Nightboat

[REVIEW] But It’s a Long Way by Frédérique Guétat-Liviani (translated by Nathanaël)

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(Nightboat Books, 2018)

REVIEW BY GABINO IGLESIAS

—

Most poetry about interstitial spaces and borders explores the permeability of imagined borders, the effects of different cultures and languages on psychological and emotional states, and the (im)possibility of (un)traveling back and forth, of finding home again. Some, however, go further than that and tackle all of it at once while simultaneously inhabiting, literally, the dividing line between languages and a multiplicity of places. In the case of Frédérique Guétat-Liviani’s But It’s a Long Way, the writing is at once an exploration of borders, a scream against a past filled with the nonsense that usually leads to migration, and a strange biography of a life spent on liminal spaces.

Despite being about many things, But It’s a Long Way is mainly about the multiplicity of borders. Language and cultures are borders. People are borders. Poverty is a border. Everything is a border. Everything is a thing that separates humans in some way. They are created, suffered, celebrated, and forgotten. They change people and force them into actions that may or may not want. Of all the things they are, however, the most important one is constructed. Recognizing that they are constructed is one of the biggest steps a person can give toward a better understanding of how borders work, but it can also lead to frustration for a variety of reasons. Guétat-Liviani’demonstrates a deep understanding of this bizarre frailty/impenetrability that changes depending on a plethora of sociopolitical elements:

borders/they are forgotten/when/it’s

to judge a president/and then later/they are put back/to prevent

people from crossing

But borders are more than just dividing lines that impede free movement. They are more than places where one nation ends and another one begins. They are more than geographical spots where cultures may be different and a different language may be spoken. Borders, in this book, are looked at in all of their significance, and that means they are also seen as problematic sociopolitical spaces and places where bad things happen merely because of what separation entails:

sometimes/there are even wars/because of/the separations

there are also/the borders you can’t see/between arabs and

the racist French/it comes/from generalization/the terrorists

they say you have to kill/in the name of islam/so people believe

all muslims/are like that/but there’s also racism

on the part of/maghrebians/toward/others

Guétat-Liviani’ writes about Otherness with knowledge and authenticity. This book is at once a travelogue, a diary, and a mosaic biography. The reader is pulled by words through an epic journey that covers France, Spain, Albania, Morocco, Kosovo, Serbia, Chlef, Algiers, Belgium, England, and more. With the geographical changes come emotional ones, but also languages, and this book is packed with people who speak French, Arabic, Spanish, English, and Turkish. These traveling, languages, and experiences frame an underlying narrative about perpetual otherness, a unique story about exile that is at once personal and universal.

The second part of this book is in French. As someone who writes bilingual fiction, I loved that. Real discussions about being outsiders/exiles/migrants can’t be had solely in one language, especially when the artist initiating the discussion or sharing his or her experiences isn’t a native English speaker. In that regard, the second half of the book is a celebration of difference that also makes a statement: language matters when discussing other cultures.

While there is much to like about this book, perhaps the most surprising element is the amount of hope packed into its pages. Yes, there is pain, loss, and coping, but the heart of the narrative, just like that of the poet, are full of beauty:

being kind/being mean/it’s a choice/it has nothing to do/with origins

—

Gabino Iglesias is a writer, journalist and book reviewer living in Austin, Texas. He is the author of Zero Saints and Coyote Songs. He is the book review editor for Pank Magazine, and a columnist at LitReactor. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.

[REVIEW] Vigilance is no Orchard by Hazel White

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(Nightboat Books, 2018)

REVIEW BY ERIKA HOWSARE

—

If landscape is one of the primary wellsprings of poetic urgency, landscape design—the human intention that arranges ground, plants, walks and walls for the human eye—is a less common subject for poets. But there are numerous ekphrastic possibilities for a poet wanting to engage with nature, where nature is not untouched wilderness, but rather the raw material for a designer’s work.

Just as many nonfictionists have worked to untangle the relationship between the way we look at landscape paintings and our seeing of actual landscapes—Rebecca Solnit comes to mind here—a poet might find fertile ground, so to speak, in contemplating the way a garden design produces an experience for the visitor.

