Oh! the Pleasures of Aaron Shurin's Citizen

Just when I wanted it, there on the library's shelf of new books was Aaron Shurin's City Lights book, Citizen. First of all, this is a beautiful book.  The cover art "The Old House" by Su Blackwell is evocative; dark with its illuminated house made from the pages of a book, it is an appropriate choice for a book so heady with the abundant possibilities of language, and full of houses, doorways, stairs, and rooms, though references to sailors, ships, and any number of other things, including Circe and perhaps Odysseus, are also part of the adventure. Opening the book, the reader encounters the endpaper which includes a close-up and cropped version of the house from the cover image, all in a faint gray. You could almost miss it. But don't.

Citizen is divided into three sections: flare, gather and hive. Taken on their own and in consideration of the book's title, one hears, in these words, echos of sexuality and collectivity, maybe, even,  references to the French and more recent (?) revolutions; although the references to places are nameless, they suggest California, the Bay Area, cities with plazas where the weather is "tropical," perhaps in Mexico or in southern France. There is both Spanish and French scattered throughout.


Inside, one encounters prose poems whose language is so pitched, so finely wrought, that it almost spills over the brim of each poem. Here's one, appropriately enough, entitled "Chalice."


Found a trophy in the distant, dumb luck--me, the dowager of chance! A sheep in self's clothing, I threw a cone of silence over my desk and parceled out the hash: dream timber, tales of subsistence, true-believer clothing. I filled the groaning catapult and fired to horizon, a big pairing of what and whatever. In a rain of particulars walls settled against windows--sanctuary fenced posts--reliquary doorjambs--and me slouched in the armchair reading with the radio on. The back stairs turn toward the attic in a flush of oak; something pulled the hidden lever on my cross and made a wheel. Lazily I stroke my stash. Supine giant, somnolent nest: I bury my face in your smoldering lap...my smoldering face in your lap... (12)


Shurin's prose poems contain many references to other writers--his poem "Positioned," reminding the reader of Creeley's "position is where you/ put it" from his poem "The Window."  The closing line of "Tracings" ends with "the century of clouds" and this Bay Area reader hears a murmur of Bruce Boone's book of the same title, a title which also references Apollinaire's line "century of clouds." Then there is "Mortal City" which suggests Jocelyn Saidenberg's book of the same name. 

Circe with her magic and ability to transform her enemies into animals haunts some of these poems. In fact, the magic of repetition and resonance, murmurs of other texts, repeated metaphors, phrases, sonic and metric pleasures, permeate Shurin's poems.


Shurin's ear is finely attuned to prosodic potential; each prose poem in Citizen delights in probing the dangerous acrobatic potential of working on the prosodic wire above the wide space of the prose poem.  What a delicious pleasure for readers! At any moment, it might all fall over. And then it doesn't.


In places, one wants to stop and scan the lines, as in the first part of these lines from "The Tipping Point":


"From something love I would split the pit of that something person open, and spit the seeds down a path of perspective lengthening in the shadows.  Tenderness swells; the wolf-teeth retract; a nimbus descends; the glottal stop sings; a totem commands; a totem revives; a totem conceives..." (18).

The line balances on assonance, alliteration, just "like a poet drunk on vowels," as one of the poems asserts.


In this last section with its italicized and pressurized words, i hear an echo of Bob Gluck's four verbs that recur in various guises throughout his book Margery Kempe: "exalt, exasperate, abandon, amaze."  So many communal comminglings, intentional or not.


Here's another from Shurin:

The Density


Descending the day with no escalier, though the heat could squeeze you through--I thought a being more than vast--as if the flutters at the edge of sight--as if the downpour in the distance--as if the moister scroll unfurled behind the curtain...Then a luna moth in the paradigm air flew right to a eucalyptus tree on green dust--congruity of mint and menthol--where the coiled air, almost verbal, whisked a wind of powder into a sheath, cool like an emerald, pilfered like an emerald, inward like an emerald...Through what convergence of root and sap did he find himself inside this swollen air? Who was his ally among the overgrown paths--transitory migrations--as the flaps sealed and the columns telescoped and the insects whirred and the buses squealed and his buttons popped and the storefronts flew open while the pine cones burst in the coloratura heat on scales of exhaustion and release? Nothing was his alone, limited to him alone. He perched on a low rock wall in the trumpeting air and licked a glove of sweat from the groove of his lip. More gathered there (16).


There's orchestral and operatic sex all over this book.

Bits of diction, motifs, drift or seep from one poem to the next, as in ""El Deseo" (wish, longing, desire), the phrase "he wanted to" recurs and is elaborated as "he wanted not so much to say as know how to say and what to say," and then migrates to "I want to," crossing into the next poem on the facing page, appearing as "I wanted not so much to say as be said to," "I wanted him to..." (34-35). Here, one is reminded of what it is like to be learning a new language, say Spanish, and also how desire is caught up in the snare of these multiple languages, and in the question of who is saying what to whom, and who and what is being said, called into being this very moment, as mouths open and hands reach out.

There's more to say about this lovely book with its score of dashes and ellipses and italics, and many other pleasures, but not enough time to say it. Instead, go get it. Hold it in your hands. Use your eyes.

Dodie Bellamy's the buddhist

We spent the long Labor Day weekend on the western shore of Lake Tahoe. I plunged into its icy waters everyday for four days in a row. Even after 15 years of returning to the lake, I never tire of the view and the many hues of blue it flashes.

An additional pleasure this year included gobbling up Dodie Bellamy's the buddhist from Publication Studio. The book begins with a bang--the details of which I will leave you to discover for yourselves--as it unleashes its garrulous alchemy, turning Bellamy's blog posts on the fireworks and subsequent fallout from a relationship with "the buddhist" into a book that pushes all kinds of literary/aesthetic/social boundaries, all the while maintaining a running commentary/meditation of and on its coming-into-being. Boundaries and how they get pushed around, wadded up, shoved aside, pierced, pummeled, and sometimes, maintained, are always central to Bellamy's writing.

For lots of different reasons, I tend to keep some pretty firm walls between different parts of my life, but I revel in how Bellamy and most New Narrative writers mess with these walls and what they have to do with writing. 

Bellamy is unafraid to parade and take apart what Sianne Ngai has called "ugly feelings." She names their gendered/political frameworks:

This is what I was getting at in my post on public display and operatic suffering--an in-your-face owning of one's own vulnerability and fucked-upness to the point of embarrassing and offending tight-asses is a powerful feminist strategy. Writing is tough work, I don't see how anyone can really write from a position of weakness. Sometimes I may start out in that position, but the act of commandeering words flips me into a position of power. To deny behaviors and experiences gendered as weak or "feminine" is not feminist or queer, it's heteronormative to the hilt. Like Kathy Acker, I long to quiver and terrify in the same gasp (35).



Image from Belladodie website. Bellamy googled "operatic suffering" and this is the first image that came up. (I love that all the participants appear to be women!)




