zoran rosko vacuum player: Donna Stonecipher - We had been to the secret service museum, to the shredded-documents-being-pieced-back-together museum, to the museum of the wealthy family’s Biedermeier house from 1830, to the museum of the worker family’s apartment from 1905, to the museum of the country that no longer exists,

12/16/23

Donna Stonecipher - We had been to the secret service museum, to the shredded-documents-being-pieced-back-together museum, to the museum of the wealthy family’s Biedermeier house from 1830, to the museum of the worker family’s apartment from 1905, to the museum of the country that no longer exists,

Donna Stonecipher, The Ruins of Nostalgia, Wesleyan University Press, 2023

New work from one of the most compelling and transformative writers of the contemporary prose poem

What is it to feel nostalgia, to be skeptical of it yet cleave intently to the complex truths of feeling and thought? In a series of 64 gorgeous, ramifying, unsettling prose poems addressing late-twentieth- and twenty-first century experience and its discontents, The Ruins of Nostalgia offers a strikingly original exploration of the misunderstood phenomenon of nostalgia as both feeling-state and historical phenomenon. Each poem, also titled The Ruins of Nostalgia, is a kind of lyrical mini-essay, playful, passionate, analytic. Some poems take a location, memory, conceit, or object as their theme. Throughout the series, the poems recognize and celebrate the nostalgias they ironize, which are in turn celebrated and then ironized again. Written often in the fictional persona of the first-person plural, The Ruins of Nostalgia explores the rich territory where individual response meets a collective phenomenon.

"This deeply intelligent book is a work of emotional and intellectual archeology revealing the changes wrought on two cities by the not-so-invisible hand of the market. Reading it, we see a bit of what Benjamin's Angel of History must see as he is blown backwards into the future."―Rae Armantrout

"'The ruins of nostalgia': a spur, a goad, a refrain, an environment, a mode of critique and homage. Stonecipher offers here both a hauntology and a melancholy celebration. This is also a sly and funny book, a brilliant new chapter in her distinctive, resonant lyrico-critical project. Stonecipher is the most compelling and transformative writer of the contemporary prose poem in English. Anecdote, vignette, ekphrasis, earworm, micro-essay, satire, incantation, griefwork: all here. This book cements Stonecipher's singular status as a poetic archaeologist and chronicler of our modernity."―Maureen N. McLane

"Most of us will reach a certain point in our living where if we can't figure out how and where to place our nostalgia it will completely overwhelm us. Donna Stonecipher's masterful solution is to build reflexive spaces for our memories, for what we've lost or what's been destroyed, for what's been so altered it's unrecognizable. She softens the blow of time and change by finding a way to tell all our stories at once, by compressing the nearly unbearable presence of our ruins into exquisitely sculpted prose passages and thinking architectures that radiate intelligence, charm, and mercuriality. This is a book I want to always be reading."―Renee Gladman

The beautiful and arresting sixth book from Stonecipher (Model City) features a series of numbered prose poems titled “The Ruins of Nostalgia,” each ending with a play on the phrase “the ruins of nostalgia.” It’s a conceit that could be overdone in the hands of a less skilled poet, but Stonecipher’s use of first-person plural and her exceptional eye for detail bestow the collection with a commanding and appealing strangeness. Throughout, descriptions of nostalgia capture its potency, delicateness, and layers: “Nostalgia feels personal as a pearl feels personal in its shell.... Many people remember the downtown of a neighborhood from their youth, with its dowdy department store and its five-and-dime, but one person is nostalgic for the clove cigarettes you could buy one at a time from a glass jar, another is nostalgic for the little blue Bakelite birds that cost a quarter.” The poem ends, “nostalgia is specific yet indiscriminate, benign yet opportunistic, personal yet collective, and if the twentieth century taught us anything, it’s that anyone feels welcome to wander through the ruins of anyone else’s nostalgia.” Readers will savor this vivid, elegant inquiry into a timeless subject. - Publishers Weekly

[sample poem]

The Ruins of Nostalgia 13

Where once there had been a low-end stationery store minded by an elderly beauty queen, there was now a store for high-end espresso machines minded by nobody. Where once there had been an illegal beer garden in a weedy lot, there was now a complex of luxury lofts with Parisian-style ivory façades. Where once there had been a bookstore and a bike shop and a bakery, there was now a wax museum for tourists. Where once there had been an empty lot there was now a building. Where once there had been an empty lot there was now a building. Where once there had been an empty lot there was now a building. Where once there had been an empty lot there was now a building. Where once there had been farms there were now subdivisions. Where once there had been subdivisions there were now sub-subdivisions. We lived in a sub-subdivision of a subdivision. We ourselves had become subdivided―where once we had merely been of two minds. * Where once there had been a river there was now a road. A vocal local group had started a movement to break up the road and "daylight" the river, which still flowed, in the dark, underneath the road. * Could we daylight the farms, the empty lots, the stationery store, the elderly beauty queen, the city we moved to? Was it still flowing somewhere, under the luxury lofts, deliquescing in the dark, inhabited by our luxury selves, not yet subdivided, because not yet whole? * Could we daylight the ruins of nostalgia?

THE RUINS OF NOSTALGIA 2

We had been to the secret service museum, to the shredded-documents-being-pieced-back-together museum, to the museum of the wealthy family’s Biedermeier house from 1830, to the museum of the worker family’s apartment from 1905, to the museum of the country that no longer exists, to the museum of the history of the post office, to the museum of the history of clocks. We had seen the bracelets made of the beloved’s hair, the Kaiserpanorama, the pneumatic tubes, the hourglasses, the shreds, the microphones hidden in the toupees, the ticking, the gilded mirrors reflecting our faces, the two rooms eight people lived in, the eight rooms two people lived in, the shreds, the trays of frangible butterflies carrying freight, the silvery clepsydras, the ticking, the simulacra, the shreds, the vitrines, the velvet ropes, the idealized portraits of the powerful, the ticking, the pink façades, the upward mobility, the shreds, the plunging fortunes, the downward spirals, the ticking, the ticking, the shreds, the shreds. We had been to the museum of the ruins of nostalgia.

I’m deeply behind on the work of American-expat Berlin-based poet Donna Stonecipher [although we did hang out that one time in Berlin], having gone through her Transaction Histories (University of Iowa Press, 2018) [see my review of such here], but not yet seeing copies of her books such as The Reservoir (University of Georgia Press, 2002), Souvenir de Constantinople (Instance Press, 2007), The Cosmopolitan (Coffee House Press, 2008), Model City (Shearsman, 2015) or Prose Poetry and the City (Parlor Press, 2017). At least I’m able to get my hands on her latest, The Ruins of Nostalgia (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2023), an unfolding of sixty-four numbered self-contained prose poem blocks, each sharing a title. As the cover flap offers: “Sparked by the East German concept of Ostalgic (nostalgia for the East) and written while living through unsettling socio-economic change in both Berlin, Stonecipher’s adopted home, and Seattle, her hometown, the poems mount a multifaceted reconsideration of nostalgia. Invented as a diagnosis by a Swiss medical student in 1688, over time nostalgia came to mean the notorious backward glance into golden pasts that never existed.” Stonecipher composes her sequence of prose poems as a weaving of lyric, essay and image, examining the very act of remembering the past, focusing on periods and geographies in the midst of change, ranging from the intimate to the large scale. “It was before the city built traffic circles at every intersection to prevent accidents,” the piece “THE RUINS OF NOSTALGIA 21” begins, “like the one she’d heard one Sunday afternoon that sounded like someone shoving her parents’ stereo to the floor, but she’d run downstairs to find the stereo intact, her brother in front of it as usual, practicing ‘Stairway to Heaven’ on the guitar, headphones on.” Her prose lines extend and connect to further lines and threads held together, end to seeming end. “Of course it was a little odd to be glad of the bombs that had enabled the holes to remain holes,” she writes, as part of “THE RUINS OF NOSTALGIA 7,” “to be grateful for the failed bankrupt state that had enabled the holes to remain holes, so lying on the grass of an accidental playground, one just listened to the ping-pong ball batted back and forth across the concrete table. And thought idly of one’s own surpluses and deficits.”

The notion of the repeated title is one I’m fascinated by, something utilized by a string of poets over the recent years, from Peter Burghardt, through his full-length debut (no subject) (Oakland CA: Omnidawn, 2022) [see my review of such here] to the late Denver poet Noah Eli Gordon’s Is That the Sound of a Piano Coming from Several Houses Down? (New York NY: Solid Objects, 2018) [see my review of such here] and Johannes Göransson’s SUMMER (Grafton VT: Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2022) [see my review of such here]. There is something compelling about working this particular kind of thread, attempting to push beyond the obvious across those first few poems under a shared title, into an array of what else might come. As well, Stonecipher’s line “the ruins of nostalgia” repeats at the end of poems akin to a mantra or chorus, running through the foundations of the sequence like a kind of tether, stringing her essay-poems together in a singular line of thought. It almost reminds of how Richard Brautigan used language as an accumulative jumble into the final phrase of In Watermelon Sugar (1968), a novel that ended with the name of the book itself; or the nostalgia of Midnight in Paris (2011), a recollection that sought a recollection of a recollection, folding in and repeating, endlessly rushing backwards. As with nostalgia, the phrase is repeated often enough throughout that it moves into pure sound and rhythm and away from meaning; to look too far and too deep into an imagined recollection, one glimpsed repeatedly and uncritically, is to lose the present moment. It is, by its very nature, to become ruin. As “THE RUINS OF NOSTALGIA 11” writes:

We were able to be nostalgic both for certain cultural phenomena that had vanished, and for the time before the cultural phenomena had appeared, as if every world we lived in hid another world behind it, like stage scenery of a city hiding stage scenery of tiered meadows hiding stage scenery of ancient Illyria. For example it wasn’t answering machines, or the lack of answering machines, or the sight of tiny answering-machine tape cassettes that triggered our nostalgia, but the realization that our lives had transcended the brief life of the answering machine, had preceded and succeeded it, encompassed it, swallowed it whole, which meant we had to understand ourselves not as contained entities, but as planes intersecting with other planes, planes of time, technology, culture, desire. One plane had waited by the phone for our best friend’s phone call before answering machines, and then one plane had recorded outgoing messages on the answering machine over and over, trying and trying to sound blithe. How many tiny tape cassettes still stored pieces of our voices like pale-blue fragments of Plexiglas shattered into attics and basements across any number of states? We still owned a tape cassette with the voice of our first beloved on it, or a version of it, and remembered the version of the girl who kept rewinding his message over and over, under an analogue wedge of black sky and endlessly delayed stars. She was listening and listening for answers the answering machine could not provide. When we felt our material planes sliding to intersect with immaterial planes, or vice versa, we bowed our heads and submitted to the pile-up of the ruins of nostalgia. - rob mclennan

https://robmclennan.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2023-12-04T08:31:00-05:00&max-results=20&start=4&by-date=false

The Ruins of Nostalgia by Donna Stonecipher is a tract on nostalgia in 64 page-length fragments. Stonecipher picks apart the 20th-century phenomenon in all its guises, taking aim at the seemingly innocuous feeling that radiates warmth and longing even as it cloaks real harm and fosters inaction:

If we thought some aspects of the previous system were better than those of the current system, were we just “nostalgic” for the previous system? If we wished the empty lots would stay empty lots and not become luxury lofts, were we just “nostalgic” for empty lots?

In fragment no. 20, the poet considers the false comfort offered by nostalgia:

the stories had excited us into the aesthetic of the empathetic: we had felt the shocks of forms of injustice new to us, and had enjoyed bristling with outrage that need not become action. These stories had briefly become our stories […] It was only once it was no longer possible that we realized how good it had felt to nestle into the ruins of someone else’s nostalgia.

Throughout, Stonecipher historicizes the phenomena with the cool detachment of someone watching a circus. The prose poems read like spells, lulling the reader into a technicolor (if depressing) dream:

we cried each time we watched the video of the once-famous polar bear rotating in a daze from brain encephalitis before slipping from his artificial ice floe into his artificial ocean, […] we hunted for the bear’s stuffed hull in the museum […] oh what to do, what to do, with all this matter, piling up in all the side rooms inside us in the ruins of nostalgia.

Stonecipher’s diagnosis exposes the cuddly feeling as a sedative that trivializes anger, quells grief.

A roomful of heavy cardboard boxes of grief. Nostalgia, on the other hand, felt weightless, a tiny black-lacquered snuffbox inlaid with golden scenes, beautiful and detrimental […]

- JANANI AMBIKAPATHY

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet-books/reviews/161450/the-ruins-of-nostalgia

The Ruins of Nostalgia 1

In the fall we were nostalgic for the summer. In the winter we were nostalgic for the fall. In the summer we were nostalgic for the spring. But in the spring we were not nostalgic for the winter, not even for its quiet, or its hot cocoas, or its video fires, though we did ask our father from time to time to tell us about how, when he was a child, the man-made lake in the middle of our city froze over every winter, and how one December day he broke through the ice and was only saved from drowning by a neighbor boy whose name he can no longer remember. We were nostalgic for the frozen lake we had never seen, that is, for the lake we had never seen frozen, the man-made lake we had swum in during the summers after the lake froze. It was hard to imagine the summer lake frozen. It was hard to imagine the winter lake summery. It was hard to imagine the lake being made, and not just spontaneously welling up its murky green effluence. We were nostalgic for winters that had descended before we were sentient, as if those winters existed in snow globes we could stow on our nightstands and dream of falling and falling through the ice we are always rescued from by neighbors who become strangers over time. The lake is always melting in the ruins of nostalgia.

The Ruins of Nostalgia 2

We were clicking through photos of a lost Mongolian tribe on the internet on our laptop after work. We had clicked on the click-bait headline “lost Mongolian tribe” and were looking at a photo of a girl clutching a baby reindeer like a stuffed animal, bathing it in a lake. We were considering the symbiotic relationship of the lost Mongolian tribe to reindeer, while looking at a photograph of a human baby asleep propped on a furry flank. We were thinking about anthropology, and about the paradox of the observed observer, and wondering how a Mongolian tribe can be lost if it has already been found by the observed observer, who has lost her own glass eye of objectivity when she has found what it is she wanted all along to see. We were imagining anthropologists observing our own behavior, noting down our symbiotic relationship to our laptop, noting down the number of clicks we expend on click-bait hoping to satisfy our nostalgia for symbiotic relationships with animals we’ve never had, noting down our nostalgia for the possibility of living lost, not found. Cities had for a century and a half permitted some of us to live lost, but forces beyond our control were now insisting that we live found. * Under the final photograph it was written that the lost Mongolian tribe survives on money from tourists, on observed observers who come to take rides into the past on symbiotic reindeer. So, like videos marked “rare” that are uploaded to the entire internet, the lost Mongolian tribe was never “lost” at all. And that’s the thing: the observer is always the observed, and the observed the observer, in the ruins of nostalgia.

