Table of Contents

Gabrielle Calvocoressi: Introduction

Mark Nowak, Ruth Ellen Kocher, Nick Flynn, & Carmen Giménez Smith: Roundtable on Citizen: An American Lyric, Part I

Gary Hawkins: Talk and Not Talk: Anne Carson’s Dialogue of Grief

Michael Robbins interviews Anahid Nersessian: A Conversation Between Friends

Lynn Melnick: I Would Have to Wake Up Young Again: On Bay of Angels, Personal Mythology, and the Enduring Badassery of Diane Wakoski

Matthew Spellberg: The Epic Art of the Haida Mythtellers

Juan Felipe Herrera: Anthropoetry

M.P. Ritger: The Charges

Cover: Sarah Conaway (Oval) Moon 2015 Chromogenic Print 27 x 21 1/2” — Introduction —

Hello from Carrboro, North Carolina, where the lilacs have yet to bloom but the azaleas are making a real racket.

National Poetry Month has come to an end and we here at LARB Poetry are about to launch a number of new projects and adventures that will take us through the rest of 2015. What better time to look back on the last few months of conversation, inquiry, and poems that we’ve been so honored to host at Los Angeles Review of Books?

Right now, for this editor and human, it seems hard to think about anything other than the devastation in Nepal and the senseless violence — and necessary uprising — in Baltimore. If poetry is truly news that stays news, then how can we best have our feet and ears on the ground? That’s what we have always tried to do here in our section: give poets and critics space to report back from their worlds.

The essays in this ePub represent poets thinking and struggling with what it is to make poems and what it is to be in a body that’s making poems in the face of a world that often violently resists being written into. There’s the joy of old friends talking. There’s myth and Wakoski and the arrival of The New World by Jorie Graham. And there is Citizen, a book whose cultural relevance is illustrated and amplified each day.

We’re glad to have you thinking alongside us.

From here.

Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Senior Poetry Editor

Michael Ursell, Assistant Executive Editor Joshua Rivkin, Assistant Poetry Editor Elizabeth Metzger, Poetry Editor, Quarterly Journal Michael Weinstein & Caitlin Weiss, Poetry Copyeditors Roundtable on Citizen: An American Lyric, Part I

Carmen Giménez Smith, Ruth Ellen Kocher, Nick Flynn, Mark Nowak

WHEN GABRIELLE CALVOCORESSI, LARB’s poetry editor, invited me to organize a roundtable with writers to talk about this important book, I was both thrilled and terrified. The discourse around race is fraught, but it’s also the most important subject we’re facing today. I invited Mark Nowak, Ruth Ellen Kocher, and Nick Flynn to have this conversation with me because I admire their work, and because they are all writers who are unafraid to talk about even the most difficult issues. This conversation could have gone on for months — all of us felt that this book brought to bear some urgent questions about race, micro- aggression, and power. We are all grateful to Claudia for reminding us that our work as poets can have a great political significance. — Carmen Giménez Smith

This is the first of two parts.

CARMEN GIMÉNEZ SMITH: I’m really excited to be talking about a poet I consider a hero, and about a highly anticipated book that speaks to a lot of urgent issues. Early on she enunciates one of the book’s themes:

[Hennessy] Youngman in his video doesn’t address this type of anger: the anger built up through experience and the quotidian struggles against dehumanization every brown or black person lives simply because of skin color.

The anger is generative; I think of the work a controlled fire does. I’m thrilled to read a book that expresses anger, something which is oppressively frowned upon in our liberal humanist circles. This wasn’t the book I expected, but I’m thrilled it’s the book it is. What about you?

RUTH ELLEN KOCHER: Carmen, I like that you say, “the work a controlled fire does.” It does seem to me from the first page that this book is doing necessary work. I have to concede that I am, initially, after emerging from this book, at a loss to ask anything of any of you. To ask means that I have to step outside the experience of the book, the experience of a body entering into and then stepping outside of the experience of this book, and somehow objectify that experience in order to “get at” it — the experience of the book, and perhaps also the experience of the body, of my black body. I’m caught up in the act of searching. What do I do? What do I say? What do I say to you? How do I “say” this feeling? How do I contain this feeling? What does that container look like? What can house a feeling like this, feelings like these? So I am confronted at once with the form of this book, and the ways it calls into question the mechanisms whereby we contain these thoughts, these feelings, this language. To what efficacy? What does a script mean to a book of poems? What does an image of Turner’s sublime terror, captured in the flailing limb of a chained body, mean to the poem, to the language that is perhaps poem or not poem, and to you, the reader and witness to this language and these images presented in this particular way? These are many questions, I know, but I want most to ask about the role of form and invention, within a discourse of the body, of identity, maybe even of the self and Other.

I’ll add that for some time now, the media has been giving us frequent reports of brutality directed at the black body. These are explosive, politically charged, violent moments. To me, they are obvious moments of degradation. Part of the work in Citizen is to engage the charged moment that is not necessarily explosive, not obviously violent, not initially considered political. These micro-aggressions are at the heart of larger conflict. They are stealth. They often fly under the radar. Their impact and the damage they cause is no less catastrophic in the end. We don’t talk much about the psychological violence that gives rise to the physical. Rankine takes us there and makes us sit with it awhile, uncomfortable in our skins, shifting in our seats, shaking our heads.

NICK FLYNN: I’ve also been waiting for this book for a long time and am thrilled to have this chance to talk to the three of you about it, and about its impact, which will be far-reaching. Ruth, in some ways I also do not know what to say, after emerging from these pages, except that I felt utterly alert to every word while reading it. One of its projects, it seems, is how — or if — one is able to navigate through the feelings these micro-aggressions bring up.

Carmen, you start with Rankine’s reference to Youngman’s video How to Be a Successful Black Artist, where he proposes an enactment of anger as a way to fulfill (white) expectations. Rankine aligns this type of anger (enactment) with Serena Williams’s (seeming) embodiment of anger, after a history of bad calls against her by line judges. Though, tellingly, the final explosion of anger comes at a justified call against her. Rankine wonders if Serena “has come across Hennessy’s Art Thoughtz and is channeling his assertion that the less that is communicated the better. Be ambiguous.”

MARK NOWAK: I totally agree, Nick (and all). And that brings up a question from Rankine’s book that seems central to my own thinking about Citizen, and I ask it of all of us — how difficult is it for one body to feel the injustice “wheeled” at another? And together with this — how does your reading of Citizen: An American Lyric make you think through this question, and your response to it, differently.

CGS: The use of the word wheeled, which seems important to reading the book, captures the relentless cycles of race and power Rankine is critiquing. While reading the book, especially the first section, I found myself audibly whispering, No. No, this can’t be true, I was thinking, Surely not now, even though another deep part of me thought, of course, and I know this. I think the cycle is also interminable and the book’s relentless quality is a rhetorical evocation of this cycle. The truth is — and I think what this book reminds us is — that we glance past the experience of blackness because it’s easier, because we don’t know what to do or because it seems insurmountable, unaddressable. The book’s urgency doesn’t let the reader off the hook (and I don’t want it to, especially since I come to literature to be transformed).

REK: Yes, Carmen and Mark. I’m thinking of that transference of injustice wheeled from one body to another as something akin to the cumulative effect of grief and mourning — how the loss of someone always recalls, freshly, the last loss, so you live through each simultaneously and as if for the first time. I respond, in thought, of course, and I know this, but also No. No, this can’t be true again.

NF: The question “how difficult is it for one body to feel the injustice wheeled at another” does seem central. It’s from the section of the book where the “Situations” are located, the texts/scripts of her collaborations with her husband/video artist John Lucas. (Citizen is dedicated to the real-life characters from his powerful documentary film The Cooler Bandits.) But this passage doesn’t seem to have a video component to it, except for the fact that it’s “In Memory of Mark Duggan,” a black man shot dead by Scotland Yard officers in London, and the fact that the subsequent riots were endlessly televised. The narrator makes a connection between the Rodney King riots, or, rather, an English novelist makes that connection, a novelist whom I assume is white (though Rankine never specifies his race). The novelist asks the narrator if she will write about Duggan, and looks “slightly irritated’ when she suggests he could write about Duggan. This is the setup for the question “how difficult is it for one body to feel the injustice wheeled at another” — in my reading, it seems the white novelist feels it is the duty of the black poet to write about the killing of a black man. Or, rather, it seems that he feels it isn’t his duty. The poem speculates that for the white novelist, “the difference (between their bodies) … makes all the difference.” Mark and I are the two white bodies on this panel, and I know that Mark is able to cross that difference, in his work, that it seems a vital part of his poetic project. That said, at the moment I am listening to the radio, and there is yet another story about a black man being shot by a white cop — “before it happened it had happened and had happened.” I am painfully aware that by simply moving through this world in a seemingly straight white man’s body the air around me parts differently. This morning I said good morning to the black crossing guard outside my daughter’s Brooklyn public school. She turned toward me, surprised, maybe slightly pissed off, and said, no one ever says good morning to me, as all the other (mostly white) parents passed by. The killing of black men by cops is everywhere these days, but by being immersed in Rankine’s book I am more tuned into the micro-aggressions, which are perhaps even more insidious.

CGS: Nick, I identify with that helplessness, and I think the book and the response the readership has to it is a crossroads at this point of crisis, when black boys are being murdered by the police. Rhetorically this book evokes empathy (and anger), which I think is meant to work as a flashpoint for all of us. I’m finally at the age in which my previous beliefs are being changed with and by history. That a book about race could be wildly successful speaks to our need for these conversations.

NF: I have a question: Rankine uses the word “manumission” to describe Serena Williams telling a lineswoman who had called a foot fault (in 2009), “I swear to God I’m going to take this fucking ball and shove it down your fucking throat, you hear that? I swear to God!” I had only recently come across the word “manumission,” in some research about Thomas Jefferson and his slave/children. It seems Rankine is coining a new use of the word here, or at least retooling it?

REK: Nick, it’s interesting to me how much this word did not stand out to me and now that you’ve called attention to it, I have to consider why not. The act of freeing here — manumission as it traditionally defines the process whereby the master frees the slave — becomes the act of freeing oneself. Serena Williams freeing herself. There’s something familiar there in terms of racial discourse I suppose. Agency, and the power that comes with it, attributed to the master in manumission is transferred to the enslaved and so here Rankine empowers the black body. If the black body reliably had such agency our discussion would be very different. I see the search for that agency, that autonomy (maybe even autocracy?), enacted throughout the book. Perhaps it would be more true to say that I see the search for the source of that agency — actually, the source of the loss of that agency — enacted throughout the book. Why did it not, at first, stand out? Perhaps the active reclamation of agency is so much a part of the context of the entire book that the term manumission seemed at one with the thematic landscape.

NF: I love your use of the word agency here, reminds me of something Rankine said in her BOMB interview with Lauren Berlant: I am not interested in narrative, or truth, or truth to power, on a certain level; I am fascinated by affect, by positioning, and by intimacy, as I know you [Berlant] are. What happens when I stand close to you? What’s your body going to do? What’s my body going to do?

It seems that one of Rankine’s strategies to address racism is to simply place her body in relation to another, either black or white or whatever, and to both document what happens and to register her emotional response. It feels, at times, almost like a daily practice, a meditation. I also think of this idea — of a daily practice — in relation to her use of the word manumission, which seems to me to be a nearly impossible strategy within which to achieve agency. As I understood the concept, manumission was a promise held out by a slave owner to a slave that after so many years of “service” the slave could then be freed, though usually that freedom had to be bought from the slave owner. So one was essentially offered the chance to buy one’s own body. Is this what Serena is doing?

REK: I would say yes, this is what Serena is doing, but with a few stipulations. First, I think I would say not “buy” but “take.” She “takes” her own body back. She, perhaps, even wrenches her body from the grip of those who would deny her agency. There is no understanding here between parties but instead, an upset, a coup, an overthrowing of the way her body is colonized by their gaze.

CGS: I’ve recently started reading Fred Moten’s In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, and here’s a bit that resonated for me in this other reading:

Between looking and being looked at, spectacle and spectatorship, enjoyment and being enjoyed, lies and moves the economy of what [Saidiya] Hartman calls hypervisibility. She allows and demands an investigation of this hypervisibility in its relation to a certain musical obscurity and opens us to the problematics of everyday ritual, the stagedness of the violently (and sometimes amelioratively) quotidian, the essential drama of black life, as Zora Neale Hurston might say.

This observation of Moten’s describes how being black creates the paradoxical condition of both being invisible and hypervisible, and Rankine writes about this too: in one moment she’s invisible to someone in a line and in the other she startles the therapist she’s only talked to on the phone by going to her door, and Serena Williams is a macro-recipient of terrible micro-aggressions that, because of her public status, Rankine asks, “What does a victorious or defeated black woman’s body in a historically white space look like?” I think Serena Williams is an analogue to, or avatar of, the speaker’s experience.

NF: Alongside the invisibility/hypervisibility of the black body, I can’t help thinking that Citizen is also about the insanity that comes from carrying racism in a white body.

CGS: So often an argument is made against the political possibility of the lyric, and obviously this book’s title engages the American political through the private quite effectively. Evoking the lyric also calls attention to the speaker, who uses the second person — which might be the reader addressing herself, but it also is suggestive of apostrophe, an address to the reader, implicating her. How are you seeing “the lyric” in this book?

MN: I agree, Carmen. I found the use of the second-person address here to be quite compelling, reminding me of other important books that use the second person in a different way — like Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place, and Mohsin Hamid’s recent novel How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia. The second person tends to draw us in close while simultaneously isolating us in its crosshairs, especially when uttered in a public space. And it’s the employment of this “you” at the intersections of the public sphere where I found myself most deeply engaged with Rankine’s use of the second person. From the World Cup to the Arthur Ashe Stadium to “quotes collected from CNN” and the rest, it’s a publicly mediated second person that seems to put readers, myself included, under interrogation, into the interrogative, on page after page after page.

REK: I’ll add that I believe the lyric has great potential, as Rankine demonstrates here and also in Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric, for the political subject in a way that purely avant-garde poetics, which rejects the expressive implications of an “I,” simply cannot. For this reason, I think that most black writers who write innovatively, who experiment with form in the way Rankine does, remain lyric poets — because the project of lyric accommodates the necessary expression and work of black aesthetics. As Evie Shockley notes in Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry, the black poet is always “renegade,” not because of the work’s formal conventions or challenges to convention, but because of the transgressive nature of blackness, of the black body as subject, in which he or she invests. An innovated lyric such as we see here, and a dedication to the second person as apostrophe, seems an apt vehicle to take up assertions and questions that perhaps cannot be contained by expectation.