Bellamy's book is full of a wide array of references to writing, the writing community, to other writers, artists, film-makers, musicians, and an array of Hollywood films, to spirituality, meditation, the death of Bellamy's mother, academic interview committees, Buddhist sex scandals, Ambien, Culver City hotel stays, and more. I love that this book includes a whole host of images, some taken by Bellamy and others snatched from elsewhere (like the one above).

Here's one of my favorite passages:

Hotel Retreat Day 6

The nightgown I brought with me is getting funky so I bought another one at the Nordstrom Rack at the Howard Hughes Center. Being a Princess and the Pea type person, I cut out the tags so they wouldn't scratch my delicate nature as I slept.

You gotta love the middle, WARNING: KEEP AWAY FROM FIRE tag, and its lame attempt at a comforting afterthought: ALL FABRIC CAN BURN. Like they're trying to convince you that this nightgown isn't particularly flammable—it's more of an existential thing, more like every time you go to bed you're in danger of combusting into yet another Anima Sola, running through the night, heartbroken over the buddhist, engulfed in tonguey orange flames. She must have bought her nightgown at Nordstrom Rack too (100).

The Buddhist begins with its title all in capitals on the cover but by the time the book closes, the buddhist has shrunk to all lower case. The book begins with engorgement and ends post-sex, "with printed love" (145). But, it takes awhile to get there. Throughout the book, Bellamy suggests that she will stop writing about the buddhist, as here:

...that's what it feels like with the buddhist, those final musculature contractions of a dead thing. I'm tired of writing about him. Back in the early days of New Narrative, when we were all wanting to be in one another's work, I complained to Kevin, why don't you write about me, and Kevin said he didn't write about me because writing was an exorcism, and he didn't want to exorcise me. Writing about the buddhist here has been a sort of  exorcism, but the time for that has passed--no more soap opera narrative for this blog, time to return to random bleeps of experience and observation (39).

But of course, he keeps turning up, however much he is denied and/or newly buried:

"The unhooking from the buddhist now feels complete; I'm ready to open the door and step out into the rays of my sunlit future" (49).

"I wish I could erase the buddhist from my consciousness, I'm sick of thinking about him, but my writing brought him into my life, and it seems he's going to stay there in spirit, if not in flesh, until the writing's through with him" (56).

"So, I'm saying goodbye to the buddhist vein here" (71).

"Based on this blog, I'm sure it sounds like I talk about him all the time, but I don't. I was feeling melancholy about the whole situation today--and there it was again, the unshakable longing that I keep thinking I've shaken--like the eternal return, it comes back again and again, its quality essentially unchanged. When the longing strikes, I get this romantic sense that the buddhist is feeling it as well..." (104).

Bellamy is aware of this constant return, of course, and works it as much as it works her. She includes in the book a section in which Colter Jacobsen, artist, friend and publisher of the buddhist, remarks upon this recurrence:

Colter added:
I thought of you when i read this [a quote from Proust]...I hope I wasn't insensitive when I said that i like the constant return in the blog of the buddhist. It was also meant to be an observation that while you are editing the buddhist blog, it also seems to be growing....I think it is brave and vulnerable....I think people appreciate this because we can so relate to it; there's always someone in our life whose relationship was left unresolved and complicated and so much time is spent weighing what happened...till it becomes almost and abstraction. (129).

I think Bellamy's constant return to the buddhist makes for a kind of abjection that is uncomfortable for the reader. Our identification with it might not be uncomplicated; or we might deny any identification with it. There's something particularly interesting to me in this display and working with and in this space of abjection; it is all about discomfort, distances, contagion. It seems to be the source of writing, writing as intense content but also intensive formal practice and investigation, abjection and writing that both undoes and remakes a person and a person's work.

Here are some other selections from the book:

Of course it ended badly. Recently I tried to smooth things over with The Buddhist. It was disastrous. Bradford Nordeen on my efforts: 'Aren't these awful experiences best when they're funneled into the work so that heartache is turned into a piece, made productive? That piece is written (and lovely) so why on earth would you get back into the sandbox?" Bradford's referring to the 1000-word story/memoir I recently completed called "The Buddhist," a piece so obscene it makes my soul blush. 1000 words sounds right; I have no desire to write any more "real" writing about him. I enjoyed working with brevity--layering subtlety into such a raunchy, blatant blip. I even created a character arc for the protagonist, just like they do in real fiction. The "now" takes place within a few minutes, but the content extends and swirls way out, the now being like the eye of a tornado, and everything else racing around that. It never ceases to amaze me that no matter how personal or vulnerable my subject matter, at a certain point in writing it all boils down to formal concerns, I become this slightly mad biologist panting to herself as I pin a butterfly, alive and writhing, to a cardboard background. Of course I'm thinking of Nabokov here. Is 1000 words and a community who's been entertained for 5 months worth the pain?  And, yes, there was pleasure as well. It was like being in a cult, a strange narcissistic Buddhist sex cult. I wouldn't have passed it up for the world (34).


Throughout I've tried to use my babbling about loss and betrayal as an opportunity to refine and promote a political/aesthetic position (49).

...after poopooing divisions, I made a distinction between blog writing and Real Writing. That's a hard one, for I don't know what I'm doing here, why I'm putting all this energy into these posts. I think of poets who speak of their 'writing practice,' meaning it's all part of the process; they don't separate out precious, discrete poems as real work and letters and journals as lesser work. Thus the fetishization of George Oppen's daybooks for example. I've always considered the whole Writing Practice idea as yet another example of some poets' insufferable egotism, a total guy thing, like they think they're such geniuses their shopping lists should be bronzed. Would these guys consider a woman blogging about her heartbreak as part of a serious writing practice? I doubt it. Is my refusing to consider this blog Real Writing an internalized misogyny? My posts are too slight, too femmy, too sloppy (I'm a compulsive reviser), too easy. So Rainer's right: I'm conflicted (73).

This section follows a passage Bellamy quotes from Helen Molesworth's "Me, You, Us: Eva Hesse's Early Paintings." Bellamy writes:

Art writing doesn't get much better than this--Molesworth's willingness to engage in such a personal, intimate relationship with Hesse's work, while never losing her analytic eye. This idea of the image looking back feels key here. It's as if the effort made to create a work invests the work with its own personhood--an otherly personhood that stares back at its creator, a stare fed by the psychic bleeding of the creator, that results both in relief and a slap of the uncanny. If the work doesn't stare back at you, you haven't invested enough energy in it. The buddhist once asked me if writing was my religion, and I said no, writing is not my religion. I don't know what religion is for me. Writing is my calling (80-81).

Dear Potential Readers out there: This books looks back and it is calling to you!

Sherwood Forest by Camille Roy

Camille Roy’s Sherwood Forest, from FuturePoem is a startling book of poetry.


