"Romanian Notes" by Gary Indiana.

[As part of Gary Indiana’s travelogue series with Vice, “Romanian Notes” was published on August 19, 2013. I am excerpting it in full below, just in case the Vice archives vanish.]


“Thanks for a country where nobody is allowed to mind his own business. Thanks for a nation of finks.”

—William S. Burroughs, A Thanksgiving Prayer


In Bucharest, the psychological damage inflicted on a society subjected to surveillance terror is apparent everywhere when you scratch the surface, even 24 years after the fall of Ceauşescu—in the suspicion older Romanians show toward one another; in the furtiveness and compulsive cheating rampant among shopkeepers and service providers; in the resigned abjection of young people who can imagine no future options besides A.) colorless, lifelong conformity in a degrading job or B.) membership in a neo-Nazi gang; in the atmosphere of demoralized powerlessness that suffuses daily life in Bucharest as perceptibly as melancholia pervades Istanbul. No problem too small to be insoluble, no conflict unthreatening enough to resolve without trauma. And in the countryside, people say, it's worse.

*

In line at an airport immigration check, the couple ahead of me debated which of their passports to use. They each shuffled at least five, like cards in a poker hand, all issued by different countries. The two sounded postcoitally blowsy, absorbed in their own sleepy dithering. They asked if I'd been around Taksim Square the night before. They had been sprayed, it turned out, with the same wave of tear gas I had walked into three blocks down the street. Like me, they'd spent all night rinsing their eyeballs, and now could easily fall alseep on their feet.

"We just got married," the woman said, making a little snort, as if they shared a few doubts about whether this had been a great idea. She was 40-ish, dubiously blond, pale, strong-chinned, gray-eyed, very pretty, of unguessable nationality, wearing a frazzled old Chanel suit and no makeup. Her partner was a hefty man, possibly Lebanese, with a stippled whitish fringe along the trim line of his thick black hair. Youthfully loose-limbed, but paunchy and quite a bit older. One pale-aubergine shirttail fluttered at his zipper; the other was stuffed into his pants. He was trying to be amusing and, unlike most people in airports, succeeding. "Guess where we're going," the woman quizzed with mock haplessness. "Cairo, jewel of the Nile," her new spouse chimed in, rolling jaded eyes at the predictable ironies of travel. I had a half-conscious flash that these people weren't touring or jetsetting at all, but testing out a much-revised script for incipient flaws, a fiction close enough to reality to go unchallenged in public. The immigration person waved them forward. "And then, what the hell," the woman laughed as she walked away, "Beirut. How's that for a dream honeymoon?"

*

It's possible that people intending to do bad things use the telephone and the internet to plan them, if they are also morons. However, morons are not noted for their planning skills. I suppose it would be nice if some bad things could be prevented before they happen without turning the world into a police state. The "eye in the sky" in casinos nips a lot of card counting and skimming and other scams in the bud. But if you place every human being or even everybody in a single country under invasive surveillance, a police state is what you get, even if the collected data is scattered around unsorted in a mainframe until a particular person becomes "a person of interest."

*

The overriding imperative of any bureaucracy funded by the state is its own self-perpetuation. If its purported reason to exist threatens to disappear, a bureaucracy will create whatever conditions it was supposed to eliminate. A drug-enforcement agency will deal drugs. An antiterrorism agency will breed its own terrorists, attracting weak-minded, potentially volatile people into bogus conspiracy cells. A central intelligence agency or so-called department of homeland security will manufacture threats to security, for example the recent "increased chatter alarm" that closed all the embassies in North Africa for a week.

If these glue traps for federal revenue are allowed to collect unlimited information about everybody, they can also make anybody into a terrorist, a drug mule, or whatever other menace a potential agency or department budget reduction calls for, cutting and pasting together a flimsy but widely believable, totally distorted version of any individual for public consumption, using bits of his or her data that have been parked in a massive hard drive in North Dakota or Utah or one of the other storage states. Last words of Lee Harvey Oswald: "I'm just a patsy."

*

In Kiss the Hand You Cannot Bite, a book about the rise and fall of Ceauşescu, Edward Behr quotes a former Securitate official: "Imagine a huge apparatus spreading rumors, fear, and terror, an atmosphere in which common people feel that if they try and do the most insignificant thing identified as an act of opposition… they will disappear. It was psychological terror that paralyzed the Romanian population, and the most outstanding piece of disinformation was the rumor, deliberately spread by Securitate itself, that one out of every four Romanians was a Securitate informer."

*

Local "unrest" distracted me from Egyptian news in Sofia, where comparatively festive marches "turned violent," as the wire services put it, only once, on the 41st consecutive night of demos, when protesters trapped journalists and politicians in the Parliament building, then stoned a police bus sent to extract them. It felt much easier to identify with angry Bulgarians, angry Turks in Taksim Square, than with the factional mix of Islamists in Cairo. The Istanbul demos targeted once-popular Prime Minister Recep Erdoǧan after he proposed razing Gezi Park and replacing it with an Ottoman Disney Mall. (Erdoǧan's biography features the most piquant dependent clause I've come across recently, citing the fecund marriage of the former sesame-bun seller and anti-Semitic playwright to Ermine Güilbaran "despite his homosexual background," about which, there isn't another word.) The Bulgarians, unusually effective street agitators (aside from bringing down the whole government last February, demos recently produced a total ban on shale-oil extraction), were enraged by the government's ongoing collusion with crime syndicates turned corporations that control much of the country's industry and resources. These things made sense. I understood where they came from. It takes no imagination at all to perceive the US since 9/11, notably New York under mayors Guiliani and Bloomberg, as a more elusively layered, distractingly overdecorated version of Bulgaria Today or Istanbul Now, if you throw in an electronic upgrade of the East German Stasi, the Romanian Securitate, the Soviet KGB, and the Albanian SHIK. Egypt, however…

*

To pilfer the title of Ivana Lowell's brilliant memoir, why not say what happened? According to Alan Taylor's The Civil War of 1812, even before the American Revolution scores of colonists in every trade and profession fled the soon-to-be-United States for remote parts of Canada, disgusted by the corruption and unbridled avarice that already permeated life in American towns and cities. By 1871, reporting on the fantastic chicaneries of the Gilded Age robber barons and the rotten judiciary they manipulated to thwart one another, Charles F. Adams, Jr. was able to write of an atypical judge, with no fear of intelligent contradiction: "At this particular juncture Mr. Justice Sutherland, a magistrate of such pure character and unsullied reputation that it is inexplicable how he ever came to be elevated to the bench on which he sits…" How different the US might be, today when the piratical ruthlessness of the Gilded Age amounts to a pimple on Lloyd Blankfein's ass, if every school child were taught the actual history of the country, instead of being stuffed with platitudes glorifying the supreme greatness and goodness of the place where he or she happened to be born.

*

I registered Egypt as a creepy smudge when it appeared on Bulgarian TV, which I only turned on for news of Edward Snowden, marooned at the time in the Moscow airport. Now, in Bucharest, I catch myself doing the same: Egypt seems even more distant, a catastrophe with no solution and no exit. I don't know how to reconcile the contradictions embedded in it. I can't look at it. Among other things, it would force me to consider: Do I honestly 'believe' in democracy?

I'm old enough to know America itself doesn't, since until very recently, any democratically elected head of state or popular leader anywhere whom the US couldn't control swiftly experienced a CIA-sponsored insurgency or coup d'etat—Arbenz, Mossadegh, Allende, Aristide, Sukarno, Lumumba, Trujillo, Diem, Goulart in Brazil, Nkrumah in Ghana, to name just a few, and then there are all the failed coups, against Castro, Chavez—the list covers every continent except Australia, where I think the US mainly just rigs elections. Everybody in this world, except in America, understands exactly what the single mission statement of US policy is: "You do it our way or we'll push your face in."

*

No answer, no exit: asking people to choose between the Egyptian military and the Muslim Brotherhood is the same as asking if they'd rather be sent to Auschwitz or Treblinka.

*

Beside the veranda of his carpet emporium, Ahmet's ringlets brushed John-from-Melbourne's ear while they sipped mint tea, slouched on fat embroidered pillows. In the midafternoon heat, they lolled like pashas on a vast Soumak carpet laid out on the ground. Ahmet's piccolo, a cherubic but very pushy 15-year-old, had "teasingly" escorted me the length of the bazaar, from a fabric shop also owned by Ahmet, where I had been on the verge of getting laid by one of his employees. Ahmet had been there earlier, striking Mae West poses and exhausting his supply of sexual innuendoes. Ahmet was what used to be called a camp. Not my thing. Now I had to deal with him again, taking in a tableau of pudgy, effeminate carpet shill nuzzling lanky, louche-looking retiree from Down Under, which strongly suggested that Ahmet and John were carnally familiar old friends. I took John for an expat living in Istanbul since at least the Battle of Gallipoli, if not the Crimean War.

After a lot of misfounded conversation, I gleaned that he was nothing of the kind. Depressingly, he was two years younger than I was. He had arrived two days before on a loosely organized package tour, and had met Ahmet for the first time that morning. He wasn't gay, or not much, just comfortable with body contact. This was the six-hour anniversary of Ahmet's campaign to sell him a carpet, subtracting an hour for lunch and another for Ahmet's mosque duty. Merchants in the Old Bazaar not only drip charm and oblige you to drink tea with them for hours, but will happily fuck you in the ass to make a sale. The playfulness involved often looks and feels more personal than it is, though.

*

Democracy, Schmemocracy. It's irrelevant to the people who manage the country, a joke to the people who own it. A local example, of course, is New York's City Council, led by Christine Quinn, abolishing mayoral term limits after they were set by a voter referendum—the most unambiguous expression of the citizens' wishes in a democracy (unless the ballot question is constructed by Californian Jesuits). What I'm not certain about is whether I support, believe in, advocate, adhere to, "democracy," if the outcome is or might be something very evil.

