Monday, October 19, 2009
upcoming readings
I will be trekking across Pennsylvania (via New York) with poet Andrew Zawacki this coming week: please see the list of future readings at right for more details, and please come if you're able...
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Monday, September 07, 2009
another review of Scape
The first two paragraphs from Andy Frazee's review in The Quarterly Conversation:
Joshua Harmon’s first book of poetry, Scape, comes two years after the publication of his debut novel, Quinnehtukqut (Starcherone, 2007), a difficult and often brilliant text that draws on the work of William Faulkner and Samuel Beckett in equal measure (not to mention John Ashbery and Susan Howe) to form a complex weave of narratives about a town in the wilderness of late 19th- and early 20th-century New Hampshire. In the novel, Harmon writes of “how a man’s head cannot begin to take in the places he has been, or the people, each word spoken a line somewhere in the land.” Following this notion, Quinnehtukqut not only takes up a meditation on local history and geography (or, as we are told, “a story of lost dreams and places now vanished”) but is also an investigation of narrative and language itself, and of how those two things—location and locution—relate.
If Quinnehtukqut is, like Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, a story about telling stories, Scape’s six sections ("Whither," "Landscape," "Inscape," "Escape," "Summer Letters," and "Summer’s Tenants") are in a similar sense poems about making poems. At the same time, these poems blend in larger concerns: the nature of the self, the possibility or impossibility of communication, the insecurities of being in the world. While Harmon does draw from Language poetry—a line from Bob Perelman forms an epigraph to the “Landscape” section—the work here balances, as does much of the finest contemporary practice, linguistic inquiry with a strong lyrical instinct, making for readings both fascinating and challenging in the best sense.
Friday, September 04, 2009
review of Scape
In a forest, it’s impossible to take in a lone tree, to trace its branches through the tangle of leaves, competitors, choking vines; it’s like that with the subjects and language of Harmon’s collection Scape. The language of the book is dense and strange: a tangle of branches or roots poking through snow, like the “alliance of branches and leaves” Harmon evokes on the final page.
[...]
The more time you spend with Scape, the more time you want to spend with it. It’s not the most inviting book on first approach (though Black Ocean’s design is up to its usual high standards), but it rewards re-reading. As in the New England woods, you feel lost at first, then fascinated.
Open Letters Monthly reviews Scape, along with Farrah Field's Rising, in the September issue.
Tuesday, September 01, 2009
current reading, pt. 3 (on fragments, pt. 10)
Coach House Books is a press I've long admired—they understand the book as physical object better than just about any publisher, and their poetry (bpNichol, Christian Bök, Lisa Robertson, Steve McCaffery, and many others) is consistently among the most interesting in North America. I picked up Kyle Buckley's book The Laundromat Essay earlier this year in part because of its title, in part because of its well-set Bembo type on laid paper, and in part because of its cover, a drawing of rickety wooden stairs, stage lighting, and other less obvious constructions.
The book is described on its back cover as a "narrative essay that continually dissects a never-finished conversation, ...annotated with fragments of poems that were maybe never written about a childhood that maybe never took place" and as "a spiralling poem about the pathology of failure and of forgetting." Structurally, The Laundromat Essay recalls for me Jenny Boully's first book, The Body, recently republished by Essay Press, which was written as a series of "footnotes to a non-existent text" (and which I reviewed in 2003), since almost every one of its two-page spreads consists of a prose block on the recto page in which one or more words are bolded, with dotted lines connecting these words to brief annotations (some of which are themselves annotated) on the verso page of the spread. Also like Boully's book, or the work of writers such as Brian Lennon and John D'Agata, The Laundromat Essay makes explicit a link between poetry and the essay, especially in the latter word's connotations of something attempted, or a thought process pursued.
None of this is to imply that The Laundromat Essay is anything but its own thing. The scaffold of the cover image is invoked almost immediately when the speaker of this essay notes that "A conversation starts with what Ashbery calls 'brittle, useless architecture' that affords a high but teetering, scaffold-like vantage point of the action." The essay offers a recounting of the conversation between the speaker and the "owner of the laundromat," as well as the speaker and an unnamed "you," and also enacts such concerns about scaffolding and architecture through the dialogue between each verso / recto spread. But such scaffolding is always transforming itself: "(I've taken beams down from the ceiling to build a staircase right down to the street, or a table, I'm not sure which.)"
The speaker's acknowledgment of the transformative possibilities—
—of this recursive, always-interrupted metanarrative makes it an engaging read; its language is precise, almost clinical (despite the fact that it often describes "memor[ies] of hopeless beauty"), and its fragmented, self-analytical qualities are perfect for its concerns with searching, explaining, and remembering.
