On the unthinkable.

1

The mayor of Hudson, Ohio demanded that the members of the local school board members resign because high schoolers cannot write about sex, beer, or death.

To write about something requires us to consider it — to think about it — and to think about a thing involves a certain level of epistemological commitment.

Source: Harper’s Magazine

2

Many things are unthinkable, or difficult to consider.

When I think of the book one doesn't want to write, I think of Emily Rapp's memoir, The Still Point of the Turning World, about her son, Ronan, who was born with Tay-Sachs. The book journeys through the "terra incognita" of raising a child to die. From the beginning, Rapp centers the presence of death in their lives--she tells people her baby is dying. The presence of dying in the verb to be.

The death of a mother giving birth to a child: Rapp considers this while studying death as it draws closer to the life of her son.

Can we speak a death into existence?

Is manifestation an actual power or a means of self-soothing?

Mary Shelley Godwin's mother died while giving birth to her. Was there any relationship between her mother's death and 18-year-old Mary Shelley’s habit of reading ghost stories with her friends and then challenging each other to write their worst?

They sat with the dead and wrote. Mary's lover, Percy Bysse Shelley, Lord Byron, and his pregnant lover, Claire, were fascinated by recent attempts to "animate" dead matter. Mary's story was published the following year, 1818, anonymously. Was she trying to animate the mother she lost?

Maybe we are all writing to animate dead matter.

3

The line between memoir and fiction is so tenuous when it comes to dying or remembering. 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.”

4

A nest is a space we dream of returning to.

An empty nest is space that wants someone to return to it.

“Values alter facts,” wrote Gaston Bachelard. “The moment we love an image, it cannot remain the copy of a fact.”

There is the loss of a child, and then there is its aftermath.

5

Ralph Waldo Emerson grieved his son’s death in patches, across decades, through pages. The harrow in his tone is made conspicuous by his efforts to hold it back. There is a passage in “Experience” where Emerson attempts to qualify grief, to send a boundary on it, and something in me always breaks when I read it.

How shaky the ground he trods here. How wobbly his footsteps.

Here is the passage (adding my own italics):

The only thing grief has taught me is to know how shallow it is. That, like all the rest, plays about the surface, and never introduces me into the reality, for contact with which we would even pay the costly price of sons and lovers. Was it Boscovich who found out that bodies never come in contact? Well, souls never touch their objects. An innavigable sea washes with silent waves between us and the things we aim at and converse with. Grief too will make us idealists. In the death of my son, now more than two years ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful estate, —no more. I cannot get it nearer to me. If to-morrow I should be informed of the bankruptcy of my principal debtors, the loss of my property would be a great inconvenience to me, perhaps, for many years; but it would leave me as it found me, —neither better nor worse. So is it with this calamity: it does not touch me; something which I fancied was a part of me, which could not be torn away without tearing me nor enlarged without enriching me, falls off from me and leaves no scar. It was caducous. I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature. The Indian who was laid under a curse that the wind should not blow on him, nor water flow to him, nor fire burn him, is a type of us all. The dearest events are summer-rain, and we the para-coats that shed every drop. Nothing is left us now but death. We look to that with a grim satisfaction, saying, There at least is reality that will not dodge us.

I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition. Nature does not like to be observed, and likes that we should be her fools and playmates. We may have the sphere for our cricket-ball, but not a berry for our philosophy. Direct strokes she never gave us power to make; all our blows glance, all our hits are accidents. Our relations to each other are oblique and casual.

Grief does not teach — it simply lays claims which cannot be evidenced or substantiated — it throws us back upon eternity without leaving a recognizable notch in it.

6

In the space where Emerson declares "the evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest” to be "the most unhandsome part of our condition”, I met Stanley Cavell.

Or, I met Cavell’s own obsession, for this is the terrain to which Cavell returned in Emerson, again and again.

One of the few things I remember from my 21st year of life is Stanley Cavell’s Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism. I know there were lakes, road trips, bagels with herring, walks in the cemetery with philosophy friends, a fiancee, two cats, two fifty gallon saltwater fishtanks— but Cavell is the part I remember most vividly.

Cavell was the text. And then he was the film. And then he was the next text, the one sitting to the left of Wittgenstein’s Tractautus. And then somewhere near Wittgeinstein’s Philosophical Investigations.

But Conditions came first. Conditions and the handful of other humans who met me in thinking through its words.

7

The conditions for speech are different than those of aesthetics. But thought is the way through a life.

Thoughtlessness is what a human can share with a red balloon.

I’m not interested in the Ohio mayor’s opinion on whether teenagers should be allowed to think through the most difficult, unspeakable, and humbling parts of human life. I am interested in how, and under what circumstances, we are encouraged to think — and what sort of thought is socialized in American high schools.

Problem-solving is a way of approaching a statement with an eye to lessening its claim on the mind. But a problem-solving approach doesn’t always require thinking; we approach the day’s tiny slights and bana; disturbances without falling deep into thought. Habit can get us across a street. Habit can regurgitate and recite. Reciting the pledge of allegiance is a habitual regurgitation. As is any anthem or ritual.

8

“I don’t think when I perform a difficult piece on the piano,” M. said tonight. “If I think, I lose my place— I lose my bearings in the flow. Performing is a strange alchemy of muscle memories, mathematics, and riding one’s nerve. You never know if the thought of someone’s feelings will rip you out of it. I think of nothing outside the music, and there are no words for how the mind operates when I am completely caught up in it.”

Is writing like this? I don’t know.

There are notes scribbled in pencil all over M.’s sheet music. He guards his notations, his marginalia, as one would guard a secret.

Composer Anton Rubinstein had his music seized at the border because Russian officials thought its notes were a kind of revolutionary code. Under the Tsar, if one signed a letter of love, it shouldn't imply insubordination to one's First Love for God or the Tsar. What Mikhail Bakunin called the Black Beast (the Russian empire’s combination of church and state) dragged Russia along behind them in a yoke. The Tsar's coronation was literally a sacrament equal to those services accompanying baptism, marriage, and extreme unction.

At 17, Arthur Rubenstein appeared at Scriabin's door and offered himself as an acolyte. He would be the first to introduce Scriabin's Fifth Piano Sonata to Londoners.

In Nexus, Henry Miller extols Scriabin as a divinity, a holy distraction from the world. 

Scriabin's Sonatas use Italian for the general tempo markings and French for the intimate particulars. I am writing a novel about this.

“That is why I acquired a taste for misanthropy; why I nurtured hypochondria; why I became the most (leaden-like) miserable of men,” wrote Erik Satie in 1924. “It distressed people to look at me — even through hall-marked gold eye-glasses. Oh yes.”

Oh yes.

9

Here’s a small excerpt from my imaginary version of 642 Things to Write About for high school students. There are no questions or puzzles to resolve. There is a human, a pen, a notebook, a rephrasing of the statement or argument followed by a response to it.

The response cannot be anything except one’s own.

There is no correct answer. There is no grade or score. There are only thoughts to be thunk, and unspeakable things to consider, closely. More closely. Again and again, and more.

Albert Camus: “The only fundamental philosopical question is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest – whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories –comes afterwards.”

Stanley Cavell: “Death, so caused, may be mysterious, but what founds these lives is clear enough: the capacity to love, the strength to found a life upon a love. That the love becomes incompatible with that life is tragic, but that it is maintained until the end is heroic. People capable of such love could have removed mountains; instead it has caved in upon them. One moral of such events is obvious: if you would avoid tragedy, avoid love; if you cannot avoid love, avoid integrity; if you cannot avoid integrity, avoid the world; if you cannot avoid the world, destroy it.”

Theodor Adorno: "On Popular Music".

Gaston Bachelard: “So there is also an alas in the song of tenderness. If we return to the old house as to a nest, it is because memories are dreams, because the home of other days has become a great image of lost intimacy.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson: “I think that philosophy is still rude and elementary. It will one day be taught by poets. The poet is in the natural attitude; he is believing; the philosopher, after some struggle, having only reasons for believing…The poet sees wholes and avoids analysis; the metaphysician, dealing… with the mathematics of the mind, puts himself out of the way of inspiration; loses that which is the miracle and creates the worship.”

Stanley Cavell: “What I require is a convening of my culture's criteria, in order to confront them with my words and life as I pursue them; and at the same time to confront my words and life as I pursue them with the life my culture's words may imagine for me: to confront the culture with itself, along the lines in which it meets me.”

David Nowell-Smith: "The Art of the Fugue: Heidegger on Rhythm".

Douglas Shadle: "Classical Music and the Color Line".

Igor Stravinsky: “If one only need break a habit to merit being labeled revolutionary, then every musician who has something to say and who in order to say it goes beyond the bounds of established convention would be known as revolutionary. [...] The quality of being revolutionary is generally attributed to artists in our day with a laudatory intent, undoubtedly because we are living in a period when revolution enjoys a kind of prestige among yesterday's elite. Let us understand each other: I am the first to recognize that daring is the motive force of the finest and greatest acts; which is all the more reason for not putting it unthinkingly at the service of disorder and base cravings in a desire to cause sensation at any price. I approve of daring; I set no limits to it. But likewise there are no limits to the mischief wrought by arbitrary acts.”

Charles Baudelaire: "It is evident that rhetorics and prosodies are not arbitrarily invented tyrannies, but a collection of rules demanded by the very organization of the spiritual being, and never have prosodies and rhetorics kept originality from full manifesting itself. The contrary, that is to say, that they have aided the flowering of originality, would be infinitely more true."

Robert Temple: "The Philosophy of the Fugue".

Tyhembia Jess: "Sam Patterson, Harlem, NY: Dec. 12, 1924".

Stanley Cavell: “Appropriating” seems to have the same stress put on it in relating the individual to the world through the ownership of property as “belief has in relating the individual to the world through the acquisition and power of knowledge.”

Emily Dickinson: “After great pain, a formal feeling comes –
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs –
The stiff Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore,’
And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before’?”

Aaron Copland: "A Modernist Defends Modern Music".

"I think therefore I green": The elliptical Elizabeth Willis.

1

I didn’t expect to burn a weekend absorbed in Elizabeth Willis’ Alive: New and Selected Poems, an NYRB imprint published in 2015 . . . but the eerie perverseness of her images, the buoyant bungle of her syntax, distracted me from deadlines and other avowals.

