Kaushik Barua's No Direction Rome

There is a certain allure in a young man loitering aimlessly – the figure tracing back to Hamsun’s narrator in Hunger, and to the French tradition of the flaneur. The streets are a place of new discoveries. Everything is at once at scrutiny. Something is in the making, you’d think. Only that Kaushik Barua’s Krantik would apply a spin to it. He walks through the city of Rome at night, peculiarly asking strangers for addresses he already knows. He tells you that his fiancé has attempted suicide and wonders whether it has anything to do with him. That is the only thread of dramatic conflict you’d find in his life, quite neutralized before the narrative begins. He continues asking addresses to strangers. There appears to be some thrill in the possibility of conversation, more so with a girl. Krantik positively sleepwalks through his days, doesn’t pass judgements, and merely observes, holding onto a vague idea of self-control. Humour, droll and detached, keeps him amused. His name is a pun on the Hindi word Kranti, meaning revolution, but his inaction is jarring and makes up for a crisp, captivating first-person monologue, which is about . . . well, everything and nothing. Here is a short novel that is designed to digress.

Because he keeps things at surface level and doesn’t allow us to deep dive in his psyche, the reader must rely on the pop-info references he makes use of, and it seems that without these references it would be difficult to understand Krantik. He is the post-internet guy. He observes his mucus and worries about having cancer. The hypochondria is not the only side effect of uncontrolled, unchecked information he appears to be loaded with. It is as if a spiritual core is missing. It is as if no amount of shopping or googling would make him realize what he truly wants. There is a hole he keeps filling with more information every day, like all of us. Krantik knows this and is in a way leading a post-awareness life. The result is that there is an indifference towards everything. So that when he talks about chakras, or Buddhism, or being like a Dalai Lama around Mom, there is a bit of mockery involved. But because he keeps mentioning them again and again, one would feel that he is in a spiritual desert. In a foreign city away from the middle-class Indian life that shaped him, he could easily step out of the solidified faith of his parents, but found only cynicism to hold onto. He describes football as “a spectacle brought to you by the monster advertising industry that endows superficial meaning to the sight of twenty-two men chasing a piece of leather.” You’ve read too much post-modern analysis to enjoy anything anymore, is what he hears back from a friend.

His routine is interrupted by thoughts of the fiancé; his step-brother calls him and lectures about standing up for the family and all. Krantik gets done with it the way one gets done with a business call, with make-believe submissiveness. There is pain for sure, even anger. In the cool flatline of the narration there are amusing spikes when Krantik blasts her in his thoughts, calling her “pull-out-last-minute Pooja”. It gives you a glimpse inside his heart, albeit a rare one. He doesn’t dwell much on the fiancé’s decision to end her life, or doesn’t tell us. The “not telling” is an important thematic concern here. The nature of Krantik’s pain and what he thinks about it are immaterial in a way. What is important is that he saunters on, in a plot-less universe, making a statement on our hedonist, unexamined lives. While on a short trip to India, he taps on his mom’s shoulder instead of hugging her before leaving. Because there was luggage between them and he didn’t want to bother. It works in a strange funny way. The acquired hard-boiled attitude! You’d feel the novel is more about it than anything else. Then midway through the narrative, Krantik comes across a nun in a bus, wearing a “Christian-hijab”, and as is his wont he cooks up an anecdote for her:

As a kid, she’d watch her father go out to sea, wait till he came back with lobsters, pincers tied but stupid eyes always open. You made it back? Yes, Saint Michael was kind. Who’s Saint Michael? Protector of the seas. Then why doesn’t he give you more fish? Because there’s only one man who could multiply fish. Who’s that: Felix who works at the factory? No, Jesus Christ. She didn’t get it, so she went to pick up shells and kill those worms that burrow into the sand with Pedro, who told her he had a worm in his pants as well. And now when she remembers that morning, she crosses herself and does the Hail Mary twenty times.

I was tempted to share it in its entirety. It is one of the many fictitious scenarios, Krantik being a good people-watcher, that bares a tenderness he tries so hard to shield.

