Wherever I Lie Is Your Bed

A little over a month ago, The Center for the Art of Translation sent me the latest edition (XVI) of their Two Lines: World Writing in Translation anthology, with the wonderful title (not to mention the cover) Wherever I Lie Is Your Bed edited by Margaret Jull Costa and Marilyn Hacker.  I finished the collection a few weeks ago, and unfortunately was unable to address it until now here.  But here I am.  I feel like I could tie in the title, but that seems too easy.

The highlight of the anthology very likely is the selection from the new translation of Günter Grass’ The Tin Drum by Breon Mitchell.  I read the original Ralph Mannheim translation many years ago.  I unfortunately didn’t have the original to compare entirely, but thankfully with Amazon’s Look Inside function, I was able to see at least a partial overlap of the two translations.

Here is a paragraph from Mannheim’s translation:

Late one October afternoon my grandmother Anna Bronski was sitting in her skirts at the edge of a potato field.  In the morning you might have seen how expert my grandmother was at making the limp potato plants into neat piles; at noon she had eaten a chunk of bread smeared with lard and syrup; then she had dug over the field a last time, and now she sat in her skirts between two nearly full baskets.  The soles of her boots rose up at right angles to the ground, converging slightly at the toes, and in front of them smoldered a fire of potato plants, flaring up asthmatically from time to time, sending a queasy film of smoke out over the scarcely inclined crust of the earth.  The year was 1899; she was sitting in the heart of Kashubia, not far from Bissau but still closer to the brickworks between Ramkau and Viereck, in front of her the Brenntau highway at a point between Dirschau and Karthaus, behind her the black forest of Goldkrug; there she sat, pushing potatoes about beneath the hot ashes with the charred tip of a hazel branch.

And here is the corresponding Mitchell translation:

My grandmother Anna Bronski sat in her skirts late one October afternoon at the edge of a potato field.  You could have seen how expertly my grandmother raked the limp potato tops into tidy piles that morning, ate a hunk of bread at noon smeared with dripping and sweetened with syrum, dug through the field one last time, and sat at last in her skirts between two nearly full baskets.  Before the upturned and inwardly tilted soles of her boots, flaring up asthmatically from time to time and sending a flat layer of troubled smoke across the slightly tilted crust of the soil, smoldered a potato-top fire.  The year was eighteen ninety-nine, she sat in the heart of Kashubia, near Bissau, nearer still to the brickworks, this side of Ramkau she sat, beyond Viereck, facing the road to Brentau, between Dirschau and Karthaus, with her back toward the black forest of Goldkrug she sat, shoving potatoes under the hot ashes with the charred top of a hazel stick.

The differences between these two translations are not huge.  The change in the first sentence is primarily a reordering, that I think is a good decision, shifting the focus of the sentence to the grandmother rather than the time, which is important but secondary to the importance of this section of the story.  The second sentence, again, Mannheim chooses to emphasize the time period, “In the morning…” rather than Mitchell’s focus on crafting a tone of storytelling, “You could have seen…”.  In fact, this stylistic force is I think the primary difference between the two.  There aren’t any, at least in this paragraph, significant changes in content–”hazel stick” vs. “hazel branch”.  The differences, instead, are in creating a style of the storyteller.  Mitchell’s translation seems to move the story towards the grandmother-storyteller of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, than the slightly more stilted and proper-sounding Mannheim that utilizes words such as “scarcely inclined crust of the earth” that seem particularly forced when compared to “slightly tilted crust of the soil”.  I remember particularly enjoying reading the Mannheim translation, but the Mitchell translation seems to at least show the promise of a step forward that could give the English translation “the melody of the text, the rhythm of Oskar’s drum.”

