Peter Markus - No other writer can make from mud and river and fish and moon the luminous world

Peter Markus, Bob, or Man on Boat (Dzanc Books, 2008)

"This is transcendent music, a 133 page song of incredible beauty from America’s preeminent poet of earthly and heavenly matter. No other writer can make from mud and river and fish and moon the luminous world Markus paints here in this story of a father and son fishing on the river. Open the book anywhere and you will find the spare and haunting prose Markus has become renowned for:
I once saw Bob, at dawn, standing up in his boat, facing where the sun was rising, and what Bob was doing, it looked like to me, it sounded like to me, was he was screaming, though what he was saying, what he was hollering, this I could not hear.
When I told this to a friend in town who is no stranger to Bob, what he said was that Bob was yelling at the sun, that he was telling it to stay where it was, for it to go away, because Bob didn’t want the night, and the night’s fishing, to come to an end. Likewise, you will not want to see Bob come to an end, or at least, you will count the days till Peter Markus’ next piece of music." - Robert Lopez

"Markus has a remarkable ability to strip life down to its basics, to the point where the metaphors we manufacture as the looking-glass for our existence end up standing in for existence itself. Fish, mud, night and river come to stand in place of family connections as fathers and sons, by giving themselves to fishing, give themselves over to a lone search and to loss.” -Brian Evenson

"With spare but magical language, Peter Markus weaves a tale with the currents of a river, a family saga that spins through both the depths and the shallows. In Bob, or Man on Boat, recollections rise from the muddy river bed to be illuminated by starshine on the surface, only to be lost once more in the river mists that mingle with the wind-scattered ashes of a dead man, and finally, to sink again to the bottom. Like the voice of the narrator, Markus uses words that “skip across the surface like a stone”, but take the reader to the depths of longing and loss, myth and memory." - Pamela Ryder

"In an unforeseeable counterpoint to Heraclitus’ dictum 'No man steps in the same river twice', Peter Markus offers the opposite wisdom: the river is always the same river, and we who step in it become the river, become the same. Only an innocent eye can see the river so. Only an innocent eye can see that in its muddy depths the river hides a secret whose nature is to be continually revealed. Here, in this river-world, where every character with a name is named Bob, where men turn into fish, where fish turn into men, where magic works darkly in the mud, where boys turn into their fathers, where dreams reveal the world, where the stars swim in the sky’s river, where hands are covered in fish scales, where the river sings to us of our origins and of our ends, to see is to baptize the mind in the river. Markus’ world is not old because it never ceased living in wonder. It is a mythic world and ever-new. When Markus sings his voice is chorus. Melville’s Ahab is in there. So is Hawthorne. So are the Brothers Grimm. So are Faulkner and Jung. But those voices return to, and harmonize with, some deeper, more sonorous Anonymity, that bodiless voice which utters every story, whose voice is itself a river, and who chooses, among countless thousands, one humble mouth to sing its story through. That voice is spoken for us by Peter Markus. And this novel is one of those songs." — Dan Beachy-Quick

Peter Markus, The Singing Fish (Calamari Press, 2005)

"These interwoven tales that make up The Singing Fish are not told, but spun from a primal, almost child-like, source of mythic language - sublimated from the fundamental building blocks of mud, brother, river, girl, moon, fish and a rusted nail."

"Very little occurs in a Peter Markus story that does not involve a fish, mud, a brother, and, usually, a concluding act of brutality. Markus's language is primal, even primitive, but his sentence structure is among the most perplexing and, ultimately, fascinating I have ever encountered. Markus serves up sentence after sentence of startling musicality. These aren't stories in any traditional sense; they are works of a prose stylist with the ear of a poet." - Peter Conners

"They enact over and over a story of death and rebirth, of killing fish, their father and each other, and nailing everything they admire the most to the telephone pole in the back yard." - Dawn McDuffie