NF: Jonathan Farmer’s Slate review points out (correctly?) that Rankine’s use of “you” refers, mostly, to herself, forcing the reader to either embody the micro-aggressions she documents, or to stand apart and say, “that’s not me,” or to defend the aggressions as possible misinterpretations. I am saying this from my white perspective, trying to remember what I felt as the aggressions piled up. I think it was somewhat nuanced, not monolithic — I was mostly sickened, but occasionally wondered if it was a simple misunderstanding. One example of a possible misinterpretation, which I am sure is not lost on Rankine, is on the airplane, when a little girl asks her mother to sit in the middle seat. I have a six-year-old daughter, and she does this all the time — it doesn’t matter if the person she would have to sit beside was black or white — that person is simply a stranger. I once heard that if you are at a party, say, and not prone to approach anyone you do not know well — shy — the risk is that this lack of contact might get interpreted as racism by a person of color. The solution offered, which I think is a good rule of thumb, is to get over your shyness.

As for the idea of Citizen as a lyric, Rankine seems to address it most fully in section VII, which is also the first section, I believe, where she employs more conventional poetic devices, specifically line breaks and enjambment. It is where the use of the “you” — used throughout until then — is questioned, and it contains the line “Don’t say I if it means so little.”

CGS: Perhaps some of these events are misunderstandings, but if micro-aggressions are par for the course, why wouldn’t one misread interactions? Racism in polite society is very coded. Just as politicians use dog- whistle statements, the person of color also receives messages that might not read racist to someone else. This book along with Presumed Incompetent have been important to me as I navigate and try to categorize the small indignities experienced by people of color around me.

NF: By bringing up Rankine copping to misreadings I’m not intending to minimize the effects of racism — quite the opposite. Part of Rankine’s project, I think, is to point out the fact that the body carries these micro-aggressions on a cellular level, and that they occasionally leak out in situations where there is, possibly, no fault — the question then becomes — is “no-fault” even possible in a society so caught up in its unprocessed racism? These moments of slippage in the book are where I see the world in an utterly new way.

MN: In the same BOMB interview with Berlant, Rankine says: “The book ends with Turner’s Slave Ship, because it seemed funny that those trips across the Atlantic would have us disgorging still. Maybe the disgorge is a form of storytelling.” The idea of storytelling as disgorge — with its multiple meanings including an act of pouring out, a discharge of occupants, ejecting (food) from the mouth (spitting, vomiting), the emptying of a river into the sea, etc. — is so intriguing to me. How might disgorge be a form of storytelling? And is Citizen an act of telling the story of America as disgorge?

CGS: I remember before Obama became president, how idealistic I felt about what it meant for us as a country: we had renounced a long history of racial discrimination and the civil rights dreams of the ’60s had come to fruition. I was so easily carried away by my own liberal humanism and by a complete lack of context when it came to understanding how the US related to blackness. As a woman of color, I knew that many entrenched and problematic views about race existed in cultural and economic infrastructures, but surely seeing a black man leading the country would change the terms with which this country dealt with blackness. Instead, Obama’s legitimacy has been disputed from the word go. White America has perpetuated a doomsday culture since a black president surely means the end is near.

The disgorging I see at work here is the insidious bile unleashed toward the black body. In the essay “Feminism Inside: Toward a Black Body Politic” bell hooks writes, “Within neo-colonial white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, the black male body continues to be perceived as the embodiment of bestial, violent, penis-as-weapon, hypermasculine assertion.” So we see the rise of Jesus as warrior, the fetishization of the phallic gun discharging (or disgorging) upon the black male body and we see the response pouring into the streets — the idealist in me sees this as a productive disgorging. I joke with my friend Joseph that we should be training our daughters for the revolution that’s coming in their adulthood, but perhaps it’s only half-joking because it seems that there’s a lot of leftover enmity that we haven’t addressed yet, perhaps because we’ve hidden behind our own sense of post-ness. But really we’ve buried our heads in the sand, and conditions have reached a boiling point.

NF: I think it best to leave my mixed feelings about Obama on the table for now and focus on Citizen. Citizen seems so much about what has been internalized, and thereby what needs to be disgorged. And I don’t mean simply what has been internalized by black bodies — the effects on the entire culture do seem at a breaking point. That the book ends with Turner’s Slave Ship, or more specifically with a close-up of the section of the painting where we can see the chained feet of a slave, sinking below the surface of the ocean. How far have we really come? Is this what we want to offer the future?

REK: I think I’m hearing disgorge here, as the three of you have spoken about it, as a conceit in conversation with itself. Mark, you talk about disgorge after Rankine’s allusions to effusive emptying of the body in Middle Passage, that is, the bodied emptying itself and also the ships emptied of black bodies cast overboard sometimes because their currency had been depleted in one way or another. The metaphor extends itself to telling — I want to say but hesitate to say confession, because of the formal poetic implications, but more because of the impotent function of the confessional for the body oppressed — as if the oppressed had something to confess, or purge, toward redemption, as if the oppressed need to ask for redemption. Carmen, you address disgorge as the mechanism whereby the black body receives, perhaps fields, aggression that is spewed in its direction. Nick, your take on disgorge seems to recall a system that’s crippled itself, such that its vile retentions are released by this reflex. And you say that which is internalized by the body “needs” to be released. I think disgorge for all of you indicates a purging of some sort, which I’d say is more accurate a characterization than “confession,” if only because a purge is somehow more violent than a confession — a reflexive mechanism that responds to an overwhelming abundance of excreta, of poison and waste.

THIS IS PART ONE OF TWO. PART TWO CAN BE READ AT: LAREVIEWOFBOOKS.ORG/ESSAY/ROUNDTABLE-CITIZEN-AMERICAN-LYRIC-PART-II.

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Carmen Giménez Smith is the author of a memoir, Bring Down the Little Birds, and four poetry collections. She currently teaches in the creative writing programs at New Mexico State University.

Mark Nowak, a 2010 Guggenheim fellow, is an award-winning poet, social critic, and labor activist, whose writings include Shut Up Shut Down (2004) and Coal Mountain Elementary (2009).

Nick Flynn has worked as a ship’s captain, an electrician, and as a case-worker with homeless adults. His most recent book is The Reenactments.

Ruth Ellen Kocher is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Ending in Planes (Noemi Press, 2014), Goodbye Lyric: The Gigans and Lovely Gun (Sheep Meadow Press, 2014), and domina Un/ blued (Tupelo Press, 2013), Dorset Prize winner and the 2014 PEN/Open Book Award. Talk and Not Talk: Anne Carson’s Dialogue of Grief

Gary Hawkins

READING ANNE CARSON makes you want to hold your people close — immersing in the presence of a lover, staving off the mortality of a mother, or grieving over the loss of a brother. This may seem a surprising immediate response to a poet known to be “inscrutable,” as The New York Times recently termed Carson, or known by her famously dispassionate one-line biography: “Anne Carson was born in Canada and teaches ancient Greek for a living.” Our reading of her ambitious and challenging work can easily follow those cues to favor its intellectual apparatus. Still, the complexities of some of Carson’s latest forms play with our presumptions of how far our head may take us if we attempt to follow only its direct lines of inquiry.

The parallel texts in Nay Rather (Sylph Editions, The Cahiers Series, 2013) include, on the verso, “Variations on the Right to Remain Silent,” an essay on silence “in the practice and study of translation”; and, on the recto, “By Chance the Cycladic People,” a poem about Cycladic culture created with randomized lines. These topics and structures leave us searching for intentionalities that may mostly reflect our desire to make connections, particularly our tendency to link figure and ground into event and then knit events into narrative. Carson recognizes this as a legitimate habit, “since humans are creatures who crave story,” and she further claims that as a classicist “I was trained to strive for exactness and to believe that rigorous knowledge of the world without any residue is possible for us.” Still, she’ll admit: “This residue, which does not exist — just to think of it refreshes me.” What as a classicist she can’t allow — that residual unknown — her work as a poet belies. Carson, like Joan of Arc and the painter Francis Bacon, both of whom she considers in Nay Rather, holds her genius in her ability to create refreshing “catastrophe,” deforming and reforming her subjects and structures to refuse the easy story (the cliché “we resort to […] because it’s easier than trying to make up something new”). She affords us entries into pasts and presents that prove her generosity, even when she leads us into devastation.

In the first half of The Albertine Workout (New Directions Poetry Pamphlets, 2014), Carson’s enumerations on Proust and his narrator’s captive beloved, Albertine, mimic an exhaustive mode. Then the accompanying randomly numbered appendices explore not only slavery and capture but also nuns and kimonos, metaphor and metonymy (Carson even admits at one point, “Sorry this appendix got away from me.”), until we confirm that Carson’s concerns lie at the limits of knowing. For Carson, these limits are mostpresent where we are closest to one another. As much as the narrator’s “intense and assiduous questioning” aims to possess Albertine by knowing her, in tracing this endeavor, Carson proposes: “Knowledge of other people is unendurable.” We can’t hold to it. It may be for the narrator that “the truth about Albertine is that close,” despite all of her bluffing, but to learn everything of and about her would collapse his desire for her. Perhaps “le bluff” is the common intercourse of our relationships, too, whether due to our intentional deflections or our necessarily limited language. Then the ambivalent reading Carson gives Proust will be our own truth. Here, propelled by desire, “love reaches into past and future and fantasy”; and yet “its suffering consists in positing to those realms all that the bluff conceals.” Such realms of silence and suffering are where Anne Carson consistently resides.

These are the subjects of her most recent full-length book, Red Doc> (Knopf, 2013). Here, Carson has returned to the story of Herakles (the strongman/demigod who is barely slowed by the seemingly impossible Twelve Labors he is assigned) and Geryon (the red, winged shepherd whom Herakles defeats as one of the Labors in order to steal his oxen), a story Carson first retold in Autobiography of Red (Knopf, 1998), casting Geryon as a red, winged adolescent and Herakles as his bad-boy friend and boyfriend. While here Carson confirms what we know from Joseph Campbell, that the ancient heroic outlines still have contemporary staying power, throughout her work she inhabits the close interiors of human connection and loss, spaces of talk and silence that were never the concern of the tragic poets but are, in her hands, great solace to us.

With their clear references to the myth and their book-length scope, we might be inclined to approach these books as contemporary heroic tales, and so we’d take the broad perspective of an ancient Greek audience in the day-lit amphitheater of Dionysus, apprehending the outlines of a tragedy like Euripides’ Herakles from afar. Carson, who has herself translated Euripides in Grief Lessons (New York Review of Books, 2006), and also translated numerous other Greek plays, reminds us that from this perspective “you can read the plot of a play off the sequence of postures assumed by its characters.” A play becomes a series of “tableaus,” each telegraphing a specific pose, from prostrate supplication to upright championship to flattened death. Each of these Geryon-Herakles books holds us with an agile and inventive plot that moves its characters through a progression of revealing tableaus. We could follow Geryon as young antihero under the sway of Herakles through a coming-of-age trajectory in Autobiography of Red: a flattened exchange between a mother and an adolescent “monster” at the kitchen table; that red boy on an nighttime adventure with his new tough boyfriend, standing high and triumphant on an overpass above “blowing headlights like the sea”; much later, his sliding off of Herakles’ bed and slinking out the exit alone into “the debris of the hotel garden” where he is laid flat by a punch from Herakles’ jealous new boyfriend; and, finally, Geryon taking flight into a volcano with his camera. Or, in Red Doc>, we could follow Geryon (now just “G”) as a young man reconnecting with Herakles (just out of the army and traumatized, now named “Sad But Good” or “SBG” or just “Sad”) through a trajectory of reconciliation and rescue: a more level exchange at the kitchen table between G and his mother, who is aging, still smoking, and maybe becoming bored with him; G and Sad reunited on a road trip north, driving under cliffs and through ice to stumble upon a PTSD clinic built high on a glacial lake; an escape back down the mountain — and G taking heroic flight; back in the lowlands, G, Sad, and their small band ringing the mother’s hospital room and propping her up in bed. Moving through these books, we cross the range of human dilemmas (much like in tragedies), which Carson gives extraordinary recourse, reminding us that these characters (as ourselves) are both gods and monsters, capable of creating both incredible intimacy and devastating separation — and also reminding us that some separations are beyond us.

As dramatic works, Carson’s poems follow arcs that are more what Brecht would call non-Aristotelian than strictly tragic. That is, their epic progression — which takes the contemporary epic form of a road trip for portions of both books — leaves us uncertain where we will end up as we move into each scene, passing through mundane and exotic, naturalistic and fantastic along the way. The perspective of the epic, as Brecht would have it, unfolds at the material scale of the “flesh and blood” human, and in Carson’s work we recognize our own uncertain, epic lives in which one minute we’re sitting at the kitchen table and the next, at the whim of our crazy, human hearts, we’re driving toward an active volcano. Still, as epics, Carson’s poems seem increasingly to want to throw us off the trail of any clean trajectory. Autobiography of Red includes stops in Hades (Herakles’ hometown), the nearby volcano, an Argentinian tango bar, a South American Harrods, and another volcano in the Andes. Red Doc> moves across an even more varied and fantastic geography: G tending his oxen herd (including an ox named Io) under the overpass, the road trip north in the ice storm, G descending into an ice fault, ice bats (a species of Carson’s own invention) rescuing him to Batcatraz, a stop at a service station to fix a broken drive shaft, the trauma clinic, its laundry room, a play by the prophet 4NO performed by the clinic patients (à la Marat/Sade), Io flying (or falling), G flying, a hospital, rain. Yes, in this madcap array we can easily lose sight of the through-line of plot, but when coincidence seems to supersede cause and effect we are again reminded that we may not even have gods to back us up. Which leaves us to ourselves, and our friends along for the ride.

