Jean Frémon
Distant Noise
Avec Books
English translations by Norma Cole, Lydia Davis, Serge Gavronsky, and Cole Swenson
2003
112 pages
Softcover, $14
The title of this book, Distant Noise, points to the muffling of sound that distance causes, to a sound one can almost not hear. In a piece called "Equation," translated by Lydia Davis, Jean Frémon writes:
against every picture
scenes of childhood
plans for the future
ballets of light
though forbidden
the ear straining
While the ear strains toward catching something it cannot, to imagine plans or re-imagine childhood, I am left straining myself, with the commonplace notion behind it given so much weight here. As if this is a startling phenomenon or thought—how we cannot retrieve everything in our minds. This is a general disagreement I have with the book as a whole. There are things presented in this book as if they are startling, insightful, brilliant, and yet they are not. Oftentimes, this is felt when Frémon is merely describing or listing a banal combination of images, events, thoughts. Like in the first piece in the book, "Theater," translated by Norma Cole, an entire page is devoted to the following:
When the bird flies away, its shadow leaves, drifts, fades.
The combination of basic thoughts mixed with the embedded drama of a short piece crops up again and again in the book. Many of them are platitudes or sentimental images dressed up in quietude, fetched from the mind of the distant, non-participatory observer in these poems. Here is another example from "Theater":
The field was not a field. The sky was not a sky. The hills
were not hills. The horizon was not the horizon. The
real was not the real nor the images the images. Nothing
was exactly what it was supposed to be. It is this, the
shift they were not arriving at describing, nor even nam-
ing, just sensing.
This is another way of saying once again that our words are not accurate as vehicles to understand life, that Life is still beyond this, beyond language, but we know this already. Also, especially in "Theater," there are sections that just list descriptions for an image or images, as if a string of tableau vivants, as in the following:
The students, all that in them was study. Their whole apti-
tude for docility, for indocility. Their impertinence and their
submissiveness, their talkativeness and their muteness. Their
crossed arms, their distracted chores. The contagion of laugh-
ter.
The narrator speaks in an all-encompassing voice, as if not affected by the students or their possibilities, by anything, and this willful distancing distances me. Frémon also has a tendency to use generalizing statements, phrasings, like "all" and "whole" in the above, or to just list general subjectless states of experience that effectively push things into universals for me, which are not trustworthy, as one person cannot possibly know how all others think or feel. It is an unnecessary falsehood which distracts me from the contents and contexts of the writing. More generalities occur on the page previous to the above, with the following:
The fever, the anxiety, the badly healed wounds.
The shames, the rancors, the humiliations, the resentments.
The tone here, as if speaking through lost eras and old skies, has a belated visionary feel to it. The feeling of "this too shall pass". A fine thing in itself, as long as we have felt and know what "this" is being passed, which never seems to appear, so the generalities continue. In "Equation," Frémon writes numbly, "emotion at the waning of the day," as if "emotion" is the same whether one’s angry or overjoyed. In the piece following "Theater", called "Ceremony," translated by Serge Gavronsky, describing, of course, a ceremony, he ends a piece with the hushed wonder that is not wonder:
what will be is
written in what was
Which just begs the question, "Is there anything in the future not conditioned by what came before it?" "Future" is entirely conditioned with the implication of something earlier. Or, again in the piece, "Equation," we have this segment, stretched to the utmost, to give every bit of its worth enough time to linger in our minds:
shepherd, flock
rustic temple
distant mountain
setting sun
all ingredients
in the idyll
To which all one can say is, Yes, that’s right. An idyll is a short poem or prose composition which deals charmingly with rustic life.
And while Frémon is attempting a blending of prose and poetry, or one hopes he is, the prose seems merely descriptive and the poetry rarely surprising. The final piece, of five total, is called "Herisau," translated by Cole Swenson, and is, for me, the least bothersome, perhaps because it’s the shortest piece in the book, perhaps because there are more imaginative lines in it, like:
The fever to serve. To be another. To show disrespect for the
next person you meet. To come to no conclusions.