"Mud is mystical. Mud is creative. Mud is the primordial ooze, a primitive but generative mixture that signals language, love and violence. At least, this is what Peter Markus' The Singing Fish ultimately seems to suggest; and in the end, mud is the perfect symbol for this deeply odd yet compelling book of short fictions. "Us brothers, we love mud," Markus' narrator tells us. And the reason soon becomes clear:
When the rain stops drumming down, us brothers, we drop down, onto our hands and knees, down in the mud, and we begin to eat. We eat until our bellies are big with mud. We take what is left of the mud and we make Girl. We start at the bottom and make our way up. Girl's knees are especially muddy. They make us want to stay forever kneeling.
Mud both creates and sustains life in The Singing Fish. It may be eaten, or it may be shaped into life, or rendered as language. Given the story's locale, this obsession with the mixture of dirt and water makes perfect sense. After all, Markus' curiously lyrical account of two brothers and one river is ultimately a story about the margin between land and river, that mixed-up liminal space where dirt becomes mud, boy becomes brother, girl becomes cave and father becomes fish.
The Singing Fish is a series of short fictions narrated by one of two "brothers" who live in a house next to a river. The action is in a way governed by the river's affiliation with life, family, violence and creation. In a sense, Markus' short vignettes form an overarching narrative not unlike the river that is at the book's center: always in motion, always in flux, and yet paradoxically static, always returning to the curiously sweet acts of violence that galvanize family relations, and compel the reader into a kind of voyeuristic complicity:
Brother, I said to Brother. You can go first. Brother, I told him, give me your hand. Hold your hand up against this pole. Brother did just what I told. We were brothers—we were each other's voice inside our own heads. This might sting, I warned. And then I raised back that hammer. I drove that rusty nail right through Brother's hand. Brother didn't wince, or flinch with his body, or make with his boy mouth the sound of a brother crying out.
Markus calls on this motif numerous times, almost word for word—and it need hardly be mentioned that "nail through the hand" is a powerful image in the canon of Western culture—but nevertheless, Markus finds ways to grant a new energy to this metaphor, showing how the family relations created in this way can achieve and sustain a deep emotional energy. The two brothers who narrate this story have an emotional, almost telepathic connection that renders them indistinguishable from one another. In "Fish Heads," the brothers tell us that even they are unable to tell:
There was a time when our father, he used to call us brothers Fish Head One and Fish Head Two. Us brothers, we never really knew for sure which of us was which—who was Fish Head One and who was Fish Head Two?
And indeed, this is a question that Markus invites us to consider, but it is ultimately resolved by the sinister yet curiously tender figure of the brothers' father, who in one of many repetitions of this theme, takes both brothers and nails their hands to the telephone pole together, ultimately signaling that there is no hierarchy, no differentiating among them. The pole, perhaps unsurprisingly, is dotted with the heads of fish that the brothers have caught, offering to us the first clue that the river is a margin more mixed-up than we have been led to believe. Later, when the father himself becomes a fish, the boys heave him into the river, where he swims into its depths as they casually cut the heads off his dozens of "fish" young.
Mud is the symbol of the mixed-up taxonomy of The Singing Fish, which resists the kinds of distinctions that conventional narrative insists upon. Man can become fish, and vice versa. People can walk on water and then drown, or drown and then walk on water. Violence has no permanent effect, because time itself seems paradoxically to be on a kind of loop. Each time we return to the moment at which one character "lines up that rusty nail" in preparation to drive it through the hand of another, we sense that The Singing Fish has abandoned the strictly temporal for an oneiric and elliptical repetition that denies that violence has consequences, or that love is impermanent, or that distinctions between land and water, mud and life, fish and man can hold any sway in this curious world. The syncretic potency of the images recalls William Carlos Williams, while the improvisatory and repetitive syntax, like that of Gertrude Stein, reveals that "repetition" is at once inevitable and impossible, like the constantly changing but nevertheless static river that draws the "Brothers" to its margin again and again.
It is true that to read The Singing Fish requires some intestinal fortitude. The graphic scenes of "gutting" fish are rendered curiously more disturbing by the fact that the fish seem to survive the process, able afterwards to escape and "swim across grass and mud". Markus' reminder to the reader ("You, do not think that this is funny") is rendered unnecessary by the disturbing force of images like "the hammer in our father's fist," which reminds us that the violence which constitutes family relations in this book is ominous and disturbing as well as sweet. And the close, telepathic relation between the brothers cannot quite take the edge off of sequences like this one:
Boy, we told Boy. Go fish. Boy took to that muddy river water like he was part dog, part fish. Boy swam back to the river's muddied bank and flopped down dead right there on the shore. Yes, just like a fish. This boy here, Brother said. He is a keeper, Brother said. If you say so, I said to Brother. And then we chopped off this boy's head.
The end result is that Markus has given violence a kind of lyrical energy that feeds on its ability to shock—and the images in this book have marvelously potent staying power as a result. At first glance, The Singing Fish looks intellectual, a kind of "artifice-as-art" postmodernism that distances the reader while engaging with the high-minded sensibilities of the aesthetic avant-garde. But Markus is up to something far more valuable and far more complicated. The Singing Fish is a throwback in the best sense of the word, a book in which symbolic energy and creative force are valued over the empty form and practiced ironic distance that has characterized so much avant-garde work over the past decade. Markus' book is violent, disturbing and at times off-putting. But it is also lovely and compelling, and reminds us that language, like mud, can both create life and sustain it." - Gunnar Benediktsson