In this way, Carson’s orientation in these books may be as much novelistic as dramatic. Autobiography of Red itself carries the subtitle, “A Novel in Verse,” and a novel (in verse or otherwise) we know provides a forum for rich involvement in the complex web of human relationships as well as the motivations and errors within them. Carson shows us that poets, too, know how to orchestrate point of view, and in these two books she’ll finesse a consistently close third person on Geryon in Autobiography of Red and then create Red Doc> with a broad omniscience that moves easily into the point of view of most all of her characters, ultimately orchestrating a world in which there are no gods or hierarchies. As part of the editorial framework (both scholarly and surely fictionalized) that Carson places around the chapter-strophes of Autobiography of Red, she cites the post-Homeric poet Stesichorus (c. 640–555 BCE) as the one who initially adopted the minor point of view of Geryon rather than the heroic point of view of Herakles. Continuing this perspective, Carson brings to life a lesser character, while also humanizing the mythic hero, bringing Herakles down to size (for instance, one of his Labors is to paint his grandmother’s house). Then, in Red Doc> Geryon and Herakles (now G and Sad) are joined by an array of characters, among them G’s mother, a new friend Ida, Lieutenant M’hek (a member of the “warrior transition team of Sergeant Sad,” a “nonpsychotropic” support team for veterans), and 4NO (prophet and clinic resident who “knew Sad in the army”) — and the book swells with all their dialogue. Carson uses the book’s chapter-poems to mark shifts of point of view between the characters while also deploying the novelist’s trope of free indirect discourse to bring us the voice of each character even if he isn’t speaking. Here, too, a remnant conceit of classical drama, the chorus, contributes both to the omniscience and the swell of voices. These “Wife of Brain” choral interludes summarize action or tell us where we are going, but they also move the judgment of a narrator out into the open field of character where the book overall can become the ruddy mess of cross- and back-talk among all the assembled humanity.

There is a lot of talk of all sorts in these books: from novelistic scene to choral speeches to dramatic monologues to characters talking to themselves. While most of the dialogue in Autobiography of Red is tagged according to the conventions of fiction, there are some moments when the tags fall away and the who’s who of a scene blurs, as in this exchange between Geryon and an academic named Lazer he meets at the Bar Guerra Civil during his trip to Argentina:

How old is your daughter? asked Geryon. Four — not quite human. Or perhaps a little beyond human. It is because of her I began to notice moments of death. Children make you see distances. What do you mean “distances”?

While it’s possible to trace the exchange back to the first tag in order to determine that the last line belongs to Geryon, Carson ups the challenge in Red Doc>. She indicates speeches with only forward slashes (“/”), while the dialogue rolls across very short lines, as in this opening scene in which G and his mother are recalling G’s old friend and flame, Herakles:

GOODLOOKING BOY wasn’t he / yes / blond / yes / I do vaguely / you never liked him / bit of a rebel / so you said / he’s the one wore lizard pants and pearls to graduation / which at the time you admired /

When whole chapters in the book are presented this way, absent gesture or setting, Carson draws our attention not to the individual actors but to the whole of the conversation and how it unites all participants. Her narrator later says as much: “Some / conversations are not / about what they’re about.” In this instance, G has been overhearing a tryst between Sad and Ida in the laundry room, measuring himself against what he imagines, and then he meets them emerging into the corridor. Sad turns away to “organize my life,” and Ida slides down to the floor beside G, where the two of them talk. They don’t talk about what has just happened, of course, but their floor-level talk here fulfills Carson’s assurance that “the word conversation means ‘turn together.’” Conversation — in particular dialogue between two — makes human connection. It’s our fundamental mode, even if each particular relationship is, of course, irreducible. Yes, the body is present in these books — in particular in the way we inhabit space in relations to others around us — but not nearly so much as talk and conversation. Even here at the moment of a tryst, the conversation afterward is more intimate.

This brings to mind an early moment in Red Doc> when G, having learned of his lover’s return after many years, recalls his first heartbroken departure from Sad (a scene which is not included in Autobiography of Red but would have occurred within that timeframe). There is again minimal gesture and setting, and the dialogue of the two is only barely tagged:

LOVE’S LONG LOST shock the boy the man he knows him. Knew. […] […] Hands and no place for hands last morning later you realize that was our last. Take my. Fuck. Tiled floor a suitcase standing bleeding no thank you yes. No. Yes. Thin red tracking no. Yes. Your nose is he says. Take my white skin yes take it my astonishing morning it’s fine. Bleeding he says. The other. Last. No. Yes. No. Take it. My handkerchief. Fine. What if he does. Your taxi is here. Who says this. […]

G’s internal question of “who says this?” is exactly our question. The abutted exchange between these two has become one whole in G’s memory, and while the contents of the scene show separation, the impact of the form draws the two participants together. Although this contrast doesn’t offer healing for G so much as emphasize the loss.

There are other places we might see dialogue in the fabric of relationship, even in the figure of Herakles. That is, Carson leads us back to the realm of myth where Herakles, the man of body, action, and emotion, isn’t one for talk. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, he’ll assert to Achelous, the river-god he scuffles with:

My brawn is better than my tongue. You win in speech, but I can beat you with my blows. (Book IX, 288)

Carson’s Herakles is also like this, while Geryon operates via words and reason. Euripides’ play Herakles itself reinforces this dichotomy in its first pages. Herakles’ father cheerleads for his son (whom he hopes will reclaim the throne of Thebes as soon as he returns from his Labors) in a speech for which the chorus offers critical praise: “Slow start, good speech.” In response, Lykos, the usurper of Thebes, asserts his brawn: “Tower of words. / I will use actions.” Meanwhile, Megara, the wife of Herakles, laments the one-sided conversation she has just had with Lykos, who intends to kill her and her children lest the boys be “reared up as avengers.” In Megara’s view, it’s only “with men of culture / you can negotiate, they have a sense of shame!” The sense of shame, which comes from an awareness and a consideration for the broader human theater — for the human connections we call “culture” — is prerequisite for (or possibly the composition of) negotiation, dialogue, and conversation. When Herakles arrives and learns what Lycos has done (killed Megara’s father and brothers) and what he plans to do (offer Megara and her children the option of killing themselves), he steps forward characteristically toward action: “It’s time for me to change things!” Yet just prior to this charge, Herakles and Megara have had their first conversation since his departure years ago. Their homecoming exchange involves a back and forth of Herakles’ questions followed by Megara’s short answers about what has happened during the patriarch’s absence. The topics of this exchange are clearly skewed toward Herakles’ purviews of action and emotion, but within it, in part via the formalized Q&A, Euripides recreates their relationship around dialogue.

Dialogue is a means of connection, and its breakdown causes pain. We’ll also see this in the connected dramas by different playwrights that Carson has translated and united as An Oresteia (including Agamemnon by Aeschelus, Elektra by Sophocles, and Orestes by Euripides: Faber and Faber, 2009). In Agamemnon, Kassandra’s prophecies emerge in riddles that none can understand. Or else we only hear her pained cries — “OTOTOI!” — vowels of anguish not words anyone in the play can respond to or act upon. In another breakdown of communication in Elektra, Chrysothemis and Elektra, sisters arguing about what they can do after their mother (Klytaimestra) has murdered their father (Agamemnon), speak across one another:

Elektra: Oh go away. You give no help. Chrysothemis: You take no advice.

Later, actually leaving, Chrysothemis complains, “You don’t hear a single word I say” as the two break even their strained filial connection. In Orestes, the character of Phylades, who had been “Orestes’ silent friend” through all of Elektra, finally speaks to negotiate a final escape with Orestes. The two men build on each other’s thoughts to create a solid plan, while also uniting themselves and their aims, lifting themselves above Orestes’ seemingly impossible dilemma via this intertwined dialogue. Yes, it’s within that back and forth of talk that we create a web of relationships, and talk is also the frame that defines and validates the self. Through such talk, undertaken fully and in good faith, we become suspended in the lives of others and recognized as among them.

So, while Geryon’s very first encounter with Herakles at the bus depot is described visually — “there it was one of those moments / that is the opposite of blindness” — their first connection is actually a negotiation, Geryon looking for change for a dollar and Herakles offering him “a quarter for free.” Accordingly, Autobiography of Red follows their tightening relationship via their conversations, their questions and answers, Geryon “pick[ing] his way carefully / toward the sex question,” but also Herakles’ demands: “Put your mouth on it Geryon please.” And this is also why, when Herakles breaks off their romance with his leading question — “Think you should be getting back?” — Carson describes the renting of the space between the two of them: “a red wall had sliced the air in half.” It’s fitting, then, that the most intimate moments of reunion for these two in Red Doc> are the conversations they have while driving, where their topics (nature documentaries, fishing, Spam) are incidental to their affinity and there closeness comes via talk. In fact, G finds a like closeness with his herd — and Carson can use this proxy to explore the function of talk:

He may talk to them listen stand in the herd. Listen. That community.

Yes, talk and listening create community. And G and Sad’s communications are countered when one of them is not heard. At one stop on their road trip, G heads to the pool. “Gone swimming he calls / back as the wind slams,” and the poem ends there, with no evidence Sad has heard him. Or, driving along a sublime coast, their car conversation likewise breaks down: “Stop if we see seals says G / but Sad appears not to / hear.” G faces a particularly tough case as he attempts to draw Sad into closeness and dialogue (Sad will say later to Ida, “I’m a man who doesn’t like being liked much”), and these failures accumulate as grief for G. Others have less personal motivation to get Sad to talk. “Talk helps,” says Lt. M’hek of the “warrior transition team” about the merits of talk therapy for the traumatized soldier, and further, bolder, he asserts: “how we / talk how we are allowed / to talk is // the most part of happy or / not.” And, too, any allowance for talk must also include an allowance for silence.

Silence permeates these books. The autobiography that young Geryon is creating evolves from a written manuscript to a collection of his photographs, and he believes “all photographs are silent,” although Herakles’ grandmother will challenge this tautology, saying, “of course but that tells you nothing. Question is / how they use it — given / the limits of the form.” Geryon — and Carson — use silence sometimes as refusal, sometimes as legitimate reply. The adolescent Geryon who has “recently relinquished speech” leaves his mother considering aloud, “maybe I’ll just keep talking / and if I say anything intelligent you can take a picture of it.” After the flurry of first encountering Herakles, Geryon “had nothing to say to anyone”; when Geryon wants to keep the “struggling” of his wings from Herakles, he’ll cut him off with “I need a little privacy”; and when Geryon surprisingly uncovers his wings to Ancash (Herakles’ new boyfriend), “all of a sudden the night was a ball of silence.” Autobiography of Red even ends with a series of chapters titled as “photographs,” including a final “photograph he never took,” which is a picture of a recording made (or never made) by Geryon flying into a volcano. Titled “The Only Secret People Keep,” this sound-photo is never rendered on the page.

The entire, lyric structure of Red Doc> leaves silence on every page. While the larger project remains novelistic, each untitled poem follows the custom of the contemporary lyric to capture segments even tighter than scene, layering moments, like snapshots, each from a different perspective. As we move from one segment to the next, we’re often left with things unsaid. So, dramatically, after a tight dialogue between Sad and Ida in a doctor’s waiting room begins to form their new, brief relationship, the next poem is, in its entirety:

They do not talk more that day.

A silence of white space fills the rest of the page. In addition, Carson has formed most of the poems into narrow, justified columns, leaving each one with an emphasized silence of line breaks against their wide margins.

For all the pervasiveness of talk and of silence in the relationship of Geryon and Herakles (G and Sad), these elements really give us insight into the most pressing — and touching — relationship through both books: Geryon and his mother. As typical teenager and parent, their earlier conversations in Autobiography of Red are standoffs, and when Geryon returns on the local bus from Hades, heartbroken after Herakles has pushed him out and back home, they don’t immediately fall into tidy repartee. Instead, they address proxies — Geryon’s new T-shirt, the empty fruit bowl on the table — until this talk turns to laughter, and “then they sat quiet.” Fast forward to when Geryon is 22, living alone on the mainland, and preparing to depart for Argentina, when he gets a phone call from his mother. We hear only Geryon’s side of the conversation, his mother’s earnest questions of concern are reduced to ellipses. In the rest of Autobiography of Red (the last two-thirds of it), his mother never reappears, and the two of them never reconnect.

This dangling mother-son connection is repaired in the opening scene of Red Doc>. Here the two reconstitute — and even improve — their dialogue while recalling that “goodlooking boy” Sad But Good (née Herakles) in Carson’s new mode of forward slash–marked speech that cleaves together their dialectic. Still, this is no saccharine family tableau, and the status of their relationship is no perfect union:

[…] They haven’t always talked easily. He used to think it would improve with age but lately she seems ever more bored by him. Than usual. He watches her face. Avoids detail. To simply say what comes to mind to simply float. Sometimes this does happen.

G, who once installed turbulence between them, now longs to float in that easy space of talk or no talk that defines closeness, that creates love. Red Doc> doesn’t say this outright, and it certainly doesn’t dwell on it. Sometimes this connection is made; sometimes it isn’t. Often, the book mourns its loss. The bulk of the book follows G, Sad, and their entourage on their epic adventures, absent G’s mother. So when, 130 pages later, G gets an urgent message (from a man in “a silver tuxedo” who seems to be Hermes) to “Call / this number it’s your / mother,” we’re transported back to their interrupted connection to realize what has been missing. Then, we find that his mother is in the hospital, and rather than floating beside her, G is left with this awkward and awful exchange:

[…] He arrived on the day after her surgery. Has seen this corridor at all hours. Notices again a hesitancy in the light as if it were trying not to shock you with how scant it is. He can hear the oxygen machine through the door. It shunts on. Runs awhile. Shunts off. He enters.

And then their heavy attachment appears as a three-line poem on the next page:

When he is there they lift the stones together. The stones are her lungs.

Then something startling if subtle occurs in the book. Yes, it is clear that through multiple poems we stay with the mother in the hospital until “she is released” in death, and then we move to her funeral (where “oxen stand quiet / under trees”). Yes, it is clear that in her last days and hours she is attended by the lot of them: G, Sad, Ida, 4NO. But here Carson lifts ambiguity into resonance. In one poem Carson holds close to a “he” whom we think, surely, is G, but turns out to be a grieving but distant 4NO (the rescued prophet and army buddy of Sad), who sees himself as “no fucking / use or comfort […]. Death to / be close to makes him / laugh” but who still takes a shift bedside. Then, after a brief grounding in an omniscient poem showing G, Sad, and Ida arrayed “awkwardly about / the bed,” Carson moves to another close “he” — who this time is Sad reminiscing closely with G’s mother about his own high school antics (lizard pants and pearls), though he finds “her voice thin / enough to see through.” Here, Sad shifts into his own memory of his own mother, remembering driving with her:

[…] All the car windows open and their hair rushing around. He felt like a whole person with her that day. Perhaps it was the car — to sit peacefully side by side and talk or not talk and let time go in and out the windows.