The Ruins of Nostalgia 3

She saw a dactyliotheca in the museum, a wooden cabinet holding three “books” containing not pages, but dozens of tiny drawers filled with white plaster cameos and intaglios—profiles of queens and goddesses sunk into ovals (intaglio—negative), or raised out of ovals (cameo—positive), rows and rows of cameo or intaglio profiles, raised or sunk, positive or negative, and she thought of the cheap black-and-white cameo pendants she and her sister had been given in Italy, the pearly profile supposedly “mother of pearl,” a new term she hadn’t understood—how did pearls have mothers?—but looking suspiciously like plastic, and thought of the cameo role the cameo had played in her life, like her sister’s friend Cameo, the three of them little girls in the sunken porcelain bathtub, Cameo with brown braids almost black, the cameo role Cameo had played, playing herself, in profile, in the bathtub, and thought she could make her own dactyliotheca with dozens of drawers full of rows and rows of cameos and intaglios, people who’d appeared and played themselves and disappeared—some positive, some negative—and like the Italian cameo in a drawer somewhere forgotten or rediscovered from time to time and considered—plastic or mother-of-pearl? Positive or negative? * What about people who’d played both positive and negative roles as themselves? Which was pretty much all of them? * Truth is the mother of beauty, necessity is the mother of invention, plastic is the mother-of-pearl cameos her mother, then young, now old, had given to her and her sister in Italy, in black and white, like the checkerboard marble floors of the palazzos they saw in postcards but never entered, leading to the positive or negative ruins of her nostalgia.

The Ruins of Nostalgia 5

Courtyard opened out into courtyard opened out into courtyard, and in the final courtyard, an art gallery was closing. It had opened shortly after the fall of the Wall, incandescent with idealism. Tonight was the opening of its closing exhibition. * What is art for? To critique society, to manufacture beauty, to make the artist lose all sense of time like a malfunctioning hourglass through which the sand just keeps pouring and pouring? * When I get a little money I buy books, if I have any left over I buy food and clothing. —Erasmus. This was printed on a bookmark tucked into each book she’d bought at the bookstore she used to frequent in her youth, which was closing. At this bookstore, courtyard after courtyard had opened in her mind. The bookstore was wood-paneled, with a spiral staircase leading up to fiction, and a spiral staircase leading down to nonfiction. At this bookstore, she had felt incandescent with idealism. * “One door closes, another opens”: a commonplace. The art gallery was closing; the bookstore was closing; but when their doors closed, the commonplace said, other doors would open. Other commonplaces. “The market takes care of itself.” * It was only at night, sometimes, that she realized that the door in the saying wasn’t really a door, it was only sgraffito, and the series of courtyards wasn’t really a series of courtyards, it was only a recurring dream of never arriving, walking permanently through archway after archway leading to the spiral staircase winding down to the ruins of nostalgia.

The Ruins of Nostalgia 18

As a child we dialed “SU2-8598” to call home, SU two, eight five nine eight, and the letters — SU — stood for Sunset: Sunset two, eight five nine eight, our phone number had a sunset in it, a sunset forever in the act of performing its orange gradations, built right into the phone number, which was not a phone number at all — but a scene, a scene with a number articulated into it, a scene with a sun that glowed once like an ember each time we articulated our phone number. There were also phone numbers that began LA (Lakeview) and AT (Atwater) and EM (Emerson), and so each phone number began with letters standing for a word that conjured an image — a phone number was also a phone-image — offering the dialer a setting in which to imagine: the telephone, located, the person answering the telephone, located, sitting perhaps at a little wooden table specially designed for telephoning, performing her orange gradations into the phone, in the background a sunset, in the background a lake view, in the background a neighborhood named after a Transcendental philosopher. We didn’t know why, over time, the usage changed, and the sunset was dropped from the number, and the scene went dark, the childhood phone number went dark, the sunset dropping down and down to the end of the sky, the childhood phone number went dark, the sun setting and setting and the lake view obscured by a set of numbers with no letters, the sun setting into the setting that was dismantling, nothing transcending nothing, the sun setting fast behind the woman sitting at a dismantling telephone table in the onset of the dark. Now she is only locatable in the ruins of nostalgia.

The Ruins of Nostalgia 20

Where there once had been a low-end stationery store minded by an elderly beauty queen, there was now a store for high-end espresso machines minded by nobody. Where once there had been an illegal beer garden in a weedy lot, there was now a complex of luxury lofts with Parisian-style ivory façades. Where once there had been a bookstore and a bike shop and a bakery, there was now a wax museum for tourists. Where once there had been an empty lot there was now a building. Where once there had been an empty lot there was now a building. Where once there had been an empty lot there was now a building. Where once there had been an empty lot there was now a building. Where once there had been farms there were now subdivisions. Where once there had been subdivisions there were now sub-subdivisions. We lived in one of the sub-subdivisions of one of the subdivisions. We ourselves had become subdivided—where once we had merely been of two minds. * Where once there had been a river there was now a road. A vocal local group had started a movement to break up the road and “daylight” the river, which still flowed, in the dark, underneath the road. * Could we “daylight” the farms, the empty lots, the stationery store, the elderly beauty queen, the city we moved to? Was it still flowing somewhere, under the luxury lofts, deliquescing in the dark, inhabited by our luxury selves, not yet subdivided, because not yet whole?

* Could we “daylight” the ruins of nostalgia?

The Ruins of Nostalgia 23

Some inhabitants of a city were milling around a room one sunny day looking at an exhibit of historical maps of earlier iterations of their city, all carrying fragile nostalgias in their minds, which they all thought of as the only possible nostalgia, but in fact they were inhabiting a city radiating with multiple and multilexical and multi-stratigraphic nostalgias. * The structure was concentric. Newer inhabitants, whose nostalgia was on the inner rings, tended to talk about it more. One brand-new inhabitant at a dinner party, possibly on coke, was so nostalgic that he wasn’t even nostalgic for the past, but for the present, a kind of pre-order nostalgia, because he knew it couldn’t last, it couldn’t last, he kept repeating, shaking his head, his wide eyes staring glazed at the table. Couldn’t last? It’s already over! thought the rest of the guests, who were longer-term inhabitants. But they sipped their wine in silence, for their nostalgias were on wider rings. * Their nostalgias were, of course, also the only possible nostalgias...

The Ruins of Nostalgia 26

Even if unconsciously, the city’s inhabitants had been glad of the holes. Empty slots between buildings, empty lots on corners, where here a handmade bar, there an impromptu park had been wedged between brick walls, or the green grass had just been left to expand unchecked. Even if unconsciously, the inhabitants had been glad of the empty lots, which had seemed permanent, rendered the city permeable; the ease of them, the way the holes allowed the whole to breathe, the city’s inhabitants to breathe more easily, for if there was surplus space, then surely there was surplus time, lots and slots of unoccupied and unmaximized time to fill the holes and empty them again. Or so it had seemed. * Of course it was a little odd to be glad of the bombs that had blown the buildings to bits, to be grateful for the failed bankrupt state that had enabled the holes to remain holes, so lying on the grass of an accidental playground, one just listened to the ping-pong ball batted back and forth across the concrete table. And thought idly of one’s own deficits and surpluses. * Then, one day, one of the city’s holes that had seemed permanent was filled. Not long after that, overnight—a few more. More people, it seemed, wanted to become inhabitants of the city marked by surplus space and time. More people than there was surplus space for. The people who had moved a long time ago to the city marked by surplus space and time started staring at the people who were now moving to the city marked by surplus space and time, who would soon be staring at the people who would soon be moving to the city marked by surplus space and time. * Soon any remaining empty lots became sites of projection and desire. Because as soon as a hole was filled, it was gone, seemingly never to return. And soon the city would no longer seem permeable. And this would seem permanent. * Content, it turned out, was not synonymous with form; some forms of content blew some forms of form to bits. Empty form was just formal. A surplus of people wanted surplus space and time, which swiftly used up the surplus space, which meant the surplus time was gone, too; never to return. And so it goes in the ruins of nostalgia.

The Ruins of Nostalgia 29

People were getting rid of their libraries, and they sighed with relief when they spoke of it, as

though the weight of all those books had long been more burdensome than they could bear.

Companies had long since downsized their workforces; governments had streamlined offices

and services; now a general reorganizing frenzy took hold of the populace, who wanted to be

freed of the clutches of matter—books, files, CDs, records, shoeboxes full of photos and

negatives, cartons stuffed with cards and letters in envelopes in a confusion of sizes with

handwriting legible and illegible, blue, black, violet, and etiolated blue. How orderly were e-

mails! Lined up in neat rows, all in the same sans serif typeface, immaterial, contained in an

inbox that wasn’t really an inbox, just the digital simulacrum of one. Everyone had had

enough of texture. There had been millennia of texture, of aristocrats’ writing boxes, now in

museums, crammed with ink bottles and quill sharpeners and beribboned letter paper, lined in

velvet and chased in silver, with secret compartments jammed with yet more matter, love

letters and IOUs and vials of laudanum, that were kept on rolltop desks honeycombed with

dozens of drawers and pigeonholes filled with seals—scissors—tins of wax—letter

openers—paper clips—invoices—drafts—and assorted other paper ephemera. Oh, who

needed it? Who needed more than a plank on sawhorses on which sat a laptop loaded with a

digital copy of Being and Time? Let the museums have the rest of it, repositories of our

collective marcescence. Unburdened by objects, people would at last slip through life like

marbles down a polished staircase. Unburdened by shops, the city streets would break free of

narrative; unburdened by stuff, the glass towers would loft auspiciously weightless. * Only

a few deluded sensualists still mad for matter were full of misgivings. They wandered,

bewildered, among their overflowing bookshelves dusky as dioramas of the ruins of

nostalgia.

The Ruins of Nostalgia 34

We found ourselves, to our astonishment, living on and on past the past. We wondered if it was, in the cosmic sense, accidental that “nostalgia” begins with “no.” Johannes Hofer, Swiss medical student, may not have had “no” in mind when coining the word “nostalgia,” but treasuries used to believe that coining new currency would beat back down engulfing debt. Nostalgia coins sentiment into durable objects that can be traded in markets of feeling jarred like honey. The exchequer clouds coin raindrops, which are absorbed by the dirt, which coins the currencies of grain. Who felt nostalgic before there was nostalgia?

From his coign of vantage Cortez, it is said, was overwhelmed by nostalgia for the beauty of Aztec cities just before he destroyed them. The profiles on gold coins, we could say, coined the obliquity of greed. It’s no wonder the Spaniards never found Eldorado, since it is always located behind us. * Does one destroy the past just by living past it? If that is true, then nostalgia may be the only currency we have with which to repay the debts we owe to what we have left behind. — To those whom we have left behind. * Even as nostalgia coins a “no” each time we fall, with a “yes,” into the defaulting splendor of the ruins of nostalgia.

The Ruins of Nostalgia 38

The Ruins of Nostalgia 42

We were nostalgic for the time when the pointillist paintings had looked like autumnal birch trees, rather than for the time when the autumnal birch trees had looked like pointillist paintings. We were nostalgic for the certainty that the bird we heard singing sweetly in the suburban forest was a recording, rather than being certain that what we thought was a recording was actually a bird. We were nostalgic for the care that had gone into the realism of the polyester lilies we had placed our foolish noses in, spoiling for perfume. We were nostalgic for foolishness, because it meant wisdom might matter. We were nostalgic for fakery, because it meant realness might matter. We were nostalgic for trompe l’oeil, for fool’s gold, for crocodile tears, for Mercator globes, for mimeographs, for velveteen, for signifiers unmoored from signifieds. We were nostalgic for the hand-painted cracks in the artificial marble in the ruins of nostalgia.

from "The Ruins of Nostalgia 43"

But the pasts we have cracked out of can't be idealized if we can't turn around and look at them getting smaller and smaller in the distance behind us. Was the little Maria suckling baby Jesus in one Gothic room nostalgic for the little Maria two Gothic rooms over quietly reading her book of hours while the annunciating dove hovered into the scene with its irreversible message? The gold rays streaking into her heart foretold the coming linearity of the ruins of nostalgia.

The Ruins of Nostalgia 46

We felt nostalgic for the abandoned dream of the paperless office. In the

paperless office, it was said, all communication was going to be clean of trace,

stored in metal. The latent urge to drift in individual sheets would be disciplined,

forests would remain uncut. Work would be orderly, armored, inexorable; the

fragility of organic matter would, at last, be overturned, in the dream of the

paperless office. * We felt nostalgic for the paperless office, yes. But what we

had forgotten was that because the term “paperless office” was made up

primarily of the words “paper” and “office,” what we had actually been

imagining all along was an office made of paper, a dream of endlessly available

surfaces we would fill with the inexhaustible ink of our calligraphic minds. In the

office made of paper, we would work in the midst of wall-size tablets of paper

whose depths upon depths of blankness were not at all blank, but latent

with the inkling that some of our beautiful ideas might be prized out of the

clouds of our minds and be transcribed, be realized. We would write exposed,

ensconced in the delicate constancy of our disconsolate thoughts, for the eyes of

those we invited in to our paper(less) office. * Like many dreams that have had

to be abandoned, the paperless office floated off somewhere, only to lodge in

the collective shelving of ideas whose time might or might not ever come. But

because it was an active imagining we had passively participated in, we too felt

wistful for the abandoned dream of the paperless office, and its unrealized

potential. It made us think of our own unrealized potential . . . of how it might

have been possible, at one time, to have been a paperless office made of paper,

etc. The offices are always open in the ruins of nostalgia

The Ruins of Nostalgia 55

Two turn-of-the-century train stations once provided ornamental ingress and egress to a single large city. One was torn down, and one was restored. But at both sites, something is missing. The commuters entering the dark misshapen warren that replaced the torn-down turn-of-the-century train station might notice the missing, let’s say, grandeur of departure, while the people exiting the restored turn-of-the-century train station might notice the vanished program of optimism for the arriving future — in which antiquated train stations are not restored, in which the past is not refurbished and retrofitted and reified, because it is universally and deliriously understood that the future is going to be so good that it’s going to demolish the past (if only by virtue of the fact that it has not yet had the chance to get fucked-up.) * As for us. All too often we felt like the future was a train that was always just leaving the station with us not on it. And so we understood the unending unease between hopes for the future and hopes for the past, we felt in our own infrastructure why every city we knew was a permanent construction site, here demolishing and there restoring, here restoring and there demolishing. For we, too, were a permanent construction site, permanently trying to understand when an edifice should be torn down, or restored — or, when to break ground to start erecting something new. * We didn’t want to perambulate and perambulate under a vaulted verdigris ceiling hermeneutic with stars considering the constellations as consolation for a world we ourselves were unable, despite all our efforts, to diagram. Oh we had tried and tried to enter the geodesic domes and the modular pods, but we kept falling backward into the ruins of nostalgia.

