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[REVIEW] BLUE COLLAR BALTIMORE: NEW AMERICAN REALISM, paintings by Tony Shore

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Taking Your Shit | Tony Shore

REVIEW BY M. SULLIVAN

“They don’t photograph well,” Tony Shore says, laughing, “so I need to get people in front of them.” Looking at the image printed on the press release, then looking at the work itself, it’s easy to see how right he is. Each work is done on black velvet. A harsh source of light softly diffuses to an edge of darkness where it is swallowed into an all-consuming black such that the scenes appear to float as in a vacuum or in a memory. A photo does little to adequately present this reality. The depth and richness of the black velvet, the precision of texture, and the fineness of expression are dimmer if not completely lost in the photocopy. But to truly see these works—they engulf you and are beyond compare.

BLUE COLLAR BALTIMORE: NEW AMERICAN REALISM, shown at the Ethan Cohen Gallery, is a culmination of fourteen years of work that demonstrates Shore’s understanding and love of working-class Americans, as well as his dedication to a medium few have practiced and even fewer have mastered. The subjects Shore chooses are often the downtrodden or the violent, and his use of chiaroscuro evokes the same emotive theatricality of a Caravaggio. The result is a series of works that often feel like tonally darker relatives to the Ashcan School’s oeuvre. But Shore’s signature use of black velvet takes these two styles to their relevant extremes. While velvet is a hallmark of the low-brow, amplifying his subjects’ societal standings, the velvet also absorbs more light than traditional oils or acrylic, allowing Shore’s shadows to be considerably darker. The already dramatic lighting is heightened even more and the physical and emotional realities of the people depicted become more poignant. All the same, the otherwise understated features and ordinary settings stave off any sense of melodrama.

Dialysis | Tony Shore

Three of the paintings form a mini-series of their own: Vacancy, Duke’s Motel, and Date. The first shows the namesake motel off of Pulaski Highway in Baltimore and the latter two depict interiors of rooms at the motel. In the first interior scene, the composition is pushed to the top of the velvet and the bottom is left black, forcing you to look up. A man with a pot-belly and a red trucker cap reclines in the bed on the right, relaxing, while a woman sits on the bed to the left, taking off her shoes. The purely black expanse of the painting remains impossible to ignore, overwhelming you with its brazen emptiness, and provoking an uneasy feeling bordering on anxiety.

The second interior is similar, though, with marked differences. There is graffiti on the wood-paneled walls, the bed on the right is empty, the man is naked, a little smug, and even though the woman sitting on the bed with him is almost entirely in silhouette, her stare is unmistakably blank, and her slightly parted lips reveal her disquiet.

Shore mentions that Date was inspired by his Uncle Jimmy, who knew every prostitute in Baltimore. “Uncle Jimmy’s Harem,” they called it. But Shore is not casting judgment when he says this. And I notice that in both these paintings the lamp glowing on the nightstand between the beds creates a halo-like light around the women, elevating them from sinful to angelic.

Date | Tony Shore

When he talks, Shore is very convivial. Holding a pale ale and wearing jeans and a gray flannel, he is an ambassador for the everyman he portrays as well as a relief in a roomful of finely-dressed art-scene regulars. When asked about his work, he focuses on the hours he commits, the quality he pursues, the unrepeatability of his paintings, and the difficulties he endures. In particular, he emphasizes how unforgiving velvet is—how he can’t correct, how he’s thrown out works that were three-quarters of the way finished simply because there’s no way to change them, and how highlights are achieved by painstakingly building up layers and layers of paint. Because of all these drawbacks, he imposes constraints on himself in an effort to ease the pains, meticulously planning each piece. He says it all causes him a lot of stress and jokes that copycats are welcomed “if they’re willing to put up with the shit I put up with.”

Working with constraints naturally causes stylistic choices that Shore otherwise may not have intended or pursued. Referring to the painting Glass Upholstery, he tells us that the puddle reflecting the neon light was actually less strictly planned and that it was freeing to paint. Within the water’s wake, we see some of Shore’s more instinctive tendencies—the swifter brush strokes, the murkier colors.

The scene was staged for Glass Upholstery, though not all of the paintings were. Shore gestures to the disturbing fight scene, Fucked-Up, and says people tell him he’s horrible for just standing there and painting it. Learning that there are staged scenes may seem surprising, may seem to contradict the fact that it’s realism. In fact, Shore goes on to further alter what he sees, blending key features from separate photos to achieve a truer, more intensely real composition. “Her hand was originally flared out, and I put it in her pocket,” Shore says, to give an example.

The emerging ambiguity between what was and what is shown is inescapable in the exhibit. In Dialysis, is the man straining to sit or to stand? is Aunt Nellie crying, yawning, smiling? In Taking Your Shit, the red and blue glare of police lights blend together and form a haze over the scene as two youths begin to fight, suggesting what may happen next, but still leaving it unresolved. A painting has no end, after all, and, unlike a novel or a poem, it cannot have an end. All of these snapshots, these glimpses of limned figures, are merely beginnings. When we look at them they stir in us interpretations but, unmistakably, whatever we feel we know, nevertheless, remains unknown.

Though, what would realism be without that sense of ambiguity which like an ineffable fixture accompanies us in our own daily lives? Where there is sadness, there once was joy that lingers still, where there is ugliness, there is an unappreciated beauty, and where clarity appears, there is also newly revealed obscurity.

 

Blue-Collar Baltimore: New American Realism will be on view at Ethan Cohen Fine Arts,  October 17 – November 16, 2019. Learn more about the artist. 

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M. Sullivan lives in Brooklyn.

[REVIEW] Slow Dance Bullets by Meaghann Quinn

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(Route 7 Press, 2019)

REVIEW BY GAIL DIMAGGIO

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Meaghan Quinn’s first book Slow Dance, Bullets opens with Withdrawal and closes with How to Forgive Yourself. Between those poles, the poems re-enact a pain-filled journey in language both contemporary and timeless, commercial and sacred. The speaker fasts on Snapple and Mentos, her brothers dip hands into “urinals of holy water”, spring pushes green leaves “up through horse shit” and death won’t hurt as much if we just keep moving. Throughout, Quinn’s voice is as lyrical as a spinning tire swing, as sensuous as a razor blade.

While the journey includes addiction and recovery, it is not defined so much by that contemporary tale as a more primal story: a girl tossed out of paradise, naked and nameless trying to remake the world and herself out of nothing. A sense of sin, it turns out, provides the rocky foundation for identity. In this world, the speaker is one of the “lost kids” who become “something and nothing up there on the cliff/perched over water.”

The poem “A Childhood” combines the sanctified language of Catholicism with the ritualized motion of the pantoum into an eerie sense of constant motion never advancing. Between the first and last stanza, the speaker loses her identity as the obedient girl who took Communion and blessed her dolls and is transformed into a stranger who wraps those dolls in plastic and blames God for the rain. “The babysitter hurt me,” she tells us and then “the babysitter hurt the girl in the white ranch,” and by the time the “baby sitter left, no one knew me.”

For a long time, the speaker searches for someone to lead her home, to lead her back to the “blow up pool.” The few adults turn out to be distracted or beside the point—her beloved mother picking up “cig buts flicked by the sad uncles.” A professor knocking back Tequila shots and conjugating, “the verb to be/ like I knew what it meant to be sum, es, est.” For the rest, she learns what it means “to be” from other ‘lost kids’: “sitting cross-legged…./Rubinoff bottles balanced between our thighs.” And “older girls (who) pushed us out of cars/pretended to brand our feet.” And her brothers: Cain and Abel she calls them, adored and energized and in love with danger.

Cain

even now grinning

under the clothesline

 

waiting to be oiled like

the smooth grooves of a gun

waiting to be triggered.

Increasingly, she searches for transformation in some sexual blood sacrifice as in Construction Sites, where she “wanted them to notice me/ to pin me down/ to beast me into/something I wasn’t//& so I stepped on a nail,” let a boy “carry me like a slain sheep.” She seems to be trying to see if she can make a life and a self out of the religion of sexuality and a sense of sin.

