Two short story collections: Lucy Ives and Sergi Pàmies,

As part of our week away in Picton, I attempted to bring as many books of unread prose with me as possible, given the difficulties of reading longer prose during the day-to-day of two small children. As our wee monsters went to the beach with father-in-law and his wife, or spent their afternoons in the pool, I managed to get through short story collections by New York City writer Lucy Ives and Barcelona writer Sergi Pàmies, and sketched a few scattering notes on each. I mean, I wish I could review fiction more often than I currently do, but it is a struggle to get to such since the wee monsters emerged. I know you understand.

I’ve known of Lucy Ives’ work for a while now [see her ’12 or 20 questions’ interview here], having first gone through her poetry collections Orange Roses (Boise ID: Ahsahta Press, 2013) [see my review of such here] and The Worldkillers (Ann Arbor MI: SplitLevel Texts, 2014) [see my review of such here], before reading her prose lyric The Hermit (The Song Cave, 2016) [see my review of such here] and more recent The Saddest Thing Is That I Have Had To Use Words: A Madeline Gins Reader (Catskill NY: Siglio, 2020), a book she edited and compiled around the life’s work of the late Madeline Gins (1941-2014) [see my review of such here]. Her latest work is Cosmogony: Stories (Soft Skull Press, 2021), a collection of twelve short stories that appear, on the surface, at least, traditionally structured. Ives writes first-person narratives on the ways in which we navigate thought and being, social and intimate interactions, but quickly include odd narrative twists, from the conceptual to the speculative, as well as long stretches of contemplation. Her stories wrestle with fundamental questions about our relationships with each other, as well as with the universe. What is our purpose, exactly? What are we meant to be doing?

The most striking and entertaining story in the collection has to be the title story, which begins: “A few years ago a friend of mine married a demon. There was a liberal in the White House then and everyone was feeling pretty sanguine.” She writes of androids, angels and demons, and a woman who lives under the sea, emerging only, it seems, to talk about writing and tennis. She pushes her narratives in unexpected directions and even theoretical asides that simultaneously propel, expand and sit alongside the main thrust of the story, as the title story offers:

            Also we’re all supposed to be OK with the notion that we can’t fully know one another. I think about it like this: Leibniz says that the irony of being human is that you’re just like everyone else. You have all the same stuff everyone else has, just in a different order. The reason it is in a different order is that you have some sort of discrete origin, you were born in a time and place, and that, in combination with your embedding among various discrete others/quanta, is what makes you you. This difference is completely arbitrary and the system is designed in this completely infuriating way that makes it impossible to know about it—which is to say, your difference—as a kind of content. Which is why medieval Europeans all look like dolls in their paintings. There wasn’t anything unknowable about them. They were the puppets of god, and they didn’t have psychology or newspapers.

Paris-born “to a family of Spanish political refugees,” and living in Barcelona since 1971, writer, translator and translator Sergi Pàmies is a name entirely new to my attention. The author of a half-dozen short story collections and three novels in Catalan, his latest collection is The Art of Wearing a Trench Coat: Stories (New York NY: Other Press, 2021), translated from the Catalan by Adrian Nathan West, a book that originally appeared as L’art de portar gavardina (Barcelona: Quaderns Crema, 2018). The writing in these thirteen stories are remarkably crisp, and propel through both narrative impulse and lyric detail with an open curiosity, a wry humour and a deep empathy. There is a music to his narratives, one that flows easily and quickly. There is a clarity to his stories exploring narratives on ageing parents, health crises, parenting and simply living in the world as a human attempting to simply be, and remain, human. There is a clarity, but an urgency, and an incredible thickness and complexity to the prose, one that rushes and flows and delights. His stories offer interactions and isolations that occasionally overlap and fold in, before unfurling once more. As he writes in “PATERNITY,” writing his main character attempting to spend time as a divorced parent with his teenaged daughter:

            When they meet, Omar again feels an emotion that has evolved since they’ve lived apart. His sense of paternity has been figurative before, linked to details and tangible memories of Amira’s life, as if the sum of the moments they’d been through formed the basis of a growing affection describable in rational terms. This accumulation of lived sequences contained difficulties overcome and assorted scenes selected by memory with chronological arbitrariness (an attack on gastroenteritis, a part in a play, volleyball games with Amira swinging from euphoric self-confidence to vertiginous depression, or a first love with turmoil and a morning-after pill). Since the divorce, Omar has noticed this feeling turning more abstract. It’s no longer about details, situations, or an ensemble of experiences, but an emotional mass he can experience without needing to understand—and even if he wanted to, he couldn’t—each and every one of its ingredients. It’s as if each were confronted with the other’s ignorance, as if they were speaking different languages but still held on to a biological bond on the outer margins of Amira’s reality, where she was oblivious to her father’s opinion or his capacity to intervene. Omar knows he can’t be as stern as he’d like. That he has to stifle his impatience and the sinister ideas that pass through his head, that he must hide his perplexity when such costly tuition produces a student so ill prepared.

