_
In 2008, Sven Birkerts published a superb survey entitled The Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again in which he distinguished two important traits of successful and literature-worthy memoirs.  Firstly, they utilize the Proustian (via Bergson) analysis of the involuntary memory.  This can be defined as any recollection that is triggered by a simple object (think of Proust’s madeleine), usually from childhood, which allows the writer to explore hitherto unknown territory of his/her mind. The second important element is the conscious manipulation of vantage points, being able to move between the “then” and the “now” on the narrative’s timeline continuum.  Difficult to master artistically, the varying of vantage points validates the writer’s “adult” or hindsight evaluations of past events and sensations, thus displaying how the writer has evolved, from the past self to the present self. As he writes in The Art of Time in Memoir, “there may be a pattern hidden in the contingent-seeming procession of circumstance.”  Both of these artistic choices permeate the vignettes in Birkerts’s newest title, The Other Walk.

To call these individual essays “vignettes” may be misleading. The longest of them runs only a few pages, but individually they each radiate a sense of ongoing-ness, and collectively they form a definite whole. The essays generally follow the Proustian formula: an object—something simple that would probably have little to no teleological meaning to anyone else—immerses the writer in a series of memories that allows him to explore larger thoughts on his life and life in general. In the piece “Lighter,” the idea is to reach and read memory:

        Found things and the stir they make in memory—that’s one ecology. But             there’s another, no less important, that describes the shadow world: all                 the things we simply lose, or lose and then, on finding, find without spark.             As if to say we are as much about our deletions as our accumulations.

Birkerts gives substance to these little essays for what they represent: objects and memories. Thus, the essays themselves evolve into more than just writing or ideas contained in the beginnings, middles, and ends of what constitutes an “essay.” In short, the essays become objects themselves for the reader to move into the memory of the writer.

The book begins with the title essay, “The Other Walk,” in which Birkerts unequivocally announces: “This morning, going against all convention, I turned right instead of left and took my circuit—one of my circuits—in reverse. Why hadn’t I thought of this before, given that the familiarity of the other loop has become so oppressive, even to one who swears by the zen of familiarity, the main tenet being that if you are bored with what you’re seeing, you’re not seeing clearly enough, not looking?” It would be difficult to conclude that this is an ideal way of offering a new essay, one which tests the reader’s preconceived notions of form, and one that tests its conventions in general.  Nevertheless, Birkerts offers a telling thought in a recent interview conducted with The Morning News: “You wear yourself out with your own repetitions. That’s also the basis of any progress in the arts, turning against what you can’t do anymore.” One could easily picture Birkerts, sitting at his computer screen, fresh off the Art of Time manuscript, having written extensively about involuntary memory, suppressing what he knows about the traditional essay form and consciously moving into new territory.  Reading these essays as simple ruminations on everyday objects and the memories they evoke would be a disservice to Birkerts. The heart of the matter regarding these pieces needs to be internalized; one must read the essays keeping in mind the amount of erudition that went into their creation.  Paintings with no brushstrokes. A genealogy of process. And, in fact, Birkerts objectively correlates the idea and brings to the fore a good amount of genealogy, writing about not only his heritage, but his children as well.

The essays would be mere studies were it not for the layers of self-analysis and meditation that pulse throughout. In “Ladder,” Birkerts uses the anecdote of an early job—where he hired himself out for house repairs and painting—to illustrate the simplicity of his formula, which is exercised with an artistic mastery of pace and rhythm. He’s nervously climbing a ladder, and going against the advice of his boss he looks down, frozen. In a seemingly masochistic vault of self-awarenes, halfway up the ladder, halfway through the essay, he gazes at the ground and time slows:

        I hear myself breathing and realize that I’ve stopped. I don’t remember                 stopping…I look  down …because I need to know where I am…What                 have I done? I can’t unsee the distance down, or lose the sense of the
        ladder shrinking away to nothing below me and above me.

In an example like “Ladder,” all of the elements of Birkerts' project come together, creating a nuanced and layered account of memory and how its facets can produce something powerful. And The Other Walk abounds with such examples.