& wasn’t this my entryway into identity

my right to know how wrong this all was because

 

we were running the risk of getting caught….

 

& how even now I’m dreaming of hearing

a tattered mouth suck on a thigh of salvation….

One after one, she turns to her lovers, most of them as lost and suffering as she is: girl in the parking lot/behind McCaffery’s Pub, the girl from the Irish Bar, the soldier in “Camp Le Jeaune” “eyes like a shard of shrapnel.” Each human contact wrapped in pain and promising pain, no available escape but “Escapism.” The journey heads down into the drowning waters of addiction. In “I Don’t Remember Making My Confirmation,” the speaker tells us that she now “feels God in my chest/when I stand sauced//buzzing before the altar”.

Quinn’s poems make it clear that the chance of survival is as random as the chance of addiction. That not everyone finds a companion who sat all night beside the speaker, whose “unholy face [is smashed] against the tiles.” A companion with the wisdom not to ask why she “takes the same thing/they use at zoos to put elephants to sleep.” Another who will paddle out to sea “just as the sky turns neon” and is willing to let her be the one to say whether they stay or turn back.

Of course, in the end, salvation—spiritual or mundane—remains mysterious. These poems are too wise and too honest to pretend we can know what makes it possible for a “lost kid” to accept life, “to learn the hard way that there is nothing/poetic about death.” To decide “to be.”

 

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Gail DiMaggio is the author of Woman Prime, selected by Jericho Brown for the 2018 Permafrost Poetry Prize published by Alaska University Press. Her work has appeared most recently in Salamander, Slipstream, The Tishman Review, and elsewhere. She lives and writes in Concord, NH.

I get dirty, you get clean: on Teresa Pepi’s L|in|P;L|in|D;L-o

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WORDS BY ANDY MARTRICH

“Le temps et le monde et la personne ne rencontrent qu’une seule fois.”

– Hélène Cixous, Dedans

 

In the 1996 novel Pussy, King of the Pirates, which is a rendering of Treasure Island, Kathy Acker documents the exploits of a timeless Antigone as a surrogate of Stevenson’s protagonist Jim Hawkins. Through a mesh of narrative voices, Acker disputes the validity of time as a categorical imperative, suggesting that its necessity in the adventure of “buccaneers and buried gold” is coupled with its role in sustaining a patriarchal dogma that inflicts trauma indefinitely:

 

Out into the future, what will be time. In this arena between timelessness and time, the most dangerous thing or being that can come into being is time. (68)

 

The present, as the embodiment of a certain perniciousness, contains traces of its assemblage alongside the implication of its intactness. Although this appears intrinsic to its archival disposition (i.e., as a palimpsestic record), this symbiosis likewise connotes its fragility, since that which appears dynamic (as the result of things having happened) only does so by both succumbing to and imposing limitations that are otherwise transitory. Acker presents this idea in a narrative continuum, where things documented aren’t necessarily taking place within a chronology. Compliance to time refracts as the indulgent rationality and morality of a particular (male) sympathy. As an impetus filtered through privilege, it adheres to deep-seated preoccupations with rules that have the semblance of coming from nowhere, yet are blindly reiterated by cryptic authority.

Teresa Pepi’s L|in|P;L|in|D;L-o (Gauss PDF, 2015) confronts time as a similar snare, albeit with born-digital connotation. Contextually, Pepi makes use of Gauss PDF’s blog format (i.e., Tumblr) and publishing structure, which enables one to present files in lieu of normative art/poetry productions, allowing for the construction of new models and the supplementing of older ones. L|in|P;L|in|D;L-o is a zip file containing three Microsoft Word documents and forty-six jpegs. Most of the files are labeled by page number (although some pages are missing) and a succinct, generic title. The blog post itself contains a preface/personal note, which cites grim indicators. Even before opening the zip file, time is characterized in a reductive sense as the brutality of entropic order that portends an interior agony. It simultaneously coerces interiority while encompassing it, granting it an exploitative creative omnipotence. Yet, in lieu of its sinister, violent, and powerful character, time is susceptible to its own deterioration; it’s in disassociation from time (perhaps in its complete decay) where we might slip its terror.

The initial document in the zip file contains a poem titled “Drive.” There’s a loose employability, as it (along with the other two Word documents) is left to the possibility of editing, changing, and even redistribution. It also provides anatomical continuity to ideas expressed in the preface by reflecting the implied malleability of an “inbetween”—an undecidability that churns within an association of certain dualities (e.g., clean/dirty, health/disease, identity/anonymity, etc.). The poem is rant-like, while at the same time incurring a detached lucidity:

 

What do I look like, I don’t look like anything

 

the vehicle is the window, time is the window

 

drive to become clean, but you need to change

 

I am the window, I get dirty, you get clean

I enter the crowd

 

the bacteria entered the window pretending to be clean, the new space is diseased

 

locate the disease, find the source

 

trace the trail

 

but now yourself is diseased

 

you yourself must go through a window

to get clean

 

[…]

 

the window through the window to be clean, time through time to undo it

 

“Driving” expresses an active energy—a propulsion through time and space within a place of confinement (i.e., the fragile interior of a vehicle). In general, it connotes inadequate escape, as it can only reframe the complications at the core of locality; one inherently brings one’s own time and space into the time and space of others. There’s mutual exchange of contamination (the worst things have already infiltrated), yet Pepi must get through the window, identified as both the self and time, in order to avoid all corruption. Pepi must access the intermediacy of contrasting conditions.

“Driving” is followed by an unsettling jpeg titled “Multiple Revisions (1),” an image of text scrawled on a wall in a dark room. Here, Pepi refers to time as “an absence,” which suggests that withdrawal from it can’t be as linear as a process of driving:

In lieu, unhinging from time requires a kind of presence. The revision of Pepi’s “motives” rescinds the proclamation that one must propel into the “inbetween,” but rather dive beneath it. This idea is bolstered by three “Lint Paintings,” minimal portraits of a small gradient immersed in a vacant landscape. The lint paintings impress contemporaneous releasing/compressing—as if floating in a vacuum, or drifting into a kind of microcosmic, isolated realm. They appear to be topographical, delineating the locality of time as it occurs in hypothetical blankness as a speck of dust. Time (as lint) is small, gray, and spectral—yet connotes a portal out of scale, a puncture leading to material abyss. Eyes are drawn to it; one follows and resides in it.

Sure enough, we next encounter Pepi on the inside, or rather in the “Inbetween Space,” the first of three jpegs depicting a process of self-burial. “Inbetween Space 1” is an image of Pepi half-buried in the ground, reaching out to a nearby wall with dirt-caked fingers. Pepi appears trance-like, as if in communion or contact with something otherworldly. There is heavily contrasted golden light and deep shadow, with the latter descending through Pepi to the wall. Again, we come upon muddling dualities (e.g., light/dark, hidden/exposed, etc.), represented here by Pepi’s body. This is followed by “Inbetween Space 2,” an extreme close-up of the unoccupied hole, suggesting the reversal or disorienting of time, perhaps the effect of Pepi’s transfer, as self-burial takes place out of sequence (“Inbetween Space 3,” which shows a blurry figure (likely Pepi) digging the hole, is found at the end of the zip file).

With Pepi wedged in the gateway, L|in|P;L|in|D;L-o flickers in and out of time’s sadism, where technological authorities—including language—start deteriorating. Duration is in a process of annulment, affecting any kind of historic regulation. In a note to J. Gordon Faylor (publisher of Gauss PDF), Pepi comments:

There’s this thing in which one’s own personal life is allowed to make sense only through addressing the past without an image of it. You can’t have legal documents in other words. So I had to make them up.