There is a sense of a life here, not an abstracted, ethereal Being, listening to sounds, looking vacantly at rain, almost posing when doing so. In the second section of "Herisau," Frémon writes "Fists clenched in pocket." It was the one time in the book, that I felt somebody, a conceivably human narrator, present. Two pages later the book ended, leaving me feeling that, like the narrator of "Yet Another Story Without An End," also translated by Gavronsky, the narrator has "tried to remain on the surface of self."
April 30, 2004
April 26, 2004
Tan Lin
BlipSoak01
Atelos
2003
325 pages
Softcover, $12.95
"Their hair is early," Tan Lin explains a little over midway in his recent collection of writing, BlipSoak01. This book is a lot of things: poetry, fiction, nonfiction, correspondence, seemingly a mining of junk emails, theatre, film, some carpentry, musical, shuttering, collapsing, mirroring, dream states, syntactical irruption, numbering, listing, waking states, despair, text art, goofy humor, a commitment, and a lot of talking. It is doing a whole lot of talking. And pointing. And laughing. And though I’ve mentioned categories above, one cannot be sure of much in this book. Which is, ultimately, an adventure, a wonder. This is an unending catalog of experience, much like Kenneth Goldsmith’s work, a writer that Lin seems especially enamored with and inspired by.
This is a complete work—there are no individual poems, no individual sections, no periods, none. It never lets up. Which is thrilling, a manipulation, and tiring. But when I was tired with its talking, I put it down, and went on with something else. And then I returned to it. It provoked me into so many emotions, so many states of mind, that it was exhausting. I was irritated, excited, bored, wondering, inspired, happy, grinning—the last three words on what makes for one of two possible endings couldn’t be more exquisitely ridiculous.
Apart from some concrete poetry in the beginning and a little elsewhere later on, this book is written in two-line stanzas—these are not couplets—on the even-numbered pages. There is a minor break with this at the very end of the book, where both the even and odd pages carry the two-line stanzas. On the odd-numbered pages, there are various blips of endings of lines that came from the opposing page. The sense goes into and comes out of the gutter of the book. For instance, and randomly, this part:
Telephones suggest nudity unredeemed by wha [gutter] tever swam sideways
Tuesdays meander pianos whose subject was r [gutter] e-runs
This is variable. Some odd-numbered pages carry just one ending of the even-numbered page’s thought. Of course, one can obviously and convincingly make the case that the gutter is really stopping it, and that those blips of sense, the "tever swam sideways" is not just a lopped-off part of "Telephones suggest nudity unredeemed by wha." Which is fine. I have no argument with that, and maybe someone will write about this explicitly. A person could spend the rest of his/her life writing about this book. In any case, what one encounters visually, without reading anything, is a sense of stability on the even numbered pages, with its two-lined stanzas, and a sense of chaos on the next page, with all its white areas, and indeterminate ends and morphemes. It makes for an odd sort of balance. I found it very comfortable visually, and it breaks up the monotony of the two-liners.
BlipSoak01 is a handy title and catch-all for what this writing is. Soaked by blips. The 01 points to more of this writing to follow. But these blips are like mercury and cannot be picked up easily. Lin writes on page 236: "Begin screen, begin evaporation of image," and this gets to the image-warping throughout the text. How one cannot exactly sit in the comfort of the image because it is all flux—even when Lin suggests a linear feeling between two lines, by use of anaphora, for instance, one is no longer comfortable believing they are connected. Lin, on page 232:
This is calligraphic receded and sinks in the gall [gutter] ons of couch
This is reached after expulsion and gallops
This is night, ears with a lobe of sand poured th [gutter] e arms to you
This is day I travel a bus
This is type
And night in a log name
The sea turns
And the random thing memorized
The world unturns the grostesqueness
And the same thing is memorized
Another
And Another
Elsewhere from this book, "in real life" as they say, Lin has remarked that "A lot of people think great works of literature should be memorized. I think poems and novels are most beautiful at the exact moment in which they are forgotten." In BlipSoak01, Lin follows through on his belief in continuous experience and constant forgetting. It is impossible, I found, to hold whatever this book is in my mind at once. It is life, surging, poking, dreaming, forgetting itself.
