The Capilano Review (Fall 2017): 3.33

Time knows what it does or it doesn’t,

is it truly a sequence that is continuing?

I might suck time from the ridge of your lips.

I think, the city negates me? Yes + No.

The mess I’ve made of things. I’m given

to the question mark, the ellipsis.

The future has already happened

and I understand nothing. A child

cries on the street and the mother

answers, “I don’t care.” Another

woman walking past in expensive

spandex says into her phone,

“whatever I have risked I stand

to earn.” I cannot hunt, I lock

the door when you go away

with my love and then with fern

in hand I signal recalcitrance. I am bogged.

A pustule of glial shine. It is possible

the rest has ended. (Liz Howard, “This Nocturne Went Summer / (a series of cosmic missives)”)

As you already know, I’m sure, one of the journals I consistently look forward to is Vancouver’s The Capilano Review [see my review of the previous issue here], currently edited by Catriona Strang. The current issue, as the short editor’s note suggests, pushes back against what often feels like a growing dark: “And yet, even as they articulate our horrors, the texts and artworks included here resist them, paradoxically finding fleeting moments of joy and delight in learning ‘to appreciate the raw beauty of our contingencies’ with Sria Chatterjee, or becoming ‘joysome from the thick damp leafage’ with Ted Byrne and Kim Minkus. So that perhaps this fall issue provides some transitory respite, and maybe refigures respite as resistance, or at least as mulch, at the same time as it takes a good hard look. ‘We’ve gathered the info,’ writes [Angela Jennifer] Lopes, ‘suck it up and believe.’” Existing as both a port in the storm and a focus on resistance, one could argue that The Capilano Review has been actively publishing and supporting this kind of work for years. In this current issue, the first thing that jumped out at me were the two short prose pieces by the aforementioned BookThug author Angela Jennifer Lopes:

at it again

So we’ve got this one. We’re planning a return to school to study physics or maybe linguistics. We knew these colonizers were just really insecure with no feeling of human. Because we know this we’re enraged. To support this moment of rage is a choice you get. For us it’s a part of it. But if you really know, the sojourn entire cannot be just peace getting a real job. It’s something we get, an attraction celestial where frothing at the conscious calves splinters. That we are ourselves the closest we are to nothing. The clandestineness of destiny is based upon a certain order earthly the report that there’s some blessing and some shunning. Some of our friends detoxify inner urgency with such sleek grace. Why do “let’s just sit on it”? And let’s bring that friend to mind. She’s the one who doesn’t care about opinions. She exudes virtues, primordial time.

I haven’t seen as much work from Liz Howard lately (I suspect I might be looking in the wrong places, possibly), so seeing her five-page “This Nocturne Went Summer” was a definite highlight. As she writes: “I dreamt supranatural and killed my memories with salt.” It was also good to see new work from Reg Johanson, Lise Downe, Colin Smith, Brian Dedora and Kevin Davies, all writers one doesn’t exactly see publishing in too many literary journals (this is one thing I’ve learned through my years of going through literary journals: when too many journals are simply publishing variations on the same, and even the same grouping of authors, any journal that includes work from authors we don’t see enough of gets my attention). Another highlight includes Sria Chatterjee, including her “THREE LETTERS,” the first of which reads:

1. Letter on a dream

I woke up this morning having dreamt that four new elements have been added to the periodic table. They sank to the bottom of my mind like words or synthetic rocks, superheavy. I arranged and rearranged these particles of primary matter on my clear blue mind slate, and you. I am writing because you were in my dream, prodding it like it was water. It was water. Each element a different tonal cluster, plunk, ringing in my plunk like Listerine. You spoke nonstop of the molecular unconscious, its two poles: paranoia and schizophrenia, molar and molecular, the nonhuman sex, the problem of affinities, the dwarfism of desire, terror and law, Seaborgium in the evolution of the state Americum, capitalism and schizophrenia, old earths and new, I had my ears to the ground you were vomiting clay screaming for Darmstadtium. You were drawing furrows in my water. We were screaming over and above each other. ORGANIZE, EXECUTE, EAT LOCAL, & MAKE the police take the Hippocratic Oath. Abstain from doing harm. I hope you are doing OK. Do write. The sky here is unfixed with the atomic structure of milk.

