Christopher Kennedy
Trouble With The Machine
Low Fidelity Press
2003
68 pages
Softcover, $11
In Christopher Kennedy’s second book of prose poems, Trouble With The Machine, a segment of Robert Desnos’ poem "To The Ends Of the Earth" precedes the third section. Desnos says:
Somewhere in the world, at the foot of an embankment,
a deserter pleads with sentries
who do not understand his language.
While one understands in this passage that the difficulty in specific language group problems can be awful, I understand Kennedy’s usage of this to articulate even a graver loneliness, of one’s perception, how one articulates it, to not being understood or experienced by others, to such an extent that one feels alone in one’s skin. By this I mean, that the fantasies and struggles one feels intensely, the grim dissatisfactions with life, the boring hassles and estranged childhoods, seem so acute and singular that no other can understand exactly what one means and feels by what one is saying.
This interior frustration, if met with acceptance, compels a distance to set in—between one’s self and its vividness and the surrounding environments of others. Some relief may be found in talking about it, in expressing the feelings, in writing, but the words really cannot communicate how the issues, the images, the traumas are felt. It seems like this is what Kennedy is trying to explain by his use of Desnos, and what follows naturally from his meaning in the title of the book.
Kennedy’s prose poetry reminds me of the humor of gravediggers. (This is not metaphoric affectation, by the way—I actually knew gravediggers when young.) Stoical, bitten-off, it is the laughter that is knowingly, self-consciously, a distraction from the heavy situations one finds one’s self in—or, perhaps in Kennedy’s case, the situations one finds one’s self under. But there is plenty of personal responsibility in these pieces. Here is "The Joy of Eating Lies":
The wrong man entered the house and began to explain his presence. I am not your husband or your father, but I am a reasonable facsimile. The wife and kids barely nodded and went about their activities. The wrong man sat down at the dinner table and began to eat all the lies he had told that day. Needs salt, he yelled out to deaf ears. He was full almost immediately, but he had been taught to clean his plate. In spite of how full he felt and how terrible his lies tasted, he felt a certain joy when he ate them. They stick to your ribs, he said to his brood, who pretended he hadn’t spoken. So the man began to eat the children and the wife, all the time assuring them he was nothing more than a benign presence. After his feast, he was smiling again, and he felt a little foolish. Well, he announced, I’m off. And he stood up from the table and left. Next door, the doorbell rang, and the wrong man stepped into the foyer, took off his hat, and stood for a moment, appraising his kingdom, if only until the truth was told.
Underlying the reserved humor, or along with it, there is a subtle satire of abandonment in all its varieties, including the abandonment of one’s self by one’s self and the abandonment by and of others, often found in the mercurial avoidance of pain. Here’s "Trivia":
There were two dogs running the ditch next to a country road. A car drove past and veered out of control. It struck a tree, a large sugar maple, the state tree of New York, and burst into flames.
Did I say two dogs? There were three, one of them a rare breed.
Kennedy’s narrator willfully buries the car accident between stray dogs and state historical facts. The death of someone—it doesn’t matter who—is reduced to a blip, just another image, another passing fact, equal in worth. The reporting in the piece is similar to the drifting sameness articulated by television news anchors when they report, for instance, a mother killing her children, and then move on to the next story about interesting chickens at the state fair.
Trouble With The Machine contains many imaginative and visceral poetic stories, including a girl who loved pork rinds, midget clans, and a frail, chain-smoking woman named Jean. There is disruption and unhappiness, humor, heartache, sensitivity bred from loneliness, and a great deal of jesting with Death. And one gets the sense Death is laughing along with.
May 26, 2004
May 14, 2004
Antennae
Issue 5
Edited by Jesse Seldess
2003
88 pages
Softcover, $6
One of the best kept secrets in American literary magazine publishing is the very unassuming and remarkable Antennae, a Chicago-based publication. Unassuming, as there is no mention of the magazine’s name, what issue it is, price, list of contributors, anywhere on the cover. This follows in the tradition it has set for itself. In previous issues, the "artwork" of the cover has been merely five holes from a hole puncher and a purposeful coffee-cup ring stain. For the recent issue, Issue 5, the "artwork" is a piece of packing tape with purposeful lint underneath it.
The magazine offers an eclectic, intense sampling of writers interested in experimenting with poetic structures, syntaxes, and new avenues for poetic expression, as in Matthew Goulish’s "Parasitology" piece, a 15-part exploration into parasites and the metaphoric reaches of such. Or as seen in Keumok Heo’s "Sounds"—a theatrical-musical piece interested in pacing and silences. Rodrigo Toscano’s work, "Subject Line Subscribe (Society)," is an active, very present, piece, with charming rhythm and a Schwitters-type humor in a conversational tone. Here’s a bit from it:
#
poddy over there
poddy hwhat?
who
who you
hwat how who hwhen
who
(yohoo)
heprehent
who?
hwhat who how
be he how she
who
(hwha hwha hwha)
no
heprehent?
