Book Reviews: September 2013
A Question Mark Above the Sun: Documents on the Mystery Surrounding A Famous Poem “By” Frank O’Hara, Poems by Kent Johnson
Opening the Doors: The Desegregation of the University of Alabama and the Fight for Civil Rights in Tuscaloosa, Nonfiction by B.J. Hollars
Proving Nothing to Anyone, Poems by Matt Cook
Tales from Ma’s Watering Hole, Stories by Kaye Linden
The Vital System, Poems by CM Burroughs
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A Question Mark Above the Sun: Documents on the Mystery Surrounding A Famous Poem “By” Frank O’Hara
Poems by Kent Johnson
Starcherone Books, October 2012
ISBN-13: 9780983740551
$16.00; 267pp.
Reviewed by Michael Martin Shea
Kent Johnson’s status as an outsider in American poetics—and here outsider refers to a decisive non-compliance with the standard workings of po-biz rather than a codification of voice-driven dissociative poems—has been established since the outset of his career, with his never-quite-confirmed involvement in the Araki Yasusada “hoax” and the questions about authorship that it raised. Fittingly, then, A Question Mark Above the Sun finds Johnson exploring and demystifying the mythic status of the author through the lens of a spurious claim about Frank O’Hara’s “A True Account of Talking to the Sun At Fire Island”—namely, that the poem was not written by O’Hara but by Kenneth Koch, who, in a selfless and moving tribute to his friend, passed off the great poem as O’Hara’s, one final act to ensure the latter’s legacy. Various critics have discussed the proposition at-length, and interested readers would do well to simply read Johnson’s argument rather than a summary of it. But that the proposition can even be considered controversial—worthy, apparently, of cease-and-desist notices from the folks at Knopf—speaks not only to the hyper-insularity of the poetic community: it also gives Johnson’s critique a self-perpetuating basis on which to stand. So what if Koch wrote the poem? the book asks us. What is it that we’ve invested in the idea of the author such that this proposition bothers us? How is it holding us back?
Of course, the reactionary response is to point out that this is still a book “by” Kent Johnson, and his more vicious critics (including Tony Towle, whose emails form a large portion of the book’s ephemera) take this as proof that Johnson is trying to prop up his own career. Yet such a reaction seems strange when a majority of the book is not “by” Kent Johnson, neither in the traditional sense nor any other (though one can never fully shake the feeling that the various authors of the supplemental materials are Johnson in disguise). More importantly, when we consider the book’s structure, we see that while it clamors to be “about” “A True Account of Talking to the Sun At Fire Island,” what’s really at-stake—that is, what emerges in “Corroded by Symbolism,” the “unfinished critical novella” that forms the central part of the book’s organization and is the only section that functions neither as introduction nor appendix—is the future of avant-garde poetics and poetic communities. Here, the O’Hara theory is relegated to comic farce, a sort of would-be thriller about a secret society bent on hiding some terrible O’Hara-related secret. Occupying the foreground, instead, is a series of idiosyncratic book reviews (anti-reviews) dictated in faux-Middle-English (to wit: “Tell me you’re pullynge my legum, I exclaimed.”) in which the speaker, Kent Johnson, meets with four British avant-garde poets (Andrew Duncan, J.H. Prynne, Tim Atkins, and Martin Corless-Smith) to discuss their forthcoming books, usually over a few pints of beer, and then later via email.
The unifying factor of these often-convoluted exchanges, aside from the sometimes-slapstick O’Hara conspiracy plot, is that the avant-garde is seriously grappling with a limiting self-definition, one which prizes grammatical difference as its only sustaining form of exceptionalism and which explicitly arose as a result of clinging to a static notion of the author as the text’s stable producer. Closing itself off from any dismantling of the social, authorial self offered the avant-garde no recourse but inward, linguistic methods of disassociation which are increasingly appropriated as acceptable forms of composition, and thus are effectively complicit with society at-large. Or, as Johnson writes/speaks:
These avant-garde/formalist/analytic gestures are getting openly, eroticallye, I would say, sucked right into the archive and shackled away in the Museum at ever increasing rates of speede. On a somewhat more banal level, my problem with this asyndetic cutup stuffum is that it’s all, after about twenty-odd years, a pretty old and exhausted porne star [sic].