*

Silence was the enemy of Ahmet's trade. He had a Wagnerian opera's worth of rug chat stored in an otherwise fallow brain. At times, weirdly, losing himself in the throes of a marketing aria, he appeared to mutate, like a human CGI effect, into a more urbane, philosophically detached, European personality, even a hereditary duke or viscount, from a country far west of Turkey. Or an actor, perhaps, researching the role of a faggy Levantine rug peddler, who sets off for lunch at the Four Seasons before remembering he's still in greasepaint and a cheap rehearsal costume. These improvised personality touches—ruminative, skeptical, fitfully dismissive, florid, conflicted, judicious, brazenly unctuous by turns—began to suggest that somebody else was trying to sell him the carpet. He made two paltry sales all day, both dismayingly irrelevant to his current business plan. His current business plan was to somehow unload a centuries-old Isfahan consignment item, valued at two hundred thousand euros. Everyone entering the shop wanted a look at it, since Ahmet invoked it as if it were the Holy Grail. Absurdly, I thought, he went as far as to tell people he expected the thing to triple in value on its next appraisal, and prayed some devilish shrewd customer wouldn't wrest it from his inventory before that. However, Ahmet could divine with amazing accuracy the net worth and disposable income of any living human being, and saw that none of the day's marks had remotely enough assets to buy it. He was just fucking with himself. It seemed mildly endearing.

*

The Obama administration scrambles to glue a happy face on its out-of-control spy agencies, while the director of the NSA lies to Congress, not only about the fact of rampant domestic spying, but about the number of terrorist plots the NSA has thwarted by means of any of its surveillance programs. At first it's 50, then it's ten, then it's down to five, finally it's "I don't have the exact figures in front of me." Exactly none, apparently. Even Joe McCarthy was less obviously full of shit. By the time James M. Clapper, if that really is his name, finished testilying under oath, news of the illegal liaison between NSA and the DEA had already leaked from the cache of yet-unpublished Snowden documents. It's brilliant to release the sordid truth one item at a time, right after the Clapper or some other federal sinkhole has been forced to admit the last one and indignantly denied that the logically inevitable next one could even be possible.

*

When Ahmet disappeared to cook tea, John mentioned that Cairo was the next stop on his itinerary. The question of whether to cancel hovered in the muzzy air. "Of course you should go," I said, yawning. "They're not rioting in Luxor or Alexandria, are they?" I had no idea if "they" were or not, but it was just rioting, as far as anyone knew. Maybe it would stop, the way the bazaar stopped when the prayer call, crackling with dense static, bleated like a scary foghorn from the Fatih Cadde mosque across the road. "Not yet," John said. "Unless all hell breaks loose before Tuesday, I'm going. I only get away from Melbourne once a year; anyway, it's already paid for."

I meant not to sound too encouraging, but life really is cheatingly brief. And people who never travel tend to imagine, when trouble erupts in a distant country, that its entire landmass has seized into convulsions. I reminded John that he knew better, though I had scrubbed Egypt from my own vague plans that morning. John wasn't American, I rationalized, he would be less unwelcome than I in a combat zone, or else less attractive as a hostage, if it came to that. "Either things will calm down before you get there," I said, "or you'll have a great story to tell your grandchildren."

"Anyway," John said, "I check the embassy travel advisory every day."

"Sometimes," I said,"even when there's a war, if the Hilton stays open, it means you can travel around and still avoid the whole thing if you're careful."

It really didn't occur to me until 3 AM, when I was feeding cats in the streets near my hotel, to ask myself what is always somehow an untimely question: "Why the fuck did I say that?"

*

Obama—not to be outdone in devising the "least untruthful" excuse for a money-gobbling vortex of warrantless searches and supine FISA court judges who sign off on anything put in front of them—assures us that he had planned some purgative review of the NSA even before Edward Snowden was a drop of cum in his father's balls, so there! How sad that the still-inspiring symbolism of Obama's election has turned out to be the only unqualifiedly positive thing about his presidency—even Obamacare is so deeply compromised by concessions to the insurance industry that its main value is likewise located in the realm of the symbolic. I'm rarely moved by the rhetorical style of Ivy League valedictory addresses, so when people say "the president made a great speech," it's just an unnecessary reminder that actions speak louder than words. And in the matter of Edward Snowden's immeasurably laudable and invaluable public service, and regarding the NSA, CIA, FBI, DEA et al., the next shoe to drop will doubtlessly be federal collection of all citizens' medical records—and, since all the acronyms are having a gang bang, why not let the IRS in on the fun, along with the family doctor?

Bruno Schulz and Józefina Szelińska.

 

The Henryk Sienkiewicza school in Drohobycz, where Jozefina was working from 1930-1934, when Bruno Schulz met her. The building is currently a private residence.

Spring came early in that year of 1933, when Bruno found himself fascinated by a 28 year old teacher at the local seminary. Her name was Józefina Szelińska—and she was equally fascinated. She agreed to pose for a portrait in pastel, a portrait that became the first in a series.

After spending the morning posing and drawing, the two would stroll through the meadows behind her parents' house, discussing literature, art, and poetry, and wandering into the birch forest to be alone. Józefina later described those meetings as "something miraculous . . .  inimitable experiences, which so rarely occur in life. It was the sheer essence of poetry."

Józefina grew up in Janow, the daughter of  Zygmunt and Helena Schranzel, a Jewish couple  who converted to Catholicism. In 1919, she officially changed her name from Schranzel to the more Polish-sounding Szelińska.

Bruno referred to her as Juno, a nod towards the Roman goddess of marriage and fertility. Every person has an animal resemblance, Bruno explained, and hers was with the antelope. As for himself, he resembled the dog.

"The artist absorbed the human being in him," Józefina said of Bruno, whom she likened  to a kobold, or "a mythological sprite neither boy nor man, alternately virtuous, and mischievous." This mixture of innocence and dangerous jouissance characterizes her thinking of him.

Schulz came to visit her almost every evening of that summer in 1933; they discovered a shared adoration of Rilke, Kafka, and Thomas Mann. She was the first ear to hear many of the stories Schulz read aloud to her.

When she lost her teaching job in 1934, Józefina moved to Warsaw, and the two began a relationship of correspondence, which she described as “passionate letters that saved Bruno from his depressions”, attenuated by short visits in winter and summer holidays.

Maria Kasprowiczowa, the widow of a poet named Jan, invited the couple to her villa near Zakopane. The correspondence between Bruno and Maria was only discovered in 1992, when a scholar was rummaging through Jan Kasprowiczowa’s archives. But this correspondence offers insight into Schulz’s thinking about his beloved during this time.

On 25 January 1934, Bruno wrote to Maria:

The word "human being" in itself is a brilliant fiction, concealing with a beautiful and reassuring lie those abysses and worlds, those undischarged universes, that individuals are. There is no human being there are only sovereign ways of being, infinitely distant from each other, that don't fit into any uniform formula, that cannot be reduced to a common denominator. From one human being to another is a leap greater than from a worm to the highest vertebrate. Moving from one face to another we must rethink and rebuild entirely, we must change all dimensions and postulates. None of the categories that applied when we were talking about one person remain when we stand before another.... When I meet a new person, all of my previous experiences, anticipations, and tactics prepared in advance become useless. Between me and each new person the world begins anew.

In January 1935, Schulz’s brother, Izydor Sculz, died young of a heart attack, leaving behind a daughter, sign, and a mother who relied on him for financial support. A few months later, Bruno and Josefina made their engagement public.

Józefina "enslaves me and obligates me," Shulz wrote to Maria of his betrothed:

My fiancée represents my participation in life; only by her mediation am I a human being and not just a lemur or a gnome. ... With her love, she has redeemed me, already nearly lost and marooned in a remote no-man's-land, a barren underworld of fantasy….Is it not a great thing to mean everything for someone?

When he was granted a six-month paid leave in January 1936, Schulz elected to spend most of it in Warsaw with his fiancée. The two attended a dinner there, in that month, where Józefina raved about living in Paris after the wedding. But Bruno stared at his plate, saying nothing. When asked where he'd like to live after their marriage, Bruno answered: "In Drohobycz." A crack had opened.

Another complication was the rising anti-Semitism in the borderlands. The nomenclature of bureaucracy required Schulz to encounter identity as construed by the state. As mentioned, although Józefina was born to two Jewish parents, she converted to Catholicism (the official Polish religion) along with them, and also Polonized her surname—-a fact which may have saved her life once the Nazis took over.

Neverthless, that February, Schulz published an announcement in local papers that formally acknowledged his “withdrawal from the Jewish community” (in Balint’s words). Rather than register himself as Catholic, the official Schulz declared himself a man “without denomination.”

In spring 1936, Josefina translated the first edition of Kafka’s The Trial into Polish. Although Bruno’s name was also listed on the cover as a translator, the majority of the translation work belonged to her. Bruno’s afterword located Kafka in a sort of universal mysticism whose ideas “are the common heritage of the mysticism of all times, and nations.” For Bruno, Kafka lifts the “realistic surface of existence” and sets it atop “his transcendental world” in a sort of “radically ironic, treacherous, profoundly ill-intentioned” grafting.

One could say that Bruno and Josefina wrote a book together, a book whose author was also Jewish, also an Austro-Hungarian who imagined life in relation to his entrepreneurial father. One can also wonder how Bruno’s reading of Kafka influenced the trajectory of his own relationship with Jozefina.


When Józefina begged him to live with her in Warsaw, Bruno refused, referencing his sister’s illness and the needs of his family. Later, Józefina said that he was haunted by an image of himself "as a beggar, wandering the city, reaching out his hands, and I would turn away from him contemptuously." Bruno often mentioned this image when discussions about money and cohabitation began. 