Open Text: Canadian Poetry and Poetics in the 21st Century, Vol. 3, ed. Roger Farr

The proliferation of anthologies of “contemporary poetics,” in the Anglophone world, began some time in the late eighties, climaxed in the late nineties and early noughts, and is, judging by a search of major library holdings, currently in the midst of its dénouement. The cultural history behind this arc probably warrants its own book. From a distance, it appears to follow closely the rise and fall of “Theory” in the academy, with “poetics” apparently having a bit more tenacity than its more visible double. It is also the case, however, that in many circles, what passes under the sign of “poetics” today is not the same as what is regarded as “theory.” Although these modes of literary discourse share certain elements and features (meta-discursivity, a frequently defamiliarizing style, an abandonment of the liberal prohibition on “bias,” a secondary status in relation to “primary” literary texts, etc.), this collection, like many others, adds an important distinction: here, “poetics” appears to be a kind of para-discourse, or dopplegänger—one who walks beside. “Poetics” in this sense refers to a discourse about poetry made by poets themselves, which gives it a unique relationship to its “object of study,” if not always unique methodologies. While this distinction between poetics and theory can not, and probably should not, be universalized into a general principle, it is worth pausing on the fact that in the writing collected here, our attention is always drawn back to the poem itself—even if only to defamiliarize that object again and again. (Roger Farr, “Introduction”)

Roger Farr’s Open Text: Canadian Poetry and Poetics in the 21st Century, Vol. 3 (Vancouver BC: CUE Books, 2013) closes a trilogy of texts of contemporary avant-garde poetry, following previous volumes Open Text: Canadian Poetry and Poetics in the 21^st Century (CUE Books, 2008) and Open Text: Canadian Poetry and Poetics in the 21^st Century, Vol. 2 (CUE Books, 2009). Deliberately built as a single unit made up of three works, the idea appears as an extension of literary readings, as Farr wrote to end the introduction for the first (and second) volume: “Between September 2008 and October 2009, the time measured by this volume of the Open Text series, the fifteen writers assembled here read from their work at Capilano University as part of our ongoing reading series. This is a record of what transpired.” The books and the reading series, it would seem, both provide an opportunity for dissemination, reading and conversation from a similar aesthetic and series of impulses, one as extension of the other. The first volume includes writing by Annharte, Oana Avasilichioaei, George Bowering, Rob Budde, Louis Cabri, Peter Culley, Jeff Derksen, Jon Paul Fiorentino, Maxine Gadd, Claire Huot & Robert Majzels, Larissa Lai, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Donato Mancini, Jamie Reid, Darren Wershler, Lissa Wolsak and Rita Wong, and the second includes writing by Ken Belford, Clint Burnham, Edward Byrne, Stephen Collis, Phinder Dulai, Emily Fedoruk, Christine Leclerc, Daphne Marlatt, Roy Miki, Fred Wah, Wayde Compton, Jordan Scott, Reg Johanson, Angela Carr, Kim Duff and Shirley Bear. It makes for an impressive list, and an enviable reading series, one I wish I lived much, much closer to. The third volume is used to close the trilogy through a collection of texts on writing from some of the contributors of the prior two volumes, as well as others. As Farr writes to end the introduction to the third volume:

So, included in this final volume of Open Text is an attempt to give some of the poets included in the first two volumes agency in altering the sphere in which their work is received. Put differently, it is an attempt to realize a limited form of self-valorization for both individual writers and the communities they identify with. What is at stake here is articulated differently from piece to piece; in all cases, however, I think it safe to say that “the point is to change it.”

What becomes clear is the insistence that work deemed “difficult” actually requires to be read on its own terms. I mean, it sounds so basic, and yet, this is a repeated mantra from readers and non-readers alike when approaching more challenging works, and the trilogy seems to hold this basic premise as its underlying argument. Farr writes in the introduction to the first volume:

The Open Text project is ambitious, however. When finished, it will consist of three volumes—two of poetry and one of poetics statements—and will be set apart from other anthologies of Canadian poetry in a number of important ways. First, it will bridge several generations of avant-garde writing. Some of the writers here were born before the Second World War, while others were born after Vietnam, allowing readers to trace lines of affinity and of difference across historical moments and cultural / literary movements. Second, it will include an unusually generous sampling of writing from the West Coast, a fact that only becomes significant when we consider that while much of this work is familiar in the US and the UK, it remains largely unacknowledged in Canada. This in turn may be an effect of the third point: the collection includes a significant amount of avant-garde work that treats formal innovation and experimentation not merely as aesthetic progress, but as extensions of specific political, ethical and social commitments.

