HR Hegnauer - Who is Sir? A pivot of language for an old man with a life of curious stories; a ghost, a mirage, a woman in Turkey. And a slice of the contemporary with its sickness, aging, death, its wars and commodities

HR Hegnauer, Sir, Portable Press at Yo-yo Labs,  2013
www.hrhegnauer.com/about/


Excerpts on Feminist Wire


Who is Sir? A pivot of language for an old man with a life of curious stories; a ghost, a mirage, a woman in Turkey. And a slice of the contemporary with its sickness, aging, death, its wars and commodities. HR Hegnauer has created an epistolary identity of engaged and hybridized increments from her own youthful living and details of others and their entwined poetries and presences. It is a highly performative text of depth, mind grammar, and beautiful gesture, inhabited by vivid characters and voices that change and charge the room. Bravo!— Anne Waldman


There is a certain liminality that haunts the architecture of HR Hegnauer’s first full-length book, Sir. The word liminal comes from the latin limen meaning threshold—a  point of entry, a door. And when I allow the book to unfurl itself in my mind’s eye, I see separate rooms—a room of life and a room of death, a room of male and a room of female.  There are so many rooms.  And then I see the walls between the rooms melting.  As the walls melt the threshold expands.  Soon enough, the entire architecture is apart of the threshold; I don’t know when I’ve left one room and entered another.

In this vein the narrator, Hannah, writes: “I cannot always remember what it is like to stand next to another human anymore. By this I mean, what is it like to stand next to every room in their body” (36). So, there are these rooms. There are the haunted rooms of the body. There are the haunted rooms after the death of Sir, where time becomes a dissolving threshold. There are also the hauntings of bodies and the hauntings of objects. These are the thresholds, melting.

There are strange role reversals that happen like a haunting…like a melting.  Like when Sir observes a man “flip his stolen car and drag his face along the freeway guardrail” and calls out to the man, “Sir, sir can you hear me?!…Dude, help me out of here! He kept yelling at us.” (16).  The liminality between the bodies of the two men, between their cries, between Sir’s past, present and future, all blur in disaster.  And of course there is the dissolving threshold between Hannah’s memory and experience, as this incapacitated body in need of help echoes in different iterations throughout the book.

As Sir attempts to serve as an archive for both the living dead and the dead who live on, Hannah also seems suspect of this act—the corpus is also a corpse.  Perhaps this is most clear when Hannah describes the experience of working as a book designer.  When zooming in and looking at the letters closely she says, “They looked something like miniature living corpses on their deathbeds” (41).

Still, fascinatingly, Hannah decides that she doesn’t want to be reincarnated as a human; she wants to be reincarnated as the word and.

And never knows any limits to its body; and knows no limits because it’s incapable of ever even thinking about no.  That’s just not possible.  I have to write the human narrative, but can only theorize about and because that is not my reality.  What a sham.  And has it made, Sir; it gets to be everything; it’s better than god or the world or love or anything (these things are just too human).  I can only describe it by saying, and. And in my next life, I want to be an and, not a human.  I just want to live amongst the other ands.

And actually, and is perfect. And is a threshold. And has no walls and and knows no walls. It is only inclusive.  And there is so much more to this book than thresholds and hauntings and and.  HR’s writing is so subtly strange that one could almost miss the wonderful weirdness of her ideas by getting swept up in the compelling story of Sir, Mrs. Alice and Hannah. But then her writing will stop you.  And suddenly you will pick the book back up and you will read it again.  And you’ll think, I can’t wait to read more of her. - Ivy Johnson


Dear Sir,
          I am trying on narration, and this is what it feels like: a pocket of
          red string.          —HR Hegnauer, Sir, page 78.

HR Hegnauer’s Sir (Portable Press at Yo-yo labs, 2013) reminds the reader of the importance of paying attention, of noting everything as it happens, of—as the book opens—not missing anything. Page one closes with: “Don’t worry, I told her, I wouldn’t.”(3) This first prose passage’s ending deftly announces the craft of the author, the shift from the expected “I won’t” to “I wouldn’t” complicating the immediacy and distance of the text and of the position of the narrator in the sections to come. Here, the narrator extends that promise to not miss anything from the moment it was made through a desire and failure to make that promise true to all futures—not just that she will not but would not miss anything at a or at any moment already slipping away.
This book is about slippage. First off the slippage between one genre of writing and another—as Sir is a kind of narrative in poetic journal form which turns into a series of epistles in the latter half. It is being composed by a fictionalized version of the author herself as narrator. Like a novel, autobiography or journal, it has characters that are part of this author-narrator’s life—primarily Mrs Alice, an old woman in her eighties who has dementia, and Sir, the husband of Alice. The author notes at the end of the book that these two characters are based on her own grandparents. It is also about the body slipping away, or even coming into being—physical vs. potential spiritual or ghost or even intellectual presence. It is also about the slippage of what one recalls. The memory being then not being there—as the narrator states, “Sir, I started this because of being afraid of not remembering.” (53) It is also about the way language does and cannot contain. About recollection and how dementia and Alzheimer’s and time whittle away at our perception of the past and present until it even whittles away at the connections between letters, thus our ability to communicate whatever might be recalled or might still be contained in us. It is a blank page we are returned to—as the opening book epigraph by William Carlos Williams states “and no whiteness (lost) is so white as the memory of whiteness     .” which is echoed thirty pages later when we are told that Mrs Alice, suffering from late stage dementia, “essentially has no more sentences” (30). But these phrases also reveal that the sentence and thus language—both making words emerge off of the white page and forming them into speech as spoken sentences—is part of being alive.   
Formally, Sir is 80 pages of short 1-4 paragraph long prose sections (with a few exceptions of 6 paragraph sections in part two) of which the first 40 pages are recollections and moments given like jotted down journal entries or anecdotes and the second 40 pages are letters addressed to Sir after Sir’s death. In the first half, the author-narrator goes from a kind of crisp, accentuated space of naiveté to a more adult sense of the body able to grasp—but not wanting to—the realities of the world, or the losses, around her. It is peppered with clever humor, at once evoking a laugh and sucker-punching us with a darker underside—such as in a section where she and Sir witness a car crash. As the person inside is dying, a policeman comes up to her and states the reason why the victim is still able to hang on:

One uniformed-man came up to me, and said, The only reason why this man is still alive is because he’s so methed-out. Let this be a lesson to you. I didn’t know what this meant: methed-out. I looked at the man’s badge and nodded. Yes, I understand. I thought to myself, Remember this. This must be a safe place—this methed-out place. (16)

But as a memory in a good poem usually serves more than one purpose, exists as more than simple journalled expression, and is more than a shared anecdote between friends, this passage serves more than to share that moment—it unveils the flaws in how logic itself functions. It is a kind of test of cause and effect, witness of event and lesson stated. From another perspective, from the reader’s and from—the reader presumes—the current perspective of the author, that moment shows how the mind connects two points in a flawed manner, fluidly, naturally, in a way that the process of logic encourages. It invites readers to reconsider and resee how lessons are learned, how perspectives and opinions they have held or now hold, based on experience and moments lived, have emerged.
In the second set of prose poems, the letter-poems, the narrator is calling out for a response, writing to the deceased. One might think of this as calling into the abyss, asking the now physically departed Sir for conversation, as that part of the book opens: “Dear Sir, //Can I still write you little letters even though you’re dead now?//Please say yes.”(43) Deceptively simple, it is gestures like italicizing the “yes” here that demonstrate the complexity underlying this seemingly naked surface. The italics place the yes in the mouth of the ghost, already separating it from the voice of the narrator, as if the narrator hasn’t just given Sir voice, permission to respond, to haunt her, but manifested him there. These forty pages are far more nakedly reaching out to the other, any other, for an answer.
Gestures such as the italicization here or the verb choice of “wouldn’t” instead of “would” mentioned at the start of this review are an attempt to use the small grammatical and typographic choices available in text to add layers. As concerns the typography, the author has announced more than once that her job is as a book designer, and, on the page preceding this, she had a moment where the letters became “tiny humans lying on their backs with their arms crossed over their chests” (41) who seemed to be “suffocating”. She wondered whether giving a little space around each letter might keep them from being smothered by others, might allow each letter to live and breathe and thrive just as the narrator herself seeks for herself a way to live and breathe and thrive despite a growing anxiety that eventually she will miss something, forget, lose those around her and have to go on even though—as the final poem in the book reveals—she finds herself sleeping alone again. As she reveals on page 83, “I had forgotten how cold it can get in bed at night when you’re only one human”.
Thus Sir is at once deeply personal—about the body and family and loss—and also deeply literary—about text, making of language, and creation in the face of loss. Perhaps it is also about creation as a sustaining force, the “and” that is connection, the “body both foreign and local at the same time” (36) as Hegnaur writes: “It’s the same way I feel about how the word and is different from the word human. And I think if everyone could just be a little more and, we’d all be a lot better off.” (36)  Though this book which in so many ways seems so bright, so full of potential, is also always announcing the inevitable loss of the self and the other, it may also be representing the response to the question that reverberates throughout the book: “What is the difference between grief and lamentation?”(38) Thus showing us that grief is personal, perhaps short lived, but that lamentation, the lament, the calling out for or back for, is a lament for what is impossible to change—that the body has limits, or that: “I understand now that this is what happens when a human tries to become an and: the language won’t let us.” (37) Language, in the end, is what imprisons and perhaps can release. It is perhaps language that is the limit of the body. Certainly, Sir poses these questions and opens that reflection in the reader. As such, Sir is a book well worth reading and reflecting upon. It is not caught up in superficial aesthetic debates that are part of much of contemporary poetics, but is formally manifesting on and through its pages something that fundamentally ties the body of the writer and the language of the writing together in and through time. As such, and as a first collection by a young author, I can only imagine what great things this book promises that have yet to emerge from HR Hegnauer. I, for one, feel lucky to have been allowed to share in the experiences and complex layerings of loss, joy and reflection that make up this gorgeous collection, Sir. - Jennifer K Dick


