Elisa Gabbert, Normal Distance

 

Yes & No

Driving, alone, at night, with music
Is safe. No visible stars.
A blood orange moon and then Mars. 

Lying, in bed, alone, is safe.
Keep your hands clean,
You can touch your own face. 

Keep the windows shut. No opening
For spirits: Influenza, evil eye,
Miasma, killer bee. Stray bullet. Flea. 

Everything comes back normal.
The image of the aster,
It’s all in mental space. 

How sublime the moon.
How sublime, the mossy ruins.
The fear and the fear itself.

American poet, critic and essayist Elisa Gabbert’s [see her 2016 "12 or 20 questions" interview here] latest poetry title is Normal Distance (New York NY: Soft Skull Press, 2022), following The French Exit (Birds, LLC, 2010), The Self Unstable (Black Ocean, 2013) [see my review of such here] and L’Heure Bleue or The Judy Poems (Black Ocean, 2016) [see my review of such here]. Given her last few years have been moving further into the realm of non-fiction, having published the essay collections The Word Pretty (Boston MA: Black Ocean, 2018) [see my review of such here], The Unreality of Memory & Other Essays (FSG, 2020) and the forthcoming Any Person Is the Only Self (FSG), the appearance of a further poetry title, returning to a particular leaning of form, is both exciting and intriguing. It is also a bit of a relief, admittedly, as numerous who venture across the boundary of poetry to prose so often do not return (or return further down the road, less sharp in the form than they once were).

Gabbert’s meditative lyric, one simultaneously easygoing and highly crafted, has always leaned into more narrative forms, with her two compositional strains sitting on either side of a seemingly-arbitrary boundary: the “essay-poems” of her poetry collections on one side and the “essay-prose” of her non-fiction works on the other. As her essays more straightforwardly articulate the feeling out of a particular argument, her poems, in their way, narrate more of a short-form of her thinking, displaying a larger lyric across a wide canvas, providing direction enough that the spaces between can be perfectly navigated. As the first half of her opening poem, “Prelude,” writes: “Every year, when the lindens bloom, I think of the year / when the lindens didn’t bloom. // This year, so far, the lindens haven’t bloomed. // I think of the year when the linden didn’t bloom. // An idea almost comes, or it comes in disguise—it’s the / same old thought, but today it is startling. // The way you fail to see, or recognize yourself, in a mirror / at strange angles. // Thoughts almost arrive.” She writes of distance, of memory and of fear, subject matter that runs through, whether overtly or underlying, seemingly through the length and the breadth of her published work. She writes of perception, striding along the boundary between utopia and dystopia, and the possibility that that may or may not be all that there is. There is such a fine pacing to her lines, allowing for enormous amounts of space between lines, between thoughts. One step and one further step, allowing the ideas to connect themselves in the spaces between, and throughout. In this way, she tells you directly what she does not say, if you are open to hearing it. As well, there are moments as though her writing can see into the future, attempting to explore, fully, each particular direction. “Sometimes the dystopia was boring.” she notes, towards the end of the six page poem “New Theories on Boredom.” “At least everyone was boring at the same time about / something inherently interesting. // Sometimes it feels like if I’m not fascinated, I’m bored.” Or a fragment of the three-page poem “I’m Not Mourning (There Is Voids),” that reads:

In the mourning journal he wrote in the months following his mother’s death in 1977, Roland Barthes quotes Donald Winnicott: “The catastrophe you fear will happen has already happened.”

Less than three years after his mother, Barthes died from injuries sustained when he was hit by a laundry van while walking through the streets of Paris.

reading in the margins: Joy Williams

Thanks to a tweet by Denver poet and essayist Elisa Gabbert, I discovered a craft essay online by American writer Joy Williams, “Uncanny the Singing that Comes from Certain Husks.” What emerged, very quickly, was Williams’ quick wit and dark humour, and a particular kind of wisdom, hard-won and practical. I’d not heard of Williams prior to this, but I became curious. In a 2014 interview I found with Williams for the Paris Review, conducted by Paul Winner, she displays that same wit and humour, as well as a kind of evasiveness, although that might be too strong a word. It is the way she responds indirectly to his questions, using Winners’ prompts as jumping off points into further thinking. Her mind, it would seem, simply moves too fast.

INTERVIEWER

I think of the Internet, the sheer volume. Cynthia Ozick wrote recently about the influence of this environment, all those Amazon customer reviews.

