In response, Iorga called the police to arrest “the gang of the spoilers of writing”. So Luca and his fellow journal editors were were arrested and imprisoned for several days on the accusation of pornography.

Throughout the 1930's, Luca continued to publish his radical work in countless literary journals. where Ovidiu Morar says "he vehemently denounced the exploitation of the proletariat, the officially encouraged anti-Semitism, the fascist danger, and the increasingly threatening specter of the war, meanwhile sustaining the idea of an «engaged» (or «revolutionary») literature." He laid himself out as the primary theorist of "proletarian poetry" in a series of articles published in 1935 in the left-wing magazine Cuvântul liber.

Per Morar, Luca thought "proletarian poetry (which was opposed to the «pure» poetry, considered to be in the service of the dominant class) had to reflect the deep contradictions of the bourgeois society, in other words, the motor had to be the class struggle." The anti-bourgeois and anti-aestheticist tone of "Poem of the Gentle People" lays out the tension between exploiter and exploited so well:

I know at last the infamy of the gentle people
I know those people with wet and round hands, ready to caress everybody
I know also their thin and smiling lips that always have one or two words of pity, of caress
oh, thin and infamous lips, against which I should write all my poems
thin lips, smiling lips, made for touching the forehead, for saying a prayer

Luca ends this poem with the following warning:

comrades,
the robbers who break in the house at night to steal
are just as dangerous, either masked or with uncovered faces
their masks, their smiles, their words of priest and god
must be once for good unmasked

THE BUCHAREST SURREALISTS

In 1938, Gherasim Luca left for Paris, where he met André Breton and other members of the French surrealist group, but the outbreak of the war forced him to return to Bucharest, where he settled, together with Gellu Naum, forming what would later be known as the Bucharest surrealist group (the other members were the poets Paul Paun and Virgil Teodorescu, and the painter Dolfi Trost). Otherwise, the adverse political context (the setting up of Antonescu’s fascist dictatorship and his alliance with Hitler) forced the group to suspend its activity by the end of the war (besides their communist sympathies, Luca, Păun and Trost were Jews).

The Bucharest Surrealists were active between 1940 and 1947, and they openly critiqued Breton's Parisian surrealists for giving up on revolution in the name of a dicta, a replicable formula or style that put value in the repetitious techniques as avenues for truth rather than revolt. Fijalkowski notes that the Bucharest surrealists were mostly writers, and the painters connected with them, Brauner and Hérold, spent this period in France. 

The group would explore a range of explicitly anti-aesthetic (in Luca and Trost’s words, “aplastiques, objectifs et entièrement non-artistiques” ‘aplastic, objective and totally non-artistic’) visual practices. Notable among these was the domain of the object, developed in particular by Luca during the early 1940s with his notion of the “Objectively Offered Object,” a game in which found and constructed objects might act as lightning rods for interpersonal exchange, sorcery and divination; Luca’s account of this experience Le Vampire passif is illustrated with a number of such assemblages. (1)

November 1940 saw a huge earthquake in Bucharest (which Luca described in The Passive Vampire), so collapse was always part of living, creating, divining for him. The architecture of existence resembled the fractures of a street during earthquake.

CUBO-MANIA

Around August 1944, when the fascist wartime regime fell apart in Romania (a topic that deserves an entire book) that Luca came up with his method of "cubomania":

A collage in which source material is sliced into precise squares and reassembled as small grids of tessellated papers, its formal economy masks an ambitious conceptual framework that makes the process not only unique within surrealist collage practice but also one of the most theoretically-driven instances of surrealist image-making. Two exhibitions in Bucharest, in 1945 and 1946, and a pair of small publications – one, Les Orgies des quanta, devoted exclusively to the cubomania – presented the first results to the public. 

The war wasn't over. The catastrophe changed shape and continued. Luca, himself, had been forced to work as a street cleaner, clearing away rubble and bodies after bombardments. (Note to self: a link between this and Antoine Volodine's rubble-cleaner as a form of metaphysical and social innocence.) 

Statements co-authored with Dolfi Trost in 1945 insist "their visual works, far from constituting an artistic practice of the kind that Dialectique de la dialectique critiqued, should be read as the visible signs of a revolutionary theoretical program." 1945 also saw the publication of The Passive Vampire, where Luca defined the objectively offered object as "an object made while thinking of the person to whom it was intended," allowing it to serve as a vehicle for intimate or intellectual exchanges which can be reinterpreted, almost an icon, a space for apocalyptic thought. (See, for example, "Le lettre L".)

