Mira Rosenthal, Territorial

 

begins in dirt, clumps of Queen Anne’s lace, bindweed unfurling in moons
            in the morning

to start somewhere to perform one’s certain act of failure

begins as still life with foliage & road

one man with a shovel, digging one measure-full of map, a clump resting heavy on
            his blade

one woman in a house up the grade laboring at a washbasin, her hands pinked raw,
            her mind worrying some idea east to west, passing it through every state her
            imagination has to offer

begins with her view out the window: blot of man in grass landscape

to throw one’s sorrow throw one’s lonely sorrow like a clod of dirt to the sky

begins with the sound of rustling, dried stalk against stalk in wind whipped up by
            the motion metal makes through space

& you, love, in the passenger seat with muddy boots & what’s native to your veins

The window rolled down, the hand making waves

& me admitting: I am that woman, I am that woman (“The Invention of an Interstate System”)

The second full-length collection by award-winning California poet and translator Mira Rosenthal, following The Local World (Kent OH: Kent State University Press, 2011), is Territorial (Pittsburgh PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022). Selected by Terrance Hayes for the Pitt Poetry Series, Territorial offers an assemblage of lyrics that unfurl and reveal across the subtle cadence of narrative lines to speak of the intricacies and minutae of anxiety, despair, resolve, and, as Valzhyna Mort offers as part of her back cover blurb: “The nuances of person & place [.]” Throughout the collection, the expansiveness of Rosenthal’s pared and rhythmic descriptions exist almost as a process of dismantling, stepping moment to moment in a pacing as clear and calm as glass, even across examinations and descriptions of anxieties around violence. Perhaps, too, the anxieties she describes is laid bare through such clear syntax, and I can only imagine that to hear such words spoken aloud might feel akin to a combination of speech and song, simultaneously revelatory and devastating. “No more defenses. I detect the human / beast,” she writes, to open the poem “Subway Theory,” “its astringent waft from the valley / of tracks, from the pushing back / & forth of air as red ticker-tape flare / doles out one measly letter at a time / in the dim ark where I wait, composing / my hypothesis.” There is an element of Rosenthal as a poet documenting the darkness from within, attempting a grounded clarity through a culture of reckless abandon, beauty and consequence. Whether through poems constructed through short or long lines, each poem is set as an extended thread that reveals itself, slowly, through patters and patterning; physically and rhythmically thick, as they sit on the page. “Bone, the bulb & socket of it,” she writes, to open the poem “Dislocation,” “how you cope, how you shift / the weight you carry. / Wicking sweat into cotton where it runs along the spine, descending / from your neck that strains against some phantom / purse on strap, on shoulder tensed / from what you’re used to lugging with you— / perhaps this book, or colored pencils, an apple / in case the run to anywhere / takes longer than expected. A pattern / grown out of life’s deviation.”

What I’ve been reading lately: Lydia Davis and The Paris Review, (and The Beatles: Get Back,

 

            And while you comply with this alien style, while you fit your own prose into it, you may also, positively, react against it, in your hours off, your away hours: it was while I was translating, with such pleasure, Proust’s very long and ingenuity-taxing sentences that I began, in contrary motion, to write the very shortest stories I could compose, sometimes consisting only of the title and a single line.
            Lydia Davis, “Twenty-One Pleasures of Translating (and a Silver Lining),” Essays Two

We had a couple of days in Picton visiting father-in-law and his wife over the weekend (driving straight there without stopping, driving straight home without stopping) for some holiday enjoyments, one of the rare few we’d planned that we hadn’t cancelled or postponed. Our young ladies played in the yard, went tobogganing and did their own gingerbread house crafts, among other activities. As part of the trip, I took a mound of books for potential reading, focusing on things that I wasn’t going through with the express purpose of working a review or other types of commentary, despite whatever random notes I might be sketching out. It would be good, I thought, to just sit and read. Christine, on her part, attended to her knitting.