I was also delighted to find a large selection of poetry, which I found to actually be the strongest part of the anthology.  I was particularly happy seeing the amount of poetry that was translated from less-common languages.  Instead of rolling out the more common Spanish and French poets, we are offered Russian (Mikhail Yeryomin and Arseny Tarkovsky), Hungarian (Anna Szabó and Krisztina Tóth), Yiddish (Celia Dropkin) and Basque (Kirmen Uribe) for example.  This foray into languages that get less attention also means that we are presented with a series of poets that were new at least to myself.  Reading the anthology becomes an act of continuous discovery, a constant reminder as to how much interesting literature is being written around the world, how much we are missing.  From Tomas Venclova’s “For an Older Poet” translated from the Lithuanian by Ellen Hinsey:

Snow melted on the balcony. Electric light under the frayed silk shade
cast shadows on the walls. One of them touched
the statue–others, reaching in the opposite direction, tried
to peer out the window. “Right there–two good lines.”
That’s what brought us together. The rest we saw differently:

The two last highlights of the anthology I feel compelled to mention are a selection from Azorno by Inger Christensen and a special section, Focus on Palestenian Poetry.  I found this final section of the anthology particularly interesting, which begins with the well-known in English Mahmoud Darwish, and then quickly moves on to a number of poets I had not come across before: Ghassan Zaqtan, Ayman Ghbarieh, Nasser Rabah, and a number of others.  I particularly enjoyed Fady Joudah’s translation of Ghassan Zaqtan’s “Like One Who Waits for Me”:

When I remember him standing under a soft light
like one who waits for me to remember him,
when our ghosts
slowly descend from the ladder
of the night slow-
ly descend,
after the evening prayers, the rosary
and the late night prayers
and the sleep in the paradise
of those who return…
like one who waits for me to tell me:
We are in the tent together
the one pitched for the fortieth day
of the dead…together!
Or maybe so I can tell him:
O father
no one prays for us in these corners
we have no narrators in the books
and no followers!

The constant waiting and potential energy throughout this poem remind me of Kafka’s short short stories.  As we approach the end of the poem, as we expect to attain a more concrete place, we find that ‘no one prays for us’ and there are ‘no narrators’ and ‘no followers’ and the poem, which for a short time seemed so graspable, flies off into the netherworld.

The one part of the anthology that I felt was missing or could be improved is some information regarding the original languages.  Romance languages and German I can usually at least sound out and get some understanding of the sound, and typically some meaning, of the original.  With so much of the anthology being in less-common and less well known languages, such as the selections in Arabic and Kurdish, a primer that would allow at least some understanding of the original would have been quite useful.  Obviously enough information to really understand the originals would not be possible, but some basic information about the languages beyond the translator’s statement would have been nice.

Overall, though, I find myself continuing to pick up the anthology and flip through it, reread many sections.  The combination of otherness and not-otherness that I find in much translated literature is so compelling, and many of the selections in Wherever I Lie Is Your Bed has been the best resource I’ve found lately.

Disclosure: Wherever I Lie Is Your Bed was provided by the publisher as an advance reader copy.

Filed under: Poetry, Prose , Breon Mitchell, Ellen Hinsey, Fady Joudah, Günter Grass, Ghassan Zaqtan, Margaret Jull Costa, Marilyn Hacker, Poetry in Translation, Ralph Mannheim, The Center for the Art of Translation, Tomas Venclova, Translation, Two Lines, Wherever I Lie Is Your Bed

CR on The Sri Lankan Loxodrome

My review of Will Alexander::The Sri Lankan Loxodrome has been published/posted at The Quarterly Conversation:

We leave the text considering: what is the difference between a dissection of a snake for scientific purposes and the decapitation of a snake for spiritual purposes? We are asked to ponder a convergence in these two seemingly disparate world perspectives of a journey towards the unknown, an unknown that is infinite in its distance from our present space:

& I know the ocean in its Indian expanse
with its turbulent infinity
with its sudden seaquake morasses
with its quickened asteroidal trenches
being like the mountains at the bottoms of Venus
at say
the distance of Apollo & Ceres from the earth

Read the entire review here…

Filed under: General Info

November Reading Update

The reading, as can be seen below, slowed down this month a bit.  End of semester crunch–particularly grading & term papers–sapped much of the reading energy.  Unfortunately, I can’t count composition papers as reading or paper research (unless I actually read the entirety of the book), or the page count would be higher.  Still, 9 ain’t all that bad given the circumstances.  So here goes:

Susan M. Schultz::Dementia Blog
Claudia Keelan::Utopic
Margaret Jull Costa & Marilyn Hacker (eds.)::Two Lines: Wherever I Lie Is Your Bed
Pat Nolan::Intellectual Pretensions
Eleni Sikelianos::The California Poem
Electric Literature::No. 2
Claudia Keelan::Missing Her
Matvei Yankelevich::Boris by the Sea
Heather Christle::The Difficult Farm

Filed under: Poetry, Prose , Claudia Keelan, Electric Literature, Eleni Sikelianos, Heather Christie, Matvei Yankelevich, Pat Nolan, Susan M. Schultz

Barbara Guest & Real Willows

Here is the third and final installment of my in-class essay transcription project.  Part one, WCW & The Rose, is here and part two, E.E. Cummings & Matter, is here.  The following is a bit more understandable, I think, without extra framing than the E.E. Cummings essay.  The following focuses on Barbara Guest’s poem “An Emphasis Falls on Reality”.  The topic was to discuss why the “willows are not real trees”…

Barbara Guest states that “willows are not real trees” in her poem “An Emphasis Falls on Reality”.  The first compulsion upon reading this line, perhaps, is to run to the encyclopedia–is the willow not in the tree phylum?  What could it be if not a tree?  Alas, the encyclopedia will give no assistance to the diligent reader.  Yes, some willows are technically shrubs, but enough are trees to discount that as the easy answer.  The reader must then look precisely where the reader should have been looking from the start–the poem itself.

In the previous stanza, Guest writes

These metaphors may be apprehended after

they have brought their dogs and cats

born on roads near willows

These metaphors?  What metaphors?  There is not any metaphor in the poem as we traditionally think of metaphor.  There is one preceding simile:

they are orderly as motors

floating on the waterway

What are these metaphors, then?  For Guest, the metaphor is the connection between the words themselves and the concept they communicate.  Thus, willow is:

[note: I drew a very poor rendition of a willow tree at this point of the essay].

Though, as discussed in other parts of the poem, the picture isn’t a real tree either.  The word willow is ink on paper that signifies something in reality but is not itself reality, and the thought moreover is not reality (of the willow tree) either.  There is not a real tree in my head when I think ‘willow tree’.

The final line of the poem also gives some indications as to how to conceptualize the willow as not real: “The darkened copies of all trees.”  The words “copied” sends the reader to thoughts of Plato and the Platonic ideal.  Except that Guest inverts the relationship.  Where Plato gives superiority and authority to his ideal tree or willow–the perfect tee that only exists in the mind–and considers all physical trees a flawed copy of that tree, Guest counters with:

The necessary idealizing of your reality

is part of the search

Guest begins with reality as the starting point, the willow trees that actually do exist, and states that from these real things each of us separately create an idealized thought or image that we then use in our attempt to approach or better understand our reality.  Without the real, the ideal doesn’t exist.  Someone who has never seen or heard of a willow tree cannot create an idealized image in their mind of a willow tree.  Reality is the original; not a copy of some real or idealized reality.

Whereas Plato is trying to get back to reality–the cave where we can see only shadows of the real–Guest is trying to move ahead to get to reality:

This house was drawn for them

it looks like a real house

perhaps they will move in today

It is necessary for “them” to idealize their house in their search for it.  Through that idealism they can find what it is in reality that they are looking for.  Reality, then, is both the beginning and the end.  The word, though, and concept “willow” is our attempt to approach, understand, and interact with our own personal reality that surrounds us.

The title also gives an indication of how to understand the willow as not a real tree.  “An Emphasis Falls on Reality” is stating that emphasis, or one’s attention, interacts with reality when that attention happens to notice something around it in its reality.  In the reading of the poem there are no real clouds, no real dogs or cats, no real willows.  The reality of reading the poem is the poem itself, the words on the page, the thoughts that rise (or potentially rise) from them.  The reality of the moment is the Guest poem itself, which, in its existence on the page is a physical object of reality too.  It has been created.  I have a sudden tangential thought about what this has to do with Cummings, kenosis, and adding matter to the world.  Guest’s poem is made of words, not trees.  She writes:

A column chosen from distance

mounts into the sky while the font

is classical

Is it too much to say that “font” is a pun indicating typography?  And that the column is the physical appearance of the poem on the page?