If forced to, one might ask, What are the consequences of such writing? What does it do? The consequences, it seems to me, are that we are shown necessary alternatives, and are briefly free from a late capitalist world (wheezing in Iraq, Colombia, Turkey) determined to brutalize the singularities out of us and make us into a horrific "one," into a nation of sameness, of same feelings, of same ideas, of what a man is, of what a woman is, of what a tree is, of what "what is." "You’re either with us, or against us," paraphrasing the president. This freeing sense, though, is perhaps the cruel feeling of freedom, and not freedom in itself. The controls, as we know, are in place for this mirage. BlipSoak01 is a product, too. A price has been attributed to it.
The shifting, lying beauties of this writing hope to give expression to what lies behind this facade of profit-making, of reduction of others into units, the insane religious faith in currency, et cetera. Lin isn’t going to make obvious polemics in his poetry, but they are there. Inside the rhetorical stances—for that’s what they are, stances—he documents the de-familiarizing impact of thinking in one moment, "Poise gathers/in retroflection," and then later on, "a bargain jar of Miracle Whip."
"How does one cohere in this world?" this book seems to be asking. How does one not just implode and begin to babble helplessly? To me, this should be the natural reaction to the fathomable horrors in our world. But one must do something [Beckett: I can’t go on, I’ll go on], so one writes, and explains by writing, like Lin, whatever is going on, whatever one thinks or thinks he/she hears in that moment, however false it may feel.
BlipSoak01
Atelos
2003
325 pages
Softcover, $12.95
"Their hair is early," Tan Lin explains a little over midway in his recent collection of writing, BlipSoak01. This book is a lot of things: poetry, fiction, nonfiction, correspondence, seemingly a mining of junk emails, theatre, film, some carpentry, musical, shuttering, collapsing, mirroring, dream states, syntactical irruption, numbering, listing, waking states, despair, text art, goofy humor, a commitment, and a lot of talking. It is doing a whole lot of talking. And pointing. And laughing. And though I’ve mentioned categories above, one cannot be sure of much in this book. Which is, ultimately, an adventure, a wonder. This is an unending catalog of experience, much like Kenneth Goldsmith’s work, a writer that Lin seems especially enamored with and inspired by.
This is a complete work—there are no individual poems, no individual sections, no periods, none. It never lets up. Which is thrilling, a manipulation, and tiring. But when I was tired with its talking, I put it down, and went on with something else. And then I returned to it. It provoked me into so many emotions, so many states of mind, that it was exhausting. I was irritated, excited, bored, wondering, inspired, happy, grinning—the last three words on what makes for one of two possible endings couldn’t be more exquisitely ridiculous.
Apart from some concrete poetry in the beginning and a little elsewhere later on, this book is written in two-line stanzas—these are not couplets—on the even-numbered pages. There is a minor break with this at the very end of the book, where both the even and odd pages carry the two-line stanzas. On the odd-numbered pages, there are various blips of endings of lines that came from the opposing page. The sense goes into and comes out of the gutter of the book. For instance, and randomly, this part:
Telephones suggest nudity unredeemed by wha [gutter] tever swam sideways
Tuesdays meander pianos whose subject was r [gutter] e-runs
This is variable. Some odd-numbered pages carry just one ending of the even-numbered page’s thought. Of course, one can obviously and convincingly make the case that the gutter is really stopping it, and that those blips of sense, the "tever swam sideways" is not just a lopped-off part of "Telephones suggest nudity unredeemed by wha." Which is fine. I have no argument with that, and maybe someone will write about this explicitly. A person could spend the rest of his/her life writing about this book. In any case, what one encounters visually, without reading anything, is a sense of stability on the even numbered pages, with its two-lined stanzas, and a sense of chaos on the next page, with all its white areas, and indeterminate ends and morphemes. It makes for an odd sort of balance. I found it very comfortable visually, and it breaks up the monotony of the two-liners.
