This Week in Books: “Poems That Fail To Start Fights”
“Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one is listening, everything must be said again.”
Dear Reader,
So, to be honest, I’m pretty sure the book news that I read for this newsletter that had the most legitimate, real world, concrete effect on me was this New York Times article about popular pandemic cookbooks. I’ve been thinking about beans ever since. I’ve been thinking about ordering Cool Beans. I’ve been making bean-plans. If you’re a subscriber, you may remember that a few global warming newsletters ago, I made a disparaging remark about being “a bean person”; well, afterwards, I received some reader feedback from a bean person who was feeling, shall we say, disparaged; who wanted me to know that the Way of the Bean is a noble and righteous path to walk on this earth. So, maybe I’ll try it, is what I’m saying! I must change my life, and all on account of a New York Times cookbook round-up, god help me.
But that’s just the legitimate, real world, concrete effect my newsletter reading has had on me. And after all who’s to say this is the real world? Even a concrete — or a legitimate — one? Almost nobody, it turns out!
“I wade knee-deep in dreams,” writes Hope Mirrlees in her epic modernist (& notably pre-Waste Land) poem Paris; and later on, as Dustin Illingworth tells us in his review [#15] of a new edition, she reports that “the dreams have reached my waist.” The dreamworld is also on the rise in Lori Green’s essay [#4] about falling down an internet research rabbit hole in search of the provenance of an untraceable David Graeber footnote. (Says Patricia Lockwood in an interview [#7] with Rosa Lyster: “I want to be around the person who’s like, you know what, I’m just going to go down this wormhole for the sheer velocity of it, I’m going to jump down there like Alice in Wonderland just for the feeling of it. I like people that don’t necessarily know why they’re interested in something, why they’re collecting information. We all have our own areas, when it comes to those things, but I think doing it on the Internet is a little bit more dangerous for your mind. A little bit of the poison does just get pumped in…”) Green, so far down the rabbit hole that she’s standing below the water-table and is waist-deep in dreams or poison or both, comes across a photograph of a scene that seems familiar, one involving the artist Penny Slinger and some large birds of prey: “The scene is a dream I’ve already had, and I dream about the dream.”
In her critical essay [#14] about the life and work of communist poet/noir screenwriter/New York novelist Alfred Hayes, Vivian Gornick says that Hayes “illuminated… noir’s central issue: the inability to feel the reality of your own or anyone else’s life, even if it belonged to someone you were sleeping with.” The person Hope Mirrlees was sleeping with, the classicist Jane Ellen Harrison, told her about the “the holophrase, a linguistic instance in which subject and object are rendered indistinguishable,” which Harrison hypothesized “suggested pre-modern speakers’ total involvement with their environments, the self dissolved in pure relation. The duality of mind and body is superseded by an articulation of shared reality.” Illingworth writes that “this desire to replenish herself in collective experience” is an organizing principle of Mirrlees’s Paris; and that the first line of the poem, “I want a holophrase,” is “Modernism[’s] shadow mantra…” — specifically, Illingworth says, a shadow of Pound’s “Make it new.” Aimé Césaire was another modernist who was looking to the old as much as to the new. In his survey [#18] of recent translations of Césaire’s poetry, Tim Keane discusses the prose-verse hybrid Journal of a Homecoming, which is a story of “secular rebirth” that nonetheless “unfolds like a séance reviving ancestral spirits from a vanquished Martinique.” Wrote Césaire: “I am breaching the vitelline membrane that separates me from my truer self.” Keane quotes the literary scholar F. Ibiola Irele who, in commentary printed in the new edition, describes the poem as a “consciousness turning wholly against […] its formative context.” For Césaire, a colonized subject, it was never the real world to begin with.
Detail from “trump XXXVII - La Luna.” A. Baragioli (editor). Minchiate card deck, Florence, 1860-1890.