The Ruins of Nostalgia 56

We called them “tennis shoes” even though they weren’t worn to play tennis, in fact we’d never learned to play tennis, might not so much as ever have held a tennis racket in our hands, but still we wore “tennis shoes” all throughout our childhood, and adolescence, to run through the neighborhood nights for hide-and-seek, to play softball or tetherball, to walk around the lake, and it wasn’t until we left to sync ourselves up with the wider world that we understood it would be necessary to drill “tennis shoes” out of our vocabulary and train ourselves to say “sneakers” instead. It wasn’t until we had extracted ourselves from our native soil that we were able to perceive the illogic of “tennis shoes” that were not actually meant for tennis, that were meant for any sport, or no sport at all, but sometimes we still thought “tennis shoes” when we saw that type of shoe in a shop window, or in our own closet, we had never warmed to the word “sneakers,” but you had better believe we used it without fail, we knew our provinciality was leaking out all over us from a thousand holes we couldn’t even see, and as we didn’t want to be provincial, as we wanted to stand at the center of the universe with our feet clad in sneakers, as we did not want to be peripheral, or irrelevant, in tennis shoes, as we did not want to be local, locatable, as we wanted to move smoothly through the sleek corridors of extreme mobility, with no part of us catching, no element sticking, we did not wish to reveal what we did not wish to reveal. * But now that we had spent so many years sanding down our own specificity, we were starting to question our contribution to the demise of this bit of illogical language still used to the end by those who had once tied our tennis shoes onto our feet, then taught us to tie our own tennis shoes, then wore blank looks on their faces when we returned home from the wider world and said “sneakers,” then left, taking “tennis shoes” with them. Our provincial city was no longer provincial, all the people who said “tennis shoes” were disappearing, and soon no one would remember the little specific illogic of people saying “tennis shoes” for shoes that were not meant for tennis, but we remembered, and we kept “tennis shoes” in a little territory inside of ourselves that was only for ourselves, a territory we would never cede or relinquish or trade away to the wider world, a selvage on the border of our self, one tiny bulwark against the overwhelming sea we ourselves had invited to annihilate us, one islet of intactness in the ruins of nostalgia.

The Ruins of Nostalgia 57

We sensed that we were mistaking our world-weariness for wisdom, but we didn’t know how to sift one from the other, we didn’t know how to extract disillusionment from the ability to see the world with no illusions. The world, it seemed, was still honeycombed with traps, but we no longer fell into most of them. But if we didn’t give in to persuasion architecture — the candy hearts arranged right next to the cash register—did that mean we had also sacrificed a certain ability to surprise ourselves with our own weakness? Surely a susceptibility to strategically placed sweetness sweetened our own stringencies. Oh the reward centers in the brain, imploding with impulse sugar. * If we were merely world-weary and not wise, how come we knew that revolutions eat their young, that lotuses are actually just onions, that erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral (Brecht)? We knew the turquoise globe was dependent on a stand, a housing, or a cord, and we also knew it could slip away from us if we failed to hold onto it with the appropriate awe. * Was our nostalgia a symptom of our world-weariness, or was it a sign that we were finally wise enough to build our own factory-palaces of synthetic happiness churning out candy hearts in our minds? We were wise to the synthetic, but in our world-weariness — or our wisdom? — we allowed it in. We were wise to nostalgia, but in our world-weariness — or our wisdom? — we allowed it in. Butter might not have melted in our mouths, but that didn’t mean all our orifices were not of ice. We were wise to flattery, to certainty, to historicity, but we lay down our burdens for all of them. We were wise to ourselves, in every sense. We were wise to hearts, candy or otherwise. We were world-weary, but we were wise enough to our world-weariness to succumb to the attractions—and the repulsions—of the ruins of nostalgia.

The Ruins of Nostalgia 59

We felt nostalgic for libraries, even though we were sitting in a library. We looked around the library lined with books and thought of other libraries we had sat in lined with books and then of all the libraries we would never sit in lined with books, some of which contained scenes set in libraries. * We felt nostalgic for post offices, even though we were standing in a post office. We studied the rows of stamps under glass and thought about how their tiny castles, poets, cars, and flowers would soon be sent off to all cardinal points. We rarely got paper letters anymore, so our visits to the post office were formal, pro forma. * We felt nostalgic for city parks, even though we were walking through a city park, in a city full of city parks in a country full of cities full of city parks, with their green benches, bedraggled bushes, and shabby pansies, cut into the city. (Were the city parks bits of nature showing through cutouts in the concrete, or was the concrete showing through cutouts in nature?) * We sat in a café drinking too much coffee and checking our feeds, wondering why we were more anxious about the future than anxiously awaiting it. Was the future showing through cutouts in the present, or were bits of the present showing through cutouts in a future we already found ourselves in, arrived in our café chairs like fizzled jetpacks? The café was in a former apothecary lined with dark wood shelves and glowing white porcelain jars labeled in gilded Latin, which for many years had sat empty. Had a person with an illness coming to fetch her weekly dose of meds from one of the jars once said to the city surrounding the shop, which was no longer this city, Stay, thou art so fair? Weren’t these the words that had sealed the bargainer’s doom? Sitting in our presumptive futures, must we let everything run through our hands—which were engineered to grab—into the past? In the library, in the post office, in the city park, in the café, in the apothecary... o give us the medicine, even if it is a pharmakon—which, as the pharmacist knows, either poisons or heals—just like nostalgia. Just like the ruins of nostalgia.

“I began writing this series while thinking about ‘Ostalgie,’ the nostalgia for East Germany, and my own feelings for my hometown of Seattle, which is changing so dramatically with the growth of Amazon and barely regulated influx of capital. ‘Nostalgia’ was invented as a diagnosis in 1688 by Swiss medical student Johannes Hofer, designating a pathological homesickness in mercenary soldiers. Over time, it came to signify longing for the past rather than for home. Svetlana Boym wrote that nostalgia ‘is at the very core of the modern condition’: once time began to be understood linearly rather than cyclically during the Renaissance, the backward glance opened up to longing. At a production of Faust in Berlin, I realized that the words ‘Stay, thou art so fair’ (Verweile doch, Du bist so schön), which will seal Faust’s doom, can also be understood within the framework of nostalgia and linear time. If time is cyclical, there’s no reason to ask anything to stay, because it will eventually return. And I began to sense the fragility of everything I took for granted that might someday disappear, even things that seemed permanent, like libraries and the post office.” —Donna Stonecipher

Donna Stonecipher, Transaction Histories, 2018

read it at Google Books

Reveling in the paradox of the formal prose poem, Donna Stonecipher’s Transaction Histories gathers together six series of poems that explore the disobedient incongruities of aesthetics and emotions. Stonecipher’s carefully sculpted forms and exacting language are held in tension with an unruly imagination to provoke a vision of experience densely layered with bodies impinging upon and altering each other, engaging in transactions that unfold in poetically complex and emotionally startling ways. By turns wry and melancholic, playful and acerbic, erotically charged and politically skeptical, Stonecipher’s poems marry a deeply felt lyricism to a fascination with the mechanisms of narrative. The result is akin to Roland Barthes’s notion of “the novelistic”: writing that flirts with the gestures and spaces of the novel without the trappings of plot, character, or action. Narrative fragments dart in and out of sight, spectral figures and motifs recur in fugal patterns, and habits of ruthless observation are brought to bear on the details of both intimate life and social organization.

Stonecipher lays claim to a stylistic achievement and vision that are entirely her own, transparent and elusive, casual in address and rigorous in design. Whether training its eye on fetishized polar bears, illegal garbage dumping, or ideological debates around rose chintz wallpaper, Transaction Histories tracks the fitful and tragicomic relationships that exist among objects, landscapes, texts, and people, and lays bare the ways in which our transactions keep our lives going.

On a cold and cloudy October evening, a group of poetry enthusiasts gathered in the cozy Slonim Living Room to listen to poet, Donna Stonecipher read some of her work.

“I’m going to read from my most recent two books and some new poems,” Stonecipher said leaning into the microphone, “I have not set foot on this campus in 29 years, so longer than many of you have been alive. It’s great to be back. Chris took me on a tour of my old dorm room yesterday and there are some changes, and some things are just the same.”

Stonecipher received her BA from Sarah Lawrence in 1991. She received her MFA from the University of Iowa’s Writers Workshop in ‘01, and in 2011 she earned her PhD from the University of Georgia. She moved to Berlin in 2004 and the subject matter of her poems began to focus on German cities and how they change and acknowledge their past. She is also well known for her translation work, and incorporates the German language into many of her poems.

The New York Times named her 2018 book Transaction Histories one of the ten best poetry books of the year. “Stonecipher’s credit that “Transaction Histories” is a delight: a mordant yet romantic survey of art, love, hunger and plastic owls in which seemingly unrelated observations are meticulously knit together to form a resonant whole.” writes David Orr of the New York Times. Stonecipher has five published books of poetry: The Reservoir, Souvenir de Constantinople, The Cosmopolitan, Model City, and Transaction Histories. On this Wednesday night, she chose to read selections from Transaction Histories, Model City, and an unpublished book, Ruins of Nostalgia.

Transaction Histories was written in prose form, which Stonecipher as well as the New York Times commented on. Orr of The New York Times writes, “The prospect of a book filled with prose poems is admittedly better than the prospect of a book filled with thumbtacks, but not by much.”

“I mostly write prose poems, and these poems look like this,” Stonecipher extends her arms and shows the audience the paragraph style writing, “It doesn’t matter you can’ t read the letters, you get the idea.”

The poems are numbered and somewhat linear. One of the lines that struck me was in number 3. Her calm, controlled, and purposeful voice filled the small room,“We wished the factories were still factories: we were hungry and dirty, we wanted bars of chocolate and of soap, something to suck on or take home to wash off our wistful, well-earned ennui.” The change that the city of Berlin undergoes is so present in her writing, it almost becomes a character in itself. Visiting a place one once knew and returning to find none of the same memories is something many can relate to, and is so relevant in the modern world.

Model City was painting a similar picture as Transaction Histoires, playing with difference in time, and evolution of cities and communities. This book is also divided into numbered prose poems. One poem that Stonecipher read that got one of the biggest reactions and was especially moving to me was number 16. Such a simple thought that had never even occurred to me, but once it was said the idea was cemented into my brain. The poem is too beautiful to choose one quote, so here is the whole poem:

It was like going to an exhibition where all the artworks are about melancholy, and falling into fits of uncontrollable laughter, especially before a case of little ivory skeletons “intended for private reflection.

It was like looking at the faces on those skeletons and asking yourself why skulls are always grinning like that, what they have to grin about, and then realizing we are all always grinning like that, under our faces.

It was like feeling that grin under your face at all times, even when you are sobbing, or expressionless, reading a thick book late at night next to a dark window: there you are grinning, despite yourself, down at the book.

It was like leaving the melancholy exhibition nearly sobbing with laughter, picturing the memento mori, the tiny skeletons in some noblewoman’s gloved hand, as she privately reflects, secretly grinning.

The audience giggled, and clapped, some saying ‘Oh!’ later than others as they realized the meaning of her words. Stonecipher smiled,“I have to apologize for that one, people tell me afterwards they cant get that image out of their heads.”

The reading was intimate and comfortable. Stonecipher’s words echoed through the small stone room, and audience members left with the corners of their lips turned upwards. - Maggie Cole

https://sarahlawrencephoenix.com/arts-and-culture/2019/11/22/review-donna-stonecipher-poetry-reading

With her new book, Transaction Histories, Donna Stonecipher cements her reputation as master of the prose poem. But the book also offers an opportunity to introduce Stonecipher, one of the most important poets working now, to a broader reading public. Issues of cosmopolitanism and displacement have long occupied Stonecipher’s work and now, with the current turn in world politics, possess renewed urgency.

Poet John Yau, who selected Stonecipher’s book The Cosmopolitan as the 2008 National Poetry Series winner, describes her as a “global flaneur.” Though American, Stonecipher grew up partly in Tehran and has long made her home in Berlin. Imaginatively she lives in an ever-shifting, diasporic world that has no secure borders and no solid ground—a world where the ruins of old schemes of domination are crumbling and the genuine recedes into the ersatz. In Stonecipher’s work, there is nothing of the breezy, unruffled cosmopolitanism of old travel writing, of an intact I who feels at home everywhere.

Stonecipher’s poems are full of elements reminiscent of prose fiction: scene changes, multiple voices, shifting pronouns. Their central dramatic tension is between a poetic persona—who is prone to nostalgia, or looking for the timeless and the infinite—and a cosmopolitan wanderer who is drawn to variety and new encounters. Both are subject to irony, but they need each other to retain their personhood in a diverse and changing world. Stonecipher shows us our bafflement, our exposure, our nostalgia, in the uncanny images and sharp paradoxes of contemporary life. She also shows us how to take amusement, wonder, and even pleasure in our rootless condition.

• • •

Stonecipher’s thematic interests cannot be separated from her formal innovation in her chosen genre, the prose poem. Her formalism, quite different from the improvisatory riffs and surrealist jumps characteristic of the genre, balances the riot of speakers and points of view present in her work, talking with or against each other. These dramatize the “innumerable interractions” characteristic of cities, as Charles Baudelaire put it when he created the modern prose poem. The form becomes an analogue for the fluctuating social and architectural spaces of modern urban life, which we approach with maps and designs, but experience incrementally and locally, making constant adjustments. In Stonecipher’s hands, the form takes on a new rigor, turning Baudelaire’s “poetical prose,” with its “lyrical impulses,” into something more substantive, less gestural. If there is an ambulatory feel to the writing sentence by sentence, thrilling in its openness to the world’s variety and unpredictability, the path is steadied by a strong sense of flexible aesthetic order and nuanced, evolving thought.

Collage is a frequent feature of prose poetry. But unlike modernist collage, with its unease about rupture and dissonance, Stonecipher accommodates heterogeneity without suppressing it. In a “Note to Readers” in The Cosmopolitan (2008), she informs us that the book explores “my generation’s relation to quotation and collage.” Toward this end, Stonecipher uses the unlikely metaphor of inlay, a craft in which slivers of woods, semi-precious stones, and shells are set into a wood surface to create a design. It is mostly employed in fine furniture, but Stonecipher puts it to surprising extended use in The Cosmopolitan. In each of the book’s twenty-two “Inlay” poems, Stonecipher introduces a literary quotation (from the likes of Franz Kafka, Zaha Hadid, and Sei Shonagon) halfway through, and the reader works to discover a relationship. The quotation functions quite differently from an authoritative epigraph, which the reader encounters before entering a text. The “inlay” is, to use the language of cosmopolitanism, a “guest” in the host poem, at its center but remaining other, neither ruling the poem nor subordinate to it.