The first volume I brought along was Lydia Davis’ latest, Essays Two (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021). I’m a huge admirer of the work of Lydia Davis, having gone through Can’t and Won’t (2014) [see my note on such here], Essays One (2019) and The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (2009), among others, much of which has sparked numerous different threads and direction in my own writing over the years. Just as Essays One focused on her pieces on writing and writers, Essays Two collects her various essays, lectures and talks on the process of translation, something that features heavily in her creative work. It is fascinating to hear her experiences attempting to explore languages she has either only a passing knowledge of, or simply no knowledge whatsoever, navigating an endless sequence of paths attempting to read, understand and translate a language, such as Norwegian, into English, deliberately without utilizing a language dictionary. She probably doesn’t know of Hugh Thomas’ ongoing project of translating poems into English from languages he doesn’t know, including Norwegian (I should certainly mention this chapbook, for example). She had me thinking in a number of directions, including, through attempting to translate a relative’s two hundred year old English prose memoir into a contemporary narrative poem, about the notion of the line break. It reminded me of Dennis Cooley’s classic essay on the line break, collected in The Vernacular Muse (Turnstone Press, 1987), an essay, and a collection, I can’t recommend highly enough. Through this piece, as well as with others, it is interesting to hear Davis speak of her uncertainty with language and form, attempting to feel her way through a puzzle to the other end, without any sense of what the final form might look like. As she offers as part of her explorations of the line break:

            Or I could take Ashbery’s answer as, really, the best an only answer, and here is how it might work: you would simply have to keep attempting your own line breaks, trusting your instincts and then listening again to what you had done, examining your line breaks, reexamining them. You would also, when you wer not writing your own poems, study the line breaks of other poets, especially poets you unquestionably admired. You would then return to examine your own, and in that way inculate in yourself a feel for line breaks, until you could confidently, without worrying, break the line “wherever it felt right.”

I took a lot of notes (including some thoughts in prose of my own, including scratchings toward a potential essay or two, and some possible fiction), but couldn’t bring myself to shape up those notes into a review, as though simply wishing to retain the experience of reading and absorbing the material. I suspect I’ll do the same here, despite Davis being one of my favourite prose writers. Sometimes it’s a matter of allowing the experience of reading to prompt my own writing and thinking, not wishing to be distracted or sidetracked through composing a review. I’ve had a similar experience earlier this year when attempting a review of Gail Scott’s Permanent Revolution: Essays (Book*hug, 2021). There are certain books that render themselves slippery when it comes to commentary, prompting me to, instead, simply prefer to lose myself in the reading and thinking. It is entirely for this reason, as well, that I never did do proper write-ups for Joshua Beckman’s paired 2018 Wave Books essay titles, despite the wealth of notes I made when working through those collections.

The first thing I always read in a new issue of The Paris Review is the interviews. Really, a good interview can be revelatory, allowing a point-of-entry for a writer with whom I’d little to no prior knowledge. Even if I never get around to reading that particular writer, there are elements that one can always pick to add to one’s own thinking around process, and how writing and books are potentially made. My mother-in-law gifted me a subscription last year for Christmas (I hope she renews), so I’ve been able to see a regular run of issues for a while now, all without leaving the house. I had begun to pick up the occasional issue prior to this, which I think had been noticed by either Christine or her mother during one of our cottage-jaunts, so perhaps that where the thought originated. I’d pick up one every year or so, depending on who was being interviewed within. The interview with Doris Lessing was deeply satisfying, for example, and I enjoyed the interview with Robert Haas far more than I’d expected, especially at his admission that even he considers that his wife, Brenda Hillman, is a more interesting poet than he is (which is actually where my own preference sits, also: sorry, Bob).

The current issue of The Paris Review is #238 (Winter 2021), and includes interviews with American fiction writer Gary Indiana and American non-fiction writer Annette Gordon-Reed. I’d heard of the first, but not the second at all. It is impossible, after all, to even hear the name Gary Indiana without being reminded of a very young Ronnie Howard singing the song named for the geography, as part of The Music Man (1962). It was fascinating reading through Indiana’s process of novel-building, and the particular political and cultural era he wrote through the midst of, the 1970s of Los Angeles, and the beginnings of the AIDS crisis. I’m aware of some of the writers and writings from this period, particularly the New Narrative writers, but I get the sense that Indiana was working a more mainstream direction in his fiction, which is how I hadn’t encountered it as of yet.

