A Transition Between the Brain and the Heart: A Review of Kelli Anne Noftle's I Was There for Your Somniloquy

As a graphic designer aesthetics are paramount. I’ve never been afraid to admit that a good cover can make me pick up a book I wouldn’t otherwise, or that a bad cover may cause me to discount a book. Similarly, I have checked out bands solely because of their name. Sometimes these things work out, sometimes they don’t. Recently I was perusing the Small Press Distribution website to pick up a specific book when I saw the cover of Kelli Anne Noftle’s I Was There for Your Somniloquy. It’s a gorgeous cover, I admired it and moved on. But that cover stuck with me. I thought about it the way some people think about cars, or women, or desserts. I wanted it.

Maybe a week later I was on the SPD site again and decided to take a crack at Noftle’s collection. I’m always on the lookout for new poetry to fall in love with, but these instances have been growing fewer and farther between one another. When the book arrived I read it late at night, as I often do with poetry collections. I like to read them cover-to-cover, immersing myself. Noftle rewarded this compulsion by drawing me in with beautiful, delicate words that surprised me at one instance and comforted me at the next.

Noftle has described the collection as being influenced by her fascination with “hypnagogia,” the transition between sleep and wakefulness, and it is a realm which her poetry inhabits seamlessly. Dreamy, yet aware, like the act of talking in one’s sleep.

Sleep with me.
I have a rusted mouth the color

of Virginia’s dirt…

Seamlessly, Noftle moves within these image contrasts, from dream state to visceral, yet tinges of the surreal act as a bridge.

How does it go in the fairytale? Someone’s been licking
the linoleum. Someone sliced a bar of soap
and polished it off with your wine.

There are clues.

And there are clues, throughout the poems that inhabit I Was There for Your Somniloquy. Clues about sleep:

Somnologists conduct a study on sleeping felines that                         enact
their dreams. They dance with their shadows, paw at the                      wall:
this science of their bodies takes on dual meanings.

Clues about sea slugs:

Learning the difference takes so long. Of being demeaned                 or being
taught to navigate the seafloor.

Clues about love:

I’ve heard true love will convince you, the way varnish                        makes a
painting more believable.

Noftle is not afraid to weave science, factoids, within the structure of her lines. There are moments in her poetry where I find myself wanting to go back and not flunk biology. But I know myself, I know it is not the facts that will stick with me whenever I close her book, it is the depth of feeling with which she has taken these moments where some might sense learning and turned them into feelings instead of lessons.

In her fascination for the transition between sleeping and waking, Noftle has created a series of odes to a transition between the brain and the heart. It is the transition all poetry is truly reaching for. And by the end of Noftle’s debut collection you will know it is attainable.

I Feel Betrayed, Just Like She Does: A Review of Sandra Simonds's Mother Was a Tragic Girl

Sometimes there’s a book of poems that makes eyes at you and you look behind yourself to make sure the book is making eyes at you and not someone else and you turn back around to face the book and point at yourself and can’t help blushing; you can’t help feeling like the poems staring back at you touch the inner parts of your heart and you can feel the poems working their charms and you don’t want them to stop.

That’s how I feel about Sandra Simonds’s latest book, Mother was a Tragic Girl. The first poem in the book, “Used White Wife,” tells me in the first line: “It is absolutely unnecessary to write serious poetry.” And I am all, Hell, yes. In “1984 Pumpkin Pie,” when the speaker, reflecting on a Thanksgiving festival in her youth, tells me Mrs. Trachtenburg said: “`Sandra Simonds, you will be a pilgrim,´” I feel betrayed, just like she does. In the long poem/section in the middle of the book, “Strays: A Love Story,” when Wife asks the phone company what Baby said to incur such an expensive bill, they answer: “`Give me all your bears.´” Over and over.” I know the sadness, the strangeness expressed in the phone company’s monotone answer.

Beyond these personal connections I feel, I think this book is about all of us—especially if you are alive in the United States at this moment in time. Though seemingly discursive, Simonds knows us better than we know ourselves. For example, the speaker in “Dear Treatment,” ends with these lines:

I contain

the pre-theologian’s instruments, the history of institutions,

debunked theorems where men and women

sit and stare as their feet shrink

to their thighs, waiting for an answer.