Stonecipher uses similar if less overt strategies throughout her work that sustain difference without disrupting aesthetic wholeness. White space, for example, is a crucial tool for her, and it performs a variety of functions. In her first book, The Reservoir (2002), she uses indents to create serpentine text shapes that resemble rivers, seeming to carve the book’s pages. In her fourth book, Model City (2015), the uniform white space between paragraphs suggests planned city blocks, while the reading experience brings the surprise and variety of busy streets where we navigate within the city’s gutters and borders, forging our individual paths. In the “Persian Carpets” series in her new book, she creates gaps inside sentences, imitating the ancient weavers’ abrash, deliberate flaws that acknowledge human imperfection.

While her attention to the page and her love of imagery link Stonecipher’s work to the visual arts, she is also proficient in that rare and much-maligned facility, verbal wit. She is a master of the aphorism, the balanced formulation: “Remember the lesson of the elevator: welcome everyone, expel everyone.” But Stonecipher foregrounds the materiality of language (she loves anagrams, homonyms, puns, riddles, false cognates), its diversity, slipperiness, and winding etymology. Language is at once the instrument of our reasoning and a source of delight. “She even tried to trick her mind into associating the letter ‘g’ with pleasure, like the silent ‘g’ in sigh. Like the sighs she made under her lover, who did not like to speak during sex.” The design of language is full of incongruities, ugly words for beautiful things (“pulchritude”) and beautiful words for ugly things (“effluvia”). Stonecipher works as a translator, and the introduction of foreign words (mostly French and German) reminds us that the cosmopolitan must tread this textured linguistic ground. There is no fixing of word to truth, and no langue but in parole. But there are lessons to be learned from languages that “have only one word” for “‘history’ and ‘story’,” for “‘luck’ and ‘happiness’.” “All the guilt-ridden people sitting in therapy week after week, he thought, could really learn something from languages, which don’t ever apologize for their deficiencies and their insufficiencies, for their omissions, obsessions, obscenities, flagrancies, fallacies, or farragoes.”

All of this verbal playfulness, combined with narrative density—forking stories, ellipses, non sequiturs—are demanding on the reader. But Stonecipher is fully aware of the risks and mixed motives involved in subverting the conventional channels of communication. “She wrote, I want people to want to work hard to see through my (really quite superficial) opacity. He wrote nothing back.” While there are gaps, arguments and stories are resumed. For all its shifts and leaps, there are few loose ends or dead ends at the level of the art here, though there are many at the level of life.

• • •

The “Portrait” series is composed of the records of a barge as it moves around the world picking up garbage from rich countries and trying to deliver it to poorer ones.

In Transaction Histories, Stonecipher’s wit is darker than before, with a tragic dimension inflected by a mounting sense of the absurd. The violence of history and our looming environmental crisis are front and center, but there is also a notable absence of harangue. The aim is to make us see the world we have made. The book opens relating the details of a romantic breakup, and on the whole we find Stonecipher here more skeptical of romance than in previous volumes. Likewise the urban flânerie of the cosmopolitan, so often her subject, is called to account. What can cosmopolitanism mean when we lose the sense of place in endless displacements and replacements, in the endless cultivated refractions of “nature” that Stonecipher skewers in the book’s “Landscape” poems? And what are we to do when the trash is piling up in islands bigger than Texas? Stonecipher depicts our current, morally inadequate solution in the book’s “Portrait” series, composed of transactional records of a barge as it moves around the world from port to port, picking up garbage from rich countries and trying to deliver it to poorer ones.

The book’s title encapsulates its themes. “Transaction” implies business across boundaries, but Stonecipher suggests that even intimate, intellectual, and social relations are increasingly inflected with this impersonal quality. She comically renders the backdrop of postmodern consumer culture in its transactional machinery (ATMs and illuminated TV towers, little airplanes towing banners), and its fetishized consumer products (Gucci jeans and designer ice cream, “staged” homes and faux everything). Desire is registered less in lyrical flights than in self-protective lures (“Come, I said to you from behind a wall of glass lined with bird stickers, come kiss me”)—in enigmas, disputations, evasions, lies, and disappointments. “We heard that he had gone into the glazier’s and ordered three new windows and a dozen donuts.” There is plenty of glass, but little transparency. Wordplay jumpstarts thought where ordinary communication breaks down.

“Histories”—the title’s second part—are made of such transactions, and the historicity of all human arrangements is a central theme, the counterpoint to utopian model cities and even planned obsolescence. In this book we are well into history as farce. “Dethroned demagogue[s],” especially Hitler and Lenin, haunt the landscape, but political history is only one dimension of a world strewn with relics and ruins that continue to affect it. The borders between past, present, and future are no more secure than national borders. Both life and art, Stonecipher’s work asserts, are subject to time, to rot, but time leaves a remainder as it proceeds by “aftermath after aftermath after aftermath.” Strange space/time incongruities exist within us and around us, and the prose poem, with its tensions between continuum and reverberation, provides an ideal form for exploring this state. Memory mansions yield to the hodgepodge of the modern city: “The old musical theater had been turned into a parking garage, but nobody had bothered to remove the ornaments, the gilding, the chandeliers . . . the dark red velvet loges.” We are essentially homeless in time: “It was like watching the snow slowly powder over the construction site across the street, which will one day be a hotel, the snow filling in the space temporarily where one day there will be permanent temporariness.”

In the book’s title series of poems, the ironist overtakes the lyricist, often turning on clichés and proverbs, linguistic trash repurposed. The stagnation and ennui can be felt in the phrasing which is less wordplay than redundancy made resonant: “the mistrust of mistrust,” the “sheep in sheep’s clothing,” the “hunger hungrier than any other: hunger without appetite.” There are lots of “transactions” in this series, mostly in dialogue form, though there is little communication or reciprocity. “The fish cannot love the fisherman,” according to a proverb Stonecipher recalls, which she then turns inside out, testing it against experience.

The book’s fourth series, six poems titled “Found to Be Borrowed from Some Material Appearance,” explores the “transaction” between words and world, between literal and abstract, and hence between the body and the spirit, self and world (“the Sudetenland of her body” with its “amber room”). These poems probe etymologies (the “dream” in “trauma,” the “invisible hand” in “manufacture”). Imagination reasserts its place in these transactions, playing vertically in puns and metaphors that yoke unlike things and the abstract and concrete: “The day felt like an out-of-focus eyechart”; “late August oak leaves almost mahogony with the tarnishing concessions of summer.”

The book’s “Snow Series” is where Stonecipher most directly engages with environmental questions. Climate change and our sentimental evasions of it are referenced in melting ice caps and a baby polar bear in a zoo “ensconced in the fur of its own fate.” We are tempted to despair when in the final “Portrait” we see ‘North Americans on holiday” “still “dumping garbage” off the “Cape of Good Hope.” But if “garbage always returns,” it is also true that there is “star matter even in trash.”

The book leaves us in bewilderment; a snowstorm makes it hard to see except what is directly in front of us. Is the human rage to order a curse or a blessing? The indicator charts, like mountain ranges, don’t show “progress,” only ups and downs. “A black comb on a white shelf, or a white comb on a black shelf? The only certainty was tines.” It could be a description of the prose poem itself and its serial structure, its lyrical peaks and depths. There are no conclusions in this open system, no triumph or despair, only more effort of observation and invention. The prose poem traverses this varied and insecure ground of experience, while finding pattern and significance in the branching paths. Perhaps it can help us see our way. - Bonnie Costello

https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/limits-cosmopolitanism/

In Europe around the turn of the last century, all upper-class boys were ceremoniously photographed wearing sailor suits. Now flea markets all over the continent overflow with little blue sailors who cannot save themselves. All up and down the diverted and straightened canal, some Romantic had once planted willows. Meanwhile, the lily flower had long since been abstracted into the fleur-de-lys. (1., “TRANSACTION HISTORY 3”)

American poet and longtime resident of Berlin Donna Stonecipher’s latest collection, following The Reservoir (University of Georgia Press. 2002), Souvenir de Constantinople (Instance Press. 2007), The Cosmopolitan (Coffee House Press. 2008), Model City (Shearsman. 2015) and Prose Poetry and the City (Parlor Press, 2017), is Transaction Histories (Iowa City IA: University of Iowa Press, 2018). Reminiscent of the work of Cole Swensen for her use of the extended, single line, Transaction Histories, as the back cover offers, is a gathering of “six series of poems that explore the disobedient incongruities of aesthetics and emotions,” yet this is also a collection constructed as a single, ongoing prose sequence, pushing further and further through the possibilities of the sentence. There is something of Russell Edson’s prose-poem influence in her work (an influence I’m not entirely fond of), but one that borrows as part of an array of influence, as opposed to something replicated. Stonecipher’s prose-explorations exist more in the fluid space, it would seem, between Edson’s narratives and a more lyric strain, akin to a poet such as Cole Swensen, or even, given her focus on sentences, Lisa Robertson. The lyric elements of her sentences have the most intriguing ebb and flow, moving through her prose like water.

The emotion bottling up in the champagne Marxist was either going to explore, skyrocketing him into the stratosphere, or sink him like a stone in his Gucci jeans. There were fates worse than being too clever by half, such as being insipid in spades. Or being a head buried and reburied in sand. We hated the developers, true, but that didn’t mean as soon as we got any money we wouldn’t buy the fanciest new apartment we could. (9., “FOUND TO BE BORROWED FROM SOME MATERIAL APPEARANCE 1”)

There is a fine tension she explores as well, between “aesthetics and emotions,” moving between and among landscapes of history, vision, artwork and writing, shifting across a wide field of interpretations and responses, as well as the collisions that occur between seemingly unconnected thoughts, images and sentences. “It is not possible to map a coastline,” she writes, to open part 4 of her poem “TRANSACTION HISTORY 5,” “because the closer you zoom in, the more complexly intricate is the tracery of the coves and jetties, the sandbars all sliding off the map to be swallowed up by the great Unpredictable.” Stonecipher’s Transaction Histories explore the prose poem through multiple entry points, utilizing the building blocks of sentences to accumulate into stanzas, stanzas to accumulate into sequences, sequences to accumulate into sections, and sections to accumulate into a single, stunning, book-length work.

If you make a declaration of love under a waterfall, does anyone hear it? The anthropologist disdained the phrenologist, though he had one of those porcelain phrenology heads on his mantel. It took almost three years to dismantle the building. She was trying to get funding for a research project in which she would determine from exactly how many apartment windows in the city the TV tower, or even part of it, could be seen. (1., “FOUND TO BE BORROWED FROM SOME MATERIAL APPEARANCE 4”) - rob mclennan

https://robmclennan.blogspot.com/2018/09/transaction-histories-poems-by-donna.html

Transaction History 1

They walked around in the foreign city looking for someplace to have dinner: There was

an Italian restaurant, an Indian restaurant, a French restaurant, a Vietnamese restaurant, and a

Thai restaurant. Just like in their own city. And in every city they’d ever been to. There were

some hungers no restaurant could quiet or curb or quell, and she’d walk out even hungrier than

she’d gone in.

Sometimes—we couldn’t deny it—life surprised us, presenting us with a sheep

in sheep’s clothing or a wolf in wolf’s clothing. But even this surprise would turn out to be, in the

end, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, for we would thenceforth mistrust our mistrust, upon which we

had come to build our houses. There were only two kinds of birds left in the neighborhood:

seagulls and starlings.

The light in the sky was bleu mourant—“dying blue”—a term for a particular shade of

powder blue he’d learned while working in an antiques shop one summer. When his girlfriend

left him that winter, he went around in the snow saying how all the blood in his heart had turned

bleu mourant overnight. And his heart had turned into an antique, for now it had carnal

knowledge of time.

From below, the snow looked like it had been on its way for centuries. People from the

small towns dreamed of driving into the city to have their choice of Italian, Indian, Thai, Viet-

namese, or French restaurants, but people from the city dreamed of driving to the small town’s

one restaurant with its three choices of entrée and its view of the derelict Greek Revival library

across the street.

Under the bleu mourant sky, the sad woman said, “When I wake up at night, I’m like a

self-destructive squid, shooting the ink of melancholy into my own heart.” Her interlocutor

answered: Nec piscatorem piscis amare potest. The small town’s populace had long been bitterly

divided into those who called the town’s main body of water a small lake, and those who called it

a large pond.

After dark, people gave the antiques stores a wide berth. As he slid behind the wheel of

his black Subaru to drive home to dinner, he tried to remember the last time he’d truly had an

appetite. Every last Christmas ornament on the tree had been made in China. Perhaps it was time

to reinstate the humble popcorn garland, the gingerbread house. Perhaps it was time, once again,

to eat Christmas.

The antiques owed what value they had to those people who believed that objects could

give them carnal knowledge of incarnate time. Some countries were winners and some losers in

the cosmopolitan restaurant sweepstakes. There were, for example, no Norwegian restaurants in

the cities. There was a hunger that just got hungrier and hungrier. Unquellable, nodded the self-

destructive squid.

The city-dwellers found that they would regularly sleep peacefully through a succession

of trains, sirens, and garbage trucks—only to be awakened by the small barking of a faraway

dog. She would never admit it, but she was secretly delighted when her errands took her to the

department store, where the whole of the material world was organized and taxonomized down

to the last hazelnut.

“The fish cannot love the fisherman” implies that the fish has tried. Notice no one asks

if the fisherman can love the fish. There was one hunger hungrier than any other: hunger

without appetite. Some small towns on the peninsula now consisted almost entirely of a few

rows of antiques stores. When the city people left the cities, they wanted only to be reminded of

incarnadine time.

Transaction History 2

The dark-haired librarian said, I started to sleep better at night when I moved into an

apartment across the street from an art museum. Knowing that, hundreds of years after the fact, a

green-eyed merchant still looked out aloof from a fur coat, a butterfly still perched on a

pomegranate next to a skull, and a blue view of distant hills still hovered behind an annunciation

scene with a stunned Mary calmed me down in the deepest locked vault of my being.

Some people were starting to find the sun oppressive, filling the world with its idio-

syncratic version of reality as it did day after day. Never mind that it was summer. Looking back

through her notebook, she saw that she’d written down “The architects say to the doctors, at least

you can bury your mistakes” at least three times in the past year. In 2010, the visiting Chilean

president wrote “Deutschland über alles” in the German president’s guestbook.

As the city densified, they found themselves looking for non-places. They kept getting

obsessed with filing cabinets. They were bewitched by the debt spiral. There still seemed to be

some cups in the cupboard, but there were no more gloves in the glove compartment, and hadn’t

been any in years. One night she found herself sitting in a house high on a hill with spectacular

views, but in the dark, the only thing she could see in the windows was herself.