"Peter Markus has written an epithalamium to mud, river, fish, moon, and childhood. The voice he has chosen to carry the lyric burden of his song is that of one of two young brothers living in a river-town whose principal features are the river, mud, a steel mill "shipwrecked in the mud," the boys' backyard, and a telephone pole transfigured, by the ritual nailing of fish heads to its creosoted surface, into a totem of boyhood's heroic and mystic passage. It is Markus' genius to have made of his fraternal romance a fabulous drama in which very little occurs, and the little that does recurs in a richly modulated variation on the author's several themes: murder and creation, death and resurrection. What Markus achieves, within his musical composition, is a dramatic enactment of the brutality and magic of which our nascent selves are constituted: the prerogatives of early childhood. The little that does happen in the eighty-seven diminutive pages of The Singing Fish is (we may come to believe by novel's end) enough -- may well be, in fact, all that needs to be written on the subject of childhood considered from the viewpoint of an ethnographer, a cultural anthropologist, or poet.
I say "novel," for the writing possesses the aspects of a novel despite its brevity. The work may be brief; but its interior structures are built of a simple language intensified by reiteration and periphrasis. The resulting rhythmic density and variety beggar the effects of any ordinary literary minimalism. A novel must have characters, and The Singing Fish has eight - chief among them two inseparable brothers, who are almost always referred to as "us brothers" in recognition of their indistinguishable natures. "We were brothers - we were each other's voice inside our own heads." They have names (Jimmy and John), but we are not certain which name applies to which brother; nor does it matter. Markus has seized, in the relation of his protagonist(s), the moment before the delineation of individuality, after which largely unconscious beings separate to become persons. Other than "us brothers," only two characters assume any significant role in the work: a tongueless boy (mutilations are omnipresent, symbolic, perhaps, of the mutation constantly at work in the novel's archetypal world) and a girl made of mud, who, becoming the moon, is transformed into stars. With the exception of us brothers' father and mother, adults are absent from the landscape; and the roles of the father and mother are reduced to a few repeated gestures of radically simplified authority figures. (The mother disappears from the story midway.) An older cousin and his girlfriend appear for the space of a single chapter and serve as a reiteration of the figures of boy and Girl. The novel's central consciousness belongs, equally and powerfully, to the pair of brothers (in spite of the narration having been given to a single one of them). This consciousness is as vast as the universe Markus creates out of mud and stars.
The sixteen chapters may be considered as theatrical stages on which the brothers play the unfolding dramatic action of the precognitive impulse towards transcendence. Here, the naive initiates can walk on water, eat mud and be nourished by it, dive into mud and harrow its bottomlessness for three days, fashion a girl from mud, hear the voice of the river speak, take instruction from talking fish, cut off a boy's head, crucify each other on a pole studded with the emblematic heads of singing fish, and have their own heads cut off - without irreversible effect. The minimal action (action considered as change or movement in character) occurs not in a phenomenological or psychological dimension, but in a mythic one. The Singing Fish is a cosmology of the simultaneously circumscribed and infinite regions of the naďf mind, using the style and tone of creation myths to present its subject. In this style and tone lie the work's interest, at least for this reader.
To return to the aspects of a novel, which The Singing Fish can claim: There is a landscape, however it may be rendered in the most economical of gestures. There is movement, largely in the form of metamorphosis, where the work's iconic notions (river, mud, rust, fish, girl, moon, stars) can be transformed into one another, as in this passage:
Then Girl stepped with both of her girl feet into this bottomless mud. Us brothers, we watched Girl lift up the cottony hem of her girl dress. The mud reached up just barely to kiss Girl's knees. Girl's knees, they are the kind of knees that make us brothers want to stay forever kneeling. When Girl stepped into this mud, it was like dipping the oar of a rower's boat into a muddy puddle. It's true, Girl was that big. Girl was so big, us brothers, we climbed our way up the side of her mud-barked body as if she were a tree. This tree, we knew, we would never get up to the top. Something would stop us - the moon, the stars. Some passing by bird or aeroplane would get in our climbing way. The moon rising up rose, but it stopped rising when it got all tangled up in Girl's hair. Girl thought the moon was just a knot of hair that the wind had twisted up. Girl walked around for a month with the moon sitting on top of her girl's head.
The passage is characteristic of Markus' astonishing fiction-making in The Singing Fish. It combines private (but not esoteric) cosmology, mythology, metaphor (in the wonderful "mud-barked body"), exquisite gesture ("lift up the cottony hem"), and the hyperbole of creation stories. The narrator goes on to describe how the moon comes unfixed, at last, from Girl's hair to splinter into stars. The action of a novel must also be set in a time. Markus sets his at night, which is suitable for magic and murder, for the birth of moon and stars, and for the fires that sometimes ignite the foundries of mythic creation.
Characters, landscape, movement and metamorphosis (change), time - Markus' novel has these. And to them, he adds - as I have noted - a melodial quality that sings throughout the work as surely as do his marvelous fish (which, when the story demands it, also talk). Why should they not when the river "told us what to do"? Why not a river that sings and fish that sing from where they have been nailed by us brothers, on the telephone pole - symbol, perhaps, of the power to communicate the unseen and the unheard voices that nevertheless are all around us? This, I think, is poetry. Ultimately, a novel may be reduced to an obsession with words. In the cosmos that an authentic writer brings into being, it is words that are its elements, objects, and fixtures -- that are, for him, the world. Us brothers - speaking for their author - understand the molecular nature of words:
Us brothers said some words back to our father, words such as moon and mud and river and fish, but even these words, words that were the world to us brothers, these words were sounds that our father did not hear.
Peter Markus has written a novel of amazement and beauty. He might also have written a cantata or work for the musical theater. Perhaps there is one who will read The Singing Fish and fashion for it a musical setting. I can only hope one day to hear Markus' novel sung." - Norman Lock