In place of these tired formal gestures, Johnson proposes the exploration of outward-facing modes of composition, ones which interrogate or undermine the authorial self—exemplified by Duncan’s creation of mythology, Atkin’s quasi-translations, and Corless-Smiths’ unstable author-position, all of which expand our notion of poetry’s disruptive social quality and thereby better suit it to the historic task of the avant-garde: to enact a practice of selfhood we could previously only imagine. Johnson phrases it thus:
To be revolutionary now, if there is that hope (remember our hope?), poetry will require a movement out of composition restricted to grammatical experiment and open into a broader conception of the syntactic—one where poetry more daringly takes stock of its status as marginal branch in the Culture’s Total Syntax—a marginalization due to Poets so obediently accepting Authorship as the Noun Phrase of the Literary sentence’s structure, if you’ll forgive the quasi-Spicerian pun.
More than a distraction, then, the question raised by the O’Hara thesis serves as direct evidence of blind acceptance of authorship by the poetic community at-large. What this fidelity to the author elides is bigger than a did-he-write-it discussion: as Corless-Smith notes in an email to Johnson, the authorial signature boxes us into a specifically limited way of approaching poems, viewing them as a room for a coherent self rather than “sites of exultant languageing” and prohibiting the shift “from a monotheistic faith in the author to a nonhierarchical acceptance of communal existence in a necessarily shared language system” that a true discussion of authorship would provoke. In other words, authorial absolutism, no matter the content of the poetry it’s attached to, is a conservative gesture. Moreover, insofar as the material benefits of adhering to a stable notion of the author are enjoyed by many members of American poetry’s lumpen-extremists, the question of authorship becomes an ethical question, one especially relevant to would-be anti-capitalists whose attempts to ensure their legacy involves denigrating other poetries while maintaining explicitly capitalist modes of production and accreditation (a critique Johnson has levied elsewhere at various groups and one which Amy King has recently voiced as well).
Yet while these critiques are more than valid—sorely needed, it seems, by American avant-gardists—what has often been elided in discussions of the book is just how much fun it is to read. A Question Mark Above The Sun is a startling, hilarious work, and the experience is unlike anything in American fiction: Johnson’s satire is able to shift from downright slapstick to biting invective in the course of a page, all while maintaining the ever-funny faux-Middle-English affect. But what also emerges from the text is a deep respect for the work of these great poets. The near-endless probing of the compositional circumstances of “A True Account…” only makes clear the enviable sense of friendship between Koch, O’Hara, and their friends. Inasmuch as it is a critical assault on some of our deepest-held notions, A Question Mark Above The Sun is still a sort of love-song for generative poetic communities, one that sends readers back to the work of both men, not with skepticism so much as awe. Which, ultimately, is the point: Johnson is not merely going at authorship indiscriminately or for personal gain—he does so to clear the way for more fruitful discussions of how we can use the practice of poetry to enact the communal (and personal) existence we could have if we subdued our desire to create empires of the self. As Tim Atkins says in an email to Johnson, “there is no battle. The only point in all of this—reading, writing, translating, talking—is the pleasure of it all.” We may not believe him fully—after all, this book takes very seriously the idea that authorship as practiced by certain poets and communities is an ethical failing—but the end-goal, the pleasure, our possible joy, remains.
Opening the Doors: The Desegregation of the University of Alabama and the Fight for Civil Rights in Tuscaloosa
Nonfiction by B.J. Hollars
University of Alabama Press, March 2013
ISBN-13: 9780817317928
$34.95; 304pp.