“Try as they might,” reviewer Jack Chelgren writes [#9], summarizing the argument made in Anahid Nersessian’s work of literary criticism The Calamity Form, “these writers find it impossible to put their pens on geopolitical plights like the enclosure of the commons and the transatlantic slave trade. What’s getting in their way is the bewildering expansion of capital into a totalizing, life-shaping order that tends to obscure its own processes.” Nersessian is talking about the Romantics — Keats, Wordsworth, a little Goethe — the whole gang. As Chelgren puts it, Nersessian argues that in these poets’ work, “capitalism’s corrosion of the personal, the social, and the corporeal” registers only as “blankness”; that these poems “repeatedly stage their inability to comprehend” the transformations afoot. Chelgren calls them “poems that fail to start fights.”
(In Shangyang Fang’s poem “A Bulldozer’s American Dream” [#3], the reality of labor relations is ungraspable: the speaker keeps reminding us that we are misunderstanding the order of things: “out of his own volition the man chose to participate / in this heavy-lifting labor. Wrong, it’s the machine that does.”)
(In Alex Press’s review [#10] of Alec MacGillis’s Fulfillment, a piece of reportage on the rise of Amazon, she writes, “It’s not that ‘good jobs left’; the transformation of work was engineered.”)
And the more I think about it, the more I’m thinking that this is a newsletter that really revolves around the potential, failed or otherwise, of poems to start fights. The poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti of course started lots of fights, as Barry Schwabsky recalls in his obituary [#5]. But some poems don’t start any: sometimes because they can’t (in Brontez Purnell’s collection 100 Boyfriends, the speaker understandably can’t disagree with a boyfriend named “The Agent” in the final poem, “Boyfriend #100” [#2]); or sometimes because they won’t (the sometimes-poet Paul Valéry’s latest translator Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody tries to understand [#11] how Valéry once ended up writing an easy-breezy take on the idea of dictatorship; mostly it came down to: he needed the cash; but also, in his lifetime, his sympathies were not above suspicion); or sometimes because no one will fight them back: because no one is paying any attention. In his review [#20] of Géraldine Schwarz’s memoir of her family’s Nazi collaboration, ominously titled Those Who Forget, Michael Scott Moore lets us know that Schwarz chose an epigraph from André Gide: “Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one is listening, everything must be said again.” I looked up the quotation. It’s from Gide’s “The Treaty of Narcissus,” which is dedicated to Paul Valéry.
—Dana
1. “King of the Sewer Rats” by Cavin Bryce Gonzalez, New York Tyrant
A poem excerpted from Cavin Bryce Gonzalez’s A Completely Nonexistent Carnival.
I made a cake for the rats outside my house. / These rats are very quite respectable. / They have lived here their entire lives.
2. “Three Boyfriends” by Brontez Purnell, Bomb
Three poems excerpted from Brontez Purnell’s 100 Boyfriends. “Boyfriend #100” (the third poem included here) is, naturally, “The Agent.”
The new poems are good—if I make you rich will you take care of me?
3. “A Bulldozer’s American Dream” by Shangyang Fang, Guernica
A poem excerpted from Shangyang Fang’s Burying the Mountain.
At the construction site the bulldozer works days & nights. / No, it is the man inside who works. The man & his machine / are one. After the stars & dogs & coffees brewed with hands / of his loved one, her night hair of soft river, / out of his own volition the man chose to participate / in this heavy-lifting labor. Wrong, it’s the machine that does.
4. “Anatomy of a Rabbit Hole” by Lori Green, Pank Magazine
Lori Green writes about a noble pursuit: becoming increasingly derailed by side plots and dream worlds as she chases down the origins of a David Graeber footnote.
The story of a part-time ghostwriter in pandemic falling into the world of someone else’s art won’t buy me anyone’s attention… “This woman,” I hear an imaginary voice scoff, “thinks she has discovered Penny Slinger? She’d never heard the name, Penny Slinger, before Pandemic?”
5. “The World Lawrence Ferlinghetti Built” by Barry Schwabsky, The Nation
Barry Schwabsky on the legacy of Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind became another of poetry’s rare million-sellers, and with good reason. The very look of the poems, the lines dancing around the page like a flock of birds careening across the sky, seemed like a promise of liberty…
6. “A Crude Intrusion of the Action” by Charlie Lee, Soft Punk
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7. “It Was Like Playing Around with the Blood of the Alphabet Itself” by Rosa Lyster, Hazlitt
Charlie Lee reviews Patricia Lockwood’s novel No One Is Talking About This; and Rosa Lyster interviews her. Writes Lee:
The past few years have seen a glut of Extremely Online Novels, usually followed by articles in which critics try to find in these novels an answer to the question of how fiction should respond to the digital age, whether it can actually capture it, mimetically speaking. It’s a fair question, and one that people will likely ask of this novel, too. But the question No One is Talking About This is asking isn’t whether novels are up to the demands of the moment, but whether we are. How will we, with our brains crammed with memes and ironic fury, be able to respond when faced with something intimately real and tragic?