(hwha hwha hwha)
hwhy
who he
who he how he she be she he
(huh?)
whoosh!
Antennae seems plugged into the interstices of life. There is a section of Leslie Scalapino’s Dahlia’s Iris—Secret Autobiography and Fiction included in the issue. In it, she says, "Events are asides," which seems to stand as some kind of unwitting thesis statement for Antennae as a whole. That is, the known events, the big moments in life, the obvious encounters of existence, are not really the main point—they are merely asides, comments on all the interstices, the wavering dialog, all the endless forgetting, the sounds one cannot place, the feelings one has/hasn’t at in/appropriate moments. These, it seems to be suggested, are the central issues, not the debris it is usually described as, but the stuff of life itself.
Tonally, the editor, Jesse Seldess, seems to appreciate serious fun. Not easy humor, but the complex humor, disturbance, and bafflement of dreams. Perhaps in the sense of Armand Schwerner’s The Tablets or Ted Berrigan’s The Sonnets. The kind of writing that is alive and jarring and yet augers into one deeply. There is also a thankful place, amid all the stylistic innovations, for emotional disclosure at times, which adds to the personable feel to these pieces.
Other writers with work in the issue include Dennis Barone, Sawako Nakayasu, Steven Timm, Michael Magee, Kyle Schlesinger & Thom Donovan, Drew Kunz, Mark Tardi, Patrick F. Durgin, Dawn Michelle Baude, Chris Pusateri, Rusty Morrison, and Stephen Ratcliffe.
There were no dead patches in this issue. Some pieces I may have liked more than others, but I never once felt that a work was not interesting enough to be published. For me, this is a very rare thing, and it made the reading of the issue exciting and memorable. Antennae deserves the largest readership possible. It’s very nice stuff.
Issue 5
Edited by Jesse Seldess
2003
88 pages
Softcover, $6
One of the best kept secrets in American literary magazine publishing is the very unassuming and remarkable Antennae, a Chicago-based publication. Unassuming, as there is no mention of the magazine’s name, what issue it is, price, list of contributors, anywhere on the cover. This follows in the tradition it has set for itself. In previous issues, the "artwork" of the cover has been merely five holes from a hole puncher and a purposeful coffee-cup ring stain. For the recent issue, Issue 5, the "artwork" is a piece of packing tape with purposeful lint underneath it.
The magazine offers an eclectic, intense sampling of writers interested in experimenting with poetic structures, syntaxes, and new avenues for poetic expression, as in Matthew Goulish’s "Parasitology" piece, a 15-part exploration into parasites and the metaphoric reaches of such. Or as seen in Keumok Heo’s "Sounds"—a theatrical-musical piece interested in pacing and silences. Rodrigo Toscano’s work, "Subject Line Subscribe (Society)," is an active, very present, piece, with charming rhythm and a Schwitters-type humor in a conversational tone. Here’s a bit from it:
#
poddy over there
poddy hwhat?
who
who you
hwat how who hwhen
who
(yohoo)
heprehent
who?
hwhat who how
be he how she
who
(hwha hwha hwha)
no
heprehent?
(hwha hwha hwha)
hwhy
who he
who he how he she be she he
(huh?)
whoosh!
Antennae seems plugged into the interstices of life. There is a section of Leslie Scalapino’s Dahlia’s Iris—Secret Autobiography and Fiction included in the issue. In it, she says, "Events are asides," which seems to stand as some kind of unwitting thesis statement for Antennae as a whole. That is, the known events, the big moments in life, the obvious encounters of existence, are not really the main point—they are merely asides, comments on all the interstices, the wavering dialog, all the endless forgetting, the sounds one cannot place, the feelings one has/hasn’t at in/appropriate moments. These, it seems to be suggested, are the central issues, not the debris it is usually described as, but the stuff of life itself.
Tonally, the editor, Jesse Seldess, seems to appreciate serious fun. Not easy humor, but the complex humor, disturbance, and bafflement of dreams. Perhaps in the sense of Armand Schwerner’s The Tablets or Ted Berrigan’s The Sonnets. The kind of writing that is alive and jarring and yet augers into one deeply. There is also a thankful place, amid all the stylistic innovations, for emotional disclosure at times, which adds to the personable feel to these pieces.
Other writers with work in the issue include Dennis Barone, Sawako Nakayasu, Steven Timm, Michael Magee, Kyle Schlesinger & Thom Donovan, Drew Kunz, Mark Tardi, Patrick F. Durgin, Dawn Michelle Baude, Chris Pusateri, Rusty Morrison, and Stephen Ratcliffe.