The prose is effortlessly smooth and achieves a sort of lightness that is only possible with the lack of antagonism. Between the banter on doomsday and Van Damme’s involvement in the ensuing crisis control, or the imagined philosophizing by pet tortoises, or the nightmares induced by Netflix, or a momentary decision to purchase plastic furniture, there is a lull Krantik never tries to come out of; never tries to change. There are others with him in this lull. And it echoes all the time, keeping them busy. Any attempt to write about this lull might sound like one big joke. But the lull is real. And Krantik is a template for something.

Consolationeer by Marc McKee

I read, reread and considered Marc McKee’s Consolationeer (Black Lawrence Press, December 15, 2017) on the bus, in the twenty-minute intervals allotted to me between home and work. This was, of course, a matter of practicality. Nobody really chooses to read poetry on a lurching, sputtering metal behemoth in the meager light of sunrise and sunset. There’s chatter from all directions, shoulders brushing against yours. The text scuttles around the page like a line of ants. In my native Chicago, some rides are gaspingly hot and others are glacial. There are often fellow passengers engaged in antagonistic conversations with one another or, more frequently, with themselves, and it’s hard not to dwell on the possibility, however remote, of danger. The windows are flipbooks of poverty and opulence, billboards and graffiti, homelessness and high-rises. Some mornings one misses one’s coffee. Some evenings find the brain bobbing in the marsh of a stressful day’s work. The bus is a maximally chaotic environment for the senses and typically not at all conducive to engaging with a text.

Reading Consolationeer in this setting, however, was a serendipitous exception. If you live in a major US city with an unreliable and unpleasant public transit system, I can’t recommend the pairing enough. McKee’s language is all rattle and excess, loose spokes and depressurizing fuselages. It is the literary approximation of whizzing past shop-fronts and construction sites and dog parks. In “O Passenger Manifest,” one of the later poems in the book, he writes:

…The bus is a colored cloud of ill portent
hanging by an axle disagreeing with a girder,
a baby tooth before before before.

After reading that passage, I looked around me and nodded with a little frown of recognition. Yes, I had indeed found myself anxious on an uncontrollable machine, lunging into who knows what horrifying consequence. Yes, I was balancing on a damp ledge. And McKee had managed to bore a peephole into that sensation.

The poems in Consolationeer are very much of a piece, and they thrive on the suspense of “ill portent.” This is a book about the apocalypse – how we define it, how we describe it, how we contend with it emotionally and philosophically. McKee is hoisting an impossible task upon his shoulders, of course. He’s attempting to make sense of comprehensive finality, to stand in the shadow of a tidal wave and point out the bright side. Even the title of the collection seems to balk at the enormity of its author’s ambition. We are prompted to consider the act of consoling the doomed alongside acts of exploring, piloting, inventing, crafting. We are not used to navigating this emotional territory; intrepid bushwhackers are in high demand.

Certainly, these poems have been sculpted more by machete than by scalpel, and I don’t mean that as a criticism. In fact, there’s a refreshing urgency to McKee’s shotgun style. I hear Eliot’s ecstatic distractibility, Schuyler’s sonic gymnastics and O’Hara’s restless melancholy, all filtered through the dirty chinois of cable news and global warming. A recurring motif is a match near ice, two mutually destructive forces accelerating one another’s demise. McKee writes like a mad chemist scrambling to whip up an antidote – for every soluble line there is a combustible one. And sometimes, he tinkers his way towards something truly revelatory, something that encapsulates all the terror and anger and hope and solidarity swirling around this most frantic of eras.

I can’t stop thinking, for example, of the opening lines to “How We Respond Is What It Means:”

At this time it is impossible not to love
at least one monster.

This is the type of observation we’re all sure we’ve made but somehow haven’t been able to articulate. It’s grammatically and conceptually “simple,” but it contains the depth and mutability of all the best poetry. Listen to clinical register in those first six words. They call to mind canned rejection letters, fatalistic meteorological reports, ultimatums from hostage-takers, insurance companies denying a claim. They ooze mutual disappointment. The phrase, “at this time” also serves to highlight the now-ness upon which these poems hinge. There’s desperation in the double-negative that follows, voice and sorrow in the words, “at least one.” A beautiful tragedy is compacted in these lines. And moments of such luminance pop up like prairie dogs throughout the book.