This is the end of my body as you know it
its superfluous penchant for love
its poorer costume, its shiny disaster

A dramatic statement followed by an eludication which estranges rather than illuminates. The secret sibilance folded into lines, binding the words by syllable —- and the internal rhymes, as in “By the smallest shipwreck / a daughter is laughter” — I can’t locate a facile comparison for Willis’ poetic diction.

There are images which blaze and linger — “a wall torn from a shadow”; “the sequin we could never come as”; the young William Blake “with flowering ears and hearsay”—- and colors created for the world of plastics and flowers, that “neo-forsythia”.

Willis is comfortable in the prose poem, as seen in “Indirect Catastrophe”, a meditation on holiness, blasphemy, plagiarism, and the rose, the flower which crosses her poems and books.

I thought I was reading but suddenly I’m read. Some kind of artist then, painting his targets. Distinct or indistinct sensation? I prefer clarity when I can afford it. So what if another flower plagiarized the rosary? I’d pick up a dime in private or a quarter in public, money’s always been ‘dirty’, some kind of death wish. Sure I’d like to own a pet, not own but take care of, not a monkey or donkey, but something that loves you like money or luck. Not a puppy made of flowers but like music, in dog years.

In “Autographeme,” Willis tells us:

The present was a relic
of a past I was older than.

2

Willis takes an overwrought idiomatic expression that comes to us in folk culture or popular culture and shakes it. She shakes it and turns it and presses her back against until something gives. She also uses these expressions to haunt language, to make us approach differently.

The title, “Kiss Me Deadly,” evoked the Lita Ford ‘s chart-topping big-hair-era song of the same name..

3

Elizabeth Willis knows how to work an image down to the unexpected softness of marrow inside a bone. I think part of this has to do with her elliptical use of figurative language, and how she uses images to open a word, to crack the shell of a solid, known thing.

”Metaphor carries something across, but from then on, it’s fugitive,” Willis writes in Alive. It is a statement of poetics.

In “Elegy,” the poem moves by definition, but it does on wood stilts — so one can feel every bump and slight dip in the terrain. She plays with rhymes and homonyms; she lingers at the microcosmos of the syllable, and this is where she sharpens sound:

a petticoat of sand
the mind’s a hinge
a roughly chestnut arsenal
a little box of nothing
an incidental rose

The mind’s a hinge — the image is what she rides to the next sonic speedbump.

I felt the grass’s poem
blown against me
like a fake harp

The abstraction is anthropomorphized, given agency, as in “The Human Abstract”, where: “Innocence shags experience and I’ll never grow.” But then beginning, a few lines later, with this uncertain subject, this enlarged speaker, this soaring line break:

Inventing a dress and the bird
it remembers

Or, elsewhere: “Desire is a form of a fastening”. The mind halts before this small frame, this metaphor, this figurative re-defining.

Another Willis strategy involves using a colloquial expression or idiom and running sandpaper across it. She brings Descartes’ Cogito ero sum to “Plundering Honey” as an interjection:

O, I think therefore I green the grass I’m
pinned upon.

There is a bit of wiccanery in the idiom-play, or in the self-referential quality of the idioms she selects. Many are related to folk tales or fairy tales. Several poems reframe lines from the witches’ speech to Little Red Riding Hood.

In “Friday”, for example:

My heart caves in
the better to see you with

In “A Species is An Idea (1)”:

What bitter landscape
the better to see you with?

A few more thoughts, a haphazard bouquet. The use of definitions as a sort of integument, or a pole vault into the next image, doesn’t land us on firmer ground with Willis — it changes the stability of the terrain.

Metaphor: “This love is a deer crying in a gentleman”.

Similie: “Triumph arches over us like bad emotions.”

Similie leaning into enjambment for suspense: “It’s always personal / like the failure of a knee”.

Ending with a question, as in “Accidental Breezes”: “What little monster have I made, to favor love of all that’s said?”

Undoing of artistic conventions: “A fig leaf only makes a crotch more obvious.”

Pronoun fluidity, particularly in Address (which feels kinned to Gluck’s You): “In this type of you / I see I am a sequel”

4

“Sonnet 63 ½” is a damn marvel. It nudges Willis’ words from an earlier poem: “As when the heart has lied / yet has a figure in it.”

In the end-notes, Willis described “Sonnet 63 ½” as a “loose translation” of Shakespeare’s sonnet 63 and sonnet 64. The half suggests this sonnet lands somewhere in the middle. Juxtaposing the two sonnets in order to trace Willis’ “translation” is fascinating and generative.

Sonnet 63 begins: Against my love shall be, as I am now,

Sonnet 64 begins: When I have seen by Time’s fell hand defaced

Willis: Against love’s battle lies, ungrammatical.

She closes the sentence in that first line, contra Shakespeare. There are so many levels of engagement and translation in this poem— I could stare at it for hours. It’s an easy writing prompt, a generous model to thieve (and attribute, if the poem moves into drafts). For example, write a sonnet which loosely translates Willis’ “Sonnet 63 ½” and Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 69”. Do whatever math makes sense for the titling.

5

Aritra Sanyal first met Willis in February 2019 at the Book Fair in Kolkota, and his interview shares the poems she read aloud, including “About the Author” and “Address”. When Sanyal asked what made it possible for poetry to resonate and reach out to a reader or audience, Willis suggested a slight wariness with the word, empathy:

I think it is mystery and curiosity more than empathy. What makes me slightly suspicious of empathy is that I think it suggests that one being knows–that they can and do know–what another being experiences. It seems to me entirely possible that that might happen in a mystical sense but not in a narrative sense. That is, I might relate to, or identify with, or have sympathy for another person’s experience, but I can’t know everything that informs it.

As we’ve been talking, I’ve often thought about how many resonances there are between our perceptions about poetic and political reality. But I hope I never presume to know, empathically, what you experience. It seems more appropriate to respect the differences as well as the similarities in what we know–what Frank O’Hara calls “the love we bear each other’s differences.”

“Fear isn’t always obvious, but obviousness is one of my greatest fears,” Willis wrote in Alive. Also: “When a mystery is made obvious people call it a revelation.” This comfort with inexhaustive definition is a mark of poetry, and one which Willis plays like a personal lyre.

The lyric of the image: “People think God is obvious, or not: everything or nothing. A hole held open by a word."

6

The use of aphorism characterizes her more recent writing. “Steady Digression to a Fixed Point,” which she dedicates to Rose Hobart and Joseph Cornell, is sharp example of Willis’ conceptualism. Aphorism is impressionstic here. The poem begins with Willis’ trademark flora, a gesture invoking Hobart:

A rose can’t change the world. It can only open or close.

The poem moves in fragments, cinematic collations, and assemblaged forms. I’ll add a few of my favorite lines in no particular order:

This is a poem about a fox. An alligator. The misplaced animals of the backlot.

About looking into the face of desire until it blinks.

An assemblage makes of an I a “we”.

The body is a formal constraint. It has this one life with which to make eternity.

7

Willis has written about the proximity of a burning world. Her essay, “Notes from and on a Landscape: Hell, Fire, and Brimstone,” begins in brimstone, in “the part of us that’s subject to ignition.” Brimstone “is a kindler of rage.” The lyric essay layers a sort of geomorphology into the the language, and then ends with a question:

The AAA guide for Wyoming lists more jails as historical sites than any other category of tourist attraction.

Jails were made to last.

By what sulphurous art may poetry, the “true fiction,” labor to take them down?

“Without its leaky reverie, the face is a shield,” Willis poems. The leaky reverie here— the evocation of tears, wonder, pieta statues, without using the usual language. Evading in order to expose.

Or, as she wrote in “Viewless Floods of Heat”: “The body is always softer than its image. Shined up, collectible, all it imagined.”

[Get your own copy of Elizabeth Willis’ Alive: New and Selected Poems from NYRB.]

On Mary Ruefle's "Why I Am Not A Good Kisser."

1

I remember—I must have been eight or nine—wandering out to the ungrassed backyard of our newly constructed suburban house and seeing that the earth was dry and cracked in irregular squares and other shapes and I felt I was looking at a map and I was completely overcome by this description, my first experience of making a metaphor, and I felt weird and shaky and went inside and wrote it down: the cracked earth is a map.

- Mary Ruefle, “I Remember, I Remember”

Speaking of maps, memory, and Mary Ruefle, I keep coming back to this one, to this poem which resembles an aerial map of a brain mid-kiss.

Ruefle opens "Why I Am Not a Good Kisser" with a list of reasons – a brainstorm of images and explications, excuses and sidelong glances . One can feel the gaze moving from the window to settle on the little black dog as the speaker marvels at how the mind impinges on the duties of being present–or resting in the sublime transport of the kiss.

The poem occurs in the key of self-conscious reflexivity, or the inability to completely inhabit the flesh and sucuumb to the erotic moment. Eros wants us completely, not half-heartedly. Ruefle plays with the idea of a successful kiss as tied to the good kisser, the one who stops thinking about things. Enjambment is everything here:

& at once it strikes me what quality goes to form
A Good Kisser, especially at this moment, & which you
Possess so enormously — I mean when a man is capable
Of being in uncertainties, Mysteries & doubts without me 

It could end there. It could end in the panic of not being enough for him. But the line continues, it drags on like a rubbed worrystone, delivering new ways of stating the same thing:

I am dreadfully afraid he will slip away
While my kiss is trying to think what to do.

I love this poem because it doesn’t know what to do with itself, and the speaker stands outside of the erotic moment to survey herself like a statue within it. The poem immortalizes the awkward, disconnected kiss. It destabilizes romantic expectations and runs off “into the mouth like a velvet movie theatre.”

What is the person thinking as we kiss them? What if the feeling of connection isn’t just illusory but an actual illusion? We assume a poem-worthy kiss would be monumental —- but this one isn’t. Ruefle defies even the shared excitation of kissing, or that space carved out by mutual desire acting in tandem, trying to meet between teeth.

Erotic excitation can be contagious. We drive faster when our hearts are racing with desire for the person in the seat next to us —- and our speed increases the pulse of the object of desire. We’ve known that suspense and fear have similar effects on the body as lust since the ancients. Erasistratus, a Greek anatomist who served as royal physician to Seleucus I Nicator of Syria, was the first to discover that love and pulse throb in unison. This poem refuses unison. Instead, it’s almost as if the speaker offers an aside, or a soliloquy, mid-kiss.

“The Kiss” as it appears on exhibit in the Tate Museum.