So Guest seems to want us to see her words as words, and then correspondingly look at reality as reality.  Her word “willows” is just a word and the thought that arises is just a thought.  But this acknowledgment actually brings us closer to reality by encouraging us to privilege reality, not the supposed Platonic ideal that Plato claims exists above reality.  There is no above or below, really, according to Guest–words are words, thoughts are thoughts, trees are trees.  And all are “necessary” for the “journey”.

Filed under: Poetry, Theory , An Emphasis Falls on Reality, Barbara Guest, Plato

E.E. Cummings & Matter

This is part two of my in-class essay transcription project for the week.  See part one (and other information about why and how I’m doing this), WCW & The Rose, here.  This essay turns its attention to Cummings, the idea of kenosis, and matter.  As a brief background, our class had spent much of our time considering Cummings with respect to kenosis, but a rather nuanced version of kenosis as understood by Don Revell, which is descended from but not directly related to the discussion within the Christian faith.  The difference between the two is considered by the essay.  But, basically, Revell put forth kenosis as an idea that the world was made from something, and if the only thing before the world was created was god (always little-g god with Revell), then the world must have been created of god and thus divine matter, thus making the world and everything in it divine as well.  Based on our studies and the way in which we discussed the poems, Cummings really seems to have a remarkable system of spirituality.  I’m not sure if I would say that it quite approached Blake in its singularity, but the uniqueness is apparent.  The below is in some sense an attempt to frame and understand what Cummings, through his verse, was developing.  And now on to the essay!

While reviewing for this exam last night, I was compelled to learn more about kenosis.  In the course of my research, I was eventually led to the following passage from Philippians (New King James edition):

Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who, being in the form of God, did not consider it robbery to be equal with God, but made Himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bondservant, and coming in the likeness of men (1:5-7).

The focus of this translation, and the resulting use of the Greek term kenosis, is as an emptying or removal of the divine.  This is a bit different from how we used it in reference to Cummings, and I think that the juxtaposition of the two ‘answers’ to the question of the divine really highlight what makes Cummings’ spirituality so unique.

We began our discussion of kenosis with Cummings’ “Introduction to New Poems” and specifically with the phrase “Take the matter of being born”.  The use of the word “matter” is a pun that Cummings uses to draw our attention to the physicality of being born, rather than the metaphysical state.  If we return to the opening, “The poems to come”, Cummings develops a parallel between being born and the act of reading a poem as both events, not products; a point of departure, not arrival; a physical process, not metaphysical.  The Christian question of kenosis centers on what Jesus gave up when he was born, what is the essence of the divine.  Cummings counters with “We can never be born enough” because Cummings answers the question with the assumption that the physical is divine, that the stuff of the universe is from and of the creator, because there is nothing else that it could have been made out of.

The idea of emptying is addressed in “XVIII” of Sonnets-Unrealities in Chimneys:

a wind has blown the rain away and blown

the sky away and all the leaves away,

The invisible wind is emptying the world of matter.  But “the trees stand” and something remains.  Cummings calls for death to:

…start

the last leaf whirling in the final brain

of air!)

Cummings is calling for an emptying of the mind like Jesus supposedly emptied his mind to become human.  The emptying here, though, occurs at death, not at birth, and there is no assumption of loss.  It is, in fact, a sense of freedom and clarity–in emptying the mind of the worry of death, in consenting to this necessity of life, a freedom over (or with, perhaps) death becomes available.  For Cummings, nothing is lost in birth and nothing is gained in death because it is all divine matter, made from the same stuff.