There were no dead patches in this issue. Some pieces I may have liked more than others, but I never once felt that a work was not interesting enough to be published. For me, this is a very rare thing, and it made the reading of the issue exciting and memorable. Antennae deserves the largest readership possible. It’s very nice stuff.
May 6, 2004
Jalal Toufic
Undying Love, or Love Dies
The Post-Apollo Press
2002
40 pages
Softcover, $13.00
It would seem, at a mere 40 pages, one could easily classify Jalal Toufic’s book, Undying Love, or Love Dies. On the back cover, it is referenced under Memoir/Philosophy, and that is probably a good start, but certainly not everything this book is. Lyn Hejinian, in her back-cover overview, makes mention of it being possibly read "as a single aphorism, an aphorism composed of aphorisms." This, too, is true. For the reader does confront the singular aphorism in the title of undying love, or, its opposite, loves dies—that is, according to Toufic, one’s ability to remember, to keep one’s love current, to keep it actual, if falsely so, and, on the other hand, Love dying: that is, let go, not held onto. In fact, of marriage vows, Toufic says that the common uniting phrase, "till death do us part," is not just a promise to stay together until the end, but it is also a promise to stop holding on when one’s beloved does die.
This central idea is carried along structurally through letters and diary entries, and within the travel essay form, but within these structures there are mentions of seemingly Toufic’s own cheating girlfriend, mixed with layered comments on Orpheus and Eurydice, Christ’s/Iblìs’s descent into Hell, filmic associations, interpretations of relevant passages from the Qu’ran, Shakespeare’s King Lear, and Nietzsche’s On The Genealogy of Morals. It is constantly moving, this writing, diving into passages, coming back up, reclaiming the thread from previous and differently angled examples. These metaphors of swimming and water seem apt to me, as with water one moves in it and through it, without the feeling of a solidified structure. So it is with Toufic’s essay, his memoir, his philosophy, his associations.
Toufic makes interesting insights throughout the book, on the possible roots, for instance, of such common phrases as "she is dead to me," "this is torture to me," and "to make their lovers’ lives hell". Within these insights is the notion of the "hidden treasure," and this is mentioned in relation to Lover and Beloved, and also to God/Allah and his creations (his being the specific pronoun). Here is Toufic, on page 26:
By its excess, every great love reveals the beloved as a hidden treasure. To be loved is not to feel one is a treasure, but to feel that one is a hidden treasure. The beloved gives what he or she does not have, the hidden treasure, felt by the lover. What the lover demands of the beloved when he or she treats him or her as a hidden treasure is, cruelly, to be a creator, so that this addition, the hidden treasure, would not be a mere subjective projection, an idealization (although a subjective projection, a pathological element [in the Kantian sense] can be added to it, mixed with it de facto).
Much earlier, the "hidden" part of "hidden treasure" is initially foreshadowed, not by name, in Toufic’s thoughts on cities and their relations to Lover and Beloved. Here is the passage:
When single, one explores a city, its museums, cafes, and bookstores, with a future lover in mind as a companion. Having found her, for a while one takes her to some of these places. But then, soon enough, love gives rise to a tendency to seclusion with the beloved away from everything else. He could not stand the cat in her house; the world was still there through that pet. She ended up acquiescing and getting rid of it.
Dreaming and films cut into these forays on Lover and Beloved, and the entire book has the feel of a rolling away, a sense just outside of one’s intelligence, outside of one’s feelings, yet one recognizes the atmospheres, the participants, the speeches. Perhaps the most powerful link to this book comes with the quotation from Nietzsche, and his ideas on the origin of memory, of how this origin is still played out underneath, or in a ghostly frame, one’s specific memories. From Nietzsche:
"How can one create a memory for the human animal? How can one impress something upon this partly obtuse, partly flighty mind, attuned only to the passing moment, in such a way that it will stay there?"
One can well believe that the answers and methods for solving this primeval problem were not precisely gentle; perhaps indeed there was nothing more fearful and uncanny in the whole prehistory of man than his mnemotechnics. "If something is to stay in memory it must be burned in: only that which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory"—this is a main clause of the oldest (unhappily also the most enduring) psychology on earth. One might even say that wherever on earth solemnity, seriousness, mystery, and gloomy coloring still distinguish the life of man and a people, something of the terror that formerly attended all promises, pledges, and vows on earth is still effective … Man could never do without blood, torture, and sacrifices, when he felt the need to create a memory for himself …
Through the revisitations of undying love, or love dies, through its many morphings, in the guises of memory and forgetting, or through the interesting imaginings of human love (Toufic: "A woman competes not so much with other women but with a city."), and out into the world of traumatized environments like Beirut, Rwanda, Kosovo, Hiroshima, and Auschwitz, Toufic builds an unbelievable network of relationships, between our very memories, the cities we live in, the things we say and especially do, and what the consequences might be. By the end of the book, the consequences of these primacies seem to create nothing short of the very world we live in, and a beautiful explanation.
