2004 WINTER / SPRING / SUMMER / FALL
Aspects of the Novel: a Novel
by David R. Slavitt
Catbird Press (2003) 189 pgs
ISBN: 0-945774-56-7 $20.00
Fiction
Many have announced that the novel (or perhaps capitalized, The Novel)
is dead, meaning variously that there can’t be a new kind of novel
written, or that there is no longer a widespread readership to impart cultural
significance upon novels. For those who believe the latter, I would refer
them to sales statistics and fan websites for authors such as Russell Banks,
Richard Ford, John Irving, or—for crying out loud—Stephen King
(who is, despite perennial academic dismissal, a novelist). Poetry and
short fiction may only rarely exist in the wild, now requiring the artificial
environment provided by the proliferation of BFA and MFA programs across
the nation, but the novel is alive and well, able to boast millions of
avid readers from every race, gender, and social class. And for those who
believe the former—that the possible kinds of novel are exhausted—I
would refer them to David Slavitt’s current work of fiction, Aspects
of the Novel: a Novel.
Hugh Nissenson’s blurb on the dust jacket nicely sums up the aesthetics
of the book: “Slavitt adroitly blends the comic monologue, the essay,
and the conventional story line into an innovative form.” One does
get the sense of reading a nonfiction piece that is at once a meditation
on the novel form (and therefore art in general) and a heartbreaking personal
essay about familial intrigues and losses.
George Garrett, in another of the novel’s apt blurbs, praises Aspects
for being “nakedly honest and yet a virtuoso demonstration of the
use of costumes and masks.”
There is a point in the narrator’s mental meanderings when he contemplates
the conventions of fictional truth: Behind the scrim of fiction, however,
there will sometimes be the discernable outlines of the stagehands who
come on to lug furniture onto the set for the next scene, and we all know,
without having to discuss it, that while the actors are acting, these people
are merely behaving. It would be an outrageous violation of the proprieties
if one of the stagehands were to turn, face the audience, and address us
with whatever was on his mind…(p. 47)
And that is the feeling the reader gets from Aspects—one of an
honest, desperate voice speaking directly to you, though there is a play
going on all around.
Aspects takes its place alongside Dostoevskey’s Notes From the
Underground and Camus’ The Fall. It shares these previous
two masterpieces’ direct, confessional, essayistic style just as it
shares their darkly and absurdly humorous view of the world. And all three
have an overly intellectual, bookish, impotent narrator tortured by his
own ceaseless imaginings. In the same way that Camus made a second installment
in the tradition (originating with Dostoevskey) of the anti-heroic monologue
of intellection, updating the tradition for the post-WWII generation, Slavitt
has updated the tradition for the postmodern era (or post-postmodern era,
or whatever era we’re in right now).
Aspects simultaneously takes a place in the tradition of metafiction,
though that term—now worn and frayed around the edges from overuse—does
not do this original novel justice. Imagine a clinically depressed Vladimir
Nabokov writing in the 21st century from the point of view of Dostoevskey’s
Underground Man, and you’ve got the basic features of Aspects.
If there is a flaw to this novel, it’s that Slavitt has decided not
to dumb down his narrator for narrative ease, a trick often employed to
make a book more writable for the author and more readable for the audience.
Aspects is therefore a difficult novel in many respects, though it is also
a hilarious and rewarding novel.
Okla Elliott
Mistranslating Neruda
By Matt Mason
New Michigan Press (2002) $5, 35 pgs.
http://www.thediagram.com/nmp/
Poetry Chapbook
Stephen Tapscott, in his translation of Pablo Neruda’s “Love
Sonnets # 37,” writes O love, O crazy sunbeam and purple premonition,
/ you come to me and climb your cool stairway, / the castle that time has
crowned with fog, / pale walls of a closed heart. Tapscott captures
something – no matter who translates – inherent in Neruda’s
poetry: a collection of strange images, weird word combinations, and a
strong sense of emotion. Neruda’s work always has had a knack for
clothing itself in off-kilter metaphors while still confronting vivid emotions.