Dear Mrs. Alice,
May I call you that?  Are you comfortable operating from a space of Mrs., a dear Mrs.?  In increments, I have come to the point where I must flee to your psyche.  I know this is problematic because you have not given me a map to get there, but I cannot read maps now anyhow.  I won’t miss anything.  I promise.  Yet, I am prepared for when we fail, how we fail and when we cannot be just a little more and.
While I know that with each body in this space, we lose a little air, but do not fear, I have protection. Sir left it for me in the form of a jacket or cloak, I cannot clearly remember, but it blankets us, brightens our colors, and it is precious.  With this in mind, let us go there, to this pivot of mirage.  First, know the difference between grief and lamentation or don’t.  Next, give up on the notion that you can emit time.  Learn, to spell Hannah backwards, and be prepared for the sentiment that words go inside books to die.
Now that we have established some ground rules, I feel comfortable moving forward.  Do you?  “I had a flash-back to my mother leaving for work in the morning when/ I was still a little girl, and she would always say to me, kiss me like a fool.”  I know it is too depressing to put this grief on you over and over again.  I know that it gets difficult when a tear is confused and won’t exit the corner of your eye, but I want us to focus on the migration.  That migration of death; not through a grandfather clock, but rather a migration through that little whistle, that little stroke of air that sounds between the teeth and tongue.
If we are to get there, we need to be cancerous. “The cancer.  It / doesn’t care where or how it started, and it doesn’t care where or how / it’s going wherever it’s going, but it knows it will get there.”  Sir, would have wanted it this way.  This cancer does not distinguish between local and foreign bodies, so please be prepared.  Be prepared for this distinction.  Be prepared to be a little more and, and we will be better off.  -   Daniel Cantrick 



Jacket2 review, by Ariel Goldberg & Rachel LevitskyThe Poetry Foundation, Favorite Book of 2013 selected by Mairead CasePoetry Society of America, New American Poets Feature selected by Eric Baus

AUTHOR STATEMENT

I’ve been writing through what a memory can be and how to preserve it; how to keep it, lose it, and retrieve it again. SIR is an attempt at thinking about what it means to be a human alongside another human — how to grieve the loss of memory at the same time as the loss of life, while trying to keep in mind that we are living right now. I am indebted to my grandparents who have inspired the characters of Sir & Mrs. Alice.
Sir happens where the thresholds between the living, the dead, and the demented become progressively less clear. To remember that we are not above being human; that we are only humans trying to live amongst humans. I see this project as a form of archive. Of course, all writing is an archive, but to archive a story of dementia is inherently contradictory, and an archive of the ethereal is in some ways inconceivable. Then Sir asks the reader, can we archive the inconceivable contradictions? Will you try with me to not miss anything?
There are also underlying questions around the body’s relationship to gender, but to ask these questions are not the main purpose of the project. I have found, however, that it is unavoidable. I think of gender as a dead place, a failed place. And in part, I am writing an elegy towards gender.
During the writing of Sir, I would often ask myself Robert Gluck’s question What kind of representation least deforms its subject? I naturally come to a place of language, art, and media, but first, I come to this question in regards to my own human body. How might I represent myself so that I least deform my thoughts? Much of this project is concerned with dementia, and I believe that the form should attempt this idea, too. Some vignettes are long and clear while others are brief; when one story ends abruptly, it may be followed by something a decade later. I have been careful to not exploit these stories, yet at the same time, to not make them any more beautiful or desirable than as they exist. I want them to feel human, and of course, that is not always a desirable thing to be. But as Sir says to the narrator, Walk steady now, I’ve tried to place myself here as the author.

Excerpt
I cannot always remember what it is like to stand next to another human anymore. By this I mean, what it is like to stand next to every room in their body.
I like to drink my earl grey tea just after I’ve brushed my teeth because it tastes extra fresh like this — like it’s from the produce department or something. No one knows this anymore. Every year, I Photoshop my college ID to keep it current, and then I go to the opera where it makes my body feel both foreign and local at the same, and I like this contradiction. It’s the same way I feel when I write about how the word and is different from the word human. And I think that if everyone could just be a little more and, we’d all be a lot better off.
I want to know these things about another human.

The house that I’m now living in has a television, which is the first time I’ve lived with a television since I was in high school and lived at home. I’ve now learned from Oprah what forgiveness means. She said that to forgive someone means that you’ve realized you do not wish you were any different than you are right now. This does not mean that you must love what is to be forgiven… Or it went something like this… There were no colors. This never happened.
I understand now that this is what happens when a human tries to become an and: the language won’t let us.

I’m writing these stories in reverse now because I can’t remember how to emit time anymore. I wanted to curse Sir. Don’t you know she’s got no memory!? But the one from sixty years ago is like a glass of water only even more clear: it doesn’t even have that distorted part at the lip: the part where you can’t tell how tall something is. The problem is is that her sentences have to exist right now. This is what the limit of her body is.
Sometimes I think about what it is like to live in Colorado now for the first time in three generations, and I wonder if the memory of the body might be genetic.
Mrs. Alice, what are the limits of the body?
This is… This is…
And then that was it. It was like she had forgotten how to make a sentence anymore. This is what? What is this? Or was it, This is, period.  I’m so afraid of this. I want to make these sentences. And I want to make them sixty years from now, too.

I work most days as a book designer, and two nights ago, I was working on a text about phenomena when I noticed that something strange was happening with the letters. I zoomed in and in and more and again. I saw each letter up closely, and I saw that they were breathing — literally and slowly. Maybe you don’t believe me, but I saw this vividly. It was like the letters were made of tiny humans lying on their backs with their arms crossed over their chests. They looked something like miniature living corpses on their deathbeds. It seemed that they might be suffocating one another — being so closely piled. So I gave space around each letter and word and line and margin, and then I zoomed back in and in and more closely still, and again, and they had stopped. Entirely. There was no more breathing — not even slowly, not even a little.
From inside of my dream, Sir asked me if I was dreaming. I said, I don’t think so. He said, you know, this is where the word goes when it’s ready to die. It goes inside the book, and it holds itself here.
The next morning, I got a phone call that the author had died.

Dear Sir,
Can I still write you little letters even though you’re dead now?
Please say yes.





“In SIR, the ideas of death and memory are inseparable. The body/not-body and who knows what when and how they know it are stitches that bind. To touch, to be bound…”  — Michael Sikkema


“HR Hegnauer’s Sir is a gorgeous, heart-breakingly honest tale (or non-tale?–“perhaps this is grief in its most idyllic form”) that feels (even after multiple reads and an experience of hearing the book recited) like a radical compassion-site–not the usual dyad compassion of one figure to another solely, somehow Sir’s compassion is compassion within a stratum of compassion. It loops in itself tenderly. It tends to and attends…”  — j/j hastain

The Force of What's Possible: Writers on Accessibility & The Avant-Garde - Is there any avant-garde? What’s at stake when 100 writers think through issues of accessibility and audience? This is a book comprised of answers—to these questions and their offspring—as various and contradictory as its contributors

The Force of What's Possible: Writers on Accessibility & The Avant-Garde, Eds. Lily Hoang and  Joshua Marie Wilkinson, Nightboat, 2015.




Is there any avant-garde? What’s at stake when 100 writers think through issues of accessibility and audience? This is a book comprised of answers—to these questions and their offspring—as various and contradictory as its contributors, ranging from Eileen Myles, Lyn Hejinian, and Joyelle McSweeney to Blake Butler, Jenny Boully, and Rikki Ducornet, among dozens of others. The results here provide discrepant engagements on the most pressing questions of the literary, the political, and the force of what's possible for writers in the 21st Century.