The great artist told us that he had never slept better in his life than the year he lived in a

house opposite a zoo. All he had to do at night was pretend that his wife lying next to him was

one of the nearby zebras, ponies, or llamas, all of them sweetly sleeping, and he himself would

slip off easily into a deep furred sleep. The little girl, upon closer questioning, turned out to have

just one wish for her tenth birthday: an entire box of fortune cookies to herself.

Day after day: sun, clanging through the windows like a relentlessly cheerful succession

of garish carillons, whether certain people liked it or not. “Keep working, and do not despair,”

wrote Brecht. Beware the voluptuousness of the demand curve. Happiness is a golden section. A

lot of people seemed to like to go to the New York Public Library, establish themselves at a desk

surrounded by books, and spend all afternoon sending texts on their cell phones.

It wasn’t that hard to walk through the city with the eyes of a developer, evaluating the

organization of space according to maximization of profit. Or you could walk through the city

with the eyes of a disappointed Romantic, that wasn’t hard either, prizing a grassy empty lot

bejeweled with dandelions, or a brick building caught in midruin still faintly advertising “Coal.”

Nothing was very hard, when you came right down to it. Except sleeping.

I never slept better in my life, the green-eyed lawyer told us, than the years I lived across

the street from an old graveyard. In the evening my girlfriend and I would sit on our balcony with

bottles of dark beer and drink in the deep peace emanating from the headstones, whose names had

all been gently effaced by time. In India, a man opened a restaurant called “Stalin’s,” not realizing,

he later said, that “Stalin” was anything more than a “famous European name.”

Sun, again. And again. There wasn’t a single dress in the dresser. “Bureau” his dead

mother had called it. “Chesterdrawer” they said in the South. His mother had larded their bureau

drawers with bars of unwrapped perfumed soap. That was before they got sucked in by the

uncanny allure of regression analysis. The girl was willing to share most of her possessions, but not,

oh not the box of fortune cookies, which she stashed carefully under her twin bed.

A glass, a debt, an absolute ceiling. In truth, there were far more suitcases in the city than

suits. “Summer afternoon,” wrote Henry James, were the two most beautiful words in the English

language. But for the heartbroken, the overworked, the underemployed, the grieving, and the

lonely, “summer afternoon” was not two words but a sentence. And the schadenfreude they

exuded on a cold and rainy July day hovered over the city like an extra layer of cloud.

Transaction History 3

To a person, everyone she aimed her camera at would demur, “Oh, I’m really not photogenic.” Which, when she thought more about it, could only mean that everyone thought they were better-looking than they really were. The covert exhibitionists liked to hang out in banks, on subway platforms, and in front of embassies, sneaking glances at surveillance cameras with their sexy gray shoulders.

Das Leben ist kein Wunschkonzert. The rose had already glazed into the rose window. Was it a suitcase or a valise we watched slowly mounting the conveyer belt to be ingested by the belly of the jetplane, was it all just baggage, or was it maybe luggage? On their first date, he joked over a plate of pakoras, “I’ve got so much baggage by now, they no longer let me on airplanes.” There was no second date.

But with you, with you, I wanted to float lazily down the straightened canal under the non-native willows near stocked swans on a raft headed for the longest, lushest, plushest waterfall on record, the one we kept seeing over and over in the movies, and to plunge forever down its endlessly varying sameness. Panoramas of fakeness may have lost their cachet, but what you lost in me was more rarefied still.

When a dance company opened a new performance space in a former soap factory, we were no longer impressed. When the bar owner shouted to us over electronica that here, chocolate had once been made, we yawned. We wished the factories were still factories: we were hungry and dirty, we wanted bars of chocolate and of soap, something to suck on or take home to wash off our wistful, well-earned ennui.

Despite all evidence to the contrary, we took it as a sign of the general psychic health of the populace that they thought they were better-looking than they really were. She collected photographs of boys in blue sailor suits — an ersatz, of course, but for what? The missing photo-graph of herself as a cowgirl? Das Leben ist kein Ponyhof. We all ought to have learned that, oh at the very least that, by now.

Transaction History 4

If ignorance is bliss, then happy people are by definition stupid. The melancholic had

always known it, sitting at home nights organizing her collection of plastic owls. In the clock

museum we learned that in schools, hospitals, and train stations there is one master clock and

many slave clocks. The city at the bottom of the lake was like any other city at the bottom of a

flooded lake: a mirror of our own desire to be drowned in insignificance.

Was it meaningful that you were quick to tell me there was a term for the nineteenth-

century swooning that occurred in the Uffizi in front of Michelangelo’s David, both men and

women fainting to left and right before the dazzling marble body, but could not come up with the

term itself? It was your birthday. The plastic owls had been manufactured to scare away other

birds, as if wisdom itself were frightening—and indeed it was.

It was not possible to go to a restaurant and not put something in your mouth. The coffee

table book was not on the coffee table, but in the bedroom splayed voluptuously across the bed.

You felt old. What was I to make of our new neighbor’s garden, resplendent with belladonna and

nightshade, false indigo and foxglove, spurge and vetch? At the clock museum we read on a panel

that, until around 1850, only the very rich could afford to tell time.

One artist has painted more self-portraits than any other artist in history. The scruffy old

man wearing a brown velvet jacket standing on the modernist bridge was asked what one piece of

advice he would give to young people. “Don’t bring owls to Athens,” he answered, staring sadly

down into the river. Watching him on TV, I wanted to bring him to the clock museum, the one

place on the planet I felt I had most truly lost track of time.

The city at the bottom of the lake haunted the solitary swimmer, who liked to imagine he

could see the top of a drowned church steeple far down in the depths. Holding a spoonful of

blackstrap molasses, the melancholic, despite herself, started to think: If she could inoculate

herself with black bile, might she be granted the occasional dose of ignorant bliss? While we

looked and looked at clocks, the clockfaces were looking at us.

The smoky glass oval in the velvet case was a Claude glass, through which city people on

excursions used to turn the countryside picturesque. If we trained the Claude glass on the city, it

would just remind us of how far we’ve fallen from the sweet ha-has of days gone by. The

melancholic loved smoky ovals. In the clock museum you kept scoffing and insisting that all

clocks are master clocks, since it is we who are the slaves of time.

Donna Stonecipher, Model City, 2015

"MODEL CITY is built from a missing antecedent, an "it" as mysterious as it is familiar: What was it like? What was what like? One's life? The city from which one fled? The city to which one did so? The last century? The one before that? The weaving in and out of traffic? Love? Candlelight from a curtained window or the dull, digital glow of a smart phone from the balcony below? Here, those old utopic dreams and social experiments collide with the age of excess information, leaving behind broken bits of experience: precise, exacting, aphoristic, arresting - the emotional residue of just how one deals with one's tiny-cog-in-a-big- machine conundrum allowed to curdle into language as concerned with form and structure, with feats of architecture and engineering, as it is with real human relationships. This book is a marvel."—Noah Eli Gordon

Model City [35]

It was like noticing hotel after hotel going up all over the city with unstoppable force and imagining a city consisting only of hotels, a city composed solely of expensive emptinesses.

It was like remembering that you had rented the apartment you live in exactly because it felt like a hotel room, radiating a friendly indifference, because it felt like the right measure of you to your life.

It was like thinking about the nights you walked through the city feeling threatened by the rampantly multiplying hotel rooms, as if vacancy were a disease invading the city’s — and therefore your — interior.

It was like wondering if the city has an interior, and if so exactly how much it costs, it was like wanting to add up all the prices for the hotel rooms and all the rents in the city to find out exactly how much the city’s interior costs.

Model City [17]

It was like watching the city slowly powdered over with snow from your bedroom window, the molecular makeup of the city slowly altered through powdery intimations of ossification.

It was like watching the snow slowly powder over the construction site across the street, which will one day be a hotel, the snow filling in the space temporarily where one day there will be permanent temporariness.

It was like slowly coming to think of the snow as permanent, the construction site as permanent, the grand opening of the hotel permanently postponed, the spring postponed, the grand opening of the crocuses.

It was like feeling powdered over with snow oneself, as one is part of the city; apart from it, watching it from the window, to be sure; but a part of it, a powdered-over temporary part.

Model City [16]

Model City [8]

It was like coming out of an unfamiliar subway station headed for a destination and noticing a sign that says ‘Sugar Museum, 500 m’ and suddenly changing your plans for the day, your destination.

It was like walking along the ‘500 m’ announced by the sign for the Sugar Museum and thinking, only 500 m to the unending sweetness I deserve, your original destination forgotten under a cascade of sugar crystals.

It was like riding dutifully on the subway to a destination and knowing nothing of the Sugar Museum, knowing only destination, knowing nothing of the Sugar Museum and how it can alter plans.

It was like walking 200 m and then suddenly understanding the nature of the Sugar Museum, and turning around to set out again for your original destination. For its nature is seduction. And yours, renunciation.

Model City [1]

It was like slowly becoming aware one winter that there are new buildings going up all over your city, and then realizing that every single one of them

is a hotel.

It was like thinking about all those empty rooms at night, all those empty rooms being built to hold an absence, as you lie in your bed at night, unable to sleep.

It was like the feeling of falling through the ‘o’ in ‘hotel’ as you almost fall asleep in your own bed, the bed that you own, caught at the last minute by ownership, the ownership of your wide-awake self.

It was like giving in to your ownership of yourself and going to the window, looking out at all the softly illuminated versions of the word ‘hotel’ announcing their shifting absences all over the city.

Donna Stonecipher, The Cosmopolitan, Coffee

House Press, 2008

These poems spin tales of traveling in a world both romantic and politicized, a world miniaturized by globalization and haunted by the figure of the cosmopolitan, who is aware of its saturated history, yet inspired by the knowledge that nostalgia is merely “memory decayed to sugar.” In the kingdom of Donna Stonecipher’s imagination, “a story is always forming to adorn reality,” and the fall of the Eastern bloc is reenacted the night “the girl with the DDR bag met the boy with the CCCP T-shirt.”

These poems were written while I was thinking about my generation's relationship to quotation and collage, writes Stonecipher (The Reservoir) in an introductory note. A child of the '70s, she came after Joseph Cornell but before DJ Danger Mouse, so the relationship is neither groundbreaking nor comfortable but instead fraught with ambiguity. Her thinking manifests itself in quotations—she calls them inlays—from writers like Franz Kafka and Susan Sontag, placed in the midst of original sequences of brief narrative prose poems. Through these samplings readers can follow Stonecipher's interest in juxtaposition and parataxis as it resonates from one poem to the next, though this is not what makes this book—Stonecipher's third—engaging. In fact, many of the quotations feel superficial, more like decals than an encoding. But Stonecipher's seductive sentences succeed in drawing readers in. Not unlike John Yau, who selected this book for the National Poetry Series, or Lydia Davis, there's a dreamy clarity to Stonecipher's best writing. Pity we who must corset our mental splendor into the whalebone of grammar, she writes in Inlay 4 (Susan Sontag), which laces us up so tight we have to remove a rib to breathe. - Publishers Weekly

Donna Stonecipher has published three books since 2002, each preoccupied with how the mind attempts to slip undetected through its own security screening and arrive at meaningful destinations. As tour directors of signification and its frustrations, her poems are both enactments and examples. Her main metaphor is travel – with all the displacement, amazement, certitude and confusion that the metaphor is capable of eliciting in an expert’s hands. The émigré, the visitor, in transit or extending his/her stay, arrives with expectations and pre-wired notions of the “new” and the “different.” Stonecipher attempts to project that moment when multiplicity (in the world and the psyche) gives way to a selective but tentative exactitude, only to collapse under the weight of its own effort at establishing meaning. The Cosmopolitan is one of the most exciting and gratifying books of poems I’ve read this year.

But first, some background. Stonecipher is progressing as a poet, discovering ever more affecting ways of making palpable a fixation with instability, and more finely calibrating the impossible perfect balance between open-ended associations and discrete states of mind for the purpose of giving the reader the experience (or illusion) of a third way. In The Reservoir (University of Georgia, 2002), she employed the prose poem, emphasizing the incompleteness of thought and language, as in “White Mouth”:

I had forgotten all about the star inside the apple, eating my way through orchardsful in the intervening years, years marked by

Who does not judge each heart by halving it from the top instead of scoring delicately around the girth? Still,

If I could fill myself with milk I’d be the old statue weathering in the yard: evangelical, cicatrixed with white roses, the white of

My heart is as sad and wide as the side of a barn, the town drunk said. Anyone can hit it, and quite frequently

But forgiveness is not in the purist’s white apothecary. Skin secretes, a mouth like oil never dries, and desire does not stay inside the lines

The intellectual element of Stonecipher’s writing plays out the excesses of thought and language – but does so with a precision or freshness of phrasing that cuts across the grain of her own urge to speak without conventional intent. The traveler is one who abandons – while insisting that the customs official stamp her passport on the way out. The Reservoir represents the sort of work that gets congratulated more for what it proposes about language and for the mysteries it implies than for the actual pleasure of apprehension it gives the reader, even as the book streams with brilliant oddity and imaginative power. In general The Reservoir too completely achieves its incompleteness, favoring the imposition of its fractured thoughts over summoning thoughts of our own. The assortment is a precocious display – but here Stonecipher seems either disinterested in integrating — or simply not yet able — to collect her expressive vectors – another of which is a vibrant narrative and allegorical impulse (unwilling to be overshadowed by the more speculative sections) as heard in the lines below from “The Secret.”

Once upon a time secrets were cheap, easily bought and,

easily spent, moving angelically through the agency

of the mouth, until the day a secret swept up to the lips,

that could not be told, capsizing as it would

everything, so the secret stayed inside, and rose in,

value, until it sank and became

a lake, keeping its decorous hem, contained by law,

more persuasive then the laws

of spilling over…

Next came Souvenir de Constantinople (Instance Press, 2007). Somehow, by employing enjambment with its many abrupt opportunities for decision-making and pause, Stonecipher assembled all this breakage into a complete and resonant take on the portrayal of an entire world and the characters within it – including her speaker. In this book, Stonecipher suddenly emerges as a poet who, as Louise Glück described George Oppen, can create work that is “whole and not final.” The wholeness of speech (still loyal to its love of the leap) embraces and pleases the reader, and the evasion of finality gives the reader something to do. The intimation of rhetorical and narrative structure (Martin Corliss-Smith calls the book “a seductively paced travelogue”) entices the reader into coming along for the ride. This is the first part of “The Postcard-Collector’s Address”:

I know the world

only through

form. Mosaic

of views. It is said

melancholics

gravitate

toward miniatures.

It is said what is miniature is liberated

from the pretty tyranny

of use. Systematic

kindlers, tonic

postulants, distillations

of the garden

into flat vials, insect’s

Louvre, insect’s

Constantinople, wherever I go

my postcards go

with me. I saw my name

calligraphed on a grain

of rice. I saw the tiara

of spires held

in the pupils’s

dark embrace.