Mother was a Tragic Girl is funny and sad and weird and alive. When Simonds writes, “I resent it when people tell me to / `be like the Buddha.´ / Hey, fuck you,” how can I resist the eyes this book makes at me? And when this book gets you alone in a chair or in bed, don’t resist the feeling that rises from your guts. Simonds’s poems are only working their charms, only tugging at your heartstrings. For this reader, nothing feels better.

We All Become Consumed By One Place Or Another: On Eric Drooker's Flood!

I have a precarious relationship with place. When I moved to Boston in 2004, people asked me, “Are you from New York?”

New York was the first real city I’d ever seen. We’d visited at least twice a year since I was eleven or so, but I couldn’t say I was from there. “No, I’m from Pennsylvania.”

“Oh, you’re from Philly?” they’d ask.

I’d grown up an hour north of Philadelphia, but had only ever visited once. Even then, we didn’t see much of the city and, although other people I knew would have answered, “Yes,” Philadelphia felt too far away and too large to know in any qualitative capacity.

“No, I’m not from Philly.”

“Oh.” Here, they’d pause, confused. “You’re from the south, then?”

Whitehall — the runt town where I spent my first nineteen formative years, an exurb known for having malls long before malls where thought of as malevolent, malls so regionally popular that the gentleman who interviewed me at the only college my father had allowed me to apply to (back when I still thought I might go to college at eighteen) said, “Oh, the Whitehall Mall!” in tones of such reverence and beloved recognition that I internally cringed while outwardly beaming because I wanted to make a good impression — is north of the Mason-Dixon line.

“No. I’m not from the south.”

Where then was I from? My hometown felt defined more by the corporations who rented its land than the physical plot itself. That bothered me for years because I wanted its geography to be a static certainty. I wanted it to be clear, if not to me, than to everyone else, that I was from a place that felt definitive. But I couldn’t even articulate that until I started thinking about it in reference to other places. New York was my only other point of reference. Though it was two hours away, it felt close and familiar enough to use as a gauge for my disdain over everything that Pennsylvania wasn’t. I didn’t want to live in New York (and wouldn’t, for years), but it served as my model for what a place should make you feel: alive and worthwhile, despite the wretched things that often happen in a city.

In the year before I left Pennsylvania, when I was steadfastly, seriously preparing for what I unironically thought of as “the rest of my life,” I first read Flood! A Novel in Pictures. A book entirely dependent on place, Eric Drooker’s biography of New York begs the reader to inhabit it. A white ladder leads from the edge of the first frame to the roof of a shadowy building, either an entry for the reader or an exit for the protagonists, or both, a link between them and us. Thereafter, we’re among Drooker’s denizens. In his New York, the setting feels indicative of all human life while remaining distinctly itself. It only makes sense that we follow a single figure who could be us or anyone or everyone. A single panel filling an entire page — seventy-five percent of which is brick wall, the remaining quarter the interior of an apartment — shows the figure asleep in front of a television. He sleeps and wakes in front of a monitor before eventually leaving for work. Surely we recognize the activity if not the figure.

When he arrives to work and finds the place has been shut down, our protagonist becomes a tourist in his own city. He walks aimlessly for pages and Drooker’s backdrop becomes the focus as the figure falls away. The place is what matters and the place includes all the parts of Manhattan that people love and fear — the seedy districts, the glitz, the drugs, the promiscuity, the anonymity, the beggars, the duality, the dark. What joins it all together is the rain. New York has distinct scents in the rain. In the summer, it smells of garbage and kosher salt; in the winter, it smells of wet wool. Even the street grates smell in the rain. The rain, natural as it is, clean as it theoretically should be, always leads to people smells. It always smells like industry or commerce, transit or waste. Traces of people. Therein lies the connection. People fill the streets of New York and, therefore, the pages of Flood!. They’re plotted within the grid of each series of panels until they look, on one page, as if they’re each stuck inside a building, one person per each individual window of a looming, blackened skyscraper, each of them divided and reduced, made smaller and weaker until they all blend together as part of the city itself.