Joshua Marie Wilkinson & Lily Hoang
Introduction to The Force of What’s Possible Issues

Starting in Summer 2012, I sent out roughly 200 invitations to a slew of poets to contribute to an anthology on the avant-garde, empire, and accessibility. Soon after, I invited Lily Hoang to co-edit a second volume on the same topics from the prose perspective. This was the solicitation we sent out:

In a recent article in The Boston Review, Marjorie Perloff argues that “by definition, an ‘avant-garde mandate’ is one that defies the status quo and hence cannot incorporate it.”¹
For Alain Badiou, in his final thesis on contemporary art, “It is better to do nothing than to contribute to the invention of formal ways of rendering visible that which Empire already recognizes as existent.”²
With these two claims in mind, I am writing to ask you to contribute a short piece on what you believe to be elemental about your work as a writer:

1. What does Perloff’s ‘avant-garde mandate’ mean for your own work?
2. Should a writer be accessible in their writing and what does this mean to you?
3. In light of Badiou’s claim, what is imperative to you about a poem/prose in terms of the political, the social, the unconscious?
4. How do you navigate the tensions between audience, your compositional practices, and your imagination?
5. In short, what compels you to write what you write and why?

Originally conceived of as a double-volume—one on poetics, one on prose—The Force of What’s Possible: Writers on the Avant-Garde and Accessibility (to be released this month with Nightboat Books) emerged as a single concentrated edition. For the next three months on The Volta, we’ll feature responses to these questions by a range of writers.

Including:

Dan Beachy-Quick | As In the Green Trees |

Brian Blanchfield | Freely Espousing: or Subject, to the Avant-Garde |

Jaswinder Bolina | A View from the Factory Floor |

Amaranth Borsuk | Towards an Auto-Destructive Poetics |

Jenny Boully | Innerworkings, In Meadows |

Susan Briante | Towards a Poetics of the Dow |

Laynie Browne | Rendering the Invisible: A Translucent Imperative of Poetry |

Blake Butler | Mirror-Maze-Child-More |

Amina Cain | Slowness |

Mary Caponegro | Success in Circuit Lies (Redux) |

Julie Carr | In Defense of My Experience (Or, The Body and the Avant-Garde) |

Ken Chen | From The Excerpts: Poetics or or Politics |

Jeremy M. Davies | The Pleasure of Perversity |

Jeffrey DeShell | Notes Toward a Defense of Experimental Writing |

LaTasha Nevada Diggs | no te entiendo

Amber DiPietra, Jen Hofer, & Denise Leto | as rigorous as a mathematical demonstration, as surprising as

       an ambush in the night, and as elevated as a star: Some Thoughts on Access, Difficulty, Limestone, and Empire

Rikki Ducornet | Eros Breathing

Nicolle Elizabeth | Take The Story

Clayton Eshleman | Genesis and Praxis

Brian Evenson | The Crazy Party Guy, or, A Disruption of Smooth Surfaces

Johannes Göransson | IT’S STILL TOO MUCH: Conceptual Poetry, The Poetry Foundation,

       The Plague Ground and the Anti-Kitsch Rhetoric of Contemporary Poetry Discussions

Noah Eli Gordon | Five Allegories to Turn the Fingers of the Right Hand into a Fist

Rachel Eliza Griffiths | Iambic Passage: How Identity and Access Trouble American Imaginations

Duriel Harris | “As Sound Creates Forms on Water”

Carla Harryman | Avant-Garde Unconscious

Yona Harvey | The Poetics of Self-Education

Lyn Hejinian | Sun on the Avant-Garde

Brent Hendricks | My Alternative Pop Song

Christopher Higgs | A Manifesto Needs Who?

Harmony Holiday | That’s the Way it’s Gonna Be

B.J. Hollars | Not Trash

Paul Hoover | The Question of the Avant-Garde

Gregory Howard | Always the Next Machine

Laird Hunt | Some Notes on the Tyrannical Prehension

Alta Ifland | I am My Own Status Quo

Jac Jemc | Notes on Trying to Say

Stephen Graham Jones | In Defense of Non-Mandates

Pierre Joris | 15 Non-Theses Towards an Un-Manifesto of Poetry Un-Randomly Culled from Recent Notebooks

Bhanu Kapil | Elemental Notes

Kevin Killian | “I Can’t See You Any More, Baby”: Accessibility, the Avant-Garde and My Flick Knife

Amy King | Gestural Poetics

Ann Lauterbach | In Praise of The Various

Hank Lazer | Why I Write and What’s at Stake

Sueyeun Juliette Lee | Actual, Real, and True

Juliana Leslie | Passive Voice

Stacey Levine | Writing Properly?

Timothy Liu | Why We Do That Thing That We Do

Robert Lopez | The Good Thing about Today is I Slept through Most of It, or the Illusion of Urgency

Sean Lovelace | Turnips

Jill Magi | “Nothing Is Wrong: Thirteen Thoughts on Poets and Poetry in the Year 2013”

Ravi Mangla | On the Merits of Moderation

Farid Matuk | Poems of the Near Mind

Mark McMorris | Where This Thing Is Going

Joyelle McSweeney | The Golden Age of Obliteration, or Staphylococcus aureus, or,

      How the Artist Must be Accessible to Art

Miranda Mellis | Sub Traction

Megan Milks | Avant Slash Pop

Lydia Millet | Self Again

Kyle Minor | Once Upon a Time (or, The Trouble with Avant-Garde Ought-Nots)

Ander Monson | Another Project for the Heart

Laura Mullen | Accidental Cliques? (Or, uhm, which status quo I was supposed to defy, again?)

Kristine Ong Muslim | On Writing, Accessibility, and the Avant-Garde

Eileen Myles | Painted Clear, Painted Black

Alissa Nutting | Our Wrong Parts

Lance Olsen | a flash poetics of illegibility

Ted Pelton | Oscar vs. George

Craig Santos Perez | from Unincorporated Poetic Territories

Vanessa Place | Refusal: The Confession of a Real Pervert

Khadijah Queen | Navigating the Body, Revealing the Audience: On Sonic Integrity,

      Contrast, Movement, and Endurance

Wendy Rawlings | Strange & Enormous & Terrible & Absurd

Elizabeth Robinson | Constellation and Dilemma

Joanna Ruocco | Living with Language: Our Body of Need

Aurelie Sheehan | Walk Through

David Shields | Negotiating against Myself

Anis Shivani | Empires of Consciousness

Cedar Sigo | Sensation

Eleni Sikelianos | What Pursuit

Carmen Gimenez Smith | Drone Poetics

Ken Sparling | A Bunch of People Paper Thin Their Butts of Mud

Cole Swensen | On the Brink of a Response

Briane Teare | My grandmother’s name was Lorine.

Roberto Tejada | Imperatives

Melanie Rae Thon | The Ethics of Perception

Lynne Tillman | Breaking What is Broken

TC Tolbert | Red, left. Light blue, right. Or, So many ways to say yes.

Steve Tomasula | I Only / Never I

Jackie Wang | We Epistolary Aliens

Kellie Wells | Fourteen Ways of Looking at Rat

Tyrone Williams | Reginald and Me

L. Lamar Wilson | Queer Black Avant-Garde Poetics: On Being Guilty of Excessive Darkness

      in the First Degree

Ronaldo V. WIlson | Living Being: After the Avant-Garde

Timothy Yu | “You’re Not Avant-Garde, Are You?”

Lidia Yuknavitch | Why Do you Write it All Weird?

Andrew Zawacki | Encounter

Linda Boström Knausgård - a mythical tale in which a father gives birth to a twelve-year-old girl, splitting his head in the process. Father and daughter are separated. The girl is placed into foster care and comes under the spell of the Pentecostal movement. When she starts speaking in tongues, she is admitted to a psychiatric ward

Linda Boström Knausgård, The Helios Disaster, Trans. by Rachel Willson-Broyles.  World Editions, 2015.
excerpt


The Helios Disaster is a mythical tale in which a father gives birth to a twelve-year-old girl, splitting his head in the process. Father and daughter are separated. The girl is placed into foster care and comes under the spell of the Pentecostal movement. When she starts speaking in tongues, she is admitted to a psychiatric ward. The girl longs to meet her father, and once they have found each other again the question of who the girl and her father are draws nearer.


The Helios Disaster is a modern Athena myth. A sorrowful song about missing a father and not being able to carry one’s full strength. About the sense that perhaps one has been born too close to the sun.


A twelve-year-old girl is born out of her father’s head. She is wearing a shining armour where she is standing, in the middle of all the blood on the floor. In a moment which lasts a lifetime, they look at each other. Then he presses his hands against his head, as if to close what has been opened, and he screams. The girl is placed with a family. The father ends up in hospital due to severe schizophrenia. The girl learns the language they speak in the village, up there in the north. She embraces the temperance movement and God, like everyone else. The Pentecostal Movement gets a grip on her, once a rumour about her is starting to spread. All of her questions threaten to burst out in a scream as strong as a storm: Who is her father? What language is she speaking when they think she is speaking in tongues? What will happen when she starts to grow, like she knows she has to?