The book is described on its back cover as a "narrative essay that continually dissects a never-finished conversation, ...annotated with fragments of poems that were maybe never written about a childhood that maybe never took place" and as "a spiralling poem about the pathology of failure and of forgetting." Structurally, The Laundromat Essay recalls for me Jenny Boully's first book, The Body, recently republished by Essay Press, which was written as a series of "footnotes to a non-existent text" (and which I reviewed in 2003), since almost every one of its two-page spreads consists of a prose block on the recto page in which one or more words are bolded, with dotted lines connecting these words to brief annotations (some of which are themselves annotated) on the verso page of the spread. Also like Boully's book, or the work of writers such as Brian Lennon and John D'Agata, The Laundromat Essay makes explicit a link between poetry and the essay, especially in the latter word's connotations of something attempted, or a thought process pursued.
None of this is to imply that The Laundromat Essay is anything but its own thing. The scaffold of the cover image is invoked almost immediately when the speaker of this essay notes that "A conversation starts with what Ashbery calls 'brittle, useless architecture' that affords a high but teetering, scaffold-like vantage point of the action." The essay offers a recounting of the conversation between the speaker and the "owner of the laundromat," as well as the speaker and an unnamed "you," and also enacts such concerns about scaffolding and architecture through the dialogue between each verso / recto spread. But such scaffolding is always transforming itself: "(I've taken beams down from the ceiling to build a staircase right down to the street, or a table, I'm not sure which.)"
The speaker's acknowledgment of the transformative possibilities—
...I feel I can draw you a map of what it is like to have something to tell you. I can tell you about trying to get back to you, trying to get to the airport, trying to get home, waiting for you. I can tell you in different ways, following these different maps. I think of all these as great possibilities and yet still as subtle, beautiful failures. I wrote you out a map titled 'Variations on getting out to or getting back from the airport.' I have this much to tell you.
—of this recursive, always-interrupted metanarrative makes it an engaging read; its language is precise, almost clinical (despite the fact that it often describes "memor[ies] of hopeless beauty"), and its fragmented, self-analytical qualities are perfect for its concerns with searching, explaining, and remembering.
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Petals of Zero Petals of One
Andrew Wessels reviews Andrew Zawacki's new collection, Petals of Zero Petals of One (Talisman House) at A Compulsive Reader:
I share Wessels's enthusiasm for Zawacki's work—indeed, enough so that I will be embarking on a reading tour of the northeast with him this October. Further details to come.
The reuses of phonemes...for different purposes turns the poem into a delightful obstacle course, one the reader is required to pick through and consider closely each word and even each syllable. The importance of each detail in language becomes heightened. Zawacki seems to be also rebelling against the notion that when we read our brain can ‘recognize’ a word within a sentence in its first syllable, presenting us with example after example of situations where we can do [no] such thing, where we must wait patiently for the word to complete itself.
I share Wessels's enthusiasm for Zawacki's work—indeed, enough so that I will be embarking on a reading tour of the northeast with him this October. Further details to come.
Friday, August 21, 2009
teaching creative writing
As the increasing number of administrative e-mails appearing in my inbox suggests, another academic year is upon me—in fact, some of my colleagues elsewhere have already begun theirs. I'm currently re-reading Pound's ABC of Reading, and reading for the first time Ron Padgett's Creative Reading (now out of print, though one can find a digital scan of a rather low-res photocopy here), both of which I may excerpt for my creative writing students this semester—even if only to quote an aphorism or two from the former, or to enact a strategy or two from the latter.
When I began teaching creative writing in 1997—thirty years after the formation of the organization now called the Associated Writers & Writing Programs, and the same year that US News & World Report first published its rankings of MFA programs—such classes were, of course, already a huge draw among students, and in the decade since, after further popular cinematic versions of writing workshops and ever-increasing demand for spots in (and sound-and-fury about) MFA programs (see Seth Abramson's long-running blog, which has already spun off an MFA handbook and, more recently, a much-commented-upon consulting firm), creative writing workshops have come to seem as much a part of the entitled academic landscape as dorm wi-fi, espresso bars, and professional-sports-team-quality gyms. I don't know what percentage of students currently attending liberal arts colleges such as the one at which I teach take one or more creative writing courses, but I would imagine it is very high; last spring, more than two-thirds of the students in the two creative writing courses I taught were not English majors (who can count creative writing courses toward their major requirements), but were taking my course as an elective.