"We agree with dream, madness, love, and revolution," they wrote, against class and poverty and death.  Towards delirium, weeping, somnambulism, the concrete,the  absurd, desire, hysteria, furs, black magic, "the dialectics of the dialectic", simulacra, flames, vice, "objective chance," cryptaesthesia, and bloodstains. Towards ecstasy. Towards a permanent revolutionary state, Luca said, "The cubomania denies. The cubomania renders the known unknown." It negates the images that oppress us, and one can discern a critique of consumer culture and the modern nation-state in this, I think.

Late nineteenth century engravings, reproductions of early twentieth century academic or impressionist-style paintings, and contemporary mass-media photographs of nudes, the three sources of the cubomanias of the 1940s, together span an era of the previous fifty years whose structural integrity had failed (Luca’s project echoing in more violent and pessimistic form Walter Benjamin’s archaeology of the outmoded fragment or ruin).

And Morar translates Luca's statements on cubomania from Inventatorul iubirii:

this vibrating mixture of fragmented women, unknown or partially known, and that are attracted to me with an irresistible force, in circumstances without equivalence in the ready-made world of the current or exceptional phenomena, but that remind sometimes of the processes of displacement and condensation suffered by the phenomena of the dream life.

These bodies of women dynamited in me, fragmented and mutilated by my monstrous thirst for a monstrous love, have at last the liberty to search and find outside the marvelous from the bottom of their being, and nothing will make me believe anything but the fact that love is this mortal entrance in the marvelous. 

INFRA-NOIR

In January 1945, Dolfi Trost and Gherasim Luca exhibited their mixed media work. One month later, a similar mixed media surrealist exhibit featured Paul Păun's work. 

But the big date was in the fall of 1946, when Infra-noir happened, including work from Dolfi Trost, Gherasim Luca, Paul Păun, Virgil Teodorescu, and Gellu Naum. The text they selected to represent this event, "Chercher le triple sur les ruines du double" ("Seek the triple on the ruins of the double"), spoke directly to the desire to negate its own negations:

Infra-noir was initially intended to be an international survey of surrealist art, an ambition frustrated by the precarious state of communications in Europe at that moment, and there is a sense in which the works on display, and the cubomania in particular, not only had to stand in for those from the absent international movement, but already to start the work of their inevitable critical dépassement.

Significantly, the group’s contribution to the 1947 International Surrealist Exhibition in Paris was not with artworks, but with a text proposing a great, pitch- black room in which to encounter unknown objects (Luca, Naum, Păun, Teodorescou, and Trost, “Le Sable nocturne”). After the war, however, Luca continued to pursue a number of visual experiments, such as fragile and meticulous drawings constructed from constellations of dots, and intriguing text/image dossiers in which found albums of photographs were re-energized by new poetic captions.

Unlike Tristan Tzara's sarcastic absurdism and near-nihilism, the Bucharest group thought randomness- for-randomness' sake was fruitless; their approach was both critical and dialectical procedure. When Tzara and his friends visited Bucharest in November 1946 for the Infra-Noir, Luca and a few others sent him an insulting letter saying as much.  I think of ceremony and play, using dialectic to negate the negation, the revolt against perception could be seen and applied to consumerism. I think of the grave yard stickers on the backs of trucks and cars.

The surrealist commitment to epistemological rupture carried an ontological component for the Bucharest surrealists. In 1947, Luca carried the Infra-noir further with Le Secret du vide et du plein: "Replace the real by the possible and anticipate their confusion . . . To forget forgetting, to triple the double, to void the void, is to invent plenitude in its movement."

Luca married Micheline Catti and collaborated with her. He stayed busy in Paris; he stayed in the orbit of artistic happenings, including his presence in Fluxus events like the Festum Fluxorum, Paris December 1962, or the 1957 painting Bouquet made in collaboration with Beat poets Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and Peter Orlovsky.