The real revelation was the interview with Annette Gordon-Reed. Apparently she was the researcher and writer who verified the long-held rumour that American President Thomas Jefferson had fathered children with a woman he owned. As the introduction to the interview begins:

Annette Gordon-Reed will always be most famous for having confirmed, beyond a reasonable doubt, the centuries-old rumors about Thomas Jefferson having had multiple children with a mixed-race woman named Sally Hemings, whom he owned. In 1997, armed with only the analog tools of traditional historiography, she made a resounding case for the relationship in Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy. The book touched off a fierce debate followed a year later by the DNA testing of male descendants in Jefferson’s family, the results of which proved her theories.

It seems stunning to me, at least from this perspective of geographic and cultural distance, that this part of Jefferson’s history had only been proven so recently, as I’d long presumed it was simply known, and widely-so. It speaks, yet again, to the importance of history as being a moving target, and one that requires ongoing updates, as new information is revealed, or even better understood. Gordon-Reed, herself, sounds absolutely fascinating, as someone deeply engaged and curious, seeking out answers to questions that had either been deliberately buried, or ones that other historians simply hadn’t thought to pose. She sounds, in all honestly, utterly brilliant.

Other than that, I haven’t dipped into much of the issue, although I was intrigued by the poem “Strange as the Rules / of Grammar,” by Terrance Hayes, a poem that ends:

The scar is so old others must tell you
how it was made

It doesn’t count as reading, but a week or two back, I spent a few nights watching that new Beatles documentary, the eight hours of watching them noodle around to create the Let It Be album, culminating in that 1969 rooftop performance—their first public performance in three years, and their final public performance as well. I saw some on social media complaining about the documentary, not able to get through that first hour, citing the level of complaining and bickering (which is fair; that first hour or two has some rough spots in it). But I found it utterly fascinating in the same way I used to enjoy Inside the Actors’ Studio: conversations on and around process, building and creation, which is why I even bring it up in the context of this assemblage of reading notes. How does anything get made? Even for the Beatles, which were, at that moment, the biggest band in the world, sitting through uncomfortable stretches and bickering and nonsense and the pressure of deadlines. Christine had no interest in the series at all (she also ignored the George Harrison doc, which I had to watch after she’d gone to bed, also, as well as a Brian Eno doc I caught last year). She offered that part of the appeal for such a documentary is having to be actually invested in these particular musicians and their music, which is fair enough. I suppose she was just never into the Beatles, whereas I spent much of my teen years attentive to same, including and up to 1987, celebrated in certain media as the “second summer of love,” pushing the 20^th anniversary of Sgt. Pepper’s, and other elements of the 1960s. I think I watched Yellow Submarine 25-plus times during that period. My ex-wife even had her 1960s-era Beatles 45s, left over from elder brothers. And every Sunday morning, an hour long radio program I caught that featured music by the Beatles. So I suppose I was the right audience for this thing. The documentary was fascinating in the way songs emerged, and the back-and-forth between the band, both individually and as a group, attempting to shape and hammer whatever came into their heads into workable songs, some of which were abandoned, and others reshaped into long-familiar classics.

It is odd, to me at least, the slight backlash the documentary has prompted, articles suggesting “Its not their fault we thought them the greatest rock band in the world.” An article in The Washington Post was titled “The Beatles are overrated. That’s our fault, not theirs.” One has to think of context, certainly. Weren’t they the perfect storm of talent, industry, timing, everything? Brian Epstein wouldn’t let them tour the US until a Number One single on American charts, whereas The Animals just went over (where are they now?), or the sheer onslaught of songs writ and sold by Paul/John, which I’m sure allowed them enough financial comfort to hang about and write their own material without requiring side-gigs. I mean, context is everything, isn’t it? It seems silly as a response, and a complete misunderstanding of who they were within that particular period, and what they were actually accomplishing. “We don’t like them now because culture has progressed further”? It has been fifty years, after all. I mean, really.