The anchor to the collection (the foundation, it would seem, upon which the rest of the collection is built), and the longest story within, is the twenty-nine section “I’M NO ONE TO BE GIVING YOU ADVICE,” a story around the narrator seeking to understand his politically-radical parents, his dreams of youth of a different father, and the weight he brings to the possibility of a trench coat. Turning from point-to-point, the story (which also provides the collection its title) exists as a complex study of multiple characters at the centre of, and far beyond, a period of political turmoil and upheaval. Pàmies writes a first-person story that explores the narrator and his comprehension of his father, and the father’s former compatriot, a political writer the narrator idolized as a youth and wished was, instead, his actual father, before returning to the figure of his mother. How might any of us, really, attempt to understand our youthful dreams and portraits of our parents without realizing it continues to change as we age, even beyond their actual presence? All of this, of course, framed in the history of political chaos and the possibilities of how one might wear a trench coat, whether in the London or Parisian style. As he writes as part sixteen of the story:

In a film about those days, we would mark the passage of time with a sequence showing the pages torn away from a calendar or a sped-up procession of clouds, daybreaks, tides, and sunsets. And, to suggest the political realities, we’d add in archival footage of peaceful and violent demonstrations, silent marches of mournful multitudes against terrorism, and some athletic feat or other. In real life, though, my parents aged with slow dignity, as did Semprún. Apparently my mother saw him again at another conference and admitted—this time without political liabilities, and with the obstinacy of someone determined to maintain her rigor to the end—that she regretted both the docility capital-H History had imposed on them and her own minor episodes of meanness.

The Saddest Thing Is That I Have Had To Use Words: A Madeline Gins Reader, ed. Lucy Ives

 

What remains lacking is a full consideration of Madeline Gins as a writer—as a poet and novelist who began, in the earliest days of popular computing in the United States, thinking through writing in a radical sense, as a process-based technology, in and of itself. It is my hope that this collection will open up a broader discussion around Gin’s work, as well as the recent history of interdisciplinary practice more generally, particularly in its relation to the novel, poetry, and possible gradients between the two. I mean this in scholar Thomas Beebee’s sense, i.e, that “genre is also a site of … noise, the cusp between different use-values of texts and between discursive entity  and non-entity,” as well as in Lyn Hejinian’s sense of literary strategies that “bristl[e] with perceptibility. As a high school and college student, I was constantly told that novels were very important, while poetry was irrelevant to contemporary culture; that while poetry was pretty and all, it was “dead,” “I, too, dislike it,” and so on. yet, what I have come to see is that the location and value of poetry was too poorly understood in these curricula: Poetry may be writing, of course, but it is not necessarily that; it is also image, performance, gesture, sung, social life, gossip, furniture, food, shelter, dance, research, email, garments. This is not to say that poetry has no determined or identifiable form, but that it suffers when it is confined to a stanza. It may well need all the room of a novel, if not the room of an actual room. Madeline Gins is the one who taught me that. (“EVERYTHING I RECEIVE WILL BECOME PART OF A NOVEL: An Introduction to the Work of Madeline Gins,” by Lucy Ives)

Thanks to the publication of The Saddest Thing Is That I Have Had To Use Words: A Madeline Gins Reader (Catskill NY: Siglio, 2020), edited by American poet and fiction writer Lucy Ives, I’ve been introduced to the work of the late Madeline Gins (1941-2014), a writer living and producing work in New York City during a particularly lively shift of visual art moving from galleries into more conceptual realms. Married to the artist Shüsaku Arakawa, with whom, as Ives writes as part of her lengthy critical introduction, “she is perhaps best known, as of the writing of this introduction, for her work with Arakawa on the Reversible Destiny architectural project, via which they designed and oversaw the realization of structures they believed had the capacity to stave off death, including lofts in Tokyo, a park in Yoro, Japan, and a house in East Hampton.” Gins existed as a writer attuned to the visual arts during a period when conceptual approaches were moving the realm of visual arts from gallery spaces into what lay beyond those perceived limitations. I’ve argued in the past that I believe Christian Bök to be a conceptual artist, but one who utilizes the realm of “poetry” as his compositional structure, and Gins appears to have done similarly, a good half-century prior. During the early years of her production, working as a conceptual artist was confusing enough for the culture, but being a writer attached to visual artists utilizing the same was even moreso. Ives lengthy introduction offers incredible insight into Gins’ extensive solo and collaborative work, and the collection includes not only writing but complete facsimile reproductions of her published books, providing an acknowledgement to an important American mid-century artist. Unlike Frank O’Hara in the 1950s and 60s, who was writing poems in representation as ekphrasis for portraits of fruit baskets, Gins was working on far larger and more complex structures, such as her 1969 book WORD RAIN (or A Discursive Introduction to the Intimate Philosophical Investigations of G,R,E,T,A, G,A,R,B,O, It Says) (New York NY: Grossman Publishers, 1969), that opens:

            I induce a sly birth with my eyes the lines of creases. (Delete) I massage geometry with a scented oil. The maintenance of lips. The battles of containers. I speak in the midst of a sifted reticence. Over there in the center, I am imploded as the size of a fly. Words fall off the curls of nothing after I have left for the next moment.
            I am folded into her. I am involved in the curves of her grey folds. I know how to use them. I know better now than at first but I knew then too. She moves as I shift. Words rain on a molded juncture which you might mistakenly call my head.
            I fill her up at the typewriter. I move her femininely as befits her body. I take her with me. I introduce the tensile subject into her. I am her introduction to the room, to the word rain, to the waterfall pummeling down over membranous rocks. I find her room. I move in the damp ocean. Words cannot say how I am she.
            I am not afraid to move. I am the judge. It is raining in the ocean. I am a river of hypotheses, categories and disjunctive relations. I pulled Aristotle taught. I wave them and words rumble out. They eddy into sentence with my meaning. Read this with me, read that with me, read me with me, read objects (tables,toes,toads,tails,tins,trains,type,tears,throat) read write read right. This is still life. Only I write and read. If you’ve misplaced me on your own, bring me up again from off this page.

 

 

Lucy Ives, The Hermit

To experiment with every kind of prose imaginable, e.g., the proses of America. I ask, What is the purpose of clarity, beyond description? Clarity, but to what end? The exquisite prose of Melville, of—what is totally different and yet feels related—Rousseau. (“33.”)

I’m happily startled (but not entirely surprised) by just how delightfully compelling and complex New York City writer Lucy Ives’ most recent title is, a small book titled The Hermit (The Song Cave, 2016). Composed in tight prose and full sentences that collage together into a larger coherence, The Hermit exists in an intriguing space that is part-poem, part-essay and part-novel, all blended together into an exploration of self, narrator and character, elements of dreams, lists and journal-entries, logic and the form of the novel (and prose-works generally) and even a thread that floats through one of the characters from A Nightmare on Elm Street. As she writes in the “Notes” at the back of the collection:

The title of the book bears some explanation. Of course, in entry 51, a hermit appears. But this is only a hermit in a work of art. I’m not sure, at any rate, what a hermit is today.

            Strangely, the hermit I have in mind is most closely or accurately figured by the character Nancy Thompson, as portrayed by actor Heather Langenkamp, in A Nightmare on Elm Street. Why is Nancy a hermit? Because she is entirely isolated from others, though she is by no means distant from them.

            Nancy is secluded in a place of psychological horror and physical violence. Sleep (acquiescence) presents a constant threat. It is Nancy’s unspoken decision, a brave one, to believe in the reality of this seclusion, in the ineluctable threat of Freddy’s choice to appear to her, that ultimately preserves her life. “He’s dead, honey, because Mommy killed him,” Nancy’s mother maintains. Although I don’t like this character very much, I understand what she is saying. See also, entry 78.

I won’t spoil what occurs in “entry 78” (an entry that feels visibly distinct from the rest of the book), but the final line in the book, from “80.” reads: “I do not know for how long any of the characters in this book can persist as characters.” I think I very much like the idea that Ives is uncertain of the lives of the characters she has included here (I hesitate to automatically refer to them as “her” characters), and just how long they might survive, potentially, beyond the bounds of the completed book. She suggestion is that she suspects they should or otherwise would, but isn’t sure. I wonder, does she include the narrator as one of her characters, also? Do they include, for example, her references to, readings of and/or quotes by Kathy Acker, Charles Olson, George Oppen and Houellebecq?

I want to write an essay about the novel as a site of novelty, where the preposition “Anything can happen” is somehow tested. (“15.”)

The Hermit follows her books Orange Roses (Ahsahta, 2013) [see my review of such here], The Worldkillers (Ann Arbor MI: SplitLevel Texts, 2014) [see my review of such here], and the novel nineties (Little A, 2015). Her full-length novel, Impossible Views of the World, is due next spring with Penguin.

I discover that writing, as a profession, is about putting oneself into a constrained position, from which there are limited means of escape. The undertaking is not about the words themselves or even some technical skill distinct from survival. One must possess only the ability to tolerate a given position long enough to make it intelligible to others. (“52.”)