In “Brown Loafers,” a pair of shoes inspires an essay on a friend’s suicide. The writer inherits the prized loafers when the friend becomes sick and can no longer fit into them. Birkerts exhibits significant control of tone and mood here, as the piece is neither eulogy nor nostalgia; it’s simply remembrance. “Some years ago, before the big operations for heart and cancer that undermined him, long before he took his life, my great sad friend discovered the obsessive pleasures of fine clothing.” Moving between the sincere and the sardonic, he considers the memory-object for what it represents, which is more than just an item that summons the past. It not only allows the writer to connect with himself, to memories otherwise perhaps inaccessible, but also offers the only point of connection to another being. These connections also represent the necessary exchange that must happen between writer and reader; representations made on the page spark entire worlds. The essays in the collection may focus on the narratives behind whatever set Birkerts’ mind to wandering (and so to writing).  His deep lyricism takes them beyond mere explorations of process, proposals set forth by Birkerts himself in his previous book. ~RS

_
A Nigerian-American psychiatrist, studying at Columbia Presbyterian, walks through New York City:


“And so when I began to go on evening walks last fall, I found Morningside Heights an easy place from which to set out into the city.  The path that drops down from the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and crosses Morningside Park…”  


The part of Manhattan, which Teju Cole describes at the beginning of his debut novel Open City, happens to be where I have lived for half a decade; his steps are so known to me that I cannot walk on the same streets now without thinking of Cole’s thoughtful narrator, who adds, “though traffic makes the river on the other side of the trees inaudible.”  Anyone who has ever lived in Manhattan is intimate with this cacophony, which competes with the muted sounds of nature. A prismatic symphony: the perfect soundtrack for walking. 

Julius, the main character, is an educated, artistic flâneur who reads Roland Barthes and St. Augustine, attends Mahler concerts in Carnegie Hall, and can speak with the same ease about fine arts as the author himself might (Cole attended Columbia and, according to his blog, attended the same photography exhibit his unnamed protagonist visited).  The distance between Cole and the ambling Julius is minimal; the reader takes for granted that the author is positioning himself inside of his own story.  The immediacy of the first person blurs the partition between Cole and his subject.  It may be presumptuous to label Open City an autobiography of sorts, but Cole works in much the same vein as a skilled poet like Marie Howe or Frank Bidart, or fiction writers such as Ernest Hemingway, David Foster Wallace, or Thomas Bernhard; the reader recognizes the works may be fictional, but cannot affirm that the details of the narrative are not in fact simply retellings of actual events. 

Orhan Pamuk writes of this thin veil between fiction and reality in his book The Naïve and Sentimental Novelist:

    Once we have searched for a deeper meaning in the novel’s complex                 landscape, have derived pleasure from the sensory experience of the                 protagonists…and have completely immersed ourselves in the world of the         novel, we can forget about the writer himself.  (48) 

Pamuk cites an experience where an acquaintance he met assumed he lived on the same block as his protagonist in The Museum of Innocence, Kemal.  In answer to the posed question, “ Mr. Pamuk, are you Kemal?” he stated the following:

1.    “No, I am not my hero Kemal.”

2.    “But it would be impossible for me to ever convince readers of my novel that I am not Kemal.”

Herein lies the predicament in novels like Open City, where the voice of the narrator is so convincing, so utterly enmeshed with the action, that it leaves little space for the reader to step away and develop his or her own conceptions about who the character is, the best characters being the ones in which the reader can—circuitously—see himself, or at least feel a certain empathy for.  This is why Cole’s unnamed protagonist is flawed: Cole relies solely on Julius's voice (his opinions, his pseudo-intellectual banter, his worldviews) and fashions a novel around it.  But not much happens in this novel.  Let me rephrase that; in actuality, many banal occurrences are described in sparkling, fairly hygienic prose (he visits an ailing Japanese professor; he sees a John Brewster exhibit; he views some migratory birds; he visits Brussels to find his grandmother; he views the cornucopia in a Chinatown shop), but all of these incidents are conveyed with the same peripatetic, uniformed tempo, echoing the Andante pace the narrator takes on his itinerant sojourns through Manhattan.   

