Joyelle McSweeney, Salamandrine: 8 Gothics, Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2013.
He who shrinks from the flames will never command Salamanders.- Arthur Edward Waite
"One would not make love to a Salamandrine during a sandstorm," wrote Aleister Crowley, anticipating by some sixty years the note of caution that Tarpaulin Sky must attach to the Black Book whose image now burns before you: Dear Reader, banish all received notions of narrative, of language itself. Masquerading as a collection of short stories, Salamandrine is a channeled text, moonchild, unholy offspring of poetry and Loser Occult. Refracting the dread and isolation of contemporary life through a series of formal/generic lenses, producing a distorted, attenuated, spasmatic experience of time, as accompanies motherhood, Salamandrine renders impossible any thinking in terms of conventional temporalities or even causalities, let alone their narrative effects. Salamandrine is the high magick of art so low it crawls. Like a toddler at a poetry reading. With a taste for achilles heels. Hell-bent on bringing literature to its knees.
EXCERPT FROM SALAMANDRINE
In which my kid proves a hero of the injection. Next stop a wrestly Mercury-mask, stops up the ears, stops up the nose, swims in the blood, sews painful wings onto those baby ankles, but theyll thank you for it. My kids got her own pod of roll-up dolphins in her spangly blood, swimming and sieving in her alien scenes.
After the check-up, I see the doctor in the parking lot. Can she recognize my kid without her chart? I want desperately for my kids face to be recognizable; I wouldnt recognize it myself if it werent tied on. I try to draw the doctors attention to us. I ring the stroller round my car. My kids dingle tires sink deeper into the tar.
*
In which the tar is mud. Girasol tamales, Parish of St. Bavo, Women, Infant and Childrens clinics all stipple-cell all sinking into the mud. No such lug today. Burning bright. Which makes the tar for melting. Which makes a Melchior. Alchemists bauble or philosophers stone stowed on the shelf amid the unused Pampers and summer togs. Salamandrine, my kid is burning in the back seat. Shit.
Interview with Joyelle McSweeney
52 Weeks / 52 Interviews: Week 28: Joyelle McSweeney
Joyelle McSweeney, Percussion Grenade. Fence Books, 2012.
Music and drama as weapons of productive destruction. This collection by prize-winning, massively influential literary star Joyelle McSweeney explodes the twinned and dangerous notions that images are pretty, and that they land predictably. Power struggles in all contexts and the driving ever-presence of a lexicon of puissance make this a bracing read, not for the faint of heart or mind.
McSweeney’s recent works make a fitful, voltaic motion in a deformation zone constituted by violence, genre, literary form, image, media, environmental degradation, power imbalances, mutation, possession, dispossession, disability, beauty, the mythic and the mundane, the living and the Dead, the Sublime.
The Montevidayans, a loose group of writers and poets and visual artists (including Joyelle McSweeney, Johannes Goransson, Lara Glenum, Danielle Pafunda, and, more loosely, Kate Bernheimer), are distinguished from the preponderance of those who are identified (or who self-identify) as avant-garde or experimental or “new” or otherwise willfully other, by their willingness to embrace and explore rather than to exclude, and by their idea that art can accommodate the high, the low, the middle, the sideways, the backwards, the constructive, the destructive, the deconstructive, the narrative, the anti-narrative, the lyric, the dramatic, the miniature, the epic, the restrained, the willfully artful, the willfully artless, the garish, the respectable, the kitschy, the hybrid, the hi-bred, the high bread, and the red hype. Where others out of explicit big-timing (and implicit self-protection or self-promotion) construct ever smaller boxes within which art might reside — and say, implicitly (and sometimes explicitly): because I reject your standard notion of rules, which are meant to bind and shame me, I will make an idiosyncratic notion of rules, which are meant to bind and shame all who are not like me — the Montevidayans, in general, say: Yes.
This is not the only reason I am drawn to their work (or to their ongoing discussion of their own work and the work of others, which might also be considered part of their work), nor is it the main reason. It’s the work itself which is exciting, and also the ever-evolving ideas that drive the work, most notably McSweeney’s notion of the Necropastoral, about which I’ve written, at some length, here. Also of interest are the ways in which the work of McSweeney and Goransson, in particular, is intertwined. (They’re married, but — and this is rather unusual — their work also seems to be married.)
In Percussion Grenade, McSweeney’s new book of poems and plays, the point of most obvious intersection is the play The Contagious Knives: A Necropastoral Farce. It is a play that is probably impossible to completely stage, except in the mind of the reader, and it is also a play that offers the reader an opportunity to direct it in many different ways — a different Contagious Knives with each reading. In these ways, it belongs to a small genre also occupied by Goransson’s book-length Entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate. (about which, more here.)
The Contagious Knives begins with a monologue that precedes the rising of the curtain (and, indeed, the curtain doesn’t rise at all until the third scene of the first act.) The speaker is Louis Braille, but this Louis Braille is a fourteen-year-old girl in pink panties and a pop-star T-shirt from Target. The stage directions are worth excerpting:
As he speaks, he carefully dons a diadem of awful awls, spikes and knives, twining his golden curls artfully around them. He pulls a Victorian child’s sailor suit over his t-shirt and panties: a Harjuku cum Craker Jack look. He cakes his face white. He ties a brown leather strap around his eyes and inserts an awl into the right. In liquid eyeliner, he paints big black tear drops, swoops and lacerations down each cheek like a kiddie Oedipus. He finishes this off in black platform boots, stolen off a passed-out teenaged hustler.