“VII” of section Four of is 5 includes the line “wholly to be a fool”, which could be rephrased as: fully to be empty-headed.  This is a complete embrace of nothingness and consent to the world.  Cummings claims that:

the best gesture of my brain is less than

your eyelids’ flutter

The physical, because it is divine, trumps the metaphysical thought.  So why not simply be fully empty-headed in the embrace of the physical, that which is divine in nature.

“30″of 73 Poems has the line “when is becomes if”.  A number of Cummings’ poems prove the realm of the possible or hypothetical.  This is again an emptying, this time an emptying into possibility.  It is not when if becomes is, because that would be reducing the multiplicitous possible into the singular actual.  Cummings is more interested in how the singular actual can become the multiplicitous possible.  By emptying the world of the real and allowing only the possible, Cummings allows for a situation where 1+1 can = whatever he wants…73, perhaps.

Where the basic religious argument looks at the concept of kenosis from a negative perspective, as emptying, as loss, Cummings sees that when a vessel is being emptied, that doesn’t mean that the contents of the vessel are lost–that stuff being emptied is just being moved to another container or place.  When Cummings looks closer he sees that this means that the physical is divine because it is of divine.  And that, moreover, because that matter and our world are divine, it can expand and multiply itself.

I didn’t quite get to one last connection–the emptying of meaning in language, particularly in “anyone lived in a pretty how town” where even though the language and syntax misbehave, empty their typical meanings, at the end there is still “sun moon stars rain”.  The cosmos remains intact despite the disruptions because meaning isn’t lost.  Meaning is just moved elsewhere in the realm of the physical divine.

Filed under: Poetry, Theory , Don Revell, E.E. Cummings, Kenosis

WCW & The Rose

Over the next couple of days I’m going to publish what are basically transcriptions of three in-class essays from my Modern Poetry class with Don Revell.  The purpose is partially self-serving, simply as I’m in the process of writing the term paper for the class and am hoping that reexamining these essays will clarify some of my own thoughts.  The only editing I am doing is if I come across basic spelling and grammatical essays.  I apologize for the paragraphs not necessarily leading consistently towards some well-defined goal.  The essay is more exploration/brainstorm session on a topic than proper essay.  The first below discusses William Carlos Williams’ “The Rose”.

Topic: Why is the rose obsolete?

First, we should ask whether the rose really is obsolete.  As the first line of the poem is, precisely, “The rose is obsolete” we at least can begin with that assumption.  But then we get a rude awakening when we move to the second line that begins with the interjection: “but”.  This “but” immediately discards the previous statement on which we have begun the poem.  The subject of the poem turns from the obsolescence of the rose to the parts of the rose, “each petal”, pushing away the concept of the rose as a thing in itself.

The rose, as a poetic trope, carries a long and well-used tradition of meaning–my love is like a red, red rose, for example.  Returning to Williams’ opening statement, “The rose is obsolete” could be considered a rejection of the rose as a poetic trope.  Writing Spring and All at the early eruptions of the high modernist period, there was a significant focus on the new, on creating the poetry of the moment, the contemporary, modern world (if we ignore the debt Pound, Eliot, H.D. and others have to their predecessors).  So Williams’ statement here is partially a rebellion against this tradition.  In some sense he is also rebelling against the use of any object or thing cleaved haphazardly to an idea that did not originate from that thing.

Williams addresses the rose-love connection when he writes in stanza six:

The rose carried weight of love

but love is at an end–of roses

It is at the edge of the

petal that love waits

These lines change the relationship between rose and the idea love–Williams places them next to each other, love existing at the edge of the petal, not within it or as it.  Williams then begins to move towards that edge:

The place between the petal’s

edge and the

ending the second line of the stanza abruptly, dropping the ending that possibly could be the movement from petal to love.

In the next stanza, Williams does gesture beyond the petal: “From the petal’s edge a line starts”.  As the thing approaches idea or non-thingness, as Williams moves closer to the point where the thing ceases to be, instead of the idea we receive a stark line.  Williams continues:

that being of steel

infinitely fine, infinitely

rigid penetrates

the Milky Way

without contact–lifting

from it–neither hanging

nor pushing–

The fragility of the flower

unbruised

penetrates space.