Also, to quote Morar again:

Another, more tentative, source with Romanian connections – not that Luca would have cared for enquiries along such nationalist lines – is a photographic album by Benjamin Fondane from the 1930s, in which either rational or arbitrary selections of images are arranged in loose, playful grids on black backgrounds. The album has only recently become known through its inclusion in the exhibition and catalogue La Subversion des images (Bajac 206-07), but it seems plausible that, as fellow expatriates and friends of Victor Brauner, Fondane and Luca may have discussed the work during the latter’s stay in Paris at the end of the 1930s. (2)

42 INFRA-NOIR OBJECTS

All of this, perhaps, is the context for my poetic series, 43 Infra-noir objects, which draws on collage forms. Each object contains traces from the writings of those who participated in the Infra-noir exhibit. Rather than invoke these ghosts by name within the poem, I engage them in the ruins of their own words, in the collision and collapse of meaning, in the images that continue to divide us.

I am grateful to Poetry at Sangam for giving these three untitled pieces from the series a home—and to Priya Sarukkai Chabria, for making space for them among the other fascinating voices.

END-NOTES AND ADDENDA

(1) Fijalkowski, Krzysztof. "Cubomania: Gherasim Luca and Non-Oedipal Collage." Dada/Surrealism 20 (2015): n. pag. Web. Note also collaborations with artists were a notable aspect of Luca’s activity from the 1950s onwards, and his books featured contributions and exchanges with figures such as Victor Brauner, Jacques Hérold, Matta, Max Ernst, Wifredo Lam, Jean Arp, Dorothea Tanning, and above all with his wife Micheline Catti.

(2) Ovidiu Morar looks at Deleuze's love for Luca, particularly the stutter of the "schizoid-revolutionary" as opposed to the "paranoid-fascist", the reading of which is very common right now. He brings in the poem, "Niciodata destul," or never enough, which developsfrom phonemes and fragments in the word "proportional", which Lucas decomposes and subverts against nationalism, anti-semitism, and war. "popor" and "prop" get close, the last line being "de popor proportional."

(3) Veronica Porumbea was also a Romanian-Jewish poet. Unlike Celan, she had no trouble following Party lines in her writing. She worked as a translator and stayed publishable throughout. And there is the romance of prisons, perhaps, the way my heart assumes what is imprisoned is always the goodness, the lone voice – and what is criminal is the system, those who run the Writers Union, who owned the arts funding, who tell us that natives should be valued over immigrants. The risk of power— the risk of being at the top—comes with purges.

"Revenge" by Diane Williams.

From The Collected Stories of Diane Williams, published by Soho Press in October 2018.

"LASS / LET" by Aria Aber.

Lass, which could mean many different things in English: sweetheart, young girl, a feminine darling. In German, it only means to “let” something happen...

The line that has carried me through my nights, companioned or no, my lyrical creation myth, begins as an imperative in both languages. It supposes obedience, wants to instruct. Like a master, this word heralds into the room with agency, with an agenda. Rilke wrote, “God talks to us before he makes each one of us”—what tameness brought him there?

Gott spricht mit jedem von uns ehe er in macht—

Rilke wrote The Book of Hours in Russia, where he was startled by God's presence. Like Nietzsche before him, Rilke thought God to be pantheistic, all-encompassing.

Marina Tsvetaeva said of Rilke that he was pure; poetry incarnate; that he was the only clean, and cleansing, soul among war-destroyed Europe, because his poetry refused to acknowledge that terror.

My mother let me happen to her. She let prison happen to her, simply because she believed in Women's Rights and Afghanistan as a sovereign state. She went to prison with her little sister, and she emerged. She was, I can say now, a political prisoner. She let it happen to her; then she decided to leave her family behind, move on for love, for family, for me.

This sacrifice let her become monstrous. She let monstrosity happen to her, then offered it back to me. When I ask, “God, who am I?” am I not just asking, Mother, who are you?

Let me rephrase this—are there any mothers that aren't cruel, perverse, unbelievable?

Rilke's mother, to this day, is called “perverse” and “unbelievable” by many male critics. She is ostracized, her own monster. She was a woman, she had her tics. She had opinions.

Rilke, who writes as neither man nor woman, is influenced mostly by God. Rilke loves God endlessly 𝑢𝑛𝑑 is not ashamed of it. Brecht called his relationship to God “gay.” I like to believe Rilke wouldn't have cared, would have said: “Let me be gay with God, then.”

As Ulrich Braer puts it, Rilke's God wasn't a fascist or heterosexist; he simply was, encompassing both the finite feelings of physical intimacy and his Drau fensein, his being-outside.

The transitive verb 𝑙𝑒𝑡 supposes danger; it is aware of the other, like paranoia. It is influenced by the other, only exists in relation. Let is only summoned when we want to be done away with: let me do this.

Meaning: give me permission. Let this happen to you. Let it go.