Soon he gets into a mini-lover’s spat with Narcissus (who at play’s end morphs into Wikileaks hero Bradley Manning) about the means of the making, whom he instructs: “Okay, cry . . . But look alive. We have to set it up before we can serve it,” and, later: “It’s time to self-destruct. We’re going to rule this place because we got fucked, we got fucked and fucked and now we’ll be the King of all the Fuck-ups. Curtain up!”
Although the Montevidayans decry manifestoes, this might well be their ars poetica.
That’s not all there is to love about Percussion Grenade. The book also features several extended movements of poems. The King Prion sequence, which originally appeared in The Necropastoral chapbook, sits alongside the three-page Whitman-meets-Tarantino title poem (“In my gondola of clouds / In my / percussion grenade / I loaf and invite myself to lock and load / dine under the table / stir the alphasoup with my epiphaneedle . . .”); the “Hanniography,” which is a series of three monologues by “Hannie Oakley” and one by “Hammie Oakley”; and four “Poems for the Catastrophe,” which close the book in echo of Geoffrey Chaucer, a forefather of the Montevidayans: “time and tide / leave no man behind.”
For all those pleasures — each of these sequences deserve their own review, at a greater length than this one — what’s really special is the book’s third section, a dumping ground of sorts titled “Killzone 2,” after the first-person shooter for the PlayStation 3, and also after McSweeney’s ekphrastic poem of the same name, which seems to connect the video game to the tragedy of the contemporary soldier, and, by extension, to the contemporary young American who has bought into the rhetoric of corporate globalization (“I take a bullet / For every member of my team / A learned violence from the game of the year.”) The Killzone 2 poems are a more varied sequence, a thematically unified showplace of great formal variety, which includes a Necropastoral rewriting of Philip Levine’s “What Work Is” (titled: “What Work Is By Phil Levine”), an anaphoric spree with the neologistic title “Guadaloop” (which in its repetition of the word “Just” interrogates ideas of bigness, smallness, sacrifice, the value of human life, and the nature of justice), the long loose lines of “Septina” (“. . . The human race / shall be packed back into their toxic barrel and destroyed. Nothing could be / simpler / than undoing this species that wants to hold on to flesh like a pathetic flea, / black bonnet.”), and the culminating “Arcadia (Post-Caucasia) for the Caucasian Dead,” which for all its other undoings, also undoes Robert Lowell.
In Percussion Grenade, McSweeney (temporarily?) leaves behind the theorizing that undergirded the chapbooks that preceded it, and stretches out into the work itself. In the best sense, it seems a transitional volume. The ideas and tropes of earlier volumes are repeated and deepened, but there is a new freedom with and embrace of all the resources of language and poetic device appropriate to a project titled Percussion Grenade, whose prefatory prose poem, titled “Indications,” prescribes: “The pieces in this volume were written for performance and should be read aloud — a-LOUD!” - Kyle Minor
1. “Hold a cheerleader’s cadaver up to Nature.”
Percussion Grenade is full of these lines that leave me a little breathless, a little confused, satisfied, sad, all sorts of things. I think the dead cheerleader is an accusation: evidence against the concept of nature.
2. “I maketh you lie down in fracked pastures
in central Pennsylvania
o my blood boils, my tapwater burns”
My favorite part of this book is The Contagious Knives: A Necropastoral Farce which made me put down the book and step away, walk around the block a few times, and then finish the book.
3. Since Kyle Minor wrote on this book here I’m going to try to focus on the The Contagious Knives and a few other sections of the book that he didn’t focus on.
4. I think some concepts that Tim Morton uses in his books Ecology Without Nature and The Ecological Thought are useful for thinking about the necropastoral. The essays Dark Ecology of the Elegy and Queer Ecology are also interesting to read along side Percussion Grenade. The authors are not strangers, and other people have talked about them together.
5. Object Oriented Ontology and Speculative Realism might also make an interesting groundwork for looking at Percussion Grenade, the rest of McSweeney’s work, and the Necropastoral, but I’m not sure what to say about it at this point.
6. “The ecological thought includes negativity and irony, ugliness and horror.“ This quote from Tim Morton seems like it applies to the Necropastoral of Percussion Grenade.
7. “To appear to be acting masculine, you aren’t masculine. Masculine is Natural. Natural is masculine. Rugged, bleak, masculine Nature defines itself through contrasts: outdoorsy and extraverted, heterosexual, able-bodied—disability is nowhere to be seen; physical wholeness and coordination are valued over spontaneity.” From Queer Ecology
8. McSweeney has a particular interest in the marginalized, the other, all of the opposites of able-bodied, heterosexual, extraverted. She’s interested in how a particular kind of power or ability is derived from instability. The Contagious Knives is full of allusions to Tiresias, the archetypal seer, who happens to be transgender and blind.
9. “My Prius drives to the reservoir for some system downtime
without me: to blow off steam. There runoff collects
from picturesque slopes and shops. O Jeunesse, Dream
Prius, Brainless, Brained.”
Mont Blanc (lines 1-4) – Joyelle McSweeney
“The everlasting universe of things
Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,
Now dark—now glittering—now reflecting gloom—
Now lending splendour, where from secret springs
The source of human thought its tribute brings
Of waters…”
Mont Blanc (lines 1-6) – Percy Bysshe Shelley
10. The Prius replaces the mountain and Ravine of Arve as object of aesthetic and philosophical contemplation. The Prius becomes a sort of liaison to the non-human, communing with the runoff.
11. In The Contagious Knives Shelley’s everlasting universe of things, from Mont Blanc is transformed into “the fetid universe of things.”
