Interviews•

Ben Lerner •

Creative •

Lydia Davis – Flaubert and Industry •
Geoffrey G. O’Brien – Three Poems •
Josh Corey – Two Poems •
Nicola Gardini (trans. Jonathan Galassi) – Cenere (Ashes) •
Vidyan Ravinthiran – Two Poems •

Essays •

Rhys Williams – The Animal Imperfect: More, Wells & Miéville •
Richard Cole – Agathe Saint of Sleep •

Ben Lerner’s work reads something like a poetic analogue to the uncertainty principle: meaning can never be located locally, without a concurrent loss of overall sense. Conversely, any attempt to create an overarching methodological schema fails because it is in precisely those concentrated nodes of local significance that all meaning resides. The result is a poetry that seems polyphonic, even as the voice empties itself of affect; which implies some absent and greater narrative unity, yet is dependent on that unity never being found. This idiom has developed over three books of poetry (The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw, and Mean Free Path), and he has won “Preis der Stadt Münster für internationale Poesie” and been shortlisted for the National Book Award as a result. His first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, found itself on numerous end of year lists, and captures, according to James Wood, “the drift of thought, the unmomentous passage of undramatic life.” It begins to clear up some of the ambiguities of his elusive aesthetics, and reads as a strange meditation on modern restlessness. We conducted this interview by email over late January and early February, and discussed negative space, the use of the subject “I”, and the temporality of narrative.

Ed Sugden: Reviews of Leaving the Atocha Station have focused on various forms of mediation that you explore in the work – poetic, medicinal, linguistic, cultural – and how they impact on the narrative. To start with, I’d like to change direction somewhat and focus on your use of the first person. What sort of challenges did this pose when creating a “mediated” narrative? Was it difficult to write with a stable subject “I”? More generally, how did it feel to write with a continuous “voice”, especially when your poetry is known for its tonal variations?

Ben Lerner: I’m not sure the subject is very stable. One thing I like about first person retrospective narratives—and this is sometimes true of poems and not just novels—is the tension between the narrated actions and the action of the narrative, between the I within the story and the I telling it, how a book can dramatize a disconnect or sudden identity between the two I’s, their persistence or change over time. I know what you mean when you say the voice is continuous, but one could also say there is a kind of foundational contradiction in the novel between Adam Gordon’s anxiety about whether he has any serious literary investments and the heavy literary investments of the prose itself, such as it is. To give just one example of how the novel evokes this very basic but to me endlessly fascinating facet of narrative: at the poetry reading early in the book Adam Gordon reads a poem that is made entirely out of language from the novel, a little collage. But Adam Gordon couldn’t have had access to that language, as the novel was at that point unwritten. You could say this is a way of dramatizing through an impossible continuity—a collapsing of the time of narration with the time narrated—the fact that Adam Gordon’s “I” is discontinuous, both subject and object of the narrative.

I think a voice is its tonal variations. A truly monotonic voice isn’t a voice in the sense we usually mean that, isn’t a marker of personality. (Which means a very flat affect can be an interesting poetic instrument, especially if you’re attempting to dramatize depersonalization; I’ve been interested in this lately.) I think my poems—say in Mean Free Path—are at their most personal when there is simultaneously a sense of the first-person as a node in a system (grammatical, economic, etc) and as a medium of lived experience. I am writing out of my experience most directly when I am writing about my difference from myself in time, which means what’s authentic about my voice has to be discontinuity as much as continuity, right?

ES: I guess the obvious question to ask then is, if you are writing “about my distance from myself in time”, is there a temporal point that you privilege when it comes to conceiving of authorial subjecthood? – a sort of still point of the turning world that grants value to narrative, that provides definition to that distance, and, if so, “when” (rather than “where”) would you locate it, and what effects does it have? How does it manifest itself in your poetry and prose? I guess I’m basically asking you to extrapolate on the quote from Atocha that reads: “far more important to me than any plot or conventional sense was the sheer directionality I felt while reading prose, the texture of time as it passed, life’s white machine.”

BL: I suppose the moment the novel privileges as capturing this paradox of identity in difference is the moment of an encounter with a work of art. I don’t have any general theory of authorial subjecthood (that I know of), but I agree with Adam Gordon’s sense of how a certain kind of poem can allow you to experience your experience in real time. I think that bears on your question about the effects of a certain calibration of narrative distances. Maybe I should say that “Life’s white machine,” Gordon’s phrase for the rhythm of mundane life, the texture of time as it passes, etc., is very close to Hart Crane’s “white machine of life,” but it’s also a line from a collaboration between the poets Geoffrey G. O’Brien and Jeff Clark, a line in turn quoted by Ashbery as an epigraph to one of his own poems. I think Ashbery is one of the greatest artists of “life’s white machine,” of intensifying our experience of time, allowing us to experience that medium immediately, and Adam Gordon and I are in agreement about what it’s like to read him:

The best Ashbery poems, I thought, although not in these words, describe what it’s like to read an Ashbery poem; his poems refer to how their reference evanesces. And when you read about your reading in the time of your reading, mediacy is experienced immediately. It is as though the actual Ashbery poem were concealed from you, written on the other side of a mirrored surface, and you saw only the reflection of your reading. But by reflecting your reading, Ashbery’s poems allow you to attend to your attention, to experience your experience, thereby enabling a strange kind of presence.

That “strange kind of presence” is the effect I think the passage you quote is describing, anticipating–but it’s not the presence of the author that’s privileged, but rather the presence of the reader.

ES: I’m intrigued by this idea of a poem existing “on the other side of a mirrored surface”, within a sort of unstated, yet absolutely vital, negative aesthetic space. When I read your poetry I’m often struck by the sense that the lines feel as though they are a refraction of some greater, yet invisible and half-conceived, reality, which, if understood, might provide a mooring for conceiving of narrative unity. In a lot of poetry of the past 50 or so years, these type of “off the page” spaces seem to have gained importance – whether in the great blank spaces of The Maximus Poems or the erasures of Ronald Johnson’s Radi Os or Jen Bervin’s Nets. How do you conceive, if at all, of these negative aesthetic spaces, and what function do they have in your work? More generally, does this discussion link with Adam Gordon’s almost obsessive fixation with “presence” and “absence”?