While Sherwood Forest is not mentioned anywhere in Roy’s book, it serves as a fitting title. It demarcates a space of revolt, both mythic and potential. Sherwood is, of course, the forest in the legends of Robin Hood, the earliest of which seem to derive from the 12th century. In Sherwood, Robin—in the early versions of the myth a commoner, only later a nobleman who is deprived of his land and title—is an outlaw who plots and conducts acts of revolt, re-scripting the social order by robbing the rich to give to the poor. We might argue that the figure of Robin as outlaw is problematic given that in most versions of the legend he serves as a loyal subject of King Richard the Lionhearted. So, his revolt against the established order ends up being temporary and contingent. The politics of our time has secured—apparently permanently—wealth and power in the hands of the very few: “As of 2007, the top 1% of households (the upper class) owned 34.6% of all privately held wealth” (Domhoff. “Who Rules America”).

Roy’s titling of her book Sherwood Forest mobilizes this history, these associations. Roy has said that her book is the forest. Instead of a band of Merry Men, Roy’s Sherwood is chock full of brassy girls, queer subjects, and a variety of marginal characters. Her writing is Rabelaisian, carnivalesque, full of shit and sex, murderous desires, and yet one that opens out onto something generous.

Sherwood Forest begins with two epigraphs that are also suggestive. One is from Will Alexander’s “Singing in Magnetic Hoofbeat” and it reads:

“Revolt is its bread, its exclusive respiration, its soil. From this evolves its sinews, its glinting explorational fiber. This being the mode of its disruptive English, its anti-memorials, its slow motion lighting…”

The second is from J.C. Johnson’s “Black Mountain”:

“I’m bound for Black Mountain, me and my razor and my gun. Gonna cut him if he stands still and shoot him if he runs.”

Johnson was born in Chicago (where Roy grew up) and his song “Black Mountain Blues” was recorded by Bessie Smith.

The choice of these epigraphs, like those that precede some of the poems themselves (from writers and artists such as Celine, Blanchot, Simone Weil, and Arnold Kemp), is significant. The book begins with quotes from Black artists who cite revolt, and who sometimes use language wrought from figures of hyperbolic violence. These two quotes also speak to historical struggles and violence in the world, but also suggest the linguistic pleasures of high and low diction, disruption, sexuality, the figure of the outlaw, and eroticism. They also provide possible architectures for exploring feeling. Roy will add to this mix, the thrills of the way her writing takes her readers in; you are caught in a snare from the get-go.

The first poem “My Play” begins


You are dead, imagine it.
So I should speak as one possessed,
grim & miraculous. Your word startles
the process: killer.

…The unborn occupy the dead, like some relationships.
Still, the appalling, almost feverish discomfort we cause each other—
this is our science story, which I place
in the safe deposit of your butch heart.

Our audience arrives as voyeurs with a wish, a natural desire
to be transformed into masochists. Not because they want to be
overwhelmed by suffering; quite the contrary. They seek an actual
possibility, not an actualized one.
Yet they suffer from the fact that the body is effeminate (that the asshole
is speaking).
This isn’t shit, it’s poetry.
Shit enters into it only as an image.

…My rather elastic neck droops, hips flatten, skeleton begins its grin.

But it has a bad smell, this play: the aroma of nothing happening.
Then I become aware of the theatrical quality of sex shows, porn, politics.
“The show” is everywhere. Theater is a quality
not a place.

…I want to write Eileen but I’m feeling guilty, I’m too high.

I fold my muscles into wads and sleep soundlessly.
I can’t remember my dreams, they crumble a soft cake.
A picnic with Carla. She brings rosemary bread and surprising pistachios.
She reads to me about utopias.
So touched and happy I float right up into the sky.


This opening poem initiates the reader into the poem’s play, where roles are shifting. The reader is a voyeur but also made a participant, strapped into the game of playing dead, until perhaps she realizes that the poem both speaks to her and is also a dialogue between two others, the “I” of the poem and the “you” with the “butch heart,” but it is already too late. The game has been entered and the poem will speak of us, its readers in the third person : “Not because they want to be/ Overwhelmed by suffering; quite the contrary.” The poem asserts that “ They seek an actual/ Possibility, not an actualized one,” suggesting that it is the theater of the poem itself and possibility per se, not some imagined “real” referent outside its words that its readers are after.

Words, in fact, elsewhere in a poem entitled “Cinderfella” will be called “voyeurs” themselves:

“We have to get to work,
stopping for soldiers & checkpoints
as we stumble over those
voyeurs called words” (8).

The opening poem gives readers a peek into the obsessions, pleasures and violences the rest of the book will explore: death and the dead, aging, masochism, voyeurs, the eerie turning of the poem’s tables, so that the reader is both taken in and ejected out of the poems themselves; there’s story’s relation to S/M, theatricality, feeling, the problem of plot, the beauty of lines like “the safe deposit of your butch heart.”

Roy’s book is full of lush and arresting language. She continually surprises and disarms her readers—and that is hard to do. In her poem “Crime Story” she writes:

“Cool moist air enveloped my skin. Nature so almost perfect. I saw the camellia bush right under my window, hot pink blooms amidst dark leaves that shone like washed dishes” (29)

and later,

“I went to my room. I scraped my cunt until I came…Outside my
window brilliant pink camellias nodded in the dark” (31).

There’s something about the beauty and exactness of description of the camellia leaves “that shone like washed dishes” juxtaposed with lines like “I scraped my cunt” that is wonderfully jarring—The unexpectedness and violence of “scraped” and the way the scraping of cunt is repeated several times.

This poem continues to explore the themes of masochism and sado-masochism that recur throughout and that have to do with the structure of the book and its projects, its exploration of narrative across language, character, theme, gender, sexuality, boundaries of all sorts, discreet and indiscreet poems!

“I perceive this as a problem…feelings have a structure, which is not sentiment. Certain emotions are structurally sadomasochistic—for example, suspense. Even now, writing this, I feel that pained warp, as though someone whipped my brain tissues…Last time we had sex my beloved made me sit still, which got me so hot I could hardly stand it. It was one of those times I felt ravaged by love” (31)

“Restraints seem to promise that someday the body will arrive, which means I’m waiting for something real: orgasm confirmation: of belief. I’m still waiting! waiting…” (19)

The following linguistic gems occur in a series of epistolary poems between two characters, Camille and Lucy: 
“I read somewhere that dialog is tongues-in-a-nest” (40) and “that’s my feeling. It’s invented & pleasurable & underage” (41)

Or from “The History of the Slut in My Relationship”:

“That sentence
is a sort of dildo” (47)

But as I said, these poems have a generosity too, one that makes itself felt particularly here:

“I love the cloud
Around speech
We call the body…
House of sensation.
Built crud wrapper”    (“Parade” 74).

And here:

“As Scott talks, he’s witnessing, & I am thrust in his life. We have some affinity that’s bloody—genetic. Back in the swarm of old Kentucky days we gnawed on the same bone…Now isn’t that a strange thing to think. I must be in a mood. It’s the methods he tells me about. Though they’re not the point. The information hurts my tissues. The air I breathe contains it. Scott leans back, dazed. Smell of black coffee on his breath” ( “Artifact” 72).