12. Joshua Corey has said some very articulate and astute things w/r/t Necropastoral and Ecology here and here and he draws a beeline from Shelley and Keats to McSweeney and others:
“The postmodern mode of Shelleyan excess or the Keatsian uncanny has not to my knowledge been fully theorized within an ecological context; but certainly the “necropastoral” for which Joyelle McSweeney has become a forceful advocate is one of its strongest contemporary manifestations. If asked to find a lineage for this writing in American poetry (yes, I realize how provincial I’m being, but that is my area of expertise), I would pick out Emily Dickinson (as so often the great foil and other for her contemporary Whitman), Edgar Allan Poe, Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy, Sylvia Plath, Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, and Alice Notley. (You will notice this second lineage is more heavily weighted toward femininity and queerness, which is probably not accidental; I would also emphasize the importance of Rimbaud and Baudelaire.) The revelatory encounter with uncanny objects, bodies, and drives dominates this poetry, which is much harder to reduce to a program or politics than the relational mode; this is no doubt the core of its strength and necessity, in Morton’s view.”
13. The King Prion poems appeared in the Necropastoral chapbook. A prion is maybe one of the strangest
“Prions propagate by transmitting a misfolded protein state. When a prion enters a healthy organism, it induces existing, properly folded proteins to convert into the disease-associated, prion form; the prion acts as a template to guide the misfolding of more proteins into prion form. These newly formed prions can then go on to convert more proteins themselves; this triggers a chain reaction that produces large amounts of the prion form.” From Wikipedia.
14. The Prion is queer, or uncanny, because it stretches the boundaries of what we can think of as alive. The Prion is what Morton might call a “strange stranger.”
15. All characters in The Contagious Knives could be thought of as strange strangers. In The Ecological Thought, Morton describes the strange stranger as “liable to change before our eyes, and our view of them is also labile.” For example, Louis Braille is described as, a “kiddie Oedipus”, “a teenage girl”, a “girlboyteen,” a “crackerjack cum harajuku.”
16. The King Prion poems have this aggressive & violent tone, the voice of the cartoon sexual predator “-Hoooooooo / Wolf whistle’d and Cadillac’d” http://gifsoup.com/webroot/animatedgifs1/1273761_o.gif
17. McSweeney uses cars:
“…let me maketh a place for you in my glade, let me drive you in my nickel-plated Escalade.”
From The Contagious Knives
“the big metal bird went whup whup whup
with my blood it was whet as it went up up
a girl in the tread and a girl on the blade
a girl in night vision and a girl on nightraid
defibrillate night’s sternum with your enfilade
defibrillate night’s sternum with your Escalade
till she wears her martyr’s dressing like a coach wears Gatorade”
From Avarice Reverie, USMC in Phoebe
18. The car becomes a sublime object; the Escalade, is sublime in its opulence and absurdity; it completely lacks utility. While one might argue something similar about the linguistic opulence of both Shelley and McSweeney, Percussion Grenade is aggressive about doing something. It has goals. It is critical politically and socially, and asserts that a poem can exist as purpose, beyond itself. A book like this can remind us that Bradley Manning and Drones and Escalades and Prions and fracking and champagne and Gatorade all exist in the same world.
19. That quote comes from the Swan in The Contagious Knives. Both the Swan and the Devil are trying to seduce an un-incarnated? Louis Braille in the underworld. They’re competing for souls or youth. They fight over Louis, who is plotting all along to murder both of them and take over. It’s worth excerpting part of this dialogue.
Swan: Squatter!
Devil: Chaser! Chaise Lounger!
Swan: Bulimic! Bored Priest!
Devil: Bored priest? I’m King of the Fiends.
Swan: I wonder. Or just a boaster? A stew hen pretending to be a rooster?
Devil: You’ll soon see who’s chief defiler.
Swan: Don’t Forget I’ve Dined at your café and it’s a bistro: quick, quick.
Not much beating in that little stick.
20. Identity in the Underworld of The Contagious Knives is decentralized, malleable, labile. Much like in Lynch’s films Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive, or the Shakespearean forest, all the players play different parts throughout the piece, and it’s hard to tell when a character is playing vs. some other thing.
21. Like DeLillo’s book of the same name, this is also a place that trash goes, but isn’t like, transcendent trash, it will never disappear, it doesn’t get thrown into the sun, not a place that you can forget about. The play takes place in the margins of death, but even the Underworld in The Contagious Knives (or the Odyssey or the Iliad for that matter) is inside the world, the barrier is permeable, and classically is is possible to return from a katabasis.
22. “Rather than maintaining its didactic or allegorical distance, the membrane separating the Pastoral from the urban, the past from the future, the living from the dead, may and must be supersaturated, convulsed, and crossed. The Crossing of this membrane is Anachronism itself.” From Necropastoral
23. “I wonder if we can imagine a reconfigured or non-configured Sublime, that does not rely on the topographical maps the Romantics configured but exists as obscurity, all inside, inside the atom, say, that is simultaneously also all outside, on the impossible-to-imagine denatured Moebius strip of the ampersand or Lyotard’s libidinal band? What if it were not a circuit but a zone?” Joyelle McSweeney on Montevidayo. In the same post you can see McSweeney struggling with the notion of sublime in Mont Blanc.
24. In the climactic scene of The Contagious Knives, Louis Braille utters the phrase, “Now I am become a zone of violence,” which echoes the line of the Bhagavad Gita, made famous by J. Robert Oppenheimer upon detonation of the first atomic bomb “Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds.” (Bhagavad Gita Ch.11, v.32) Instead of the apotheosis or transcendence of the sublime, the zone of violence “translates.”
25. As Louis Braille expands the sublime zone of violence the world fills with blood. The space itself bleeds, boundaries are “convulsed and supersaturated”; Louis Himself is drowned by the blood that he lets out. The organic matter of the “Natural,” which seemed safely internal, floods the scene, translating the play into a homogenous field of organic matter. The blood-flood is the necropastoral. It implicates everything. - Leif Haven
Make it matter. Make it cut & infect
like contagious knives. Like a sidewalk
made smart with brain matter.