I closed up

the postcards in a jewelry

box where they remain

eternally

local.

“I know the world / only through / form” takes us directly to The Cosmopolitan, Donna Stonecipher’s stunning third book. Now she returns to prose, reconsidering the topics of Souvenir de Constantinople while dropping the scaffolding of the first-person and the premise of a particular voyage and love affair. The book is populated like a city, with a stream of glimpsed characters – desirous, ambitious, frustrated, meditative, amorous, bemused. They encounter a world striving for integrative form (often through meditations on architecture and urban design) but built on foundations of opposites: beauty/dissolution, pleasure/lassitude, time/moment, symbol/allegory, facts/ideas, invention/inheritance, iconography/realism, experience/aesthetics, freedom of expression/inadequacy of language.

John Yau, who selected the manuscript for the National Poetry Series, says that Stonecipher “has opened up the prose poem so that it is no longer a box in which one pours their little story … the false securities offered by narrative.” Is narrative really a writer’s emergency exit? Certainly not by definition. Anyway, Stonecipher has a more considered view of narrative – as expressed in an interview segment with Camille Guthrie provided by Coffee House Press:

“CG: The poems are full of characters and little stories – narratives which can stand by themselves – and it’s kind of a novel in itself really. Do you see the prose poem here as a bridge between poetry and the novel?

DS: I think of the poems as lyric poems, but maybe narrative was an escape hatch from the rocket of lyric, which is so insistent on its own subjectivity. The characters allowed me to diffuse (and defuse) my own ‘I,’ and the form let me include novelistic observations that make up a significant part of the noise in my mind and would otherwise go homeless.”

She also remarked, “I wanted to avoid the line break. Line breaks are seductive, but for the time being neither they nor the silences at the ends of line breaks feel right. Line breaks feel like cliffs leading to a kind of dangerous euphoria.” Clearly, the poet sensed a need to slow down, extend a thought, and find another device to cut it off. The selected form of her inlays – and the wonderfully complementary book and type design by Coffee House Press – collaborate to deliver a tour de force.

The Cosmopolitan is comprised of 22 “inlays” – Stonecipher’s term for each multi-part story. Each inlay has between eight and fourteen mini-stories, and each mini-story has two or three sentences. “I was at the Met, looking at inlaid furniture, when the idea came to me to ‘inlay’ a poem,” she told Guthrie. The inlay itself is a quotation from another author – Kafka, Ruskin, or Plato, but also Susan Sontag, Elaine Scarry, or Elfriede Jelinek. “I wanted to very exaggeratedly and artificially call attention to the problem [of attribution] for myself by placing a quote from another author squarely in the center of my text.” The quotations lend themselves to aphorism – but Stonecipher uses them as fuel, not as maps, to travel further.

This is part 5 of “Inlay 19 (Jane Jacobs)”:

”An oasis may or may not be a mirage, said the camel on its knees in the dark caravansaray. Oh the oasis was real, all right, but when we left it we could not have said if the mirage had been in us or if we had been in the mirage. There is a viewfinder through which everything is seen – mirages, and oases, and …”

Each of the inlays’ mini-stories is a speech – a blurting, a passing thought spoken during observation of an entire world. Although the narrative is unconventional, the narrative voice is actually quite consistent. Remarking on characters and fellow travelers who come to cities looking for a place that is both metaphor and playground of metaphor, the unnamed narrator participates in the in-gathering and expiration of thought and perception. I expect The Cosmopolitan will be commended by those who have no patience for anything but the smashing of the so-called standard, established self in American poetry. But in fact, the book enacts the intriguing difficulty with which we all struggle to have and comprehend selves in the first place.

The Cosmopolitan, both mysterious and inevitable like all truly great writing, is both oasis and mirage for the reader. It takes some presumption to assume the role of the cosmopolitan, to pass gorgeously through the swabbed-for-Semtex-and-C4 jetways. The cosmopolitan upholds both a system and a dream. The system offers a lingua franca for all airline pilots, a worldwide striving for on-time arrivals and departures via gleaming concourses. In the dream the cosmopolitan is aloft, gazing down at local color, a consumer of nationalities enacting the privilege of appreciating the various arts, beauties and flavors. This is, we often say, one small globe. But the reader, enticed to travel in Stonecipher’s precisely observed world, becomes the character below in part one of “Inlay 16 (Thomas Bernhard)”:

He wanted to be a citizen of the world and was crushed to discover that the world fields no citizens as such. So he settled for drifting with the voluptés of the clouds. And that is how he met her on a ship from Spain to Morocco, eating clementines and throwing the perfectly spiraled peels into the sea.

The cosmopolitan is the one who knows the difference between the Hutus and the Tutsis.

Two of the central inlaid quotations come from Emerson. The second reads, “… and yet how evanescent and superficial is most of that emotion which names & places, which Art or magnificence can awaken …” Emerson married Ellen Tucker in 1829; she died of tuberculosis in 1831. The next year, Emerson resigned from the ministry, disappointed with the church, and sailed for Europe. The quotation is taken from a letter he wrote from Rome. These details aren’t provided by Stonecipher nor do they add anything to her inlay. But they do suggest to me that Stonecipher is yet another accomplished, progressive American writer in the tradition of the expatriate, the seeker.

This is the fourth part of “Inlay 13 (Thomas Mann)”:

In February came vacation ads. Figures plunged into blue seas on television screens all over the city. Standing outside the apartment block, she saw all the windows flash and pop at the same time. Somewhere do lie the meccas in which our love finds its proportion – somewhere the ziggurat in which the giant inside us snugly fits.

In “Language as Gesture” R.P. Blackmur wrote, “The poet is likely to make his purest though not his profoundest gestures when most beside himself. If words fail they must serve just the same. Transformed into gesture, they carry the load, wield the load, lighten the load, and leap beyond the load of meaning.” Beside herself, Stonecipher reaches to the furthest extent of purity, pulling back language just at the point of utter failure, and leaping beyond meaning. Mistrustful of aphorism yet naturally appreciative of its terseness, Stonecipher skirts the edges of profundity. Blackmur defines “gesture” as “our own vital movement,” and Denis Donoghue explicates Blackmur’s phrase to indicate “one’s force beneath and prior to the words with which we try to express it.” The recognition of this force, Stonecipher’s gesture, entirely her own, is the pleasure of this book.

I fear that if I don’t include an example of an entire multi-part inlay, my reader can’t possibly appreciate how Stonecipher creates the subtle connections between her stories and achieves such eloquence – along with some humor, irony, and whimsy. So I’ll conclude with “Inlay 7 (Franz Kafka)”:

He travelled to Japan but he didn’t see any geishas. He travelled to Kenya but he didn’t see any giraffes. When he opened the book, he was surprised to find inside it another book. After a bad night in room 536, the hotel pool swallowed him like a blue mouth swallowing a tiny sleeping pill.

It is hard to rip up a photograph with a face in it. In the tiniest torn-up piece, the face is still intact. The face lies smiling up from the bottom of the wastebasket, and then smiles as it falls out of the garbage truck onto a lawn, and then smiles as it drifts slowly across the city back to your door.

Young people from the less powerful country came over to study the language of the more powerful neighboring country. The questionnaire found that, within a small margin of error, such-and-such percentage of women prefer to be on their knees while performing such-and-such sexual acts.

She felt like crying when she read in the paper that déjà vu was a chemical reaction in the body and not a magical window into existences previous and future at all. The oval mirror hanging by a black ribbon above the mantel reflected part of the dark sofa and the little light-bomb of the lamp.

The Russian exile with blue eyes admitted — not without a certain pride — that he had an accent in every language: A Russian accent speaking German, a German accent speaking Russian, an indeterminate accent speaking English, and an English accent when speaking indeterminately.

The language liquefaction. Sexy attempts at traction. A smattering of satisfaction. He held the word up to the light like a spectacularly faceted chit. She wondered if it were true what she had read, that when one speaks a foreign language, one becomes, briefly, an exemplar of that foreign tongue.

“What you say sounds reasonable enough,” said the man, “but I refuse

to be bribed. I am here to whip people, and whip them I shall.”

The silent majority stared hard at the vocal minority. More and more, there were eyes closing as velvet curtains descended upon screens. More and more, there were hands turning on electric lights in the daytime. More and more, there were cosmopolitans carefully examining tropical flowers in the dark.

The young people from the less powerful country did not stop to admire the complicated beauty of their new language’s intricate grammar. They made neat vocabulary lists in cheap notebooks, and in their own language made fun of the professor’s hair, glasses, clothing, shoes, and laugh.

In Paris the American girl speaking French began almost imperceptibly to bat her eyelashes. In St. Paul the German boy speaking English had the urge to fill silences almost before they began. One of the most marvelous memories of her life, she said, was of having déjà vu of having had déjà vu.

10.

He travelled to France but he didn’t see any existentialists. He travelled to Italy but he didn’t see dolce far niente. He travelled to China but he didn’t see any panda bears. He traveled to California but he didn’t see any surfers. Nevertheless his shell collection, with every vacation, grew.

- Ron Slate

https://www.ronslate.com/on-the-cosmopolitan-poems-by-donna-stonecipher-coffee-house-press/

Donna Stonecipher, The Reservoir:

Poems, University of Georgia Press, 2002

In Donna Stonecipher's debut collection of poems, a continual renovation of prose-poem forms unites narrative with lyricism to invent a luxurious little country, where the elegance of architecture, specifically European, houses a purely American spirit.

"Anything seen through an arch is instantly picturesque," declares the first line of "Album." Form renders meaning and makes beauty possible, and yet the arch is an artificial imposition on the scene. Likewise, birds, butterflies, and a swan flit through the poems, symbols of the artifice of ornamentation that dazzles in the distance but disappoints upon closer inspection; in these poems, a bird in the bush is worth two in the hand.

It is the reservoir, artificial but functional, beautiful only incidentally, that, "placid through the seasons, may save us." The union of narrative (function) and lyricism (beauty) in the reservoir, both reserving and reserved, results in poems that have much to tell, and even more to hold in, leaving the reader with the impression of secrets partly revealed, partly kept in reserve as mercurial lifeblood.

Meticulous and haunted, these poems live in a world only partly ours—one that overlaps into others where mirrors line the throats of birds and bees are baked into cakes. It's often evening here; we're often in a garden; we're often wandering. Stonecipher's precise language is both pensive and uncannily present, her images both seductive and oddly settling. She has achieved a beautiful truce among the most difficult emotions without compromising a thing.-- Cole Swensen

Stonecipher gives her poems both the texture and the structure of a continuous meditation on her own best, strongest, or prettiest memories . . . Stonecipher spent part of her youth in Teheran, and some of her twenties in the Czech Republic. Unsurprisingly, she enjoys writing about place; ultimately, though, all her poems are meditative, inward, remotely Proustian.-- Boston Review

Her unusual style and skillfully turned language, applied to a range of women's secrets, make this collection a read that is both compelling and haunting, and one to which readers will wish to return many times.-- Carolina Quarterly

Donna Stonecipher, Prose Poetry and the City,

Parlor Press, 2017

excerpt

read it at Google Books

"In this fascinating book, Donna Stonecipher doubles down on the development of prose poetry and the city. Tactically, her sweeping, complex yet meticulous essay engages Baudelaire's sudden--or is it sudden?--incursion from the constraints of verse into the 'roominess' of prose, 'paragraphs of place, ' while linking 'civic horizontality' and 'corporate verticality.' Tracking possibilities, (m)using everything from architecture to landscape to cookbooks, flÂneur-like, her essay exuberantly and expertly gathers together rhizomatic threads of thinkers and poets of the last two centuries. Reads like a song." - Norma Cole

"This fascinating exploration of the prose poem begins with a question that most other studies have overlooked or taken for granted: 'What, if anything, do cities and prose poetry have to do with each other?' Donna Stonecipher's touchstone for this question is Charles Baudelaire's prose poems in Le Spleen de Paris, but her excavation of the relationship between the 'built environment' of prose poem and city moves backwards to ancient Greece and forwards to the new sentence. As Stonecipher unpacks the 'dialogic space' of the prose poem, her essay moves vertically and horizontally, providing histories of the skyscraper and the aesthetics and ethics of vertical ascension, and much else. As she moves nimbly through large swaths of intellectual, architectural, urban, and aesthetic history, Stonecipher engages debates central to poetics and to modernity itself, taking seriously the challenge of considering how aesthetic forms register, respond to, and transform their built, social, and historical environments. An indispensable and enlightening guide that is also a pleasure to read." - Susan Rosenbaum

I once asked Donna Stonecipher if she, formidable prose poet that she is, ever felt a nostalgia for the line. I surely wouldn’t have asked that question had I already read her Prose Poetry and the City, a probing, flâneur-like meander through the history and poetics of the prose poem. Stonecipher’s history is written not unlike the prose poem itself—an open space of relations that view modernity and its poetics not as a matrix, a network, or a panopticon, but rather as a series of moving tensions. She builds the space of the prose poem by perusing Paris’s nineteenth-century urban landscape that gave the hybrid genre birth. We start oriented in language as it takes root in the city’s ways and means, especially the tension between, on the one hand, the “vertical” city conceptually rendered through maps and understood through a bird’s eye view of patriarchal control and architectural planning and, on the other, the “horizontal” city of lived experience. The conceptual city, with its godlike vertical first-person perspective, structures not only the monologic lyric but the formal control of meter and rhyme. Yet, it is the latter where Baudelaire’s flâneur roams, making acquaintance will all sorts of people and dives by way of a dialogic, prosey sentence.

Such a crux shapes several interlocking discoveries about a genre that has come to be so all-pervasive and yet still so mysterious in our own poetic landscape. It allows her to explain why nineteenth-century poetry fractured the formal bounds of form and meter in strikingly different ways in America and France. Whitman developed free verse just before the vertical power of skyscrapers came to dominate the New York state of mind and authorized the bold, individual excesses of his long line that remained married to the strictures of the iamb. The more grounded prose poem, by contrast, labored through Paris’s more sedate horizon. In Baudelaire’s sentence, Stonecipher finds an equilibrium between the capitalistic individual and the crowd, the vertical sublime and a more uniformly horizontal city, the formal commands and limitations of meter’s imposed hierarchy and the lackadaisical habits and heartbeats of breathy clauses, attached one to the other indeterminately or contingently.