2

I saw Rodin’s sculpture, “The Kiss'“, while wandering through Paris with the first man whose name I imagined tattooed under my eyelids. The kiss I saw sat in a room filled with windows and sunlight; the stone shaped by the motion of shadows across the room. I remember noticing how the shadow of a windowpane ran across my sandal and then climbed up the kiss’ back.

According to the original 13th Century story, Francesca and Paolo fell for one another as they sat reading tales of courtly love. When Francesca’s husband, who was also Paolo’s brother, discovered them, he stabbed them to death. Rodin decided to depict the lovers at the moment of their first kiss. Look closely, and you can see the book slipping from the man’s left hand.

- Alastair Sooke

According to the Musee Rodin, where this statue is permanently housed: “The Kiss originally represented Paolo and Francesca, two characters borrowed, once again, from Dante’s Divine Comedy: slain by Francesca’s husband who surprised them as they exchanged their first kiss, the two lovers were condemned to wander eternally through Hell. This group, designed in the early stages of the elaboration of The Gates, was given a prominent position on the lower left door, opposite Ugolino, until 1886, when Rodin decided that this depiction of happiness and sensuality was incongruous with the theme of his vast project.”

Rodin reimagined the group into an independent piece which he exhibited the following year. The public named it. The French government commissioned this larger version in marble, which took Rodin a decade to finish. Of The Kiss as we know it, Rodin called it his “huge knick-knack”, and released it a companion piece to his monument for Balzac, perhaps hoping to borrow the sexiness of one to bolster the radical darkness of the other.

3

Dante met Paolo and Francesca in the second circle of hell. Also housed in Musee Rodin: Iris, Messenger of the Gods. I remember circling it, trying to balance Rodin’s appetite with his aesthetic, or to locate a way in which one formed the other.

4

We can look at Rodin's sculpture, "The Kiss," and write a poem about what each one is actually thinking during this kiss.

We can follow Ruefle, perhaps, by titling it in the negative, and using that as a sort of hint, a new trail into the poetics of kissing.

We can wonder about the kiss that led e. e. cummings to move towards the ending of “non-lecture three” with this:

So ends the second anecdote. You may believe it or not, as you wish. As far as I'm concerned, it's the unbelievable- but also unquestionable-selfportrait of a one hundred and one percent pseudoworld: in which truth has become televisionary, in which goodness means not hurting people, and in which beauty is shoppe. just (or unjust) how any species of authentic individualism could stem from such a collective quagmire, I don't-as always-know; but here are four lines of a p oem which didn't:

(While you and i have lips and voices which
are for kissing and to sing with
who cares if some oneeyed son of a bitch
invents an instrument to measure Spring with?

On Bacon's final triptych.

1

Francis Bacon (1909–1992) painted 28 known triptychs between 1944 and 1986. The Triptych pictured above was his final one. Using oil paints on prepared linen, Bacon painted from the left panel and worked across, usually completing each frame before beginning the next. Since he was very sick by 1991, art scholars have suggested that this piece represents Bacon painting his own death.

2

A triptych tells a story in three pieces. There are three panels, a trio, a trinity — and the mind has to cross them, the mind has to mimic the structure of division. We face the triptych.

The word face comes from the Latin word fascia, meaning corresponding to form, figure, face; it is related to facere meaning to make, to do, perform. (This verb is the same in Romanian.)

3

“What is the story of a face?” Dan Beachy-Quick asks in his essay, “Allegory of a Face” (on the work of Simon Dinnerstein):

“It is wounded, and it stares at us through its wounds, or eyes. It is wounded, and speaks through its wound, or mouth. The face that tells a story is also a story itself. It says: there is no art without damage.”

4

In Bacon’s triptych, the face stands apart from the flesh — it is tacked-on to the canvas like a self-conscious headshot doubling as a label which tells the viewer that this is a man, or two men.

The left panel faces us with its face — which is the face of a Brazilian racecar driver.

The right panel faces us with its face — which is Bacon’s face.

In iconography, which is where the triptych originated, the center panel exhibits the object of devotion.

Bacon’s central panel depicts two bodies, tangled, faceless. We are not allowed to read their facial expressions. Something is hidden from us. Something is made sacred in this hiding.

And yet — each figure seems to exist in its own black box, its own theatrical space where no other figures absorb or receive their gestures. “Every enacted calamity is presented as a mere collateral accident”: John Berger.

5

Bacon tied his preference for making triptychs to his though of one day making a film. “I like the juxtaposition of the images seperated on three different canvases,” he said.

Historian Mark Harrison has said of Bacon’s early years:

“He had this strange, staccato early career. Not many of his early works survive because he tried to destroy them. It’s really because they stayed in the collection of friends and relatives that we have any.”

Although Bacon was Irish, his primary artistic influences were French. Monaco is “where Bacon became Bacon.” Drawn to the gambling, sunshine, and tonal friskiness, he lived in Monaco after the war with his partner Eric Hall and childhood nanny Jessie Lightfoot.

John Berger didn’t begin to appreciate Bacon’s work until later in life, and he wrote about regretting this late discovery. Of Of Bacon he writes:

“What is different in Bacon’s vision is that there are not witnesses and there is no grief. Nobody painted by him notices what is happening to somebody else painted by him. Such ubiquitous indifference is crueller than any mutilation.”

6

One could take each panel of this triptych and write a small story, a character sketch from it, imagining the subject apart from Bacon and his work — I’m thinking of “Mr. Sandy” by Peter Orner as an example.

Francis Bacon. Study of a Bull (1991)

7

Mark Harrison is the one who actually found Bacon’s final painting, as explained by Mark Brown:

Residing in a “very private, private collection” in London, Study of a Bull. 1991, came to light as Harrison worked on editing a catalogue of every work by Bacon . . .

“Bacon is ready to sign off ... he was so ill,” he said. “He knew exactly what he was doing here. Is the bull making an entrance? Is he receding to somewhere else? To his cremation?”

Most of the two-metre-high painting is deliberately raw canvas. Underneath the bull Bacon has used real dust from his famously shambolic studio in South Kensington. “To me that is terribly poignant,” said Harrison. “He often used to say: ‘Dust is eternal, after all we all return to dust.’”

"Re-statement of Romance" by Wallace Stevens.

Restatement of Romance

The night knows nothing of the chants of night.
It is what it is as I am what I am:
And in percieving this I best percieve myself

And you. Only we two may interchange
Each in the other what each has to give.
Only we two are one, not you and night,

Not night and I, but you and I, alone,
So much alone, so deeply by ourselves,
So far beyond the casual solitudes,

That night is only the background of ourselves,
Supremely true each to its separate self,
In the pale light that each upon the other throws.

Dan Beachy-Quick whets the writing appetite.

The itch to write attacks me whenever I read Dan Beachy-Quick. Today, I came across an essay where he says that becoming a poet means accepting the debt of others as one’s own, and working to repay it so that the dead can be freed from their own debts of bondage. The work, here, involves forgetting the poems one has loved in order to be able to write one’s own.

He looks at a psalm, noticing how reading transforms each word from anticipation to memory.

Of Menelaus’ wife, he says: “A cloud is just dirt holding its breath.”

Of Augustine, he says forgetting is an awareness of “absence being present.”

Of betrayal, he says one the poet betrays the poem by desiring “quiet in words” or “silence in music.”

Of Greek verbs, he admires their middle voice as the space “when the verb acts upon itself.”

Beachy-Quick wrote his undergraduate thesis on Czeslaw Milosz and eschatology because he was curious about the end of time as a beginning. “Each memory has its own life,” he says, even though it pretends to be a replay of our own lives. Each memory makes its separate demands of us. I thought of the ghost who demands too much of its host — how this ghost is named a vampire, or one who sucks life from the veins of the living.

I use his essays as prompts. For example, this page which lists “Titles of Forgotten Books” makes me think of Anne Carson’s short lectures, and tiny prose poems that speak obliquely to a subject, leaning into a Dickinsonian slant. One might pick three titles from this list and use them as titles of short lectures, borrowing the form from Carson or Mary Ruefle.

DBQ teaches me to play with etymology continuously, unceasingly, as a monk prays atop a mountain which cannot be the peak of any world. Take a word you love — oracle, shell, carapace— and then do two things to it. Stain it and strain it. The difference between staining a word, where stain is to “tinge with color other than the natural one”, and strain is “to draw tight”, can illuminate how a word bounces inside its modifiers and context. A question to consider during edits, when eyeing a phrase or word: Do I want to stain this word or strain it? Why?

On figs.

1

I have become a fig thief.

My night walks include a stop at the neighbor's fig tree. Darkness makes it difficult to see the fruit from the leaf by the light of the street lamp. Even more difficult to discern an unripe fig from a ripe one. I read in shades and hues with Radu at my side, playing sentinel, his tiny nose twitching at every sound or possible mammalian scent nearby.

Radu eats a cicada. We return home with two green figs and a desire for something more.

2

In the Bible given to her by her father, Emily Dickinson pressed flowers. The archived copy of this Bible includes the flowers Dickinson pressed and left inside the pages.

The page on which Jesus kissed Judas on the cheek and later forewarned Peter that she would betray him has no flower —- it does not exist in Dickinson’s holy book. She cut this page out completely.

Dickinson also dogeared the pages in Revelations which refer to the wormwood star and when the locusts come out in gold crowns and armor.

I marvel at the simple fact that the archives still hold the pressed flowers in Emily's Bible — how she didn't remove them.

Or maybe she did… Maybe flowers were pressed then enclosed in letters and correspondence, so the ones that are left in the Bible are the ones which were not selected to be mailed.

Did she pick which flower to enclose based on its relationship to language, or its place in the text his weight made it permanent, pressed?

3

Figs are propagated from cuttings and grow on their own roots.

The farmers market near our house has seasonal figs packed into small wooden baskets. My partner offers to buy a basket of figs to assuage my fig-frenzy. I tell him it's not the same: a fig purchased in daylight tastes different from a pit fig procured in darkness. An official fig is different from an illicit fig.

Jan Kirsch, Cast Bronze Two Part Fig, 5 x 3 x 6 inches each.

4

What charges the fig with such possibility? I turn to poems for more figgishness…

And find a fig tucked inside Ruth Stone’s “Translations,” where the fruit’s flesh becomes a memorial: “Alexander Mehielovitch Touitzen, fig of / my pallid college days, plum of my head, did the silk stocking / factory go up in flames?” He is the fig of my pallid college days. It is a poem that carries a fig quietly.