    I covered the city blocks as though measuring them with my stride, and the         subway stations served as recurring motives in my aimless progress.  The            sight of large masses of people hurrying down into underground chambers         was perpetually strange to me, and I felt that all of the human race were             rushing, pushed by a counter instinctive death drive, into movable catacombs.      Above ground I was with thousands of others in their solitude, but in the                subway, standing close to strangers, jostling them and being jostled by them         for space and breathing room, all of us reenacting unacknowledged traumas,     the solitude intensified.  (p. 7)

But what are these traumas the narrator alludes to?  Open City lacks an overarching structure, depending rather on the almost unbearably intelligent vignettes to push the narrative forward.  There is an amorphous quality to even the most detailed renderings of the scintillating grid work that is Manhattan: “The water was a kind of embarrassing secret, the unloved daughter, neglected, while the parks were doted on, fussed over, overused;” “…so I walked under the arbor of elms, passing by rows of concrete chess tables, which were oases of order and invitations to a twinned solitude;”“Traffic growled low alongside us, the sound of impatient, churning engines, and gasoline smoke adding menace to the park’s perfumed world.”  Cole offers glimpses without any kind of emotive disclosure.  The prose is glancingly beautiful, chromatic in the way it intimates passion without explicitly describing it, yet one feels somewhat alienated from the characters, the glimpses of the city merely fractured missives which are not convincingly emblematic of a larger theme.   

Yet Open City is an articulate and auspicious debut.  In the best novels, as Pamuk writes, “the writer is most present in the text at the moments we most completely forget about him.  This is because the times we forget about the writer are the times we believe the fictional world to be actual…and we believe the writer’s mirror…to be a perfect and natural mirror.”  What Cole hopes to convince us is that the actual world is, in fact, fictional.  And the author succeeds in a difficult feat: his narrator remains enigmatic while still retaining the attention of the reader.  There was not one moment when I wanted to put the book down in favor of another.  I was as riveted by the idiosyncrasies of a Haitian shoe shiner as by his sexual encounter with a Czech woman in Brussels.  In one of my favourite passages, Julius attends a concert in Carnegie Hall to listen to Mahler.  Before the music ebbs, an elderly woman abandons her front row seat and walks up the crimson aisle: “It was as though she had been summoned, and was leaving into death, drawn by a force invisible to us.”  Cole’s subtle elegance is at its best here, and the understated acuity of his solitary characters rises to meet us; a slow but steady promenade. ~JMB    

 

_ The winner of the 2011 Fence Motherwell Prize, Negro League Baseball is Harmony Holiday’s first full-length collection of poetry, and in its own way, a conceptual piece of art. This is not to say that the concepts and theories Holiday engages in the collection necessarily take precedent over the poems themselves, but in order to participate as a reader of the poems, we are asked first to work through the conceptualizations behind their existence. From the “foreword” of text on the book's inner flap, to the included audio CD, to the afterword, and even in some of the titles of the poems, Holiday works in a painstaking manner.  Reading through the collection, you feel the author's background in music, dance and theory; you are continually challenged to work through her breadth of knowledge while getting at the poems. We feel as if she is constructing an experience of reading her poems for us, and through this, constructing herself:

    Nor is my house a house nor is myself a self in the way they mean one                 occupant of one place called a body” (“Assembly,” 7)

After all of this, what we are left with are poems and language that want us to consider the people and relationships under whose shadows we live. In this collection, Holiday’s father casts one of these shadows. His presence and absence leaves an indelible mark through the collection - it is in his name that some of the most straight-forward poems take place. But Holiday is not solely concerned with writing towards a lost parent; she is exploring the totality of becoming someone or something through who and what intersects with your life.

Most of the poems in the collection are prose poems, and those that are not take the look of prose poems, with long lines collected in paragraphs, almost as if the language can’t bear to be placed in smaller lines, constricted by line breaks. The poems are dense, unrelenting as their language tries to uncover what happens when you can’t be who you are--as an artist, as a woman, as a person--without BEING who you are--a daughter, a lover, an ethnicity.