— from The Contagious Knives
A few years ago, I watched one of the special versions of Guy Maddin’s Brand upon the Brain! at The Music Box Theater in Chicago — one of the versions where a live actor read sections of the film (in this case, Crispin Glover) and where a crew was in place (called the Foley Artists) to create the sound effects. And the effect I remember most was the scene where a character turns to cannibalism, biting into the skull of another character: one of the sound artists at that point crunched and chewed a piece of celery into the microphone. (As I write this, I realize I might be mis-remembering. Maybe he twisted the celery in his hands instead? If anyone out there saw any of the shows, feel free to correct me!) The moment was funny, sickening, and unsettling in a way that’s hard to describe. It might have to do with the juxtaposition, and how it becomes almost an act of translation. The person in front of us eating celery = the image on the screen of a character eating brain with an all-too-real sound. The crunch, the saliva, the swallow. (Or so I remember it.) But of course it cuts the other way too, and by doing so taints the act of eating a stick of celery. Never had eating celery seemed so full of ill-intent. It reminded me of how Artifice can make the unsettling more so. The almost-pink blood in so many horror films from the 60s always seems more disturbing to me than the darker, more realistically colored blood in later movies. To me, something about the artifice made the violence more visceral. “Fake” fake blood can be more effective than “real” fake blood. Another example would be the bright “blood” Godard used in the 60s, a kind of POP “blood.”
To misquote Zizek (who was quoting Kieslowski): the fright of fake blood.
Anyway, I bring up the Maddin/celery/brain chewing incident because something about that experience reminds me of McSweeney’s Percussion Grenade, one of my favorite books of American poetry in the last few years. The “fake” blood in this book is all the more real for being fake. Good taste (the realm of “real” fake blood) is often a way of letting us stay in our comfort zones by whispering in our ear that Realism, after all, can never hurt us. It mimics reality. In can never be it. Percussion Grenade offers the reader/performer no such assurances.
The collection is about violence, war, contamination, catastrophe, kill zones, contagions. We walk through this decimated landscape that seems to have has no beginning and no end — there are no privileged, aerial views of the disaster here. In “Dear Fi Jae 3,” the speaker works in a factory owned by a multi-national: “I had a glue pot & several brushes & I had a smock // which fastened at the neck with a thong and an eye // and my hair in spit curls like eyes on my forehead // and another eye for each cheek // and my feet thrust in half-slippers called moliere shoes // striped like circus tents.” The language-spill here — the eyes that foam over the scene — and the odd precision of the shoes (“striped like a circus tent,” with its childlike vibe contrasting strongly with this setting) create an atmosphere of menace. The speaker goes out to take a break and meets “the killer of little shepherds.” The factory floor soon turns into a killing floor. The speaker tells us, “I am no shepherd sir I tweeted // when I went back inside // he spilled my guts on the floor // too-clogged fish gear // drain damage system crushed emotional mutating agent // multinational.” The poem then turns spectral. The speaker says, “I dipped a latex cover’d hand to the glue pot // I glued the ghostface to the ghostproduct.” This Blakean poem ends on a Blakean note: “When this you see remember me.” The terrain here reminds me of the flattened worlds of Bolaño and Cormac McCarthy (especially Blood Meridian) and Godard’s Weekened. Flattened because there is no teleological escape hatch in those zones, only landscape and days and weather and years.
There are countless great lines and images in this book. The language at times seems wonderfully drunk on itself. (One example from “A Peacock in Spring”: “He shrugs obscenely green, / obscenely jewel-toned, obscenely neck-like, / an obscene grandeur and an obscene decadency, / A screen, a mask, a dance, / A thousand green-groping eyes.”) Artifice runs like acid through the pages, dissolving the usual connections and groundwork. In the play “The Contagious Knives, “Louis Braille stands alone in pink panties and pop-star t-shirt from target…He ties a brown leather strap around his eyes and inserts an awl into the right. In liquid eyeliner, he paints big black tear drops…” In the same play, Bradley Manning appears, played possibly by Andy Warhol. And there’s a wedding chorus made up of the Jack Smith Superstars circa Normal Love.
While reading the book, I kept thinking of the introductory titles in Godard’s Weekend: a film found in a trash heap, a film adrift in the cosmos. Art that exists in a fallen state — the art of “no future” — is also an art that exist in a guerilla state, with a guerilla sensibility: an art that doesn’t believe in the usual notions of representation, the picture window view, but in coordinates and montage. And McSweeney’s Percussion Grenade is a great example of it. - James Pate
In the opening “Indications,” Joyelle McSweeney instructs that “the pieces in this volume were written for performance and should be read aloud—a-LOUD!” She goes on to offer suggestions for how those without a voice might sign or express the poems, tumbling eventually into a prolonged description of the performance process that concludes “How brilliant, how strange you have become. What a current.”
Far beyond reading suggestion, this opening provides an important entrance into the theoretics and aesthetics that drive Percussion Grenade, McSweeney’s third book of poetry in a career that spans genres and modes. The pages that follow are driven hard by the rhythmic and physical qualities of the words, those aspects of the language that become most present when they are enacted through the body. While there are suggestions of narrative or progression of thought, what is more important here is the way that the physicality of the words pushes in every direction, such as in the title poem:
I cause a eutrophied current to glut and push closeDrinking toward sobriety, the poems succeed by holding themselves to a firm sense of the words themselves. Like in the work of Harryette Mullen or DA Powell, puns and remixes from other sources (pop culture and literature prime among them) provide a sort of connective tissue while also pointing us to the nearly endless resonances of language. The effect is that we are forced into making our own scaffolding and logic out of the explosion of phrases, the six sequences of the book all with their own recurrences and their own resistances, yet held together by this consistent mode. Beauty is suspect if allowed in, as when “The golden note emerges corrupted from her throat / Opening the wrong celestial door,” and the ability to recognize a story, such as in the “Hannie Oakley” sequence titled “Hanniography,” will only mislead if you expect anything familiar to result.
what a worrywarm!