”The Helios Disaster is a story about longing for a father and about prepubescence. About the will to die, refusal and a sun shining far too brightly. But in this tension field there is also simple happiness. Boström Knausgård’s authorship keeps getting better and better.” - Dagens Nyheter

”It is simple and it is grand, the story about the girl who came too close to the sun. The Helios Disaster shines!” - Kulturnytt, Sveriges Radio P1, Swedish public radio

”The Helios Disaster is an insightful story about mental illness and missing a father. Linda Boström Knausgård manages to fill the rather monotonous hospital existence with a tension so powerful and poetic that one is actually quite taken by it and reads without missing a single detail.” - Kulturnyheterna, SVT, Swedish national public TV

”Linda Boström Knausgård’s childhood story is at once myth and realism, case description and the case itself. There is no skin layer between the reader and what’s written. Being forced to read that way is painful and indefeasible.” - Sydsvenskan

”The Helios Disaster is a dense, tender, painful novel written in a prose which, always poetic, touches, shakes and makes a mess.” - Helsingborgs Dagblad


”The Helios Disaster is a novel vibrating with beauty, pain and deprivation, and an intense and remarkable presence throughout the text. /…/ I need to go back to Janet Frame if I want to name a description of a psychiatric hospital which has made an equally powerful impression on me. /.../ To read The Helios Disaster is to come very close to an awareness which contains the power of creation and a wish for death. It is a story about being in a span which may burst at any moment. And it is told without fear.” - Birgit Bjerck


Whether a desirable state of affairs or not, a post-religious culture demands extraordinary things from its people, not least from its artists. The attempt to come to terms with the cessation of religion as the primary place of knowing has been demonstrated in the increasing variety and fluidity of artistic forms in the past few centuries, most of all in the previous one. The struggle did not end there. The arguments of the Modernists, the Post-Modernists, the Dadaists, the Abstract Expressionists, the New Critics, Analytic philosophers, etc.: these remain with us, and all of the grand nineteenth- and twentieth-century attempts to make Western societies at ease in (or, at the very least, aware of) a godless world remain in flux, none of them gaining ground on the others for very long. The only long-standing replacement for religion, ironically, has been the ever-changing and increasingly powerful sciences of technology. But this kind of knowledge, despite the convenience it provides, does little to help us understand ourselves and our place in the world, and the search for meaning goes on.
One option in the face of this radically demythologized, not to say dehumanized, worldview is an equally radical realism, to turn the human eye on every detail and relate them with painstaking accuracy, and the cult of memoir and realism dominates the current market. As an anthesis, the poet and writer Linda Boström Knausgård's debut novel, The Helios Disaster, presents an exercise in fantastic metaphor and allegory, with a strong mythological core and vivid imagery throughout. The strangeness, originality, and supreme gentleness of the narrator's inner world contrast sharply with the more recognizable, though not in all respects ordinary world into which she is forced. This, combined with her quiet determination to find her father and the increasingly astonishing events that occur, all add up to form a surprisingly modern portrait of longing and the possibility of homecoming.
The novel begins so strikingly, so shockingly, that one wonders, not entirely happily, whether the rest of it will be the same way:
I am born of a father. I split his head. For an instant that is as long as life itself we face one another and look each other in the eye. You are my father, I tell him with my eyes. My father. The person in front of me, standing in the blood on the floor, is my father. His woolen socks suck it up greedily and turn red. The blood sinks into the worn wooden floor and I think, his eyes are green like mine.
And, indeed, things do go on in essentially this manner. The prose, though tightly wound and highly lyrical, is as demanding as it is lucid, to say nothing of the story itself, which progresses less through the events related than layers of the young protagonist's psyche and spirit.
But there is an unmistakable rhythm to the Knausgård's narrative, even something like a musical key, and The Helios Disaster is virtually without a misplayed note. A slight deferment of judgment is necessary, but once granted, the world as described here envelops the reader in a way that only a very strong artist can produce. The effect is particularly striking in this case, since so much of what the novel both works toward and depends on is the alteration -- sometimes slight, sometimes drastic -- of the world which we inhabit, always with a hint (or more) of the primordial, the originary.
After being born, things go sour for the narrator, and, at twelve years old, she arrives in the snow-covered "village in the north," naked except for a golden helmet. She is taken in first by a well-intentioned, if slightly aloof, neighbor, and then goes to live in a home, where she is named Anna. One of the first introductions of the ordinary world into Anna's consciousness is the stark revelation of her father's condition:
My father had acute schizophrenia and was sent, screaming, to the mental hospital in Skellefteå, where his story was disregarded and his headache was alleviated with medicine so strong that in the end, he himself was skeptical that it had really happened.
She is sent to live with a family in a town divided between a Pentecostal church and a rigorous temperance league, though residents are able to be members of each. Anna, despite her adopted family being of the temperance league, is brought to the Pentecostal church and begins speaking in tongues. The passage of time is ambiguous here, but Anna becomes comfortable in her role. She even begins to feel love for her adopted family, until a series of variably coherent letters from her father remind her of her obligation to find him and to be with him.
Through unknown circumstances, Anna performs a complete reversal of her role at the church and becomes nearly catatonic. Her inner experience remains as vibrant as ever, but she shuts the world out, save for the odd violent outburst or concession to requests. She is placed in a psychiatric ward, where she cooperates with the staff, except for when she does not. As time passes, the lyrical flow which occupied her is replaced by a kind of paranoid pulse. Whereas before she thought of her father and the sea, now she thinks of death and medication. Again Knausgård's artistry is masterful, and she brings us into the vagaries of institutionalized life seamlessly, though she never loses the unique, sustaining voice of the novel, which would be whimsical were it not so dark.
From the beginning of The Helios Disaster the theme of intoxication rings through in a variety of ways. The almost Bacchic lyricism of the opening staves is stanched, or at least moderated, by an entrance into the dry village, but even then stories of the ravages of alcohol and mental illness are widespread. Then another form of intoxication arises in the form of Anna's speaking in tongues. But this, too, is tempered by the psychiatric ward, and though the initial impulse is to chalk this up to a unique gift misunderstood, the longer she is there the more it appears she needs to be.
The words fell out of me and landed in his lap and I clearly saw him pick them up one by one and polish them the way you might polish an apple.
"Then that's settled, Anna," he said with the apples in his hand.
Anna's condition improves, and she appears to accept that what were her deepest desires were in large part illusory, but that the love that motivated them might be possible in the family who adopted her. But the ambiguity of the closing passages reveals a more complex relationship between the object of desire and its subject, the stories we tell ourselves to sustain that connection, and what cost those stories might exact when they are not shared.
The Helios Disaster is a fine first novel, but it is very much a first novel. There are too many undeveloped characters, too many unanswered questions. All of these, to be sure, stem not from laziness but from the overwhelming force of the central figure of Anna, but the book nevertheless is stained by being simply too rough around the edges. But what is strong here is extraordinary. Knausgård is obviously a writer with a great deal more to say, and we will be fortunate to hear it. - Jack Hanson



Ideas are woven into the flowing text of this intense novella about a young woman sinking into a near-psychotic state. One is introduced in the title: the Helios disaster is a reference to Helios Airways flight 522, which ended with the death of all on board after a series of human errors led to it crashing into a mountain north of Marathon, Greece. In the author’s eyes, the disaster has a mythological dimension: ‘The dead, strapped in their seats while the plane flew on its course under the sky. The dead pilots and the crew of gods who had come to fetch us.’

The second idea turns up on the first page; this time, it is based on classical Greek myth, but strangely modernised so that the present-day narrator, a young woman, and her mad father are Athena and Zeus reborn: ‘My father gave birth to me. I split his head. For a moment as long as life itself, we stand facing each other and meet each other’s eyes… His woollen stockings greedily suck up the blood.’

These two ideas, or motifs, are rarely mentioned again. Instead, second and third-order references in the girl’s mental world remind you of them: spears and golden helmets, Greek islands, speaking (untaught) classical Greek, the Mediterranean, sea-green eyes and madness that might be divine. 

Arguably ‘madness’ is not just an idea, but rather the essence of the book. Maintaining a precarious balance on the brink of madness, perhaps of death, is intrinsic to the life of the narrator, whom we meet as the twelve-year-old girl born knowing but inarticulate from her father’s head.  As her father is carted off to mental hospital, the girl is taken care of by a kindly but baffled local family. ‘The way you turned up from nowhere is a marvel’, they tell her.

Birgitta, Sven and their two teenage sons Ulf and Urban become fond of the strangeling who agrees to be called Anna. She quickly learns to speak and seems happy enough, but remains quiet and withdrawn. She longs for her lost father.

Then the story starts anew. Anna is now in her late teens and has become so unreachable that she is admitted to mental hospital. To the doctors, she says just one thing: ‘Can you help me die?’

Death obsesses her, as do many other things. The next 40-odd pages are filled with Anna’s frightening fantasies – about snakes, deep wells, blood, a mirror-bright sea. Dream-like states are interrupted by more aware moments when she attempts to respond to the hospital routine and the kind but helpless staff, and to cope with her excruciating loneliness. Anna clings to her memories of another world, of being with her father, under the sky, by the sea: ‘To sense the last beats of your heart. Such liberation is denied to me. Why? Because I was Athena.’

The story is tightly, cleverly organised around a central idea: to show how Anna’s perceptive, disturbed mind struggles to impose some kind of mental order and, finally, fails. It is through Anna’s eyes that we see the other characters but her observations are limited by her lack of real interest in them. Internal monologues are difficult to sustain, but the writing is accomplished and the author’s passionate involvement with her protagonist illuminates what it is like to slide irresistibly away from reality.