Sometimes, as in “It Has Never Not Been Thus,” McKee’s apocalyptic landscapes resemble Charles Simic’s, but with the heart shifted confidently to the sleeve. The poem is dire at first:

…It is night. A lemon scythe rises,
then overwhelms its fulcrum,
the plants camouflage themselves
in decline…

But it shifts dramatically at the end:

It’s a beautiful night
among the surviving leaves,
I am happy to be here.

Elsewhere McKee calls to mind Jay Hopler, as in “We Are All Going to Die, and I Love You,” which cheekily begins,

The world is ending again
only this time we are sure.

The poem mounts in anxiety and madness and lyricism, climaxing with,

…But but but! such fantastic plumage of viscera! such spirits
hot-glued to properties! such a muchness,
of dismantled wheels! Really?…

Those tonal changes offer a little glimpse of McKee’s signature move: the insertion of hazily optimistic, affirmative mantras in the midst of catastrophe. I think it’s fair to call them “consolations.” At times, I have to confess, this approach becomes a little predictable. One gets the sense that the poet is resting on his laurels a bit, dropping consolations like puffs of smoke in order to escape from despairing litanies. But when it works – as it does with impressive frequency – it works. The best McKee consolations come on like smelling salts, slaps to the face, adrenaline injections. They’re best when they’re heavy with irony and complexity, when they’re woven naturally into the text that precedes them. Take, for example, the following passage from the Schuyler-esque “Lately Indesolate:”

The yellow car de-hurries so rapid
it appears to ripple and bunch

in the rearview mirror: such a silly yellow
to be screaming that way,

followed after by wheelsmoke
like a languorous countercloud, train

of a wedding gown. Nothing happens.
Which is to say an awful lot very nearly

happens…

Here, the shift from disaster to serenity helps to philosophically frame both sensations. The reader questions his or her instincts – what does danger feel like? What does safety feel like?

I’m also drawn to these two contrasting passages from “Soft Watch:”

Any inventory is a story invented into life,
a swarm of pictures made to march,

this how we row our battered boat
into one now’s future…

…Here we stand among the bramble
of fallen calls and broken shields

and your eyes will not stop opening…

I caught myself reading this poem aloud at full volume and looked up to find a half dozen fellow commuters glancing nervously at one another. I may have been the crazy stranger on the bus before, but I hadn’t noticed until then. In any case, there’s an exquisite development in this poem from collapse to reconstruction, and it contains insight into McKee’s coping strategy. Listing these inventories, these invented stories, is a way to journalistically explore the decline of our civilization. Cataloguing the piles of detritus around us can serve as both diagnostic survey and meditation.

I would say that effect is most vivid in “Some Names of Ships,” my favorite piece in the collection. In it, the speaker walks down a bay and regards the names of docked vessels with alternating bemusement, melancholy and fear. The little lyrical treasures within are too multitudinous to list here, but I’ll point to an excerpt from the center, which I think is both apocalypse and consolation.

What can track a freckle of light right out
of netsnarl and gravity until you forget

you’re at the mercy of the sea?
Here’s Passengers, here’s One Train.
The name should be able to stay almost still

beneath the teeth of the broken champagne bottle.
Are we not always on some dock
choosing between Paradise and History?

And then some boats never launch
at all…

I used to fear the bus, long before I had no other choice. I didn’t like the confinement, the absence of an escape route should something go terribly wrong. I didn’t like how directed it was, how inevitable the stops. I was afraid of relinquishing control. Now, thousands of bus rides later, I can appreciate that all those worries were entirely called-for, but perhaps lacking in perspective. Because while a bus ride is quite like crowding a barrel full of strangers and hurtling it over a waterfall, it’s also a communal experience. An adventure, even. The person sitting next to you is infinite in his or her potentiality. All passengers are stripped of their egos and statuses for a moment. They’re all given to the contingencies of the vehicle. And in that strange, captive solidarity, there’s something exquisite. I think that’s what Consolationeer is about.