Earlier this summer, Louis Menand, in a review of Mark McGurl's book The Program Era, wrote about the teaching of creative writing in the New Yorker. Menand's essay invokes many of the usual writing workshop tropes (the question of whether writing "can be taught," the workshop as "a combination of ritual scarring and twelve-on-one group therapy where aspiring writers offer their views of the efforts of other aspiring writers," the hard-drinking writing professor, etc.), before mellowing into a sentimental conclusion about his own undergraduate experiences in creative writing classes, but I'm interested in this passage:
Menand's understanding here seems limited to the historical (and/or cinematic) version of the creative-writing classroom (and what classroom isn't, to some extent, an "unscripted performance space"?). Reading, apart from the manuscripts of one's peers, does not seem to be part of this description of the writing workshop, though it's interesting that he mentions the act of writing as part of what the workshop enforces, as generally the act of writing has been understood as something entirely apart from the venue of workshop.
Too often, students asked to name a few favorite writers or books on the first day of a creative writing course can cite only books assigned in other courses, or movies. I share Frank O'Hara's belief about the "forced feeding" of poetry ("Too many poets act like a middle-aged mother trying to get her kids to eat too much cooked meat, and potatoes..."), though of course feel that any student interested in writing will be interested in reading as well (Barbara Guest: "To be a poet requires that one also be a reader"): ideally, I'm less involved in manufacturing that interest than in directing it in ways helpful to a particular student. And while Pound's pronouncements in ABC of Reading about learning from the masters are rigid and proscriptive in a way that seems mostly quaint in 2009, certainly many beginning students need some models for writing, if only to learn a broader range of possibilities for their own work.
In the typical studio art course, students spend hours of class time during the semester actively painting, sketching, and making art, as well as critiquing the resulting efforts; of course, much of this fact is due to issues of materials, equipment, and the physical space required, e.g., to paint in oils, or to make prints, but I still think it important that the writing workshop duplicate the studio art course's attention to the act of making something during class time. Some framework for writing—and the transmission of some practical knowledge—should always have been part of the "curricular script" in a writing workshop.
Students electing my introductory creative writing course this fall will be reading these books—hopefully none of them qualifies as meat and potatoes—during the semester:
Paige Ackerson-Kiely: In No One's Land (Ahsahta).
Geoff Bouvier: Living Room (Copper Canyon).
Kyle Buckley: The Laundromat Essay (Coach House).
Barbara Guest: The Countess of Minneapolis (Burning Deck).
Harryette Mullen: Recyclopedia (Graywolf).
Frank O'Hara: Lunch Poems (City Lights).
Zachary Schomburg: The Man Suit (Black Ocean).
Charles Simic: The World Doesn't End (Harcourt).
Allison Titus: Sum of Every Lost Ship (Cleveland State UP).
When I began teaching creative writing in 1997—thirty years after the formation of the organization now called the Associated Writers & Writing Programs, and the same year that US News & World Report first published its rankings of MFA programs—such classes were, of course, already a huge draw among students, and in the decade since, after further popular cinematic versions of writing workshops and ever-increasing demand for spots in (and sound-and-fury about) MFA programs (see Seth Abramson's long-running blog, which has already spun off an MFA handbook and, more recently, a much-commented-upon consulting firm), creative writing workshops have come to seem as much a part of the entitled academic landscape as dorm wi-fi, espresso bars, and professional-sports-team-quality gyms. I don't know what percentage of students currently attending liberal arts colleges such as the one at which I teach take one or more creative writing courses, but I would imagine it is very high; last spring, more than two-thirds of the students in the two creative writing courses I taught were not English majors (who can count creative writing courses toward their major requirements), but were taking my course as an elective.
Earlier this summer, Louis Menand, in a review of Mark McGurl's book The Program Era, wrote about the teaching of creative writing in the New Yorker. Menand's essay invokes many of the usual writing workshop tropes (the question of whether writing "can be taught," the workshop as "a combination of ritual scarring and twelve-on-one group therapy where aspiring writers offer their views of the efforts of other aspiring writers," the hard-drinking writing professor, etc.), before mellowing into a sentimental conclusion about his own undergraduate experiences in creative writing classes, but I'm interested in this passage:
...a workshop is not a course in the normal sense—a scene of instruction in which some body of knowledge is transmitted by means of a curricular script. The workshop is a process, an unscripted performance space, a regime for forcing people to do two things that are fundamentally contrary to human nature: actually write stuff (as opposed to planning to write stuff very, very soon), and then sit there while strangers tear it apart.