The Hermit  is set in eighty short, numbered prose-sections, and I’m fascinated by how Ives writes a book that, in part, tells us how to read it, as her forty-third entry, in full, reads: “One must work, perhaps for some time, to see scenes.” The Hermit reads as an essay/novel-through-accumulation, allowing the short semi-standalone scenes to collect and reshape via the reader, much in the same way, perhaps, as Sarah Manguso’s Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape (McSweeney’s, 2007), a book that heavily influenced my own The Uncertainty Principle: stories, (Chaudiere Books, 2014). In the entry immediately prior to the forty-third, she also offers: “An essay occurs in time like dog years, where it isn’t a task of reasoning so much as something that befalls one. I perhaps don’t read or write enough and yet always feel like I am reading, like I am writing.” Or just a bit earlier, as she writes as part of “67.”:

Make an illogical jump—dissociation—but, then, imperceptibly—so, quickly—return to render it logical before anyone has seen. In this way, you may seem to improve upon reason.

New American Writing 32 (final issue)

Sleeping Beauty

to all the waters we went it cannot be expressed and the vows so sorry we were /all the waters to no purpose the pilgrimages to no end and the days so sorry were /and tired in our seeking when she came from the ether it was no simple however /it was gold-back and bellsound rung toward future all the waters it wept/ til spindle-cursed the lure of cloth drew her up the tower / unknowing at the wheel a good woman and alone handed the needle kindly and oh quiet blood it cannot be expressed our waiting became her waiting / redsky redbird forgive us a life we grow tired in our sleep (Jennifer K. Sweeney)

While the nature of literary publishing has always appeared tenuous, there is still something disappointing and altogether sad about the demise of any literary journal, whether the recent announcement of the final issue of Toronto’s Descant (after some four decades), or that Maxine Chernoff and Paul Hoover’s New American Writing will cease publication (one can at least feel some twinge of optimism through the fact that Vancouver’s The Capilano Review, in the midst of a transition out of the institution that had long supported them, managed a highly successful Indiegogo Campaign to midwife their new independence). Any project that has continued this long should certainly be admired and celebrated, especially one that has managed so long with the original editors. I can easily imagine that the work they’ve done with the journal over the years has influenced an entire generation or two of American poet-publishers who have, themselves, gone on to produce their own publications, even as New American Writing continued to evolve, develop and annually publish. Having only discovered them a few years back, I’ve admired the work I’ve seen in each issue, and am sad to see them go. As Hoover wrote on the journal’s Facebook page in December:

Friends of New American Writing: Maxine Chernoff and I have decided to cease publication of the magazine due to overwhelming problems with the funding. We are grateful to have published some of the best poetry of the last four decades, including OINK, which ran 19 issues beginning in 1971. We are proud of our ability to help young poets become established and to have contributed to the larger discussion of poetics and the literary history of the period. Thanks to our many contributors, subscribers, and readers.

The final issue of New American Writing is therefore the current, NAW 32 (2014). That issue and all back issues except 4 (Australian poetry) and 5 (Censorship and the Arts) are available through www.ccnow.com.

Part of the enjoyment of going through issues of New American Writing has always been in the strength of writing from familiar and unfamiliar names both new and well established, some of whom run through multiple issues of the annual journal, and this, the 2014 volume, features new writing by numerous poets, including Endi Bogue Hartigan, Fanny Howe, Aaron Shurin, Geoffre O’Brien, Clayton Eshleman, Karla Kelsey, Laynie Browne, Lisa Samuels, Noelle Kocot, Lucy Ives, John Tranter, Matthew Cooperman, Edward Smallfield, Anselm Berrigan, Philip Hoover, Travis Cebula, Amish Trivedi and Sara Marinelli, as well as a series of translations by Gillian Conoley, Philip Metres and Tatiana Tulchinsky, Stephen Kessler, and Odile Cisneros. I’m fascinated by the density of the three poems included here by Noelle Kocot, a poet I’ve long heard of but haven’t yet explored the work of, as well as the incredibly sharp lines of the extended sequence “The Hermit,” only some of which is included here, by the brilliantly talented Lucy Ives. Impossible to replicate here, the three poems included here in Anselm Berrigan’s “Rectangle” series are visually interesting, and suggest a far larger project down the line (that I am very interested in seeing). Attentive readers will not only see work by the late Chicago poet and publisher Dean Faulwell (1939-2013), prefaced by a short introduction by Paul Hoover, but some of the last work, the poem “Gogol’s Luck,” of the late San Francisco poet Colleen Lookingbill (1950-2014) who passed away in March, 2014, a couple of months before this issue was released. Her poem includes:

Meanwhile hints and questions are forgotten

overcome, we spend a long time

scrutinizing smart and beautifully shaped references

back to the wasteland, return is seeing

that’s how we do things