As we follow that line, possibly a line or missile of meaning, do we ever see love?  What does occur is a movement from thing to idea, but the idea in the last stanza is the “fragility of the flower”, a tangible idea with a direct connection to the physical world, not the love or weight of love mentioned previously.  The one idea – love – that we expect at the onset of the poem’s title and that is recognized in the previous stanza fails to materialize even at the edge of the petal, instead leaving us with a flower, a line, and emptiness.

I have not touched on a few important ideas.  In stanzas three through five, Williams focuses on a majolica rose (the Juan Gris painting), a representation that is an attempt to cement, to recognize, to create a static and totalitarian world.  But for Williams, this staticness is impossible.  What makes the rose a rose is not its moment frozen in time.  It is the rose’s mutability, the rose’s ability to renew, the rose’s very fragility.

But if it ends

the start is begun

Every thing is always ending and always beginning, each line is then both signalling the end of the previous line and the beginning of both itself and the oncoming next line.  The rose is obsolete because the rose that was “like” love is gone, has passed in time.  The trope is behind us for that reason and, moreso, because it has been “worked to defeat”.  Even the supposed permanence of the majolica rose finds itself on a “broken plate”.  The rose is constantly becoming obsolete, and yet, “but”, constantly renewing itself.  But that new thing has made the previous thing obsolete.  (That sentence might have fallen into tautological reasoning).  But so is Williams, so is the moment (at least how he seems to conceive it), and so is Williams’ rose.  Hopefully these ideas have some bearing on why the rose is obsolete, or perhaps the answer is simply because Williams saw that it was.

Filed under: Poetry, Theory , Don Revell, In Class Essay, The Rose, William Carlos Williams

National Book Award ‘09

Keith Waldrop::Transcendental Studies was just announced as the National Book Award winner for poetry.  One of the more interesting selections in recent memory.

One of my favorite sections (section 7 of “Shipwreck in Haven”):

I was hardly dead, when you
called. Now are you convinced?
Infinitely soft strum.

As if night. As if im-
perceptibly. Slowly you fall. Break
somewhat the blackness of the day.

Might also be any
direction, every start
takes us to other time.

Forth across the sands. From
sky or from the liver,
divined. Endless beginning.

From the first line, the oddity of the punctuation and the necessity of rethinking the role of punctuation becomes necessary.  “I was hardly dead, when you called”–the comma that separates the two sections is, technically, grammatically incorrect.  The punctuation of this section (and throughout this first chapbook of sorts) indicates movement of thought, rather than syntactic rule.  “when you called” is a sub-set idea of “I was hardly dead”, but the transition is a movement of idea.  The second clause is a transformation of the initial clause, so the two are separated by a comma, which in this specific use indicates this connection.  There are only two other commas in the poem:  the second line of the third stanza and the second line of the fourth and final stanza.  The comma separating “direction” and “every” functions similarly to the first comma.  The comma separating “liver” and “divined” is a bit different.  If one ignores meaning, the syntax of the sentence is at the least more correct or more normal.  But what is divined?  The liver?  The sky?  The idea of from-ness?  The idea of or-ness?  All of the above?  Divined in a way seems more connected to “Endless beginning” than the liver or the sky.

Only one sentence is typical when it comes to syntax, or at least somewhat typical: “Slowly you fall.”  Though placed between “As if imperceptibly” and “Break somewhat the blackness of the day” any move towards standard meaning becomes difficult.  There is no direct and obvious progression of ideas, yet there is seemingly an underlying logic to the poem.  An origin of “I was hardly dead” moving towards an ending of “Endless beginning” seems to make sense.

This entire poem seems to exist within the Emily Dickinson moment “I heard a fly buzz when I died”.  In that instantaneous moment before death, there are endless beginnings.  A fly begins to buzz.  Births occur.  The entirety of humanity breaths.  The repetiton of “As if…” in the second stanza represents these endless potential beginnings that “might be” in “any direction”.  And “every start” including the start that is death “takes us to other time”.  Every moment precedes logically into the next moment.  There doesn’t have to be an imposed logic on the succession of moments and events because by simply moving from moment to moment, each end creates the next beginning, and each beginning marks the end of the previous beginning.