There is radical pssibility in the way a poem carries its fig, or the uses a poet makes of a fig. US Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman references the fig tree in her poem, “The Hill We Climb,” imagining a time and place where Black Americans can sit under vines and fig trees without being afraid. I thought this was interesting — how the poem changes the fig to fit what the poem imagines. Poems can do this. Poems can consecrate objects into impossible, imaginable images. I mean, simply: figs aren’t often planted in vineyards, since their deep roots and massive branches take up alot of soil that might be otherwise used for vines. And unlike grape-vines, figs are fairly common trees, whose branches tend to cover the entire trunk, leaving little space for sitting beneath. Gorman’s fig tree is on a hill of hope, and it is not the fig tree that has existed throughout history — it is a new fig, a fig of the future which changes how we exist in relation to each other and time.

5

“I was a little tipsy on the dance of the velvety heart rolling in my mouth,” Ross Gay says, in “To the Fig Tree on 9th and Christian”.

“Oh many-branching candelabrum, oh strange up-starting fig-tree, Oh weird Demos, where every twig is the arch twig, each imperiously over-equal to each, equality over-reaching itself like the snakes on Medusa's head, Oh naked fig-tree!” D. H. Lawrence rhapsodizes in “Bare Fig-Trees”.

“Oh bring us some figgy pudding,” commands the traditional caroling song.

6

In the parable of the barren fig tree found in Luke 13:6–9 (NRVS), Jesus seems to suggest that a tree which doesn’t bear fruit should be destroyed:

Then he told this parable: “A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and found none. So he said to the gardener, ‘See here! For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree, and still I find none. Cut it down! Why should it be wasting the soil?’ He replied, ‘Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.’ ”

Denise Levertov responds to this bleak parable by allowing the fig tree to speak in her poem, “What the Fig Tree Said:”

But I, I knew that
helplessly barren though I was,
my day had come. I served
Christ the Poet,
who spoke in images

Likewise, Donald Hall takes up the failed fig tree in “Syllables of a Small Fig-Tree”:

7

The Mesopotamians were the first to cultivate figs, which spread from Iraq to Syria, and then to the Greek Islands by the Phoenicians in 9 B. C., where they developed an auspicious signification in myth and ritual.

Romulus and Remus, the founders of ancient Rome, were suckled by a she-wolf under a fig tree.

Greeks honored the winners of races with the foliage and fruit of the fig.

Myth has it that Zeus pursued Ge and her son, Sykeus in the war of the Titans, and Ge, desperate to save her son, metamorphosed into a fig tree that would distract Zeus.

Ancient statues used fig leaves to cover the pudendial regions of statues when they decided to draw a line between the sacred and profane in human flesh. In Mythologies, Roland Barthes mourned the presence of the fig leaf covering the newly-privatized area:

“Woman is desexualized at the very moment when she is stripped naked…We may therefore say that we are dealing in a sense with a spectacle based on fear, or rather on the pretence of fear, as if eroticism here went no further than a sort of delicious terror, whose ritual signs have only to be announced to evoke at once the idea of sex and its conjuration.

…This ultimate triangle, by its pure and geometrical shape, by its hard and shiny material, bars the way to the sexual parts like a sword of purity.”

An Irish gallery decided to remove the fig leaves from its male statues in order to show that, when it comes to penis size, “small is beautiful.”

8

Viewing the fig tree as an enclosure of sacred space is an ancient practice. In Amanda Gorman’s poem, the fig tree encloses a hoped-for safety.

Located between Athens and Eleusis, there is a place known as the “Holy Fig” — where a tree Demeter had given as a gift to Phytolus, king of the land of Cephsius, still grew beneath a tited roof tended by priestesses of the Eleusian mysteries. The inscription on Phytalus’s tomb read:

“Hero and king, here Phytolus received the majestic Demeter, when first she brought fourth the first fig of autumn, which mortal man called the sacred fig.”

9

MY FATHER AND THE FIG TREE

For other fruits, my father was indifferent.
He’d point at the cherry trees and say,
“See those?  I wish they were figs.”
In the evening he sat by my beds
weaving folktales like vivid little scarves.
They always involved a figtree.
Even when it didn’t fit, he’d stick it in.
Once Joha was walking down the road
and he saw a fig tree.
Or, he tied his camel to a fig tree and went to sleep.
Or, later when they caught and arrested him,
his pockets were full of figs.

At age six I ate a dried fig and shrugged.
“That’s not what I’m talking about! he said,
“I’m talking about a fig straight from the earth –
gift of Allah! —  on a branch so heavy
it touches the ground.
I’m talking about picking the largest, fattest,
sweetest fig
in the world and putting it in my mouth.”
(Here he’d stop and close his eyes.)

Years passed, we lived in many houses,
none had figtrees.
We had lima beans, zucchini, parsley, beets.
“Plant one!” my mother said.
but my father never did.
He tended garden half-heartedly, forgot to water,
let the okra get too big.
“What a dreamer he is.  Look how many
things he starts and doesn’t finish.”

The last time he moved, I got a phone call,
My father, in Arabic, chanting a song
I’d never heard. “What’s that?”
He took me out back to the new yard.
There, in the middle of Dallas, Texas,
a tree with the largest, fattest,
sweetest fig in the world.
“It’s a figtree song!” he said,
plucking his fruits like ripe tokens,
emblems, assurance
of a world that was always his own.

This poem is from 19 Varieties of Gazelle, one of my favorite books by Naomi Shihab Nye.

There is a blurring of pronouns, or a way in which the word he travels throughout this poem, and changes shapes. The first stanza refers to Joha, a trickster figure in Palestinian folktales — he, too, is present among the trees and he’s. The poem takes place in Dallas, Texas, a booming metropolis, a city known for its speed and rapid growth, where the father longs for the fruits of his childhood and homeland.

To raise a family in a foreign country, to make a new life, should not require self-erasure. The relationship between fidelity, longing, and nostomania, or yearning for a homeland, develops throughout this poem as Shihab Nye carefully reveals the intersections of past and present. The father wants to build a livable future for his loved ones.

The turn in the poem comes in the final stanza, when the father begins singing in Arabic, showing his daughter a thriving fig tree, describing his chant: “It’s a figtree song!” There is a sense in which both finds and creates this fig tree song on foreign soil. I heard a home in it. The poem offers an inheritance, a future patrimony, for the displaced refugee.

Nisha Atalie’s gorgeous poem, “The Fig Tree”, also touches on the fruit’s relationship to immigration, and the sharing of fruit as a bridge that summons the homeland. As a mixed poet of South Asian and European descent from the Pacific Northwest, Atalie writes of the father who plants both fig tree and Japanese maple before leaving. These trees are picked up by the daughter as both inheritance and longing.

The fathers plant trees and daughters. I think of the plum trees my mother planted from Romanian seeds (which she had me carry illegally in my child backpack over Customs borders). My first kiss flowered near those plums, near the stories and luck said to abide in them. In the successful growing of this tree across a border, one samples a soft repudiation of assimilationist logic.

10

Incompetence nestles near distraction.

Feckless rhymes with reckless.

A verb, shoot, is dangerous when someone is carrying not a camera but a gun.

Florescence can be violent, excessive, decadent, a bloomburst is silent but visually loud.

“You can lean back in the long grass and cover up the sun with your toe,” Dan Beachy-Quick wrote.

Because Hesiod said it is safe to travel when “a man thinks that the leaves at the top of the fig tree are as big as the footprint a crow leaves as it goes,” I take a photo of the neighbor’s fig tree today, and try to eyeball the measurements of the top leaf. It seems safe to travel.

The crow knows how man should travel; the fig tree reveals the crow’s secrets.

11

I read Bambi yesterday. There are no fig trees in the forest, in the book which Felix Saltern subtitled "Life in the forest”.

Figs came to the Americas and various islands by way of Spanish and Portuguese missionaries (see "mission figs"). Perhaps in those places, the relationship between figs and colonization alters the tone of the fig tree, rendering it less familial and more reminscient of lost autonomy.

12

Night again. The kids are complaining about more things they need for school.

The shield of Heracles has in its center an image of "Fear, made of adamant, unspeakable, glaring backwards with eyes shining like fire." Fear tries to look back at the one carrying the shield.

I am afraid someone will see me loosening figs, and eating them. Robert Calasso said nothing angers the gods as much as humans eating things, removing them from the face of the earth by consuming them. The gods subsist on nectar and ambrosia. Humans are the fools who hanker for fruit.

Radu barks twice and stares into the funnel of darkness. I am afraid someone is watching —- someone who has seen me do this many times on their security camera. Someone who is torn between disgust and amusement.

Darkness is my shield from the eyes of others, from the dailyness of normal, acceptable, neighborly conduct. Since thieves have no allotted angels, Radu is my guardian woof.

Two translations of Tudor Arghezi.

Because it is Saturday morning, and Arghezi returned yesterday in my readings of Benjamin Fondane. And so here is "Ceasul de apoi" by Tudor Arghezi, which could also be translated as “The Doomsday Clock.”

And here is one more… which feels awkward, which speaks of poverty and failure and carries the undercurrents of a wooden tongue. Arghezi titled it "Flori de mucegai,” which means “flowers of mold,” but one could argue for a translation of the title into “Mold, flowering” or “Mold flowers.”

Ending the first stanza with “it” and beginning the second stanza with this same “it” is very Arghezi, very typical of his elliptical moments and friskiness with pronoun-reference.

Alina Popa, etc.

Unsorcery composes and explores ways of sorcery that can eventually surpass or undo some of the contemporary realities and subjectivities. It is an Artworldinvolved in a productive alienation from concepts through experience and from experience through thought. Unsorcery is an environment in which Alina Popa and Florin Flueras were working together, each following their own path, doing their own practices, texts and performances around the concepts: Life Programming, Artworlds, Black Hyperbox, Second Body, Dead Thinking, End Dream.

- les presses du reel

from “You Are (Durational Life)”. Photo by Petre Fall.

[Source: WorkspaceBrussels]

The Postspectacle Shelter was organized in a place with both artistic and political importance, the House of the People built by Ceausescu and never entirely finished (but after the Romanian revolution in 1989), whose Western wing was transformed into the National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC) in 2004. In it, the homeless were offered food and medical assistance, and a voice in the Presidential Candidacy. The House of People was through this practical gesture given back to the People – now claustrated between the heavy brackets of double walls, that of the Parliament and of contemporary art.