I want to leave you with one last poem because it is another piece that performs that magic of taking the reader into the poem as it rewrites Little Red Riding Hood:

Red Hood

Little Red skips through the outback
trailing a red balloon:
I-trial, her floating word.
When she crosses the stream
she falls in.
Tumult under the bridge.

Worlds withdraw from the rushing water.
Names & letters: goners—
With Little Red tumbling after,
To the beat of her grass heart
As all roads disappear
& ruin geometry.
Alone, without politics,
She’s swept from mother to night.

My body is every body, she cries,
Startling a wolf.
“Your proper being is potential,”
he corrects, taking up a trot
along the shore. Other words
of his bad conscience:
“Poor little chick!
Hiding behind spicy red lips.”
(Flapping apart
neither will be saved).

Your house of skin is all wind,
          Sings the wolf, as he swims.
My body is every body,
          She cries, again & again.


O tender bite—!
His one accurate art performs
like a tongue, splitting right from left
in flat out songs.
Finally snacking on the grass heart
(even as she still squeals)
he is no longer embarrassed.
Distrust, disconnection, dishonesty—
he licks the dishes. Takes a nap.

Little Red regrets how she did love it
Or not exactly.
As reddish puckers, the ballerinas,
melted into her skin, our red
mistress tasted throat burger.
Wolf story gleamed under her cloak.
It was so beautiful, that minute.


The “our red” and “wolf story gleamed under her cloak,” subtly rework the entire poem and mark our complicity, seem to let us in on its project, its secret, even if it is hard to say what that is. Delicious.


Camille’s book will be out soon and you can catch her reading with Robert Gluck for the Poetry Center at San Francisco State on Thursday, April 14th. The reading will be held at the Meridian Gallery in San Francisco.

“Bob” appears in a number of places in Roy’s book, including in her thanks where Roy acknowledges that this book “is the product of a context….San Francisco.” She writes: “The Bay Area writing scene has been a rich source of friendships and intellectual life.” Roy singles out Gluck when she writes: “I would like to especially thank Robert Gluck for making me a better writer, and for all the dimensions of our long association.” A line/quote attributed to “Bob” in Roy’s poem “Properties of Criminal Girls in the String Universe” is another delight: “A secret of life is that it’s fine to be dead. Getting there is the problem” (65).

Indeed!

Interviews with Camille:

I interviewed Camille in "Torquing the Erotics of Attention," in November 2008 here, and in Poetry Flash in 1991. A reprint of that interview "Words in the Mouth" is available here.

You can read an excellent three-part interview that Michael Cross recently did with Camille here:

Part I here

Part II here

Part III here

Charles Bernstein and Norman Fischer :Radical Poetics and Secular Jewish Culture

At the San Francisco Jewish Cultural Center, co-sponsored by the Taube Center and Small Press Traffic, on Tuesday May 11, 2010, Charles Bernstein and Norman Fischer talked about and read poetry and writing from the newly published Radical Poetics and Secular Jewish Culture edited by Stephen Paul Miller and Daniel Morris and published as part of The University of Alabama Press's Modern and Contemporary Poetics Series.

I was eager for this evening's discussion and reading because for me the question of identity and radical poetics is both fascinating and problematic. It seems to be so for all of the writers included in this anthology. Charles and Norman explained a bit about the project's emergence out of just this fascination and problematic.

In the Introduction to the anthology Radical Poetics and Secular Jewish Culture, Daniel Morris explains that this anthology grew out of a poetry event held in 2003 at the American Jewish Historical Society at the Center for Jewish History in New York. The Center had asked Stephen Paul Miller to host the event and when Miller spoke to Charles Bernstein, he found that Bernstein had a project in mind. He "seemed to have seen a need and was responding to it," writes Morris. He explains:

Conservative and fundamentalist coalitions were dominating the religious institutional and political terrain, and Bernstein proposed an alternative that would facilitate the public life of imaginative and interpretive, as opposed to fundamentalist, forms of religious life and support. Bernstein also stressed the 'secular,' which significantly underscores practical realities of religious life and culture and its relations with culture at large.

Out of this emerged the event,"Secular Jewish Culture/ Radical Poetic Practice: on September 21, 2004," as part of which, Morris explains,

Bernstein asked: What are the innovations and inventions of American Jewish poets over the past century? Can we say that there is a distinctly Jewish component to radical modernist and contemporary poetry? What is the relation of Jewish modernist and contemporary poets to the historical avant-garde and to contemporary innovative poetry? How do Jewish cultural life and ethnic and religious forms and traditions manifest themselves in the forms, styles, and approaches to radical American poetry? What role does a distinctly secular approach to Jewishness by poets and other Jewish artists mean for 'racial Jewish culture'? (1-2)

Miller also noted that:

This volume contrasts with Telling and Remembering: A Century of American Jewish Poetry (1997), in which the editor Steven J. Rubin presented the first anthology devoted to Jewish American poetry. In his introduction, Rubin writes that his 'purpose throughout this collection is to present the best and the most representative work of those writers who can properly be classified as American Jewish poets' (11). He goes on to state that he has 'not included those poets who, although nominally Jewish, do not deal significantly with the American Jewish experience.' how did he define 'best' or 'representative?' What does he mean when he says that certain 'nominally Jewish' poets 'do not deal significantly with the American Jewish experience?' Does Rubin consider a test such as 'The Artifice of Absorption,' an eighty-plus-page 'essay' in the form of lineated verse by Charles Bernstein, an insignificant expression of American Jewish experience? Although his poem does not focus overtly on Jewish themes (such as the Holocaust, immigrant experience, Diaspora, anti-Semitism, the family, the place of Yiddish in American poetry, or the Bible), Bernstein seems to express his Jewishness in many ways, especially through the poem's half-serious / half-comic scholarly tone, the concern with the issues of 'absorption' and 'exclusion,' the way he tests the borders between genres, and argues for the instability of the relationship between 'content' and 'style.' ....Rubin's project is commendable, but his anthology fails to offer a sustained critical apparatus or theoretical perspective through which readers could evaluate how his selections were made. We mention the critical lacunae and theoretical shortfalls of Rubin's anthology because it is precisely in such gaps and silences that our collection would like to lay stress (2-3).

The anthology expands upon the New York event and includes writing by:
Paul Auster
Merle L. Bachman
Charles Bernstein
Charlie Bertsch
Maria Damon
Rachel Blau DuPlessis
Amy Feinstein
Thomas Fink
Norman Finkelstein
Norman Fischer
Benjamin Friedlander
Michael Heller
Dr. Kathryn Hellerstein
Bob Holman
Adeena Karasick
Hank Lazer
Stephen Paul Miller
Daniel Morris
Ranen Omer-Sherman
Alicia Ostriker
Bob Perelman
Marjorie Perloff
Jerome Rothenberg
Meg Schoerke
Joshua Schuster
Eric Murphy Selinger

In San Francisco at the JCC, Bernstein opened the discussion with the observation that you would think that there would be a great deal written about secular Jewish culture since it is an important tradition and foundational for radical poetics in the U.S. in the 20th century; yet, for a number of reasons, it is not the subject of much discussion. Secular Jewish culture is elided in discussions of Jewishness in Jewish organizations in the U.S. Many of the people asked to participate in the New York event, like Melville's Bartelby, "preferred not to" talk about being Jewish in relation to their writing projects. So, the event brought people together to talk about what they did not want to talk about, what they preferred not to do.