One refracts former and prospective selves, experiences, relationships, and traumas into an imageless void. Indeed, Pepi constructs legal documents from this space—fabricated legalese composed of garbled text and symbols, perhaps reminiscent of spam, code, or found language. Legal documents are situated around the jpeg of the hole, connoting an extraterrestrial (non)communication via mystical expression or an arcane symbology (although rendered through a familiar filetype) from the “Inbetween Space” itself:

With the thread of authoritative evidence in peril, the delusion of the rule-based self-as-result is confounded by the breakdown of time. The legal documents are the last “texts” we see. There’s no longer a language, or any device for that matter, through which to recognize time’s jurisdiction. Pepi articulates its absence in a hiccuping continuum of digital photographs. Easily the most extensive part of L|in|P;L|in|D;L-o, thirty-nine of its forty-six jpegs are dedicated to a nearly identical shot—what Pepi refers to as “Overhead Light,” a ceiling fan and lamp framed from the same angle in varying light and shadow. The images are for the most part labeled in order (i.e., “Overhead Light 1,” “Overhead Light 2,” etc.), aside from a few missing numbers in the sequence. Yet like the “Inbetween Space” photos, they don’t seem to follow any particular duration beyond how they appear arranged in the zip file.

Many of the images include ghostly backscatter, implying spectral presences. One gets the sense of claustrophobic domesticity—that of being trapped or hiding in a room. The repetition and eeriness of a common household object suggests something conspiratorial at play, drawing parallels to Lynch/Frost’s use of the ceiling fan at the Palmer house in Twin Peaks, which is cryptic enough for fans of the show to speculate numberless roles, although most certainly embodying an essential function regarding the on-going violence, trauma, and ghoulishness of the series’ narrative. Pepi’s “Overhead Light,” on the other hand, appears to be more deliberate regarding its apparent inertia, although, once again, blurring the boundaries of chronology. But given the monotony of imagery and implicit paranoia (as to what is happening off camera), what are the effects of Pepi’s transfer to the “inbetween”—is Pepi liberated, captured, or none of the above? And where does that put the reader?

In L|in|P;L|in|D;L-o, time is a cliché that produces, compartmentalizes, and enacts cruelty within a solipsistic fantasy that ensnares us all. Amid the oscillation of extraneous conditions (e.g., as articulated in gradual disjunction out of time), Pepi appears rhizomatic (as per Deuleuze/Guattari’s conception of it)—planted within the intermediary, rooting and shooting into unknown perpetuity. There’s boundless interconnection in the presence of indefinite possibility beyond time’s snare. Perhaps, then, L|in|P;L|in|D;L-o suggests a peripatetic literature, contingent on activism against a foundational curse. On the other hand, the preface concludes that “this project is about nurturing,” asserting that Pepi found comfort, healing, and solace in the exploits of a self metamorphosed into a timeless Antigone. But with the terrible sadness of Pepi’s passing in 2015 at the age of twenty-one, L|in|P;L|in|D;L-o is not only more painful to revisit but also leads one to wonder if it isn’t an explicit gesture.

 

Self destruction is what it is

it’s a collective wish that

what is exists

—

Andy Martrich is the author of Ethical Probe on Mixed Martial Arts Enthusiasts in the USA (Counterpath Press), A manifest detection of death-lot in banking games (Gauss PDF Editions), and Iona (BlazeVOX Books), among others. Some essays have appeared at Jacket2, The Volta Blog, and ON Contemporary Practice. Andy works on Hiding Press with Mark Johnson and Jonathan Gorman, and lives in France.

“No Content Warnings”: a conversation with Laura Sims, author of LOOKER

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(Scribner, 2019)

INTERVIEW BY JO VARNISH

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Laura Sims, author of the critically acclaimed Looker (Scribner, 2019) opens up about her debut novel, her process and her feelings on content warnings.

 

Jo Varnish: The paperback edition of your novel, Looker, comes out on October 1st. How would you describe the novel and its central themes?

Laura Sims: I’d describe it as a literary character study first and foremost, though it also has the fast pacing and dark storyline of a psychological thriller. It shouldn’t be confused with a typical thriller, though; it doesn’t make the expected genre moves—like plot twists and shocking revelations. The novel follows a woman whose life has recently imploded; in the wake of this, she becomes fixated on her neighbor, a famous actress who seems to have everything the narrator wants and believes she will never have: a stable, loving family, an exciting career, a beautiful home, status and wealth. In her obsession, the narrator acts out in increasingly unacceptable ways…and things go very badly.

Through the narrator’s situation, the book explores how toxic our culture of looking at others—whether in real life or on social media—can be. My narrator is particularly vulnerable and embittered by circumstance, but I think anyone can relate to comparing themselves to someone else and feeling decidedly “less than.” In my narrator’s case, some of this feeling can be attributed to how societal standards for women impact her life. She isn’t checking certain boxes women of her age and station are “supposed” to check, so this adds pressure and ultimately has disastrous results.

JV: There are some biographical similarities between you and your narrator.  Like her, you used to live in Brooklyn, and also like her, you taught creative writing to adult students at a city school.  How do you react to the inevitable questions of author-narrator merge?

LS: I just heard Phoebe Waller-Bridge address this question/issue in an interview. When asked how autobiographical “Fleabag” was, she said: “Women can make things up. It’s not all a diary.” That cracked me up—and also resonated with me. I think it’s true that women get questions about author-narrator or life-fiction merge far more often than men, as if it’s assumed that our imaginations are so limited, our lives so constricted, that we must rely on autobiography for our creative work. I definitely share some autobiographical facts (and a lipstick shade) with my narrator, and we all know that fiction writers do draw, to some extent, on their lives for their writing, but in the end: it doesn’t matter. The character and her story exist independently of the facts and circumstances of my life, and the work should be received, valued, and understood solely as a work of fiction.

JV: Where did you draw your inspiration for Looker’s story and characters?

LS: Living in Brooklyn was a huge inspiration for the novel, because of the way you live pressed up against people from all segments of the socioeconomic spectrum: middle-class families, homeless people, longtime working-class residents, and even celebrities. It was interesting to think of the different worlds we inhabited, all within a relatively small space, and what that kind of proximity might do to someone who perceives herself to be steps away, yet forever separated from a richer, better life. There was one particular day when I was walking home in the dead heat of August, lugging fifteen grocery bags from the store and girding myself to carry them up four flights, when a beautiful actress walked by. My immediate reaction was to envy her seemingly effortless elegance, and to wonder if she had ever carried grocery bags uphill in her life (probably not, I decided). That’s when another woman’s voice, bitter and raging at the world, popped into my head. She couldn’t stand seeing this entitled, richly dressed woman walk by so unencumbered, so carefree. She admired, despised, and envied her in equal measure. I went home, sat down, and started to write in that woman’s voice. The other characters around my narrator came pretty easily, as they were loosely inspired by ‘types’ in my Brooklyn neighborhood.

JV: Is the object of the narrator’s obsession a reflection on our fascination with celebrity insofar as she is a famous actress?  Further, was your decision not to name the actress or the narrator a comment on our culture’s interest in surface at the cost of deeper identity?

LS: It can definitely be read as a reflection on our fascination with celebrity, though it wasn’t intentional. In our culture of constantly looking at celebrities, they seem an easy target for fixation, especially for someone who’s in a vulnerable state of mind. It’s potentially harmful to both parties—the looker and the looked at. It’s even dangerous—or unhealthy, at least, for people who aren’t particularly sensitive or damaged. To always be looking at others’ seemingly flawless lives can make our own lives feel thin and dreary by comparison—even if the seeming flawlessness is nothing but a show.

I didn’t intentionally leave my characters unnamed. It was something that happened naturally as I was writing the book, but looking back I see how their namelessness fits with Looker’s focus on how intertwined perception and identity can be. The actress is trapped by the narrator’s perception of her as “the actress”; she isn’t allowed to be more or less than that. And the narrator’s namelessness blots her out, just as she blots herself out, or perceives herself to be blotted out by society. But her namelessness is also useful because it erases the distance between reader and character and helps create the raw, even uncomfortable, intimacy that some readers have described.

JV: The narrator has a complicated relationship with her pet, Cat, who she refuses to return to her ex-husband. What do her changing feelings for Cat tell us about her mental state?

LS: As it shifts from one extreme to the other, her relationship with Cat reflects the moods and stages of her mental decline.  She begins by seeing Cat as a nuisance, then shifts to loving her, adoring her, even, when she realizes Cat can be used to manipulate her ex-husband. When things deteriorate further in the narrator’s life, she becomes impatient, unkind. And then her final, most vicious act signals to us that she has finally crossed the line into what many would call madness.