I blot it, smile out and sigh I
a-tro-fy in my percussion grenade
and I defy
any pastesayer or ruddy snop to decry
the sanction of my equipage
In this world, the words are not intended as written objects, but as a medium of performance (“a-LOUD”). The act of reading provides an immediate pleasure in the tactile nature of the language, “The trumped-up sludge / Like chum / Pump action.” But it also serves an additional function. The poems are corporeal in the messiest sense, and McSweeney’s images and characters are like grotesque, clowned-up Kenneth Anger films. To read them, in their vomit and pederasty, is to be thrown into the upsetting potential of the language. Familiar words, which we have been lulled into seeing as comfortable, safe tools, become instead objects of ridicule, laughter, raucous disrespect, and disgust, all gloriously so.
This is perhaps most clear in “The Contagious Knives: A Necro Pastoral Farce.” In it, a series of characters with extremely loaded symbolism and cultural histories perform a cruel drama. Louis Braille, “alone in pink panties and pop-star t-shirt from Target,” blinds himself with an awl on the opening page, going on to move through a series of monologues and manipulations with Narcissus, a Swan, and a Fiend. The Swan is tormented by her beauty, declaring that her “dress mocks me / like the dribbling grin of a fool.” The Fiend dips Louis Braille’s face in wax, initiating a debate with the Swan over the boy’s fate (“That beak’s seen so much cock it won’t even close anymore,” the Fiend/Devil declares of the Swan). And an epithalamion brings in characters like Lynndie England and a Wedding Chorus played by the Jack Smith Superstars. The language, of course, stays as frantic as ever:
only infamee’s fetal pulseAs with the rest of Percussion Grenade, the world of “The Contagious Knives” inhabits language and culture by tearing them open, yanking out all the meanings we know and many we hadn’t realized were there. The “percussive” movement makes it near impossible to linger, encouraging you instead to ricochet into the next grotesquerie.
picking up in the sonogram, baptism by geiger
only petting zoo organisms
only tetanus and lockjaw
only hymen, hymenaeus, hemorrhage, cold storage,
wound center, the taxi driver’s corpse
under ice, wrapped in plastic, the big gulp, the golden shower
of piss
or coins
or bridal rice…
There is an inquiry at the heart of all this. As performance lets us move through language, image, and self, what new social opportunities arise, and what new problems? The first step, maybe, is abandoning all the crap we’ve been dealt in order to celebrate all the other crap, to insist on all the pleasures that other people pretend are not there. When “The cop shoots the piñata with his service revolver,” we watch and maybe join as “The crowd, the crowd / Makes a spasmody / Scrums for candy.” This is not an amoral world, and the question “Is it ok to live inside the percussion grenade” is answered with an ongoing “It’s awesome It’s great It’s OK It’s OK I can OK” that does not at all convince when spoken. The violence we throw on the human body and the shame we expect of one another are all endlessly reflecting in language. McSweeney asks us to inhabit the conflicting edges of that reality, mouthing the power and joy that come with degeneracy. She does not let us read for beauty or lyricism, but makes us active participants, tongue-tied by our own culture. It’s a whirlwind of a book, and it leaves you grateful that the images keep crashing into your walls, never quite settling or letting you acquiesce. - T Fleischmann
from The Contagious Knives
Joyelle McSweeney, Flet. Fence Books, 2007.
Flet is an Administration flunky who begins to suspect that the oft-invoked Emergency, after which all public spaces are off-limits, is a tool of sociopolitical manipulation, if not oppression: the decentralized citizenry binge on endless, aimless file tape transmissions drained into their homes. A face-off between this tentative muckraker and her icy superior is set to go down at a mandatory, nationwide Reenactment, in advance of which Flet finds herself dreaming and driving endlessly off the map. Will she find the missing cities, or will she lose herself in the flood-tide of images that wash over the Nation? An elegant entry in the field of speculative fiction, Flet finds McSweeney slowing her distinctively hyperactive imagination and syntax down to the speed of a narrative.
Flet goes down in a spaced-out, delimited future in which all cities have been evacuated after an oft-invoked “Emergency.” As the decentralized citizenry binge on the endless, aimless filetape transmissions draining into their homes, our eponymous heroine, a quiescent-but-full-of-agency Administration flunky, is poignantly alone in her suspicion that the Emergency is a tool of sociopolitical manipulation, if not oppression. A face-off between this tentative muckraker and her icy superior is inevitable at the mandatory, nationwide Reenactment, in advance of which Flet finds herself dreaming and driving endlessly off the map. Will she find the missing cities, or will she lose herself in the flood-tide of images that wash over the Nation?
An elegant entry in the field of speculative fiction, Flet finds poet Joyelle McSweeney slowing her distinctively hyperactive imagination up to the speed of narrative.