By January 1937, Józefina despaired of his commitment. His indecision made her "the weaker party in the relationship," she said. For where "he had his creative world, his high regions," Józefina felt that she "had nothing". She celebrated her 32nd birthday quietly. A few days later, she poured a handful of sleeping pills into her mouth and swallowed them. Wavering along the edge of unconsciousness, tasting the nearness of death, Józefina cried out for help and was taken to the hospital. 

After learning of his fiancee's averted suicide, Bruno rushed to Warsaw to be with her. While at the hospital, Bruno caught influenza and spent 10 days in bed, completely enfeebled. With Bruno being treated for influenza, Józefina went to recuperate at her parents' home, near the birch forest where she and Bruno had spent countless memorable afternoons. 

In February, Bruno appeared at her parent’s house, carrying figs, dates, and flowers. He surrounded  Józefina with tenderness and devotion. "He felt guilt," she wrote later, adding that the guilt was "completely unfounded, for he was nothing but goodness."

But a plant can be beautiful and transient; a gift horse can begin a war; a romance can mean everything and go nowhere. And if Bruno was goodness to his betrothed, but he was also indecisive, unreliable, wracked with self-doubt and insecurity.

In the spring of 1937,  Józefina ended their engagement and forced herself to stop answering his correspondence. 

Neither Bruno nor Józefina ever married. After Schulz's murder by a Nazi,  Józefina spent the next 49 years in fidelity to his memory. "To stay with him, for better or worse, forever," she wrote. That is the story she insisted upon.

Ambient Eno.

“So as not to become meat we must return the jaguar's gaze. But in this encounter we do not remain unchanged. We become something new, a new kind of we perhaps aligned somehow with that predator who regards us as a predator.”

- Clarice Lispector

“Score without Parts (40 Drawings by Thoreau): Twelve Haiku, 1978” by composer John Cage is currently housed in the Princeton Library, which describes the piece as follows:

In this work, Cage, who is among the most influential composers and conceptual artists of the postwar avant-garde, duplicates the score with which he conducted his 1974 composition Score (40 Drawings by Thoreau) and 23 Parts. Inspired by the writings of the American naturalist Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), the artist replaced conventional musical notation with small drawings of natural elements—seeds, animal tracks, and nests—drawn from Thoreau’s journal, which Cage selected and sequenced at random with the aid of the I Ching, an ancient Chinese divination text. He then divided each of the twelve bars into three sections of five, seven, and five measures, transforming the score into a visual, sonorous, and experiential haiku.

Brian Eno’s “Three Variations on the Canon in D Major” (on the B side of his album Discreet Music) took a canonical piece, Johann Pachelbel’s Canon in D, and “varied” it. Although some musicologists claim Discreet Music the origin of ambient music, the first ‘official’ ambient was Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports, which came three years later.

“Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting,” Eno explained. And there is movement from the word discreet, which connotes a quietude and reticence, to the word ambient, which suggests the creation of a certain environment.

The challenge Eno set for ambient music—-being simultaneously ignorable and interesting—reminds me of Proust, laying in bed, writing an entire world from his convalescence. Or maybe it reminds me of convalescence in general, and the way in which confinement, or restriction, or the constraint of the bed shapes the way objects are received and experienced.

In Eno’s telling, he was bedridden and unable to move when the inspiration for Discreet Music occurred. Recovering from a car wreck in 1970, a friend came over to visit him. As she was leaving, she asked him if she should put a record on, since he couldn’t rise to do this himself. This question about whether he wanted music feels tied to the question of what sort of environment he preferred to stew in. After putting on a record, the friend left. But the volume of the music was too low, the melody was “much too quiet,” and Eno couldn’t reach the record player to turn up the volume. “It was raining outside,” Eno recalls. “It was a record of 18th-century harp music, I remember”:

I lay there at first kind of frustrated by this situation, but then I started listening to the rain and listening to these odd notes of the harp that were just loud enough to be heard above the rain.

Colin Marshall explains:

Discreet Music‘s B side performs a reinterpretation of its own with variations on Johann Pachelbel’s Canon in D, “Fullness of Wind,” “French Catalogues,” and “Brutal Ardour.” On Eno’s instructions, the Cockpit Ensemble repeated parts of the score while gradually altering it, imbuing this familiar (not least from weddings) 17th-century piece with an otherworldly grandeur. Like their mistranslated-from-the French titles, these variations may in some sense be “mangled,” but they become all the more ambiguously evocative for it.

The liner notes from Eno’s Music for Airports.

And, of course, the opportunity to drop one of my favorite albums of Eno’s, namely, his collaboration with King Crimson’s Robert Fripp on “Evening Star.”

Notes on poetic syntax.


not touching you is a silence
in the discourse of touching you
but is a word
in the phrase of looking at you

- Ulalume González de León, “Syntax” (translated by Terry Ehret, John Johnson, & Nancy J. Morales)


Syntax—or the way the basic components of a sentence are arranged, connected according to phrases and clauses, and extended to other sentences—comes from the Greek syn (together) and tax (to arrange), meaning the orderly or systematic arrangements of parts or elements.

“Each is embedded in the syntax of the moment—” said Marvin Bell.

*

“The poem is itself essentially a body, comprised of various parts that work in various relation to one another–which could also be said, I know, of machines, but because poems are written by human beings, these relationships are unpredictable. A successful poem will never feel robotic or mechanized. It feels felt.”

- Carl Phillips, “Muscularity and Eros: On Syntax”

*

“The line is no arbitrary unit, no ruler, but a dynamic force that works in conjunction with other elements of the poem: the syntax of the sentences, the rhythm of stressed and unstressed syllables, and the resonance of similar sounds.”

- James Longenbach, The Art of the Poetic Line

Longenbach’s three kinds of poetic lines include parsed lines, annotated lines, and end-stopped lines. O, kudos to Frontier Poetry for this resource!

*

“It is this question of grammatical phrasing and ending that orchestrates relationships between syntax and the poetic line.”

- Shira Weiss, “Syntax and the Poetic Line”

*

Lines can contain what is called a memory of meter rather than meter.

*

“Why not consider parallelism a type of prestidigitation, where subtle shifts in prosodic execution stack in such a way that we do not get the chance to see how quickly and sometimes violently the poem has changed? A word has been “put out of place,” a speaker who once held on to an orderly image of flying birds has become the very perch upon which the birds may sit. Meanwhile, the structure of the poem turns and entangles in its own (il)logic, and the likelihood of closure falls into deferment. But does not deferment of closure, of pleasure, carry the potential of intensifying pleasure once it finally arrives, a kind of driving one out of their mind?”

- Phillip B. Williams, “Wandering Through Wonder: Parallelism and Syntax in the Poetry of Carl Phillips”

More closely, Williams lists the following ways a poem can turn at the volta:

  1.  A reversal of what was just said comes into play.

  2.  A shift in mode: narrative to lyrical, lyrical to dramatic, dramatic to narrative, etc.

  3.  A shift in the spatiotemporal, meaning the when and where of the poem changes.

  4.  A shift in voice, meaning the actual embodiment of the speaker changes.

  5.  A shift in tone, often times signaled by a rhetorical shift. Meditative to enraged. Curious and deciphering into sure-hearted and self-engaged. Thinking about rhetoric, does the speaker move from listing to directive? Statement to question?

Each of these formal decisions—-each of these turns—-relies on choices about syntax. Each is an opportunity to make it “feel felt,” as Phillips has said.

*

“I mean, syntax is always about ascribing hierarchy, right? Syntax is a matter of who/what comes first, of what entity or force acts or is acted upon, and so on. When I play inside the constraints of this order, I’m playing so as to expose machinations that hum beneath familiar cadences, the under-rhythms and the ideas they carry. I want the arrangement to come under scrutiny. I love when syntaxes fold, repeat, contradict, and undo themselves to reveal their and our hypocrisies. I love the experience, while writing, of stumbling onto coded meanings in habitual language patterns and then defamiliarizing or destabilizing them. And I’m most interested in: What becomes possible after that?”

- Ari Banias in “The Politics of Syntax and Poetry Beyond the Border” by Claire Schwartz

*

“Syntax provides the opportunity for lines that are usually end-stopped, usually by means of a punctuation mark, and for lines that are enjambed because the sentence runs to the next line. Most free verse writers like to mix end-stopped and enjambed lines so as to create an individual sound, and to provide surprise and reward in the text. Syntax provides the opportunity for changes in pitch, pace, and tambour. Syntax and rhythm define a tone of voice far more than do vocabulary and lining. Line holds hands with syntax, and syntax holds hands with rhythm. The more kinds of sentences one can write, the more various can be one's poetry, whether metered or free. Syntax creates grammar and logic too, though in the end, music always wins.”

- Marvin Bell, after calling syntax “the secret to free verse” in a workshop

*

In an essay on Trevor Winkfield, John Ashbery described "sight-reading" a painting, or noticing how each element in the painting has "its precise pitch, its duration." One thinks of the hard, jewel-like poems that want to dissuade us from drawing closer. The quick clip of monosyllabic syntax and fricatives.

*

Language relates – and the words we use tell the reader what sort of relationship is brewing.

Haryette Mullen compared Stein’s syntax in Tender Buttons to “baby talk”, which she defines as "a magical marginal language used mainly by women and children.” For Mullen, the minor and the marginal are potential sites of freedom, and so she chooses the prose poem, which she also describes as a "minor genre," as the form to carry the words about gendered clothing in trimmings.

*

“Because many poets like a poem to look like a column, much free verse has the feel of accentual verse, in which one is counting the number of stresses in each line. These poems often are a conversational three-, four-, or five-beat line, with an occasional line a beat shorter or longer. Free verse at its most free verse-like is elastic: Some lines are noticeably shorter or longer than others, and each is embedded in the syntax of the moment. As a young poet, I sometimes follow the early example of William Carlos Williams and the later example of Robert Creeley, for example, enjambing short lines in jazzy syncopation. Thus, it seemed important to hesitate slightly at the end of each line.”