WILLIAMS

Who writes those?

INTERVIEWER

Anyone. People who may, in an earlier age, have written letters to the editor.

WILLIAMS

It’s one thing when it’s a restaurant. I mean, they can destroy a restaurant overnight. To do that with books?

Williams is wonderfully present, deeply engaged and comfortably outside the mythical inner-circles or goings-on of big name authors, of which she might even be one. She presents an aura of practicality and confidence; doing her work in her own way, conducting her own silences and spaces, and building up her own solitudes, from where she is able to contemplate and create her best work.

I like the way she references Alice Munro as part of the interview, so wonderfully evocative and charming in her descriptions: “That nice Canadian writer who recently won the Nobel—beloved, admired, prolific. Who would deny it? She said she had a ‘hellish good time’ writing. This could be a subject for many, many panels. Get a herd of writers together and ask them, Do you have a hellish good time writing? Mostly, I believe, the answer would be no. But their going on about it could take some time.”

Responding to my follow-up, Elisa recommends I begin with Williams’ novel, The Quick and The Dead. I hesitate to attempt to read a novel during pandemic lockdown, predominantly for the fact of our two wee children are underfoot, in the midst of their online schooling. But the summer will soon be upon us, my wife reminds. You can sit outside, then. Elisa also points me to a November 2020 profile on Williams in the New York Times by A.O. Scott. Scott writes of comparisons made between Williams’ work with that of John Hawkes and John Barth, Donald Barthelme and Lydia Davis, and to Raymond Carver, who studied writing at the University of Iowa at the same time as Williams. He writes:

Not that she needs their company. Her protean aspect — her manner of showing both a realist and an experimental face, sometimes in the space of a single page — exposes the limitations of such sorting. The bird evades capture, even in a notebook. Capture and evasion, not incidentally, are what she writes about most.

Given my own leanings toward Davis, perhaps this article does provide me with an answer of where to begin: her collection of micro-fictions, Ninety-Nine Stories of God. My searches also uncover options for a new novel, published in September 2021. That might be a later step. On my part, I quote the first two sentences of her essay as part of a short story I’m working on, slipping her lines just underneath the railings. They fit just fine.

Two short story collections: J. Robert Lennon and Joy Williams,

Further to our time away in Picton, I went through recent short story collections by American writers J. Robert Lennon and Joy Williams. All the adults were two weeks-plus beyond double vaccination (and seeing anyone else, obviously), and everyone was super careful. The children spent the week in the pool.

I’ve previously only read one book by New York State fiction writer J. Robert Lennon: his short story collection Pieces for the Left Hand (Graywolf Press, 2005), and recently read through his Let Me Think (Graywolf Press, 2021). Whereas Pieces for the Left Hand was made up of one hundred very short stories organized into thematic section-groupings, the stories in Let Me Think are assembled via multiple shapes and sizes, from the short burst to the longer narrative. Lennon’s stories explore odd, small moments that can’t easily be explained, like droplets of magic sprinkled in to shift the narrative. His stories explore how certain experiences or interactions shift perception, from the repetition of a single day into infinity, the experience of a painful divorce or the seemingly-simple matter of sweeping up dust. As he writes to end the flash story “Unnamed”: “The road has no name. This is the commonest name in the world for a road.”

The stories in Pieces for the Left Hand were structural echoes of each other, offering twists and unexpected turns of perception, something that collection shares with this one, albeit through an equal exploration of form: a story might be propelled almost entirely by dialogue, for example, while another is composed closer to a flash, or even a prose poem. Listen to the story “Monsters,” that reads:

The blind man, who everyone agreed was exceedingly handsome and who had married a woman widely regarded, among their acquaintances, as extraordinarily beautiful, was chosen to participate in the trial of a new medical procedure that doctors  believed might fully restore sight to certain patients. The surgery was a complete success, but when the handsome man saw, for the first time, his own face and the face of his wife, he was horrified, and could not be dissuaded of the notion that they, and everyone around them, were hideous monsters; and when, six months later, the procedure’s efficacy unexpectedly faded, and the handsome man was plunged again into darkness, he said that he was not, as his friends might have predicted, relieved, but rather more horrified still, because now, and forevermore, he could not know with any certainty where the monsters were.