Including a mixture of critical prose, interviews and poetry, the contributors to the third volume include George Bowering, Donato Mancini, Wayde Compton, Cecily Nicholson, Larissa Lai and Rita Wong, Ken Belford, Erín Moure, Danielle LaFrance, Phinder Dulai, Mercedes Eng, Roy Miki, Fred Wah (with Roger Farr), Stephen Collis, Louis Cabri, Jeff Derksen and Roger Farr and Reg Johanson. The works included in this third volume are offered to extend and even open a conversation about writing generally, and specific writing and writers specifically. A particular highlight is the piece “Circles of Intimacy: Translation, Corporality, Responsibility: Mi Versión” by Moure, writing on her past decade or more working more deeply in other languages, from her own writing to translating books from Galician by Chus Pato and from French by Nicole Brossard, among others:

Yes, when I translate, I am giving you, the readers and writers of English books, a book by someone not written in English, because I want you to read it and to feel similar things to what I once felt, reading it. It is affect that drives me to translate works, a corporeality, a relation.

In so doing I am able to share that part of my own corporeality that exists, no, thrives, in other languages, a part most often masked to my Anglo public, who do not see it, even though (maddeningly to me) it is part of my being. I perform this unmasking by translating between languages I know. By listening to the language of someone else as it enters my body.

In an excerpt from Vancouver writer and critic Wayde Compton’s enlightening essay “The Canadian Dub Poets, Aesthetic Conscience, and Donato Mancini’s Critique of the Discourse of Craft,” he suggests approaches to engaging with Dub and Indigenous works, writing that one should be “setting aside one’s own positional idiolect and its terms; by engaging with the experience that the poetry produces; by considering its own methods and procedures; by responding to the modes or registers of language that it deploys; and by reading or auditing it without resorting to the demand that it must decamp before you can admit that it is poetry at all.”

There has long been cultural chasms that the writers that Open Text champions have been caught up in (whether accidentally or deliberately), from purely geographical, to formal and even political. It doesn’t help that a particular formal consideration of poetry over the past few decades in Canada—the metaphor-driven lyric—casts a wide shadow, as does the series of publishers based in Central Canada, allowing for an entire series of other engagements to produce a literature that isn’t heard about much in these parts. Much of that is frustrating, and really showcases the downside of the arguments of Regionalism—many of our regions (and communities) don’t interact nearly as much as they really should, often existing entirely within self-contained bubbles of activity.

If the avant-garde has been characterized by such a dialectical oscillation between formal autonomy / experiment and commitment to causes reflected in engaged contents and expressive social affects, we may now be at a transition point where the pendulum is swinging towards commitment and expression once again—though this may ultimately also propel an experimental push for new forms pertinent to this social moment.

            Another way of stating this: we are in the midst of a return, in many communities, to a politicized practice that is positioning itself within the communist horizon—at least, within the field of struggle for broad and fundamental social change and a rejection of capitalism in its totality that is still perhaps best figured, in short-hand, as “communism.” (Stephen Collis, “Notes on the Death of the Avant-Garde (…once again, with feeling…)”)

I’ve long been fascinated in the histories that cumulated in the west coast to bring about such a combination of innovative language writing, and politics (language, social, political, cultural, etcetera), with the loose collective of the Kootenay School of Writing, if not at the exact centre of such, pretty damned close to the centre. There might be pockets throughout the rest of Canada of political writing, but the west coast manages one of the more ongoing and engaged centres for such (and I keep hoping that someone somewhere will write on the hows and the whys of such, in part so I can gain a clarification). We supposedly read for a variety of reasons, but one hopes that if you are reading this, your goals in reading (and possibly writing) include attempting to discover, as opposed to moving through what is already familiar, which alone make these three works absolutely essential.

I’m experimenting with different forms of artistic production. I want to create something that is more embodied and spatial than poetry produced for the page is, to look for more visually-oriented modes of expression. Still thinking in terms of text, moving simultaneously between word and image, one form I try is both: the sampler. A sampler is a piece of embroidery typically produced by girls and women as a demonstration of skill in needlework. It often includes the alphabet and figures to illustrate it, biblical quotes, decorative borders, or sometimes the name of the embroiderer and the date. But I’m interested in the subversive potential of this form. (Mercedes Eng, “Notes for a Subversive Sampler”)

Stephen Collis, To the Barricades

The first principle of The Barricades Project, to which To the Barricades belongs, is taken from Robert Duncan: “We begin to see that the intention of the boundless is manifest in the agony and restoration of pages or boundaries or walls” (“The Delirium of Meaning”).