Cole Swensen has explored this question in more than one book, thinking about how we learn to see beauty and also how we physically, deliberately build our notions of beauty in actual places. “If you stare long enough the image / gilds itself over the eye,” she writes in Park, and again in Greensward: “…a garden is, in short, an open link bent on forming more, ever outward, a line between humans and other species…a following thinned to an horizon with all its attendant aesthetic principles of balance, rhythm, motion, etc., and the ethical principles inherent in them, and in both directions, i.e., it comes back to us.”

Poet Hazel White, in her new book Vigilance is no Orchard, takes the project a step further, to include the investigation of her own writing process as she grapples with the overwhelming aesthetic impact of a private Southern California garden designed by landscape architect Isabelle Greene. The book is much more than a simple account of walking through the garden; it includes quotes from conversations between White and Greene, and it repeatedly circles through a thicket of inspiration, influence, writerly ambition and writerly despair.

It’s worth knowing that White, along with one previous book of poetry, has published many instructional gardening books, and one can sometimes detect in Vigilance the tension between the experimental and commercial modes of writing—or, perhaps, a torque happily applied to the latter mode, as the poet begins to set herself free within the field of language, composing lines that would not rest easily in an average how-to book: “Terraces that step down gently were a clue that Greene intended a seamless departure. My feet anchored in groundcover, my head could ride the lines there, on / air’s back.”

But although White’s break with conventional language provides her with a lodestone and a methodology, the book’s true subject is her struggle with the admiration and envy she feels toward Greene’s accomplishment in the Valentine garden in Montecito. The garden is considered a landmark in modernist landscape design, but for White the source of unease is more personal and, indeed, bodily:

“I bowed low to Greene’s motion. Accepted the blow of it—I must know the how of its thinnest leaf on its strongest breeze, be sure, as my back was bending in astonishment.”

Being deeply affected by another person’s aesthetic accomplishment is a joy that immediately turns to exigency. “Beauty is not shelter, it necessitates a forward momentum,” White writes, in a perfect encapsulation of the discomfort that an artist can feel toward another artist’s work—the desire to produce a response that possesses, that wraps the original work in one’s own, even larger, vision. “…though the phrasing small and never named as envy: I would/I wished/I would/write about her.” Those final three words take on spatial shades—“write about” as in “encompass.”

The quest thus identified, White sets off (“urgently”) into cycles of poetic advance and retreat. Vigilance is a self-referential account of its own making that makes frequent use of Greene’s words to generate slippage between the landscape design process and the writing process. “To make a garden or a text show up—one needs the connections to be manifold,” writes White, and then quotes Greene: “‘But I hate geometry.’”

The writerly struggle, in White’s account, has many facets, and her commitment to an honest narrative about the difficulty of conceiving, and completing, a project is refreshing. Many of her readers, after all, will be poets who can intimately relate to the various conundrums she describes.

It takes White a while, for example, to settle into the scope of the project, to name all its imperatives. She must “have an environment whole…not parceling or steering into writing.” She must stay connected to her own physical experience in the garden: “Awareness of its forms alerts the body, so if I am quick / I can prod spatial pleasure for the texture of attention.” She must track inspiration as it “crosses into space never looking back,” like an exuberant toddler one must follow and contain without controlling too tightly. Above all, she must stay “at the edge inventing.”

“Drought / Worry of direction,” the title of the middle section in Vigilance, is of course a major part of the writing process: that parched, sinking feeling that the text one has been laboring over is ill-conceived and will add up to nothing. Drought for a garden is like doubt for the poet. “The work arcs and fails,” White assesses her own progress halfway through the book, and a page later, quotes Greene, who’s enjoying the fruits of a long and successful career: “My shows at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and the UCSB Museum were an immensely enlarging experience. There was ME!”

There’s another important difference, in White’s account, between her own struggle to create work that satisfies her and Greene’s seeming confidence, lightness, with the materials of her craft. Greene works with trees, rocks, water, “‘cow parsnips riffling among quaking aspens.’” She carries “‘a feeling for the crease in an arroyo, down in it and way back up the other side.’” This delicious physicality contrasts with the writer’s tools, which can only ever be abstract: “a fragmented narrative,” a plot that “dissolves to tableau…a gaze through glass toward no particular direction.”