“McSweeney acutely imagines a locked-down world only millimeters distant from our own. Flet is an ice-blue, dystopic rubric that makes cool remarks on the government’s manipulations of mass media, then goes for a lyrical ride. Jeweled surprises await in this prose.” —Stacey Levine
Poet McSweeney (The Commandrine and Other Poems) enters the realm of speculative fiction with this debut novel, with spotty success. Years after E-Day—a bioterrorist version of 9/11, aimed at what survivors now remember as Old Capitol—a new version of the U.S. has reconstituted itself along familiar near-future lines: fake food, curtailed travel and Internet, government-controlled TV. The heroine, Flet, is a top aide to Sub-Secretary Lonnie Otis, a mid-level bureaucrat and icy Hillary Clinton type. Flet cherishes a few trinkets left behind by the decontaminators, junky fossils of a life before everything became dirty, and finds diversion with Mick, a reality TV filetape editor contracted to the government's Education Media. In the days leading up to a memorial Re-Enactment, Flet comes to believe that the government has distorted the real events of the emergency, and that Otis is an agent of the coverup. The Devil Wears Prada elements of the setup make for some workplace sparks, and the 9/11 parallels are nicely turned. McSweeney's descriptive writing can be precise and energetic, and the dialogue of her young people amusing and real. But the narrative, chopped into short, titled chapters, is too often freighted with impressionistic passages that defy understanding. - Publishers Weekly
"McSweeney is in fact poet, and it impacts her writing style in Flet, which is written in short, poetic prose blackout chapters. It's surreal and familiar. Just reading it may make you feel like you are in one of those dreams where the real world is re-arranged so as to be uncomfortably unfamiliar."--Rick Kleffel
Joyelle McSweeney’s Flet, a baroque, cerebral novel, whose dystopic vision collides with those imagined by Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, William Gibson, Ben Marcus, and George Orwell, imagines a tech-drecked future still reeling from a cataclysmic air attack, which might never have actually happened. Its percolating sentential surface, kin to texts by Will Alexander and Andrew Joron (not to mention Hart Crane and Marianne Moore), might be considered a “cyber-punctum” text, playing off Barthes’ formulation of the punctum as an “accident which pricks, bruises,” while registering this text’s “accident” as being highly-machined, calibrated for critique, for textual/textural pleasure.
Ever-attentive to the sonorities, the materialities of language, to the possibilities of aural and phonemic play, McSweeney seemingly remakes language, offering a great deal of “roughened” language, as Shklovsky would put it, viz., cognitive “noise” which succeeds in slowing down perception, thereby increasing pleasure in the text. The various lexical interpolations and anarchic metaphorizing, the rarefied lexicon of unusual and specialized words, of archaisms and neologisms, found in Flet, make for a dense surface, conjuring up worlds within worlds, a wordy-world that serves as one possible answer to the novel’s querying how “one thing” could “at once be three: / container, contained and accessorie.” As container, Flet is plastic, that is, a form that forms and deforms. What it contains: consciousnesses; identities and other obscurities; and dreams, of invisible and visible cities. Its language, whose beauty, obscurity, and intensity abets and disrupts its narrative, suggests that it might also be considered an accessory, though not merely an embellishment but a knowing accomplice to a “crime,” that is, necessary transgressions against received language, the so-called real, and other mundanities. - John Madera
In a future land called Nation, late-stage capitalism and an unchecked faith in technology have wreaked planetary havoc: “Distressed survivors huddle illustratively or claw up cliffs or weep on overpasses dressed in neon, rainsoaked T-shirts screenprinted with the slogans of corporate sponsors: Product is Life. Life is good.” Earth has been pushed beyond what its “immune system” can bear. The environment befouled, people eat synthetic honey and drink chemically constituted milk. The Continuous Heritage Board produces propaganda for nonstop viewing on ubiquitous “filescreens,” and personal liberties are severely limited. There are vast areas of Nation that are off-limits to the populace, and citizens can travel only via preapproved routes. Real freedom of movement is unknown. An unnamed geographer, who works for the Bureau of Maps, notes that “sometimes in the interest of national security we would remove a land or water route from all future editions of a map.” Think Brave New World, 1984, or J. G. Ballard’s dark, prophetic sci-fi. Touted on its back cover as “speculative fiction,” Joyelle McSweeney’s Flet could also be described as a poetic fever dream of the future.
The novel proceeds through the accretion of strange details, which the reader must assemble into the destabilized reality of the state of Nation. Bits of narrative (dis)information can be glimpsed only as fragments of a shipwreck, gradually surfacing to reveal the book’s unsettling central dilemma: Did Nation’s fate-shaping catastrophe, a vaguely documented air attack dubbed Emergency Day, ever actually take place? Or, as the novel’s eponymous young female protagonist begins to suspect, is it a manipulative fiction, staged and maintained by the powers that be for their own murky purposes? To read this novel is not to solve that mystery or the others the book offers, but to become mired in them, as in quicksand.Flet is composed of short, dense chapters, with titles that range from simple informative phrases (“The Leader Speaks”) to self-reflexive commentary on the writing process (“Plot as a Topology of Hydrostatic Pressures”). McSweeney is also a poet—she has published two collections—and here, straight narrative loosely alternates with stream of consciousness. The latter spills forth in compressed, postapocalyptic mind gushes, full of wordplay, branching associations, mixed diction, and copious references: “For when the eye has lost its slaver, what then? Blind man, by your sense of the sea, steer the vessel. Lift the staff. Part the water. Strange fruit swings in stormy welter. Waxwings. The storm at sea. Wax lips and jelly babies. Learning, the barefoot boys in straw hats before the red schoolhouse. Leaning.”
The novel is both coded and elegiac. It is a warning cry and an evocation of nostalgia for eras within recent memory, when we and our planet were healthier. Flet’s cautionary aspects are timely and dire, yet the book also pays tribute to the urge to hold tight to the ephemeral pleasures of language while so many other joys fizzle and wink out. - Amy Gerstler
Joyelle McSweeney, Nylund, the Sarcographer, Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2007.