A second principle can be found in Walter Benjamin: “This work has to develop to the highest degree the art of citing without quotation marks. Its theory is intimately related to that of montage” (The Arcades Project).

If there is a third principle, it may be contained in the following passage from Rancière:

Suitable political art would ensure, at one and the same time, the production of a double effect: the readability of a political signification and a sensible or perceptual shock caused, conversely, by the uncanny, by that which resists signification between opposites, between the readability of the message that threatens to destroy the sensible form of art and the radical uncanniness that threatens to destroy all political meaning.

(The Politics of Aesthetics)

To push through boundaries towards the boundless (which is tangled there) – to mix appropriation of found material with lyric expression to the point that the one becomes indistinguishable from the other – to practice a dialectic of “readable” political signification and uncanny shock – these are the pathways of this poetry. A lyric voice takes up procedures and citations because they are the world in which it finds itself embodied, a co-embodiment of the address “Dear Common” that someone calls out to anyone else there. “Lyric,” writes Thom Donovan, “relates the body of the poet to a poetics of collective affects” (“Lyric’s Potential,” Jacket2). So we try here, in a lyric space in which we must continue building resistance.

This volume is part of an ongoing long poem project that always seeks “plausible deniability” that it is in fact a long poem project. Everything I write is thus part of some inaccessible and inconceivable totality outside the work itself. Part of its fight is thus with itself, and with “culture” as such. The barricade made of language is both boundary and call for “beyondery” – an outside still to be practiced. But there’s that other boundary looming everywhere here too: how and when do we cross over from word to world, from text to action? Does the poem barricade us from a world of “doing things,” postponing action? Does it wall us up in the “merely cultural”? These poems, increasingly, have been written between actions in the streets. They hover there – a boundless boundary around the bound. The gaps and spaces between poems and pages and books are inhabited by “activism,” by a body amongst bodies in streets. Dear Common. Let’s speak our way into action, into each other’s arms, into new shared futures, into new speeches at new barricades thrown.

If this is “documentary poetry” – and it is certainly as much researched as it is lived – it is a documentary of social affects, past and present, of collective expressions of desire, of hope, of outrage, of solidarity, of defiance, of the endless call from the commons for “liberty or death.” It is a documentary of the spirit of resistance and revolution. The address of the insurgent impulse, to all potential insurgents, to all tomorrow’s insurgent parties. (Stephen Collis, “Notes and Acknowledgements”)

It’s difficult to begin to discuss Vancouver poet and critic Stephen Collis’ poetry collection To the Barricades (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2013) without first quoting at length from his “Notes and Acknowledgements,” placing this collection in a context larger than itself. Collis is the author of a number of books, including two previous poetry collections which form the first two sections to his ongoing “Barricades Project” – Anarchive (New Star, 2005) and The Commons (Talonbooks, 2008). Over the space of five trade poetry collections, Collis’ work explores a series of short-phrased stretches of sentence-stanzas in an ongoing project writing Vancouver specifically, Canada generally and social issues throughout.  In his “12 or 20 questions” interview (posted September 7, 2007), he talked about his work-in-progresss, “The Barricades Project,” and the subsequent volume of such, to be titled “The Red Album,” which appears to have since shifted into fiction, given that The Red Album is the title of his forthcoming novel with BookThug. As he writes in the interview:

I always work on books or series of books. The book is the main unit I think in terms of—my unit of composition. At the same time I do write short, occasional lyrics, and I publish a few of these in journals, but whenever I’ve tried to group them as a possible book it’s been entirely unsatisfactory. I just don’t work that way. I have to have the concept for the book to work towards, to think through. Writing in general usually begins with the making of collages—word assemblages that come out of the research I’m doing for the book in question. These often don’t make it into the book, but at some point the playing around with my research stops, and something else takes over, as I find my way into the language I want to use—or be used by.