- Marvin Bell, again


*

Metaphor positions us in a counterfactual relation to the world of ordinary speech and conversation. It puts us in what Anne Carson calls "an uncanny protasis of things invisible" which doesn't seek to argue with (or even refute) the known world so much as "to indicate its lacunae".

A counterfactual sentence can operate as a vanishing point for these two perspectives that lay in symmetry, or in protasis,  in the conditional relationship. Syntax is how this vanishing is set up. Syntax determines its reach, texture, and duration.

*

"And we have to figure out what these coins mean, not
knowing the language."

- John Ashbery, "Flow Chart Part II"


Odes on necrophilia.

I found a reference to Frank O’Hara’s “Ode to Necrophilia” in C. D. Wright’s essay “the new american ode.” Having never read this particular O’Hara ode, discovering an urge to do so, feeling needled by a vague curiosity, I searched for it—and settled for transcribing this visual screen-print created by by Michael Goldberg and Frank O’Hara in 1961.

Michael Goldberg & Frank O’Hara, "Ode to Necrophilia", screen-printed 1961. From the book Odes.

ODE ON NECROPHILIA

by Frank O’Hara

“Isn’t there any body you want back from
the grave? We were less generous in our
time.” Palinarus (not Cyril Connolly)

Well,
it is better
that
OMEON
S love them E
and we
so seldom look on love
that it seems heinous

 

This should be the end of the story, according to plot scheme mapped as 1) reader wants to eat a poem described a writer 2) reader finds poem 3) reader satisfies hunger with poem 4) reader makes notes on the feast itself. But the feast turned into a correspondence.

O’Hara’s ode fed me directly to Kati Horna’s gelatin silver print series, Oda a la Necrofilia (Ode to Necrophilia) from 1962. One year after O’Hara and Goldberg’s publication, Horna (who lived in Mexico City) created this photo-narrative of a woman grieving a death. Perhaps necrophilia was in the chemtrails of the early 1960’s.

The Oda a la Necrofilia series was originally published in Salvador Elizondo’s avant-garde journal, S.nob, for which Horna coordinated the section on “Fetishes.” The only title I’ve found for the piece below is “Untitled.” It is incredible.

We know someone has died because the large plaster death mask lays on the pillow. At the head of the bed, hidden beneath the black fabric, a silhouette of a figure. The fabric is a mantilla, the traditional lace shawl worn by Spanish and Mexican women during mourning and on holy days.

Commemorative: the lit candle in the foreground. A half-open porch door with sunlight spilling onto the wall. The tension between the candle’s small flame and the bright light filling the room.

The figure beneath the mantilla is Horna’s friend and artistic collaborator, Leonora Carrington.

Leonora (Ode to Nechrophilia series), signed 'Kati Horna' (on the verso, gelatin silver print, sheet 8 1/8 x 7 1/2 in. (20.6 x 19.1 cm), executed in Mexico City, circa 1962.

Horna’s photo-narrative is silent, enigmatic, hued towards the erotic, and centered on Carrington’s interaction with various objects.

The shifting spatial relationship between the mourning body and the objects resembles a grieving process in which various defenses or forms or protective covering are shed. Once the mantilla is removed, the woman stands in her bra, smoking a cigarette, cradling the mask as if the absent could share the smoke with her.

The empty ankle-boots look so awkward poised ballerina-style near the bed. Are they hers or his?

Carrington watches herself smoke in the mirror to the left, and we see her reflection lit by the sunlight. The black umbrella is part of grief’s traditional costume in some villages, but I’m not sure if this is true in Mexico City, where Carrington posed for this photo series with Horna.

Clearly the black umbrella serves no useful function inside the room. If anything, it is—-like the cigarette and the cradling of the death mask—-a courting of bad luck. Opening an umbrella indoors is bad luck in most cultures. Is there a defiance in photo titled “Leonora”? Is there a risk?

There is—-I believe—a cigarette tucked behind Carrington’s ear.

The light moves to the white of the mask in her lap. The sheets are pulled back as if she is preparing to climb in bed with the mask.

The umbrella is open, hiding her face. A stroke of reflected light, like something shot from a mirror, on her left shoulder.

I don’t know the correct sequence of this series, so there is a sense in which I am inventing the story as I go, which means missing the story Horna intended.

Leonora (Ode to Nechrophilia series), signed 'Kati Horna' (on the verso, gelatin silver print, sheet 8 1/8 x 7 1/2 in. (20.6 x 19.1 cm), 1962. “Standing as fetish for the body of the deceased, a white mask carefully placed on top of a pillow becomes the recipient of the woman’s sorrow and desire.”

I don’t understand how Horna created this doubled-headboard effect. The shadow of the headboard interacts with the naked back and the absence of Carrington’s face in an extraordinary way— a melange of erotism and agony.

And the porcelain jug holding the candle: the subtle tension between this bedside, water-bearing vessel which is holding a lit object that lights the plaster face on the pillow. Grief is the story where form detaches from function.

The three images above are housed in L. A.’s Hammer Museum.

An inventory of moving objects in this series: the white mask, the candle, the pillow, the black mantilla, the unmade bed, the umbrella, the cigarette, the ankle-boots, the open book, the jug, the woman’s body in various states of undress.

A note on the artist: Kati Horna was born in Budapest, Hungary to an upper middle-class Jewish family. She learned her craft from the renowned photographer, József Pécsi.

In the late 1920’s and 1930’s, Horna moved across Europe from Berlin to Paris to Barcelona to Valencia taking photos for the illustrated press. Demand kept her moving through war zones in the interwar period, but it was Spain that affected Horna deeply, particularly after she got involved with the anarchist fringe in the Spanish civil war and began creating photos and montages for their propaganda materials. These anti-fascist agitprop materials combined satire with intense hope, two tones one can feel in Horna’s later work, where loss encounters itself as a continuous displacement, a reenactment among objects, a gestural dance with disillusionments.

In late 1939, as Nazism moved into the mainstream, Horna left the continent and settled down in Mexico City where other radicals and surrealists congregated. This is where she met Carrington, who had moved to Mexico knowing no one and speaking zero Spanish. Painter Remedios Varo had also come from Spain to Mexico, and Carrington and Horna may have rubbed elbows with other surrealist women, including Anna Seghers. (The international anthology, Surrealist Women, might have details, or else entirely disprove my wild speculations.)

Artist Pedro Friedeberg named Horna and Carrington as inspirations on his work and this should be the end of the end of the story about odes to necrophilia, if not for my failure to define the oded noun, itself.

Necrophila americana male (left) and female (right).

*

Necrophilia—-not to be confused with Necrophila, a genus of beetles—also known as necrophilism, necrolagnia, necrocoitus, necrochlesis, and thanatophilia, is sexual attraction or act involving corpses. It is classified as a paraphilia by the World Health Organization (WHO) in its International Classification of Diseases (ICD) diagnostic manual, as well as by the American Psychiatric Association in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM).

Adjacently, as reportedly inspired by O’Hara’s poem, in a stack of necrophilia and Twilight-hustling Goodreads posts—

It should also be noted that Marjorie Perloff, author of Frank O'Hara: Poet Among Painters, explained how Goldberg and O’Hara got involved:

O'Hara turned to art because the literary scene was so dead at the time. He disliked Robert Lowell, who was the prominent poet then but had no interest in the art of his day—especially not Jackson Pollock. Nor did [Lowell’s] contemporaries. O'Hara opened that up. When I wrote my book in 1976, saying that he was a notable poet of the period, people said it was ridiculous. Now there is enormous interest. The variety, good humor and charm in his work are tremendous.

Necrophila americana is a sonnet series waiting to be written by a suburban beetle in the auspices of a romance with a reading list.

Lines for centos.

A LINE-SCRAMBLE

A list which retains the exact line and punctuation of the poems in no particular order, updated lazily.

*

At a hotel in another star. The rooms were cold and
[Jean Valentine, "If a Person Visits Someone in a Dream, in Some Cultures the Dreamer Thanks Them"]

the millisecond I was born to look up into.
[Jorie Graham, “History”]

the way a mountain is land and a harbor is land and a parking lot
[Ari Banias, “Oracle”]

the uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.
[W. B. Yeats, “The Magi”]

It will not be a part of the weather.
[Charles Wright, “The New Poem”]

How even a little violence
[Joan Baranow, "The Human Abstract"]

it does not mean we are about to die
[Zachary Schomburg, "Love is When a Boat is Built From All the Eyelashes in the Ocean"]

Nothing approaches a field like me. Hard
[Donika Kelly, “Love Poem: Centaur”]

Poem that at each door believes itself
[Sophie Cabot Black, “Love Poem”]

this is the edge between what is and what is not.
[Patricia Fargnoli, “Then”]

I am trying to invent a new way of moving under my
[C. D. Wright, “Crescent”]

the fatigued look of relief on post-coital faces,
[Dean Young, “The Euphoria of Peoria”]

With my eyes closed I saw:
[Rachel Zucker, “After Baby, After Baby”]

nightly toward its brightness and we are on it
[C. D. Wright, “Crescent”]

Time will append us like suit coats left out overnight
[Charles Wright, “Still Life with Spring and Time to Burn”]

In a thousand furnished rooms.
[T. S. Eliot, “Preludes”]

The bed and desk both want me.
[Rachel Zucker, “After Baby, After Baby”]

Instinct will end us.
[Charles Wright, “Easter 1989”]

It's sacrilege to imagine
[Sarah Vap, “Reconcile”]

That landing strip with no runway lights
[Kim Addonizio, “My Heart”]

because there are seven kinds of loneliness
[Marty McConnell, “the fidelity of disagreement”]

Find me home in New York with the Alone
[Allen Ginsberg, “Personals Ad”]

It is the sea that whitens the roof
[Wallace Stevens, “The Idea of Order at Key West”]

Dear Reader, I thought
[Dean Young, “Dear Reader”]

I don’t see anything at the end of it except an endlessness . . .
[Larry Levis, “Boy in Video Arcade”]

