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.
Labels: fragments, Jenny Boully, Kyle Buckley, prose poetry, reading
posted by Josh at 8:33 AM
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