JV: I was surprised to learn how strongly some readers have reacted to the narrator’s treatment of Cat. I know “content warnings” are increasingly used on Goodreads and elsewhere.  How do you feel about such warnings?

LS: Yes, I was surprised, too. The moment in the book they’re responding to was the hardest scene for me to write, but it was also the most crucial; inevitable, I’d have to say. She had to do it. She had to show us just how far she’d come from her reasonably ordered, societally acceptable life: very far. I was happy to learn that people felt discomfort, anger, even outrage in response to that moment; it constitutes a powerful reaction to the book, and isn’t that what fiction and other art forms are for? To provoke, in the most general sense: to provoke thought and emotion. I find that ‘content warnings,’ in the sphere of literature, interfere with that crucial relationship between artwork and audience. They neutralize any potential threat to a reader’s state of mind, and in doing so they neutralize the work itself. Make it bland and safe for everyone, so that we may as well be watching a network sitcom (though they’ve come far in recent years) rather than reading a complex work of fiction.

JV: I find it impossible not to empathize with the narrator.  Dealing with infertility and the breakdown of a marriage are understandably unsettling, and likely trigger her breakaway from reality. Was creating compassion for her intentional?

LS: I wouldn’t say it was intentional, but I did feel very deeply for her. I didn’t want her to be a two-dimensional villain. (I don’t think of her as a “villain” at all.) My hope is that readers will feel some measure of compassion and empathy for her—as you did—and will see in her some basic human desires: to love and be loved; to connect; to transcend the rigors, indignities, and monotony of everyday life. Maybe she heads down strange avenues in hopes of satisfying these desires, but the desires themselves are universal.

JV: Tell us about your process as a writer.  What does a writing day typically look like for you?  Over what time period did you write Looker?

LS: On my best, most productive days, I head to a co-working space in town right after the school bus leaves. I try to work for several hours in the morning there, when my focus is sharpest. Then I devote the rest of my day to family business, schoolwork (see below), exercise, errands, etc. But I find it really important to preserve and protect those morning hours when I can. It also depends on what stage I’m in of the writing process. Right now, I’m editing a finished draft, and while the morning hours are helpful, I end up working outside of those hours, too. I can’t stop working. But when I’m struggling my way through a first draft I need more structure to stay engaged. I find drafting painful and editing intoxicating and FUN.

I wrote Looker over a period of about three years. At the time, I was working on other creative projects, too: a young adult novel that never saw the light of day and a poetry book. I was also teaching part-time and getting my Master’s degree in Library & Info Science. (Still getting that degree, by the way. Almost done!) But Looker was my side project, my passion project—I couldn’t stop returning to it, and worked on it whenever I could. One of the things that’s been hardest about moving forward after Looker is trying to recapture that feeling of working on something that no one knows or cares about, in a kind of protective secrecy. It’s something new authors don’t talk about enough: how hard it is, after being seen, to go back and work on something in the same cloistered way you did before you’d published your book. I realize it’s a good problem to have, but it’s been a challenge nonetheless.

JV: For readers who loved Looker, what would you recommend they read next?

LS: There are several books that inspired me (in some way) in the writing of this novel, and I’d highly recommend them because they’re also some of my favorite contemporary novels: The Days of Abandonment, by Elena Ferrante, Dept of Speculation, by Jenny Offill, and Notes on a Scandal, by Zoe Heller. I wasn’t consciously drawing on these books when I was writing Looker, but thinking back, I know they were influential. Also The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Reading that in college had a profound impact on me; it’s the ultimate tale of a woman’s downward spiral and the societal forces that hastened it. I’d also highly recommend Helen Phillips’ new book, The Need—it’s very different from Looker, but plays with genre, too, in that it’s a literary novel with a science fiction storyline and thriller pacing. It’s compulsively readable, beautifully written, and terrifying. Three of my favorite things.

JV: What are you working on at the moment?

LS: I’m working on a novel—well, to be honest, two novels. I’ve got complete drafts of both of them and am working to make them readable before passing them to my agent, who will help me whip them into shape.

JV: Lastly, Looker has a cinematic feel on reading.  Are there any plans to bring your story to the big screen?

LS: Not to the big screen, but to the small screen! Emily Mortimer and Alessandro Nivola’s King Bee production company, along with eOne, have bought the rights to Looker. Emily will star as the narrator and produce. The screenwriters are working on the screenplay now; I can’t wait to see how they adapt it.

—

Laura Sims’s debut novel, Looker (Scribner), was published to critical acclaim in early 2019; The Wall Street Journal called it “a sugarcoated poison pill of psychological terror” and Publishers Weekly called it a “chilling and riveting debut.” Sims has also published four books of poetry, including, most recently, Staying Alive; her first poetry collection, Practice, Restraint, was the winner of the 2005 Fence Books Ottoline Prize. In 2014, she edited Fare Forward: Letters from David Markson. Sims has been the recipient of a US-Japan Creative Arts Fellowship, and her poetry and prose have appeared in The New Republic, Boston Review, Conjunctions, Denver Quarterly, Fence, Gulf Coast, and other journals. She lives in New Jersey with her family.

 

Originally from England, Jo Varnish now lives outside New York City.  She is assistant editor at X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, and her short stories and creative nonfiction have recently appeared, or are forthcoming, in Okay Donkey, Ellipsis Zine, Brevity Blog and others. Jo has been a writer in residence at L’Atelier Writers for two years, and is currently studying for her MFA.  She can be found on twitter @jovarnish1.

[REVIEW] Nobber by Oisín Fagan

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(John Murray Originals, 2019)

REVIEW BY SHASTRI AKELLA

—

Nobber has an exceptional opening act, one that removes the conditional out of John Gardner’s oft-quoted idea that all great novels begin either with a stranger arriving in town or a character taking a journey. Oisín Fagan’s novel begins with four characters taking a journey, and then the novel shifts point-of-view: these strangers arrive in the town of Nobber, and their arrival is shown through the eyes of the locals. The novel, at first, shifts perspectives from one chapter to the next, bringing Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying to mind, but as the story progresses, the point-of-view starts to shift within chapters, and at an increasingly dizzying pace, leaving readers with the distinct impression that Nobber is the schizophrenic monster-protagonist and we are stuck inside its head, an experience that anyone familiar with a small town and its incestuous intimacies and flawed loyalties will recognize. It is a setting that in Stephen King’s works is often the source of horror and that, in Fagan’s hands, also has a distinctly Dickensian feel, the claustrophobia of the setting accentuated by the epic scale of the narrative that plays out in such a tight space.

The novel is set during Ireland’s black plague, but its temporal distance does not make its characters feel any less familiar. de Flunkl and his men are on the move in pursuit of real estate in a time of economic slump; their goal, to buy property on the cheap so they can sell it for a higher value once the plague has ended, holds a strong presence in literature set during the Depression. The men have two encounters as they are about to enter Nobber: the first one is with a band of Gaels, a people who have been displaced from their lands and into the wilderness, and who are now perceived to be ‘savages’. The tension of the prolonged dialogue between the men and Gaels, made possible with the assistance of a translator, William (who is a part of de Flunkl’s retinue), hints at social tensions that, in the present political moment, feel close to home (no matter where, geographically speaking, home is). The second encounter, which I will focus on, brings up a striking instance of the animal dysmorphia that runs like a thematic thread throughout the novel. On the outskirts of Nobber, the men see “a cruciform of wood…on it, thickly laid like a skeleton’s musculature, are reams of dead crows, and they give the form a certain plumpness and lifelikeness from a distance.” The crows, which at first de Flunkl assumes are dead, are “nailed into the wood”. As Harold, another member of the itinerant group, persuades de Flunkl to retreat, warning him that such a ghastly sight can bring no good tidings their way, one of the birds starts to flap its wings, and several others follow suite, and a horrified de Flunkl realizes that they are, in fact, alive. The cross, they notice, is topped with a peasant’s cap, a detail which becomes a lens to read the broader narrative implications of the sight.