The Postspectacle Shelter operated an aesthetic intervention to re-enact the crises of compassion—its internal contradiction. Postspectacle recognized that the only possible place to both stage reality and affirm the real effect of the stage where we play every day as bodies in and out of place is a No Hope shelter. A shelter which takes over a public institution by overstating its past and present failed promises of compassion and care for the people: The House of the People, now mainly housing the Romanian Parliament. The grand narrative of Romanian modernity produced this concept of a grand 'home' which was to never belong to the people, as its name so performatively promised. At the same time, the current representative democracy failed to meet the necessities of the demos; the people itself stopped believing in it. Hence, everybody invited could fearlessly play on the political stage constructed in the Shelter: by addressing the audience from the open tribune of the Presidential Candidate you became what you already were—the spectacle itself.

Freeing the homeless from 'representativity', from being caught in the rogue algorithm of compassion operates a shift in the relationship between representation and injustice. There is no sure 'home' for the spectator and the performer. The audience is as fragile as the performing bodies. The assigned roles inside the spectacle are in themselves precarious, unstable, oscillatory. The partial-spectator becomes the partial-performer and vice versa. There is no pure audience. Like in the performance of compassion, mere spectatorship generates the illusion of agency, but there is first and foremost the illusion of spectatorship that shadows any oscillation between comforting agency and the much-feared passivity. The stakes are not about seeing a spectacle, but about sensing the movement, the uncertainty of every moment, the fragility of borders and of the possible outcomes.

- Alina Popa, “The Crises of (Com)Passion and the Corrupt Audience”

If you are lucky to have escaped a disease conventionally you can go back to the radicality of thought as if nothing happened. Some may experience a new surge of life. Almost everyone wants to change, especially if the threat is big enough. When my existence has been put at risk thought felt deeply humiliated, it stopped. For days I have been just feeling that I exist and that is my protection like a lucid breath inhaled and exhaled by heart.

- Alina Popa, “Disease as an Aesthetic Project”

“I am preoccupied with developing performative practices, both somatic and discursive, that give form to the invisible, that give gravity to the immaterial.”

- “Art After Cantemir” (one of her most stellar texts, in dialogue with Dimitrie Cantemir and black on black)

Partysophy/Philoparty at Brut Theater, Vienna, 2015 photo: Pepa Ubera

“Partysophy/Philoparty comes out of a sustained practice of giving "staged" lectures, which are in themselves only modes of organization of social space – different from those enforced by the standard staging of thinking. This one is a lecture that needs a different kind of preparation, besides reading books or hierarchizing information: meditating, dancing absentmindedly, structuring your daily moods or going shopping with your urgent questions in the basket. Partysophy/Philoparty is a performance set up as spatiotemporal confusion. Bracketed between crowd pleasing DJ sets, it is the staging of a lecture built on the fine border between sophism as "the performance of intelligence" and the intelligence of performance, between wisdom and imitation of wisdom. The performer, be it in the guise of a DJ or in the guise of a "philosopher", is a space-organizer employing technologies for the formalization of diffferent, even antagonistic, community structures. Rhythm is the carrier of social space. The aestheticization of a lecture's rhythm has mainly come to emphasize the hierarchical mode of the "one preaching to the many", even if the message carried by its symbolic content turns against this hierarchy. On the other hand, being slave to the rhythm of a DJ's song opens up a more liberal space, yet one haunted by the totalitarianism of the spectacle. Partysophy/philoparty is affirming both party loving as a more truthful way of being together, and party spoiling, as a necessary distance from the spectacle of entertainment, in itself formalized, much like the aesthetics of wisdom in contemporary academia. The decisive moments are not the party or the lecture in itself but the ambiguous spatiotemporality at the beginning and end, when the space is in process of being restructured from party to lecture, from lecture to party. Applause fades into pop rhythms before it even starts, the content is forgotten having fun.”

- Alina Popa, Square of Will in Square of Love – Texts, Notes, Drawings

Contigencies.

Gellu Naum's Apolodor, and a translation.

Like many avant-garde writers during the Romanian communist regimes, Gellu Naum wrote and published a few books for children, including The Books of Apolodor.

This version was illustrated by Dan Stanciu, a Bucharest artist who often hung out with Gigi Rasovszky as “Polipul”. I love the cover art much I had to share it, to keepsake it.

On another random note, Jacques Herold, a Romanian surrealist artist who had fled to Paris and shared circles with Victor Brauner, went on to illustrate almost 20 poetry books written by Naum.

But here’s a translation of a poem by Naum…he has been on my translating table these days.

Softness with Sheers: Shelley Wong's "As She Appears"

Shelley Wong. As She Appears. YesYes Books, May 10, 2022
Cover & Interior Design: Alban Fischer
81 pages, ISBN 978-1-936919-5
Winner of the 2019 Pamet River Prize

*

Anne Carson once wrote that “eros is a noun which acts everywhere like a verb”. . . There is a stickiness to eros, and it is the stickiness that made Jean Paul Sartre cringe in Being and Nothingness. For Sartre, "viscosity" is a repellent "state halfway between solid and liquid… unstable but it does not flow," electing to cling like "a leech" which attacks "the boundary between myself and I."

The viscous is sticky, unlike water which allows Sartre to stay “solid” when swimming in it.

"To touch stickiness is to risk diluting myself into viscosity," Sartre writes, he then compares to "a possessive dog or mistress." Honey must have been horrifying to Sartre.

I thought of this viscosity, this sweetness, when reading Shelley Wong’s first poetry collection, As She Appears.

I marveled at how Wong creates an erotic palette of soft colors and vowels which feels viscous without being possessive. As a queer Chinese-American poet, she palpates the stickiness of hybridity and personhood while queering the gaze, and playing with the lens to highlight how the self is seen— how being seen over-determines being, itself. Or her-self.

Wong’s voice carefully unpacks the silences of love; she aims "to tell all the quiet sisters" to whom this poetry collection is inscribed. In so doing, Wong "talks" about the weather — each of the book's four numerated sections ends with a "forecast" poem which subverts the reading of future weather by bringing climate to bear on expectation . . . And so we move with the poet through the seasons of a relationship, but also a life.

Only one of the sections has its own epigraph,namely, the fourth section, the last one before the Coda. This epigraph from Korean poet and filmmaker Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee also titles the book:

One seems to be able to see her. One imagines her already.

Looking at Each Other Across Seasons

Muriel Rukeyser’s poem, “Looking At Each Other,” is set as an overaching epigraph for the entire book. “Yes were were looking at each other,” Rukeyeser confirms in this poem which builds from a place of confirmations and affirmations, a record and inventory of particular Yes's.

Yes, our bodies entire saw each other
Yes, it was beginning in each
Yes, it threw waves across our lives
Yes, the pulses were becoming very strong
Yes, the beating became very delicate
Yes, the calling the arousal
Yes, the arriving the coming
Yes, there it was for both entire
Yes, we were looking at each other

Summer, the season of warm nights and long-limbed light, is the first section. "The Summer Forecast" opens with a question about display:

Is it too late to go off-
the-shoulder?

Enjambment plays with fashion as an interpretive lens for subtle emotional display. There is a lover who takes photographs, and the speaker’s relationship to posing mingles with the apprehension of being defined by the lover’s lens. Flowers are everything in Wong’s book—the speaker's relationship to the flowers is a means of emotional expression, or forecast. I sensed this in the precision of her attention to the peonies, in a series of brisk couplets which close with an image, an act:

as I approached
softness with sheers.

The centrality of looking is also emphasized by the multiple ekphrastic poems. "Private Collection" uses the act of viewing art as a sort of erotic ekphrasis, and it is the quietness of the speaker which is conveyed in both aural and physical ways:

We wore quiet glasses, our hair in low ponytail
like George Washington.

The lover takes photos of the speaker looking away, and one senses a relationship morphing into a film reel. But there is also humor, a wry smile which exists as subtext, or as a correlate of the silence. You can see me without seeing me, Wong’s speaker suggests.

Topography and terrain also invoke silence, as in "Department of the Interior," written from Fire Island, where the speaker returns "in the silence that follows / a separation." Here, the barrier island feels like a loose metaphor for time's relationship to gravity and tides and the human body.

I love how the body is asserted in the fluidity of improvised language, as Wong reveals “For the Living in the New World”:

I may be happiest

improvising the language a body can make
on a dance floor. We are just learning

how female birds sing in the tropics.
Spring insists we can build the world

around us again. How has love brought you
here? My head is heavy from the crown.

Again, some part of amatanormative conventions are challenged by both the ornaments (i.e. the crown) and the seasons, or the expectations built into them by our relationship to seasons past. Spring brings green and renewal — or does it bring fire? How much of what we know can be relied upon to understand the future?

As a fourth-generation Chinese-American, Wong writes from a longing to know, or be known by, her homeland. This feels different from seeking to reclaim an identity —- perhaps it aims closer to seeking a living connection.

"To Yellow" is about race, and the direct address to the word emerges as a soft, gleeful rejection of being identified:

Dear yellow, you
have never covered my body.
I leave your light in the dark.

Embracing the relationship between light and what it touches, the poet gives yellow a particular power, and leaves the reader with a small epiphany:

how quiet
is strong & often beautiful.

Wong engages her heritage by moving around it, adding layers, as in "All Beyonce's and Lucy Lius" where it is tendered as a sort of social currency, or a set of instructions one can know without being known by:

I can't tell Mandarin

from Cantonese
drink hot water

"Refrain" bids adieu to "romantic sacrifice" when the speaker declares "I choose myself." Here, the self is posed against the duties of romantic love, where vows resemble "a closed hand," and flourishing occurs outside the promise, on the outskirts of the hot seasons.

Source: YesYes Books website

"I paint myself because I am alive," Frida Kahlo wrote in her diary. "I am the subject I know best."

Prior to this book, Wong published a chapbook on Frida Kahlo (Rare Birds, Diode Editions, 2017), and there are several Frida-facing poems in this collection.

In "Invitation with Dirty Hands," Frida Kahlo is the poem’s speaker who invites the "happy skeleton" to dance with her. Flowers, again, consecrate the space of heritage, or inheritance, as marigolds attach themselves to her "bloodline. Their soft throats crowd closer."

The epistolary "Dear Frida" begins by crediting Kahlo with the author's fascination with "flower names." Frida is addressed outside the shadow of her famous lover, Diego Rivera (Wong's decision to leave his name out of text seems significant), whose machismo the poet invokes:

He approves of your dresses
when your skirts unfurl

into a temple.