Reviewed by Daniel Pecchenino
It’s not uncommon to read a history book and feel like the events and conflicts it describes resonate in profound ways with the concerns of one’s own moment. Often this is because the author is trying, perhaps a bit too explicitly, to get us to see that people and societies haven’t actually progressed as much as we’d like to believe. But other times the similarities we observe don’t require the author to tell us where to look or how to feel, as the problems being written about are, to quote William Faulkner, “not even past.”
The latter is certainly true of Opening the Doors: The Desegregation of the University of Alabama and the Fight for Civil Rights in Tuscaloosa (Univ. of Alabama Press) by B.J. Hollars. The book focuses on three events that frequently go unmentioned in grand narratives of the Civil Rights movement: Autherine Lucy’s violently thwarted 1956 attempt to desegregate the University of Alabama, Vivian Malone and James Hood’s successful desegregation of the school in 1963, and Reverend T.Y. Rogers’s community organizing that culminated in the mostly bloodless integration of Tuscaloosa’s civil services in the summer of 1964. Hollars rightly posits that Rogers’s absence from most popular accounts of the Civil Rights movement is a “true mystery,” as he was a close confidant and protégé of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and, like King, died young and under suspicious circumstances. If all Opening the Doors did was to give Rogers’s accomplishments the public airing they deserve, it would be a worthwhile read.
But the book does more than this. Through its clear, journalistic style and logical structure, Opening the Doors tells a story that has been relevant since America’s founding and continues to be relevant today. The most famous incident described in Hollars’s study is the 1963 desegregation of the University of Alabama, which makes a cameo in Robert Zemeckis’s 1994 film, Forrest Gump. Governor George Wallace’s standoff with Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach to prevent Malone and Hood from signing up for classes has long been regarded as a piece of political theater intended to raise Wallace’s profile while embarrassing President John F. Kennedy and his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy. Malone and Hood were going to be registered no matter what the governor did. But Wallace’s assertion that the people of Alabama were “God-fearing,” not “government-fearing,” is as important to note today as it was then. Indeed, when Hollars writes that “while [Wallace] publicly decried the growing encroachment of the federal government, he was more than happy to accept its money,” a reader would be forgiven for thinking that Hollars is describing the current governor of Alabama, Robert J. Bentley.
Arguments about whether the federal government or individual states should enforce laws and customs always seem to be in the news cycle, but since Barack Obama’s election in 2008, the debate feels more intense than at any time since the 1960s. In light of the rise of the Tea Party movement, attempts by states (including Alabama) to pass harsh immigration laws in the face of federal opposition, the stripping away of the preclearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act, and renewed scrutiny of the now infamous “stand your ground” laws many of us were introduced to during George Zimmerman’s trial for the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, Opening the Doors is an important reminder that these clashes about federalism, race, and rights are, for better and for worse, nothing new. They are the undead past with which we continue to wrestle, making one wonder if we will ever be able to put it to rest.
As with any book, there are things Opening the Doors could do better. Its account of the Tuscaloosa bus boycotts lacks resolution, and in its effort to craft a story without stereotypical villains, “merely people who believed what they believed due to an amalgam of experiences, traditions and geography,” it cuts much of the white community both in the town and on campus a bit too much slack. Still, this in no way diminishes the importance and potency of Hollars’s work. America and the South are not what they were in the 1960s, but recent events should prompt us to remember that the battles of the Civil Rights era weren’t the stuff of black-and-white photographs and newspaper columns. Many people made real, bloody, and unacknowledged sacrifices to lurch the cause forward inches at a time, and Opening the Doors demands that we learn their names and stories.
Proving Nothing to Anyone
Poems by Matt Cook
Publishing Genius Press, June 2013
ISBN-13: 9780988750326
$14.95; 86pp.
Reviewed by Michael Luke Benedetto
Matt Cook’s fourth book of poetry, Proving Nothing to Anyone, takes itself about as seriously as the title would suggest, but that’s in no way a bad thing. These pages are spilling over with Jack Handy-esque one-liners that teeter on the brink of profundity, like “I never really got to know my mother— / The fact that I was her son always got in the way,” “I always thought not hitting a road worker was its own reward,” and “Do you ever wonder where the Pepsi truck is going with all that Pepsi?”