Yes, a lot of 100 Love Sonnets is inherently surreal, but surrealism
isn’t usually a tool for romantic verse. Still, Neruda always succeeds,
and that has inspired decades of imitation.
In that regard, Mistranslating Neruda is Matt Mason’s homage
to Pablo Neruda’s Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair.
Not only does Mason mimic the sequence in length, but he also tries duplicating
the inventive use of language: Like angel hair pasta waving goodbye to
the boiling water, / the sausages from the refrigerator fly into your hands.
// Innumerable hearts of the sausage / fortify inside the rare silences
of young love. Equally emblematic for the rest of the sequence, Mason writes,
early on: Body of a woman, white as flour, as egg whites, / you break into
the world with the immediacy of warm cookies.
Lines like these make Mason’s chapbook a hoot to read. While he actively
tries to mimic Neruda, to “mistranslate” him, Mason’s own
sense of absurdity takes off, pulling the reader along. These poems also
display the depths of Mason’s imagination, but do they stand up to
the master inspiring them?
No, but they weren’t intended to, either. In his preface, Mason claims
everybody has read a horrible act of translation, be it in high school
English texts or elsewhere, and this chapbook was to be a satire on “mistranslations.”
That doesn’t change the joy of language Mason revels in, and to this
collection, that’s a gift.
Rich Ristow
Centuries
By Joel Brouwer
Four Way Books (2003) 52 pgs.
ISBN: 1-884700-39-4
Prose Poems
Centuries is a huge departure from Joel Brouwer’s first book. He
has cast away the three-line stanza common in Exactly What Happened (Purdue
University Press, 1999). Plus, he’s thrown out lineation and created
a prose poem of – exactly – 100 words, but that’s not all:
Brower raided histories and newspapers for Exactly What Happened, but in
his new collection, he abandons textual sources, choosing dreamscapes instead.
More lyric than narrative, Centuries strings together strange, absurd imagery.
In the middle of “Bicycle,” for example, Brouwer writes: I stewed
dud grenades so well my brother guessed venison. I grew huge rifles in
our garden. I kicked gold from dead mouths to buy my Mama oranges from
the market. Each of these sentences are so dense in their comparisons,
it slows the reader down. After all, a cooking verb like “stewed”
is paired with “grenades,” and “rifles” are produce
“grown” in a “garden.”
Still, slowing the reader down isn’t a bad thing. Brouwer has only
100 words to work with, so the brevity of each prose poem is elongated
by all the contradictory detail crammed into each sentence. So, each entry
in Centuries appears deceptively simple while forcing complex imagery into
a tight space.
In this regard, Brouwer’s work calls to mind Russell Edson’s
prose poems, known chiefly as surrealistic word pictures and fables. Edson’s
The Tormented Mirror, for example, contains pieces like “Baby Pianos”
– which opens with: A piano had made a huge manure. Its handler hoped
the lady of the house wouldn’t notice. Edson’s subject matter
shifts from sentence to sentence, as great leaps occur. Brouwer does the
same thing, and not only does this fuel the humor of each poem, it provides
a continual sense of surprise.
Rich Ristow
Hammer
By Mark Turpin
Sarabande Books (2003) 77 pgs.
ISBN 1-889330-86-8
Poetry
Mark Turpin’s Hammer profits from one unassailable fact:
every profession has its own unique language. Some call it jargon; for
others, however, it’s a special lexicon for special circumstances.
In this regard, Turpin chooses the world of carpentry, construction, and
job sites for the subject matter of Hammer, and in doing so, he chooses
a topic that is rife with nuances.
The results are interesting. In “Sledgehammer’s Song,” Turpin
almost celebrates the use of such a tool: The way you hold the haft,
/ the way it climbs a curve, / A manswung curve, / The way it undoes what
was done. That poem ends with The way the weight is weighed / Stalling
the swing, / The sorrow mid-arc. So, what initially appears as poetry
about labor has a melancholy underbelly. A lot of Turpin’s Hammer
comes off like this, with varying degrees of subtlety in meditation.