Or that is what I can cobble together immediately after seeing the results of the NBA awards.

Congrats to Keith Waldrop for his NBA ‘09 winning Transcendental Studies, certainly one of the better books I’ve had the pleasure of reading this year.

Filed under: Poetry , Award, Emily Dickinson, Keith Waldrop, National Book Awards, Transcendental Studies

Holiday Book Sales

Some great sales are going on at the moment.  First, is Dalkey Archive’s holiday sale featuring either 10 books for $65 or, for the person who wants to do all their holiday shopping in one place, 20 books for $120.  Shipping is already included in both packages, at least for shipping to a US destination.  Some recommendations to get your list started are Gabriel Gudding::Rhode Island Notebook, Warren F. Motte::Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature, John Ashbery::A Nest of Ninnies, Stanley Elkin::The Living End, and Jacques Jouet::Mountain R.

I’m not sure exactly if this can be called a holiday sale, but subscriptions for the 2010 Ugly Duckling Presse catalog are now on sale for $150.  You receive 20+ books over the course of the year (according to UDP it is “everything we make in an edition of 300 or more), which is a deal that is pretty difficult to beat, all published and printed with great care by UDP.  The subscription list is capped at 200, so you don’t want to miss out like I did for the ‘09 list.  I already have my ‘10 subscription nailed down, in case you were afraid I might miss out again.

The literary journal Ninth Letter has also begun a holiday sale (scroll down a bit to see the info).  1 year subscriptions have been reduced to $15.  1 year subscriptions + 2 back issues is $21.95.  And single copy back issues are $5.

Interim is also offering a discounted subscription price.  3 years + 1 back issue of your choice for $28 (scroll to the bottom of the page).

Filed under: Poetry, Prose, Publishing , Book Sale, Dalkey Archive, Gabriel Gudding, Holiday Sale, Interim, Jacques Jouet, John Ashbery, Ninth Letter, Stanley Elkin, Ugly Duckling Presse, Warren F. Motte

Attention Span ‘09

From Third Factory comes the 2009 version of Attention Span.  60 contributors listed 663 ‘things’–books, chapbooks, songs, films, &c. &c.  This is quite the who’s who of both selectors and selectees.  Among the selectees are ACR favorites G.C. Waldrep, Rae Armantrout (Poem of the Week X), Kit Robinson, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis.  Among many others.

The above link to Attention Span ‘09 gives a list of the books listed by more than one contributor.  Among the books read and/or considered here:

Andrew Zawacki::Petals of Zero Petals of One (discussed here)
Keith Waldrop::Transcendental Studies
Cole Swensen::Ours (reviewed here)
Ron Silliman::The Alphabet (selections)
Jack Spicer::My Vocabulary Did This To Me (selections)
Lyn Hejinian::Saga/Circus (reviewed here)
Barbara Guest::The Collected Poems (selections)
Roberto Bolaño::2666

Tough to argue against setting aside time to read any of the above.  I enjoyed all of them thoroughly.  The rest of the list is going to give me ample material to pursue for the next few months.  The sheer size of the list is pretty overwhelming–it would be an accomplishment to read every book on the list and nothing else over the course of a year.  A good and thorough start to the end-of-the-year-best-of lists.  And none of the controversy of the publisher’s weekly best of list.

Filed under: Poetry, Publishing , Lyn Hejinian, Demise, Cole Swensen, Kit Robinson, Rae Armantrout, Andrew Zawacki, Third Factory, Attention Span, G.C. Waldrep, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Publisher's Weekly

Electric Literature::no. 2

Even though Electric Literature has hit the big time with a write-up in the New York Times, editor Andy Hunter has not forgotten about the little guy over here in this corner and made sure to get me a copy of the hot-off-the-presses second issue.