BL: Yes, I think it is linked. One way to conceive of those negative spaces—a way of thinking that’s everywhere in the novel and has been increasingly important to my poetry—is in terms of the actual and the virtual. I take that binary from Allen Grossman (and from Grossman’s student, Michael Clune), who in a brilliant and bizarre essay on Hart Crane, talked about “virtual poetry”—basically, the abstract potentiality of the medium, the originary poetic impulse that is necessarily betrayed by any actual, empirical poem. For Grossman, there is something “bitter” about poetic logic, because the poem arises from the desire to get beyond the world of representation but necessarily depends on the materials of that world. In The Long Schoolroom he writes:

[T]he manifest world (the only one there is) is subject to the logic of representation because it comes to mind only as representation And representation, our only access to the world, reproduces its hierachical and exclusionary structures as social formations. The poem is the site on which originality is expressed as the attempt to discover alternative structures of intelligibility that do the work of representation in another way. (11)

The poet always fails in this attempt because the stuff of poetry, language, invariably replicates the structures it aspires to replace; it turns out you can’t do the work another way.

But I think poets can develop a range of techniques for defeating mere actuality, for keeping in touch, albeit negatively, with the abstract possibilities of the medium. This is in part what Adam Gordon is saying about Ashbery: the poem never becomes merely real, it never attempts to force the impossible identification of the actual and the virtual in a way that leads to bitterness, but rather manages to catalyze an experience of presence by transforming itself into a kind of mirrored surface that lets the reader attend to her own attention as she reads. You mention The Maximus Poems, and certainly white space is a—maybe the—foundational poetic strategy for figuring what can only be represented negatively, but I might also mention the opening of “The Kingfishers.” You know that famous first line:

What does not change / is the will to change

But I’m not really sure if this is a line of poetry or two lines or zero, that is, is it actually one line of verse or is it two lines of verse presented as citation.

The slash exists in Pound; Olson is copying it from the Pisan Cantos (“That maggots shd/eat the dead Bullock”), and Pound is copying it, according to Guy Davenport, from John Adam’s letters, where such abbreviations were common. So the virgule itself is being quoted, troping the tradition, so to speak. Olson, in “Projective Verse,” describes the slash “as a pause so light it hardly separates the words,” as a mechanical advantage the typewriter offers for a poet who wants something softer than a comma, and so makes the virgule as much about a new mechanical compositional present as it is about the evocation of an archival past. (Olson’s selecting and foregrounding of the virgule as link with Poundian experiment seems particularly significant in this context because it’s a way of evoking Pound’s formal innovation in a manner that simultaneously signifies a refusal of that poet’s disastrous attempt to actualize his poetics as politics.) Anyway, there’s a lot more to say here, but what interests me about the virgule in relation to your question is that—at the beginning of postwar American poetry, at its threshold—we have a virtualized line break. It looks more like the citation of a poem from elsewhere, a critic quoting a poem instead of the primary source itself, and in that sense it’s off the page even when it’s on it.

ES: So you’re basically trying to create some sort of grammar of absence, using a set of pre-extant linguistic tools to formulate structures that are important precisely because they cannot exist?

BL: Yes, in the sense that you’re trying to formulate what can’t be formulated without being betrayed, so you develop tactics for defeating or deferring actuality so that you retain a glimmer of what the poem cannot contain. My way of talking here is very roughly analogous, as suggested by my use of the word “defeating,” to how Michael Fried (whose most recent book, by the way, is dedicated to Grossman) conceives of works of visual art defeating their objecthood, or, at a specific moment of French painting, defeating theatricality through the depiction of figures engaged in scenes of absorption. Don’t get me wrong, I’m cobbling together these different ideas in order to construct a fiction—all of this is a fiction the poem and I advance about the poem, an enabling fiction that allows me to position the poem in the gap between the actual and the virtual. It’s a way of talking that allows you to respond to a sense of the ultimate failure of all empirical poems without giving up or going crazy, because it allows you to make the formal dramatization of the poem’s limitations a figure for something beyond them.

A key word for me in “Mean Free Path”—a book where lines are often out of order or belong to several possible orders simultaneously—is “virga,” which is visible precipitation streaking from a cloud that evaporates before it hits the ground. To quote from one stanza where the term appears:

….how the eye moves constantly
To keep light from the object falling
Gently on a little clearing. They call this
Like rain that never reaches ground
Reading, like birds that lure predators away
Virga, or the failure of the gaze to reach
By faking injury, like flares that bend
Across the lake in total dark
Missiles from their path

Here the line “like rain that never reaches ground” can connect with “light from the object falling,” or describe “reading,” or itself seem to evaporate before the possibility of “They call this /// Virga” is discovered in the sixth line. I think the multiplicity of orders in that book was my way of defeating mere actuality. Many people have said that reading Mean Free Path makes them feel there was some linear ur-poem I then cut up and rearranged to form the book, and that they intuit—without ever quite being able to piece it back together—the ghostly presence of that original. As a matter of fact, there was no original, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a present absence, and I like to think of that as another way the poem avoids becoming merely real and keeps in contact with a virtual possibility, with some space beyond the page. Anyway, virga and virgule both come to us from the same Latin term for little rod, the mark for verse that is not yet or no longer or not merely actual, a rainfall that never quite closes the gap between heaven and earth, phenomena whose failure to become or remain fully real allows them to figure something beyond the phenomenal.

from Flaubert’s Rants

How nature laughs at us!
And what an impassive ball is danced by the trees, the grass, and the waves!

The bell of the steamship from Le Havre rings so furiously I have to stop working!

What a raucous thing a machine is!
What a racket industry makes in the world!
How many foolish professions are born of it!
What a lot of stupidity comes from it!
Humanity is turning into an animal!

To make a single pin requires five or six different specialists!

What can you expect from the people of Manchester, who spend their life making pins?