Menand's understanding here seems limited to the historical (and/or cinematic) version of the creative-writing classroom (and what classroom isn't, to some extent, an "unscripted performance space"?). Reading, apart from the manuscripts of one's peers, does not seem to be part of this description of the writing workshop, though it's interesting that he mentions the act of writing as part of what the workshop enforces, as generally the act of writing has been understood as something entirely apart from the venue of workshop.
Too often, students asked to name a few favorite writers or books on the first day of a creative writing course can cite only books assigned in other courses, or movies. I share Frank O'Hara's belief about the "forced feeding" of poetry ("Too many poets act like a middle-aged mother trying to get her kids to eat too much cooked meat, and potatoes..."), though of course feel that any student interested in writing will be interested in reading as well (Barbara Guest: "To be a poet requires that one also be a reader"): ideally, I'm less involved in manufacturing that interest than in directing it in ways helpful to a particular student. And while Pound's pronouncements in ABC of Reading about learning from the masters are rigid and proscriptive in a way that seems mostly quaint in 2009, certainly many beginning students need some models for writing, if only to learn a broader range of possibilities for their own work.
In the typical studio art course, students spend hours of class time during the semester actively painting, sketching, and making art, as well as critiquing the resulting efforts; of course, much of this fact is due to issues of materials, equipment, and the physical space required, e.g., to paint in oils, or to make prints, but I still think it important that the writing workshop duplicate the studio art course's attention to the act of making something during class time. Some framework for writing—and the transmission of some practical knowledge—should always have been part of the "curricular script" in a writing workshop.
Students electing my introductory creative writing course this fall will be reading these books—hopefully none of them qualifies as meat and potatoes—during the semester:
Paige Ackerson-Kiely: In No One's Land (Ahsahta).
Geoff Bouvier: Living Room (Copper Canyon).
Kyle Buckley: The Laundromat Essay (Coach House).
Barbara Guest: The Countess of Minneapolis (Burning Deck).
Harryette Mullen: Recyclopedia (Graywolf).
Frank O'Hara: Lunch Poems (City Lights).
Zachary Schomburg: The Man Suit (Black Ocean).
Charles Simic: The World Doesn't End (Harcourt).
Allison Titus: Sum of Every Lost Ship (Cleveland State UP).
Thursday, August 13, 2009
"issues of verisimilitude"
Tim O'Brien, in his essay "Telling Tails" (from The Atlantic's summer fiction issue), nails the primary problem with fiction workshops (and with a great deal of contemporary fiction):
In general, the topic is born out of writing workshops, in which I’ve noticed, almost always to my alarm, that classroom discussion seems to revolve almost exclusively around issues of verisimilitude. Declarations such as these abound: I didn’t believe in that character. I need to know more about that character’s background. I can’t see that character’s face. I don’t understand why that character would behave so insipidly (or violently, or whatever).
These are legitimate questions. But for me, as a reader, the more dangerous problem with unsuccessful stories is usually much less complex: I am bored. And I would remain bored even if the story were packed with pages of detail aimed at establishing verisimilitude. I would believe in the story, perhaps, but I would still hate it.
Monday, August 03, 2009
The future of fiction
Some thirteen years after the Review of Contemporary Fiction posed the question, the American Book Review asks writers about "the future of fiction" (in the forms of "words, sentences, quotes") and then allows some writers further elaborations.
The responses range from polite deflections to all-caps howls of despair, and I'm guessing that many writers would respond with different levels of optimism depending on the particular day on which they were asked the question. (Or, as Charles Bernstein puts it in "State of the Art" [from A Poetics]: "There is of course no state of American poetry, but states, moods, agitations, dissipations, renunciations, depressions, acquiescences, elations, angers, ecstasies....")
I'm certainly in agreement with Jonathan Baumbach's reading that "recent evidence suggests that the most interesting future of fiction will be featured in small independent presses," as well as Vanessa Place's statement that, "[w]hile conceptual poetry has been staking its claims and counter-claims in the avant community for a number of years, conceptual fiction has barely begun." I share Michael Griffith's "hope, not a prediction" that
As I was reading through Haze, Mark Wallace's 2004 book of "essays, poems, prose" yesterday, I lingered on a question he asked, which I'll edit slightly into this statement: "poetry is, ...I believe, the art that allows people access to their own complexity in language, complexity which is elsewhere denied them...."
One of my own hopes for the future of fiction might include fictions that reclaim such linguistic complexities, and a readership eager to reclaim such complexities as well.