In case the author’s name and the determined self-revelation of her prose has left anyone in doubt: yes, she is married to Karl-Ove Knausgård. - Anna Paterson

Linda Boström Knausgård, Grand Mal, Modernista, 2011.


A collection of short stories that twists and turns everyday life with great concentration.
In the first story of Grand Mal, the narrator introduces her family, her children, while sitting at the breakfast table, to someone who sees them for the first but also for the very last time. This someone seems to exist outside the fragility of time and space, and has power over them and their well-being. The second story of the book is about a girl who meets the enchanted Vitbjörn King Valemon, who lives as a bear during the day and as a man during the night. The girl gives birth to a daughter but loses sight of her in the woods, in the dream. But who is it that she is separated from, using her hunting blade? “The choice between her and him is always her. Then what am I doing here? With blood on my arms?” The voices of generations of parents are incarnated in the body of the narrator. This gravity towards belonging and love, family, is challenged by raging desire and immense wrath. The tension between the different forces of the book becomes electric, as if the narrator’s body might explode in a single seizure, a grand mal. The narrator tells us that we are just as exposed as her. What are we supposed to do with ourselves now that we see this so clearly?
The book ends the same way it started, with a woman addressing someone, this time a daughter who is facing a dangerous border. A border that may be the border of death.

Lev Rubinstein is the true heir of the OBERIU artists of the late 1920s. Like his most illustrious predecessor, Daniil Kharms, Rubinstein creates deadly serious, devastatingly funny comedy that incorporates a broad range of literary forms

Lev Rubinstein, Compleat Catalogue of Comedic Novelties, Trans. by Philip Metres, Tatiana Tulchinsky, Ugly Duckling Presse, 2014


"An engaging translation of a major work of contemporary Russian poetry." — Charles Bernstein

Almost ten years ago UDP published Catalogue of Comedic Novelties, a representative selection of Lev Rubinstein's "note-card poems," a seminal body of work from one of the major figures of Moscow Conceptualism and the unofficial Soviet art scene of the 1970s and 1980s. These texts form what Rubinstein called a "hybrid genre": "at times like a realistic novel, at times like a dramatic play, at times like a lyric poem, etc., that is, it slides along the edges of genres and, like a small mirror, fleetingly reflects each of them, without identifying with any of them." As American scholar Gerald Janecek has noted, the texts are made up of "language ready-mades (commonplace expressions, overheard statements, sentence fragments)" and organized "in such a way that we seem to be observing the creation of a poem from raw material."
This new edition collects for the first time all of Rubinstein "note-card poems" and includes a preface by American poet Catherine Wagner, an introduction by translator Philip Metres, and a short essay by the author.
Some of These texts have previously been translated into German, French, Swedish, and Polish; now Rubinstein's complete card-catalog of "comedic novelties" has been re-opened—in a precise and sensitive translation—to the English reader.

Lev Rubinstein's note-card poems, here transcribed for the page and imaginatively translated by Philip Metres and Tatiana Tulchinsky, are an eye-opener! Their particular brand of conceptualism has affinities with our own Language poetry as well as with the French Oulipo, but its inflections are purely those of contemporary Russia—a country struggling to make sense to itself after decades of repression...We can literally read between the lines and construct a world of great pathos, humor—and a resigned disillusionment that will strike a resonant chord among American readers.—Marjorie Perloff

Lev Rubinstein's Catalogue of Comedic Novelties is a poetry of changing parts that ensnares the evanescent uncanniness of the everyday. By means of rhythmically foregrounding a central device—the basic unit of work is the index card—Rubinstein continuously makes actual a flickering now time that is both intimate and strange. Metres and Tulchinsky have created an engaging translation of a major work of contemporary Russian poetry. In the process, they have created a poem 'in the American' and in the tradition of seriality associated with Charles Reznikoff and Robert Grenier.—Charles Bernstein

Rubinstein's "texts" can be compared with computer hyper-texts, where each message conceals a larger context and where you unavoidably leave certain files unopened on each page as you go on… His poetics can be described as that of fatally missed opportunities and in this sense he brings to mind Chekhov, a fact that has been noted by many critics. —Ekaterina Degot

Lev Rubinstein is the true heir of the OBERIU artists of the late 1920s. Like his most illustrious predecessor, Daniil Kharms, Rubinstein creates deadly serious, devastatingly funny comedy that incorporates a broad range of literary forms. In the precise translations of Philip Metres and Tatiana Tulchinsky, this witty and elegant work is available to an English-language public in its full glory for the first time.—Andrew Wachtel

At the end of the prose tract Democratic Vistas, Walt Whitman calls for a kind of book that is written 'on the assumption that the process of reading is not a half sleep, but, in the highest sense, an exercise, a gymnast's struggle; that the reader is to do something for himself, must be on the alert, must himself or herself construct indeed the poem.' Lev Rubinstein's Catalogue of Comedic Novelties is exactly this kind of book. It is interactive, engaging, and sometimes exhausting as a good workout should be. The reader is constantly implicated in the meaning making process of the poem, invited to fill in the blanks, to recreate the context from a series of intriguing and mysterious clues. Reading Rubinstein indeed strengthens one's imaginative muscles, but it is importantly a ludic as well as calisthenic activity. His poems are funny, utterly playful, 'comedic' to use his own description, yet not without pathos.—Michael Leong

Rubinstein’s work … drives a wedge between cultural production and the culturally produced. I’m not expected to do anything or buy anything, I’m flickering between emotion and ironic awareness; that is, I’m learning about the way I work when I encounter language...Rubinstein lets me acknowledge both my human emotion and its quoted, cultural ground.—Catherine Wagner

Lev Rubinstein, Thirty-five New Pages, Trans. by Philip Metres, Tatiana Tulchinsky, Ugly Duckling Presse, 2014

Translators Metres and Tulchinsky team up again to bring us Thirty-five New Pages, one of Lev Rubinstein's note-card poems, written in 1981. Does it tell a story? Is it a reflection on the form of the book? Is it there at all? This classic minimalist/conceptualist text from the "postmodern Chekhov" summons Genesis and Zen, Tractatus and guided meditation, with whip-smart wit and considerable elan, presented here on 35 library-style cards in a handsome letterpressed box. (This poem is not included in Rubinstein's other UDP collection, Catalogue of Comedic Novelties.) "Here, in fact, something could happen."

Many of us recall the careful little Emperor from Peter Shaffer’s “Amadeus”, who encountering a baffling scene in Mozart’s operatic rehearsal, tactfully inquires “Is it modern?” That no one today asks the question testifies to the success (and also the failure) of the great modernist project. In an age of reactionary finance and Tweety Bird attention spans, who, aside from aesthetic antiquarians, academic row-hoers and the tabula rasa’d young, takes Picasso, Stravinsky, Joyce or Le Corbusier seriously, however much we admire their energy, wit and nerve? (The Villa Sovoye is a very clever structure but you wouldn’t want to live there. Almost no one has.)

But if these great monuments of modernism stand as carefully preserved barely ruined choirs, there is the still active and vital, like nibbling mice, other modernist motif of refusal, obliquity and off-beat critique, a movement whose particles continue to proliferate along the cyclotron of the long 20^th century, its taxonomy extending at least from Dada to Zaha  (and includes Radical Randomists, Found Objectivists, Rushing Constructivists, Situationalists, Saturationalist,  Atmanic Confabulists,  Fruit Oulipoists and Branch Derridians (a term I co-invented back in 1984 when it was already old).

Lev Rubinstein’s (the librarian and artist) Thirty-Five New Pages is placed somewhere in that spectrum. This device for reading consists of thirty-five 3x5 inch cards (with a colophon card) of the type:

The major integerial presentation, with the modification of a mathematical or editorial super- scripture conveys a kind of lexical authority, belied by the subordination of the rather gnomic (Gnostic?) text in red ink. These elusive/allusive propositions, proposals of what should appear, are linked / generated via a loose bell change effect, a not quite continuity of phrases that suggests but doesn’t constitute a continuum. Card 35 (which we won’t spoil) is a surprise ending-or is that a beginning? So what does this rosary for reading do, apart from looking nice and feeling good in the fingers? Well, it would violate the spirit of Rubenstein’s project to tell you what. (But questions come readily to hand : what is reading? Narrative? The frame of art?) Suffice it to say, after reading a hundred conventional chapbooks—“man passing misery to man” (Sophocles or was that Larkin?) Thirty-Five New Pages comes on like a crisp cracker after predictably acrid wine. And some credit, surely, to the translators who midwife us to the humanity and clarity of Rubinstein’s desiderata.