In five sections, Cook’s often humorous and occasionally bizarre poetry appears in forms from sestinas to prose poems to everything in between. The simple language and short, punchy sentences emphasize the pseudo aphoristic nature embedded in many of these poems, such as in “My Wife’s Car” when the speaker fondly remembers, “My grandfather said death is like looking at your house from across the street,” or the penultimate stanza in “Not Really My Problem”: “Through our insanity and our desperation / We accomplish as much as through our discipline.” These compelling lines leap out amid abominable snowmen suffering from head colds and the obituary for the inventor of frozen French fries, forcing a reexamination of all the surrounding absurdity.
Though many of these poems are essentially compilations of witticisms similar to those above, the more narrative pieces are excellently paced and equally as funny. In “Commitment to Excellence,” the speaker delays telling a woman that her hair has suddenly caught fire because he is nearing the end of an amusing anecdote. Only after the punch line is delivered and well received does he let her know. At the poem’s close, we are assured that “The woman was not seriously harmed, / And she ended up writing me a letter of recommendation.”
Even with slowly burning hair, it is difficult not to devote full attention to Cook when he is in his element. If you are able to attend one of his readings, it would be well worth your time because while on the page his poetry will elicit at least a few chuckles, seeing him deliver one of his poems doubles the urgency and hilarity in each line and leaves his voice echoing through his writing long afterward. Matt Cook has a real knack for making people laugh, pause and think, and then laugh again. This book is the proof.
Tales from Ma’s Watering Hole
Stories by Kaye Linden
BookLocker, July 2013
ISBN-13: 9781326264346
$14.95; 152pp.
Reviewed by Joe Ponepinto
Ninety-nine-year-old Ma left the outback and opened a café in Sydney, but she never gave up the ways of her aboriginal beginnings. In these short fictions the shaman woman hosts nightly gatherings for tourists, the curious and the down and out, during which she encourages them to tell their stories as a way of creating a link between modern, mainstream Australian culture and the ancient one of her forbearers. She practices a traditional form of healing, built around the values of community/tribe, recognizing that the present is empty without the foundation of the past. Her attitude, in this case from the aboriginal point of view, reflects the national reconciliation that has occurred in Australia over the last couple of decades. There are lessons in Kaye Linden’s tales, but no hatreds or prejudices exposed during Ma’s story-telling sessions.
Ma, though, has not been untouched by modernization. She understands the pressures and demands of current culture. Although Ma eschews technology and commerce, she doesn’t run from them, and sometimes employs those modern methods, such as when she agrees to the construction of a cement monument, Uluru, mimicking the original from her desert childhood, to placate her desire to return to her roots. But always she sees people in the old way, peering through their 21st century, culturally induced obsessions, to find the human being at their core. As a shaman, she seeks to purify the people around her, to stop them from wandering too far from their real selves.
In the best of these tales, Ma abandons her city surroundings for the outback. It’s one thing to talk about ancient values and practices in the context of city life, but quite another to experience them firsthand. In “A Shaman Goes Walkabout,” Linden takes Ma on a reinvigorating trek back to her roots in the great desert:
On walkabout from the café, tired of city lights, Ma catches a bus from the downtown station to the end of the line. Here, Ma runs with emus through the red desert dust and eats bush cucumbers in full fruit. After absorbing electricity from lightning, she flies with the magpies to places of desire, waterholes of power, canyons where cave dwellers recorded their first Dreamings. She descends to a land inhabited by tiny rock sprites who bow to the shaman’s journey and beg to honor her wish. For inspiration, Ma requests the creation of a sand painting.
In returning to Ma’s origins, to the land of Dreamings, Linden prods readers to look beyond the boundaries of their cities and lives, and to remember, as ancient cultures do, that existence is a progression of generations, each tied to the others, rather than the urges of individuals that seems so common today.