 

Diana Khoi Nguyen, Ghost Of

2.

 

If one has no brother, then one used to have a brother.

 

There is, you see, no shortage of gain and loss.

 

Let’s admit without embellishment what we do with each other. When the daughter begins to walk, it is apparent that she ambles pigeon-toed. A doctor tells her alarmed parents that no surgery is needed, just some rollerskating. Each day after work, the father helps his daughter stay upright on her skates.

 

If you have a father, then you also have a son.

 

A child has difficulty weaning from nursing bottle to glass of milk. Concise in her expression of impatience, the mother pours a gallon of milk over the girl’s head.

 

A tiger came across a donkey and having never seen a donkey before, mistook it for a god.

 

After everyone has gone to bed, an eldest child hoists her younger brother over her shoulders, then a sheet over his shoulders, and they sway as one into the middle sister’s room.

 

Who is weak and who is weaker and what does relativity have to do with it? (“Ghost Of”)

 

Winner of the Omnidawn Open Prize, as selected by Terrance Hayes, is Denver poet and multimedia artist Diana Khoi Nguyen’s remarkable debut, Ghost Of (Richmond CA: Omnidawn, 2018), a book that, as the press release states, “elegizes a brother lost via suicide, is a mourning song for the idea of family, a family haunted by ghosts of war, trauma, and history.” The collection moves back and forth between some very sharp lyrics to poems carved out of lyric via erasure, attempting to fill the absences her brother left, as Nguyen discusses as part of a brief interview conducted by Gillian Olivia Blythe Hamel (included with the press release):

 

In order to talk about the visual-text cutout poems, I need to provide some background context. My brother took his own life in 2014, and two years prior, calmly sliced himself out of the family portraits hanging around the house; I say calmly because he slipped these portraits back into place—in the frames and on the walls—after excising himself. These altered family portraits continue to hang on the same walls today. Every time I visit my parents, I’m visually confronted with my brother’s physical and emotional excision from the family; though I’ll never forget it, I’m forced to confront his actions, our family history, my family’s loss, and my grief.

 

For a long time I didn’t know how to deal with his death and its aftermath—all that it called forth and removed. The cutout portraits on the wall grew in power and significance each time I beheld them, and at times, I felt crippled by their intensity. On the 2^nd anniversary of his death, I sat at my computer, staring at these portraits on my computer screen (I had scanned them for archival purposes), and began to write inside the white space of the portraits, to “fill in” the void that my brother had cut out. What began as a hopeful experiment in self-therapy quickly became a tidal wave that swept me up into the floodwaters of trauma, history (individual, familial, and cultural), and grief, among other things. I found myself reaching out, speaking to my brother (his ghost, his void, the memory of him, etc.) by writing in and around these cutouts, and I couldn’t stop. The deluge was all-consuming.

 

As part of this structure, the collection includes poem/sections titled “Triptych,” that include a photo her brother excised himself from, a lyric composed in the shape of that absence, and a photo-sized prose-lyric, composed to include that original brother-shaped silence. The effect is both powerful and subtle, pushing and exploring the effects that the absence, both as cut out of photos and through his death, couldn’t help but have. As the poem “Family Ties” writes: “The nights before the monks came / to usher my brother out of the realm of the living, / we gathered on the same bed, sifting through photos / and stories of him. / At the funeral, his hand was warm / where my mother would not let go [.]” Nguyen’s Ghost Of is an incredible exploratory series of lyrics, meditations and visuals on family, memory, loss and being, managing to be breathtaking, heartbreaking and even playful, attempting to write both the loss and the absence, physically carved out of an into the page. And the ghosts in this collection are plenty, as are the dislocations: from that of the author’s late brother, to the ghosts that come from her family’s emigration from Saigon to California. As contest judge Hayes writes as part of his introduction to the collection: “Poetry is found in the gaps, silences and ruptures of history. Sometimes it is as if these poems address the reflection of a ghost in the mirror. Other times the poems here look off to a father’s rooftop in Saigon. Or they look deeply into the interiors of family, a brother’s silhouette in the doorway.”