Christine Hume
Alaskaphrenia
New Issues
2004
78 pages
Softcover, $14
Page 5: phantom; catastrophe; the girl’s fear
Page 6: torture; grotesque
Page 7: I’m not right; to burn you off; tongue’s cutthroat; it’s a new kind of dead; it hides its death in my cinched/testicle; queasy waves; mottled to the marrow; my mean streak; until they clench the damaged night in me
Page 8: mange [a skin disease of animals—all bracketed information is mine, JW]; a dream of being eaten
Page 9: suicide
Page 10: its wings stabbed at him angry; I want to shoot you
Page 11: Asphyxia [the condition in which a person is not able to get air into his/her lungs. The commonest causes are drowning, poisoning by coal gas or other vapors, and obstruction of the respiratory passages by external pressures, i.e. suffocation or strangulation, or by internal blockage, e.g. in diseases of the throat or windpipe]; torture
Page 12: ataxia [loss of the power to control movement or muscular action], abducted
Page 13: festers
Page 14: poisonous hitting
Page 15: wet demons; bones to pick
Page 16: your eyes drillholes; toxic
Page 17: scars; bellweather bomber; suffocated
Page 18: blitzkrieg; starve the air of me
Page 19: stops the hundred cuts/across her face from bleeding the largest stillness; ice-burn
Page 20: eels locked under ice
Page 21: the shock of bad news; hemlock; poison plants; the dogs are done howling at you; dead flies; your younger sibling’s coffin
Page 22: the choice is to go back to the water and not die this time; nothing will be more haunted
Page 23: Ice worms burrow their 200-year-old mucus heads/into your throat
Page 24: eerie silence; cold voices; tiny tundra birds eat loose metal/shattered from shade
Page 25: the rotten reindeer/hanging in a dwarf tree; though you/cannot sort the ill/ from illness; last worm gnaw
I could go on. Alaskaphrenia’s final poem, "What Became of the Company You’ve Kept, According to One Who Left," contains (on pages 69 and 70) the following words: Man Stabbed By His Wife; Deathcunt; Dead Body; Ice-Queen.
This is one of the most death- and disease- and terror-ridden books I’ve ever read. Associative writing like Christine Hume’s makes a reader freely associate as well. The poetic worlds of Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Joyce Mansour come to mind often enough when reading Alaskaphrenia, but also the imaginative constructions of Ben Marcus (see especially Hume’s "Index of Observations on Pioneering Portraiture (Borealism Sketch)" and the wit and uneasy atmospheres of the Winnipeg filmmaker Guy Maddin, as seen in his films Careful and Tales From The Gimli Hospital.
The book is not, to me, ghoulish for dramatic effect (something that admittedly puts me off); it seeks, I feel, to place the very real concerns of disease in the world, microbes, and give them a place to grow. Poetry doesn’t often show this side of life. Yet the only serious and continual predators of humans are microbes. Microbes want to live just as much as their animal and human hosts do.
This sense of interior decay and living, of dueling necessities, is often conjoined with a rather catatonic narrative (there is a lot of cold and stillness in the book), with all the metaphors that Alaska can hold. Of course this is an Alaska-of-the-mind as well. Here’s "The Sickness & The Magnet":
Cursed caught snow & his horse
Prevented falling sickness
Diadems & degrees echoed
Every red electricity spit out
He starved a beast & became full of tricks
Now a lightning maker could feel
What a lightning of metal tasted like
It hammered at him & joined disease
He felt the storm sew magnets in hems
He felt fevers of wept railings
Amazed how hot an animal is
So sorry so chattered so scat sorry strung
Sweated horse light excruciating sweat
Birds went in & out of his mouth
He lived out of his mouth
Sucking the slap backwards
Then everything wanted to be
Killed at the rural spot
More than a few of the poems take on the structure of a play, with characters. But the characters in one piece are the names of unincorporated towns [more stillness], and none of the towns are really listening to what the other is saying, as it should be. Here are a couple of sections from "Dialogue Among Unincorporated Towns Concerning Alaska’s Resources":
[Note: In the book, there are tab returns on the left margin that I cannot duplicate here in html.]