Skating on the Vertical: An Interview with Jan English Leary

Jan English Leary and I met in the mid-1990s, in Fred Shafer’s short story-writing workshop in Evanston, Illinois. Week after week, we’d sit next to each other and compare notes: about writing, about reading. We drank lots of coffee. We talked about our kids. Jan had already been working with Fred for a few years, and as her classmate, I was immediately struck by — and inspired by — the assurance of her prose, which combines evocative description with a clear, direct voice. These qualities are abundantly evident in her new collection of stories, Skating on the Vertical (Fomite Press), a sympathetic exploration of what it means to be a teen, the connections (and misunderstandings) that exist between the generations, and the very human quest to find one’s place in the world. Jan and I chatted recently about the book, its themes, and her caffeinated beverage of choice.

* * *

JD: Your new collection, Skating on the Vertical, draws together stories from different points in your career. The stories’ themes—connection, belonging—are timeless concerns; do you think your perception of these themes has changed in the years since the first of the stories was published?

JEL: Yes and no. Since I’ve matured as a writer, my writing has changed and, I hope, deepened. On the other hand, connection and belonging, as you say, are timeless. I just think I’ve found new ways of exploring them in my writing. I like to think that I’m always learning about myself and about the world. Plus ça change….

JD: You taught writing to high-school students for several years. You are a parent to two boys, now grown. Jan, you have an uncanny sympathy for what it means to be a young adult; how do you think your experiences as a teacher and parent have informed this understanding, and thus the work?

JEL: Of course, my experiences have shaped my writing. My entire career was spent teaching high school. I enjoy that age and am drawn to situations involving someone on the brink of adulthood. We all pass through adolescence, and the strong imprint of that formative period stays with us for life. But my fiction also deals with issues such as marriage, infertility, infidelity, and miscarriage. I sometimes find it easier to explore a character whose experience is different from mine: an infertile woman who paints graffiti on the windows of her town, a man who has had an affair, a woman who cuts herself to ease her psychic pain. I think that my life experience as a teacher and as a mother has fed my writing, but I also think that being witness to the dramas of life around me has influenced me just as strongly.

JD: Your stories are distinguished by powerful, insightful endings. Do you generally know the ending when you begin a story, or do you “find” your way to it while writing?

JEL: Endings are hard and absolutely crucial, obviously. I tend to have an idea of the ending early on. That’s how a story often occurs to me, but I also think it gives me an anchor. The ending sometimes changes, but I like to know where I’m going, even when I don’t necessarily know how I’m going to get there. And I have to be open to changes along the way; otherwise, the whole thing can feel too determined and therefore rigid and lifeless.

JD: The book’s title, Skating on the Vertical, is drawn from a story of the same name in this collection. What prompted you choose this as the book’s title?

JEL: For a long time, I planned to name the collection Frequent Losers after a story I particularly liked. I thought it reflected the losses and missteps of life. However, that story left the collection and was revised to become a chapter in my novel. I needed a new title, and I toyed with Eunuchs because I also like that story, but my editor, Marc Estrin, didn’t think it represented the collection as a whole (and he was right). Besides, I wanted my husband, John, to give me one of his paintings for a cover image, and I don’t know what he would have done with Eunuchs! So I chose Skating on the Vertical because it evokes disequilibrium, movement, and energy. And it’s a title I’d never heard before.

JD: What was it like to revisit stories you wrote earlier in your career? Did you revise those earlier stories for this collection, and if so, what do you think informed the changes you made?

JEL: It was both satisfying and dismaying. There were things I liked which pleased and surprised me and other things I found clunky. I did what I could to hone the language while still keeping the original feel of the stories. I didn’t want to undertake major overhauls. That seemed both overwhelming and unnecessary. With practice, every writer improves in terms of craft. I tried to bring what I’ve learned into the older stories. And I removed some stories I thought didn’t quite work anymore. In that way, the stories felt fresher, and the process allowed me to re-engage with the material more deeply.

JD: Preparing this collection has brought you back to the short story form, after a recent focus on the novel (Jan is the author of the novel, Thicker Than Blood, published by Fomite Press in 2015, and is currently working on a new novel). How did that feel? Does working on short stories versus a novel demand different habits or approaches, in your view?