Throughout the novel, Fagan uses animal dysmorphia alongside a disintegrating human psyche to place the human and the non-human on a level plane. The conjunction becomes a powerful device to show how the victimized responds to a loss of control by distorting the reality of someone less powerful then themselves. A character who enters Nobber with two lambs, two calves, and a badger (all of which are stolen or captured), reflects: “if animals are jumbled up too greatly in species, and confined too closely, disastrous things happen…Beasts, who should emerge into the synechdocal perfection of predator and prey, too closely combined begin to act in an erratic and unpredictable manner. Both of the lambs think one of the calves is its mother. One of the calves thinks [he] is its mother, and the badger, who should prey on the lambs, instead wishes to prey on him.” Earlier in the novel, a local of Nobber is approached by four men who are naked and who have “sheep skulls tied to their heads.” Mary, a Gael who is kidnapped by Colca (another local of Nobber, and one of the more notorious characters in the novel), kills a horse, but this act of cruelty too is inseparable from human depravity. Colca, as readers find out, practices bestiality, and the novel hints at him having sexual contact with the horse. Rather than the plague taking a toll on both man and animal, it messes with the minds of the humans who then act against the animals.

The action of the novel, once de Flunkl and his men arrive in Nobber, takes places almost exclusively inside the houses of locals. Behind each locked door are an unlikely pair or group of people who parry for power. At times the dead and the dying are trapped in the same space, and the corporeal effects of the plague create for tremendous moments of body horror like the following one:

 

“Dervorgilla’s arms, held above her head, are shivering with such force that they are almost a blur. Amidst the matted hair of her armpits are swollen protuberances with smooth surfaces. The swellings are hairless, yellow and thick, one under each armpit, like hidden apples growing out of her. One of them is covered in stale pus that has erupted at some former point. Around each buboe is a purple circular bruise, perfect as the concentric ripple of water…[And] Tedbalt[‘s] putrid carcass is decomposing, sunken beneath his work clothes. Steam rises off him, blending the little light above him into a wavy mirage, and his face is covered in a blanket of sleeping flies.”

 

In the final act the action shifts to the town center, bringing all of its residents together. Colca becomes the focal point of everyone’s anger. Throughout the novel, he enforces a curfew on the people of Nobber to keep the plague from spreading. He kidnaps a Gael and hold her hostage as his ‘wife’, and he has an abnormal relationship with animals. Yet, the conversation he has with his mother and her grief as she watches the plight her son is subjected to makes us wonder if the vigilante form of justice is deserved. And in the process dehumanizing Colca, the people of Nobber dehumanize each other.

Christopher Higgs (2017)  poses the rhetorical question of ‘what does it mean to be human?’ and then responds to it to the following effect: “one is not born a human, one becomes human,” for to be human is “not a natural fact. Instead, it is the result of a certain history, a certain civilization, which has resulted in [his or] her current status” (8). Being human, Higgs notes, is a social construct. He adds that “we must not be fooled into believing a human is a human and a monster is a monster outside of or isolated from social and historical contexts” (9). If the notion of what it means to be human has historically been a patriarchal construction—the patriarchy placing a boundary around what it means to be a human civilization and deciding on the laws of governance that decide who qualifies and who disqualifies—then dehumanization, as Peter Grosvenor (2014) states, is the “psychological capacity to relegate people to the status of non-human animals, and to deprive them of the protection normally accorded to fellow humans by moral codes” (154). Thus, “to become a human,” Higgs states, “one must participate in a system of belonging…one becomes human by sacrificing autonomy in favor of participation…those who are human make this agreement. To break this agreement is to become Other” (31). As a socio-cultural construct humanity is, Higgs notes, an act of membership. The shifting points-of-view in Nobber show how each character is, in turn, dehumanizes/is dehumanized. In the face of the plague, the system of belonging that the locals of Nobber participated in, and that the Gaels were kept out of, has fallen apart, leaving the former with no familiar system to work within, thus reducing them all, in status and behavior, to non-human animals. Their treatment of animals is reflective of their own psychological and social condition.

The novel is highly relevant to our current sociopolitical and environmental reality: where on the one hand, the surge of right-wing regimes has narrowed and tightened the boundaries of the systems of belonging that keep some people in and everyone else out, environmental collapse, on the other hand, is on the brink of erasing all such known systems, creating new ways of life—a hitherto unknown chaos—where those who dehumanize the Other also dehumanize each other because the system that once held them together has fallen apart. Indeed, the locals in Nobber dehumanized the Gales until the plague hit them and then they started to dehumanize each other. One need look no further than the fact that Syrian refugee crisis that began because of an environmental disaster created mass migration into Europe, and the attitudes towards these migrations in turn caused a split between the U.K. and the rest of Europe, precipitating the coming about of Brexit.

I began with a famous literary tenet, and I would like to end with one. Ursula K. Le Guin once remarked that all fantastic narratives ultimately address the ills that ail our present social reality, ills that have become background white noise to us and that, therefore, when exaggerated and placed in strange new spaces, far removed from our reality, startle us into paying attention. That, I think, is where the genius of Fagan’s novel lies. In making us pay attention to the black Plague in the 1300s and showing us how some complex, well-wrought characters react to it, it makes us pay closer attention to our own disintegrating reality, to those around us, and ultimately to ourselves. It interrogates the systems of belonging we participate in and it creates a powerful experience of empathy for our future selves who might no longer have access to those systems and who will, as a result, be Othered. And seeing our future Othered selves might exactly be what we need to empathize with the Other in the here and the now. Nobber is an ode to precarity, one that I think will live beyond its generation, serving as both an instructive allegory and a highly readable work of fiction.

—

Shastri Akella earned his MFA in fiction at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst) where he is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature. His story won the Bridging the Gap fiction contest at the Slice Writers’ Conference in 2018. His works appears in Guernica, Electric Literature, The Common, Rumpus, World Literature Today, LA Review of Books, Danse Macabre, and European Stages, among other places. He is currently seeking agents for his novel, The Elephant Songs, queer novel set in 1980s India with an an interracial love story at its core.

October’s Future Friday 10/25- Janiru Liyanage

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The last Friday of the month we feature an incredible young creative talent age 18 and under in our Future Fridays!

Janiru Liyanage is a 14 year old Sri-Lankan Australian student and poet, who currently lives in Sydney and attends high school. He is the 2019 junior winner of the Dorothea Mackellar Poetry Awards, a national poetry competition, & loves the Oxford comma, hyphens, & cats! – His work is forthcoming in Driftwood Press and The Journal Of Compressed Creative Arts, is a prolific participant and winner of poetry slams, and having just begun his personal poetic journey, Janiru is eager to find his own voice in his work.

 

__

 

It’s The Hunger

The inside of heaven is garland with all the animals
we made extinct
The inside of me is garland with glass bottles that
cooled too early to have any noticeable shape:
a single kidney that may also be a liver,
an ambre lung;
The ghost of a thrush sings its songs each night
and I listen just to fall asleep –
this living
this body: my insides scraped out by a single
index finger
I bare the same tenderness of a small child
decomposing into his grave – the heaviest breath
is the last one  –  there are men
who still worship black moons
they light candles and draw circles around their feet
These men seek out my insides so hungrily
I’m sure that whatever moves them must also move
us – slouching into the night just to wake into
TV light with many Sinhala women singing old
songs; I forgot all the words I repeated last night –
still, there is the scent of tobacco and maple after all these
months –
I am still the ugly boy I began as – nightly crying for
mothering and suckling on everything I find
I’m sure something or someone is summoning me – still,
I am deflecting all their wishes;
the first few times were out of curiosity – now, my body steps
out of me and I have to leash it from snorting, smoking
or drinking anything – it’s the hunger that stops me
and the hunger that starts it too;
A single thumb placed under my tongue – I recite the
smallest prayer; even that I’ve forgotten:
Oh Lord, something, something, You are mine, I am yours,
take me, take me, I am waiting and will be
 
 

[REVIEW] People Skulk by Gordon Faylor

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(GaussPDF, 2019)

REVIEW BY CLARA B. JONES

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“No theoretical generalization is foolproof.” Marjorie Perloff

 

The broader San Francisco poetry scene has a long artistic history and has been called the “countercultural center of modern poetry,” associated with poets such as Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, and Allen Ginsberg. J. Gordon Faylor: an editor at San Francisco MOMA & Editor of GaussPDF, publisher of digital and innovative books, is author, among other works, of the highly-regarded, Registration Caspar [2016], a stunningly original novel/”long-form” poem, as well as, The Puppet Wedding, a 2017 pamphlet—both volumes composed experimentally using innovative grammar, semantics, form, and content, as well as, indeterminate semantics and non-sequiturs. A few words from The Puppet Wedding are employed in People Skulk [e.g., “puppet,” “half-pint”], a between-text repetition facilitating the perception of unity across the author’s oeuvre. Other devices employed to enhance wholeness in the new collection are the lack of a Table of Contents and serial pagination. Similarly, the phrase, “people skulk” is repeated in the title poem, and idiosyncratic punctuation is employed throughout the book to highlight structure, as well as, “referential” and “non-referential” elements.