Bernstein noted that while in California, he happened to meet one of the editors of the Nortan Anthology of Jewish American Literature and asked what Gertrude Stein work the anthology would include; the editor told Bernstein that he did not think they were going to include Stein. Bernstein was shocked by the omission of perhaps one of the most important Jewish (though she didn't necessarily identify as such) Twentieth-Century American authors. The editors eventually did include Stein, apparently (given a framework that demanded readily identifiable Jewish content--I'm extrapolating here) because they were able to link something from the Making of Americans to Jewish culture. Bernstein cited another example of omission and silence around radical writing projects and the Jewish writer: he spoke of the recent and amazing conference on Zukofsky which included almost no framing of Zukofsky's work in relation to Jewish culture. Bernstein found the great aversion to identify as Jewish a valuable incitement to conversation.

Norman Fischer agreed: He noted that inside synagogues, people don't like to talk about the secular Jewish culture that doesn't identify as Jewish; if you are in the secular culture, outside of synagogue, there is reluctance to talk about a possible Jewish dimension to what you do. Fischer said that it is all very confusing!

Fischer elaborated. It is all not clear: What does Jewish mean? Religion, culture? What is culture, secular, religious? Fischer noted that the more he has thought about this, the less clear the distinctions between them become. Fischer mentioned that some would wonder why, Fischer, a Zen Buddhist priest and poet, who is involved in religious life, could having something to do with radical Jewish secular poetics!

[Note that these proceedings were accompanied by an ongoing playful banter between our two speakers.]

Fischer told several stories. First: Many years ago, he brought his pregnant, non-Jewish wife to Brooklyn to meet for the first time his Jewish family. They all met at the apartment of Fischer's cousin, a kosher butcher. Fischer looks over and sees his wife has a stricken look on her face. Fischer asks her if she is ok, and she says she needs to go outside:

She: Can't you see what's going on here? These people-- they are all talking at the same time and they are shrieking, they are yelling.

Fischer: No, they're not. It is a normal conversation.

They go inside. He listens, and, yes, he realizes they were all talking at once.

For Fischer, the deep point in this is: This is the nature of Jewish discourse, everyone talking at once at the top of their voices. It makes a beautiful music and is inherently self-contradictory and confusing. This is, Fischer said, the essence of what we are dealing with here.

Another anecdote: Fischer talked about reading from his book Opening to You: Zen-Inspired Translations of the Psalms. In the mostly Jewish audience in New York, a guy begins attacking Fischer vehemently. At the event, Rabbi Jonathan Slater says that in Judaism there is no pope. No body gets to say what Judaism is. Judaism is whatever a person who defines him/her self as Jewish says it is.


Fischer then read from Bernstein's piece entitled "Radical Jewish Culture/ Secular Jewish Practice":

Remember Kafka's question: 'What have I in common with Jews? I don't know what I have in common with myself.' Or, in a recent translation, I wouldn't want to have an ethnicity that would automatically count me in its number...when the saints go marching in...

Am I Jewish? Is this Jewish? I am no more Jewish then when I set my Jewishness adrift from fundamentalist religious practice. I am no more Jewish than when I refuse imposed definitions of what Jewishness means. I am no more Jewish than when I attend to how such Jewishness lives itself out, plays tunes not yet played. Jewishness can, even must, in one of its multiple manifestations, be an aversion of identification--as a practice of dialogue and as an openness to the unfolding performance of the everyday. Call it the civic practice of Jewishness (13).

and then, Norman Fischer read a piece from his own contribution to the anthology. This is from "Light (silence) word."

The Kabbalists were obsessed with language. They were not interested merely in analysis, contemplation, and interpretation. Study for them was not an intellectual act. Instead, every word of text masked hidden depths that revealed operations crucial to the salvation of the world on a moment-to-moment basis; and every word was related not only to every other word of text but to everything else throughout the whole of the mundane and supernal realms. Things of the world were, in their essence also 'words' (in Hebrew devar means both word and thing), because God had after all, in the most hidden of all parts of the Bible, Bereshit ('In the beginning,' the Jewish name for Genesis, and the main subject of the Zohar) created the physical universe exactly by uttering words. What was the nature of God-speech, God-word? And how did it relate to human speech, in which it lay hidden?

The Torah, it was said, was written in light. Every letter was light. And within this light all mysteries were contained. The book was the world, the world was the book. To those who then and now complain that the Torah is a primitive text, full of violence and vindictiveness of a terrified people and a terrible God, the Kabbalists had little to say; they knew otherwise, but how could one explain, for without faith, spiritual practice, and intimate knowledge, what could be understood? They knew that certainly the Torah was not saying only what it seemed to be saying, what the black letters on white seemed to indicate, it was saying that and everything else, in multifaceted, ineffable ways. The words, the letters, were fire; the page was burning. (In an essay on Buber's vision of Chasidism, Kenneth Rexroth, who felt that the Bible was the most destructive text ever written, said that the Chasidism had manage to read the Bible in such a way that is said exactly the opposite of what it actually did say; Rexroth was seemingly both right and wrong about this.) Behind every letter of the text, every infinite pinpoint of light, lay universe upon universe (61-62).

Fischer makes the link between "a key Kabbalistic theme, concealment, hiddenness" and "the germs of nearly all avant-garde writing's chief themes: revolt against the polite, rational, Aristotelian order of things; focus on language not as a conduit of communication but as infinitely suggestible medium that writes the world; concealment, hiddenness, obscurity, exile; intertextuality; resistance to closure and the univocal interpreting self. The world is hidden within language, words conceal rather than reveal meaning, meaning as meaning being essentially concealed, the not said, the written writing the unwritten etc, (65).

from Norman Finkelstein's essay "Secular Jewish Culture and Its Radical Poetic Discontents," Fischer read:

We think of innovative writing as providing a liberating perspective on reality--otherwise, why "Make it New?" In his discussion of Rabi Nachman's contribution to Jewish hermeneutics, Ouaknin focuses on Nachman's interpretation of the concept of divine tsimtsum (contraction or withdrawal) that is fundamental to Isaac Luria's kabbalistic theory of creation. According to Ouaknin, Nachman's concern is with the process of textual innovation, how it is possible and how it may be encouraged, since in Talmudic interpretation, 'the plural speech of Mahloket, room is left for each person to create his own world' (284). Nachman associates innovation with tsimtsum:'When someone wishes to innovate new words (new meanings), he should limit his knowledge (literally: accomplish the Tsimtsum in his mind), that is to say, evacuate, not hurry into the known preliminary considerations that confuse his mind and are not necessary for innovating. He should act like someone who does not know and only then can he progressively, and in order, innovate new meanings' (285). The rationale for this procedure implies a critique of institutional thinking and of the status quo. As Ouaknin puts it, 'Man has to withdraw from 'himself' in order to attain himself. The first 'self is not the real one; it is constructed, prefabricatd by institutions' (285). Tsimtsum is thus a process of designification; the innovative reader (or writer) 'attacks the semantic actuality of speech, or, in other words, rediscovers for himself the power of words through their 'designifying'(287). Withdrawal from conventional signification transforms one into a 'simple man,' one who says, ' I know nothing'--a notion that I cannot help but see as analogous to Keats's negative capability, which went on to inspire ideas of open form composition in poetry over a century later (228).