That’s what I wanted from a place. To be so deep in it that it practically swallows me, which is where the main figure ends up. At the end of the first half, he gets caught up in his own subconscious desire to have a city that accepts and welcomes him, then wakes up to find the city he’s in is not the city he has in mind. It’s more dangerous, more unfortunately threatening and lonely. But in the second half, the figure becomes the artist at his desk, drawing what we assume is the book we hold, enfolding us once again into the book and, by proxy, into the city.

In Luc Sante’s introduction to Flood!, he mentions that “the book comes directly out of a historical moment — the upheavals of the city of New York in the late 1980s and early 1990s — that marked [Drooker], and me, and a few million others forever, but Flood!has wings that send it soaring above and beyond that moment.” Flood! A Novel in Pictures’s strengths remove the book not just from time, but from place. Somewhere in the middle, the story becomes less about New York and more about America, and one city’s consumption of its citizens is simply one part of several identical parts where we all become consumed by one place or another.

Hey, Have You Ever Visited A Crumbling, Bilious, Post-War Hydropathic

In Britain, there is a long and boring tradition of novels about World War I, AKA the First World War, AKA The Great War. In my head, these mingle with the longer and even more boring tradition of novels about World War II. There are novels about the Blitz and the Home Front and the trenches and blackouts and evacuation, and I have not read a single one of them because I am not interested in World War I or World War II. I would go so far as to say that I actively avoid novels about wars — any novel, any war. I hate that shit. But then I saw Elaine di Rollo’s Bleakly Hall.

The Wonderland-esque cover drew me in, as well as the title (so dramatically dreary, so Gothic), but when the blurb informed me that the novel is set in a crumbling, bilious hydropathic, I was hooked. The story jumps between the hydropathic (in the novel’s ‘present’, after WWI) and the trenches (in the ‘past’, during WWI). Both settings seemed so real I could taste them. In a few years, if someone says to me “hey, have you ever visited a crumbling, bilious, post-war hydropathic?” (because I imagine that in a few years I will have achieved my goal of having the sorts of friends that ask those sorts of questions), then I’ll genuinely believe that I have. Bleakly Hall is that vivid.

Not surprisingly, I fell a little bit in love with the elusive and aristocratic Captain Foxley (because my other main goal in life, after having friends who ask bizarre questions, is to have a name like Lady Kirsty Foxley). But the real heroes are Monty and Ava, two women who worked as nurses on the front line in Belgium and have now found themselves thrown together again at Bleakly Hall. All the characters are exaggerated, myth-like constructs, and yet each one lives and breathes so that I can imagine them outside the pages of the book. These characters are all real people. They must be, because I don’t think I’ve ever read fictional characters I believed in so strongly.

Although the scenes set during wartime are darker, in that there’s blood and death and hideously gory injuries, the modern scenes feel more grim. There’s a certain glee to Monty and Ava’s manic yet heroic escapades, and Captain Foxley is a wartime hero. Afterwards, lost and aimless at the hydropathic, they are all so much sadder. The Hall may be bleak, but its inhabitants make it that way.

Bleakly Hall has everything I want in a novel: beautiful prose, believable characters, an intense setting, and an interesting plot. I love it so much that I wish I hadn’t read it, so that I could go back and read it for the first time. And like its characters, in reading the novel I have come away a changed person. I’ve now read many books set during the world wars — I particularly recommend those by Pat Barker and Sarah Waters — and I’ll be seeking out more. None of them have lodged in my heart like Bleakly Hall, but I’ll still keep looking. Thanks, Elaine di Rollo, for making me love that shit.

Strange Ballet On the Page

All show, no tell. That’s the best way I can think to describe Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s work. Terrence Malick adapting Beckett. Extreme minimalism. Delicate maximalism. Strange ballet on the page.

I’m recommending Reticence here, but all show, no tell could easily be said of the Parisian Belgian’s work as a whole. Reticence, published in France in 1991 and just now being issued in English by Dalkey Archive, doesn’t stray greatly from the more recently notable Running Away and The Truth About Marie. Like those works, the prose is more pacing than plot, more action than emotion, more supposition than exposition. Drop a Toussaint novel into a writing workshop and show your students how to crack a table into rational and emotional halves.