Sad finds with his mother that same “float” that G sometimes did with his, and the parallel of the two descriptions of this ideal state underscores its centrality of dialogue in the book. Only then do we get the “he” we most expected, and here G knows too well the nature of his loss:

[…] And the reason he cannot bear her dying is not the loss of her (which is the future) but that dying puts the two of them (now) into this nakedness together that is unforgivable. They do not forgive it. He turns away. This roaring air in his arms. She is released.

In death we lose the prospect of any naked, buoyant interplay, of talk and even the choice not to talk. While the failures of conversation or of disconnection between living persons is painful, when G’s mother is finally gone, placed into the van that will carry her to the cemetery, “the / freedom stuns him.” The Wife of Brain chorus delivers one last litany that assures us that Carson means her kaleidoscope of points of view to bring forth all mothers —

Mothers at altitude Mothers in solitude Mothers as platitude Mothers in spring

— and not just tell the tale of a red, winged boy and his mother alone.

Which moment of encompassing grief brings forth Anne Carson’s other astonishing work of late, Nox (New Directions 2010), the poet’s epitaph to her brother “in the form of a book.” In form, Nox reproduces Carson’s original artist’s book as a long accordion-fold of paper that interleaves her sequenced exploration of her brother’s life, her investigations of history and of elegy, her family photographs, her brother’s only letter home torn into fragments, and a Catullus elegy (#101) rendered as a series of Latin lexical entries. “We want other people to have a center, a history, an account that makes sense,” writes Carson, and Nox attempts that while at once showing us the elusiveness of any such attempt. Nox is Carson’s elegy for her brother, but in reconstructing his life and her grief she also draws us into her own mother’s grief for a son, the young man who leaves home for Europe, writes one letter, and then makes no contact for the last seven years of that mother’s life, leaving her only grief: “Eventually she began to say he was dead. How do you know? I said and she said When I pray for him nothing comes back.” Late in Nox there is a short entry that Carson has reformatted with narrow, justified margins remarkably like Red Doc> and repasted on the page. Though she has also rubbed it across with graphite, she cannot obscure this tuning fork:

8.5 There is no possibility I can think my way into his muteness. God wanted to make nonesense of “overtakelessness” itself. To rob its juice, and I believe God has succeeded.

Elsewhere in Nox, Carson has considered the work of the historian to be “a storydog […] collecting bits of muteness like burrs in its hide,” and she has pursued the linguist’s take on “mute” as “an onomatopoeic formation referring not to silence but to a certain fundamental opacity of human being, which likes to show the truth by allowing it to be seen hiding.” Our muteness in conversation — those times we pause too long or don’t respond or walk off — forecasts things unsaid. This opacity, reminiscent of the fundamental hiding — or bluffing — in all conversation, is much more huge in death. We keep looking for what the dead have hidden, again “positing to those realms all that the bluff conceals.” And yet, Carson has also invoked the philosopher’s term “overtakelessness” (Unumgängliche): “that which cannot be got round. Cannot be avoided or seen to the back of. And about which one collects facts — it remains beyond them.” That the philosophers have a name for this endlessness, which we face in every conversation and in every conversation lost irretrievably to death, may be some intellectual solace. But to think we could be satisfied with understanding the muteness of our lost ones is, in a word, nonsense. Carson brings us into the tight interpersonal spheres of talk that encircle a red-winged boy, his once and former lover demigod, his dying mother — and her own brother. When those spheres break and humanity is muted, it is neither heroic nor tragic but a devastation. For all of us.

¤

Books considered in this review:

Carson, Anne. The Albertine Workout. New Directions Poetry Pamphlet #13. New York: New Directions, 2014.

Carson, Anne. Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999.

Carson, Anne, Trans. Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides. New York: New York Review of Books, 2006.

Carson, Anne. Nay Rather. The Cahiers Series. No. 21. Center for Writers & Translators, The American University of Paris. London: Sylph Editions, 2013.

Carson, Anne. Nox. New York, New Directions, 2010.

Carson, Anne, Trans.. An Oresteia. New York: Faber and Faber, Inc, 2009.

Carson, Anne. Red Doc>. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013.

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Gary Hawkins teaches writing and serves as associate dean at Warren Wilson College. A Conversation Between Friends

Michael Robbins & Anahid Nersessian

I MET ANAHID NERSESSIAN when we were graduate students in English at the University of Chicago. We didn’t get along. It was only during our last year in the program, as we were finishing our dissertations and the interpersonal melodramas of graduate school were starting to seem as facile as they had always been, that we began to meet for coffee and conversation. She is now one of my closest friends. We talked via email recently about her forthcoming book, Utopia, Limited: Romanticism and Adjustment (Harvard University Press); my poetry collections in the Penguin Poet series, Alien vs. Predator and The Second Sex; feminism; literature; and Taylor Swift. — Michael Robbins

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ANAHID NERSESSIAN: I’ll start predictably: what are you reading these days?

MICHAEL ROBBINS: I’ve been going through Jonathan Edwards. Marilynne Robinson’s piece on him for the NEH prompted me to reread Part Four of The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended, and now I’m on The Nature of True Virtue. And James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, which somehow I’d never read before.

I just finished Rivka Galchen’s American Innovations, which is really something else. Karen Russell, in her blurb for the book, suggests that what Galchen “is doing doesn’t yet have a name,” which is exactly right. You can say her stories have not a word out of place, that they’re both delicate and broad-shouldered, that they swerve consistently away from the likely choice, but you won’t get within a football field’s length of their achievement. Meanwhile, I moved to Los Angeles this summer, so I’ve been reading John Chase’s essays in Glitter Stucco and Dumpster Diving to get a handle on Los Angeles’s famously eccentric architectural landscape.

Ah, this is great; I’ll pick up the Galchen. Which reminds me: I can see five books from where I’m sitting that I bought on your recommendation — by Adorno, Catherine Malabou, Michel Serres, Jonathan Crary, Joanna Piccioto. If you say I should read something, I’ll read it. Or at least buy it and let it accuse me from my shelves. But you refuse to read Marilynne Robinson’s essays despite all my cajoling, just because you hated Gilead (which, to be fair, you read on my recommendation). What should we conclude from this?

Is the Adorno his lectures on negative dialectics? That’s an amazing series of documents, not just for their content, but for the battle of wills between Adorno and his students that’s going on for the whole lecture course. It’s the 1960s; the students are trying to start a revolution and they’re getting increasingly impatient with this guy droning on about Hegel and Romanticism, but they also respect him and want him to affirm what they’re trying to do in the streets. Adorno, of course, is not going to give an inch; like Lacan and Foucault, he was skeptical of the whole premise of liberation, especially sexual liberation. You mostly don’t know what the students are saying to Adorno, but their rage and sense of betrayal comes through at a high volume, as does his disdain and his despair. On a more basic level, the transcripts suggest an excruciatingly accurate record of a bad day in the classroom; it’s comforting to know that really every teacher has been there.

It’s true that I refuse to read Robinson’s essays all the way through, because I’ll get fed up by the first paragraph; like that last one you sent me, which opens with her describing how, under the influence of her older brother, her young soul did some time “gloomily captive to the determinisms of Positivism, Behaviorism, Freudianism, Marxism, and the rest.” Leaving aside the question of whether all those very different philosophical schools are actually deterministic, I find her opposition of “Modern Thought” to “liberation” deeply anti-intellectual, and for me that’s an insuperable turn-off. I disliked Gilead — which replays this same opposition between the narrator and his older brother — for the same reason. But happily for our friendship, we both love Taylor Swift.

Is it obnoxious to quote from my review of When I Was a Child I Read Books? I’m going to anyway:

It would be remarkable if anyone besides Marilynne Robinson agreed with everything Marilynne Robinson has to say …. Robinson is too brisk with Marx and Freud (that their worldviews are irreconcilable with each other, as she asserts in Absence of Mind, would be news to, inter alia, Marcuse, Lacan, Althusser, Deleuze and Žižek).

And “too brisk” is too kind. But you have to keep reading. I mean, we read Freud despite finding many of his positions untenable and even “deeply anti-intellectual.” (I think Philip Rieff is entirely right to refer to his “entirely anti-intellectual approach … to religion.”) You don’t read Freud to learn about religion; if you look to Robinson for insight on Marxism, you’ll be misled. But if you keep reading her best essays — if you read “Darwinism” and “Psalm Eight” and “Wondrous Love” — you discover a tremendously intellectual religious writer whose refusal to capitulate to fashionable cant is almost unparalleled and, if I can use this word, inspiring.

But okay, she’s a fissiparous thinker. Taylor Swift is too. From Swift’s recent Rolling Stone interview:

“I have to stop myself from thinking about how many aspects of technology I don’t understand. … Like speakers,” she says. “Speakers put sound out ... so can’t they take sound in? Or” — she holds up her cellphone — “they can turn this on, right? I’m just saying. We don’t even know.”

I’m hoping there’s something in this wonderful koan that will allow you to transition to talking about your wonderful book, Utopia, Limited, which will be published in March 2015.

Well, speaking of being skeptical about liberation, my book describes some ways in which Romantic literature — British and German Romantic literature, mainly — imagines utopia as a place where people are not absolutely free, but partially constrained, in particular when it comes to what they can demand from the finite resources of the material world. A lot of radical thought leans heavily on ideals of comprehensive liberation, and on versions of Hegel’s claim that “it is not the finite which is the real, but rather the infinite.” So, for example, when Judith Butler spoke at Occupy Wall Street, she (very beautifully) said, “If hope is an impossible demand, then we demand the impossible.” While being completely in solidarity with people like Butler and movements like Occupy, Utopia, Limited turns to Romanticism for a different paradigm, one in which restraint, loss, and a deference to the planetary limits on “impossibility” are placed center stage. For the Romantics, the desire for utopia is best expressed through a version of what Michel Serres says in Malfeasance: “I wish for, and practice, the dispossession of the world.”

Believe it or not, Alien vs. Predator is a big influence on my book; even knowing you as well as I do (for almost a decade now) I was surprised by how environmentally engaged it was, without being at all preachy. And I suspect, even though Serres himself can be quite preachy, that you have a lot in common with him. Your poem “Enjoy My Symptom” ends “I etch the speckled cybernaut. / I rape the earth. It’s not my fault,” and there are dozens of other examples in your work of powerfully non-sentimental, funny, and tragic instances of eco-critical thinking. A principal claim of Utopia, Limited is that poetic form can be used to model this idea of utopian constraint, and I’m interested in your thoughts on how form and prosody work to elaborate some of the environmental themes in your work.

Even knowing me as well as you do, you can’t know how much that means to me. Well, I will say that I am interested (for instance in a paper I published on Paul Muldoon that no one read) in the ways in which poetic negotiations with form become allegories for larger social and moral problems. Prosody has been experienced as constraint in modern and contemporary poetry, or so the story goes. I experience it as liberation. Adorno, in the lectures you recommended, notes that the concept always contains its contradiction, which is one attraction of your thinking about utopia. One thing we’ll have to do if we wish to address ecological catastrophe — although it doesn’t appear that we wish to do so, and it might be too late anyway — is to begin to think about liberation through, rather than from, formal constraints on our desires and imaginations. Lacan is probably an obvious reference point here, but I’m not in the mood.

When you write of “a place where people are not absolutely free, but partially constrained, in particular when it comes to what they can demand from the finite resources of the material world,” I’m reminded of the situation of the poem, even though language’s resources are not depletable. I suppose in this sense — in your sense — I’m a late Romantic: the lines from “Enjoy My Symptom” you cite remind me of Geoffrey Hill’s assertion in The Lords of Limit (note the title, borrowed from Auden) that “Romantic art is thoroughly familiar with the reproaches of life. Accusation, self-accusation, are the very life-blood of its most assured rhetoric.” Prosody might be a form of wishing for and practicing your own dispossession.

There’s an allegorical argument for formalism as (if you will) a sustainable mode of production whose output is infinitely renewable even if its raw materials are not. Of course, the notion of “sustainability” has become indecorous as it’s become more and more clear how easily it accommodates a consumerist model of environmentalism, one that drastically misrepresents the causes and the scope of our planetary crisis; I use it in my book a few times, albeit in a very specific context, and I’ll probably get some heat for that. As for the possibility of an ecological politics — and, for that matter, of left politics in general — William Blake would agree with you that emancipation is contingent upon imaginative and libidinal or appetitive constraint. His concept of “the bounding line,” which is at once cognitive, scriptive, moral, and biological, expresses exactly that principle. “Leave out this line,” he writes, “and you leave out life itself.”

Taking a cue from you taking a cue from Geoffrey Hill, let’s talk about self-accusation, Your poems often assume the position of both prosecution and defense — the two voices seem knotted together in that line, which I’ll quote again, “I rape the earth. It’s not my fault” — but there’s a real pleasure and exuberance, even a lightness, that spins out from that confrontation.

Yeah. I think the speaker’s simultaneous self-accusation and self-exculpation in my poems register antagonism to and complicity in several aspects of our situation at once. So in the line you quote the speaker both opposes and celebrates the rape of the earth, while both insisting upon and rejecting his complicity in it. It’s the proper dialectical response to liberalism, don’t you think? The consumerist fantasia of Earth Day, on which we all go around picking up trash and resolve to be better shoppers, is a way of accusing ourselves while feeling good about how enlightened we are while imagining that the power to make the world a better place resides in our individual habitus. Fuck that. Green capitalism is worse than openly rapacious capitalism, for the same reason Nietzsche found the reforms of Protestantism so dispiriting — they guaranteed the survival of the beast.

You quote H. Bruce Franklin on J. G. Ballard to the effect that the end of the capitalism may be the beginning of the human world. I take it that Utopia, Limited, is anti-humanist but not anti-human. Where is agency in this picture, for you?

That’s a great question. The line Žižek is always throwing out — “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” — and which you also find Fredric Jameson using, seems to have its origins in some comments Franklin made about Ballard, who (says Franklin) portrays capitalism’s disintegration as the beginning of a global “tribal warfare” whose wages are mutually assured destruction. (One could say all sorts of things about the implicit racialization of the apocalypse as “tribal warfare”; Jennifer Wenzel’s recent work is terrific on this.) So, Franklin says, why imagine the death of capitalism as the death of everything? Isn’t that exactly what capitalism is trying to tell us, that without it we’re doomed? My own view is that being serious about alternatives to capitalism means accepting that only human beings are capable of being the architects of such alternatives. This in turn means rejecting claims that there is nothing distinctive about humans as a species, or that the category of “species” is itself arbitrary. It certainly means rejecting the reboot-button fantasy, the one that involves saying, “I can’t wait until our awful species is finally extinct and the world can go on being the world.” That’s just narcissism dressed up in the pseudo-sophistications of nihilism. Anyway, none of this entails commitment to a great-chain-of-being model, in which humans are and should be at the top of the evolutionary hierarchy; it just means rethinking categories like “agency” to be collective rather than individual, and oriented not toward self-actualization and fulfillment but toward the more radical purpose of renunciation.