Evening comes soft and grey like
[Wong May, "In Memoriam"]

If I fall
[Zachary Schomburg, "Love is When a Boat is Built From All the Eyelashes in the Ocean"]

and green how I want you green, that house of am
[Karen Volkman, “Sonnet”]

We were never the color-blind grasses,
[Larry Levis, “Elegy with an Angel at Its Gate”]

Think of death, then, as an open season.
[Jesse Lee Kercheval, "I Open Your Death Like a Book"]

All we are is representation, what we are & are not,
[Larry Levis, “Elegy for Whatever Had a Pattern In It”]

The body knows, at most, an octave
[Deborah Digges, “To Science”]

Hi, I’m Asphodel, the flower of hell,
[Angela Vogel, “Asphodel”]

Sometimes he demands a sacrifice.
[A. E. Stallings, “Palinarus”]

Sitting along the bed’s edge, where
[T. S. Eliot, “Preludes”]

No one chose me
[Claudia Keelan, “Little Elegy (1977-1991)"]

A man walked into the drugstore and said "I'd
[Frank O’Hara, “The eyelid has its storms…”]

One day, the fox doesn't show.
[Dean Young, “The Fox”]

The way the world is not
[Bill Knott, "Sonnet”]

I'm through with you bourgeois boys
[Bernadette Mayer, “Sonnet”]

The windows, the view, the idea of Paris.
[Rachel Zucker, “After Baby, After Baby”]

The grimy scraps
[T. S. Eliot, “Preludes”]

beneath the mattress
[Zachary Schomburg, "Love is When a Boat is Built From All the Eyelashes in the Ocean"]

I swear before the dawn comes round again
[W. B. Yeats, “The Fascination of What's Difficult'“]

Every sky
[Matthew Henriksen, "Afterlife with a Gentle Afterward"]

Collate foliage into freezer
[Dannyka Taylor, "Improveras, I Heart Abandonment"]

The inside of a car
[Claudia Keelan, “Little Elegy (1977-1991)"]

to romanticize. Think of the train cars
[Paul Guest, “Poem for the National Hobo Association Poetry Contest"]

My nightmares are your confetti
[Dean Young, “Dear Reader”]

And therefore I chose, leaving behind what was supposed to be left behind—
[Patricia Fargnoli, “Then”]

The notion of some infinitely gentle
[T. S. Eliot, “Preludes”]

is a greedy thing. We thought we understood
[Jayne Pupeck, "Scheherazade"]

got high on the sublime lightness of desolation,
[Brian Smith, “What Will My Urn Say, Maybe”]

See the photon trespassing the wide pupil. See the soul
[Jaswinder Bolina, "You'll See a Sailboat"]

writing a letter
[Jean Valentine, "If a Person Visits Someone in a Dream, in Some Cultures the Dreamer Thanks Them"]

Every face exists for at least one illusion
[Matthew Henriksen, "Afterlife with a Gentle Afterward"]

What made anyone think I was a Communist I don’t know.  I never went
[James Tate, “The Argonaut”]

committee for this shitty city.
[Angela Vogel, “Asphodel”]

sad blue satchel,
[Jesse Lee Kercheval, "I Open Your Death Like a Book"]

it was all perfectly normal. In ruins
[Chad Bennett, "Gerhard Richter"]

Past the cannibals of diction, rhetoric in its coffin
[Terrance Hayes, “The Blue Sylvia”]

I went to the zoo and talked to the animals.  I dreamed I had an affair
[James Tate, “The Argonaut”]

we die amid the fumes of our uncertain words.
[Paul J. Willis, “Letter to Beowulf”]

You, my adoration—no fooling—I've
[Hayden Carruth, “Adoration is Not Irrelevant”]

your bones already asterisks,
[Dean Young, “Dear Reader”]

I am sleeping with another woman.
[Ian Harris, “Factbook”]

Blue is the tarp, blue the crane,
[Randall Man, “South City”]

characters in works of fiction.
[Rodney Jones, “Fears”]

You have soft hands. Because when we moved, the contents
[Matthew Olzmann, "Mountain Dew Commercial Disguised as a Love Poem"]

I remember that I am falling
[W. S. Merwin, “When You Go Away”]

Masks, questions, and a writing prompt.

Bumped into some Lucy Sante excerpts on masks today. And was reminded of how well some writers describe the tension of images. For example:

The wig isn’t a cheap one, and its slippage might be deliberate. It serves in combination with the mask to give her a passingly eighteenth-century aspect: a debauchee airlifted from a painting by Fragonard and deposited, a bit the worse for wear, in the pages of Juliette. The photograph is a circular riddle that causes the viewer’s eye to travel, back and forth, from south to north pole and back again, always somehow expecting a resolution that is locked away forever.

Here is what Sante says of “the panto-mask” pictured above:

“The mask that is no a concealment but an enhancement”— what a supple metaphor for writing in form, or slipping into a formal constraint invented by others. The mask reveals according to the mask’s conventions. And those conventions are limitations, or boundaries, on how exposition takes place.

I’m fascinated by the way photographs and texts aim towards a similar preservation-through-presentation of selves and selfhood. Reading a lot of Bhanu Kapil lately, immersing myself in her Cixousian borders and syntax, and (of course) browsing Kapil’s reading lists and invocations of possible literary lineage. In an interview with Laynie Browne, Kapil listed the following novels written by poets which inspired her: “Gail Scott's My Paris and The Obituary; Sina Queryas’ Autobiography of Childhood; Melissa Buzzeo’s What Began Us and The Devastation; Laynie Browne’s The Ivory Hour (a future memoir); Laura Mullen’s Murmur.; Juliana Spahr and David  Buuck's Army of Lovers collaboration; Chris Abani’s Becoming Abigail; Renee Gladman’s Juice; Laura Moriarty’s Ultravioleta; Douglas Martin’s Your Body Figured and Elena Georgiou’s unpublished novel on the Crimean war.”

The mask reveals according to the mask’s conventions. The moth dangles vertically as it develops. I learned this from watching things my children have nurtured and monitored through glass windows, in a way that approximates our own most “civilized” notions of parenting and education.

It is easy to pretend the glass isn’t there, or that something objective is occurring—something that doesn’t partake of subjectivity. This ease should should make us suspicious, for nothing true is characterized by ease, and no gaze lacks the bias of its origins and socialization.

Back to Kapil—to language and questions and masks and vertical approaches. Her prose poetry collection, The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers is arranged using a series of twelve repeated questions, and integrates the answers of various women alongside her own.

Ranging across maps and locations, including Punjab, Central America, England, Arizona, and the US, the speaker meditates on the "interrogations" in fragmented form, in apostrophe, in aside, in dramatic monologue, in repetition of sensual images (candles, baths, skin, etc) without settling, or providing a settled image of the speaker. I read this nomadic texture of female selfhood as a soft dismissal of modernity’s sessile, fully-realized selfhood. But one can read Kapil many ways, I think; her work aims towards that multiplicity and fracture.

Kapil’s 12 Questions for the Vertical Interrogation of Strangers

1. Who are you and whom do you love?

2. Where did you come from / how did you arrive?

3. How will you begin?

4. How will you live now?

5. What is the shape of your body?

6. Who was responsible for the suffering of your mother?

7. What do you remember about the earth?

8. What are the consequences of silence?

9. Tell me what you know about dismemberment.

10. Describe a morning you woke without fear.

11. How will you / have you prepare(d) for your death?

12. And what would you say if you could?

There is a poem in this… or a writing exercise, a way of restricting one’s self to fragments as responses, and answering each of Kapil’s questions in a line, in something like a vertical interrogation poem. To illustrate by riffing:

A porch with no ontology loves the lie of sunshine.

Maybe a sperm met an egg and then fled on an airplane.

Convene in a language where no one knows his name means “longing.”

Milliseconds don’t exist in an hourglass figure.

When they opened the hotel room door, she was dead on the bed.

Already en route to dust.

Quiet decomposes. Sonatas die if no one hears them.

Maybe the unsung never existed.

….. (and so on and so on…. just filling in elliptical answers to difficult questions, and riffing into the emergent terrain of ideas)

A vertical interrogation sonnet would answer each of these 12 questions in fragments or statements, and then work those 12 lines into 14 lines by experimenting with lineation, enjambment, and substitution.

Iamb if you want. I am seeing sonnet prompts everywhere now it seems.

Excerpts from sonnet notebooks.

1. 1

“The future, the word, and the unknown are . . . linked. Words which consciously aspire to the future are heightened by the desire to rise, be free of, the tyranny of history.”

- Fanny Howe

“Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas!”

- Frank O'Hara

“Bodies have their own light which they consume to live: they burn, they are not lit from the outside.”

- Egon Schiele

Egon Schiele, in one of his many self-portraits. The frame of the sonnet is so tight somehow, so pre-drafted, that it makes a lovely vehicle for the self-portait. Or for a series of self-portraits.

I A. Richards defined poetic tone as the speaker's attitude to the listener. The tone of Schiele’s self-portraits is uniquely brutal. Ornately brutal—brutalesque. Like Tomaz Salamun’s “Status Sonnet”… The way the poem or painting uses its sequins.

1 . 2

One can’t do justice to the contemporary American sonnet in four Sundays, but one must try anyway—-as one must also share the notes of admiration which exist in the margins of one’s preparations. Of relevance: the perfect pro-rhyme position as articulated in “Presto Manifesto” by A. E. Stallings. For background on the 18th century sonnet, a book chapter. For sheer beauty, see Monica Youn’s breakdown of the Petrarchan sonnet and Milton in this excerpt from Blackacre. For sonic and structural subversions, see Candace Williams’ “Gutting the Sonnet: A Conversation with Jericho Brown” and Stephen Kampa's thoughts on "disguised form" and "echo verse" sonnets. For details on turns and motions, see Michelle Boisseau’s “The Dancer’s Glance” and Virginia Bell’s “The Turn as Poetic Striptease in Anne Carson’s ‘Wildly Constant’.” For a close look at Gerald Manley Hopkins and the curtal sonnet, see Haj Ross’s "How Hopkins Pied It". For anything and everything, see Mike Theune’s labor of love: Voltage.