Nylund, the Sarcographer is a baroque noir. Its eponymous protagonist is a loner who tries to comprehend everything from the outside, like a sarcophagus, and with analogously ornate results. The method by which the book was written, and by which Nylund experiences the world, is thus called sarcography. Sarcography is like negative capability on steroids; this ultra-susceptibility entangles Nylund in both a murder plot and a plot regarding his missing sister, Daisy. As the murder plot places Nylund in increasing physical danger, his sensuous memories become more present than the present itself.
"If Vladimir Nabokov wanted to seduce Nancy Drew, he'd read her Nylund one dark afternoon over teacups of whiskey. Welcome to fiction's new femme fatale, Joyelle McSweeney." - Kate Bernheimer
If Wallace Stevens had written a novel it might have come close to Joyelle McSweeney s Nylund, the Sarcographer. But any imagined effort of Mr. Stevens would pale next to Nylund s journey through the butterflied joinery of syntax, the jerry-rigged joy of this tour de joist. And you thought you knew your own language. This book hands it back to you on a platter and includes the instructional manual for its further use." - Michael Martone
"Flights of campy-cum-lyrical post-Ashberyan prose. . . . Language dissolves into stream-of-consanguinity post-surrealism and then resolves into a plot again. . . . recommended." - Stephen Burt
"Nylund, the Sarcographer is like interesting on steroids. Caution: if you are looking for a typical, straight forward, good old fashioned yarn, you d do best to look elsewhere; but if you want to experience something fresh, daring, creepy, and significant, this is the one for you. . . . Other than the incomparable Ben Marcus, I m not sure anyone in contemporary letters can compete with the voracity of ingenuity, complexity, and beauty of McSweeney s usage. Each sentence is carefully crafted to upend your expectations in such a way as to make you giddy with anticipation. Call me strange, but I seriously felt a rush of adrenaline from the sheer excitement over what might come next." - Bookslut
"McSweeney does not marry poetic and prosaic language – rather, she brings them together in a collision of semi-fabulist writing. [She] has not only created a unique concept – that of sarcography – she has illustrated it memorably with a masterful redefinition of what constitutes prose, and created a character who is the very embodiment of writing, reminding us of how flexible the narrative form can be." - New Pages
I tried to find a definition of “sarcographer” in a half dozen dictionaries, but came up empty. According to the publisher, the word refers to the method by which the book was written, as well as the method by which the eponymous protagonist experiences the world: “Sarcography is like negative capability on steroids.” How odd, I thought to myself. Odd, but crazy interesting.
Enter Joyelle McSweeney. Part poet (see: The Commandrine and Other Poems and The Red Bird, both from Fence Books), part professor (see: University of Alabama turned University of Notre Dame), part co-founder and co-editor of Action Books, a poetry and translation press, and Action, Yes!, a web-quarterly for international writing and hybrid forms. In the past half decade her name has become synonymous with interesting. And now, luckily for us, she is poised to majorly crossover into the land of prose, with the publication of this novella and the upcoming sci-fi book, Flet, slated to drop in 2008.
Nylund, the Sarcographer is like interesting on steroids. Caution: if you are looking for a typical, straight forward, good old fashioned yarn, you’d do best to look elsewhere; but if you want to experience something fresh, daring, creepy, and significant, this is the one for you. It is the opposite of boring, an ominous conflagration devouring the bland terrain of conventional realism, the kind of work that tickles your inner ear, gives you the shivers, and tricks your left brain into thinking that your right brain has staged a coup d'état. In short, it personifies the “totality of vision” John Hawkes so infamously championed sixty-two years ago when he said: “I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme, and having once abandoned these familiar ways of thinking about fiction, totality of vision or structure was really all that remained.” That is not to say this book is plotless, characterless, settingless, or themeless. Those elements (enemies) do drift in and out of focus in modulated intervals, enough that one could gather:
There is a stuttering lug named Nylund whose chin, in moments of stress, “made a motion like a typewriter when someone’s punched return. It jerked right, then jerked left to its angle of incidence.”
Before disappearing, Nylund had a sister named Daisy who “liked to be this or that, just two things.”
Both the theme and setting are hauntingly dark (in a David Lynch sort of way).
There is a murder, a robbery, and a kidnapping.
There is a Grandson.
There are bosses and police and thugs.
&
There is a woman named Armenian Rose.
But in the overall scheme of things, these enemies (elements) are considerably less significant than McSweeney’s true superpower: her ravishing sentence constructions:
If you breathe too close to the land you get the bird flu, we know that now. Then, no. If you breathe too high up in the air the air thins out and you see through a fog of particulates blindly and if you look at things through a mirror on your birthday then the scales fall from your eyes.Or what about:
The gravel driveway curved away like a uterus and the Mister and the Missus were born through the threshold and into the house.Or how about this description:
Nylund arrived at work one morning to find the Superior’s face drawn to a point. It was like a knife turned on you if it was turned right on you you couldn’t see it.Other than the incomparable Ben Marcus, I’m not sure anyone in contemporary letters can compete with the voracity of ingenuity, complexity, and beauty of McSweeney’s usage. Each sentence is carefully crafted to upend your expectations in such a way as to make you giddy with anticipation. Call me strange, but I seriously felt a rush of adrenaline from the sheer excitement over what might come next. Seriously, I did. I’m not kidding.
I would share more quotes, but that would be the equivalent of a spoiler. You need to get this book and feast on the delicacies for yourself. - Chris Higgs
Nylund is a practitioner, or perhaps an inventor, of sarcography, the act of understanding the world through its surfaces. “Sarcography” breaks down literally to mean “flesh writing,” and in Nylund the Sarcographer, a petite but loaded volume by Joyelle McSweeney from Tarpaulin Sky Press, the term is somewhat expanded to include rain, reading, one’s children or the idea of them, the senses, possibly more. McSweeney does not so much marry poetic with prosaic language in semi-fabulist form as bring it together in a collision.