    Like I’m symbol                     so that I have become competitive with my                history” (“Like I’m Simple,” 12)

Holiday’s “history”--or any of our histories, for that matter--is not just personal.  She is not just speaking of her father, and she readily engages this in the poems and also in the naming of the collection (Negro League Baseball).  In the very explicit afterword, Holiday explains, “I am afraid to evoke the word jazz which has become vapid and spangled through overuse and misuse (over-meaning), so I use the safest analog game, baseball …” Of course, the word jazz may not have been used directly, but its weight throughout the book is clear--the cover of the book is a photograph of Big Jay Neely on stage, surrounded by a white audience of fans, the inside book flap speaks of the great bassist Charles Mingus’ liner notes, and of course, the inclusion of the audio CD.

But the bigger point is that both jazz and baseball have become expanded beyond their dictionary definitions. As two of the most globally influential American productions (as the essayist Gerald Early noted, “I think there are only three things America will be known for 2,000 years from now when they study this civilization: the Constitution, jazz music, and baseball”), jazz and baseball have come to be symbolic of so much more, almost too much more, and they change depending on their context and our approach. Do you think of jazz as a music enthusiast does? As a dancer does? As the daughter of a jazz musician? What is different in how a young boy living in Venezuela and a middle-aged white man living in Kansas think of baseball?

What belongs to you and what belongs to the world, is not so easily separated out, particularly when you are an artist and attempting to create both yourself and your art simultaneously. Holiday explores the interplay between the personal and the persona; the struggle to define but not be defined is a tension throughout the book.  The idea of a public and a private space itself is overturned. In “A Series of Events Linked by Casualty,” Holiday opens with:

    Some  public things     are so steeped in an imagined privacy that we keep         forgetting to be, when trite is a fitness   that stylized grief does not heal or              resists healing, severenceless, maybe but you are not alone because you are     not with me    I can’t read the line on the subway graffiti   about ‘you are the         man you are my other country’ over and over without perceiving a belligerent        ecstasy    I left my seat    like losing it   but to be over-near-you   illusion of            profit    the one who said (75)

The way ‘public’ is overturned by ‘imagined privacy,’ the confusion of ‘alone’ and ‘not with me;’ the movement from an intellectualized, mental space into the physical, public space of a subway -- it becomes overwhelming, and quickly turns into loss.

But love and loss are not so far apart, and as we grow to understand this, both become more nuanced, but more unavoidable, more true. This negotiation of loving, of losing and of being in that space in between love and loss, is what drives the collection. Each poem straddles memorializing and mourning. Each poem becomes a hopeful aspiration to capture something lovely, something loved. As Holiday writes, “If I come to love you but don’t believe in conclusions, there you will be again” and then in the very last lines of the collection:

    So if I had never met

    anyone but you,

    I would have known which way to go.
    (“(Afterward) Notes on a Letter to the Singer Abby Lincoln from Her Lover,            Abraham Lincoln,” 86)

It’s that feeling of being led astray, not by the things we love but by the loving itself. But even if it comes crashing down afterwards, it was still there at one point, and wasn’t it beautiful. ~AVW

_ In her new book, Re-, Kristi Maxwell pursues the “she” and the “he” as the visible and ideological arc of an artfully syntactical language.   Echoed and reinforced by the title, “she” and “he” become generic appropriations of personhood, character, and identity.  These are not narrative poems, but the appeal of a lyrical bend towards language casts away any doubt of being able to appreciate the beauty of these short poems.  Maxwell has written in her author’s statement that she is interested in the “gene”, “the resemblance between the’ generic’ and the ‘generative’…that recalls patterns.”  So, re-what, exactly? Re-call?  Re-do?  Re-discover?  Re-linquish?  It shouldn’t matter in the end, save the knowledge of the prefix’s etymology: “re-“ denotes a before and an after: a once, then maybe a loss, and a once more again.  Perhaps, in the case of any tangible approach to narrative-meaning, a prior “she” and “he” and an after “she” and “he,” in all its supposed iterations. There are hints throughout, but they willingly withhold absolute conjecture:

                       This image they know best:
                        bright light that denotes
                        the carnival they have yet
                        to attend. ..

                        This image of closer,
                        the closer they close in on
                        to secure an image of it.