BlipSoak01 is a handy title and catch-all for what this writing is. Soaked by blips. The 01 points to more of this writing to follow. But these blips are like mercury and cannot be picked up easily. Lin writes on page 236: "Begin screen, begin evaporation of image," and this gets to the image-warping throughout the text. How one cannot exactly sit in the comfort of the image because it is all flux—even when Lin suggests a linear feeling between two lines, by use of anaphora, for instance, one is no longer comfortable believing they are connected. Lin, on page 232:
This is calligraphic receded and sinks in the gall [gutter] ons of couch
This is reached after expulsion and gallops
This is night, ears with a lobe of sand poured th [gutter] e arms to you
This is day I travel a bus
This is type
And night in a log name
The sea turns
And the random thing memorized
The world unturns the grostesqueness
And the same thing is memorized
Another
And Another
Elsewhere from this book, "in real life" as they say, Lin has remarked that "A lot of people think great works of literature should be memorized. I think poems and novels are most beautiful at the exact moment in which they are forgotten." In BlipSoak01, Lin follows through on his belief in continuous experience and constant forgetting. It is impossible, I found, to hold whatever this book is in my mind at once. It is life, surging, poking, dreaming, forgetting itself.
If forced to, one might ask, What are the consequences of such writing? What does it do? The consequences, it seems to me, are that we are shown necessary alternatives, and are briefly free from a late capitalist world (wheezing in Iraq, Colombia, Turkey) determined to brutalize the singularities out of us and make us into a horrific "one," into a nation of sameness, of same feelings, of same ideas, of what a man is, of what a woman is, of what a tree is, of what "what is." "You’re either with us, or against us," paraphrasing the president. This freeing sense, though, is perhaps the cruel feeling of freedom, and not freedom in itself. The controls, as we know, are in place for this mirage. BlipSoak01 is a product, too. A price has been attributed to it.
The shifting, lying beauties of this writing hope to give expression to what lies behind this facade of profit-making, of reduction of others into units, the insane religious faith in currency, et cetera. Lin isn’t going to make obvious polemics in his poetry, but they are there. Inside the rhetorical stances—for that’s what they are, stances—he documents the de-familiarizing impact of thinking in one moment, "Poise gathers/in retroflection," and then later on, "a bargain jar of Miracle Whip."
"How does one cohere in this world?" this book seems to be asking. How does one not just implode and begin to babble helplessly? To me, this should be the natural reaction to the fathomable horrors in our world. But one must do something [Beckett: I can’t go on, I’ll go on], so one writes, and explains by writing, like Lin, whatever is going on, whatever one thinks or thinks he/she hears in that moment, however false it may feel.
April 23, 2004
Graham Foust
As In Every Deafness
Flood Editions, 2003
66 pages
Softcover, $13
There are many ways to begin reviews. One type begins with an anecdote that will throw light on the book at hand, another type reads the book through associations with other books, still another type progresses with the conventional thesis statement, or a general concern, and fills in the concern with examples from the book being reviewed. Many times, as well, the tones of reviews take on the distance of hindsight, of calm reflection. Within this calm, in the finished product of the review, there is lost, usually, the initial excitement, however badly worded one is in the middle of thinking. I would like to begin, then, with one of my first full thoughts about midway through Graham Foust’s book, As In Every Deafness:
Well, this is exciting writing. Aside from my deep discomfort of quoting myself, I want to convey my enthusiasm for the dark, fluid, musical inwardness these poems display. Foust is a craftsman of wonderfully controlled lines, but the lines are not constraining, as the syntax is not attempting conclusions. Conclusions come, certainly, but really never in the way I expected. There is thinking taking place, and the states of mind, the influences of weather, rooms, silence, winter, and music, underscore a questioning desperation and strangeness, an estrangement from living while living. Here’s "Love Poem":
Love Poem
For we are only
ever
joined
in a figure
built above
the Earth.
Sleep
like me
with me
this way—
ungestured,
begging invasion.
*
Of influences on Foust’s writing, one can point to William Bronk’s brief intensities, as Susan Howe notes on the back cover, or to the torqued turning in poems by Paul Celan, or to the anaphora and quietude of Michael Burkard’s. Robert Creeley seems yet another figure involved, as with Foust’s very Creeley-esque environment in the poem and poem title, "Here":
Here
In the dumb
dumb garden
we are all
all talk
unsure
for nothing
of no one
not there.
*
Only a few of Foust’s lyrics continue on to another page. The courage in the book is to risk the short poem without making an ass out of one’s self. The short poem is a deadly area, filled with the victims of platitudes and glibness. There are ways out of the short form, of course, sometimes accomplished by the poem being witty, as seen in a recent poem in Conjunctions by Hayden Carruth called "Duality":
Duality
Two roads converged in the woods, and I
Turned around and came back.