Mark

There was nothing but days. Seven
Box stores set along the broken way
Filled with generation. And the people
Came to each as the other six days
Of being amazed. At first thirty or so,
Not enough to survive in
Or anything else. Enough to run

The first person through a face
Surrounded and brought comparison.
A month cut and paved with squares
So Sundays could occur, free to keep
If you like such things. The main point
To be coming home or leaving it
Led on by a promise of signage

Into fluorescence and particle board,
Coated wire, sugar, smart and self-
Circulating waters, heated cups,
Mountain men in a world without
Mountains. Hidden hours broken
Toward then against but little in the way
Of raw materials. Convenient the trap-beds,

Convenient the house shakes if
The truck is full. Privately they
Brought the head to be heard but it
Counts for nothing while alive. Instead
No voice said here are companies,
Cut flash, instruments designed
To produce inviting distances; we won’t

Reject you, you’ll be heard both
Coming and going, sit down and eat,
Come apart and gather in, ask what is
Tolerable, a house the purse far time
Passes. They said it asleep in tombs,
Both sorry and pleased items went
With them to the next domain

But one. And they came to fall,
The days, like gifts without sense. Within
There was nothing but deaf coast, heads
On strings, bills for hands, a house
They were commanded to dream
Was missing nothing but more.
And they were good at substituting

Surnames for possessions, night for day
Cycling past with its messenger bag,
All things published or possessed
In a kind of recirculation seen by any
Everyone. And since the face is made
Of little warm circuits, half-real
Charities friends rely upon, sleep

Now flows like electrical current.
So mechanical the calm about perishing
You’d think an order had been given
To assume the city was always there
In silent commute, and they took to the maze,
Rotating through assaulted exchange
What they could say any of them would.

Christopher Smart

1

The ecstatic can visit even in prison
And prison isn’t limited. One is
Sent mostly against one’s will
To a less than ideal place, in the ring
Structures of the body electrical
Impulses play about internally,
Uncaring there isn’t conservation
Of mental matter. For every choice
Another that could go missing,
Never to be thought of. I’m talking about
How economically night descends,
How rapidly the opportunity to praise
Becomes a stilling in inventory. And
How easily a stance breaks, why
Among the captures made at night
You mistake stray sounds for small feet.
Nothing but mistakes to make,
Themselves taken for investments
Proceeding from decades or more
Of experience with trackable motion
In the form of a not yet elegy
Padding about the house. Though innate
Your grammar suffers where it obeys
The senses, which are not the final
World on the matter and seem to fail
In a time outside space. Maybe it’s always
When, not if, as the term begins
Ticking, looking for affinities,
Cat being one whereby the world is
Forgotten among acrid intuitions.
It was a garden judgment, that she’d live

2

A certain amount without ceasing
Then go stopped glass
While nothing else did, so there is
The problem of pertinence, of making
Sure a name is marriage comedy
While also making certain ritual
Is no longer the pertinent question.
Say she let you be for her, though few
Were admitted to the commission
Of her sound. Say it was enough
To constitute a vertical hymn
Everybody could almost agree
Hovers over the smallest being,
Tailored and active, sensible
Through the unreal jacks of the face.
Stare long enough and you can see
The arbitrary relation between
Love and its object, the dais of daisy
Spinning within benevolence.
The two have a strong relationship,
They cry out at each other as in
The history of two orphans,
A musical crash that allows one to
Stay all summer in a new place.
Immediately you feel you have it
You’re thinking again of the future,
The moment’s lost its pentothal
And with it electricity has one fewer
Home. Water under flowing glass,
If you want to live again
Put the prefix where the suffix goes.

Second Intensity

I stood in Pound’s fake spring 100 years
Later, pessimistic the continuous
Renovations are really for us,
Mistaking thinking this for joining

A tradition of finding each other
Through laments we’re unavailable,
Bad light on the chambered face
Anonymous as a pomegranate.

Translation: I took the underground
Ferry to the past while waiting
For a train, pretended I could count
Mosaic, tally the work they had done

In navy and cream tiles for the three of us
Then five ranged along the platform
Never satisfied with being
A general petal of our privacy.

Observation: it’s embarrassing
Still to be using this system, antiquated
As reading a newspaper or using
The semicolon, looking into a face

Rather than at it; and the oldest thing,
Talking silently to the other strangers,
Which I’ve been doing seven minutes
Now into a lack of encouragement.

Anyway: in a can’t-win world
I hear you out against dull roar
As the minimum of sustenance
Though you aren’t exactly talking

But somehow enough while seeming not
To be anywhere close. We met once
Or was it every time, hard to say
When the crowd closed its eye, the door

Opened onto stations slick
With succeeding. You grew accustomed
To light below ground, somewhere between
Tradition and addiction as it makes you

Legitimate again. It’s like the last time
Never ended and you forgot
To be more than looped postures,
Temporary lights in their yellow baskets

That when you look at them are the eyes
Anything is, the eyes we bring
To spring’s green stanchions unaware
They’re become or becoming

Part. And forgive me for adding you
When you’re just the faintest example
Of empire stress at the other end
Of the poem, with the F due in two minutes

While you lean against the freshly painted
Faith it will come, water in the tracks
Patient as a rat. There are so many
Of you, that’s what right now means,

Chances lost before their apprehension
Yet all the same continuing.
You get the feeling your being at risk
Doesn’t require a definite event,

Could close back down into routine
Like being bathed and carried once was.
Now you’ve gone from remembering
Not having to ask for that care

To walking down worn out steps
With a soft dip in their middle
Without much of a protest.
You shouldn’t be able to

Be here where everything is out of place
And even variety looks typical
But there is no making things
Happen faster. It’s the opposite

Of dreaming except that objects
Are alive and episodic, connected
By comforting blurs. And just the two
Of us now, alone with the signs for scar

Repair and jobs on the force. I watched you
Ignore them all at once, do it
Like a veteran, shaking without moving,
Then forgot myself in the same way.

Words Without Acts

Of the mind.

Of the mind’s Parliament.

Of the mind’s Parliament sans its Lords.