“Closer” reads like “closure,” and nonetheless could be read as either noun or adjective, each way slyly altering the ultimate interpretation of meaning. What is definitive, however, is that “they” are active participants in the transmission of reference between the reader and these lyrics; some placement is possible. On the subsequent page of the sequence (the book is constructed of untitled lyrics in four titled sections), Maxwell writes:

                        In this undressing they called steam
                        for its pace and the lightness with which
                        they moved their feet from sock holes
                        so where their ankles had been
                        their ankles appeared still to be…
 
                        …they removed their garments,
                        for unto each other they undid themselves
                        individually and undulated their stadiums…

Something is obviously happening here, something concrete in the mind of the poet, but its transfer to language presents the problem of knowing.  Not a problem of knowing on the reader’s part, but more on the level of linguistic apprehension and conclusion, so that what emerges in these lyrics is more than a focus on the generic; it is a generating of linguistic guiding and massaging.

Associative logic also plays to Maxwell’s strengths as a writer, as the logic never deflates or disregards the reader. In an intimate lyric, Maxwell writes of the pair’s commingling, as the “she” and “he” become more explicitly a formed union of “they”.

         Their favorite knot was a kiss. Loose noose of lips and gruesome
         tongue like a torn-open neck or one inside out, shirt-like, should they wear
         the body to where bawdy bought all ballrooms where any body                            can rouge up the cheekbone of a chair by lounging just so.

Maxwell has also stated, this time in an interview, “I am a body, language is bodies, writing is bodies, I am bodies, and we are all inside and outside of one another.” The statement in itself is almost a poem, beautiful in its eloquent simplicity. And this section quoted above illustrates her thoughts best, in how the kiss of the “they” moves from a knot in a noose to a tongue to a shirt, which then moves to a ballroom, and finally returning back to the kiss by evoking the cheekbone.  But it is the cheekbone of a chair, anthropomorphically lounging as the reader might expect the “they” to be doing.  Circular in its logic, but also very associative, like playing a suggestive word game.

The balance of wordplay throughout the collection could easily fall by the way of annoyance, Heather McHugh-like, but the seriousness of tone (perhaps an appreciation or a respect for poetics) keeps the poems from sounding commonplace, balance being superbly achieved in Maxwell’s writing.  Though obvious, the wordplay is never distracting. The repetitive sounds, creating close-homonyms, speak to the elusive and debatable constrictions and limits of language itself (and its reception on the eye/ear) which these poems explore. Maxwell’s clever punning, obvious as it is, never feels like her focus, again demonstrating her ability to control language and, by proxy, her abilities as a poet.  Hers is not a hybrid-style, fusing the tenets of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and “less difficult, more narrative” poetry, as much as it is an emergent voice in younger American poetics which seeks to illuminate the ever-reductive denotation of words as they bounce off one another. Think of Matthew Henriksen or Brian Teare, who both bend the colloquial in a way which galvanizes contemporary American poetry.   

This of course, and thankfully, is not the mode of language in which people speak, therefore Maxwell’s stellar poems draw attention to the importance of the genre’s medium; a particular focus on words is a focus on language (read, syntax) and vice-versa. What emerges, to quote Kristeva on poetry, is “language beyond language,” in part always there waiting to be discovered, and in part waiting to be fashioned. ~RS

_“You are inverted, always, above the place at which you are caught. Caught living.”

            -Bhanu Kapil, in an interview with Katherine Sanders, BOMBLOG, Sept. 2011

In a September 2011 interview on BOMBLOG, Bhanu Kapil told the story of her first book, published a decade ago.  She was an hour into labour, less than twelve hours from giving birth to her son.  The phone in her kitchen rang and she picked it up.  It was Patricia Dientsfrey from Kelsey Street Press, telling Kapil that they were going to press immediately, and needed a title for her book.  She had been having some difficulty titling the manuscript, but when Dientsfrey called, Kapil impulsively said “The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers.”  And then she hung up, to give birth.  Kapil recalls that at a certain point, during labor, she thought, “This isn’t pain.  It’s intensity.” 