And there is "his first against" Kahlo's "locked door". The speaker references her own lover, and the quietude, the "desperate wanderings" her lover undertook; one senses a parallel between Kahlo and the speaker in the "quiet interior."

The "Epithalamium" written for Kahlo again gestures towards her marriage to Rivera, as well as Kahlo's bisexuality. But Wong subverts the epithalamium form by arming the betrothed rather than celebrating the wedding. It begins:

Lady, keep the tequila
by your lamp for when
you need a knife.

The instructions on how to make birds from azul paint to "wash away / the memory of his sweat, / the drowning taste" reinterprets Kahlo's art in light of her traumatic relationship with Rivera. Like Kahlo, Wong speaks in colors, borrows hues, builds a world from observation and affinity. The speaker admits: 

I, too, worshipped beauty,
parading in my pastels.
I fought & I loved the silences.

The pastel peacock is remarkable, memorable counterpoint to the brilliantly-feathered male peacock with his palette of turquoise and deep greens and blues and golds while the peahens sit peacefully in their quiet creams and soft browns. 

The poem "Albino" opens as a metaphor and then alters it at the end—the speaker is not quiet a pea-hen but rather a modified, pastel peacock. 

“Serene Chinese hibiscus”": Wong’s playful representations

Towards the end of the book, the poems recreate the dislocation of pandemic time, or the way in which it alters the seasons.

The final forecast poem beckons spring, naming the flowers as "my queens of color," creating a relationship between the flora and the flesh:

Sandal
ready. A pointed foot.

Again, Wong emphasizes listening, and how words recreate or misanticipate us.

There is a Coda, a single poem titled "Pandemic Spring" where "color becomes a feeling," and blooms stand in for emotions: : the "shocked orange poppies" and "serene Chinese hibiscus." The coda seems to defy all prior forecasts; the speaker calls herself "a pastel queen" whose time is now measured by listening, measured and made and marked by the hum of memories in amid cherry trees. Italics designate the quotations which refer to the speaker without quite seeing her:

Along the secret lake, I linger under a cherry tree in full blossom,
as is my ancestral right, something my Ohio
friend once said to me about hunting. When the petals fall like
snow, I think all my karaoke dreams.

I love these echos, and Wong’s use of italics to create an interior dialogue which brings the voices of others into the mind of the poet, which is also the room of the poem. 

Perhaps an entire book, or a year of seasons, throbs in the final lines of this poem, in the queer Chinese-American who has dressed herself in pastel pink to look back, to hug the redwood tree of her California home, and to speak plainly:

Dear ancestor: I am always rapidly departing, forgive me. To live, I want to be known &
loved, the two together, inseparable.

A beautiful book — sticky as the fondest hell, sweet as warm honey drizzled over yogurt, witty as quietude, and certain to have terrified poor old Sartre. What could be more delicious?

Why we write: A collage of words from others.

Because we have always written.

Because it’s the third thing, the god in the image, the ghost in the room, the thrall.

And because….. I have all these quotes written down in my notebooks… to share.

*

Seymour Krim: “I think all writing comes out of some sense of injustice: Why wasn’t I born beautiful? Why can’t I dance well? I think the inability to bear your situation as it’s been dealt to you has a very definite effect on your becoming a writer. It becomes changed and polished and you no longer have that primary feeling of changing your fate through your work—perhaps for some people, it always remains—but I think the impulse to rectify an injustice is at the bottom of the impulse to write.”

Dmitri Shostakovich: “We can’t allow the fear of death to creep up on us unexpectedly. We have to make the fear familiar, and one way is to write about it.”

Charles Simic: “The secret wish of poetry is to stop time….. Poems are other people’s snapshots in which we recognize ourselves.”

Claribel Alegria: “Traditionally in Central America the role of the poet is very important. In Central America, but especially in Nicaragua, practically everybody is a poet.”

Lucy Corin: “But what is more magic than access to death, what is more magic than something moving from a state of not being alive to being alive, or from being irrevocably lost to us to being present in another form, a form of sound and shadow, because of words, because of the sometimes inconceivable persistence of life? Every literary tradition I know is rooted in tales of the transformations between life and death. Words by their nature conjure; they make real. These are the stakes of magic in literature.”

Terry Tempest Williams: “When one woman doesn’t speak, other women get hurt.”

Adrienne Rich: “A poem can't free us from the struggle for existence, but it can uncover desires and appetites buried under the accumulating emergencies of our lives, the fabricated wants and needs we have had urged on us, have accepted as our own. It's not a philosophical or psychological blueprint; it's an instrument for embodied experience.”

Rita Dove: "I can’t imagine living without writing. Writing a poem for me means putting a name to a face, to memories. It means calling up emotions that I don’t quite have a handle on, and beginning to understand them a little better by writing about them. But it also means reaching out and connecting with someone else.”

Dumitriu Tsepeneag: "To have talent, I think, means to have the courage of pride and desperation, though also a little exhibitionism. The pride of thinking yourself a creator, Author; the desperation, because you know that no creation can be absolute, remaining, in fact, an apology, an exhibitionism, because you display the pride and desperation that accompany it." [trans. by Carla Baricz]

Julio Cortazar: “I was a very realistic child for the simple reason that the fantastic never seemed like the fantastic—but rather like one of many possibilities or existences that reality can present to us when, for some immediate or indirect reason, we manage to open ourselves up to the unexpected.”

Sven Bikerts: “When the words were coming, the future was naïvely projected as a continuation and fulfillment of the same. Working at full tilt one has a hard time imagining things ever not being thus. It is part of the nature of inspiration that it when it strikes us we feel it will be ongoing. In this one way, it’s like love. // Needless to say, writing is by now bound up with everything in my life, and there is no scenario, really, in which all other things are not affected by it. If I’m not writing, or at least pointed inwardly toward writing, I am suffering. Privately, I am listless and anxious by turns. Publicly I carry on as if I still had full title to my existence. But really, everything about how the day — the life — proceeds has to do with the presence or absence of the impulse.”

Natalie Goldberg: “The only place my walking into the room exists is in my saying it. I am keeping it alive. You turn around to look and me-walking-into-the-room is gone. You can’t see it.” ⁃ “There’s a dream dreaming us.”

Charles Simic: “Poetry is always the cat concert under the window of the room in which the official version of reality is being written.”

Donald Hall: “I write a lot of elegiac poetry. Poetry is trying to preserve place, and certainly elegiac poetry tries to keep the dead around. Poetry enacts our own losses so that we can share the notion that we all lose—and hold each other’s hands, as it were, in losing.”

Dorothy Allison: “The reality is that I am not to be trusted. Novelists are liars. That is a fact. We make up stories and try to tell them so well that people will fall under our spell and believe what we say absolutely. We work hard so that the reader will believe our fictional creations, believe all that stuff really happened--had to have happened. How, doing that, can we make so strong a claim to truth? More importantly, how, having written a novel that makes such terrible use of our own reality, can we claim a right to say what about our lives is now off-limits for public discussion?”

Graham Greene: “It is the storyteller's task to elicit sympathy and a measure of understanding for those who lie outside the boundaries of State approval.”

Gerald Stern: “The poet’s main job might be to preserve memory.”

Anne Lauterbach: “Poetry protects language from serving any master. One can it better from the periphery than the center.”

Coleman Barks: “What is the ache within an ache? What do we really want when we love a river or a grandchild? What is something that doesn’t ever get solved in being human?”

George Saunders: “A short story works to remind us that if we are not sometimes baffled and amazed and undone by the world around us, rendered speechless and stunned, perhaps we are not paying close enough attention.”

Jane Hirschfield: “I grow lonely for poems, the way you would grow lonely for an absent lover. And then they return. Longing is the ladder we meet on.”

Grace Paley: “But during all those jobs, once I was married and after I had children, most of the day I was a housewife. That is the poorest paying job a woman can hold. But most women feel gypped by life if they don’t get a chance at it. And during all those jobs and all the time I was a housewife, I was a writer. The whole meaning of my life, which was jammed until midnight with fifteen different jobs and places, was writing. It took me a long time to know that, but I know it now.”

Carolyn Forche: “One of the things that I believe happens when poets bear witness to historical events is that everyone they tell becomes a witness too, everyone they tell also becomes responsible for what they have heard and what they now know.”

Claribel Alegria: “Where there is so much horror around you, I think you have to look at it. You have to feel it and suffer it with others and make that suffering yours.”

Garrett Kaoru Hongo: “I think poetry is about our most familiar need which we deny in order to lead more practical lives, but ultimately these lives are impractical because they do not have such presences in them. I think poetry can bring such presences back…”

Anne Carson: “In letters as in love, to imagine is to address oneself to what is not. To write words I put a symbol in place of an absent sound.”

Isabelle Allende: "I need to tell a story. It’s an obsession. Each story is a seed inside of me that starts to grow and grow, like a tumor, and I have to deal with it sooner or later. Why a particular story? I don’t know when I begin. That I learn much later. Over the years I’ve discovered that all the stories I’ve told, all the stories I will ever tell, are connected to me in some way. If I’m talking about a woman in Victorian times who leaves the safety of her home and comes to the Gold Rush in California, I’m really talking about feminism, about liberation, about the process I’ve gone through in my own life, escaping from a Chilean, Catholic, patriarchal, conservative, Victorian family and going out into the world."

Ray Bradbury: “You must write every single day of your life…You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads…May you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.”

Norman Manea: "What I do know, is that I refused to compromise with the system and I was obsessed with preventing my work from being manipulated for their propaganda. Even stories about the Holocaust could have been promoted as anti-fascist stories, which they were in a way, but I didn’t want them to be taken only as such. I remember I had a reading in Berlin in the ‘80s and a man in the audience, asked me: ‘Sir, I read your book, I read the stories, you didn’t say who the oppressors were nor who are the people who are suffering.’ And I said, ‘No, I didn’t.’ It was important to me that a Vietnamese reader reading a story about a young boy who is in a camp, can recognize himself, without me saying: the boy is a Jew, the oppressor is a Romanian, or a Nazi, and so on. I wanted to have a more universal approach."

Colette: "To write, to be able to write, what does it mean? It means spending long hours dreaming before a white page, scribbling unconsciously, letting your pen play around a blot of ink and nibble at a half-formed word, scratching it, making it bristle with darts, and adorning it with antennae and paws until it loses all resemblance to a legible word and turns into a fantastic insect or a fluttering creature half butterfly, half fairy."