Meaning: I give you the permission to abandon it. Let me go outside!

Let me be

everything that happens to you.

[from Hard Damage, University of Nebraska Press]

A list of prose poems to explore.

Alejandra Pizarnik, “Sex, Night” (trans. by P. Ferrari & Forrest Gander) ^
Alexander Long, “Meditation on a Suicide”
Alina Stefanescu, “Hush Hush Hush” and “Two Faces”
Amaris Feland Ketcham, “How We Echo”
Amelia Martens, “A Robin Pulls a Thread”
Amorak Huey, “Prayer for What I Do Not Want”
Ann Waldman, “Stereo”
Anne Carson, “Short Talks” ^
Aria Aber, “Lass/Let”
Arthur Rimbaud, “First Evening” (translated by Kline)
Beckian Fritz Goldberg, “Past Immaculate”
Beckian Fritz Goldberg, “Enchanted Egg, #2”
Beckian Fritz Goldberg, “He Said Discipline Is the Highest Form of Love”
Beckian Fritz Goldberg, “Afterlife”
Beckian Fritz Goldberg, “The One with the Darkest Hair”
Ben Miller, “The Opposite of That Famous Story”
Bob Hicok, “Prose Poem Essay on the Prose Poem”
Brenda Hillman, “Childhood” - an essay in rhyme
Cameron Awkward-Rich, “Meditations in an Emergency”
Campbell McGrath, “The Prose Poem”
Carol Dorf, “On the Way Out of Memory Palace”
Carol Guess
Cecilia Woloch, “Postcard to I. Kaminsky from a Dream at the Edge of the Sea”
Charles Rafferty, “The Problem with Sappho” ^
Charles Simic, “Heroic Moment”
Christopher Kennedy, “Personality Quiz”
Christopher Kennedy, “The Genius”
Claudia Rankine, 2 poems from Citizen, I ^
Czeslaw Milosz, “Decency”
Daniel Poppick, “The Apple’s Floor”
Daniel Romo, “Attention”
Danielle Mitchell, “Year of the Dig”
David Daniel, “Paint”
David Daniel, “Hotel”
David Ignatow, “Forever”
David Ignatow, “Information”
David Keplinger
David Shumate, 3 prose poems
Deborah Digges, “Fence of Sticks”
Denise Duhamel, “Napping on the Afternoon of My 39th Birthday”
Denise Duhamel, “Infiltration”
Denise Duhamel, “The Drag Queen Inside Me” ^
Denise Duhamel, “Permanence”
Diane Raptosh, “Husband” 
Dina Relles, “In A Sunday Kitchen”
Doug Martin, “Morning Sickness”
Emma Bolden, “Describe the Situation in Specific Detail”
Essy Stone, “Among the Prophets”
Fanny Howe, “Second Childhood”
Frank O'Hara, “Meditations in an Emergency”
Frank O’Hara, “The Eyelid Has Its Storms” ^
Gabriel Gudding, “A Defense of Poetry” ^
Gary Young, “Four Poems”
Geoffrey Dyer, “Tuesday, April 11, 2006”
Geoffrey Dyer, “Wednesday, January 26, 2006”
Gian Lombardo, “On the Mark”
Gian Lombardo, “Three Wishes”
Howie Good, “Door to the River”
James Tate, “All Over the Lot”
James Tate, “Goodtime Jesus” ^
James Wright, “Honey”
Jane Harrington, “Ossein Pith”
Jayne Anne Phillips, “Happy”
Jean Follain, “Prose Poem” (translated by William Matthews and Mary Feeney)
Jennifer Givhan, “Domestic” ^
Jennifer Martinelli, “The Devil Tides”
John Ashbery, “The Young Son” ^
Kellie Wells, “Desertion”
Laird Hunt, “Michiko and Akiko”
Lance Larsen, “32 Views from the Hammock” - list poem
Lawrence Goeckel, “The Last Days Before the Age of Industry”
Layli Long Solider, “Introduction” - docupoetics
Layli Long Solider, excerpt from “Whereas”  
Lucy Ives, Three paragraphs from The Nineties
Mark Strand, “Dream Testicles, Vanished Vaginas”
Mark Vinz, “Letter from the Cabin”
Mark Yakich, “The Ordinary Sun”
Mark Yakich, “The Mountain”
Marvin Bell, “About the Dead Man, Ashes and Dust”
Matthew Rohrer, “Disquistion on Trees”
Maxine Chernoff, “The Sound” ^
Maxine Chernoff, “Simple Gifts”
Maxine Chernoff, “Subtraction”
Mary Ruefle, “On Twilight” ^
Metta Sama, “Outlaw”
Mia Ayumi Mamalhotra, “On the street where a certain democratic leader lives…” ^
Michael Benedikt, “Three Sensualities”
Naomi Shihab Nye, “Hammer and Nail”
Nathan Parker, “Choice Pines”
Nicole Sealey, “Even the Gods” 
Nin Andrews, “Adolescence”
Nin Andrews, “The Magic of Forgetting”
Nin Andrews, “How to Deal with Rejection”
Nin Andrews, “1967”
Peter Davis, “Poem Addressing Boys, Age 5”
Peter Davis, “Poem Addressing People Who Are Tired, Hungry, or Horny”
Randall Horton, “After Ruin”
Ray Gonzales, “Who Were You?”
Ray Gonzales, “I Saw” -a list of objects
Rob Carney, “Movie Review”
Robert Haas, “My Mother’s Nipples”
Robert Hill Long, “Doing Hatha Yoga”
Robert Lopez, “Man on Bus with Blindsters”
Ron Silliman, “Final For”
Rosmarie Waldrop, “The Material World”
Russell Edson, “Let Us Consider” ^
Russell Edson, “A Love Letter”
Sean Thomas Daugherty, “In the Light of One Lamp”
Sean Thomas Daugherty, “Two Variations on a Paisley”
Sean Thomas Daugherty, “Untitled” ^
Sho Spaeth, “Moods—Yoel Hoffmann”
Steve Berg, “Shaving”
Stuart Dybek, “Alphabet Soup”
T. S. Eliot, “Hysteria”
Terrance Hayes, “A Land Governed by Unkindness Reaps No Kindness”
The Cyborg Jillian Weisse, “My Friend Says I Should Be Thinking about “Masked Intimacy” When I Think about Leila Olive”
Tomas Transtromer
Yoel Hoffmann, “9”
Yoel Hoffmann, from Curriculum Vitae
Zach Savich, “Melon City” 
Zach Savich, “Chestnut City”
Zach Savich, “Sheet City”
Zachary Schomburg, “The Fire Cycle” ^
Zbigniew Herbert, “The Wall” ^