Titles of volumes and poems may conceal rather than expose or stress meanings of compositions, particularly, if there appears to be no connection between them. The title of Faylor’s new collection is connected to its title poem’s first lines, “People skulk, / they really do; / match affinities, rain descent / arrogance volitive, dated / worthy blisters on Leonora’s / shells otherwise abandoned.” [36]. Experimental poems lend themselves to critical, including, textual, analysis [“close reading”], and the reader might ask, for example, is “Leonora,” Leonora Carrington, the British-Mexican Surrealist painter—possibly, referring to the author’s aesthetics or the lens through which he intends his collection to be viewed? Alternatively, “Leonora” may be an intimate reference or a symbolic name indicating, perhaps, that the text is to be read as a heteronormative one. This quote exhibits a common device of experimental poetry—the deployment of non-sequiturs and erasure to “splice,” conceal, obscure, or delete material that may or may not enhance meaning or facilitate interpretation.

For example, “skulk,” and other words, may have more than one, or archaic, meanings or may function as different parts of speech, and the reader must decide how the poet is using language that may be deployed in many different ways—e.g., intentional-unintentional, conscious-unconscious. “Skulk,” as a verb, may mean to hide or to malinger [Br.]—often with a sinister or cowardly motive; alternatively, used as a noun, “skulk” means, a group of foxes. Following Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept, “language games,” word usage is meaningful only insofar as the reader can determine what “rules” the writer has employed. The “game” for the reader is not to reconstruct what the author intended, but to use “close reading” to uncover “rules” or “associations” [n.b. “associative poetry”] derivable from the text. The title poem continues:

 

“I’m going to skulk myself

fudge fish chats with the NSA

these last days wagering

wipe-washing with my carrot

not behaving toward vocalizing

the glowed leftover, my standing here

unfollowed so to speak,

hoveling for present people

standing around here, dead guilty.”

 

—and, later in the title poem,

 

“You get to dress tape

understand animal

smarts not worthy

fuck and walk

undone go ahead hate me and my

pickled people love for putting up

with, at most, our kites’ reports.”

 

Cowardly or sinister motives are not addressed explicitly; however, the poem’s speaker refers to himself as skulking “with the NSA,” “not behaving,” “unfollowed,” “dead guilty,” and the like. Similarly, though foxes are not mentioned in the poem, the speaker mentions “fish” and “animal”— referentiality contrasted to and contradicting the non-referentiality of the composition when it is read as a whole and in parts. Furthermore, the components, “you…fuck and walk” and, “go ahead hate me,” direct the reader’s attention to an apparent relationship between the speaker-subject and recipient-object, while other  words and phrases may function parenthetically or as “fillers,” or they, also, may stand alone—referentially, or not. The subject’s “gaze” is, clearly, directed at the female, “you;” however, it seems throughout that the object’s gaze is not directed towards the subject or “voice,” who, we shall see, is Gordon, himself. Elements that stand alone, with or without apparent relationship to other parts of a poem, may be considered Functionally Independent components of a poem or, even, “fillers” or “stops,” devices common in experimental poetry [see “Collage” and “Erasure” below].

Joan Retallack made the following observation, “What I’ve found in my decades of teaching…is that the conviction that there is an entity called ‘poem’ with a discrete essence one should be able to discern and evaluate according to universal aesthetic principles continues to be widespread.” This point of view suggests, I think, that non-traditional, non-mainstream poetry—innovative, avant garde, experimental poetry—is not rule-governed. Retallack, and many others, however, would probably agree that different sub-genres of poetry may encompass different procedures and aesthetics. The brief discussion of Faylor’s title poem, for example, demonstrates writing that is formally non-linear, without surfical clarity or 1 : 1 mapping of parts of speech and meaning. Such characteristics violate and disrupt the  rules of classical art—what the 19th century German art historian, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, called, “true style”—incorporating, “noble simplicity,” patriotism, order, lack of emotion, symmetry, balance, emotional restraint, harmony, no distortion, and/or scientific precision, among other traits. Faylor’s compositions, instead, are fractured with respect to form and content, grammar and semantics. Like Winckelmann’s Greek Revival aesthetics, then, experimental poetry exhibits its own recognizable style that can be described no less clearly than “true style.” Consistent with this idea, Marjorie Perloff, speaking of collage, stated, “It does not follow that collage is essentially a “degraded” or “alienated” version of earlier (and presumably superior) genres.”

What additional information can we extract from People Skulk? Faylor makes clear that the “voice” of the collection is the author, himself—“Inside demand—inside demand, Gordon.” [14]; “stop apologizing, Gordon / people do it because they’re depressed / or unintentionally dreary,” [48]. As Rosalind Krauss has noted, speaking of Claude Cahun’s photography, the artist is “subject and object of representation,” a type of “mirroring” and “doubling” reinforced by the device that Faylor is, at once, speaking to himself and to an “Other”: “You’re a radiant individual and make me glad, / but if we’re done we’re done, I promise. / I’ll still send your / aerations a kiss and always tear up after.” [8]

In addition to identifiably “experimental” devices, Faylor’s new collection includes some traditional features—occasional soft rhyming, even, a few 14-line, sonnet forms [32], or near-sonnets, suggestive of the classical “love poem,” and the couplet on p 61 is  Shakespeare-like: “Answer me with both lolling now that I’m bare / let me bleed my share.”—a couplet expressing loss and, possibly, regret.  Apparently, as suggested above, People Skulk is, inherently, about lost love [“…secure until you finally see me off? / I’ll love you until I die, regardless.”, 5; “I’ll still send your / aerations a kiss and always tear up after.”, 8; “If and when you coddle her goneness”, [15]; “…in retrospect, bitterly.”, 27], and there are numerous references to sadness, regret, reflection, and loneliness. Also, conventional, if not, traditional, the volume includes quite a few words uncommon in US speech but more common in the British vernacular [“archegonia,” “aletheia,” “propaedeutic,” “psionic,” Latin phrases, etc.], a device that might be interpreted as pretentious or elitist, though archaic or uncommon words combined with inclusion of splicing, erasure, or non-sequiturs in a poem can be employed as a formulaic way of creating an innovative or experimental composition. Although, “death,” “necrophilia,” “dead,” “lifeless,” “malignancy,” “polyps,” and angry tones are elements of many of the poems in People Skulk, this is not a “dark” collection, in great part due to Faylor’s frequent word play, as well as, the indeterminacy [“undecidability,” “non-referentiality”] and fractured arrangement of the compositions. On the other hand, see 4-5, “They wanted the same minced baby / lowered into its cradle, sobbing.” The subject has his low moments—like all of us.