This reminds me of Adorno’s insistence, following Marx, that human history has not yet begun, that we remain pre-historical. I recently attended a graduate-student workshop on politics and poetry at one of New York City’s storied universities, and I was struck by how quickly the conversation became one about internal transformation, shifted individual perspectives, and the like. Which isn’t to say such experience isn’t legitimate and valuable — but it hardly seems political in the meaningful sense that is urgently required. “The personal is political” is obviously true, and just as obviously false. The personal must in an important sense give way before the political. I would like to see less valorization of difference and more emphasis on unity, on solidarity. Without human solidarity, the dream of autonomous subjectivity remains undreamt. One question is how to incorporate or address sexual politics from or within such a standpoint.

Well, what Gayatri Spivak calls universalist feminism — which thrives on staging dramas of the individual — certainly continues to have its moment in the sun. On the one hand, it sometimes feels churlish to object to websites like Jezebel, which probably do a lot of good in demystifying some basic principles of feminism for, in particular, a younger generation that’s been raised to consider it passé. On the other, their rhetoric steers very deliberately away from proposing that there could be serious doctrinal divisions among feminists, and that those divisions might point toward incommensurate experiences of class and race — never mind the failure to recognize that feminism in its universalist incarnation is routinely leveraged against marginalized populations. All politics and forms of activism have their blind spots; pretending that a feminism born and raised in Europe and the United States, whose consciousness is very much that of the individual and, candidly, of the consumer, is or should be beyond critique doesn’t do it any favors.

I recently read on one of those sites a thoughtful essay arguing that resistance to Beyoncé as a feminist role model must be rooted in fear of blackness and sexuality. Fair enough, and I love Beyoncé’s music — I finally bought the self-titled album on vinyl and it’s just perfect pop. But is it not problematic that she’s worth hundreds of millions of dollars? If she’s a feminist role model, where does that leave feminist critiques of affective and domestic labor (Silvia Federici, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James)? Who speaks for undocumented women who clean toilets for minimum wage? I mean, it’s farcical.

You know, I’ve always wondered if you like Beyoncé — glad this mystery is now solved! Anyway, I don’t want to sound grumpy, but the more interactions I have with college students who are desperate for a feminist culture that simply was more visible when I was growing up than it is now, the more reasonable it seems to draw a line in the sand and say, “It’s a better world where X-Ray Spex puts out records with EMI and you could see Salt-N-Pepa and Sonic Youth on MTV than one where it blows people’s minds that a public figure would self-identify as a feminist.” Beyoncé’s never going to hook up with Precarias a la Deriva, and Taylor Swift is never going to write a song about how Manhattan is a gated community embowered by a police state. But as a person like you, with a great love for popular music, I think we’ve had and should have a more interesting and robust mainstream. What’s happened to radio in this country, and to the price and possibility of being an independent musician, is not trivial; it’s slashed and burned the field of what’s sonically, lyrically, and politically available.

On the subject of pop, when your first book came out, reviews were obsessively focused on how your poems use pop and hip-hop lyrics, often to the exclusion of any comment on their political content or formal choices. The Second Sex similarly refuses to represent the poet’s world as a cloistered private library stocked only with George Herbert and John Ashbery, but to my ears the poems are less evasive about their affection for the lyric tradition than those in Alien vs. Predator. Were you consciously aiming for what I hesitate to call a statelier performance with your second book? That’s not an insult, by the way.

How could I love pop without loving “Irreplaceable” and “Jealous” and “XO” and “Haunted”? “You must not know ’bout me.”

While popular music and the lyric tradition aren’t opposed — the ballad tradition, for instance, has been important to the development of English lyric, as you know — it’s true several of my new poems more openly embrace certain lyrical tropes. Statelier isn’t how I’d put it, but I reread Songs and Sonets and, yes, The Temple for this book. I read Ammons’s Sphere. I don’t feel hostile toward the canon of English poetry. My favorite poets of the twentieth century are Yeats and Berryman.

Recently I’ve decided I need to cut out the pop allusions in my poems. I feel I’ve done all I can with them, and they do distract the critics. But we should probably end on a pop note, so I’ll ask what music you’ve been listening to lately. I’ve been obsessively replaying Charli XCX’s new singles; Actress’s Splazsh and R.I.P.; Taylor Swift, natch; Young Thug’s Black Portland; Big K.R.I.T.; YOB; Lana Del Rey’s Ultraviolence; Miranda Lambert’s Platinum; Jenny Lewis, despite myself. And I think I was the last person to discover Future Islands’ performance of “Seasons” on Letterman — I watch it over and over. It’s a work of genius in Emerson’s warmed-over sense: it gives me back my rejected thoughts with a certain alienated majesty. I’ve also been spinning lots of jazz.

In Los Angeles your commute really drives your listening habits. On the bus, I try to keep things considerately low-key so people aren’t annoyed by the sound coming out of my headphones, and my iPhone reveals that I mostly play Mulatu Astatke, Silver Apples, Candi Staton, and my dear friend Larkin Grimm, whose album Parplar got me through many long Chicago winters. When I’m in the car, and if I’m by myself, it’s also old favorites but played at extremely high volume: lately Felt, Lizzy Mercier Descloux, and the most incredible live rock band I’ve ever seen, Prince Rama. One of Taylor’s many BFFs, Lorde, gave a pretty dazzling performance at the AMAs; I had never listened to her music before, nor (to be honest) have I since, but she’s so charismatic and if you must have a song stuck in your head you could do worse than “Yellow Flicker Beat.”

What kind of jazz?

Oh, lots of stuff — Lee Konitz, Steve Lacy. I’ve been hanging around Ben Ratliff, The New York Times’ jazz critic, and he’s reignited my jones. I saw Jason Moran’s trio at the Village Vanguard a couple of weeks back. He’s still doing his Fats Waller thing — giant papier-mâché mask, looped samples. His version of “Jitterbug Waltz” brought me to tears. I was with a friend, and we had been talking earlier in the evening about our attraction to disparate accounts of the world as broken — critical theory, Christianity. I leaned across to her during the song and said, “The world is broken, but this is one of the things we do about it,” gesturing in awe at the band. She said, “And would it mean as much if the world were whole?” Which is basically the theme of the critical book I’m working on, Equipment for Living. I’m sure all that sounds ridiculous, but “Jitterbug Waltz” was incandescent and perfect that night. I bought the record, took it home, put on the studio version of the song. It wasn’t even close.

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Anahid Nersessian is an Assistant Professor of English Literature at University of California, Los Angeles. Her first book, Utopia, Limited: Romanticism and Adjustment, is forthcoming from Harvard University Press.

Michael Robbins is the author of the poetry collections Alien vs. Predator and The Second Sex, both published by Penguin. He is an Assistant Professor of English Literature and creative writing at Montclair State University. I Would Have to Wake Up Young Again: On Bay of Angels, Personal Mythology, and the Enduring Badassery of Diane Wakoski

Lynn Melnick

FOR MORE THAN TWO DECADES, a Monday has rarely passed where I haven’t thought of “Blue Monday,” Diane Wakoski’s bleak, beautiful, incantatory masterwork:

Blue of the heaps of beads poured into her breasts and clacking together in her elbows; blue of the silk that covers lily-town at night; blue of her teeth that bite cold toast and shatter on the streets; blue of the dyed flower petals with gold stamens hanging like tongues over the fence of her dress at the opera/opals clasped under her lips and the moon breaking over her head a gush of blood-red lizards …

This is the first stanza and it continues without misstep for eighty lines. Wakoski’s talent is like that: relentless, sneaky, smart.

In Bay of Angels, Diane Wakoski’s 23rd and most recent collection of poems, she continues with her career- long tropes and obsessions: love and betrayal, strong male figures and absent male figures, beauty and its shame-faced opposite. Amid references to old arms and aching knees, to the feeling that “No one listens to me. / And it doesn’t matter,” to the harsh realities of a woman growing older in our youth-obsessed culture, Bay of Angels follows the clear line that runs from the poet’s earliest books forward. This collection is probably not the place to first discover Wakoski, one of our too-often overlooked writers of this and the last century, but for lovers of the poet and lovers of poetry, it is more than worth reading where Wakoski has taken her talent. In a literary scene not unlike the Southern California of Wakoski’s youth, a scene that tends to fade out its aging starlets, Wakoski earns a read, and another.

Bay of Angels follows closely on the heels of The Diamond Dog, Wakoski’s 2010 collection, which was her first of entirely new work in over a decade. The Diamond Dog of the title is based on a nightmare Wakoski experienced as child, the memory of which follows her throughout her life and through the book. To a longtime reader of Wakoski’s work, her The Diamond Dog was a thrilling comeback, containing much of what I treasure in her poetry: the wild yet controlled chaos of uneven lines and stanzas, the vivid imagery, and the fact that she is: “Yes, still angry, / despite the beauty.”

The Diamond Dog is more directly autobiographical than much of her prior work, and Wakoski prefaces the book with an essay on her belief in “personal mythology.” Anyone who is familiar with her work, and certainly anyone who has read her essays and interviews, or, likely, any current or former students, will have heard Wakoski speak of personal mythology. She preaches it with the zeal of, well, a preacher. Her assertion is that poets are never writing autobiography in the strict sense (an idea I very much support) but are creating a myth of self in which to tell their most personal stories. “Truth teller, I am,” she writes. “But I don’t disclose my secrets easily.”

Wakoski can be very hardline about this personal mythology business; she strongly believes that there is a right and wrong way to tell one’s story. Although she has been occasionally mischaracterized as a confessional poet, she is not confessing; she has created a cast of characters that represent things she might confess. Longtime readers of Wakoski will recognize all the residents of her myth — the Motorcycle Betrayer, George Washington, and now, in Bay of Angels, The Shadow Boy (more on him later). Perhaps this cast of characters makes her books more difficult to fall into without having read the earlier books, but I suspect not. What is difficult about this adamant level of remove — and we all have it, though not always so mapped out and rigid — is that sometimes it feels deeply personal and sometimes it leaves us cold. Sometimes the structural layers and inventions are so thick, it is difficult to find our way into the emotional truth of the matter.

When it works, though, it works. One of the first Wakoski poems I ever read was “Justice is Reason Enough,” a poem, I learned in the intro of The Diamond Dog, that she first wrote in Thom Gunn’s undergraduate class! This poem tackles the death of a sibling, stares unblinking at love, loss, and incest. Wakoski has long been clear that the twin brother she refers to in the poem is imaginary, a character, a stand-in for how we wrestle with ourselves. With its ability to find truth without telling biographical truth — “Justice is/ reason enough for anything ugly …” [EI 15] — it remains one of my favorite poems of all time. And she returns to David, her invented brother, at the other end of a lifetime, when she writes, in Bay of Angels:

I myself am looking for David’s footprints in the soaked grass.

Give me the day to read A Moon and The Bonfires; then I will open the closet, still stained with mud, put on my boots. Once you get here, I’ll be ready for battle but probably not until winter will I wake up angry. For, to do so, I would have to wake up young again.

Clearly, then, “personal mythology” has been an indispensible and effective tool for Wakoski. In her intro to The Diamond Dog, Wakoski reveals some factual heartbreak from her youth that she could not speak of for years, including an unwanted pregnancy as a teenager, which ended with her giving her baby up for adoption. Instead of going the “confessional” route, she formed a way to write about her truths indirectly. I would argue that that’s what all poets are trying to do — even the confessional ones — in all of our various ways. And, as Wakoski wrote as her biographical note for many of her earlier books: “The poems in her published books give all the important information about her life.”

Over her decades-long career, Wakoski has been claimed by, or lumped in with, the Beats, the Black Mountain School, the confessional tradition, the deep image poets, and then, far too often, forgotten and ignored — like many women writing mid-century — by history and the younger poets who came after. But, no mind, because Wakoski has always stuck hard to her own beliefs and constructions and continues to write a poetry dazzlingly and maddeningly her own, regardless of what history and fashion wants to do with her, because history and fashion will do what it will. Wakoski was removed from the Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry when its second edition came out; however, Rita Dove recently included her poem “The Mechanic” in The Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry.

I discovered the poetry of Diane Wakoski when I was about 15, when I knew very little about poetry or its trends and schools. Stumbling into a thrift store near Hollywood Boulevard, I was just a fucked up kid, high as a kite, scrounging a spare 50 cents for a book. That book was Dancing on the Grave of a Son of a Bitch and it changed my life; I opened it and found myself. I’m not just talking about the subject matter, although poems from a woman’s perspective — honest, unflinching (never self-pitying) poems about sex and love, beauty and (more radical) ugliness, hurt and survival, self-loathing, class, California — all spoke to me hard. I’m talking about Wakoski’s rhythms, which felt like mine, felt like my brain talking. Suddenly poetry was also for me, was something a woman could do, and do with astonishing honesty.

When we think of poetry’s champions of feminism of the 20th century, the women who stick with us are Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, and June Jordon. Why not Diane Wakoski? Why is she not required on women’s studies reading lists, if not in the poetry curriculum? Well, because she has resisted being folded into that movement. What’s more she seems constitutionally incapable of belonging to any group. When I read interviews she’s given about feminism, about the male authority in her work, about her unwillingness to do the work of self-reflection (on why she uses the masculine pronoun: “… I’ve said this in public a million times: grammar is grammar. I don’t feel I’m being slighted as a woman because instead of saying ‘he or she’ I say ‘he …’”), she comes off more cantankerous and contrary than thoughtfully feminist or anti-feminist.