Loring: All the while Eskimos sing of the death you got on your knees and palms. You got it crawling around in caves and it never got out of you. It made a mark then went straight for your heart and you canned it.
Chignik: You’re salmonella under the Governor’s tongue. You awe at yourself as if you were a Cruise Line. Better to be an isomorphic isthmus or fata morgana looming its walls, stained pink algae’s pigment, along the horizon home.
Throughout the book, Hume lets the sounds of words be her guide. Sound tells the stories, finds the stories we hide or don’t know about, as in "In Plane View" and the wonderful, rolling control of "They can still smell the invisible/Skyhole holding the undergrace of a mental hideaway: Rain running/through their voices rusts whatever they say.
Very rarely do poetry books hold together as complete worlds, because often the insincerity of a fictive imagination is at odds with the sincerity of the poet’s emotions. Or vice-versa. One reads along and feels pulled in by one or the other, and oftentimes feels distracted or becomes annoyed when the realm one is more interested in has not been visited in awhile. But Hume has accomplished a difficult thing here in Alaskaphrenia. The emotional scale meets the imagination at work. They correspond. They feel conjoined, as if the poet is walking Alaska, thinking Alaska, and being Alaska.
For evocation of a place and mind, and the two together, I doubt there will be a more carefully haunted book than this one this year.
July 15, 2004
July 6, 2004
Denver Quarterly
Vol. 38, No. 4
Guest Editor, Paul Maliszewski
2004
122 pages
Softcover, $6
Why do we make up things that never happened? Or did they? Why do we make maps of countries that never existed? Or did they? Why do we imagine? Why do we insist on what did happen? Why do we expect sentences to duplicate reality? Why do we think we know what we are talking about? Why isn’t this conflict of interest—people reflecting on their own thinking—talked about more?
In the first of two Denver Quarterly issues related to "literary geography," to the construction of fictional places, in all their varieties (which is what a land and/or people becomes immediately when someone describes another, or one’s self, or land) the reader begins with a piece about D.H. Lawrence, battling tuberculosis in Ceylon, moves through re-riverings of Concord and Merrimack rivers, obsessions with B-words and William Gass, a grim Surf ‘n’ Turf restaurant, literary forcefeeding and forced-agreeing by way of Beloved, before ending up in a remote area of an island in the Philippines, looking for the lost Tasaday people. There are many other stories in-between.
It’s quite an ample sampling of geographical oddities, and what geography means to humans: money, recreation area, food source, a place to imagine another place on which to imagine again. Mark Honey’s "The Landman" depicts his drives out to oil and mineral rich areas around Houston in order to deal with the land and landowners. I’ll let Honey explain what a landman is and what one does:
A landman either works in-house, with an oil company, or free-lances, like me. Landmen spend a great deal of time in courthouses, searching land records recorded on the pages of heavy, leather-bound volumes stored in deed rooms, located in musty basements, typically. The heavy books contain every land transaction since the land patent, when the state granted its public lands to the first landowners. Landmen scrutinize all the deeds of property transactions past to determine current ownership.
The more strenuously non-fictional pieces in the issue, like the above, display the form of New Journalism, with descriptive details of situations mixed with more pronounced emotional reactions than one would encounter in a regular newspaper article. These pieces made me recall being in my news-writing class in college and the professor telling us to limit our adjectives and adverbs, those subjective stumbling blocks to Truth, and to stick to the nouns and verbs—which just left me confused mostly. As if nouns and verbs weren’t as subjectively used as anything else, as if the entire positioning of a piece, its framing, its movement, didn’t speak at every corner of one’s politics, one’s very subjective interest in being a writer, the mystery of how that happened, the unexamined mores of a society, the advertising dollars supplying the newspaper’s existence in the first place, and a whole lot more. This unmentioned but constant connectivity between the words and the society, the trees in the paper and the chemicals in the ink, seemed to bring one to causality and its germination into physical appearance, but the links were all mental. We knew the paper came from a tree, but never saw the tree. The wood framing in a house would never remember its origins in the forest. Nor would the inhabitants of the house know where the lumber had come from. As fast as a tree turns into a product called wood, and one uses this term, one is already within the market.