If the prose poem leads out of the supposedly monologic lyrical voice of solitary Romanticism, as Valery and Rimbaud would have us believe, it does so by exploring the novelistic dialogism that was the boon of capitalist fictions from the eighteenth-century onwards. Here we see again the capaciousness of the prose poem, and not only for its polyvocal polyphonies of place and person. In part, born out of the desire to make money, Baudelaire capitalized on the lucrative success of the novel and other popular prose forms by publishing his first set of prose poems in the newspaper La Press. The prose poem adopts the garrulous variety of the novel, not to mention the legal, journalistic, and other urban discourses of modern prose, and tempers it with metaphor. This hybrid genre has always been associated with freedom, openness, subversion, and social critique. However, as Stonecipher shows us, it does not simply throw off the suffocations of the tight alexandrine or the teleological concepts of symbol and form (e.g., the courtly blazon and the sonnet); rather, it incorporates the conceptual, paradigmatic transformations of metaphor amid the urban sprawl of utilitarian prose.

Thus, the dynamism of the prose poem works reversibly, in both ways, integrating the discursive and lyrical, or more specifically the metonymic and metaphorical. In perhaps one of the most fascinating discussions of the form’s texture, Stonecipher counterposes the filled-in space of the text-dense prose poem with its tendency to inaugurate breaks, gaps, and ruptures within that crowded (urban) space and the sentence’s usual hypotaxis not via the exterior control of line breaks but through a variety of parataxis, asyndeton, juxtaposition, jump cuts, association and other “leaps and gaps.”

For readers who think, as I did, of a prose poem as a block of prose amped up by metaphor and lyrical language, Stonecipher shows how a prose poem’s sentences create unexpected spaces, or gaps, within their own continuous (and urban) flow, gaps that can be even more numerous than lineated poetry’s caesuras and line breaks.frequen Think of a neighborhood amble that is, of course, continuous yet consciously represented by a series of landmarks, remarked-upon items in shop windows, the Michael Jackson impersonator sauntering by, a clownish Frenchie licking the pavement, and other O’Hara-esque effluvia. Stonecipher cites Rosmarie Waldrop’s tricksy use of conjunctions, where “and,” “but,” “though” bring the expectation of hypotactic logical connection (“I like poetry but also prose poetry”) yet enact asyndeton that cuts out logical connection (“I like poetry but it is gloomy in LA in June”), creating what Stonecipher coins as “hypertaxis.” Here we have all the crowded arbitrary richness of the city’s fortuity that holds its own jangly, frequent serendipity.

A reader might crave a bit more context, possibly a longer historical sense of the urban or a view to British or other global prosey contexts, or perhaps a consideration of the “dissents” to her argument throughout the book rather than placed in a short section toward the end. But this focus serves the lilt of the book: there is something wonderfully prose-poemish about its writing, which seems to create a critical, investigative prose form all its own. Interfusing academic studies with contemporary and current poet musings about the form, Stonecipher writes something both lyrical and discursive, critical and imaginative. Perhaps taking her cue from the very form she is so adept an architect of, the twenty-four short sections muse on the space and architecture of the late nineteenth-century city even as they weave through the spaces of the prose sentence, the page, and the commodity culture that encircles and yet is escaped, at least in moments, by both. Take this in your bag as you traipse through any city this summer, and your mind will surely follow into unexpected pleasures. — Kate Singer

https://www.bodyliterature.com/2019/06/07/prose-poetry-and-the-city-review/

Inlay 7 (Franz Kafka)

The language liquefaction. Sexy attempts at traction. A smattering of satisfaction. He held the word up to the light like a spectacularly faceted chit. She wondered if it were true what she had read, that when one speaks a foreign language, one cannot help but become a member of that foreign tribe.

“What you say sounds reasonable enough,” said the man, “but I refuse to be bribed. I am here to whip people, and whip them I shall.”

10.

He travelled to France but he didn’t see any existentialists. He travelled to Italy but he didn’t see dolce far niente. He travelled to China but he didn’t see any panda bears. He travelled to California but he didn’t see any surfers. Nevertheless his shell collection, with every vacation, grew.

Enzyklopädie des Ungeschmacks 3

On the center shelf of the “Encyclopedia of Bad Taste” was a square of blowzy rose-

patterned wallpaper which, the sign noted, was still a runaway success for the manufacturer

to this day. In other words, the extent of the general benightedness was beyond the encyclopedists’

worst nightmares. In the distance, two black church steeples rose above the trees like two black

cats’ ears.

We heard that he had gone into the glazier’s and ordered three new windows and a dozen

donuts. The melancholic wished she could get what she wanted in life as effortlessly as a bee gets

pollen from a flower. Shouldn’t the objects of her desire also cluster impassively in a field,

beautiful and bursting with pollen, and defenseless? The result, she knew, would be exquisite

honey.

“Taste” was so infantile anyway. As if rational adults could only judge the world like

babies, sticking everything they got their hands on into their mouths. At the breakfast table,

you snapped open the newspaper and read that yet another celebrity had been found asphyxiated in a

hotel room from too much autoeroticism. If you lick a banana slug, it is said, your tongue goes

numb.

It seemed the equation could be made: The more sad plants in the office window, the more

soul-eroding the job. A cluster of dusty Boston ferns and spider plants was like a wan green SOS.

If the blowzy rose wallpaper is not to one’s taste, one can just spit it out. The encyclopedists had a

stash of volumes of Adolf Loos for palate cleansers. The melancholic ate a whole angel food

cake.

There was the beautiful and then there was the sublime, but nowhere had anyone said

anything about the tasteful. Was an Alp tasteful? Was a blowzy rose tasteful? After all, a great

Russian dancer started out as the Golden Slave in the Kirov Ballet and ended up on The Muppets.

The most elegant ice skaters in the world decorate their apartments with hordes of pink teddy

bears.

We found it a bit amusing to imagine the encyclopedists hunched over their labor,

collecting specimens of bad taste with proselytizing zeal to disabuse a public addicted to blowzy

rose wallpaper and never, ever to renounce it. A bit amusing, and a bit pathetic. We liked blowzy

roses—a bit. The word “bit” comes from “bite.” Try as you might, there is no circumventing the

mouth.

Tiergarten

One evening I had to admit to myself that I had long since preferred trees to

people. Trees had never hurt me. Which did not, of course, mean that they never

would. For some reason I had this thought upon entering the Tiergarten after

visiting an exhibition on Karl Marx and capitalism. Was it because Marx’s life

work consisted almost entirely of criticizing people, and the ways we have

chosen to organize our societies? I was feeling very critical of people. At the

exhibition I was reminded of the enclosure laws, which pushed subsistence

farmers to the cities. I was reminded of laws against wood theft. I regarded the

word “theft” for a long time, its heft. I thought of the Tiergarten during the war,

and of how its trees had all been cut down for firewood. How old was the oldest

tree in the Tiergarten? I found myself in a young forest, a hopeful forest, a lush

forest summers, a forest that at any time could once again be cut down for

firewood. That is the way a capitalist sees a forest. But if I preferred trees to

people — didn’t that mean I also preferred the trees to myself?

One evening I had to admit to myself that I had long since preferred trees to

people. I loved trees in the aggregate, as I could not love people in the

aggregate. Upon entering the park I felt my crown begin to glow as the crowns of

the trees were glowing in the evening’s golden gloaming. I could not love people

as a collective noun, but I could love trees as a collective noun. I preferred to

think of it not as misanthropy, but as philo-arbory. Was I so predictable? Is there

not a stone footbridge leading from the urban to the rural as we age, our tree

rings smashing together inside us, as we cross footbridge after footbridge, even

when all we long to do is lie down on a bench and rest? Was I so predictable, my

crown glowing, as I entered the park after the Marx exhibition, where I saw that

Marx had predicted everything, the crisis after crisis, and tree after tree

exploded into view, crowns all glowing, and I lay down on a bench to try, but

could not, rest.

One evening I had to admit to myself that I had long since preferred trees to

people. I picked up a book about trees but after fifty pages laid it down again,

because the author was too fond of likening trees to people. I learned many

astonishing things in fifty pages, about how trees communicate with and protect

each other, but I could not abide the author’s fondness for likening trees to

people. Trees are not people, which is why I prefer trees to people. Not even

poplars, named for people, are people. Trees give their lives for people. I am

writing this on paper in a notebook that was made from a tree, which is resting

on a desk which a tree gave its life to make possible. At the Marx exhibition I

took photos, which require light, as trees require light for their photosynthesis. I

took a photo of a painting of a young mother caught in the act of wood theft, her

bundle of gathered sticks abandoned at her feet. Her guilty expression glowed

with creamy paint. The young mother glowed with the guilty righteousness

of redistribution. The bundle of sticks was private property, but did not know it.

The entire forest was private property, but did not know it. I thought about

wood theft as I stooped down to pocket a twig. I lay down on a bench with the

twig in my pocket, but could not rest.

One evening I had to admit to myself that I had long since preferred trees to

people. Entering the Tiergarten I felt that I had at last come among them, among

the friends who would never hurt me. Or ask too much of me. They would never

bombard me with e-mails, or not respond to mine. They would never ask to stay

a week in my tiny apartment. True, the trees would also never read this poem, or

any poem. They would never read “I think that I shall never see /.” They would

never cry at a poem, or write me a love letter about a poem, and a whole holt of

them would not make my poem go viral. So for whom was I writing my poems? If

not for my friends the trees? At the exhibition I wondered like everyone else

what Marx would have thought of the internet. Of platforms where “friends”

“labor” for the “remuneration” of being surveilled. For the remuneration of

having our faces harvested. When a forest is harvested, the trees do not create

special names for the round yellow moon that surveils it. The harvested trees do

not make a sound that human ears, attached to our harvested faces, can hear.

One evening I had to admit to myself that I had long since preferred trees to

people. Trees knew exactly what to say in each situation: nothing. And only very

occasionally, if I was lucky, a great, crescendoing shiver. I wasn’t certain how to

interpret this silence in the Tiergarten. The book had taught me that the trees

were communicating constantly with each other, but I did not know how to

interpret their keeping mum to me. Was it circumspection, or indifference, or

some sort of sylvan critique? The Tiergarten had begun life as private property —

the hunting grounds of the Electors of Brandenburg, enclosed by a fence so that

the wild animals brought in to be hunted could not escape. Wikipedia calls this

type of hunting a hobby. Collecting leaves, bark, acorns, and seeds to make

xylotheques was also a hobby. Imagine taking apart a tree piece by piece to turn

it into a book. The world is a Wunderkammer and a torture chamber, at once.

The enclosure laws allowed landowners to put up fences to keep landless

farmers out. The landless farmers escaped to the factories run by the new

bourgeois in the burgeoning cities. At dusk, the Tiergarten filled up with soft gray

rabbits flicking their snow-white tails in this and that direction like beacons to

the odd alienated human. If I followed it, where would the soft gray rabbit lead

me?

I was drawn to the deciduous trees in the Tiergarten because the leaves had

arrived in spring as though a six-month life were something too wonderful to

miss. I loved the soft, bushy profusions of leaves living out their precarity with an

expectant spectatorship, a show that I was not privy to but could sense going on

all around me. The trees parted to make way for a clearing with bronze

sculptures of animals in the Tiergarten, a bear and a boar and an elk whose

snout had been rubbed gold by luck-seeking people. My own hand had rubbed

the snout gold more times than I cared to count, as I asked the elk for luck in this

or that circumstance. The bronze sculptures of bears and boars and elk appeared

in parks as living bears and boars and elk were being driven from the land that

would become the city, with artisans’ studios making bronze sculptures of bears

and boars and elk, which would become a city full of factories producing

machines and medicines to make people live longer and better in a world

without bears and boars and elk. The first document of civilization, wrote

Margaret Mead, was a healed human femur. From that point on, the bears and

boars and elk were out of luck. As for the trees: their luck fluctuated.

Trees would not nurse me as my broken femur healed. People would hurt me.

Trees would never make xylotheques. People would read my poems. Trees

would never harvest faces. People would never let me rest.

I walked into the Tiergarten to enclose myself in a haven of leaves, whose gentle

rustling drowned out my criticism, and whose explosive profusion blotted out my

confusion. Here everything was clear: rest was permanently deferred, but luck

might still be in the offing. I stuffed my pocket with twigs and made my way to

the elk, where I lay down on a bench to think of all the people I would nurse

while their femurs healed, and all the people who would nurse me as my femur

healed. I looked up into the trees and preferred them to all of us, but I knew my

place: I was an odd, alienated, tired human with femurs instead of branches and

I lay on a wooden bench near a bronze elk whose golden snout made promises it

might or might not keep. I forgave the trees.

Traumbaum

I started following a tree on Instagram. Not the tree itself, but the people

forming a human chain around the tree, trying to protect it. The tree said: LET

ME LIVE. Not the tree itself, but a sign tacked to the tree painted in bright red

letters, which looked like bright red blood. LASS MICH LEBEN. The account was

called Traumbaum = dream tree. I do not know if it meant that the tree was a

dream tree, i.e. a kind of ideal tree, or that the tree itself dreamed, or that the

people dreamed of the tree at night beyond their windows, living, wanting to be

allowed to live. The people wanted to be allowed to live the way they wanted to

live: with the tree beyond their windows. The tree was on Instagram, where I

followed it. I followed the children decorating the tree and writing love letters to

the tree. I followed the adults writing letters to the developer, who needed the

ground the dream tree occupied for four parking spots. I followed the news

stories of the hand-wringing local politicians, I followed the posts pointing out

that the tree had lived through two world wars, three kaisers, the Nazis, and

probably also Napoleon. I followed the increasingly urgent calls to action. I

followed the preparatory lopping of its 200-year-old branches. I stopped

following the tree.

I started following a tree on Instagram. I gave a “heart” to every post from the

Traumbaum account, including the post with a link to a petition, which I clicked

on and signed. Every time I scrolled down and spotted the tree in its allotted

square, I felt a thrill of spangled melancholy not unmingled with anger, not

unmingled with my own well-rooted griefs. Briefly I forgot my own griefs as I

built an edifice of sadness around the dream tree. I could feel my own volume of

sap, but I continued dispensing hearts. I imagined the time of the kaisers, I

imagined Napoleon marching through the Brandenburg Gate as the tree I was

following was still a sapling, unsuspecting and unaware of its future life wearing

a hand-painted blood-red sign that said LET ME LIVE. I “hearted” the tree in an

abstract way, despite my grief. I knew it was abstract, and mediated, and

cathected, and a projection, and an ersatz, and transference, but still, I “hearted”

and “hearted” the tree. Until I stopped following the tree.

I started following a tree on Instagram. I did not know much about the tree,

apart from the fact that it was located in a courtyard in Kreuzberg, that it was as

old as Napoleon, that it had survived three kaisers, two world wars, the Nazis, a

cold war, and god knows what else. But I did not know the genus of the tree. I

imagined cutting open the trunk and counting its 200 tree rings, I imagined

putting my arms around its august bark, I imagined tasting its sap. But I did not

know the genus of the tree. My edifice of sadness did not require knowledge of

this kind. I knew what I needed to know. I could ID some trees, in leaf, if need be

— I could ID an oak, a sycamore, a chestnut, a linden, and a maple tree, in leaf, if

need be. But the Traumbaum was not in leaf. It was a dream tree, and like all

trees, dream or otherwise, reliant on human caprice, on human dreams of

scarcity or plenitude or sufficiency or satisfaction or suffering or need, stoked

and sated and magnified and spurred on and sublimated by Instagram. I courted

my own caprice. I stopped following the tree.