And some books. Guide to Prose Poetry (Rose Metal Press) - Renee Gladman, Calamities (Wave Books) - David Shumate, High Water Mark (University of Pittsburgh Press) - Michael Benedikt, The Prose Poem: An International Anthology - Russell Edson, The Reason Why the Closet Man Is Never Sad (1972) - Arthur Rimbaud, Illuminations - Claudia Rankine, Citizen - Czeslaw Milosz, Roadside Dog - Frank O'Hara, Meditations in An Emergency (Grove Atlantic, 1957) - Mark Strand, The Monument (denied 1978 Pultizer Prize) - Top 10 prose poetry books according to Daniel Hales

"Object Permanence" by Hala Alyan

This neighborhood was mine first. I walked each block twice:
drunk, then sober. I lived every day with legs and headphones.
It had snowed the night I ran down Lorimer and swore I’d stop
at nothing. My love, he had died. What was I supposed to do?
I regret nothing. Sometimes I feel washed up as paper. You’re
three years away. But then I dance down Graham and
the trees are the color of champagne and I remember—
There are things I like about heartbreak, too, how it needs
a good soundtrack. The way I catch a man’s gaze on the L
and don’t look away first. Losing something is just revising it.
After this love there will be more love. My body rising from a nest
of sheets to pick up a stranger’s MetroCard. I regret nothing.
Not the bar across the street from my apartment; I was still late.
Not the shared bathroom in Barcelona, not the red-eyes, not
the songs about black coats and Omaha. I lie about everything
but not this. You were every streetlamp that winter. You held
the crown of my head and for once I won’t show you what
I’ve made. I regret nothing. Your mother and your Maine.
Your wet hair in my lap after that first shower. The clinic
and how I cried for a week afterwards. How we never chose
the language we spoke. You wrote me a single poem and in it
you were the dog and I the fire. Remember the courthouse?
The anniversary song. Those goddamn Kmart towels. I loved them,
when did we throw them away? Tomorrow I’ll write down
everything we’ve done to each other and fill the bathtub
with water. I’ll burn each piece of paper down to silt.
And if it doesn’t work, I’ll do it again. And again and again and—

Diamond Media: A look at images.