So, too, with the pieces in Denver Quarterly. I was struck mostly with the interconnectedness of people and the land, and the land that would bring one to other people and other formations of land. But also the interconnectivity that the mind "sees" between words and places, most easily apparent in Michael Martone’s piece, appropriately called "On Being". In the piece Martone moves in many directions at once, progressing through his native state of Indiana, but also through associations with William Gass’s "In The Heart of The Heart of The Country"—a title which is apt for this issue, with its sense of endless referral (like the land, tree, wood and house above)—and linking these main paths [more geography] of Indiana [Indians] and Gass [gas] with various sections/structures beginning with B, such as ByPass and Battlefields, Baptism and Breast.
The land is in the word, and the word is in the land. But the words are in our heads. And I think this is what the guest editor, Paul Maliszewski, is getting to in this issue. He semi-struggles in his Editor’s Note to define what this collection of writing might be called—he suggests "literary geography". It is a struggle to give this writing a broad encompassing term that suggests compatibility, and this is why I like it so much … because the connections between the pieces are working on endlessly minor levels of remembering—the Merrimack and Concord rivers in the interview with John McPhee to the Tippecannoe river in Martone’s piece, to the partial title of the book reviewed by Jeff Mock, Inventing Eden. And Eden sends me back to Vincent Standley’s title, "Gardenpath, April 1973". And so on.
Except for brief forays in airplanes, hot-air balloons, helicopters, or when one jumps, we are always standing on land, even if we are standing in a badly-vented hotel room 100 feet up in Manhattan. The sheet rock that makes the sense of walls in the room, the hidden wood behind the walls, the steel girders structuring and supporting the floor—all have their origins in the land. The steel girders go down into the earth.
When we are in airplanes, many of us get nervous not for fear of crashing but because we are off the land. When we are in the air, we think of landing. And yet even when we are off the ground, the planes are running on fuel supplied from deep inside the earth. When this fuel runs out, the plane must touch earth again, and the fuel person, thinking of who knows what, comes with the fuel from some faraway place.
This issue additionally includes work by Hasanthika Sirisena, Joshua Harmon, Michael Mejia, Paul West, John Hollis Parrish, Amie Barrodale, Stacey Levine, Scott Bradfield, J. Robert Lennon, and Marc Herman. Maliszewski interviews McPhee.
Vol. 38, No. 4
Guest Editor, Paul Maliszewski
2004
122 pages
Softcover, $6
Why do we make up things that never happened? Or did they? Why do we make maps of countries that never existed? Or did they? Why do we imagine? Why do we insist on what did happen? Why do we expect sentences to duplicate reality? Why do we think we know what we are talking about? Why isn’t this conflict of interest—people reflecting on their own thinking—talked about more?
In the first of two Denver Quarterly issues related to "literary geography," to the construction of fictional places, in all their varieties (which is what a land and/or people becomes immediately when someone describes another, or one’s self, or land) the reader begins with a piece about D.H. Lawrence, battling tuberculosis in Ceylon, moves through re-riverings of Concord and Merrimack rivers, obsessions with B-words and William Gass, a grim Surf ‘n’ Turf restaurant, literary forcefeeding and forced-agreeing by way of Beloved, before ending up in a remote area of an island in the Philippines, looking for the lost Tasaday people. There are many other stories in-between.