Even the setting comes into play—White, who grew up in rural England, is permanently out of place in California, which is Greene’s native state. The oneness of Greene with her environment and its indigenous flora offset the sense of being a foreigner in another person’s vision.

White manages to report on these disparities between her own uncertainty and Greene’s artistic fulfillment in a way that is gracious and responsible, and makes clear that Greene is a warm, generous friend as well as an articulate commentator on her own work. Yet she also recounts at least one episode of questioning Greene’s aesthetic: “Wait– // Working low to the earth—is Greene timid and showing no tail?” White goes on to describe another, very different garden, one whose soaring verticals create an effect that’s more aggressive, almost violent (“Time Before whistles in from the outside. It…threatened to take down my pants”) compared with Greene’s horizontal, “explorative” or “solicitous” style.

This is not only the arcane shop talk of landscape designers; it echoes White’s own search for the right approach to poems. Elsewhere in the book she finds a parallel between the empty page (“White page a slick of construction talk”) and land that’s been violently cleared: “Scrape the hillside. / Loud bulldozer erases topsoil, turns, / piles it. / White real estate.” Even if the author isn’t punning on her own surname here, she does seem to be criticizing a certain mode of relation to a field of possibility.

A few pages later, a resolution suggests itself—a listening attitude, a way of allowing rather than forcing significance. “Move into mouth’s house: but don’t write myself into / a miniaturized shelter on paper.”

Physical reality, the garden itself and the body moving through it, are the keys both to White’s finding a way through her subject and to making this book an account of something more than a poet’s inner process—a real communication. The lines about the Valentine garden thrum with sensuality: “A field day, as wasps know, crawling split fruit.” And: “Brilliance of neon pink crabapple bloom / shatters around itself.”

Even as White suggests a parallel between conventional, strictured language and landscape design that imposes an external vision on a site assumed to be passive, she also echoes and reenacts Greene’s innovativeness, building a quiet rebellion against centuries of tradition surrounding nature poetry. The inclusiveness of her language makes clear that this voice belongs to someone who, though passionate about plants and gardens, is not writing from an idyllic vacuum.

That voice invites many kinds of language to become part of a search for “a manner in which language might push out and touch us.” Greene’s words, both quotes from conversations and bits of what must be written communications, form a collage with White’s deliciously unpredictable lines. The dominant mode recalls Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s prose-influenced, abstracted style, but White is a collagist and a word-sculptor, who can deftly skid among registers, and

“pivot/

into

thinning

bruising

switch-

eroos.”

 

She has a keen ear for idiomatic speech and a designer’s eye for white space, and can slip between addressing the reader and seeming to address herself (“Try talkback…Make a rustle”).

The invitation to language-awareness parallels the call to place-awareness. One must be present to the presences (as Greene, quoted here, exclaims: “‘The persimmon tree is intensely red just this minute!’”) and mindful of imminent loss and decay (“Gardens flicker in and out of existence”). Being outside, being in a space, being attuned to one’s own body and conscious of the mind riding that body through a special, ordered environment: These are a salve for the condition of habitual thought and worn metaphor, a “coherent deformation” that acknowledges imperfection: “scars in the blue bloom of agave leaves.” These are the anchors that allow a new kind of language about nature to come into being.

It’s as though White strives to deserve, through writing, the experience she’s already had in the garden. The final chapter of this effort is ultimately not described, but rather manifested in the existence of the book itself, with all the moments of doubt, resolve, and labor elegantly woven into the work’s polished form.

—

Erika Howsare is a Virginia-based poet and her second full-length book, How Is Travel a Folded Form? was published this year by Saddle Road Press. She previously published a book-length meditation on waste, co-authored with Kate Schapira, called FILL: A Collection. She has also published several chapbooks and served as a coeditor at Horse Less Press for eleven years. Her reviews, interviews and essays have appeared at The Millions, The Rumpus, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Taproot.