Says Lockwood:
…some people could definitely, with relish, present it as a book that is a sort of condemnation of the Internet and this sort of communal life. I don’t think that’s what it is…
…I think you can make those observations in the first half. And you can also make observations about how the language gets really crunchy, and it doesn’t feel like it’s yours anymore. And there is a problem with that, of course. But then it comes to the second half of the novel; she is using that language to think about the child, she’s using that language to cope with what’s happening to her and what’s happening to her family. So this is why we build these things. This is why we do this, because we can turn them to our use. They can elevate us, they can be our tools.
8. “Will We Ever Fully Understand Humans’ Impact on Nature?” by Naomi Elias, The Nation
Naomi Elias interviews Elizabeth Kolbert, whose Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future “chronicles the casualties of short-sighted human meddling with the planet and its resources and the present-day efforts being made to address that meddling—or, as Kolbert puts it, efforts to ‘control the control of nature.’” Says Kolbert:
The first project that got me started down this whole path was the “super coral” project, which is currently in Hawaii and partly in Australia. As the oceans warm, corals are having a lot of trouble surviving. We get these coral-bleaching events that I’m sure people have heard about. Some scientists were looking at how we can save coral reefs and the idea they came up with was that we need to intervene and try to coax along evolution so that these creatures can survive climate change. That struck me as a really interesting project, and got me thinking about this question of, Can we intervene to redress our own interventions? Once I started seeing that pattern, I started to see it everywhere.
9. “Anahid Nersessian, The Calamity Form” by Jack Chelgren, Chicago Review
Jack Chelgren reviews Anahid Nersessian’s The Calamity Form: On Poetry and Social Life, a piece of literary criticism which argues that the work of the Romantic poets was deeply affected by the rapid emergence and dominance of global capitalism in their lifetimes, but only in the sense that it is definable by its absence, like an outline of a missing piece.
…semiotic hijinks is often found in works associated with modernism and postmodernism, especially Language Poetry, but it’s not something many people would associate with Romanticism. Yet Anahid Nersessian… argues persuasively that many of the most famous works of Romantic poetry are in fact thoroughly nonreferential, in response to the overwhelming transformations wrought by the expansion of capitalism. Indeed, in her third chapter, she… examin[es] how blankness registers capitalism’s corrosion of the personal, the social, and the corporeal in the work of none other than John Keats.
…Nersessian is interested in poems that fail to start fights, and in the historical conditions that prevent them from doing so. She argues that many canonical Romantic poets—Keats, William Cowper, William Wordsworth, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe—repeatedly stage their inability to comprehend capital’s transformations of social and ecological systems. Try as they might, these writers find it impossible to put their pens on geopolitical plights like the enclosure of the commons and the transatlantic slave trade. What’s getting in their way is the bewildering expansion of capital into a totalizing, life-shaping order that tends to obscure its own processes.
10. “Prime Mover” by Alex Press, Bookforum
Alex Press reviews Alec MacGillis’s Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America.
…It’s not that “good jobs left”; the transformation of work was engineered. Fulfillment meticulously documents how that process plays out, with the fate of millions haggled over by a handful of people in tucked-away conference rooms.
…Surveying Amazon’s operations in the state, MacGillis writes that “the company had, in a sense, segmented its workforce into classes and spread them across the map: there were its engineering and software-developer towns, there were the data-center towns, and there were the warehouse towns”...
11. “Paul Valéry and the Mechanisms of Modern Tyranny” by Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody, The Hedgehog Review
Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody, translator of The Idea of Perfection: The Poetry and Prose of Paul Valéry, examines exactly how Valéry ended up writing an anodyne essay on the idea dictatorship.