The responses range from polite deflections to all-caps howls of despair, and I'm guessing that many writers would respond with different levels of optimism depending on the particular day on which they were asked the question. (Or, as Charles Bernstein puts it in "State of the Art" [from A Poetics]: "There is of course no state of American poetry, but states, moods, agitations, dissipations, renunciations, depressions, acquiescences, elations, angers, ecstasies....")
I'm certainly in agreement with Jonathan Baumbach's reading that "recent evidence suggests that the most interesting future of fiction will be featured in small independent presses," as well as Vanessa Place's statement that, "[w]hile conceptual poetry has been staking its claims and counter-claims in the avant community for a number of years, conceptual fiction has barely begun." I share Michael Griffith's "hope, not a prediction" that
...I’d love to see fiction that concentrates on the things fiction does uniquely well—chief among these the inhabiting of thought, the mapping of consciousness—rather than chasing vainly after more popular art forms.
As I was reading through Haze, Mark Wallace's 2004 book of "essays, poems, prose" yesterday, I lingered on a question he asked, which I'll edit slightly into this statement: "poetry is, ...I believe, the art that allows people access to their own complexity in language, complexity which is elsewhere denied them...."
One of my own hopes for the future of fiction might include fictions that reclaim such linguistic complexities, and a readership eager to reclaim such complexities as well.
Thursday, June 18, 2009
the radiation of writerly confidence
I pay so little attention to the book reviews (and the books reviewed) in the NYT these days that I can't be sure if Janet Maslin is simply playing an elaborate joke on her readers in today's review.
This review, of Ron Currie Jr.'s second novel, praises Currie's exuberant style and natural talent: Currie is a "startlingly talented writer" who possesses, Maslin claims, "a daring yet polished style," "whose book [pays] no heed to ordinary narrative conventions," who uses "fresh, joltingly funny imagery," and, "[a]bove all, [whose novel] radiates writerly confidence."
As citation of Currie's "tenderly mordant voice of his own," Maslin's review offers us, among others, these sentences from the book:
Now, Maslin does offer the caution that "Currie is not a traditionally trained writer"—leaving aside the question of how a writer is "traditionally" trained, though we understand her implication about MFA writing programs. Training matters nothing to me, but prose style certainly does, and the first sentence I've quoted above startles me only in that it uses four clichés: "not the ideal place to go," "lost your mind," "curl up in the bottom of a bottle," "having your insides ripped repeatedly from your body." These first-draft, shorthand descriptions are beyond exhausted and trite, and I fail to see how someone who reads as many novels a year as Maslin does can see anything redeeming in them, however much they may transgress the sorts of descriptions that too often emerge from the great leveller of the MFA fiction workshop.
The other two sentences suggest the real market for this novel; even Maslin can't help but note that the book "parallels historical events with perilous Forrest Gumpish quirkiness."
Should you care to read more, the NYT provides another excerpt of the novel here.
This review, of Ron Currie Jr.'s second novel, praises Currie's exuberant style and natural talent: Currie is a "startlingly talented writer" who possesses, Maslin claims, "a daring yet polished style," "whose book [pays] no heed to ordinary narrative conventions," who uses "fresh, joltingly funny imagery," and, "[a]bove all, [whose novel] radiates writerly confidence."
As citation of Currie's "tenderly mordant voice of his own," Maslin's review offers us, among others, these sentences from the book:
"Chicago is not the ideal place to go when you've recently lost your mind and plan to curl up in the bottom of a bottle and wait for the feeling of having your insides ripped repeatedly from your body to subside."
"You could not be more shocked if Amy suddenly sloughed off her human disguise and revealed herself to be a six-limbed insectoid extraterrestrial."
"[Y]our life is so blue it looks like a James Cameron movie."
Now, Maslin does offer the caution that "Currie is not a traditionally trained writer"—leaving aside the question of how a writer is "traditionally" trained, though we understand her implication about MFA writing programs. Training matters nothing to me, but prose style certainly does, and the first sentence I've quoted above startles me only in that it uses four clichés: "not the ideal place to go," "lost your mind," "curl up in the bottom of a bottle," "having your insides ripped repeatedly from your body." These first-draft, shorthand descriptions are beyond exhausted and trite, and I fail to see how someone who reads as many novels a year as Maslin does can see anything redeeming in them, however much they may transgress the sorts of descriptions that too often emerge from the great leveller of the MFA fiction workshop.
The other two sentences suggest the real market for this novel; even Maslin can't help but note that the book "parallels historical events with perilous Forrest Gumpish quirkiness."
Should you care to read more, the NYT provides another excerpt of the novel here.
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