Of the mind’s Parliament sans its Lords in plenipotentiary session.

Of the mind’s Parliament sans its Lords in plenipotentiary session hereby

resolving.

Of the mind’s Parliament sans its Lords in plenipotentiary session hereby

resolving an act.

Of the loins.

Of the loins’ machine in residence.

Of the loins’ machine in residence above the Holy Father.

Of the loins’ machine in residence above the Holy Father in his sanctum.

Of the loins’ machine in residence above the Holy Father in his sanctum of

personal injury.

Of the loins’ machine in residence above the Holy Father in his sanctum of

personal injury distraught under a blade.

Of the loins’ machine in residence above the Holy Father in his sanctum of

personal injury distraught under a blade in prevention.

Of a chrysalis.

Of a chrysalis in the crotch.

Of a chrysalis in the crotch of a solitary elm.

Of a chrysalis in the crotch of a solitary elm before a bent dancer.

Of a chrysalis in the crotch of a solitary elm before a bent dancer spreading her

hair.

Of a chrysalis in the crotch of a solitary elm before a bent dancer spreading her

hair at the edge of a goblin glade.

Of a chrysalis in the crotch of a solitary elm before a bent dancer spreading her

hair at the edge of a goblin glade lit from within.

Of a chrysalis in the crotch of a solitary elm before a bent dancer spreading her

hair at the edge of a goblin glade lit from within the fallen fiery heart.

Of the man.

Of the man dealt a hand.

Of the man dealt a hand in the belly.

Of the man dealt a hand in the belly of a blowing between teeth.

Of the man dealt a hand in the belly of a blowing between teeth of the burn-

clad hills.

Of the man dealt a hand in the belly of a blowing between teeth of the burn-

clad hills beneath the roseate cervical moon.

Of the man dealt a hand in the belly of a blowing between teeth of the burn-

clad hills beneath the roseate cervical moon at the center of a view.

Of the man dealt a hand in the belly of a blowing between teeth of the burn-

clad hills beneath the roseate cervical moon at the center of a view perspectless and free.

Of the man dealt a hand in the belly of a blowing between teeth of the burn-

clad hills beneath the roseate cervical moon at the center of a view perspectless and free from the fear of a hereafter.

❧

drift

a  ~              tethered

moored

from the world-historical

sofa

driven       Miltonic stickpin       through our life’s

crust

tip in Satan’s heart     the shaft miraging     Singapore Berlin Mombasa

and the angels on top, a

sprinkling

spiritual affect impales me     bipedal standee     throne for blood be seated

spongy mass buildup     nuts to you

lymphing Magellanic clouds

so far

so goodnight           fair lyricism

Carnival gets cancelled
and the steam builds

❧

Pretend to it, chief sufferer. Magistrate marked by systematicity. Your specific gravity’s been squelched.

All this energy comes to rest in a body Bobby Sands hurtled back and forth between walls.

Osmosis passes through bone, bathed in the fire of labor. Blaze of bright hair round the conditions of its production. As means of subsistence for individual consumption.

What’s to eat. Part and parcel of a compleat organism. Hoist meat! As it were, made alive.

❧

To prefer the bruised fruit. Apple of sex, not a peach.

Parting lips in a landscape. To coordinate by the kiss, all roads leading to it. Dirt dampened on its way clearly to mud.

Nothing replaces heighth of a parapeted principle. Conditions of cellular production without a view.

“Stardust.” Animal filament forms between our bodies. Perfecting the work or the life frets a string.

Gauze is a poor concealer. Spinnerets blind my eye to markets. The point is to apprehend the world: achoo! You’re under arrest.

On your toes the red-rimmed inclines toward purple. Your face masking a future, eyes fixed on the back of your favorite head. Light uninterrupted by curvature bears the apple away.

A solar principle surrounded by the night it blinds. The new twenties threaded through with colorful overproduction. Who can stop the Chinese orbiter?

Who would stop. Catch rain in a rusty oil barrel, see depreciated dollars at work. Oxidation happens.

“Crazy.” In your torn dress you follow the trail of ruby slippers. Bowery boudoir under pale glass slivers. Torn couch in the middle of the street.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it. The information is arranged in blue and green plastic bins, later to be hauled away. Stockroom fucking, mean what you say.

Mean what you say, there’s enough for everyone.

Fruited skin of harvest-time wrapped in hot foil—that’s desire. Archaic agricultural methods accumulate beards of virtue. Plain as your nose.

Slender’s the least of her.

Hunger’s attractive package if your dream were mine. The best song in the world! The last of Ithaca’s only lonely, moated by what we know. A blow.

❧

Of the calisthenic withering of fat fearful flanks.

Of the pose assumed by Hindenburg at the instance of a spark.

General Blimp.

I pursue my own interests with ruthless and calculated disregard for the interests of others.

This confession likewise.

But a contract?

Blesséd bolt. Hook and eye. The boys come to carry it, all, away.

THE NOVEL

No more poems, only novels. Novels are easy: you write one sentence and then a second sentence.

For example: The roadkill’s black feathers fluttered a bit in the wind. Perhaps it wasn’t dead yet.

The history of cultural overproduction is long and tangled but boils down to this: Mr. Edgar Leeming woke on the last morning of his life and got up and went out for coffee. He died later that same day.

Or: I began writing this on my birthday. I intend to stop writing it on the same day.

The girl you use for sex has a question. She holds her hand high in the air like a pale fringed flag.

If I’m a character in your novel what are the benefits? Will I be prettier, will it make you rich?

Her name’s Sera. I take a long swallow of water while thinking about the question.

Shall I say nothing, an abstraction in the path of the projector’s scintillant beam? The other persons are starting to fidget.

Just now in Chicago it’s gray, spitting a little rain. The fans in the stands sing “America the Beautiful,” “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and “Take Me Out to the Ballgame”; it is ascending or descending, it’s a bird tangled in our Ordnung.

Everyone wanders around dazed and hopeful in the disaster’s wake. Sera paints her fingernails black while I continue to say nothing to the room at large.