In 1922, the former director of the Havas News Agency, a certain Edouard Lebey, died in Paris. The man who had been Lebey’s private secretary for more than two decades, handling his correspondence and personal affairs, reading aloud to him for hours from novels and travelogues, suddenly found himself out of a job, at the age of fifty, with a family to support and no other qualifications than being a famous poet. From Lebey’s death until the end of his own life, in 1945, Paul Valéry did what he could to transform his literary fame into an income, turning out essays, speeches, prefaces, and limited editions of his work seemingly on demand. His celebrated dialogue Idée fixe (1932) was written on commission for an association of surgeons…
12. “Past Imperfect” by Ben Lerner, The New York Review of Books
Ben Lerner reviews Erica Hunt’s Jump the Clock: New & Selected Poems, which takes “new & selected” to a whole different level.
…What’s new here are revisions and additions to the previous books, internal innovations and expansions that complicate their dating.
…In a typical “new and selected” collection, poems from earlier publications tend to be omitted, not added, so I kept having to remind myself that I might be reading new writing under an old title. I was briefly disoriented, for example, to encounter the poem “Lines on Love’s (Loss)”—a poem “for Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor”—within Veronica: A Suite in X Parts, a series that I first read in 2019. For a moment it was as though the elegy preceded the losses in question, mourned them in advance…
…In its very structure, Jump the Clock marks progress and regress, the ongoing dance of exploitation and resistance…
13. “Said by Said” by Jane Hu, Bookforum
Jane Hu reviews Timothy Brennan’s Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said.
“If along with Chomsky, Hannah Arendt, and Susan Sontag he was the best-known U.S. public intellectual of the postwar period,” writes Brennan, “he was the only one of them who taught literature for a living.” Places of Mind takes the task of the intellectual biography to heart: it… is as much an intellectual biography as a kind of literary criticism on literary criticism… [I]t’s literary criticism, and its attention to cultural representation, that allows Said to make connections others might miss:
“If there was one thing Orientalism was about, it was that the humanities have political consequences, not only because of the weight and scope of influence wielded by Orientalist scholars but in the particular sense that literary critics (rather than politicians, journalists, or social scientists) study representation. Only they can explain how a mania like Orientalism takes shape and acquires, as he put it, ‘mass density and referential power.’”
14. “Sex, Noir & Isolation” by Vivian Gornick, The New York Review of Books
Vivian Gornick writes about Alfred Hayes, who in one lifetime managed to go from a communist poet (he wrote “Joe Hill”) to a noir screenwriter to a New York novelist, and whose latest book to have been reissued by NYRB is The End of Me.
…It wasn’t that he didn’t appreciate what a good screen noir could do, especially if it featured love gone rotten in compromising circumstances. It was that he knew it would take an extended fiction to illuminate what for him was noir’s central issue: the inability to feel the reality of your own or anyone else’s life, even if it belonged to someone you were sleeping with.
15. “Little Funny Things Ceaselessly Happening” by Dustin Illingworth, Poetry
Dustin Illingworth writes about a recently reissued edition of Hope Mirrlees’s modernist long poem Paris.
…The Woolf scholar Julia Briggs has called the poem “modernism’s lost masterpiece.” …Paris is structured as a set of nested journeys: ostensibly from the Left Bank to the Right but also from day to night and from past to present. It suggests a city of superimpositions, both modern and ancient, an accretion of centuries, trends, technologies, half-glimpsed faces, and unlikely encounters…
…the garish, skimming quality of Paris conceals an intimate organizing principle. Surrounding its flood of images, tastes, and sounds is an intensely private frame of discipleship: an invocation to the ideas of Mirrlees’s partner.