JEL: The short story is still my first love. I like the process of working on a novel, of having a big mass of material that I can stretch and manipulate and into which I can thread strands. I like the task of building a world and populating it with more people than I can comfortably put in a short story. However, I also love the tautness of a short story, the intense payoff of the shorter time frame, the small dramas that have large consequences. I like being able to hold the arc in my head and tighten the elements, the language, and the rhythms. They say novels take longer to write, but I spent about seven years on the novel while the short stories span nearly 20 years of writing.

JD: What is your writing routine at this time? And I’ve got to ask: coffee or tea when you’re writing?

JEL: Chinese black tea only these days. Too much caffeine is no longer my friend. I am a morning writer, almost exclusively. I can revise in the afternoons, but the mornings are my best times for generating material. I mostly write at the Writers Workspace, which is a cooperative space three blocks from my house. I am lucky to have that resource nearby. It’s a great quiet atmosphere where I can really concentrate, unlike my home where I’m easily distracted.

JD: Can you tell us a little about what you’re working on now?

JEL: I am working on a novel with two alternating points of view: two women who grow up in the same rural college town. They exist on parallel tracks due to social class, but their lives intersect over a shared experience. I am interested in the ways in which two people can grow up in the same small town but because of income and family expectations, their lives take very different paths. There’s been a lot of attention lately given to the “Two Americas,” and I want to explore this theme in a “town-and-gown” setting. I enjoy research, and this project has allowed me to read about the Iraq War, homeschooling, and the anti-vaxxer movement, as well as Caribbean literature, Greek mythology, and massage therapy certification programs. Ultimately, it’s a novel about forgiveness and what constitutes home and family.

Alex Behr's Planet Grim

In “Teenage Riot,” one of the first—and best—stories in Alex Behr’s debut collection, Planet Grim, a broken teenage girl admits, “I want something to love.” It seems like such a simple statement, but, like the stories with which it shares its space, there’s much more happening beneath the surface.

Planet Grim is difficult to describe because it’s such a complex (and often complicated) gathering of short stories. There’s pain and suffering, but humor is just as prevalent. Imagine a Flannery O’Connor world written by David Sedaris. In “Wet,” for example, we find an unnamed woman struggling to deal with her recent divorce. Her pain is real: “I cut off my left arm with nail clippers. It hangs on. I can’t snip the final pieces of dried-out skin.” But Behr gives the story an added dimension by juxtaposing the immense sorrow with comedic absurdity. The woman says, “I have stained teeth and an undeniable love of cheese.”

“A Reasonable Person,” another one of Planet Grim’s standouts, strikes a similar balance. Here, Mary, a juror on a murder case in which a boy saw his mother murdered, can’t focus on the trial because she’s so overwhelmed by the struggles of her own life. Some are seemingly minor: she worries about when to urinate and if her armpits stink. Others, though, are much more serious. After going home, she removes her own absent son’s clothing from a drawer and cradles them on a bed. She talks to him intimately. It’s unsettling, but Behr works her magic again. Mary says to her son’s scattered clothing, “You ran pretty damn far from me!” It becomes heartbreaking.

“Sentient Times” and “The Garden” are two other stories that show Behr at her best, shifting tones and engaging in affecting wordplay. She’s a master of language, and these stories show a meticulous command.

One of the most appealing elements of Planet Grim is how Behr focuses on characters who are so realistic. These are characters who are identifiable misfits—maybe our own family members or even ourselves. They are struggling, but they are still fighting. There are issues with drugs, parenthood, childhood, divorce, and death. Even in their most desperate situations, they are still relatable.

At twenty-eight stories, Planet Grim could lose a few of the stories and, perhaps, be a little stronger. Having so many stories with dynamic shifts and quirks creates an occasionally fragmented overall experience. The ones that do work, though, and just for the record, most of them do work, sing.

Planet Grim is an affecting debut that should remind us how we’re all fighting a tough battle.