In “The World of Things,” Turpin writes, So I began to adopt
the physical swagger / universal to most men who work with their bodies:
/ an acceptance of weariness, of gravity // of weight – the defiant
nonchalance / in response to it the posture/ recognizable in the hips and
shoulders. This comes after, earlier in the poem, the quote from fellow
worker “Dee”: “Don’t let the wood push you around.”
Still, the coupling of “swagger” with “gravity” and
“weariness” is interesting in its contradictions.
It’s easy to feel mixed emotions about where you work. After all,
whether the job is construction or administrative duties, we all approach
work with a similar level of dread and hesitation. If not, the idea of
going to work is a mere fantasy available to so few – in a land, a
place where nothing goes wrong. In Hammer, Mark Turpin succeeds not only
in capturing the language of the carpenter, but also of the man-or-woman
who loves and hates what they do everyday of their life.
Rich Ristow
Ashtrays and Bulls
by Robert Plath
Liquid Paper Press (2003), 44 pgs. $5
Poetry
The 2003 first prize winner of Nerve Cowboy’s Chapbook Contest,
Ashtrays and Bulls is the work of an artistic dipsomaniac named
Robert Plath. Plath writes that at least “eighty-five percent of his
poems contain references to beer, whiskey, cigars, and death.” Kid,
let’s be honest here. That is almost everything you write about.
So as a reviewer, I kind of suspected I would be grappling with some fumbling
Charles Bukowski clone, a rotten and raunchy epigone that Bukowski himself
would deplore. In a way, that’s exactly what I found. On the other
hand, I kind of despised myself because I actually liked what I was reading.
Plath treats his subject matter the way a hypochondriac treats his body,
with the utmost attention and concern. In fact, Plath’s Sylvia-complex
makes his work deeply confessional without a whiny parsimonious appeal
for pity. That’s the talent Bukowski possessed. We empathized with
him, because 1) he didn’t want our empathy and 2) he didn’t deserve
it. I think this is where Plath and Bukowski share common ground.
The Bukowski influence is undeniable. “At the Tavern,” for instance,
starts with a Bukowski phrase: “[what matters most] is the whiskey
at midnight,” reminding one of the titled What Matters Most is
How Well you Walk Through the Fire, a compilation of 200-some Buk poems
from the 1970s to 1990s.
As for versatility, there are some glimmers of childhoods past. Still most
of the poems feel like the carnage of “the morning after the party,”
somebody waking up next to you whom you don’t know, regrets, strangers
wandering the halls, cigarette butts scattered in every nook of floor tiling,
and floaters throughout the house. This is the poetry of an empty person,
ladies and gentlemen. And if he achieves anything, Plath achieves this
feeling in his audience as well. And then, one stirring line punctuates
his personal demon: “poor was never reading your son’s poems.”
How many of you suffer the scorn of loved ones who don’t know a thing
about what it is you do with your words when you write or why you’re
not making money at it? Plath speaks some truth, folks.
Frank S. Palmisano III
Trading Futures
by Nikki Roszko
First Printing: Hignell Book Printing
Winnipeg, MB Canada
pgs. 39, $7.00
Poetry
“The difference between a moth and butterfly is stripes and spots.”
With this line, Roszko sets the tone for what is an uneasy journey into
a dark corner of poetic musing. Invariably, Roszko chooses moths over butterflies,
the ugly against the beautiful. Her poetry is tainted with the obscene
as commonplace, flights of sexual fancy and furtive trysts under stairwells,
back alley abortions—the subject matter is treated seriously, but
as a testament to the world we live in.
This chapbook was the 2003 winner of the 16th Annual Slipstream Poetry
Chapbook Competition. Roszko’s sexual identity seeps through the pages
but never quite enough to give us a taste of who she is. Like the subject
matter, the layout is hardnosed, a kind of awkward typographical mess that
runs your eyes in every direction, as witnessed in the poem “radio-free.”
As disturbing as the typography is, even more harrowing are the images
controlling the tone. Rozsko can’t say enough about dirty fingernails.
In fact there are so many references to “fingernails,” one wonders
if Rozsko isn’t the alter ego of some happy-go-lucky manicurist. Along
with this, the smell of burning flesh, pyromania, consumptive sex, pseudo-psychotic-gothic
obsessions that paint much of today’s counter-cultured youth are put
forth with a subtle sophistication.