Susan Sontag: "You have to be obsessed… [Being a writer] is not like something you want to be — it’s rather something you couldn’t help but be. But you have to be obsessed. Otherwise, of course, it’s perfectly okay to write, in the way that it’s perfectly okay to paint or play a musical instrument — and why shouldn’t people do that? I deplore the fact that only writers can write, as it were? Why can’t people have that as an art activity? … But to actually want to make your life being a writer, it’s an auto-slavery … you are both the slave and the task-master. It’s a very driven thing."

William Faulkner: “An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn’t know why they choose him and he’s usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.”

Andrei Codrescu: “It is a sad fact that all flesh must die, but there is no reason why one's story, as well as one's soul, should be slighted after the passage. The attraction artists feel for our cemeteries is only partly aesthetic; much of it is gossip, a continual whisper intended for the delighted ear. Marble without a story is just marble. A true monument leans over and murmurs in your ear."

Ray Bradbury: (piping back in with a little advice on writing from lists) "Three things are in your head: First, everything you have experienced from the day of your birth until right now. Every single second, every single hour, every single day. Then, how you reacted to those events in the minute of their happening, whether they were disastrous or joyful. Those are two things you have in your mind to give you material. Then, separate from the living experiences are all the art experiences you’ve had, the things you’ve learned from other writers, artists, poets, film directors, and composers. So all of this is in your mind as a fabulous mulch and you have to bring it out. How do you do that? I did it by making lists of nouns and then asking, What does each noun mean? You can go and make up your own list right now and it would be different than mine. The night. The crickets. The train whistle. The basement. The attic. The tennis shoes. The fireworks. All these things are very personal. Then, when you get the list down, you begin to word-associate around it. You ask, Why did I put this word down? What does it mean to me? Why did I put this noun down and not some other word? Do this and you’re on your way to being a good writer. You can’t write for other people. You can’t write for the left or the right, this religion or that religion, or this belief or that belief. You have to write the way you see things. I tell people, Make a list of ten things you hate and tear them down in a short story or poem. Make a list of ten things you love and celebrate them. When I wrote Fahrenheit 451 I hated book burners and I loved libraries. So there you are."

Petre Barbu: "Since we live here as emigrants...."

Richard Siken's "Why" (and a few poems I'm obsessing over).

Richard Siken's poem, "Why," is the prompt that won't go away. And because it infuses my reading of poems—and speaks to what we find as readers in addition to what we do as poets—I decided to reconstruct the entire poem, in order, as a frame for speaking about other poets and poems I’ve enjoyed this year. The words from the poem are direct quotations. Don’t ask me why any of this matters. It is what it is—or what it does.

Because poetry is the language of the imagination and you need a larger imagination.

You need an imagination with enough space to imagine fucking the ocean inside Diamond Forde’s “I Can’t Write About the Ocean Without It Being About Slavery”, and then spend an hour lost in marvel, eating “Moon Pie, or a Fat Ode to Pussy and Marshmallows,” numbering euphemisms.

Because you need more than a gun and a jug of water.

You need to taste the sky in Mahmoud Darwish's wilderness—the desert and the deserted—to find your voice in the desertification.  You need to be there, on the page, “Standing Before the Ruins of Al-Birweh” in Sinan Antoon’s translation.

I shut the door to my emotions to become my other
I don’t feel that I am a stone sighing
as it longs for a cloud
Thus I tread as if I am a tourist

And you need to read Darwish in all these translations, in all these brushstrokes and proximities.

Because you have explicable and inexplicable needs and the world is full of things and you want some of them and to get them you need to be able to say them and think them. 

But surely some of them return like echoes, and so writing the non-material needs— the immaterialities of the human spirit— can be the most difficult, the easiest to botch, which is what Etel Adnan does not do in Sea and Fog, where “love precedes us to the grave and follows us into it.”

Because undigested biography is boring.

And the roughage of real biography includes dreams, “The Sleep Stage” elucidated by Kim Addonizio wherein someone feeds pudding to temporality, itself.

Because what we call sincerity is an oversimplification.

And the line in Renee Gladman's Calamities is inseparable from the line in her art: "They entered blank space and made a problem for the page - what next, where to go – and they were lovely in themselves." Which may be to say: they were lovely in their ability to expose language down to " the live wire set loose," and then seeing the burned, "the map it made" by electrifying a particular space.

Somewhere in the object world, I'd decided I would talk about the drawings: I'd give them language so that I could say they weren't language exactly.

A map is a page with markings. For Gladman, drawing and writing both make lines to think their way into something, which is to become. The line deserves following. Sincerity may be structural.

Because sometimes desire in a person sounds like whining. 

Or like “The Mother’s Loathing of Balloons” by A. E. Stallings, where pronouns share vowels with disavowals, and desire is a flotation device that disappears between mother and child.

Because nostalgia is always creepy and it makes you seem helpless. 

But nostalgia is neither creepy nor helpless—it is daunting, dangerous, evocative, resplendent as Hua Xi’s ““Heaven””:

Loneliness is an imaginary thing,
but so is the entire country.
You try. There are ceilings
you hold up
like heavens.

Because you can evoke instead of recount.

And you can write from the evocation and thereby raise the dead inside a poem as Luisa Muradyan does with “Bruce Willis, in the Light”, where the evocation blurs with invocation, and something sacred emerges from this layering of pop culture and a grandmother’s out-raged spirit:

I was named for 
my grandmother, and I carry
her anger in this life and the next.

Because you can trace the path of the mind as well as the way the body drags through the mud.

And give us the alphabet needed to describe what is seen and what is done, the relationship between the mind and the landscape, as Natalie Diaz does in "Abecedarian Requiring Further Examination of Anglikan Seraphym Subjugation of a Wild Indian Rezervation”, meeting the myths:

Pastor John’s son is the angel—everyone knows angels are white.
Quit bothering with angels, I say. They’re no good for Indians.
Remember what happened last time
some white god came floating across the ocean?

Because we’re savvy and media drenched and you can leave out the parts of the story we already know. 

By already know, one means we know nothing. Which is to say we know the form and shape by which others feign to know things, and these very forms, shapes, and vessels deserve their own bawdy invocation—they deserve to be revisioned as Alejandro Zambra does in “Multiple Choice.”

Because knowing where to put the commas is boring and subject-verb-object is boring but knowing how to break a line to push against a sentence, make a friction, spin against the way you drive, find the place to breath, is interesting.

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."

Because what it does is more interesting than what it is about.

And what A. E. Stallings does in "Dyeing the Easter Eggs" is both iconoclastic and iconographic. Notice how it moves through colors; how it lands in "chrism"; how the contrasts depend on connection and cycles of resurrection and birth.

I am the children’s blonde American mother,
Who thinks that Easter eggs should be pastel—
But they have icon eyes, and they are Greek.

Because you have a rich inner life, or want one, and everyone looks good smoking a cigarette in a cage with a notebook and a faraway look. 

But no looks as good, as gruff, as amazing in its reversals, leaving so much to hinge on “the demotic—John Ashbery.

Because notebook.

May be a pilgrimage which resembles Anne Carson's space, somewhere between the ancients and the present, where ruins meet in us—or in Caron’s lyric essay, “The Anthropology of Water.”

How can you see your life unless you leave it? 
It is already late when you wake up inside a question. 
Pilgrims were people who got the right wish. 
I'm asking you to study the dark.

Because the page.

Is filled with sheets. And Patrycja Humienik finds in them a “Failed Essay on Repressed Sexuality.”

Because paper is cheap and no one really gets hurt.

W. H. Auden knew this when he wrote what Elizabeth Hardwick called “a throwaway libretto” for Benjamin Britten’s Paul Bunyan in 1940, shortly after his arrival to the United States. Auden never sought to reprint the text of this libretto: one instance. Paper is cheap. Maybe someone gets hurt. Maybe someone else finds freedom in it. Maybe someone’s sprained ankle is as dramatic as someone else’s broken back.

Because language existed before you.

And language is what must exist in order to cross us. As it appears in Ross Gay's "Alzheimer's," where the use of repetition both creates and de-creates a grandmother’s portrait, in her own words, a wind:

She stood in her doorway, asked my name
Again—something she would never
remember. A breeze
loosed some cherry blossoms, petals
flipping through her open arms
as she whispered, “Look what God has done,
look what God
has done.”

Ilya Kaminsky pointed out that the work of this poem is done in the titling: the Alzheimer’s, there, as both a character and a diagnosis—and one can’t help thinking about the before/after selves of chronic illness, the division between the body that didn’t know division except as a spectator, even though Gay gives us this portrait from two planes, the subject watching the speaker, the speaker drawing the subject. There is a haunting tenderness in the pitch of the refrain.

Because you rise up into language for only so many hours before falling back down into silence and you might as well do something useful while you’re here. 

You might lay the sonnet space for the last supper and invite everyone you can imagine to discover a shoreline, as Diane Seuss does in “[Here on this edge I have had many diminutive visions.]”

Because you’re susceptible, elastic, thin-skinned, moody.

And when you describe it, readers find themselves in the graft of your dislocation. You are "The Street You Cross" by Ryszard Krynicki. You are Poland, at some point, the line between traffic and complicity, the ethics no one mentions underneath.

Because landmark.

And Jason McCall needs to show us why even the landmark, itself, dies inside a particular body. He does this on so many levels which re-mark, de-mark, and rattle the ground the landmark needs to exist.  

Because amnesia.

Is an unremembered map, and we need to find our way back. The poem in drafts may be asking for a cartographer. And because poetry "has no obligation to the present that it forms its own time, or duration," to quote Dionne Brand’s The Blue Clerk.

Because you will not remember this moment with accuracy.

You will spend years trying to reconstruct your steps towards the bed with a dead baby, towards the ways you could have prevented what you could not prevent. The death of a baby has no meaning. There is no salve, no salvation, no syntax to hold it together. Beth Gordon will write these difficult poems anyway. 

Because language belongs to those who use it and some things develop sideways.

And so Shane McCrae enters the experience of being biracial in the US sideways, through the persona of Jim Limber, a mixed-raced man adopted by Jefferson and Viola Davis. McCrae offers backstory in titles, which refer to Limber as “the Adopted Mulatto Son of Jefferson Davis”— and he uses the word “mulatto” to indicate the characters will be bound by time, by the specificity of gaze which McCrae uses to develop tension across time.