Fischer and Bernstein then discussed Ben Friedlander's astonishing essay which reads Paul, suggesting that Paul probably was just a Jew who said I'm a Reformist, and I'm going to do this whole thing differently, but it is Jewish. Friedlander's argument is that our reading of Paul now is an anachronistic one. When Paul wrote, he was writing as a Jew.

from Friedlander's essay "Letter to Romans":

If 'secular Jewish culture" is a form of antinomianism, then it follows that this culture is also a part of the religious history of Judaism, and not, as is ordinarily conceived, the nonreligious extract of that history. A further corollary is that problems faced by this culture will often be translatable into Pauline terms. Ethics without adherence to the law? 'Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law' (Romans 13:10). Compatability of traditions within mixed groups or families? 'Practice hospitality....Let not him who eats despise him who abstains, and let not him who abstains pass judgement on him who eats....None of us lives to himself, and none of us dies to himself' (12:13, 14:3, 14:7). Hostility among Jews of divergent beliefs? 'Do not boast over the branches. If you do boast, remember it is not you that support the root, but the root that supports you' (11:18). Paul's entire discourse concerns the continuation of Judaism in a new form (430).

Importantly, during the evening's discussion Bernstein mentioned what innovative writer Leslie Scalapino asked them when they had had dinner with her the night before: why bother then with the Jewish framework?

Bernstein replied: because it is an important part of American history...and important for opening up discourse and practices to contest the rigid and singular.

At some point in the evening at the JCC Bernstein quipped that he is starting a new movement called Midrashic Antinomianism, or Bent Studies, the motto for which is: See the Crookedness in the Straight. I am an observant Jew. I look closely at the things around me as if they were foreign!

The discussion at the JCC didn't get around to a detailed discussion of the intersection between radical poetics and secular Jewish Culture; there just wasn't time and the questions from the audience took us elsewhere. I am looking forward to reading more of the book as I'm wondering if the anthology suggests what its editors found lacking in Telling and Remembering. That is, if one were evaluating the success of Radical Poetics and Secular Jewish Culture, one would have to ask if this anthology offers a sustained critical apparatus or theoretical perspective. In my cursory reading thus far, it does indeed offer an array of differences, locating and examining the histories of various writers and practices while suggesting continuing possibilities for multiplying perspectives, voices, and textual strategies, for opening rather than restricting, for delinking identity from boundaries and borders and enforcement, for emphasizing an ongoing daily, lived and textual practice. Can the resulting historically specific and rich engagement be extended to other so-called identity and poetic categories? Certainly, African American poets, women poets, queer writers, a wide variety of Asian American poets and any number of other poets and writers categorized by identity have encountered similar though historically distinct problematics and possibilities. One question seems to be: How to make contingent use of categories--whether identitarian or genre-based--and simultaneously to subvert them. Or deform them all together. An ongoing rumination. Antinomian poetics? Against the law. Retaining the law to mark it in all its complex history and then to make many and much out of it.

You can listen to this program via the podcasts available at the San Francisco Jewish Center HERE.

Here are Charles and Norman's bios from Small Press Traffic:

Charles Bernstein is the author of 40 books, ranging from large-scale collections of poetry and essays to pamphlets, libretti, translations, and collaborations. All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems ( 2010) from Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Recent full-lengtht works of poetry include Girly Man (University of Chicago Press, 2006), With Strings (University of Chicago Press, 2001), and Republics of Reality: 1975-1995 (Sun & Moon Press, 2000). He has published two books of essays and one essay/poem collection: My Way: Speeches and Poems (University of Chicago Press, 1999); A Poetics (Harvard University Press, 1992); Content's Dream: Essays 1975-1984 (Sun & Moon Press, 1986, 1994; reprinted by Northwestern University Press, 2001). Shadowtime (Green Integer, 2005) is the libretto he wrote for Brian Ferneyhough's opera and Blind Witness (Factory School, 2008) collects the libretti he wrote for Ben Yarmolinsky.

Bernstein is Donald T. Regan Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Pennsylvania.

He is the co-founder and co-editor, with Al Filreis, of PENNsound (writing.upenn.edu/pennsund); and editor, and co-founder, with Loss Pequenño Glazier, of The Electronic Poetry Center (epc.buffalo.edu). He is coeditor, with Hank Lazer, of Modern and Contemporary Poetics, a book series from the University of Alabama Press (1998 - ). He has been host and co-producer of LINEbreak and Close Listening, two radio poetry series.


A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Norman Fischer has been publishing poetry since 1979. Loosely associated with the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets of the seventies and eighties, he maintains close creative and personal relationships with many writers from that movement. Fischer spent five years living at Tassajara Zen Monastery in monastic Buddhist practice where poets Jane Hirshfield and Phillip Whalen were fellow students. He enjoyed a particularly close relationship to Phillip Whalen whom Norman describes in the dedication of his book Slowly But Dearly as a fellow “poet, Zen priest, teacher, friend.” Norman is Philip Whalen’s literary executor.

The Swerve and Sting of Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip

Soon, I want to tell you about the reading and conversation between Charles Bernstein and Norman Fischer I attended at the Jewish Community Center in San Francisco last Tuesday, May 11th. First, I feel compelled to tell you a bit about a book that has made a breach in that plan. Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip, published by Toronto's Coach House Books, is an elegant volume in every sense. It is a sleek 7 ¾ by 4 ¾ inches, covered in chartreuse paper with silver embossed lettering. On the front: LISA ROBERTSON’S MAGENTA SOUL WHIP and on the back, a line from one of the poems, MY FIDELITY IS MY OWN DISASTER. 101 pages. The writing inside is a mix of lineated poems and prose pieces, some of them entitled “essays.” Some of these pieces –“Wooden Houses,” “About 1836,” “A Modest Treatise”—were commissioned by various art galleries.




Lisa Robertson's writing astonishes. She is an exquisite fabricator. Her tools are numerous and baroque and startlingly contemporary. The book's frontispiece, the little pencil illustration of a sword entering a wound, is precise and accurate. The wound is embedded in the page. And the selves and worlds we fantasize and experience there. Elaborate torture chamber of language and being’s pleasures and excruciations. Robertson has used this sword to unhook the clasps of the fragment, self, origin, eros, gender, language. Or she lifts a flap of skin so that a moment later the absence of the sharp slice of pain is experienced as a pleasure…..or, is it the slice that is the pleasure? So many sensations at once and then each is disarticulated.