Wakoski’s work presents some challenges to feminist scholars who would have her, too. To begin with, she has often been in the thrall of the male figure — she cites her influences as male poets almost exclusively: Stevens, Williams, Koch, and O’Hara among many others. In her personal mythology we have the recurring personas of George Washington, the King of Spain, the motorcycle betrayer, her twin David. There is also the issue of male dominance in Wakoski’s worldview and her writing, which she has quite often attributed to the spotty presence, and then disappearance, of her father when she was a child. And now, in her newest book, we have the poet Matthew Dickman, to whom the whole final section of Bay of Angels is written for and inspired by. So, yes, Wakoski is most certainly a lover of men — and why shouldn’t she be? But I suspect that, beyond her reluctance to identify as a feminist or “female poet,” and in spite of her often harsh and biting criticisms of real or imagined lovers, it might be her moony-eyed and near exclusive appreciation of men as muses that has kept her out of the feminist canon.

This is ironic, of course, because sexist critics have portrayed her negatively. In Peter Schjeldahl’s New York Times Book Review review of her poetry in the 1970s, he refers to her “anti-male rage” and a “pervasive unpleasantness,” the kind of which might lend a male poet some mystique and power but in a woman could be seen as unseemly: “One can only conclude that a number of people are angry enough at life to enjoy the sentimental and desolating resentment with which she writes about it.” This is not just mid-century sexism; reading through her biography on the Poetry Foundation’s website, the Peter Schjeldahl review is quoted as if this “anti-male rage” — which, according to the website is “difficult to appreciate” — is a real thing and not a misogynist construct.

Still, I think perhaps it is this refusal to self-identify as a feminist, as well as Wakoski’s strong opposition to the overtly political in poetry, that has kept her from a feminist audience who likely would be her strongest readers. Among our female poetry heroes, I rarely hear Wakoski’s name tossed about, and too many poets have barely heard of her. What, then, besides not aligning herself with the feminist — or any — movement, has kept her out of the 20th century canon? Who can say for certain, of course, but perhaps her recurring characters, book to book, have made it difficult to attract new readers who don’t want to feel adrift. And, frankly, invisibility is just the harsh reality of women in the canon. Women seem to fall away more than men have done. If things are changing, and I hope they are, they are not changing quickly enough for Wakoski, and she — for better or worse — is not ever going to be the token female poet of any movement. And one gets the sense, of course, that she wouldn’t want to be. Sure, many might bristle at Wakoski’s refusal to classify herself as this or that on traditional terms, but, for me, discovering her work with no history or academy to bring to it, work which didn’t hide rage or sexuality, which dared to have a female speaker call herself ugly, which was unafraid to call out its longing — well, Wakoski is a feminist hero of mine, whether or not she’d care for the term or the sentiment.

Recently rereading much of Diane Wakoski’s long career, I was impressed how very much the poet is who she always is. Which isn’t to say she grows dull or less interesting with time, but she’s not bending with trend. In Bay of Angels, we find the same sprawling forms, wild lines of thought, exquisite control and focus. If the book occasionally reads more prose-like than some of her earlier work, Wakoski aims to keep reader interest through her subjects: “Watching La Femme Nikita, both film and / TV show, I found the closeted, violent enslavement / of all the characters / believable.”

As in the above quote, much of the first section of Bay of Angels focuses on movies and pop culture and, because these poems hold less music than those in the later sections, how much a reader enjoys these is going to be dependent on how much s/he enjoys pop culture. The Purple Rose of Cairo, Breathless, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer all make appearances here (and, yes, of course Wakoski is a Spike fan!). Even 50 Shades of Gray finds its way in (insert groan or “hell yeah!” here). Many of these poems celebrate youth and celebrate vices, smoking, men. These are Wakoski poems, after all, even if they seem to have been co-written with the editors of Entertainment Weekly.

Section one begins to move when it gets to the poem “Winter Solstice.” Here the poet imagines (or remembers) herself in front of the camera, as subject, and, as ever, Wakoski is at her strongest when she is in dialog with an emotional charge, when she is tangling with herself over men, over her own self image. Growing up in the shadow of Hollywood, Wakoski understands the lure of the image. This seduction moves into the second section of Bay of Angels, called “Palm Trees”: “I was for a moment the woman / on film.” Here she runs through the myth of LA glamour and the reality of the citrus grove smudge pots; here is the motorcycle betrayer again, the detailed, lush yet disciplined Wakoski poems I first fell in love with. From bell bottoms to body hatred, the poet remembers her youth and takes us through until the present, when aging is an unavoidable obsession. In “Cognac in France // --for the Motorcycle Betrayer” she writes:

Tonight, no one can see my young arms, like cobweb dusted grape skins, Monet’s water lilies, branching into their bracelets, toasting you, their shadow inside my matronly pebbled limbs.

As ever, Wakoski has a knack for making transcendent her own self-loathing, for insisting that we look at what we may not want to see, and for letting no one, not even herself, off the hook. These poems are exhilarating.

The book closes with a section entitled, “The Lady of Light Meets the Shadow Boy” in which Wakoski writes “I invented another hero recently …” She is speaking of a hockey player character newly appearing in her poems, but she could just as easily be speaking of the real-life Dickman. In one of her pre-poem notes, Wakoski relates that she is drawn to Dickman’s story, to his “personal mythology,” as she would call it, in particular because of Dickman’s loss of his brother. Although Wakoski’s brother (from “Justice is Reason Enough”) is invented and Dickman’s was a real person, the connection speaks loudly to Wakoski (“Of course I always look for patterns, connections.”), and she writes some of the strongest work in the book based on this shared grief. “David, my brother always missing,” looms as large now as he did decades ago.

Many of the poems in this last section begin with a letter to Dickman, and give him, and the reader, the background of the poem. In fact, quite a few of the poems in the book carry some kind of introduction, with the last section especially filled with them. Wakoski has always written notes to help the reader understand, not unlike what a lot of poets do at their own poetry readings, introducing each poem before it is read. Even ahead of her classic “Dancing on the Grave of a Son of a Bitch” there are paragraphs of explanation before the poem can begin. These notes have long seemed controlling to me, as well as unnecessary. There is simply no predicting or influencing how your poem will be read, and it is restrictive to expect a reader to interpret your words exactly as you would wish. It’s also impossible. The notes in Bay of Angels are increasingly invasive and I often found myself wanting to throw away all her chatter about her work and just enter the poems. Because, like some of her master poems from earlier in her career, sometimes there are lines in Bay of Angels that are so unflinching and beautiful, they make me gasp: “I have our mother’s only / attractive physical trait, her premature, / extravagantly white hair, / and look my age, having grown ragbag soft and fat / from my sedentary bookish life.”

About a week after I finished my third read-through of Bay of Angels, a friend gave me a chapbook he found at a used bookstore in Manhattan. The book, Four Young Lady Poets, was published in 1962 and published by Amiri Baraka and Hettie Jones’s Totem Press. I hadn’t heard of three of the poets — Carol Bergé, Barbara Moraff, and Rochelle Owens. I looked them up and found that each of them had gone on to a career in poetry, but in the kind of obscurity in which so many 20th-century female poets existed. The fourth woman in the chapbook is Diane Wakoski, who has managed, despite the odds, and despite the climate, to endure. Yes, she should be more well known, and yes, her influence is perhaps not credited nearly enough, but she’s still here. Reading through Wakoski’s earliest poems — like this from 1962 — was a lovely coda to reading through her most recent, and I am grateful for the span and scope of her long career:

… and because the truth is trembling on the tip of every golden, green, purple, black, magenta stamen and even the wind touches it with its tongue, passing by, but I never do, and want to, but am forbidden. Is there anyone who understands? Surely one of you with all your iron masks can throw the dice and just once let them come flower-side up so that I can hold a daffodil in my hand and smile.

¤

BOOKS QUOTED IN THIS REVIEW:

All by Diane Wakoski:

Bay of Angels, Anhinga Press, 2013 The Diamond Dog, Anhinga Press, 2010 Emerald Ice, Black Sparrow Books, 1988 Toward a New Poetry, The University of Michigan Press, 1980 Four Young Lady Poets, Totem Press, 1962

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Lynn Melnick’s first collection of poetry, If I Should Say I Have Hope, was published by YesYes Books in 2012. The Epic Art of the Haida Mythtellers

Matthew Spellberg

WHAT DID LITERATURE SOUND LIKE at the beginning, when it passed without pen or parchment between the mouth and ear? When it flourished in societies without ploughs or furnaces or seed-furrows? We can never exactly know what it meant to listen to a storyteller in an oral culture in a community of hunters. But we can get a sense of the thrill from the surviving stories: A young man paddles out to sea in a dugout canoe, disembarks onto a strand of kelp, and makes his way to a spirit-lodge on the ocean floor.

A lust-bloated Raven summons the ghost of a shaman to help him rape the village women in their sleep.

The son of a god, wearing a hat whose brim swirls with ocean waves, kidnaps a chieftain’s daughter, and is chased for two years by the girl’s mother and a shaman in a canoe dragged by a spear that has somehow become a sea otter.

These myths belong to one of the richest surviving archives of oral literature, and one of the world’s great epic traditions. They appear in Robert Bringhurst’s trilogy, Masterworks of the Classical Haida Mythtellers, a compilation of the mythology and oral poetry of the Haida, a nation of people indigenous to the Pacific Northwest. Their traditional homeland is an archipelago 100 miles off the coast of northern British Columbia, called the Queen Charlotte Islands by the British, recently renamed Haida Gwaii, or the Islands of the People, and known before the arrival of Europeans as Xhaaydla Gwaayaay, or the Islands on the Boundary between Worlds.

Bringhurst, a Canadian poet and translator, has spent the better part of a career studying the classical Haida literary tradition, and a decade translating thousands of lines of Haida myth-poetry into English. His trilogy consists of a book-length essay — A Story as Sharp as a Knife — on Haida literature, culture and ecology, and two volumes of poetry, each devoted to the corpus of a master Haida poet. These books, which deserve much greater recognition than they currently have, transmit the rich language of a long and once-flourishing poetic tradition:

After they’d travelled a ways, A wren sang to one side of them. They could see that it punctured A blue hole in the heart Of the one who passed closest to it, they say. Something about the epic tone is unmistakable, even when the context of a given story has long ago been swallowed by history. The language is mingled vitality and violence; the stakes are high and the journeys are long; the characters are debased and distinguished. These qualities, more even than their fantastical elements, mark them as belonging to that archive of epic and myth which is the deepest foundation of nearly all literary traditions.

The Pacific Northwest was home to some of the most sophisticated hunter-gatherer societies to have ever existed. Living in an environment with plentiful game and relatively mild weather, the tribes of modern- day British Columbia and coastal Alaska developed an intricate culture with large communities, impressive wooden houses, superb visual art, monumental carved poles, a complicated system of heraldry, a web of family relations, and a rich mythological heritage. Out of this complex culture emerged a remarkable literary tradition. Thanks to Bringhurst and his intellectual predecessors, it has survived the destruction of Native American civilization at least partially intact.

In fact, the pleasure of encountering these poems is made all the stronger by the unusual story of how they came to be preserved, a story which serves as a framing narrative for A Story as Sharp as a Knife.

In 1900, a 27-year-old American ethnographer named John Swanton, newly minted PhD from Harvard, junior employee at the Bureau of American Ethnology, and disciple of Franz Boas, arrived on Haida Gwaii to study the culture of the islands and collect artifacts for the American Museum of Natural History. Swanton met a younger Haida, fluent in English, named Henry Moody, who would act as his translator and entrée into Haida society. Moody was a prince under the old system, and he could bring Swanton into the most refined Haida households, or at least what remained of them. By the end of the 19th century, nine-tenths of the Haida had fallen victim to ecological destruction and disease, especially smallpox. By 1900 the ancient villages, some of the largest pre-agricultural settlements in history, were cemeteries of fallen house-poles and rotting cedar-plank lodges. The survivors of the holocaust lived in two clapboard missionary towns.

Swanton realized that transcribing stories was the most important task he could set himself to while on the islands. He was a hard worker and a patient, self-effacing listener — a man who lived for a year on Haida Gwaii “as if nothing in the world were more important than to record what a Native American oral poet wanted to say in precisely the way that poet wanted to say it.” For six hours a day, six days a week, Swanton took dictation. His Haida informants would tell their stories a few phrases at a time. Then, Henry Moody, at Swanton’s side, would repeat slowly what they had said, and Swanton would transcribe the poetry into a phonetic alphabet of Boas’ devising. The Haida spoke a language that had never existed before in writing, except as the vessel for evangelical tracts and Bible passages.

Swanton believed that stories ought to be recorded exactly as they were told, in the original language, preserving the storyteller’s vocabulary and syntax. He did not believe that there was a single version for each myth in a culture; he thought that a storyteller’s variations on a story were conscious artistic choices, not mere corruptions of the original. In this he differed from Boas and most of his colleagues, who preferred to make English prose reductions of the myths, trying to distill some elusive standard version of each story. Swanton’s Haida texts are thus some of the only unadulterated mythtellers’ works to survive the eclipse of classical North American Indian culture.

Bringhurst doubles down on Swanton’s convictions: his trilogy champions the exact words of Native American poets, and makes the sweeping claim that those words are — niceties of cultural relativism be damned — products of artistic genius. The result is a true widening of the canon of world literature.

Swanton met two literary geniuses on Haida Gwaii. These were the poets named Ghandl of the Qayahl Llaanas, baptized in English as Walter McGregor, and Skaay of the Qquuna Qiighawaay, called by the missionaries John Sky. Swanton spent more than a month with each of them, and collected long works from both.

These poets are the systole and diastole of this trilogy; the alternation between them sets the rhythm for Story as Sharp, and the two final volumes are each devoted to one of them — Nine Visits to Ghandl, Being in Being to Skaay. Their poetry is difficult in much the same way as the Iliad, Paradise Lost, or Gilgamesh — that is, difficult because it is concerned with the unending cycle of existence, both mortal and immortal. The poems are philosophy enmeshed in personification and metaphor: there are divinities that desperately seek rebirth, animals who shed their skins to talk and live as humans, paths laid with feathers, shamanic hats made from crashing ocean-waves, and a world-creating raven who is both greedy and recklessly generous.

Ghandl was blind, Skaay had a stooped back (neither uses the formulaic ending common to some traditions farther south: “my spine is straight!”). Ghandl authored tight, skillful poems; Skaay wove suites of stories into two cycles, one a creation myth and the other a sprawling epic.