The folks at Ugly Duckling Presse are always turning out hard to pigeon hole objects that make you think.  I recommend their work (and website) for its interest and stimulation Theirs is a risky enterprise; they are surely more aware than me how the radical object can easily transmute, via reverse alchemy, into just another bit of conceptual bric- a-brac. - P. Nelson

I am drawn to books of poetry on cards, and I didn't realize it until today. Robert Grenier's Sentences. Susan Howe's Poems Found in a Pioneer Museum. bpNichol's still water. The many many works of poetry that Márton Koppánny has produced on cards. To that list, I will now add Lev Rubinstein's Thirty-Five New Pages, recently published by Ugly Duckling Presse.
This is a book to manipulate, a tactile book, haptic. It gains value by forcing us to deal with the pieces of it. But it comes at us, as you can see above disguised as a codex, bearing even its title on its spine, which you could slip between two other tiny books and not recognize, without close inspection, that the book is a box.

These thirty-five cards work through a process of repetition, the slow working out of a thought with few words. Each card is a page numbered, the number appearing at the top of the page as a title. And every title has a small superscript number bearing the same number as the page. And each of these superscript numbers directs you to a footnote, and each of those footnotes tells you what should be on the page, not what is there, but what should be.

As we might guess, the first card should be blank, a blank flyleaf before the title page, and then the numbers pull you into the book that is nothing but a deck of stiff cards in our hands. Rubinstein plays games with you as thoughts slowly and indefinitely arise from the sturdy pages in your hands. "Here," you read in the fourteenth footnote, which appears on Page 14, "something should be written," and you realize it has been. These are conceptual games, but serious, and satisfying. I smiled broadly near the end of the book, filled with a kind of joy at the beautiful rendition of the book's own genius in my head.

I am reminded most, in these cards, of the work of Márton Koppánny, which is also conceptual in this playful way (though also much more visual in intention), and that is a good thing. This text is clean, emotionless, without subject, because it is all subject, because it is about us, about the act of reading, and about the expectations we bring to any process of reading. The book may be a bit pricey given its size, but the joy of reading it doesn't diminish with time.
I'll end, though, with two quibbles: the box itself is far too thin. It needed to have been much sturdier. Books in boxes usually have much stronger boxes, and this one even shows some creasing from merely being assembled by hand. Second, the translation is really not perfect. Maybe this was intentional, but a number of times near the end of the book the text simply isn't idiomatic English. Read Page 30, "is currently read" should be "is currently being read" and "constantly reminding of the Author" should be "constantly reminding one [or you or us] of the Author." I can't imagine a need for this clumsy English.
Still I love the book. It was the first I read this year and the first I reviewed, and it's from Ugly Duckling Presse, and it has a number in its title, and I'm sure it will be one of my favorites of the year even by the end. Just as last year the first book I read and reviewed was a book from Ugly Duckling Presse that had a number in its title: Sarah Riggs' 60 Textos. 
I see a pattern, and that is what this book is about: the patterns of reading, the patterns of being, the patterns of expectation. - dbqp.blogspot.com/2012/01/pick-card.html

Boris Groys, History Becomes Form: Moscow

Conceptualism. The MIT Press, 2013

An insider's account of the art and artists of the most interesting Russian artistic phenomenon since the Russian Avant-Garde.

In the 1970s and 1980s, a group of “unofficial” artists in Moscow—artists not recognized by the state, not covered by state-controlled media, and cut off from wider audiences—created artworks that gave artistic form to a certain historical moment: the experience of Soviet socialism. The Moscow conceptualists not only reflected and analyzed by artistic means a spectacle of Soviet life but also preserved its memory for a future that turned out to be different from the officially predicted one. They captured both the shabby austerity of everyday Soviet life and the utopian energy of Soviet culture. In History Becomes Form, Boris Groys offers a contemporary's account of what he calls the most interesting Russian artistic phenomenon since the Russian avant-garde.

The book collects Groys's essays on Moscow conceptualism, most of them written after his emigration to the West in 1981. The individual artists of the group—including Ilya Kabakov, Lev Rubinstein, and Ivan Chuikov—became known in the West after perestroika, but until now the artistic movement as a whole has received little attention. Groys's account sheds light not only on the Moscow Conceptualists and their work but also on the dilemmas of Soviet artists during the cold war.

What we learned: Lev Rubinstein Note Card Poems

Born in 1947, Lev Rubinstein was a major figure of Moscow Conceptualism and the unofficial Soviet art scene of the 1970s and 1980s. While working as a librarian, he began using catalogue cards to write sequential texts. He described his “note-card poems,” as a “hybrid genre” that “slides along the edges of genres and, like a small mirror, fleetingly reflects each of them, without identifying with any of them.” His work was circulated through samizdat and underground readings in the “unofficial” art scene of the sixties and seventies, finding wide publication only after the late 1980s. Now among Russia’s most well-known living poets, Rubinstein lives in Moscow and writes cultural criticism for the independent media. His books in English translation include Here I Am (Glas, 2001), Catalogue of Comedic Novelties (UDP, 2004), and Thirty-Five New Pages (UDP, 2011). In Compleat Catalogue of Comedic Novelties (UDP, 2014), his note-card poems appear in their entirety for the first time.

Alex Green - In Green’s sun-battered landscape, it’s always the last day of summer, nothing worked out the way it was supposed to, and the optimistic pop songs in the background play a jangly counterpoint to real life disappointments. Neon sunsets, lost girls, grifting tennis instructors, and dazed surfers with bite scars shaped like lightning bolts

Alex Green, Emergency Anthems, Brooklyn Arts Press, 2015.


www.alexgreenbooks.com


“Alex Green’s work blossoms on the page like small explosions. A surf-side Spoon River tinged with Chandler, Dali, and David Lynch. Neon sunsets, lost girls, grifting tennis instructors, and dazed surfers with bite scars shaped like lightning bolts. And through it all, the dark, swift flash of sharks. Serious and hilarious, Green’s pop culture satire lunges with the same deft surprise as those sharks.”     —Tom DiCillo

“Green’s short pieces read like secrets, someone sharing a passion, a bias, a humiliation, a love. They crash into your ears like the surf, and you flip the page, awaiting the next beauty, the next set of waves.” - Joshua Mohr

“Alex Green is the uncrowned poet laureate of the last day of Summer and his first book is an absolute stunner—rich with metaphor, confessional honesty, and melancholy narrative. In Green’s sun-battered landscape, it’s always the last day of summer, nothing worked out the way it was supposed to, and the optimistic pop songs in the background play a jangly counterpoint to real life disappointments. In the afterglow, he finds humor, revelation, and that much maligned old measure of poetic meaning: beauty. Green forgoes opaque linguistic ornamentation in favor of coherent narrative, honesty, and lyricism. His gift for sudden and surprising metaphors is unmatched. This is a collection to return to over and over again and one that marks the debut of an important and refreshing poetic voice. Emergency Anthems is incredible, my favorite book of poetry of the last five years. Maybe of any five years.” - Jesse Michaels


I couldn’t wait to get my hands on Alex Green’s just-released poetry collection Emergency Anthems. One, Alex is one of my favorite music writers, at the helm of blog-turned-tumblr “Caught in the Carousel,” the insider’s insider when it comes to music. (You can read a “Still in Rotation” guest post he wrote for me here.) Two, even though I am seriously intimidated by poetry and Alex has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize in Poetry, Emergency Anthems is a book of prose poems. As in, beautiful morsels of poetry that read like extremely short stories and are even accessible for poetry idiots like me.
Alex’s musical chops inform the entire collection. What I loved about reading this slim little book is how much it replicates the experience of listening for the first time to an album that you are destined to wear out and buy in two additional formats. At first read-through, the stories are a disconnected. A guy plays the Stone Roses for a girl who doesn’t fall for him, a woman writes a book about the history of the parasol, a captain sets his boat on fire. Maybe you like Songs 1 and 3 and 6 immediately, but the rest of the album may take a few more listens.
Then you listen (read) again, and themes emerge, threads that tie the whole work together: sharks, love doomed to miscues, musicians whose bands break up. A third read and you’re picking out which stories thread together, skipping pages to see what happens if you read this poem next to that poem instead of the way they’re sequenced. It’s the book equivalent of playing albums in reverse and seeing if there are any hidden messages. (Fun fact: I just Googled “backmasking” and learned that if you play “Detour Through Your Mind” by the B-52s, you’ll hear “”I buried my parakeet in the backyard. Oh no, you’re playing the record backwards. Watch out, you might ruin your needle.” B-52s, you sassy rascals.)
At the same time, each poem story is a little universe in itself, satisfying even when it suggests there’s more to the story. If that’s not the definition of a perfect song, I don’t know what is. Everyone who reads this will have a favorite poem, a favorite line; mine may be “Air Fountain,” with the line “I hope you come home soon. No one else things I’m funny.”
Emergency Anthems is a fabulous way to add poetry to your music-loving life, and to give yourself fifteen things to ponder while you stare into the middle distance. And I’ll make it easy for you. - Nancy Davis Kho


"Anyone who knows his music writing knows that Alex Green knows music, and in this, his first book of poems, he seems also to know how to make it.  Green’s feel for the wheel—not to mention his insistence on keeping the moving parts clean—offers the reader a usefully clarified ride through the various terrains we live in and for; a grand (but never grandiose) tour of both world and word as they give sadly beautiful rise to one another..." - Graham Foust


"In these strange and unnerving and very funny shorts Alex Green conjures a drowning world where time moves like a moment of a thousand years and you will always be someone small on a stupid red bike. Comic, tender, realistic, and absurd, the stories introduce a cast of curious California characters: the Julliard graduate who plays a lifeguard on TV and wants to make his character complicated but there's only so much he can do with scenes in a hot tub; the model who's struck by lightening and gets really good at yoga; a spider with muscles like an action figure who opens a beatle like an egg.  In this world, figs split open to reveal cities inside, the real problem is living too long, and the champagne you drink goes down cold and sharp like a "world gone to glass, a decade turned to ice." It's an astonishing world rendered in an astonishing voice. "The world wheezes its secrets to a standstill and you stagger into her arms," Green writes. I staggered into the arms of every single page."--Marilyn Abildskov

Reginald Ullmann - Resonant of nineteenth-century village tales and of such authors as Adalbert Stifter and her contemporary Robert Walser, the stories in The Country Road are largely set in the Swiss countryside. In these tales, the archaic and the modern collide

Regina Ullmann, The Country Road, Trans. by Kurt Beals. New Directions, 2015.