Peter Markus, Good, Brother (Calamari Press, 2006)

"Peter Markus' Good, Brother is a collection of short-short stories/prose poems that revolve around the lives of two virtually conjoined brothers and the mythical world that they fashion out of fish, mud, stars, the moon and a girl. Through acts of sublimely innocent brutality, they perpetually (and unconsciously) strive to preserve and continually renew their primordial creations—and their own primal child selves—while living in a town, with a dirty river running through it, that is seen by others as being just a shipwrecked sort of place."

"In this spare and simple novel, Markus shapes and reshapes river and mud into a protean world perpetually reasserting itself through rituals that are at once down-home and arcane. There is a whole mythology here, generated privately between two brothers engaged in an always childlike (and for that reason all the more serious) task of creation. Good, Brother is like watching Raymond Roussel and Flannery O'Connor show up to the barn dance wearing hip waders and despite this still managing to outwhirl the best of them." — Brian Evenson

"Very little occurs in a Peter Markus story that does not involve a fish, mud, a brother, and, usually, a concluding act of brutality. Markus's language is primal, even primitive, but his sentence structure is among the most perplexing and, ultimately, fascinating I have ever encountered. Markus serves up sentence after sentence of startling musicality. These aren't stories in any traditional sense; they are works of a prose stylist with the ear of a poet." — Peter Conners

"In some moments like a compact novel and in others like a series of connected stories, Good, Brother uses the most sophisticated, experimental edges of fiction to tell a story about the grittiest, most primal emotions." - Ross Simonini