Trauma Becomes Tender in Paul Yoon's The Mountain

In Paul Yoon’s second story collection The Mountain, people in France, Russia, the Hudson Valley and beyond cope in the aftermath of World War Two. I opened the book expecting the violence and horror of war, but instead found tender accounts of people humbly piecing their lives together. Yoon’s characters tread gingerly in the aftermath of war, nursing the wounds inflicted upon their environment and their bodies. The power of Yoon’s stories lies in what’s not said. By entering scenes after the climax of battle, Yoon bypasses brutality to arrive at the quietly wrenching. His stories made me ache, like scar tissue after the injury has not quite healed.

The Mountain smacks of Tim O’Brien’s classic The Things They Carried, a collection published in 1990 that explores the grim banality of the lives of soldiers who suffer from PTSD after serving in the Viet Nam war. In the wake of trauma, both O’Brien’s and Yoon’s characters experience a muted, dulled version of the world. In turn, the climaxes these authors construct are so subtle you almost miss them. In O’Brien’s “Speaking of Courage,” for example, protagonist Norman Bowker drives in circles around a pond in his hometown after returning from war, replaying his friend’s death on the battlefield. After eleven cycles around the pond he ultimately gets out of his car and walks into the water. Nothing has been resolved, and Norman is still haunted by his memories, but he has done something. He has stepped out of his cyclical thoughts and activity and, in a way, is baptized. In Yoon’s story “A Willow and the Moon,” a woman returns to the Hudson Valley after working to save patients in a bombed out hospital in England. She goes to the now abandoned sanatorium in which her mother, a nurse, worked and eventually overdosed on morphine. She meanders through the empty hallways, finding trinkets she’s hidden under floorboards decades ago and reflecting on the brutality she witnessed throughout the war. Like Norman, she was forced to watch her mother slip away. Like Norman, she has returned home in search of closure. The story ends with her sitting in a rocking chair in front of the sanatorium, watching the sun go down while palming the items she’s found. These are not tales of complete healing or resolution. O’Brien’s and Yoon’s characters remain broken, but they are able to find small tokens of comfort. For those who have survived trauma, the mere act of collecting oneself and moving forward is a victory.

O’Brien’s collection was instrumental in portraying war as banal. He shed the archetypal trappings of war as triumphant, and the idea of men emerging from war as heroes. Yoon carries on this tradition and takes it a step further. While O’Brien fixates on the objects his characters carry, Yoon writes about a different kind of baggage. Instead of focusing on physical objects such as ammunition and dog-eared photos of girlfriends, Yoon emphasizes how people carry their own bodies through the world after having experienced the trauma of war. For Yoon’s characters, bodies are very much things to be carried. Individuals continue to fight internal battles after the war is over.

In Vladivostok Station, for example, Mischa carries his physical disability, a congenital limp that inhibits his movement. As Mischa walks through his town of Primorski Krai, he stops to look at an island in the distance on which his grandfather, a Korean refugee, worked in a labor camp for six years. Mischa remembers touching his grandfather’s hands and spine, which was contorted from years of labor, and recalls wonders if his own “misshapen bones” are inherited from his grandfather. For Yoon, trauma does not die. It takes up residence in the body, and is then passed down.

But Yoon’s characters persist. Mishca finds a job where his boss allows him to work at his own pace repairing trains. He falls asleep on a train and ends up near the ocean, where his grandfather and other men in the labor camps were taken to bathe. He walks around an adjacent town, which is vibrant and bustling. He stops to call his father to tell him, simply, that he is by the ocean. Mischa has carried this ancestral weight back to its origins. Things do not change for Mischa by the end of the story, but there is a shift. It is possible to carry sorrow while relishing the victory of survival.

Yoon has a knack for condensing a life, with all its pain and grief, into bite size fragments that make the reader double take. His prose is simultaneously cool and distant, while also pinpointing intimate and striking moments. In the title story The Mountain, the protagonist Faye moves from South Korea to Lianyungang for a job in a factory. Although she is only 26, she has endured a great deal:

She watched her father die. She left. She worked in a motel. She picked apples. She lived in barns that had been converted into dorms. She lived for over a decade in a country where she was never sure of the language. She was robbed, beaten, had her shirt torn off, and six times she was pinned to the ground while she frantically searched for her knife.