But Foust’s short poems work because they use a lot of air/white space between line breaks, which lengthen the feeling of their statements; the white space controls the motions of the words. Syntactically, they also turn in tight arcs, which provides a dense expression, and ultimately settle on things or ideas that never seem steady. Throughout the book, there is openness and intelligent poignancy, as in the first of two poems called "Winter":
Winter
Things will never be
the same. Are they
the same yet?
Each day’s a hint.
Each shadow,
no new window.
I’ll turn until I tear until
the building leaves
the building.
*
May more winters come. This book’s a white diamond.
As In Every Deafness
Flood Editions, 2003
66 pages
Softcover, $13
There are many ways to begin reviews. One type begins with an anecdote that will throw light on the book at hand, another type reads the book through associations with other books, still another type progresses with the conventional thesis statement, or a general concern, and fills in the concern with examples from the book being reviewed. Many times, as well, the tones of reviews take on the distance of hindsight, of calm reflection. Within this calm, in the finished product of the review, there is lost, usually, the initial excitement, however badly worded one is in the middle of thinking. I would like to begin, then, with one of my first full thoughts about midway through Graham Foust’s book, As In Every Deafness:
Well, this is exciting writing. Aside from my deep discomfort of quoting myself, I want to convey my enthusiasm for the dark, fluid, musical inwardness these poems display. Foust is a craftsman of wonderfully controlled lines, but the lines are not constraining, as the syntax is not attempting conclusions. Conclusions come, certainly, but really never in the way I expected. There is thinking taking place, and the states of mind, the influences of weather, rooms, silence, winter, and music, underscore a questioning desperation and strangeness, an estrangement from living while living. Here’s "Love Poem":
Love Poem
For we are only
ever
joined
in a figure
built above
the Earth.
Sleep
like me
with me
this way—
ungestured,
begging invasion.
*
Of influences on Foust’s writing, one can point to William Bronk’s brief intensities, as Susan Howe notes on the back cover, or to the torqued turning in poems by Paul Celan, or to the anaphora and quietude of Michael Burkard’s. Robert Creeley seems yet another figure involved, as with Foust’s very Creeley-esque environment in the poem and poem title, "Here":
Here
In the dumb
dumb garden
we are all
all talk
unsure
for nothing
of no one
not there.
*
Only a few of Foust’s lyrics continue on to another page. The courage in the book is to risk the short poem without making an ass out of one’s self. The short poem is a deadly area, filled with the victims of platitudes and glibness. There are ways out of the short form, of course, sometimes accomplished by the poem being witty, as seen in a recent poem in Conjunctions by Hayden Carruth called "Duality":
Duality
Two roads converged in the woods, and I
Turned around and came back.
But Foust’s short poems work because they use a lot of air/white space between line breaks, which lengthen the feeling of their statements; the white space controls the motions of the words. Syntactically, they also turn in tight arcs, which provides a dense expression, and ultimately settle on things or ideas that never seem steady. Throughout the book, there is openness and intelligent poignancy, as in the first of two poems called "Winter":
Winter
Things will never be
the same. Are they
the same yet?
Each day’s a hint.
Each shadow,
no new window.
I’ll turn until I tear until
the building leaves
the building.
*
May more winters come. This book’s a white diamond.
April 22, 2004
Parakeet
Issue 1
Edited by Heidi Peppermint (soon Heidi Staples), John Staples, and Deb Olin Unferth
93 pages
2004
Softcover, $10
An interest in versions of writing seems to be one of the central motifs of this first issue of the literary magazine, Parakeet. There are translations of poems by Vladimir Holan that retain in the English version the sense of a Czech speaking English, as in "The Street":
Ink-blak, the gall and blud, and the tearš are spoilink, too.
Time turnd raven and began rippink apárt deluzóry špirits.
[Note: there are further diacritic symbols in the above that I cannot (or don’t know how to) represent in html coding—another occurs above the ‘c’ in Horacek, following]
These translations by Lara Glenum and Josef Horácek actualize a wonderful other sense that is not felt in normal translations. The hard stops at the end of "spoilink" and "rippink," for instance, are palpable to me in a way that "spoiling" and "ripping" wouldn’t be. It also makes for the feeling of the author, or a version of the Czech in the author, being more immediately present ... that there is less distance between the people involved—author, translator, and reader. I’m all for that.