American fiction writer Joy Williams is someone I only discovered recently, thanks to catching a tweet (and subsequent recommendation) by Denver poet and essayist Elisa Gabbert. After moving through Williams’ extensive catalogue, I decided to pick up a copy of her short story collection, 99 Stories of God (Tin House Books, 2016). An assemblage of ninety-nine short, self-contained stories, each story is numbered, with their titles only set at the end. There are echoes of Milan Kundera through Williams’ prose, moving easily from big ideas to specific actions and ideas. The twenty-ninth story, “IGNORANCE,” writes of a man on the beach, rescued from the water by a pig: “Would the pig have rescued the man if she had known that he and his companion had just enjoyed a picnic of ham sandwiches?” With the response: “The pig’s owner replied that pigs are intelligent, more intelligent than dogs, but they are not omniscient.”

What is fascinating through this collection is how it is the framing that allows for these seemingly untethered and unconnected pieces their book-length shape and anchor. Hers are short bursts that suggest more than they say, and hold far more than they might easily let on; indirectly, and even directly, these are stories about and around God, even utilizing God as a character, moving around the earth, interacting with others in curious and even mundane ways. Should he adopt a tortoise? At another point, he answers questions for the wolves. These are stories that refuse to provide easy answers, instead offering openings of thought; offering, instead, a way through which to contemplate ideas. Offered as story number thirty-nine, titled “BURIED IN COLORADO ALL ALONE,” she writes:

The girl from the pharmacy who delivered Darvon to Philip K. Dick, the science fiction writer, wore a gold fish necklace.
            “What does that mean?” asked Dick.
            She touched it and said, “This is a sign worn by the early Christians so that they would recognize one another.”
            “In that instant,” Dick writes, “I suddenly experienced anamnesis, a Greek word meaning, literally, loss of forgetfulness.”
            Anamnesis is brought on by the action of the Holy Spirit. The person remembers his true identity throughout all his lives. The person recognizes the world for what it is—his own prior thought formations—and this generates the flash. He now knows where he is.

 

Elisa Gabbert, The Word Pretty

My notebooks are not diaries because they have no timestamps. Dating the entries would impose a structure, a sense of continuity and narrative, on the writing inside. They capture thoughts, not events; they are lyric notebooks. I’d be having thoughts anyway, but now I write them down—and knowing I might must alter the thoughts. Before I can write one, it has to become a sentence, an object with a shape. When I was seven or eight, I confessed to my mother that I couldn’t stop narrating my life back to myself; I thought it meant I was crazy. No, she said, it means you’re a writer. I’ve since gotten used to it, that layer of language like running commentary between my direct experience and the external record of it. (“Personal Data: Notes on Keeping a Notebook”)

The collected short essays that make up Denver, Colorado poet Elisa Gabbert’s The Word Pretty (Boston MA: Black Ocean, 2018) are very much a logical extension of her published books-to-date, utilizing writing itself as her thinking form in the poetry collections The French Exit (Birds, LLC, 2010), The Self Unstable (Black Ocean, 2013) [see my review of such here] and L’Heure Bleue or The Judy Poems (Black Ocean, 2016) [see my review of such here]. In The Word Pretty, her “thinking form” simply exists in a shape more familiar to a wider readership wishing to engage with her series of studies, captured in short, narrative theses on more specific topics, as opposed to her more wide-ranging and expansive book-length studies structured in the open lyric and collage of her poetry collections. Over the course of twenty-three short essays, Gabbert explores the minutae of a variety of subjects, from crying, dreams, journal-writing and “How to Be Pretty on TV,” as well as various pieces on writing and the writing process, including “What Poetry Is,” “Writing that Sounds like Writing,” “Why Read Novels?” and “The Art of the Paragraph,” as well as the essay “Aphorisms Are Essays,” that includes:

            In other words, an aphorism is not a truth but a kind of test (an assay), a statement you are meant to run up against to decide if you agree. If you don’t agree, that is not necessarily a failure of the aphorism. The best aphorisms are not the most true but the most undecidable, those worth endlessly retesting. In The Folded Clock, Heidi Julavits writes of herself and her husband: “We love to take a conviction we might, for a moment, entertain, and then turn it on its head and make a joke about it. This joking is our form of the Socratic Method. Our jokes are interrogations that help us figure out what we care about, and where our faith, at the moment, lies.” (Jokes as essays.)