1. 3

The texture of Anne Boyer’s archival sonnet notates itself in demise, as something which perishes and can (at best) be preserved. One thinks of the 19th century Atheneum group’s desire to manufacture ruins, or to create the ruined form of the substantial and monumental.

A Sonnet from the Archive of Love's Failures, Volumes 1-3.5 Million

by Anne Boyer

If you were once inside my circle of love

and from this circle are now excluded,
and all my love's citizens I love more than you,
if you were once my lover but I've stopped
letting you, what is the view from outside

my love's limit? Does my love's interior emit
upward and cut into night? Do my charms,
investigations, and illnesses issue to the dark
that circles my circle? Do they bother

your sleep? And if you were once my friend
and are now my villainous foe, what stories
do you tell about how stupid those days
when I cared for you? Because I tell stories

of how you must tremble at my love's terrible walls,
how the memory of its interior you must always be eroding.

The poem begins in the conditional— “If you were once inside my circle of love”— and sets this part as a single-line stanza so the reverb can reach down into each stanza separately. The stone-swoon internal rhymes of the second stanza, after the sharp enjambment—“my love’s limit? Does my love’s interior emit” —- reveals how splendidly the shorn word makes for a rhyme. It’s as if the limit got clipped, a bit of Samson and Delilah energy.

Kevin McFadden on sonnet: it has the "dramaturge's urges, it wants to talk itself out..." One feels this dramaturgical urge in the questioning of Boyer’s sonnet, in the trembling of “love’s terrible walls.” Ruination is the point as well as the momentum.


1. 4

Will teach Bernadette Mayer’s “Sonnet”—- every time I re-read it, the sonnet rises from the ruins of a skyscraper, insisting on being seen while forsaking everything except the patina of its form. But there is a building, and there are techniques which helped create it. Among Mayer's plays, notice the mixed references to pop culture near ancient history— G. I. Joe and Cobra Commander nestle near Catullus. Mayer does this with diction as well, so we have the high of "soporific" and the low of "fucking." Another play involves using found language— "to _____, turn to page___" comes from Choose Your Own Adventure books as well as women's magazines and instructionals. The Choose-Your-Own-Adventure vibe of the extra couplet is as modern as a sonnet can get. It's as if Mayer wants to suggest the sonnet of the present advertises a choice rather than a conclusion or an argument. It ends in an option. Or the illusion of an option.


1. 5

Voltas. The volt. The surge or the bolt. The position from one which one can pivot. William Matthews named it the “invisible hinge” in his poem, “Merida, 1969”, where a major change in content (or form) occurs across a stanza break. The poem doesn’t comment on the shift but absorbs it. Also called a “pivot” or a “dovetail joint.” Forrest Gander calls the volta the "argument turn." H. L. Hix has 12 questions about the turn.

1. 6

“Language is just music without the full instrumentation,” says Terrance Hayes. The musicality of the sonnet, particularly in the Petrarchan’s relation to be written for singing and scoring. Sonnet as a form which invites the imagined symphony into the texture. Instrumentation is figurative language and figuration, I think. One can bring various instruments into the poem, and maybe this is a more interesting way of thinking about “voice” in poetry—-or in the voices brought into a poem. The association of voice with Iowa-style, US ‘confessional’ poetry makes it difficult to discuss the vocable and vocalizations of poems: everyone presumes the voice is personal, and that they are developing their voice?

Elsewhere, Hayes on wearing multiple shoes and taking multiple paths:

“I have very little interest in establishing a fixed style or subject matter.… I’m very interested in wearing Larry Levis on one foot and Harryette Mullen on the other. Or on another day—in another poem—Gwendolyn Brooks and Frank O’Hara. Reading provides an infinite number of shoes and paths.” (Italics mine)

1. 7

American Sonnet for the Magic Apples

by Terence Hayes

Or the one drunken half-quarter grand uncle recalling
The sound speckled apples on his fabled real daddy’s
Coastal orchard made falling multidimensionally
To the vaguely salty combination of plantation dirt
And marshland bearing the roots of this strange
Distant cousin to the plum, the Cherokee palm tree,
And West African pear, color of a bloody, dusky, ruby,
Husky & almost as bulky as the lamenting lamb’s head
His daddy lopped off once & kicked at him laughing,
The uncle informed me wistfully at a reunion of family
Fleecers, fabricators, fairy tellers & makeup artists
With his cast-off awful alcohol stench burning my nostrils
As he gripped the back of my head & gazed deeply
At the speckled invisible apple or head in his hand.

The specificity and sonic entanglement of Hayes’ diction strikes me. The way plum draws into the palm of the first line… The way sound serves as integument … and the proliferation of y-endings… bloody, dusky ruby, husky … bulky—which then leaps into the lamenting lamb’s head and the lopped of the next line. Hayes is the maestro of strung-sonic-effects in the contemporary sonnet form.

In an interview with Lauren Russell, Hayes had the following to say about “the perfect poem”:

If you think about an animal, there’s no perfect animal. Most people think of poems like they’re machines. I’m thinking of something more organic and human that exists the way it needs to exist, more like a baby or child. How do you achieve that? I think of myself as a person who likes to be in control of everything. So how do I surprise myself? For so long I’ve been this person who’s been too in control, so how do I relinquish control? Some of it’s about line breaks, narrative. I like the poem to look a certain way in terms of line breaks, but how do I release control? Some of it is subject matter. The poet wants to be liked in the poem, but what does it mean to not always chase some kind of appeal? Discomfort, vulnerability, rawness that come up in a poem—that also has to do with perfection, the absence of perfection. That’s hard to teach, but if you make people more generous in the workshop, then you can get it. You say, “Oh, it’s not a perfect poem, but it’s pretty good; we’ll take that.” It creates generosity if you aren’t chasing a perfect object.

Refrain: It creates generosity if you aren’t chasing a perfect object.

1. 8

The game-like structure of Hayes’ essay on poetic lineage—the cards which trace influence, and challenge the simple directionality of influence we tend to read into pedagogy. I keep thinking of riffing and jazz and blues, the performances that depend on multiple variables, none of which can be easily isolated. The piece plays you; and you play the piece—and one is played by it.


1. 9

Past conditional tense is a form of privilege wielded by the present against the past.

Julian Barnes’ description—- “What mother would have wanted…” a hypothetical based on a person who lived and now doesn’t. A double-remove prone to projection.”

"The silence was so intense there might have been a sound moving around in it." (John Ashbery, Girls on the Run)


1. 10

Sunday Service

by Taylor Byas

“The Blood Still Works” stampedes through the nave
and once the organ player’s shoulders seize
with song, the spirit hits the pews in waves.
I catch the loosening necks, the mouths’ new ease

as the congregants begin to speak in tongues;
I move my lips, pretend to be saved, and next
to me, my grandma convulses—-the drums
of the band a puppet master, a hex—-

while ushers in white surround her, lock hands
to keep us in. The preacher’s sermon builds
to a screech, his sinners flitter fans
like mosquito wings, and with his eyes he guilts

me into clasping hands: I repent for things
I’ve yet to do. They jerk to tambourines.

Mike Theune on “strange voltas”— and how the “heat map” of the poem makes the volta glow. This Shakespearean sonnet enlivens the rhyme scheme with off-rhymes and slant rhymes— and I wonder if that is why Byas’ writing feels so fresh, so unexpected, so vivid. The subject is glossolalia—-or speaking in tongues. For those who haven’t observed it, the effect can be jarring: one doesn’t know whether the person is literally seizing or experiencing an ecstatic connection to the divine. Byas rides that margin between ecstasy and neurological misfiring throughout the sonnet. Lines like “his sinners flitter fans” and “with his eyes he guilts” are incredible—-as is the held breath enacted by the stanza break, the bigness of that enjambment.


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The eros of sparse sayings, the statuesque nude statue, as in Richie Hofman’s “The Romans”. I thought of Derek Jarman’s sonnet torsos, almost. But also of how the statue, like the sonnet form, craves its own ruin—or exists as erotic possibility in relation to that very ruin. As in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labor Lost, when Armado, upon discovering that he has fallen in love, says: "Assist me, some extemporal god of rhyme, for I am sure I shall turn sonnet." The extemporal god of rhyme, like the lyric poem, sits outside time; he languishes in eternity.

1. 12

Note on the extraordinary variety of form and adaption in the contemporary sonnet. Amit Majmudar's “sonzals”; Bernadette Mayer’s “deconstructed sonnets”; Molly Peacock's "exploded sonnets”’ John Berryman's "devil sonnets" (which Kevin Young has called the six-six-six); Jericho Brown's "gutted sonnets"; Joyelle McSweeney's "almost sonnets"'; Tyehimba Jess' "shattered sonnets" ; Gwendolyn Brooks' "soldier sonnets" ; Ted Berrigan's "sonnet collages"; Dorothy Chan's "triple sonnets" ; Diane Seuss’ sonnets built from the syllabics of the “American sonnet”; the sonondilla (or sardine) by Charles L. Weatherford; the salamander’s fireburst by Jose Rizal M. Reyes (and, less recently, the Pushkin sonnet by Alexsandr Pushkin).


1. 13

Bernadette M. again: I'm through with you bourgeois boys. The internal rhyme lifts this line from the page; it hovers in the air of the poem like a joke or a threat. Lines move like ruffled feathers or windblown papers, borrowing from collage:

Nowadays you guys settle for a couch
By a soporific color cable t.v. set

How the enjambment thickens "by". Buy a tv set or sit by a tv—it's all the same texture for the boys who got bought by it. Mayer brings her study of Greek and Latin prosody to the Lower East Side of New York City, where the land "of love and landlords" ties the personal to the political. Sometimes it feels as if the speaker is a female Catullus.