In addition to the Holan translations, there is a translation by W. Martin of a controversial moment in German history, regarding Heinrich von Kleist’s appropriation (or mangling, certainly according to those appropriated) of the original text by Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim called Various Sentiments before a Seascape by Friedrich, upon Which a Monk. The Friedrich in the title is Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), the well-known painter of German Romanticism. Martin provides helpful notes on the principal issues and events, and his "Sentiments After Kleist’s ‘Sentiments’" provides an even larger frame of understanding, detailing the art arguments in vogue at the time. He ends his Sentiments with the following sentence:
Like a translation, it alters, mediates, simultaneously delivers and suppresses, another text, by another author, with which it shares a claim of identity.
At first I somehow badly misread the final word: I read "authority," not "identity". In any case, it does seem to me that that was really Kleist’s intent, not just the smaller goal of being identifiable, but having the claim of having one’s say hold its tenuous ground. I didn’t at first realize it, but perhaps I’m speaking not of the typical sense of authority, of the right and power to command and be obeyed, but the notion of author-ity, the displacing zones of textual legitimacy—i.e., is the translation an original work or a mediating-suppressor of another work?
Later in the issue, Lydia Davis’s inventory essay, "C: Contiguous," traces the five times the word "contiguous" appears in her translation of Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way. She provides her translation of the particular section, the original French, and then her thoughts on why she chose "contiguous" instead of "adjoining" or "adjacent," for instance. It is a short essay, but one I found extremely interesting. It gets one to the place of making, of realizing the choices available, and the decisions involved in making the final choices. In the subtitle position of "C: Contiguous" it is mentioned that this piece is from a work in progress to be called An Alphabet of Proust Translation Problems.
More versions come up in Parakeet in four poems by Bruce Andrews, with the mostly indexical titles, "A 1 B 1 - a," "A 1 B 1 - b" and so on. Michael Burkard has a sequence of poems, or separate works, called "a retreat of chairs". Andrews’s and Burkard’s work seem especially important, as they both are interested in displacement, but for different reasons. Andrews is interested in disruption, upheaval, as a means to impede the fictions of a capitalistic mentality. Burkard is interested in the dispersals and fictions of the self.
There are three pieces by Diane Williams, whose work provides me with the sense of erasure and fracture underlying the quick jumps from sentence to sentence. At their best, the fractures are speaking through. One piece ends, seemingly out of the blue, but not, with "Oh, is it Wednesday?" Vincent Standley’s piece has a similar effect of fracture, but at the level of the paragraph, not so much from sentence to sentence. His story, beautifully phrased and made, makes for a surreal and sensual meandering.
Parakeet makes a very strong beginning, displaying focus and intelligence, and claiming a space for the legitimacy of changing one’s mind, of re-explainings, while allowing a soft spot for humor along the way.
Issue 1
Edited by Heidi Peppermint (soon Heidi Staples), John Staples, and Deb Olin Unferth
93 pages
2004
Softcover, $10
An interest in versions of writing seems to be one of the central motifs of this first issue of the literary magazine, Parakeet. There are translations of poems by Vladimir Holan that retain in the English version the sense of a Czech speaking English, as in "The Street":
Ink-blak, the gall and blud, and the tearš are spoilink, too.
Time turnd raven and began rippink apárt deluzóry špirits.
[Note: there are further diacritic symbols in the above that I cannot (or don’t know how to) represent in html coding—another occurs above the ‘c’ in Horacek, following]
These translations by Lara Glenum and Josef Horácek actualize a wonderful other sense that is not felt in normal translations. The hard stops at the end of "spoilink" and "rippink," for instance, are palpable to me in a way that "spoiling" and "ripping" wouldn’t be. It also makes for the feeling of the author, or a version of the Czech in the author, being more immediately present ... that there is less distance between the people involved—author, translator, and reader. I’m all for that.