YASMINE GHATTAS: Before World War II, only 10% of engagement rings had diamonds in them. After the Depression, no one was lining up to buy expensive goods. Americans had just been traumatized by one of the worst economic downturns ever and were stockpiling their money.

De Beers was quickly sinking in this economy, but they refused to sit idle. They had a stockpile of diamonds they needed to start selling, so they created a narrative around their diamonds. They wanted to equate diamonds with marriage — a pretty big ask. They started with simple celebrity marketing tactics. They would run stories of celebrities who wore diamonds, and more importantly, stories of those celebrities who had proposed with diamond rings. Fashion designers quickly started fawning over them and claiming diamonds as the new big trend.

BUSINESS INSIDER: In 1947, Ayer creative Frances Gerety suggested the slogan "A diamond is forever." Both she and her colleagues weren't too excited by it, but they eventually used it in a campaign the next year. It immediately clicked with the American people, who soon began associating the gemstone with a fitting symbol of a promise of eternal love, rather than just an extravagant luxury. "A diamond is forever" has appeared in every De Beers ad since 1948, and Ad Age named it the best slogan of the 20th century.

DEBORAH MARQUARDT, CHIEF MARKETING OFFICER OF DPA: The audience is given a glimpse into private ‘couple moments’ where the role of the diamond is intrinsic to the storyline, and is an expression of their love, their life together, and their commitment to each other.

YASMINE GHATTAS: De Beers’ marketing managed to convince American men that to marry their dream woman they had to buy her a big old shiny diamond ring. They were marketing geniuses using simple psychology to conflate a product with an end goal. But for some reason, they weren’t able to do the same for women. In the 1980s, in an attempt to expand their audience, they started targeting women. Specifically, calling on women to buy their men diamonds.

MS. KAUFMAN, A TEACHER:

5. Assuming you plan to get married some day, do you expect to either 1) receive a diamond engagement ring or 2) buy a diamond engagement ring? Why or why not?

ANDERSON & WEBB: So much has been written on diamonds, how to judge and buy, with issues of colour, cut and clarity, that it's hard to add anything new. So here’s a word for an unsung diamond hero, which rarely gets a look in the West, the polki diamond. Polkis are a prominent feature of Indian jewellery and especially wedding jewellery, where enormous stones are set in the most fabulously opulent of jewellery. Polkis are lower grade diamonds, almost of industrial quality for drills etc, but are sliced lengthways to form great swathes of gem, often with blacked oxidised finishes and foil underlay. So a very different look, at a fraction of the price of a polished stone, worth checking out to see if this is something you’d like to add to your jewellery box – I have!

TESS PETAK for Brides: So after searching for months to find the perfect ring without success, Vaughan decided to take matters into his own hands. He commissioned Kay Jewelry to help design a same-sex engagement and wedding band all in one. Vaughan had a major part in designing this ring (the initial sketch was done on his Poke bowl to-go container!). Still, it's important to note that this historic piece of jewelry marks one of the first same-sex engagement/wedding bands offerings by a major retailer.

BALLARD & BALLARD: “Men want to be on the foreground of a growing trend” -Unknown

Most people picture big, elaborate, sparkling, diamond rings when they picture an engagement. Most people also picture said ring on the bride to be’s ring finger forever changing her life for the better. Now what if we told you there was a ring just as elaborate or stunning sitting on the groom to be’s ring finger as well. In today’s changing world the topic of men wearing engagement rings has been brought to the forefront, and the numbers don’t lie. In recent years when surveyed, as many as 17% of men said they wouldn’t mind wearing an engagement ring. For some it might be just as flashy as their soon to be bride’s, but for others it’s something toned down from what their bride is flashing. This trend is going nowhere but up as men all across the world are wanting to be more involved in the wedding aspect of their lives.

THE PLUMB CLUB: Women are not only buying jewelry for themselves, they are involved in a majority of the engagement ring purchases and greatly influence gifting, says Neil Shah, a principal of Shah Luxury in New York City. He says the dramatic rise in customization services that his company has experienced in recent years is a testament to the significant increase in women participating in the jewelry buying process, because they know what they want. “And, we should be listening.”