The ordinary often devolves into the obscure, reaching from solid description outward into sentences that take on a mind of their own. Nylund’s mind, too, is susceptible to such effects—the mind, after all, exists as something to be written upon. He feels “his mind itself stretch and bend in sarcography.” The writing dips into obscurity and deliberate misspellings, only to arc up unexpectedly and peak into areas of concrete, more readily accessible narrative. The first chapter, “I’m a Lug,” begins, or perhaps simply continues, “What else could I be as I walked down the street but a sarcographer of raining. I had to build a cask around it, built like itself.”
As Nylund narrates what is supposed to be the story of his involvement in a murder plot and a situation involving his missing twin sister, his sarcographic nature leads him to envelop scene, setting and narrative into his own mind’s scripting. It may come as no shocking conclusion that his mind seems split. Dualities abound: in the language, where it fuses boundaries of poetry and prose; in his idea of selfhood, represented by his twin sister Daisy; and the twin-ness inherent in his thinking (“If only we could twin our behavior to oppositely arrive.”) Twinhood, it seems, sparks Nylund’s designation as a sarcographer; where there is twinning, there is by definition a split, duplication or division, which for Nylund, manifests in instances of paraphasia, or substitution of one word for another (the “name” of the neck instead of the “nape,” in one of several instances).
Similarly, Nylund’s perceptions are inverted. People, things, are expelled or extruded, rather than leaving or exiting (buildings, cars) of their own free will. An egg does not break, but rather, “The yolk exerts itself outwards.” Empty spaces and negatives are everywhere, a concept that appears to be inherent within the nature of sarcography, one of its prerequisites. Spaces are necessary for holding things within it, for acting as a shield or form for objects outside it. One example is interesting both for the poetic leaps it makes as well as for its implications of how sarcography applies to the self, and to duplicates and copies of the flesh:
The network, the extended family. He was winging away from them on the burst blades of a helicopter. He was cruising into them with his grown sons in tow, and with his ungrown sons, and with his children coiled in his belly. […] He lowed. He had his children in his mouth. His voice came out around them and there was a space for them in it shaped like themselves.
Joyelle McSweeney has not only created a unique concept—that of sarcography—she has illustrated it memorably with her redefinition of what can constitute prose. Nylund, as a character, becomes a sort of embodiment of writing, which is an extension of the self, in a sense, like a child can be—something deriving from a self that is given form and space, that takes up a space for all other matter to work around and interact with, something to be contained. - Cynthia Reeser
Joyelle McSweeney, The Commandrine and Other Poems. Fence Books, 2004.
Joyelle McSweeney’s The Commandrine and Other Poems is a necessary series of interrogations. This verse play and poems question what it means to endure knowledge in a global economy. With Yeatsian breadth, McSweeney insists not on anarchy but on an Odyssean journey, beyond the sirens, home. This inventive lassoing-in of reality as we are presently experiencing it leaves no one “clean” or in the clear.—Claudia Rankine
The brilliance of Joyelle McSweeney’s poems is a given; what remains delightfully open to negotiation are its methodologies and its mien. Is she an earnest relator, using wit and gesture to tell the story faster? Or does she take the piss of her subjects, using perfected skills of mimicry and divination to exploit, spot on, their errant humanities? In her second book McSweeney finds her subjects in the long form; “The Commandrine” is a verse-play that in nine scenes tells the story of sailors Zest, Coast, Ivory, and Irish, and their watery run-in with the Devil. “The Cockatoos Morose” stirs Eliotic grandeur with Stevensian absurdity for a cocktail of delirious observation and rigorous leaps of the sort for which McSweeney is certain to become known. “Crusade-dream flips like a standard. The standard / narrows to a point. And points. / Then it dips like a fern.”
Joyelle McSweeney, The Red Bird. Fence Books, 2002.
Winner of the 2002 Fence Modern Poets Series
“The Red Bird has more in common with a fast red car, except that it does, indeed, fly. Within its agile slips and twists, McSweeney has managed a rare insight, casting our own historical moment as the postmodern medieval, full of knights running errands, where Machu Piccu, Radio Sucre, and lawn chairs all take on Biblical proportions. Except that it’s really Darwin we’re talking about, as he careens around the globe. She deflates this and other old battles by giving us new terms: ‘O beautiful he produceth / language from everyplace / on his body. . .’ This is a stunning first book. It glows in the dark.” —Cole Swensen
“[McSweeney's] poems are neither reductive nor fantastic. But they are profoundly mysterious in the way any truthful account of the world must be. Joyelle McSweeney is a poet with a vocation- a calling to the world. What is given her (the vocation) is to make others see what is given her to see.”
—Allen Grossman
In describing, in turn, a “Toy House,” “Toy Bed” “Toy Enterprise,” “Toy Election,” “Toy Maternity,” and nine separate accounts of “The Voyage of the Beagle,” one might think Joyelle McSweeney lacks high seriousness in The Red Bird, selected by Alan Grossman for Fence Books. While certainly playful and relentlessly up to date (check the “Celebrity Cribs” poem), McSweeney’s is a satirist’s sensibility, wickedly sending up, in “Avian light,” the identities and settings her speaker encounters, whether in books, “a maritime chart of the Yensai Delta” or “Afterlives”: “Forsythia opens its bright palm and the woman pushes her stroller out of it.” —Publishers Weekly
Interview by Jeff Jackson