The “story” of Reticence is quite simple. Our narrator and his young son (still sleeps in a crib, no language or mother) spend a few nights in a small fishing village, the idea being to visit a writer friend named Biaggi, who keeps a house there. Something holds our hero back, though. An “initial reticence” takes over, so consuming he can’t sleep, and in the midst of this reticence he becomes convinced Biaggi knows he’s in town. In fact, he’s convinced Biaggi is following him, even having him watched by the proprietor of the hotel.

By nights, our hero sneaks about the village, leaving his son to sleep alone. Struggling with misgivings about seeing a friend is apparently a greater motivator than fear of leaving his infant son. In one of his first insomniac outings, our hero spies in the night water a dead cat floating with a piece of fishing line out its mouth:

“The way it was floating it was impossible to see its face, and it was only when the current caused its body to pivot slightly that I saw it had a fish head in its mouth, from which a broken bit of fishing line protruded a couple of inches. And it was precisely this piece of line that made me think later in the evening — at the time I’d just looked at it without giving it too much thought — that the cat had been murdered.”

So much depends upon a murdered cat. With our hero full of questions, the answers he accepts are never quite waterproof enough for us readers to accept. So cycles of crisis-conflict-climax repeat again and again and again, and suspense piles and piles and piles, no dramatic beat ever completely resolved:

“How else to explain the fragment of fishing line in its mouth? How could such a tough and resistant bit of line be cut by the animal itself? And how, supposing it had indeed managed to cut the line, to explain the presence of a trolling line just a few feet from the side of the pier when it should have been out at sea anywhere from thirty to sixty feet underwater? Why, above all, was the end of the line cut so cleanly, as if with a knife, if it’s not because once the cat had been caught in the trap that Biaggi had set the night before — because Biaggi was in the village, I was now sure of it. . . .”

The human mind is only half rational. Why not visit his friend? Because he doesn’t feel like it. Why doesn’t he feel like it? Because he’s reticent. Why is he reticent? I don’t know, but here’s a book about what reticence can drive a man to do. And this makes Reticence, like all of Toussaint’s books, beautifully unsettling, and happily irrational. Running into a friend may as well be a life and death affair. And really, “giving it too much thought” can make anything a matter of life and death. Six degrees of separation from fishing line to murder.

If this were a book of Envy or Sexual Attraction or True Love, no reader would question the rationality or motives behind the narrator (although the better parents in us might judge him for the nighttime walks). What Toussaint shows us in each of his books — showing again and again and again, cinematically — is that nothing need happen for drama still to exist. A literary Malick, Beckett with a bigger prop department. Nothing needs to be told for a reader to want to listen. Great writing does not need a story.

When I Arrived, The Music Changed: On Brian Oliu's Level End

A long time since I — Player 1 — last played games (depending on who you ask) and I sigh to steady my hands. I’m the boy who gave up games for the broken belle who babbled something about “growing up;” I am the old gunman who incorrectly believes it is a time of rest, that retirement is a save point, that my season has passed as opposed to the truth: a season’s end is flagged by transition — call it “death” — but until then —

Fight!

Level End loads. 8-bit pixilated backdrop of a mountainous desert, a pyramid with spires, a cliff in the foreground, the hero — Brian Oliu of So You Know It’s Me fame — on said cliff, staring, preparing himself; he stands as a stocky, broad block in a red track jacket, the letters “RTR” on the back.

When I arrive as Oliu arrives, the music changes — changes much too soon, much too fast. I remember my youth; I remember the proving grounds: Sega Master System, Sega Genesis, Super Nintendo; I remember easing myself into the new world. The first level should be filled with third-rate henchmen or goons or robots ready to be pulverized into coins or points.

Level End begins with a Boss Battle — The One With the Long Neck — and I quickly scan the HUD to ascertain Oliu’s status: six full hearts indicating maximum health; one life, no extra man.  He rocks back and forth, knife in hand.

I take my knife and start cutting–your neck breaking in sections and vanishing, tendons unraveling like our time away from this room, your neck growing shorter by the second. Your face shrinks back toward your shoulders, shoulders I remember but cannot place. [ . . . ] This is where you disappear. This is where the door opens. This is all that I have wanted.