Undying Love, or Love Dies
The Post-Apollo Press
2002
40 pages
Softcover, $13.00
It would seem, at a mere 40 pages, one could easily classify Jalal Toufic’s book, Undying Love, or Love Dies. On the back cover, it is referenced under Memoir/Philosophy, and that is probably a good start, but certainly not everything this book is. Lyn Hejinian, in her back-cover overview, makes mention of it being possibly read "as a single aphorism, an aphorism composed of aphorisms." This, too, is true. For the reader does confront the singular aphorism in the title of undying love, or, its opposite, loves dies—that is, according to Toufic, one’s ability to remember, to keep one’s love current, to keep it actual, if falsely so, and, on the other hand, Love dying: that is, let go, not held onto. In fact, of marriage vows, Toufic says that the common uniting phrase, "till death do us part," is not just a promise to stay together until the end, but it is also a promise to stop holding on when one’s beloved does die.
This central idea is carried along structurally through letters and diary entries, and within the travel essay form, but within these structures there are mentions of seemingly Toufic’s own cheating girlfriend, mixed with layered comments on Orpheus and Eurydice, Christ’s/Iblìs’s descent into Hell, filmic associations, interpretations of relevant passages from the Qu’ran, Shakespeare’s King Lear, and Nietzsche’s On The Genealogy of Morals. It is constantly moving, this writing, diving into passages, coming back up, reclaiming the thread from previous and differently angled examples. These metaphors of swimming and water seem apt to me, as with water one moves in it and through it, without the feeling of a solidified structure. So it is with Toufic’s essay, his memoir, his philosophy, his associations.
Toufic makes interesting insights throughout the book, on the possible roots, for instance, of such common phrases as "she is dead to me," "this is torture to me," and "to make their lovers’ lives hell". Within these insights is the notion of the "hidden treasure," and this is mentioned in relation to Lover and Beloved, and also to God/Allah and his creations (his being the specific pronoun). Here is Toufic, on page 26:
By its excess, every great love reveals the beloved as a hidden treasure. To be loved is not to feel one is a treasure, but to feel that one is a hidden treasure. The beloved gives what he or she does not have, the hidden treasure, felt by the lover. What the lover demands of the beloved when he or she treats him or her as a hidden treasure is, cruelly, to be a creator, so that this addition, the hidden treasure, would not be a mere subjective projection, an idealization (although a subjective projection, a pathological element [in the Kantian sense] can be added to it, mixed with it de facto).
Much earlier, the "hidden" part of "hidden treasure" is initially foreshadowed, not by name, in Toufic’s thoughts on cities and their relations to Lover and Beloved. Here is the passage:
When single, one explores a city, its museums, cafes, and bookstores, with a future lover in mind as a companion. Having found her, for a while one takes her to some of these places. But then, soon enough, love gives rise to a tendency to seclusion with the beloved away from everything else. He could not stand the cat in her house; the world was still there through that pet. She ended up acquiescing and getting rid of it.
Dreaming and films cut into these forays on Lover and Beloved, and the entire book has the feel of a rolling away, a sense just outside of one’s intelligence, outside of one’s feelings, yet one recognizes the atmospheres, the participants, the speeches. Perhaps the most powerful link to this book comes with the quotation from Nietzsche, and his ideas on the origin of memory, of how this origin is still played out underneath, or in a ghostly frame, one’s specific memories. From Nietzsche:
"How can one create a memory for the human animal? How can one impress something upon this partly obtuse, partly flighty mind, attuned only to the passing moment, in such a way that it will stay there?"
One can well believe that the answers and methods for solving this primeval problem were not precisely gentle; perhaps indeed there was nothing more fearful and uncanny in the whole prehistory of man than his mnemotechnics. "If something is to stay in memory it must be burned in: only that which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory"—this is a main clause of the oldest (unhappily also the most enduring) psychology on earth. One might even say that wherever on earth solemnity, seriousness, mystery, and gloomy coloring still distinguish the life of man and a people, something of the terror that formerly attended all promises, pledges, and vows on earth is still effective … Man could never do without blood, torture, and sacrifices, when he felt the need to create a memory for himself …
Through the revisitations of undying love, or love dies, through its many morphings, in the guises of memory and forgetting, or through the interesting imaginings of human love (Toufic: "A woman competes not so much with other women but with a city."), and out into the world of traumatized environments like Beirut, Rwanda, Kosovo, Hiroshima, and Auschwitz, Toufic builds an unbelievable network of relationships, between our very memories, the cities we live in, the things we say and especially do, and what the consequences might be. By the end of the book, the consequences of these primacies seem to create nothing short of the very world we live in, and a beautiful explanation.
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