“In the beginning was the word and the word was mud” (John1:1). This quote prefaces Good Brother, by Peter Markus, detailing characters living and surviving in a particular, diminished landscape. The book is equally plausible as a narrative, about people navigating a bleak environment, and as a particular psychic terrain, with interwoven elements of things real, imagined and symbolic. The deft blend of brutalities, forms of tenderness, outbursts, and discipline, covers complex and convincing ground. With no wish to live in, or even visit such grounds, I am willing, even thankful, to be absorbed in the world they make up. Markus strings together sentences that are astonishing, rhythmic intonations. With them he returns, again and again, to an uncomfortable, unpredictable, yet uncannily familiar sense of symbiosis. His piercing depictions of love, family, survival and grit are presented in ways that underscore the importance of stories themselves as vehicles able to express and connect such primal elements of our existence.
Markus writes like a blues singer; his tools are limited and specific. He employs just a few notes, but oh how those notes ring. They include: brothers, father, mother, river, mud, rust, dirt, girl, and fish. The brothers are actively diligent in their diminished, dirty, scant, physical world, making mud soup, catching fish, cooking them, nailing fish heads, and one another’s hands, to things. As you read the book, the preface quote, particularly the word “beginning”, is called into question. The brothers’ way of life is an adjustment, perhaps a set of responses to something that has happened. And what that thing might be becomes an important subtext. Clearly, it is not just any slight thing, but some big, harsh, unalterable thing that has occurred to generate the conditions of this particular beginning. Why are these people so poor, why is their river so dirty, where does mom go? Throughout the narrative, one wonders what came before the beginning.
Markus lives in Michigan, the lower part of the state, outside of Detroit. I mention this because I believe the work can be looked at as a contemporary parallel to a famous collection set in the woods of Northern Michigan, Ernest Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories. Nick, tall, brawny, appropriately dressed, treks through towering forests, fishes in sparkling rivers, neatly fries his catch over a fire he makes himself, has a doctor father. These brothers, you imagine, have one set of clothes, are thin, and in need of sunlight and vitamin C. They fish in sludge, their family eats the fish that surely tastes of it. Nick is destined for greatness, at least upward mobility. These Good Brothers, in contrast, are fully occupied doing what they need to do to get by." - Lynn Crawford

"Markus, if you don’t know his writing, works in whirlwinds & loops, repetitive cycles something akin to prayer or chant where only a word or two changes from sentence to sentence or carries from one phrase to the next, & somehow this feat of both liquid writing & entrancing rhythms never ceases to surprise me:
‘Girl is all ours.
We made her.
Girl began as mud.
Girl began as mud but became a girl when we gave her her name. We named her Girl because that’s what she looked like: girl. Girl, we said. And the name stuck like a stick stuck in the mud.
We took a stick and spelled Girl’s name in the mud down by the edge of the river.
G-I-R-L.
Girl looked good in the mud.
Girl’s mud body shined like something made brand new in the moonlight.’
& also, if you don’t know Markus, the Boys in GOOD, BROTHER as well as their Father, Mother, their Girl Made of Mud, their Fish & their Moon & their Stars & their Lighthouse, these are all elements that are picked up & laid down meticulously throughout Markus’ other Calamari book THE SINGING FISH as well as in his New Michigan Press title THE MOON IS A LIGHTHOUSE, his Dzanc novel BOB, OR MAN ON BOAT, &, one can safely assume, in his forthcoming Dzanc collection WE MAKE MUD.
But this is not to say that Markus deadens, numbs, tires, or plays-out these relationships, their roles, or the characters. In fact, what GOOD, BROTHER instantly shows the reader is that we can take up & leave down these Boys at their River over & again, always finding a new twist in the narrative, a new picture in the images, or a new doorway in their humble for-sale-by-the-River house. The Boys themselves, not wanting to leave their home, not wanting to go, seek discovery of their world along side the reader, never tiring:
‘And this, making mud, is a thing us brothers can’t never get enough of…Look at the sky. The sky, we say, it is a river. And the stars: the stars are the glowing eyes of fish. And the moon? our mother asks us brothers, catching us, her sons, off guard. The moon, we tell our mother, it is a lighthouse. And we are all of us living inside.’
Part of the wonder for me, is the simplicity of Markus’ language, how it invites a reader in, humbly, & then grows over the pages to a fury of sound, a cacophony, a complex & vibrant noise that we cannot shake from our heads. There is glorious beauty in invading the reader, in taking him or her with you, especially when they don’t even notice they are on the journey until it is nearly at its end.
‘Close your eyes, Girl tells us brothers. Then you’ll see what I mean. Us brothers, we close our eyes just like Girl tells us. Good, Girl whispers. Now hold out your hands in front of your face, your palms facing away. Tell me what you see. We see a river, I say. We see fish. We see moon. Mud, I say. I see Girl. Good, Girl says, to this. Now, open your eyes back up. Look into the palm of your right hand. We look. The star that was in our hand, in its middle, it is now an eye. It is an eyeball as big as a baseball is. It is lid-less, is blink-less, its pupil, it is a wide open sky that is the color of mud. There is this river there, running through it, and a moon floating whitely above.’" - J. A. Tyler