But the two mythtellers shared much in common. Their poetry is sinewy, full of elision, and hypnotically repetitive. Anaphora of a sort is possibly the most important literary device, since repetition in an oral poem is an essential linking mechanism, not unlike a recurring theme in music. A sudden alteration in the mode of delivery, to continue the analogy, is like a new theme that suddenly throws the earlier repeated figure into stark relief. Repetition and variation create a recognizable relation between different parts of the story even though the listener cannot, as with a book, look backwards or forwards. Sometimes these forms play out in the language; more often they inhere in the imagery or content. It may be that a phrase is constantly repeated (“they say” is an important trope), or that an object, like an animal skin or hat, recurs in a series of slightly altered guises.

Skaay is the master of these deceptively simple devices. As written text, his poems might occasionally be mistaken as clumsy. But that’s because they have to be spoken out loud, with pauses after each clause and a real command of inflection and speech-tone:

One day he gave ten servants to the eldest of his grandsons. Then he gave ten servants to the next. He gave ten to all eight. And then he made houses for each, arranged in a row. All the housefronts were sewn.

On the eldest one’s housefront he painted a thunderbird. On the next, he painted the sealion. On the next, he painted a rainbow. On the next, he painted a killer whale.

On the next, he painted a human. On the next, he painted stars. On the next, he painted a cormorant. On the next, he painted a gull.

He presented a chest full of spears to the eldest. He gave him a box full of arrows as well. He gave the same things to all eight. And as for their sisters, He dressed each of the two In two marten-skin blankets, they say.

Then he sat down in front of his grandchildren’s town, And he called them to come. They picked up their weapons And went at each other.

These lines must be read deliberately, with an expressiveness approaching pantomime, to be fully appreciated. This is poetry as stately ritual. But the formal and numeric structures serve a literary purpose: they tell a story, explore themes, and generate gorgeous images (the whole universe enfolded into a few housefronts!). In this passage, each grandson is given his own crest and so distinguished from his brothers. But the story is packed with oblique meaning for an informed listener. Skaay is doing something very complex with both Haida metaphysics and Northwest Coast history. First off, the housefronts are “sewn” — an archaism, since they would normally have been wooden — so we know the story takes place in the deep past. The painted images display the plenitude of the universe, but perhaps also reference the heraldic signs of specific Haida families or of the neighboring Tsimshian, in whose territory the story takes place. The image-list may be the genealogy of a tribe, but it is also a lexicon of sea creatures and sky entities. This makes sense, since the sea and the sky are the two main poles of the Haida spirit-world. But what is the logic behind the order? In the first four lines, sky and sea alternate (thunderbird, sealion, rainbow, killer whale). But then comes the human: what do we do with him? In some Haida accounts, he is a “surface bird,” like the gull, who cannot dive into the ocean. But what do we make of the fact that the final totem, the cormorant, both dives into water and flies in the sky? We barely have enough time to ponder these questions when the grandfather passes out identical weapons to the eight boys, this time with no symbolic repetition — just a curt “He gave the same things to all eight.” Where before the poem had created expansive lyrical difference, now it displays the laconic parity of violence. Then, in a single, sharp line — “they went at each other” — all distinctions collapse into the chaos of war. Now it’s no longer sea and sky, man and whale. It’s all against all — although even that, it turns out, is not as it seems. In the following lines of the story the fighting turns out to have been a kind of game, everyone is basically unhurt, and the myth jumps to a different adventure.

Bringhurst is a good shepherd through the complexities of these poems — my reading of Skaay owes much to his example. His method is a hybrid: part historicist, part structuralist, part emotive. One of his best analyses is of Ghandl’s poem called In His Father’s Village, Someone Was About to Go Hunting Birds (incidentally the subject of Gary Snyder’s senior thesis at Reed).

The poem, which Bringhurst describes as a variation on the swan-maiden story, is about a hunter who falls in love with a goose princess. He brings her back to his village, but when someone insults her for liking goose food she flies away. The hunter goes on a quest to find her, meeting spirits, a prophet, the Mouse Woman, and a man with only one-half a body. He acquires and loses a series of magical tools. He shimmies up a pole into the sky and is reunited with his love. But ultimately he realizes he misses the earth and can’t stay in heaven.

Ghandl’s myths, like Skaay’s, are formally complex events, with a quasi-musical logic. They are also full of striking images, as in this little scene where the hunter, having reached the sky, comes upon a strange council of animals:

After travelling further, He came to a river. It was running high.

Near it perched an eagle. A heron perched on the opposite bank. A kingfisher perched upstream. A black bear sat on the opposite bank, And he had no claws, they say.

Then, they say, the black bear said to the eagle, “Lend me something, grandfather” Then, they say, the eagle did as he asked. Then and there the black bear got his claws.

I call the image striking because it is intended for a listener who can recall the color and shape of every feather and tuft on each of these animals. And for such a person, familiar with the fauna of the northwest, the peaked crests and claws and colors of this assembly of creatures must be as impressive as Proust’s rainbow-stippled asparagus or Melville’s lacquered Japanese sunset.

Ghandl’s work is built from careful sequences, often centered on objects (there are 10 magical tools discharged in 10 scenes; marten skins, goose skins, mouse skins and salmon skins are all constantly circulating). It is governed by symmetries of varying sizes, so regular and careful that they resemble rhymed couplets or the exposition and recapitulation of a sonata – only they are imagistic and thematic rather than aural. The kind of beauty that inheres in this story is thus like that of a classical sonata or string quartet, a series of consonances and dissonances, of anticipations and resolutions, of echoes and inversions.

According to Bringhurst, even the interlude about the black bear getting his claws, which seems so unrelated to the main story, has a musical function. A mouse-skin and claws were given away earlier in the poem, so now something else’s claws must be given back — we must return, so to speak, to the tonic key. Ghandl resolves the dilemma with an allusion: “The story of the bear getting claws from the eagle is a stock piece of North American folklore,” Bringhurst explains, “slipped into the poem like an innocent bit of folksong inserted into a string quartet or sonata.”

The comparison to a folksong in a sonata is, I think, superb, because it lends the familiar cultural context of those terms to an unfamiliar poem. Ghandl suddenly feels a little closer because a reader perceives an analogy between his artistic method and that of Mozart or Schumann. The distance between these poems and our own experience is bridged by the artistic achievements of cultures closer to our own.

The sonata-folksong method writ large is the main strategy of Bringhurst’s book, and a great achievement for comparative literature. Bringhurst treats Native American literature with the same weight as we treat the highest works of European (and, for that matter, Asian and African and Middle Eastern) civilization, and he does so by maintaining a continuous thread of comparison between the two. As we readers grope to find the compass points of our Haida literary universe, we are buttressed by a reality more familiar (if no less enigmatic), one filled with Velazquez paintings, Homeric epithets, Thelonious Monk improvisations, Schubert rondeaux, Flaubert paragraphs. References to the Western tradition (as well as, less frequently, to Arab, South Asian, Japanese and Chinese traditions) hold us in place while slowly, over the course of this book, we build in our imaginations a worthy home for Haida literature.

The approach has its opponents. Some members of the Haida nation have attacked Bringhurst for his perceived misappropriation of their culture. Linguists studying indigenous languages of the Americas have called him unprofessional (scholar John Enrico went so far as to set up an angry website pointing out Bringhurst’s failings). He has been above all criticized for his apparent use of western categories like “art” and “genius” to describe non-Western cultural practices. “Native American mythtellers living in oral cultures could not, I was told, have been as I described them,” Bringhurst writes in the preface to the second edition. “They couldn’t have been individual artists and thinkers, employing the tools and techniques of traditional narrative to overreach or question societal norms, much less to interrogate the nature of the world. They could not have been poets. It couldn’t be true — and even if it were, only their consanguineal descendants ought to be free to lay out the evidence supporting such a perverse and insensitive claim.” Bringhurst offers two arguments against such attacks, one explicit, the other implicit. The explicit argument is that these categories of respect — “artist,” “genius,” the author as critic and consummation of his culture — are in fact not limited to a European context, even if Haida and some other languages lack explicit terms for “artist” or “philosopher.” Bringhurst provides a great deal of evidence to support this, some of which will be best judged by anthropologists.

But the deeper argument is that the book’s intention is to transpose the subtleties of Haida literature onto an English speaker’s plane of thought. In other words, Bringhurst’s efforts are not only supposed to provide an introduction to Haida phonetics and literary conventions, but to help plant a deep subjective experience of Haida literature into the minds of his readers, none of whom are classical Haida living in the 19th century.

These poems were originally told in the midst of a vibrant cultural context (and, of course, were told by actual human beings with expressive voices, faces, and hands). When earlier listeners (including the go- between Henry Moody, I presume) heard about a particular species of bird or tree, or particular kind of basket or canoe, or heraldic figure or family lineage, they knew exactly what it meant. We do not have that privilege, and for that reason Bringhurst’s historical and anthropological work is almost as important as his translations. He puts in his books photographs of Haida Gwaii and of Haida carvings; he clues us into the complex ecology of the region. But even these are not enough: to really commune with these poems, we also need to understand what makes something funny in Haida culture, what makes something sad, and what makes a person proud or ashamed, upset or merely bemused. We need to know, as much as is possible after a hundred years, what kind of face (heroic? foreboding? ironic?) the storyteller was pulling.

Hence, for example, Bringhurst’s unraveling of an enigma in the Swanton transcriptions. When Skaay promises to tell Swanton his version of Raven Travelling — the Northwestern Indian creation myth — he begins with a curious misstep. He starts in medias res, telling an unimportant part of the story (it’s supposed to begin with the stealing of the sun and the creation of the world). Then Skaay’s clan chieftain jumps in, telling other bits and pieces of the story. The two Haida elders go back and forth, while the poor Swanton scrambles to keep up with his transcription. The next day, Skaay returns to Swanton and tells him that after consulting with an old woman, he’s realized that the poem should actually be told from the beginning, not the middle.

According to Bringhurst, the whole show is an elaborate joke. Skaay and his chieftain are engaging in a poetic sparring match: Skaay tells a story in which the Raven and a crew of birds trip up Xhyuu, the Southeast Wind, with a bunch of halibut tails. Xhyuu is also the name of the chieftain sitting in the room, and the halibut tails are a playful jab. He jabs back by interrupting Skaay and telling his own tale in which the raven takes the form of a shriveled old man, that is, of Skaay himself. Bringhurst calls this exercise a “Flyting,” the name for an exchange of insults between poets, once practiced in Scotland and in the early Anglo-Saxon world. He also compares the duet to the structured improvisation of the 12-bar blues. In a schematic diagram of this Flyting, he uses convincingly the words “strophe” and “antistrophe” to describe the recitations of Skaay and Xhyuu. Everywhere his comparisons are circumscribed by qualifiers — the mythpoets don’t directly attack each other, as in an actual Flyting, the pulse of mythtelling is much less temporally strict than in a jazz improvisation. But these qualifications only enhance the function of these comparisons as tools for subjective comprehension: gradually our notion of a Haida literary exchange takes on weight from the collage of different images — three quarters of a Flyting, one-tenth of a blues solo, a drop of the Virginia reel, just the faintest echo of the Greek Chorus.

Bringhurst is a literary critic in the high Romantic mode. His claims for literature and art are cosmic in scale. He writes on the Haida as Schelling might have, or Walter Pater or Northrop Frye. This will not suit all temperaments, and even I admit that there are times when I find the drama of his writing disproportionate. Moreover his work occasionally walks an uneasy line between ecstasy at the brilliance of the poetry and indignation at the neglect it has suffered. There are moments — and they are for the most part very brief moments — when a nagging, superior voice intrudes on the best defense of this tradition, which is its beauty.

But much is gained by the drama of Bringhurst’s writing, for when a new concept is first planting itself in the mind, it must often appear swollen and urgent, impossible to ignore. Only that way does a reader come to appreciate how much is at stake, and only then can he or she proceed to whittle down the idea until it corresponds exactly to the reality it is trying to shape or describe. Should more books on the Haida follow Bringhurst’s into the (relative) mainstream, doubtlessly some of his conclusions will be revised. But this is as it should be: the plant has to grow before it can be pruned.

We might hope that eventually Haida literature will stand alone without need of all these comparisons. But even the transcriber John Swanton felt he needed to touch one foot to more familiar ground to make clear how great these poems really were. In a letter to Boas, he wrote, “Haida mythology, I want to state here, can not be defined as animal worship. The Haida pantheon was decorated just as lavishly as the Roman, and they seem even to have risen to the level of an Olympian Jove.” The Haida spirit-beings, of course, have no Olympus; they prefer the top of the sky and the bottom of the sea. But to follow them there is no easy feat, especially since the old ladders leading up and down have been cruelly cut away. Until they can be fully rebuilt, borrowed ones made from foreign metals will have to suffice.

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Matthew Spellberg is a graduate student at Princeton. Anthropoetry

Juan Felipe Herrera

IN RENATO ROSALDO’s The Day of Shelly’s Death, the inner and outer elements of the poem — that is, the poetics of eyes, notes, hearts, bodies, and voices, and the whispers, murmurs, shouts, grief-howls, and body-mind-word implosions — trace out, like bullets, from what he calls the “irruption,” the “event”: his wife and research partner Shelly Rosaldo’s fatal fall from a cliff in an Ilongot village of the Northern Philippines on October 11, 1981. These “tracings,” as Rosaldo calls them, collect, rewind, re-speak, and reveal, and make us feel as if he is still walking back and forth, staring at the crumbling rim of an irrigation trough, in the barrio of Mungayang, town of Kiangan, Ifugao province, on the day Shelly fell to her death.

Shelly and Renato had been there before, doing ethnographic research on the Ilongot in Kakidugen: for three years, 1967-’69, and again in 1974. Shelly was most interested in the notions and practices of oratory in settling disputes. Her work culminated in Knowledge and Passion: Ilongot Notions of Self and Social Life (Cambridge University Press, 1980), and Renato authored Ilongot Headhunting, 1883-1974: A Study in Society and History (Stanford University Press, 1980). Here, among other things, he contested the prevalent notions in the field of anthropology and on the rest of the island of Luzon — the common view that Ilongot peoples lacked a history — by setting out on a trek to uncover and cover Ilongot accounts of the changes they had witnessed through generations.

Somehow all this — the half-century of research, the fierce anthropological debates, the oratorical prowess of the Ilongots, the entrance into headhunter territories, the foibles and successes of Renato Ethnographer, his meditations, most of all his heart-fired eyes and tear-fed years and his return as poet-speaker nourished by losses and wounds and findings and love — all of it comes to full form in this chorale of tellings, this daybook, this book of “The Day,” broken, re-figured, and lived again.