There has long been a history of politically-engaged poetry out of Vancouver, something that, in comparison, seems lacking in much of the rest of the country, and something that has been given far less critical attention than it deserves. What is it about Vancouver that makes so many of their writers, especially language writers surrounding the past couple of decades of the Kootenay School of Writing, so engaged? One can point to such socially and politically-engaged poets such as Aaron Vidaver, Roger Farr, Maxine Gadd, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Jeff Derksen, Marie Annharte Baker, Reg Johanson, Peter Culley, Nancy Shaw and nikki reimer, among others. To the Barricades is a book that works to document protest and other civil action, including the “Paris Commune” or “Fourth French Revolution,” a working class revolution that ran from March to May, 1871. The collection contains critical poems of self-protection, poems working to protect human interest and interaction, constructed out of ready-made material, quotes that speak of action, such as the Fredric Jameson quote that opens the poem “RELUMINATIONS 1”: “Barricades involve a kind of bricolage, a provisional cobbling together of whatever bits and pieces come usefully to hand … this may also serve as a perceptive account of the poetic techniques of a Rimbaud, indeed of the revolutionary avant-garde in general.” In the second part of the poem “La Commune [1871],” he writes:

Revolution

is the search for happiness

we know history

repeats itself

thanks

to all the dead anarchists!

I make you a chain of flowers

a grave of roses

now let’s not lack audacity

in dealing with the banks

even in a democracy

we aren’t free to demonstrate    freely

things kept germinating

long after the event

it’s time we stop being

represented and start     being

the commune echoes

we’re still at the same point

[Stephen Collis reads in Ottawa to launch To the Barricades alongside Margaret Christakos on April 20, 2013, as part of the A B Series]

The Capilano Review 3.14: The George Stanley Issue

There's a phrase of T.S. Eliot's that has been in my mind for a long time. It's called “the intolerable struggle with words and meanings.” And I very recently realized that Eliot is wrong on two counts there. It's not intolerable, and it's not a struggle. It's attention, or attentivity to words and meanings and when you're writing expressively, say, or out of the unconscious, you're not involved with that. Now I'm beginning to think that when I go back to the original work it's going to be more conscious and more concerned with words and meanings than in the past. In the past my biggest strength has largely been spontaneous and... at least half of it has been spontaneous, from the unconscious. But I always have been interested in the choice of the right word. Sometimes the meaning is right but the sound is wrong. Or the sound is right but the meaning is wrong. That's what Eliot called “intolerable.” (“'This is the place': A Conversation with George Stanley,” by Brook Houglum & Jenny Penberthy)

With new editor Brook Houglum at the helm, Vancouver's The Capilano Review presents “The George Stanley Issue” as their spring 2011 release, #3.14, on the Vancouver poet George Stanley. San Francisco-born and involved in the San Francisco Renaissance under Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer and Robin Blaser before heading north to Vancouver, then Terrace and back to Vancouver, Stanley is the author of the poetry collections The Love Root (White Rabbit, 1958), Tete Rouge/Pony Express Riders (White Rabbit, 1963), Beyond Love (Open Space, 1968), You (New Star, 1974), The Stick (Talonbooks, 1974), Opening Day (Oolichan Books, 1983), Temporarily (Gorse, 1986), Gentle Northern Summer (New Star, 1995), At Andy's (New Star, 2000), A Tall Serious Girl: Selected Poems 1957-2000 (Qua, 2003), Seniors (Nomados, 2006) and Vancouver: A Poem (New Star, 2008) [see my review mentioning same here].

Snow moon stars twinkle

for George Stanley

on the outside, a

birthday cake, a

shadow, a squirrel

fried up in grease,

in the ninth line

the fifth circle,

circling useful branches

and a package or two of

chips,

in the news,

episodic, contemplating

chains of grace of

these particular

fragmentary evenings,

dreams, and chairs,

a thank you

for a random church,

the goats, and

drinking water,

a return to

first feeling, a

luster-streak

of stars. (Lisa Jarnot)

Part of the appeal of an issue such as this is in the continued realization of the disconnect, the chasms between regions, with much of the high regard for George Stanley and his work still caught up in Canadian regionalism, leaning west, a near-apathy up against the sheer number of writers who have wholeheartedly responded here to Stanley and his work, including Michael Barnholden, Ken Belford, George Bowering, Rub Budde, Steve Collis, Jen Currin, Beverly Dahlen, Lisa Jarnot, Reg Johanson, Kevin Killian, Joanne Kyger, Barry McKinnon, Jenny Penberthy, Stan Persky, Meredith Quartermain, Sharon Thesen, Michael Turner and plenty more.