You were never real, I tell them at last. I needed you to be real to complete my own disappearance.

I can tell my choice of words puzzles some. I sit down.

Later in a lawn chair on the building’s roof Sera straddles me in her bikini top. She leans down so that her hair brushes my bare chest and whispers insinuations of death.

Will be, poor Will, will be. Sweet nothing of no name.

These sentences. They wrap themselves around me like Sera, like the serpent round the trunk of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil (we must always use its full name), like the endlessly ramifying syntax of Milton who made English dance in Latin drag, making him the greatest novelist.

What we want most is to be heard, I tell the schoolroom, Sera’s cardigan serious as her spectacles. We need to believe in a bottom to every well.

There’s a bustle in my hedgerow and I’m alarmed now, I’m adding. Speak for yourself says Sera, walking out of the empty room.

Sentences imply a past, even those written in present tense. A long unspooling yellow tape leads me ineluctably back to the crime scene where I play every part but the victim’s.

Prose makes it safer for words like “ineluctably.” Sera is younger, will always be younger, be young.

Pose. Mistaken for Proust who’s mistaken for Poe.

I’ve given her everything and how does she thank me? She won’t even do me the courtesy of existing; she insists on the transitive; one must love something.

It doesn’t matter how any sentence might be nude and fondled for anyone’s pleasure. Backwards from the night window overlooking the city I retreat into the hot light of a hotel room bathroom where my reflection crouches to confront me, hollow-eyed, unshaven, a foreigner with shaking hands, protected only by his willingness to provide voice-over narration dirt cheap.

In preparation for the heist the dapper leader says, Our subjective is gold, all the gold in Fort Knox. Someone raises his hand—Don’t you mean objective?—That’s what I said, objective—But you said subjective—What’s the difference?—I don’t know—Whatever you want, motherfucker, just drive—

Sera’s not the leader but the crucial missing member like Shackleton’s third man, like Harry Lime who’s dead in the first half, risen in the third quarter, dead again at the end. Being then is polar and the novel’s a doomed expedition to where the seas begin their rise.

The shortest possible novel isn’t even a sentence. Isn’t even an emotion.

Fewer words slip past a sentimental feeling. Invisible as a verb.

Character operates by indirection, as in the dictations of Henry James: “It’s a mistake not to,” claims a minimal unit of luminance. The narrator bears a third eye.

David Foster Wallace made love to Sera, then killed himself. In the interval he wrote some novels.

I prefer his essays. I’d prefer Sera to look back over her shoulder as she walks away from me, but she doesn’t.

Getting younger. That’s no way to end a novel.

There’s one way to end it. A man with two plastic bags filled with Marie Calender frozen dinners gets up and leaves this Starbucks, never to return.

Calendar pages ripping by in the black-and-white wind. Novels are adapted into films as a means of dematerializing time.

Films adapt poems as the camera lingers. But evolution has no goal.

Sera. Come back.

Prose crowds the margins. In which living has become, unthinkable.

Avevi trovato la cenere.
Dove altri fecero festa
Restavano per noi la sera,
L’odore di bruciato e la cenere.

Che caldo ancora mandava
Da sotto il braciere deserto
E tu come la guardavi bianca
E ferma come si guarda chi

Ci ha aspettato. Pensavo di fare
Un fuoco, un calore più grande
Per te, di trasformare la cenere
In un rogo di foglie e di carte

Ma quella mandava solo poche
Scintille che non bastavano all’esca
E un fumo alto come le piante
E bianco. Non sapevo che la cenere

Non cambia. È sbagliato pensarla
Una cosa che resta, la cenere è
Qualcosa che inizia sempre. Lo sapevi
Tu che ti scaldavi solo di quel sapere,

Che avevi in te il tepore delle cose
Bruciate che non hanno né prima né
Dopo e sono giuste e bianche come te
Che avevi sempre capito la cenere.

——————————————

You had uncovered the ashes.
Others were celebrating
but what we found was the evening,
the odor of burning and ashes,

the warmth that we felt rising
under the empty brazier–
and you stared at them, white and still,
as at someone we know we’ve kept waiting.

I thought of building a fire
to make more heat for you,
make the ashes into a blaze
fed by leaves and paper,

but it only gave off a few sparks
that weren’t enough to catch fire,
and a white smoke that rose to the bushes.
I didn’t know ashes don’t change,

but it’s wrong to think they just stay;
ashes are always beginnings.
You knew it, and kept yourself warm
with this simple knowledge;

you were warmed by burned things
with no before and no after,
things right and white like you,
who always understood burning.

Manuscrit trouvé dans une cervelle

The more I think, the more I think; if, little by little again, I see in myself all the astonishing things that are known, they become better known. Suddenly, I have slowly conceived them; and, when they vanish, it is without strain.
I am changing in the shadow, in a bed. An idea that has lost its own beginning becomes clear, but false, but pure, then empty or immense or old: it becomes nothing just the same, for it rises to the unexpected, bearing with it my undivided mind.
My body hardly discerns the quiet and indistinct volumes of bedding that support it: on top, my sovereign flesh watches and mixes the dark. I fix, I shake, and I lose by the movement of my eyes, some center in this dark space without light, and nothing in the black palette stirs.
The result is that one glimmer quite close by me appears.ⁱⁱ
On the naked or velvet midnight or on any mind, this weak effort, I doubt, represents, any anterior clarity, given its late, low value; only sufficient, it maintains amidst the active shadows a paltry residue of bright day, thought, almost thinking. This poor glow is transformed into a dull and impermanent cheek, soon its useless face smiles against me, prompt, itself consumed by the deepening luster of dusk.ⁱⁱⁱ
It is my bottom depths that I touch. To such a number of spontaneous figures all my invention restores, that is to say it starts again, here, far below all scales of comparison, after an indifferent period or lapse, having always followed lost ways, the being who is made for forgetting; or maybe it returns as a scattering of diurnal charms, dismantling the constellation of everyday forms.
The blackness still conjures forth some shards: of a seascape extended thin, of the breaths, and the glacial cold rump of a horse… My duration softly pursues the destruction of a succession of similar residences, necessary in an annihilated region.