 

Swiping Left on the Hangout: A Conversation with Felix Bernstein

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“I wonder if one person out of 8,000,000 is thinking of me.”—Frank O’Hara

 

For decades, experimental poetry, underground performance, and the art world have made for the (un)likeliest of bedfellows, even if the power imbalance becomes increasingly discomfiting. In his manifold creative practice, Felix Bernstein has traversed these intersecting spheres lustily; slicing through the various, porous borders of the cultural continent in an attempt to lay bare the psychosexual strictures on contemporary aesthetic production. In this conversation, we found ourselves continually returning to formats—from the social media feed to the personal essay to the “About Me” section of dating apps—as the pride and the pitfalls of our generation’s libidinal economy.

—Joseph Pomp 

 

Joseph Pomp: What I find compelling about your writing is that the distance between you the critic and your subjects is often fluctuating. At times, you offer very insider-y takes on certain sub-subcultures, and other times you step back and do some big-picture diagnosing.

 

Felix Bernstein: I tend to distance myself from the pool of references around me, until I get pent up and write about it. Mostly this is out of anxiety and impatience, but I think it has allowed me to link up with people who hate the artists or art institutions I’m discussing, and even with people who hate me. Sometimes this is because people like to read anything flippant: it’s clickbait. The click-baited might not be a sustained readership, but it was the most immediate readership I got. Then there are cynics playing the “game” in New York, who have competing interests with institutions or wanted to protect themselves from critique. And also some of the people I’ve critiqued get excited to be enraged—so they can seem iconoclastic on Twitter, and so on.

 

JP: Are you mourning for a pre-Internet viewing culture? In this vertiginous climate, do you see a light at the end of the tunnel?

 

FB: I’m not in mourning, at all. My optimism is that I still desire and, to a certain extent, seek out, and get surprised by, stuff. I’m not surprised by anything theoretically determined to be “better than,” i.e., less neoliberal, more queer, more mutable, more radical, more avant-garde, more relation, more anti-relational/cruel. A kind of tragic irony is that the tastemakers and people boosting artists in theory or writing listicles online don’t really believe that they can be surprised by anything anymore. They are lying; they see tastemaking as a job, or a way to inevitably promote themselves, or keep up with appearances. The same goes with those who “hate” everything, which is simply the reverse mode of taste-making. As Baudrillard had it, “Reversibility has nothing to do with reciprocity.”

 

JP: So do you think there’s a danger in continually putting the present down, especially through the lens of the past?

 

FB: Yes, but also, putting it down in favor of the future. I’m constantly asked, or seeing panels about, the future of poetry and art, film and video, and art and digital processes, as well as on the topic of millennial, gay, and queer, because people feel run down by their disciplinary bureaucracies. They think holding yet another symposium will help. The idea that suddenly queer, gay, poetry, art, film, and performance are being “commodified” depends on an ahistorical fallacy about untainted origins—it’s a very tricky question, but the answer implied is, “things are becoming more commercial, we have to come up with alternatives to mainstream, really fast,” which is a market-driven mode of thought. These symposiums feed off of the labor of outliers—the queer-art-academic-critical-party is so monotonous, it requires unpaid interns, emerging artists, and struggling students, to continually throw some idiosyncratic jouissance to the gallery or panel, and then be discarded.

 

And with all critical evaluation and comparative analysis of the present art there is the danger of what might best be called aesthetic decisionism—the sort of mythical, grand, allegorical proclamations about paradigms that Foucault made all the time. But there’s also the farce of the compulsory claim that artists today are the “new” version of past icons: “This novelist is the James Joyce (or Artaud or Schneemann, etc.) of today.” This is the Vice blurbing industry. There is also the problem of what is effectively transgressive in a suburban high school does not so much matter in the art world. Or what is replicated by the formal charisma of “Joyce” or “Schneemann” today is not the same as it was then… as when Lena Dunham writes that a radical queer poet is “that weird girl in high school who was always writing in her diary.” Often this comparison arises, since high school presents the fantasy of belonging to a clique and table, or else being different as a brand (the loner who wears hot topic; the one who critiques the hot-topic anarchist for being a poser; or the one like me, who critiques the critic of hot topic for their claims of exemption from complicity), so there is a continual inclusivity.  Chris Campanioni’s treatment of names and cliques in his writing (see Death of Art) really tackles the ironies inherent  in these problems, which are really hard to confront, because often disheartening. Extending, however ridiculously, the high school metaphor; just as the same mall has a shirt for the jock, cheerleader, hipster, and loner; so too Amazon recommends books by an “experimental artist,” “experimental cultural critic,” “experimental poet,” with indifference to micro-distinctions…. or the fact that in these worlds we all hate each other.