Here a life has been paired down to a paragraph, with strife and the mundane mixed together. The fact that Faye picked apples takes up as much space as being robbed and beaten. One is not given more emotional weight than another. This is also the nature of war: when violence is everywhere, our ability to gauge the magnitude of events diminishes. Story and sentence structure mimic the moral nihilism of war.

Despite the dissolution of his characters emotional responses, physical markings of trauma still must be carried. When Faye gets punched during a fight at her factory job, her face is bruised. After a few weeks she can’t tell if the pain is dissipating, or if she’s getting used to it. The coin-sized bruise on her cheek never goes away. Again, physical ailments become metaphor for withstanding emotional trauma. Although pain is not felt emotionally, it manifests in the body.

Yoon’s characters experience profound loss that ultimately cannot be reversed or redeemed. The collection’s power, however, is its presentation of people’s raw, banal struggle. The very title of the book infers a trek. A mountain is a towering natural phenomenon that one must labor to conquer. One must force their body upwards. Yoon does not describe the glory of the summit, but the view afforded by the footholds and crags along the way.

Lucid Dreaming: Michael Rothenberg's Wake Up and Dream

Michael Rothenberg is a political organizer who herds individualistic cat-souled poets into the world’s largest poetry reading each September, who co-founded the life-saving organization, Poets in Need, and who participates tirelessly in important contemporary causes. Thus, I was surprised to read the vividly sensual and descriptive poetry, based on real flora and fauna and earth, of Wake Up and Dream. Alongside calls for skinheads to martyr themselves and the warning that Monsanto owns you, there are haiku-like, real-to-the-touch lines depicting our planet’s landforms and beings.

And as I read on, I realized: this is why Rothenberg is an environmentalist, this is why he is political – it is because of this cellular love for the concrete world around him and its people, places, and things. From “Revolt of the Donkeys”:

Only fools
plan

for a better
world

Five minutes
a day

under
the carob tree

we speak
without

fetters
But mostly

we carry
carts

of sweet
oranges . . .

The poetry, like Rothenberg, is global. Whitmanesque, the poet conjures the cities of the United States, and, like an ancient prophet, calls forth nations: Macedonia, Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Syria, China. Ancient, the deserts and mountains hold history and the poems reveal their diegesis. The land heals “cannibal” political wounds. In “Bozo the Slick,” Rothenberg juxtaposes the “baby Mussolini” world of the con man (guess who?) with his beloved Italy:

Alburni . . .
Virgil saw this mountain

There was a thunderstorm pelted
The terra cotta shingles
We shivered through the Amalfi night
In a house built in 700 AD
In a town built long before the redwoods . . .

Of course, these poems are political, if by political you mean aware, tough, punk. Rothenberg summons “Baudelaire (borderlands),” as the poet alliterates, and Henry Miller, to his aid as he makes his protest and dances with:

Exhausted senses, wild visions
Timelessness, days without dates
(Deities) . . .

Even when the poet trips with surrealism and Language riffs, the poems are wide awake; the dream in the title is never a fuzzy oneiric sleep. Through despair and exhaustion, the poems sing to what we are fighting for, what Rothenberg insists we make real in our world, what we need to preserve. It is the dream of an alive, non-GMOed, non-conned reality that stems from love for our planet and ourselves.

The Analyst by Molly Peacock

The Analyst is an elegy for a living woman—at least, for the position she once held. She was the psychoanalyst the poet confided in and relied on for decades. A stroke now prevents the analyst from working in that capacity. In addition, this book invokes elegies for other losses in the poet’s life: the death of her father, mother, sister, an abortion, a divorce. The therapist supported Peacock throughout that painful sequence of events. But now, as the beloved mentor succumbs to limitations imposed by the stroke, Peacock—in a role reversal—becomes more whole and vital.

She does this by looking back. For example, the broken relationship with the author’s sister was put into perspective by this remarkable therapist. Peacock writes, “Thank you for witnessing this use of the imagination: / I began to creep away from the crevasse, / it was war, away from the ocean of her heroin addiction.”