1. 14

The erotic cufflinks of the sonnets—the ecstasy where Donne’s holy sonnets meet Simone Weil’s asceticism. And how much tension exists in Mark Jarman’s “Unholy sonnet” series, with their focus on the reasoning mind, and their resistance to extravagance. In The Flaming Heart, Mario Praz discusses the ecstasy Bernini’s Saint Teresa:

There exists in Rome, in the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria, a work of art which may be taken as the epitome of the devotional spirit of the Roman Catholic countries in the seventeenth century. Radiantly smiling, an Angel hurls a golden dart against the heart of a woman saint langourously lying on a bed of clouds. [The Italian name for this work of art is "Santa Teresa in Orgasmo."] The mixture of divine and human elements in this marble group, Bernini's Saint Teresa, may well result in that "spirit of sense" of which Swinburne, who borrowed the phrase from Shakespeare, was so fond of speaking. Spirit of sense as in that love song the Church had adopted as a symbol of the soul's espousals with God: The Song of Solomon, which actually in the seventeenth century was superlatively paraphrased in the coplas of Saint John of the Cross. Inclined as it was to the pleasures of the senses, the seventeenth century could not help using, when it came to religion, the very language of profane love, transposed and sublimated: its nearest approach to God could only be a spiritualization of the senses.

Of Bernini's angel and saint, not all critics agreed with the sacralization of spiritual ecstasy. Mrs. Anna Brownwell Jameson (1794-1860), for example, declared that "all Spanish pictures of S. Teresa sin in their materialism…".

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Anthony Hecht (who has done his time with the double sonnet) takes Shakespeare’s Sonnet 151 ("Love is too young to know what conscience is") as "the bawdiest-some would say the crudest and most vulgar" of the Bard’s sonnets: "In a comic-erotic parody of the vassal's submission and fidelity to his midons, Shakespeare subordinates his soul to his body, and his body, synecdochically represented by his penis, is made subservient to the mistress to whom the poem is addressed."

Lupercalia (which also happens to be the Day of the Bear referenced in my poem, “On the Day of the Death of the Bear,” published in Copper Nickel last year)— and Hecht’s passage on it:

The Roman feast of Lupercalia, observed on the second of February, was observed as a fertility festival, celebrating both the growing of crops and the sexual vitality of humans and the other creatures. The festival coincided with the resumption of work in the fields after the rigors of winter (which, in Italy, were milder and briefer than in the northern part of the United States). But in the year 492 Pope Gelasius I abolished the Lupercalia, and substituted for it a subli- mated version known as the festa candelarum or Candlemas, dedicated to celebrating the Presentation of Christ at the Temple and the Purification of the Virgin Mary. Its ritual involved a procession of lighted candles meant to symbolize the light of the Divine Spirit.

Followers of Orpheus took the councils of dark, unlighted night as the source of the most profound wisdom. Prophecy comes to those who are willing to risk the world, or to plunge into metaphysical mania, in search of an even more disorienting ecstasy. Or this is the Orphic position’s stake in the saying. Some poets are more Orphic than others.


1. 16

David Haskell wrote what he heard from listening to trees…to green ash, cottonwood, ponderosa pine, redwood, etc. "Sounds travel around and through barriers," he said, so listening to trees "reveals stories and processes that are otherwise hidden." A botanical soundscape formed from small labs of attentive listening.

Nicole Walker: "I also love the form that wilderness imposes on the wild. That hawks must eat baby squirrels. That bark beetles decimate drought-stricken pines. That Max must go home for dinner." [Italics mine. Time as formal constraint in sonnet.]


1. 17

In response to John Donne’s holy sonnets, Coco Owen borrows the key words and leans into the possessive, capitalist/conqueror analogies. “Mocking little purr,” to quote Erik Satie’s tempo marking.

1. 18

A cosmology is an account or theory of the universe. The word comes from French cosmologie or modern Latin cosmologia, from Greek kosmos ‘order or world’ + -logia ‘discourse’. Cosmology is a branch of physics and metaphysics dealing with the nature of the universe. The term was first used in English in 1656 in Thomas Blount's Glossographia. Cosmic discourse!


1. 19

"Beneath these stars is a universe of sliding monsters,” wrote Herman Melville.

Slippage is central to cosmology—and to the words selected as stars in one’s sonnet. Always the question of how to constellate them.


1. 20

Not enough time to talk about curtal sonnets or bring in Gerald Manley Hopkins. But I can squeeze in Rimbaud’s monosyllabic sonnet. On the other hand, there is sonnet energy in Johannes Göransson’s “Sugar Theses”— there are strange juxtapositions which could be culled from his words as titles or prompts:

When I’m writing about shoplifting, I’m writing about the divine. When I write novels about sugar and movies, I’m writing about war. I don’t have the proper distance toward art. I don’t believe in minimalism. I’m prone to outburst and invasions. I live in an exocity and I can taste the poisons. I pick playgrounds for my children based on the contamination levels. I pick my children up and stare at them as if they were snakes. My children are snakes. At least in the paintings of the pre-raphealites.

Fourteen lines turns into an addiction. Like a toy you want to ride everywhere just to see how it feels over different terrains.

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Variations: Clark Coolidge’s Bond Sonnets; “White, White Collars” by Denis Johnson; fraction sonnets like Elizabeth Willis’ “63 ½”; Jeffrey Thomson’s “Blink”, an enumerated, list-like sonnet: Thomas Carper’s “Catching Fireflies,” a sonnet strung from one long sentence; “Nicole Steinberg Brett’s Getting Lucky; a sonnet in a letter from John Keats. The buried-in-a-letter sonnet deserves recognition, I think, as an epistolary sonnet, even if it evades itself by wearing feathers.

1. 22

I keep coming back to Terrance Hayes, particularly when trying to decide whether to push towards use of contranyms and homonyms in sonnet prompts. Contranyms are words with opposite, or nearly opposite, meanings. An example is sanction, which means “to authorize, approve, or allow” and “to penalize, discipline”.

The magic of this in “New York Poem”—-and how Hayes continuously draws in the blue note, the jazz brush, the disco, the music in counterpoint against the “sci-fi bridges.” One could also read this as a declarative (“the sci-fi bridges) rather than a description (the bridges which look sci-fi).

1. 23

John Berryman in “Sonnet 13”, ending the first stanza’s rhyme (glass / brass / pass / alas):

“The spruce barkeep sports a toupee alas—”

The clipped, lexical control of Joshua Jones’ series, “Thirteen Sonnets in Transition.”

The way Marilyn Hacker slips her lesbian love inside a French word in “La Loubiane”:

Two long-haired women in the restaurant
caress each other's forearms. I avert
my eyes. I'm glad to see them there; I hurt
looking on, lonely, when I so much want
to touch your arm, your hand like that, in front
of two mémés enjoying their dessert

And the way Hacker begins an untitled sonnet with the line: “First, I want to make you come in my hand”.

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francine j. harris’ sonnet uses the wetland as an extended metaphor in an address to a lover or former lover or a lover somewhere between solid ground and open water.

Wetland

by francine j. harris

The sea is so far from us now. Partly I think because we
are not softspoken desire. There are rude thoroughfares
and abandoned mines that brag. They gather and pile
with ruin and vacancy. It's an accrual that is in me, it seems.
At best, a wetland. Beautiful and useless in the face of flood.
So that when we walk the perimeter, we can see the ground
starve and crack. But then fear of sinkhole is so important.
Truthfully, I am not enough to steer clear of. To fall in love again,
dear, reforested bund, is a matter of self-preservation. In your expert
opinion, will you tell me how to know you if I am forever meant
to leave you undisturbed. This will not save us, I'm afraid. A brownstone
for hummingbirds is shortsighted too, like picking out honeybees
from the dog's mouth. Then blowing on her tiny hairs like a breeze.
Love, we can wish it were so; it does not make us fit to survive.

A wetland is defined as “a distinct ecosystem that is flooded or saturated by water, either permanently or seasonally.” In wetlands, “flooding results in oxygen-free processes prevailing, especially in the soils.” The relationship between underground air, aeration, and the threat of sinkholes is also at play in the poem. Reforesting a wetland won’t change it, the speaker says, drawing on the ecology of the land form.

One portmanteau word—-softspoken, as if to score the composition. An archaic noun—thoroughfares— alters the texture, or expands the tone of the poem. The turn happens midway, with Truthfully, I am not enough to steer clear of. Ending the sentence with this “of” has the counterpoint motion of opening it; the internal rhyme between steer and clear pulls the reader close just as the speaker is turning, rephrasing, making her argument. Love, we can wish it were so; it does not make us fit to survive. And how carefully this final line looks the lover in the eye and says—love, yes, I grant love, but the act of wishing doesn’t make the wish capable of surviving. The wetland insinuates love cannot grow in the speaker, or between the two persons, but it harris doesn’t insist on a settled analogy (it could be the speaker or love, itself), and this element aerates the poem, somehow. The unsettledness, like the scent of sulfur near a wetland, contrasts with the physicality of eco-geology.

1. 25

Voice in contemporary sonnet: Wanda Coleman in conversation with Paul Nelson on her sonnets, 2008. The rue of Craig Morgan Teicher’s “New Jersey”. The I’ll-take-it-and-raise-you-a-triple of Dorothy Chan’s “triple sonnet for oversexed and overripe and overeager” which makes a trinity of the oversexed, overripe, and overeager—-and no question mark at the end of the question because the speaker isn’t asking, she is telling— “Don’t we all want to be the best time. / I think about what it even means to be ladylike". Enjambing the line across the stanza here.