Among the more notable selections “Stall” “Breakfast”
and “Lunch” caused the most tummy-twisting or meditative moments.
“Mother” reminisces an urban legend all the better forgotten.
Honestly, one feels dirty after reading this. But one must feel dirty,
and perhaps that’s the emotions that Roszko draws out of us best that
makes us remember that poetry in all its anesthetic forms must sometimes
require painful jaunts before the wounds can heal properly, before, as
Roszko states, “the girl/shattered against the floor/pieced together
by careful hands/a star-shaped scar” resolves appearances with reality.
Frank S. Palmisano III
The United Colors of Death
by Mark Terrill
Pathwise Press (2003)
47 pgs. ISBN 0-9675226-5-X, $5.95
Poetry
Though the title of his work sounds like the backlash of a disgruntled
employee of a particular clothing retailer popular in the 1980s, Terrill
is too far removed from trite variations on theme to paint a rainbow of
well wishing.
Terrill is instead a poetic necromancer, with an historic tour guide’s
obsession with the dead and dearly departed figures of literature and the
lives their stories have left behind. His poems go where Sartre urinated;
they take us into the oven where Plath cooks herself. They are at the end
of Hemingway’s shotgun barrel or in the car with James Dean. Terrill
busily pitches the dirt from his own grave and invites us all to do the
same, but with the expectation that much of the experience we leave behind
resounds in eternity as well.
In his poem, “Ways In, Ways Out,” Terrill brings back a sense
of the tragic hero, as great writers are portrayed in stark death-dealing
scenarios. “When I Died and Went to Heaven” shows what little
faith Terrill has in an afterlife that is more than an extension of the
reality he already lives.
Heaven is full of bars and human fretfulness. There are quite a few angels
running through his poems, and not the kind you’d expect to find in
Hallmark cards: all have frazzled feathers, crooked halos—and
even the author imagines himself inheriting hollowed (instead of “hallowed”)
wings made of papier-mâché. Sometimes he’s a little too
obscure for his own good. Poems that pronounce great mysteries sometimes
stay locked in mystery, as in “The Birth of Death.” In “What
Days Are Like” the beautiful iambic hustle of the verse, “What
ghosts would sing if words were songs and death was something different”
becomes incomprehensible to meaning. One is not so sure what “song”
means in this context. Or how words, so integral to songs, could be so
much the different.
Though not entirely visible, small pretenses seem to loom on the margins
like the ghosts and divine beings that haunt his collection. But Mark Terrill
makes death a thing of gorgeous reflection. “Do You Remember the World?”
is one of the best poems I’ve read in a while, with tight, dynamic
verse mustering a fierce and compelling voice as it moves seamlessly from
line to line.
The chapbook in the end is a well-strewn thematic balance true to its title;
much of its joie de vivre depends on depressing pictures of the Transcendent
and its absolute disquietude for the dog and pony show of traditional heavenly
pictorials. If Belinda Carlyle thought “heaven is a place on earth,”
Terrill certainly empathizes.
Frank S. Palmisano III
Sauce Robert
Pavement Saw Press
F.J. Bergmann
ISBN 1-886350-60-4
6.00, pgs 28.
No, it’s not the name of a college alt band. It’s Sauce Robert,
co-winner of the 2002-2003 Pavement Saw Press Chapbook Competition award
along with War Holdings by Lisa Samuels.
Let me make my peace with what I did not like before I find the silver
lining that hedges in this work. Bergmann is a well-read poet, as evidenced
in her poem “Cento Prohibitorium” (even the pedantic name sends
shutters down the book spine). But just like a cento that hasn’t been
thought through, some of Bergmann’s verse feels garage sale, a mixed
multitude of words and images that don’t quite work together, although
taken in part, they serve a function.
Perhaps this is because in some of these poems, Bergmann takes on an elevated
dialect, speaking incantations above the mere mortal that concede nothing
to the interpreter. More than anyone else, Bergmann is aware of this fact,
as she writes in her own self-fulfilling prophecy from “Conditional
Claws”: If I had written the poem,/ I would have used flashier
adjectives/ and longer words, and left you with/ a distressing lack of
completion/ and a sense of fear.