The result: “All method is a/ demonstration of history.” Robertson writes simultaneously of metaphysics, Epicureanism, aesthetics, history, rhetoric, the visual, debates in contemporary poetics, the body, mortality.

Epicurus and Lucretius haunt this text. In De Rerum Natura, Lucretius writes:

“…that while the first bodies are being carried downwards by their own weight in a straight line through the void, at times quite uncertain and uncertain places, they swerve a little from their course, just so much as you might call a change of motion. For if they were not apt to incline, all would fall downwards like raindrops through the profound void, no collision would take place and no blow would be caused amongst the first-beginnings: thus nature would never have produced anything…….

…..Again, if all motion is always one long chain, and new motion arises out of the old in order invariable, and if the first-beginnings do not make by swerving a beginning of motion such as to break the decrees of fate, that cause may not follow cause from infinity, whence comes this free will in living creatures all over the earth, whence I say is this will wrested from the fates by which we proceed whither pleasure leads each, swerving also our motions not at fixed times and fixed places, but just where our mind has taken us? For undoubtedly it is his [sic] own will in each that begins these things, and from the will movements go rippling through the limbs.” (“Book II.” De Rerum Natura. 1924. Trans. W.H.D. Rouse. Cambridge, MA:: Harvard University Press, 1997.)

Robertson writes:

“Lucretius said that to flourish we must absorb more than we exude
Of elements, minerals and so forth.
We call this food, and it fabricates us
From the inside. But much does drip and escape
From the corporeal tissues and we use this
Excess to make belief.
It is normal therefore for the body to perish
From incessancy of belief. In the meantime
How about a milky pablum, nutmeats
Quickened with liquor, the iron
Our blood sucks from roots, the delicate
And ingenious bodies we call pastries
Or most intimate aspects of animals
Honey, sap and other lucky seepage
Various salts and the slightly bitter textures of leaves:
From a fortuitous concourse of atoms
Blond foams, dripping vineyards, these curved
Spontaneously out of the pleasurable earth.
Clots of rubbish washed up on shore became us.”

--from “First Spontaneous Horizontal Restaurant” (34)

There is hunger and eating and animals and atoms and melancholy and ornament. The swerve is a delight and productive. Change is frequent and who doth frequent with it shall be here a woman or women. Lucretius as a girl.

“Frankly, even our genders stutter and
Choke. Please believe that I myself claim no
Innocence from vigorous paroxysms
Of excretion: I pine for the body’s
Nice parataxis, the heart’s inestimable
Syntax and the good grace of your gaze; but
Here my enunciative platform borrows
A diction from judicial surfaces, which
Are also points of rest.
--from “Coda: The Device” (85-86).

The body as house. Subjectivity shimmers. Another ornament: “I’ll solicit nothing/ But ornament, that spacious edifice--/Kinds of ornament are change/Because it will change anyway” (20). The world around an animal’s throat. Somewhere in the distance, architecture. Darkness. Dazzlement.

Utopia is so emotional.
I’m speaking of the pure sexual curves
Of utopia, the rotation
Of its shadows against the blundering
In civitas. History does not respond
To this project—History, who has disappeared into
Architecture and into the
Generosity of the dead. This states
The big problem of poetry…
--from “A Hotel” (19).

Robertson’s book is capacious. Her diction, syntax, images—all continually surprise and move in unexpected directions. Hers is a meditative, intellectually expansive, melancholic, and scintillating language. The experience of reading the book recalls a scene from John Schlesinger’s 1967 film Far From the Madding Crowd which I recently saw again. While the film is dated, its slow camerawork (Nicholas Roeg) and the pleasures of looking at Julie Christie prevail. In the middle of nowhere in England, in a landscape of rolling, yellowed hills, Christie as Bathsheba Everdine is dazzled by the dangerous and sexual swordplay of Terence Stamp as Captain Troy. The blade comes so close; it glints in the sun; it undoes her. The danger is real.

from “On Painting”

The question of the origin of painting is obscure, or Egyptian.
Pliny says it had to do with combat
and victory
also known as war and triumph.
Such was its beauty
that a crow
would attempt to enter the tableau
to peck at the corpses (69).


Let me leave you with one of the final pieces from Lisa’s book:

Report 1624: The House

The House is humble and commodious. Here it is always fluent. Here we listen to voices. Here also are solid things. The House is a mould. The common division of the House is into three principal tiers—vegetal, sensitive and rational. The souls inhabiting the House migrate among levels. The inferior may be alone, but the superior cannot subsist without the other. Let this epitome suffice: the rational cannot subsist without the vegetal. The House is build from this complicated love really. Repeatedly we meet its surfaces. We see the House against the long scroll of politics, which is landscape, but also the House itself is a furled scroll. In the scroll of the House we are compelled to preserve what elsewhere we desire abolished.

Ten things are framed by the House.

The first, the proportions of a young child. The second, proportions of a grown man. The third, proportions of a woman. The fourth, proportions of an animal. The fifth, something about architecture. The sixth, about an apparatus through which it can be shown that all things may be traced. The seventh, about light and shadow. The eighth, about colours, which are like nature. The ninth, about the order of the mind. The tenth, about something free, which is alone without any help from the understanding.

These are the ten things.

There is no House that does not introject its landscape of doubt. There is no House that is not a clock. We manipulate memory to make it or we dreamed its downward sloping ceilings as percussive surfaces for the sonic augmentation of rain. We wrote each of the tawdry brownish wallpapers. We dreamed the silent harms. When the porch rots we dream its decay and when the kitchen sags with the weight of our appetites it is an extremely beautiful curve. With particularity we dreamed the dry sound of pigeons’ feet on the asphalt roof in summer. The clicking and grinding of the House in wind is so lively the animals won’t rest. Sometimes in the House we let our outward senses sink. This is sometimes called sleep and sometimes called thought and it has to do with the economy of the House.

When asked if the House is natural or non-natural we reply: The House is strange, wayward, arcane, pedantic economics, or the House is an organ of melancholy. How are we to know if it is cause or effect, a symptom or an unease? The House is a ladder. The House has a mirror. The apple tree lifting with sparrows. Does the form of desire change? If we dilate the House the tiers of habitual emotion will be dissolved in its vastness. There will be gestures that don’t complete us. There will be surfaces. When we leave the House we are light-footed (94-95).


You can find links to numerous reviews and interviews with Lisa Robertson at Coach House Books web site here.

Maid as Muse

When Harreytte Mullen, at Small Press Traffic, recently gave a talk about the challenges and trauma of exploring her own genealogy, Kevin Killian asked Harryette if she knew about Aífe Murray's Maid as Muse: How Servants Changed Emily Dickinson's Life and Language. He recommended it. Intrigued, I got the book from the San Francisco Public Library, and then was unable to put it down! What a fabulous read.