It would be an oversight not to see these poems as also mourning facets of Peacock’s self, “I believe in being killed, and I believe in poetry.” In release, in “dying,” she is liberated to create. The role(s) the analyst played through transference—as lifeline and confidant—have been manifested in the therapeutic act of writing poetry. However, healing is rarely perfect or complete. Peacock admits:

And partly healed injuries have
their own torque … Bones
(minds have bones) grow even
after they’re operated on …
human growth is complicated

As she delves into her abiding love for the analyst, she also explores how that woman has helped her to navigate and endure anguish:

Thank you for not believing me when I said I was suicidal
(my dad had died and evaporated into smoke
—that rageful man, yes, slowly I admitted I had
half his genes—bomb—vaporous beneath
the heavy gray apartment door).

Each death, or transformation, is guided by the loving perception of the titular analyst. In addition to being an elegy for the relationships and histories that have been subsumed by others, this poignant book is also a love letter to the confidant:

Thank you for that silhouette I saw
wearing your earrings and belt
as I stood at a podium before a darkened theater,
the vast audience unmoved after I failed to entertain.

Now, that stalwart mother-figure has been felled by fate and physiology. As the beloved analyst abandons speech, the tool of her métier, she learns to wield another one like a wand: the paint brush. She returns to an old love—painting. Although this actually occurred, it can also be seen as a metaphor for the growth that the analysand shared with her analyst. Indeed, this book is a tribute to the transformational power of art. While the title refers to the therapist, Peacock—her patient, student, daughter—has been reborn and redeemed through her multifaceted literary gifts: “[Y]es, each of us is many-roomed.” This is a nod to the word “stanza,” meaning “room” in Italian. Certainly, Peacock is a deft practitioner of the architectonic aspects of poetry. As such, it is worth noting the range of forms and voices that swirl with authority throughout this collection. It’s as if each poem were searching for the boundary beyond which pain ceases to exist. And yet ache (rage and fear) drives these poems. They fuse into a dissonant dirge:

Our jaws could eat cement.
Anger chomped at
the marriage wall
ate the glass windows of friendship
and bled from its stone teeth,
muttering, Oh not, I am not, at all, at allI am not at all

The elegiac focus extends to a contemplation of the poet’s own mortality, which she handles without ever being maudlin or melodramatic. We even catch a glimpse of the brutality of American history. At the New York Historical Society, the poet and her analyst catch sight of Dying Indian Chief, Contemplating the Progress of Western Civilization: “You duck beneath him with your wobbly cane / then upturn your face toward his, contemplating // his sober view of hysterical society.” This brings to mind The Dying Gaul, a sculpture that captures the anguish of conquest, the erasure of a culture, and death. How the human body is like history, with its fragility and indignities. The trope of the stroke extends its shadow. This recalls Susan Sontag’s seminal book, Illness as Metaphor and Aids and Its Metaphors. Despite lamentation, a striving to prevail permeates these varied poems:

and live the raw I am, as you do now,
relearning how to show

the few of us who stay in touch
how to twist and learn.

Variety enlivens the forms of the poems. Form, for which Peacock is prodigious and rightfully famous, has been liberated into a new, more raucous version. The effect is thrilling. Formed, yes. Formal (in the sense of solemn and constricted), no. These trenchant poems burst every seam that attempts to bind them. The result is one of luxuriantly musical phrasing. Here, Peacock employs terza rima:

Three Tibetan monks make a sand painting
(under spotlights) in a reverential hush,
the circular world before them everything:

a cosmos, a brain, a divine palace lush
with lotuses and pagodas in children’s
paintbox colors. “Excuse me, my friend is

recovering from an accident …”

To enter more deeply into the world of images as words, Peacock bends her voice to a place where visual details take over. The image, like a Chinese character, carries the weight of thought and emotion. In this, she inhabits the analyst’s visual locus, where color and form have meaning, where a leaf flickering in a breeze is a poem. Simile is too tenuous. Transformation occurs; this is the realm of metaphor.

                        Here,
when all are there,
the sky shows through
a peephole: a leaf hole
shapes
getting nowhere
out of the blue.

Through loss upon loss, metamorphosed into the marrow of Peacock’s language, she writes, “Only when / something’s over can its shape materialize.” The losses reconstruct themselves from vapor, rise from these pages, and insert themselves into the reader’s mind, where they will not be forgotten.