Also noting the tendency to move between voices—to gather multiple voices into poem and use rhythm and punctuation as means of distinguishing between them—per second quatrain of Cortney Lamar Charleston’s "Doppelgangbanger":

with badge and walkie-talkie, walking up on the envoys
of decency—mom and me—doing the kid some “solids”:
straighten this. Pull up that. E-NUN-CI-ATE. I peep his ploy.
Play a historian. Hone on his perfect white teeth, horrid

Charleston’s alliterative rhinestones sparkle the scene. “The envoys of decency”—an unforgettable description.

1. 26

Ted Berrigan on "Ann Arbor Elegy, for Franny Winston died September 27, 1969," a sonnet he wrote with the intention of altering the elegy to make it "a very mild poem,” in his words:

I didn't read in the newspaper that Franny Winston had died, but rather I had read that [the boxer] Rocky Marciano had died, in a plane crash in a field in Iowa.

So, reading of his death made me write a poem about her death, which was on my mind. The sonnet seemed to me a proper vehicle for this, that is, to write an elegy, and at the same time, to write a poem in which I was making the events happen in the present, even though obviously I wasn’t writing the sonnet while they were going on. And finally, there was the transference of having read something in the newspaper about someone’s death who was not the person I was writing about. Again, the sonnet form seemed to allow me to do all those things.

1. 27

Bernadette Mayer saying in 1997: “Never. I’m sorry. I wasn’t impressed by Eliot.”

Susan Sontag saying in 1977: “There’s no opposition between the archaic and the immediate.”

Jack Ridl saying in a poem: “Dogs live knowing how to live; they alone defy Kierkegaard.”

1. 28

Listening to “From the Grammar of Dreams” (1988) by Kaija Saariaho—five different soundscapes composed from Sylvia Plath’s words— while thumbing through the Pop Sonnets tumblr and thinking of “match cuts” in relation to stanzas in Namwali Serpell’s description:

"A match cut “jumps” rather than flows from shot to shot. Unlike a splice cut, which moves smoothly from one angle or moment to another in a single setting, giving us a feeling of continuity, a match cut lasts long enough for us to notice that two shots in different settings have similar shapes or movements—we make the leap to connect them, to relate two things separated by space, time, perspective. You could think of a match cut as a visual analogy or metaphor: a purposive claim that one thing is like another thing, a “perception of the similarity in the dissimilar,” as Aristotle put it. Or you could think of a match cut as a visual pun: a trifling way to play with the fact that two things echo each other. Either way, as a technique for juxtaposition, match cuts raise two questions: What’s the relationship between the things juxtaposed? And how is the juxtaposition itself justified?"

A way to think about time and tense change within sonnets—using these questions. What’s the relationship between the things juxtaposed? And how is the juxtaposition itself justified?

1. 29

Consider word & letter as forms—the concretistic distortion of a text, a multiplicity of o’s or e’s, or a pleasing visual arrangement: “the mill pond of chill doubt.” (from Bernadette Mayer’s list of poetry exercises)

Among things found on twitter today: Hölderlin, Ovid's Return to Rome. Metrical Scheme from poem draft. Words noted in left margin:

Climate
Homeland
Scythians
Rome
Tiber Peoples
Heroes
Gods

1. 30

Joyelle McSweeney’s “hyperdiction”— the super-charged, excessive words that fill the interior mindscape brought forward to populate the poem. As if our multiple lexicons could sit together in a room and represent themselves in the overlapping, dissonant dictions.

Music, everywhere.

Reading Dorianne Laux’s short, one-stanza poem “Enough Music” this morning, and thinking about the swinging of “this rhythm of silence” between the speaker and the subject—-and how Laux refuses the easy image of the pendulum, choosing instead the playful possibility of the rope over a lake.

This poem is made, somehow, from its refusing the pendulum—-and the notion of time that it invokes.

Because I am thinking about music, time, motion, and memory—-again—-the rope swaying over the surface of the lake gathers itself in reflections and intonations of light.

The mystery of music— how vibrations in the spectrum of sound lead to complex reactions in humans. No theorist has yet resolved it. No neuroscientist has found a singular, cohesive explanation.

One of my favorite performances of Mahler’s Ninth was conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas—-who is also a notable composer.

At at one point in this brief video, Tilson Thomas traces the music in the sounds of kids on the street:

One day in New York, I was on the street and I saw some kids playing baseball between stoops and cars and fire hydrants. And a tough, slouchy kid got up to bat, and he took a swing and really connected. And he watched the ball fly for a second, and then he went, "Dah dadaratatatah. Brah dada dadadadah." And he ran around the bases. And I thought, go figure. How did this piece of 18th century Austrian aristocratic entertainment turn into the victory crow of this New York kid? How was that passed on? How did he get to hear Mozart?

Well when it comes to classical music, there's an awful lot to pass on, much more than Mozart, Beethoven or Tchiakovsky. Because classical music is an unbroken living tradition that goes back over 1,000 years. And every one of those years has had something unique and powerful to say to us about what it's like to be alive.

As a conductor, Tilson Thomas’ interpretations have changed the way pieces are experienced. I’m thinking of Mahler’s Ninth, and TT’s statement “the main melody of the piece that is only heard in at the climax of the first movement” becomes “klezmer-like in the second and third movements.” And how Mark Swed interprets TT’s Mahler’s as using the kletzmer to tell us “what people thought of him,” before moving in the extraordinary cavalcades of the final movement.

Rombo.

This week, I had an interesting (albeit abrupt) exchange with an American female who insisted she had lived in “a village”—- and it was this allusion to personal experience in an American village which she used to dismiss (immediately, unquestionably, and absolutely) my interest in the village-like images of a poem titled “Peasant” from a book titled The Lice.

As I muted myself, the teen walked into the room with wide eyes and asked: “Eeee, who is the person screeching at you from the computer, Mom? She needs to chill out.” He had heard her yelling from the kitchen. I tried not to laugh.

Leaving aside the aspirations of global-villageism wielded by neoliberalism’s finest, turning my attention to a world outside the almighty dollar’s branding of planned communities, Esther Kinsky’s Rombo, translated from the German by Caroline Schmidt (NYRB, March 2023), is a formidable novel about an Italian village destroyed by an earthquake.

Background: Il rombo is an Italian term for the subterranean rumble before an earthquake. In May and September 1976, two severe earthquakes ripped through the Friuli region in northeastern Italy, causing extensive damage. About a thousand people died under the rubble, tens of thousands were left without shelter, and many ended up leaving their homes forever. Rombo is a record of this disaster and its aftermath, as told by seven men and women who were children at the time: Anselmo, Mara, Olga, Gigi, Silvia, Lina, and Toni. They speak of portents that preceded the earthquakes and of the complete disorder that followed, the obliteration of all that was familiar and known by heart. Their memories, like the earth, are subject to rifts and abysses. Esther Kinsky splices these indelible, incomplete recollections with exacting descriptions of the alpine region, forgoing a linear narrative for a deftly layered collage that reaches back and forth in time.

The novel’s author is German. I was intrigued by the references to a Slavic language spoken by the villagers—and to the way certain words (like Babe) also map onto Carpathian mountains in Transylvania.

How can we find a way into a complex story where the landscape is much as much a speaker as the narrators? Many immigrant writers struggle with this relationship between the palpable, subconscious longing (dor) for a particular land and the way in which the land feels like part of the self. 

I think Esther Kinsky does this effectively and brilliantly. 

Alternating between small encapsulated sections titled after speakers, flora, fauna, geological features, and “found objects” (descriptions of photographs), Kinsky's novel also blurs the line between the geology and the processes which lead to photos that 'preserve' the past. For instance, the sections titled "Corrosion" and "Vapours" describe parts of photochemical development in order to analogize those processes to landscape features in Italy. 

The aftermath— first humans help each other, then they begin competing for resources, arguing over explanations, trying to find a way to understand (and control) the earthquake.

The world is divided. The arguments, themselves, occupy a choral form.

How are these village arguments different from the interpretations of poetry? In this novel, the villagers know each other; and the entanglement of their lives means that blame carries consequences, or increases the likelihood of curses.

Using metaphor, analogy, geology, and local lore, Kinsky links geographical changes in the disputed memories and layers of perspective. The landscape is shaped by the humans on its surface, and the humans, in turn, are formed from their relation to the damaged landscape—-these two processes are so deeply intertwined that consequentialist readings can only result in misreading.

Considering the question—What we do know for sure?—-the writer reckons with perspective and point-of-view.

How does the knowledge of the child narrator differ from that of the adult narrator?

How does the child narrator expand the scope of possibility?

The voice that doesn't already know what it wants to say—this is the vulnerable voice, the least defensive one, the space in which the human speaks to the human in all their brokenness. 

Back in the 1950’s, in a lesser-known book, Rachel Carson spoke of a “sense of wonder” in relation to childhood, or the possibility of the child’s placement in relation to the world. Granted, she was criticizing the nature of screens and media at a time when she believed television cut off the mind from relating to its environment. Sometimes I sense this hunger for wonder in W. S. Merwin’s poems, or in their efforts to re-enchant the world without the idolizing the powers that govern and destroy it.

I say “destroy”—

Initially, a typo had the prior sentence reading: their efforts to re-enchant the world without the idolizing the powers that govern and destory it. The de-storying of the world is at the heart of the culture industry’s efforts to promote the mental healthy industry. Rather than choose a barricade in this category of the culture wars, I feel more comfortable listening, reading, studying and trying to observe the ways in which money and mental health rubrics mediate the human hunger for meaning in contexts where community is increasingly thin and related to the administration of capitalist markets.

And perhaps, also: to consider the ways language produces outcomes.

To cherish the conversation between Yiyun Li and A. M. Homes in which Homes says:

And to which Yiyun Li responds:

This writer— me— holds Yiyun Li’s words as talismans against the impulses and urges which lead me to believe I could know all villages from having lived in or summered in or visited one. For how could the world not be more complicated and incredible than the Disneyworld of neoliberalism’s global village? What would have to die within us in order to believe that the USA is the expert of the village?