On this shadow without evidence, I write, as if with phosphorus, of dying suppositions I so desire; and outlining their absolute moments, when it seems I am so close to their restoration, I must trace out each one again; for insights only fall asleep to the measurement I exact to nourish them. If, one time, I press them and exceed the speed of their death, I can hold them briefly, in a slight suspension, visible above the horizon of many moments. In such efforts I believed that they must deepen, and do not make that final crossing to the new forms whose connection with the first can elapse without ever having been requested: I do not know where it leads, at once or indefinitely.
There I am lost but, without horror and new mystery, the loss of my monotonous thinking prolongs me, and forgets me. Those idols carry me in their insensible distortion. Unique, my astonishment moves away, surrounded by so many great phantoms who know nothing of amazement between themselves.

Myself in this moment, I can distinguish what destroys those who think to such an extent. No moment fails to save every instant from invalidity; but returning to find each depth bitter, I set keel on more delicious drinks.
So I resemble that which sleeps, if I do not appear to imitate it. I gently rock my truth, I dream that which I am.^iv
My muscles mix with their indefinite bed of layers; the agitation forces sheets through the air, reading sadness from afar.
I begin to name (movement) all desire; intimate and more closely united with the pure execution of thought, I visit each tendency until its repose; I do not design what arrives; everything I predict is colored; I am everywhere where I will be.
If I want anything in the slightest, I pronounce an action so immense that it combines with no machine, to unfold without resistance before my smallest inclinations. Because of a secret freedom, increasing such that I scorn the movement, the trace, and the particular heft, I set free in myself a faithful source of agility: I revive any physical nuance, and loosen the swim stroke of wet eyes, the abundance of a flexible laziness, fluid feet in the fullness of high water… Almost human, upright in the coiling spring of the sea; swathed in vast cold, upon whom that whole vastness weighs, on to the shoulders of responsibility, even to the ears sullied by variable noise; I still touch the strange absence of soil which becomes the ground of concepts altogether new, and with any remainder of my strength, I tremble. My power was unhinged; my weakness is no longer the same. This incomprehensible faculty is what shakes me, troubles me, and absorbs all the labors of my body: an icier height is concealed below me, but forgoes my collapse, only to return again to drink me in some future dream.
It costs me nothing to be possessed by these abysses, rather deep and genuine, yet rather empty in their duration, for I feel all their force in the intervals between two periods I know are my own. To this imposing calm about me, I respond with acts enlarged by the veritable monsters of movement and change. Who can this be, who, in rest, happily reverses and disconnects? Who flourishes and circulates without habit, origin nor name? Who is asking? The same who answers. The same who writes and erases the same line. These are nothing but scriptures on water.
Once my power was diluted, I possessed them more than ever.
At this hour that cannot be counted as an hour, who cares for my history? I mistook it as a book. But the ideal opportunity is here: to strip memory of its mortal order, annul my experience, illuminate what was different, and, by a simple nocturnal song, to escape myself so completely that I could misrecognize my own form. All seems partial to me. In the midst of this spreading out, I steer my mind haphazardly toward chance, toward encountering the verse of another sleeper, so as to abandon my own absolute clarity. . . .

Hearing expands itself; upon the horizon, it overhangs a chasm made by an immense feat. A sharper creature leans out into the emptiness, stretching to hear the slightest sound: through her^v I fathom a space with each possible breath and I fly! as no sound quenches this desire for sound, to the limit of my own abeyance, — to the timbre my blood and the animation of my moment’s duration.
A silence so still fixes and fortifies itself in the night, awakening me deeper and deeper.^vi
How pure the desire for tomorrow, the direction I take toward tomorrow! I feel uncertainty speed from the fore-brow of time, the event to arrive, its vigor, its languor, the dissolution of experience, and the voyage reawakens, as pure, as hard as itself, adorned in unending mind. Novelty sheds itself in advance, by way of a tower more imperceptible than the angle of a figure in the sky…

You know yourself in reverse. You carry backward a power, a kind of discernment, and only able to see in opposite the direction you now travel, you analyze what is finished, you act out only that which has already been achieved.
Once, I had reflections on a striking number of subjects: but now I am so serene that gravity seems to be separated, in suspension. . . .

Invent the effects of some creature exceedingly desired by the mind: after spotting it once, it would absorb into its own a splendid fixity every which thought capable to come after it; so that any power of newness about it would grow weakened. It would be so satisfactory that if, at first, the greatest distraction could be substituted for it: I would know that we would meet again. This is just the rule of the game: I win, I lose, and there is a connection…
Now I am close to it perhaps, and I touch the laws: in this immaculate envelope of the night, where each thought modulates itself, turns in observation of itself, trailing a value behind itself, where my sense empties equally, the black and delicate unit of the night appears so easily extended that the most profound deductions, including my full attentive power, operates in the midst of an identical clarity. So always this purity could be the insulator of the unforeseen, executing completeness of thought, permitting the separation of its own aspects, and the division of the spiritual duration into clear intervals — soon, I would make all my ideas confused or irreducible.
Still, I preserve the variety of my disquietude: I maintain a distortion within me to better attract my pure power or whichever dispersion awaits.

Since, voluptuously, the palpitation of multiple space no longer revivifies anything other than just my flesh; and I am no longer willingly savor ideas in isolation; together this constellation of knowledge constitutes my immanence: controlled, high and foreboding; form^viimaintaining a system worthless or indifferent to substance or its deepening to come; when the illusory shadow gently succumbs to utter birth, and it is the mind; unless still, all very strange, very alone the outer limit of the universe, a doubt, a trace, a unique breath, occasionally each is interchanged.