            Twitter has made my poetry more aphoristic. Formally, it’s a platform ideally suited to the aphorism; in fact aphorisms should be quite a bit less than 140 characters. Further, you can like an aphorism even if you disagree, or aren’t sure you agree. “RT ≠ endorsement,” as many Twitter bios attest, but nor does a like imply endorsement. Some tweets, of course, aspire to literal, factual truth—those that report on science or the news, for example. But others are more like essays or poems or novels that can’t, fundamentally, be true or not true; it’s a category error.

In essays that read both slightly wistful and deeply grounded, Gabbert’s incredibly precise and exploratory prose manages to get to the heart of some impossible things, giving weight to what would otherwise be abstract and even ephemeral, providing enough weight to allow her to hold in her hands and properly examine. Her text moves from fact to fact, idea to idea, and through the process, turn what would otherwise be a random assortment of information into something far greater. Compact in both form and physical book-size, this was a smart, endearing and entirely pleasurable read, and Gabbert manages to assemble what could have been a collage of thoughts and meandering into a casual series of direct lines of thinking. Through the process, The Word Pretty also presents some quite lovely and startling bits of information, including this intriguing nugget that opens her essay-quartet “The Inelegant Translation: Four Essays on Language”:

There’s an idea in linguistics that until a culture creates a name for a color, they don’t really see it as a distinct category. It builds from the anthropological discovery that languages tend to develop color terms in the same order: first, for black and white (or roughly, light and dark), then for red, then for either green or yellow and then both, then blue (and so on). They don’t invent a word for blue, the thinking goes, much less for mauve or taupe, until they need it. Color terms proliferate in a world of dyes and spectrometry.

Elisa Gabbert, The Self Unstable

Crows can tell one human from another, but we are unable to distinguish among various crows. This is mischaracterized as a paradox. Humans may be racist, but crows can’t read, and robots can’t really dance. All species evolve toward overspecialization. If you find anything other than food or sex interesting, it’s signaling.

After reading and reviewing her third book not that long ago [see my review here], I’m finding it interesting to go through Denver, Colorado poet Elisa Gabbert’s work in reverse, currently reading her second book, the lyric essay The Self Unstable (Boston MA: Black Ocean, 2013). Composed as a sequence of stand-alone aphoristic prose sections, her prose meditations to explore, query and question, existing almost as a precursor to such as Sarah Manguso’s 300 Arguments (Graywolf, 2016) [see my review of such here]. Given I’m still working my way through the American strains of prose poetry/the lyric essay, I’d be curious to know some of Gabbert’s own influences that led to such a work. What books led her to this?

I saw a figure from a distance and thought it was me. I drank from the opposite side of a glass. If you can’t describe how you feel to yourself, you can’t be sure what you’re feeling—or that you feel at all. Consciousness as unreliable narrator. The self is a play that you watch from the audience—you affect it, but you can’t control it.

The book that emerges from her accumulations is quite fascinating, one that, in part, comes from the way the pieces in The Self Unstable are grouped, set into an opening poem and five seemingly-seemed sections: “The Self Is Unstable: Humans & Other Animals,” “Transcending the Body: Memories, Dreams, Fears, & Fantasies,” “A Crude Kind of Progress: Art & Aesthetics,” “First-Person Shooter: Games & Leisure” and “Enjoyment of Adversity: Love & Sex.” Were pieces composed as stand-alone and reordered and grouped later on, as part of the editing process? The effect really is quite stunning, and this is a book that explores the structure of plays, history and the notion of the self in a way that requires multiple readings. The poem that opens the collection asks, in a title borrowed from Wallace Shawn’s play, “The Designated Mourner” (a play she explores more fully in her third collection), “What Was the Self?” In itself, this becomes the question of the entire collection. As she writes:

What was the self?

You wanted a life of causes, but it was all effects: you could never get before.

Finding meaning in the meaningless was no kind of meaning, but you were satisfied with meaningness.

Luck is a skill, as is beauty, intelligence—all things you’re born with. It can almost ruin you, the belief that you can choose.

I watch a baby in a restaurant playing with a plastic Slinky.

The only way past is through.

There is a lot going on in this collection, and her directions are legion. Comparatively, the poems that make up her first collection, The French Exit (Birds, LLC, 2010), do exist as an intriguing and coherent collection, but the two that follow are expansive, book-length single projects, a structural shift in her work that is utterly compelling, and far deeper. It is as though that, once her first collection was completed, she shifted from writing poems to writing books. I am very interested to see where she might end up next.