In addition to the Holan translations, there is a translation by W. Martin of a controversial moment in German history, regarding Heinrich von Kleist’s appropriation (or mangling, certainly according to those appropriated) of the original text by Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim called Various Sentiments before a Seascape by Friedrich, upon Which a Monk. The Friedrich in the title is Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), the well-known painter of German Romanticism. Martin provides helpful notes on the principal issues and events, and his "Sentiments After Kleist’s ‘Sentiments’" provides an even larger frame of understanding, detailing the art arguments in vogue at the time. He ends his Sentiments with the following sentence:
Like a translation, it alters, mediates, simultaneously delivers and suppresses, another text, by another author, with which it shares a claim of identity.
At first I somehow badly misread the final word: I read "authority," not "identity". In any case, it does seem to me that that was really Kleist’s intent, not just the smaller goal of being identifiable, but having the claim of having one’s say hold its tenuous ground. I didn’t at first realize it, but perhaps I’m speaking not of the typical sense of authority, of the right and power to command and be obeyed, but the notion of author-ity, the displacing zones of textual legitimacy—i.e., is the translation an original work or a mediating-suppressor of another work?
Later in the issue, Lydia Davis’s inventory essay, "C: Contiguous," traces the five times the word "contiguous" appears in her translation of Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way. She provides her translation of the particular section, the original French, and then her thoughts on why she chose "contiguous" instead of "adjoining" or "adjacent," for instance. It is a short essay, but one I found extremely interesting. It gets one to the place of making, of realizing the choices available, and the decisions involved in making the final choices. In the subtitle position of "C: Contiguous" it is mentioned that this piece is from a work in progress to be called An Alphabet of Proust Translation Problems.
More versions come up in Parakeet in four poems by Bruce Andrews, with the mostly indexical titles, "A 1 B 1 - a," "A 1 B 1 - b" and so on. Michael Burkard has a sequence of poems, or separate works, called "a retreat of chairs". Andrews’s and Burkard’s work seem especially important, as they both are interested in displacement, but for different reasons. Andrews is interested in disruption, upheaval, as a means to impede the fictions of a capitalistic mentality. Burkard is interested in the dispersals and fictions of the self.
There are three pieces by Diane Williams, whose work provides me with the sense of erasure and fracture underlying the quick jumps from sentence to sentence. At their best, the fractures are speaking through. One piece ends, seemingly out of the blue, but not, with "Oh, is it Wednesday?" Vincent Standley’s piece has a similar effect of fracture, but at the level of the paragraph, not so much from sentence to sentence. His story, beautifully phrased and made, makes for a surreal and sensual meandering.
Parakeet makes a very strong beginning, displaying focus and intelligence, and claiming a space for the legitimacy of changing one’s mind, of re-explainings, while allowing a soft spot for humor along the way.
April 21, 2004
Jeff Clark
Music and Suicide
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004
67 pages
Hardcover, $20
Music and Suicide feels like an intentional joke at many moments, much like Jeff Clark’s first book, The Little Door Slides Back, did, with its humorous, bitten-off lines like "’Stroke teeth’ in the loghouse" and "First Skoal fiasco." Music and Suicide continues the drugged, vivid writing of the previous book, with an uncanny ear for language ("We never quieted cries or shot at odious offshore ships") and an ecstatic imagination. Yet I find it difficult to be fully involved sometimes because of these same tendencies, as in the opening poem, "A Chocolate and a Mantis," and its overkill of the long A sound in the first four lines of the book:
The phosphorous cheeks of an ailing jester fallen that day
from an alien haze over jade lanes
to blades arrayed in ribboned mazes
created to flay a dilated spirit hole
This is an exceptional case, admittedly—at no other point is there as much of a chalkboard-fingernail moment, though a later poem’s "who’s on a stool, a punished fool" comes to mind. This section also reveals a typical Clark character, an ailing jester. There are also mediums, Princes, cats (strangled or unstrangled), bats, a serpent and worms in a crib, etc., all of which escalate the feeling of a staged atmosphere. The atmospheres work best for me when they conjure more contemporary images ("the impromptu of MC Endless") and less when the imagery feels taken from a trope-book of a decadent Romanticism. Though it is not as easy as all that, as part of the appeal of Clark’s poetry is this very incongruity, between modern speech acts—("Anyway, whatever" begins one poem titled "Jade Ache"—and the timewarping encounters with an ill jester.