Here, on the calm shines that timelessness is the master of the world: connecting the idea with the point of its emergence.
One raises them just the same, and one takes the place of another; none amongst them can be more important than its hour.
They ascend, original; in a meaningless order, mysteriously transforming up toward the admirable noon of my presence, where scorched, such that the sole thing that exists; the ordinary one.
All their natural quantity is as such: one between them.^viii

ⁱ The poem, or prose poem, was begun in 1898. Unpublished during Valéry’s lifetime, it appeared posthumously under many titles. Valéry’s notebooks reference at least four working titles: Agathe, or: Agathe or Sleep; Agathe: Saint of Sleep; Manuscript Found in a Brain. In 1906 Valéry would name his daughter Agathe.
ⁱⁱOn the significance of this solitary light, in a letter dated January 15, 1898, Valéry confesses that the poem was written at night. The conditions of the poem’s composition, like the theme itself, were responsible for its inevitable failure: “one evening in the last few days, I put myself under the lamplight to write the beginning of the following story, which I shall never finish because it is too difficult.”
ⁱⁱⁱHereafter the perspective of the sleepwalker returned to quotidian life to give testimony to outside experience only intensifies. Valéry once stated that the ambition behind his automatic writing of, and obsessive revisions to, Agathe came about after learning about women who suffered a medical condition, similar to a coma, in which they could sleep for long periods of their life, only to wake: “Given one of those women who sleep two, three, or ten years at one interval, it may be supposed (quite gratuitously) that she dreamed the whole time, and that she can recall this dream on waking. Now, for two, three . . . or ten years, there has been no sensation for her: then study the deterioration (or something else) of the given data on which she fell asleep. This is a problem in transcendent imagery psychology, which is very hard to even envisage. The successive zones of alteration of the images, etc., would be curious to realize. The theme excited me for ten minutes. Then, with no enthusiasm, I wrote a few lines of the beginning, foreign moreover to the problem, then I stopped. But, as a very typical thing, I set aside this statement of the facts to study at leisure, geometrically, and outside all literature. . . .”
^1v je rêve ce que je suis. It is interesting to compare Valéry’s proto-Freudian claim that dreams construct the self with Descartes’ precept: je pense donc je suis. In one of his two lengthy essays on Descartes, Valery emphasizes “the strong, the bold, the great personality of Descartes, whose philosophy has less value for us, perhaps, than the idea that he has given us of a magnificent and memorable Self.”
^vThis marks the only moment in the poem to directly reference a woman, if not the Saint of Sleep herself. Elsewhere in the French manuscript, feminine nouns are routinely substituted with the female pronoun, “it” (elle), a strategy echoing the more distinct subject, “elle” (she), of this line.
^viIn an essay, “Variations on a Pensée,” Valéry wrote, “The same darkness which obliterates our physical surroundings makes us also lower our voice, reducing it to an inner voice, since we have the inclination to speak the truth only to those who are close to us. We experience a strange feeling of calm and uneasiness. Between the “self” and the “non-self” there is no longer communication. In the full daylight our actions created a link between our thoughts and things.”
^viiIn his essay, “On Speaking Verse,” Valéry describes the obscured, broken up verse of Racine, before directly citing the poet: “Do not confine yourself to respecting the rhymes and caesuras. . . . Moreover, and above all, don’t be in a hurry to reach the meaning. Approach it without forcing it and, as it were, imperceptibly.” It is this imperceptibility that seems to operate, to a certain extent, on a level with prose. See: Paul Valéry: The Art of Poetry. Trans. Denise Folliot. Random House: New York, 1961. 165.
^viiiSoon before abandoning his obsession with Agathe as an inevitable failure, Valéry wrote Gustave Fourment: “But this state isn’t durable! Must I return to the War Ministry? And besides the work, I write—an extravagant thing. I say, besides work, because I have always reserved that word for the pure operations of my mind.” (January 12, 1901).

Man cursing the sea
(after Miroslav Holub)

This bloke went to the cliff-edge
spread his arms wide
and cursed the sea

idiot water
ditzy clone of the sky
whoring yourself out

to the sun then the moon,
fingering your own
fishy necklace of shells

set to erode
whatever hunk
you throw yourself at!

This went on for some time
while the tide melted the cliff
so it could lick at his feet

like the dog he panted like
then he took a deep breath
That’s my girl, he said

Stranded

At check-in, a little Indian girl
in a velour jumpsuit – let’s call her Pinky
plays Etch-A-Sketch for hours

I recognise the ancient tablet
its knobs out to complicate
needlessly drawing by hand

making impossible a true circle
such as Michelangelo that dead white male
could doodle off-the-cuff

and I imagine myself a child again
seated at the growing tip
of each line I took for a walk

something like Kimball O’Hara
sat astride Zam Zammah
on her brick platform

When they were wild
When they were not yet human
When they could have been anything,
I was on the other side ready with milk to lure them,
And their father, too, each name a net in his hands.

Birth, by Louise Erdrich (1989)

Memoirs of a Utopian¹

[…] find the point where we begin. Name it as beginning. We know very little about before. We know that there was madness, pain, cruelty. Before was scarcity, and war, and hunger; oppression, alienation, and feverish desperation. We know after, there was purity.

Utopia: it began. The after begins with Utopos: lightning strike that ruptured our lives and made us strangers to ourselves. Before, we were like the angel; flung headlong by the winds of time, impotent spectators to the chaos we wrought. We dreamt, in our strife, of a tranquil past, and a future where the winds changed, but those dreams only gave shape to our ruin. We know it was terrible, and that is all we know. Until he came, that impossible breach: One-Eyed, One-Armed; Magician-Emperor and Jurist-King.

He caught us and named us: Utopians, and in that name he cast us. He carved our island like a god, and carved our crooked timber straight. The angel rejoiced, finding herself suddenly in an eddy. We all spun around our new being, a thing of nature: at peace in our dwelling; gratifying to our gods; implacable in our righteous joy. We worked the land and watched the island bloom. Our cities grew strong and prosperous while we were kind to each other, and spoke of educated things. We were pure, and would produce only purity.

Of course, it was not to be. We should have known from the beginning. Those that were conquered were severed in two by the lightning; a mess of instinct and torn culture. As if a thin line of humans could seal the borders of redemption! Many were a sorry sight, not often spoken of; a huddled mass of Mephistopheles turned inside-out. Suicide became commonplace, and sacred prohibition swiftly followed. Our Priests granted permission to some, too dangerous to be saved. Others they denied, and when they found them dead they called them dirt, and sank them in the swamps. Others still were enslaved.