…In her book Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion (1912), [the classicist Jane Ellen Harrison] provided an example of a holophrase ascribed to an indigenous language of Tierra del Fuego: mamihlapinatapai, which means “looking-at-each-other-hoping-that-either-will-offer-to-do-something-which-both-parties-desire-but-are-unwilling-to-do”…
16. “How Ishiguro rewrote himself” by Leo Robson, The New Statesman
Leo Robson reviews Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel Klara and the Sun, in which “now and again, Ishiguro can seem to be trolling the reader – or at least [the] critics…”
…clues to Ishiguro’s intentions arise throughout. Josie’s father, an engineer who has been “substituted” by a machine worker, invents a compact mirror that reflects her face the right way around: “Wow,” she tells him, “it’s a masterpiece.” …
Given Ishiguro’s record, the likely general response will be to acclaim the novel as a conventional success – moving, powerful, and so on. That would seem a curious sort of tribute, though to call it a disaster would miss the point no less. When the critic James Wood said that The Unconsoled invented “its own category of badness”, I cannot help but wonder how he knew that it was bad. I’m not convinced that Anita Brookner solved the problem any more effectively when she panned the novel, then changed her mind and hailed its perfection. My own response to Klara and the Sun, over two more or less identical readings, initially resembled Ishiguro’s note on finishing the first part of The Brothers Karamazov: “I’m disappointed with how baggy and unedited it feels.” By the end, I was put more in mind of his reflection, after reading The Trial, that “one could drive oneself mad thinking of … interpretations”.
17. “A Revelatory Tarot Deck by Leonora Carrington” by Cassie Packard, Hyperallergic
Cassie Packard reviews The Tarot of Leonora Carrington, a facsimile of the recently discovered tarot deck that Carrington painted by hand, edited and with commentary by Susan Aberth and Tere Arcq.
…The book puzzles over the artist’s additions and omissions in relation to… predecessors, using biographical cues and a knowledge of visual symbolism to “read” her cards — not so unlike a tarot card reader. In Carrington’s Chariot card, two female creatures who normally face away from one another face toward one another, bound by a heart; the authors suggest that choices like this one reflect the artist’s belief in feminized collaboration…
18. “The Modernist Poet Who Took on Colonialism” by Tim Keane, Hyperallergic
Tim Keane writes about the poetry and verse plays of Aimé Césaire, which have lately “been appearing in a raft of new English translations,” among them N. Gregson Davis’s translation of Journal of a Homecoming.
Unparalleled in mid-20th century French literature, Journal of a Homecoming resembles prose-verse hybrids like Comte de Lautréamont’s Chants of Maldoror (1869) and Arthur Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell (1873). The Journal’s incantatory stanzas — 174 in this 1956 version — develop into a tripartite whole that might be described as a journey through hopeless desolation, poetic assuagement, and secular rebirth, as the poem unfolds like a séance reviving ancestral spirits from a vanquished Martinique. As Irele puts it, the poem represents a “consciousness turning wholly against […] its formative context.” “I was inoculated with debasement,” the speaker declares, “I am breaching the vitelline membrane that separates me from my truer self.”
19. “Family Secrets” by Charles Trueheart, The American Scholar
Charles Trueheart reviews Philippe Sands’s The Ratline: The Exalted Life and Mysterious Death of a Nazi Fugitive, “a massive forensic exercise, its findings so teasingly unraveled that the author’s dogged quest becomes as much a part of this narrative as the story of his protagonist.”
…the author’s diligence is palpable as he continues, ever so gently, to confront Horst and other family members with his evidence. Some of the most arresting portraits in The Ratline are of these 21st-century scions of the Holocaust insisting that Otto Wächter was just not that kind of man.
20. “Amnesiacs and Bystanders” by Michael Scott Moore, The Los Angeles Review of Books
Michael Scott Moore reviews Géraldine Schwarz’s Those Who Forget: My Family’s Story in Nazi Europe — A Memoir, a History, a Warning.
Karl Schwarz, her grandfather, committed the crimes of a regular businessman under Nazism… Schwarz and his partner acquired the Jewish petroleum product business Löbmann & Co. for the cut rate of just over 10,000 Reichsmarks…
…Julius escaped a forced-labor shift in Vichy France and survived as a fugitive in Europe until the Allies arrived; then he moved to Chicago. In 1948, he hired a lawyer and tried to reclaim his business…
But Karl Schwarz balked. He pled poverty; he argued in a series of letters that Löbmann & Co. wasn’t worth much in 1938. The purchase had occurred in “a most amicable manner,” he wrote, and, if anything, he’d saved the business. “In his five-year exchange with Julius Löbmann and his lawyers,” writes his granddaughter, “Karl Schwarz never departed from his tearful tone”...
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