The Vital System
Poems by CM Burroughs
Tupelo Press, October 2012
ISBN-13: 9781936797158
$16.95; 64pp.
Reviewed by Anne Shaw
CM Burroughs’ exquisite first collection, The Vital System, begins, riskily enough, in the womb. “My skin was / translucent,” the poet writes, “already feminine. Knowing nothing of it.” Subjected to the vicissitudes of a body compromised by illness and haunted by the absence of a sibling whose death is somehow related, these poems probe the painful cracks and crevices of experience. “I love you, but, and believe this / I mostly want to talk” the narrator states simply in the book’s opening poem, “Dear Incubator.”
These poems command registers that range from the plainspoken to the densely lyric and experimental. “So much has happened,” she writes: “I’m black. I have a dead sister.” Deploying an inventive arsenal of forms, Burroughs relentlessly pokes, prods, and dissects history. Her key strategy is to adopt a range of viewpoints. For instance, in “Black Memorabilia,” the narrator delves, by turns, into the ways that Black women have historically been labeled and (mis)constructed by whites, into the body’s physical interiors, and into the sexual and political appropriation of Black women’s bodies by Black men. “I have faced the question: What are you?” she writes. In recalling the ways in which she is called out of, rather than by, her name, the narrator offers “drafts and drafts of self. Deleting” but also reconstructing and reclaiming.
The book’s abiding questions circle around the intertwined nature of physicality and language, and specifically the capacity of each for harm or redemption. “I was accustomed to being sewn / open,” the narrator tells us in “For the Circus of I,” “my mouth, / bracketed tug.” There are “names that acknowledge pain but / don’t let it out” as well as the racially-implicated “Nth words, / which did the swift damage.” Yet, too, “when language / failed, there was the body.” Physicality and language not only mirror and catch one another, but also combine to create moments of blinding transcendence, as in the title poem: “I, in strutting cock stance / anatomy blazing, phonic, self – / made mid light.”
These impeccably crafted poems offer no one clear narrative and no clear answers. Instead, Burroughs creates a “tilling cipher” in language that is sonorous, muscular, and multiplicious. Her complex poetics present a welcome shift from the standard lyric-narrative mode of many first collections. With an infallible ear and an unflinching eye, The Vital System unfolds the excruciating even as it evokes the miraculous.
Reviewer Bios:
Michael Martin Shea’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Colorado Review, Indiana Review, jubilat, Pleiades, and Best New Poets 2012. He lives in Oxford, Mississippi, where he edits Yalobusha Review and coordinates the Trobar Ric Reading Series.
Daniel Pecchenino teaches in the Writing Program at the University of Southern California. His poetry and criticism have appeared in American Literature, The Los Angeles Review, Flaunt, and Turnstile, and he blogs about higher education, literature, and pop culture at The General Reader. He lives in Hollywood where he’s allegedly working on a book about F. Scott Fitzgerald, Walter Benjamin, and the Hays Motion Picture code.
Michael Luke Benedetto hails from New England but currently lives and writes in San Diego. His work has appeared in the Long River Review and The Essay Connection.
Joe Ponepinto is the former Book Review Editor for The Los Angeles Review, and is now a principal with Woodward Press, a Michigan publisher. His stories and criticism have appeared in dozens of literary journals. Joe was a journalist, political speechwriter and business owner before turning to creative writing full time in 2006. He lives in Michigan with his wife, Dona, and Henry, the coffee drinking dog. His blog on the writing life is at http://joeponepinto.com.
Anne Shaw is the author of Undertow, winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky Poetry Prize, and Dido in Winter forthcoming from Persea Books in December 2013. Her poems have appeared in journals including Harvard Review, Black Warrior Review, Denver Quarterly, Crab Orchard Review, Prairie Schooner, and New American Writing. Also a visual artist, she is currently a graduate student of writing and sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work can be found online at www.anneshaw.org.