 

JP: Academia also sometimes engenders these types of facile, trans-historical comparisons. Do you see that a result of its territorial nature?

 

FB: I think it comes from an impulse to try to be the mythmaker—to seem as prophetic as William Blake, even though you are merely his biographer (to seem as dangerous as Jack Smith even though you are merely performing for an MFA board of esteemed critics…or perhaps, on a Bravo TV show). The myth-making poets are making ontological proclamations, but if you’re a cultural critic, you can’t really do that, but you can have a hand in changing the canon. It’s such an impotent and limited thing to be a critic in the sense that any change to the canon is going to be ephemeral, and few dissertations will sell well (if they even make it to publication). I’m confused by the desire to convert one’s niche into a Renaissance portfolio. Everyone on Tinder is a dilettante, which is the sort of sensibility that the liberal arts college produces. People aren’t satisfied with what they’re doing, or rather they always want to do more. People have a hard time accepting a vocation, or a disciplinary constraint. Hybridity, a fetish of today’s marketplace, is a way around that. But it is its own disciplinary constraint. I think I am constrained by it, for sure.

 

JP: Would you say that there’s something campy about this conception of hybridity?

 

FB: There’s something, not necessarily campy, but annoying about it. I’ve annoyed people, too, by doing similar stuff—writing critically about a museum and then performing in a museum.

 

JP: It seems like the dilettantism propagated by social media comes from those networks’ obsession with celebrity.  Everyone is striving for some glimmer of fame.

 

FB: Yes, but there’s also a striving for recognition of having good taste. I remember when “liking” Fight Club or Pulp Fiction on Facebook signified that. It was enough. I like to be alone, but in public, like going to the movies. It’s hard to really be alone on social media. Though, sometimes my YouTube videos get only 200 views but that’s not really alone. The other way in which people try to cash in on the fabrication of persona at the level of social media is to treat themselves as readymade objects. Showing up to events as a club kid is increasingly being considered art. Curators are sometimes like club promoters; they just want people to show up.

 

JP: Like Klaus Biesenbach and MoMA PS1 …

 

FB: Right, but everyone also attempts to think they are better, which they might be, but the traps are all laid out for you, no matter what, if you are a museum curator. Thanks to this particular marketplace, there are people who are recognized and are in good standing as artists who have made maybe one work. And I think it’s the MFA mentality, because sometimes people in MFA programs make one video, or write one poem, and otherwise just spend three years making sure everyone likes it. Every inch you go forward as an artist, you have to check that everyone’s okay with it. I imagine this is what it would be like to be in an overpriced kindergarten, all the ambitious prodding and observation from authority figures. Same with PhD programs, a million apologias before arriving at an appropriate, airtight thesis—“To be or not to be” becoming, “What else should I say, All apologies,” / “What else should I write, I don’t have the right,” so you have all the Kurt Cobain self-flagellation without any of the grunge and beauty.

 

On the flip side, are those who go full speed ahead, run before they can walk, which is attractive but they can “run out” of steam fast, or else get stigmatized for, paradoxically, having “too much” vision. But the inch-by-inch mode is very odd to me, as a hysteric. I need to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. I also find being critiqued in private continually until you feel you can go public, because now you are exempt from critique (you have affiliated with just the right cultural critics) is a trap. It’s like having the blurbs for your book coming from so many institutional heavyweights that one can’t really comment, without feeling like they are trespassing an institutional sanction.

 

JP: That’s the price one pays for taking a very academic approach to art making. To zoom out a bit, how much do you think academia, or a degree, matters to artists? You suggest that the contemporary, perfunctory “artist’s statement…only appears to be counter-academic,” as if there are hidden, sublimated, allegiances therein (“The Irreproachable Essay,” Texte Zur Kunst, Fall 2016).

