S:
I’ve not read Bluets,
but The Argonauts did feel like a game-changer, partly because
of its subject matter, and partly because it brought to light a
tendency in recent non-fiction writing to ignore generic and formal
boundaries, producing something that feels entirely new in the
process (I’ve covered this ground pretty comprehensively in my
stalled exchange with James, so won’t go over the same material
here). Not sure how relevant it is, but there’s an excellent
titbit about compositional methods from the Wave collection, where
Maggie Nelson explains to Wayne Kostenbaum about how she writes poems
on scraps of paper and napkins, and then carries the collated
material around with her wherever she goes. It’s a fractured
method of writing - something she contrasts with the more
conventional procedures she applies to prose - which I can
appreciate, and it’s precisely these little nuggets of writerly
practice that make interviews with poets and their ilk so useful -
it’s so much more valuable than the pseudo-scholarly gossip that
often underpins literary biographies.
Claudia Rankine, too,
has been a key part of my reading: both she and Nelson seem to have
found a way to reinvigorate socially engaged writing in a way that
combines the personal and the political, and feels immediately
accessible for a general reader without sacrificing either formal
invention or their innate radicalism. But they also feel strangely
unrepeatable: both The Argonauts and Citizen will
undoubtedly be incredibly influential, though not necessarily in
terms of form or even theme, but rather as goads for the rest of us,
on either side of the pond, to radically up our collective game.
(Another nugget from the What is Poetry: Ted Greenwald - who’s
in the reading jumble, too - bemoaning the decline in *creative*
competition in poetry, the sense that we might be driven to greater
compositional heights by the output of our peers and friends:
jealousy as the great begetter. Think of Brian Wilson making Pet
Sounds after hearing Revolver, and McCartney returning the
complement with Sgt Pepper. I’m sure there are more
literary examples I could have leant towards, but that’s always the
analogy that’s at the forefront of my brain.)
Gratifyingly, Michael
O’Brien’s work turned out to be as exciting as I’d hoped. Not
sure why the hell I’ve not been reading him for years, to be
honest; it feels like an irredeemable oversight on my part. Still,
I’m glad to have discovered his work now, even if it is a little
late in the day. I feel like he’s just the tip of an iceberg of
poets with long and respected careers who’ve somehow, for whatever
reason, managed to slip through the cracks of critical attention (or
mine, at least). My mission for the next few months is to try and
plug a few of those gaps: the world is absolutely stuffed with
exciting work, both old and new; you just have to keep reading
without jaded eyes.
In an entirely
unrelated note, tell me about Motorman.
G:
Well now, I
wholeheartedly second everything you say about Nelson and Rankine,
and glad for the extra bits I didn’t know about Maggie’s process.
I’ll let that rest and move on because I’ve been thinking about
anti-novels lately, or anti-narratives. And your query about Motorman
sparks a few thoughts.
Do you know about Tin
House magazine’s ‘Lost and Found’ section? The list is,
fortunately, online, although the articles themselves are
subscription-only. (And at time of writing their store is undergoing
maintenance so I can’t see much more.) Anyway, I very much like the
outcome of a ‘reclaimed from the heaps’ reading list, although
the principle itself is somewhat, I dunno, distressing/frustrating?
It’s obviously subjective: I’d hardly put Lessing and Henry
Green, or Dodi Smith on those lists, but you can’t tell when these
pieces were written from the list. There’s certainly some
interesting stuff on there, regardless - it looks like a better ‘hit’
than ‘miss’ approach for me. (It is, I should add, exclusively
prose, to the best of my knowledge).
At the same time, it
leans toward American and ‘literary’ more than my tastes in
recent years. If I had to draw up my own list of lost and founds, it
might read with a mix of difficult and delightful, but all, to me,
perspective game-changers in terms of what a novel can do (yes, OK,
if I were being blunt they’re books that accept the whole ‘Joycean
moment’):
David Ohle Motorman
(originally loaned, then gifted, by Andrew Bailey, total legend that
he is)
Ann Quin Berg
JG Ballard The
Atrocity Exhibition
Kenneth Gangemi Olt
David Thomas The
White Hotel
Renee Gladman The
Activist
Robin Blaser The
Holy Forest
Ursula Le Guin The
Dispossessed
Flann O’Brien The
Third Policeman
Boris Vian
Heartsnatcher
I’m sure there are
others I’ve forgotten for now and would need to hunt through
shelves to recover. I can’t describe any of these as ‘perfect’
books but they definitely stuck with me in ways that other books
haven’t. And by ‘stuck’ I mean they left an emotional smear
across my otherwise numb and vacuous heart/soul echo chamber, like
the remains of a vampire’s supper entrailed across a crypt floor.
Against these there’s
a stack of less successful experimental novels:
Frederick Rolfe Hadrian
VII
Juan Filloy Op Oloop
…
And what am I doing? I
actually was on the verge of trawling through shelves to remind
myself of all the bad writing out there and then I thought:
list-making is a mug’s game. Some books work better than others,
but this division into ‘successful/unsuccessful’ or ‘good/bad’
is kind of pointless. I’ve been spending too much time on the
internet. Bump those two up into the top category and add the proviso
there are dozens more. Yes, your point is spot on: “the world is
absolutely stuffed with exciting work”.
So, I’ll do what I
was semi-avoiding and offer up a quick precis of why Ohle’s
Motorman moved me so much: I can’t honestly say what it is
‘about’ but it is laced with a passion for life and survival in
ways few books seem capable of celebrating. The protagonist, whose
name I’ve forgotten, has several minor hearts and a few major
hearts. He sounds semi-robotic. He drives about, escapes the State,
seems to be some kind of retarded expression of a free-wheelin’
sixties independent spirit operating in an early
Thatcherite/Reagan-esque or even McCarthyan, ‘This World has Moved
On’ authoritarian regime, which expresses itself benignly through
doctors and malignantly through a kind of militarised police force.
And our hero has to
basically chase down his old mentor - who was a state doctor type,
possibly, but has since gone rogue - before too many of his hearts
pack up and cause his main heart(s) to go into arrest. Or something
like that. It’s urgent, you care for him. It’s written in bursts
of poetic prose, almost like diary entries, each one barely
contingent on those around to start with, but the narrative grows
through fragments into a coherent dissonance.
You follow his urge to
write love letters to a woman you’re never quite sure exists, but
he’s madly in love with. You follow his quest through various
deranged biomes and territories, his encounters with madnesses in the
swamps and mists, weird episodes which seem hostile at first, turn
into safety, etc. It’s that movement between safety and danger, and
the continuous urgency of having to keep moving, chasing, to survive,
wrapped up in the bizarre love story underwriting it, which may or
may not be a false hallucination/implanted memory. I mean, I’m
cobbling it all together, it was so weird I had to half-guess what
was going on with it.
At the same time, it’s
so joyfully written, so open-minded and clean to read. And funny and
emotive: the prose is a beating heart, it bleeds energy and feeling.
I haven’t read another book like like that, which also managed to
catch me on the first page.
A lot of gushing and
I’ve done all that without even checking the contents of the book
again. The memory of reading it sits like a hazy-shaped ball of
happygoo inside me somewhere. That’s the stuff I crave these days.
And to be honest, I
haven’t had that feeling from poetry for quite a while. Maybe I had
a slight tang/buzz off Cathy Park Hong’s Dance Dance Revolution
and maybe I’m forgetting other stuff...
But yes: quite, quite
too long. Any recommendations along those somewhat indefinite lines?
===
The short answer: no, never. The nails in the coffin - Part 4 - tomorrow.
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