Murray's book begins with a quote from Ralph Ellison's Going to the Territory:

Having had no adequate models to guide us [as Americans] in establishing what we told ourselves was to be a classless society, it has often been difficult for us to place people and events in proper perspective of national importance. So it is well that we keep in mind that fact that not all of American history is recorded. In some ways we are fortunate that it isn't, for if it were, we might become so chagrined by the discrepancies which exist between our democratic ideals and our social reality that we would soon lose heart. Perhaps this is why we possess two basic versions of American history: one which is written and as neatly stylized as ancient myth and the unwritten as chaotic and full of contradictions, changes of pace and surprises as life itself....Surely there must be some self-descriptive magic in this, for in spite of what is left out of our recorded history, our unwritten history looms as its obscure alter ego, and although repressed from our general knowledge of ourselves, it is always active in the shaping of events.

Murray's Maid as Muse undertakes to explore some of this unwritten history. Wondering "who made Emily's prolific writing life possible" (3), Murray goes on a scholar and writer's journey to explore why, "despite references in Emily's letters [to servants]and scholar Jay Leyda's tribute to them, the Dickinsons' servants were all but ignored in biographies and critical works" (4). Murray discovers that,

when the family employed a maid, Emily wrote more. There was a sharp upswing in her creative production after the long-term permanent maid, Margaret O'Brien, was hired in 1856. For the next nine years the poet steadily turned out some one hundred to three hundred poems a year. With Margaret O'Brien's departure, Emily's output dropped to ten poems the next year. Manuscript scholars thought her great poetic 'drive was spent.' I determined that the numbers stayed similarly low for three and a half years of intermittent maids until Margaret Maher was wooed to the household in 1869. For the rest of her life with the second Margaret (whom the family took to calling "Maggie") until her final illness in 1884, Emily steadily averaged about seventy-five poems and letters per year. Having a permanent maid created opportunity that enabled Emily to identify herself as poet (10).

But Murray's book posits more than this assertion as she seeks to locate Dickinson and her work and the work and lives of the servants with whom she came into contact in their specific social context. Murray tells how two prominent Amherst families--the Boltwoods and the Dickinsons--"staged a many-month tug-of-war over [Maggie Maher's] services" (29); how it was Maggie that Emily was closest too; how it was in Maggie's trunk that Dickinson stored her fascicles, her bundles of finished poems; how Maggie was instructed to and then refused to burn Emily's poetry at Dickinson's death; how the various versions of English that Emily would have heard, including African American vernacular English and the Hiberno-English of Irish immigrants impacted and shaped Dickinson's linguistic experiments.

While there were Native and African American people working in and around Amherst and the Dickinson Homestead, Murray posits that it is the influence and intimate familiarity with her Irish immigrant servants, particularly the maid, Margaret Maher, and long-time Dickinson familiar Tom Kelley (who worked for the Dickinsons for many years and was the chief pallbearer, one of six Irish Catholic immigrant laborers Dickinson requested to carry her coffin at her funeral) that seems to have most affected Dickinson (though Murray also traces the influence on ED of African American speech patterns). Careful to attend to the lives of these individuals (by having done exhaustive library, archival, and in-person sleuthing with descendants and town historians) and mindful of the complexity of Dickinson's shifting prejudices and racism, Murray also provides a rich and engaging examination of a variety of individuals while also revealing the formidable challenges faced by those engaged in various forms of service in 19th-Century New England.

Murray writes:

How did Emily trade on skittishness about her place in the hierarchy to slip in and out of social view or resist poetic or linguistic categories and categorization? To leap boundaries even as she constructed them--to let the Kelleys or Matthews in but keep the "new Black man" (JL 721) out--to refuse adherences to form and genre (which, as composer Gil Evans once pointed out, is a 'merchandiser's problem, not mine') was part of her process. She opened herself to eclectic influences, crisscrossed boundaries, used her privilege to control and challenge as much as she parlayed the means and authority achieved in one artistic medium to another. It should not surprise readers that her politics were conservative but her poetics were not; that she disdained the African American gardener in the 1880s but wrote stunning antislavery verse in the 1860s. She was a figure of her time and class. That she opened herself, indeed, was changed by her close association with poor people working with and around her, is not surprising. She didn't shed her privilege but wore it comfortably.

Where does "the servant's hand" come in? Where does it get pushed away? What is to be made of the fact that Margaret Maher preserved the work in her trunk or saved the poems destined for destruction? As people investigating artistic motivation and process look around the writer's room, they are not just communing with the author and the view from the windowpane over the writing table. There was a woman leaning over the grate and some chance remarks that seeded an idea for a poem. All those quotations in the poems suggest engagement, ongoing conversations, and inspiration from the social world around her as much as the written world she inhabited. That 'social text,' that fleshy real world was inhabited by maids, laundry workers, seamstresses, blacksmiths, tinsmiths, basket weavers, laborers, stablemen--all of whom Emily knew by name. The poet may have traded on stereotypes (what Folsom and Price call vortex words) that telegraphed charged images to her readers. What's to be made of Emily's relationships to the people behind these stereotypes? This was the social context of her art-making, the whole roster of people who make the work possible and 'fuel the fantasy of independence. Ironically, it is this very support that allows the practice of art making to appear as the ultimate expression of individual freedom.

Emily's language was affected by Mrs. Mack's and certainly by that of other servants with whom she regularly spoke or listened to intently. The queen of mimicry took an improvisational page from her servants' books. Even her genius for ambiguity could have found influence among servants for whom the art of evasion and ambiguity were part survival strategy and, at least in the case of the Irish, part of their legal tradition. Genius is believed to be solitary. What would it mean to rethink a body of work--in this case reread poems for class and race--in light of the way Emily's daily life was shared with the working poor of the town?

....

The intimacy of small-town life, its ebbs and flows, dramas and controversies, as well as the intimacy of domestic service, meant that Emily Dickinson was interwoven with Amherst's poor white Yankee community, the entwined Native and African American one, and enclaves of Irish and English immigrants. In the brief glimpses offered, the men and women who spent some of their working lives in and around the Dickinson family are at least partially restored to the written narrative. Whatever their roles at the Homestead and their closeness to the poet, the maids and laborers come from the silent wings until it is so crowded onstage that we wondered why we hadn't seen them all along(215-218).

While I found myself sometimes wishing Murray would have stopped and spent additional time and space reading more closely, in light of the various linguistic influences she enumerates, some of Dickinson's poems, I can't complain. This doesn't seem to be the main goal of the book. Rather, it provides a speculative, complex, carefully researched and richly imagined tapestry of intertwined lives and the wild poetry these lives made possible.

I am alive-- because
I am not in a Room--
The Parlor--commonly--it is--
So Visitors may come--
(FP 605)

#670

One need not be a Chamber--to be Haunted--
One need not be a House--
The Brain has Corridors--surpassing
Material Place--

Far safer, of a Midnight Meeting
External Ghost
Than its interior Confronting--
That Cooler Host.

Far safer, through an Abbey gallop,
The Stones a'chase--
Than Unarmed, one's a'self encounter--
In lonesome Place--

Ourself behind ourself, concealed--
Should Startle most--
Assassin hid in our Apartment
Be Horror's least.

The Body--borrows a Revolver--
He bolts the Door--
O'erlooking a superior spectre--
Or More--