The good news is Bergmann can write poetry. The images are significantly
haunting. Her phraseology is magnificent. And not every incantation is
an incomprehensible feat of verbal abstraction. Some poems do charm the
tongue and leave the reader breathless at times.
I particularly enjoyed sinking my teeth into the image of the “bleeding
sunrise [that] leaves eternity a virgin.” “Lamia Rosary”
is another poem, and “Death and the Maiden” has all the workings
of an intelligent poem with a surprise ending. If you like poetry with
a quixotic feel about it without the sap, Sauce Robert is a fair
undertaking.
Frank S. Palmisano III
Leaving Maggie Hope
Anthony S. Abbott.
Novello Festival Press, 2003
177 pages, $21.95
Fiction
Hope: a desire or expectation that gives promise for the future. Author
Tony Abbott tells of this need in his fiction debut, the coming-of-age
story of David Lear. Lear’s life is filled with physical and emotional
obstacles that threaten to overwhelm him and his family. Yet he continues
searching for a future despite these hurdles.
Violence and suspicion rule David’s early life. He is born with clubfeet,
Abbott’s vivid descriptions of hospitals, operations and other manipulations
make readers empathetic with his physical plight and his desire to be normal.
His sister and protector Elizabeth is away at school, leaving David to
his mother, Maggie Hope, a woman who drinks and loves with equal fierceness.
David doesn’t know his father, and his stepfather Bernie leaves after
one of Maggie’s vicious drunken escapades. David, too, falls prey
to outbursts when he attacks the school bully. After the fallout, the family
decides to send him to boarding school, because (as his sister says), “you’ll
be better off without us.”
Lowell School proves to be the safe haven David needs away from his disjointed
family. A rich benefactress, Mrs. Ariel, an old friend of Maggie’s,
pays for his tuition. The school’s regimented life gives him purpose
and the desire to do well that borders on the obsessive. Teachers
and coaches mentor the eleven-year-old through his formative years and
he learns quickly how to walk the fine line between being a “goody-goody”
teacher’s pet and being popular with the other boys. As he learns
to balance peer and academic pressure, David becomes more self-reliant.
Abbott uses numerous scenarios to illustrate our protagonist’s abilities.
David ventures to New York to visit his mother to find Maggie has “left
town” on a bender, abandoning him once again. Another time he finally
visits his father only to find a male version of his mother and a stepmother
who barely tolerates David’s presence. Elizabeth elopes and leaves
David to start a new life.
Even when he visits Mrs. Ariel, David has trouble fitting in at the
beginning. But David escapes by attending movies, reading, or exploring
his surroundings and slowly realizes he doesn’t have to become another
lost soul. He reaches this epiphany on a train ride back to school after
talking with Newland, a younger student. “Newland,” he said after
a while, “do you know anybody that talks about their families?”
Newland thought for a moment. “Not really,” he said. “I
don’t either,” said David. “Maybe that’s why we’re
all at school,” said the younger boy. “That’s right,”
said David. “Maybe everybody’s got some reason to be at boarding
school, and no one wants to talk about it. Everybody’s got somebody
divorced or dead or sick. I’ve never thought about it like that before.”
What makes this passage even more telling is the fact that the novel is
set in the 1940’s, yet still resonates for today’s youth.
Maggie sums up the four things in life that best describe her
family: “We were always hopers. It’ll be better in the morning.
We really believed that, you and Lizzie and I. The second thing is courage.
You learned that from your feet. That and the third: determination. Hope
and courage and determination. They’re great things. They kept us
all going. But you, you’re afraid of love, afraid of risking it. Don’t
be afraid. Just don’t.” This last thing is what David searches
for and doesn’t find. He isn’t sure he’ll ever find love
but will live one day at a time.
Abbott’s account of David’s odyssey is in truth everyone’s
odyssey. David is just the conduit for readers to experience this and leave
hoping not only for David’s character and the future, but for themselves.
Sherri Smith