Lauded by Hesse, Rilke, Musil, and Mann, this is the first book to appear in English by the unique Swiss modernist Regina Ullmann.

Resonant of nineteenth-century village tales and of such authors as Adalbert Stifter and her contemporary Robert Walser, the stories in The Country Road are largely set in the Swiss countryside. In these tales, the archaic and the modern collide. In one story, a young woman on an exhausting country walk recoils at a passing bicyclist but accepts a ride from a wagon, taking her seat on a trunk with a snake coiled inside. Death is everywhere in her work. As Ullmann writes, “sometimes the whole world appears to be painted on porcelain, right down to the dangerous cracks.” This delicate but fragile beauty, with its ominous undertones, gives Regina Ullmann her unique voice.    

“A pure and noble poetic talent: everything is full of mystery.”— Herman Hesse

“To read your book for me is such a multiplicity of joys that I can only gradually cope with it.”— Rainer Maria Rilke (in a letter to Regina Ullmann)

“Regina Ullmann has a sense of authenticity and a touch of genius.”— Robert Musil

It is no coincidence that the landscape of the earth is identical to that of the heart.

The work of Swiss poet and writer, Regina Ullmann, is permeated with an abiding sadness that seems to speak to the core of human existence. Her language, contemplative without moralizing, pierces the surface of the façades we present to the world. Encountering her work, one has the sense that she is drawing on a deep, dark well. But light filters through, creating a canvas that evokes rural and small town life in the early decades of the twentieth century—a world inhabited by farm labourers, young girls and women harbouring secrets, lonely old folk, circus performers, and hunchbacks.

Ullmann was born in Gallen, Switzerland, in 1884, into the family of a Jewish-Austrian businessman. Her father died when she was only a few years old. In 1902, she and her mother moved to Munich, where she would first read a number of the key poets of the day, including Rainer Maria Rilke who would become an important mentor and patron. However, Ullmann’s personal life was difficult. She had two daughters out of wedlock, the second with psychoanalyst Otto Gross, who left her emotionally wounded. Depression dogged her, worsening after her mother’s suicide in 1938. Her conversion to Catholicism in 1911, a move that greatly informed the tone of her work, was not sufficient to prevent her expulsion from the German Writers Association in 1935 on the basis of her Jewish heritage, so she left Germany, spending several years in Austria before relocating to her Swiss birthplace, where she would remain for over twenty years. She returned to Germany only a few months before her death in early 1961.

Throughout her career, Ullmann, won critical praise from the likes of Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse and Robert Musil—in addition to her champion Rilke—but she remained largely unknown and often struggled to make ends meet. She was, perhaps a step out of time, a modernist trailing ghosts of the past, but with the release of her 1921 story collection, The Country Road in English translation (by Kurt Beals, New Directions, 2015), her fragile, haunting work is offered a new lease on life.

And I, for one, was ready to meet her.

From the opening paragraphs of the title story, I was struck by the spare, unforgiving earnestness and sombre beauty of the prose:

Summer, but a younger summer than this one; the summer back then was no more than my equal in years. True, I still wasn’t happy, not happy to my core, but I had to be in the way that everyone is. The sun set me ablaze. It grazed on the green knoll where I sat, a knoll with almost sacred form, where I had taken refuge from the dust of the country road. Because I was weary. I was weary because I was alone. This long country road before and behind me… The bends that it made around this knoll, the poplars—even heaven itself could not relieve my bleakness. I was ill at ease, because just a short way into my walk, this road had already dragged me into its misery and squalor. It was an uncanny country road. An all-knowing road. A road reserved for those who had been, in some way, left alone.

In a sense, this opening sets the tone for the entire collection, evoking a landscape with its illusory freedom that will reappear again and again, balanced against the confined spaces—rented rooms, taverns, houses—occupied by people who often live alone or are drawn into shared solitude. Her narrators tend to affect a dispassionate distance, a non-judgemental piety, whether telling their own stories or imagining the thoughts and motivations of others; however, there is a persistent awareness of social stigmatization against which the most disadvantaged of her characters are regarded or disregarded. Ullmann’s world is one in which deeply burdened souls cross paths, rarely unveiling the true nature of the crosses that they bear.

It is difficult to convey the mood of these stories without implying that this is a catalogue of darkness and despair. There is rather a grounded and humane sadness, an awareness of loss that recurs. But there is more. Throughout the collection, an animated natural world—flowers, forests, gardens, vegetables, berries, stars and blue skies—regularly reminds the reader that an unquenchable beauty does exist against the odds. The story “Strawberries,” one of several tales narrated by a young girl who, like the author, has an older sister and a single mother, captures perfectly the summer magic of childhood:

Perhaps you will argue that the three of us had never learned to go without. But what does it mean to go without—assuming that we really couldn’t do it—if not to take pleasure in looking at things. We returned from our trips to the market feeling sated, and often we hadn’t bought a single bouquet, a single basket of early cherries. And the treasure chests of our minds was wide open. But the little mirror inside that chest had only to reflect the ground; it showed the stand piled high with fruits and vegetables. But we felt how that world, like jewelry and old music, was transformed and passed over into us.

Ullmann’s other worldliness that sees her writing suspended somewhere between modernism and an earlier form of gothic folk tale is best illustrated in “The Old Tavern Sign,” one of the strongest and most striking pieces in the entire collection. It begins with an old tavern “in a hidden corner of Styria,” that stood, “as if it had been left vacant, like an etching made by one soul to tell another just what a house really is.” The story follows the troubled emotions of a young farmhand who falls for a beautiful young girl—deaf-mute and simple-minded—who had been taken in and cared for by the old horsekeeper. The girl, as she grows, remains indifferent to all and everything around her, but her caregiver and the beasts, wild and domestic, protect her and keep her safe. The farmhand knows his affections are misdirected, and struggles to fight his persistent desire to go to the horse pasture:

But if he didn’t know this love, it surely knew him. It always recognized him. It knew if he lifted the pitchfork, how he lifted it, whether he took large steps or stood still, where he stood and dreamt. And when he slept, it took the power of its dreams for its own, and dreamt for him. He was climbing a fir tree, up to the top and then beyond. He didn’t even notice he was past its tip. And so he fell over it, down to the ground, and lay there with dream-shattered limbs, on the edge of the forest, and yet in his bed, and it was night, or morning. It didn’t matter, anyway.

In the end, as human desire meets the force of nature, with savage intensity, Ullmann maintains a measured poetic account that is as breathtaking as it is brutal.

This is a collection that is at once perfectly pitched my current state of sorrow, grief, and depression—and yet stunningly beautiful to read. Ullmann’s vivid imagery, her lost and lonely characters, and the gentle, thoughtful pace of her prose offers unexpected comfort for the weary soul. This is, in the end, an offering of small and tender joys. - Joseph Schreiber

Gregoire Pam Dick - a hybrid prose-poem/novella riffing on the lives and works of Austrian poet Georg Trakl and his sister, Grete.The inventive, androgynous, sexually loose (and intermittently incestuous) persona of Greta expresses itself through the surreal and haunted imagery of Trakl's poems

Gregoire Pam Dick, Metaphysical Licks, BookThug, 2014.


excerpt


Metaphysical Licks, a hybrid prose-poem/novella riffing on the lives and works of Austrian poet Georg Trakl and his sister, Grete, is the restless new work by writer and translator Gregoire Pam Dick [a.k.a. Mina Pam Dick, Jake Pam Dick et al., author of Delinquent (Futurepoem, 2009)]. With a mix of high and low, tragic and comic, abstract and concrete, artifice and confession, Dick's playful writing takes risks. It transposes Georg’s Grete (musician, fellow addict and suicide) to current-day Greta, gives her Wittgenstein and Kafka as other brothers, and betroths her (unhappily) to Nietzsche. Crossing New York City with Vienna and Berlin, it composes dissonance from urban moments, narrative fragments, and philosophical remarks. The inventive, androgynous, sexually loose (and intermittently incestuous) persona of Greta expresses itself through the surreal and haunted imagery of Trakl's poems. Readers will be drawn to Dick's combination of girl/punk rebelliousness and intensely questioning thought, in a text where creativity alone offers escape and exultation, and subjectivity keeps changing its sounds.