Victory. Gold coins rain down into Oliu’s body. I breathe and select “Continue.”

When I arrived, the music changed —

Again, no henchmen or goons to use as punching bags and cheap power-ups to hoard before the Boss Battle. A Woman Made of Feathers.

If I could fit your body inside my mouth I would, you said, and I believed you: to be swallowed whole like a fish is a noble way to lose one’s way — out of breath, crushed to serve a purpose. As you spin your feathers come undone — they crash into the walls, they spin in reverse. I can catch anything you throw at me: grasp it between my fingers; snatch it as it floats to the ground.

*

By the time I move Oliu, limping and sluggish, to the Save Point: Inn so he may rest and contemplate a more tranquil setting — the northern coast of France, perhaps — I figure out Level End. Or at least, I get the gist.

One life; Oliu’s pixelated knife looping, swirling, slicing, re-arranging the Bosses and the rooms, which hold them: our hero knows each Boss. Or knows that each Boss is a composite of known people. The Bosses stand before him, each with his or her own special ability, supernatural body, and hidden reason to strike him down.

Level End is a game of recollection. Based on events true to the main character, Level Endis a saga through memories — those undependable images in our brains, chopped and screwed out of sequence and shaded with our perspectives, our version of what really happened.

The Boss Battles are as surreal as any level in any game I once played during my younger days: worlds which are frightening and wondrous and against the laws of physics; Bosses that can only exist in a young boy’s mind or on a television screen in a living room in New Jersey, volume turned up to push down his — my — parents’ shouts and swear words.

*

Oliu and I are exhausted; Level End’s diminutive size belies the weight, the pressure, of each battle. This is an old school game, before the days of memory cards and hard drives; you press Pause to catch your breath, to get a snack, while Oliu stands frozen in place. We began early in the morning; it is now night and I haven’t showered, haven’t called my lover, haven’t eaten.

Game players can feel the last level approaching, the story near its end. Showers and lovers and food can wait because I feel it in my bones — that stinging sadness mixed with an adrenaline rush, my thumbs sore from button-mashing madness — we are here, Boss Battle: The Final Boss.

There is nothing romantic about the idea of final when final arrives like this: not with an arrow in the eye, not with a body losing grip on the floor and disappearing in the dark with a sparkle and a wink, not with a final blink after turning magenta, a red not found in nature, a red not found in your face, not even while choking, not even while gasping for breath. What you have imagined the final stage to be is not what it is — here is a list it is not.

I know how this will end because of my history with games — each preceding Battle gave me clues to the climax — but I cannot share my knowledge. True gamers do not reveal spoilers; to do so would ruin the laughs, the claps, the excitement shared between those who faced each Boss and lived to talk about it.

Each of us who load Level End become, for a time, a version of Brian Oliu. We bring our own Boss Battles to Level End, a video game transformed into art.

Which of my bosses, then, do I — Player 1 — bring to Level End? Only one. A fight to the death, I can assure you.

Roll credits. Play inspirational music pecked out on a keyboard. Shut off the game. Breathe.

Something About the Self

Consider broadly the painted portrait: A torso and face in oils on canvas. A grayish greeny black mixture of nothing-space for background. This is the classical portrait, the Rembrandt or Van Eyck, the Gilbert Stuart. The face floats without context in order to capture the portrayed person without bias.

Now consider broadly the photographic portrait: A whole body, perhaps. Perhaps nude, perhaps in context of daily environment, as Diane Arbus’ carnival photographs. Perhaps in studio, as Richard Avedon. Perhaps elaborately staged, as Annie Liebovitz. Perhaps Cindy Sherman’s brief beautiful fictions.

Lastly consider the written portrait: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, The Portrait of a Lady, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. A life captured between covers, or as quickly as in a sentence, between initial capitalization and full stop. Consider character sketch as portraiture. Consider “the man in the hat” portraiture. Consider description, portraiture.