Because the landlord will let himself in without notice. 

And Dean Young will bring drive-in, the piano, the girlfriend, the infected finger—all into “Lives of the Inventors”:

Because your supervisor will change your schedule without notice. 

The schedule, itself, may be a transcript of the end times. The funeral home is haunted by what we don’t want the morticians to say, as Luisa Muradyan does in "If You Were Wondering About the Couple Who Runs the Funeral Home", narrated from inside the mind of that couple, and how they cope with their work, or what work-life balance means in the context. Notice how she sets up the title perfectly, the couple runs the funeral home, rather than owns it, which lets us know that they are involved in the daily details. the long title keeps the poet from having to get bogged down in back story. The poem takes its cue or beat from an inventory, and the "beautiful pie charts" which the couple "makes up" to you "stay sane."  this is where the motion and imagery against – as the poet plays out what each color symbolizes:

Violet means these bodies 
just got here and haven't even taken their clothes off.

 And she says what each color means to the couple, who is both directly addressing the reader in an intimate you, accomplished in the final line's "your"-- also narrated as an "I" which stands for the couple. it's a feat of narrative power – and the poem which opens her book, American Radiance.

Because hot pants.

Maybe a failed sestina, may be a poem by Jane Huffman which undoes itself at the seams.

Because parataxis.

Because a myth can be a costume that lets Cavafy imagine himself into a space—and Leonard Cohen can pick up this space inside the hot pants of his own song decades later.

Because we need more than a clunky extrapolation.

Something like Marie Howe opening the archives of where we are now by organizing the archives we made of others. Something like discovering the need for a concordance which includes sparrows.

Because we are waiting for you to make sense of it for us. 

We are waiting to hear a composition by La Monte Young titled “Piano Piece for David Tudor #1”.

Because poetry can move the fulcrum of the mind just enough so that the world, this same world, becomes electrified and bewildering.

And Alice Notley knows this. She knows that the baby had to emerge from the owl's forehead in a poem about post-partum depression. To choose both is to refuse the very choice. I am grateful for every poem and every poet that teaches us to write us.

Because poetry is mysterious and criticism is not.

And, often, the form, itself, creates the questions it cannot answer, as in Oliver de la Paz’s extraordinary poem, "Autism Screening Questionnaire — Speech and Language Delay.”

Because craft can be taught but vision can’t, which is problematic, since you need both. 

I keep thinking of Sophia Stid’s poem, “Lifestyle Factors,” about gendered apologies, and how the poem locates itself within the body of one single, long stanza trying to figure itself out, using form to make physical the figuring, the accounting, the embodied ledger:

And now sorry is one more way to be wrong, to be hungry,
the secret stare I carried stolen & thrown right back
at me.

The lifestyle factor of having a body.

Because a consistent way of seeing is a philosophy. 

And gratitude is a lens, or angle which amplifies the small intersections of life in Ross Gay’s “Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude,” where poet gives the bird permission to come in, come in through the window “coochie-cooing my chin.”

Because when you mess with syntax, you’re messing with morality. 

So Kyle McCord can lean into the language and syntax of iconography—and the diptych and triptych of forms with the gorgeous couplets of “Triptych for Nighthawks”:

She slurred words
as she pointed to the print.

Only the corymbs flowering
my father’s canvas were absent.

Hot pants, because some things are worth repeating. 

And the form of repetition may be a poem titled “C.V". that subverts its inhumanity, as Iman Mersal does.

Hot pants, because image is the coal you shovel into the poem to fuel its little engines. 

And how to describe the poem that includes an aside to the image that it can’t quite abandon in another poem? I’m thinking of Patrick Donnelly’s intertext in “Jesus said Will someone”:

(Fleeing the deep grasses of the hunting ground,
Sokaku wrote, I heard the stag cry
—my friend is lost—)

Because there are more ways of getting there than just plot.

And Cedar Sigo believes we must keep touching them, keep inhabiting the ways of getting there. And I believe him.

Because the sound of a singular human voice.

The echo of tappings inside a prison wall. The poetry that emerges as a way of speaking with the dead, with the mother who dies as you sit in a Russian prison, trying to divine what it means to live. Vera Figner was a revolutionist, but poetry was the language she used to speak to her mother. The most precious return, somehow, "To My Mother," a missive.

Because they will not lay down in the streets and give you the keys to the city until you give them what they want and what you want to say and what they want to hear will overlap anyway so why not give it to them, love, love, it’s not like there’s only so much, it’s not like it’s gonna run out, so give it to them, give it to them.

All I can say is Tiana Clark’s “Broken Ode for the Epigraph”—all of it. Here’s how it begins:

O, intertextuality.
O, little foyer to my poem.
O, little , first and foremost.
My amuse-bouche, meaning mouth amuser,
a little glimpse of the meal to come. And sushi:
little epigraphs over rice. And if I could, I would add
an epigraph over everything. Wait . . . who says I can’t?

Because you can go ahead and make it happen, finish the thought, say the dream was real and the wall imaginary, raise the dead, heal the sick, cast out demons, and levitate. 

And if you do this, it might take an epistolary form that resembles Rachel Mennies’ The Naomi Letters, where the sent letter, “November 30, 2016,” sits next to the “[unsent draft]”, creating a dialogue between the speakable, the written, and the subtext of the conversation. To raise the dead is to remove the imaginary wall between said and unsaid. Or, to quote an “unsent”:

Before you, I wrote myself letters.

I typed them and saved them in a folder marked Vacation Photos.

Because readers are greedy and great literature is about its readers not its writers.

And sometimes I still can’t believe I get to live in a world that include Alison C. Rollins’ “Quartet for the End of Time”…even this first quartet—-astonishing.

Because participation.

Includes giving grief a shape through pacing, as does Chris Abani in his new collection (Restless Books), and this stanza:

I will fashion you from your relentless 
darkness.

The motion here is so different from walking. Closer to lifting blades of grass from a patch and trying to blow them, looking for that shrieking whistle – and yet not wedded to defining the satisfaction of the moment by it.

See "Terminus" and the role "incessant" plays. And then the haunted image of shadow behind the eyes. Abani chases his brother across continents. Use of the word blessed to flip at the end; use of pyromania to suggest it leads to self-immolation and maybe that is what it signifies. The effect of "desire" here as it intersects with grief. And how grief renders us homeless. Perhaps this is an argument for an expansive poetry based on grief and loss, how our place in the world no longer exists. But also: sparseness in pacing.

Because witness.

Sometimes looks at the children, or the ones who won’t live to witness the world we have made for them, as in this “For the Kids” by Langston Hughes.

Because history.

May return in "the smooth cup" passed by a brown hand in Hoa Nguyen's "I Didn't Know." A certain can offer a cup across time which feels like tomorrow.

Because, in spite of it all, it’s between you and the page.

To stare into the sky and refuse to write it. To break it down into morsels like Kay Ryan that are easier to carry in a pocket, and which feel like silences or vegetables. 

Because sometimes, in spite of it all, it’s just words on a page. Because sometimes, in spite of it all, it’s still in your head and not on a page and you have to do it all over again.

To watch a daughter in the mirror noticing where the light intersects with memory, as Carmen Bugan does in "She looks in the mirror." To look—and look again, seeing how she sees, how she is seen, how the seeing, itself, becomes a story about salience.

Because you want to be heard, or overheard, or you don’t and you need to invent a coded language to get the message underneath the radar. 

As when Ludwig Wittgenstein turned to his landlady as he lay dying, and said: "Tell them I've had a wonderful life."

Because you want to write it down and slide it under the door and run away or you want the words to outlast you or at least do their job while you are sleeping. 

You want your dead brother to read the letter which tries to make sense of his absence, and yet which cannot believe in this absence entirely, even as the poem is addressed to it. See Marie Howe’s “What the Living Do,” where the traditional, public-facing elegy is replaced by an epistolary form, and the intimacy of private conversation includes failures with Drano.

Because even when intent and urgency push past dexterity into blather and deceit you have still accomplished something.

As Noah Warren accomplishes something which sticks, something which rumbles, something resilient in "Operation Pedro Pan”, a portrait with sharp elbows, fascinating rhymes, revisionary repetitions:

and Rich the careful, the claims adjuster,
the trembler, then the trembler

Because sometimes the places you’d like to smooth over are the places where you have betrayed yourself and you should take a minute to really think about that. 

In the black hole, maybe even in a cemetery, 
humans, my armed friends, absorbed their own whispers --
all were filthy, thin, pathetic per Shakespeare, 
they numbered their bullets & days & dreams in overnight attacks.

Then the moon appeared without a helmet, coming forth from thorned darkness; 
but my friends failed to fall with their faces to the ground; 
instead they lit cigarettes, talked of liberty, the shooter's freedom, 
their backs leaning loosely against the black hole, the possible gravestone.

And I cannot stop thinking about the ways in which one betrays the self in translation, or in the assumption that translation is not both a funeral and a birth.

Because you don’t need to be brave but it helps to be unashamed. 

It helps to sit in Dorothea Lasky’s extraordinary “Lilac Field” and imagine ourselves.

To perform death is something only humans would do
No animal would sit there
With a blank look on its face
Just because the camera is there

Because we are all always moving forward in time, word by word, and you can trust us to follow you into the future.

You can trust us to notice the enjambments which sever the speaker from the words, the mischief of breaking a line after "you"—the committed, recursive hauntedness of Shane McCrae's "To Make a Wound."

Because we are going to spend the rest of our lives in the future. 

And no one can prove the future will not resemble “The House” by Warsan Shire.

Because black square, white square, goes the linoleum.

Gherasim Luca wrote “Inventor of Love” in 1945 and I will never get over any of it. Or poetry.

I carry with special elegance the suicidal head on my shoulders and I circulate an infamous mile from one place to another, poisoning the breaths of beings and if things over a range of several kilometers....... I look at myself in the mirror and I see my face full of eyes, mouth, ears, numbers. Under the moonlight, my body casts a shadow, a half-shadow, a pit, a quiet lake, and an onion.

*

Presses & journals associated with these poems: University of Nebraska Press; Wave Books; Bull City Press; Four Way Books; BOA Editions; Archipelago Books; Harvard Review; NYRB Imprints; Tin House; FSG Books; Restless Books, countless journals, I give up…

And why not end by making my mom happy and leaving a little note from Leonard Cohen—

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.