Anyone who reads this blog regularly knows that I've long been partial to the literary festshrift, and consider the form to be an essential contribution to literature generally, something The Capilano Review has long been an active part of, featuring, over the years, issues on Sharon Thesen [see my review of such here], George Bowering and Robin Blaser, among others. Unlike the more formal essay series produced by Guernica Editions (another essential grouping of responses), the festschrift allows for more of a range of responses, from the critical to the creative and all between, from essays and interviews to small memoir pieces, poems and photographs. Featuring two interviews, numerous essays, appreciations and poems, the issue also includes a generous selection of recent poems by Stanley, from a work-in-progress entitled “After Desire,” which includes the title poem:

After Desire

After desire the springs of longing

dry up, beauty is almost unrecognizable,

astonished that you passed it by. The background

wants to come into sharper focus, by default,

but you know the background.

And football keeps us going too, politics, reports from the slave trade.

Always readying ourselves for a funeral—being asked

to real funerals just sweetens the pot—

some kind of game or other always in play.

It's Friday again, time to do laundry.

The world trying to come into sharper focus

has nothing to offer but the impersonal.

Fair enough, but keep the old identity

in your closet, to be trotted out for wear on holy days.

Even if you haven't read a single word by Vancouver poet George Stanley, this issue provides an opportunity for an entry point to his writing, an important connection between the San Francisco Renaissance of the 1950s to current and recent decades of Canadian writing in Prince George and Vancouver, and “Aboutism,” which he explains in his interview with Houglum and Penberthy:

BH: You were one of the founders of Aboutism—could you tell us about it? What were the tenents, the context? What are your thoughts on it now?

GS: Aboutism was an idea framed as if it were a poetic movement. The manifesto is from Ryan Knighton: “Theory guards us from error; we are for error.”

Aboutism was a reaction to language poetry, and language poetry quite clearly eliminated reference. I think what the language poets were trying to do was similar to what the post-impressionists did in painting. That is, to make a painting not out of the images of the world, portraits, and landscapes and all that, but to make a painting out of paint. So that's a lesson that one learns from Cézanne. So I think language poetry at a theoretical level, with a classic language poet like Clark Coolidge, was attempting to create an art form simply out of words abstracted from their signification. My sense of that immediately was “You can't do that.” It's not possible in language. In visual arts you can take shape and line and colour away from the world and make something new out of them that has nothing to do with any referential object. Abstraction. But you cannot separate a word from its signification. If you have the word “tiger” in a poem the image of a tiger will arise in your mind inevitably. It seems to me that even in the most austere language poets—like Deanna Ferguson or Clark Coolidge—there was always this sort of semantic haze around the poem of the meanings, of the significations that had been excluded but didn't go away.

Admittedly, one of the frustrations with Stanley's work recently has been how difficult it has been to see a copy of his selected poems, produced by a small American publisher; will a Canadian press take up the job of producing same, for those of us north of the border? At least his Vancouver publisher, New Star, has long kept to a commitment of keeping authors' books in print, so there are still books of Stanley's that remain available for Canadian bookstores. At two hundred pages, this is perhaps one of the strongest issues I've seen from TCR in some time, after a run of also-strong issues over the past couple of years, a worthy tribute to a still-working and still-relevant Vancouver writer. At the end of his piece “'Who Marks the Changes?': George Stanley at The End/The Beginning,” Reg Johanson writes:

If so much is changing so fast, if the soul has become privatized, to whom is the poet speaking? What is the world he or she can depend upon to be shared by, or recognizable to “the” audience? The Canada, Terrace, Vancouver, Prince George, San Francisco, or the justice, history, and economy that the poet knew has become a matter of conjecture. Its reality as a shared experience can be no longer assumed. The very idea of sharing can be no longer assumed. Following the trajectory of this style in later books, Stanley is beginning again, attempting to “mark the changes” at the scale of thought and perception. Stanley's work at the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century is an exemplary, if despairing, “experimental” account of the passing of one global order and the emergence of another. It is this “heart” in Stanley's work—vulnerable, confused, mourning, mistaking, starting over—that I respect. History, of course, did not end—writing and resistance and resistance-writing continue.