In search of a genuinely adventurous and challenging read that will never obey you? Look no further than Gregoire Pam Dick’s Metaphysical Licks, published this year by BookThug under the official category of poetry but in effect a unique mix of biography, poetry, philosophy, memoir and fiction.
Loosely inspired by the life and work of the German poet Georg Trakl and his pianist sister Margarethe, known as Grete, who had a relationship a little too close for conventions and who both experimented with drugs, the work takes readers on a wild ride in multiple directions. There are no characters in the traditional sense — and getting lost at sea, giving up on finding your bearings, then unexpectedly feeling at home during this aimless floating is one of the great surprises of the work. I spoke with the New York City author via Skype about this and other pleasures in her text.
Xtra: As readers we tend to seek a character behind the words — and as thinkers, the subject behind the statement. But you want to complicate this for us. Tell me about the sibject, traject and other queered subjects.
Pam Dick: There is a main character in the book — Greta — but she’s shifting (and shifty), unstable. She/the book wrestles with the philosophical idea of the subject, with its reinvention. The traject notion emphasizes the idea of change, veering and of being thrown into a world, finding yourself there even as you remake it. The sibject notion is about escaping a sharp subject/object division, such that there is more intimate relation between “I” and world. It also suggests the idea of Greta as a subject fused with Georg — the possibility of a joined or doubled subject. That’s how it’s first raised. Later in the book, the question arises of whether the sibject idea could apply to other terms: world and expression or truth and meaning, et cetera. With the idea of the sibject, for Greta, comes the idea of an incest metaphysics; I’m interested in using these ideas to explore alternate metaphysical conceptions. Of course, Greta/the subject as fluid in gender occurs repeatedly in the book as well. I am more interested in reconceptualizing the subject and the I in these ways than in jettisoning entirely the notions, because of my commitment to the notion of the first-person singular and a sort of subjectivity which is expressive, vital, spiritually significant and ineliminable.
There’s great pleasure in sort of floating between several possible people in the book — the historical Margarethe, the fictionalized Grete, Greta, Gregoire as Greta, et cetera — and sometimes having to give up on this urge to know who or what is speaking right at that moment.
Yes! The I shifts. It goes from Greta to these other figures, and Greta herself seems able to become these others, so there is very much a sense of an open, variable I, not one that’s closed off. And it isn’t clear who’s speaking when, but hopefully the voice compels as it roams. There’s a sort of rebelliousness in this roaming, a refusal to remain one thing or be limited in that way, and there’s also a sense, really, of the impossibility of being just one I or persona or character, even if you wanted to be one. But the sense of possibility in that variability is very important to me. It’s a sort of lateral as opposed to vertical transcendence.
“If it doesn’t brake, don’t try to fix it.” I loved finding little signposts like this along the way. If you’re propelled by the text, stop worrying about fixing it to a permanent identity.
Yes, there’s a speed and momentum to the text that for me is somewhat intoxicating, thereby also gesturing toward the various forms of intoxication felt by Greta, Grete, Georg, et cetera. And also the use of the materiality, sound, sense of language to fuel this motion. Wordplay, word associations, homophones, et cetera, all, so to speak, charge or power the text forward and sideways and backwards, so there’s a kind of word-drunk rushing around. The notion of trans, rapid transit again.
How much is known about the actual Margarethe? Did you research her closely?
I had trouble finding out much at all about her, so I didn’t research her closely. There were contradictions, even, in the info I got (such as what year she was born), so I decided to create a Grete, a version of her, who came from what I did learn. I give some false information about her, I invent things, but I also draw on what I was able to learn, in my rather minimal reading, about her real situation. At the same time, I wanted to respect the fundamental elusiveness of her, her life, her death. I would never presume to think of my book as capturing or conveying her; it isn’t a history or biography of her. It’s, if anything, a biography of Greta. Greta imagines her own version of Margarethe, which is Grete. I was haunted by Margarethe’s life as I understood it and by, in fact, our lack of knowledge of it compared to that of Georg. It’s possible that more is known and coming out now, in German language scholarship, than I was aware of. Anyway, this book was not a research project in that sense; hence, the idea of it being more of a “riff” on the real Trakls. One thing that might interest you, or perhaps you picked this up from the book, is that I did see samples of her handwriting in one book, and they became the visual basis for the graphic score which ends the book.
Aha . . . so the “music score” in the final pages is in “kinship” with the documents showing her handwriting! Tell me about some other music in the book. Tristan und Isolde appears at some key moments.
She had this crazy looping handwriting that seemed very close to illegible to me — but very beautiful. Re Tristan, I do a version of Wagner’s libretto, interrupted at various points, and reinterpret the characters to fit the historical Georg, Grete and Grete’s older husband (who here becomes Nietzsche). I was interested in the opera for obvious reasons: forbidden love, double suicide, the music’s own intoxicating qualities, Nietzsche’s involvement with Wagner, the tonal similarities one might sense between Trakl’s poems and Wagner’s music and themes in this work, the philosophical background (Schopenhauer, who is another figure in my version, namely Ardl). At the same time, I wanted to allude to Austrian musical expressionism and the 12-tone serialism, Schoenberg, Webern, Berg, for their (various) formal qualities, their contemporaneity with the Trakls, and the force and feeling, the radicality and gorgeousness I personally find in their music. Then, in addition to the classical references, there are obviously many punk/pop/alternative music references: the Carpenters (in the opera, allowing a parodic aspect), the Silver Jews (silver comes up often in Trakl’s poems), no-wave bands, et cetera. I like mixing so-called high and low in my work in this way, in the same way that I might mix philosophizing and references to TV shows in one paragraph.
How did you cast her “brothers,” husband and other figures? Wittgenstein, Kafka, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer: they all appear, and the fun is that they’re recontextualized, reimagined, often mocked.
The casting was really fun and easy; it just seemed so natural! It’s something I do in my other work as well; it allows me to engage with thinkers/writers I love or am obsessed with but to do it in an irreverent yet still deep way. Wittgenstein’s work is important and compelling to me — it’s something I studied as a philosophy student — and Greta works with some of his (particularly early) ideas in her philosophizing, so he was a natural brother. Kafka for an affinity, too. Nietzsche as a figure both attractive and unattractive, someone to work off of and against, with ideas responding to and rebelling against his.
Nietzsche at one point does push-ups after his tirade in front of the siblings.
You know, he was very sickly but also vigorous and did do exercises. His attitude to the body forms a nice contrast to Kafka’s, and that general issue certainly comes up in the book. - Lydia Perovic

Gregoire Pam Dick, Delinquent, Futurepoem, 2009.

"The Minas are many. Tompkins Square Park is the site of Philosophical Investigations. Walser is writing the New Sentence, again. Fear and Trembling on the sidewalk... A t-shirt, a haircut, a dependent clause, a math equation. The best part of the dissertation is unwritten--here it is"--Matvei Yankelevich


"Like a gender-errant Benjamin, Mina Pam Dick constellates recombinant philosophies, aesthetic forgeries, and the intertextual detritus of the big slithering city. The poems and prose that pack DELINQUENT's sucker punch are weighted with the freight of excess baggage, which means they are the very work of today"--Vanessa Place


"[A] text that reminds us that imagination lives in language, is uncontainable, fluid, reverses gravity and history, unties the knot between gender and body, assumption and consumption. Who are we? Or how many are we? Or where are we? . . . . I think Dick offers a jouissance for the 21st century-accelerate the wit, play, and bite."--Sina Queyras


[A] hybrid tractatus that runs circles around Spinoza and all the bad boys of analytic philosophy who tripped over their own logic and uncovered new realms of uncertainty between truth and falsity, sense and reference, proof and paradox. Into this gap in the binary jumps Pam Dick's poetic avatar: a bastard son who's really a daughter, a rogue bachelorette of the intellect who surfs the thickets and asylums of Western thought, shaking the tree of knowledge for subversive apple-truths . . . . culminating in a veritable Q.E.D. of heretical subjectivity that is by turns rigorous, risible, picaresque, and profound."--Pam Lu


Gregoire Pam Dick (aka Mina Pam Dick, Jake Pam Dick et al.) is the author of Delinquent (Futurepoem, 2009). Her writing has appeared in BOMB, frieze, The Brooklyn Rail, Aufgabe, EOAGH, Fence, Matrix, Open Letter, Poetry Is Dead , and elsewhere, and has been featured in Postmodern Culture; it is included in the anthologies The Sonnets (ed. S. Cohen and P. Legault, Telephone, 2012) and Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics, (ed. TC Tolbert and Tim Trace Peterson, Nightboat, 2013). Her philosophical work has appeared in a collection published by the International Wittgenstein Symposium. Also an artist and translator, Dick lives in New York City, where she is currently doing work that makes out and off with Büchner, Wedekind, Walser, and Michaux.