It’s quite an ample sampling of geographical oddities, and what geography means to humans: money, recreation area, food source, a place to imagine another place on which to imagine again. Mark Honey’s "The Landman" depicts his drives out to oil and mineral rich areas around Houston in order to deal with the land and landowners. I’ll let Honey explain what a landman is and what one does:
A landman either works in-house, with an oil company, or free-lances, like me. Landmen spend a great deal of time in courthouses, searching land records recorded on the pages of heavy, leather-bound volumes stored in deed rooms, located in musty basements, typically. The heavy books contain every land transaction since the land patent, when the state granted its public lands to the first landowners. Landmen scrutinize all the deeds of property transactions past to determine current ownership.
The more strenuously non-fictional pieces in the issue, like the above, display the form of New Journalism, with descriptive details of situations mixed with more pronounced emotional reactions than one would encounter in a regular newspaper article. These pieces made me recall being in my news-writing class in college and the professor telling us to limit our adjectives and adverbs, those subjective stumbling blocks to Truth, and to stick to the nouns and verbs—which just left me confused mostly. As if nouns and verbs weren’t as subjectively used as anything else, as if the entire positioning of a piece, its framing, its movement, didn’t speak at every corner of one’s politics, one’s very subjective interest in being a writer, the mystery of how that happened, the unexamined mores of a society, the advertising dollars supplying the newspaper’s existence in the first place, and a whole lot more. This unmentioned but constant connectivity between the words and the society, the trees in the paper and the chemicals in the ink, seemed to bring one to causality and its germination into physical appearance, but the links were all mental. We knew the paper came from a tree, but never saw the tree. The wood framing in a house would never remember its origins in the forest. Nor would the inhabitants of the house know where the lumber had come from. As fast as a tree turns into a product called wood, and one uses this term, one is already within the market.
So, too, with the pieces in Denver Quarterly. I was struck mostly with the interconnectedness of people and the land, and the land that would bring one to other people and other formations of land. But also the interconnectivity that the mind "sees" between words and places, most easily apparent in Michael Martone’s piece, appropriately called "On Being". In the piece Martone moves in many directions at once, progressing through his native state of Indiana, but also through associations with William Gass’s "In The Heart of The Heart of The Country"—a title which is apt for this issue, with its sense of endless referral (like the land, tree, wood and house above)—and linking these main paths [more geography] of Indiana [Indians] and Gass [gas] with various sections/structures beginning with B, such as ByPass and Battlefields, Baptism and Breast.
The land is in the word, and the word is in the land. But the words are in our heads. And I think this is what the guest editor, Paul Maliszewski, is getting to in this issue. He semi-struggles in his Editor’s Note to define what this collection of writing might be called—he suggests "literary geography". It is a struggle to give this writing a broad encompassing term that suggests compatibility, and this is why I like it so much … because the connections between the pieces are working on endlessly minor levels of remembering—the Merrimack and Concord rivers in the interview with John McPhee to the Tippecannoe river in Martone’s piece, to the partial title of the book reviewed by Jeff Mock, Inventing Eden. And Eden sends me back to Vincent Standley’s title, "Gardenpath, April 1973". And so on.
Except for brief forays in airplanes, hot-air balloons, helicopters, or when one jumps, we are always standing on land, even if we are standing in a badly-vented hotel room 100 feet up in Manhattan. The sheet rock that makes the sense of walls in the room, the hidden wood behind the walls, the steel girders structuring and supporting the floor—all have their origins in the land. The steel girders go down into the earth.
When we are in airplanes, many of us get nervous not for fear of crashing but because we are off the land. When we are in the air, we think of landing. And yet even when we are off the ground, the planes are running on fuel supplied from deep inside the earth. When this fuel runs out, the plane must touch earth again, and the fuel person, thinking of who knows what, comes with the fuel from some faraway place.
This issue additionally includes work by Hasanthika Sirisena, Joshua Harmon, Michael Mejia, Paul West, John Hollis Parrish, Amie Barrodale, Stacey Levine, Scott Bradfield, J. Robert Lennon, and Marc Herman. Maliszewski interviews McPhee.
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