SUSANNE RAMIREZ DE ARELLANO: Beyoncé is the fourth woman and first Black woman to wear the famous gem — unearthed by De Beers in South Africa in 1877. The so-called Tiffany diamond was previously worn by Audrey Hepburn, Lady Gaga and the American socialite Mary Whitehouse, the first time it was paraded in public, at a Tiffany Ball in 1957. Tiffany & Co., which was recently acquired by the fashion conglomerate LVMH, hopes the campaign (together with a separate effort dubbed “Not Your Mother’s Tiffany”) will freshen and update Tiffany’s image for a new generation of luxury consumers. …The problem is the backstory of the yellow Tiffany diamond. Found in the Kimberley diamond mines in South Africa (under British rule) in 1877 as a 287.42 carat rough stone, it was later purchased by Charles Lewis Tiffany in 1878 for $18,000. Its estimated worth today is $30 million.

The poets with Appollinarian lineage.

I love discovering poems that invoke Guillaume Apollinaire as part of poetic lineage.

Maybe I also just love poems dedicated to dead poets, or what Jim Brodey calls the “greatest of predecessors” in his poem titled “To Guillaume Apollinaire” (which I found in a large yellow anthology edited by Andrei Codrescu in an earlier decade).

Revisiting William Stafford.

It’s been a while. I’d like to say it’s been too long, but the truth is that William Stafford reappears on a day when I needed him, in the outskirts of an autumn afternoon, at the edge of a song.

And song, itself, is central to Stafford’s verse—it recurs, returns, resurges, and sometimes revolts (as when the songs are national anthems or related to a war he refused to fight). “Why I Am a Poet” could be considered an ars poetica, or even an anti-anthem—three quatrains appended by a single line.

And the land is always palpable in Stafford’s poems—where the dirt exists in a mixture of wonder and humility. “Something That Happens Right Now” begins in a confessional tone that reaches towards a maple tree in the distant past, only to swerve into an expectant silence, a silence that precedes the adult’s knowledge of the world.

Death isn’t a terror so much as a wonder in this poem, in this unlineated creation bursting at the seams with marvel. I want to remember being young and feeling that cosmic silence, or feeling small and secure in it.

I will read this one to my kids tonight once the darkness arrives…to re-member the power of longing in a world that cautions us against it.

And one more. One more Stafford to tuck into a pocket, to carry through days when the words argue with one another and the images fizzle. One more for any writer today seeking “the great dance, walking alone”….

Annie Ernaux's use of italics in "A Man's Place."

 In A Man's Place, Annie Ernaux says she uses italics:

"not because I wish to point out a double meaning to the reader and so draw him into my confidence -- irony, pathos and nostalgia are something I've always rejected. But simply because these particular words and sentences to find the nature and the limits of the world where my father lives and which I too shared. It was a world in which language was the very expression of reality."

A small collage of all the non-proper nouns Ernaux italicized in this text. I have added capital letters and periods where none existed, often to indicate words which stood alone in italics. I have preserved all the intact phrases and fragments and sentences. Where Ernaux italicized quotations and words by others, I have dropped the quotation marks and used italics.

We were happy in spite of everything. We had 

to be. Had to live. Out of place.  Nothing fancy, just 

the standard thing. Eau-de-vivre. Galette des rois. 

Town clothes. Patois. Lycee. In the fresh air. Elsewhere. 

Bourgeois. There were others worse off.

For rolling in the dew makes the milkmaids so fair. 

Brought home. Unprejudiced. Social outcast. What do you expect. 

What are people going to say? Respected. Necessary. 

Maintain his status. Position. All that. Good, clean

fun. Humble. Extended. I've only got one 

pair of hands. Just as many things. The child has 

everything she needs. Silly films. Luxury. 

Wasn't as good. Too busy even to take a leak. Eat

into their capital. Think! You clumsy oaf.

There's no reason why you shouldn't go.

Despite everything one had to go on living. 

Mademoiselle really had it tough

Better to be the head of a dog than the tail of a lion.

Widow of the late A------- D------. 

Canton. Got on her nerves. Battled. Bad

manners. Walking, that's how I get rid of 

my flu. Give a good talking to. Ditto. We all know

what's waiting for us. High-ranking. 

Good manners. Concierge. Beat himself.

Or maybe hoped. To live. Enjoy life.

Impregnate. All that big business

ending up with a worker. 

Do them any harm.

Oh, the hell with it, let's enjoy life while we can!

Honest, hardworking people half 

set in their ways. Hired.

How's it all going to end

looked one up and down.

It’s a marvelous book. And I wanted to keep a record of the italicized words somehow. This is that.