The device, “collage” [splicing], and its relation to experimental literature, whereby poets layer ideas or images, assembling various forms of speech to create a new whole, has been famously studied by the poetry critic, Marjorie Perloff*.   Collage subordinates and disrupts the voice and identity of the subject,  though each composition is likely to have dominant elements serving as moments of clarity or emphasis or, sometimes, normalcy. In the two-sonnet poem, “I Forget,” for example, “Gordon” states, “’You could’ve responded with so much more’ I tell myself….” [44]. Motifs such as the foregoing denote what dominates situations [see the poem, “Proof of Staff” (may become, “Proof of Stuff”?) on p 3], and strong units of speech may dominate through emphasis, making a point, or grabbing attention —similar to repetition. On the other hand, speaking of Dadaism and “anti-art,” Dietmar Elger has pointed out that the reader may not make “coherent sense” out of the works. Admittedly, fragmentary language [“text fragments”] often suppresses logic, and People Skulk includes several fragmentary, even, one-line, pieces [e.g., 40, 49, 58]. I am arguing, however, that collage poetry is not necessarily random, “stream of consciousness,” or “free association” though some content may be concealed in subconscious [dreams] or unconscious processes. Commenting on Kenneth Goldsmith’s idea that Conceptual Poetry is “unreadable,” Marjorie Perloff contended that each word constitutes a “choice” by the poet and is, thus, intentional. Thinking of a Bob Seger song, the poet must decide, “what to leave in, what to leave out.”

Collage poetry requires erasure and non-disclosure—of words, phrases, parts of speech. The Italian Futurist writer, F.T. Marinetti, for example, exclaimed that adverbs, adjectives, punctuation, conjugated verbs, and syntax, in general, should be abolished. Erasure might be employed to conceal or repress painful, embarrassing, socially unacceptable, prohibited, triggering, private, or otherwise unpleasant or proscribed material. Erasure, then, might hide [sic—“skulk”] meaning, though it would be a mistake to attempt to recover whatever thoughts or motivations Faylor [“Gordon”] may have had when composing his collection. Erasure might, also, function as a type of Wittgensteinian “language play” [“I take on the malignancy of the room / swept on by sterile water, / polyps of my itinerary.” [55], a complex line that might have been written by the German poet, Gottfried Benn. Examples of “word play” may be found in the rich poem, “Archegonia” on pp 26-27. Language and word play may entail the reader switching or adding words, such as in the lines, “I want to make you comfortable / I defied that one cracked night / and spun out apologizing.” [56]. What if we change the phrase, “one cracked night” to “one crazy night?” “Crazy” appears in several poems and, if inserted here, may facilitate associations and decipherability, substituting for “cracked.” Similarly, The reader might, also, elect to insert “of control” between “out” and “apologizing,” creating a more harmonious and normal phrase, “and spun out of control apologizing.” Both of these modifications may enhance the reader’s experience of, interpretation of, and/or accessibility to parts of the poem or of the whole composition. On the other hand, collage may, also, be effected for purely artistic purposes by the poet, and, according to Perloff, “…is, by definition, a visual or spatial concept.”, implying that collage poems are types of spliced visual art, in addition to spliced verbal compositions.

Because of the juxtaposition, intertextuality, and unconventional usages [e.g. using verbs as nouns or adjectives] of a variety of linguistic elements, collage and erasure may contribute to the experience of contradiction, ambiguity, ambivalence, tensions, oppositions, and conflicts, such as, those between male-female, imagination-reality, archaic-modern, native-foreign. Experimental poetry, then, is, in part, recognizable because of indeterminate meaning, yielding a “transrational” experience, according to the critic, Gerald Janecek. He goes on to suggest that, like many Russian Futurist compositions, poets strove to write independent of Nature—like Abstract Expressionists after them; elements were, often,  interchangeable, as they seem to be in many of the poems in People Skulk, and there seems to be no necessary logical or functional basis for the poems’ ordering in the text. Nonetheless, as pointed out by Perloff, some logical elements and relations may still be present, such as, negation, contradiction, similarity, equivalence, identity, and their negatives; as well, arrangement, association; assortment, repetition [e.g., 28, 36] are often used as “rhetorical devices” for clarity, memory, emphasis, or other functions, as in the following excerpt from the poem, “Safer’s Pet Rescue” [28],

 

“Gory repetition childish

your small dog isn’t. No you don’t bit by bite sled dog

the world war’s garage

my students’ crystals depicting ruby red

I want kids to band together

in uncooperative moments

cads ripping back-up plastic article “Stressed”

for the small dogs’ fiber, their backup system finally tested

yet no longer my own, which

I gave up depressed-guy style.”

 

What comes next [“indeterminacy”]? Logical conventions are not followed throughout [“transrational”]. “World war’s garage” does not occur in Nature—at least, not on surface. Words, phrases might be interchanged without loss of effect [e.g., “crystals” and “article”]. However, some logical and relational associations remain present, particularly, at the level of phraseology, if not complete sentences [e.g., “small dog,” “ruby red,” “backup system”], and repetition [“small dog”] is employed for emphasis, to enhance memory, to attract attention, or other effects.

Several critics have pointed out that Indeterminacy in literature is a device in which components of a text require the reader to make their own decisions about the text’s meaning. Often, the final lines of a poem leave the reader “hanging,” as in examples above. The text’s meaning, then, remains open to interpretation [“indeterminate”]. Some readers have decided that these features render the poems of John Cage, Gertrude Stein, John Ashbery, for example, “incomprehensible;” however, I have attempted to show that close reading and critical analyses may result in intra- and inter-textual comprehension of some components of experimental poetry such as that found in Faylor’s new collection. In People Skulk, “Gordon” is never whole or self-actualized. Throughout the book, he is embedded in a “system” of contradictions, ambiguities, and oppositions: subjective-objective, plant-animal, personal-impersonal, part-whole, attachment-detachment, self-conscious-other-directed, instinctual-cerebral. Like the formalities of the text, “Gordon,” himself, remains indeterminate, fractured—“self” determined, primarily, by what the Other [“you”, the subject’s object] reflects back [Jacques Lacan’s, “mirroring”]. Non-specificity can be distracting and can seem like no more than distortion or obscurity or  illusion or tricks or games that the poet is imposing upon the reader; however, if we understand that “entering” and embracing an experimental collection, such as Faylor’s, People Skulk, relies upon methodology no less than traditional poetry, as outlined in this review, the reader’s efforts will be rewarded many times over.

 

*Chapter 2 in Perloff M (1986) The Futurist Moment. The University of Chicago Press.

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Clara B. Jones is a knowledge worker practicing in Silver Spring, MD, USA. In addition to other writings, she is author of, /feminine nature/ [GaussPDF, 2017].

September’s Future Friday 9/27 – Grace Song

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Introducing our very first Future Friday–a showcase of talent 18 and under.

 

Grace Q. Song is 16 years old and a Chinese-American writer from New York. A high school junior, she enjoys photography and indie music. She thinks you’re awesome.

—

 

DEAD FISH SYNDROME

They came at dawn—
blue fish, amber fish, silver fish.
After the tide slipped away, I walked
past overturned boats
to where the ocean buried them—
eight, nine, ten in acid seaweed.
The sea cannot carry all of its dead
forever. A body hurts to touch
my sister tells me, so we never touched.
Our hands returned to salt
& shipwrecked light stole eyes
devoured bones, tore scale after scale until
the gulls must have mistaken them
for broken white shells.
These days, I leave the piano covered.
I don’t know where I’ve hidden myself
in these minor keys. I don’t know why
this music box & everything I want to hold   cut
into my skin like those crimson-serrated gills.
I am so in love,        so lonely,
I could fill the ocean with this song.

 

 

SISTER, YOU CALL ME A BITCH

& the wilderness lures us
into its jaws.
But this story,
I devour the land
alive
& leave no bone
to the vultures.
Here are the knives I throw
into your thorn-
plum shoulder.
Here is the name
you brand on my cheek.
Its vowels fester
in my belly.
Look, sister: I break
my fingers for you. I crush
my ribs for you.
I wear these wounds
as a second skin
& bathe myself
in carnivore
darkness.

 

 

THE BOYS PLAY FRISBEE BAREFOOT

& grass clings to their toes
like dew to sunrise.

I can name this afternoon as a memory
in a brief, summer blink

& I must tell my sister to doubt
the world I’ve given her.