My experience reading issue 2 was remarkably similar to my response to issue 1.  I had not intended to actually sit down and read issue 2.  I had a couple of minutes and decided to just see what was going on inside, sneak a little preview, before devoting myself to the volume later.  Well, I opened up the first story, “The Comedian” by Colson Whitehead, and before I knew it I hadn’t budged and I was halfway through Stephen O’Connor’s “Love”, the second story in the collection.

Again, as with the first issue, I cannot quite pinpoint what exactly makes the stories so compelling.  The only story of the five that is particularly experimental is the concluding “The Cows” by Lydia Davis.  All the others follow in varying degrees a fairly standard short story progression, but the stories are just simply so well written.  Though there is nothing technically forward-thinking necessarily about the stories (other than the Davis, perhaps), each story plays subtly with its own structure as a work of fiction, such as Pasha Malla’s “The Slough”, which is split into two sections: the first section is a realm of unnamed characters existing in a quirky world where it is possible through a specific cream to lose one’s entire outer layer of skin at one time, instead of slowly losing it over the course of 6 years.  In the second section, the story both continues seamlessly and shifts violently–characters are named and in their naming the primary concern shifts from a magical cream to the realities of skin cancer.

The one story that did not capture me to the extent of the others was Marisa Silver’s “Three Girls”, which felt like more of a gloss of a story than a fully fleshed out piece of fiction.  The story seemed to want to force a catharsis to the story that came up out of nowhere and did not quite fit with the rest of the story.

The two best stories are the first, from Whitehead, and the last, from Davis.  Interestingly, each of these are from former MacArthur winners.  Whitehead’s story is a short short, coming in at a mere 6 pages, but tracks the career ups and downs of an unnamed comedian whose fame-creating “shtick fell into two subject areas: Everything Is Terrible; People Are Disappointing”.  The more true the comedian becomes, the more successful he becomes, and the farther from reality he as a person is flung.

Davis’ story is a series of epigrams on cows:

So often they are standing completely still.  Yet when I look up again a few minutes later, they are in another place, again standing completely still.

Davis eschews traditional character development and plot to simply watch the cows:

They are often like a math problem: 2 cows lying down in the snow plus 1 cow standing up looking at the hill equals 3 cows.

Or: 1 cow lying down in the snow plus 2 cows on their feet looking this way across the road equals 3 cows.

Today, they are all three lying down.

The question a reader is forced to ask is whether this is even a story.  Thankfully for me, I don’t really care.  This is a poem or series of poems as far as I’m concerned.  But I will still contemplate whether we can call this truly a short story for fun.  There is no main character, not even a particular cow, that becomes a central point around which the story can coalesce.  There is no unity of action, nor even necessarily a unity of place.  There is no unity of time.  So Aristotle’s poetics have been thrown out the window entirely.  How do we see this as a story, then?  I continue to claim that it doesn’t matter, but I acknowledge that it will for many people.

At the very end of the story the “I”, which through most of the story is only implied through the necessity of there being an “I” who writes every story, comes out into the open and begins to create a relationship within the story between the reader and the cows:

Other neighbors may be away, from time to time, but the cows are always there, in the field.  Or, if they are not in the field, they are in the barn.

And I know that if they are in the field, and if I go up to the fence on this side, they will, all three, sooner or later come up to the fence on the other side, to meet me.

What Davis seems to be contemplating is a sense of eternity.  One could perhaps read the cows as an analogy of a god, but I would think that that is reductive and too easy of a reading.  Because cows are not gods.  Cows are cows, and simply in being themselves–out in the field, or in the barn–they are a creature worthy of the wonder and worship of our attention.

All in all, Electric Literature is 2 for 2 in my book.  The care and excitement taken producing both issues shines through in the energy that each story transmits to the reader.  The condensation to 5 stories in a roughly 100 page package makes each issue pertinent from start to finish.  The stories really seem to have an electricity running through them.

Order a copy of Electric Literature::no. 2 here.

Disclosure: Electric Literature no. 2 was provided by the publisher as an advance reader copy.

Filed under: Prose , Andy Hunter, Colson Whitehead, Electric Literature, Lydia Davis, Marisa Silver, Pasha Malla, Stephen O'Connor