I started following a tree on Instagram. I stopped following a tree on Instagram. I

started following a tree on Instagram. I stopped following a tree on Instagram. I

heard through other channels that at the eleventh hour, the dream tree had

been saved. Why it could not have been saved in the fourth or even the ninth

hour was beyond my comprehension. I logged on to Instagram and searched for

the Traumbaum, and there it was, in its square as usual, with its lopped branches

and its hand-painted blood-red sign LET ME LIVE, and its chain of neighbors

rejoicing over the continuance of a being as old as Napoleon. This being, with its

lopped branches, its hacked-off limbs, its grotesque pollarded appearance. I was

bursting with sap. I sat at my desk with sap flowing out all over, rejoicing with

the neighbors through my screen. I had signed a petition. I had fed the

algorithm. I had performed my small civic duty. I had dispensed a Valentine’s box

worth of hearts. I had used my daily dose of fossil fuels. I had followed and

unfollowed. I was in control of my outrage, mistress of my grief. I read the rest of

the article on the Traumbaum account. It said how wonderful it was that the

Traumbaum had been saved, but too bad about the other four trees that had

already been felled before the Traumbaum action began. I stopped following the tree.

White Mouth

I had forgotten all about the star inside the apple, eating my way through orchardsful in the intervening years, years marked by

Who does not judge each heart by halving it from the top instead of scoring delicately around the girth? Still,

If I could fill myself with milk I’d be the old statue weathering in the yard: evangelical, cicatrixed with white roses, the white of

My heart is as sad and wide as the side of a barn, the town drunk said. Anyone can hit it, and quite frequently

But forgiveness is not in the purist’s white apothecary. Skin secretes, a mouth like oil never dries, and desire does not stay inside the lines

The face of the statue in the wild yard is soft and smeared as though definition itself were an affront—herein nature’s woozy story

How “human” is human enough. Little rescues are at hand, angels in plainclothes, but how can we know inside whom embark the seeds of our

As I stood holding my face up to the night sky the stars in their pristine arrangements pricked every last swollen thing inside me, as if

For the larger the target of your heart, the more you must smelt yourself down to the slick business of forgiving

Forgiveness the liquid eating away at the cool white stars of the sugar. Intransigence the cream billowing up through the dark

I hold with white hands the purity of my own arrangement, while the brown star glows forgotten inside the pristine cage of each

In the tribunal of the streets I judge and condemn, never by choice but because we do what comes naturally

Show me, the town drunk said, one star in the night sky that is not waiting to be eaten by the spacious white mouth of the sun

In 2007, when I was asked to be one of judges of the National Poetry Series, I selected The Cosmopolitan by Donna Stonecipher. Coffee House Press published it the following year. Reviewing the book on his website, On The Seawall (October 23, 2008), Ron Slate wrote: “The Cosmopolitan is one of the most exciting and gratifying books of poems I’ve read this year.” This is how he described the book:

The Cosmopolitan is comprised of 22 “inlays” — Stonecipher’s term for each multipart story. Each inlay has between eight and fourteen mini-stories, and each mini-story has two or three sentences. “I was at the Met, looking at inlaid furniture, when the idea came to me to “inlay” a poem, she told [Camille] Guthrie. The inlay itself is a quotation from another author — Kafka, Ruskin, or Plato, but also Susan Sontag, Elaine Scarry, or Elfried Jelinek. “I wanted to very exaggeratedly and artificially call attention to the problem [of attribution] for myself by pacing a quote from another author squarely in the center of my text.” The quotations lend themselves to aphorism — but Stonecipher uses them as fuel, not as maps, to travel further.

This is from “Inlay 4 (Susan Sontag)”:

Pity we who must corset our mental splendor into the whalebone of grammar, which laces us up so tight we have to remove a rib to breathe.

Stonecipher’s ability to synthesize the visceral (corset), the ephemeral (splendor), and the abstract (grammar) into a self-sufficient sentence set her apart from her contemporaries: this was neither a style that could be picked up nor writing that could be taught. Whatever her sources or inspirations, she got here on her own.

Since my first encounter with Stonecipher’s poems in a pile of anonymously submitted manuscripts, I have published her translation of the novella, Ascent, by Ludwig Hohl through my press, Black Square Editions, in 2012. Written in German, Ascent is about a mountain climbing expedition that goes all wrong, a tragedy foreshadowed in the book’s remarkable first paragraph. And yet, knowing that doom lies ahead, the reader keeps chugging along until reaching an end that is expected and unexpected. Stonecipher’s deft translation revealed Hohl to be, as Susan Bernofsky wrote in a jacket blurb, “a great discovery, an unjustly neglected author.”

In 2015, I wrote about her book of prose poems, Model City (Shearsman, 2015) under the title: “This Is Not a Book Review of Model City by Donna Stonecipher.” This is my description of Model City:

The book consists of seventy-two consecutively numbered short prose poems collectively titled “Model City.” Each prose poem is divided into four sections, with each section being one sentence long. This adds up to 288 sections, each of which answers the question: What was it like? The antecedent becomes a dream, a memory, a fiction, or a perception, all of which are inflected by the fact that the poet’s decision to begin every section begins with, “It was like … ” Out this conceptual scaffolding, where the writing is always responding to an absent thing or event, Stonecipher opens up her “Model City” to admit all kinds of stuff, from a “real fox” to “a new opera house built in China by Zaha Hadid, and how it is beginning to crumble after having been open for six months.”

However, just because I am not supposed to review a book by an author whose translation I have published does not mean I cannot plug a book she has neither finished nor found a publisher for, does it? Am I really supposed to curb my enthusiasm for an author whose work I was lucky enough to have discovered in a mountain of submissions?

By the time Stonecipher published Model City, it was apparent to a number of readers that she was renovating the prose poem in ways that opened it up, like a bursting star, enabling her to go in multiple directions and muse on just about anything. The prose poem in her hands can be a dream catcher, a travelogue, a report, an archive, a series of aphorisms, a contemplation of modernity, often simultaneously. As she titled three of the 24 chapters in her long essay, Prose Poetry and the City (Parlor Press, 2017), it can embrace “Trivia,” “Aphasia,” and “The Sublime.”

My feeling that Stonecipher has become a major poet, an innovator who writes in concise, sparkling language, was emphatically reinforced when I recently heard her read in Berlin from an unfinished manuscript, The Ruins of Nostalgia, which consists of more than 65 prose poems and does not yet have a publisher. The reading took place in a courtyard and the other readers were Barry Schwabsky, Matvei Yakelevich, and myself. In addition to publishing Stonecipher’s translation, I have published books by Schwabsky and Yankelevich.

Siddartha Lokanandi organized the reading at his bookstore, Hopscotch Reading Room, where, in addition to encountering a wide range of books, whose haphazard arrangement makes for surprises and delights, you can also buy beer and other spirits long after the sun has departed. Although this was the first time I met Lokanandi, it was quickly apparent that he was interested in building connections and creating a borderless, multi-racial community, which isn’t always the case among poets or the avant-garde.

Each of us read for 15 to 20 minutes as night slowly moved in. At the beginning of his segment, Yankelevich expressed amazement and happiness at the size of the audience, which was far larger than many of the readings he attended in New York.

By the time Stonecipher finished reading four poems from the unfinished manuscript, I knew that I wanted to write about them and that I did not want to wait until the book was published to do so, as this could take years and it clearly shouldn’t. Also, at the time I did not know that Stonecipher had a book forthcoming, Transaction Histories, which is due to be released by the University of Iowa Press on September 18, 2018. I found it interesting that she neither announced her forthcoming book nor read from it, perhaps because she had done a reading a few weeks earlier at Hopscotch Reading Room and resists repeating herself (which makes for an interesting contrast with her use of repetition in her poetry — just one of many things I find compelling about her work).

According to the publisher, Transaction Histories consists of “six series of poems that explore the disobedient incongruities of aesthetics and emotions.” I don’t think this description is going to lure a lot of readers. Like the “inlays” of The Cosmopolitan, the poems I have read from Transaction Histories are a series of mini-stories, each of which is numbered and made up of a half dozen sentences, at most. While each story is discrete, certain motifs reappear (plastic owls, photographs of boys in sailor suits, specimen boxes, and a clear plastic backpack) within a particular “Transaction History.” Often, more than one motif will appear in different sections of the same poem. The sentences of each section stand on their own, suggesting a collage without being one.

This is the seventh section of “Transaction History 6,” which appeared in issue # 11 of the online magazine Wave Composition:

It was all too easy to swim in the lake that summer without thinking about the fish chasing smaller fish chasing smaller fish along the bottom, to glide along the surface with one’s distorted limbs and feel that one was “deeply experiencing” the lake. He pulled out the tiniest cell phone she’d ever seen. Bitter Lemon was the drink of choice; then there was a craze for homemade seltzer; then suddenly everyone had to have absinthe.

This is what I love about Stonecipher’s work. You never know what the next sentence is going to tell. The connections between the sentences feel both tenuous and tensile. You don’t just read this paragraph; you reread it and take it apart, your curiosity driven by the desire to see what makes it tick.

In poem after poem, Stonecipher opens up a space in which readers can reflect upon what has been placed before them – a mosaic that is rigorous and elusive, a challenge to keep the whole in mind while remembering all the distinct elements, to recognize the different transactions or exchanges in the fluid world she evokes with preternatural precision. Stonecipher seems to be asking in this paragraph, what is the relationship between experience and folly, familiarity and escape?

At once detached and empathetic, Stonecipher observes, uncovers, and probes our present malaise, the recognition that the future and past are constantly colliding in our everyday lives, shadowed by the suspicion that such encounters may erase all evidence of our existence. The information explosion, with the vast access offered by the digital tentacles at our fingertips, has made us acutely aware of how truly insignificant we are as individuals in the grand scheme of things. Stonecipher’s poems are located in cities undergoing relentless change, as all of them seem to be doing these days. The phrase “ruins of nostalgia” appears in each of the poems, usually at the beginning or at the end. If wistful affection for a golden age in our collective and personal past lies in ruins, how do we embrace the future that will eventually devour us? Can we continue to be open and compassionate? Here is the beginning of “The Ruins of Nostalgia 9”:

For a long time we had listened to the stories of those who had lived in countries that no longer existed, and the stories had been exciting—stories of privation, of deprivation, of limits, of lack. But after a time we had heard the same stories so many times that even the tellers grew weary of the telling. “Nobody had telephones—we just left messages on notepads attached to people’s doors” (mm). “I wasn’t allowed to go to university, because I did x (harmless thing)” (mm). “Everyone was having affairs, because the private life was the only realm in which you felt free” (mm).

That parenthetical interjection “(mm)” adds a note of humor as it exposes the need to distance ourselves from others in order to maintain our privileged status of voyeur, which we have become, whether we admit it or not. Stonecipher is in touch with the different ways we feel displaced and estranged in our everyday lives, the various states of incomprehension infiltrating all of our perceptions.

How do we adjust to the structural changes cities are undergoing due to gentrification and capitalism’s demand for ever higher profit margins, as if the importance of people is measured by how much they spend? Here is the beginning of “The Ruins of Nostalgia 20”:

This is “The Ruins of Nostalgia 50” in its entirety:

The Ruins of Nostalgia 50

The oldest house in the neighborhood is for sale. The oldest house in the neighborhood, owned by the state garden club, has been put up for sale. Queen Anne-style, with leaded-glass windows, and a turret, the house has been put up for sale by the state garden club, to whom it was bequeathed, in 1977, by the ladies’ improvement club. The bequeathal included a clause that included the stipulation that the Queen-Anne-style house, and its pear orchards, be preserved by the state garden club “forever.” Nevertheless, the state garden club has put up the oldest house in the neighborhood for sale. The house is, was, is, no longer listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The garden club went to court to ask for a lifting of the listing on the National Register of Historic Places. Because the upkeep of the oldest house in the neighborhood, with its leaded-glass windows, and its pear orchards, and its historic-ness, is onerous. For forty years the garden club tended its pear orchards, and its garden, and intended to preserve its pears and its leaded-glass windows and its turret “forever.” Forever? Forever. Forever? Forever. Pears are preserved into preserves. A historic place is preserved into a Historic Place. A tower slurs into a turret. The oldest house in the neighborhood, with its leaded-glass windows and its garden, sits on a lot that could contain an apartment building with “30 to 40 units” in a city with a crippling housing shortage. But the house was bequeathed “forever.” But the house, the house, with its leaded-glass windows and its garden, its 135 years of existence. Its 135 years of pears. Its preservation. But the “30 to 40 units.” The court allowed the listing to be lifted because the ladies’ improvement club was dissolved in 1983, and no ladies were left to protest it. But a lady from the state garden club board did resign in protest, an 88-year-old lady named Lona. But Lona. But the 30 to 40 units. But the pear orchards. But the new families. But the leaded glass. But the ladies, improving and improving. But the Queen-Anne-style house. But the obsolescence of queens. But the history, the Historic Place. But the city’s crippling housing shortage—the homeless people lining the freeways. But the stories the house could tell, if it could tell. But Lona. But the neighborhood groups now scrambling to buy the house. What are they trying to preserve? The house, the past, the old neighborhood, the historic place, history? And Lona? But Lona. But the house—the large, old, antiquated, elegant, beloved, hated, fragile-as-an-eggshell house, which escaped fire, earthquakes, the ravages of time, of everything except “prosperity.” Built 135 years ago for shelter, will the shelter now be sheltered? But the 30 to 40 units. But Lona. But Lona. But the pear orchard, the garden, the turret, the leaded glass, the house, the house.

In his essay “The Painter of Modern Life” (1863), Charles Baudelaire recognized that the borders separating (and protecting) classes and individuals had broken down:

The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being himself and someone else as he sees fit. Like a roving soul in search of a body, he enters another person whenever he wishes. For him alone, all is open; if certain places seem closed to him, it is because in his view they are not worth inspecting.

Stonecipher’s renovation of the prose poem is inextricable from her sensitivity to how much further erosion has taken place since Baudelaire walked the streets of Paris. In this global economy, and the growing, insurmountable disparity between the privileged and vulnerable, she watches a world vanish and does not turn away from the particulars, “the obsolescence of queens,” “a crippling housing shortage,” “new families,” and “the homeless lining the freeways.” - John Yau

https://hyperallergic.com/454125/donna-stonecipher-the-ruins-of-nostalgia-50-books/

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12/16/23

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