One feels much the same affect when consuming Kapil’s newest work from Nightboat books, Schizophrene.  The emotion elicited is not so much suffering as it is a beleaguering sense of fervency and magnitude.  In the book’s opening “Passive Notes:” Kapil writes:

    For some years, I tried to write an epic on Partition and its trans-generational        effects: the high incidence of schizophrenia in diasporic Indian and Pakistani         communities; the parallel social history of domestic violence, relational                 disorders, and so on.  Towards the end of this project, I felt the great strength      of the page: its ability, as a fibrous surface, to deflect the point of my pen.    

While this introduction sounds systematic enough, the italicized words create echelons in the mind, a type of ranking of ideas and subjects.  During these “Passive Notes:” other words are highlighted –the screen, reflective, touch, had failed, house, winter, fragments, decayed—which produce a layered representation on the page, a painted image by way of words.  Through this accumulation of thoughts we come upon a telling narrative:  one night, when she knew this manuscript had failed, she threw the notebook in her garden.  It snowed that winter, into spring, when she finally retrieved her notes again and began to re-write “from the fragments, the phrases and lines still legible on the warped, decayed but curiously rigid pages.”

This idea of time and decay is central to Schizophrene, which haltingly, in prose, traces the junctures of migration and schizophrenia in diasporic communities, primarily in India and Pakistan.  I say haltingly not in slight, but rather to illustrate the subtleties in recounting experience which is communicated in sparse sentences on the page, hemmed in by an exquisite use of blank space.  One page from the section 4. ABIOGENESIS reads as follows:

        Dreamed I left my coat on the aeroplane.

This sole sentence appears at the top of the page, the rest which is left blank, yet it conveys key points which reappear in the collection: the sub-conscious, journey, personal property.  Throughout the text, inquiry is elected (rather than a straight recounting) to explore the trauma (in the context of racism and violence) experienced by immigrant women.  Even though the questions are not voiced directly, the demand is clear:  in a diverse world how does an artist reconcile oneself with the suffering of affected sectors of society, is reconciliation even possible, and how then to communicate in a scientific yet emotionally relevant context? 

These are large concepts, and Kapil handles them well.  In eight sections, written in first-person quasi-poetic and intellectually rigorous prose, Kapil guides the reader from her garden in Colorado (where the manuscript was discarded) to South Asia, and to affluent neighborhoods in the United Kingdom where she grew up.   Hardly any distinction is made between the “I” of the book to the author herself, positioning Kapil as one of the recipients “the displaced” as Karla Kelsey stated in her review of the book.   The immediacy of the first person abolishes the partition between author and subject, Kapil uses herself as a sounding board and a medium:

    My mother’s mother put a hand over my mother’s mouth, but my mother saw,     peeking between the slats of the cart, row after row of women tied to the             border trees.  “Their stomachs were cut out,” said my mother.  This story,             which really wasn’t a story but an image, was repeated to me at many                 bedtimes of my own childhood.

    Sometimes I think it was not an image at all but a way of conveying                      information. 

In Schizophrene, narrative is conveyed through an ancestor or in an interview (such as the one taking place at London’s Institute of Community Health Services), through a notebook holding corroded sentences which survived the snow, or through dreams, which the author describes in startling cinematicism:

    I dreamed of a tree uprooted by the river and instinctively, I climbed up.  In the     roots, I saw a velvet bag knotted with string, bulky with jewels.  I wanted to         give it to the family who squatted on the land.  They were white.  They had         long, brown and knotted hair…

These moments, intimate and sensual, create a fractured portrait.  They allude to—without articulating directly—a fragmentation of the self and society. Can exploring racism and trauma begin to mend history, or at least come to terms with memory? Kapil writes:

    A schizophrenic narrative cannot process the dynamic elements of an image,     any image, whether pleasant, enriching or already so bad it can’t be tendered      in the lexicon of poses available to it.

In an interview in TINGE magazine, Kapil says:  “In this sense, to throw away the book is to stop the book. To stop is an act of proprioception; it gives the book a severe limit. In the arc of a book’s flight into the dark garden, nothing happens and nothing can happen. This is my anti-colonial stance, my anti-colonial desire, in retrospect.” After the self and the text are displaced, what remnants of language persist?  Kapil doesn’t give us answers, yet she doesn’t need to.  In the end, Schizophrene is as much about the impossible task of writing such a narrative, and the intricate virtue of that impossibility. ~RS