Yet The Day of Shelly’s Death is not confessional, nor romantic, the work is not text-centered nor a set of language-to-language Legos as the old arguments in good old poetry used to go. This text is revolutionary; it presents another way, a new way of making poetry matter. Here Rosaldo performs — almost three decades past George E. Marcus and Michael M.J. Fischer anticipated the same in their groundbreaking volume, Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences — a site where “ethnographic field work and writing have become the most lively current arena of innovation.” Rosaldo lays out a new map — a poetics he calls antropoesía, a verse soft-rooted in the human condition. And he makes a great case for it in the next-to-last chapter, “Notes on Poetry and Ethnography.” The handsome photographs of the village speakers opening the book, taken by Rosaldo, reappear in its second half. In a sense, they compress the narrative and flip back to the end point of his 1981 field notes, only to appear here as a hybrid anthropoetry, along with penciled sketches, maps, re-drawings of the trail to the cliff. In this shadowy realm of the poem-walk, these images are more like body imprints of a place, space, partner, self; of sheared flesh and of a coming together of two bodies, Renato and Shelly, or four, Renato, Shelly, and their children, Sam and Manny, who were present, or five, with the Ilongot, or six with Luzon, itself. Text and the earth and the “human condition.” We are all there.

The poems stand individually and are threaded to each other. The people in the village speak — the taxi driver, the soldier, the nun, the body carrier. Each one comments, each one is a witness to the “irruption.”

Wagat, married to Tukbaw, speaks of her husband:

He orates through the night, his oblique, flowery speech soothes bruised feelings, tires him. He does for others what he doesn’t do for me.

Tukbaw responds:

Does she think oratory nothing but speaking? I listen for what’s hidden, call out the hearts of others

Each one appears with dignity, unfinished, yet whole. The wholeness is everywhere — the charts, the maps, the death certificate, the “notes.” This is what makes Rosaldo’s book, his third of poetry, a masterpiece.

At the edge, near the end of the book, “The Cliff” speaks:

but I am blamed though I never wanted this day of lamentation.

No matter where we fall or rise or rest in this collection, we cannot escape the heart, the rage, the compassion, the 32-year trail of introspections and transformations, the multivoiced reverberations, re-cuerdos, re- tracings, and documentations of one Day made of many days, of one loss, made of many losses, and one finding: that is, what it is to grieve, with force and love, what it is to be taken by the unexpected rush of creative transport, with its all-life outpourings made of all things inside us and around us — and now with us in this paradigm-shifting volume.

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Juan Felipe Herrera is the Poet Laureate of California. The Charges

M.P. Ritger

I come from people who held slaves, and people who were put in ovens. So I have a sense there is very little one human being won’t do to another. — Jorie Graham in Harvard Magazine, 2001

BY TITLING her new selected poems From the New World, Jorie Graham has done a brave thing. In the title poem, the speaker, who is identified as Jorie (or “not Jorie,” since her aging grandmother is slipping into dementia), makes an audacious comparison: she likens the experience of locking herself in a bathroom to being trapped in a gas chamber during the Holocaust.

Her reflection is held in the mirror in the nursing home bathroom “as by a gas, / the thing which was with me there in its chamber,” which recalls the poem’s opening:

Has to do with the story about the girl who didn’t die in the gas chamber, who came back out asking for her mother. Then the moment — the next coil — where the guard, Ivan, since the 50’s an autoworker in Cleveland, orders a man on his way in to rape her.

Reading poems like “From the New World,” I can see why Graham’s most serious critics find her political poetry underwhelming, and even unethical. The poem is frustratingly and purposefully unclear about the speaker’s relationship to “the girl” — is this really just a traumatic story that “not Jorie” has remembered while being forgotten by her grandmother? Does the girl turn out to be the grandmother? Would it be acceptable to appropriate a family narrative, but not a historical one? Did Graham really just compare the face in the mirror to a face in a gas chamber?

The bad taste can be breathtaking, even when it’s precisely this bad taste that the poem dramatizes, and at which it points an insistent finger.

Like what, I wonder, to make the bodies come on, to make room, like what, I whisper, like which is the last new world, like, like, which is the thin young body (before it’s made to go back in) whispering please.

I can understand the superficial likenesses of the puns, how the “clasp” (handshake) in the court room becomes the “clasp” (metal fastener) on the grandmother’s purse, how the “click” of the poet’s camera-like eye is the “click” of the grandfather’s telephone line going dead. But the comparison at the center of the poem, between Graham and “the girl,” makes a substantially different leap.

Context helps: The poem, narrated by “not Jorie,” is taken from her 1991 collection Region of Unlikeness; the title is a two-pronged reference to St. Augustine’s Confessions and (the great “confessional”) Robert Lowell’s first book, Land of Unlikeness. In 1991, “Ivan” would also have been more easily recognizable as Ivan the Terrible, the Nazi war criminal who was tried in a sensational double trial — first in a case of mistaken identity, for crimes he didn’t commit, then under his actual identity, for the ones he did.

Thus, Graham’s provocative comparison reverses itself. Even while she asks “the bodies” of historical traumas to “come on” like a TV news broadcast, Graham shows precisely how callous it is to create an aesthetic experience to which traumas are marginal, turn-off-able: We forget. We look away. We empathize too easily, then not at all.

Graham makes us feel how our own daily experiences are predicated on the suppression of traumas like the one that “Has to do with the girl,” even while the aesthetic experiences we seek are so often tragedies: “God knows I want the poem to continue,” she writes, “want the silky swerve into shapeliness / and then the click shut / and then the issue of sincerity.”

The “issue” of sincerity is the topic, the controversy, and the progeny: the girl who returns, “looking for her mother”; the poet who returns from “not Jorie” to “go back in,” looking for her grandmother, and for the poem to continue.

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Can poetry post-Auschwitz or poetry for Auschwitz ever continue, as Adorno reminds us? On this issue, Graham has succeeded (“Two Poems by Gustav Klimt,” one of her best) and failed (“From the New World”), but she has never backed down from facing the challenge, or from fully inhabiting the implications of failure — hers, and ours, both. She can make her reader see

right and wrong like pools of shadow and light you can step in and out of crossing this yellow beech forest, this buchen-wald,

one autumn afternoon, late in the twentieth century, in hollow light, in gaseous light. … (“Two Paintings by Gustav Klimt”)

Buchen means book: this is a book world, not Buchenwald, not the beech forest nor the concentration camp, and Graham knows it. Her poetry is self-aware about everything it risks — seeming to exploit these narratives for the sake of the seriousness of her poetry; seeming to obscure some internally coherent morality, simply for provocation. The harder you read Graham’s poems, the more self-aware they seem. But does this acute self- awareness make the poetry ethical, or more insidiously un-ethical? I’m not sure I know. “The Dream of the Unified Field,” the title poem from Graham’s previous selection, left off with a rewritten portion of Columbus’s diary that (merely, or bravely) alluded to the entire future of the “new world”: theft, genocide, slavery. The implications of that ending were sickening and hair-raising, but only gestured toward, and thereby more to the tastes of most readers. With the title poem of her second selection, Graham seems to suggest she is writing to us from that history-ridden, warming, revolting New World. She’s gone all the way in.

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From the New World is an opportunity to reassess the achievement of a poet who, for the past 40 years, has whipped like a gale-force wind across the landscape of American letters. Graham has published 11 volumes of poetry, taught at the Iowa Writers Workshop, and been showered in praise and in prizes (which include a Pulitzer and a MacArthur grant). She now holds Harvard’s prestigious Boylston poetry chair. Despite all the grumblings about her “privilege” and what Dwight Garner (in The New York Times) recently called her “occasional interest in marginal lives,” Jorie Graham is an institution.

If Graham has a fault, it is that she has sometimes, as in the poem “From the New World,” allowed her conceptual points to run roughshod over her poetry’s quality. This is increasingly the case in the books that coincide by no coincidence with the Bush years — Never, Overlord, Sea Change. Her ecological worrying can devolve into hectoring, and her philosophical questing can rip past a reader’s patience too easily when her concepts and her administrations to sensed experience aren’t subtended by formal rigor.

And yet, reading From the New World, and especially Graham’s earlier work, I am reminded of her unparalleled capabilities. I firmly believe that Graham’s is the best poetry written in English in the last 40 years.The achievement of her verse is not only to make something happen: Graham’s poetry is something happening.

Consider the first sentence of the poem “Noli Me Tangere,” from her career-defining collection The End of Beauty (1987).

The angels have come to sit on the delay for a while, they have come to harrow the fixities, the sharp edges of this open sepulcher, they have brought their swiftnesses like musics

down to fit them on the listening.

The characteristic way her prepositions coordinate abstract noun-phrases might seem worthy of an eye-roll: How could angels sit on “the delay”? What is “the delay” supposed to mean? But that resistance is exactly what the poet wants to activate — it’s the same resistance to abstract thought we still capture with the colloquial question: how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?

Already we must be puzzling out the poem’s ekphrastic relationship to the tradition of Noli me tangere paintings in Christian iconography, even while reveling in the phenomenal pleasure of Graham’s incongruous combinations: “Harrow the fixities,” for example. Harrow, with such deep troughs of sound and connotation, makes the fricative rapidity of “fixities” shine. And then the conceptual fugue of “swiftnesses like music” contrasts so rightly with the grounding of “down,” set back to the left margin, on its own one line.

As usual in a Graham poem, several dense and abstract sentences later, we get a fairly clear encapsulation of a physical, suburban experience that could be said to “ground” the piece: the poet is watching some birds fit themselves through a chain-link fence: “I’ve watched all afternoon how the large / red birds here / cross and recross […] the gaps that constitute our chainlink fence.” There will be birds. But the birds “fit” themselves “onto” the previous images with an unsettling intelligence: like the Biblical figures who want to touch Christ to believe that he is really risen, who want to put their fingers into his wounds to prove that he’s there, the birds too push themselves in and through the fence, as the poet too wants to push this mundane image “Out of the light which holds steel and its alloys, / into the words for it like some robe or glory.”

Mary Magdalene’s doubt-in-faith and faith-in-doubt is now fully inhabited as an inter-permeable metaphor for the poet’s knowing of the physical world: “She wants to put her hands in, / she wants to touch him.” Christ resists being known even as the world (represented, of course, by birds) resists the poet.

And because Jorie Graham has always been as much an epistemologist and a phenomenologist as a poet, it is precisely in the world’s resistance to being known or shown that she finds her drama:

I have seen how the smoke here inhabits a space in the body of air it must therefore displace,

and the tree-shaped gap the tree inhabits, and the tree-shaped gap the tree invents. Siren, reader, it is here, only here, in this gap

between us, that the body of who we are to have been emerges: imagine: she lets him go, she lets him through the day faster than the day […]

There is an ineffable beauty accessible through thinking about “the body of who we are” (present indicative tense) “to have been” (the past participle but also the conditional perfect, parse-able as who we were meant to be, who we might still become) as it “emerges” — an emergence made possibly only as she “lets go.” If this is not poignant to you, as a person trying to understand experience or empathy, or as a writer trying to understand how writing shapes these possibilities, I don’t know what could be.

Graham’s power is to make the formal closure of poetry feel, line by line, increasingly and freshly unsatisfactory for a world so open, and therefore to make the reader yearn for that formal closure even more desperately:

until you have to leave her be if all you have to touch her with is form. (“Noli Me Tangere”)

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What about form? If Graham’s greatest effect is the sensation that poetry is happening, that perception and feeling and intellection are all being registered in real time, how does she produce this effect, formally?

Her hallmark is not the long line, though that was for many years the careless assertion. The rapt sensitivity of her verse has always been achieved by shifting drastically between line lengths and switching rapidly between theories of the line break, so that her poetry can register not only rhythm but rate (and can mime the juxtaposition between historical time and human experience, which she’s always working over). Consider a segment from another Graham poem where the intimate eclipses the apocalyptic, “What the End is For” (1987):

you refused. Until I couldn’t rise out of the patience either any longer to make us take possession. Until we were what we must have wanted to be: shapes the shapelessness was taking back.

The breaks in the shortest lines work to articulate different semantic possibilities within the sentence: she either cannot “make us” anymore, or she can’t “make us take possession” anymore. “Take possession” on its own line is an imperative: inside the sentence declaring that the speaker is giving up is a sentence imploring her listener to take hold.

Then the poem does just that: the longer lines reverse to the oracular, the breath-regulated. One version of what “shapes the shapelessness” (the mind) is being “taken back” while another (the breath) takes over. Graham’s brilliance can be dizzying.

Of course, we should note that while the “shapes” are the speaker and her partner in the falling darkness, we have also learned earlier in the poem that “shape” is a military term for a practice bomb. It turns out that the end of a relationship is being compared to the beginning of nuclear war, in the Graham manner.

The poems in her most recent collection, PLACE, should make it obvious, but the poems in her greatest books — Erosion, The End of Beauty, Region of Unlikeness — always worked by strafing the drifts of her long lines with short bursts, by flicking back and forth between pauses for the breath and enjambments for the mind, and by retaining a skeleton of anaphora on which to pin her fluttering, bizarre phrases (“Until… Until…”). And what those poems achieve is an experience: experience in itself.

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The only poet I can compare to Graham is G.M. Hopkins. What Graham did to the open field with semantics, Hopkins did to formal verse with sound: her sprung-rhythm is the sprung-rhythm of the mind, but the idiosyncratic “charge” it creates is not unlike his. Both these poets create poems that are not separate from experience, sealed off in formal wonder, but are experience: “charged with grandeur,” as Hopkins wrote, “charged with forgetfulness,” as Graham wrote — and as she would be sure to make us feel, “after” him.

When we are reading too quickly or not carefully enough, it can seem that Graham is forgetful, of her place and her privilege. This is especially ironic, since she has charged her own poetry with the power and responsibility of remembering everything — history, politics, ecology, and every detail of sensed experience. But like Hopkins, Graham’s work will withstand its occasional misunderstandings, and her poems will find the readers they deserve: those willing to work with all their capacities — empathic, imaginative, analytic — to interrogate experience.

We will always need to read Jorie Graham, and to read her closely, if we want to understand the last 40 years of poetry in America (as well as abroad, where her reputation is only growing), and if we want to experience that poetry’s formal innovations, moral questions, and polarizing effects. From the New World, a perhaps too ruthless but discerning selection, is now the place to start.

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M.P. Ritger is a lecturer in the English department at Cornell University.