I am simplifying things here, of course. Writing “broadly.” But doing it in the interest of giving you an idea of Édouard Levé’s Autoportrait, a beautiful and (at least to me) new kind of portrait (translated from the French by Paris Review editor Lorin Stein). I read it first on the flight back from AWP, and following so many conversations about writing and its purpose/manner/role/etcetera, it was refreshing to just sit and read an excellent book without having to talk about or defend it.

And yet, here I am.

Whereas the narrator of Levé’s brilliant Suicide told the story of a friend’s death (again, I speak “broadly”) here we get the story of a life, told in just over a hundred first-person pages of declarative sentences, strung together in vague overlap.

Levé begins with broad strokes. Life and death:

When I was young, I thought Life: A User’s Manual would teach me how to live and Suicide: A User’s Manual how to die. I have spent three years and three months abroad. I prefer to look to my left. I have a friend who gets off on betrayal. The end of a trip leaves me with a sad aftertaste, the same as the end of a novel. I forget things I don’t like. I may have spoken, without knowing it, to someone who killed someone. I look down dead-end streets. I am not afraid of what comes at the end of life.

What you first notice is how quickly Levé moves. His portrait is not linear, but is in motion with its audience. That’s the first difference between what occurs in Autoportraitversus a Gilbert Stuart or Cindy Sherman. In still portraiture, a snapshot provides the glimpse from which a life can be read (Sherman being the master of this).

As a photographer as well as writer, Levé uses his declarative sentences as a kind of series of photographic instances, one after another, without a strict narrative string. Some fifty pages later:

I see no point in holding on to my old toothbrushes. My favorite months are September and April, September for the resumption of social activity, April for the arrival of spring and the progressive denudification of women. I am not an expert in anything. I have subjects of conversation besides myself. I form very few hard and fast judgments about politics, the economy, and international affairs. I do not like bananas.

The result of this movement is an interactive portrait, drawn as much by the reader as the writer. Levé’s form demands the reader seek a common link between all these declarations and, beside their source, that commonality is that each declaration arrives in terms of some outside influence. Never does the declaration contain a subject and verb without an object, some necessary action-reaction. Even the simple “I am thin” (toward the end of the book) relies on the reader’s judgment of “thin.”

Later, when Levé’s physicality if further defined, it’s done according to a system of measurement we can only understand in relation to our own height. And that this slight description comes between calculations regarding age and preference is no accident, Levé already has us considering personal dualisms, further engaging with him:

I prefer the name to the taste of Darjeeling. I notice the length of a journey less if I already know the way. I have lived through 14,370 days. I have lived through 384,875 hours. I have lived through 20,640,000 minutes. I am one meter and eighty-six centimeters tall. My eye is not sated with seeing, nor is my ear with hearing. Déjà vu gives me more pleasure than a great wine.

Do I prefer Darjeeling’s name or taste? How do I notice the length of journeys? How long is 14,730 days? Am I taller than Levé?

A film might use narrative to carry the audience forward, as might most novels (even those “portrait” novels listed above). But Autoportrait forces the reader into movement with it. The closest we come to traditional narrative emerges as repetitive themes on those aspects of his life our narrator does not fully understand: that he may have a child somewhere he’s never met, that “today” may be the best day of his life, that he will die someday, and then what? These are unknowns nearly all readers can identify with, and their repetition requires our reconsideration. Our own consideration, not Levé’s, drives the novel to its inevitable, reassuring-yet-uncertain end:

I don’t know why I write. I prefer a ruin to a monument. I am calm during reunions. I have nothing against New Year’s Eve. Fifteen years old is the middle of my life, regardless of when I die. I believe there is an afterlife, but not an afterdeath. I do not ask “do you love me.” Only once can I say “I’m dying” without telling a lie. The best day of my life may already be behind me.

In Autoportrait, Levé gives us a Rembrandt missing head and torso, a Diane Arbus circus tent missing a freak, the portrait of an artist co-written by a moo-cow. If I were still at AWP, the Hilton bar with a drink in hand, I might say it was a mirror in the center of an elaborate background, uncovering glimpses of our selves within the portrait of another.

For now I’ll just say it was a damn good book, unlike any other I’ve read.

Read an excerpt of Autoportrait and view some of Levé’s photographs on The Paris Review.