She says I am not sick
& I know she loves this lie—

counts her bones as sheep.
The boys wear sweat as rain

roam the olive hairs of the earth
as a fuzzy rug that curls

against the rough of their feet.
I hold my sister as a stranger—

unforgivable—
watch a white disk

cut a horizon
across the sky

as a swan
I know

is dead.

[REVIEW] Kansastan by Farooq Ahmed

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(7.13 Books, 2019)

REVIEW BY J.D. HO

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One of the important projects of contemporary writers of color or writers belonging to marginalized religious groups is to reclaim and rewrite histories that have largely been recorded and imagined by the majority. Farooq Ahmed’s Kansastan is one such reclamation. Ahmed weaves an alternative narrative of Kansas during the Civil War. His unnamed narrator lives in Imam Bahira’s mosque, slaughtering goats and doing other chores, while around him Kansans defend the state against Missourians. Like a less wholesome Forrest Gump, complete with leg braces, our narrator meets historic figures like the abolitionist John Brown. While the setting is America during the Civil War, on the border between a free state and a slave state, Ahmed incorporates narrative elements from the Qur’an and Islamic history, drawing in particular on the story of Hajar and her son Ismail, ancestor of the Prophet Muhammad. Muslims populate Ahmed’s novelistic universe, and the mosque stands without comment in Kansas. In the Civil War period, Muslims were, in fact, present in the U.S. because a significant number of slaves came from Islamic regions, but that aspect of history is not directly addressed in this narrative.

The narrator of Kansastan at one point proclaims: “If I inherited the mosque, I could retell our stories!” Thus, the main character ostensibly shares a goal with the novel itself. But what is the purpose of retelling and reclaiming history? The tone of Kansastan leans more toward satire than historical illumination or giving voice to unheard witnesses. The retellings seem to be important primarily to gratify the narrator’s ego. In the text, the narrator often feels overlooked, unjustly treated, incorrectly perceived. His sense of injustice increases with the arrival of a woman named Maryam, whom the narrator claims is his aunt. The members of the community regard Maryam’s son, Faisal, as a healer and prophet, while the narrator is the butt of jokes. When Faisal strikes a geyser in the parched landscape, the populace shower him with gratitude, but the narrator complains that no one acknowledges the fact that he was the one to make Faisal play the game that led him to discover the well. That link, he says, “was lost between the storytellers and the told.” The narrator exists only as “the cripple” in songs about Faisal. To combat that injustice, the narrator schemes to take over the mosque by defeating his oppressors one by one.

We know little of our narrator’s past, though we know he is an orphan, that he has a malady that prevents him from walking easily, and that he possesses some knowledge of the Qur’an, though that knowledge is perhaps as unreliable as he is. He doesn’t know Arabic, and calls “ignorance—my shield and my sword.” Despite the character’s ostensible religion and time period, he smokes cigarettes and marijuana (which he calls his “analgesic seasonings”), commits murder and rape, and is generally unsympathetic. In this he resembles some of Vladimir Nabokov’s narrators, whom we are not necessarily supposed to like or trust, and who often have an exaggerated sense of self-importance and a shifty moral compass. Ahmed’s narrator is similar. He seems to bend facts to cast his ethically dubious actions in a positive light. He is our storyteller and our archivist, the compiler of all the information we know about the novel’s world.

As I began this novel, I had trouble getting my bearings because there is little exposition of the factions and historical background of this particular universe. I found myself wishing for more world-building and exposition. I turned to the Qur’an for direction because Kansastan so constantly references the Qur’an and the people in it. Though my reading of it is incomplete and certainly not deep, the Qur’an helped in two ways. First, as I looked up many of the novel’s quotations from the Qur’an, I began to question the narrator’s knowledge of scriptural context. Second, thinking about how to read the Qur’an was helpful for thinking about how to read Kansastan. In his introduction to my version of the Qur’an (Oxford), M.A.S. Abdel Haleem states: “An important feature of the Qur’anic style is that it alludes to events without giving historical background.” Haleem goes on to say that the Qur’an relied upon its readers’ knowledge of events that were, at the time, current. Ahmed employs a similar style, perhaps purposely leaving the particulars of the Kansas–Missouri conflict vague in order that readers will treat the novel as contemporary fable—or satire. Though Ahmed draws upon the Qur’an and the story of Hajar and Ismail, he does not create straightforward parallels.

From an editorial perspective, I think Kansastan tries to take on too many narrative tasks at once. Its satirical elements often clutter the narrative in a way that decreases their effectiveness. (References to Kansas-specific insider jokes, for instance, are worldbuilding, but not in a meaningful way.) But Ahmed possesses the skills to wield a satirical blade, as when the Imam says, “Whom ye war against, I war against,” and much later Faisal says, “If the Lord be for us, who can be against,” echoing both Romans 8:31 and George W. Bush after 9/11.

Another purpose of retelling in the form of satire is to attempt to make sense of—or find relief from—the present, and I think that is where Ahmed’s aim lies. In mocking disability, religion, and the fight against slavery, Kansastan treats nothing as sacred, revealing a deeply pessimistic worldview. The point may be that the particulars of factions and history will do nothing to make sense of the events of our times or the narrator’s. If our murderous and narcissistic narrator is on the side of abolitionists, what does that say about the other side? Perhaps both sides are Fanatics (the narrator’s term), and both sides believe they are right, but, as readers standing outside the narrative, one side’s fanaticism is indistinguishable from the other’s.

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J.D. Ho has an MFA from the Michener Center at the University of Texas in Austin. J.D.’s poems and essays have appeared in Georgia Review, Ninth Letter, and other journals.

[REVIEW] Bloomland by John Englehardt

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(Dzanc, 2019)

REVIEW BY DAVID TROMBLAY

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Bloomland, the winner of the 2018 Dzanc Prize for Fiction, explores the cyclic American cultural phenomenon of an all too real mass shooting set at a fictionalized southern university nestled in an evangelical stronghold where God and guns are routinely spoken of in the same breath and with the same reverence. Though the setting is masterfully crafted and given intimate nuance by Englehardt, Bloomland could also have the thinnest veil dragged across its pages and become Anytown, USA, all too easily unnervingly. Therein lies the first of countless gripping details waiting between the novel’s pages. Englehardt strikes at the unfortunately understood universality of this story by whispering to the psyche of the reader, saying, “this is what real endings look like, after anxiety erodes into routine.

This conversation—which has spent too much time in the mouths of talking heads following the week’s latest and greatest presumably unavoidable tragedy—is examined through the unfolding lives of a trio of characters including a student struggling to find a life of which they are willing to subscribe to, a widowed professor, and young man who is made listless by an emptiness and unknown yearning which he sets out to eradicate at any cost. The cost is interrogated by a trinity of narrators who attempt to talk the three characters through the descriptive, prescriptive, and speculative, events that led up to, unraveled during, and followed that fateful day.

“Later I understand you’re opening up to me, telling the story of your life like it happened to someone else, like the things you’ve experienced are not singular, but part of a cycle that is always repeating and reinventing itself.”

Englehardt employs these second-person narrators expertly while reminding the reader there is an “I” behind the tragedy to help usher the survivors who are left alive to move on afterward. Not doing so would be a grave mistake and no different than what America has been inundated with by the media following the endless string of mass shootings of recent history. By leading the reader through these knotted lives while using the “you” and “I,” Englehardt presents the question of who are “we” to sit back so apathetically and serve as an audience to what is quickly becoming history’s most grotesque spectator sport, leaving you to “…wonder if the scariest thing about all this is not that life can’t return to normal, but that it already has.”

It should not surprise readers that this book does not end with a cheery conclusion, but envelopes a meticulously scaffolded reflection of the current American society, one so willing to send thoughts and prayers when the time arises, yet simultaneously waiting for it to be their own turn, as if it is merely inevitable.

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DAVID TROMBLAY is a native of Duluth, Minnesota. He served for 10 years in the U.S. Navy, deploying to Iraq, Eastern Europe, and Africa. He is currently studying English Literature and Writing at the University of Wisconsin-Superior. His essays and short stories have appeared in Minerva Zine, The Nemadji Review, and Yellow Medicine Review. His first novel, The Ramblings of a Revenant, was published in 2015.