Early French surrealism seems to be a strong influence on Clark’s work, with the shared interests in black humor, dreams, and dramatic imagery. The various voices on display interweave an informal, current American idiom and a mock-dignified phrasing, especially encountered in the longest piece, "Shiva Hive," a conversation between two characters seemingly, though with Clark one never knows. This piece sits in the middle of the book, and its combinations of philosophical musings, much more directly, if oddly stated, than elsewhere, offer a longer view into Clark’s poetic interests with these sentences in particular:
The figures in your nightmare are sad because they are recognizable.
To the extent they are not recognizable, they are beautiful.
An object rejected by all categories is, by definition, unrecognizable: "There was once a man whose mirror failed him …"
A warning: do not place your hopes in the idea of "total attention," which, as a mirror-relation, can never see the back of its own head.
To realize itself, even "torment" must contain what it is not.
Alas, the world is constantly revising and erasing its propositions. At the mercy of these tides, we long for the unauthored …
*
It is easily the most ambitious piece in the book, and I was appreciative of Clark’s concentration in it, to follow through from the initial discussion on love and its fancies to its final pleas for the unrecognizable. It is the unrecognizable that is the allure of Clark’s work, along with the lushness of its worlds. Underneath, or aside from, the jarring and humorous activities in his poems, there is a convincing, if concealed, poet, who has a charming sensitivity that our world really needs right now.
Music and Suicide
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004
67 pages
Hardcover, $20
Music and Suicide feels like an intentional joke at many moments, much like Jeff Clark’s first book, The Little Door Slides Back, did, with its humorous, bitten-off lines like "’Stroke teeth’ in the loghouse" and "First Skoal fiasco." Music and Suicide continues the drugged, vivid writing of the previous book, with an uncanny ear for language ("We never quieted cries or shot at odious offshore ships") and an ecstatic imagination. Yet I find it difficult to be fully involved sometimes because of these same tendencies, as in the opening poem, "A Chocolate and a Mantis," and its overkill of the long A sound in the first four lines of the book:
The phosphorous cheeks of an ailing jester fallen that day
from an alien haze over jade lanes
to blades arrayed in ribboned mazes
created to flay a dilated spirit hole
This is an exceptional case, admittedly—at no other point is there as much of a chalkboard-fingernail moment, though a later poem’s "who’s on a stool, a punished fool" comes to mind. This section also reveals a typical Clark character, an ailing jester. There are also mediums, Princes, cats (strangled or unstrangled), bats, a serpent and worms in a crib, etc., all of which escalate the feeling of a staged atmosphere. The atmospheres work best for me when they conjure more contemporary images ("the impromptu of MC Endless") and less when the imagery feels taken from a trope-book of a decadent Romanticism. Though it is not as easy as all that, as part of the appeal of Clark’s poetry is this very incongruity, between modern speech acts—("Anyway, whatever" begins one poem titled "Jade Ache"—and the timewarping encounters with an ill jester.
Early French surrealism seems to be a strong influence on Clark’s work, with the shared interests in black humor, dreams, and dramatic imagery. The various voices on display interweave an informal, current American idiom and a mock-dignified phrasing, especially encountered in the longest piece, "Shiva Hive," a conversation between two characters seemingly, though with Clark one never knows. This piece sits in the middle of the book, and its combinations of philosophical musings, much more directly, if oddly stated, than elsewhere, offer a longer view into Clark’s poetic interests with these sentences in particular:
The figures in your nightmare are sad because they are recognizable.
To the extent they are not recognizable, they are beautiful.
An object rejected by all categories is, by definition, unrecognizable: "There was once a man whose mirror failed him …"
A warning: do not place your hopes in the idea of "total attention," which, as a mirror-relation, can never see the back of its own head.
To realize itself, even "torment" must contain what it is not.
Alas, the world is constantly revising and erasing its propositions. At the mercy of these tides, we long for the unauthored …
*
It is easily the most ambitious piece in the book, and I was appreciative of Clark’s concentration in it, to follow through from the initial discussion on love and its fancies to its final pleas for the unrecognizable. It is the unrecognizable that is the allure of Clark’s work, along with the lushness of its worlds. Underneath, or aside from, the jarring and humorous activities in his poems, there is a convincing, if concealed, poet, who has a charming sensitivity that our world really needs right now.
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