That unfortunate generation died lonely deaths, surrounded by children they didn’t understand. Children of the event, blind to the deformities of the past wrestling the present, who couldn’t know the life that shaped their elders. Children who despised those relics for their weaknesses, and never saw their diversity as strength; who never saw the weakness in their own purity, nor the hard cruelty of it. They marched over other nations, and stole their land with clean conscience. Broken legions begged for their property at the feet of our Priests.

Because we never ceased to move. Now we realize, as we stand victorious over this subdued world, that we never ceased to move. Time’s true arrow did not die but twist; became Time’s helter-skelter. A hurricane grew, blowing a wind more fierce than we had ever known. Many remained impervious, placid in the confines of the gentle centre. But many others were flung into the violent gyre to join those strangers we despised; the world swallowed in Utopia.

We had thought our fearful sphere would be without circumference; that its perfect heart would encompass everywhere. For a time it seemed true, while the process was extinguished in conquered lands and contented stomachs. But gradually its limits became clearer, as our means were picked out in suffering for all to see. With each passing generation, more people stamped as scum are spattered on the walls by our dreadful purity, and we begin to wonder what monsters we have become.

Interlude (1)

But you want something to hold on to. I understand. You want a bit of stability in your life. You like routine. You like to walk the same steps every day. I could capture your vital statistics in a time-lapse photo.

The Sayer of the Law ² vs.     Tadashi Harai ³

When I spoke, it was the Law that spoke through me, and it was He whose will echoed in that Law, and it was we who were made. He was Master of the Island, whose power was transcendent and touched us basely, grossly. His was an implacable reason and purity of vision; it could only touch this aberrant world as a knife touches unwrought flesh, and this world could only ever disappoint Him.

We know nothing of you and your dreams, but we know they are not our own.

Moreau caught us and called us Men. Within His House He tore us from our sleep of savagery and opened our unwilling eyes. We awoke to pain – such agony of nerve and sinew – and the terrible fear that we knew not what we were. In His mercy, he bound us with the Law, taught us the shame and guilt of our own desires, and made us what we could be.

Hear the rhythm of the Law that confines us – are we not men? The repetition that pretends reality – are we not men? – is naught but skin and air. The plea that pretends to assertion, sealing in plain sight the truth that we are all taught not to know – for are we not men?

A king’s word is our command. Our freedom is to control that word.

We were men, and had to learn the Law, to be men and to bear that Law. Yet those shackles could not save us from ourselves. We tore them from us with screams that echoed through the jungle. Moreau was overmastered by the brute; a thing too monstrous and free for His nets. In our revolt we found our freedom, but in our freedom we found ourselves caught, still.

We are our own visitors and ghosts.

This place is now an isle of specters. We cannot slip back into forgetfulness, and so we struggle, forever distant from ourselves. I am the only one who holds to His faded edicts, these ill-fitting clothes, though some I have discarded, and others still created, to suit. With my second birth I became a ruin that only now I recognize truly.

We survive among elements of our own demise.

The promise held out to us, the promise with which, in our fear, we so gratefully chained ourselves, the promise of understanding that spoke to us from the clear and calm eyes of our Creator, is now laid bare as wicked dissimulation. The crumbling House, where we were opened up and given over defenseless into knowledge – in Its own decay from creeping life and pernicious time the House casts in mocking relief any dreams of past or future peace.

Reason promised much, but in the end led blindly, forever restless and incomplete, and we were ill-prepared for such a heavy burden.

We are beyond death, for we are already ghosts, and we live, even now, against the skeleton of our emergence into the past by these, our undeniable words.

Are we not men? And as such, are we not defaced? Perhaps if we were not the end of our kind, perhaps if we could be more than an impossible and effaced beginning…

Interlude (2)

If you ask “Why is Thekla’s construction taking such a long time?” the inhabitants continue hoisting sacks, lowering leaded strings, moving long brushes up and down, as they answer “So that it’s destruction cannot begin.” And if asked whether they fear that, once the scaffoldings are removed, the city may begin to crumble and fall to pieces, they add hastily, in a whisper, “Not only the city.”

[…] “Where is the plan you are following, the blueprint?” […] Work stops at sunset. Darkness falls over the building site. The sky is filled with stars. “There is the blueprint,” they say.

(from Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino)

Notes on approaching certain Cities (a political aesthetic) ⁴

Introclusion

Imagine our little Eden, our closed whole; pure in its rhythm of eternal return. So long a looping feedback of death and birth, reaffirmation, reinforcement – set loose like burst and flailing hoses. New forms gush out, and the old sink in their deluge. Suddenly there is growth and change, history and ruin.

Our own creations outpace us, turn and confront us, and we dream of the rest that never was. In our flight, we lament for what we lost when consciousness took us.

Now we run from the eternal return, looking for a life that will bear repetition. But never will there be a clear beginning to this return. Only perhaps a return that, in returning, marks this impossible beginning.

¹ Utopia by Thomas More
² “I am the Sayer of the Law,” said the grey figure. “Here come all that be new to learn the Law. I sit in the darkness and say the Law.” (From The Island of Dr. Moreau by H. G. Wells)
³ A madman, founder and solitary inhabitant of the utopia Kanzennashima. (From Slow Action; dir. Ben Rivers)
⁴ Perdido Street Station; The Scar; Iron Council; King Rat; Embassytown by China Miéville

Interviews•

Robert Coover •

Creative •

John Ashbery – Not Beyond All Conjecture •
Rae Armantrout – Exit Row •
Lisa Steinman – Two Poems •
Stephanie Yorke – Two Poems •
Tim Smith-Laing – Cimetière Marin •

Essays •

Alexandra Manglis – Getting Wires Crossed / Science Fiction in Conversation •
John Culbert – Killjoy •
Ed Sugden – Art in the Age of Economic Recession: B.S. Johnson and Ben Lerner •