 

FB: The artist’s statement is ubiquitous to every bureaucratic facet of the arts and humanities. Even just using Tinder, you have to prove that you can write about yourself.  Why is that valued so highly? I don’t know. People want to move away from standardized testing, and they think the most radical thing you could do is this humanistic recuperation of—the multitalented. This comes with all the dilemmas outlined in Alice Miller’s Drama of the Gifted Child. This epistemologically aware notion of the self (as cultural juggler) is something you need to display to get into college, but now you need it in the art world too. Nowadays, obviously there’s a turn against this kind of personal statement. A hip gallery won’t even have one. And that’s another reason for the turn to poetry, because people think poetry diffuses formal rigidity. This is a fantasy, and inevitably a letdown as Ben Lerner suggests in The Hatred of Poetry.

 

JP: Considering that art schools now offer MFA degrees in New Genres, which uncannily include writing, as if that is an emerging, promising ‘new’ medium, do you think the art world’s appropriation of poetry is in any way affecting poets?

 

FB: I think that the emulation of any form, as presented by a professor who is looking over your shoulder, is tricky. For instance, if you watch a crumby old tape of a Jack Smith performance you might attempt to imitate the “ephemeral” retro nature in a way that suits the pre-approved look of what you are seeing. Or you try and make something for the PS1 Book Fair that looks like an ephemeral zine. It’s always when the ephemeral is grasped that the canon is doing its work, and this is very easy to do with poetry and performance, a double take; which I think Broodthaers satirized when he turned Mallarmé into an austere art object, with the words blacked out. This is the issue now, fetishizing something for being obscure at the very moment that it’s no longer obscure, for instance, clicking fetish on Pornhub. But what happens when you receive your fetish under the label “fetish,” is you are just buying hardware, the whips and chains not the psychic danger. This is similar to what it might mean to buy an overpriced chapbook. James Franco can collect all the props, the degrees, the small press publications, but he will never appear psychically tormented. Broodthaers was very conscious of how the museum was archiving all of these things and by now it’s commonplace to critique this sort of approach. But it remains an interesting and important critique to consider the limitations of the platforms we all use. What can’t you post on Instagram (and not just porn), what can’t be consumed in that way? Even a video over one minute is hard to disseminate over apps, which trim how durational a vision can be—and it’s why people no longer have the patience to go to avant-garde films. Even the people I studied “experimental” film with don’t watch film anymore, unless pressed to do so by some sort of event or retrospective, or by peer pressure. However, this is an injunction to enjoy someone’s fetish, i.e., a screening of the B-side of a random experimental artist (when the audience doesn’t even know the A-side).

 

JP: Right, people are so overwhelmed by the onslaught of short attention-span media at this moment that they have all but abandoned their aesthetic criteria of judgment.

 

FB: The other problem is that, at the level of the gallery, to suddenly flip and show a James Benning film, forces the work to be read as interesting only by nature of its opposition to social media. It becomes the tortoise. And just another tab to scroll through, much like watching films on Ubuweb. The point being, you can walk in and out; take a picture; leave. Taking a picture of a picture is the best way to file the labor of decipherment away for later. On the other hand, taking a picture of the person taking a picture of the picture, like what we are doing now, can be a cogent way of deciphering, but has only a very transient merit—since it feeds off of the futility of its own perspectival impotence, its complicity with the act of consumption it attempts to outdo.

 

 

Joseph Pomp is a cultural critic whose writings on international film have appeared in edited volumes and publications including The Brooklyn Rail, Film Quarterly, and Senses of Cinema. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Comparative Literature and Critical Media Practice at Harvard University.

 

Felix Bernstein is a writer, performer, and video artist, as well as the author of Notes on Post-Conceptual Poetry (Insert Blanc Press, 2015) and a collection of poems, Burn Book (Nightboat Books, 2016). His opera Bieber Bathos Elegy, in collaboration with Gabe Rubin, premiered at the Whitney Museum in January 2016. His book on contemporary queer avant-gardes, written with philosopher Kyoo Lee, is forthcoming.